should be duly and justly performed; and that no work, which does not possess a certain degree of intrinsic merit, should be allowed to pass under shelter of the author's name. Had the merit been there, we should most gladly have followed the example of our critical brother in the _Edinburgh Review_; and, adopting his magnificent, sonorous, but not very intelligible phraseology, have taken care that "the last chords of our opera should be accompanied by double drums, and the burst of a brass band, and that our curtain should drop before the gold and tissue, the waving wings, and the flowing garlands of a modern opera!" FOOTNOTES: [19] _Foreign Reminiscences._ By HENRY RICHARD LORD HOLLAND. Edited by his Son, Henry Edward Lord Holland. Longmans: 1850. [20] Chapter XCII. Sect. 72. [21] ALISON, Chapter XCII. Sect. 66. [22] ALISON, Chapter XCV. Sect. 101. POPERY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. The constant custom of the advocates of Popery is to represent their religion as a work of the primitive age. With them it is a Patriarchal figure, beginning its pilgrimage by a Divine summons, and protected by Divine influence; perhaps occasionally touched by the stains, or sinking under the struggles belonging to all human history, but still suddenly purifying its robes into more than their original brightness, and turning its difficulties into the weapons of that warfare which is to end in the sovereignty of the world. The learned investigation of Protestantism, however, wholly strips this Patriarchal figure of its antique habiliments, declares that every fragment of its ceremonial has been the work of ages when Christianity had fallen into oblivion; that its belief is credulity, its system an accumulation of error, and its spirit an antagonism to the gospel. On the other hand, the Popish stigma on Protestantism is, that it is a _new_ name, unknown before the sixteenth century. But to this charge the natural answer has been, that a name is nothing; that Christianity was once a new name, and that Heathenism was older than Popery. The true question is of principle, and then the decision is clear. Popery appeals for its authority to councils and fathers; Protestantism, to apostles and prophets. The doctrines of Rome are to be looked for only in the annals of the Popedom; the doctrines of Protestantism appeal only to the New Testament. "The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants," was the maxim of the celebrated Chillingworth. Nothing commanded by the New Testament can be rejected by Protestantism, nothing contradictory of the New Testament can be received by Protestantism. The appeal of Rome is to tradition; the appeal of Protestantism is to inspiration. We shall now give the dates, at which the peculiar errors of Popery were engrafted on the worship of the Roman world.