The Sun.
London, England, 1847-07-17 00:00:00

will often attach to his writings ; and if he has convinced
himself that the common literary style of his country-
men is used as a vehicle for the concealment or inade-
quate expression of thought, he will be not unlikely to
substitute for it the plain-speaking of colloquial inter-
course, though this should occasionally verge towards
vulgarity. Hence mannerism ;—but we can by no means
see that mannerism must necessarily be affectation
Some of our readers will perhaps be startled by the as
sertion we are about to make—that Mr. Carlyle's style is
identical in its leading peculiarities with that of Bishop
Andrewes. Perhaps there were never two men who
were more different in the habitual direction of their
thoughts, or in their early training, or in the raw mate-
rials of which their writings are made up. And we feel
certain that the author of Sailor Resartus ' never read
a page of the bishop's writings, otherwise he must have
referred to them in his Cromwell.' 'We must conclude,
then, that these two peculiar writers of the seventeeth
and nineteenth centuries wrote as they did from some
internal necessity of a similar nature—namely, that as
Andrewes wished to speak plainly from the pulpit on
subjects which were involved in the wrappings of theo-
logical learning, his pedantry, quaintness, and slang,
were the results of his struggle with the fetters imposed
upon him ; and that the same defects in the style of the
modern author were produced by a similar wish to shake
off the trammels which he felt to be imposed upon him
by the sometimes unmeaning decencies of the fashion-
able mode of writing."
. .

Several curious examples are given of this strange
resemblance between the styles of Carlyle and
Andrewes, as for instance in the derivation or real
meaning of proper names ; in the manufacturing of
words ; in the use of the vulgarest colloquialisms;
in a pedantic play upon words ; in an etymological
sort of punning; in abrupt exclamatory sentences ;
in quaint inversions ; and in emphatic and demon-
strative epexegesis. Perhaps the most remarkable of
these resemblances is the last—namely, the epexegesis.
" From Oxford to Rome" is a dissertation Protestant
to the back-bone. It is conceived in a spirit of true
earnestness. Those who love the witcheries of
voyaging in the Arctic and Antarctic regions will
read with intense interest the review of the
works written respecting the memorable expedi-
tion of Captain Sir James Clark Ross, R.N.,
one of the ablest navigators that ever lived. The in-
terest of the article is enhanced by the mystery sur-
rounding the fate of the expedition to the North Pole
under Franklin and Crozier—for the safety of which
expedition all true hearts pray. Of the " Financial
Pressure" we have spoken so repeatedly, and there is
a certainty of so many better opportunities than the
present arising to tempt us to a reiteration of our
animadversions upon the Bank Charter Bill of 1844,
that we shall content ourselves with simply men-
tioning the publication of a paper upon
this important subject in this number of the
Quarterly. " Peel Policy" is a diatribe very little to
our taste. The great statesman, whose conduct is
rendered the theme for so many malicious invectives
and scurrilous vituperations, will not go down to
posterity through the pages of the Quarterly Review.
His memory will live, as he desires it to live, in the
cottages of those who labour, and from the great
boons he has showered upon his contemporaries, that
remembrance we do believe will be as beautiful as
it is illustrious. Quarrel we must, and we do, with
Sir Robert, for his innovations upon the national
system of currency—as a grand and ruinous
in!stake ; but we should be ungrateful not to call to
mind, at the same time, the noble and patriotic mea-
sures he has been principally instrumental in passing
through the Houses of Legislation. " The Heirs of
the Stuarts" and " Grand Jours d'Avergne" are
papers replete with historical knowledge, happily
compiled. " Lord Lindsay on the History of Christian
Art" and the "Journal of a Residence in Portugal"
complete the very able contents of this number of the
great organ of the shadow of Conservatism.