told his audience that God was forty years leading Israel through the wilderness to Canaan, which was not forty days' march; but that God's way was a great way about. He then made a circumflex on his cushion, and said that the Israelites were led "crinkledom cum crankledom."-(See the story at large, in the Parliamentary History, vol. 22, p. 72.)

Sir Thomas Browne, on the subject of the world's being destroyed by fire, observes, "Philosophers that opinioned the world's destruction by fire, hid never dream of annihilation, which is beyond the power of sublunary causes; for the last action of that element is but vitrification, or a reduction of a body into glass; and therefore some of our chemists facetiously affirm, that, at the last fire, all shall be crystallized and reverberated into glass, which is the utmost action of that element.” -(Religio Medici, 135.)

One of Whitfield's flights of oratory is related on the authority of David Hume. "After a solemn pause, Mr. Whitfield thus addressed his audience :-The attendant angel is just about to leave the threshold, and ascend to heaven; and shall he ascend and not bear with him the news of one sinner, among all the multitude, reclaimed from the error of his ways! To give the greater effect to this exclamation, he stamped with his foot, lifted up his hands and eyes to heaven, and cried aloud, 'Stop, Gabriel! stop, Gabriel! stop, ere you enter the sacred portals, and yet carry with you the news of one sinner converted to God!"" Hume added, that this address was accompanied with such animated, yet natural, action, that it surpassed any thing he ever saw or heard in any other preacher. It is reported of the same eloquent and powerful but eccentric preacher, George Whitfield, that, in a sermon exhorting his hearers to read their Bibles more than they did, he added, "I love to see the word of God well thumbed, as if it had been read till the inside is dirty: but there are some whose Bibles, I grieve to say it, lie in a corner so outwardly covered with dust, that damnation may be traced on it with the finger in legible characters." When Whitfield was at Aberdeen, he was invited to preach in the pulpit of the church, of which there were co-pastors. One of them, however, was hostile, and in the afternoon, when it was his turn, began his prayers as usual, but, in the midst of them, named Whitfield by name, and whom he knew to be then present, and intreated the Lord to forgive the dishonour that had been put upon him, when that man was suffered to preach in that pulpit."—(Southey's Life of Wesley, &c.)

When three hundred pounds reward were offered for the apprehension of Swift, (the author of the Drapier's Letters,) a patriotic Irish quaker applied this text to the case:-" And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground; for he wrought with God this day. So the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not."-1 Samuel, chap. xiv. v. 45.

Mr. Brown, the picturesquist, and the father of our improvers, was in such an ecstacy when one of his works was commended, that he cried out," None but your Browns and your God-Almighties can do such things as these!" Mr. Price, who gives this anecdote, justly observes, "This is very blasphemous indeed."

According to Socrates, the historian, Constantine the Great commanded Arius to subscribe to the opinion of the council of Nice, which was a final condemnation of ARIUS. The signature of ARIUS was brought to the emperor. The emperor could not credit it! He summoned the arch heresiarch to swear before him that he had subscribed! Arius swore! He had concealed under his arm his own particular opinions, written by himself, and when he swore, as he held the condemnation of the council, that he held what he had written: by these words he alluded to his own opinions under HIS ARM, and not the decision of the council in HIS HAND.

There was a visionary who flourished in the last century. He was at the expense of having a plate engraved, in which he is represented kneeling before a crucifix, with a label from his mouth, "Lord Jesus do you love me?" From that of Jesus proceeded another label, "Yes, most illustrious and most learned Sigerius, crowned poet of his imperial majesty, and most wotthy rector of the University of Wittenberg, yes, I love you."—(Walpole.)

When ten Englishmen had been cleared by the ordeal of fire from the charge of killing deer in the time of William Rufus, that king being present exclaimed,-" Pretty justice above, indeed! to let ten such scoundrels escape!"

"A Spiritual Spicerie; containing sundrie sweet Tactates of Devotion and Piety," was the title of a book written by Richard Brathwaite, published 1638: with an odd quotation from Canticles, c. 1, 12, and c. 5, 13.

The Crossed Friars, or vulgo vocato, Crutched friars, astonished the English, by appearing among them in 1244, from

Bologna, and requiring from the opulent a house to live in, telling them they were privileged by the pope to be exempt from being reproached by any body; and that they had from him power to excommunicate those who were hardy enough to reprove them.-(Pennant's London.) We need not add that such matchless impudence succeeded; it always does.

We forbear to give what may be seen in Clarke's Letters on the Spanish Nation, and from him copied, by Mr. Pennant, (Wales, vol. 1.) as to the Spanish Drama. Our own mysteries and moralities, in the old times, were bad enough; but the nation over which the most Catholic of all kings have presided, encouraged a blasphemy peculiar to themselves.

One of the Scotch Presbyterians, holding forth against the observance of Christmas, said, "Ye will say, sirs! good old youle-day; I tell you, good old fool-lay! You will say it is a brave holiday; I tell you it is a brave belly-day!”—(Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, p. 98.)

One of the most exceptionable of all liberties, in this way, is taken by the collegians, in the name of their colleges. Thus we read in a letter from Dr. Dobson, Pesident of Trinity College, Oxford, to Dr. Charlett, "The Scotch collection is going on here and in Jesus, the issue of which you shall speedily have an account of." The adjunct, College, is too troublesome to write.

The Abbé de Choisy not only dedicated his translation of Thomas a Kempis to a courtezan, Madame de Maintenon, but added, as a motto, from the Psalms,-"Hear, my daughter, and see, and incline thine ear, and the king shall desire thy beauty!"

Mr. Pennant, speaking of a monument in Wrexham Church, to the memory of a daughter of Sir Hugh Middleton, says, "She is represented rising out of her tomb in all the fuluess of youth and beauty. She died a very withered woman: but I like the thought of the sculptor, allusive to the sublime passage in the burial service:- The dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." "

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Mr. Samuel Ireland, in his tour to Holland, says, rived at Peronne just in time to attend the grand mass. pageantry and shew of the ceremony received much addition from the military band of music which accompanied the regiment, and gave a kind of vigour and exhilaration to the senses, making as it were the soul dance on a jig to heaven."

One half of our jests may be traced to Bagdad. How many versions have we not seen of the following eastern anecdote ? A preacher in a mosque began the history of Noah with this text from the Koran:-"I have called Noah ;" but forgetting the rest of the verse, repeated the same words over and over. At length one of his hearers cried out, "If Noah will not come, call somebody else."

The French cordelier, Maillard, in his sermons, which were published, shews, in that of Thursday, in the second week in Lent, the following extraordinary style of preaching he addresses himself thus to the lawyers' wives, who then wore gowns embroidered with gold, "You say you are clothed according to your rank: go to the devil, ladies, you and your rank together! You will tell me, perhaps, Our husbands don't give us these fine gowns; we earn them by the industry of our sweet bodies; thirty thousand devils take your industry and your bodies too!"

A clergyman preaching a charity-sermon, February 4, 1778, at a church in the city, during his discourse pulled out of his pocket a newspaper, and read out of it the following paragraph, viz.-On Sunday, the 18th of January, two ponies ran on the Uxbridge road twenty miles for twenty guineas, and one gained it by about half a head; both ponies ridden by their owners." Also another paragraph of the like kind, of a race on the Romford road, on a Sunday. He made an

apology for reading part of a newspaper in the pulpit, said he believed it was the first instance of the kind, and he sincerely wished that there never might be occasion for the like again. He then pointed out the heinous sin of Sabbath breaking.(Dodsley, 1776.)

King John, pointing to a fat deer, said, "See how plump he is; and yet he has never heard mass!" John might have alluded to the gluttony of themonks, which was notorious in his days; for Giraldus Cambrensis says, that from the monks of St. Swithin's, Winchester, Henry II. received a formal complaint against the Abbot, for depriving his priests of three out of thirteen dishes, at every meal. The monks of Canterbury exceeded those of St. Swithin; they had seventeen dishes every day, and each of these cooked with spices and the most saYoury and rich sauces.

It is said, that a preacher to King James the first began thus:James the first and sixth, waver not!" (i. e. James the first of England, and sixth of Scotland.)

In the civil wars, one Stephen Marshall, beginning to preach, split his text into twenty-four parts. One of his hearers ran home for his night-cap and slippers.

An Italian poet, who had written an opera, was so fearful of taking any of these liberties, that, in the author's advertisement prefixed, he makes the following declaration :-" The words fate, deity, and destiny, which occur in the drama, are introduced merely poetically, without any serious meaning, as I believe in every thing which my holy mother church has set forth as an article of faith and injunction."-(Addison's Travels in Italy.)

A Spanish preacher, discoursing on the temptation, exclaimed, "Happily for mankind the lofty Pyrennees hid this delightful country of Spain from the eyes of the Redeemer, else the temptation would have been too strong for the blessed Lord!" -(Ensor's Independent Man, vol. 2, p. 464.)

The little territory of Lucca, in Italy, has taken a pious liberty in their coin, which carries on it the image of no earthly prince, but the head of Jesus Christ, our Saviour, on the one side, and the word liberty on the other!-(Piozzi's Tour, vol. 1, p. 339.)

Du Perron complains of a spiritual orator, of his time, for saying "Seigneur! nettoyez moi le bec, de la serviette de ton amour." Lord, cleanse thou my lips with the napkin of thy love!

At Nancy, in Lorraine, when Claudia Valesia, the duke's wife and sister to Henry II. King of France, deceased, the churches were forty days shut up; no prayers, no masses said, but only in the room where she was.-(Burton's Anatomy.)

The Archbishop of Arras, in his Pastoral Letter of December 23, 1803, thus designated Buonaparte :-"He who has been distinguished by his valour in war; he who has been raised up to save the elect (a speculative bull) of God; to overthrow those who have rebelled against him; to assemble the remnant of Israel, and to restore him the earth, which is his inheritance." Again, "Has not the Lord, in some measure, raised up enemies, in order that he might conquer them."

In Spain, plays are performed for the benefit of the Virgin and saints, and balls are given for the deliverance of souls from purgatory. On an occasion of the above kind, a play-bill was exhibited, couched in the following terms:-To the Empress of heaven, mother of the Eternal World, the leading star of