—could it be by the same reviewer ?—as having "charms
of language and method which made it exceedingly attractive." I am conscious of having very definite ideas of the subject about which I was writing ; and whatever my faults RR a writer, " vagueness " is a charge from which the judgment of the Spectator, given on more than one occasion, has hitherto exempted me. Moreover, to assist my readers, not to say reviewers—though I know that they have not always time to read every page of every book whose merits are appraised by them—I prefixed a minute and careful analysis of the volume ; and this, I think, is not a customary practice with writers whose "vagueness" is "per- plexing." My chief complaint, however, is that, of my prac- tical suggestions, which are carefully enumerated in the fourth chapter as "Counsels of Amendment," under nine distinct "heads," your reviewer does not allude to one, but speaks as if my only "counsel of amendment" were an improved method of "preach- ing," which I had, indeed, spoken of in a previous chapter, but in a very different character from the "exercises" commonly under- stood by that, as I have shown, " unhappy " designation. His taunting suggestion that work would be more useful in my cir- cumstances than "rhetoric," and especially as he recognizes in me some capacities for work that might be effective, should surely have been spared, since his mention of my twenty-five years' ser- vice as a parochial minister shows that he had seen the page in which I said that this book, "like its predecessors, has been written in leisure time which might well have been claimed for relaxation, and amidst continual distractions,"—whicli "distrac- tions," I may add, arise from the very work in which he recom- mends me to employ myself. I shall be very thankful if you will allow me to say thus much on behalf of this additional "work," which was undertaken, as I have explained in the introduction, at a bidding which I dare not disobey, and for the purpose of supply-. ing, from long experience, helpful counsels to men who are heavily burdened like myself.—I am, &c.,
THE AUTHOR OF "CHURCH RESTORATION."
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