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wooden or bronze beams, but by curtains, which, being drawn aside, the stranger suddenly finds himself at the lower end of the church, from whence a scene of beauty, grandeur, and luxury bursts upon him, which cannot be described. Upon first seeing it, the devout Catholic might well be pardoned for the most enthusiastic or profound expressions of admiration or worship.

The first glance at the interior affects different persons differently. Some insensibly sink down upon their knees and cast a confiding and grateful glance toward the high altar; others fall prostrate and water the precious marble pavement with a profusion of tears. The Protestant is generally struck with wonder and delight, and stands in breathless silence, soothed and refreshed by the genial atmosphere, which is charged with the delicious incense that incessantly rises from many altars. At length he awakes from that profound wonderment that had entranced his soul upon entering, and begins to distinguish the several parts, and to comprehend the tout ensemble of this most wonderful temple. He looks up into the majestic vaults covered with the finest pictures fixed there in unchanging and everduring mosaic; then he casts a glance through the vast ranges of columns encased in precious marbles, and adorned with magnificent funereal monuments, and the countless emblems and reminiscences of religion sculptured in marble and bronze. Amid this wondrous scene he will observe here groups standing in breathless silence contemplating some statue or picture, and there others kneeling at some favorite altar, or to some favorite saint.

At length he begins to advance into the church, and soon perceives that his feet move upon the precious marble pavement as upon a polished mirror. His attention is gradually concentrated upon a cluster of a hundred little lamps close to the floor, twinkling in their silver sockets amid a flood of milder light that comes down from the great dome, impending immediately above, and illumines the pavement. In the midst of this flood of celestial light is a heavy mass of shade, caused by the canopy of the great altar, under which repose the headless bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul, the descent to whose tombs is constantly illuminated by the silver lamps.* Let the traveler approach the railing, and look down to the gate of these martyrs' graves, and he will see kneeling before it the statue of a Pope at prayer, which is so life-like, that for a time, it deceives him, and he expects to see it find entrance and disappear. If he choose to descend into the vaults beneath, he will there find the tombs of all the holy fathers, together with kings, queens, and princes, who have deserved well of the Church, but ill of their country,

On the authority of Vassi and Nibby, Roman Catholic antiquarians, I assign the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul to this tomb and their heads to that of St. John Lateran, which is the metropolitan church of the Catholic world.

from which they have fled, or been indignantly driven, and at length found absolution and a grave here. Upon ascending from the vaults below, the stranger, perhaps for the first time, looks aloft, and shudders involuntarily at beholding the dome, like a vast gulf, inverted and impending over him. In the concave of the lantern that crowns the dome, is a magnificent mosaic painting of the eternal Father, who looks down benignantly from that half shadowy, half illuminated recess, upon the tombs of the apostles and martyrs four hundred feet below.

Recovering from the first impulse of terror, he now discovers what, if he is a Protestant, shocks him-if a Catholic, fills him with reverence. It is a black statue of an ancient Jupiter, now regarded as St. Peter, seated in an elevated chair placed against a pillar, whose right foot is literally worn away by the kisses of the faithful through the lapse of a thousand years. I have seen the coarse, revolting peasantry press their garlicky lips and wrinkled foreheads ardently upon it, and the instant after, a princess passed her cambric handkerchief over it, and applied her delicate and beautifully chiseled mouth passionately to the same warm iron, and then lifted up her little son to do the same, while others were waiting to take their turn.

We must look for the emblems of St. Peter, as the head of the Church, in the tribune at the extreme upper end of the temple. There one sees an apparently small window of a mild yellowish golden color, so painted as to increase in richness and light toward the centre, where a celestial dove appears hovering over a bank of clouds, at the base of which, and blending with it, are saints, Ambrose, Augustin, Athanasius, and Chrysostom, bearing up the original chair of St. Peter, over whom two angels sustain the tiara, while hosts of seraphs hover around. The multitude do not worship here-they only wonder and believe.

Every time the visitor enters this mighty temple, every hour he spends in it, increases his admiration of this wonderful creation of man. But the Protestant cannot worship in St. Peter's.

He who has visited Westminster Abbey and St. Peter's will naturally compare the impressions which the interior of each made upon him. The interest of the two is totally different; yet each is overwhelming. In Westminster, the genius of the place overpowers you-in St. Peter's the place itself. The first fills you with reverence and awe as you gaze upon the monuments of those whose works and actions are the richest legacy ever bequeathed by mankind to man: the second fills you with wonder and delight as the most magnificent and harmonious composition in marble, metals, and colors, man has ever produced. Over the world of letters, science, and ambition, Westminster has the greater power: over the religious and ideal world St. Peter's reigns triumphant.

LITERARY SKETCHES.

BY THE EDITOR.

JOSEPH ADDISON AS A PROSE WRITER.

THE world knows but little of the personal appearance of Joseph Addison; but his genius is appreciated, with more or less accuracy, wherever the English language is spoken. Lord Chesterfield once observed, that he "had never seen a more modest, or a more awkward man;" and this criticism may give us some conception of his person. Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, in summing up the manifestations of his genius, lays it down as an axiom, that "he who would write English with correctness and elegance, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison;" and this sentence may furnish us with a sufficient idea of his mental character.

The

Chesterfield and Johnson, I will remark in passing, fairly represent the two great classes of critics, into which the world is divided. The one class judges only from personal appearances; the other by the acknowledged productions of the individual. The first looks entirely to the physical; the second as exclusively to the mental demonstrations. one asks the question, how did he look? The other is satisfied to inquire, what can he do? If a man eats well, and sleeps at night, and cares but little how the world goes, his fine healthy face and full form will soon settle his fortune with the Chesterfield critics; but the thoughtful, studious, reflecting, and earnest man-he who lives an intellectual rather than an animal life, unless Providence has given him an iron frame which no labor can reduce-will do best to get his character drawn by the followers of Johnson.

This first order of critics, let me add, is not a new race of people. We have it on reliable authority, that Faustina, the mother of the Emperor Commodus, was so passionately devoted to their mode of judgment, that she discouraged in every way the mental education of her son, and, to improve his bodily appearance, brought him up as a gladiator. Socrates, also, was pronounced a villain, either because his figure and expression were not sufficiently bold and imposing, or there was some other deficiency in his person, when compared with the unchangeable Chesterfield standard. One of these critics, but a few years ago, on meeting with a flat-faced stranger in an English gentleman's parlor, expressed some resentment for being brought into the society of an idiot; nor was he prepared, by following his own rule of judgment, to manifest or feel much surprise, when he was informed that that idiot was only the celebrated Mr. Coleridge!

Notwithstanding the present popularity of this style of criticism, of judging a man's mind by his mien and magnitude, I shall prefer, in speaking of the intellectual characteristics of Mr. Addison, to

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take the minority side with my old friend, Dr. John

son.

There was a time when the name of Addison stood at the head of the literary canon. For almost a century, he was regarded as the best writer of the English language. He was seldom criticised, because criticism had already made him its model. Within the last half century, however, other writers have appeared, and presented their claims to rivalship with the great English composer; and it is for this reason, that the thinking part of the literary world begin again to examine and to rejudge their old standard.

In judging of the style of any writer, there are two points only to be noticed. They are, the thought and the expression of it. The thought in any piece of composition must be attended to, for several reasons. The first is, that the style of expression will very much depend on the amount of thought it labors with. If a writer has little or none of it to trouble him, his pen may glide easily and rapidly along, with all imaginable felicity of diction. The mind, freed from nearly every restraint, gives a loose reign to the imagination, and the words flow along in a continual stream of beauty. But just impose an intellectual burden on the mind, give it an intricate historic truth to unravel, or let it be employed in bringing to light some profound philosophical problem, and the muse of rhetoric is soon trammeled, the lines are apt to be found limping, and the mere manner of writing is almost necessarily lost in the difficulties or grandeur of the subject. There is so much importance to be given to this consideration, that, in the comparison of any two or more writers, the first question raised should always refer to the amount of solid matter respectively conveyed by them.

Another principal reason for attending, in all our strictures, to the thought of a composition, is, that the style of any writer will vary, as his matter is either original or borrowed. If it is borrowed, he has nothing to do but move quietly forward, with more or less variety and ease of manner, in the path made familiar to him by his predecessor. Perhaps he only polishes the blocks quarried and partly finished by another hand. But let him go himself to the granite or marble mountain-let him blast out with vast toil his own material, and, if I am not mistaken, the very habit of such rough labor will partially unfit him for the more delicate operation of the polisher; but if, as it rarely happens, there should arise a genius, capable of performing both parts with equal energy and perfection, no language can be too strong to celebrate his triumph. Such a man was Addison, as I shall endeavor to show before this sketch is finished. Next to the thought in any piece of writing, the expression of it, I have said, should be regarded. Clearness of expression, or what is called perspicuity by rhetoricians, is of the first importance, because