large, but recognising each other by a secret sign. Its proceedings were summary and sanguinary, and its sentences were entrusted for execution to the daggers of its countless assassins.

The officers of the tribunal stole in the night to a Castle or a town, and affixed, on the gates, a judicial summons to this Prince or that citizen to appear at the Frei Stuhl, at a given time and place, to be examined on a given matter. If the summons was repeated three times, without effect, the accused was condemned, par contumace, once more summoned and if that proved fruitless, outlawed and hanged by the road-side whenever caught. If he resisted he was bored through the body, bound to the tree, and left with the executioner's knife sticking by him, to show that he was not murdered, but a convict of the Frei Gericht. The tribunal used to assemble at midnight, in the church-yard of the place where they intended to hold a sitting. At break of day, the ringing of the bells announced to the inhabitants the presence of these formidable visitors. All were obliged to assemble in an open field, sitting down in a circle, in the middle of which sat the President and Judges of the Tribunal-the insignia of a sword and rope before them. When any one of bad reputation appeared in the circle, one of the Judges would step up to him, and touching him with his white staff, say to him" Friend, there is as good bread to be eaten elsewhere as here." If the conscience of the person was so clear that he did not choose to take the hint and go away, he might sit still and run the chance of accusation; but it was generally more prudent to decamp. When the Judge touched any one, three times, with the formidable white wand, it was a signal that he was a hapless convict already secretly accused and convicted; and no time was lost in hanging him at the next tree or beam which presented itself. This was the invariable punishment of criminals of all ranks; although now it is out of use in Germany, and the meanest criminals have the honour of decapitation. The youngest Judge generally performed the office, which was managed with so much secrecy that the hangman was rarely known. The crimes taken cognizance of by the Vehm Gericht, were chiefly heresy, infidelity, sacrilege, high treason, murder, incendiarism, rapes, robbery, and contumacy to the Tribunal, its Judges and Messengers.' p. 221–222.

At length, however, the iniquities and oppressions of this tribunal became intolerable: the sovereigns of Germany united their efforts to suppress it, and at the close of the sixteenth century, it was extinct.

Wirtemberg, the next in this wilderness of sovereignties, is a compact territory. The King is an active man of talent, courage, and firmness, of a small but important figure, re'served and little polite, possessing more intellect than feeling, but considered warm and hearty in his attachments. He has been at variance with the states of his kingdom, on the subject of the new constitution; and if the matter be correctly stated by the present Writer, he seems to have offered fair and reasonable concessions, while the states appear to have insisted upon points

the cession of which would have left him more at their mercy than a German, necessarily a military potentate, could, with prudence, voluntarily allow. Some interesting particulars of the life and habits of the old monarch, well known some years since to the small wits of England, as the gross and unwieldy suitor to our Princess Royal, are introduced in this part of the volume. He was a coarse but strong minded man, an acknowledged coward, violent and tyrannical. There were, however, some good points in his character. His taste was cultivated, his manners dignified and gentlemanly; he was ready and skilful in conversation, and to crown all, Napoleon is affirmed to have repeatedly described him as the only sovereign in Germany capable of reigning. But the finest trait in his history is furnished by his strong and unvarying attachment to his friend and minister Count Zeppelin, who retained through life the confidence of the monarch and the attachment of the people. A monumental temple was erected by the king to the memory of his favourite, with the simple but impressive dedication: To the friend gone before. The Queen dowager, after fulfilling in an exemplary manner, the duties of a wife, maintains in retirement, a most respectable character, and is frequently visited by the reigning monarch, who treats her with courtesy and deference. Danneker, the statuary, is a native of Stutgard. His works are mentioned with the highest admiration, but we feel no disposition to give the Writer much credit for skill or science in the arts.

The morals of Germany, if we may judge from the incidental illustrations afforded by this work, are by no means of a high standard. The licence of the drama, and the countenance given to many little and some gross irregularities of conduct, are strong intimations of a lamentable state of things; but a more distinct evidence of the lax morals which prevail, is presented in the facility and frequency of divorce. The numerous universities of Germany are very fallacious indications of a wide diffusion of the higher descriptions of knowledge: the term of instruction is too brief, and the motives to extensive acquisition are too few, to tempt the turbulent and unmanageable students beyond a certain limit.

The scenery of the Rhine has been too often described, and too recently specifically noticed by us, to require much detail here. It seems to be characterised by a peculiar and piquant variety throughout its stream. It flows during its early course, among the bleak and sterile mountains in the very heart of Switzerland, and after expanding into the Lake of Constance, winds round the extremity of the mountains of the Black Forest, clothed with firs, whose rich, tufted, funereal appearance,' gives a gloomy grandeur' to the heights they shade. Between Heidelberg and Darmstadt lies the beautiful Bergstrasse, or

Mountain-road, with its wooded and vine-covered declivities and its castellated summits; and parallel with this rich and picturesque chaussée, lies the district of the Odenwald, a tract diversified with every variety of surface, where forests, cornfields, villages, masses and precipices of granite, rivulets, torrents, pastures and orchards, succeed one another in most romantic intermixture. On the crest of the Feldsberg, one of the highest and wildest mountains in Odin'swood (Odenwald), lies a large and well-finished column of granite, thirty feet in height and four in its greatest diameter. Conjecture is baffled in the attempt to ascertain its origin, and the tools of modern workmen have been unable to divide it for the purpose of removal. Not far from this spot stands the castle of Rodenstein, where the wild Jäger is fabled to reside, and on the eve of great events to traverse the air with a noisy armament to the opposite 'castle of Schnellerts.' From Mayence to Bingen, the stream flows through a luxuriant and highly cultivated tract; and from the latter town to Bonn, the river rushes between wild and precipitous mountains: beyond this all is flat. We reviewed in our last Number a series of graphic illustrations of the picturesque scenery of the Rhine; but of the towns and palaces which adorn its banks, the best common representations which we can at the present moment recollect seeing, will be found among the aquatints in Sir John Carr's Rhenish tour. They were both drawn and engraved by Daniell in his usual able and artist-like, though somewhat pedantic style.

Art. V. Sermons on the Seven Epistles in the Apocalypse; compreprehending a brief Geographical and Historical Description of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea; and also, the most recent Accounts of the State of Christianity in the Apocalyptical Churches. By John Hyatt. 8vo. pp. 442. Portrait. Price 12s. London. 1820.

THIS

HIS course of Sermons, as being published by subscription, and therefore, it may be presumed, intended as addresses made permanent on paper for the pleasure and instruction of the Author's friends, rather than as compositions challenging the judgement of what is called the public at large,' cannot in fairness be made the subject of formal and rigorous criticism. It may be considered as especially designed for the use of numerous individuals in his very large congregations, many of whom will naturally desire (and it is honourable to the Preacher that they should desire) to be possessed of such a means of renewing the impression of what they had heard with interest and serious resolutions, in the public delivery.

They will probably recognise in the volume nearly the identical train of thought and tenour of language which they heard

from the pulpit, as the pages do not, we think, betray much of an injudicious attempt to elaborate the composition into a cast foreign to the style appropriate to a popular address. Brief sentences, enounced in a spirited manner, with an emphasis of expression sometimes partaking of exaggeration, of instantly intelligible meaning, not encumbered with what may be called secondary thoughts, (such as exceptions, distinctions, and qualifying turns and circumstances,) not complicated in a protracted connexion and dependence of the ideas,-in short, a something which, all together, gives the idea of unembarrassed, rapid, forcible, popular preaching, will be found prevailing through the volume, and will go far we should think, toward placing those readers who had also been hearers of the discourses, in the same state of feeling as when they heard them.

The life of preaching is the application,' some one has said. In conformity to this maxim, Mr. H. very often turns from general expressions to a pointed appeal to the sense and conscience of his auditors. And very judiciously he intermingles these applicatory addresses with the train of his observations, as he goes on, instead of adhering to the old method of reserving them for a formal section of the discourse toward the conclusion. So good and long exercised a judge as our Author is of the manner in which sermons are received by congregations, must be well aware of the far better effect of thus giving the topics and sentiments a prompt and animated turn upon the conscience at the moment of their being fresh to the hearer's attention, instead of keeping the enforcements and exhortations in store to make a sermon upon a sermon at the time that he is beginning to steal a look at the clock.

These sermons, regarded as actually spoken to a congregation, bear conspicuous evidence of a quality of great importance in a preacher-courage. The language is resolute and uncompromising in addressing the classes whose correspondence in character to what is described, in order to be rebuked, in the messages to the Seven Churches, deserves the application of the same censures. Especially we are pleased to see the Preacher always ready to take all consequences of a most explicit declaration of war against the notions and spirit of one class of pretended Christians, whose resentment, very easily excited and not very easily appeased, many worthy ministers have found it no trifle to encounter; we mean those who will not accept what they call the Gospel, on any other condition than its complete divorce from the Law; who repel an inculcation of moral duty, as an attempted infringement of Christian privilege; and whose grim and frowning visages tell the preacher, that a Popish, or even Mahomedan priest, would be fully as acceptable an occupant of the pulpit. The preacher of these sermons tells all such

persons that he does not fear them; and he proves it, by seizing every opportunity afforded by the solemn admonitory passages chosen as his texts, for enforcing rectitude of temper and conduct as the indispensable attendant and evidence of genuine Christian faith. In several places, he intimates that he is aware this will give offence to some of his auditors; and near the end he signifies that he has not been so happy as to find himself deceived in this anticipation; but that nevertheless he feels no repentance of that faithful explicitness against all sin, and all principles tending to the extenuation of sin, in which he had obeyed the great law of pleasing God rather than man. If we were disposed to note any fault in connexion with this characteristic of the sermons, it would perhaps be, that there is some trifle too much of ostentation in the terms of the preacher's avowal of what he dares do in defiance. Perhaps it did not require to be so formally expressed, that an unsparing malediction on all forms of antinomianism could not, at the present time, be pronounced, at every interval of doctrine, in the face of a very large congregation, without a manfulness of resolution and a hazard of very ungracious effects. It is, at the same time, a lamentable thing to think that this should be true.

The sermons contain many serious and important admonitions on the danger, the signs, and the infelicity of declension in religion, with incitements to zeal and activity. In describing, in forms parallel to the things so solemnly reproved in the seven ancient churches, the evils existing in the churches of our own day, he proves himself very observant of what may be called our English Christian world, and better acquainted with the evils in the state of the Dissenting communities, than we can wish their enemies to be.

If we had not signified a suspension, for the time, of our judicial functions, in noticing a work published under the auspices of friendship and subscription, will Mr. Hyatt give us credit that we should have been able to make out a list of faults, to a tolerable length. What could we not say of words incorrectly employed; as when he tells us that to hate what the Son of God hates, is 'highly commendatory;'—of incongruity of figurative language; as when he says, we imbibe and retain distorted views of many passages contained in the volume of revelation;'-of pure extravagancies of expression, as in such a sentence as this: The 'display which he will one day make of his glory, as Immanuel, 'will cover the souls of the impious deniers of his divinity, with blush of guilt ten thousand times deeper than vermilion ;' -of a tone of harshness, partaking, we might almost say, of fierceness, in expressing the menaces of the Divine Justice;of assertions and descriptions too much in the extremes of con

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