burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was, indeed, in economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance, as in other fields of statesmanship, Walpole was forbidden from taking more than tentative steps toward a wiser system by the needs of the work he had specially to do. To this work every thing gave way. He withdrew his excise bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the revolution. His hatred of religious intolerance, or the support he hoped for from the dissenters, never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry, which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by any effort to repeal the laws against non-conformity. His temper was naturally vigorous and active, and yet the years of his power are years without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long administration, indeed, is almost without a history. All legislative and political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was absorbed, for the time, in the rapid extension of commerce and accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone to enjoy their new freedom and develop their new industries. And Walpole let them alone.

On the other hand, the forces which opposed the revolution lost, year by year, somewhat of their energy. The fervor which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but their wrath against the house of

Hanover ebbed away for want of opportunities of exerting itself. And, meanwhile, on opponents as on friends, the freedom which the revolution had brought with it was doing its work.

It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that, in spite of every temptation, he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the laws that oppressed the Catholic or the dissenter, he took care that they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered. Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the non-conformists from the consequences of their infringement of the test act. There was no tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and action were alike left free. No minister was ever more foully slandered by journalists and pamphleteers, but Walpole never meddled with the press.

L.

THE PREACHING OF WHITEFIELD.-LECKY.

[The great Methodist revival dates from the later years of Walpole's ministry. The Church of England was in a state of great stagnation, and a group of Oxford students, among whom John and Charles Wesley were the most prominent, determined to regenerate it. But the wonderful preaching of Whitefield was the main instrument in spreading the movement, especially among the lower classes.]

His eloquence had nothing of that chaste and polished beauty which was displayed in the discourses of the great French preachers, and which, in the present century, has led so many men of fastidious taste to hang spell-bound around the pulpit of Robert Hall. It had none of that force of reasoning, that originality of thought, or that splendor of language, which constituted the great charm of the sermons of

Chalmers. Yet, while exercising a power which has, probably never been equaled on the most ignorant and the most vicious, Whitefield was quite capable of fascinating the most refined audiences in London, and he extorted the tribute of warm admiration from such critics as Hume and Franklin, from such orators as Bolingbroke and Chesterfield. His preaching combined almost the highest perfection of acting with the most burning fervor of conviction. No man ever exhibited more wonderfully that strange power which great histrionic talent exercises over the human mind-investing words which are, in truth, the emptiest bombast with all the glow of the most majestic eloquence, and imparting, for a moment at least, to confident assertions more than the weight of the most convincing arguments. His gestures were faultless in their beauty and propriety, while his voice was so powerful that Franklin, who was the most accurate of men, ascertained by experiment that it could be heard distinctly in the open air by 30,000 persons. It was, at the same time, eminently sweet, musical, and varied, and it was managed with perfect skill. Garrick is reported to have said, with a pardonable exaggeration, that Whitefield could pronounce the word Mesopotamia in such a way as to move an audience to tears. With the exception of a slight squint of one eye, which was much dwelt on by his satirists, his person was unusually graceful and imposing, and, like Chatham, the piercing glance of a singularly brilliant eye contributed, in no small measure, to the force of his appeals.

To these gifts we must add a large command of vivid, homely, and picturesque English, and an extraordinary measure of the tact which enables a practiced orator to adapt himself to the character and dispositions of his audience. We must add, above all, a contagious fervor of enthusiasm, which, like a resistless torrent, bore down every obstacle. Of no other preacher could it be more truly said that he preached as a dying man to dying men." His favorite

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maxim was that "a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear." To his vivid imagination heaven and hell, death and judgment, appeared palpably present. His voice was sometimes choked with tears; he stamped vehemently on the pulpit floor; every nerve was strained; his whole frame was convulsed with passion. One who heard him described how, during the whole remainder of his life, he was haunted by the recollection of the tone of piercing pathos with which Whitefield once interrupted the course of his remarks, as if overpowered by a sudden thought: "O, my hearers, the wrath to come! the wrath to come!"

One of the great peculiarities of the Methodist preachers was the personal application they gave to their exhortations. It was their main object, by gesture, by look, by the constant use of the singular pronoun, to preach so that each member of the congregation might imagine the whole force of the denunciations or of the pleadings of the preacher was directed individually to himself. In this art Whitefield especially excelled, and he sometimes carried it to strange lengths, and employed it with strange effects. On one occasion he saw the actor Shuter, who was then attracting much notice in the part of Ramble in the "Rambler," seated in a front pew of the gallery. He at once turned toward him and exclaimed, " And thou, too, poor Ramble, who hast rambled so far from him, O! cease thy ramblings, and come to Jesus." On another, when appealing to a Negro congregation, he asked whether they did not desire to go to heaven, the audience was amused by an old Negro audibly exclaiming, "Yes, sir." "The gentleman put the question once or twice," he afterward explained, "till at last he seemed to point to me, and I was ashamed that nobody should answer him, and, therefore, I did." Very frequently, by his glance, he singled out, or appeared to single out, one member of his vast con

gregation, and a great part of the tremendous power which his appeals exercised over some minds is ascribed to this habit.

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He delighted in strokes of dramatic oratory, which, with an ordinary man, would have appeared simply ludicrous or intolerably tawdry, but to which his transcendent power of acting never failed to impart an extraordinary power. On one occasion— the scene is described by no less a person than David Hume —“ after a solemn pause, he thus addressed the audience : 'The attendant angel is just about to leave the threshold of this sanctuary, and ascend to heaven. And shall he ascend and not bear with him the news of ore sinner among all this multitude reclaimed from the error of his way?' To give the greater effect to this exclamation, Whitefield stamped with his foot, lifted up his hands and eyes to heaven, and cried aloud, 'Stop, Gabriel, stop, ere you enter the sacred portals, and yet carry with you the news of one sinner converted to God !'" "This address," adds Hume, "was accompanied by such animated yet natural action, that it surpassed any thing I ever saw or heard in any other preacher." He was fond of painting the denial by Peter, and when he came to describe the apostle as going out and weeping bitterly, he had always ready a fold of his gown in which to bury his face. Sometimes he would visit a court of justice, and afterward reproduce the condemnation scene in the pulpit. With his eyes full of tears, and his voice trembling with pity, he would begin, after a momentary pause: "I am now going to put on the condemning cap. Sinner, I must do it. I must pronounce sentence upon you." Then changing his tone, he thundered over his awe-struck congregation the solemn words, "De. part from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!" Of the vehemence of his manner, and the extraordinary effect which that vehemence produced, it is difficult, from any example of our own day, to form a conception. "I hardly ever knew him to go through a sermon," wrote one who knew him well, "without weeping more or less, and I truly believe his were