the closet which Chrysostom is in the pulpit, with the difference between passion and premeditation. Taylor is a great painter, Chrysostom a great musician. Taylor is elaborate and smooth, Chrysostom impassioned and abrupt. The one, the perfection of fancy; the other, the perfection of effective address, running over the diapason of the human soul in its every changeful mood with a master's skill, with an under tone sustaining the whole of ample learning and strong common sense. But let us not be mistaken in the verdict we have just pronounced. Those will greatly misapprehend us who fancy they will find in Chrysostom's pages elaborate and flashing paragraphs of wordmusic designed for effect; lengthened harangues appealing to the imagination or the heart, aiming at the excitement of the passions of his hearers; sky-rockets that mount heavenward by the help of a little extraneous matter in their head kindled with the fuse of a false enthusiasm, to glare, and flash, and rattle, and surprise. This is quite unlike the natural and manly eloquence of the Greek ecclesiast, who, if he knew such arts, would scorn to practise them, refuse their help, and utterly contemn their effects. His aim is rather so to expound Holy Scripture, and the Christian duties enforced therein, with the assistance of all the appliances in his reach-his own boundless talent, conscientious industry, and painful earnestness-as to bring out the sense of God's holy word to the understanding of his hearers, and make it the law of their life. Too much stress is laid upon Chrysostom's fancy. For our own part, we find it hard to recognise such a faculty in his writings. We perceive a copious rhetorical fulness of figure and illustration in his works, such as a well-furnished and ingenious mind will spontaneously supply, but neither predominance nor cultivation of fancy. His sermons are not overlaid with ornament; indeed, it would be hard to say in what part of his works ornament could with propriety be said to be laid on. All that appears to us is a natural genesis of good and obvious thoughts expressed in that vein of mingled poetry and prose which has ever lain within the province of the effective rhetorician; the variety and redundance of these resources of his eloquence being in proportion to the unexampled richness of the stores from which he drew. Chrysostom was a student more than an artist; and his results the combined effect of industry and unequalled genius, not of artifice and design. Who does not read in his persistence in "dining alone,"-a sin against the traditional housekeeping of the patriarchate not to be forgiven,-the secret of much of his success? A solitary by his monkish profession, he was so still more by the exigencies of his pursuits and his unintermitted preaching. Sermons five or six times in the week,

addressed to a cultivated and exacting auditory, carefully written beforehand, and delivered without a manuscript, would have tasked the powers of the most extraordinary orator; and did so in the case of this distinguished Father. He was ever equal to his work, for he might have relaxed it if he felt so disposed; but he continued to prosecute it at a fearful expenditure of time, and pains, and health-of studious seclusion and continuous thought. The people, fed on his honied accents, became fastidious in their tastes, and would listen patiently to no other in Chrysostom's church but the patriarch himself. The distinction was flattering to the orator, but it entailed an enormous amount of labour, and is the simple key to much of the obloquy that befel him for his presumed distance of manner and reserve. His unsocial habits arose from no unsocial disposition-he neither despised nor renounced his species-but from the demands of the pulpit. A great preacher must be a diligent student, and Chrysostom was both.

To quote favourable opinions of this magnificent divine, would be to quote from almost every one that has ever written upon the subject. Suffice it to say, in the words of our own Savile, "Johanne Chrysostomo, nemo Græcorum patrum plura dedit, nemo meliora." No preacher of any communion will repent of making Chrysostom a frequent study; we refer chiefly to his expository and hortatory works. The times are favourable to such studies, for the Fathers of the Church have their merits recognised now-a-days as they have not been for two centuries past. The conviction is arising on all hands that they were not so puerile and besotted as it has been the fashion in unlearned or secular circles to represent them; but that the estimate formed of them in earlier days, and within the pale of the Greek and Latin churches, must have been based upon considerable merits. With our views and known convictions, we must allow that there is much chaff in their writings, arising from their superstitious training and ecclesiastical position; nevertheless, candour will own that the chaff bears no proportion to the wheat. They were learned men, they were conscientious men, they were earnest and influential men, and filled a very large space in the eyes of their contemporaries and immediate successors, and this could not be without indisputable intellectual and moral pre-eminence. Jerome, Augustine, and especially Chrysostom, we would urge upon the daily, the nightly perusal of the ministers of all communions, as voluminous and learned writers, zealous and distinguished divines, and one or two of these, powerful and popular preachers. The Puritans and the early Nonconformists, whose folios have been the nurture of our piety, and are still the admiration of the

world and the fortune of the booksellers, were devout students of the Fathers. Their text and margins are studded with quotation and reference from these long-neglected authors, and they feel happy when they can clench a doctrine or close a period with an authority from the early Church. When we advocate their more habitual study now, it is with a view to their legitimate use: not to foster the vanities of pedantry; not to innoculate with an exaggerated ritualism; not to lead astray from the "green pastures" and "still waters" of the only inspired Book; not to reproduce, with the loathing of the auditory, Chrysostom and Augustine in a modern pulpit; but in order that the learning, the method, the eloquence, the plenitude, the earnestness, the fire of these holy men, which charmed contemporaries, and have won everlasting renown, may be transfused into the present generation of servants of the sanctuary. The English translation of the "Library of the Fathers" facilitates the adoption of our advice; but our advice extends to the Greek of Chrysostom, as cheaper for the pocket, and more satisfactory to the student himself.

ART. III.-GEORGE STEPHENSON.

The Life of George Stephenson. By Samuel Smiles. Third Edition; Revised with Additions. London: Murray.

WAS it the excitement of youth, or the exhilaration incident to that mode of travelling, that made us, with a zest which the railroad never inspires, mount in Basinghall Street, or at the White Horse Cellars, the "Company's Coach," about six o'clock on a fine summer's evening, with four fine horses in sparkling gear before us, and Bath or Bristol for a terminus? Very luxurious was the evening ride through the varied scenery of the Western road; very pleasant was it to watch the setting sun, the deepening, twilight, the starry host coming forth into full revelation, the rising moon; pleasant to chat with fellow-travellers without being compelled to raise the voice to a bawl; pleasant when after midnight, the pealing notes of the guard's horn seemed to give new life to the pattering hoofs of the horses till they drew up at the half-way house, where a bright fire and a well-spread table presented charms such as the most spiritual could not withstand, and the "Refreshment Room" knows not. It were vain to call in question the triumph of locomotives, as exhibited in the intensely interesting "Life of George Stephenson;" but

reviewers, whose hair has long been grey, may be forgiven for remembering with lingering fondness those chronometers, the Manchester "Telegraph" and "Defiance;" and that Shrewsbury "Wonder," with its five or six mile stages, the coachman never handling his whip, and almost afraid to suffer to break into a gallop that noble team, which proudly trotted over the six miles, so as to leave two minutes or nearly of the half-hour for changing horses. We do not wish to forget how once as that famous coach was rolling up the hill near Barnet, with steeds that did not seem to know the difference between ascending and descending gradients, the guard pointed, with such admiration as guards only could express, to a post-chaise, as we passed it, in which were two ladies unattended: "There, sir, those ladies came out of Shrewsbury with me this morning; not many ladies in England would keep up with the Wonder,' in that way, sir." For the mere pleasure of travelling, nothing has yet matched the outside of a first-rate coach in fine weather, as such coaches were worked just before the introduction of locomotives :

"But it had its dark side also. Any one who remembers the journey by stage from Manchester to London will associate it with recollections and sensations of not unmixed delight. To be perched for twenty hours, exposed to all weathers, on the outside of a coach, trying in vain to find a soft seat-sitting now with the face to the wind, rain, or sun, and now with the back-without any shelter such as the commonest penny-a-mile parliamentary train now daily provides, was a miserable undertaking, looked forward to with horror by many whose business called upon them to travel frequently between the provinces and the Metropolis. Nor were the inside passengers more agreeably accommodated. To be closely packed up in a little, inconvenient, straight-backed vehicle, where the cramped limbs could not be in the least extended, nor the wearied fame indulge in any change of posture, was felt by many to be a terrible thing. Then there were the constantly recurring demands, not always couched in the politest terms, for an allowance to the driver every two or three stages, and to the guard every six or eight; and if the gratuity did not equal their expectations, growling and open abuse were not unusual. These désagréments, together with the exactions practised on travellers by innkeepers, seriously detracted from the romance of stage-coach travelling; and there was a general disposition on the part of the public to change the system for a better."-Pp. 346, 347.

George Stephenson was the main instrument in effecting that change-a change great in itself, and in its consequences to England and the world, incalculable. The volume before us is the third edition of the history of that remarkable man, and contains many particulars illustrative of his private life and

N.S.-VOL. III.

E

habits, while residing at Liverpool, Alton Grange, and Tapton, which supply an admitted defect in the earlier editions of his biography. The work exhibits clearly and fully, the triumphs of Mr. Stephenson's moral character and mechanical genius. They who wish to trace the locomotive in all the stages of its advance to its present perfection, will find here the requisite information: yet the book is a biography, not a dissertation on mechanics. The numerous scientific details which its five hundred pages contain, are all made to revolve around the engineer; and by the help of a few master-strokes, in which this third edition excels, Mr. Smiles makes his reader thoroughly conversant with his hero, from the time when his home was in Jolly's Close, where father, mother, four sons, and two daughters, all lived and slept in one room, till he had won for himself one of "the stately homes of England," and the two most illustrious of living monarchs, Victoria and Leopold, sought to shower honours on his head, and were not able; for, to the name of George Stephenson, any addition from the Herald's College would have been not glory, but a shadow.

George Stephenson, the real railway king, was the son of parents "who had very little to come and go upon-honest folk, but sore haudden doon in the world." His father was "an exceedingly amiable person," who encouraged the robins to feed around his engine fire, and delighted the boys and girls by his stories of Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor. His mother, though somewhat nervous, "was a rale canny body." At an early age George was delighted to obtain employment as a cow-keeper, his wages being twopence a-day. His favourite amusement was, in conjunction with his chosen playmate Tom Thirlaway, to erect clay engines, the wild hemlock serving for imaginary pipes. Gradually, but surely, he gets better work, and about the age of fourteen, is appointed assistant-fireman to the engine, at one shilling a-day. Three years afterwards he becomes plugman, taking precedence of his father as a workman; and despite some obstacles, he pushed his way onward to yet more responsible occupation. Intending to marry, he added shoe mending and making, and the manufacture of lasts, to his other labours, as a means of increasing his slender resources. From the time an engine was placed under his care, it became his practice to take it to pieces on Saturday afternoon, for the twofold purpose of cleaning it and gaining a perfect knowledge of its parts and working. When he had reached the age of twenty-nine, an engine set up to pump water from a pit, failed to accomplish its purpose, though kept at work for nearly twelve months. Stephenson had repeatedly from curiosity marked the failure, and examined the