out the meaning of this exhibition, for it must have been done to produce stage effect, as she knew before she went down to the House of Lords that Theodore Majoochi was to be examined as a witness against her; but, whatever was the intention, the effect was not favourable, as it gave the impression of her being much alarmed at his evidence, and I fear that on the wrong side of fifty a woman does not create much interest by being in a passion.'—Vol. iii. pp. 253, 254.

The lady's report of her own examination is given with great spirit and candour. Lady Charlotte had quickness and presence of mind enough to keep strictly to the truth, and yet compromise as little as possible her former mistress. When the trial is over she writes to Miss Berry :

'And now, my dearest Mary, my brother has already settled that we are to set out for Italy on the 15th of this month. I cannot express with what delight I look forward to finding myself with you in the repose of the Eternal City, occupied with nothing more immediately interesting than the recollections of Roman patriots and Roman emperors! and to your sincerity and affection I shall apply as a safeguard against believing myself to be either an angel or a devil, which during the last five weeks has been a point rather difficult for me to determine. The manner in which I have been cried up and complimented by the Opposition, for having had sufficient presence of mind in some manner to defeat the designs of the counsel for the Bill, of drawing from me opinions that I conceived they had no right to extract, might have turned a head excitable as mine, and persuaded me that I am a female Solomon; while, on the other hand, the scurrilous and abominable attack upon my evidence in the ministerial papers, and the horrible anonymous letters with which I am daily persecuted, might, to a person of my nervous constitution, have frightened me into imagining myself a creature despised and contemned by all the honest part of the community! You know exactly all that I have thought and felt, and I trust that you will acquit me of any dishonourable or mean motives in all that I have done or said. I have suffered much uneasiness, terror, and perplexity during all this business.

'I must not omit to tell you that Lord Liverpool, with much gentlemanlike good nature, put a stop to the abusive attacks upon me in those papers over which he had an influence.'-Vol. iii. P. 260.

The friendship, thus warmly expressed, grew with advancing age. Lady C. Lindsay was the Miss Berrys' constant companion for 'years and years,' and her death, three years before her friend's, was regarded as that of a sister; while the letters received on the occasion show how much vigour must have remained to Miss Berry at 87, to render natural the tone of her correspondence. Her sister Agnes, but one year her junior-who in life shared her popularity, but of whom we learn no particulars in these volumes-died in the beginning of 1852, and the subject of this memoir at its close, in her 90th year. Her editor and biographer, whose own death we have had to regret, very shortly after the completion of this laborious task most conscientiously performed, writes of the last years of these distinguished sisters :—

'Notwithstanding the depressing sense of advancing age and receding powers, which pervaded most strongly every line Miss Berry wrote of herself, during the latter years of her life, a certain amount of social enjoyment never really forsook either her sister or herself: they cast no gloom on the friends whom they welcomed, and who congregated at their house no less for their own pleasure, than to show their love and respect for those they visited. With the lives of the sisters closed a society which will be ever remembered by all who frequented those pleasant little gatherings in Curzon Street. Sometimes a note, sometimes a word, and more often the lamp being lighted over the door, was taken as notice to attend, and, on entering, it might be to find only a few habitués or a larger and more brilliant assembly. All that was uncertain; but it was certain to find the cordial welcome of the two genial, lively, well-dressed, distinguished-looking hostesses-the comfortable tea-table, over which their friend Miss Anne Turner presided for years, and Lady Charlotte Lindsay, the third partner in the firm, clever and agreeable to the last. There was an absence of formality—a kindly mingling together of persons of various habits, pursuits, and positions in life, that tended to bring different portions of society together, as much as in other coteries there is a tendency to keep them apart; and when death had closed this little chapter in our social life, no one attempted, or, indeed, could have carried it on with equal success: their age, their experience in society, Miss Berry's acknowledged talent, their home-staying life, their absence of domestic duties and of family ties, all contributed to give them the power and the means which others have not, to do that which few would have done so well, under equally favourable circumstances.'—Vol. iii. p. 516.

As a picture of old age, and as a memorial of times slipping fast into history, we do not wonder at the warm and tender interest these ladies inspired in their friends.

One main attraction of these volumes lies in the letters addressed to Miss Berry. Men of the world of her day wrote well. The letters of Sir W. Gell, Keppel Craven, the late Duke of Devonshire, Uvedale Price, and others, are full of spirit and observation. Jeffrey and Playfair gave her the best of their thoughts, and Sydney Smith showed himself in his notes. Canova writes to her effusions of elegant compliment, and Mde. de Staël depicts with painful power her own physical sufferings. Her correspondents of her own sex included Joanna Bayly, Mrs. Damer, Lady Dufferin, Lady Davy, and a host of others, who, in writing to Miss Berry wrote their best. For a list of correspondents in such works as these tells for very little, the poin is how people write, with what degree of fulness, thought, and intimacy. It is a book full of passages, touches, illustrations of times and manners; but we have done enough to show its character, and must not extend our extracts. Those who had simply heard of Miss Berry through common outside rumour, will, we think, have found her superior to their expectation; a woman of the world, indeed, but not the heartless, superficial person generally understood by that title; nor yet an esprit fort in the sense some gave her credit for. A respected and beloved old

age speaks for itself, that there must have been many powerful and excellent qualities habitually kept in exercise. In some points, probably, Miss Berry deceived herself, and in others she was mistaken; but she always kept count of the years as they rolled by. She always knew how old she was, and used her graces of manner, and her thorough acquaintance with society, to give dignity and consequence to the point in life she had reached, rather than to the endeavour to make herself and others forget it. And if she allowed herself to be guided by the peerage in her choice and estimate of friends, she was faithful to them, when once gained, devoted to them her best energies and powers, and made herself thoroughly respected and beloved by them.

156

ART. VI.-The Church of England a portion of Christ's One Holy Catholic Church, and a Means of restoring visible Unity. An Eirenicon. In a Letter to the Author of The Christian Year.' By E. B. PUSEY, D.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. London : Rivington. Oxford: Parker. 1865.

WE do not propose to offer our readers any analysis of the interesting volume, the title-page of which is prefixed to this article. A work that is selling at the rate of a thousand copies a month will reach a far wider circle of readers than the Christian Remembrancer obtains access to. And probably there is scarcely one of our readers who has not studied and formed his own opinion on the already celebrated Eirenicon.'

For this Review to express its substantial agreement with the Regius Professor of Hebrew would be superfluous, whilst to avow any serious difference of opinion would partake of the nature of impertinence. We shall perhaps be doing better service if we offer a few remarks bearing on the subject generally, and the circumstances under which the work appears. And, indeed, Dr. Pusey's recent publication is neither the first work that has appeared with the title of an Irenicum; nor is it the first utterance of the feeling of political and ecclesiastical isolation in which the Church of this country has existed for now more than three centuries. Union is strength; and the conviction of this truth has been at the bottom of many an effort made in many different directions to secure the co-operation of those who stood aloof from each other, either in secular or religious matters. Henry the Eighth would have felt more secure in his position, if he could have obtained the sanction of the Lutheran divines for his unhallowed marriage with Anne Boleyn. During the whole of Edward's reign it was considered that no available front against Rome could be exhibited, unless there was a concurrent action of England and foreign Protestants. In the century that followed, amidst all the changes of Elizabeth's reign and that of the first two Stuarts, people would not go out of their way to offend the prejudices of foreign Protestantism. During the Great Rebellion, and once again after the Revolution which placed the Prince of Orange on the throne, there was an earnest desire on the part of many Churchmen to gain the assistance of Nonconformists, and to unite the nation under one comprehensive form of religion. In a recent article in this Review we took occasion to notice this last

abortive attempt at a reunion of English Protestants, and assigned our reasons why an undertaking which was unsuccessful in 1689, must be a total failure if attempted now. Since that egregious failure no efforts in this direction have been made, which are at all worthy of notice. Miserable as the condition of the Church of England was all through the reigns of Queen Anne and the four Georges, endeavours to promote the unity of Christendom, such as they were, took a different direction, and the sympathies of the few theologians who adorned the eighteenth century were directed towards schemes of union with the Gallican or with the Eastern Churches. Neither has this idea ever been allowed to die away. Probably the greatest barrier to the intercommunion of the Anglican with different portions of the Eastern Church has been the entire ignorance in which the authorities of the latter have been educated, as to the position and the nature of the teaching of the Church of England. Educated Roman ecclesiastics are acquainted with the controversy which men of their own Church have waged with Anglicanism, on the subject of English Orders, as well as on other matters of debate between the Roman and the English Churches. But patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, and priests alike, in the East, have been for the most part ignorant that there was such controversy at all. We have been looked upon in the light of Protestant seceders from the Roman communion whom it was not worth while to notice. Whatever might be the rights of the case as regards the controversy between East and West, the East could have little sympathy with a body of people who, whatever might be the orthodoxy of their creed, had lost the life and sign of a church by being cut off from the Apostolical Succession, and whose ordinances therefore were deprived of sacramental validity. On many different occasions, however, attempts have been made to bring before the Eastern prelates the claims which the Church of England has never wholly lost sight of, and which she now so loudly avers, of being a true branch of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. And we need not remind our readers that the idea of union with the Eastern Churches has embodied itself in a society, consisting of ecclesiastics and laymen of the Eastern, Roman, and Anglican communions, whose common bond of union is the desire for the reuniting of the severed links of Christendom.

Of course it would be reasonable to expect that if union is to be effected at all, the method by which such union will be brought about would be the junction of the Anglican portion of the Western Church with the Greek Churches. Without some such imposing front as would in this way be created, it seems hopeless to expect any other treatment from Rome than that of