Of his sarcasm, the following example, well-known as it is, must be given. It occurs in the _Essay on the Prospects of the Anglican Church_, which is reprinted from the _British Critic_ in the first volume of the _Essays Critical and Historical_. 'In the present day mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half a dozen general propositions, which escape from destroying one another only by being diluted into truisms, who can hold the balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam, who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself from being supposed to exclude the contradictory, who holds that Scripture is the only authority--yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend on the sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine ordinance--yet those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have--this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons to guide it through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No. But, alas! reading sets men thinking. They will not keep standing in that very attitude, which you please to call sound Church-of-Englandism or orthodox Protestantism. It tires them, it is so very awkward, and for the life of them--they cannot continue in it long together, where there is neither article nor canon to lean against--they cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting without a chair, or walking with their legs tied, or grazing like Tityrus's stags on the air. Promises imply conclusions--germs lead to developments; principles have issues; doctrines lead to action.' Of the personal note to which I have made reference--no examples need or should be given. Such things must not be transplanted from their own homes. 'The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearl to their enamel gave; And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam And brought my sea-born treasures home: But the poor, unsightly noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.'