among the mightiest of their host, kept | juries, instead of having to retain them by their communications open by encamping closeness of reasoning, or felicity of illustrain immediate vicinity to each other. Even tion. to Lord Brougham the same station may, with poetical truth at least, be assigned by It must have struck all who heard him the Homer who shall hereafter sing these when, early in 1808, he entered parliament battles; for though at that period his Lon- under the auspices of Mr. Perceval, that don domicile was in the walks of the Inner whatever defects he had, arose entirely from Temple, yet might he not seldom be en- accidental circumstances, and not at all countered in the less inviting walks which from intrinsic imperfections; nor could any led him to the suburban councils of his one doubt that his late entrance upon parbrethren in command. There he formed liamentary life, and his vehemence of temor cemented attachments, of which no sub- perament, alone kept him from the front sequent elevation of rank, or intoxicating tri- rank of debaters, if not of eloquence itself. umph of genius, or agony of political strife, With Mr. Perceval, his friendship had been have ever rendered him forgetful. Of one long and intimate. To this the similarity of those denizens of Clapham he has pub- of their religious character mainly contriblished a sketch of which we avail ourselves, uted; for Mr. Stephen was a distinguished not as subscribing altogether to the accu- member of the evangelical party to which racy of it, but as we can thus fill up, from the minister manifestly leant without bethe hand of so great a master, a part of our longing to it; and he was one whose pious canvass which must have otherwise remained sentiments and devotional habits occupied blank and colorless :-"Mr. Stephen was a a very marked place in his whole scheme person of great natural talents, which, if acci- of life. No man has, however, a right to dental circumstances had permitted him fully question, be it ever so slightly, his perfect to cultivate, and early enough to bring into sincerity. To this his blameless life bore play upon the best scene of political exer- the most irrefragable testimony. A warm tion, the House of Commons, would have and steady friend-a man of the strictest placed him high in the first rank of English integrity and nicest sense of both honor orators. For he had, in an eminent degree, and justice-in all the relations of private that strenuous firmness of purpose and glow- society wholly without a stain-though ing ardor of soul, which lies at the root of envy might well find whereon to perch, all eloquence: he was gifted with great malice itself, in the exasperating discords industry, a retentive memory, an ingenuity of religious and civil controversy, never which was rather apt to err by excess than could descry a spot on which to fasten. by defect. His imagination was, besides, Let us add the bright praise, and which lively and powerful; little, certainly, under, the chastening discipline of severe taste, but often enabling him to embody his own feelings and recollections with great distinctness of outline and strength of coloring. He enjoyed, moreover, great natural strength of constitution, and had as much courage as falls to the lot of most men. But having passed the most active part of his life in one of the West Indian colonies, where he followed the profession of a barrister, and having, after his return, addicted himself to the practice of a court which affords no scope at all for oratorical display, it happened to him, as it has to many other men of natural genius for rhetorical pursuits, that he neither gained the correct taste which the habit of frequenting refined society, and above all, addressing a refined auditory, can alone bestow, nor acquired the power of condensation, which is sure to be lost altogether by those who address hearers compelled to listen, like judges and

sets at nought all lesser defects of mere taste, had he lived to read these latter lines, he would infinitely rather have had this sketch stained with all the darker shades of its critical matter, than been exalted, without these latter lines, to the level of Demosthenes or of Chatham, praised as the first of orators, or followed as the most brilliant of statesmen. His opinions upon political questions were clear and decided, taken up with the boldness, felt with the ardor, asserted with the determination, which marked his zealous and uncompromising spirit. Of all subjects, that of the slave-trade and slavery most engrossed his mind. His experience in the West Indies, his religious feelings, and his near connexion with Mr. Wilberforce, whose sister he married, all contributed to give this great question a peculiarly sacred aspect in his eyes; nor could he either avoid mixing it up with almost all other discussions, or prevent his views of its various relations from

Such at least is the doctrine which, if

influencing his sentiments on other matters | terests of the world, from which, at no of political discussion." remote period, the inexorable law of our The author of the preceding portrait en-existence must summon him away. In that joyed the happiness denied to the subject of prospect, so full of awe to the wisest and it, not merely of witnessing, but of largely the best, he may well rejoice in the rememparticipating in, the last great act by which brance that, in conferring on him the capathe labors borne by them in common, dur- city to discern and the heart to obey the ing so many preceding years, were con- supreme and immutable will, God enabled summated. It was a still more rare bounty him to grasp the only clew by which the of Providence, which reserved the abolition rulers of the world can be safely guided of slavery throughout the British Empire amidst the darkness and the intricacy of as a triumph for the statesman who, twenty-human affairs. seven years before, had introduced into the House of Commons the first great act of Clapham could have claimed him for her tardy reparation to Africa. Crowned with own, Clapham would have instilled into honor and with length of days, to Lord Grey that Great Minister of the British crown, it has further been given, by the same be- to whom, more than to any other, she was nignant power, to watch, in the calm even- prompt to offer her allegiance. Politics, ing of life, the issues of the works of jus- however, in that microcosm, were rather tice and of mercy which God raised him up cosmopolitan than national. Every human to accomplish. With the evil omens, and interest had its guardian, every region of with the too glowing anticipations of for- the globe its representative. If the Afrimer times, he has been able to contrast the can continent and the Charibbean Archiactual solution of this great practical enig-pelago were assigned to an indefatigable He has lived to witness eleven years protectorate, New Holland was not forgotof unbroken tranquillity throughout coun- ten, nor was British India without a patron. tries where, before, a single year undisturbed It was the special charge of Mr. Grant,

ma.

by insurrection was almost unknown-the better known to the present generation by extinction of feuds apparently irreconcilable the celebrity of his sons, but regarded at -positions full of danger in former wars, the commencement of this century as the now converted into bulwarks of our nation-real ruler of the rulers of the east, the Dial power-an equal administration of jus-rector of the court of Directors. At Leadtice in the land of the slave-courts and the enhall Street he was celebrated for an incart-whip-a loyal and happy peasantry, where the soil was so lately broken by the sullen hands of slaves-penury exchanged for abundance-a population, once cursed by a constant and rapid decay, now progressively increasing Christian knowledge and Christian worship universally diffused among a people so lately debased by Pagan superstitions and the conjugal duties, with all their attendant charities, held in due honor by those to whom laws, written in the English language, and sanctioned by the kings of England, had forbidden even the marriage vow. If, with these blessings, have also come diminished harvests of the cane and the coffee plant, even they who think that to export and to import are the two great ends of the social existence of mankind, have before them a bright and not very distant futurity. But he, under whose auspices the heavy yoke was at length broken, is contemplating, doubtless, with other and far higher thoughts, the in

tegrity exercised by the severest trials; for an understanding large enough to embrace, without confusion, the entire range and the intricate combinations of their whole civil and military policy; and for nerves which set fatigue at defiance. At Clapham, his place of abode, he was hailed as a man whose piety, though ever active, was too profound for much speech; a praise to which, among their other glories, it was permitted to few of his neighbors there, to attain or aspire to. With the calm dignity of those spacious brows, and of that stately figure, it seemed impossible to reconcile the movement of any passion less pure than that which continually urged him to requite the tribute of India by a treasure, of which he who possessed it more largely than any other of the sons of men, has declared, that the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. No less elevated topic (so judged the inquisitive vicinage) could be the subject of his discourse, as he traversed their gorse-covered common, attended by a youth, who, but for the fire of his eye,

and the occasional energy of his bearing, man worse than wild beasts; none of those might have passed for some studious and corruptions which add still more to the sickly competitor for medals and prize miseries of mortality, shall be seen or heard poems. If such were the pursuits ascribed of any more." Ten days afterwards those by Clapham to her occasional visitant, it is aspirations were fulfilled. His body was but a proof that even "patent Christianity" laid in the grave by the hands of strangers is no effectual safeguard against human fal- at Tocat, and to his disembodied spirit was libility. revealed that awful vision, which it is given to the pure in heart, and to them alone, to contemplate.

Towards the middle of the last century, John Martyn of Truro was working with his hands in the mines near that town. Amidst all the discords which agitate the He was a wise man, who, knowing the Church of England, her sons are unaniright use of leisure hours, employed them mous in extolling the name of Henry Marso as to qualify himself for higher and more tyn. And with reason; for it is in fact the lucrative pursuits; and who, knowing the one heroic name which adorns her annals right use of money, devoted his enlarged from the days of Elizabeth to our own. means to procure for his four children a Her apostolic men, the Wesleys and Elliliberal education. Henry, the younger of otts and Brainerds of other times, either his sons, was accordingly entered at the quitted or were cast out of her communion. University of Cambridge, where, in Janua- Iler Acta Sanctorum may be read from end ry 1801, he obtained the degree of bache- to end with a dry eye and an unquickened lor of arts, with the honorary rank of senior pulse. Henry Martyn, the learned and the wrangler. There also he became the dis- holy, translating the Scriptures in his soliciple and, as he himself would have said, tary bungalow at Dinapore, or preaching the convert of Charles Simeon. Under the to a congregation of five hundred beggars, counsels of that eminent teacher, the gui- or refuting the Mohammedan doctors at dance of Mr. Wilberforce, and the active Shiraz, is the bright exception. It is not aid of Mr. Grant, he entered the East In- the less bright, because he was brought dia Company's service as a chaplain. Af- within the sphere of those secular influenter a residence in Hindostan of about five ces which so often draw down our Angliyears, he returned homewards through Per- can worthies from the Empyrean along sia in broken health. Pausing at Shiraz, which they would soar, to the levels, flat he labored there during twelve months with though fertile, on which they must depasthe ardor of a man, who, distinctly perceiv- ture. There is no concealing the fact, that ing the near approach of death, feared lest he annually received from the East India it should intercept the great work for which Company an ugly allowance of twelve hunalone he desired to live. That work (the dred pounds; and though he would be neitranslation of the New Testament into Per- ther just nor prudent who should ascribe sian) at length accomplished, he resumed to the attractive force of that stipend one his way towards Constantinople, following hour of Henry Martyn's residence in the his Mihmander (one Hassan Aga) at a gal- east, yet the ideal would be better without lop, nearly the whole distance from Ta- it. Oppressively conclusive as may be the briz to Tocat, under the rays of a burning arguments in favor of a well-endowed and sun, and the pressure of continual fever. punctually paid "Establishment," they On the 6th of October 1812, in the thirty-have, after all, an unpleasant earthly savor. second year of his age, he brought the Jour- One would not like to discover that Polynal of his life to a premature close, by in- carp, or Bernard, or Boniface, was waited scribing in it the following words, while he on every quarter-day by a plump bag of sought a momentary repose under the shad- coin from the public treasury. To reow of some trees at the foot of the Carama-ceive a thousand rupees monthly from that nian mountains: "I sat in the orchard, source, was perhaps the duty, it certainly and thought with sweet comfort and fear of was not the fault, of Henry Martyn. Yet God-in solitude, my companion, my friend, it was a misfortune, and had been better and comforter. Oh, when shall time give avoided if possible. place to eternity! When shall appear that new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness and love! There shall in nowise enter any thing that defileth; none of that wickedness which has made

When Mackenzie was sketching his Man of Feeling, he could have desired no better model than Henry Martyn, the young and successful competitor for academical honors; a man born to love with ardor and to

his own heart as corrupt, and his own reason as delusive, he exercised an unlimited affiance in the holiness and the wisdom of Him, in whose person the divine nature had been allied to the human, that, in the persons of his followers, the human might be allied to the divine.

hate with vehemence; amorous, irascible, self-renunciation painful, the victory comambitious, and vain; without one torpid plete. His understanding embraced, and nerve about him; aiming at universal ex- his heart reposed in the two comprehencellence in science, in literature, in con- sive and ever germinating tenets of the versation, in horsemanship, and even in school in which he studied. Regarding dress; not without some gay fancies, but more prone to austere and melancholy thoughts; patient of the most toilsome inquiries, though not wooing philosophy for her own sake; animated by the poetical temperament, though unvisited by any poetical inspiration; eager for enterprise, though thinking meanly of the rewards to which the adventurous aspire; uniting in himself, though as yet unable to concentrate or to harmonize them, many keen desires, many high powers, and much constitutional dejection-the chaotic materials of a great character, destined to combine, as the future events of life should determine, into no common forms, whether of beauty and delight, or of deformity and terror.

Such was his religious theory-a theory which doctors may combat, or admit, or qualify, but in which the readers of Henry Martyn's biography, letters, and journals, cannot but acknowledge that he found the resting-place of all the impetuous appetencies of his mind, the spring of all his strange powers of activity and endurance. Prostrating his soul before the real, though the hidden Presence he adored, his doubts were siAmong those events, the most momen-lenced, his anxieties soothed, and every tous was his connection with Charles Sim- meaner passion hushed into repose. He eon, and with such of his disciples as sought pursued divine truth (as all who would learning at Cambridge, and learned leisure at Clapham. A mind so beset by sympathies of every other kind, could not but be peculiarly susceptible to the contagion of opinion. From that circle he adopted, in all its unadorned simplicity, the system called Evangelical-that system of which (if Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the writers of the English Homilies, may be credited) Christ himself was the author, and Paul the first and greatest interpre

ter.

succeed in that pursuit must pursue it,) by the will rather than the understanding; by sincerely and earnestly searching out the light which had come into the world, by still going after it when perceived, by following its slightest intimation with faith, with resignation, and with constancy, though the path it disclosed led him from his friends and the home of his youth, across wide oceans and burning deserts, amidst contumely and contention, with a wasted frame and an overburdened spirit. He rose to the Through shallow heads and voluble sublime in character, neither by the power tongues such a creed (or indeed any of his intellect, nor by the compass of his creed) filtrates so easily, that, of the multi- learning, nor by the subtlety, the range, tude who maintain it, comparatively few or the beauty of his conceptions, (for in are aware of the conflict of their faith with all these he was surpassed by many,) but by the natural and unaided reason of mankind. the copiousness and the force of the living Indeed he who makes such an avowal will fountains by which his spiritual life was hardly escape the charge of affectation or nourished. Estranged from a world once of impiety. Yet if any truth be clearly re- too fondly loved, his well-tutored heart vealed, it is, that the apostolic doctrine was learned to look back with a calm though foolishness to the sages of this world. If affectionate melancholy on its most bitter any unrevealed truth be indisputable, it is, privations. Insatiable in the thirst for freethat such sages are at this day making, as dom, holiness, and peace, he maintained they have ever made, ill-disguised efforts to an ardor of devotion which might pass for escape the inferences with which their own an erotic delirium, when contrasted with admissions teem. Divine philosophy di- the Sadducean frigidity of other worshipvorced from human science-celestial things pers. Regarding all the members of the stripped of the mitigating veils woven by great human family as his kindred in sorman's wit and fancy to relieve them-form row and exile, his zeal for their welfare an abyss as impassable at Oxford now, as partook more of the fervor of domestic at Athens eighteen centuries ago. To affection, than of the kind but gentle Henry Martyn the gulf was visible, the warmth of a diffusive philanthropy. Elevated SEPTEMBER, 1844. 2

in his own esteein by the consciousness of an | low-toned, ascetic morality, would describe intimate union with the Eternal Source of as distracting the heart between earth and all virtue, the meek missionary of the heaven.

cross exhibited no obscure resemblance to Yet it is a life pregnant with many oththe unobtrusive dignity, the unfaltering purer weighty truths. It was passed in an age pose, and indestructible composure of Him when men whom genius itself could scarceby whom the cross was borne. The ill-ly rescue from abhorrence, found in their disciplined desires of youth, now confined constitutional sadness, real or fictitious, not within one deep channel, flowed quickly merely an excuse for grovelling in the stye onward towards one great consummation; of Epicurus, but even an apology for denor was there any faculty of his soul, or any ifying their sensuality, pride, malignity, and treasure of his accumulated knowledge, for worldly-mindedness, by hymns due only to which appropriate exercise was not found those sacred influences, by which our beton the high enterprise to which he was ter nature is sustained, in the warfare with devoted. its antagonist corruptions. Not such the And yet nature, the great leveller, still gloom which brooded over the heart of Henasserting her rights even against those whose ry Martyn. It solicited no sympathy, was triumph over her might seem the most per- never betrayed into sullenness, and sought fect, would not seldom extort a burst of pas-no unhallowed consolation. It assumed the sionate grief from the bosom of the holy form of a depressing consciousness of ill deHenry Martyn, when memory recalled the sert, mixed with fervent compassion for a image of her to whom, in earlier days, the world which he at once longed to quit and homage of his heart had been rendered. panted to improve. It was the sadness of The writer of his life, embarrassed with an exile gazing wistfully towards his disthe task of reconciling such an episode to tant home, even while soothing the grief of the gravity befitting a hero so majestic, his brethren while in captivity. It was a sadand a biography so solemn, has concealed ness akin to that which stole over the heart of this passage of his story beneath a veil, at his Master, while, pausing on the slope of once transparent enough to excite, and im- the hills which stand round about Jerusapervious enough to baffle curiosity. A form lem, he wept over her crowded marts and may be dimly distinguished of such witch-cloud-capped pinnacles, hastening to a desoery as to have subdued at the first interview, lation already visible to that prescient eye, if not at the first casual glance, a spirit soar- though hidden by the glare and tumult of ing above all the other attractions of this sublunary sphere. We can faintly trace the pathway, not always solitary, of the pious damsel, as she crossed the bare heaths of Cornwall on some errand of mercy, and listened, not unmoved, to a tremulous voice, pointing to those heights of devotion from which the speaker had descended to this Tidings of the death of Henry Martyn lower worship. Then the shifting scene reached England during the Parliamentary presents the figure-alas! so common-of debates on the renewal of the East India Coma mother, prudent and inexorable, as if she pany's charter; and gave new impetus to had been involved in no romance of her the zeal with which the friends and patrons own some brief twenty years before; and of his youth were then contending for the then appears the form (deliciously out of establishment of an Episcopal see at Calcutplace) of the apostolic Charles Simeon, as- ta, and for the removal of all restraints on the suming, but assuming in vain, the tender diffusion of Christianity within its limits. In intervenient office. In sickness and in sor- the roll of names most distinguished in that row, in watchings and in fastings, in conflict, scarcely one can be found which toils and perils, and amidst the decay of does not also grace the calendar of Clapall other earthly hopes, this human love ham. It was a cause emphatically Clapblends so touchingly with his divine enthu-hamic. John Venn, to whom the whole siasm, that even from the life of Henry Mar-sect looked up as their pastor and spiritual tyn there can scarcely be drawn a more guide, was at that time on his deathbed. valuable truth, than that, in minds pure as He had been the projector, and one of the his, there may dwell together in most har- original founders, of the society for sending monious concord, affections which a coarse, I missionaries of the Anglican communion to

life from the obdurate multitude below. It was a sadness soon to give place to an abiding serenity in the presence of that compassionate Being who had condescended to shed many bitter tears, that he might wipe away every tear from the eyes of his faithful followers.