and in his ever giving me credit so far beyond my deserts, did not say, 'Tom Poole would have done so and so,' not that he did so and so? However that may be, I must request you to suppress that part of your narrative which gives me the credit of subduing Sir J. M. in argument.

"With respect to the Epitaph, at the publication of which I am surprised, pray do not make it more significant than it is, by publishing the name. This I would withhold, if only in consideration of those excellent men, the Wedgwoods, whose brother-in-law you know M was; and they were the liberal patrons of C. The Epitaph, as you say, seems dictated by a vindictive spirit; but this sort of feeling in C

was never

more than skin deep, of which being conscious, he often seemed to delight in sporting with it.

"It is certainly true that M- proposed to Cto go to India with him. Whether the proposal was seriously made I know not; but I am sure that Cnever gave it a serious thought.

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"I remember, as you mention, my having been taken by some one to see Thomas Payne at Paris. We found him in a poor lodging, very intent in making the model of a bridge (I think of iron), which he was about to present to the French Government. He complained that the Moderns had sadly retrograded, compared to the Ancients, in the construction of bridges.

"He spoke, I think, as you say, of intending to give an answer to Bishop Watson's 'Apology for the Bible.'

"He was then a hard-featured man, advanced in life, and I remember I thought him a very dull fellow. But

perhaps this remark is unfair, as we were not with him an hour, and he seemed at the time much out of spirits.

"Should any circumstance bring you to this neighbourhood, it would give me great pleasure to see you here. You mention Doctor Parry. I trust he is well; if you see him, pray make my kind remembrance to him. Your's, my dear Sir, very sincerely,

66

"THOMAS POOLE."

It is evident from the manner in which Sir J. Mackintosh speaks of Mr. Martyn, on the occasion of their first interview, that I have not overrated the personal advantages which characterised Bishop Heber. By personal advantages, I mean that easy address and self-reliance which may depend in part on individual temperament, but which are chiefly referable to the habit of familiar intercourse with the best educated and polished classes of society. As a scholar and a man of science, Martyn had scarcely a superior; and he and Heber were saints alike. Yet how different, I repeat, would the first impression made by Bishop Heber upon Sir J. Mackintosh have been from that which was made by the meek and unadorned missionary! Had Martyn been as much a man of the world as Heber, the first afternoon he passed with Sir James would have been much more satisfactory to both. That self-love (amour propre) which is more or less inherent in all but the very lowest of mankind, would have been conciliated to the great relief of both parties.

But in saying thus much, I must not do injustice to Mr. Martyn. If his address was less prepossessing, and

his manners less courtly than those of Bishop Heber, he was equally with the Bishop sustained by religious principle, and I can answer for his having been as brave as he was learned and good. He quailed before no man. Accordingly we find, that at their last interview, Sir J. Mackintosh, who doubtless was a man of no ordinary pretensions, found himself drawn into a philological discussion with a stranger whose mental capacity was commensurate with his own. Martyn may have gained an easier entrance to the head than to the heart of the Jurisconsult; and here, as elsewhere, science may have been auxiliary to religion, and it is probable that Sir James was thus led to think more highly not only of Mr. Martyn, but of the objects of his journey to Persia and of his missionary labours generally. Such a supposition we know to be in accordance with what happened afterwards at the seat of the Persian government. After the Moolahs had discovered that Mr. Martyn was their superior in science, they more readily attended to him when he spoke of spiritual things; and since science is sure to keep pace with civilization, any attempt to check its progress, as detrimental to revealed truth, is to be deprecated for the plain reason, that "Magna est veritas et prævalebit."

Professor Sedgwick has treated this subject fully, and with great wisdom, in his "Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge." He nobly vindicates the teaching of that ancient seat of learning as Catholic in the fullest sense of the word, as giving to faith what belongs to faith, while it gives to reason what belongs to

reason.'

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At no great distance from the time when Cambridge was mustering her strength against the adversaries of religion; when Bishop Watson was consigning, almost with a stroke of his pen, the writings of the infidel Payne to contempt and oblivion; when Horsley, nobly upholding the doctrine of our Lord's divinity, was achieving a complete triumph over Priestley; exhibiting to the world not merely his fallacious mode of reasoning in a circle, but quotations ignorantly misapplied by him; testimonies perverted by artful and forced constructions; passages in the Greek fathers misinterpreted through want of knowledge of the Greek language, and doubly confounded through ignorance of the Platonic philosophy as well as of the phraseology of the earliest ecclesiastical writers; when the learned Herbert Marsh, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, was not only raising his voice in maintenance of the orthodoxy of our Church, but proving to the Continent of Europe from evidence, with which his long residence in Germany had supplied him, that England was engaged in a just and righteous warfare; whilst from the same stronghold of science and religion, men such as Buchanan, and Thomason, and Middleton, and Martyn, were preparing to devote their lives to the service of their Maker in heathen lands; whilst Simeon was rearing, in the very bosom of the University, the evangelical standard, amidst intestine enemies, and the opposition of real, but then somnolent, friends of the Church; even at this very time, there was gathering in the sister University, a cloud which, assuming more and more a threatening aspect, would, if not dispersed, have obscured the brightness of our

Reformed Church, and consigned her again to the gloom and thraldom of Papal superstition and tyranny. But, not to lose myself in metaphor, let it suffice to say, so subtle were the measures of the party with which the "Tracts for the Times originated, that Professor Sedgwick, ever jealous of the honour of the University, of which he was so watchful a guardian, declares that he had no suspicion whatever of the drift of the Oxford Tractarians till he had read the Preface of their second volume, which appeared in 1836.

Suspicion and fear were soon changed into reality of danger on the appearance of the ninetieth and final Tract, and he candidly admits that the snake had crept into Cambridge, and was sheltered in the folds of the Cambridge Camden Society. Established for the purpose of promoting the knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities, its writings after a while were not merely damaged by faults of taste, and fantastical puerilities, but were vitiated by some grave errors of principle. Some of its members seemed to have taken up a religion built upon the principles of taste, rather than upon more solid reasons drawn out of sacred and historical evidence. They learned to speak of the architects of the middle age as men religiously inspired, and of our old Reformers as a set of Vandals and infidels. At one of the meetings an undergraduate read an elaborate architectural paper, ending with a kind of religious or moral dissertation, in which he seemed to declare that Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died at the stake by the just judgment of God, for having consented to the desecration of our monasteries.