A fire, whose flames thro' crackling stubble fly;
A meteor, shooting from the summer sky;

A bowl, adown the bending mountain roll'd;
A bubble breaking,-and a fable told:

A noontide shadow, and a midnight dream;

Are emblems, which, with semblance apt, proclaim
Our earthly course."

So, also, that of Fawkes :

"If life a thousand years, or e'er so few,
'Tis repetition all, and nothing new:

A fair, where thousands meet, but none can stay;
An inn, where travellers meet, and post away."

And how majestically does Shakspeare make the fallen Woolsey echo the sentiment of the Hebrew prophet, "All flesh is grass, and the glory thereof as the flower of grass,"

etc.

"Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: To-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope: to-morrow, blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost,-a killing frost;
And, when he thinks, (good easy man,) full surely
His greatness is a ripening,-nips his root,
And then he falls as I do."

Just so says the prophet, "The wind passeth over it, and it is gone."

The Bible is replete with passages of the highest sublimity,-passages, many of which breathe, also, a most touching eloquence. Such are, the song of Deborah and Barak, in Judges: the reception given by the shades of Hades to the spirit of Babylon's king, as presented in Isa. chap. 14, already referred to. Such, also, is the triumphant song of the Israelites, on viewing the destruction of Egypt's martial hosts in the Red Sea (Exodus, chap. 15.) Such is the prayer of Jonah (Jonah, chap. 2); and where shall we find, in any writings, a passage fuller of grand imagery than the prayer of the prophet Habakkuk, chap. 3: 3-16? Where are sublimity and beauty more richly combined than in the 104th Psalm? "O Lord my God, thou art very great," etc. Where can you find a more touching description of goodness worthy of the Deity, than in Psalm 103? "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him," etc. How beautiful and how appropriate, too, is the picture

drawn by Moses (Deut. 32: 9, 14) of the care of Jehovah for his own covenant people! "The Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance. He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings; so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might eat the increase of the fields; and he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock." But we forbear; the Bible is full of such imagery, grand, striking, and affecting. Do we look for pathos? What more pathetic than David's lament over Jonathan and Saul, slain in battle? (2 Sam. 1: 17-27.) What more affecting than the royal father's heartpiercing lamentation over his fair-haired, but rebellious son? "O my son, Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

66

Would we ponder deeply the treasured results of wisdom, the dear-bought fruits of experience? We have, in the book. of Proverbs, an exhaustless storehouse of wisdom, for the guidance of our conduct in all the diversified circumstances of human life. The one short book of Proverbs contains more sound practical wisdom, than can be gathered from all the boasted teachings of all the renowned philosophers of antiquity and of modern times combined.

Now, the Bible, thus teeming with wisdom, and blazing with beauty of thought and splendor of imagery, has, for ages, been in the hands of men; and these thrilling passages have been before their eyes and present to their minds; and they have mingled in the thoughts and assisted to mould the conceptions and to determine the phraseology of our most masterly writers.

Let the Bible and its influences, direct and indirect, be blotted out of existence, and we at once extinguish the sun that illumines our literary heavens, and impair the strength and mar the beauty of our whole literature.

That book which, whenever possessed, has fostered the spirit of learning in all its varied departments; which has given birth to some of the profoundest works in existence, written solely for its illustration; which has laid a broad foundation for the science of jurisprudence; has promoted

(far as it has been known) general intelligence among the mass of the people; which has decidedly elevated the tone of morals, has imbued mankind with a gentler spirit, and has mitigated the horrors of war; that book which (besides doing all this) has furnished to our most admired writers, topics of unrivalled grandeur, and images of peculiar beauty, so that its annihilation would deface the largest and the fairest portion of our literature; that book may well awaken our admiration, ensure our respect, and commend itself to our closest attention, as the sun of true knowledge, the light and glory of our literature, a prize invaluable to human society, a boon of priceless worth to every young man.

And that book is the Bible, Heaven's best gift to man. It is the repository of noble thoughts, the originator of splendid imagery, the oracle of soundest wisdom. It is a counsellor to the young,-a solace to the aged. It is the grand textbook to the true student! It sparkles with brilliance, it blazes with beauty, and it breathes the spirit of liberty. It is emphatically and pre-eminently, THE BOOK FOR THE PEOPLE!

"Most wondrous book! bright candle of the Lord!
Star of eternity! the only star

By which the bark of man could navigate
The sea of life, and gain the coast of bliss
Securely;-only star which rose on Time,
And, on its dark and troubled billows, still,
As generation drifting swiftly by,

Succeeded generation,-threw a ray

Of heaven's own light,-and to the hills of God,
The everlasting hills,-pointed the sinner's eye.
This book, this glorious book, on every line
Mark'd with the seal of high divinity;
On every leaf bedew'd with drops of love
Divine,-and with the eternal heraldry
And signature of God Almighty stampt
From first to last,-this ray of sacred light,
This lamp, from off the everlasting throne,
Mercy took down, and, in the night of time
Stood, casting on the dark her gracious bow;
And evermore beseeching men with tears
And earnest sighs, to read, believe, and live!"

POLLOCK, Bk. I.

ART. IV.-Euvres de Rabelais. A Paris. Chez L'Edentu, Libraire-Editeur, Quai des Augustins. MDCCCXXXVII. Imp. 8vo., pp. viii., 677.

We think it was Edmund Burke, who very happily remarked of the great English Reformer of Intellectual Science, that his work was most truly a Lock(e) on the Human Understanding; for, though looked at by all, few possessed the key, or were willing to open it. This must invariably be the case, to a greater or less extent, with the recognized classics of every language, they are studied by a few, skimmed over by many, and spoken of by all. Their ordinary destiny, however, is to slumber undisturbed in the enjoyment of the dusty honors of the upper shelf. The loose and general reader finds that contemporary literature is always amply sufficient to engross those scanty remnants of his leisure hours, which he is willing to devote to books; and the ostentatious or superficial student deems he may safely venture to neglect the perusal of writers, of whom he is conscious that the great majority of those he meets in society know but very little. He can descant upon the hero and heroine of the last novel,-can discuss with the greatest unction the scenes and the characters depicted therein,—he can speak most critically of the simplicity of Hume, the breadth and majesty of Clarendon, and the point of Bolingbroke; but here he stops: his acquaintance with literature will carry him no further: he may edge in a stale and second-hand sarcasm from Voltaire, a bald fallacy from Rousseau, or a trite witticism from the Comedians of the Restoration, but even here he cautiously feels his ground, looks round upon his audience, and will not dare to swim without the saving help of corks or bladders. To him, little but the names and recorded characteristics of the great classics are known. Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Newton, Leibnitz and Locke, are nothing more than current coin, which he may throw confidently upon the counter,—and, as he represents a class, we can easily understand and account for the rarity of any actual acquaintance with the mighty works which have ennobled other times.

But, if these assertions be true of the ordinary authors of standard literature, in speaking of Rabelais, we must reduce materially even the trifling proportion of readers, which we

assign to other books of established excellence. Though he be, indeed, studied by very few, he is not known even by name to many; and few but those who have meandered through the thorny and devious labyrinths of his humour, would venture to make him the subject of their conversation or remarks. To those, who have merely heard of his great production, without having ever obtained initiation into the curious obscurities of the Pantagruelistic mysteries, his name remains as the unmeaning symbol of all that is most quaint and humorous in the wide field of satire and of wit, but with less definite or real significance than 'ducdamé, or other Greek invocations to call fools into a circle.' The singular phraseology in which Rabelais delighted, the peculiar, antiquated and fantastical language in which he wrote,―obsolete, grotesque, and obscure, even in the day of its publication,*-(old French deliberately bequilted with bastardized Latin and latinized Patois,)-exhibit a strange and heterogeneous medley, requiring a special study as an independent tongue; thus deterring many from perusal, and excluding him from the library of the mere French scholar. Moreover, his fanciful conceits and mad vagaries render wholly inappreciable to the many, who might master his dialect, the cutting wit, pointed sarcasm, inexhaustible humour, profound reflection, and eternal philosophy, which are so curiously jumbled together in his pages. To this must be added the frequent and intentional obscurities of his expression, and the studied mystifications of his meaning, which continually recur, and render a large portion of his humour wholly unintelligible in the present day, when the petty and post-scenial transactions of his own times are buried in the most profound oblivion, or require to be ferretted out from the ponderous tomes of Thuanus, and when many of the characters whom he so unsparingly ridicules, were forgotten with the sound of the bell that tolled their funeral,† or have long since passed to the tomb of all the Capulets.' These causes would alone be sufficient to repel those, who cannot enjoy what is really comprehensible in the Gargantua and Pantagruel, while so much remains behind without possible significance for them.

In the very commencement of his book, Rabelais informs his readers of the wilful obscurities of his diction, and compares the labor requisite for their comprehension to a dog craunching a bone. Prol. liv. i.

+ La memoyre en expira avecques le son des cloches lesquelles quarilloua rent a son enterrement. Liv. iv. c. xii.