Glowing, waving as they hung As all must know, who aught can tell Then, as doctors wise preserve Through half his mighty round hath run- Lest the potion should be heady, Strain the mixture, strain it well Then, to hold the rich infusion, But clean and pure from spot or taint, That within its tight hoop'd gyre Has kept Jamaica's liquid fire; Or luscious Oriental rack, To make the compound soft as silk, Stir it round, and round, and round, Be the vials clean and dry, Corks as sound as chastity ;Years shall not impair the merit Of the lively, gentle spirit. Babylon's Sardanapalus, 'Tis the Punch so clear and bland, JOE BARRINGTON, THE VILLAGE BARBER. Never mind the World of Fashion,'-or the 'Parisian Beau Monde.' "THAT'S THE BARBER !" VILLAGE barbers are a few of the originals left on the stage of life, their characters being seven ages,' to show us that where the march of intellect' has not reached to the quickness of a countrydance, and the introduction of new schemes, (such as shaving by steam and cutting hair by patent) has not been prevailing, there is a possibility of remaining in the ancestral grade, and of being old fashionedly useful in the small compass of a few hundred houses. Joe Barrington (it would be affectation to call him Joseph) is one of the unpolished remnants of a village barber, without being a learned phlebotomist, or chirurgeon, with a shop window full of teeth as that of a Tooley Street professional; he is, like any other notable man, of consequence when wanted; otherwise Joe might starve in his profession. But, so unlike men of genius in general, he does not place his whole reliance in the use of the scissors and razor, and makes it rather serve as auxiliary to, than the essential means of, his living. That he has worked fifty years for one family as †The Arabians, notwithstanding the sober precepts of their prophet, are supposed to have discovered distillation, as the word Alcohol plainly indicates thresher, is cause enough why he should not go out of the land of the living into the grassy grave over which he has played a hundred times, unnoticed. Were Gray, indeed, living, he would make an Elegy for him in the church yard, and Burns would compose an additional stanza with variations, for Joe Barrington, my Jo.' Ferguson, that Sow of Feeling,' who died in the freshness and bloom of his genius, though not like Hammond for love, Savage for Debt, Otway for food, or Shaw for a widowed heart, would not be less anxious to do justice to the beater out of corn and the corncutter. Without being a statuary, Joe is overtall and the highest headed, (like Saul) if not the highest minded, man in the parish. Years, however, have bowed down his stature almost to a curve, and he cannot keep the even tenor of his way' as in days elapsed. Yet he has maintained his fame so steadily, that it would be absurd in a rival attempting to set up, before Joe is set down in his last peaceful bed. To view him as a man, he bears the marks of perseverance and industrious content. His wrinkles are not those of care, but wrought gradually across his brow and in his cheeks by the growth, not the severity of time. As a christian, Joe is equally correct. very seat in the Meeting House is sacred, and the ceiling under which he sits in the gallery is marked like the hallo of an apostle, with the warmth of his unshaken constancy to the good cause. The brush of the white washer hath not effaced it. It is a patch,' (as Wordsworth would call it,) of devoted beauty in the sanctuary of peace.' Joe is not an enemy to the church, for therein he was christened and married, and there he is the first ringer and leads' triple bob' and 'grandsires' with musical taste. He has the very hat which he won at the Bell' when a young man, and glories in having been umpire several times to decide the peals of college youths,' and the feats of Hobbinols' in Somerville's Chase' and village sports. providers of modern instances and exstacies.' His book of recollection is a sort of Selden's Table Talk', illustrated by Strutt's Sports.' Joe, like his tall father before him, has brought up a large family, yet neither of his sons is immediately under the guidant influence of the Pole, or has crossed the Line. It is said, in Joe's younger days, that he cut hair with a bowl, put like a monk's coif on the head. In Russia, authors say the practice was common formerly. Why should it not have had countenance in England? The Croppies, in the Irish rebellion led a fashion in the village in which Joe lives, to crop the hair close to the head, and this practice might have made popular that celebrated song, 66 Croppies lie down!" Be this as it may-Joe has laid down many a crop, and divided Lord Ellenborough's cutting" from the maiming' act. The effect produced when the Brutus' first reached the village, about forty years ago, was very great, through the medium of a Cassius who attended London to give evidence in behalf of an election contesting candidate. It was whispered in church, talked of in the farms, and like a new species of animal, or variety of a flower, shown and admired every where." Oh! Brutus!" His Joe was not least anxious about this innovation. He affected to be displeased with it, but such was the itching palm to wear a brutus' over the understanding among the youths, that he was necessitated to bring the curling irons into use, and no one could enter a country dance with credit to the fair sex and to himself, unless his hair like a ploughed field, were turned up and subjected to the criticism of the vicar of Harrow. There is so obvious a decency in Joe's demeanor, that not a bell tolls but he is sent to shave the dead, or previously called in, like Don Quixote's Sancho, to clip the ghastly visage of a sick man. It would afford a picture for a life-painting artist, such as Wilkie, or Haydon, to delineate Joe's approach into a room. His immeasurable length-the smoothing down It is delightful to get Joe in a talking his hair like straggling thatch over an old key. His anecdotes are as valuable to barn-attempt at a genteel obeisancecountry ear-receivers, as Kelly's Town the untying his coloured apron—the unReminiscences,' 'Sheridan's Evasions,' the folding the apparatus-the sharpening the Gossip of Miss Hawkins,' the wit of razor with a fillip on the palm of his hand, Curran,' or the jeux d'esprit of 'Lord the tying the said apron round his waist Norbury. It is unfortunate that no li- the putting on the one-eyed spectacles, terary eaves-dropper has ever laid embar--the beating up the lava flood-the go on his memory to freight a bookseller. His accounts of usages dying from the scene, and only floating like fish with the last gasp on sickly waters, are valuable to the lovers of the past and wise men's saws,' but treated lightly by the putting the little napkin on the shoulder with a slip of paper-the collossal stride— the tucking the bib under the chin—clip of the nose-paring the corners, and the dissemination of the last news -Or, of a child, when he coaxes the pretty little 6 dear darling!' to stand in a chair, facing the window. But whatever Joe does is replete with intention and mostly gives satisfaction. To be sure, the young lady, more nice in her head dress, is rather shy of his operations, for her boarding school frizeur comes from Ross,' and he is the very Man of Ross.' It is certainly a trial for Joe to turn his long, large, hard fingers, like bony death's among her ringlets. But how sweet are his words! in 'not hurting her,' when he plucks out dozens of hairs by root and branch,and how he will take care not to distress her scalp, after breaking the teeth of her comb in spite of his own teeth. There was a time when Joe could mow, And plough, and hoe, and set, and sow. Joe is not comme il fait' in the art of scenting hair, though he can trace the form to a hare in a field. Rowland's Kalydor and Prince's Russia are essentials still unknown to him. A bottle of Palma Christi, has however, like the Otto of Roses, supplied many heads of Sutton with a drop which Joe circulates with pomatum in the heat of his hands. How grateful this gift of a friend in London that remembers Joe giving him the first shave and the first cut, not excepting the proverbial allusion of a cat's lick over the Downs!' Joe was not conversant with wigs and a forenisc gentleman would be at a loss to be properly bobtailed, or entailed, for a smart entrée for the assize. But fashion, not the artist, is in fault, for he knows a little about pigtails, and boasts that he more than once pulled that of the Rev W. Jay, Admiral Houlton, and Justice, (not Judge) Bailey, at the Quarter Sessions. This was in their younger days, when fops appeared in ruffles, with cocked hats, swords, and silver buckies, and paste brilliants. Most of Joe's work, professionally, is done between, before and after, the labours of the barn, unless by emergency. But Sunday morning is the witching time for his popularity:-not that he shaves like his fraternity shaved formerly at revels and high mass days in the churchyard, nor is he so light and steady in removing the stubble from the chin as the Tabernacle-walk woman. Yet flocks resort to his room, in which they sit and take their turn for a clean face and smooth countenance. Here, at length, the circulating medium of knowledge, a newspaper, arrives, which is read aloud, pro bono publico. Thanks to mails, instead of broad-wheel waggons, and messengers of grief to some '--the post-boys. Amid the commotion of half a century in which many have shone conspicuously, but who terminated their existence by the razor, it is a pleasurable instance to Joe, while he takes his retrospect, as he does the handle of his white narrow pint cup, with a smile, that he never meddles nor makes with nobody's concerns.' But is prepared to work like a good shoemaker to his last, seeing it will bring him to his end, and he will shave and cut like a critic, without shedding blood, when any of Nature's works pass under his Review. P*. THE MISSIONS OF CHRISTIANITY IN EUROPE AND ASIA. THE extent to which the efforts of the great societies now established in every Protestant kingdom, have urged their missions for the conversion of the heathen, and for the instruction of the careless, the selves, raises them into one of the grand ignorant, and the infidel, among themfeatures of our time, or perhaps even into that characteristic by which all others are to be thrown into the shade. If the fifteenth century was the age of natural and scientific discovery, the eighteenth the age of infidelity and revolution, the nineteenth may yet bear the illustrious name of the age of christian labours for the enlightening and happiness of mankind. To bring all these labours into one point of light, with the double purpose of shewing us what we have done, and what we have still to do, would be to render a public service to the Christian community. But it requires time and details which are at present beyond our power, and we rapid view. must reluctantly content ourselves with a timated by Humboldt at 198 millions, of The general population of Europe is es52 Protestants, 38 followers of the Greek whom 103 millions are Roman Catholics, ritual, and 5 Mahometans. Europe,-Lapland, a space of 150,000 To begin at the Northern extremity of miles, or about the extent of France or Germany. In a population perhaps the thinnest in the world-one to every four square miles-Lapland has at present thirteen principal and ten filial churches. Three translations of the bible have been printed. The Swedish bible society of Stockholm has directed its attention to this desolate kingdom, and twelve young men are constantly educated at the king's expense, for preachers among the Laplanders. The Russian bible societies are also exerting themselves in this direction; and, so early as 1815, had distributed 7000 bibles. Passing on to the north-east-Russian Asia, a space of four millions of square miles, with a population of about nine millions, is still almost totally heathen. The Edinburgh missionary society so far back as 1803, sent two ministers to preach in Tartary. In 1815, they renewed their attempt at Astracan. Three missionaries of the London missionary society, have been for some years stationed at Selinginsk, about 160 miles from Irkutz, where the Emperor Alexander gave them an estate and money for building. A printing press of the Mongolian has been erected there. They have made extensive journeys towards the south and the Chinese frontier, but the poverty of the soil, the inclemency of the climate, and the roving nature of the tribes, offer the most formidable obstacles to the diffusion of religious knowledge. at the head of all a great Supreme, the declared "vicegerent of omnipotence," the Teshoo Lama, who "never dies." an infant born on the day of his apparent decease being appointed to his throne, and receiving his spirit thus transmitted into a new form. Hence this Pope of the Himmalaya is named " Lama Kaku," the eternal father. The convents are as numerous and as fully peopled as might be presumed, under this holy oligarchy. The high convent of Teshoo Lumba contains 3,7000 priests. To the south lies one of the most remarkable regions of the world,-Tibet, the Switzerland of Asia, an immense succession of hill, valley, dells of exhaustless fertility, and mountains towering almost twice the height of Mont Blanc. The top of the Dwawalaghiri rises 26,000 feet above the level of the ocean. But the civil constitution is still more extraordinary. The nation is one great convent, with a multitude of lay brethren to labour for the monks. It is the centre of Lamaisin, a religion_spreading from the Volga to Japan. Its tenets are a compound of Christianity-probably learned from the Nestorian missionaries of the early ages and of the original superstitions of Asia. The Tibetians hold the unity and trinity of a Supreme Being; the existence and perpetual opposition of an evil principle, and an incarnation which they aver to be a thousand years before that of the founder of our faith; but later corruptions, probably introduced by the Jesuits in 1624, diversify this mixture of creeds. They believe in purgatory, in the efficacy of prayer for the dead, they have holy water, a rosary, and extreme unction. They have priestly robes, a dress for the nuns, three orders of initiation into the priesthood, superior priests, equivalent to cardinals, six grand lamas or patriarchs, presiding over the three divisions of Tibet Proper, and the three of the southern provinces, or Bootan, and The Capucins in 1707 sent out missions, which, like those of their more vigorous predecessors, the sons of Loyola, failed of making converts. Yet they were enabled to found two houses of their order, which lasted during a century. A Protestant Missionary, Schroter, unfortunately died when, in 1820, he was preparing himself, at Calcutta, for translating and propagating the scriptures among this extraordinary people. The At the extremity of the east, Japan exhibits the most determined resistance to every attempt at conversion. The country has reached that precise rank of civilization which makes a nation jealous of foreign knowledge, without the power of adding to its own. The spiritual and temporal authorities are distinct and defined, and both repulsive of European intercourse in the strongest degree. lower orders are idolators, but some of the leading sects reject every species of image worship, and probably many among the higher orders, and philosophers;for they have an affectation of metaphysics, are scoffers at every idea of the acknowledgment of a divine being. But the superstitious are deeply superstitious, they make pilgrimages, they have convents, and their rules would do honour to a Trappist or a Carthusian. -- In the early part of the 17th century, Rome established some missions in Japan. But the popular indignation was armed against them, and the missionaries were expelled, after a residence of almost a century, during which they perpetually sent pompous accounts of conversions to Europe, but seem to have done little more than trade, offend the national prejudices, by their ill-directed efforts, and degrade Christianity by the example of their lives and doctrines. In 1715, the Abbe Juidott attempted to renew the Roman mission. His fate is not known. Jesuits and monks of other orders followed and failed, and since 1748, Japan has been rendered nearly accessible, by a severe strictness that has had no parallel in the world. China, with its two hundred inillions of people, and variety of tribes, is at present perhaps, in the state which must precede the reception of Christianity in an Asiatic empire. Its religion is broken up by fu rious sects, which alternately assume the character of spiritual disputants and rebels in arms. The "Pelinkin," or, "enemies of foreign religions," agitate the north. The Kedufis," or, Heaven and earth one," a race of levellers, proclaim equality of men and community of property in the west and south, and the society of the three powers, heaven, earth, and man," makes war against all authority whatever. The Jesuits planted their missions in China in the middle of the sixteenth century. Multitudes of nominal Christians were made but the suspicious spirit of the government appears to have nearly extinguished their advance. So late as 1815, an imperial ordinance commanded that the introducers of Christianity should be put to death. The Protestant missionaries are prohibited from going beyond Canton. But this prohibition may have been for tunate, in its compelling the missionaries to attend to perhaps the only way of inpressing the mind of China. It has led them to prepare tracts and versions of the Scriptures in the language of the country. Doctors Morison and Milne made a translation of the Old and New Testaments; and Morison's great Chinese Dictionary and Grammar have laid open the language to the European student for all time to come. An Anglo-Chinese college has been established at Malacca, with some Chinese schools. But the circulation of the scriptures in China is at present rendered extremely difficult by the Government, which, disturbed by fear of insurrection, and unable to distinguish between political and religious change, has prohibited at once all religious meetings, and all books of Christianity. Hindostan, the finest portion of Asia, called by its people "The Garden of God" a territory of a million of square miles, and with a population of a hundred and twenty millions, is kept in awe by twenty thousand British troops, and governed by three thousand British functionaries, at a distance of eight thousand miles from home, the most singular instance of possession in the history of empire. The renewal of the Company's charter, in 1813, gave some hope of making a solid religious impression on India. An English bishop was sent to Calcutta, where a college was erected in 1821. Schools are supported through the provinces, many English, Protestant, and Lutheran Missions are located, and a striking spirit of improvement is displaying itself, in the efforts of some of the Rajahs and men of high caste, to acquire European literature; in the gradual inclination for European intercourse, and the extinction of some cruelties and many prejudices. But actual Christianity has hitherto made but a slight impression. The habits of the people, their natural reluctance to the religion of strangers, their ignorance of our language, and the fatal distinction of castes, raise formidable obstacles against the effective progress of religion. In Persia, the Jesuits had attempted but little, which forms a ground for the Protestant missionaries to hope for much. The popular belief of the people, one of the most tasteful and ingenious of the East, is a loose Islamism. But among the higher ranks are thousands who disdain the religion of the vulgar, or all religion, and are called Suffees, or Freethinkers. The Russian invasion has laid open the northern frontier, and from the facility with which the people of the conquered districts have adopted the tenets of the Greek Church, it may be augured that Islamism would still more readily give way to the intelligent zeal, and pure doctrines, of the missionaries of England, an ally bearing the Scripture. The immense Archipelago of the Indian isles is almost wholly untouched by missionary labours. The final conquest of Ceylon, in 1815, put into our hands the "Sacred Island" of India, the original seat of Buddhism, with a population of 300,000. Schools have been established, and the forms of British government and laws introduced. In this spot the conversion of the Archipelago may be prepared. 66 New Holland with its islands, covering an immense space of the great Southern Ocean, and growing up before the eye in islands innumerable, had been, since the first English settlement in 1788, the object of religious labour. But, in 1825, an Auxiliary Church Missionary Society" was formed in New South Wales, with a grant of 10,000 acres. A grant to the same extent was made to the "London Missionary Society," and of twice the quantity to the "Wesleyan Mission," in consequence of its wider establishment in the colony. But the natives, perhaps among the most brutish of mankind, have been hitherto but little influenced. Nothing can be more contrary to the received ideas, that human nature derives its evil habits from natural privations, inclemency of climate, or long oppression, than the temperament of the dwellers in the South Seas. The fine climate, abundant provisions, and lazy equality of condition, are all made for the overthrow |