should give, he looks about him, and says, Who sees me? no alms nor prayers fall from him without a witness; belike lest God should deny that he hath received them; and when he hath done (lest the world should not know it) his own mouth is his trumpet to proclaim it. With the superfluity of his usury he builds an hospital, and harbours them whom his extortion hath spoiled; so when he makes many beggars, he keeps some. He turneth all gnats into camels, and cares not to undo the world for a circumstance. Flesh on a Friday is more abominable to him than his neighbour's bed; he abhors more not to uncover at the name of Jesus than to swear by the name of God. When a rhymer reads his poem to him, he begs a copy, and persuades the press. There is nothing that he dislikes in presence, that in absence he censures not. He comes to the sick bed of his stepmother and weeps, when he secretly fears her recovery. He greets his friend in the street with a clear countenance, so fast a closure, that the other thinks he reads his heart in his face; and shakes hands with an indefinite invitation of When will you come? and when his back is turned, joys that he is so well rid of a guest; yet if that guest visit him unfeared, he counterfeits a smiling welcome and excuses his cheer, when closely he frowns on his wife for too much. He shows well, and says well, and himself is the worst thing he hath. In brief, he is the stranger's saint, the neighbour's disease, the blot of goodness, a rotten stick in a dark night, the poppy in a corn field, an ill-tem

pered candle with a great snuff, that in going out smells ill; an angel abroad, a devil at home; and worse when an angel, than when a devil.

DAVID.*

DAVID had lived obscurely in his father's house; his only care and ambition was the welfare of the

*In the preface to an edition of Horne on the Psalms by the Rev. Edward Irving, there is a character of David, from which the following is extracted—

Now, as the apostle, in writing to the Hebrews, concerning the priesthood of Christ, calls upon them to consider Melchizedek his solitary majesty, and singular condition and remarkable honour; so call we upon the church to consider David, the son of Jesse, his unexampled accumulation of gifts, his wonderful variety of conditions, his spiritual riches and his spiritual desolation, and the multifarious contingencies of his life; with his faculty, his unrivalled faculty, of expressing the emotions of his soul, under all the days of brightness and days of darkness which passed over his head. For thereby shall the church understand how this the law-giver of her devotion was prepared by God for the work which he accomplished, and how it hath happened that one man should have brought forth that vast variety of experience, in which every soul rejoiceth to find itself reflected. There never was a specimen of manhood, so rich and ennobled as David, the son of Jesse, whom other saints haply may have equalled in single features of his character, but such a combination of manly, heroic qualities, such a flush of generous godlike excellencies, hath never yet been seen embodied in a single man. His psalms, to speak as a man, do place him in the highest rank of lyrical poets, as they set him above all the inspired writers of the old Testament,-equalling in sublimity the flights of Isaiah himself, and revealing the cloudy mystery of Ezekiel; but in love of country, and glorying in its hea

flock he tended; and now while his father and his brothers neglected him as fit for nothing but the field, he is talked of at the court. Some of Saul's

venly patronage, surpassing them all. And where are there such expressions of the varied conditions into which human nature is cast by the accidents of providence, such delineations of deep affliction and inconsolable anguish, and anon such joy, such rapture, such revelry of emotion, in the worship of the living God! such invocations to all nature, animate and inanimate, such summonings of the hidden powers of harmony, and of the breathing instruments of melody! single hymns of this poet would have conferred immortality upon any mortal, and borne down his name as one of the most favoured of the sons of men.

But it is not the writings of the man which strike us with such wonder, as the actions and events of his wonderful history. He was a hero without a peer, bold in battle and generous in victory: by distress or by triumph never overcome. Though hunted like a wild beast among the mountains, and forsaken like a pelican in the wilderness, by the country whose armies he had delivered from disgrace, and by the monarch whose daughter he had won-whose son he had bound to him with cords of brotherly love, and whose own soul he was wont to charm with the sacredness of his minstrelsy he never indulged malice or revenge against his unnatural enemies. Twice, at the peril of his life, he brought his blood hunter within his power, and twice he spared him and would not be persuaded to injure a hair upon his head, -who, when he fell in his high plans, was lamented over by David, with the bitterness of a son, and his death avenged upon the sacriligious man who had lifted his sword against the Lord's anointed. In friendship and love, and also in domestic affection, he was not less notable than in heroical endowments, and in piety to God he was most remarkable of all. He had to flee from his bedchamber in the dead of night, his friendly meetings had to be concerted upon the perilous edge of captivity and death, his food he had to seek at the risk of

followers had been at Jesse's house, and taken notice of David's skill; and now, that harp which he practised for his private recreation shall make

sacrilege, for a refuge from death to cast himself upon the people of Gath to counterfeit idiocy, and become the laughing stock of his enemies. And who shall tell of his hidings in the cave of Adullam, and of his wanderings in the wilderness of Ziph in the weariness of which he had power to stand before his armed enemy with all his host, and by the generosity of his deeds, and the affectionate language which flowed from his lips, to melt into childlike weeping the obdurate spirit of king Saul, which had the nerve to evoke the spirits of the dead! King David was a man extreme in all his excellencies, a man of the highest strain, whether for counsel, for expression, or for action, in peace and in war, in exile and on the throne. That such a warm and ebullient spirit should have given way before the tide of its affections, we wonder not. We rather wonder that tried by such extremes his mighty spirit should not often have burst control, and enacted right forward the conqueror, the avenger and the destroyer. But God, who anointed him from his childhood, had given him store of the best natural and inspired gifts, which preserved him for sinking under the long delay of his promised crown, and kept him from contracting any of the craft, or cruelty of a hunted persecuted man. And adversity did but bring out the splendour of his character, which might have slumbered like the fire in the flint, or the precious metal in the dull and earthly ore.

But to conceive aright of the gracefulness and strength of king David's character, we must draw him into comparison with men similarly conditioned, and then we shall see how vain the world is to cope with him. Conceive a man who had saved his country, and clothed himself with gracefulness and renown in the sight of all the people by the chivalry of his deeds, won for himself intermarriage with the royal line, and by unction of the Lord's prophet been set apart to the throne itself; such a one conceive driven with fury, from

him of a shepherd a courtier. The music that he meant only to himself and his sheep brings him before kings.

house and hold, and through tedious years, deserted of every stay but heaven, with no soothing sympathies of quiet life, harassed for ever between famine and the edge of the sword, and kept in savage holds and deserts; and tell us in the annals of men, of one so disappointed, so bereaved and straitened, maintaining not fortitude alone, but sweet composure and a heavenly frame of soul, inditing praise to no avenging deity, and couching songs in no revengeful mood, according with his outcast and unsocial life; but inditing praises to the God of mercy and songs, which soar into the third heavens of the soul; not indeed without the burst of sorrow and the complaint of solitariness, and prophetic warnings to his bloodthirsty foes, but ever closing in sweet preludes of good to come, and desire of present contentment. Find us such a one in the annals of men, and we yield the argument of this controversy. Men there have been driven before the wrath of kings to wander outlaws and exiles, whose musings and actings have been recorded to us in the minstrelsy of our native land. Draw these songs of the exile into comparison with the psalms of David, and know the spirit of the man after God's own heart; the stern defiance of the one, with the tranquil acquiescence of the other; the deep despair of the one, with the rooted trust of the other; the vindictive imprecations of the one, with the tender regret and forgiveness of the other. Show us an outlaw who never spoiled the country which had forsaken him, nor turned his hand in self-defence or revenge upon his persecutors, who used the vigour of his arm only against the enemies of his country, yea lifted up his arm in behalf of that mother, which had cast her son, crowned with salvation, away from her bosom and held him at a distance from her love, and raised the rest of her family to hunt him to the death; in the defence of that thankless unnatural mother country, find us such a repudiated son lifting up his arm, and spending its vigour in siniting and utterly discomfiting her