178 ART. IX.-1. Glimpses of the Old World, or Excursions on the Continent, and in Great Britain. By the late JOHN A. CLARK, D.D., Rector of St. Andrew's Church, Philadelphia, United States. 2 vols. The Fourth Edition. With a Memoir of his Life, by the REV. S. H. TYNG, Rector of St. George's, New York, United States. London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1847. 2. Recollections of England. . By the Rev. STEPHEN H. TyNG, D.D., Rector of St. George's, New York. London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1847. 3. A Year of Consolation. By MRS. BUTLER, late FANNY KEMBLE. 2 vols. London: Moxon, 1847. 4. The Christmas Holidays in Rome. By the REV. WILLIAM INGRAHAM KIP, M.A. Author of the Double Witness of the Church, &c. Edited by the REV. W. SEWELL, B.D., Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. London: Longmans, 1847. 5. The Spirit of Little Children: the Bishop's Address to the Members of the Senior Class, &c.; to which is added the Catalogue and Prospectus for the Winter Term, 1846-7 [of St. Mary's Hall, Burlington, New Jersey, United States]. COMPLEX and multiplex is the final cause of foreign travel. Debt, the long vacation (as editors find to their cost), marriage, nerves, lungs, a sentence at the bar of the Old Bailey, or of public opinion,-to have written a very good book, or, again, a very bad one,-to fly one's creditors, or friends, or wife, or selfthese, which make up the formal or efficient causes, the immediate motive, may soon be ascertained. So may the instrumental cause; that is palpable enough-a steamer from Dover or Ramsgate the South Western rail, or the South Eastern-the Amiens line, or the Ostend-or, best of all, the old Soho or Antwerpen; this is all plain and patent. But what do people go abroad for? What is their end and aim? Not why do they go abroad-nor how do they go abroad-but for what purpose do they vagabondize? In nine cases out of ten they only go abroad because they do not choose to stay at home-the final is superseded by the formal cause. Were it not for that unyielding and untoward law, that body, under its present conditions, must locally occupy space; and, therefore, that if a man is not in London, he must, by the stern necessity of this our inflexible being, be in Paris, or Brussels, or Jerusalem, or Rome, or, failing these, somewhere; we suspect that that delightful region of the moon, the land of Medamia, which Gargantua rejoiced in, would be the most popular summer trip. Still, though many go abroad for no reason, or, to express it with a difference, since few go abroad for a reason, that reason, wherever there is one, is not a little various. Martene and Durand, the Theseus and Pirithous of chartularies and black letter, travelled for the sake of ransacking libraries; Borrow travels for the sake of Bibles, not unaccompanied with black-eyed gipsies; one friend travels to exhaust the Almanach de Gotha, by kissing hands at every court in Europe; another to get up the equally delightful Almanach des Gourmands, by bowing down and worshipping at the Rocher de Cancale; the Secretary of the Camden Society travels to see churches; and Howard to see prisons; Lord and Lady Londonderry to show their diamonds. Some are spies, and some critics. Some tempt exotic perils for the sake of music, and some, with nearly as much sense, for the maccaroni. Now, candidly, we have no especial objection to all, or, indeed, to any of this; such is human nature, that, if things are not pursued for the best end, it is really something that they are pursued for an end; in other words, that a pursuit exists. We had almost said, never mind what it is-soldiers, music, musical boxes, fiddling, eating, books, pictures, dancers, mountains, mosses, ribbons, butterflies, birds, beasts, or fishes, art, nature, or Saur Kraut, a manuscript or a mantilla--if you must go abroad, go abroad for something. Any one thing pursued for its own sake, fairly and honestly fetched-the game started, hunted, and hunted down by your own thews and sinews—is a legitimate object of foreign travel. Be it but one single thing that you cross a thousand miles of land or water to see, or to touch-Etna, Niagara, Louis Philippe or General Tom Thumb, Mont Blanc or the industrious fleas-you have earned the name of traveller if you have travelled to see and have seen it. Your work has had its final cause fulfilled; you have lived and watched for something; it is but for the sake dyaloû Twos that all energize, and your Tayabov is gained. It may not be the best of ends; it is an end, if only a fag end. And this being true, of the final cause of travel in general, certain limitations must be observed when we come to settle the particular epyov of individual travellers. Now the Old World and the New are in very opposite relations to each other in the way of travel: save in the ruins of Central America, in mysterious Palenque, and dim Uxmal, there is little of the higher class of objects for which educated people would take the pains to cross the Atlantic. With Mr. Murray's tastes, a sojourn among the aborigines may have its charms; but while quiet people value their scalps, they will, for some time at least, be backward at cultivating more than a literary acquaintance, through the medium of Mr. Fenimore Cooper, with the most gentlemanly among the Sioux. And since civilized history, literature, and art-the associations of empire and tradition-are entirely blank in British North America; since the smartest nation in all creation' has neither monuments, title-deeds, nor a portrait gallery, we cannot say that a very burning desire ever possessed our unenthusiastic minds to embark in the most clipping liner, or the most go-a-head steamer which bridges the broad Atlantic. One great river, and one great forest; one mighty prairie, and one great lake; any one of these might be worth the fortnight at sea; but these might be seen without encountering the stripes and stars. Nature in her wildest and widest is the true glory of the New World. A Christian land, in which English is spoken, and which has its thirteen or thirty millions, we know not which, and no cathedral; why the whole United States, as an object of travel for an intelligent European, is as nothing when compared with the information to be gained from a single village in France or Italy. These have something to tell and show; but America is too much in the condition of Canning's knifegrinder. Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, Sir.' We are not therefore saying it in arrogance when we allude to the indisputable fact that, the inducements for an Englishman-still less for an English Churchman-to visit the United States, are but faint. With the Dissenters it is very different: of course they are at home, and more than at home. America is the sublime of Dissent. There is a range of capability about American dissent of which the most visionary and ambitious non-conformist' in England could hardly dream, even after the wild excitement of being closeted for five minutes with an astute cabinet minister. Transatlantic schism is so bursting with vitality-so puffs, and spreads, and expands-divides itself into such countless slips-shoots up into so many suckers-speechifies, and prints, and swaggers, and preaches to such an extent-multiplies, and brags, and bullies with its Revivals, and Colleges, and Universities, and Doctors of Divinity, and Theological Professors, and State Chaplains of the President's own denomination-all this swells so fast and far that Reed and Matheson, the two small 'dissenting brethren,' who were sent a few years ago as a deputation' to America 'from the Congregational Union of England and Wales,' must have felt at Boston and New York much as the twelve masterbakers who have lately left St. Petersburgh with the disinterested purpose of instructing benighted England in the art of making bread, will feel when they are introduced to Lemann's shop: or as the late Dr. Chalmers ought to have felt, and most likely did feel, when he came to lecture-say the beneficed clergy and the Rector of Doddington—on the peculiar blessings of a Church Establishment in general, or the especial consolations of the Church of England in particular. 6 What a sound English Churchman would feel or say about even the best and highest aspect of English religion in America, —that is, what his judgment of the practical and living character and temper of the Church would be, we have few opportunities of knowing. It is certainly somewhat remarkable that we are almost without any Glimpses of the New World, by an English Rector,' or 'Recollections of the United States, by an Oxonian.' If such have travelled in America, there is a delicate feeling about them which holds them back from publication. We scarcely remember one set of American travels which treats of its religion as a Churchman would treat of it. On the other hand, it is natural-it is commendable-nay, it is one of the highest and most honourable traits in the Anglo-American character, that among the chiefest and dearest object of his travel is his Mother-Church in England. England is still 'home'the Delphi, yas oupaλov-ever may it be so!-to the best class of Americans: it is so even among the more respectable dissenters, but it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the estimate of the Church of England which possesses the higher American mind. To our cathedrals they make pilgrimages; Westminster or Winchester is approached by a sort of Scala Santa, in the American anticipation: American Churchmen treasure up our letters-reprint our books-and, happy are we to say that we have often recognised with something more than pleasure our own poor pages transferred to the cotton paper and battered types of their warm and vigorous periodicals. This is a state of feeling which cannot be otherwise than graceful in the daughter and honourable to the mother: and if at times this interest in our proceedings seems to tend to the gossipping aspect, as we begin to fear wher we see private letters, embodying the usual ecclesiastical and ecclesiological news of the day printed by American dignitarie for general circulation-still we are not only ready to make allowances for, but even to sympathize with, an extravagant, or i such were, even with a perplexing interest in our internal concerns. Let us not, therefore, be misunderstood; let it not be thought that we are checking advances, or slackening the cords of duty and affection. It is rather ourselves than America that we now address, and if American travellers are occasionally grotesque, or worse, it would be unfair as unkind in us to be over-querulous or over-sensitive. For we candidly confess that the books which common English travellers have written about America deserve any amount of retaliation, and account for any One exception at present occurs in the interesting Letters on Canada and the United States, by Mr. J. R. Godley, published a year or two ago. degree of soreness or jealousy. American manners, or society, have never been fairly estimated; the due amount of allowance has not been made; Christian charity has been too sadly absent from the Basil Halls, and Trollopes, and Dickenses for us to complain, however much we in turn may be misrepresented. But this is not our object. Our present task is rather to display certain prominences in our de facto ecclesiastical proceedings — prominences which our readers probably consider mere excrescences and anomalies, unlucky accidents of the English system of religion,--but which seem by our American visitors to be considered principles, and settled axioms and ruled points. It is well that we should know how others see us: and to this end we purpose to avail ourselves of certain Transatlantic note-books which have been jotted down about us and our doings, especially connected with the popular religionism of our day. When we said just now that there were few inducements, beyond the study of external nature, to take an Englishman across the Atlantic, we meant our readers to supply the other member of the sentence, that the motives which might bring an American to England were many and stringent. So many, that their very variety might be distracting: and yet among this variety none seems so becoming in an American, and that American a clergyman, as the religion of the Old World. It is not, therefore, because the Church of England is a main and proper object of inquiry with Americans that we complain: it is only the mode of inquiry, and the practice of giving to the world the results of their inquiries, which surprises, and ought, perhaps, to humiliate us. These publications, among other things, show that religion is a social principle; that if men deny in theory the communion of saints, in fact they recognise it, or set up some hollow substitute in its stead; that the most disparaged features of other systems have each some solid nucleus of obligation in human nature, and therefore in divine truth: and that we are constantly and unconsciously reproducing even to caricature not only the questionable features, but the very defects and errors, of our neighbours. We repudiate an Ecumenical Council, and sit in an Evangelical Alliance; we deny saint worship, and fall down before a popular preacher; we scorn relics, and purchase at more than its weight in gold scraps of the piece of silk out of which Bishop Alexander's robes were made;' we laugh at jubilees, and attend the May Meetings; we flout at pilgrimages, and breast the Atlantic for a platform seat in Exeter Hall. Now, honestly, it is not that we complain of books being written about us; it is not that we deprecate criticism or surveillance; it is not the nakedness of the land which we are afraid of; but it always so happens that they who are most ready to |