lane worthies, even though he has for a companion the great Lexicographer, and we anticipate that like the illustrious, but credulous Doctor, he will abandon all such notions. The volume concludes with the history of David, the man according to God's own heart. The portrait of David, is beautifully, and we think, very correctly drawn. We have always considered, that with all his faults, the son of Jesse is one of the greatest, as well as the most lovely characters of Scripture. In every capacity he shines. As a king, a father, a warrior, a statesmen, and a private worshipper before the Lord, in the temple. We have ever felt a strange drawing of heart to the minstrel king of Israel, though he is no favourite with the Talmudists, who represent him as one possessed of the devil. There is so much nobility, generosity, grace, ardent natural affection, unquenchable earnestness, soul-consuming zeal in the cause of God about him. We by no means vindicate his faults. They were great, and we as greatly condemn them; but let those who would throw a stone at the erring monarch, remember his repentance-its depth, its continuance, its agony. We can conceive that he carried a sense of his fearful sin to the very gate of heaven, and that he even now bears its remembrance before the throne,-a remembrance, but to give a louder and a loftier intonation to the song of Moses and the Lamb, which he celebrates on his harp of gold, amid the bright myriads of the heavenly choir, with his feet on the sapphire pavement, and a crown of glory on his head, "for he is now a king and a priest unto God." We cannot refrain from quoting the following. It is an admirable example of how a spiritual meaning may be ingrafted on a scriptural fact.

"Now that the time of change was come, all things went well with him, and his prosperity increased, like a river gathering strength and fulness in its course, until long after, a great crime stayed its course, and overwhelmed him with the tides of trouble and grief, compared with which, the trials of his early days were light. This Ziklag is laid in ashes, but no sooner is he left shelterless, than God provides him a better city, even Hebron, a city of refuge, and most truly a refuge to him. Saul even dies at this time to give him room. Now doth David find the comfort,' says Bishop Hall, that his extremity sought in the Lord his God. Now are his clouds for a time passed over, and the sun breaks gloriously forth. David shall reign after his sufferings. So shall we, if we endure to the end, find a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give us at that day. With reference to his taking with him his companions to be the sharers of his better fortunes, while their mutiny was yet fresh and green, the same writer beautifully remarks-Thus doth our heavenly leader, whom David prefigured, take us to reign with him, who have suffered with him. Passing by our manifold infirmities, as if they had not been, he removeth us from the land of our banishment, and the ashes of our forlorn Ziklag, to the Hebron of our peace and glory.' Nor do these observations find application only to temporal prosperities. The same is observable in the higher matters of spiritual life. It is perhaps the general rule, that we are seldom admitted to the fulness of God's presence, and to the enjoyment of that peace, which passeth all understanding, until we have gone through great throes of spirit, and groanings that cannot be uttered, in the consolation of our forlorn and miserable condition. It is then that the comforter comes to reveal Christ to our hearts, as a Redeemer and a healer, and then

to us old things are passed away, and all things are become new. We are not healed, till we feel how desperately we have been wounded-not redeemed, till we know how utterly we have been enslaved-not saved, till we know how entirely we are lost. And again, how often do we in our spiritual course, have seasons, sometimes long of darkness and of gloom of spirit, during which our Lord seems to hide his face from us, and has forgotten to be gracious to us; and then at the moment of most despondency and discouragement, when the gloom is deepest, the agony most intense, and we grasp as in the throes of spiritual death, the cloud rolls away, the sun shines out upon it, and all the fair fields and gardens of our inner paradise again look green, the drooping flowers of the heart revive, and all that is not earthly in us exults in the enlivening rays. These considerations are most proper in the history of David, for there is no human history in which those transitions are more distinctly marked, while his Psalms are full of passages, which may be, and are continually cited to illustrate these contrasted aspects of our spiritual condition."

When the Series is completed, it will form one of the most delightful additions to theological literature in our language:

ORCADIAN SKETCHES,

NO. I.

BY DAVID VEDDER.

Unquestionably Mont Blanc is the monarch of European mountains; he lords it over the Shrieckhorns and the Yunge Fraus of his Alpine regions in unapproachable sublimity; but like all absolute sovereigns it is extremely difficult to get access to him-and when he is arrayed in terror, it is more than life is worth to approach him; his sceptre is an avalanche, with which he desolates plains and annihilates villages-and his diadem of eternal snow is hidden in midheaven. He is gazed upon at a safe distance, with a mixture of fear and wonder, but as to his utility, I have been unable to learn much about it. Amidst a countless congregation of Scottish mountains, Ben Nevis stands like Saul among the people; taller by head and shoulders than his gigantic compeers-a most respectable old monarch of the wild-somewhat hoary and bald, indeed, but nevertheless enjoying a green old age. But his utility is also questionable. At a great expense of bodily labour, not altogether unmingled with danger, you ascend to the apex of the mountain, but when you have struggled for several hours, and have at length attained the summit of the vast eminence, and your own wishes, the chances are, that you see nothing but squadron after squadron of clouds, careering like aerial cavalry over a confused mass of apparent congeries,-yet ensconced in a sable pall, dense as the ninth plague of Egypt; where, but for the instinct of sagacious bipeds, and still more sagacious quadrupeds, you have every chance of furnishing matter for a paragraph in the Inverness Cou

rier, and adding a few more tenants to the little kirk-yard of Fort William.

To gaze upon a landscape of surpassing glory and beauty, place me on a platform of moderate elevation-say from a thousand to sixteen hundred feet above the level of the sea-and let that elevation be the ward hill of Hoy, in Orkney; time sun-rise; in the month of July: and if a calm has succeeded to a severe north-west gale, so much the better. Behold, then, our hyperborean archipelago expanded beneath your vision, like a chart on an enormous scale. Every headland glowing like a pyramid of fire-every mountain bathed in the effulgence of the morning sun-every islet and rock glancing like starlets flickering from, and anon disappearing into the blue profound.

The mighty Atlantic, with resistless energy, is straining and struggling through every artery, that he may perform his allotted part in the economy of nature; the waters of the Pentland Firth are rushing, and wheeling, and boiling, and thundering, through their abyss; while richly laden argosies of a thousand tons, and smaller craft of every description, are borne aloft upon its surges, impotent and imbecile as November's leaves on the surface of a mountain torrent.

Hoy Sound groans with its weight of turbulent waves, and toils with tumultuous rapidity, as if the grand object was to sweep the island of Graemsay from its base. Water Sound, Skerry Sound, and Holm Sound, in parallel lines, contest each other's powers of velocity, and contend for the goal, like

"Coursers of ethereal race,

With necks in thunder clothed, and long resounding pace!"

Enhallow Sound is one sheet of white foam; from bank to brae, that is, from Evie to Rousay, a drop of blue water is not to be seen. The bottom is broken, rugged, and precipitous; the channel tortuous, and the small island of Enhallow, or Holy Island, cleaves the saline torrent in midway career, so that the spray occasionally takes a vertical direction.

Thus, under the benign auspices of a clear atmosphere, and a sum · mer morning sun, from six hundred to a thousand miles of coast scenery may be obtained by the unassisted eye; while the ear is regaled with such sonorous sounds-most musical, most melancholyas never fall to the lot of mortals, except in similar circumstances, and surrounded by oceanic influences. The exile of Patmos compares the celestial sounds which he heard in that lonely isle to "the voice of many waters," the simile was, and is, glorious, and in perfect keeping with his solitary position among the Egean isles: the harmonies of heaven must be in some measure analagous to the harmonies of nature—and what can be so sublimely grand, as the rattling of heaven's artillery among the Alps, the voice of the tempest and the whirlwind in an illimitable forest, or the conflict of the Atlantic and Germanic

oceans when the storm is loudest ?

At the distance of some sixty miles, in a north-westerly direction, may be seen a huge, conical rock, rising sheer out of the ocean, to an

B

elevation little short of two thousand feet, white as the polar axle, and something like a grey cloud hovering over its apex. This enormous pyramid is named "the Stack," and is tenanted by countless myriads of solan geese, (Pelecanus Bassanus,) which accounts for the apparent grey cloud referred to. On discharging a piece of ordnance against it, the fowls arise in such dense swarms, as actually to obscure the sun. The waters, for many leagues around this stupendous eyry, teem with the finest white fish which appear in Billingsgate market; and in the early part of the present century, numerous fishing smacks, from thirty-five to an hundred tons burthen, belonging to Greenwich, Gravesend, Harwich, &c., frequented them for the purpose of supplying the metropolitan gourmands with "deep sea" cod and ling; which was, and is still esteemed a great luxury.

It is possible that some of the old stagers about St. Margaret's Hope may yet remember Old Joe C, who commanded a small fishing vessel called the "Cleverly," and whose fame extended over all the south isles, for obtaining cargoes speedily, and making passages rapidly. Blow high, blow low, fair or foul, Joe made his passage. Even when he chanced to be the most leeward vessel in the fleet, of a dark December afternoon, in turning to London, he somehow contrived to have them all hull down, or out of sight in the morning; his cargo generally obtained the high prices ere the markets were glutted, and he thus gained an envied celebrity. However, detraction follows merit as surely as the shadow follows the substance. Malicious tongues have been known to utter queer stories about Joe, and to insinuate that he had dealings with a certain individual whose appellation is seldom or never made use of in good society. Nevertheless the skipper of the "Cleverly" was the beau ideal of his class; he stood five feet nothing in his boots, for shoes he never wore-was as rotund as a salt barrel; had an oleaginous countenance, deeply seared with small pox, and prematurely wrinkled by a life-long exposure to all the elements. His bullet head was ensconced in a heavy "sou' wester," and his "slop" hung around him like a dorsal fin. He set an example to the meanest of his crew. No man could rigg a sprual, or bite the cap off a putrid wilk better or faster than him-and though the extent of his "humanities" never reached beyond a kind of hazy knowledge of the points of the compass, he could poke his craft through the intricacies of the Hebrides and Orcades, or grope his way among the sand banks on the coast of Essex or Norfolk, with the best navagator of them all. Joe's fame even attracted the especial notice of the northren nobility-and it was deemed a capital opportunity for these magnates to obtain a passage from or to the British metropolis by such a well conducted craft as the "Cleverly," and under such a skilful pilot as her skipper. Indeed, such was the regard in which he was held, that a great Hebridean proprietor actually made over the "Stack and Skerry" to the Gravesend fisherman by deed of gift. Whether the said "deed" was written or verbal is a question I cannot solve, but the statement is nevertheless true! Ah! how the Billingsgate fishmongers would gape with wonder, when their old protegé,

whom some of them remembered having apprenticed out of the parish workhouse, talked about his "estates in the north;" the number of his "tenants," and "the noise they made in the world." "But the rascals," he would add, "are never hinclined to pay me no rent,—and ven I axes 'em, they kicks up such a bobbary, I'm a-glad to get avey from amongst 'em : howsomever, the Scotch lawyers tells me, I may shoot 'em if I likes-and I'm blessed if I dont too, if there's gunpowder to be had in London for love or money-or else there's no cod on the Dogger-bank."

About three miles distance from the "Stack" lies a low, flat holm, or islet, called Sule Skerry, or Seal Skerry. This small patch of ground is so very low, that you may see the white foam all around it, and hear the tremendous surges of the Atlantic thundering on its rocks, before you can discover what breaks them. This little island, as its name imports, is the haunt of innumerable seals, who congregate here in thousands, and gratify their amphibious propensities by basking in the sun's warmth, and dozing like aldermen after repletion. In former times, say sixty or seventy years since, ere capital had been invested in nets and lines, when cod fishing was only partially known, and when herring fishing was altogether unknown, this solitary spot was occasionally frequented by the young men inhabiting the west end of the island of Pomona for the purpose of shooting, and otherwise capturing these sea calves. This somewhat dangerous expedition was often profitable, always chivalrous; and entitled the daring voyager to hold up his head several degrees higher than those "home-keeping youths," who prefer the safety of terra firma to the dangers of "sealing."

About the distance of time which I have previously mentioned, this lonely flat, amidst the wilderness of waves, became the scene of a harrowing tragedy; the catastrophe of which filled a little isolated rustic community, with lamentation, and mourning, and woe. It may not be known to our "southeren" readers, that there are a numerous class of small proprietors in the western parishes of Pomona, holding their property by UDAL right, that is, lands held by uninterrupted succession, without any original charter, and without subjection to feudal service, or acknowledgment of any superior.

These were alike

exempt from the temptations of poverty, and the allurements of wealth, they held on the noiseless tenor of their way in virtuous obscurity, and descended into the narrow mansion with unobtrusive decency; leaving a small, unincumbered Scandinavian inheritance, which most likely had been in the family for eight hundred years, and the odour of a good name to their children.

Such were the parents of Henry Graham and Helen Waters, whose progenitors and themselves had been neighbours and friends for many generations.

The youth and maiden having arrived at that delicious stage of

existence

"When love's delirious pulse beats high;"