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Untitled Article
' She is a woman who has tried the world And found it a deceit ; therefore she keeps Her gentle Raymond like a Corydon , Watching his silly sheep among the fields . Of course f her gentle Raymond * is prepared to be imposed upon by the deceit . She had kept the wax soft for the reception of the fiend ' s seal . This capital mistake should have been more strongly marked . ' Philip of Maine' is on ambition ; a long and bustling drama , but to our taste the least pleasing of the whole . A disappointed
young aristocrat becomes a demagogue , and then a despot , and so goes to the devil . The tale is somewhat trite . The series concludes , very beautifully and impressively , with f Sorrow of Theresa / in which the demon endeavours to make maternal fondness a rack on which to torture a woman into the language of impiety . He is not only foiled of his intended victim , but loses one who was previously in his grasp ,
the stern and reprobate husband , whose heart is touched and purified by her unconquerable goodness . In conclusion , the spirit of evil , though successful in dragging down to perdition four out of the seven on whom he had tried his temptations , is pronounced , by an angel of truth , to have failed , because the miserable example of those whom he seduced * had warned many more of danger , and become the means of their salvation .
While we award strong and heartfelt praise to this poem , both in its conception and execution , there are some objections which , regarding it rather as a moral than as a literary production , il is incumbent on us to express . We think it is constructed on too narrow a basis , too limited a view of the struggles , perils , and glories of man ' s moral nature ; that the temptations are too remote from the actual trials of life * in the present state of society ; and that sometimes the temptation , in order to give it sufficient power , is so framed as to render doubtful the reality of the virtue to which it is opposed . No less than three of the dramas relate entirely to religious
faith or trust , the trial of which is also specifically included in a fourth . This is out of proportion for a temptation which must chiefly address itself to weak and ignorant minds . The prevalent modes of teaching religion unhappily keep many minds in that condition , but the knowledge even of history and science throw so much light on the benignity of the providential plan ,
as to drive the peril very much into that circle within which priestcraft domineers in darkness over feebleness . There might also have been much more touching delineations of the corrupting influences of cupidity , drawn from the existing state of society , than those which are afforded by the crimes of the Miser and the Pirate . The peculiar manifestation is so alien from , common life , that it keeps out of sight how thoroughly the vice itself is
Untitled Article
400 The Seven Temptations .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 400, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/18/
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