we find him draining the cup of misery, filled to the brim, and overrunning with bitterness, but not the less bitter because made ready and prepared in the secret chambers of his own melancholy bosom. What a wonderful and inconsistent piece of work is man! The master of the world, how nearly allied is he to the meanest and weakest of God's creatures! While he walks erect with his head in the heavens, his feet are doomed to traverse the rough asperities of the earth, torn, mangled, and bleeding, at every step of his wearisome progress.

But let us beware how we suffer ourselves to speak with reproach or severity against such a man as William Cowper. We have already seen that he strove honestly, sincerely, and even resolutely, against his terrible infirmity, but its malignity was greater than he was able to conquer. This infirmity became his evil genius, pursuing him through every lane and avenue of life. It was the constant attendant of his laboring and palpitating bosom, poisoning all his pleasures, and drinking the life's blood of his health and happiness. Wherever he suffered his thoughts to roam, to whatever department of life his feelings and affections were directed, there he found his tormentor to be busy with his earthly projects, and to be waiting with eagerness to injure and destroy him. Nor was this the worst consequence of a hostility so bitter and determined. If that hostility had favored no other destruction than that of his temporal peace and happiness, cruel and distressing as he would have felt such a calamity to be, he might have borne it with. something like patience and equanimity. But, not content with destroying his earthly hopes and prospects, it insinuated itself into the inner recesses of his mind; it began to disturb the peaceful quiet of his sacred musings; it gradually questioned the propriety of his spiritual security and confidence; and at last accused him directly of downright faithlessness and treason to the KING of heaven.

And now the shades of night of a long, dark, and dreary night-began to settle down on the mind of poor Cowper. He feared that the fierce anger of Almighty GoD was ruthlessly directed against him; that the curse of Heaven was everlastingly to rest on his devoted head; that the decree had gone forth to destroy him, both soul and body, in hell. What a horrible idea! What a dreadful thought to entertain of HIM who is all love and all mercy! Infatuated man! Infatuated teachers, who had been the cause of an opinion so horrible entering his bewildered brain! Happy is it for the world that such opinions cannot now be uttered without challenge and without reproof! and that we all believe that no one enters hell except as he makes it his appropriate sphere by falses and evils of life!

It is impossible we should comprehend the load of sorrow which thenceforward afflicted the soul of that melancholy man. An exile from the busy world around him; feeling how great was the distance that separated him from the rest of mankind; alone in the midst of his sorrows and sufferings; he let go his hold on external objects, and sought for forms and images in the inner world of his own mind. But that world was one he scarcely dared look into without shuddering. Sometimes, indeed, it presented to his better vision the glowing realities of truth and goodness. Forms of real beauty flitted before him in indis

tinct perception, and he rallied on the freshness and novelty, the loveliness and grace of a brighter and happier existence. But the smiling picture soon faded from his eyes, like the magic hues adorning the vault of heaven after the sun has sunk below the horizon, and he was again called to grapple and fight with the horrible fantasies of his own bewildered imagination. All the loathsome shapes and figures of despair and anguish marched in gloomy procession before him. They seemed to mutter pitiless curses on their doomed and unhappy victim; they grinned in triumphant mockery as they passed; they bound him in the charmed circle in which they moved; they tortured and they reviled him; and having left him wounded, crushed, and forsaken, they consummated their hellish spite by making him believe the horrid blasphemy, that all this was but the just judgment of offended HEAVEN on his guilty soul.

While reviewing the misery and infatuation of this unhappy man, it is, perhaps, not wonderful that our minds should be led to indulge in a train of thoughts bordering on the undefined and mysterious. Were his mental aberrations owing to causes strictly confined to the sphere of our natural world? May there be an agency and an influence exercised over the human mind by beings associated with our spiritual organism, and who, taking advantage of our ruling fears and propensities, may wield these to their own purposes of serious and irreparable injury? Certain it is that such an agency is exercised in regard to our highest as well as our lowest states of moral and religious probation - an agency that is acknowledged, in a greater or less degree, over the whole world, to be potent and available both for good and for evil. May it not sometimes transcend the sphere of its ordinary and more confined influences? If demons, in some incomprehensible way, possessed the bodies of men once, as we know they did, may they not now, in an equally mysterious way, possess their minds? Must there not be causes for the mental disorders of men as cogent and efficient as those which we believe produce their moral disorders, the one class of disorders being only a more violent and aggravated manifestation of the other? To all these questions we leave the reader to frame such answers as may suggest themselves to his own mind. At the same time, however, it is undeniably true, that we cannot be too much on our guard against indulging in gloomy and unreasonable thoughts. Who knows what power the tempter may exercise over our minds in consequence of such indulgence? No agent, we may suppose, is more cunning, more subtle, or more malicious, than an agent of the Evil One. We know that William Cowper was an eminently good man, but he might not have been eminently fortunate in the management of what was passing within him. Neither was Dr. Johnson, neither was. Lord Byron, and a host of others. We do not say that these men were troubled by the evil influence of invisible agents more than the rest of mankind, but certain it is they labored under most extraordinary fears and anxieties. Whatever may have been the cause of this, nothing can be more apparent than that it is our duty to govern our thoughts as well as our actions, to regulate the inner world of our hidden spirits, as well as the outer world of our visible bodies.

A. J. C.

LITERARY NOTICES.

A REVIEWER REVIEWED: a Reply to a Review of The Life of WILLIAM PINKNEY, of Maryland, by his Nephew, the Rev. WILLIAM PINKNEY, D.D.' In a Letter to the Editor of the KNICKERBOCKER.

WE place in this portion of our Magazine the following reply to an article in a late number of the North-American Review, upon the 'Life of WILLIAM PINKNEY, of Maryland, by his Nephew,' for the reason that in the December issue of the KNICKERBOCKER there appeared in the same department an editorial notice of the work in question, in which conscientious and we believe well-deserved praise was awarded to it. It may not be amiss to add, that the author of the book, and the writer of this reply, is a gentleman of the highest character, and one of the most esteemed pastors of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland:

THERE is in the April number of the North-American Review a criticism upon my book, which it is my intention briefly and respectfully to consider. If the criticism affected myself alone I should permit it to pass without comment. This however is not the case. It seeks to discredit the work, that it may more or less affect the reputation and character of the subject of it. The qualifications of a biographer, together with the mode of accomplishing his task, are to be settled by the decision of a just and enlightened public sentiment, and from that decision there is no appeal. I am aware that a critic possesses over an author many advantages, growing out of the circumstance that he is presumed to write impartially; whereas, in reality, he may be, even unwittingly, performing the functions of an advocate, and giving expression in his critical dicta to to long-cherished and deeplyinlaid prejudices. There is scarcely a biography that does not bear more or less upon some of the great and good men who have gone before us. This is to be deeply regretted, because there is room enough in the temple of fame to admit each, and space sufficient in the public regard to take in all. The indiscretions of one biographer may make it, however distasteful, obligatory on another to assume the attitude of defence, and defence sometimes brings one into the position of an assailant. Now it may be that a reviewer, essaying to judge dispassionately of the