gray, rise thick around us; and there are fragments of mouldering bones lying scattered amid the loose dust that rests under them, in dark recesses impervious to the rain and the sunshine. We dig into the soil below; here is a human skull, and there numerous other well known bones of the human skeleton-vertebræ, ribs, arm and leg bones, and those of the jaw, breast and pelvis. Still, as we dig, the bony mass accumulates-we disinter portions, not of one but of many skeletons, some comparatively fresh, some in a state of great decay; and with the bones there mingle fragments of coffins, with the wasted tinsel-mounting in some instances still attached, and the rusted nails still sticking in the joints. We continue to dig, and, at a depth to which the sexton almost never penetrates, find a stratum of pure seasand, and then a stratum of the sea-shells common on the neighboring coast-in especial, oyster, muscle, and cockle shells. We dig a little further, and reach a thick bed of sandstone, which we penetrate and beneath which we find a bed of impure lime, richly charged with the remains of fish of strangely antique forms. 'The earth, for anything that appears to the contrary, might have been made yesterday!' Do appearances such as these warrant the inference? Do these human skeletons, in all their various stages of decay, appear as if they had been made yesterday? Was that bit of coffin, with the soiled tinsel on the one side, and the corroded nail sticking out of the other, made yesterday? Was yonder skull, instead of ever having formed part of a human head, created yesterday, exactly the repulsive-looking thing we see it? Indisputably not. Such is the nature of the human mind-such the laws that regulate and control human belief-that in the very existence of that church-yard, we do and must recognize positive proof that the world was not made yesterday.

"But can we stop in our process of inference at the mouldering remains of the church-yard? Can we hold that the skull was not created a mere skull, and yet hold that the oyster, muscle, and cockle shells beneath are not the remains of molluscous animals, but things created exactly in their present state, as empty shells? The supposition is altogether absurd. Such is the constitution of our minds, that we must as certainly hold yonder oyster-shell to have once formed part of a mollusc, as we hold yonder skull to have once formed part of a man. And if we can Why not pass

not stop at the skeleton, how stop at the shells? on to the fish? The evidence of design is quite as irresistible in them as in the human or molluscous remains above. We can still see the scales which covered them occupying their proper places, with all their nicely designed bars, hooks and nails of attachment; the fins which propelled them through the water, with the multitudinous pseudo-joints, formed to impart to the rays the proper elasticity, lie widely spread on the stones; the sharp

pointed teeth, constructed like those of fish generally, rather for the purpose of holding fast slippery substances than of mastication, still bristle in their jaws; nay, the very folates, spines, and scales of the fish on which they had fed, still lie undigested in their abdomens. We can not stop short at the shells; if the human skull was not created a mere skull, nor the shell a mere dead shell, then the fossil fish could not have been created a mere fossil. There is no broken link in the chain at which to take our stand; and yet having once recognized the fishes as such-having recognized them as the remains of animals and not as stones that exist in their original state,-we stand committed to all the organisms of the geological scale."

We can not refrain from two quotations more, of a geological character, they are so poetically beautiful. "Metaphysic theology furnishes no real argument against the 'infinite series' of the atheist. But geology supplies the wanting link, and laughs at the idle fiction of a race of men without beginning. Infinite series of human creatures! Why, man is but of yesterday. The fish enjoyed life during many creations-the bird and reptile during not a few-the marsupial quadruped ever since the time of the Oolite the sagacious elephant in at least the latter ages of the Tertiary. But man belongs to the present creation and to it exclusively. He came into being late on the Saturday evening. He has come as the great moral instincts of his nature so surely demonstrate, to prepare for the sacred to-morrow."

To this we append the following reflections upon the skeleton of Guadeloupe.

"Mysterious frame-work of bone locked up in the solid marble -unwonted prisoner of the rock!—an irresistible voice shall yet call thee from out the stony matrix. The other organisms, thy partners in the show, are incarcerated in the lime for ever-thou but for a term. How strangely has the destiny of the race to which thou belongest re-stamped with new meanings the old phenomena of creation! I marked as I passed along, the prints of numerous rain-drops indented in a slab of sandstone. And the entire record, from the earliest to the latest times, is a record of death. When that rain-shower descended, myriads of ages ago, at the close of the Palæozoic period, the cloud, just where it fronted the sun, must have exhibited its bow of many colors; and then, as now, nature, made vital in the inferior animals, would have clung to life with the instinct of self-preservation, and shrunk with dismay and terror from the approach of death. But the prismatic bow strided across the gloom, in blind obedience to a mere optical law; bearing inscribed on its gorgeous arch no occult meaning; and death, whether by violence or decay, formed in the general economy but a clearing process, through which the fundamental law of increase found space to operate. But when

thou wert living, prisoner of the marble, haply as an Indian wife and mother, ages ere the keel of Columbus had disturbed the waves of the Atlantic, the high standing of thy species had imparted new meanings to death and the rainbow. The prismatic arch had become the bow of the covenant, and death a great sign of the unbending justice and purity of the Creator, and of the aberration and fall of the living soul, formed in the Creator's own image-reasoning, responsible man.'

The following extracts will present our author in a new aspect. Mr. Miller shows himself to be not less a profound critic than a good writer. It is somewhat venturesome to pronounce any criticism on Shakspeare to be absolutely new, but we do not remember to have seen the topic elsewhere so fully handled. The assemblage of great men in the second extract, and the estimate which Mr. Miller places upon them, point out the authors whose productions are most congenial to him. We have already said that the elegance and beauty of Mr. Miller's own writings are to us as wonderful a phenomenon as are his geological science and skill. We wish we were able to give an account of the process by which he has made himself one of the best writers of his age, but we have not the materials. Undoubtedly, however, one part of the process was the study of those great authors whom he here com

memorates.

After speaking of "Hero-Worship" as forming, however much perverted, one of the original elements of the mental constitution, and saying that it must find something higher than mere man to worship, he asks

"Did Shakspeare, with all his vast knowledge, know where its aspirations could be directed aright? The knowledge seems to have got somehow into his family; nay, she who appears to have possessed it, was the much loved daughter on whom his affections mainly rested,

'Witty above her sex; but that's not all-
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.'

So says her epitaph in the chancel, where she sleeps at the feet
of her father. There is a passage in the poet's will, too, written
about a month ere his death, which may be, it is true, a piece of
mere form, but which may possibly be something better. 'I
commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping,
and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ,
my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting.' It is, besides,
at least something, that this play-writer and play-actor with wit
at will, and a shrewd appreciation of the likes and dislikes of the
courts and monarchs he had to please, drew for their amusement
no Manse Headriggs or Gabriel Kettledrumles. Puritanism could
have been no patronizer of the Globe Theatre. Both Elizabeth

and James hated the principle with a perfect hatred, and strove hard to trample it out of existence; and such a laugh at its expense as a Shakspeare could have raised, would have been doubtless a high luxury; nay, Puritanism itself was somewhat sharp and provoking in those days, and just a little coarse in its jokes, as the Martin Mar-Prelate tracts serve to testify; but the dramatist, who grew wealthy under the favor of Puritan-detesting monarchs, was, it would seem, not the man to make reprisals. There are scenes in his earlier dramas, from which, as eternity neared upon his view, he could have derived little satisfaction; but there is no 'Old Mortality' among them. Had the poor player some sense of what his beloved daughter seems to have clearly discovered the true 'Hero-Worship?' In his broad survey of nature and of man, did he mark one solitary character standing erect amid the moral waste of creation, untouched by taint of evil or weakness-a character infinitely too high for even his vast genius to conceive or his profound comprehension to fathom? Did he draw near to inquire, and to wonder, and then fall down humbly to adore?"

We conclude our extracts with the following acknowledgment. "Nothing in the English character so strikingly impressed me as its immense extent of range across the intellectual scale. It resembles those musical instruments of great compass, such as the pianoforte and the harpsichord, that sweep over the entire gamut, from the lowest note to the highest; whereas the intellectual character of the Scotch, like instruments of a narrower range such as the harp and the violin, lies more in the middle of the scale. By at least one degree, it does not rise so high; by several degrees it does not sink so low. There is an order of English mind to which Scotland has not attained: our first men stand in the second rank, not a foot breadth behind the foremost of England's second-rank men; but there is a front rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman. Like that class of the mighty men of David, to which Abishai and Benaiah belongedgreat captains, 'who went down into pits in the time of snow and slew lions,' or 'who lifted up the spear against three hundred men at once and prevailed'-they attain not, with all their greatness, to the might of the first class. Scotland has produced no Shakspeare; Burns and Sir Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative. A Scotch poet has been injudiciously named as not greatly inferior, but I shall not do wrong to the memory of an ingenious young man, cut off just as he had mastered his powers, by naming him again in a connection so perilous. He at least was guiltless of the comparison; and it would be cruel to involve him in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively EnVOL. VIII.

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glish; and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotchman, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question, indeed, whether any Scotchman attains to the powers of Locke; there is as much solid thinking in the Essay on the Human Understanding,' greatly as it has become the fashion of the age to depreciate it, and notwithstanding his fundamental error, as in the works of all our Scotch metaphysicians put together."

We can stop at no better place in our quotations, than with this noble and just tribute to the great English philosopher.

Since this article was written and in part printed, we have read in the reprint of the North British Review, a notice of a new work by Mr. Miller, entitled, "Footprints of the Creator, or the Asterolepis of Stromness." We hope this work will be made accessible to the American reader, as we are sure it contains matter of high importance. We have another reason for referring to this notice-which is, that the two articles, both in the estimate which is placed upon Mr. Miller as a geologist and a writer, and in the use which is made of the same materials, have many things in common, though they were written independently of each other.

ART. VI.-HENRY WARE, JR.

Memoir of the Life of Henry Ware, Jr. By his Brother, JOHN WARE, M.D. In two volumes. New edition. Boston: James Munroe & Co. London: Chapman, Brothers.

1846.

FROM a perusal of "Ware's Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching," from the title of some others of his published works, and from his general reputation, we had known something of him, as an earnest and effective practical writer, and as a man of serious religious spirit. But it was far from our thoughts to expect to feel any strong interest in a memoir of one whose life was mostly spent in a circle of men whose theoretic views on some of the main points of Christian doctrine differ widely from our own, and, as we are constrained to believe, from the Bible. We esteem it a privilege, however, to render the tribute of our admiration and praise to true Christian excellence, wherever it may be found; and therefore we own, most cheerfully and gladly, the lively interest with which we have read again and again this simple, dignified and unambitious memoir, the modest offering of brotherly affection, written in perfect keeping with the unpretending goodness and greatness of him whom it commemorates. It is a record of the life of a Christian minister, the perusal of which, we think, can