aiming for his order an immunity from indiscriminate scurrility; he
will not allow that, in any case, any word or act of a divine can be a
proper subject for ridicule: Nor does he confine this benefit of clergy
to the ministers of the Established Church. He extends the privilege to
Catholic priests, and, what in him is more surprising, to Dissenting
preachers. This, however, is a mere trifle. Imaums, Brahmins, priests of
Jupiter, priests of Baal, are all to be held sacred. Dryden is blamed
for making the Mufti in Don Sebastian talk nonsense. Lee is called to a
severe account for his incivility to Tiresias. But the most curious
passage is that in which Collier resents some uncivil reflections thrown
by Cassandra, in Dryden's Cleomenes, on the calf Apis and his
hierophants. The words "grass-eating, foddered god," words which really
are much in the style of several passages in the Old Testament, give as
much offence to this Christian divine as they could have given to the
priests of Memphis.

But, when all deductions have been made, great merit must be allowed to
this work. There is hardly any book of that time from which it would be
possible to select specimens of writing so excellent and so various. To
compare Collier with Pascal would indeed be absurd. Yet we hardly know
where, except in the Provincial Letters, we can find mirth so
harmoniously and becomingly blended with solemnity as in the Short View.
In truth, all the modes of ridicule, from broad fun to polished and
antithetical sarcasm, were at Collier's command. On the other hand, he
was complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation. We scarcely
know any volume which contains so many bursts of that peculiar eloquence
which comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Indeed the spirit of
the book is truly heroic. In order fairly to appreciate it, we must
remember the situation in which the writer stood. He was under the frown
of power. His name was already a mark for the invectives of one half of
the writers of the age, when, in the cause of good taste, good sense,
and good morals, he gave battle to the other half. Strong as his
political prejudices were, he seems on this occasion to have entirely
laid them aside. He has forgotten that he is a Jacobite, and remembers
only that he is a citizen and a Christian. Some of his sharpest censures
are directed against poetry which had been hailed with delight by the
Tory party, and had inflicted a deep wound on the W