tiful as the after-glow of sunset, in which love and resignation are mingled with something of a melancholy heroism? Who has not lingered with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi—the sufferer's inability to make his farewell messages of love intelligible, and the last long hours of silent pain? Yet for the sake of furnishing his disciples with a "ready reply," Dr. Cumming can prevail on himself to inoculate them with a bad-spirited falsity like the following:
"We have one striking exhibition of an infidel's brightest thoughts, in some lines written in his dying moments by a man, gifted with great genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless principle, and yet more worthless practices—I mean the celebrated Lord Byron. He says:
"'Though gay companions o'er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill,
Though pleasure fills the maddening soul,
The heart—the heart is lonely still.
"'Ay, but to die, and go, alas!
Where all have gone and all must go;
To be the Nothing that I was,
Ere born to life and living woe!
"'Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
Tis something better not to be.
"'Nay, for myself, so dark my fate
Through every turn of life hath been,
Man and the world so much I hate,
I care not when I quit the scene.'"
It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Cumming can have been so grossly imposed upon—that he can be so ill-informed as really to believe that these lines were "written" by Lord Byron in his dying moments; but, allowing him the full benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain his introduction of this feebly rabid doggrel as "an infidel's brightest thoughts?"
In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Cumming directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either
