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detention, Henley was set at liberty, and his papers were restored to him. It should seem, however, that, for some time after, the threats of a prosecution were held over him in “ terrorem;" for, prefixed to a pamphlet which he published in 1748, entitled "The Victorious Stroke for Old England," we find an eloquent address to jurymen, exhorting them to take "rational preachers" under their protection. Let no illintentioned or iniquitous superiors, equals or inferiors, friends or foes, judges, justices, or counsellors, by intimidating, cajoling, or sophistical efforts, erroneously incline you against them; and God, angels, and men, your consciences, and your country, will repay you ten thousand fold into your bosom." The pamphlet itself, which is in the form of a series of sermons, contains an able and spirited vindication of the right inherent in British subjects, to canvass with freedom the measures of the king's ministers. The text of his first discourse, being taken from Acts xxxvi. 1. "Then Paul stretched forth his hand, and answered for himself;" he opens his discourse with the following characteristic observation: " In this last verse we have an authority for action in public speaking and preaching, in the example of St. Paul; a proof that it is not in itself theatrical, and that it may not only be used without sin or indecency, but with propriety and force." In the second sermon, he analyses the paper which had been circulated, charging him with sedition, which he answers point by point, insisting upon it, that what he really said or the occasions when these notes were taken, was, when viewed in its connexion with the foregoing and antecedent passages of his discourse; innocent and loyal. The turns which he here gives to some of the allegations against him are strange and ludicrous. For instance, he was charged with influencing the Court of St.Germains, the common topic of the squirearchy of the time, against the Hanover family; but he protested the informer was drunk and mistaken, as, in point of fact, he had ridiculed the Court of St. Germains. Again, it was affirmed that the preacher had said, that Mr. Ratcliffe, who, having fled from justice after condemnation in the year 1715, was executed upon his old sentence in 1745, was not properly identified; but he averred that he had only declared that some persons affirmed that Ratcliffe " was not himself" when he was brought up for judgment. In a third discourse, the orator vindicated the liberty of preaching, from the appropriate text, 1 Samuel xx. 15. "Let not the king impute any thing to his servant, nor to all the house of my father. The essence of this sermon may be found in the following pertinent remarks:

"Sedition is a crime not defined by the law, but one idea of it, as tending to break allegiance, seems to determine it. Allegiance cannot

be violated, but by a breach of law; and whoever speaks upon such matters as are looked upon to be public grievances, in order to obtain the redress of them by reason, as a rationalist, cannot possibly be a seditionist, who endeavours this point by force of arms. Though Bishop Hoadley is for measures and degrees of resistance, by speaking of measures of obedience: so that a subject of England by his system (for which he was thanked by the House of Commons,) must always be, in some measure and degree, seditious; because obedience is by measure proportioned to the duty of the civil magistrate, who, not being infallible, must, in some affairs, be liable to err, and justify the like measure of sedition. And the office of a king or government is of a political character. When wrong as such, they are private men; so that he who speaks of them as wrong, does not speak upon king or government, but upon private persons like himself, and never can be guilty of sedition. An elector, or one interested, may speak of the management of his trustee; and a preacher has much more right than the press, by which the greatest men have conveyed their freest sentiments on the most arduous points of public conduct. Moral religion is that of God, being the imitation of his attributes, the height of all religion; and by moral religion every man may be an orator in his own habitation or property. To punish him for it, would be inquisition and popery. He has authority to dissent from and protest against any other, though he be an emperor, who shall tell him what he is, or is not, to preach, or in what manner. that restraint be laid, which even the papists do not lay on their priests and monks, there is no protestancy, no religious liberty to a preacher, whose duty and privilege it is to rebuke all vice boldly, in all ranks of men, unmolested."

If once

In the first of this series of sermons, Henley lays down the following judicious canon.

"Words are not actions. Overt words and overt acts differ in themselves and in law. No words whatever ought to be punished, that do not infringe the property, liberty, or reputation, of one who was no aggressor. The reputation of a political officer is what all are concerned (because interested in a trust) to examine and be free with; not that of a private individual: the former is no libel, the latter may be."

In the year 1748, Henley also published the third number of the "Oratory Magazine," in which he endeavoured again to defend himself against the continued attacks of his opponents. This work contains much mysticism, accompanied by pretty indications of deistical principles, intermixed with specimens of that buffoonery which is so generally supposed to have constituted the whole of his character. As a specimen of the last, we shall quote the following extract, from what he styled a scriptural proof of the propriety of his manner of preaching.

"For boldness in preaching and rebuking all ranks of men, Jer. i. 17, 18. Be not afraid of their forces; whatsoever I command thee; i. e. Right Reason commands thee (St. John calls reason God,) that thou shalt speak. Behold I have made thee a fenced city and an iron pillar, a brazen wall (which Pope, and such scribblers, blasphemously call bronze and a brazen face; in preaching it is God's command) against the whole land, against the kings and princes, against the priest and people. So Ezekiel iii. 8. Behold I have made thy face strong against their faces; thy forehead strong against their foreheads; as an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead; fear them not, neither be dismayed, though they be a rebellious house."

In the same discourse, he thus vindicated the jocular strain in which he sometimes addressed his auditors:

"For pleasantry, mirth, and ridicule, Prov. iii. 17. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, 2. Kings ii. Elisha ridiculed Baal's priests at the altar. Ps. 2. 4. The Lord shall have them in derision. Ps. c. 5. Serve the Lord with gladness."

This mode of appealing to Scripture, by which any practices whatsoever may be vindicated, was familiarly adopted by the Rentowels and the Macbriars, who beat the "drum ecclesiastic" during the civil wars of Charles I., and to their enthusiasm it may be pardoned. But, in Henley, it was inexcusable. He well knew the futility of his quotations, as to their alleged purpose, and could have only used them to impose upon the ignorant, or to amuse the volatile.

In his attacks on the ministry, he appeared in the odious character of an apostate, as he had for some time published, in their defence, a weekly pamphlet or journal, under the title of the Hyp Doctor, for the composition of which he received from the treasury a hundred a year; but which did not evince any considerable degree of ability: his stipend was consequently withdrawn;" hinc illæ lacrymæ." He also gained an addition to his income, by occasionally working for the booksellers. The following list of his publications, prefixed to the third number of his "Oratory Magazine," which appeared in the year 1748, will evince that he was not an idle man: 1. Scholastic and Academical Exercises in Prose and Verse, English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, from the age of six to fifteen. 2. Sir Isaac Newton's Principles of Philosophy vindicated. 3. Translation of the last parting of Hector and Andromache, and two other Poems. 4. Esther, Queen of Persia, a Poem. 5. A Latin Oration spoken at Melta Mowbray school. 6. The Complete Linguist, or an universal Grammar of the Languages, and the Art of soon learning any Language. 7. A Funeral Oration spoken at the Interment of the late Duke of Marlborough. 8.

A compendious History of Sweden. 9. Translations from the French. 10. Translation of Pliny's Epistles. 11. Montfaucon's Italian Travels, in folio, from the Latin. 12. Version of Mr. Addison's Latin Poems. 13. A new edition of the Duke of Buckingham's Poems. 14. A Supplement to Dean Swift's Miscellanies. 15. Sermons. 16. Errors of Painters, &c. 17. Lectures on various subjects. 18. The Greek, Hebrew, and Ethiopic Inscriptions on the Monuments of the two wives of Sir Samuel Morland, in Westminster Abbey.

The rest of the history of the versatile subject of this memoir will be told in a few words. After carrying on his plan of the Oratory for some years, in Newport Market, he removed his tabernacle to Clare Market. He continued to attract audiences for a longer period than might have been expected. As, however, his physical powers decayed, his popularity decreased, and he died in the year 1756. The satirical verses of Pope, and the notes of the commentator on the Dunciad, have led the public to deny justice to his talents; and the tradition which, on the slight authority of Sir John Hawkins, affixes his name to the jolly clergyman, in Hogarth's Midnight Modern Conversation, has perhaps done equal wrong to his moral character. That he was not circumspect in his conduct, we will readily admit; but that he was a mere buffoon, or an abandoned profligate, we are by no means prepared to believe. His works evince a considerable extent of information and great acuteness of perception; and the industry which he must have exerted during the whole of his life, to procure a livelihood, is incompatible with the extreme dissipation with which he is charged by his adversaries.*

*The author of the brief life of Henley, in Aikin's Biographical Dictionary, asserts, that "he is the principal figure of two of Hogarth's satirical prints. In the first, he is christening a child; and in the other, called the Oratory," he is represented on a scaffold with a monkey by his side, over whom is written the word Amen, and a box of pills, and the Hyp Doctor lying beside him ;" &c. It may be observed, that no such prints as above described appear in Boydell's collection of the works of Hogarth, which professes to be a complete one. As to the common stories of Henley's buffoonery, such as his instructing the sons of Crispin how to make a pair of shoes in ten minutes, as they rest on no authority, we deem them unworthy to be repeated.

ART. III-A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. Illustrated with a Map of the Island, as also the principal Trees and Plants there, set forth in their due Proportions and Shapes, drawn out by their several and respective Scales; together with the Ingenio that makes the Sugar, with the Plots of the several Houses, Rooms, and other places, that are used in the whole process of Sugar-making; viz. the Grinding-room, the Boiling-room, the Filling-room, the Curing-house, Still-house, and Furnace; all cut in Copper. By Richard Ligon, Gent. London, 1673.

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Every thing sweats in the West Indies. Whites, Blacks, sugar-canes, and even Creole beauty, according to a co-voyager of the new Barbadoes Bishop, in the fifty-gun frigate, with which the reverend prelate seemed determined to sail down the methodist parsons, all emulate one another in exsudation. At home, Mr. Obadiah Macauley sweats the lady's maids and milliners of tender conscience at Freemasons' tavern, with reports: the society sweats the public for subscriptions, and the planters sweat with fear. No wonder that the West India question is a formidable one, when all parties give such copious signs of sore travail. Poor Quaco! Thou little dreamest, whilst grinning love to Quasheba under the mango leaves, that, two thousand leagues over the sea, a score of talking Whites strive, day and night, to make twenty millions more believe thou hast ever "the iron in thy soul." Thou wottest little of, and carest less for, the preaching admirals, who at least fight such battles valiantly, or the juvenile lawyers, who, with a more carnal self-seeking, spout through thee for clappings of hand! "Goramity, young Massa Cauley, why no talkee for dem poor things drop down dead with hungry belly in Engyland? Why no let Massa planter lone, young Massa Cauley?" However, we must not speak of this subject at present. We must enter upon an examination of the work before us, which is one of the few early histories of the sugar-islands.

On the 16th June, 1647, Master John Ligon embarked on board the good ship Achilles, Thomas Crowder, of London, master, to run a risco, as he styles it, all the way to Barbadoes, although as innocent as a born liege of Cockayne of wotting aught of "smooth, rough, and raging seas, and high-going billows, which, he gravely informs us, "are killing to some constitutions!" But need, which, he says, "makes the old wife trot," and which we shrewdly suspect to have been neither more nor less than a bum-bailiff, drove him to the tropics; then, and for fifty years before, the refuge of all the gallants, in plain words, blackguards of the day, who found it convenient for their

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