psalmist, a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last
Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuate between rhapsodic
applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After
spending "a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a
hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a
parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with
fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his
imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general
mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has
determined on that renunciation of the world implied in "taking
orders," with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous
matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an
Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of
temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the
momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for
immortal life and for "livings;" he has a vivid attachment to patrons
in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with
something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly
things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his
meritorious efforts in directing man's attention to another world are
not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man
believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire
for "an ornament of religion and virtue;" hopes courtiers will never
forgot to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the
King's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar
than Golgotha and the skies; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among
the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes,
and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it
were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise
and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one's father; and, heaven