could desire. Her pen still flowed with its accustomed ease; but it became impossible even for her egregious vanity not to perceive that her fame was already far past its meridian, the fashionable taste for her writings on the wane, and the magnificent sums which Mr. Colburn's courageous prodigality had once brought within her reach no longer obtainable. Two years before she became a widow, she paid a visit to Germany, and received in that country the due amount of aristocratic lionising; but no eager publishers petitioned for the copyright of her journal; and no chronicle of the tour, except in private letters, is presented to us. On the other hand, several of the Irish grievances, which gave interest and importance to her earlier novels, had been swept away, and the public enthusiasm on the subject had died down to a point at which it became almost hopeless to turn her peculiar vein of humour and familiarity with national and local customs to any good ac

count.

As the shadows close in upon her, the real deficiencies of Lady Morgan's character begin to stand out with very disagreeable distinctness. Conclusions are proverbially difficult; and to bring a career of studied juvenility to a graceful ending is no doubt beyond the reach of all but the favoured few, whose tact and delicacy enable them to pass triumphantly through the most perplexing embarrassments. Lady Morgan, at any rate, was unequal to a task which required higher powers than her own, and a different attitude of mind from that which she had so long piqued herself upon maintaining. She had not the stability, the calmness, or the sober self-possession, necessary for meeting the grave realities which necessarily mark the close of the most sunshiny existence. The latter portion of her journal contains little but the half-querulous record of relations and friends cut off, of lessening powers, of darkening prospects, and of her own inability to bear up against the deprivations and to meet the exigencies of advanced old age. With one foot in the grave, she still sticks to her rouge, her parties, and her pen, and with almost dying lips chronicles the compliments which good-natured companions or condescending aristocrats thought it worth their while to pay her. Her chief feeling about life seems to have been regret that a world in which such pretty speeches were made, and such excellent prices given, should not be ours for ever; and even the passionate vehemence with which she laments her husband and her sister had little about it of the "divine mystery of sorrow," through which the noblest of our species have had to make their pilgrimage towards ultimate perfection. Into such an atmosphere of elevated thoughtfulness she had neither the ability nor the wish to rise. "She never,"

says her biographer, "needed either privacy or repose;" and having lived in a whirl, and drunk deep of the sickening cup of flattery, she found herself unable alike to keep up the dismal farce of eternal youth, or to retire with dignity from the stage where she could shine no longer. Those natural, moderate, and lawful "regrets of life," described with so much feeling delicacy in the pages of a contemporary a week or two ago, are something very different from the desperate clutching after the pleasures of existence, as one by one years steal them from us, or the half-frantic endeavour to ignore those solemn aspects of our position, as a dying race, of which Nature, as the end approaches, forbids Levity itself to be any longer forgetful. There is something absolutely ghastly in the merriment that would fain prolong itself when the true materials for mirth have passed away.

"So I reel on," Lady Morgan writes, some years before her death; "the world is my gin or opium; I take it for a few hours per diem,-excitement, intoxication, absence. I return to my desolate home, and awaken to all the horrors of sobriety.' My impressionableness of spirits, my debility of body, my sight dim from nervousness, my heart palpitating at the least movement; and yet I am accounted the 'agreeable rattle of the great ladies' coterie,' and I talk pas mal to many clever men all day."

It would be difficult, we think, to draw a less agreeable picture, or to see the gray hairs, which are properly a crown of honour, less honourably circumstanced. Old age has its beauties, no less than youth and manhood; but they are beauties of a grave, chastened, and melancholy order; and the attempt to transfer to one period of life the habits, language, and sentiments of another is as misjudged as the anile fatuity which is occasionally to be seen forcing the ravages of time upon our notice by the contrast of school-girl graces and juvenile attire. Life has a mysterious awe, tragic mysteries, unspoken suffering, a "thousand natural pangs" which it is foolish to attempt to throw into the background of any portion of a human career, and to which, as death approaches, it seems almost profanity to refuse the first place in our thoughts. Compliments, coquetry, good stories, and comic songs, are excellent material for an idle hour, and take their lawful place amid the lesser solaces of fatigue or gloom. But they shock us when carried, as in the present instance, up to the very edge of the grave; and Lady Morgan's admirers will prefer to turn aside from her veteran foibles, and to think of her as a courageous and independent worker who had the good sense to perceive and the honesty to attack political grievances, which

the mass of her contemporaries were bent upon maintaining; and who allowed neither the excitement of social success nor the virulence of hostile criticism, to tempt her into deserting the patriotic cause in its difficult advance against the firmly compacted barrier of political pride and religious intolerance.

ART. IX.-EARLY HISTORY OF MESSIANIC IDEAS.

Des Doctrines religieuses des Juifs pendant les deux siècles antérieurs à l'ère chrétienne. Par Michel Nicolas. Paris, 1860.

Essais de Philosophie et d'Histoire religieuse. Par Michel Nicolas. Paris, 1863.

Die jüdische Apokalyptik in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung. Von Dr. A. Hilgenfeld. Jena, 1857.

Handbuch der Einleitung der Apokryphen. Von Dr. Gustav Volkmar. Tübingen, 1860.

Abhandlung über Entstehung und Werth der Sibyllischen Bücher. Von Heinrich Ewald. Göttingen, 1858.

THE distance at which Christianity stands from Judaism at the present hour might well surprise us, if we measured their affinity by what they hold in common. With two-thirds of their sacred history accepted by both, with the whole of the canonical literature of the one maintained in authority by the other, with the same consecrated list of patriarchs, poets, and prophets, and the very glow and pathos of their piety resorting to the same words, they yet exhibit an apparently ineffaceable contrast of inward genius. This fact becomes the more striking the nearer we place ourselves to the incunabula of Christendom, and the more closely we scrutinise its external filiation. These two religions furnish the strongest antitheses of human thought and feeling,-law and love,-letter and spirit,-the claims of an old birth and need of a new birth,-the promise of this world to a nation and that of another to every human soul; and the precision with which every thing is formulated in the casuistry of the synagogue reverses the free life of faith and conscience which forms the saintly ideal of the Church. The vitality of Judaism displays itself in an unchangeable persistency, gazing out of the same eyes on an ever-varying world: that of Christianity in an inexhaustible susceptibility to fresh lights of truth and goodness, enabling it to appropriate what is best in the civilisation of every age. And yet these two faiths no Roman of the first century could distinguish from each

other: the same law protected, or the same edict proscribed, both the tumult that expelled the Rabbi did not spare the Apostle and had some philosophic civilian listened to their polemic in the proseucha of Philippi or Thessalonica, he would have heard them start from the same assumptions, appeal to the same traditions, quote the same Scriptures, and vie with each other in reverence for the same names. The whole difference arose from two causes scarcely appreciable in their earliest action: the personal characteristics of Christ's divine humanity, and the Pauline doctrine of a heavenly and universal Redeemer. In these is contained the living essence of the new religion and their intense power cannot be adequately estimated till we fully picture to ourselves the original identity, which they have so absolutely destroyed, between the Hebrew and the Christian ideas.

It is no wonder that the religion of Christ, now that its genius has distinctly opened itself out, should appear to us to make quite a new beginning in the world; should stand detached, as a sudden apparition, from the common history even of the nation in which it arose, and seem scarcely to touch the earth except as the theatre of its manifestation. This illusion, due to our distance, could not be shared by the first witnesses who lived across the dividing time of the old world and the new, and occupied the very scene of the transition. They, accordingly, linked their fresh allegiance closely with their national birthright: if they accepted the gospel, it was in obedience to the law: they followed Jesus of Nazareth, because the prophecies must be fulfilled; nor were they surprised at his call, for they were looking for some such "consolation to Israel." In its earliest aspect Christianity was no new or universal religion: Judaism had found the person of its Messiah, but else remained the same. Had the first two gospels and the book of Revelation been the only monuments of the primitive age, no other view than this, which makes the New Testament simply the last chapter of the Old, would have been represented in our Scriptures: and it is by no means clear that, within the first generation, "the Twelve" and their disciples ever withdrew from the synagogue, or regarded the church as more than its supplement and ally. It was impossible, however, permanently to shut up and paralyse the spiritual power of Christ's personality within the narrow formulas of Jewish tradition and expectation. His words contained the germs, his life the image, his entrance into a higher world the consummation of the purest and widest human faith; and could not fail to speak home to many a spirit already sighing for such deliverance and repose. Hence arose a reaction against the Hebrew Chris

tianity; beginning with Stephen, systematised by Paul, and urged to its extreme in Marcion's final breach with the Old Testament. In his attempt to unfold the independent religious elements of the gospel, and to vindicate their sufficiency, he committed the error of speculative minds, and disowned the Past: he was not content with cutting the thread which united new and old, but set up in absolute opposition the spiritual stages which were really continuous. The Church had enough of historical feeling to condemn this Gnostic extreme, and of catholicity to rise above the other Jewish one; and settled into the compromise which has continued ever since, and may be stated thus: Christ fulfils the Law and the Prophets, inasmuch as they look towards him, and he bounds their view. Christ destroys the Law and the Prophets, inasmuch as he supersedes by transcending them; and they, having no significance but as preludes to him, retire on his appearing. It is not true, as the Marcionites say, that they came from a bad god, he from the Good: there is one divineness in them all. Neither is it true, as the Ebionites say, that he was sent only to usher in the triumph of the Law, and publish the Old Testament religion among mankind: on the contrary, he is the end, they the instrument; and when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part is done away.

The good sense of this verdict, regarded as a practical solution, cannot be denied. It saves the main truth of both the extremes: reserving supreme authority for the specialties of the new dispensation, without displacing the sanctity of the old. The connexion between the two, however, is represented as exclusively supernatural: it is sought for, not on earth, but in heaven ;-in the scheme and economy of God, not as ruling, but as overruling, the course of human affairs. The sequence of the new upon the old is in no degree that of natural growth, but purely that of artificially created correspondency,-antitype to type,-realisation to prediction. Through the national drama of Hebrew history, the Divine purpose always had regard to the final scene: but that scene was not wrought out by the inner movement of the piece: it was subjoined by detached volition; and its time, its mode, its character, were any thing rather than results of the antecedent conditions, and were determined in unexpected ways by special creative power turning the tides of tendency. So long as God was quite set apart from the world, and supposed to act upon it rather than in and through the courses of its life, the divine connexion of the two religions could be represented in no other way. The theory was also favoured by the chasm that lay between Malachi and Matthew, -the blank leaves that rendered it impossible to read on from