Mr. Wesley says:—“One knows not which to admire most, the _purity_ of the language (such as scarce any foreigner wrote before); the _strength_ and _clearness_ of the argument; or the _mildness_ and _sweetness_ of the spirit that breathes throughout the whole.” Those who read these discussions in the present day feel surprised at the warmth and bitterness exhibited by the antagonists, but allowance must be made for the temper of the times. MR. FLETCHER AS A POLITICIAN. As in the religious controversy, so in the political dispute which arose out of the American War of Independence, Mr. Fletcher came forth as the champion of his friend Mr. Wesley, who having provoked his antagonists, deputed the task of answering them to the Madeley vicar, and the friends of both must now, we imagine, regret that either of them took up their pens in such a cause. It is not too much to say that both entered the lists, if not on the side of the oppressor, at any rate as against that spirit of liberty for which a Washington and a Franklin fought, and which had been implanted on New England soil by colonists to whom a Stuart king had made the old country unsafe longer to live in. The mistake was perhaps the result of that harsh-drawn line by which intensely devout minds like those of Mr. Wesley and Mr. Fletcher are apt to separate things religious and political, and which not unfrequently leads to an insensibility to public injustice and crime, even, strangely disproportioned to the zeal displayed in behalf of some dogmatic and invisible subtleties of creed. Dr. Arnold and others since Mr. Fletcher’s day have done much to correct the notion which removes religion and God from politics, and which sets up in sharp opposition the earthly and heavenly relations of men. MR. FLETCHER AS A DESCRIPTIVE WRITER. It may afford a fair specimen of Mr. Fletcher’s dispassionate descriptive style of writing, and at the same time serve to commemorate a notable phenomenon much talked of at that time, to quote his account of the great landslip at the Birches, just on the borders of the parishes of Madeley and Buildwas.