Believe me, in the brief interval, your obliged and grateful
DEAR SIR,--If not with the works, you are doubtless familiar with the name of that "wonderful man" (for such, says Doddridge, I must deliberately call him), Archbishop Leighton. It would not be easy to point out another name, which the eminent of all parties, Catholic and Protestant, Episcopal and Presbyterian, Whigs and Tories, have been so unanimous in extolling. "There is a spirit in Archbishop Leighton I never met with in any human writings; nor can I read many lines in them without impressions which I could wish always to retain," observes a dignitary of our Establishment and F. R. S. eminent in his day both as a philosopher and a divine. In fact, it would make no small addition to the size of the volume, if, as was the fashion in editing the classics, we should collect the eulogies on his writings passed by bishops only and church divines, from Burnet to Porteus. That this confluence of favourable opinions is not without good cause, my own experience convinces me. For at a time when I had read but a small portion of the Archbishop's principal work, when I was altogether ignorant of its celebrity, much more of the peculiar character attributed to his writings (that of making and leaving a deep impression on readers of all classes), I remember saying to Mr. Southey[186] "that in the Apostolic Epistles I heard the last hour of Inspiration striking, and in Arch. Leighton's commentary the lingering _vibration_ of the sound." Perspicuous, I had almost said transparent, his style is _elegant_ by the mere compulsion of the thoughts and feelings, and in despite, as it were, of the writer's wish to the contrary. Profound as his conceptions often are, and numerous as the passages are, where the most _athletic_ thinker will find himself tracing a rich vein from the surface downward, and leave off with an unknown depth for to-morrow's delving--yet there is this quality peculiar to Leighton, unless we add Shakespeare--that there is always a scum on the very surface which the simplest may understand, if they have head and heart to understand anything. The same or nearly the same excellence characterizes his eloquence. Leighton had by nature a quick and pregnant fancy, and the august objects of his habitual contemplation, and their remoteness from the outward senses, his constant endeavour to see or to bring all things under some point of unity, but, above all, the rare and vital union of head and heart, of light and love, in his own character,--all these working conjointly could not fail to form and nourish in him the higher power, and more akin to reason, the power, I mean, of imagination. And yet in his freest and most figurative passages there is a _subdued_ness, a self-checking timidity in his colouring, a sobering silver-grey tone over all; and an experienced eye may easily see where and in how many instances Leighton has substituted neutral tints for a strong light or a bold relief--by this sacrifice, however, of particular effects, giving an increased permanence to the impression of the whole, and wonderfully facilitating its soft and quiet _illapse_ into the very recesses of our convictions. Leighton's happiest ornaments of style are made to appear as efforts on the part of the author to express himself _less_ ornamentally, more plainly.