Thirdly, the length of a note, or the comparative time it occupies, has an important influence on the emphasis. Public speakers often dwell on those words, to which they would call particular attention, or, what amounts to nearly the same thing, make a pause after them, though the following words be closely connected. That the same practice should give emphasis in music, is what we might expect, and the force is augmented if, instead of a single note, a syllable be made to cover two or more notes, amounting to the same length, and especially if they fall from a higher to a lower one, which is almost always the case in rhetorical emphasis.

In the last place, emphasis may be increased or diminished by increasing or diminishing the quantity of voice. This, however, appears to us less effectual than some things mentioned above.

All the constituents of emphasis here enumerated are frequently combined in giving force to a particular point in music, and they render it perfect. One or two of the three first, however, with the aid of the fourth may suffice. With a proper degree of attention to these principles, the chorister may always adapt the tune to the hymn, as far as the irregularity of most hymns will permit. Such, however, are the changes that are often made in the rhythm in passing from one stanza to another, that many of the emphases in the music must clash with the poetical expressions, and entirely subvert them. If a tune be well adapted to the first stanza, it may, for that very reason, be ill suited to every other, so that no effort can prevent absurd expressions. Thus superlative importance is frequently given to an and, a to, or a the, while the principal word—the name of God, it may be - is sunk into comparative insignificance. Were we not accustomed to these perversions, we should not endure them for a moment. We should regard them as perfectly shocking.

In the year 1823, a book, containing about an hundred and fifty hymns, was offered to the public, designed to exemplify a method by which these difficulties might be removed. The hymns, which were all original, were intended to be so perfectly regular, that a tune which was well adapted to one stanza, would, so far as emphasis or rythm was concerned, be equally suited to every other

stanza. In 1830, a Collection of hymns on the same general plan was published. Some circumstances, connected with the time in which it appeared, probably operated against so favorable a reception as it might otherwise have secured. There were, besides, some inherent difficulties to prevent full success. The plan required many alterations in the hymns selected, though, perhaps, not more than had been tolerated in the New York and the Cambridge Collections, as well as in several English publications; where they were often made for the mere gratification of taste. We have nothing to object to the strong attachment to old hymns, which has lately been revived, having ourselves so much of the same feeling that we should not without reluctance either lay aside, or alter the best productions of Watts, Doddridge, and some more recent authors. Still, they are not capable of being well expressed by the repetition of psalm tunes; and it appears to us, that in general they ought not to be sung in any other way than that of chanting. For this kind of music, irregularities increase the value of a hymn; that is, if the chant be so arranged as to give the proportional length and emphasis to the successive words and syllables. That hymn of Cowper, for instance,

"God moves in a mysterious way,"

can be nothing more than mangled in any psalm tune, that ever was or can be made; whereas it may be chanted to perfection. All that is wanted to effect this is, to have some notation, that will express the proportional length of the notes; and this may be done by the application of the figures 1, 2, 4, and 8, representing the semibreve, the minim, the crotchet, and the quaver, together with the points used in music.

The Collection of hymns mentioned above was introduced into several societies; but the general taste, we fear, is unfavorable to the success of this, or any other attempt to make our church music what it should be an aid to devotion. There is too little seriousness in many of those who compose our choirs, if not in the leaders themselves. It is too often the principal object to exhibit their own powers and musical attainments; and where it is not so, there is generally such a thirst for change, as can hardly be reconciled with essential improvements in musical performance. In

most choirs, the time is chiefly consumed in acquiring a superficial acquaintance with new tunes, instead of learning to give more expression to old ones, which are often the best. Till this vitiated taste be corrected, there is little hope of improvement. How it is to be corrected we know not, unless it be by adopting the method of some few churches, that of making the musical exercise the service of the congregation generally, and not of an exclusive choir. The propriety and the benefits of such a change, and the best means of obviating the disadvantages that would attend it, cannot now be discussed.

As every theory is better understood and appreciated when illustrated by examples, we subjoin the following hymn, in which, as it may be observed, there is a correspondence between the emphases of one stanza, and those of every other.

THE DESPONDING CONSOLED.

Tune, "Peace, Troubled Soul."

Cheered by the rays of hope divine,
Thou child of grief, no longer pine.
Why shouldst thou doubt thy Father's care,
Who ne'er denied a filial prayer?

Whose hand is ever prompt to save,
And grant thee all thy heart should crave.

Does ill desert thy hope destroy?
Or earth-born fears o'ercloud thy joy?
Strive to subdue the power of sin,
And all foreboding cares within ;
Then soar aloft on wings of faith,
Above the fear of change, or death.

Earth may be dark to downcast eyes,
But mercy beams through all the skies;
God is our light, who yet will shine,
Through every cloud, with ray benign:
No longer then, like one forlorn,
In life-corroding sorrow mourn.

کرتے

Brief are the woes of hearts renewed,
To Heaven's decree resigned, subdued;
Soon mayst thou lay thy burdens down,
In worlds of light receive thy crown;
And there, relieved of all thy fears,
Enjoy the fruit now sown in tears.

S. W.

ART. VII.-RELATION BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS.*

WE are well aware of the vast difference between our own age, and that in which Patrick, Lowth and Whitby flourished and wrote. They knew little of our present conflicts of opinion as to matters of philosophy and points of criticism. They lived towards the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. They had done their work before Tindal and Shaftesbury had become the public champions of Deism in England, and of course before Germany followed in their career and neology arose in the speculations of Bahrdt and the criticisms of Michaelis. They write apparently undisturbed by the questions that now most trouble the earnest student of the sacred volume. No more fearful foes than Le Clerc and Socinus appear to haunt their vision. There is something very refreshing in observing the quiet confidence in which their faith rests upon the letter of the sacred page. Whitby may have less of this quietude than the two others, and was undoubtedly a man of a more modern cast than they. But in his pages we do not find that those matters are handled which have most troubled the scholars of our own day. Nothing would probably have surprised these men more than one of our modern Commentaries of the Orthodox stamp, for example, that of Tholuck or Olshausen, or even our own Stuart, with all its references to a kind of philosophy and criticism as then unheard of,

* A Critical Commentary and Paraphrase on the Old and New Testament and the Apocrypha. By PATRICK, LOWTH, ARNALD, WHITEY and LOWMAN. A New Edition, with the Text printed at large. In Four Volumes. Imp. 8vo. Philadelphia, and New York. 1844-5.

or if heard of, not strongly enough asserted to demand any open refutation. Yet these men lived at a time of peculiar interest, and had gone through a peculiar discipline. They flourished after the Church of England had passed through its two great trials, first with its Romanist, and then with its Puritan foes, and was seeking to find rest in some golden mean between Popish formalism and Calvinistic fanaticism. Their Commentaries partake much of the character of their position. They are moderate, candid, sensible, free from objectionable extremes. They give a very good idea of the mild Orthodoxy of the Church from which they emanated, before Whitefield had revived the spirit of the great Genevan, or Froude and Pusey had called up the ghost of Laud.

Patrick seems to us the least valuable of the three as to learning and power. Lowth, learned and judicious as he is, gains much when associated with his more genial and imaginative son, who followed him in his critical labors, and who bears to his father something of the relation of the fair foliage and fruit to the rough trunk of the parent tree. Perhaps, on the whole, no Orthodox commentator on the New Testament is worth more than Whitby, although our Trinitarian friends will not blame us for wishing that his work had been written after, instead of before he became a Unitarian of the Arian order. As to the works of Arnald on the Apocrypha and Lowman on the Apocalypse, we cannot hope to derive much light from them in the present advanced state of learning. It is too late in the day to take it for granted, as the Dissenter Lowman does, that all Christian history is wrapped up in the mystical Apocalypse; and such is the present knowledge of the Alexandrian mind, in which the chief thought of the Apocryphal Books arose, that we must look to a deeper scholar and thinker than the Churchman Arnald, to describe that singular combination of Oriental mysticism, Jewish faith, and Greek philosophy, in which Trinitarian Orthodoxy was developed gradually by the son of Sirach, by Philo, and finally by Athanasius.

The publication of a series of commentaries upon the whole Bible may be allowed to furnish us with an occasion for some remarks upon the relation which exists between the Old and New Testaments.

The value of the Old Testament for us who live under