Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/413

Rh what akin to, but more expansive and practical than that of Archdeacon Hare and Professor Maurice. Moderate and conservative in his general views, he is no straitlaced partisan; and we know those who account him "unsafe,” because he is not afraid to quote the quarantine pages of Shelley, Carlyle, and Emerson; nor does his churchmanship recoil from writing down doctrinal primnesses, clerical over-niceties, protracted litanies, and long sermons. His lines of thought are constructed on the broad, not the narrow gauge; and it is pleasant to watch the steady swiftness of the trains—the ease with which they touch at intermediate stations—the quiet triumph with which they issue from some long dark tunnel of speculation—and the methodical fidelity with which they keep time, and discharge their consignment at the terminus. Although it might seem that the accommodations are only for first-class passengers—scholars and men of culture—yet there is that lucid arrangement, forcible illustration, and attractive style about our author, which, with due attention on, their parts, will be found available even by humble penny-a-milers. His style is polished, but not pedantic,—occasionally a little careless, but frequently rising into poetical beauty, and usually characterised by tranquil elegance. Nor may we omit to notice the religious spirit, the tone of mild, intelligent, benignant piety, which animates him with its prevailing presence, and colours his pages with a light as of setting suns.

His first work—so far, at least, as we are able to trace his anonymous career—was "Essays written in the Intervals of Business,” published some ten years since. It treats on such subjects as Practical Wisdom, Self-Discipline, Aids to Contentment, Benevolence, Domestic Rule, Advice, Secrecy, the Education of a Man of Business, the Choice and Management of Agents, the Treatment of Suitors, Party-spirit, &c. The first eight of the fifteen pertain to mankind in general; the concluding seven to men of business. It is a man of business who writes, and who writes essays—essays of lofty moral tone, of large intellectual character, and of considerable imaginative power. And this man of business shows, what technical men of business so systematically ignore, that imagination and philosophy can be woven into practical wisdom, and that the highest moral qualities may be translated into action. He shows how feasible it is, or may become, for a sound heart and a clear head to compass the material ends of a Benthamite by the unselfish means of a spiritualist—to unite the "not slothful in business" with the nobly "fervent in spirit." His view of practical wisdom is as far from so-called expediency as it is from impracticability itself. His doctrine is, that high moral resolves and great principles are for daily use, and that there is room for them in the affairs of this life; and, in fine, that the men who first introduce these principles are practical men, although the practices which such principles create may not come into being in the lifetime of their founders, being regarded at first as theories only, but eventually acknowledged and acted upon as common truths. The object of the Essay on Contentment—is, to suggest some antidotes against the manifold ingenuity of self-tormenting; and most admirably does it expose the evils of oversensitiveness about what people may say of us,—many unhappy persons imagining