in the faculties of comparison and nice discrimination, brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the exercise of a cultivated and refined taste on the productions of mind in any form whatever. But a three-fold, or rather a thousand-fold, pleasure is theirs who to a sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in Art, and who combine with delicacy of perception, and technical knowledge, more elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that, in placing before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume any such superiority as is here implied. Like a child that has sprung on a little way before its playmates, and caught a glimpse through an opening portal of some varied Eden within, all gay with flowers, and musical with birds, and haunted by divine shapes which beckon onward; and, after one rapturous survey, runs back and catches its companions by the hand and hurries them forwards to share the new-found pleasure, the yet unexplored region of delight; even so it is with me: I am on the outside, not the inside, of the door I open.

After Gaudenzio Ferrari, at Saronno.

PART I.

"YE too must fly before a chasing hand,

Angels and saints in every hamlet mourned!
Ah! if the old idolatry be spurn'd,

Let not your radiant shapes desert the land!
Her adoration was not your demand,

The fond heart proffer'd it, the servile heart,
And therefore are ye summon'd to depart;
Michael, and thou St. George, whose flaming brand
The Dragon quell'd; and valiant Margaret,
Whose rival sword a like opponent slew;

And rapt Cecilia, seraph-haunted queen
Of harmony; and weeping Magdalene,

Who in the penitential desert met

Gales sweet as those that over Eden blew !"

WORDSWORTH.

"I can just remember,' says a theologian of the last century, when the women first taught me to say my prayers, I used to have an idea of a venerable old man, of a composed, benign countenance, with his own hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow-chair.' And he proceeds to say that, in looking back to these beginnings, he is in no way disturbed at the grossness of his infant theology. The image thus shaped by the imagination of the child was, in truth, merely one example of the various forms and conceptions fitted to divers states and seasons, and orders and degrees, of the religious mind, whether infant or adult, which represent the several approximations such minds at such seasons can respectively make to the completeness of faith. These imperfect ideas should be held to be reconciled and comprehended in that completeness, not rejected by it; and the nearest approximation which the greatest of human minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded as much nearer to the imperfection of an infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. The gown of flowered damask and the elbow-chair may disappear; the anthropomorphism of childhood may give place to the divine incarnation of the Second Person in after-years; and we may come to conceive of the Deity as Milton did when his epithets were most abstract :

'So spake the SOVRAN PRESENCE.'

But after all, these are but different grades of imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith; and if there be a devouter love on the part of the child for what is pictured in his imagination as a venerable old man, than in the philosophic poet for the Sovran Presence,' the child's faith has more of the efficacy of religious truth in it than the poet's and philosopher's. (Vide "Notes on Life," by HENRY TAYLOR, p. 136.)

THERE is something so very attractive and poetical, as well as soothing to our helpless finite nature, in all the superstitions connected with the popular notion of Angels, that we cannot wonder at their prevalence in the early ages of the world. Those nations who acknowledged one Almighty Creator, and repudiated with horror the idea of a plurality of Gods, were the most willing to accept, the most enthusiastic in accepting, these objects of an intermediate homage; and gladly placed between their humanity and the awful supremacy of an unseen God, the ministering spirits who were the agents of his will, the witnesses of his glory, the partakers of his bliss, and who in their preternatural attributes of love and knowledge filled up that vast space in the created universe which intervened between mortal man, and the infinite, omnipotent LORD OF ALL.

The belief in these superior beings, dating from immemorial antiquity, interwoven as it should seem with our very nature, and authorised by a variety of passages in Scripture, has descended to our time. Although the bodily forms assigned to them are allowed to be impossible, and merely allegorical, although their supposed functions as rulers of the stars and elements have long been set aside by a knowledge of the natural laws, still the coexistence of many orders of beings superior in nature to ourselves, benignly interested in our welfare, and contending for us against the powers of evil, remains an article of faith. Perhaps the belief itself, and the feeling it excites in the tender and contemplative mind, were never more beautifully expressed than by our own Spenser.

"And is there care in heaven? And is there love

In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,

That may compassion of their evils move?
There is!-else much more wretched were the case
Of men than beasts! But O th' exceeding grace
Of highest God that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro

To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe!

"How oft do they their silver bowers leave,

And come to succour us that succour want?
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant,
Against foul fiends, to aid us militant?

They for us fight, they watch, and duly ward,

And their bright squadrons round about us plant,

And all for love, and nothing for reward!

Oh why should heavenly God to men have such regard !"

It is this feeling, expressed or unexpressed, lurking at the very core of all hearts, which renders the usual representations of angels, spite of all incongruities of form, so pleasing to the fancy: we overlook the anatomical solecisms, and become mindful only of that emblematical significance which through its humanity connects it with us, and through its supernatural appendages connects us with heaven.

But it is necessary to give a brief summary of the scriptural and theological authorities, relative to the nature and functions of angels,