Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part, those who bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and endeavour without ostentation to fulfil them.

The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras for penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of England.

We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.

Your loving old
G.P.

16

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into the innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons.  The stoutest heart may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism of these platitudinous volumes.  But there does occasionally arise above the dull horizon a star whose brilliance is the more conspicuous for the surrounding gloom.

In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter[1] to a Mr. Flower, who was a publisher at Cambridge, wrote:—­

    “I hope Robert Hall is well.  Why is he idle?  I mean towards the
    public.  We want such men to rescue this enlightened age from
    general irreligion.”

I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries his fame was great and deserved.

As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor.  When Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall’s place of worship on the eve of their departure to Spain.  The occasion was memorable and moving, and the preacher’s splendid periods deserve to be preserved from oblivion:—­

“By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of equal laws and a free constitution.  Freedom, driven from every spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here, and threatened with destruction.  The inundations of lawless power, after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylae of the universe.

“As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race; for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the latest posterity shall be born;