TO BE READ AT LEAST ONCE.

TO OUR PATRONS.

THE ECLECTIC MAGAZINE is now the only Monthly repository of Foreign Literature in the country; and having absorbed every thing else of the kind, it stands unrivalled, and is, truly, an Eclectic Magazine. Its plates have always been unequalled; and, by a special agreement with Mr. Sartain, whose execution in this line surpasses that of all others, they will in future be even superior to those already given. The Engravings are considered, by many, worth the price of the work.

To those who have taken Campbell's Semi-Monthly heretofore, we now send the Eclectic Magazine monthly, hoping they will be satisfied with the change. The Eclectic is conducted very much on the same plan with the other, but contains more matter, the printed page being larger. After consultation, we are disposed to think that a monthly issue of such a work is preferable to any greater frequency, and will be generally acceptable.

The last four numbers of the Semi-monthly have been made up of the matter of the Eclectic, so that subscribers to the former have had a fair opportunity of judging of the character of the latter. They will excuse the repetition of one or two short articles, which, under the circumstances, could not well be prevented.

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Our intention, hereafter, is to issue promptly, on the FIRST DAY of each month, waiting for the arrival of the steamers, which leave Liverpool on the 4th of each month, and bring us our Magazines. Thus we shall always furnish fresh matter, selecting for Oct. 1, from the September Magazines, and so on.

All moneys to be sent directly to 194 Broadway, except by subscribers in Philadelphia and vicinity.

THE CLAPHAM SECT, OR THE COTERIE yet unborn, to determine what was The

1. The Life of Isaac Milner, D.D., F.R.S., Dean of Carlisle, President of Queen's College, and Professor of Mathematics done aforetime. The antiquities of Clapham, in the University of Cambridge; compris- had they not been written in the Britannia ing a portion of his Correspondence of Mr. Lysons? Her beauties, had they not and other Writings, hitherto unpublish-inspired the muse of Mr. Robins? But ed. By his Niece, MARY MILNER. 8vo. it was reserved for Mrs. Milner, and for

of the borough of Southwark, having become a husband, became also the owner of a spacious mansion on the confines of the villa-cinctured common of Clapham.

It is difficult to consider the suburban retirement of a wealthy banker esthetically (as the Germans have it); but, in this instance, the intervention of William Pitt imparted some dignity to an occurrence otherwise so unpoetical. He dismissed for a moment his budgets and his subsidies, for the amusement of planning an oval saloon to be added to this newly purchased residence. It arose at his bidding, and yet remains, perhaps a solitary monument of

embraced and loved, under all the varying forms which conceal their union from each other, and from the world. Discord never agitated that tranquil home; lassitude never brooded over it. Those demons quailed at the aspect of a man in whose heart peace had found a resting-place, though his intellect was incapable of repose.

Henry was the second son of John Thornton, a merchant renowned in his generation for a munificence more than princely, and commended to the reverencé of posterity by the letters and the poetry of Cowper. The father was one of those rare men, in whom the desire to relieve distress

the architectural skill of that imperial mind. assumes the form of a master passion; and Lofty and symmetrical, it was curiously if faith be due to tradition, he indulged it wainscoted with books on every side, except with a disdain, alternately ludicrous and where it opened on a far-extended lawn, sublime, of the good advice which the ecreposing beneath the giant arms of aged elms and massive tulip trees.

Few of the designs of the great Minister were equally successful. Ere many years had elapsed, the chamber he had thus projected became the scene of enjoyments which, amidst his proudest triumphs, he might well have envied, and witnessed the

centric have to undergo from the judicious. Conscious of no aims but such as might invite the scrutiny of God and man, he pursued them after his own fearless fashionyielding to every honest impulse, relishing a frolic when it fell in his way, choosing his associates in scorn of mere worldly precepts, and worshipping with any fellow

growth of projects more majestic than any Christian whose heart beat in unison with which ever engaged the deliberations of his own, however inharmonious might be his Cabinet. For there, at the close of each some of the articles of their respective succeeding day, drew together a group of creeds. playful children, and with them a knot of His son was the heir of his benevolence, legislators, rehearsing, in sport or earnestly, but not of his peculiarities. If Lavater had some approaching debate; or travellers been summoned to divine the occupation from distant lands; or circumnavigators of of Henry Thornton, he would probably the worlds of literature and science; or the have assigned to him the highest rank Pastor of the neighboring Church, whose among the Judges of his native land. Brows look announced him as the channel through capacious and serene, a scrutinizing eye, which benedictions passed to earth from and lips slightly separated, as of one who heaven; and, not seldom, a youth who list- listens and prepares to speak, were the true ened, while he seemed to read the book interpreters of the informing mind within. spread out before him. There also was It was a countenance on which were graven still a matronly presence, controlling, ani- the traces of an industry alike quiet and mating, and harmonizing the elements of persevering, of a self-possession unassailable this little world, by a kindly spell, of which by any strong excitement, and of an undernone could trace the working, though the standing keen to detect, and comprehensive charm was confessed by all. Dissolved in to reconcile distinctions. The judicial, endless discourse, or rather in audible so- like the poetical nature, is a birthright; liloquy, flowing from springs deep and in- and by that imprescriptible title he possessexhaustible, the lord of this well-peopled ed it. Forensic debates were indeed beenclosure rejoiced over it with a contagious yond his province; but even in Westminster joy. In a few paces, indeed, he might tra- Hall, the noblest of her temples, Themis

verse the whole extent of that patriarchal dominion. But within those narrow precincts were his Porch, his Studio, his Judgment-Seat, his Oratory, and 'the Church that was in his house,' the reduced but not imperfect resemblance of that innumerable company which his Catholic spirit

had no more devoted worshipper. To investigate the great controversies of his own and of all former times, was the chosen employment, to pronounce sentence in them the dear delight, of his leisure hours.

Nothing which fell within the range of his observation. escaped this curious inquiry. His own duties, motives, and habits, support of his commercial credit, he adthe characters of those whom he loved best, judged that it ought never to be increased the intellectual resources and powers of his by accumulation nor diminished by sumpvarious friends and companions, the pre-tuousness; and he lived and died in the possessions, hereditary or conventional, to rigid practice of this decision. In the diwhich he or they were subject, the maxims vision of his income between himself and of society, the dogmas of the Church, the the poor, the share he originally assigned

problems which were engaging the attention of Parliament or of political economists, and those which affected his own enterprises-all passed in review before him, and were all in their turn adjudicated with the grave impartiality which the keeper of the great seal is expected to exhibit. Truth, the foe of falsehood-truth, the antagonist of error-and truth, the exorcist of ambiguity-was the object of his supreme homage; and so reverential were the vows offered by him at her shrine, that he abjured the communion of those less earnest worshippers, who throw over her the veil of fiction, or place her in epigrammatic attitudes, or disguise her beneath the mask of wit or drollery. To contemplate truth in the purest light, and in her own fair proportions, he

to them was nearly six-sevenths of the whole; and as appeared after his death, from accounts kept with the most minute commercial accuracy, the amount expended by him in one of his earlier years, for the relief of distress, considerably exceeded nine thousand pounds. When he had become the head of a family, he reviewed this decree, and thenceforward regarded himself as trustee for the miserable, to the extent only of one-third of his whole expenditure. The same faithful record showed that the smallest annual payment ever made by him on this account, amounted to two thousand pounds. As a legislator, he had condemned the unequal pressure of the direct taxes on the rich and the poor; but instead of solacing his defeat with the narcotic of virtuous inwas content that she should be unadorned dignation combined with discreet parsimoby any beauties but such as belong to her ny, he silently raised his own contribution celestial nature, and are inseparable from to the level of his speech. Tidings of the it. Hence his disquisitions did not always commercial failure of a near kinsman emescape the reproach of drought and tedious- barked him at once on an inquiry, how far ness, or avoided it only by the cheerful he was obliged to indemnify those who might tone and pungent sense with which they have given credit to his relative, in a reliwere conducted. He had as little preten-ance, however unauthorized, on his own sion to the colloquial eloquence as to the resources; and again the coffers of the multifarious learning and transcendental banker were unlocked by the astuteness of

the casuist. A mercantile partnership (many a year has passed since the disclosure could injure or affect any one), which, without his knowledge, had obtained from

*revelations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet the pilgrimages to Clapham and to Highgate were made with rival zeal, and the relics brought back from each were regarded as of almost equal sanctity. If the phi- his firm large and improvident advances, losophical poet dismissed his audience un- became so helplessly embarrassed, that der the spell of theories compassing all their bankruptcy was pressed on him as the knowledge, and of imagery peopling all only chance of averting from his own house space, the practical philosopher sent his the most serious disasters. He overruled hearers to their homes instructed in a doc-the proposal, on the ground that they whose trine, cheerful, genial, and active-a doc- rashness had given to their debtors an untrine which taught them to be sociable and merited credit, had no right to call on oth

ers to divide with them the consequent loss. To the last farthing he therefore discharged the liabilities of the insolvents, at a cost

busy, to auginent to the utmost of their power the joint stock of human happiness, and freely to take, and freely to enjoy, the share assigned to each by the conditions of of which his own share exceeded twenty

that universal partnership. And well did the teacher illustrate his own maxims. The law of social duty, as expounded in his domestic academy, was never expounded more clearly or more impressively than by his habitual example.

Having inherited an estate, which, though not splendid, was enough for the

thousand pounds. Yet he was then declining in health, and the father of nine young children. Enamored of truth, the living spirit of justice, he yielded the allegiance of the heart to justice, the outward form of truth. The law engraven on the tablet of his conscience, and executed by the ministry of his affections, was strictly interpreted