bered among the saints of that lowly household.

He who knows that he writes in the fear of God and in the love of man,
will not arrest the thoughts that flow from his pen, because he knows
that they may--will be--insulted and profaned by the name of cant, and
he himself held up as a hypocrite. In some hands, ridicule is indeed a
terrible weapon. It is terrible in the hands of indignant genius,
branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule
in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as
a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her
blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float
in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the
sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage
during the Christmas holydays of a thousand years.

We never are disposed not to enjoy a religious spirit in metrical
composition, but when induced to suspect that it is not sincere; and
then we turn away from the hypocrite, just as we do from a pious
pretender in the intercourse of life. Shocking it is, indeed, to see
"fools rush in where angels fear to tread;" nor have we words to express
our disgust and horror at the sight of fools, not rushing in among those
awful sanctities before which angels vail their faces with their wings,
but mincing in, with red slippers and flowered dressing-gowns--would-be
fashionables, with crow-quills in hands like those of milliners, and
rings on their fingers--afterwards extending their notes into Sacred
Poems for the use of the public--penny-a-liners, reporting the judgments
of Providence as they would the proceedings of a police court.

SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER II.

The distinctive character of poetry, it has been said, and credited
almost universally, is _to please_. That they who have studied the laws
of thought and passion should have suffered themselves to be deluded by
an unmeaning word is mortifying enough; but it is more than
mortifying--it perplexes and confounds--to think that poets themselves,
and poets too of the highest order, have declared the same degrading
belief of what is the scope and tendency, the end and aim of their own
divine art--forsooth, _to please_! Pleasure is no more the end of
poetry, than it is the end of knowledge, or of virtue, or of religion,
or of this world. The end of poetry is pleasure, delight, instruction,
expansion, eleva