THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
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 itto (fata uf Itetraite. 
 
 *+J ^tO
 
 T H I R'D 
 
 GALLERY OF PORTRAITS. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE GILFILLAN, 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 SHELDON, LAMPORT AND BLAKEMAN, 
 
 115 NASSAU STREET. 
 MDCCCLV.
 
 JOHN J. REED, PRINTER, 
 16 Spruce-street.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 3 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 MlRABEAU, . . 13 
 
 MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON, . . . .21 
 
 VEKGNIAUD, ........ 32 
 
 NAPOLEON, 38 
 
 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 EDWARD IRVING, 52 
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR, 67 
 
 ROBERT HALL, 76 
 
 DR. CHALMERS, 85 
 
 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS, 116 
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH, 130 
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG, 143 
 
 GERALD MASSEY, 163 
 
 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 HAZLITT AND HALL AM, 175 
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE, 189 
 
 DELTA, 200 
 
 THACKERAY, ........ 218 
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, .... 233 
 
 1157507
 
 VI CONTENTS. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Page 
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING^ 267 
 
 EMERSON, 281 
 
 NEALE AND BTTNYAN, 289 
 
 EDMUND BURKE, 301 
 
 EDGAR A. POE, 325 
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER, . . . .338 
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI, ...... 352 
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON, 366 
 
 HENRY ROGERS, 391 
 
 AESCHYLUS; PROMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND, . 422 
 
 SttAKSPEAUBi A LECTURE, 431 
 
 V
 
 P KEF AC E, 
 
 IN issuing a THIRD GALLERY OF PORTRAITS, the 
 Author has a few preliminary statements and explan- 
 ations to make. 
 
 1st. He is aware that some of his friends have of 
 late begrudged the time he has been devoting to peri^ 
 odical writing -a, time which they think might be bet- 
 ter employed in independent works. To them he 
 would reply, that he is employed, slowly, but regu- 
 larly, in constructing a work on our present religious 
 aspects, besides preparing the materials of others of an 
 entirely different kind from any of his preceding, and 
 which aim, at least, at paullo majora than many of 
 his writings in the Magazines and Reviews ; and, that 
 so many are the demands made upon his pen, by the 
 editors and proprietors of journals, that without a
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 greater faculty of saying " No " than he possesses, he 
 could not altogether avoid compliance with their im- 
 portunities. The day of a dignified withdrawal from 
 that arena, and of an entire devotion to weightier and 
 more congenial matters, may arrive. 
 
 2d, He is induced to send forth the following vol- 
 ume for various reasons. His materials have gradually 
 increased upon his hands, to an amount which renders 
 a selection from them proper and easy. As he contri- 
 butes to various periodicals, and as many of his friends 
 have only the opportunity of meeting with him in one 
 or two of the five or six periodicals where he writes, 
 it has occurred to him, and the idea has been confirm- 
 ed by others, that a book containing the cream if he 
 may so call it of his diversified lucubrations, might 
 not be unacceptable to them. 
 
 3d, His aim in this volume has been to secure the 
 two elements of variety, and of patness to the mo- 
 ment. The sketches here collected are many of them 
 short they include notices of the most diverse varie- 
 ties of mind ; from an .ZEschylus to a Neale from a 
 Chalmers to a Marat ; they invite special attention to 
 some of those rising poets, whom the Author is proud
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 to say he has been able somewhat to aid in their gen- 
 erous aspirations ; and they seek to cast a frail gar- 
 land on the graves of such illustrious men, and so re- 
 cently removed, as Delta and Wilson. Should the 
 charges of shortness and slightness be urged against 
 some of these essays, he can only point, on the other 
 hand, to the papers on " Napoleon," " Macaulay," 
 "Burke," " Bulwer," "Henry Eogers," "Prome- 
 theus," " Shakspeare," and two or three others, as 
 not certainly exposed to the latter of these accusations 
 if to either. 
 
 4th, The careful reader will notice in this new 
 volume, a striking diversity from its companion Gal- 
 leries in one important particular he means, a certain 
 change of in his spirit, tone, and language toward the 
 celebrated men who at present lead the armies of 
 Modern Scepticism. This change has repeatedly been 
 charged against him, and ascribed to motives of a per- 
 sonal and unworthy kind. Such motives he distinctly 
 and strongly disclaims. With these men he was never 
 intimate ; their opinions he never held ; of their pre- 
 sent estimate of, or feelings toward himself he cares 
 and knows nothing ; but he is willing to grant that
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 the longer he has read their works, and watched the 
 tendency of their opinions, the more profoundly has he 
 been impressed with a sense of the hopelessness of ob- 
 taining any more light or good from such sources, and 
 of the extremely pernicious influences which they, wit- 
 tingly or not, have exerted, and are still exerting, 
 upon the mind of this country. Those who will take 
 the trouble of reading his papers on " Carlyle's Ster- 
 ling" and "Emerson" will understand what he 
 means. He has not, in the new edition of his preced- 
 ing works, suppressed his former expressions of admi- 
 ration for these men let them stand because they 
 were sincere at the time because they may serve 
 hereafter as landmarks in his own progress because 
 they never commend the sentiments, but only laud 
 too much the spirit, the intentions, and perhaps the 
 genius of these writers and because the very energy 
 and earnestness of these laudations will prove, that 
 nothing but a very strong cause, and a very profound 
 conviction, could have made him recoil from them ! 
 To absolute consistency he does not pretend ; to hon- 
 esty to progress and to fidelity in his words to his 
 thoughts, he does, and ever did. This will, and must
 
 PREFACE. XI 
 
 account, too, for his altered tone in reference to the 
 literary merits of some writers whom he had sketched 
 before. His mind no more than his pen has stood 
 still during the last eight years. He commends, in 
 fine, this new volume, as he has done his former ones, 
 to the Public, feeling persuaded, that, as a " true 
 thing," the Public will welcome it ; and confident 
 that he will find in this, as in all his former experi- 
 ence, that, let cliques or coteries say or do what they 
 please 
 
 " The great Soul of the world is just."
 
 file a! jftmli 
 
 NO. I.-MIRABEAU. 
 
 ONE is sometimes tempted to suppose that our earth hangs 
 between two centres, to which she is alternately attracted, 
 like those planets which are said to be suspended between 
 the double stars, and that she now nears a blue and mild, and 
 now a blood-red and fiery sun. There are beautiful days and 
 seasons which stoop down upon us like doves from heaven, and 
 give us exquisite but short-lived pleasure, in which our world 
 appears a " pensive, but a happy place," the sky, the dome 
 of a temple ; Eden recalled, and the Millennium anticipated : 
 we are then within the attraction of our milder Star. There 
 are other days and seasons, the darkness of which is lighted 
 up by the foam of general frenzy, like the lurid illumination 
 lent by the spray to the tossed midnight ocean when there is 
 a crying, not for wine, but for blood, in the streets when the 
 mirth of the land is darkened, and when all hearts, not filled 
 with madness, fail for fear. Such are our revolutionary eras 
 when our Ked Sun is vertical over us, shedding disastrous 
 day, and portending premature and preternatural night. 
 The value of revolutions lies more in the men they discover, 
 than in the measures they produce, j For a superior being, how 
 grand and interesting the attitude of standing, like John, on 
 the sand of the sea-shore, and seeing the beasts, horned or 
 crowned, fierce or tame, which arise from the waves which re- 
 volution has churned into fury, to watch them while yet fresh 
 and dripping from the water, and to follow the footprints of 
 their progress ! From the vantage-ground of after-time, the
 
 14 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 human observer is able to take almost a similar point of view. 
 He has this, too, in his favor. The lives of revolutionists, as 
 well as of robbers, are generally short ; their names are writ- 
 ten laconically and in blood their characters are intensified, 
 and sharply defined by death their footsteps are the few but 
 forcible stamps of desperate courage and recklessness ; and 
 the artist, if at all competent for the task of depiction, is 
 helped by the terrible unity and concentration of his subject. 
 If, besides, he be fond of " searching dark bosoms," where are 
 to be found darker bosoms than those of revolutionists ? if 
 he loves rock scenery, what rock like the Tarpeian, toppling 
 over its Dead Sea ? if he loves to botanize* among the daring 
 flowers of virtue, which border the giddiest precipices of guilt, 
 let him come hither if he wishes to brace his nerves and 
 strengthen his eyesight, and test his faith by sights and sounds 
 of woe, here is his field if he wishes to be read, and to send 
 down a thrill from his red-margined page into the future, let 
 him write worthily of revolutionists. The " History of Cata- 
 line's Conspiracy" has survived less from its intrinsic merit, 
 than because it records the history and fate of one who aspired 
 to be a revolutionist on a large scale, although he succeeded 
 only in becoming the broken bust of one. 
 
 One motive in the present series is somewhat different from 
 any we have now stated. We formerly drew portraits of God's 
 selected and inspired men. To bring out, by contrast, the 
 color and tone of these, we are tempted now to draw faithfully, 
 yet charitably, the likenesses of some generally supposed to be 
 the Devil's selected and inspired men. Nor are we indifferent, 
 at the same time, to the moral purposes which such painting, 
 and the contrast implied in it, may serve. 
 
 We begin with Mirabeau, the first-born of the French Revo- 
 lution a revolution in himself. In any age and country, 
 Mirabeau must have been an extraordinary man. We may 
 wish the more because we wish in vain that he had lived in 
 an age of religious faith, when the solar centre of the idea of 
 a Grod might have harmonized and subdued his cometary pow- 
 ers. Had he lived in the time of the Reformation, he had 
 been either a Huguenot of the Huguenots, or a fiercer G-uise; 
 but, thrown on an age and a country of rampant denial and 
 licentiousness, he must deny and be lewd on a colossal scale.
 
 MIR.ABEAU. 15 
 
 He was not, we must remark, of that highest order of minds 
 whose individualism, approaching the infinite, stands alone in 
 whatever age, and which rejects or selects influences according 
 to its pleasure. Mirabeau belonged to that class whose mis- 
 sion is to exaggerate with effect the tendency and spirit of 
 their nation and period, and thus to precipitate either their 
 sublimation or their reductio ad absurdum. In him the French 
 beheld all their own peculiarities, passions, and powers magni- 
 fied into magnificent caricature, even as they had seen them 
 exhibited on a miniature scale in Voltaire ; and hence their 
 intoxicated admiration, and their wild sorrow at his death. 
 When he fell, it was as the fall of the statue on the summit 
 of their national column. 
 
 Some of Mirabeau's admirers speak of him as if he were 
 something better than a French idol as if he partook of a 
 universal character as if a certain fire of inspiration burned 
 within him, classing him with Burns, and elevating him far 
 above Burke. We cannot, we must confess, see any such 
 stamp of universality on his brow, or rod of divination in his 
 hand. Of all Frenchmen (and he was hardly one,) Rousseau 
 alone appears to us to have so risen out of French influences as to 
 have caught on his wings an unearthly fire, not indeed stream- 
 ing down from heaven, but streaming up from hell. His was 
 a Pythonic frenzy. He spake to the ear of humanity falsely 
 often, but earnestly and powerfully always. His dress might 
 be that of a harlequin, but his bosom was that of a man fana- 
 tically in earnest. He was the most sincere man France ever 
 reared. To a pitch of prophetic fury, Mirabeau neither rose 
 by nature like Rosseau, nor, like Burke, was stung by circum- 
 stances. He could at all times manage his thunderbolts with, 
 consummate dexterity, could husband his enthusiasm, ard 
 never allowed himself to be carried away all-powerful in his 
 very helplessness upon the torrent he had stirred. He had 
 genius hung up on the armory of his mind, and could upon 
 occasion take down the bright weapon and dye it in blood ; 
 but genius never had him like a spear in its blind and awful 
 grasp. 
 
 Which quality of the Frenchman was wanting in Mirabeau ? 
 The versatility, levity, brilliance, instability, irritability, volu- 
 bility, the enthusiasm of moments, the coldness of years, the
 
 16 A FILE OF FUEXCII REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 immorality, now springing from tempestuous passions, and 
 now from the cool conclusions of atheism, the intuitive under- 
 standing, the declamatory force of the genuine Gaul, were all 
 found in him, but all expanded into extraordinary dimensions 
 through the combustion of his bosom, and all pointed by the 
 romantic circumstances of his story. His originality, like 
 Byron's, lay principally in that wild dark blood which had run 
 down through generations of semi-maniacs, till in him it was 
 connected with talents as wondrous as it was hot. 
 
 Mirabeau, as the basis of his intellectual character, possessed 
 intuitive sagacity, and sharp common sense. He was " all 
 eye." His very arm outstretched, and finger up-pointed, 
 seemed to see. No gesture, no motion of such a man, is blind 
 or insignificant. His very silence is full of meaning ; his 
 looks are as winged as the words of others. Mirabeau's in- 
 sight was sharpened by experience, by calamity, by vice, by 
 the very despair which had once been the tenant of his bosom. 
 " The glance of melancholy is a fearful gift." Add the intel- 
 lect of a fallen demi-god to the savage irritation of a flayed 
 wild beast, and the result shall be the exasperated and hideous 
 penetration of a Mirabeau. The rasping recollections of his 
 persecuted childhood and wandering youth, the smouldering 
 ashes of his hundred amours, the " sweltered venom" collected 
 in his long years of captivity, along with his uncertain pros- 
 pects and unsettled principles, had not only hardened his 
 heart, but had given an unnatural stimulus to his understand- 
 ing, which united the coherence of sanity with the cunning, 
 power, and fury of madness. This wondrously endowed and 
 frightfully soured nature was by the Kevolution its incidents, 
 adventures, and characters supplied with an abundance of 
 food sure to turn to poison the moment it was swallowed, and 
 to nourish into keener activity his perverted powers. 
 
 To counterbalance this strongly-stimulated, self-confident, 
 and defiant intellect, there was little or no moral sense. 
 Whether, as we have heard it alleged of certain characters, 
 omitted in his composition, or burned out of him by the com- 
 bined fires of cruelty on the part of his father, and excess on 
 his own, we cannot say, but it did become microscopically 
 small. Indeed, it seems to us to have been a most merciful 
 arrangement for Mirabeau's fame, that he died before the revo-
 
 MIRABEAU. 17 
 
 lutiouary panic had come to its height. In all prc bability, he 
 would have acted the sanguinary tyrant on a larger scale than 
 any of the terrorists ; for France had come to such an apoplec- 
 tic crisis, that blood must relieve her. All that was wanted 
 was a hand unprincipled and daring enough to apply the 
 lancet. Who bolder and more unprincipled than Mirabeau ? 
 And who had passed through such an indurating and imbit- 
 tering process ? Possessed of a thousand wrongs, steeled by 
 atheism, drained of humanity, he had undoubtedly more wis- 
 dom, culture, and self-command, than his brother revolution- 
 ists, and would have been a butcher of genius, and scattered 
 about his blood (as Virgil is said to do his dung in the G-eor- 
 gics) more elegantly and gracefully than they. But in him, 
 too, slumbered the savage cruelty of a Marat, and in certain 
 circumstances he would have been equally unscrupulous and 
 unsparing. 
 
 Mirabeau's imagination has been lavishly panegyrised. It 
 does not, we think, so far as we have been able to judge from 
 the specimens we have seen, appear to have been very copious 
 or creative. Its figures were striking and electrical in effect 
 rather than poetical ; they were always bold, but never beau- 
 tiful, and seldom, though sometimes, reached the sublime. 
 The grandest of them will be familiar to our readers : " When 
 the last of the Grracchi expired, he flung dust towards heaven, 
 and from this dust sprung Marius ! Marius, less great for 
 having exterminated the Cimbri, than for having prostrated in 
 Rome the power of the nobility." A little imagination goes 
 a far way in a Frenchman. Edmund Burke has in almost 
 every page of his " Regicide Peace," ten images as bold and 
 magnificent as this, not to speak of his subtle trains of 
 thinking which underlie, or of those epic swells of sustained 
 splendor, which Mirabeau could not have equalled in madness, 
 in dreams, or in death. 
 
 The oratory of Mirabeau seems to have been the most im- 
 posing of his powers. Manageable and well managed as a 
 consummate race-horse, it was fiery and impetuous as a lion 
 from the swelling of Jordan. In the commencement of his 
 speeches, he often hesitated and stammered ; it was the fret 
 of the torrent upon the rock, ere it rushes into its bed of wrath 
 and power ; but once launched, " torrents less rapid and less
 
 18 A FILL: OF FREXCII REVOLUTIONISTS 
 
 rash." His face as of a " tiger in small-pox" his eye blazing 
 with the three-fold light of pride, passion, and genius his 
 fiery gesticulation -his voice of thunder the strong points of 
 war he blew ever and anon the strong intellect, which was the 
 solid basis below the sounding foam all united to render his 
 eloquence irresistible. His audiences felt, that next to the 
 power of a great good man, inspired by patriotism, genius, and 
 virtue, was that of a great bad man, overflowing with the 
 Furies, and addressing Pandemonium in its own Pandemonian 
 speech. Even the dictates and diction of mildness, sense, and 
 mercy, as they issued from such lips, had an odd and yet 
 awful effect. It was, indeed, greatly the gigantic but unludi- 
 crous oddity of the man that enchanted France. Having come 
 from prison to reign, smelling of the rank odors of dungeons, 
 with nameless and shadowy crimes darkening the air around 
 him, with infamous books of his composition, seen by the 
 mind's eye dangling from his side, there he stood, rending up 
 old institutions, thundering against kings, and deciding on 
 the fate of millions. What figure more terribly telling and 
 piquant could even France desire ? Monster-loving she had 
 ever been, but no such magnificent monster had ever before 
 sprung from her soil, or roared in her senate-house. Voltaire 
 had been an ape of wondrous gifts ; but here was a Creature 
 from beyond chaos come to bellow over her for a season, and 
 unable and afraid to laugh, she was compelled to adore. 
 
 As an orator, few form fit subjects for comparison with 
 Mirabeau, because few have triumphed over multitudes in spite 
 of, nay, by means of, the infamy of their character, added to 
 the force of their genius. Fox is no full parallel. He was 
 dissipated, but his name never went through Europe like an 
 evil odor, nor did he ever wield the condensed and Jove-like 
 power of Mirabeau. He was one and not the brightest of 
 a constellation: the Frenchman walked his lurid heaven alone. 
 Sheridan was a dexterous juggler, playing a petty personal 
 game with boy -bowls ; Mirabeau trundled cannon-balls along 
 the quaking ground. Sheridan was common-place in his vices ; 
 Mirabeau burst the limits of nature in search of pleasure, and 
 then sat down to innoculate mankind, through his pen, with 
 the monstrous venom. As the twitch of Brougham's nose is 
 to the tiger face of the Frenchman, so the eccentricity of the
 
 MIKABEAt/. 19 
 
 one to the Herculean frenzy of the other. Mirabeau most, 
 perhaps, resembles the first Caesar, if not in the cast of ora- 
 tory, yet in private character, and in. the commanding power 
 he exerted. That power was, indeed, unparalleled ; for here 
 was a man, ruling not creation, but chaos ; here was the old 
 contest of Achilles with the rivers renewed ; here was a single 
 man grappling in turn with every subject and with every party, 
 throwing all in succession himself, or dashing the one against 
 the other snatching from his enemies their own swords 
 hated and feared by all parties, himself hating all, but fearing 
 none knowing all, and himself as unknown in that stormy 
 arena as a monarch in his inmost pavilion dissecting all 
 characters like a knife, himself like that knife remaining one 
 and indivisible and doing all this alone ; for what followers, 
 properly speaking, save a nation at a time, had Mirabeau ? 
 We hear of single men being separate " estates ;" the language, 
 as applied to him, has some meaning. 
 
 It has often been asked, What would have been his conduct, 
 had he lived ? Some say dogmatically, that because he was 
 on terms with the king at the time of his death, he would have 
 saved the monarchy ; while a few suppose that he would have 
 rode upon the popular wave to personal dominion. If it were 
 not idle to speculate upon impossibilities, we might name it 
 as our impression, that Mirabeau would have been, as all his 
 life before, guided by circumstances, or impelled by passions, 
 or overpowered by necessity, and become king's friend, or 
 king, as fate or madness ruled the hour. Perhaps, too, the 
 revolution was getting beyond even his guidance. He might 
 have sought to ride erect in the stirrups, and been thrown ; 
 while Marat grasped the throat and mane of the desperate ani- 
 mal with a grasp which death only could sever. Perhaps the 
 monarchy was not salvable; perhaps, while seeking to con- 
 serve this ripe corn, the sickle might have cropped the huge 
 head of the defender; perhaps the revolution, which latterly 
 " devoured its own children," would have devoured him, leav- 
 ing him the melancholy comfort of Ulysses in the Cyclop's 
 cave " Noman shall be the last to be devoured." But all 
 such inquiries and peradventures are for ever vain. 
 
 Mirabeau's death was invested with dramatic interest. He 
 died in the midst of his career ; he sank like an island ; he
 
 20 A FILE OK FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 died while all eyes in Europe were fixed upon him ; ho died 
 while many saw a crown hovering over his head ; he died, un- 
 discovered, concealing his future plans in the abyss of his 
 bosom, and able to " adjust his mantle ere he fell ;" he died, 
 reluctant less at dying, than at not being permitted to live. 
 All his properties seemed to rise up around him as he was 
 leaving the world. His voluptuousness must have one other 
 full draught : " Crown me wilh flowers, sprinkle me with per- 
 fumes, that I may thus enter upon the eternal sleep." His 
 levity must have one more ghastly smile : " What !" as he 
 heard the cannon roaring, " have we the funeral ere the 
 Achilles be dead ?" His vanity must cry out, " they will 
 miss me when I am gone. Ay, support that head ; would I 
 could leave thee it !" His wild unbelief must once more flash 
 up like a volcano fading in the dawn : " If that sun be not 
 God he is his cousin-german." His intellect had, perhaps, in 
 the insight of approaching death, passed from previous uncer- 
 tainty and vacillation to some great scheme of deliverance 
 for his country ; for he said, " I alone can save France from the 
 calamities which on all sides are about to break upon her." 
 And having thus gathered his powers and passions in full pomp 
 around his dying couch, he bade them and the world farewell. 
 France had many tears to shed for him ; we have not now 
 one tear to spare. His death, indeed, was a tragedy, but not 
 of a noble kind. It reminds us of the death of one of the evil 
 giants in the " Pilgrim's Progress," with their last grim looks, 
 hard-drawn breathings, and bellowings of baffled pride and fury. 
 It was the selfish death of one who had led an intensely selfish 
 life. What grandeur it had, sprung from its melodramatic ac- 
 companiments, and from the mere size of the departing un- 
 clean spirit. A large rotten tree falls with a greater air than 
 a small, whose core is equally unsound. Nor was the grief of 
 France more admirable than the death it bewailed. It was 
 the howl of weak dependency, not of warm love. They mourn- 
 ed him, not for himself, but for the shade and shelter he gave 
 them. Such a man must have been admired and feared, but 
 could not have been sincerely or generally believed. Mr. Fox, 
 on the other hand, having what Mirabeau wanted a heart 
 fell amid the sincere sorrows of his very foes, and his country 
 mourned not for itself, but for him, as one mourns for a first-born.
 
 MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON. 21 
 
 We were amused at Lamartine's declaration about Mira 
 beau : " Of all the qualities of the great man of his age, he 
 wanted only honesty" a parlous want! Robin Hood was a 
 very worthy fellow, if he had been but honest. A great man 
 deficient in honesty, what is he but a great charlatan, a sub- 
 lime scamp, a Jove-Judas to apply, after Mlrabeau's own 
 fashion, a compound nick-name ? 
 
 Such a Jove-Judas was Mirabeau. Without principle, 
 without heart, without religion with the fiercest of demoniac, 
 and the foulest of human passions mingled in his bosom with 
 an utter contempt for man, and an utter disbelief of God, he 
 possessed the clearest of understandings, the most potent 
 of wills, the most iron of constitutions, the most eloquent of 
 tongues united the cool and calculating understanding of an 
 arithmetician to the frenzied energies and gestures of a Moe- 
 nad the heart and visage of a Pluto to something resembling 
 the sun-glory and sun-shafts of a Phoebus. Long shall his 
 memory be preserved in the list of " Extraordinary (human) 
 Meteors," but a still and pure luminary he can never be 
 counted. Nay, as the world advances in knowledge and virtue 
 his name will probably deepen in ignominy. At present, 
 his image stands on the plain of Dura with head of gold and 
 feet of iron, mingled with miry clay, and surrounded by not 
 a few prostrate admirers ; but we are mistaken if, by and by, 
 there be not millions to imitate the conduct of the undeceived 
 revolutionists (who tore down his bust,) and push him, in 
 wrath, off his pedestal. Carlyle attributes to him with justice 
 an " eye," but, though strong, it was not single ; and is it not 
 written, " If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of 
 darkness ?" 
 
 NO. K MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON. 
 
 ONE obvious effect of the upheavings of a revolution is to 
 develop latent power, and to deliver into light and influence 
 cast-down and crushed giants, such .as Danton. But another 
 result is the undue prominence given by convulsion and an- 
 archy to essentially small and meagre spirits, who like little
 
 22 A FILE OF FRENCH II EVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 men lifted up from their feet, in the pressure of a crowd, are 
 surprised into sudden exaltation, to be trodden down when- 
 ever their precarious propping gives way. Revolution is a 
 genuine leveller ; " small and great " meet on equal terms in 
 its wide grave ; and persons, whose names would otherwise 
 have never met in any other document than a directory, are 
 coupled together continually, divide influence, have their res- 
 pective partisans, and require the stern crucible of death to 
 separate them, and to settle their true position in the general 
 history of the nation and the world. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, has tended to deceive and mystify the pub- 
 lic mind more than the arbitrary conjunction of names. The 
 yoking together of men in this manner has produced often a 
 lamentable confusion as to their respective intellects and char- 
 acteristics. Sometimes a mediocrist and a man of genius are 
 thus coupled together ; and what is lost by the one is gained 
 by the other, while the credit of the whole firm is essentially 
 impaired. Sometimes men of equal, though most dissimilar 
 intellect, are, in defiance of criticism, clashed into as awkward 
 a pair as ever stood up together on the floor of a country dan- 
 cing school. Sometimes, for purposes of moral or critical 
 condemnation, two of very different degrees of criminality are 
 tied neck and heels together, as in the dreadful undistinguish- 
 ing " marriages of the Loire." Sometimes the conjunction of 
 unequal names is owing to the artifice of friends, who, by per- 
 petually naming one favorite author along with another of estab- 
 lished fame, hope to convince the unwary public that they are on 
 a level. Sometimes they are produced by the pride or ambition, 
 or by the carelessness or caprice, of the men or authors them- 
 selves. Sometimes they are the deliberate result of a shallow, 
 though pretentious criticism, which sees and specifies resem- 
 blances, where, in reality, there are none. Sometimes they 
 spring from the purest accidents of common circumstances, 
 common cause, or common abode, as if a crow and a thrush 
 must be kindred because seated on one hedge. From these, 
 and similar causes, have arisen such combinations as Drydeii 
 and Pope, Voltaire and Rousseau, Cromwell and Napoleon, 
 Southey and Coleridge, Rogers and Campbell, Hunt and Ha- 
 zlitt, Hall and Foster, Paine and Cobbett, Byron and Shelley, 
 or Robespierre and Danton.
 
 MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND CANTON. 23 
 
 In the first histories of the French Revolution, the names 
 of Marat, Robespierre, and Danton, occur continually to- 
 gether as a triumvirate of terror, and the impression is left 
 that the three were of one order, each a curious compound of 
 the maniac and the monster. They walk on, linked in chains, 
 to common execution, although it were as fair to tie up John 
 Ings, Judge Jeffreys, and Hercules Furens. A somewhat 
 severer discrimination has of late unloosed Marat from the other 
 two, and permitted Robespierre and Danton to walk in couples. 
 
 Yet, of Marat, too, we must say a single word " Marah," 
 might he better have been called, for he was a water of bitter- 
 ness. He reminds us of one of those small, narrow, inky 
 pools we have seen in the wilderness, which seem fitted to the 
 size of a suicide, and waiting in gloomy expectation of his ad- 
 vent. John Foster remarked, of some small "malignant" or 
 other, that he had never seen so much of the essence of devil 
 in so little a compass." Marat was a still more compact con- 
 centration of that essence. He was the prussic acid among 
 the family of poisons. His unclean face, his tiny figure, his 
 gibbering form, his acute but narrow soul, were all possessed 
 by an infernal unity and clearness of purpose. On the clock 
 of the Revolution while Danton struck the reverberating 
 hours while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like 
 the minute hand, to his object Marat was the everlasting 
 " tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, 
 the quick seconds of murder. He never rested ; he never 
 slumbered, or walked through his part ; he fed but to refresh 
 himself for revolutionary action ; he slept but to breathe him- 
 self for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, 
 or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, 
 when full, sleeps; but Marat was never full the cry from 
 " the worm that dieth not," within him, being still " Grive, 
 give," and the flame in his bosom coming from that fire which, 
 is " never to be quenched." 
 
 If, as Carlyle seems sometimes to insinuate, earnestness be 
 in itself a divine quality, then should Marat have a high place 
 in the gallery of heroes ; for, if an earnest angel be admirable, 
 chiefly for his earnestness, should not an earnest imp be ad- 
 mirable too ? If a tiger be respectable from his unflinching 
 oneness of object, should not a toad, whose sole purpose is to
 
 24 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 spit sincere venom, crawl amid general consideration too ? 
 But we suspect, that over Carlyle's imagination the quality of 
 greatness exerts more power than that of earnestness. A 
 great regal-seeming ruffian fascinates him, while the petty 
 scoundrel is trampled on. His soul rises to mate with the 
 tiger in his power, but his foot kicks the toad before it, as it 
 is lazily dragging its loathsomeness through the wet garden- 
 beds. The devils, much admired as they stood on the burn- 
 ing marl, lose caste with him when, entering the palace of 
 Pandemonium, they shrink into miniatures of their former 
 selves. Mirabeau, with Carlyle, is a cracked angel ; Marat, 
 a lame and limping fiend. 
 
 Some one has remarked, how singular it is that all the 
 heroes of the French Revolution were ugly. It seems as cu- 
 rious to us, that they were either very large or very little per- 
 sons. Danton was a Titan ; Mirabeau, though not so tall, was 
 large, and carried a huge head on his shoulders ; whereas 
 Marat and Napoleon were both small men. But the French 
 found their characteristic love of extremes gratified in all of 
 them. Even vice and cruelty they will not admire, unless 
 sauced by some piquant oddity, and served up in some extra- 
 ordinary dish. A little, lean corporal like Napolean, con- 
 quering the Brobdtgnagian marshals and emperors of Europe, 
 and issuing from his nut-like fist the laws of nations ; a grin- 
 ning death's-head like Voltaire, frightening Christendom from 
 its propriety, were stimulating to intoxication. But their 
 talent was gigantic, though their persons were not ; whereas, 
 Marat's mind was as mean, and his habits as low, as his sta- 
 ture was small, and his looks disgustful. Here, then, was the 
 requisite French ragout in all its putrid perfection. A scarecrow 
 suddenly fleshed, but with no heart added his rags fluttering, 
 and his arms vibrating in a furious wind became, for a season, 
 the idol of the most refined and enlightened capital in Europe. 
 
 Had we traced, as with a lover's eye, the path of some 
 beautiful flash of lightning, passing, in its terrible loveliness, 
 over the still landscape, and seen it omitting the church spire, 
 which seemed proudly pointing to it as it passed sparing the 
 old oak, which was bending its sacrificial head before its com- 
 ing touching not the tall pine into a column of torch-like 
 flame, but darting its arrow of wrath upon the scarecrow, in
 
 MARAT, nOBESriEURE, AND DANTOfc. 25 
 
 the midst of a bean-field, and by the one glare of grandeur re- 
 vealing, ere it consumed, its " looped and ragged" similitude 
 to a man, its aspiring beggary, and contorted weakness it 
 would have presented us with a fit though faint image of the 
 beautiful avenger, the holy homicide, the daughter of Neme- 
 sis by Apollo Charlotte Corday smiting the miserable 
 Marat. Shaft from heaven's inmost quiver, why wert thou 
 spent upon such a work ! Why not have ranged over Europe, 
 in search of more potent and pernicious tyrants, or, at least, 
 have darted into the dark heart of liobespierre ? Such ques- 
 tions are vain ; for not by chance, but by decree, it came 
 about that a death from a hand by which a demi-god would 
 have desired to die, befell a demi-man, and that now this 
 strange birth of nature shines on us for ever, in the light of 
 Charlotte Corday's dagger and last triumphant smile. 
 
 Yet, even to Marat, let us be merciful, if we must also be 
 just. A monster he was not, nor even a madman ; but a man- 
 uikin of some energy and acuteness, soured and crazed to a 
 preternatural degree, and whose fury was aggravated by pure 
 fright. He was such a man as the apothecary in " Romeo 
 and Juliet" would have become in a revolution ; but Marat, 
 instead of dealing out small doses of death to love-sick tailors 
 and world-wearied seamstresses, rose by the force of despc-v., 
 tion to the summit of revolutionary power, cried out for eighty 
 thousand heads, and died of the assault of a lovely patriotic maid- 
 en, as of a sun-stroke. And yet Shakspere has a decided pcn- 
 cliant for the caitiff wretch he so graphically paints, and has 
 advertised his shop to the ends of the earth. So, to vary the 
 figure, let us pity the poor vial of prussic acid, dashed down 
 so suddenly, and by so noble a hand, whom mortals call Ma- 
 rat. Nature refuses not to appropriate to her bosom her spilt 
 poisons', any more than her shed blooms appropriates, how- 
 ever, only to mix them with kindlier elements, and to turn 
 them to nobler account. And let us, in humble imitation, 
 collect, and use medicinally, the scattered. drops of poor acrid 
 Marat. 
 
 Marat was essentially of the canaille a bad and exaggera- 
 ted specimen of the class, whom his imperfect education only 
 contributed to harden and spoil. Robespierre and Danton be- 
 long, by birth and training, by feelings and habits, to tho mid-
 
 FILE OF FllENC'H REVOLUTIONISTS, 
 
 die rank Robespierre sinking, in the end, below it, through 
 his fanaticism, and Danton rising above it, through his genius 
 and power. Both were " limbs of the law," though the one 
 might be called a great toe, and the other a huge arm ; and, 
 without specifying other resemblances, while Marat lost his 
 temper and almost his reason in the melee of the Revolution, 
 both Robespierre and Danton preserved to the last their self- 
 possession, their courage, and the full command of their intel- 
 lectual faculties. 
 
 Robespierre reminds us much of the worst species of the old 
 Covenanter a picture of whom is faithfully drawn by Sir 
 Walter in Burley, and iu our illustrious clansman the " gift- 
 ed Gilfillan." Such beings there did exist, and probably ex- 
 ist still, who united a firm belief in certain religious dogmas 
 to the most woful want of moral principle and human feeling, 
 and were ready to fight what they deemed God's cause with 
 the weapons of the devil. Their cruelties were cool and sys- 
 tematic ; they asked a blessing on their assassinations, as 
 though savages were to begin and end their cannible meals 
 with prayer. Such men were hopelessly steeled against every 
 sentiment of humanity. Mercy to their enemies seemed to 
 them treason against God. No adversary could escape from 
 them. A tiger may feed to repletion, or be disarmed by 
 drowsiness ; but who could hope to appease the ghost of a 
 tiger, did such walk ? Ghosts of tigers, never slumbering, 
 never sleeping, cold in their eternal hunger, pursuing their 
 relentlessly devouring way, were the religious fanatics the 
 Dalziels and Claverhouses, as well as the Burleys and 
 Mucklewraths, of the seventeenth century. 
 
 To the same order of men belonged Robespierre, modified, 
 of course, in character and belief, by the influences of his 
 period. The miscalled creed of the philosophers of France in 
 the eighteenth century, which, with many of themselves, was a 
 mere divertisement to their intellects, or a painted screen for 
 their vices, sunk deep into the heart of Robespierre, and be- 
 came a conviction and a reality with him. So far it was well ; 
 but, alas ! the creed was heartless and immoral, as well as 
 false. Laying down a wide object, it permitted every license 
 of vice or cruelty in the paths through which it was to be 
 gained. Robespierre became, accordingly, the worst of all
 
 MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON. 27 
 
 einners a sinner upon system a political Antinomian, 
 glorying in bis shame, to whom blood itself became at last au 
 abstraction and a shadow ; the guillotine only a tremendous 
 shuttle, weaving a well-ordered political web ; ajid the tidings 
 of the fall of a thousand heads agreeably indifferent, as to the 
 farmer the news of a cleared hay or harvest field. 
 
 That Eobespierre had at the first any appetite for blood, is 
 not now asserted by his bitterest foe. That he ever even ac- 
 . quired such a monstrous thirst, seems to us very unlikely. 
 His only thought would be, at the tidings of another death, 
 "Another sacrifice to my idea; another obstacle lifted out 
 of its way." Nero's wish that his enemies had but " one 
 neck," was, we think, comparatively a humane wish. It 
 showed that he had no delight in the disgusting details, but 
 only in the secure result of their destruction. He is the un- 
 natural monster who protracts the fierce luxury, and sips his 
 deep cup of blood lingeringly, that he may know the separate 
 flavor of every separate orop. Robespierre, no more than 
 Nero, was up to such delicately infernal cruelty. 
 
 Carlyle frequently admits llobespierre's sincerity, and yet 
 rates him as little other than a sham. We account for this 
 as we did in the case of Marat. He is regarded as a SMALL. 
 sincerity ; and the sincerity of a small man contracts, to 
 Carlyle's eye, something of the ludicrous air in which a Lilli- 
 putian warrior, shouldering his stfaw-sized musket, and firing 
 his lead-drop bullets, seemed to Gulliver. " Bravo, my little 
 hero !" shouts the historian, with a loud laugh, as he sees him, 
 with " sky-blue breeches," patronising the houseless idea of a 
 Divine being, " prop away at the tottering heavens, with that 
 now nine-pin of thine ; but why is there not rather a little 
 nice doll of an image in those showy inexpressibles, to draw 
 out, and complete the conversion of thy people ? and why not 
 say, 'These be thy Gods, toy and toad-worshipping France?' " 
 To bring him to respect, while he admits, the sincerity, we 
 would need to disprove the smallness, of our Arras advocate. 
 Now, compared to truly great men, such as Cromwell or to 
 extraordinary men, such as Napoleon, Mirabeau, and Damon 
 Robespierre was small enough. But surely it was no pig- 
 my whose voice calm, dispassioned, and articulate ruled 
 lunatic France; who preserved an icy coldness amid a land of
 
 28 FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 lava ; who mastered, though it was only for a moment, a 
 power like the Revolution ; and who threw from his pedestal, 
 though it was by assailing in an unguarded hour, a statue so 
 colossal as Danton's. Rigid, Roman-like purpose keen, if 
 uninspired, vision the thousand eyes of an Argus, if not the 
 head of a Jove, or the fist of a Hercules perseverance, 
 honesty, and first-rate business qualities we must allow to 
 Robespierre, unless we account for his influence by Satanic 
 possession, and say " Either no dunce ant Diabolus." 
 Carlyle attributes his defeat and downfall to his pertinacious 
 pursuit of a shallow logic to its utmost consequences. Pro- 
 bably he thus expresses, in his own way, the view we have al- 
 ready sought to indicate. Robespierre was the sincere, con- 
 sistent, unclean apostle of an unclean system a system of 
 deism in theology of libertinism in morals of mobocracy in 
 politics of a "gospel," according to Jean Jacques, a gos- 
 pel of " liberty, equality, fraternity" a liberty ending in 
 general bondage, an equality terminating in the despotism of 
 unprincipled talent, a fraternity dipping its ties in blood. 
 With faithful, unfaltering footstep, through good report and 
 bad report, he followed the genius of revolution in all her de- 
 vious, dark, dangerous, or triumphant paths, till she at last 
 turned round in anger, like a dogged fiend, and rent him in 
 pieces. 
 
 In dealing with Robespierre, we feel, more than with Marat, 
 that we are in contact with an intelligent human being, not an 
 oddity, and mere splinter of a man. His idea led, and at last 
 dragged him, but did not devour nor possess him. His 
 cruelty was more a policy, and less a raging passion ; and his 
 great moral error lay in permitting a theory, opposed to his 
 original nature, to overbear his moral sense, to drain him of 
 humanity, and to precipitate him to his doom. If he had re- 
 sisted the devil, he would have fled from him. 
 
 In rising from Robespierre to Danton, we feel like one com- 
 ing up from the lower plains of Sicily into its western coast 
 the country of the Cyclopses, with their one eye and gigantic 
 stature ; their courage, toil, ferocity, impiety, and power. 
 Danton did tower Ujtanically above his fellows, and, with lit- 
 tle of the divine, was the strongest of the earth-born. He had 
 an (< Eye," like a shield of sight, broad, piercing, and looking
 
 MAYAT. ROBESPIERRE. AND CANTON. 29 
 
 straight forward. His intellect was clear, intuitive, command- 
 ing, incapable of the theoretical, and abhorrent of the vision- 
 ary. He was practical in mind, although passionate in tem- 
 perament, and figurative in speech. His creed was atheism, 
 not apparently wrought out by personal investigation, or even 
 sought for as an opiate to conscience, but carelessly accepted, 
 as the one he found fashionable at the time. His conduct, 
 too, was merely the common licentiousness of his country, 
 taking a larger shape from his larger constitution and stronger 
 passions. His political faith was less definite and strict, but 
 more progressive and practical, and more accommodated to 
 circumstances than Robespierre's. His patriotism was as sin- 
 cere as Robespierre's, but hung about him in more easy and 
 voluminous folds. It was a toga, not a tunic. A sort of lazy 
 greatness, which seemed, at a distance, criminal indifference, 
 characterised him when in repose. His cupidity was as Cy- 
 clopean as his capacity. Nothing less than a large bribe 
 could fill such a hand. No common goblet could satisfy such 
 a maw. Greedy of money, for money's sake, he was not. He 
 merely wished to live, and all Paris knew what he meant by 
 living. And with all the royal sops to Cerberus, he remained 
 Cerberus still. Never had he made the pretensions of a Lord 
 Russell, or Algernon Sidney, and we know how they were sub- 
 sidised. His " poverty, but not his will, consented." Had he 
 lived in our days, a public subscription a " Danton testimo- 
 nial, all subscriptions to be handed in to the office of 
 
 Camille Desmoulins" would have saved this vast needy pat- 
 riot from the disgrace of taking supplies from Louis, and then 
 laughing a wild laughter at his provider, as he hewed on at 
 the foundations of his throne. 
 
 In fact, careless greatness, without principle, was the key 
 to Danton's merits and faults his power and weakness. Well 
 did Madame Roland call him " Sardanapalus." When he 
 found a clover field, he rolled in it. When he had nothing to 
 do, he did nothing; when he saw the necessity of doing some- 
 thing immediately, he could condense ages of action into a 
 few hours. He was like some dire tocsin, never rung till dan- 
 ger was imminent, but then arousing cities and nations as one 
 man. And thus it was that he saved his country and lost 
 himself, repulsed Brunswick, and sunk before Robespierre.
 
 30 FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 It had been otherwise, if his impulses had been under the 
 watchful direction of high religious, or moral, or even political 
 principle. This would have secured unity among his passions 
 and powers, and led to steady and cumulative effort. From 
 this conscious greatness, and superiority to the men around 
 him, there sprung a fatal security and a fatal contempt. He 
 sat on the Mountain, smiling, while his enemies were under- 
 mining his roots 5 and while he said, " He dares not imprison 
 me," Robespierre was calmly muttering. " I will." 
 
 It seemed as if even revolution were not a sufficient stimu- 
 lus to, or a sufficient element for, Danton's mighty powers. 
 It was only when war had reached the neighborhood of Paris, 
 and added its hoarse voice to the roar of panic from within, 
 that he found a truly Titanic task waiting for him. And he 
 did it manfully. His words became " half- bat ties." His ac- 
 tions corresponded with, and exceeded, his words. He was as 
 calm, too, as if he had created the chaos around him. That 
 the city was roused, yet concentrated furious as Gehenna, 
 but firm as fate, at that awful crisis was all Danton's doing. 
 Paris seemed at the time but a projectile in his massive hand, 
 ready to be hurled at the invading foe. His alleged cruelty 
 was the result, in a great measure, of his habitual careless- 
 ness. Too indifferent to superintend with sufficient watchfulness 
 the administration of justice, it grew into the Reign of Terror. 
 He was, nevertheless, deeply to blame. He ought to have 
 cried out to the mob, " The way to the prisoners in the Ab- 
 baye lies over Danton's dead body ;" and not one of them had 
 passed on. He repented, afterwards, of his conduct, and was, 
 in fact, the first martyr to a milder regime. Not one of his 
 personal enemies perished in that massacre ; hence the name 
 " butcher" applied to him is not correct. He did not dabble 
 in blood. He made but one fierce and rapid irruption into 
 the neighborhood of the " Red Sea" and returned sick and 
 shuddering therefrom. 
 
 His person and his eloquence were in keeping with his 
 mind and character. We figure him always after the pattern 
 of Bethlehem Gabor, as Godwin describes him : his stature 
 gigantic, his hair a dead black, a face in which sagacity and 
 fury struggle for the mastery a voice of thunder. His mere 
 figure might have saved the utterance of his watchword
 
 MARAT, ROBESPIERRE, AND DANTON. 31 
 
 '' We must put our enemies in fear." His face was itsdf a 
 " Reign of Terror." His eloquence was not of the intellec- 
 tual, nor of the rhetorical cast. It was not labored with care, 
 nor moulded by art. It was the full, gushing utterance of a 
 mind seeing the real merits of the case in a glare of vision, 
 and announcing them in a tone of absolute assurance. He did 
 not indulge in long arguments or elaborate declamations. His 
 speeches were Cyclopean cries, at the sight of the truth break- 
 ing, like the sun, on his mind. Each speech was a peroration. 
 His imagination was fertile, rugged, and grand. Terrible 
 truth was sheathed in terrible figure. Each thought leaped 
 into light, like Minerva, armed with bristling imagery. Dan- 
 ton was a true poet, and some of his sentences are the strong- 
 est and most characteristic utterances amid all the wild elo- 
 quence the Revolution produced. His curses are of the 
 streets, not of Paris, but of Pandemonium; his blasphemies 
 were sublime as those heard in the trance of Sicilian seer, 
 belched up from fallen giants through the smoke of Etna, or 
 like those which made the " burning marl" and the " fiery 
 gulf" quake and recoil in fear. 
 
 Such an extraordinary being was Danton. There was no 
 beauty about him, but there were the power and the dreadful 
 brilliance, the rapid rise and rapid subsidence, of an Oriental 
 tempest. Peace the peace of one of the monsters of the 
 Egyptian desert, calm-sitting and colossal, amid long desola- 
 tions, and kindred forms of vast and coarse sublimity be to 
 his ashes ! 
 
 It is lamentable to contemplate the fate of such a man. 
 Newly married, sobered into strength and wisdom, in the 
 prime of life, and with mildness settling down upon his char- 
 acter, like moonlight on the rugged features. of the Sphinx, he 
 was snatched away. " One feels," says Scott of him, " as if 
 the eagle had been brought down by a ' mousing owl.' " 
 More melancholy still to find him dying " game," as it is 
 commonly called that is, without hope and without Grod in 
 the world caracoling and exulting, as he plunged into the 
 waters of what he deemed the bottomless and the endless 
 night ; as if a spirit so strong as his could die as if a spirit 
 so stained as his could escape the judgment the judgment
 
 32 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 of a God as just as he is merciful ; but also blessed be his 
 name ! as merciful as he is just. 
 
 NO. III.-VERGNIAUD. 
 
 ELOQUENCE, like many other powers .of the human mind, 
 lies often dormant and unsuspected, till it is elicited by cir- 
 cumstances. The quantity of silent eloquence awaiting de- 
 liverance in a nation, is only to be calculated by those who 
 can compute the amount of undeveloped electricity in the 
 earth or sky. Genius is natus haudfactus ; but eloquence is 
 often facta hand nata. Rouse ordinary men to the very 
 highest pitch, and they never even approach to the verge of 
 genius, because it is the unsearchable and subtle result of a 
 combination of rare faculties with rare temperament ; but any 
 man, touched to the quick, may become, for a season, as elo- 
 quent as Demosthenes himself. The child, when struck to a 
 certain measure of brutality, utters screams and words, and 
 assumes attitudes, of high eloquence, and every sob of her 
 little heart is an " Oration for the Crown." How eloquent 
 the pugilist, when his blood is up, and the full fury of the 
 fray has kindled around, and made his very fists seem inspired ! 
 What speeches have sometimes come from the gutter, where a 
 drunk Irishman is leaving Curran far behind in the grotesque 
 combination of his maddened fancy and the " strange oaths" of 
 his infuriated passions ! And now many dull men has the ap- 
 proach of death stirred up into an almost superhuman tide of 
 eloquence, as if both soul and tongue were conscious that their 
 time was short. Perhaps the most eloquent words ever spoken 
 by man were those of Jackson, the Irish rebel, who, having 
 swallowed poison ere his trial commenced, called his advocate 
 to his side when the pleading was over, and gasped out, as he 
 dropped down dead, in a whisper which was heard like thunder 
 (using the language of Pierre, in " Venice Preserved"), " We 
 have deceived the Senate.''' 1 
 
 Upon this principle, we need not be surprised that revolu-
 
 VERGNIAUD.. 33 
 
 tions, while developing much latent genius, have inspired far 
 more of genuine eloquence. A collection, entitled the " Ora- 
 tory of Revolutionists," would contain the noblest specimens 
 of human eloquence. What the speeches of Cicero, compared 
 to those of Cataliue or Cethegus ! What poor things, inmere 
 eloquence, the long elaborate orations of Pitt and Fox, to the 
 electric words, the spoken signals, the sudden lightning strokes, 
 to even the mere gestures, of Mirabeau and Danton ! And 
 has not the recent Italian revolution quenched though it has 
 been roused one orator worthy of any age or country, Ga- 
 vazzi the actual of Yendys' ideal and magnificent " Monk," 
 the tongue of Italy, just as Mazzini is its far-stretching and 
 iron hand ? 
 
 Such remarks may fitly introduce us to Vergniaud, the 
 most eloquent of the " eloquent of France," the facile princeps 
 of the Girondins that hapless party who, with the best pro- 
 fessions, and the most brilliant parts (parts not powers the 
 distinction is important, and so far explains their defeat), 
 committed an egregious and inexpiable mistake : they mistook 
 their age and their work, and, as they did not discern their 
 time, their time revenged itself by trampling on them as it 
 went on its way. 
 
 The most misplaced of this misplaced party was Vergniaud. 
 But no more than his party was he fitted, as some would have 
 it, for those Roman days to which he and they incessantly re- 
 verted their gaze. Sterner, stronger spirits were then re- 
 quired, as well as in the times of the French Revolution. 
 The Girondins were but imitative and emasculate Romans at 
 the best. Vergniaud would have been in his element in the 
 comparatively peaceful atmosphere of Britain. There, a 
 Charles Grant on a larger scale, he might have one-third of 
 the day " sucked sugar-candy," the other third played with 
 children, and in the evening either sat silent or poured out 
 triumphant speeches, as he pleased. But, in France, while 
 he was playing at marbles, others were playing at human 
 heads. His speeches were very brilliant ; but they wanted 
 the point which Robespierre's always had the edge of the 
 guillotine. And for want of that terrible finish, they were 
 listened to, admired, but not obeyed. 
 
 " Slaves," says Cowper, " cannot breathe in England." We 
 *2
 
 34 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 may parody his words thus, " WJiigs cannot brtathe in 
 France." Britain has long been their element ; but France 
 demands either colder or hotter spirits. And because the 
 French Whigs, the Girondins, were lukewarm, they were 
 vomited out of its volcano mouth. That balancing of opin- 
 ions, that avoidance of all extremes, that reverence for the 
 past modified by respect for the present, by the exercise of 
 which party differences have been so frequently reconciled in 
 this country, seem mere trifling or impertinence to the torrid 
 revolutionary hearts in France, or even to those extreme 
 royalist natures in her, of whom we may say that the " ground 
 burns frore, and frost performs the effect of fire." And such 
 a French Whig was Vergniaud : possessed of an impetuous 
 and ardent nature, a fiery eloquence, and an impulsive intel- 
 lect, all running in the narrow channel of his party. In Bri- 
 tain he would have been counted a " Whig, and something 
 more." In France, he was reckoned a " Revolutionist, and 
 something less;" in other words, a weak Revolutionist the 
 most fatal and miserable of all forms of weakness. A timid 
 flash of lightning, a remorseful wave in an angry ocean, a 
 drivelling coward among a gang of desperadoes, a lame and 
 limping wolf among the herd descending from the Apennines 
 upon the snow-surrounded village such are but figures for the 
 idea of one who pauses, halts, stammers, and makes play, 
 amid the stern, earnest, and rushing realities of a revolution. 
 
 The Girondins were, we suspect, as a party, a set of fantas- 
 tic fribbles, filled with a small fallacious thought, and without 
 the unity or the force to impose even a shred of it upon the 
 world. In the fine image of Grattan, " after the storm and 
 tempest were over, they were the children of the village come 
 forth to paddle in the streamlets." Barbaroux seems a bril- 
 liant coxcomb. Brissot was an unarmed and incapable ruffian, 
 " who," said the dying Danton, " would have guillotined me 
 as Robespierre will do." Condorcet was a clear-headed, cold- 
 hearted, atheistic schemer. Roland was an able and honest 
 prig. Louvet was a compound of sentiment and smut. The 
 only three redeeming characters among the party were Ma- 
 dame Rowland, Charlotte Corday, and Vergniaud ; and yet, 
 sorry saints, in the British sense, any of these make, after all 
 being nothing else than an elegant intriguante, with a brave
 
 VERGNIAUD. 35 
 
 heart and a fine intellect within her, a beautiful maniac, and 
 an orator among a thousand, without the gift of common 
 energy or common sense. 
 
 " They sought," says Carlyle, " a republic of the virtues, 
 and they found only one of the strengths." Danton thought 
 otherwise, when he said, " they are all Brothers-Cain." His 
 robust nature and Cyclopean eyesight made him recoil from 
 the gingerbread imitation of the Romans, the factitious vir- 
 tues, the elegant platitudes of language, and the affected re- 
 finements of the saloons of the Girondins. He smelt blood, 
 with his large distended nostril, amid all their apocryphal 
 finery. Had they succeeded, they might have gilded the 
 guillotine, or substituted some more classical apparatus of 
 death ; but no other cement than blood could they or would 
 they have found for their power at that crisis. At this they 
 aimed; but while the Jacobines fought with bare rapiers, tii3 
 Girondins fought with buttoned foils ; while the one party 
 threw away the scabbard, the other threw away the sword. 
 
 Vergniaud lives on account of the traditionary fame of his 
 eloquence ; his eloquence itself can hardly be said to be alive. 
 The extracts which remain are, on the whole, diffuse and fee- 
 ble. Even his famous prophecy, Ezekiel-like, of the fall of 
 thrones, is tame in the perusal. What a contrast between 
 his sonorous and linked harangues, and the single volcanic 
 embers issuing from the mouth of Mirabeau or Danton, or 
 even the nasal " I pronounce for doom," which constituted the 
 general oratory of Robespierre ! Vergniaud neither attained 
 to the inspired monosyllables of the one, nor to the infernal 
 croaldngs of the other. His speeches were, indeed, as power- 
 ful as mellifluous. It was a cataract of honey which poured 
 from his lips. Their effect for the time was irresistible : like 
 the songs in Pandemonium, they, for a season, " suspended 
 hell, and took with ravishment the thronging audience;" but 
 it was only for a season. When the orator ceased to be seen 
 and heard, his words ceased to be felt. Hence he was only 
 able to pronounce the funeral oration of his party, not to givo 
 it any living or permanent place in the history of his country. 
 He had the tongue, and perhaps the brain, but he wanted the 
 profound heart and the strong hand to be the deliverer of 
 Franco.
 
 36 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 He broke at last, as breaks a wave of ocean the most 
 beautiful and eloquent of the deep, starred with spray, diffuse 
 in volume upon a jagged rock, which silently receives, repels, 
 and extinguishes the bright invader. The echoes of his elo- 
 quence still linger, like ghosts amid the halls of history, but 
 his name has long since faded into partial insignificance, and, 
 in comparison with his manlier and stronger foes, has not even 
 the sound which that of Eschines now bears beside that of 
 Demosthenes, He fell, and, being the weaker, he could not 
 but have fallen in the death-and-life struggle. 
 
 The account of his and the other Girondists' last night in 
 prison is pronounced by Carlyle <' not edifying." And yet, 
 as with all last scenes, noble elements are mingled with it. 
 They sing " tumultuous songs;" they frame strange satiric dia- 
 logues between the devil and his living representatives ; they 
 discourse gravely about the happiness of the peoples ; they 
 talk, too, in wild and whirling words, of the immortality of 
 the soul, and the scenes so near, beyond the guillotine and 
 the grave. Vergniaud, like Hannibal, had secreted poison, 
 but, as it is not enough for his friends as well as himself, 
 therefore, " to the dogs he'll none of it." His eloquence, 
 too, bursts out, like an expiring flame, into glorious bravuras. 
 If not edifying, surely this was one of the most interesting of 
 scenes. Who can or dare reproduce it to us in words ? 
 Where now the North capable of this " Noctes ?" We think 
 Carlyle himself might, twenty years ago, have given it us, in 
 a rough and rapid manner. As it is, " for ever un described 
 let it remain." 
 
 It was intensely French, They never die like the wolf de- 
 scribed by Macaulay 
 
 " Which dies in silence biting hard, 
 Among the dying hounds." 
 
 They must go out either in splendor or in stench, but both 
 must be palpable and ostentatious. A Vergniaud, quiet, se- 
 rene, meditative, lost in contemplation of the realities before 
 him, or even saying quietly, like Thistlewoqd to Ings, " We 
 shall soon know the great secret," is an incongruous concep- 
 tion. He must speak and sing, laugh and speculate, upon the
 
 VERGNIAUD. 37 
 
 brink of the abyss. Might not, by the way, a panoramic 
 view of national deathbeds, and how they are met and spread, 
 tell us something about national character, and about things 
 more important far ? 
 
 Having been compelled, shortly but severely, to express our 
 notion of Vergniaud and his abortive party, we are not, at the 
 same time, disposed to part with either in anger. They did 
 their best ; they did their no work in an elegant and artistic 
 manner ; and now, like the Gracchi of ancient Rome, they 
 are honorable, more for what they were reputed to be, than 
 for what they effected. Let the hymn of the " Marseillaise," 
 which the Girondists sung at the foot of the scaffold, in ghast- 
 ly gradation, waxing feebler and fainter, till it died away in 
 one dying throat, be their everlasting remembrancer and 
 requiem ! 
 
 u Such an act of music ! Conceive it well ! The yet living 
 chant there the chorus so rapidly wearing weak ! Samson's 
 axe is rapid } one head per minute, or little less. The chorus 
 is worn out. Farewell, for evermore, ye Girondius ! Te 
 Deum ! Fauchet has become silent ; Valaze's dead head is 
 lopped ; the sickle of the guillotine has reaped the Girondins 
 all away the eloquent, the young, the beautiful, and brave ! 
 Death, what feast is toward in thy ghastly balls ?" 
 
 " Such," says Carlyle, "was the end of Girondism. They 
 arose to regenerate France, these men, and have accomplished 
 this. Alas, whatever quarrel we had with them, has not their 
 cruel fate abolished it ? Pity only survives. So many ex- 
 cellent souls of heroes sent down to Hades they themselves 
 given as a prey to dogs and all manner of birds ! But here, 
 too, the will of the Supreme Power was accomplished. As 
 Vergniaud said, ' The Kevolution, like Saturn, is devouring 
 its own children.' "
 
 38 A FILE OF FRENCH E EVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 NO. IV. NAPOLEON. 
 
 A VERY interesting book were a history of the histories of 
 Napoleon a criticism on the criticisms written about him 
 a sketch of his sketchers ! He, who at one period of his life 
 had the monarchs and ambassadors of Europe waiting in his 
 antechamber, has enjoyed since a levee, larger still, of the au- 
 thors, orators, and poets of the world. Who has not tried his 
 hand at painting the marvellous manuikin of Corsica for- 
 tune's favorite and football nature's pride and shame 
 France's glory and ruin who was arrested and flung back, 
 when he was just vaulting into the saddle of universal domi- 
 nion ? What eminent author has not written either on the 
 pros and cons of this prodigy of modern men ? To name only 
 a few : Horsley has tried on him the broad and heavy edge of 
 his invective Hall has assailed him with his more refined and 
 polished indignation Foster has held up his iron rugged hands 
 in wonder at him Byron has bent before him his proud knee, 
 and become the laureate of his exile Hazlitt has fought his 
 cause with as much zeal and courage as if he had belonged to 
 his old guard Coleridge has woven his metaphysic mazes 
 about and about him Wordsworth has sung of him, in grave, 
 solemn, and deprecatory verse Southey has, both in prose 
 and rhyme, directed against him his dignified resentment 
 Scott has pictured him in Don Roderick, and written nine 
 volumes on his history Brougham, Jeffrey, and Lockhart, 
 have united in fascinated admiration, or fine-spun analysis of 
 his genius Charles Philips has set his character in his most 
 brilliant antithesis, and surrounded his picture with his most 
 sounding commonplaces Croly has dashed off his life with his 
 usual energy and speed : Wilson has let out his admiration in 
 many a glorious gush of eloquence the late B. Symmons has 
 written on him some strains the world must not let die (his 
 " Napoleon Sleeping" is in the highest style of art, and on 
 Napoleon, or aught that was his, he could not choose but 
 write nobly) Channing, in the name of the freedom of the 
 western world, has impeached him before high Heaven 
 Emerson has anatomised him, with keenest lancet, and calmly
 
 NAPOLE.iN. ' 39 
 
 reported the result Carlyle has proclaimed him the " Hero 
 of tools" and, to single out two from a crowd, Thiers and 
 Alison have told his history with minute and careful attention, 
 as well as with glowing ardor of admiration. Time would fail 
 us, besides, to speak of the memories, favorable or libellous 
 of the dramas, novels, tales, and poems, in which he has figured 
 in primary or in partial display. Surely the man who has 
 borne such discussion, endured such abuse, sustained such 
 panegyric, and who remains an object of curiosity, wonder, and 
 inquiry still, must have been the most extraordinary produc- 
 tion of modern days. He must have united profundity and 
 brilliance, splendor and solidity, qualities creating fear and 
 love, and been such a compound of the demigod and the demon, 
 the wise king and the tyrant, as the earth never saw before, 
 nor is ever likely to behold again. 
 
 This, indeed, is the peculiarity of Napoleon. He was pro- 
 found, as well as brilliantly successful. Unlike most con- 
 querors, his mind was big with a great thought, which was 
 never fully developed. He was not raised, as many have stu- 
 pidly thought, upon the breath of popular triumph. It was 
 not " chance that made him king," or that crowned him, or 
 that won his battles. He was a cumulative conqueror. 
 Every victory, every peace, every law, every movement, was 
 the step of a giant stair, winding upward toward universal 
 dominion. All was systematic. All was full of purpose. 
 All was growingly progressive. No rest was possible. He 
 might have noonday breathing-times, but there was no nightly 
 repose. " Onwards" was the voice ever sounding behind him : 
 nor was this the voice of his nation, ever insatiate for novelty 
 and conquest ; nor was it the mere " Give, give" of his rest- 
 less ambition ; it was the voice of his ideal, the cry of his un- 
 quenchable soul. He became the greatest of warriors and 
 conquerors, or at least one of the greatest, because, like a true 
 painter or poet, he came down upon the practice of his art, 
 from a stern and lofty conception, or hypothesis, to which 
 everything required to yield. As Michael Angelo subjected 
 all things to his pursuit and the ideal he had formed of it, 
 painted the crucifixion by the side of a writhing slave, and, 
 pious though he was, would have broken up the true cross for 
 pencils; so Napolean pursued his ideal through tempests of
 
 40 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 death-liail and seas of blood, and looked upon poison, and 
 gunpowder, and men's lives, as merely the box of colors ne- 
 cessary to his new and terrible art of war and grand scheme 
 of conquest. 
 
 But were the art and the scheme, thus frightfully followed 
 out, worthy and noble ? Viewed in a Christian light, they 
 hardly were. The religion of Jesus denounces war, in all 
 save its defensive aspects. But, when we try Napoleon by 
 human standards, and compare his scheme with that of other 
 conquerors, both seem transcendently superb. He saw clear- 
 ly that there was no alternative between the surges of anarchy 
 and the absolute government of one master-mind. He saw 
 that what was called " balance of power" was a feeble and use- 
 less dream, and that all things in Europe were tending either 
 to anarchy or a new absolutism either to the dominion of 
 millions, or of that one who should be found a match for mil- 
 lions. He thought himself that one. His iron hand could, 
 in the first place, grasp the great sceptre ; and his wise and 
 powerful mind would afterwards consolidate his dominion by 
 just and liberal laws. " On this hint he spake" in cannon. 
 This purpose he pursued with an undeviating energy, which 
 seemed, for a season, sure and irresistible as one of the laws 
 of nature. The unity of his tactique only reflected the unity 
 of his plan. It was just the giant club in the giant hand. 
 Of his system of strategy, the true praise is simply that it 
 gave a fit and full expression to his idea- it was what heroic 
 rhyme was to Dryden, blank verse to Milton, and the Spen- 
 serian stanza to Byron. 
 
 To his scheme, and his mode of pursuing it, there occur, 
 however, certain strong objections 5 but all, or nearly all, 
 founded upon principles the truth of which he did not recog- 
 nize. First, it is a scheme impossible. No one human arm 
 or mind can ever govern the world. There is but One person 
 before whom every knee shall bow, and whose lordship every 
 tongue shall confess. Napoleon saw that there is no help for 
 the world, but in the absolute dominance of a single mind ; 
 but he did not see that this mind, ere it can keep as well as 
 gain dominion, and ere it can use that dominion well, must be 
 divine. Who can govern even a child without perpetual mis-
 
 NAPOLEON. 4 1 
 
 takes ? And how much less can one ungifted with divine 
 knowledge and power govern a world ? 
 
 But, secondly, Napoleon mistook the means for gaining his 
 object. He thought himself invested with immunities which 
 he did not possess. The being who can repeal the laws of 
 justice and mercy who can pursue plans of ultimate benevo- 
 lence through paths of profound and blood-sprinkled darkness 
 who can command the Banaanites to be extirpated, and per- 
 mit the people of Kabbah to be put under axes and saws of 
 iron, and raise up base, bad, or dubious characters, to work 
 out his holy purposes, must be a being superior to man must 
 be God. Whereas the man, however endowed, who violates 
 all conventional as well as moral laws in seeking his object 
 who can " break open letters, tell lies, calumniate private 
 character," as well as assassinate and poison, must be pro- 
 nounced a being in many respects inferior to mankind, a hu- 
 man Satan, uniting magnitude of object and of power to detest- 
 able meanness and maliciousness of character and of instru- 
 mentality. We ought, perhaps, to apologize for bringing thus, 
 even into momentary contrast, the Governor of the universe, 
 and his mysterious, but most righteous ways, and the reckless 
 actions of the Emperor of the French. 
 
 A greater mistake still was committed by Napoleon, when 
 he allied himself with the princes of Europe, when he ceased 
 to be the soldier and the Caesar of democracy, and when, above 
 all, he sought to found a house, and was weak enough to be- 
 lieve that he could ever have a successor from his own loins 
 equal to himself. Cromwells and Napoleons are but thinly 
 sown, and " not transferable," might be written on their brains. 
 Here we see another proof of the gross miscalculation he made 
 of his own, and indeed of human, nature. " My children must 
 be as great as myself," was his secret thought : otherwise, u I 
 am God, and gods must spring from me." But it is not in 
 human nature to continue a hereditary series of able and wise 
 rulers, far less a procession of prodigies. From heaven must 
 come down the one immutable Man, who is without beginning 
 of days or end of life, whose kingdom is an everlasting king- 
 dom, and the days of whose years are for ever and ever. 
 
 But, thirdly taking Napoleon on his own godless ground, 
 in seeking his great object, he neglected some important ele-
 
 42 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 mcnts of success. He not only committed grave errors, but 
 he omitted some wise and prudent steps. He reinstated the 
 crosier and re-crowned the Pope, instead of patronizing a 
 moderate Protestantism. He was more anxious to attack 
 aristocrats than the spirit of oligarchy. He sought rather to 
 crush than to transfuse the Jacobin element. He contrived 
 elaborately to disguise his real purpose, to dream of his ima- 
 gination, under the trappings and pretensions of vulgar ambi- 
 tion, and thus created a torrent of prejudice against himself. 
 He made the contest against Russia assume the aspect of a 
 strife between two butchers for a very fair heifer, rather than 
 that of civilization bearding, since it could not interpene- 
 trate, barbarism of the hunter seeking the bear in his den. 
 The enthusiasm he kindled was chiefly that of the love of mar- 
 tial glory, or of attachment to his flag and person, not of the 
 "idea" which possessed his own breast. Hence the ardor of 
 his army, being of the " earth, earthy," yielded quickly to the 
 first gush of genuine patriotism which arose to oppose them, 
 and which, though as narrow as intense, was, in comparison, 
 fire from heaven. Perhaps, in truth, his inspiring idea was 
 not easily communicable to such men as those he led, who, 
 shouting " Vive la France," or " Vive 1'Empereur," little 
 imagined that he was paving, on their carcasses, his path to 
 the title and the throne of an " Ornuiarch." 
 
 The theory of Napoleon, thus propounded, seems to explain 
 some points in his character which are counted obscure. It 
 accounts for his restless dissatisfaction with the success he did 
 gain. What were Belgium, Holland, and Italy to him, who 
 had formed not the mere dream, but the hope and design of a 
 fifth monarchy ? It explains his marvellous triumphs. He 
 fought not for a paltry battle-field, nor for the possession of 
 an island, but to gain a planet, to float his standard in the 
 breezes of the whole earth ! Hence an enthusiasm, a secret 
 spring of ardor, a determination and a profundity of resource, 
 which could hardly be resisted. How keen the eye, and 
 sharpened almost to agony the intellect, of a man gambling 
 for a world ! It explains the strange gloom, and stranger 
 gaiety, the oddness of manner, the symptoms which made 
 ninny think him mad. The man, making a fool of the world, 
 became often himself the fool of a company, who knew not be-
 
 NAPOLEON. 43 
 
 sides that he was the fool of an idea. The thought of univer- 
 sal dominion the feeling that he was made for it, and tend- 
 ing to it this made him sometimes silent when he should 
 have spoken, and sometimes speak when he should have been 
 silent this was a wierd wine which the hand of his Demon 
 poured out to him, and of which he drank without measure 
 and in secret. It explains the occasional carelessness of his 
 conduct a carelessness like that of the sun, who, warming 
 the earth and glorifying the heavens, yet sometimes scatters 
 abroad beams which burn men's brains, and anon set corn- 
 fields on fire. It explains the truth and tenderness, the love 
 of justice and the gleams of compassion, which mingled with 
 his public and private conduct. He was too wise to under- 
 rate, and too great not to feel, the primary laws of human na- 
 ture. And he intended that, when his power was consolidated, 
 these should be the laws of his empire. His progress was a 
 voyage through blood, toward mildness, peace, and justice. 
 But in that ocean of blood there lay an island, and in the is- 
 land did that perilous voyage terminate, and to it was our 
 daring hero chained, till his soul departed. Against one is- 
 land had this continental genius bent all the fury and the 
 energy of his nature, and in another island was he for a time 
 imprisoned, and in a third island he breathed his last. 
 
 Our theory, in fine, accounts for the calm firmness with 
 which he met his reverses. His empire, indeed, had fallen, 
 but his idea remained intact. He might never express it in 
 execution ; but he had thrown it down on the arena of the 
 world, and it lies still in that " court of the Gentiles." It has 
 started anew in these degenerate days, an invigorating thought, 
 the thought of a single ruler for this distracted earth ; a 
 thought which, like leaven, is sure to work on till it leaven all 
 the lump ; and is to be fulfilled in a way of which many men 
 dream not. Napoleon, though he failed in the attempt, felt, 
 doubtless, the consolation of having made it, and of having 
 thereby established for himself an impersonal and imperish- 
 able glory. The reality of empire departed when he resigned ; 
 but the bright prophetic dream of empire only left him when 
 he died, and has become his legacy to the world. 
 
 Such, we think, were Napoleon's purpose and its partial 
 fulfilment. His powers, achievements, and private character
 
 44 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 remain. His powers have been, on the one hand, unduly 
 praised, and, on the other, unduly depreciated. His unex- 
 ampled success led to the first extreme, and his unexampled 
 downfall to the latter. While some have talked of him as 
 greater than Caesar, others think him a clever impostor, a vul- 
 gar conjurer, with one trick, which was at last discovered. 
 Our notion lies between. He must, indeed, stand at some 
 distance from Caesar- the all-accomplished, the author, the 
 orator whose practical wisdom was equal to his genius who 
 wore over all his faculties, and around his very errors and 
 crimes, a mantle of dignity and whose one immortal bulletin, 
 " Veni, vidi, vici," stamps an image of the energy of his charac- 
 ter, the power of his talents, and the laconic severity of his taste 
 Nor can he be equalled to Hannibal, in rugged daring of pur- 
 pose, in originality of conception, in personal courage or in 
 indomitable perseverance Hannibal, who sprang like a bull- 
 dog at the throat of the Roman power, and who held his grasp 
 till it was loosened in death. But neither does he sink to the 
 level of the Tamerlanes or Bajazets. His genius soared above 
 the sphere of such skilful marshals and martinets as Turenne 
 and Marlborough. They were the slaves of their system of 
 strategy; he was the king of his. They fought a battle as 
 coolly as they played a game of chess ; he was full of impulses 
 and sudden thoughts, which became the seeds of victory, and 
 could set his soldiers on fire, even when he remained calm 
 himself. In our age, the name of Wellington alone can 
 balance with his. But, admitting the Duke's great qualities, 
 his iron firmness, his profound knowledge of his art, and the 
 almost superhuman tide of success which followed him, he 
 never displayed such dazzling genius, and, without enthusiasm 
 himself, seldom kindled it in others. He was a clear steady 
 star; Napoleon, a blood-red meteor, whose very downfall is 
 more interesting than the other rising. Passing from com- 
 parisons, Napoleon possessed a prodigal assortment of facul- 
 ties. He had an intellect clear, rapid, and trenchant as a 
 scimitar ; an imagination fertile in resources, if incorrect in 
 taste ; a swift logic ; a decisive will ; a prompt and lively elo- 
 quence ; and passions, in general, concentred and quiet as a 
 charcoal furnace. Let us not forget his wondrous faculty of 
 silence. He could talk, but he seldom babbled, and seldom
 
 NAPOLEON. 45 
 
 used a word too much. His conversation was the reflex of 
 his military tactics. As in the field he concentrated his forces 
 on a certain strong point, which when gained, all was gained; 
 so, in conversation, he sprung into the centre of every subject, 
 and, tearing out its heart, left the minor members to shift for 
 themselves. Profound in no science, save that of war, what 
 he knew, he knew thoroughly, and could immediately turn to 
 account. He called England a " nation of shopkeepers ;" but 
 he was as practical as a shopkeeper himself -the emperor of a 
 shopkeeping age. Theorisers he regarded with considerable 
 contempt. Theories he looked at, shook roughly, and asked 
 the inexorable question, " Will they stand ?" Glimpses of 
 truth came often on him like inspiration. " Who made all 
 that, gentlemen?" was his question at the atheistic savans, as 
 they sailed beneath the starry heavens, and denied the Maker. 
 The misty brilliance, too often disguising little, of such a 
 writer as Madame de Stael was naught in his eyes. How, had 
 he been alive, would he have laughed over the elegant senti- 
 mentalism of Lamartine, and with a strong contemptuous 
 breath blown away, like rolled shavings, his finest periods ! 
 Yet he had a little corner of literary romance in his heart. 
 He loved Ossiau's Poems. For this his taste has been ques- 
 tioned ; but to literary taste Napoleon did not pretend. He 
 could only criticise the arrangements of a battle, was the au- 
 thor of a new and elegant art of bloodshed, and liked a terri- 
 bly terse style of warfare. But, in Ossian, he found fire amid 
 fustian ; and partly for the fustain, and partly for the fire, he 
 loved him. in fact, Ossian is just a Frenchified version of 
 Homer 5 and no wonder that it pleased at once Napoleon's 
 martial spirit and his national taste. The ancient bard him- 
 self had been too simple. M'Pherson served him up with 
 flummery, and he went sweetly down the throat of our melo- 
 dramatic Hero. 
 
 Napoleon's real writings were his battles. Lodi let us call 
 a wild and passionate ode ; Austerlitz an epic ; and Waterloo 
 a tragedy. Yet, amid the bombast and falsetto of his bulle- 
 tins and speeches, there occur coals of genuine fire, and gleams 
 of lofty genius. Every one remembers the sentence, " French- 
 men, remember that from the top of these pyramids forty cen- 
 turies look down upon your actions ;" a sentence enough to
 
 46 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 make a man immortal. In keeping with the genius discover- 
 ed in this, were his allusions to the " sun of Austerlitz," 
 which, as if to the command of another Joshua, seemed to 
 stand still at his bidding his belief in destiny, and the other 
 superstitions which, like bats in a mid-day market-place, flitted 
 strangely to and fro through the clear and stern atmosphere 
 of his soul, and prophesied in silence of change, ruin and 
 death. 
 
 Like all men of his order, Napoleon was subject to moods 
 and fits, and presents thus, in mind, as well as in character, a 
 capricious and inconsistent aspect. Enjoying the keenest and 
 coldest of intellects, and the most iron of wills, he had at 
 times the fretfulness of a child, and at other times, the fury of 
 a demon. He was strong, but surrounded by contemptible 
 weaknesses. Possessing the French empire, he seemed him- 
 self at times "possessed" now of a miserable imp, and now 
 of a master-fiend. Now almost a demigod, he is anon an idiot. 
 No;v organising and executing with equal wisdom and energy 
 complicated and stupendous schemes, he fails frequently into 
 blunders which a child might have avoided. You are remind- 
 ed of a person of majestic stature and presence, who is sud- 
 denly seized with St. Vitus's Dance. How strange the in- 
 consistencies and follies of genius ! But not a Burns, seeing 
 two moons from the top of a whisky-barrel nor a Coleridge, 
 dogged by an unemployed operative, to keep him out of a 
 druggist's shop nor a Johnson, standing in the rain to do 
 penance for disobedience to his father nor a Hall, charging 
 a lady to instruct her children in the belief of ghosts iior a 
 Byron, shaving his brow to make it seem higher than it was, 
 or contemplating his hands, and saying, " These hands are 
 white" is a more striking specimen of the follies of the wise, 
 of the alloys mingled with the " most fine gold," than a Na- 
 poleon, now playing for a world, and now cheating one of his 
 own officers at whist. 
 
 We sometimes envy those who were privileged to be con- 
 temporaries of the battles of Napoleon, and the novels of Sir 
 Walter Scott, while each splendid series was yet in progress. 
 The first Italian campaign might have made the blood of 
 Burke (opposed though he was) dance on his very death-Led, 
 for there he was lying at the time. And how grand, for a
 
 NAPOLEON. 47 
 
 poetic car, to have heard the news of Jena, and Austerlitz, 
 and Wagram, and Borodino, succeeding each other like the 
 boom of distant cannon, like the successive peals of a thunder- 
 storm ! Especially when that dark cloud of invasion had 
 gathered around our own shores, and was expected to burst in 
 a tempest of fire, how deep must have been the suspense, how 
 silent the hush of the expectation, and how needless, methinks, 
 sermons, however eloquent, or poems, however spirit-stirring, 
 to concentrate, or increase, or express, the laud's one vast 
 emotion ! 
 
 Looking back, even now, upon the achievements of Napo- 
 leon, they seem still calculated to awaken wonder and fear 
 wonder at their multitude, their variety, their dreamlike 
 pomp and speed, their power and terrible beauty, and that 
 they did not produce a still deeper impression upon the world's 
 mind, and a still stronger reverberation from the world's poe- 
 try and eloquence ; and fear, at the power sometimes lent to 
 man, at its abuse, and at the possibilities of the future. 
 Another Napoleon may rise, abler, wickeder, wiser, and may 
 throw heavier barricades of cannon across the path of the 
 nations, crush them with a rougher rod, may live to consolidate 
 a thicker crust of despotism over the world, may fight another 
 Austerlitz without a Waterloo, and occupy another St. Cloud 
 without another St. Helena ; for what did all those far-heard 
 cannon proclaim, but " How much is possible to him that 
 dareth enough, that feareth none, that getteth a giant's power, 
 and useth it tyrannously like a giant that can by individual 
 might, reckless of rights, human or divine, rise and ride on 
 the topmost billow of his age ?"* 
 
 In looking more closely and calmly at those battles of Na- 
 poleon, we have a little, though not very much, of misty exag- 
 geration and false glory to brush away. Latterly, they lose 
 greatly that air of romance and miracle which surrounded the 
 first campaigns of Italy. The boy, wha had been a prodigy, 
 matures into the full grown and thoroughly furnished man. 
 The style, which had been somewhat florid but very fresh and 
 powerful, becomes calmer and rather less rapid. Napoleon, 
 
 * This paragraph, written early in 1851, has since received two em- 
 phatic comments need we name Louis Napoleon and Nicholas 1
 
 48 A FILE OF FRE.VCli REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 who had fought at first with an energy that seemed desperation, 
 with a fire that seemed superhuman, against great odds of 
 experience and numbers, fights now with many advantages on 
 his side. He is backed by vast, trained, and veteran armies. 
 He is surrounded by generals only inferior to himself, and 
 whom he has himself reared. And, above all, he is preceded 
 by the Gorgon-headed Medusa of his fame, carrying dismay 
 into the opposing ranks, nerving his own men into iron, and 
 stiffening his enemies into stone. And, although longer and 
 sterner ever became the resistance, the result of victory was 
 equally sure. And now he has reached a climax ; and yet, 
 not satisfied therewith, he resolves on a project, the greatest 
 and most daring ever taken or even entertained by him. It 
 is to disturb the Russian bear in his forests. For this pur- 
 pose, he has collected an army, reminding you of those of 
 Jenghiz Khan or Tamerlane, unparalleled in numbers, mag- 
 nificent in equipment, unbounded in confidence and attachment 
 to their chief, led by officers of tried valor and skill, and 
 wielded and propelled by the genius of Napoleon, like one 
 body by one living soul. But the " Lord in the heavens did 
 laugh;" the Lord held him and his force " in derision." For 
 now his time was fully come. And now must the decree of 
 the Watchers and the Holy Ones, long registered against him, 
 begin to obtain fulfillment. And how did God fulfill it ? He 
 led him into no ambuscade. He overwhelmed him with no 
 superior force. He raised up against him no superior genius. 
 But he took his punishment into his own hand. He sent 
 winter before its time, to destroy him and his " many men so 
 beautiful." He loosened snow, like a flood of .waters, and frost, 
 like a flood of fire, upon his host; and Napoleon, like Satan, 
 yielded to God alone, and might have exclaimed, with that 
 lost archangel 
 
 " Into what pit thou seest, 
 
 From what height fallen, so much the stronger proved 
 He with his thunder, and, till then, who knew 
 The force of those dire arms?" 
 
 Thus had man and his Maker come into collision, and the 
 potsherd was broken in the unequal strife. All that followed 
 resembled only the convulsive struggles of one down, taken, 
 and bound. Even when cast back like a burning ember, from
 
 NAPOLEON: 49 
 
 Elba to the French shores, it was evidently all too late. His 
 ' star" had first paled before the fires of Moscow, and at last 
 set amid the snows of his flight from it. 
 
 Of the private character of Napoleon, there are many con- 
 tradictory opinions. Indeed, properly speaking, he had no 
 private character at all. For the greater part of his life, he 
 was as public as the sun. He ate and drank, read and wrote, 
 snuffed and slept in a glare of publicity. The wrinkles, dark- 
 ening into gloom, on that massive forehead, did indeed conceal 
 many a dark and secret thought ; but his mere actions and 
 habitudes were all public property. How tell what he was in 
 private, since in private he never was ? He was like the man 
 who had " lost his shadow. 1 ' No sweet relief, no dim and 
 tender background in his character. Whatever private vir- 
 tues he might have possessed, never found an atmosphere to 
 develope them in ; nay, they withered and died in the sur- 
 rounding sunshine. He had no time to be a good son, or 
 husband, or father, or friend. The idea which devoured him 
 devoured all such ties too. Still, we believe that he never 
 ceased to possess a heart, and that much of his apathy and 
 apparent hardness of nature was the effect of policy or of ab- 
 sence of mind, A thousand different spectators report differ- 
 ently of his manner in private. To some, he appeared all 
 grace and dignity to others, a cold, absent fiend, lost in 
 schemes of far-off villany to a third class, an awkward and 
 unmannered blunderer and to a fourth, the very demon of 
 curiosity, a machine of questions, an embodied inquisition. 
 One acute spectator, the husband of Madame Rahel, reports a 
 perpetual scowl on his brow, and a perpetual smile on his lips. 
 We care very little for such representations, which rather de- 
 scribe the man's moods than the man himself. We heard once, 
 we protest, a more edifying picture of him from the lips of a 
 Scotch innkeeper, who declared that he believed " Boney, 
 when he was at leisure, aye sat, wi' his airm in a bowl o' wa- 
 ter, resting on a cannon-ball, an' nae doubt meditauting mis- 
 chief !" It were difficult to catch the features of an unde- 
 veloped thought and what else was Napoleon ? 
 
 As concentration was the power of his mind, so it was the 
 peculiarity of his person. His body was a little vial of in- 
 tense existence. The thrones of Europe seemed falling before
 
 50 A FILE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. 
 
 a nincpin ! He seemed made of skin, marrow, bone and fire. 
 Had France been in labor, and brought forth a mouse? But 
 it was a frame formed for endurance. It took no punishment, 
 it felt no fatigue, it refreshed itself by a wink, its tiny hand 
 shivered kingdoms at a touch, and its voice, small as the 
 " treble of a fay," was powerful and irresistible as the roar 
 of Mars, the homicidal god. Nature is often strange in her 
 economies of power. She often packs her poisons and her 
 glorious essences alike into small bulk. In Napoleon, as in 
 Alexander the Great and Alexander Pope, a portion of both 
 was strangely and inextricably mingled. 
 
 We might deduce many lessons from this rapid sketch of 
 the Emperor of the French. That "moral of his story," of 
 which Symmons speaks, would require seven thunders fully 
 to express it. We will not dwell on the common-places about 
 "vaulting ambition," " diseased pride," "fallen greatness," 
 " lesson to be humble and thankful in our own spheres," and so 
 on. Napoleon was a brave, great man ; in part mistaken, 
 perhaps also in part insane, and also in a large part guilty. 
 But he did a work not his full work, but still a work that 
 he only could have accomplished. He continued that shaking 
 of the sediments of the nations, which the French Revolution 
 began. He pointed attention with his bristling guns to the 
 danger the civilization of Europe is exposed to from the 
 Russian silent conspiracy of ages cold, vast, quietly pro- 
 gressive, as a glacier gathering round an Alpine valley. He 
 shook the throne of the Austrian domination, and left that of 
 his own successors tottering to receive them. He drew out, 
 by long antagonism, the resources of Britain. He cast a 
 ghastly smile of contempt, which lingers still, around the papal 
 crown. While he proved the disadvantages, as well as advan- 
 tages, of the domination of a single human mind, he uncon- 
 sciously shadowed forth the time when one divine hand shall 
 take the kingdom his empire, during its palmy days, form- 
 ing a feeble earthly emblem of the reign of the Universal King. 
 
 A new Napoleon, were he rising, would not long continue 
 to reign. But even as the ancient polypharmist and mistaken 
 alchemist was the parent and the prophecy of those modern 
 chemists, who may yet advance the science even to its ideal 
 limits, so in this age, Napoleon ras been the unwitting pioneer
 
 NAPOLEON. 51 
 
 and imperfect prophet of a Sovereign, the extent and the du- 
 ration of whose kingdom shall equal and surpass his wildest 
 dreams. Did he, by sheer native genius, nearly snatch from 
 the hands of all kings their time-honored sceptres nearly 
 confirm his sway into a concentrated and iron empire and 
 prove the advantages of centralization, as they were never 
 proved before ? And why should not " another king, one 
 Jesus," exerting a mightier might, obtain a more lasting em- 
 pire, and form the only real government which, save the short 
 theocracy of the Jews, ever existed on earth ? We pause 
 nay, nature, the world, the church, poor afflicted humanity, 
 distracted governments, falling thrones, earth and heaven to- 
 gether, seem to pause with us, to hear the wherefore to this 
 why.
 
 NO. I. EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 WE Lave often asked, and have often too, of late, the ques- 
 tion asked us, Why have we no life of Edward Irving ? Why 
 no full or authentic record of that short, eccentric, but most 
 brilliant and instructive career ? What has become of his 
 papers, which, we believe, were numerous of his sermons, 
 private letters, and journal ? (if such a thing as a journal he 
 ever kept think of the journal of a comet !) Why have none 
 of his surviving friends been invited to overlook these, and 
 construct from them a life-like image of the man ? Or, fail- 
 ing them, why has not some literary man of eminence even 
 although not imbued with all Irving's peculiar opinions, yet, 
 if possessing a general and genial sympathy with him been 
 employed on the task ? We know that many think this arises 
 from the impression that Irving died under a cloud, being felt 
 by his admirers to be general. But does not the silence of 
 his relatives and friends serve to deepen this impression ? We 
 have heard it hinted, on the other hand, that the real reason 
 is connected with the peculiar views of Irving, some imagining 
 that no man can write his life well, if not what is called an 
 Ervingite, and that no Irvingite has the literary qualifications. 
 These statements, however, we do not believe. Some of the 
 Irvingites are men of very considerable talent, and why al- 
 though most of his very eminent literary friends be either dead 
 or have departed farther^and farther from his point of view 
 although Chalmers be gone, De Quincey otherwise occupied, 
 Thomas Carlyle become a proclaimed Pantheist, and Thomas
 
 EDWAIID IRVING. 53 
 
 Erskine, of Linlathen, ceased to lay much if any stress on the 
 Personal Reign, and forsaken other Irvingite peculiarities 
 does not some one of his own party attempt a biography of 
 this eagle-winged man ? Meanwhile, we propose to give what 
 we know to be an honest and believe to be a true outline of 
 his character and peculiar genius. 
 
 We have had not a few disappointments in our career, but 
 none in one small department that of sight-seeing and hero- 
 hearing equal to that which befell us in Edinburgh, in the 
 year 1834. We were told that Edward Irving was to hold 
 forth in Mr. Tait's chapel, Canongate, on the forenoon of a 
 February Sabbath-day. We went accordingly, and with some 
 difficulty procured standing room in the gallery of a small 
 chapel in an obscure and very dirty close. It was not he ! 
 The lofty, once black, but now blanched head did not appear 
 over the throng, like the white plume of a chieftain over the 
 surge of battle. Another came (good Mr. Tait, who had 
 left the sweet moorland solitudes of Tealing, and resigned his 
 living to follow Irving) and we never had another opportu- 
 nity of seeing and hearing the giant of pulpit oratory. In the 
 close of that year he died in Glasgow, a weary, worn, grey- 
 headed, and broken-hearted man of forty-two. 
 
 What a life his had been ! Short, if years are the only 
 measurement of time ; but long, if time be computed by the 
 motion of the higher stars of thoughts, feelings, and sorrows ! 
 His life, too, was a strangely blended one. It was made up 
 of violent contrasts, contradictions, and vicissitudes. At col- 
 lege his career was triumphant ; he carried all easily before 
 him. Then, after he obtained license, came two great reverses 
 unpopularity as a preacher, and, if general report be credited, 
 a love-disappointment. He was discouraged by these to the 
 extent of preparing to leave his native land, and undertake 
 the duties of a missionary to the heathen. In this case he 
 would probably have perished early, and his fame had been 
 confined to the corner of an obituary in a missionary magazine. 
 Then in a moment whether fortunate or unfortunate, how 
 shall we decide ? Chalmers heard him preach, and got him 
 appointed as his colleague in Glasgow. Then London rose up 
 to welcome him, as one man, and his pulpit became a throne 
 of power, reminding you of what Knox's was in Edinburgh in
 
 54 A CONSTELLATION OF SACKED AUTHORS. 
 
 the sixteenth century. Not since that lion-hearted man of 
 God had thundered to nobles and maids of honor, to senators 
 and queens, had any preacher in Britain such an audience to 
 command and such power to command it as Irving. There 
 were princes of the blood, ladies high in honor and place, 
 ministers of state, celebrated senators, orators, and philoso- 
 phers, poets, critics, and distinguished members of the bar and 
 of the church, all jostled together into one motley yet magnifi- 
 cent mass, less to listen and criticise, than to prostrate them- 
 selves before the one heroic and victorious man ; for it seemed 
 rather a hero of chivalry than a divine who came forward Sab- 
 bath after Sabbath to uplift the buckler of faith, and to wield 
 the sword of the Spirit. The speaker was made for the audi- 
 ence, the man for the hour. In Glasgow he was an eagle in a 
 cage ; men saw strength, but strength imprisoned and embar- 
 rassed. In London, he found a free atmosphere, and eyes 
 worthy of beholding his highest flight, and he did " ye stars ! 
 how he did soar." It was a flight prompted by enthusiasm, 
 sustained by sympathy, accelerated by ambition, and conse- 
 crated by Christian earnestness. There might be indeed a 
 slight or even a strong tinge of vanity mingled with his appear- 
 ances, but it was not the vanity of a fribble, it was rather that 
 of a child. It was but skin deep, and did not affect the sim- 
 plicity, enthusiasm, and love of truth which were the bases of 
 his character and of his eloquence. His auditors felt that this 
 was no mouthing, ranting, strutting actor, but a great good 
 man, speaking from a full intellect and a warm heart ; and 
 that if he had, and knew that he had, a strange and striking 
 personal presence, and a fine deep voice thoroughly under his 
 management, and which he wielded with all the skill of an art- 
 ist, that was not his fault. These natural and acquired advan- 
 tages he could not resign, he could not but be aware of, he 
 must use, and he did consecrate. What less and what more 
 could he have done ? 
 
 We have heard him so often described by eyewitnesses, not 
 to speak of the written pictures of the period, that we may 
 venture on a sketch of a Sabbath, during his palmy days, in 
 the Caledonian Chapel. You go a full hour before eleven, and 
 find that you are not too early. Having forced your way 
 with difficulty into the interior, you find yourself in a nest
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 55 
 
 of celebrities. The chapel is small, but almost every person 
 of note or notoriety in London has squeezed Lmi or herself 
 into one part or another of it. There shine the fine open 
 glossy brow and speaking face of Canning. There you see the 
 small shrimp-like form of Wilberforce, the dusky visage of 
 Denman, the high Roman nose of Peel, and the stern forehead 
 of Plunket. There Brougham sits coiled up in his critical 
 might, his nose twitching, his chin resting on his hand, his eyes 
 retired under the dark lids, his whole bearing denoting eager 
 but somewhat curious and sinister expectation. Yonder you 
 see an old venerable man with mild placid face and long grey 
 hair ; it is Jeremy Bentham, coming to hear his own system 
 abused as with the tongue of thunder. Near him, note that 
 thin spiritual-looking little old individual, with quiet philo- 
 sophic countenance and large brow : it is William Godwin, the 
 author of " Caleb Williams." In a seat behind him sits a yet 
 more meagre skeleton of man, with a pale face, eager eyes, 
 dark close-cropped hair and tremulous nervous aspect ; it is 
 the first of living critics, William Hazlitt, who had "forgot 
 what the inside of a church was like," but who has been fairly 
 dragged out of his den by the attraction of Irving's eloquence. 
 At the door, and standing, you see a young, short, stout per- 
 son, carrying his head high, with round face, large eyes, and 
 careless school-boy bearing : it is Macauley, on furlough from 
 Cambridge, where he is as yet a student, but hopes soon to be 
 equal with the proudest in all that crowded Caledonian Chapel. 
 And in a corner of the church, Coleridge the mighty wizard, 
 with more knowledge and more genius under that one white 
 head than is to be found in the whole of the bright assem- 
 bly -looks with dim nebulous eyes upon the scene., which 
 seems to him rather a swimming vision than a solid reality. 
 And then, besides, there are belted earls, and feathered duch- 
 esses, and bishops not a few, and one or two of the Guelphic 
 race included in a throng which has not been equalled for 
 brilliance in London since Burke, Fox, and Sheridan stood up 
 in Westminster Hall, as the three accusing spirits of Warren 
 Hastings. 
 
 For nearly half an hour the audience has been fully assem- 
 bled, and has maintained, on the whole, a decent gravity and 
 composure. Eleven o'clock strikes, and an official appears,
 
 56 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 bearing the Bible in his hands, and thus announcing the ap- 
 proach of the preacher. Ludicrous as might in other circum- 
 stances seem the disparity between the forerunner and the 
 coming Man, his appearance is welcomed by the rustle and 
 commotion which pass through the assembly, as if by a unani- 
 mous cheer a rustle which is instantly succeeded by deep 
 silence, as, slowly and majestically, Edward Irving advances, 
 mounts not with the quick hasty step of Chalmers, but with 
 a measured and dignified pace, as if to some solemn music 
 heard by his ear alone the stairs of the pulpit, and lifting 
 the Psalm-book, calmly confronts that splendid multitude. 
 The expression of his bearing while he does this is very pecu- 
 liar ; it is not that of fear, not that of deference, still less is 
 it that of impertinence, anger or contempt. It is simply the 
 look of a man who says internally, " I am equal to this occa- 
 sion and to this assembly, in the dignity and power of my own 
 intellect and nature, and MORE than equal to it, in the might 
 of my Master, and in the grandeur and truth of my message." 
 Ere he proceeds to open the Psalm-book, mark his stature and 
 his face ! He is a son of Anak in height, and his symmetry 
 and apparent strength are worthy of his stature. His com- 
 plexion is iron grey, his hair is parted at the foretop, and 
 hangs in sable masses down his temples, his eye has a squint, 
 which rather adds to than detracts from the general effect, and 
 his whole aspect is spiritual, earnest, Titanic ; yea, that of a Ti- 
 tan among Titans a Boanerges among the sons of thunder. 
 He gives out the psalm perhaps it is his favorite psalm, the 
 twenty-ninth and as he reads it, his voice seems the echo of 
 the " Lord's voice upon the waters," so deep and far-rolling 
 are the crashes of its sound. It sinks, too, ever and anon into 
 soft and solemn cadences, so that you hear in it alike the moan 
 and the roar, and feel both the pathos and the majesty of the 
 thunderstorm. Then he reads a portion of Scripture, select- 
 ing probably, from a fine instinctive sense of contrast, the 
 twenty-third psalm, or some other of the sweeter of the 
 Hebrew hymns, to give relief to the grandeurs that have 
 passed or that are at hand. Then he says, " Let us pray," 
 not as a mere formal preliminary, but because he really wishes 
 to gather up all the devotional feeling of his hearers along 
 with his own, and to present it as a whole burnt-offering to
 
 EDWARD IHVING. 57 
 
 Heaven. Then his voice, " like a steam of rich distilled per- 
 fumes," rises to God, and you feel as if God had blotted out 
 the Church around, and the Universe above, that that voice 
 might obtain immediate entrance to his ear. You at least are 
 conscious of nothing for a time save the voice and the Auditor. 
 " Reverence and lowly prostration are most striking," it has 
 been said, " when paid by a lofty intellect, and you are 
 reminded of the trees of the forest clapping their hands unto 
 Grod." The prayer over, he announces his text, and enters on 
 his theme. The sermon is upon the days of the Puritans and 
 the Covenanters, and his blood boils as he describes the ear- 
 nest spirit of their times. He fights over again the battles of 
 Drumclog and Botlnvell; he paints the dark muirlands, 
 whither the Woman of the Church retired for a season to be 
 nourished with blood, and you seem to be listening to that wild 
 eloquence which pealed through the wilderness and shook the 
 throne of Charles II. Then he turns to the contrast between 
 that earnest period and what he thinks our light, empty, and 
 profane era, and opens with fearless hand the vials of apocalyp- 
 tic vengeance against it. He denounces our " political expe- 
 diences," and Canning smiles across to Peel. lie speaks of 
 our " godless systems of ethics and economics," and Bentham 
 and Godwin shrug their shoulders in unison. He attacks. the 
 poetry and the criticism of the age, inserting a fierce diatribe 
 against the patrician Byron in the heart of an apology for the 
 hapless ploughman Burns ; knocking Southey down into the 
 same kennel into which he had plunged Byron ; and striking 
 next at the very heart of Cobbett ; and Hazlitt bends his brow 
 into a frown, and you see a sarcasm (to be inserted in the next 
 " Liberal") crossing the dusky disc of his face. Nay, waxing 
 bolder, and eyeing the peers and the peeresses, the orator de- 
 nounces the " wickedness in high places" which abounds, and 
 his voice swells into its deepest thunder, and his eye assumes 
 its most portentous glare, as he characterises the falsehood of 
 courtiers, the hypocrisy of statesmen, the hollowness, licen- 
 tiousness, and levity of fashionable life, singling out an indi- 
 vidual notoriety of the species, who happens to be in more im- 
 mediate sight, and concentrating the " terrors of his beak, the 
 lightnings of his eye," upon her till she blushes through her 
 rouge, and every feather in her head-dress palpitates in reply
 
 58 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTUOUS. 
 
 to her rotten and quaking heart. It is Isaiah or Ezekiel over 
 again, uttering their stern yet musical ad poetic burdens. 
 The language is worthy of the message it conveys, not polished, 
 indeed, or smooth, rather rough and diffuse withal, but vehe- 
 ment, figurative, and bedropt with terrible or tender extracts 
 from the Bible. The manner is as graceful as may well co- 
 exist with deep impetuous force, and as solemn as may evade 
 the charge of cant. The voice seems meant for an " orator 
 of the human race," and fitted to fill vaster buildings than 
 earth contains, and to plead in mightier causes and controver- 
 sies than can even be conceived of in our degenerate days. 
 It is the " many-folded shell" of Prometheus, including in its 
 compass " soft and soul-like sounds," as well as loud and vic- 
 torious peals. The audience feel in contact, not with a mere 
 orator, but with a Demoniac force. 
 
 That this sketch is not exaggerated, we have abundant tes- 
 timony. Canning repeatedly declared that Edward Irving 
 was the most powerful orator, in or out of the pulpit, he ever 
 heard. Hazlitt has written panegyric after panegyric upon 
 him, annexing, indeed, not a few critical cavils and sarcasms, 
 as drawbacks from his estimate. De Quincey called him once 
 to us a " very demon of power," and uniformly in his writings 
 speaks with wonder, not unmingled with terror, of the fierce, 
 untamed, resistless energy which ran in the blood and spoke 
 in the talk and public oratory of Edward Irving. 
 
 Yet there can bs little doubt that these splendid exhibitions, 
 while exciting general admiration in London, were not pro- 
 ductive of commensurate good. They rather dazzled and 
 stupified, than convinced or converted. They sent men away 
 wondering at the power of the orator, not mourning over their 
 own evils, and striving after amendment. They served, to 
 say the most, only as a preface, paving the way for a volume 
 of instruction and edification, which was never published ; as 
 an introduction, to secure the attention and gain the ear of the 
 public, for a sermon, and an application thereof of practical 
 power, which was never preached. 
 
 Irving, indeed, left himself no choice. He had so fiercely and 
 unsparingly assaulted the modes of thought and styles of 
 preaching which prevailed in the Church, that he was com- 
 pelled, in consistency and self-defence, to aim at a novel and
 
 EDWARD IRVING. 59 
 
 original plan of promulgating the old doctrines. By and by. 
 intercourse with Coleridge, added to his own restless spirit of 
 speculation, began to shake his confidence in many parts of our 
 ancient creeds. A new system, of colossal proportions, founded, 
 indeed, on the basis of Scripture, but ascending till its sum- 
 mits were lost in mist, began to rise under his Babylonian 
 hand. He saw, too, for the first time, the mountain-ranges of 
 prophecy lowering before him, dark and cloud-girt for the 
 most part, but with strange gleams shining here and there 
 upon their tops, and with pale and shadowy hands beckoning 
 him onwards into their midst. These were to him the Delecta- 
 ble Mountains, and to gain the summit of Mount Clear 
 became henceforth the object of his burning and lifelong ambi- 
 tion. He toiled up these hills for many a weary hour and 
 with many a heavy groan, but his strong faith and sanguino 
 genius supported him; in the evening of each laborious day 
 he fancied he saw, on the unreached pinnacle, 
 
 " Hope enchanted smile, and wave her golden hair;" 
 
 and each new morning found him as alert as ever, climbing the 
 mountains towards the city. Again and again, he imagined 
 that he had reached tho far-seen and far-commanding summit, 
 and certainly the exaltation of his language, and the fervor 
 of his spirit, seemed sometimes those of one who was behold- 
 ing a " little of the glory of the place ;" but ; alas ! the clouds 
 were perpetually gathering again, and many maintained that 
 the shepherds Watchful and Experience (whatever Sincere 
 might have done) had not bid him "welcome to the Delectable 
 Mountains," and that he had mistaken Mount Clear for Mount 
 Error, which hangs over a steep precipice, and whence many 
 strong men have been hurled headlong, and dashed to pieces 
 at the bottom. 
 
 It was certainly a rapid, a strange, a fearful " progress," 
 that of our great-hearted pilgrim during the ten last years of 
 his life. What giants he wrestled with and subdued what 
 defiles of fear and danger he passed what hills of difficulty 
 as well as of delight he surmounted -what temptations he 
 resisted and defied what by-paths, alas ! too, at times he was 
 led to explore ! All subjects passed before him like the ani- 
 mals coming to be named of Adam, and were scanned and
 
 60 A CONSTELLATION OF SACKED At THORS. 
 
 classified, if not exhausted ; all methods of " concluding" 
 men into the obedience of his form of the faith were tried ; 
 now he " piped" his Pan's pipe to the mighty London, that its 
 inhabitants might dance ; now he " mourned" to them his wild 
 prophetic wail, that they might lament. All varieties of 
 character he met with and sought to gain all places he 
 visited all varieties of treatment and experience he encoun- 
 tered and tried to turn to high spiritual account. We see him 
 now preaching among the wildernesses of Golloway, and 
 seeming a Renwick Redivivus, and now, Samson-like, over- 
 throwing the Church of Kirkcaldy, by the mere pressure pro- 
 duced by his popularity. Now he is seen by Hazlitt laying 
 his giant limbs on a bench in the lobby of the Black Bull, 
 Edinburgh ; and now, at five in the morning, in the same city, 
 ere the sun has climbed the back of the couchant lion of Ar- 
 thur Seat, or turned the flag floating o'er the Castle into fire, 
 he is addressing thousands in the West Church on the glori- 
 ous and dreadful advent of a Brighter Sun from heaven. 
 Now we see him (as our informant did) sitting at his own hos- 
 pitable morning board, surrounded by a score of disciples, 
 holding a child on his knee, a tea-pot in his hand, and, with 
 head and shoulders towering over the rest, pouring out the 
 while the strong element of his conversation. Now we watch 
 him shaking farewell hands with Carlyle, his early friend, 
 whom he has in vain sought to convert to his views, and say- 
 ing with a sigh, " I must go up this hill Difficulty ; thou art 
 in danger of reaching a certain wide field, full of dark moun- 
 tains, where thou mayest stumble and fall, and rise no more." 
 Now he pleads his cause before the judicatories of the Church 
 of Scotland where he is sisted for error, but pleads it in vain ; 
 and in the afternoon of the day on which he has been cast out 
 from her pale, stands up with tears in his eyes, and preaches 
 the gospel in his own native Annan to weeping crowds. Now 
 he prevents the dawning to translate " Ben Ezra" into Eng- 
 lish, and to prefix to it that noble apology, for the Personal 
 Advent, which a Milton's ink might have written and a mar- 
 tyr's blood sealed. Now he appears, after years of estrange- 
 ment, before the view of his ancient ally, Carlyle, suddenly as 
 an apparition, in one of the parks, grey-haired with anguish, 
 pale and thin as a spectre, blasted, but blasted with celestial
 
 EDWARD IRVINv?. 61 
 
 fire, and they renew friendly intercourse for one solemn hour, 
 and then part for ever. And now he expires in Glasgow, pant- 
 ing to keep some dream-made appointment in Edinburgh, 
 whither he was bound, but saying at last, with childlike resigna- 
 tion, " Living or dying, I am the Lord's." 
 
 From his life, thus cursorily outlined, we pass to say a few 
 words about his works, and genius, and purpose. In compar- 
 ing the divines of the seventeenth century with those of our 
 own day, there is nothing more remarkable than this the 
 vastly greater amount of good literature produced by the for- 
 mer. They were not, to be sure, so much engrossed with 
 soirees, Exeter-Hall meetings, and visits, as the present race; 
 but their pulpit preparations were far more laborious, and yet 
 they found time for works of solid worth and colossal size. 
 Our divines, too, are determined to print, but what flimsy pro- 
 ductions theirs in general arc, in comparison with the writings 
 of Howe, Charnock, Barrow, and Taylor ! There is more 
 matter in ten of Charnock's massive folio pages, than in all 
 that Dr. Gumming has hitherto published. Chalmers and 
 Irving, of course, are writers of a higher order, but even 
 their works cannot be named beside those of our elder theolo- 
 gians, whether in learning, in genius, in power, in practical 
 effect, or even in polish. In proof of our statement, we invite 
 comparison between Chalmers's " Astronomical Discourses" 
 or Irving's "Orations" and the "Christian Life" by old 
 John Scott ; and, waiving the question as to which of the 
 three possesses the greatest intellectual power and eloquence, 
 we challenge superiority on behalf of the elder, even in respect 
 of correctness, grace, and every minor merit of style. Vain 
 to say that the works of Chalmers and Irving were written in 
 the intervals of varied and harassing occupations. So were 
 those of the old divines. Vain to say that in the Scottish 
 schools and colleges, at the beginning of this century, little 
 attention was paid to composition in the schools and colleges 
 of the seventeenth century we believe there was still less. 
 The true reasons are to be found in the simple fact, that these 
 olden men were men of a still higher order of intellect that, 
 besides, they had more thoroughly trained themselves, and 
 that a still loftier earnestness in their hearts was strengthened 
 and inflamed by the influences of a sterner age. As Milton
 
 62 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 to Bailey and Tennyson, do Howe and Barrow stand to Chal- 
 mers and Irving. 
 
 Yet we moan not to deny that some of Irving's productions 
 are worthy, not only of his floating reputation, but of that gift 
 in him which was never fully developed, or at least never com- 
 pletely displayed. In all his writings you see a man of the 
 present wearing the armor of the past ; but it is a proof of his 
 power, that, although he wears it awkwardly, he never sinks 
 under the load. It is not a David clad in a Goliath's arms, 
 and overwhelmed by them; it is the shepherd-giant, Eliab, 
 David's brother, not yet at home in a panoply which is not 
 too large for his limbs, but for wearing which a peaceful pro- 
 fession and period had not prepared him. Irving, in native 
 power, was only, we think, a little lower than the men of the 
 Elizabethan period, and of the next two reigns. He was ori- 
 ginally of a similar order of genius, but he had given that 
 genius a less severe and laborious culture, and he had fallen 
 upon an age adverse for its display. Hence, even his best 
 writings, when compared to theirs, have a certain stiff, imita- 
 tive, and convulsive air. There is nothing false in any of 
 them, but there is something/era*/ in most. You feel always 
 how much better Irving's noble, generous thoughts would have 
 looked, had he expressed them in the language of his own day. 
 Burke had as big a heart, a far subtler intellect, and richer 
 imagination than Irving, and yet how few innovations, and 
 fewer archaisms, has he ventured to introduce into his style. 
 Hall and Foster, too, are as pure writers as they are powerful 
 thinkers. Thus, too, felt the public, and hence the boundless 
 popularity of the man was not transferred to his books. His 
 two best productions are, unquestionably, his Prefaces tD 
 " Home on the Psalms," and to " Ben Ezra." Nothing can 
 be finer than his defence of David, and his panegyric itself a 
 lyric on his psalms in the former, and the apostolic dignity, 
 depth, and earnestness, which distinguish the latter. Why 
 are these, and some of his other smaller works, not reprinted ? 
 
 The genius of Irving was not of the purely poetical sort, it 
 was rather of that lofty degre.e of the oratorical which verges 
 on the poetical. In other words, it was more intense than 
 wide. His mind was deeper than that of Chalmers, but not 
 so broad or so genial it was in some departments more pow-
 
 EDWARD IKA'ING. 63 
 
 erful, but not so practical. Many of his ideas, he rejoiced 
 to see, as he said, " looming through a mist." Even the 
 poetry that was in him was rather of the lyrical, than of the 
 epic or dramatic sort. The lyrical poet does not look abroad 
 upon universality he looks straight up from his lyre some 
 intense idea at once insulates and inflames him, and his poetry 
 arises bright, keen, and narrow, as a tongue of fire from the 
 altar of a sacrifice. It was so with the prose of Irving ; his 
 flights were lofty, perpendicular, and short-lived. He has left 
 very few of those long, swelling, sustained, and victorious pas- 
 sages which characterise the very highest of our religious au- 
 thors, nor, on the other hand, are his pages thick with sudden 
 and memorable felicities of thought. They are chiefly valua- 
 ble for those brief patches of beauty, and bursts of personal 
 feeling and passion, which recall most forcibly to those who 
 heard him the remarkable appearance and unequalled elocution 
 of the man. For, emphatically, he himself was " the Epistle." 
 We admit most frankly, even though the admission should 
 have the effect of producing distrust in our own capacity of 
 criticising one whom we never saw, that, to know his genius 
 fully, it was necessary to have seen and heard him only those 
 who did so are, we believe, able to appreciate the whole power 
 that was condensed in that marvellous " earthen vessel," the 
 appearance of which, especially in his loftier moods, suggested 
 an energy within, and a possibility before him, which made 
 his works, and even his public preachings, seem poor in the 
 comparison. Let us remember, too, the age at which he was 
 removed. He was barely forty-two, an age when nine-tenths 
 of clever men have not even begun to publish. And he had 
 advanced at such a rate. It was true that latterly he fell 
 into a singular hallucination, or, at least, a one-sidedness. A 
 gentleman told us, that, calling on him once, and complaining 
 that his published writings were not quite worthy of his fame, 
 Irving pointed to a mass of MS. below his study table, and said, 
 " Look here, sir ! There are there scores of sermons incom- 
 parably superior to aught I have published. But when I wrote 
 them I was under the impression that I must fight God's 
 cause with the weapons of eloquence and carnal wisdom ; I 
 have learned otherwise since, sir, and believe that the simpler 
 and humbler I am in my language, God will prosper my ser-
 
 64 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 mons and writings more; according to that Scripture, 'When 
 I am weak, then am I strong.' " So far he was right, but so 
 far also he was wrong; and in a short time, had he lived, he 
 would have come to the golden mean. No preacher can be 
 too simple, and none too sublime. Every preacher, who is 
 able, should, by turns, be both. No writer can be too clear, 
 and none too profound ; and every writer should seek, if he 
 has capacity, to be both. The author of that little card to 
 Philemon, wrote also the Epistle to the Romans. Irving 
 might, and would, had God spared his life, have attained a 
 mode of writing, which, by turns, would have attracted infants, 
 and overpowered philosophers made a Mary weep and a Felix 
 tremble a child, like Timothy, prefer it to the instructions 
 of his grandmother Lois, and a doubter, like Thomas, cry out, 
 "My Lord and my God." 
 
 To enter into a consideration of his creed, we have not room, 
 and it might besides involve us in controversy. In some points 
 we deem him to have been deeply and even fearfully mistaken, 
 and his wildest errors, of course, were most popular among 
 the weak ; but in others, if he was in error, his errors were 
 not deadly, and he erred in good company. But, whatever 
 were or were not his mistakes, of one thing there could be no 
 doubt. He was in earnest, and he strove to infuse his earnest- 
 ness into the age. In another part of this volume, discoursing 
 of Wilson, we have said that his wondrous powers were neu- 
 tralised through his want of concentrated purpose ; but cer- 
 tainly this cannot be charged against Irving. His objects 
 during his life seem to have been two. Carlyle says, "This 
 man strove to be a Christian priest." This was his first but 
 not his only purpose. He strove, secondly, to be a Christian 
 prophet. Believing that the end of our present cycle of 
 Christianity was at hand, and that God was about to intro- 
 duce a new and most mighty dispensation, he felt impelled to 
 proclaim that old things were passed away, and that all things 
 were becoming new. This he did with all the energy of his 
 nature. He smote with his hand he stamped with his foot 
 he wept he cried aloud and spared not he rose early and 
 sat late he exhausted his entire energies, and gained an early 
 grave in the proclamation of his message. The mantle of the 
 Baptist seemed to have descended on him, and his sermons
 
 EDWAUD IRVING. 65 
 
 ceased to be compositions, and became cries the cues of fierce 
 protest, stern injunction, and fire-eyed haste : " Repent ye ! 
 Repent ye ! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." How far 
 his impressions on this subject were correct, is a question on 
 which we enter not now. But surely if Carlyle the godless 
 prophet of his period, the cursing Balaam of his day demand 
 and deserve credit for the half-insane sincerity with which he 
 recites his lesson of despair, Irving must be much more ad- 
 mired for his earnestness, as, like the wild eyed prophet who 
 ran round doomed Jerusalem, crying out, "Wo, wo," till he 
 sank down in death, he spent his last breath in crying " Wo, 
 wo, wo, to the inhabiters of the earth, because of the trumpets 
 which are soon to sound, and the vials of vengeance which are 
 soon to be outpoured." 
 
 Vain perhaps the inquiry, had he lived, what would have 
 been his career? Many may be disposed to say "Bedlam." 
 We think not. Irving had, indeed, his deep hallucinations, 
 and died under them ; but he was a man still in his prime, his 
 mind retained much of its original vigor ; these hallucinations 
 were only mists, which had strangled his sun at noon, and 
 would have passed away, and left the orb brighter, and shining 
 with a tenderer light than before. Others may say "Popery." 
 We trow not. He had too much Scotch sagacity, whatever 
 some of his followers may have, ever to become the bond-slave 
 of its degrading and mind-murdering superstitions. Carlyle, 
 we know, supposes that at the time of his death Irving was 
 ripe for that transfigured negation, that golden No, which he 
 calls his creed. Here, too, we demur. That Irving admired 
 and loved Carlyle, is notorious, but that a nature so enthu- 
 siastic, affectionate, sanguine, trustful, and holy, could ever 
 have been satisfied with Carlylcism, is to us inconceivable. 
 Had he even, like Samson, been seduced under cloud of night 
 into that city No, when his senses returned in the morning, he 
 would have arisen in wrath, shaken himself as at other times, 
 and carried away its gates with him in his retreat. A man 
 like Irving would, we verily believe, rather have died trailing 
 the car of Juggernaut, than have lived trusting to the tender 
 mercies of a system which stereotypes despair, and in banish- 
 ing God out of the universe, reduces man to a hopeless puzzle, 
 and life to a miserable dream.
 
 66 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHOR?. 
 
 We venture to say, that had living's life been spared he 
 would have forsaken his wilder nostrums, rid himself of the 
 silly people around him, and calmed and sobered down into 
 one of the noblest specimens of enlightened, sanctified, hum- 
 ble, Christ-like humanity which our age or any other has seen. 
 He had the elements of all this within him. His heart was 
 as warm as his genius was powerful. If in his pulpit efforts 
 he sometimes seemed touching upon the angel, in private life, 
 and in the undress of his mind, he "became as a little child." 
 A thousand stories are extant of his generosity his liberality 
 his forbearance his simplicity, as well as of his piety and 
 zeal. But it seemed good to Eternal Providence that his 
 career should be as short as it was chequered, brilliant, and 
 strange. And what, although he founded no sect deserving the 
 name, wrought no deliverance on the earth, reared no pile of 
 literary or of theological handiwork what, although he died 
 sick of his associates, of his position, and of some of his cher- 
 ished doctrines, and was emphatically "at sea r he had lived, 
 on the whole, a heroic life; his errors themselves had pro- 
 claimed the nobility of his nature ; he died a meek and humble 
 disciple of Jesus Christ, and ages may elapse ere the Church 
 shall see his like again. Of many lowly individuals, it can 
 bo truly said, as Christ said of the woman, " she hath done 
 what she could;" but of how few men of Irving's powers, ac- 
 complishments, and splendid fame, can it be affirmed that duty 
 was ever dearer to him than delight that his purpose ever 
 towered more loftily before him than his personal desires 
 that he loved God better than himself that emphatically " he 
 did what he could ?" And the time has come when even those 
 who most deeply differed from him in opinion, and do still in 
 many things differ, may unite with his ardent worshippers in 
 proclaiming him a man of whom the world was not worthy. 
 
 Note. We have called Irving a comet ; but, unlike a comet, his tail 
 has not been his brightest or largest portion. With a few exceptions, 
 the present race of Irvingites are, we fear, as feeble, conceited, and su- 
 perstitious a set of religionists as exists. Even their love and charity, 
 which they parade so much, are diseased too " sweet to be whole- 
 some." Edward Irving would not now march through Coventry with 
 such semi-papistic semi-Swedenborgian hybrids. They shelter un- 
 der his name ; but were his name fully known it would crush them. 
 Alas ! how often do monkeys gibber and make mouths and attempt 
 mimicries behind the back of a man.
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 67 
 
 NO. II.-ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 To commence our review of the great author of the " Satur- 
 day Evening " and his works, we have selected an appropriate 
 season a Saturday evening after a day of constant and hard 
 intellectual work with the mists of autumn hanging in divine 
 festoons over the sky, and concealing the stars which had 
 begun lately to come out from their grave of summer sun- 
 shine, and to shine like the risen and glorified dead in the 
 serene heaven and with the prospects of the day sacred to 
 the memory of the resurrection of Jesus casting their gentle 
 shadow forward over our souls. Thus, ere soothing ourselves 
 to calm and rest as we do every Saturday evening, by perusing 
 some of the glorious words of Bunyan, the dreamer of Elstowe, 
 let us first begin our tribute to the dreamer, scarcely less ima- 
 ginative, of Stamford Rivers. 
 
 Taylor never, so far as we know, mounted a pulpit or 
 preached a sermon. Bvt a Christian priest, alike by lineage 
 and by nature, and by training, he unquestionably is. He is 
 one of the few of his surpassing order of intellect who in the 
 present day are Christians, whatever they may avow them- 
 selves to be. He is not only a Christian, but a Christian of 
 the most decided kind, and has gathered up the despised 
 names of "saint," "fanatic," &c., and bound them as a crown 
 unto him. In search of an ideal of Christianity, he has 
 looked at and bowed aside most of our modern forms of it 
 tarried reverently near the Reformation for a season, and then 
 passed on his way gone shuddering, but keenly observant, 
 through the midst of the mediaeval ages paused almost 
 patronisingly over the Patristic period and at last fixed his 
 thought at that singular point where the Primitive began to 
 merge into the Patristic, where the Christ seemed to sink back 
 into the Moses, and there raised his Eureka, and set up his 
 pillar. We wish that he had gone back a little farther, and 
 striven to reproduce and revive the naked substance of Chris- 
 tianity, as it was left by Jesus of Nazareth himself; but still 
 we feel profoundly grateful for the elaborate and argumenta- 
 tive statements he has given in proof of the vitality which
 
 68 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUT11DRS. 
 
 continued to breathe in Christianity till the anti-Christian 
 leaven had fairly begun to work ; and no less for the exhibi- 
 tion he has presented us of the causes of the Church's decline. 
 Taylor, while a Briton by birth, is in soul and essence an 
 Orientalist. His sympathies, his genius, his scholarship, his 
 temperament, his peculiar kind of piety, all link him to Pales- 
 tine, and the lands still nearer the sun, where man was first 
 let down from heaven where he spent his brief Paradisal 
 period where he fell and whence the original currents of 
 the race flowed westward, diverging and deepening as they 
 flowed. Like the window of the prophet Daniel, Taylor has 
 his imagination and heart always " standing open towards Je- 
 rusalem." Like Christian in the " Pilgrim," he sleeps in a 
 chamber looking toward the east. His imagery and language 
 are oriental " barbaric pearl and gold." We know not if he 
 ever traveled to the lands of his dreams ; but certain we are, 
 that no man of this century would derive more solemn plea- 
 sure from such a journey. We love to fancy him sailing on 
 the Lake of Galilee, and conjecturing which of the sunburnt 
 mountains around was that to which the Saviour went up to 
 pray, "himself alone;" or pacing, in profound awe and 
 silence, the beach of that sea which was once Sodom ; or sit- 
 ting by Jacob's well ; or looking down from the top of Tabor 
 on the gorge of Endor, and the beautiful plain of Jezreel ; or 
 prostrate in prayer under the trees of Gethsemane ; or walk- 
 ing out pensive and alone, towards Emmaus ; or looking from 
 some giant peak in Lebanon eastward, and northward, and 
 southward, and westward ; or marking the windings of the 
 infant Jordan ; or mounting a hill of Moab in search of Pis- 
 gah; or bathing in " Abana and Pharpar, lucid streams;" or 
 climbing the savage Sinai, by the very path up which Moses 
 trembled, and looking abroad from its summit upon peaks, 
 and crags, and valleys, and deserts, bare as a lunar landscape, 
 and which the ire of Heaven seems to have crossed over in a 
 scorching whirlwind, and made for ever desolate ! Few books 
 of travels to Palestine have in them much poetry. M'Cheyne, 
 for instance, passes through all these haunted spots, and seems, 
 and is, deeply affected by their memories ; but, being utterly 
 destitute of genuine imagination, he fails in making us realize 
 the solemn scenery of the promised land his enthusiasm is
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 69 
 
 entirely pious, instead of being a compound of the pious and 
 the poetical, as Taylor's would be. Lamartine and Chateau- 
 briand go to the other extreme, and become nauseously senti- 
 mental. Warburton (in the " Crescent and Cross ") and Dis- 
 raeli (in " Tancred ") come nearer to our ideal. But we wait 
 for the avatar of the true traveler and reporter of his travels 
 through that wondrous land, where God did desire to dwell 
 where he took on him flesh, and looked at his own creation 
 through human eyes and where he shall, we believe, dwell 
 again, at that prophetic period, when once more to Jerusalem 
 shall the tribes go up, and when the " Holy City," inhabited 
 by the " Holy One of Israel," shall become the praise and the 
 joy, the centre and the glory, not of the earth only, but of 
 the universe ! 
 
 To the poetic enthusiasm and piety of the East, Taylor has 
 annexed much of the acute intellect, balancing logic, and 
 varied culture of the West. Yet, we confess, we like him 
 always best when he is following the original bent of his mind. 
 We care very little for his opinions on such men as Chalmers 
 and Foster. His idiosyncrasy is so different, that he does not 
 understand, although he loves them both ; nor, perhaps, did 
 either of them fully comprehend him. Hence, in his articles 
 on them in the " North British Review," he talks very labori- 
 ously, very eloquently, and, to appearance, very profoundly 
 about them, as if he were a kindred spirit. Whereas, in fact, 
 Chalmers was a resuscitated apostle of the first century. 
 Foster was, in all but superstition, a monk of the tenth. Tay- 
 lor is a Platonic Christian of the second, or Justin Martyr 
 age. Chalmers was the genius of activity, seeking to make 
 things better ; Foster was stiffened into an attitude of solitary 
 protest and stationary wonder at the evils which are in the 
 world; while Taylor calmly and dispassionately, yet with 
 enthusiastic hope, contemplates its good and its evil as a 
 whole. Often, indeed, he leaves this quiet collateral attitude, 
 and rushes down into the field of action or controversy ; but 
 it is awkwardly and his efforts, like those of elephants in the 
 battles of yore, are sometimes less destructive to foes than to 
 friends. His logic is often clumsy ; his satire, sarcasm, and 
 invective, are heavy ; his controversial weapon is as blunt as 
 it is ponderous; his style is often cumbered and involved;
 
 70 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 but in that mood of mind partly poetic, partly philosophic, 
 partly devout, in which the Essenes and ancient mystics in- 
 dulged, he stands among the authors of this age facile prin- 
 ceps. He can reason ; but he is better and truer to himself 
 when he broods, with half-shut dreamy eye, as did his spirit- 
 ual fathers under the divine evenings of the East, when the 
 moon was rising over the mountains of Moab, or as the stars 
 were leaning upon Sinai, now silent in his age, and wrapt as 
 in eternal wonder, at the memory of the more awful burden 
 of wrath and glory which once rested for forty days and forty 
 nights upon his quaking summit. 
 
 Taylor is often speculating about the characteristics and 
 tendencies of the present age. These speculations are always 
 ingenious, always eloquently expressed, sometimes just and 
 profound. But, more frequently, a certain vague and dim un- 
 reality seems to swathe them, and you are tempted to apply 
 to them the expression, less truly applied to the thought of 
 Coleridge, " philosophic moonshine." He cannot deal clearly 
 or cogently with the present ; his congenial fields are the past 
 and the future. His soul loves to penetrate the silent seas of 
 the past, and to seek to resuscitate the mighty primeval forms 
 which once peopled them, fie talks to Moses and 'Isaiah, to 
 Peter, and John, and Paul, to Justin Martyr, to Origen, to 
 Augustine, and to Chrysostom, as to brethren and neighbors. 
 If you can hardly say of him, with Spenser 
 
 "The wars be well remember'd of King Nine. 
 Of old Assaracus, and Inachus divine," 
 
 yet his memory, his fancy, and his heart have gone back a 
 great way, and have collected very rich resurrection spoils. 
 Nor is he less trustworthy, or delightful in his views of the 
 future. He is a Millennarian. We do not mean that he is as 
 certain as was Edward Irving, or as hopeful as we are, of the 
 Pre-millennial Advent ; although various passages in his wri- 
 tings would indicate that he inclines to that ancient hope of 
 the Church. But he is a profound believer in the fact that a 
 long bright evening is to succeed this dark and stormy day, 
 and that Christianity is to gain its final triumph through 
 supernatural aid and intervention. On this hope bespeaks;
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 71 
 
 and beautiful are many of his excursions into that Promised 
 Land, which lies beyond the red Jordan of the " Last Conflict 
 of Great Principles." Our wonder is, that, with these views, 
 Taylor is so sanguine in his expectation of good from some of 
 the methods of spreading or defending Christianity which at 
 present prevail. He believes that we are to have help from 
 on high ; and yet he seems hardly to believe that we absolutely 
 need it, and that all our present schemes and buttresses can 
 only break the wave of assault, but cannot increase much far- 
 ther the aggressive power of our faith. 
 
 We shall never forget our first perusal of the " Natural 
 History of Enthusiasm." It was in golden summer-tide, in 
 the fair city of Perth, with the Tay adding its fine murmured 
 symphony, and with the blood of eighteen beating almost 
 audibly in our veins, as we read aloud some of its more glow- 
 ing passages. We remember no prose work, with the excep- 
 tion of Chalmers's " Astronomical Discourses," and Hazlitt's 
 " Lectures on English Poetry," by which we were ever so 
 much electrified. We did not then perceive, or at least feel, 
 its faults the splendida vitia of its style, or the hasty gen- 
 eralizations of much of its thinking; but the compound it 
 presented of philosophic tone, poetic genius, and pious spirit, 
 was to us then as new as it was welcome. We had waded 
 through much metaphysics of the Locke and Hume school as 
 through dusty sand we had revelled in the poetry of Milton, 
 Byron, Cowper, and Thomson we had read all the common 
 theological writers but here we found a species of writing 
 which seemed to include all the elements which were presented 
 separately in the other three classes, and we were tempted to 
 cry Eureka ! Years and after-reading have somewhat modi- 
 fied our estimate ; we would not now compare the " Natural 
 History of Enthusiasm," for suggestiveness, originality, and 
 richness of thought, to such books as Foster's " Essays," 
 which gained more slowly our admiration. The style now 
 seems to us forced and unnatural ; but still the treatise must 
 ever have its place and praise as a masterly and powerful 
 analysis of one of the most singular phases of the human 
 mind ; perhaps the first upon the same scale ever conducted at 
 once on philosophical and Christian principles. 
 
 It added considerably at the time to the interest of this
 
 72 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHOKS. 
 
 treatise first, that the author's name was unknown; and, 
 secondly, that it appeared at nay, properly speaking, sprang 
 out of a period when men's minds were much agitated, and 
 when many " expected that the kingdom of God should imme- 
 diately appear." Wrapt in soft shadows, another great un- 
 known had come upon the stage. How interesting the two 
 alternatives presented ! If it was an old friend, what a univer- 
 sal genius to be able to present a face so new ! If a new au- 
 thor, and especially a young one, what a Christian Colossus 
 he must be ! And then the tone he assumed was very pecu- 
 liar and exciting from its decision, its moderation, its avoid- 
 ance of extremes, and its oracular depth and dignity. He 
 seemed the very man for the hour ! He commenced with 
 recogising distinctly the existence and the uses of genuine en- 
 thusiasm ; nor did he deny the fact that there were prospects 
 in the future of Christianity which might justify unbounded 
 ardor of expectation ; but, having premised this, he proceeded 
 to grasp the reins of the rushing chariot, to curb the fiery 
 steeds, to guard them by the bounds of Scripture, and to 
 guide them on to the goal of common sense. You saw evi- 
 dences in the book that the author was one in whose veins the 
 tide of enthusiasm had originally boiled very strongly ; but 
 who had, by culture, by stern investigation, and by habitual 
 submission to the Word of God, modified and tained it ; so 
 that, while no critic could call him cold, none could accuse 
 him of undue warmth. The book consequently became very 
 popular was strongly commended by Dr. Chalmers from his 
 chair was widely circulated and closely imitated by a large 
 class of aspiring youths. Hall alone, with his usual fastidi- 
 ousness, objected to the style, which, he said, " wearied and 
 fretted his mind," and with his usual acuteness, saw and 
 pointed out proofs that the author was seeking to disguise 
 himself by a terminology in part affected. 
 
 Taylor's second work was his " Saturday Evening." We 
 shall speak, however, first of his " Fanaticism." The subject 
 of Fanaticism was less pleasing than that of Enthusiasm, and 
 the execution not so happy. In his first work, his field lay 
 mainly in the first three centuries, when the Christian Faith 
 sat like morning upon the mountains a dawn already indeed 
 partially overcast, but still a dawn, fresh, strong and beauti-
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 73 
 
 ful. In his third, he was compelled to pierce the shadow of 
 that deep eclipse which shrouded religion and the middle ages 
 in night, and during which the baleful fires of superstition 
 and fanaticism produced a horrid counterfeit of day. In his 
 first work you saw Stylites on his pillar; the religious hermit 
 in his cave; the enthusiast meditating below the large stars 
 of that sky which had kindled the poetic splendors of a Job. 
 In " Fanaticism" you saw the lonely monk brooding, or ago- 
 nising, or studying, or sinning in his gloomy cell ; the Arabian 
 soldier twanging his bowstring, flourishing his scimitar, and 
 shouting, " No God but Allah, and no prophet but Ma- 
 homet;" the stern Crusader, with all the passions of hell in 
 his heart as he stepped from his galley on the shore of Holy 
 Land, and expanded in the sultry atmosphere the standard of 
 the Cross: the sullen inquisitor dreaming of ghastlier dresses 
 for the victims of future auto-da-fes, or of drier dry-pans and 
 slower fires, and deeper dungeons for the enemies of Holy 
 Mother Church ; and the savage persecutor lifting up his 
 torch, and with an eye fiercer than it, stepping forward to the 
 pile, and completing the poet's image of the 
 
 " Pale martyr in his shirt of fire," 
 
 Most powerful were some of Taylor's pictures, and profound 
 not a few of his disquisitions ; but, as a whole, the work 
 rather pained and horrified, than satisfied or delighted. It 
 was a faithful daguerreotype of a disgusting subject ; and a 
 portion of the disgust was reflected upon the execution, and 
 laid in charge to the artist. 
 
 Without dwelling on Taylor's " Physical Theory of Another 
 Life," his " Spiritual Despotism," or his contributions to the 
 Tractariau controversy, we come to his best work, the " Sat- 
 urday Evening," This is a series of most interesting, and 
 often profound, meditations on such subjects as the stars; the 
 future world ; the relation in which our earth stands to the 
 universe ; and the future struggles and triumphs of the church. 
 Compared to all the other meditations in the language, those 
 of Taylor are Colossal in their merit. His chapters on the 
 vastness of the material universe are particularly striking. 
 No one has better expressed the unostentatious and silent 
 force with which the u Heavens declare the glory of God, and
 
 74 A CONSTELLATION OP BACHED AUTHOR 5. 
 
 the firmament showeth his handiwork." They tell so much, 
 and that so quietly ! Silently the sun comes out of nis cham- 
 bers ; silently the great moon climbs the September air, and 
 silently she looks down on the silvered sea and the yellow 
 corn ; silently, one by one, come forth the host of heaven j 
 silently stretches away that stream of suns the galaxy ; 
 silently, as ghosts of rivers, do its two arms diverge, and wan- 
 der on ; and silently does even the comet, on his fiery wheels, 
 enter the shuddering sky. Were it otherwise, we could not 
 endure their mighty speech. What ear could bear to listen 
 to the thunder of the axle-tree of the sun as he passed us by ; 
 or even to that " sphere music" fabled of old to pervade the 
 universe ? Were it otherwise, in another sense still were we 
 to become conversant with the moral laws and conditions of 
 the Great Whole our state of seclusion would be entirely 
 broken up, and our probation interrupted. But here, too, all 
 is silence. And yet " there is no speech and no language 
 where their voice is not heard." They speak in concert and 
 perfect harmony. Even the comet that has abruptly and with- 
 out warning swum into this autumn sky is not contradicting, 
 but confirming, the silvery utterance of every smallest planet 
 that shivers out the name " God" to the listening night. They 
 speak constantly " day unto day uttering speech night unto 
 night teaching knowledge" the sun passing on to Sirius, and 
 he to Arcturus, and Arcturus to Ursa Major and his sons, 
 and they to Orion the great revolving chorus. They speak 
 universally ; for where is there a spot so solitary where that 
 star is not seen ? and how, at this very hour, are a thousand 
 observatories, and ten thousand times ten thousand eyes, gaz- 
 ing at our fiery stranger as he is telling them in his own mys- 
 terious speech concerning his Creator ! They speak with 
 divine majesty ; and Taylor, to show this in the most striking 
 manner, takes us away to the remoter planets of the system, 
 where the sun is faint and sickly with distance where the 
 glory of alien firmaments seeks to struggle through the noon ; 
 where, at evening, our earth is seen afar off as a dim trembling 
 speck on the verge of the sky ; and where, at night, a solid 
 flood of splendor seems to burst from every pore and crevice 
 of the crowded heavens ! 
 
 Returning to the earth again, our author fails not to give
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 75 
 
 her her true place in the august system. Little as she rela- 
 tively is, she has a peculiar importance as a spot selected for 
 the development of certain great moral purposes of the Al- 
 mighty. Here have been announced tidings of vastly greater 
 importance than all these skies ever have uttered, or ever can. 
 These ancient heavens, young too as on creation's day, yet 
 cannot assure us of God's infinity only of his prodigious su- 
 periority to the children of men. All the crowded space we 
 see or can imagine, bears no more proportion to real infinitude 
 than a man's hand does to the marble firmament. That sur- 
 passing truth must come from the profundities of our own men- 
 tal and moral nature. The heavens cannot reveal the Father. 
 They show a vague kindness, floating to and fro; but not a 
 special love searching for, to embrace, its children. Of fallen 
 stars they do assure us ; but they tell us not that WE have 
 fallen from a height higher far than they. Concerning Christ's 
 salvation, too, they are dumb. The " bright and morning 
 star" shines not amid those forests of fire. And on man's 
 immortality they cast not a gleam of light : although for ages 
 they have been shining on his grave. For all this intelligence 
 we must go below, or rather above the stars 'to the Bible 
 "the Book of God -say, rather, God of Books;" and to 
 this star of Bethlehem, Taylor reverently and tenderly con- 
 ducts us. 
 
 Years have elapsed since we read the " Saturday Evening," 
 and yet we believe that in our two last paragraphs we have 
 not misrepresented the author's purport, although the language 
 and imagery are our own. We wish we had time to proceed 
 and analyze some of the other papers, especially those in which 
 he paints the approaching days of earth. The author of the 
 " Coming Struggle" has terribly vulgarized that field of Ar- 
 mageddon. How differently does Taylor, uplifting as he goes 
 " the shout of a king," tread its mist-covered but magnificent 
 plain ! Read, to see this, the noble paper entitled, " The 
 Last Conflict of Great Principles," or one or two of the chap- 
 ters which succeed. We wish, too, that we could follow his 
 daring but holy guidance in amid the celestial ardors, and the 
 heavenly hierarchies, rising (as in David Scott's immortal il- 
 lustrations of the " Pilgrim's Progress,) tier above tier, circle 
 above circle, gallery above gallery, towards the ineffable blaze
 
 76 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 of glory which terminates the view, and in which other sys- 
 tems, and firmaments, and orders of being are dimly discovered, 
 as in a shaded mirror, or seen swimming like motes in the 
 sunbeam. But we forbear, and simply recommend all these 
 contemplations of the most contemplative mind of modern 
 days to our readers. Being " nothing if not critical," we 
 might have dwelt on some of Ta} r lor's faults on his occasional 
 affectations of manner, turgidities of language, and confusions 
 of imagery. But this is useless, as, in spite of all these, and 
 partly perhaps in consequence of them, he has already obtain- 
 ed a fixed and lofty position among our prose religious writers. 
 We shall merely, ere closing this paper, advise him, in the 
 name of all his genuine admirers, to give up lecturing in pub- 
 lic. This is a field which most men of his order are gradually 
 resigning, in weai-iness or disgust. It is a field, too, for which 
 he is not specially or at all qualified. His manner and de- 
 livery are bad his voice husky, and perpetually interrupted 
 by a cough his matter, admirable as it seems in the closet, 
 falls fiat and dead on a popular audience; and, to crown all, 
 he chose a subject precisely the worst he could have selected 
 for such people as haunted his lecture-rooms, many of whom 
 were the genuine disciples of Theodore Parker and George 
 Dawson. He lectured ou the "Poetry of the Bible;" and 
 his enlightened audience cheered him while he was present, 
 and after their usual manner, abused him when he had depart 
 ed (in, we trust, happy ignorance of their feelings) from 
 amongst them. 
 
 NO. III.-ROBERT HALL. 
 
 EGBERT HALL is a name we, in common with all Christians 
 of this century, of all denominations, deeply venerate and ad- 
 mire. We are not, however, to be classed among his idola- 
 ters ; and this paper is meant as a calm and comprehensive 
 view of what appear to us, after many needful deductions from 
 the over-estimates of the past, including our own in a former
 
 ROBERT HALL. 77 
 
 paper, to bo his real characteristics, but in point of merit, of 
 fault, and of simple deficiency. 
 
 We labor, like all critics who have never seen their author, 
 under considerable disadvantages. " Knowledge is power.'' 
 Still more craving Lord Bacon's pardon " vision is power." 
 Csesar said a similar thing when he wrote Vidi, vici. To see 
 is to conquer, if you happen to have the faculty of clear, full, 
 conclusive sight. In other cases, the sight of a man whom 
 you misappreciate, and, though you have eyes, cannot see, is 
 a curse to your conception of his character. You look at him 
 through a mist of prejudice, which discolors his visage, and, 
 even when it exaggerates, distorts his stature. Far other- 
 wise with the prepared, yet unprepossessed look of intelligent 
 love. Love hears a voice others cannot hear, and sees a hand 
 others cannot see. In every man of genius, besides what he 
 says, and the direct exhibition he gives of the stores of his 
 mind, there is a certain indescribable something a prepon- 
 derance of personal influence a mesmeric affection a magi- 
 cal charm. You feel that a great spirit is beside you, even 
 though he be talking mere commonplace, or toying with chil- 
 dren. Just as when you are walking through a wood at the 
 foot of a mountain, you do not see the mountain, you see only 
 glimpses of it, but you know it is there ; in the find old word, 
 you are "aware" of its presence; and, having once seen (as 
 one who has newly lost his burden continues for a little to 
 imagine it on his shoulders still), you fancy you are still see- 
 ing it. This pressure of personal interest and power always 
 dwindles works in the presence of their authors, suggests their 
 possible ideal of performance, and starts the question, What 
 folio or library of folios can enclose that soul ? The soul it- 
 self of the great man often responds to 'this feeling takes up 
 all its past doings as a little thing " paws" like the war- 
 horse in Job after higher achievements and, like Byron, 
 pants for a lightning-language, a quicker, fierier cypher, " that 
 it may wreak its thought upon expression;" but is forced, 
 like him, to exclaim 
 
 " But, as it is, I live and die unheard, 
 With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."
 
 78 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS 
 
 Those who met and conversed with Robert Hall seem all to 
 have felt this singular personal charm this stream of " vir- 
 tue going out of him" this necessary preponderance over his 
 company. Nor was this entirely the effect of the pomp and 
 loftiness of his manner and bearing, although both were loftier 
 than perhaps beseemed his Christian character. We have 
 known, indeed, men of mediocre, and less than mediocre 
 talents, exerting an uneasy and crushing influence over far su- 
 perior persons, through the sheer power of a certain stiff and 
 silent pomp, added to an imposing personal appearance. We 
 know, too, some men of real genius, whose overbearing 
 haughtiness and determination to take the lead in conversation 
 render them exceedingly disagreeable to many, disgusting to 
 pome, and yet command attention, if not terror, from all. But 
 Robert Hall belonged to neither of these classes. He might 
 rather be ranked with those odd characters, whose mingled 
 genius and eccentricity compel men to listen to them, and 
 whose pomp, and pride, and overbearing temper, and extrava- 
 gant bursts, are pardoned, as theirs, and because they are 
 counterbalanced by the qualities of their better nature. 
 
 We have met with some of those who have seen and heard 
 him talk and preach, and their accounts have coincided in this 
 that he was more powerful in the parlor than in the pulpit. 
 He was more at ease in the former. He had his pipe in his 
 mouth, his tea-pot beside him, eager ears listening to catch 
 his every whisper bright eyes raining influence on him ; and, 
 under these varied excitements, he was sure to shine. His 
 spirits rose, his wit flashed, his keen and pointed sentences 
 thickened, and his auditors began to imagine him a Baptist 
 Burke, or a Johnson Redivivus, and to wish that Boswell 
 were to undergo a resurrection too. In these evening parties 
 he appeared, we suspect, to greater advantage than in the 
 mornings, when ministers from all quarters called to see the 
 lion of Leicester, and tried to tempt him to roar by such 
 questions as, " Whether do you think, Mr. Hall, Cicero or 
 Demosthenes the greater orator ? Was Burke the author of 
 ' Junius ?' Whether is Bentham or Wilberforce the leading 
 spirit of the age?" &c., &c. How Hall kept his gravity or 
 his temper, under such a fire of queries, not to speak of the 
 smoke of the half putrid incense amid which it came forth, we
 
 ROBERT HALL. 79 
 
 eannot tell. He was, however, although a vehement and irri- 
 table, a very polite mau ; and, like Dr. Johnson, he " loved 
 to fold his legs, and have his talk out." Many of his visitors, 
 too, were really distinguished men, and were sure, when they 
 returned home, to circulate his repartees, and spread abroad 
 his fame. Hence, even in the forenoons, he sometimes said 
 brilliant things, many of which have been diligently collected 
 by the late excellent Dr. Balmer and others, and are to be 
 found in his memoirs. 
 
 Judging by these specimens, our impression of his conver- 
 sational powers is distinct and decided. His talk was always 
 rapid, ready, clear, and pointed often brilliant, not unfre- 
 quently wild and daring. He said more good and memorable 
 things in the course of an evening than perhaps any talker of 
 his day. To the power of his talk it contributed that his 
 state of body required constant stimulus. Owing to a pain in 
 his spine, he was obliged to swallow daily great quantities of 
 ether and laudanum, not to speak of his favorite potion, tea, 
 This had the effect of keeping him strung up always to the 
 highest pitch ; and, while never intoxicated, he was everlast- 
 ingly excited. Had he been a feebler man in body and mind, 
 the regimen would have totally unnerved him. As it was, it 
 added greatly to the natural brilliance of his conversational 
 powers, although sometimes it appears to have irritated his 
 temper, and to have provoked ebullitions of passion and hasty, 
 unguarded statement. It was in such moods that he used to 
 abuse Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Pollok, and Edward 
 Irving. He often, too, talked for effect; and his judgments 
 were sometimes exceedingly capricious and self-contradictory. 
 Society was essential to him. It relieved that " permanent 
 shade of gloom" which the acute eye of Foster saw lying on 
 his soul. He rushed to it as into his native air ; and, once 
 there, he sometimes talked for victory and display, and often 
 on subjects with which he was very imperfectly acquainted. 
 We cannot wonder that, when he met on one occasion with 
 Coleridge, they did not take to each -other. Both had been 
 accustomed to lead in conversation ; and, like two suns in one 
 eky, they began to " fight in their courses," and made the at- 
 mosphere too hot to hold them. Coleridge, although not so 
 ready, rapid, and sharp, was far profounder, wider, and more
 
 80 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS, 
 
 suggestive in his conversation. Hall's talk, like his style, 
 consisted of rather short, pointed, and balanced periods. 
 Coleridge talked, as he wrote, in long, linked, melodious, and 
 flowing, but somewhat rambling and obscure paragraphs. The 
 one talked ; the other lectured. The one was a lively, spark- 
 ling stream ; the other a great, slow, broad, and lipful river. 
 
 A gentleman in Bradford described to us a day he once 
 spent there with Hall. It was a day of much enjoyment and 
 excitement. At the close of it Hall felt exceedingly exhaust- 
 ed ; and, ere retiring to rest, asked the landlady for a wine- 
 glass half-full of brandy. " Now," he says, " I am about to 
 take as much laudanum as would kill all this company ; for if 
 I don't, I won't sleep one moment." He filled the glass with 
 strong laudanum j went to bed; enjoyed a refreshing rest; 
 and came down to breakfast the next morning " the most ma- 
 jestic-looking man " our informant ever saw ; his brow calm 
 and grand ; his eye bright ; his air serene ; and his step and 
 port like those of a superior being, condescending to touch 
 this gross planet. He described his conversation as worthy 
 of his presence the richest and most sparkling essence he 
 ever imbibed withal. Yet his face was far from being a hand- 
 some one. Indeed, it reminded some people of an exaggerated 
 frog's. But the amplitude of his forehead, the brilliance of 
 his eye, and the strength and breadth of his chest, marked 
 him out always from the roll of common men, and added 
 greatly to the momentum both of his conversation and his 
 preaching. 
 
 His preaching has been frequently described, but generally 
 by those who heard him in the decline of his powers. It came 
 to a climax in Cambridge, and was never so powerful after his 
 derangement. To have heard him in Cambridge, must have 
 been a treat almost unrivalled in the history of pulpit-oratory. 
 In the prime of youth and youthful strength, " hope still ris- 
 ing before him, like a fiery column, the dark side not yet 
 turned /" his fancy exuberant ; his language less select, per- 
 haps, but more energetic and abundant than in later days ; 
 full of faith without fanaticism, and of ardor without excess 
 of enthusiasm; with an eye like a coal of fire; a figure, 
 strong, erect, and not yet encumbered with corpulence ; a 
 voice not loud, but sweet, and which ever and anon " trem-
 
 ROBERT HALL. 81 
 
 bled " below his glorious sentences and images, and an utter- 
 ance rapid as a mountain torrent did this young apostle 
 stand up, and, to an audience as refined and intellectual as 
 could then be assembled in England, " preach Christ and him 
 crucified." Sentence followed sentence, each more brilliant 
 than its forerunner, like Venus succeeding Jupiter in the sky, 
 and Luna drowning Venus ; shiver after shiver of delight fol- 
 lowed each other through the souls of the hearers, till they 
 wondered " whereunto this thing should grow," and whether 
 they were in the body or out of the body they could hardly 
 tell. To use the fine words of John Scott, " he unveiled the 
 mighty foundations of the Rock of Ages, and made their 
 hearts vibrate with a strange joy, which they shall recognize 
 in loftier stages of their existence." What a pity that, with 
 the exception of his sermon on Modern Infidelity, all these 
 Cambridge discourses have irrecoverably perished. 
 
 This, however, like Chalmers's similar splendid career in the 
 Tron Church, Glasgow, could not last for ever. Hall became 
 over-excited, perhaps over-elated, and his majestic mind depart- 
 ed from men for a season. When he "came back to us," much 
 of his power and eloquence was gone. His joy of being, too, 
 was lessened. He became a sadder and a wiser man. He no 
 longer rushed exulting to the pulpit, as the horse to the bat- 
 tle. He " spake trembiiug in Israel." He had, in his de- 
 rangement, got a glimpse of the dark mysteries of existence, 
 and was humbled in the dust under the recollection of it. He 
 had met, too, with some bitter disappointments. His love to 
 a most accomplished and beautiful woman was not returned. 
 Fierce spasms of agony ran ever and anon through his body. 
 The terrible disease of madness continued to hang over him 
 all his life long, like the sword of Damocles, by a single hair. 
 All this contributed to soften and also somewhat to weaken 
 his spirit. His preaching became the mild sunset of what it 
 had been. The power, richness, and fervor of his ancient 
 style were for ever gone. 
 
 We have heard his later mode of preaching often described 
 by eye-witnesses. He began in a low tone of voice; as he 
 proceeded his voice rose and his rapidity increased ; the two 
 first thirds of his sermon consisted of statement or argument ; 
 when he neared the close, he commenced a strain of appeal
 
 82 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 and then, and not till then, was there any eloquence ; then his 
 stature erected itself, his voice swelled to its utmost compass, 
 his rapidity became prodigious, and his practical questions 
 poured out in thick succession seemed to sound the very 
 souls of his audience. Next to the impressivencss of the 
 conclusion, what struck a stranger most was the exquisite 
 beauty and balance of his sentences; every one of which 
 seemed quite worthy of, and ready for, the press. Sometimes, 
 indeed, he was the tamest and most commonplace of preach- 
 ers, and men left the church wonderiug if this were actually 
 the illustrious man. 
 
 His Sermons, in their printed form, next demand our con- 
 sideration. Their merits, we think, have been somewhat exag- 
 gerated hitherto, and are likely, in the coming age, to be rated 
 too low. It cannot be fairly maintained that they exhibit a 
 great native original mind like Foster's, or that they are full, 
 as a whole, of rich suggestive thought. The thinking in them 
 is never mere commonplace ; but it never rises into rare and 
 creative originality. In general, he aims only at the elegant 
 and the beautiful, and is seldom sublime. He is not the 
 Moses, or the Milton, or the Young only the Pope, of 
 preachers. Like Pope, his forte is refined sense, expressed in 
 exquisite language. In conversation, he often ventured on 
 daring nights, but seldom in his writings.,, While reading 
 them, so cool is the strain of thought so measured the wri- 
 ting so perfect the self-command so harmoniously do the 
 various faculties of the writer work together that you are 
 tempted to ask, How could the author of this ever have been 
 mad? 
 
 We are far from wishing, by such remarks, to derogate 
 from the merit of these remarkable compositions. For, if 
 not crowded with thought or copious in imagination, and if 
 somewhat stiff, stately, and monotonous in style, they are at 
 once very masculine in thinking, and very elegant in language. 
 If he seldom reaches the sublime, he never condescends to the 
 pretty, or even the neat. He is always graceful, if not often 
 grand. A certain sober dignity distinguishes all his march, 
 and now and then he trembles into touches of pathos or ele- 
 vated sentiment, which are as felicitous as they are delicate. 
 Some of the fragments he has left behind him discover, we
 
 ROBERT HALL. 83 
 
 think, more of the strong, bold conception, and the ms vivida 
 of genius, than his more polished and elaborate productions. 
 Such are his two Sermons on the Divine Concealment. But 
 in all his works you see a mind which had ventured too far 
 and had overstrained its energies in early manhood, and which 
 had come back to cower timidly in its native nest. 
 
 It were wasting time to dwell on sermons so well-known as 
 those of Hall. We prefer that on the death of Dr. Ryland, 
 as more characteristic of his distinguishing qualities of digni- 
 fied sentiment, graceful pathos, and calm, majestic eloquence. 
 In his " Infidelity," and " War," and the " Present Crisis," 
 he grapples with subjects unsuited, on the whole, to his genius, 
 and becomes almost necessarily an imitator, particularly of 
 Burke whose mind possessed all those qualities of origina- 
 tion, power over the terrible, and boundless fertility in which 
 Hall's was deficient. But in Ryland you have himself ; ami 
 we fearlessly pronounce that sermon the most classical and 
 beautiful strain of pulpit eloquence in the English language. 
 
 Hall as a thinker never had much power over the age, and 
 that seems entirely departed. Even as a writer he is not now 
 so much admired. The age is getting tired of measured peri- 
 ods, and is preferring a more conversational and varied style. 
 He has founded no school, and left few stings in the hearts of 
 his hearers. Few have learned much from him. Yet as 
 specimens of pure English, expressing evangelical truth in 
 musical cadence, his sermons and essays have their own place, 
 and it is a high one, among the classical writings of the age. 
 
 Hall, as we have intimated, had a lofty mein, and was 
 thought by many, particularly in a first interview, rather arro- 
 gant and overbearing. But this was only the hard outside 
 shell of his manner; beneath there were profound humility, 
 warm affections, and childlike piety. He said that he " en- 
 joyed everything." But this capacity of keen enjoyment was, 
 as often in other cases, linked to a sensitiveness and morbid 
 acuteness of feeling, which made him at times very melancholy. 
 He was, like all thinkers, greatly perplexed by the mysteries 
 of existence, and grieved at the spectacles of sin and misery 
 in this dark valley of tears. He was like an angel, who had 
 lost his way from heaven, and his wings with it, and who was 
 looking perpetually upwards with a sigh, and longing to re-
 
 84 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 turn We heard, some time ago, one striking story about 
 him. He had been seized with that dire calamity, which had 
 once before laid him aside from public duty, and had been 
 quietly removed to a country-house. By some accident his 
 door had been left unlocked, and Hall rushed out from bed 
 into the open air. It was winter, and there was thick snow 
 on the ground. He stumbled amid the snow and the sudden 
 shock on his half-naked body restored him to consciousness. 
 He knelt down in the snow, and, looking up to heaven, ex- 
 claimed, " Lord, what is man ?" To the constant fear of this 
 malady, and to deep and melancholy thoughts on man and 
 man's destiny, was added what Foster calls an " apparatus of 
 torture " within him a sharp calculus in his spine a thorn 
 in the flesh, or rather in the bone. Yet against all this he 
 manfully struggled, and his death at last might be called a 
 victory. It took him away from the perplexities of this dim 
 dawn of being, where the very light is as darkness from 
 almost perpetual pain, and from the shadow of the grimmest 
 Fear that can hang over humanity and removed him to those 
 regions mild, of calm and serene air, of which he loved to dis- 
 course, where no cloud stains the eternal azure of the holy 
 soul where doubt is as impossible as disbelief or darkness 
 and where God in all the grandeur of his immensity, but in 
 all the softness of his love, is for ever unveiled. There his 
 friends Foster and Chalmers have since joined him ; and it is 
 impossible not to form delightful conjectures as to their meet- 
 ing each other, and holding sweet and solemn fellowship in 
 that blessed region. " Shall we know each other in heaven ?" 
 is a question often asked. And yet why should it be doubted 
 for a moment ? Do the brutes know each other on earth, and 
 shall not the saints in heaven ? Yes ! that notion of a re- 
 union which inspired the soul of Cicero, which made poor 
 Burns exult in the prospect of his meeting with his dear lost 
 Highland Mary, and which Hall, in the close of his sermon 
 on Ryland, has covered with the mild glory of his immortal 
 eloquence, is no dream or delusion. It is one of the " true 
 sayings of God," and there is none more cheering to the soul 
 of the struggler here below. These three master spirits have 
 met, and what a meeting it has been ! The spirit of Foster 
 has lost that sable garment which suspicious conjecture, pry-
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 85 
 
 ing curiosity, and gloomy temperament had woven for it here, 
 and his " raiment doth shine as the light." Chalmers has 
 recovered from the wear and tear of that long battle, and life 
 of tempestuous action which was his lot on earth. And Hall's 
 thorn rankles no longer in his side, and all his fears and fore- 
 bodings have passed away. The long day of eternity is before 
 them all, and words fail us, as we think of the joy with which 
 they anticipate its unbounded pleasures, and prepare for its 
 unwearying occupations. They are above the clouds that en- 
 compassed them once, and they hear the thunders that once 
 terrified or scathed them, muttering harmlessly far, far below. 
 Wondrous their insight, deep their joy, sweet their reminis- 
 cences, ravishing their prospects. But their hearts are even 
 humbler than when they were on earth ; they never weary of 
 saying, " Not unto us, not unto us ;" and the song never dies 
 away on their lips, any more than on those of the meanest and 
 humblest of the saved, " Unto him that loved us and washed 
 us from our sins in his own blood, be glory and honor, domin- 
 ion and power, for ever and ever. Amen." 
 
 NO. V.-DR. CHALMERS. 
 
 THERE are some subjects which seem absolutely inexhausti- 
 ble. They may be compared to the alphabet, which, after 
 5000 years, is capable still of new and infinite combinations 
 or to the sun, whose light is as fresh to-day as it was a million 
 of ages ago or to space, which has opened her hospitable 
 bosom to myriads of worlds, and has ample room for myriads 
 on myriads more. Such a fresh ever-welling theme is Chal- 
 mers, and will remain so for centuries to come ; and we make 
 no apology at all for bidding his mighty shade sit once more 
 for its portrait, from no prejudiced or unloving hand. And 
 here we propose first to give our own reminiscences of him ; 
 then to speak of the characteristics of his genius, eloquence, 
 and purpose ; and, in fine, to examine at some length his most 
 popular work, his "Astronomical Discourses."
 
 86 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 We first heard Dr. Chalmers preach on Sabbath, the 9th of 
 October, 1831, when introducing the Rev. Mr. Martin, of St. 
 George's, Edinburgh, to his flock. Through the kindness of a 
 friend who sat in the church, we obtained, although with diffi- 
 culty, a seat in the very front of the gallery, near a pew in 
 which, on Sabbath, the 8th of February, 1846, we enjoyed a 
 comfortable nap under a sermon from the Rev. Dr. Brunton ! 
 There was no napping THAT forenoon. We went, we remem- 
 ber, with excited but uncertain expectations. We had read 
 Chalmers's "Astronomical Discourses," and had learned to 
 admire them, but had no clear or decided view of their author, 
 and were not without certain Dissenting prejudices against 
 him. Being near-sighted, and the morning being rather dim, 
 we could not catch a distinct glimpse of his features. We 
 saw only a dark large mass of man bustling up the pulpit 
 stairs, as if in some dread and desperate haste. We heard 
 next a hoarse voice, first giving out the psalm in a tone of 
 rapid familiar energy, and after it was sung, and prayer was 
 over, announcing for text, " He that is unjust let him be un- 
 just still (stull, he pronounced it), he that is filthy (fultky, he 
 called it), let him be filthy still, and he that is righteous, let 
 him be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be holy 
 stull.' 1 ' 1 And then, like an eagle leaving the mountain cliff, he 
 launched out at once upon his subject, and soared on without 
 any diminution of energy or flutter of wing for an hour and 
 more. The discourse is published, and most of our readers 
 have probably read it. It had two or three magnificent pas- 
 sages, which made the audience for a season one soul. A 
 burst especially we remember, in reference to the materialism 
 of heaven " There may be palms of triumph, I do not know 
 there may be floods of melody," and then he proceeded to show 
 that heaven was more a state than a place. On the whole, 
 however, we were disappointed, as indeed we were, at the first 
 blush, with all the Edinburgh notabilities. Strange as it may 
 seem, neither Wilson, nor Chalmers, nor Professor Leslie, nor 
 Dr. Gordon, nor Jeffrey, produced, AT FIRST, on us a tithe of 
 the impression which many country ministers, whose names 
 are extant only in the Lamb's Book of Life, had easily and 
 ineffaceably left. We learned, indeed, afterwards to admire 
 Wilson and Chalmers to the very depths of our hearts ; and
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 8T 
 
 John Bruce, whom at first, too, we rather disrelished, became 
 ultimately an idol. But, on the whole, our first feeling, in 
 reference to the Edinburgh celebrities, lay and cleric, was that 
 of intense disappointment. 
 
 This feeling would be forgiven by the men themselves, or 
 even by the warmest of their admirers, if they could have 
 seen us. a year or two afterwards, listening to Wilson on the 
 immortality of the soul, to John Bruce on the text, " The 
 sting of death is sin," or to Thomas Chalmers repeating, at 
 the opening of the General Assembly of 1833, the sermon on 
 " He that is fulthy let him be fulthy still." That morning 
 opened in all the splendor" of May and the Assembly which 
 met knew that the Reform Bill had passed since its last ses- 
 sion, and that it must become perforce a reforming Assembly 
 too. Chalmers rose to the greatness of the occasion. After 
 delivering, with greatly increased energy, all the original dis- 
 course, he added a new peroration of prodigious power, draw 
 ing the attention of his " Fathers and Brethren " to the cir- 
 cumstances in which they were placed, and to the duties to 
 which they were called. It told like a thunderbolt. Even 
 the gallery, which was half empty, was absolutely electrified ; 
 and the divinity students and young ladies who had been per- 
 severingly ogling each other there, were compelled to turn 
 their eyes and hearts away towards the glowing countenance 
 and heaving form of the " old man eloquent." 
 
 We occasionally heard him, too, in his class-room, always 
 with great interest and often with vivid delight. Our tone of 
 enthusiasm, however, was somewhat restrained, from our fre- 
 quent intercourse with his students, who in general over-rated 
 him, and were sometimes disposed to cry out, " It is the voice 
 of a god, not of a man," and whose imitations of his style and 
 manner were frequent, and grotesquely unsuccessful. We 
 never but once heard him there rise to his highest pitch. It 
 was at the close of a lecture illustrating the character and 
 claims of Christianity ; when, grasping, as it were, all around 
 him (like an assaulted man for a sword), in search of a yet 
 stronger proof of his point, he lifted up his own " Astronomi- 
 cal Discourses," and read (with a brow flushing like a crystal 
 goblet newly filled with wine an eye glaring with sudden 
 excitation a voice " pealing harsh thunder " and a motion
 
 88 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 as if some shirt of Nessus had just fallen upon his shoulders 
 amid dead silence) the following passage : 
 
 " Let the priests of another faith ply their prudential expe- 
 dients, and look so wise and so wary in the execution of them ; 
 but Christianity stands in a higher and firmer attitude. The 
 defensive armor of a shrinking or timid policy does not suit 
 her. Hers is the naked majesty of truth ; and with all the 
 grandeur of age, but with none of its infirmities, has she come 
 down to us, and gathered new strength from the battles she 
 has won in the many controversies of many generations. With 
 such a religion as this there is nothing to hide. All should 
 be above-boards ; and the broadest light of day should be 
 made fully and freely to circulate through all her secrecies. 
 But secrets she has none. To her belong the frankness and 
 simplicity of conscious greatness." 
 
 This is eloquent writing ; but where the fiery edge of Bardic 
 power which seemed to surround it as he spoke? That is 
 gone ; and the number must fast lessen of those who now can 
 remember those strange accompaniments of Chalmers's elo> 
 quence the uplifted, half-extracted eye the large flushed 
 forehead the pallor of the cheek contrasting with it the 
 eager lips the mortal passion struggling within the heaving 
 breast the furious motions of the short, fin-like arms, and 
 the tones of the voice, which seemed sometimes to be grinding 
 their way down into your ear and soul. 
 
 We heard Chalmers once, and only once, again. It was in 
 Dundee, in the spring of 1839. The audience was crowded, 
 although it was a week-day, and only afternoon. The object 
 of the discourse was to defend church extension. For an 
 hour or so the lecturer was chiefly employed in statistical de- 
 tails. He lifted up, and read occasional extracts from certain 
 dingy, and as he called them, " delightful ill-spelled letters," 
 from working men in support of the object. Toward the end 
 he became more animated, and closed a brilliant burst of ten 
 minutes' duration by quoting the lines of Burns : 
 
 " From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs; 
 
 These make her loved at home, revered abroad. 
 Princes and lords are but the breath of kin.qs ; 
 An honest man's the noblest work of God."
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 39 
 
 The effect was overwhelming. We happened, in leaving the 
 church, to pass near the orator, and were greatly struck with 
 the rapt look of his face 
 
 " The wind was down, but still the sea ran high." 
 
 A certain pallid gleam had succeeded the flushed ardor of his 
 appearance in the pulpit. It was the last time we were ever 
 to gaze on the strange, coarse, but most powerful and meaning 
 countenance of Dr. Chalmers. 
 
 And yet when, years later, we saw Duncan's picture of him, 
 he seemed still alive before us. The leonine massiveness of 
 the head, body, and brow the majestic repose of the atti- 
 tude the eye withdrawn upwards into a deep happy dream 
 the air of simple homely grandeur about the whole person 
 and bearing were all those of Chalmers, and combined to 
 prove him next, perhaps, to Wilson, the Genius of Scotland 
 the hirsute Forest-God of a rugged but true-hearted land. 
 
 It was this air of unshorn power which marked him out 
 from all his ecclesiastical contemporaries, and contributed in 
 some measure to his popularity. Scotland " the land of 
 mountain and of flood" loves that her idols shall be large 
 and shaggy. Think of her worship of the rough John Knox 
 of the stalwart sons of the Covenant of Burns and Wilson, 
 the two tameless spirits ! and of her own homely, all-reflect- 
 ing, ami simple Sir Walter Scott. What cares she, in com- 
 parison with these, for her polished Robertsons and Jeffreys ? 
 
 It is well remarked by Jeffreys, in vindicating the Scottish 
 language from the charge of vulgarity, that it is not the lan- 
 guage of a province, like Yorkshire, but of an ancient and in- 
 dependent kingdom. So Chalmers's peculiarities and rough- 
 ness of speech were those of the ancient " kingdom of Fife;" 
 and in his " whuches," and his " fulthies," and his bad quan- 
 tities, after the first blush there was found a strange antique 
 charm they were of the earth, earthy, and suited the stout 
 aboriginal character of the man. His roughness was but the 
 rough grating of the wheels of the huge and wealthy wain, as 
 it moved homewards over a rocky road, amid the autumn twi- 
 light, and told of rude plenty and of massive power. 
 
 The effects of his eloquence have been often described. 
 Many orators have produced more cheers, and shone more in
 
 90 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 brilliant individual points : Chalmers's power lay in pressing 
 on his whole audience before him, through the sheer momen- 
 tum of genius and enthusiasm. He treated his hearers as con- 
 stituting " one mind," and was himself " one strength," urging 
 it, like a vast stone, upwards. In this he very seldom failed. 
 He might not always convince the understandings he often 
 offended the tastes ; but, unlike Sisyphus, he pushed his stone 
 to the summit he secured at least a temporary triumph. 
 
 This he gained greatly from the intensity of his views, as 
 well as from the earnestness of his temperament, and the 
 splendor of his genius. He had strong, clear, angular, although 
 often one-sided and mistaken, notions on the subjects he 
 touched ; and these, by incessant reiteration, by endless turn- 
 ing round, by dint of dauntless furrowing, he succeeded in 
 ploughing into the minds of his hearers. Or it seemed a pro- 
 cess of stamping " I must press such and such a truth on 
 them, whether they hear or forbear. I shall stamp on till it 
 is fixed undeniably and for ever upon their minds." Add to 
 this the unconsciousness of himself. He never seemed^ at 
 least, to be thinking about himself, nor very much of his hear- 
 ers. He was occupied entirely with those " big bulking" ideas 
 of which he was the mere organ, and he taught his audience to 
 think of them principally too. How grand it was to witness 
 a strong and gifted man transfigured into the mere medium of 
 an idea ! his whole body so filled with its light that you 
 seemed to see it shining through him, as through a transparent 
 vase ! 
 
 His imagination was a quality in him of which much non- 
 sense used to be said. It was now made his only faculty, and 
 now it was described as of the Shakspeare or Jeremy Taylor 
 order. In fact, it was not by any means even his highest 
 power. Strong, broad, Baconian logic was his leading faculty ; 
 and he had, besides, a boundless command of a certain order 
 of language, as well as all the burning sympathies and ener- 
 gies of the orator. Taking him all in all, he was unquestion- 
 ably a man of lofty genius ; but it very seldom assumed the 
 truly poetic form, and was rather warm than rich. Power of 
 illustration he possessed in plenty ; but in curiosa felicitas, 
 short, compact, hurrying strokes as of lightning, and that fine 
 sudden imagery in which strong and beautiful thought so na-
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 91 
 
 turally incarnates itself, he was rather deficient. He was, 
 consequently, one of our least terse and quotable authors. 
 Few sentences, collecting in themselves the results of long 
 trains of thinking, in a new and sparkling form like " apples 
 of gold in a network of silver" are to be found in his wri- 
 tings. Nor do they abound in bare, strong aphorisms. Let 
 those who would see his deficiency in this respect compare him, 
 not with the Jeremy Taylors, Barrows, and Donnes, merely, 
 but with the Burkes, Hazlitts, and Goleridges of a later day, 
 and they will understand our meaning. His writings remind 
 you rather of the sublime diffusiveness of a Paul, than of the 
 deep, solitary, and splendid dicta of the great Preacher-King 
 of ancient Israel. 
 
 A classic author he is not, and never can become. From 
 this destiny, his Scotticisms, vulgarities, and new combina- 
 tions of sounds and words, do not necessarily exclude him ; 
 but his merits (as a MERE LITERARY man) do not counter- 
 balance his defects. The power of the works, in fact, was not 
 equal to the power of the man. He always, indeed, threw his 
 heart, but not always his artistic consciousness, into what he 
 wrote. Hence he is generally " rude in speech, although not 
 in knowledge." His utterance is never confused, but is often 
 hampered, as of one speaking in a foreign tongue. This some- 
 times adds to the effect of his written composition it often 
 added amazingly to the force of those extempore harangues he 
 was in the habit of uttering, amid the intervals of his lectures, 
 to his students. Those stammerings, strugglings, repetitions, 
 risings from and sittings down into his chair often, however, 
 coming to some fiery burst, or culminating in some rapid and 
 victorious climax reminded you of Wordsworth's lines : 
 
 " So have I, not unmoved in mind, 
 Seen birds of tempest-loving kind, 
 Thus beating up against the wind." 
 
 You liked to see this strong-winged bird of the storm match- 
 ing his might against it now soaring up to overcome it now 
 sinking down to undermine it now screaming aloud in its 
 teeth now half-choked in the gust of its fury but always 
 moving onwards, and sometimes riding triumphant on its
 
 92 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 changed or subjugated billow ! But all this did not (except 
 to those who had witnessed the phenomenon) tend to increase 
 the artistic merit or permanent effect of his works. 
 
 No oratory can be printed entire. Every speaker, who is 
 not absolutely dull and phlegmatic, says something far more 
 through his tones, or eye, or gestures, than his bare words can 
 tell. But this is more the case with some than with others. 
 About the speaking of Whitfield there was a glare of shall 
 we say vulgar ? earnestness, which, along with his theatrical, 
 but transcendent elocution, lives only in tradition. It was 
 the same with Kirwan, a far more commonplace man. Stru- 
 thers, a Relief minister in Edinburgh, at the beginning of this 
 century, seems to have possessed the same incommunicable 
 power, and his sermon on the battle of Trafalgar lives as a 
 miraculous memory on the minds of a few and nowhere else. 
 The late Dr. Heugh, of Glasgow, possessed a Canning-like 
 head, as well as a certain copperplate charm in his address, 
 which have not, as they could not, be transferred to his print- 
 ed sermons. And so, in perhaps a still larger degree, with 
 Dr. Chalmers ; the difference being, that while in the others 
 the manner seemed to fall out from the man, like a gay but 
 becoming garment, in Chalmers it was wrapped convulsively 
 around him, like the mantle of a dying Caesar. It is but his 
 naked body that we now behold. 
 
 Finer still it was, we have been told, to come in suddenly 
 upon the inspired man in his study, when the full heat of his 
 thought had kindled up his being into a flame when, in con- 
 cert with the large winter fire blazing beside him, his eye was 
 flaming and speaking to itself his brow flushing like a cloud 
 in ios solitude his form moving like that of a Pythoness on 
 her stool and now and then his voice bursting silence, and 
 showing that, as often in the church he seemed to fancy him- 
 self in solitude, so, often in solitude, he thought himself 
 thundering in the church. Those who saw him in such moods 
 had come into the forge of the Cyclops ; and yet so far was he 
 from being disturbed or angry, he would rise and salute them 
 with perfect politeness, and even kindliness ; but they were 
 the politeness and kindliness of one who had been interrupted 
 while forming a two-edged sword for Mars, or carving another 
 figure upon the shield of Achilles.
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 93 
 
 It is curious, entering in spirit into the studies or retire- 
 ments of great authors, in the past or the present, and watch- 
 ing their various kinds and degrees of excitement while com- 
 posing their productions. We see a number of interesting 
 figures Homer, with his sightless eyes, but ears preterna- 
 turally open, rhapsodizing to the many-sounding sea his im- 
 mortal harmonies Eschylus, so agitated (according to tradi- 
 tion) while framing his terrible dialogues and choruses, that 
 he might have been mistaken for his own Orestes pursued by 
 the Furies Dante, stern, calm, silent, yet with a fierce glance 
 at times from his hollow eye, and a convulsive movement in 
 his tiger-like lower jaw, telling of the furor that was boiling 
 within Shakspeare, serene even over his tragic, and smiling a 
 gentle smile over his comic, creations Scott, preserving, 
 alike in depicting the siege of Torquilstone, the humors of 
 Caleb Balderstone, and the end of the family of Ravenswood, 
 the same gruff yet good-natured equanimity of countenance 
 Byron, now scowling a fierce scowl over his picture of a ship- 
 wreck, and now grinning a ghastly smile while dedicating his 
 " Don Juan" to Southey Shelley, wearing on his fine features 
 a look of perturbation and wonder, as of a cherub only half fallen, 
 a;;d not yet at home in his blasphemous attitude of opposition 
 to the Most High Wordsworth, murmuring a solemn music 
 over the slowly-filling page of " Ruth," or the " Eclipse in 
 Italy" Coleridge, nearly asleep, and dreaming over his own 
 gorgeous creations, like a drowsy bee in a heather bloom 
 Wilson, as Hogg describes him, when they sat down to write 
 verses in neighboring rooms, howling out his enthusiasm (and 
 when he came to this pitch, poor Hogg uniformly felt himself 
 vanquished, and threw down his pen !) or, in fine, Chalmers, 
 os aforesaid, agonizing in the sweat of his great intellectual 
 travail ! 
 
 We have spoken of Chalmers as possessed of an idea which 
 drowned his personal feelings, and pressed all his powers into 
 one focus. This varied, of course, very much at different 
 stages of his history. It was, at first, that of a purely scien- 
 tific theism. He believed in God as a dry demonstrated fact, 
 which he neither trembled at nor loved whose personality ho 
 granted, but scarcely seems to have felt. From this he pass- 
 ed to a more decided form of belief, worship, and love for the
 
 94 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 great I Am, and is said to have spent a portion of his youth 
 in constant and delighted meditation upon God and his works, 
 like one of the ancient Indian or Egyptian mystics. From 
 this pillar he descended, and, as a preacher, tried to form a 
 compromise between science and a certain shallow and stripped 
 form of Christianity. The attempt was sincere, but absurd 
 in idea, and unsuccessful in execution. The vitality of Chris- 
 tianity became next his darling argument, and was pled by 
 him with unmitigated urgency for many years. Christianity 
 must be alive, active, aggressive, or was no Christianity at all. 
 This argument began, by and by, in his mind to strike out 
 into various branches. If alive and life-giving, Christianity 
 ought to give life, first of all, to literary and scientific men ; 
 secondly, to the commercial classes; thirdly, to the poor; 
 and fourthly, to governments. And we may see this four- 
 headed argument pervadiug his book on Astronomy, his " Ser- 
 mons on Commerce," his " Christian and Civic Economy of 
 large Towns," and his innumerable brochures on the questions 
 of Church Extension and of Non-intrusion. Nay, in his 
 penultimate paper in the " North British Review," we find 
 him, almost with his last breath, renewing the cry for " fruit," 
 as the main answer to that tide of German scepticism which 
 none saw more clearly than he coming over the church and the 
 world. That he always pled this great argument of practical- 
 izing Christianity with discretion or success, we are far from 
 asserting ; nay, we grant that he committed as many blunders 
 as he gained triumphs. Nor have the results been commen- 
 surate. Literary and scientific men have not, alas, listened 
 to the voice of this charmer, but have walked on their own 
 uneasy way, over the " burning marie" of unhappy specula- 
 tion. The commercial spirit of the times is far enough yet 
 from being thoroughly Christianized ; and the golden rule 
 does not yet hang suspended over our warehouses and dock- 
 yards. The poor are, as a mass, sinking every year more and 
 more deeply into the gulfs of infidelity and vice ; and the 
 great problem of how the State is to help if it help at all 
 the Church, seems as far from solution as in the year 1843 or 
 1847. Still, Chalmers has not lived in vain. He has left a 
 burning testimony against many of the crying evils of his 
 time, especially against that Selfishness which is poisoning al-
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 95 
 
 most all ranks alike, and in which, as iu one stagnant pool, so 
 many elements, otherwise discordant, are satisfied to " putrify 
 in peace." He has taken up the reproach of the gospel, and 
 bound it as a crown around his brow. From the most power- 
 ful pulpit in the land, he preached Christ and him crucified. 
 He has created various benevolent and pious movements, 
 which are likely long to perpetuate his memory. And he has 
 laid his hand upon, and to some degree, although not alto- 
 gether, shattered those barriers either absurd iu the folly of 
 man, or awful in the providence of God which have too long 
 separated Christian principle from general progress, the Bible 
 from the people, the pulpit from the press, and made religion 
 little else than " a starry stranger" in an alien land. We ac- 
 cept him as a rude type of better things as the dim day-star 
 of a new and brighter era. 
 
 We linger as we trace over in thought the leading incidents 
 of his well-known story. We see the big-headed, warm-hearted, 
 burly boy, playing upon the beach at Anstruther, and seeming 
 like a gleam of early sunshine upon that coldest of all coasts. 
 We follow him as he strides along with large, hopeful, awk- 
 ward steps to the gate of St. Andrews. We see him, a second 
 Dominie Sampson, in his tutor's garret at Arbroath, in the 
 midst of a proud and pompous family himself as proud, 
 though not so pompous, as they. We follow him next to the 
 peaceful manse of Kilmauy, standing amid its green woods and 
 hills, in a very nook of the land, whence he emerges, now to 
 St. Andrews to battle with the stolid and slow-moving Pro- 
 fessors of that day, now to Dundee to buy materials for 
 chemical research (on one occasion setting himself on fire with 
 some combustible substance, and requiring to run to a farm- 
 house to get himself put out !), now to the woods and hills 
 around to botanise ay, even on the Sabbath-day! and now 
 to Edinburgh to attend the General Assembly, and give earn- 
 est of those great oratorical powers which were afterwards to 
 astonish the Church and the world. With solemn awe we 
 stand by his bedside during that long, mysterious illness, which 
 brought him to himself, and taught him that religion was a re- 
 ality, as profound as sin, sickness, and death. We mark him 
 then, rising up from his couch, like an eagle newly bathed 
 like a giant refreshed and commencing that course of evan-
 
 96 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 gelical teaching and action only to be terminated in the grave. 
 We pursue him to Glasgow, and see him sitting down in a plain 
 house in Sauchiehall Road, and proceeding to write sermons 
 which are to strike that city like a planet, and make him the 
 real King of the West. We mark him next, somewhat worn 
 and wearied, returning to his alma mater, to resume his old 
 games of golf on the Links, his old baths in the Bay, and to 
 give an impetus, which has never yet entirely subsided, to that 
 grass-grown city of Rutherford and Halyburton. Next we see 
 him bursting like a shell this narrow confine, and soaring away 
 to "stately Edinburgh, throned on crags," to become there a 
 principality and power among many, and to give stimulus and 
 inspiration to hosts of young aspirants. 
 
 With less pleasure we follow the after-steps of his career 
 the restless and uneasy agitations in which he engaged, which 
 shook the energies of his constitution, impaired the freshness 
 of his mind, and paved the way for his premature and hasty end. 
 With deep interest, however, we see him sitting at the head of 
 a new and powerful ecclesiastical body, which owed, if not its 
 existence, yet much of its glory, to him ; so that the grey head of 
 Chalmers in that Canonmills Hall seemed to outshine the 
 splendors of mitres, and coronets, and crowns. We watch 
 him with still profounder feelings, preaching to the poor out- 
 casts of the West Port, or sitting like a little child beside 
 them, as others are telling them the simple story of the Cross. 
 We follow him on his " last pilgrimage" to the south con- 
 fronting senates going out of his way to visit the widows of 
 Hall and Foster bursting into the studies of sublime unhap- 
 py sceptics, and giving them a word in season preaching 
 wherever he had opportunity, and returning in haste to die ! 
 And our thoughts and feelings rise to a climax, as we hear the 
 midnight cry, " Behold, the Bridegroom cometh !" raised be- 
 side his couch ; and, entering in, behold the grand old Chris- 
 tian Giant the John Knox of the nineteenth century laid 
 gently on his pillow, asleep, with that sleep which knows no 
 waking, till the trumpet shall sound, and when HE surely shall 
 be among the foremost to rise to meet the Master, and to go in 
 with him into the eternal banqueting-room. 
 
 What divine of the age, on the whole, can we name with 
 Chalmers ? Horsley was, perhaps, an abler man, but where
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 
 
 the moral grandeur ? Hall had the moral grandeur, and a far 
 more cultivated mind ; Foster had a sterner, loftier, and rich- 
 er genius ; but where, in either, the seraphic ardour, activity, 
 and energy of Christian character possessed by Chalmers ? 
 Irving, as an orator, had more artistic skill, and, at the same 
 time, his blood was warm with a more volcanic and poetic fire; 
 but he was only a brilliant fragment, not a whole he was a me- 
 teor to a star a comet to a sun a Vesuvius, peaked, blue, 
 crowned with fire, to a domed Mont Blanc, that altar of God's 
 morning and evening sacrifice, Chalmers stood alone; and 
 centuries may elapse ere the Church shall see and when did 
 she ever more need to see ? another such spirit as he. 
 
 We come now, in fine, to examine the argument of the " As- 
 tronomical Discourses," and to make a few closing remarks on 
 Astronomy, expanding, and in some important points modify- 
 ing, the views propounded in our " First Gallery." 
 
 The " Astronomical Discourses" were a kind of chemico- 
 theologic experiment at the beginning. Chalmers was fond, 
 we know, of turning the air-pump, as well as of pursuing the 
 queerest chemical, or pneumatic, or dietetic whims. Soon af- 
 ter he arrived in Glasgow, and while the city was yet vibrating to 
 the electric shock he gave it on his first entrance, he determined to 
 deepen and prolong the thrill, by snatching an argument for 
 Christianity from the stars. He had often gazed at the gleaming 
 host of Heaven, now with the mathematical purpose of the 
 astronomer, and now with the abandonment and enthusiasm of 
 the poet. Along with stars, doubts and dark questions had 
 shot across his soul, and he set himself, in his " Astronomical 
 Discourses," in seeking to answer the objections of others, to 
 give and to enshrine the reply to his own. 
 
 Sooth to say, the answer was about as shallow as the argu- 
 ment. All attacks on Christianity founded on physics are es- 
 sentially and ab originie worthless. Christianity has nothing 
 whatever to do with physical or metaphysical conjectures about 
 the conformation of the universe ; and nothing yet has trans- 
 pired beyond conjecture on that wondrous theme. Even grav- 
 itation is but a big- sounding name for a series of inscrutable 
 affinities between larger and lesser particles of matter ; and 
 truly did Newton call himself a boy, gathering, in his resplen- 
 dent generalisations, only a few bigger and brighter pebbles on
 
 98 A CONSTELLATION OF BACHED AUTHORS. 
 
 the shore of the unsearchable ocean of truth. Even the peb- 
 bles HE gathered may yet be more severely analysed and found 
 perhaps to be air ! In metaphysics it is still worse. For there 
 we have not even pebbles ; but a shower of conflicting sand- 
 grains tossed up and down upon breaths as vain and varied as 
 the winds of the African wilderness ! 
 
 Across this wide and burning waste of stones and shifting 
 sands of thought, there came, 2000 years ago, a still small voice 
 the voice of the Man-G-od of Galilee, saying, nor saying in 
 vain, " Peace, be still." He was no physicist only the 
 waves obeyed his voice^ He was no metaphysician only He 
 " knew what was in man." He never discoursed on sympathy 
 or patriotism, but His heart bled at the tales and sight of the 
 wretched, the forlorn, and the forgotten. He uttered no dog- 
 matic system either of morality, or politics, or religion, but he 
 spoke as never man spake ; He breathed, as it were, on the 
 world, and it revived at the breath ; His word was the inspi- 
 ration, His death the life, and His last blessing the legacy of 
 the world. His faith at once established itself as something 
 entirely different from, and incomparably higher than all earth- 
 ly systems and theories. It appealed directly to the moral 
 nature. It sought and found an echo in the heart and con- 
 science. There it fixed, and there it still holds its inexpugn- 
 able foundations. It is friendly to all true philosophy, and 
 science, and literature ; but it regards them as we could con- 
 ceive an angel regarding an assembly of earthly sages. It is 
 not of their order. It is impassive to all scientific attacks, 
 and hardly requires scientific defence. It dwells apart a glo- 
 rious anomaly, even as its founder was. It is a stranger on 
 the earth, and its great purpose is to gather its own out of this 
 ruined world, and to take them away to heaven. 
 
 Hence, we repeat, attacks, however able and ingenious, may 
 seem to shake, but cannot overturn it. They have never been 
 able to approach its seat of life or its fortress of power. What, 
 for example, has it to do with the length of time taken up in 
 building this globe, or with the size of the starry firmament ? 
 Christ came not to give any information on these subjects, but 
 to announce the " golden rule." Paul preached not on such 
 topics, but on righteousness, temperance, and judgment to 
 come. The gospel is a message of mercy to a fallen race, and
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 99 
 
 bears no other burden with it. It has not been elicited or 
 elaborated from the universe, or the mind of man it has come 
 into both from a higher region, and it is not amenable to the 
 laws of this cold and cloudy clime. Shake its power over the 
 moral nature, and you destroy its essence ; but, as long as this 
 remains, all minor difficulties and objections pass by like the 
 idle wind. 
 
 Dr. Chalmers does not seem, at least when writing his 
 " Astronomical Discourses," to have been sufficiently im- 
 pressed with these views of Christianity. He was, on the 
 contrary, anxious to find for it a scientific basis, and to an- 
 swer all scientific objections. He found one of these floating 
 about in conversation it had probably often impressed his 
 own mind and he must drag it forth and put it to death. 
 This attempt he has made with prodigious energy, but, we 
 humbly think, with indifferent success. He has mangled, it 
 may be, the neck of the victim with his steel, but he has not 
 deprived it even of the little life it had. 
 
 The first of these famous sermons is a powerful sketch of 
 the modern astronomy. It blazes like a January Heaven. 
 He mounts up toward his magnificent theme like a strong 
 eagle toward the sun, and his eye never winks, and his wing 
 never for a moment flags. We, who have been so long famil- 
 iar with the facts of astronomy, have no conception of the 
 freshness and the overwhelming force with which, in Chalmers's 
 style, they fell on a Presbyterian Glasgow audience in the 
 year 1817. Few of the common class of Calvinists in Scot- 
 land, at that date, were even Copernicans ; down as far as the 
 year 1825 or 1826, we have heard some of them gravely main- 
 taining that there were only " two worlds that which is, and 
 that which is to come." How amazed must these readers of 
 Boston's " Fourfold State" have been, to hear their most 
 admired divine pouring out his sublime Newtonics from the 
 Tron Church pulpit with such fearlessness and freedom ! 
 What had seemed heresy from any other man, seemed from 
 Chalmers revelation. He stood up week after week, and read 
 off to astonished crowds the burning hieroglyphics of the orbs 
 of heaven. The excitement was unparalleled. The novelty 
 of the theme the daring of some of the individual flights 
 the apparent force of the argumentation the almost super-
 
 100 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRKD A'JTHORS. 
 
 human excitation of the orator, who seemed to heave, and 
 leap, and swelter, and burn, and groan under the burden of 
 immediate inspiration, carried Glasgow away in a whirlwind. 
 We were then mere children, nor did we hear Chalmers till 
 fourteen years later ; but, great as his excitement continued, 
 we were assured by those who had heard him in earlier days, 
 that it was calmness compared to the prophetic fury with 
 which he delivered his " Astronomical Discourses." 
 
 Professor Nichol has come after, and in some measure sup- 
 planted Chalmers as an eloquent interpreter to the language 
 of the stars. Without the rapt and rushing force of Chal- 
 mers's style, he has a calm and deep hush of manner as he 
 walks under the stupendous sublimities of his subject, which 
 is very thrilling. Chalmers claps his hands in enthusiastic 
 joy, as he looks up toward the gleaming midnight; Nichol 
 bows his head before it. Chalmers is moved and moves us 
 most to rapture ; Nichol is moved and moves us most to won- 
 der. Chalmers plunges like a strong swimmer into the stellar 
 ocean, and ploughs his nervous way through its burning waves ; 
 Nichol walks beside it on tiptoe, and points in silent awe to 
 its unutterable grandeur. While Chalmers shouts, " Glo- 
 rious!" while Carlyle sighs, "Ah ! it's a sad sight" Nichol, 
 perhaps more forcibly, expresses his emotion by folding his 
 arms, and speaking in whispers, or remaining dumb. 
 
 The second discourse is on the " Modesty of True Science," 
 and is chiefly remarkable for its panegyric on Sir Isaac New- 
 ton certainly the noblest tribute to that illustrious man ever 
 paid, unless we except Thomson's fervid poem on bis death. 
 Yet, while panegyrising "modesty," the author makes one or 
 two rather bold and unwarranted suppositions ; for instance, 
 that sin has probably found its way into other worlds that 
 the Eternal Son " may have had the government of many sin- 
 ful worlds laid upon his shoulders" and that the Spirit 
 " may now be working with the fragments of another chaos, 
 and educing order, and obedience, and harmony out of the 
 wrecks of a moral rebellion, which reaches through all these 
 spheres, and spreads disorder to the uttermost limits of our 
 astronomy." Indeed, the great defect of these discourses is, 
 that he is perpetually meeting assumptions with assumptions, 
 and repelling one conjecture by another equally groundless.
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 101 
 
 In the third sermon he states the infidel argument as follows : 
 " Such a humble portion of the universe as ours could never 
 have been the object of such high and distinguishing attentions 
 as Christianity has assigned to it. God would not have mani- 
 fested himself in the flesh for the salvation of so paltry a 
 world. The monarch of a whole continent would never move 
 from his capital, and lay aside the splendor of royalty, and 
 subject himself for months or for years to perils, and poverty, 
 and persecution, and take up his abode in some small islet of 
 his dominions, which, though swallowed by an earthquake, 
 could not be missed amid the glories of so wide an empire ; 
 and all this to regain the lost affection of a few families upon 
 its surface. And neither would the Eternal Son of God he 
 who is revealed to us as having made all worlds, and as hold- 
 ing an empire amid the splendors of which the globe that we 
 inherit is shaded in insignificance neither would he strip him- 
 self of the glory he had with the Father before the world was, 
 and light on this lower scene, for the purpose imputed to him 
 in the New Testament. Impossible that the concerns of this 
 puny ball, which floats its little round among an infinity of 
 larger worlds, should be of such mighty account in the plans 
 of the Eternal, or should have given birth in heaven to so 
 wonderful a movement as the Son of God putting on the form 
 of our degraded species, and sojourning among us, and sharing 
 in all our infirmities, and crowning the whole scene of humilia- 
 tion, by the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyrdom." 
 
 We will not stop to object to the theological mis-statement 
 in one of the sentences of this passage. Christ did not, could 
 not lay aside the " splendor of royalty" he merely veiled it 
 from the eyes of men, and it was not " himself," in the whole 
 meaning of that expression, but simply his human nature, that 
 was subjected to " perils, and poverty," and persecution." 
 
 But, waiving this, let us notice how Chalmers proceeds to 
 answer the objection. He does this first by dwelling, with 
 much munificence and rhythmical flow of language, upon the 
 extent of the Divine condescension ; and his picture of the 
 powers and acbievements of the microscope is exceedingly 
 beautiful. Yet it is one-sided. For, if the microscope shows 
 us Divine Providence watching over the very lowest hem and 
 skirts of animal existence, does it not also show us rage, ani-
 
 102 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 mosity, evil, and death burning on the very brink of nothing 
 < a Waterloo in every water drop ? Besides, the microscope 
 serves only to prove the universal prevalence of certain laws ; 
 it does not discover any analogy to that special love and super- 
 natural interference found in the history of Christianity. It 
 proves simply that God condescends to care for every being he 
 has condescended to create; but would never, previous to 
 experience, suggest the possibility of God saving, by a pecu- 
 liar and abnormal method, a race that had fallen. On such a 
 subject, telescope and miscroscope are alike silent; they say 
 nothing for it, but they say nothing against it. The whole 
 discourse, therefore, we consider an eloquent evasion of the 
 question, notwithstanding the magnificent burst with which it 
 closes, the reading of which, by himself, we have already 
 described. 
 
 In his fourth discourse he attempts to prove that man's 
 moral history is known in distant parts of the creation ; and 
 thence to argue its vast importance and general bearings. 
 The evidence he produces is entirely derived from Scripture, 
 and is neither very abundant nor very strong. He tries to 
 show, first, that "the history of the redemption of our species 
 is known in other and distant parts of the creation ; and then, 
 secondly, indistinctly to guess at the fact that the redemption 
 itself may stretch beyond the limits of the world we occupy." 
 
 In reference to the first, he tells us that Scripture " speaks 
 most clearly and most decisively about the knowledge of 
 man's redemption being disseminated among other orders of 
 created intelligence than our own." And yet, strange to say, 
 the first proof he produces of this is the conversation on Mount 
 Tabor between Moses and Elias with Jesus, on the " decease 
 to be accomplished at Jerusalem," as if these two glorified 
 beings belonged to another " order of created intelligence" 
 than ours as if they were not the " spirits of just MEN made 
 perfect." He next introduces the song of the angels, and the 
 text " unto these things the angels desire to look" forgetting 
 that the angels are circulating perpetually through the uni- 
 verse ; that they are the servants the ministering spirits 
 of the good ; and that it is impossible to argue from their 
 knowledge of our earthly affairs to that of the myriads of sta- 
 tionary inhabitants of space if such there be in the other
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 1 03 
 
 planets and systems of the universe. There had not then 
 appeared Isaac Taylor's admirable paper entitled the " State 
 of Seclusion." in which the author shows so strikingly the 
 advantages which have accrued from the insulated position of 
 the various worlds of space, as securing more completely the 
 probation of moral beings. What Taylor means is this : 
 could we, from this isle of earth, see all the consequences, 
 whether of good or of bad, as manifested in the innumerable 
 orbs, which he supposes to be replete with intellectual and 
 moral life, we should be driven, not led, from vice and into 
 virtue so enormous would appear the superiority of the one 
 over the other in its effects. But God has secluded us from 
 other worlds, and them from us, that our will may have freer 
 play in choosing good and refusing evil ; that the great irre- 
 vocable choice may be less a matter of necessity and of terror, 
 and more of voluntary consent. IJence, too, the deep shroud 
 of darkness which Scripture keeps suspended over the secrets 
 of the future world. Dr. Chalmers, 00, in the passages he 
 quotes about Christ's gathering into one all things in heaven 
 and in earth, and about " every creature which is in heaven, 
 and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the 
 sea, and all that are in them," saying " Blessing, and honor, 
 and glory, and power be unto him that sitteth on the throne ; 
 and unto the Lamb for ever and ever" does not advert to 
 the fact that all this is to be done, and said, and sung, after 
 this present system has passed. Meanwhile, there is not the 
 most distant evidence that the inhabitants of other worlds, if 
 such there be (for this, too, is a point of extreme uncertainty), 
 know more of our moral state than we do of theirs, which is 
 precisely nothing at all. 
 
 The fifth discourse of the series contains some most melting 
 and eloquent descriptions of the sympathy felt for man in the 
 distant places of the creation. Still, so far as argument is 
 concerned, it does not help forward his point one step. For 
 that man alone has fallen, is one assumption; and even sup- 
 posing that he has, that this is known throughout the whole 
 universe is another. Angels do know indeed that man is a 
 sinner, and do feel for us ; but angels can hardly be called 
 inhabitants of the material creation at all ; they are celestial 
 couriers, winged flames passing through it ; and it is only in-
 
 104 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 cidentally that we know that even they sympathise with our 
 low and lost estate. Again, too, we urge the principle of 
 "seclusion;" and ask, besides, if the inhabitants of other 
 planets (supposing such there be) are wwfallen, might not the 
 knowledge of a fallen earth damp their joy ? if they are fallen, 
 might it not encourage their rebellion ? 
 
 The sixth sermon is perhaps the most powerful of the seven. 
 Fervet immensusque vuit. Towards the close especially it 
 becomes a torrent of fire. After describing the great contest 
 of angels and demons over the dead Patroclus, Man, he says : 
 
 " But this wondrous contest will come to a close. Sonic 
 will return to their loyalty, and others will keep by their re- 
 bellion ; and in the day of the winding-up of the drama of this 
 world's history, there will be made manifest to the myriads of 
 the various orders of creation both the mercy and the vindi- 
 cated majesty of the Eternal. Oh ! on that day, how vain 
 will this presumption of the infidel astronomy appear, when 
 the affairs of men come to be examined in the presence of an 
 innumerable company ; and beings of loftiest nature are seen 
 to crowd around the judgment-seat; and the Savior shall 
 appear in our sky, with a celestial retinue, who have come 
 with him from afar to witness all his doings, and to take a 
 deep and solemn interest in all his dispensations; and the 
 destiny of our species, whom the infidel would thus detach in 
 solitary insignificance from the universe altogether, shall be 
 found to merge and mingle with higher destinies ; the good to 
 spend their eternity with angels the bad to spend their eter- 
 nity with angels; the former to be re-admitted into the uni- 
 versal family of God's obedient worshippers the latter to 
 share in the everlasting pain and ignominy of the rebellious ; 
 the people of this planet to be implicated throughout the whole 
 train of their never-ending history with the higher ranks and 
 more extended tribes of intelligence." 
 
 This passage is not only exceedingly eloquent and solemn, 
 but seems to contain the strongest argument in the volume 
 for the importance of man. The only weak point in the ser- 
 mon perhaps lies in his apparently supposing that the universe 
 is now aware of this mighty contest which is going on between 
 purely spiritual beings for the possession. As well say that 
 all Europe was literally looking on Waterloo on the very day
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 105 
 
 of the battle when its fate was decided. This earth will not 
 assume its real aspect of dignity and importance, till after its 
 wonderful history is over, and perhaps itself burned up. 
 
 The seventh sermon is on the slender influence of mere taste 
 and sensibility in matters of religion ; and appears indeed to 
 be an eloquent apology for the whole series, and a virtual 
 admission that in it he had rather pleased the taste and 
 touched the sensibility, than informed the judgment, con- 
 firmed the faith, or refuted the adversary. We look, in fact, 
 upon this volume as not worthy, as a whole, of its author's 
 talents. It is a mass of brilliant froth. The thought is 
 slight and slender, when compared to the abundance of the 
 verbiage which clothes it. The language is often loose and 
 coarse to the last degree. The argument, so far as we know, 
 never convinced a gainsaycr ; and, indeed, none but a very 
 silly infidel could have been convinced by it : we were going 
 to say that none but a very feeble thinker could even have 
 started the objection, till we remembered, not only that it 
 seems to have rested at one time like a load upon Chalmers's 
 own soul and he, need we say, as his " Bridgewater Treatise" 
 proves, could be as subtle at times as he was eloquent always 
 but that Daniel Webster was long puzzled and kept back 
 from embracing Christianity through its influence. But Web- 
 ster, to be sure, thought generally like a lawyer, seldom like a 
 legislator or philosopher. He was one of those men of whom 
 Burke says " Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions 
 us, and with great weight and propriety, against a species of 
 delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the 
 most fallacious of all sophistry." 
 
 Let us now try ourselves with all diffidence to meet the 
 objection fairly and fully in the face ; and we would do so, 
 first, by asking what has magnitude to do with a moral ques- 
 tion ? secondly, what, above all, has magnitude to do with a 
 moral question, unless it be proved to be peopled by moral 
 beings ? and, thirdly, what is magnitude compared to mind ? 
 
 First, What has magnitude to do with a moral question ? 
 what has the size of a man to do with his soul ? is not the 
 mind the standard of the man ? What has the size of a city 
 to do with the moral character of its inhabitants ? what have 
 size, number, and quantity, to do with the intellectual or
 
 106 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 moral interest, which may be or may not be connected with 
 the plains of a country ? Whether is Ben Nevis or Bannock- 
 burn the dearer to a Scottish heart though the one is the 
 prince of Scottish hills, and the other only a paltry plain, 
 undistinguished except by a solitary stone, and by the immor- 
 tal memories of patriotism and of courage which gather around 
 that field wherein the " Scots who had wi' Wallace bled '' bade 
 " Welcome to their gory bed, or to victory ?" Whether is 
 Mont Blanc or Morgarten the nobler object, though the one 
 be the monarch of mountains, and the other only an obscure 
 field, where the Swiss met and baffled their Austrian oppres- 
 sors, aud first in the shock was the arm of William Tell ? 
 Whether is dearer to the Christian's mind Caucasus or Cal- 
 vary ? the one the loftiest of Asia's mountains, the other 
 only a little hill, a mere dot on the surface of the globe ? So 
 may there not issue from this tiny earth of ours from the 
 noble deeds it has witnessed, from the high aspirations which 
 have been breathed up from it, from the magnificent thoughts 
 which have been conceived on its surface, from the eloquent 
 words that have stirred its air into music, from the poets who 
 have wrought its words into undying song, from the philoso- 
 phers who have explained the secret of its laws, from the men 
 of God who have knelt down in its temples a tide of glory 
 before which the lustre of suns and constellations shall tremble 
 and melt away. 
 
 But, secondly,* what has magnitude to do with a moral 
 question, if it cannot be proved that that magnitude is peopled 
 with moral beings ? Science, indeed, may and does hope that 
 each fair star has its own beautiful and happy race of immor- 
 tal intelligences ; but science does not know. For aught sci- 
 ence knows, there may be no immortal intelligences except 
 man, angels, God, and devils, in the wide creation. For aught 
 science knows, those suns and systems may be seen only by our 
 eyes and our telescopes ; for aught she knows, the universe 
 may only be beginning to be peopled, and earth have been se- 
 lected as the first spot for the great colonization. The peo- 
 pling of our own planet was a gradual process. Why may not 
 
 *This was written and published years before the masterly treatise 
 on the " Plurality of Worlds," attributed to Whewell, appeared.
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 107 
 
 the same be concluded of the universe of which our earth is a 
 part ? May not earth in this sense be an Eden to other re- 
 gions of the All ? Are appearance and analogy pleaded as 
 proofs that the universe is peopled throughout ? Appearance 
 and anology here utter an uncertain sound ; for are not all the 
 suns, or what we call the continents of creation, seemingly 
 burning masses uninhabitable by any beings we can even con- 
 ceive of? Do not many of the planets, or islands, appear 
 either too near or too remote from the central blaze to support 
 animal existence ? The moon (the only planet with which we 
 are particularly acquainted) has manifestly not yet arrived at 
 the state necessary for supporting living beings, and science re- 
 members that innumerable ages passed ere even our globe was 
 fitted for receiving its present population, and that, according 
 to the researches of geology, the earth rolled round the sun for 
 ages, a vast and weltering wilderness. Here, then, science is 
 totally silent, or utters only a faltering " perhaps." Is it said, 
 that but for intelligent beings space would be empty ? How ! 
 empty if it contain an entire Deity in its every particle? Is 
 God not society enough for his own creation ? Shall you call 
 the universe empty, if. God be present in it, even though he 
 were present alone ? Science, indeed, grants it probable that 
 much of the universe is already peopled ; but she grants no 
 more. But as long as his probability is not swelled to a cer- 
 tainty, it can never interfere in any way whatever with the fix- 
 ed, solid, immutable evidences of our Christian faith. 
 
 We ask, thirdly,* what is material magnitude compared to 
 mind ? The question is : Why did God, who made the vast 
 creation, interfere to save the human spirit, at such immense 
 expense, and by a machinery so sublime and miraculous ! Now, 
 in reply to this, we assert the ineffable dignity of the human 
 spirit. The creation, large and magnificent as it is, is not 
 equal in grandeur to one immortal mind. Majestic the uni- 
 verse is ; but can it think, or feel, or imagine, or hope, or love ? 
 " Talk to me of the sun I" one might say, standing up in all 
 the conscious dignity of his own nature, " but the sun is not 
 alive ; he is but a dead luminary after all ; I am alive, I nev- 
 
 * We quote this passage from the " First Gallery," as necessary to 
 >ur argument here.
 
 108 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 er was dead, I never can die ; I may therefore put my foot 
 upon that proud orb, and say, I am greater than thou. The 
 sun cannot understand the geometry of his own motion, nor 
 the laws of his own radiating light. I can do both, and am, 
 therefore, immeasurably greater than the sun. The sun can- 
 not with all his rays write on flower, or grass, or the broad 
 page of ocean, his Maker's name. A child of seven years old 
 an, and is therefore greater than the sun. The sun cannot 
 from his vast surface utter one articulate sound ; he is dumb in 
 his magnificence ; but ' out of the mouth of babes and sucklings' 
 God perfects praise. The sun cannot love one of the planets 
 which revolve round his ray. You and I can love all beings ; 
 nay, were our heart large enough, we could, in the language of 
 the German, ' Clasp the universe to our bosom, and keep it 
 warm.' The sun shall be plucked froni its sphere, and perish, 
 but I have that within me which shall never die. 
 
 ' The sun is but a spark of fire, a transient meteor in the sky ; 
 But I immortal as his sire, shall never die !" 
 
 And if greater than the sun, I am greater than the entire uni- 
 verse. It might indeed rise and crush rue, but I should know 
 it was destroying me, whilst it would crush blindly and uncon- 
 sciously. I should be conscious of defeat it would not be 
 conscious of victory. The universe may be too great now 
 for the grasp of my intellect, but my mind, I feel, can grow to 
 grasp it. The universe, in fact, is only the nursery to my im- 
 mortal mind, and whether is greater the nursery or the child ? 
 The universe, you may call it what you please ; you may lav- 
 ish epithet upon epithet of splendor upon it, if you please ; 
 but you can never call it one thing you can never call it a 
 spirit ; and if not a spirit, it is but a great and glorious clod. 
 But I am a spirit, though a spirit disguised in matter ; an im- 
 mortality, though an immortality veiled in flesh ; a beam from the 
 source of light, though a beam that has gone astray; and there- 
 fore I dare to predicate even of my own fallen nature, that 
 there is more dignity, and grandeur, and value in it, than in 
 the whole inanimate creation ; and that to save no more but me, 
 it were worth while for the Saviour to have descended, and for 
 the Saviour to have died."
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 109 
 
 We pass to make a few closing remarks on some points con- 
 nected with the " Star-eyed Science," premising that we 
 are mere amateurs, and know very little of the details of the 
 study. 
 
 We yield to no man in admiration of the splendors of the 
 heavens. They are a book of beauty, opened up every night 
 over our heads, and each beautiful line includes a great and 
 living moral. But we think, first, that the terms " Infinity," 
 and " Immensity," are unduly applied to them. Secondly, 
 that they give us no new light as to the history or destiny of 
 man. Thirdly, that the telescope, as a mental and magical in- 
 strument, has been overrated. Fourthly, that the inference of 
 the insignificance of man, drawn from the vastness of the uni- 
 verse, is altogether illogical. Fifthly, that astronomical dis- 
 covery has nearly reached its limits. Sixthly, that the astron- 
 omy of man's soul is infinitely grander than that of the starry 
 heavens, and is but distantly related to it ; and, finally, that 
 there is no reason to believe that death and the immortality 
 which lie beyond, will allow us to remain in those material re- 
 gions of which the stars are the shining summits. We hope 
 for our readers' indulgence as we try to explain more fully 
 what we mean. 
 
 First. We hear astronomers often speaking of those " In- 
 finities," those " Immensities ; " words which, though used 
 sometimes rhetorically, are always fitted to give a false impres- 
 sion to the general mind. The universe is not infinite. As well 
 say of a drop of water that it is infinite, as that a universe is. 
 The vastest and most complicated firmament is not one step 
 nearer the abstract and absolute idea of Infinity, than is a 
 curled shaving in a joiner's shop. The infinite aspect the Cre- 
 ation assumes is a mere illusion of our eye, the dimness of a 
 weak and bounded vision. The universe is just the multipli- 
 cation of a sand-grain or fire-particle, and by multiplying the 
 finite, how can we reach the infinite ? Who can, by searching, 
 find out God ? " To an inconceivably superior being," says Cole- 
 ridge, " the whole fabric of Creation may appear as oneplain, 
 the distance between stars and systems seeming to him but as 
 that between particles of earth to us;" say, rather, it is high- 
 ly probable that this vast universe seems to God but as one 
 distinctly rounded pea, swimming on the viewless ocean of that
 
 110 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRKD AVTHOKS. 
 
 true Infinite which is "higher than heaven, deeper than hell, 
 longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." 
 
 " A metaphysical difficulty," says Isaac Taylor (if we need 
 clench a statement so obvious by authority), "prevents us 
 from ever regarding the material universe as infinite." And 
 if not infinite, what is it but an elongation and fiery exaggera- 
 tion of any boy-bubble blown on the streets? Away, then, 
 with the words which sound much, and mean nothing, of " in- 
 finity" and " immensity," applied to that mere scaffolding to 
 the eternal and inner fabric, which is all our earthly eyes or 
 telescopes now or ever can possibly behold ! 
 
 Secondly. Those enormous discoveries of the Newtonian 
 and Herschellian heavens have not really told us anything 
 new in reference to the great mystery of man of his being, 
 history, destiny, or relation to God. The} 7 have simply trans- 
 ferred and magnified the difficulties by which we are environed 
 on this isle of earth. They have not, hitherto, shed one beam 
 of light on any moral theme. It is, as yet, utterly uncertain, 
 for all the stars can teach us, whether the universe beyond our 
 globe be peopled or not ; on the moral state of their popula- 
 tions (if populations there be) the sky, however strictly ques- 
 tioned or cross-questioned, remains quite silent. In fact, a 
 large crowd of silent human faces, looking up towards an un- 
 common phenomenon in the heavens, reflect as much light up 
 on it, as do the stars down upon the anomalous and awful 
 condition of the human family. Blank ignorance, blind 
 astonishment, or helpless pity, are all the feelings with which 
 even imagination can invest their still, persevering, yet solemn 
 gaze. Foster, in one of his journals, seems rather to rejoice 
 in the notion that they are made oifire ; because in this there 
 is one link connecting us with the remotest luminaries of hea- 
 ven. Some philosophers doubt, we believe, if this be a fact ; 
 but, at all events, we wonder that he did not see, on his own 
 showing, and in accordance with his own gloomy notions, that 
 the universe might bo literally called one vast hell ; a "burn- 
 ing fiery furnace," to be quenched only in the final extinction 
 of all things. If the stars are fire, it may be a fire in which 
 all the earths and alkalis around them are slowly, but certain- 
 ly, to be consumed. And thus the great mirror of the mid- 
 night heavens becomes rather a reflector of the austere purposes
 
 CHALMERS. 1 1 1 
 
 of the Divine Destructiveness, than of the prosperous caieer of 
 even regenerated man. In fact, we humbly conceive that the 
 discovery of a new family of animalcule, or of a new gallery 
 of minerals, would cast as much light upon human nature and 
 history as the revelation of firmaments upon firmaments of 
 what seems distant and inscrutable flame. 
 
 Thirdly. The telescope, as a mental and magical instru- 
 ment, has been overrated. The imagination of a poet, in a 
 single dream, has often immeasurably outrun all its revelations. 
 What has it told us, after all, but that our sun, a bright and 
 burning point, has innumerable duplicates throughout space, 
 and that these duplicates, by their position near each other, 
 have assumed certain shapes, which are, however, perpetually 
 shifting and changing, like the clouds on a windy day, in pro- 
 portion to the power of the instrument which surveys them ? 
 In truth, there are views of astronomy in Addison's " Specta- 
 tor," a century old, as sublime as any written since. And 
 what have the two Herschells, or Arago, or Nichol, done to 
 answer the questions What is a sun, what is a system, what 
 is a comet, what is a firmament, or what is the one " fiery 
 particle" which pervades and forms, it is said, by expansion 
 the whole ? It is as if a man, questioned as to the essence of 
 the matter constituting an umbrella, were to reply by unfurl- 
 ing it, and deeming that, thus the query was answered. The 
 telescope, in one word, has only broadened the periphery of 
 our view, but has not admitted us really into one of the se- 
 crets of heaven ; the mystery of the atom has merely been 
 transferred, unsolved, to that of the Star-universe. 
 
 Fourthly. The inference of the insignificance of man, from 
 the magnitude of the Creation, as we have already hinted, is 
 miserably illogical. A man, in reality, is as much overborne 
 by the size of a hill or a house, as by that of the Herschellian 
 skies. A mountain is a noble object; but why ? because man 
 sees it and sheds the meaning and the glory of his own soul 
 over it. A sun is but a burnished breastplate till the same 
 process passes over it, and man has said of it, in reverent imi- 
 tation of the Demiurgic Artist, " It is very good." The stars 
 too, must all wait in the ante-chamber of the human soul to 
 receive their homage, to be told of their numbers, and to lis- 
 ten to their names. Even although these splendid bodies
 
 112 A CONSTELLATION OF SACRED AUTHORS. 
 
 were peopled, man has no evidence that those beings are 
 greater or purer than himself, any more than he has evidence 
 that snow and torrid sunshine, anxiety, misery, and death, are 
 confined to his sphere ; a sphere which, dark, torn, and rup- 
 tured, to his eye, is (as the author of " Festus " hath it) 
 " shining fair, whole, and spotless," a " living well of light," 
 to spectators in the far-off ether What, in fact, are the in- 
 creasing and receding firmaments of space, but the steps of a 
 ladder on which man is climbing every year, without coming 
 nearer to his great ultimate inheritance Space, Eternity, and 
 God. 
 
 Fifthly. It is clear to us that astronomical discovery has 
 nearly reached its limit. That God designed to it a distinct 
 and not distant period, seems plain from the separation which 
 is effected of other worlds from ours by the nature of the hu- 
 man eye, by distance, and by that dancing phenomenon in the 
 objects which we are told increases with the power of the tele- 
 scope, and which makes the stars reel like drunkards, instead 
 of sitting sober before the calm pictorial power of the instru- 
 ment. All our recent cosmogonies, too, such as the nebular 
 hypothesis, have been utterly exploded. And it is very cu- 
 rious how the world nearest us (the moon) seems the most per- 
 verse and inscrutable of all the heavenly puzzles ; and it seems 
 strange to us how, having looked so long on the absurdities 
 of our world, and particularly on the theories propounded 
 about itself, it has hitherto forborne to laugh ! By and by, 
 we suspect, man, even with Lord Rosse's telescope in his 
 hand, may be seen stretching over the great gulf a baffled hand, 
 and foot, and eye, baffled because he has reached at last the 
 limits of his earthly platform. 
 
 Sixthly. But why should he, therefore, repine, or sit down 
 and weep ? " Can his own soul afford no scope ?" Are there 
 no stars within, no firmaments of central, yet celestial, fire ? 
 Astronomy is doubtless a magnificent study, but the mind 
 which has made the telescope as an assistant eye for its inves- 
 tigation, is surely as worthy of investigation, nay, far more so. 
 What comet so wonderful as the human will ? What sun so 
 warm and mysterious as the human heart ? \\ hat double- 
 orbed Gemini to be compared with the twin eyes of man ? 
 What firmament is like the wiry, waving, knotted, intesselated
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 113 
 
 and far-stretchmg brain, sending out its nervous undulations, 
 even as the spiral nebula sends forth its thin films of suns ? 
 What conception of a universe, however vast and complex, can 
 be named in mystery, with man scarce a mathematical point 
 in size, and yet spanning earth, measuring ocean, analyzing 
 the clouds and the skies above him, poetizing the dust below 
 his feet, worshipping God, and sending out his careering 
 thoughts into Eternity, and yet, like his progenitor Adam, 
 while aiming perpetually to be as a God, as often losing his 
 balance, and becoming inferior to the brute ? Why seek so 
 eagerly to explore firmaments, till we have explored the depths 
 which lie enclosed, yet beseechingly open, in our own natures ? 
 And alas ! no light do all the fires of all the firmaments, how- 
 ever beautifully concentred and condensed by the power of 
 poetical genius, cast upon the mystery of man's moral condi- 
 tion, his nature as a sinner, or the hope he has of forgiveness 
 and everlasting life ! 
 
 We take leave of this brief view of a magnificent theme, by 
 uttering (seventhly) what may appear our most paradoxical 
 assertion namely, that there is no reason to believe that 
 death and immortality will permit the emancipated soul to re- 
 main amid these present starry splendors. However bright, 
 and even, at times, inviting they may seem, they contain no 
 home for us after we are freed from these tabernacles of clay. 
 We often hear men talking as if, somehow, they went up, after 
 death, among the heavenly bodies. It were wrong in us to 
 dogmatise on any such question ; but it seems more probable, 
 and more scriptural, too, that we pass, at death, amid a pure- 
 ly spiritual scenery, as well as into a purely spiritual state 
 or, at least, that the grosser phenomena of matter will be then 
 as invisible to us as are now the microscopic worlds. This 
 conviction came upon us some two years ago, with a sudden 
 and startling force, which we felt more than enough for our 
 own minds. Taking up, shortly after, one of the strange 
 reveries of poor Edgar Poe, we were astonished to find the 
 following language : " At death, these creatures, enjoying the 
 ultimate life immortality, act all things, and pass everywhere 
 by mere volition indwelling not the stars, which to us seem 
 the sole palpabilities, and for the accommodation of which we 
 blindly deem space created but that SPACE itself that infi-
 
 114 A CONSTELLATION OF SACKED AUTHORS. 
 
 r.ity, of which the true substantive vastncss swallows up the 
 star shadows blotting them out as nonentities from the per- 
 ception of the angels." And again : " the stars, through 
 what we consider their materiality, escape the angelic sense, 
 just as the unparticled matter or space, through what we con- 
 sider its immateriality, eludes the perception of organic and 
 incarnate beings." 
 
 Inferences of much interest might be drawn from these cur- 
 sory remarks. We might infer, for instance, that there was, 
 and is, no alternative for Man but Revelation or Despair. 
 Nature can, at the utmost, do little for us, and can tell us very 
 little. This the highest of philosophers have ever felt (in- 
 cluding some of the Alchymists), and hence they have tried to 
 qet behind nature and to get so behind it as to turn it to 
 their will. In this they have all miserably failed ; and ever 
 shall. One only possessed this ineffable secret one only ever 
 stood behind the tremendous veil of creation and why ? 
 Because he was originally divine because he came from the 
 Excellent Glory (which is, perhaps, another name for that 
 <( unparticled matter," that sublime reality of existence which 
 is within all things), as well as confirmed his power by "pri- 
 vilege of virtue." HE alone, even in the days of his flesh, with 
 open face, looked at the Glory of God ; and this power he 
 gives already in some measure, and shall yet more fully be- 
 stow upon his faithful and simple-hearted followers, that they, 
 too, may behold, as in a glass mightier than the mirror of 
 all the stars the inmost glory of the Lord. 
 
 Once more, how overwhelmingly grand the views opened up 
 by such thoughts as these ! Here are new heavens and a new 
 earth. Here, in every death, is a rehearsal of that scene in 
 which the heavens are to flee away. The sight of those fair, 
 yet terrible and tantalizing heavens of ours is at the death- 
 moment of every Christian exchanged for that of spiritual 
 scenes, which no eye hath seen, and no ear heard. That ma- 
 jestic universe, which was the nursery of the budding soul, 
 dissolves like a dream, and that soul is admitted within the 
 veil of the unseen, and begins to behold matter as it is, space 
 as it is, GOD as he is, and to know now what is the meaning of the 
 words, " the \\ghtinaccessible and full of glory." Nor will 
 the soul, thus introduced, sigh for the strange and fiery "star-
 
 DR. CHALMERS. 115 
 
 shadows" which surrounded its infancy. There was much in 
 them that was beautiful ; but there was much also that was 
 fearful, perplexing, and sad. But here, in this spirit-land, the 
 sun of truth shines. That city has no need of the sun nor of 
 the moon to shine on it. The mind shall there begin to see 
 without cloud, or shadow, or reflected radiance, Knowledge, 
 Essence, Eternity, GOD, and shall look back upon the stars as 
 but the bright toys of its nursery, childish things it has sur- 
 mounted and put away. Further we dare not penetrate here 
 let the curtain drop but let it drop to the music of one 
 solemn word, from the only Book which has given us authen- 
 tic and commanding tidings from that inner world. " Seeing, 
 therefore, that all these things shall be dissolved, what man- 
 ner of persons ought we to be in all holy conversation and 
 godliness ?''
 
 u! efo I k 
 
 ^ ^ ^4*0 
 
 KO. I.-SYDNEY YENDYS. 
 
 THIS book* we hesitate not to pronounce the richest volume 
 of recent poetry next to " Festus." It is a "wilderness" of 
 thought a sea of towering imagery and surging passion. 
 Usually a man's first book is his richest, containing, as it gen- 
 erally does, all the good things which had been accumulating 
 in his portfolio for years before he published. But while 
 " The Roman " was full of beauties, " Balder " is overflowing, 
 and the beauties, we think, are of a rarer and profounder sort. 
 There was much poetry in " The Roman," but there was more 
 rhetoric. Indeed, many of the author's detractors, while 
 granting him powers of splendid eloquence, denied him the 
 possession of the purely poetic element. " Balder " must, un- 
 questionably, put these to silence, and convince all worth con- 
 vincing, that Yendys is intensely and transcendently a poet. 
 
 In two things only does " Balder" yield to "The Roman." 
 It has, as a story, little interest, being decidedly subjective 
 rather than objective ; and, secondly, its writing is not, as a 
 whole, so clear. In " The Roman," he was almost always 
 distinctly, dazzlingly clear. The Monk was never in a mist 
 for a moment ; but Balder, as he has a Norse name, not un- 
 frequently speaks or bellows from the centre of northern dark- 
 ness. We speak, we must say, however, after only one read- 
 ing; perhaps a second may serve to clear up a good deal that 
 Keems obscure and chaotic. 
 
 * " Balder." By the author of " The Roman.'
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS. 117 
 
 The object of the poet is to show that natural goodness, 
 without the Divine guidance, is unable to conduct even the 
 loftiest of the race to any issue but misery and despair. This 
 he does in the story of Balder a man of vast intelligence, 
 and aspiring to universal intellectual power who, partly 
 through the illness of his wife, represented as the most amia- 
 ble of women, and partly through his own unsatisfied longings 
 of soul, is reduced to absolute wretchedness, and is left sacri- 
 ficing her life to his disquietude and baffled ambition. The 
 poem has one or two interlocutors besides Balder and Amy, 
 but consists principally of soliloquies uttered and songs sung 
 by these two in alternate scenes, and has very little dramatic 
 interest. It is entitled " Balder, Part First;" a title which 
 pretty broadly hints that a second poem with a far sublimer 
 argument (the inevitable sequel of the former), showing how, 
 since natural goodness fails in reforming the world, or making 
 any man happy, Divine goodness must be expected to perform 
 the work may be looked for. 
 
 We pass from the general argument and bearing of the 
 poem, to speak more in detail of its special merits and defects. 
 The great merit of the book, as we have already hinted, is its 
 Australian wealth of thought and imagery. Bailey must look 
 after his laurels ; Tennyson, Smith, and Bigg are all in this 
 one quality eclipsed by Yendys. Nor are the pieces of gold 
 small and of little value ; many of them are large nuggets 
 more precious than they are sparkling. Here, for instance, is 
 a cluster of noble similitudes, reminding you of Jeremy Tay- 
 lor's thick rushing " So have I seen : " 
 
 " Nature from my birth 
 Confess'd me, as one who in a multitude 
 Confesseth her beloved, and makes no sign ; 
 Or as one all unzoned in her deep haunts, 
 If her true love come on her unaware, 
 Hastes not to hide her breast, nor is afraid ; 
 Or as a mother, 'mid her sons, displays 
 The arms their glorious father wore, and, kind, 
 In silence, with discerning love commits 
 Some lesser danger to each younger hand, 
 But to the conscious eldest of the house 
 The naked sword ; or as a sage, amid 
 His pupils in the peopled portico, 
 Where all stand equal, gives no preoedenca 
 But by intercalated look and word
 
 118 A CLUSTEU OF NEW POETS. 
 
 Of equal seeming, wise but to the wise, 
 Denotes the favor'd scholar from the crowd ; 
 Or as the keeper of the palace-gate 
 Denies the gorgeous stranger, and his pomp 
 Of gold, but at a glance, although he come 
 In fashion as a commoner, unstarr'd, 
 Lets the prince pass." 
 
 By what a strong, rough, daring figure does Balder describe 
 the elements of his power : 
 
 " Thought, Labor, Patience, 
 And a strong Will, that, being set to boil 
 The broth of Hecate, would shred hisjlesh 
 Into tlie caldron, and stir deep, with, arms 
 Flay'd to the seething bone, ere there default 
 , One tittlefrom, the spell these should not strive 
 In vain!" 
 
 " The repose 
 
 Of Beauty where she lieth bright and still 
 As some spent angel, dead-asleep in light 
 On the most heavenward top of all this world, 
 Wing-weary.'' 
 
 Of what follows death he says 
 
 " Thejirst, last secret all men hear, and none 
 Betray." 
 
 " My hand shakes ; 
 
 But with the trembling eagerness of him 
 Who buys an Indian kingdom with a bead." 
 
 " Fancy, like the image that our boors 
 Set by their kine, doth milk her of her tears, 
 And loose the terrible unsolved distress 
 Of tumid Nature." 
 
 " Men of drug and scalpel still are men. 
 I call them the gnomes 
 Of science, miners who scarce see the light, 
 Working within the bowels of the world 
 Of beauty." 
 
 " Love 
 Makes us all poets " 
 
 " From the mount 
 
 Of high transfiguration you come down 
 Into your common lifetime, as the diver 
 Breathes upper air a moment ere he plunge, 
 And by mere virtue of that moment, lives 
 In breathless deeps, and dark. We poets live 
 Upon the height, saying, as one of old, 
 ' Let us make tabernacles : it is good 
 To be here-' '
 
 SYDNEY YEJJDYS. 119 
 
 "Dauntless Angelo, 
 
 Who drew the Judgment, in some daring hope 
 That, seeing it, the gods could not depart 
 From so divine a pattern." 
 
 " Sad .Alighieri, like a waning moon 
 Setting in storm behind a grove of bays." 
 
 The descriptions which follow, in pages 91 and 2 of Mil- 
 ton and Shakspeare are very eloquent, but not, it appears to 
 us, very characteristic. They are splendid evasions of their 
 subjects. Reading Milton is not like swimming the Alps, as 
 an ocean sinking and swelling with the billows; it is rather 
 like trying to fly to heaven, side by side with an angel who is 
 at full speed, and does not even see his companion so eagerly 
 is he straining at the glorious goal which is fixing his eye, and 
 from afar flushing his cheek. Nor do we much admire this : 
 
 " Either his muse 
 
 Was the recording angel, or that hand 
 Cherubic which fills up the Book of Life, 
 Caught what the last relaxing gripe let fall 
 By a death-bed at Stratford, and henceforth 
 Holds Shakspeare's pen.* 
 
 No, no, dear Sydney Yendys, Shakspeare was no cherub, 
 or seraph either; he was decidedly an "earth spirit," or 
 rather, he was just honest, play-acting, ale-drinking Will of 
 Stratford, with the most marvellous daguerreotypic brow that 
 ever man possessed, and with an immense fancy, imagination, 
 and subtle, untrained intellect besides. He knew well a 
 "Book of Life;" but it was not "the Lamb's!" it was the 
 book of the wondrous, living, loving, hating, maddening, 
 laughing, weeping heart of man. Call him rather a diver 
 than a cherub, or, better still, with Hazlitt and Scott, compare 
 him to that magician in the eastern tale who had the power of 
 shooting his soul into all other souls and bodies, and of look- 
 ing at the universe through all human eyes. We are, by this 
 comparison of Shakspeare to an angel, irresistibly reminded of 
 Michael Lambourne in " Kenilworth," who, after in vain try- 
 ing to enact Arion, at last tears off his vizard, and cries 
 " Cog's bones !" He was none of Arion, or Orion either, but 
 honest Mike Lambourne, that had been drinking Her Majes- 
 ty's health from morning till midnight. Lambourne was just
 
 120 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 as like Orion, or his namesake the archangel Michael, as Shaks- 
 peare like a cherubic recorder. 
 
 Now for another cluster of minor, but exquisite beauties 
 ere we come to give two or three superb passages : 
 
 " Sere leaf, that quiverest through the sad-still air ; 
 Sere leaf, that waverest down the sluggish wind ; 
 Sere leaf, that whirlest on the autumn gust, 
 Free in the ghastly anarchy of death : 
 The sudden gust that, like a headsman wild, 
 TJplifteth beauty by her golden hair, 
 To show the world that she is dead indeed." 
 
 " The bare hill top 
 
 Shines near above us ; I feel like a child 
 Nursed on his grandsire's knee, that longs to stroke 
 The bald bright forehead ; shall we climb 7" 
 
 " She look'd in her surprise 
 As when the Evening Star, ta'en unaware, 
 \Yhilefearless she pursues across the Heaven 
 Her Lover- Sun, and on a sudden stands 
 Confest in the pursuit, before a world 
 Upgazing, in her maiden innocence 
 Disarms us, and so looks, that she becomes 
 A worship evermore." 
 
 " The order'd pomp and sacred dance of things." 
 
 " This is that same hour 
 That I have seen before me as a star 
 Seen from a rushing comet through the black 
 And forward night, which orbs, and orbs, and orbs, 
 Till that which was a shining spot in space 
 Flames out between us and the universe, 
 And burns the heavens with glory." 
 
 We quoted his description of Night once before from MS. 
 We give it again, however : 
 
 " And lo ! the last strange sister, but though last, 
 Elder and haught, called Night on earth, in heaven 
 Nameless, for in her far youth she was given, 
 Pale as she is, to pride, and did bedeck 
 Her bosom with innumerable gems. 
 And God, He said, ' Let no man look on her 
 For ever ;' and, begirt with this strong spell, 
 The Moon in her wan hand, she wanders forth, 
 Seeking for some one to behold her beauty ; 
 And whersoe'er she cometh, eyelids close. 
 And the world sleeps." 
 
 This description has been differently estimated. Some have 
 called it magnificent, and others fantastic ; some a matchless
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS. 121 
 
 gem, and others a colossal conceit. But wo think there can 
 be but one opinion about the following picture of Evening. 
 It seems to us as exquisitely beautiful as anything in Spenser, 
 Wordsworth, or Shelly : 
 
 " And sccst thou her who kneeletk clad in gold 
 And purple, with ajlush upon her cheek, 
 And upturn' d eyes, full of the love and sorrow 
 Of other worlds ? 'Tis said, that when the sons 
 Of God did walk the earth, she loved a star." 
 
 Here the description should have stopped, and here we stop 
 it, wishing that the author had. But it is curious and charac- 
 teristic, not so much of the genius as of the temperament (or 
 rather of bodily sufferings influencing that temperament) of 
 this gifted poet, that he often sinks and falls on the very 
 threshold of perfection. Another word, and all were gained, 
 to the very measure and stature of Miltonic excellence; but 
 the word comes not, or the wrong word comes instead ; and as 
 Yendys, like the tiger, takes no second spring, the whole effect 
 is often lost. We notice the same in Shelley, Keats, and 
 especially in Leigh Hunt, who has made and spoiled many of 
 the finest poetic pictures in the world. Wordsworth, Tenny- 
 son, and Alexander Smith, are signal in this> that all their 
 set descriptions and pet passages are finished to the last trem- 
 bling articulation ; complete even to a comma. Yendys has, 
 perhaps, superior, or equal genius; he has also an equal will 
 and desire to elaborate ; but, alas ! while the spirit is always 
 willing, the flesh is often weak. 
 
 Speaking of the Resurrection to Amy, Balder says : 
 
 " My childhood's dream. Is it a dream ? For thou 
 Art such a thing as one might think to see 
 Upon a footstone, sitting in the sun, 
 Beside a broken grave." 
 
 " I have been lika 
 
 A prophet fallen on his prostrate face 
 Upon the hill of fire." 
 
 Such is the prophet above. Mark him now, as he cornea 
 down to mankind : 
 
 "In the form 
 
 Of manhood I will get me down to man ! 
 As one goes down from Alpine top with snows 
 Upon his head, Ij who have stood so long
 
 122 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 On other Alps, will go down to my race, 
 Snow'd on with somewhat out of Divine air; 
 And merely walking through them with a step 
 God-like to music, like the golden sound 
 Of Phebus' shoulder' d arrows, I will shake 
 The laden manna round me as I shake 
 Dews from this morning tree." 
 
 He has, two or three pages after this, a strange effusion, 
 called the " Song of the Sun," which we predict shall divide 
 opinion still more than his " Night." Some will call it 
 worthy of Groethe; others will call it a forced extravaganza, 
 a half-frenzied imitation of Shelley's " Cloud." We incline 
 to a somewhat intermediate notion. At the first reading, it 
 seemed to us to bear a suspicious resemblance, not to Shelley's 
 " Cloud," but to that tissue of noisy nonsense (where, as there 
 was no reason, there ought at least to have been rhyme), War- 
 ren's " Lily and the Bee." Hear this, for instance. Mark, it 
 is Sol that speaks : 
 
 "Love, love, love, how beautiful, oh love! 
 Art thou well-awaken' d, little flower 1 
 Are thine eyelids open, little flower ? 
 Are they cool with dew, oh little flower ? 
 
 Ringdove, Ringdove, 
 This is my golden finger ; 
 Between the upper branches of the pine 
 Come forth, come forth, and sing unto my day." 
 
 Who will encore the sun in such ditties as these ? But he 
 has some more vigorous strains, worthy almost of that voice 
 wherewith Goethe, in his " Prologue to Faust," has repre- 
 sented him making " music to the spheres :" 
 
 " I will spend day among you like a king ! 
 Tour water shall be wine because I reign ! 
 Arise, my hand is open, it is day ! 
 Rise ! as men strike a bell, and make it music, 
 So have I struck the earth, and made it day. 
 As one blows a trumpet through the valleys, 
 So from my golden trumpet I blow day. 
 White-fa vor'd day is sailing on the sea, 
 And, like a sudden harvest in the land, 
 The windy land is leaving gold with day ! 
 
 I have done my task ; 
 
 Do yours. And what is this that I have given, 
 And wherefore 1 Look ye to it ! As ye can, 
 Be wise and foolish to the end. For me, 
 I under all heavens go forth, praising God."
 
 SYDNEY YENDl'S. 123 
 
 Well sung, old Baal ! Thou hast become a kind of Chris- 
 tian in these latter days. But we have seen a far stronger, 
 less mystic, and clearer song attributed to thy lips before, 
 although Yendys has not. His, as a whole, is not worthy 
 either of thee or himself! 
 
 But what beautiful words are these about the sun's darling 
 Summer immediately below this Sun-song ? 
 
 Alas ! that one 
 
 Should use the days of summer but to live, 
 And breathe but as the needful element 
 The strange, superfluous glory of the air ! 
 Nor rather stand apart in awe beside 
 Th' untouch'd Time, and saying o'er and o'er, 
 In love and wonder, ' These are summer-days.' " 
 
 We quote but one more of these random and ransomless 
 gems : 
 
 " The Sublime and beautiful, 
 Eternal twins, one dark, one fair ; 
 She leaning on her grand heroic brother, 
 As in a picture of some old romaunt." 
 
 We promised next to quote one or two longer passages. 
 We wish we had room for all the description of Chamouni, 
 which, like the scene, is unapproachable the most Miltonic 
 strain since Milton and this, because it accomplishes its 
 sublime effects merely by sublime thought and image, almost 
 disdaining aught but simple and colloquial words. Yet we 
 must give a few scattered stones from this new Alp in descrip- 
 tive literature this, as yet, the masterpiece of its author's 
 genius : 
 
 " Chamouni, 'mid sternest Alps, 
 The gentlest valley ; bright meandering track 
 Of summer, when she winds among the snows 
 From land to land. Behold its fairest field 
 Beneath the bold-scarr'd forehead of the hills 
 Low lying, like a heart of sweet desires, 
 Pulsing all day a living beauty deep 
 Into the sullen secrets of the rocks, 
 Tender as Love amid the Destinies 
 And Terrors ; whereabout the great heights stand, 
 Down-gazing, like a solemn company 
 Of grey heads met together to look back 
 Upon a far-fond memory of youth." 
 
 " There being old 
 All days and years they maunder on their thrones
 
 124 A CLUSTER. OF NEW POETS. 
 
 Mountainous mutterings, or through the vale 
 
 Roll the long roar from startled side to side, 
 
 When whoso, lifting up his sudden voice 
 
 A moment, speaketh of his meditation, 
 
 And thinks again. There shalt thou learn to stand 
 
 One in that company, and to commune 
 
 With them, saying, 'Thou, oh Alp, and thou and thou, 
 
 And I.' Nathless, proud equal, look thou take 
 
 Heed of thy peer, lest he perceive thee not- - 
 
 Lest the wind blow his garment, and the hem 
 
 Crush thee, or lest he stir, and the mere dust 
 
 In the eternal folds bury thee quick." 
 
 Coleridge, in his " Hymn to Mont Blanc" a hymn, of 
 which it is the highest praise to say that it is equal to tho 
 subject, to Thomson's hymn at the end of " The Seasons," to 
 Milton's hymn put into the mouth of our first parents, and to 
 this grand effusion of Sydney Yendys says, 
 
 " Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, 
 
 And straight stood still, 
 Motionless torrents silent cataracts!" 
 
 Balder has thus nobly expanded, if he ever (which we doubt) 
 thought of the Coleridgean image : 
 
 " The ocean of a frozen world ; 
 A marble storm in monumental rage ; 
 Passion at nought, and strength still strong in vain 
 A wrestling giant, spell-bound, but not dead, 
 As though the universal deluge pass'd 
 These confines, and when forty days were o'er, 
 Knew the set time obedient, and arose 
 In haste. But Winter lifted up his hand, 
 And stayed the everlasting sign, which strives 
 For ever to return. Cold crested tides, 
 And cataracts more white than wintry foam, 
 Eternally in act of the great leap 
 That never may be ta'en these fill the gorge, 
 And rear upon the steep uplifted waves 
 Immovable, that proudly feign to go." 
 
 There follow a number of verses, striving like ante-natal 
 ghosts for an incarnation worthy of their grandeur, but not so 
 clearly representing the magnificent idea in the author's mind 
 to ordinary readers as we might have wished. Yet all this 
 dim gulf of thought and image is radiant, here and there, with 
 poetry. But how finely this passage sweetens and softens the 
 grandeur before and after :
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS. 125 
 
 " Here, in the lowest vale, 
 Sit we beside the torrent, till the goats 
 Come tinkling home at eve, with pastoral horn, 
 Slow down the winding way, plucking sweet grass 
 Amid the yellow pansies and harebells blue. 
 
 The milk is warm, 
 
 The cakes are brown ; 
 
 The flax is spun, 
 
 The kine are dry ; 
 
 The bed is laid, 
 
 The children sleep ; 
 
 Come, husband, come 
 
 To home and me. 
 
 So sings the mother as she milks within 
 The chalet near thee, singing so for him 
 Whom every morn she sendeth forth alone 
 Into the waste of mountains, to return 
 At close of day, like a returning soul 
 Out of the Infinite : lost in the whirl 
 Of clanging systems, and the wilderness 
 Of all things, but to one remember' d tryste, 
 One human heart, and unforgotten cell, 
 True in its ceaseless self, and in its time 
 Eestored." 
 
 Our readers will notice, in these and the foregoing extracts, 
 a vast improvement over " The Roman" in the music of the 
 versification. The verse of " The Roman " was constructed 
 too much on the model of Byron, who often closes and begins 
 his lines with expletives and weak words. The verse of Yen- 
 dys is much more Miltonic. We give, as a specimen of this, 
 and as one of the finest passages in the poem, the following 
 description of Morn : 
 
 " Lo, Morn, 
 
 When she stood forth at universal prime, 
 The angels shouted, and the dews of joy 
 Stood in the eyes of earth. While here she reign" d, 
 Adam and Eve were full of orisons, 
 And could not sin ; and so she won of God, 
 That ever when she walketh in the world, 
 It shall be Eden. And around her come 
 The happy wonts of early Paradise. 
 Again the mist ascemleth from the earth, 
 And -.vatereth the ground ; and at the sign, 
 Nature, that silent saw our wo, breaks forth 
 Into her olden singing ; near and far 
 To full and voluntary chorus tune 
 Spontaneous throats. 
 
 Morn liath no past. 
 Primeval, perfect, she, not bom to toil,
 
 126 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 Steppeth from under the great weight of life, 
 And stands as at the first. 
 
 As love, that hath his cell 
 
 In the deep secret heart, doth with his breath . 
 
 Enrich the precincts of his sanctuary, 
 And glorify the brow, and tint the cheek ; 
 As in a summer-garden, one beloved, 
 Whom roses hide, unseen fills all the place 
 With happy presence ; as to the void soul, 
 Beggar' d with famine and with drought, lo, God ! 
 And there is great abundance ; so comes MORX, 
 Plenishes all things, and completes the world." 
 
 We could select a hundred passages of equal merit ; but, as 
 faithful critics, are bound now to take notice, and that at some 
 little length, of what we think the defects of this remarkable 
 poem. 
 
 "We think that the two main objections to " Balder " will 
 be monotony and obscurity. We will not say of the hero, 
 what an admirer of Yendys said of the Monk in " The Ro- 
 man," that he is a great bore and humbug ; but we will say 
 that he talks too much, and does too little. The poem is lit- 
 tle else than one long soliloquy a piece of thinking aloud ; 
 and this kind of mental dissection, however masterly, begins, 
 toward the end of 282 pages, to fatigue the reader. " Bal- 
 der " is in this respect a poem of the Manfred and Cain school, 
 but is far longer, and thus palls more on the attention than 
 they. A more fatal objection is the great obscurity of much 
 in this poem. The storj does not pervade it, as a clear road 
 passes through a noble landscape, or climbs a lofty hill, dis- 
 tinct even in its windings, and forming a line of light, connect- 
 ing province with province : it is a footpath piercing dark for- 
 ests, and often muffled and lost amid their umbrage. The 
 wailings of Balder toward the close become oppressive, inar- 
 ticulate, and half-frenzied ; and from the lack of interest con- 
 nected with him as a person, seem unnatural, and produce 
 pain rather than admiration. This obscurity of Yendys has 
 been, as we hinted before, growing on him. We saw few 
 traces of it in " The Roman." It began first to appear in 
 some smaller poems he contributed to the "Athenaeum," and 
 has, we trust, reached its climax in the latter pages and 
 scenes of " Balder." It is produced partly by his love of 
 personification and allegory figures in which he often indeed
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS. 127 
 
 greatly excels ; partly by a diseased subtlety of introspective 
 thought ; partly by those fainting-fits to which his demon (like 
 a very different being, Giant Despair in the " Pilgrim ") is sub- 
 ject at certain times, and partly by a pedantry of language, 
 which is altogether unworthy of so masculine a genius. 
 Take two specimens of this last-mentioned fault : 
 
 " Adjusting every witness of the soul, 
 By such external warrants I do reach 
 Herself ; the centre and untakeu core 
 Of this enchanted castle, whose far lines 
 And strong circuravallations, in and in 
 Concentring, I have carried, but found not 
 The foe that makes them deadly ; and I stand 
 Before these most fair walls ; and know he lies 
 Contain' d, and in the wont of savage war 
 Prowl round my scathless enemy, and plot, 
 Where, at what time, with what consummate blow, 
 To storm his last retreat, and sack ths sense 
 Tliat dens her fierce decease." 
 
 The second is worse, with the exception of the first four 
 lines : 
 
 " As one should trace 
 An angel to the hill wherefrom he rose 
 To heaven, and on whose top the vacant steps, 
 In march progressive, with no backward print, 
 A sudden cease. Sometimes, being swift, I meet 
 His fallen mantle, torn off in the wind 
 Of great ascent, whereof the Attalic pomp 
 Between mine eyes and him perchance conceals 
 The bare celestial. Whose still happier speed 
 Shall look up to him, while the blinding toy, 
 In far perspective, is but as a plume 
 Dropp'd from the eagle 1 Whose talarian feet 
 Shall stand unshod before him while he spreads 
 His pinions']" 
 
 His description of the heroine, with all its exquisite touches, 
 is considerably spoiled by a similar unwise elaboration and in- 
 tricacy of language : 
 
 " But when the year was grown 
 And sweet by warmer sweet to nuptial June, 
 Thejlowery adolescence slowly fill'd, 
 Till, in a passion of roses, all the time 
 Flush'd, and around the glowing heavens made suit, 
 And onward through the rank and buxom days," Ac.
 
 128 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 There is a mixture of fine fancy with the quaintness antl 
 odd phraseology of what follows : 
 
 " She came In September, 
 And if she were o'erlaid with lily leaves, 
 And substantived by mere content of dews, 
 Or liinb'd of flower-stalks and sweet pedicles, 
 Or make of golden dust from thigh of bees, 
 Or caught of morning mist, or the unseen 
 Material of an odor, her pure text 
 Could seem no more remote from the corrupt 
 And seething compound of our common flesh 5" 
 
 A splendid passage near this is utterly spoiled by language 
 as apparently affected as anything in Hunt's " Foliage," or 
 Keats' " Endymion :" 
 
 ' Nature thus 
 
 The poet Nature singing to herself 
 Did make her in sheer love, having delight 
 Of all her work, and doing all for joy, 
 And built her like a temple wherein cost 
 Is absolute ; dark beam and hidden raft 
 Shittim ; each secret work and covert use 
 Frngrant and golden ; all the virgin walls 
 Pure, and within, without, prive and apert. 
 From buried plinth to viewless pinnacle, 
 Enrich' d to God." 
 
 In justice, we must add one of the "better passages of this 
 very elaborate, and in many points signally felicitous descrip- 
 tion : 
 
 "Yet more I loved 
 
 An art, which of all others seem'd the voice 
 And argument, rare art, at better close 
 A chosen day, worn like a jewel rare 
 To beautify the beauteous, and make bright 
 The twilight of some sacred festival 
 Of love and peace. Her happy memory 
 Was many poesies, and when serene 
 Beneath the favoring shades, and the first star 
 She audibly remember'd, they who heard 
 Believed the Muse no fable. As that star 
 Unsullied from the skies, out of the shrine 
 Of her dear beauty beautifully came 
 The beautiful, untinged by any taint 
 Of mortal dwelling, neither flush'd nor pale, 
 Pure in the naked loveliness of heaven, 
 Such and so graced was she." 
 
 Smith and Yendys differ very materially in their conception
 
 SYDNEY YENDYS. 129 
 
 of women. Smith's females are houris in a Mahometan hea- 
 ven ; those of Yendys are angels in the Paradise of our God. 
 Smith's emblem of woman is a rich and luscious rose, bending 
 to every breath of wind, and wooing every eye ; that of Yen- 
 dys is a star looking across gulfs of space and galaxies of 
 splendor, to one chosen earthly lover, whose eyes alone respond 
 to the mystic messages of the celestial bride. Smith's idea 
 of love, though not impure, is passionate ; that of Yendys is 
 more Platonic than Plato's own. We think that the true, 
 the human, the poetic, arid the Christian idea of love, includes 
 and compounds the sensuous and the spiritual elements into 
 one a tcrtium quid diviner, shall we say ? because more 
 complete than either ; and which Milton and Coleridge (in his 
 " Love ") have alone of our poets adequately represented. 
 Shelley, like Yendys, is too spiritual ; Keats, like Smith, is 
 too sensuous. Shakspeare, we think, makes woman too much 
 the handmaid, instead of the companion, of man : his yield- 
 ing, bending shadow, not his sister and friend : 
 
 " Stronger Shakspeare felt for man alone." 
 
 Ere closing this critique, we have to mention one or two con- 
 clusions in reference to Yendys' genius, which this book has 
 deeply impressed on our minds. First, his forte is not the 
 drama or the lyrical poem. The lyrics in this poem are nu- 
 merous, but none of them equal to Smith's " Garden and 
 Child," or to his own " Winter Night," in " The Koman ;" 
 none of them entirely worthy of his genius. Nor is he strik- 
 ingly dramatic in the management of his scenes and situations. 
 He should give us next, either a great prose work, developing 
 his peculiar theory of things, in the bold, rich, and eloquent 
 btyle of those articles he contributed to " The Palladium," 
 " The Sun," and " The Eclectic ;" or he should bind himself 
 up to the task he has already in his eye, that of constructing 
 a great epic poem. We know no writer of the age who, if he 
 will but clarify somewhat his style, and select some stern, 
 high, continuous narrative for his theme, is so sure to succeed 
 in this forsaken walk of the Titans. The poet who has coped 
 with the Coliseum, the most magnificent production of man's 
 art, and with Chamouni, the grandest of God's earthly works, 
 need shrink from no topic, however lofty ; nay, the loftier his 
 theme the better.
 
 130 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 NO. II. -ALEXANDER SMITH. 
 
 THERE is something exceedingly sweet but solemn in the 
 strain of thought suggested by the appearance of a new and 
 true poet. Well is his uprise often compared to that of a 
 new star arising in the 'midnight. What is he ? Whence has 
 he come ? Whither is he going ? And how long is he to 
 continue to shine ? Such are questions which are alike ap- 
 plicable to the planet and to the poet. A new poet, like a 
 new planet, is another proof of the continued existence of the 
 creative energy of the " Father of Spirits." He is a new mes- 
 senger and mediator between the Infinite and the race of man. 
 Whither rising or falling, retreating or culminating, in aphe- 
 lion or in perihelion, he is continually an instructor to his 
 kind. There is never a moment when he is not seen by some 
 one, and when to be seen is, of course, to shine. And if his 
 mission be thoroughly accomplished, the men of future ages 
 are permitted either to share in the shadow of his splendor, or 
 to fill their empty urns with the relict radiance of his beams. 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a joy for ever ;" 
 
 so a poet, a king of beauty, is for ever a joy or a terror ; a 
 gulf of glory opening above, or an abyss of torment and mys- 
 tery gaping below. 
 
 'Tis verily a fearful gift that of poetic genius ; and fearful, 
 especially, through the immortality which waits upon all its 
 genuine inspirations, whatever be their moral purpose and 
 tendency. Thus, a Marlowe is as immortal as a Milton a 
 Congreve as a Goldsmith a Byron or Burns as a Words- 
 worth or James Montgomery an Edgar Poe as a Longfellow 
 or a Lowell. Just look at the dreadful, the unquenchable, the 
 infernal life of Poe's " Lyrics and Tales." No one can read 
 these without shuddering, without pity, and sorrow, and con- 
 demnation of the author, without a half-muttered murmur of 
 inquiry at his Maker " Why this awful anomaly in thy 
 works ?" And yet no one can avoid reading them, and reading 
 th3m again, and hanging over their lurid and lightning-blast-
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH. 131 
 
 ed pages, and thinking that this wondrous being wanted only 
 two things to have made him the master of American minds 
 virtue and happiness. And there steals in another thought, 
 which deepens the melancholy and eternises the interest 
 what would Poe NOW give to have lived another life than he 
 did, and to have devoted his inestimable powers to other works 
 than the convulsive preparation of such terrible trifles such 
 nocturncB nugte as constitute his remains ? And still more 
 empathically, what would Swift and Byron now exchange for 
 the liberty of suppressing their fouler and more malignant 
 works works which, nevertheless, a world so long as it lies 
 in wickedness shall never willingly let die ? 
 
 Alas ! it is too late eipyaaro, as the Greek play has it. 
 The shaft of genius once ejaculated can be recalled no more, 
 be it aimed at Satan or at God. And hence in our day the 
 peculiar propriety, nay, necessity, of prefacing or winding up 
 our praise of poetic power by such a stern caution to its pos- 
 sessor as this : " Be thou sure that thy word, whether that 
 of an angel or a fiend, whether openly or secretly blasphemous, 
 whether loyal or rebellious to the existence of a God and of 
 his great laws, whether in favor of the alternative Despair or 
 the alternative Revelation, the only two possible, shall endure 
 with the endurance of earth, and shall remain on thy head 
 either a halo of horror or a crown of glory." 
 
 Claiming, as we do, something of a paternal interest in 
 Alexander Smith, we propose, in the remainder of this paper, 
 first characterizing his peculiar powers, and secondly, adding 
 to this estimate our most sincere and friendly counsel as to 
 their future exercise. 
 
 It is a labor of love ; for ever since the straggling, scratch- 
 ing MS., along with its accompanying letter, reached our still 
 study, we have loved the author of the " Life Drama ;" and 
 all the more since we met him in his quiet yet distinct, modest 
 yet manly personality. And perhaps the opportunities of ob- 
 servation which have been thus afforded may qualify us for 
 speaking with greater certainty and satisfaction, both to our- 
 selves and others, than the majority of his critics, about the 
 principal elements of his genius. 
 
 We may first, however, glance at some of the charges which 
 even his friendly critics have brought against him. He has
 
 132 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 been accused of over sensuousness. The true answer 
 to this is to state his youth. He is only twenty-five 
 years of age, and wrote all those parts of the poem to which 
 objections have been made when he was two or three years 
 younger. Every youth of genius must be sensuous ; and if he 
 write poetry, ought, in truth to his own nature, to express it 
 there. Of course we distinguish between the sensuous and the 
 sensual. Smith is never sensual ; and his most glowing des- 
 criptions, no more than those in the " Song of Songs," tend 
 to excite lascivious feelings. Female beauty is a natural ob- 
 ject of admiration, and a young poet filled with this passionate; 
 feeling, were a mere hypocrite if he did not voice it forth in 
 verse, and, both as an artist and as an honest man, will feel him- 
 self compelled to do so. Had Wordsworth himself written poe- 
 try at that period of his life to which he afterwards so beauti- 
 fully refers in the lines 
 
 " happy time of youthful lovers, 
 balmy time, in which a love-knot on a lady's hrow 
 Seem'd fairer than the fairest star in heaven" 
 
 it had perhaps been scarcely less richly flesh-colored than the 
 " Life Drama." In general, however, the true poet, as he ad- 
 vances in his life and in his career, will become less and less 
 sensuous in feeling and in song. Woman's form will retreat 
 farther back in the sky of his fancy, and woman's ideal will 
 come more prominently forward ; she will " die in the flesh, to 
 be raised in the spirit;" and this inevitable process, through 
 which even Moore passed, and Keats was passing at his death, 
 .shall yet be realised in Alexander Smith, if he continue to 
 live, and his critics consent to wait. If our readers will com- 
 pare Shelley's conception of woman, in his juvenile novels 
 " Zastrozzi" and the " Rosicrucian," with Beatrice Cenci, or 
 the graceful imaginary female forms which play like creatures 
 of the elements in the " Prometheus," he will find another 
 striking instance of what we mean. In some cases, perhaps, 
 the process may be reversed, and the young poet who began 
 with the ideal may, in after life, descend to the real, and 
 drown his early dream of spiritual love in sensuous admira- 
 tion and desire. But these we think are rare, and are ac- 
 counted for as much from physical as from mental causes.
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH. 133 
 
 Smith has been called an imitator, or even a plagiarist. 
 We are not careful to answer in this matter, except by again 
 referring to his age. All young poets are imitators. " Po- 
 etry," says Aristotle, "is imitation." It begins with imita- 
 tion, and it continues in imitation, and with imitation it ends. 
 The difference between the various stages only is, that in boy- 
 hood and early youth poets imitate other poets, and that in 
 manhood they pass from the study of models which they may 
 admire to error and extravagance, to that great original, which, 
 without blame, excites an infinite and endless devotion. That 
 Smith has read and admired, and learned of Keats, and Shel- 
 ley, and Tennyson, and many others, is obvious; but it is 
 obvious also that he has read his own heart still more closely, 
 and has learned still more from the book of nature. Every 
 page contains allusions to his favorite authors; but every 
 page, too, contains evidences of a rich native vein. The man 
 who preserves his idiosyncrasy amid much reading of the 
 poets, is more to be praised than he who, in horror at plagiar- 
 ism, draws a cordon sanitaire around himself, and refuses to 
 cultivate acquaintance with the great classics of his age and 
 country. A true original is often most so when he is imitat- 
 ing or even translating others. So Smith has marvellously 
 improved some of the few figures he has borrowed. The ob- 
 jects shown are sometimes the same as in other authors, but 
 he has cast on them the mellowing, softening, and spiritualis- 
 ing moonlight of his own genius. 
 
 A still more common objection is a certain monotony of 
 figure which marks his poetry. He draws, it is said, all his 
 imagery from the stars, the sea, the sun, and the moon. Now 
 we think we can not only defend him iu this, but deduce from 
 it an argument in favor of the power and truth of his genius. 
 What bad or mediocre poet could have meddled with these 
 old objects without failure ? Nothing in general so vapid as 
 odes to the moon, or sonnets on the sea. But Smith has 
 lifted up his daring rod to the heavens, and extracted new 
 and rich imagination from their unfading fires. He has once 
 more laid a poet's hand upon the ocean's mane, and the sea 
 has known his rider, and shaken forth a stormy poetry to his 
 touch. Besides, his circumstances have prevented him from 
 coming in contact habitually with aught but nature's elemen-
 
 134 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 tary forms, aud he has sung only what was most familiar to 
 his mind. What could he have told us about the 
 
 " Alps and Apennines, 
 The Pyrenean and the river Po," 
 
 whose summer excursions never, till of late, extended farther 
 than Inversuaid or Glencoe, and to whom 
 
 :! The stars were nearer than the fields ?'' 
 
 Nothing worth listening to ; and therefore he watches the 
 moon circling large and queenly over the smoky tiles of the 
 Gallowgate ; or he contemplates the round red sun, shining 
 rayless through the Glasgow morning fogs ; or he sees the 
 head of the Great Bear or the foot of Orion glimmering on 
 him at the corner of the streets ; or striking out from the 
 city, he marks the 
 
 " Laboring fires come out against the dark, 
 Where, with the night, the country seemed on flame ; 
 Innumerable furnaces and pits, 
 And gloomy holds, in which that bright slave, Fire, 
 Doth pant and toil all day and night for man, 
 Throw large and angry lustres on the sky, 
 And shifting lights across the long black roads." 
 
 Or, in his rare holidays, he sails to Loch Lomond, or paces 
 the banks of Loch Lubnaig, and fancies eclipse instead of 
 sunshine bathing the crags of Benledi, and shadowing into 
 terror and inky darkness the placid lake. Thus has he sought 
 to realise and to utter the poetry which he has found around 
 him, and, verily, great has been his reward. Few as are the 
 objects he describes, what a depth of interest he attaches to 
 them. With what lingering gusto does he describe them. In 
 proportion to the smallness of their number, is the strength 
 of his love, the felicity of his descriptions, and the energy 
 and variety of the poetic use he makes of them. It is as if 
 he were apprehensive of immediate .blindness coming to hide 
 them from his view, and were anxious previously to daguerreo- 
 type them for ever before the eye of his soul. 
 
 In this we are reminded of Ossian ; and the defence put in 
 by Blair on behalf of the monotony of the objects of his poetry 
 may be used with fully more force in reference to Smith. His 
 figures, like Ossian's, are chiefly derived from the great pri-
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH. 135 
 
 mary forms of nature, but their application is still more va- 
 rious, and much less than the Highland bard does he repeat 
 himself, not to speak of the far subtler and intenser spirit of 
 imagination which pervades the later poet. For we fearlessly 
 venture to assert, that no poet that ever lived has excelled 
 Smith in the beauty and exquisite analogical perception dis- 
 played in his images from nature. We select a few on this 
 principle, that we have not seen them quoted in any other of 
 the reviews or notices : 
 
 " The anguish' d earth shines on the moon a moon. 1 ' 
 
 " Now the fame that scorned him while he liv'd 
 Waits on him like a menial." 
 
 " His part is worst that touches this base world ; 
 Although the ocean's inmost heart be pure, 
 Yet the salt fringe that daily licks the shore 
 Is gross with sand." 
 
 " The vain young night 
 Trembles o'er her own beauty in the sea." 
 
 " The soft star that in the azure east 
 Trembles in pity o'er bright bleeding day." 
 
 " The hot Indies, on whose teeming plains 
 The seasons four, knit in one flowery band, 
 Are dancing ever." 
 
 " Oh, could I lift my heart into her sight, 
 As an old mountain lifts its martyr's cairn 
 Into the pure sight of the holy heavens" 
 
 "His cataract of golden curls." 
 
 " The married colors in the bow of heaven." 
 
 " The while the thoughts rose in her eyes, like stars 
 Kising and setting in the blue of night " 
 
 " The earnest sea 
 
 .... ne'er can shape unto the listening hills 
 The lore it gather' d in its awful age : 
 The crime for which 'tis lash'd by cruel winds 
 To shrieks, mad spoomings to the frighted hills." 
 
 " A gallant, curl'd like Absalom, 
 Cheek'd like Apollo, with his luted voice." 
 
 " 'Tis four o'clock already. See, the moon 
 Has climb'd the blue steep of the eastern sky, 
 And sits and tarries for the coming night, 
 So let thy soul be up and ready arm'd, 
 In waiting till occasion comes like night." 
 
 ' The marigold was burning in the marsh, 
 Like a thing dipp'd in sunset."
 
 13G A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 By the way, not one critic, so far as we know, has noticed 
 the exquisite poem from which this last line is quoted a poem 
 originally entitled u The Garden and the Child," and which 
 alike we and the author consider the best strain in the whole 
 " Life Drama." Our readers will find it in page 91. Its 
 history is curious. Mr. Smith was trudging one day to his 
 work along the Trongate, when he saw a child " beautiful as 
 heaven." There was no more work for him that day. Her 
 face haunted him ; her future history rose before his fancy ; 
 and in the evening he wrote the poem (or rather it " came 
 upon him") in the space of two hours. Certainly it reads like 
 inspiration. It is one gush of tender or terrible beauty. The 
 author now says of it (p. 101) : 
 
 " I almost smile 
 
 At the strange fancies I have girt her with 
 The garden, peacock, and the black eclipse, 
 The still grave-yard among the dreary hills, 
 Grey mourners round it. I wonder if she's dead. 
 She was too fair for earth." 
 
 The child is another little Eva. We must say that we love 
 not only little children, but all who love them. Especially 
 we sympathise with all those who have some one dead and 
 sainted image of a child hanging up in the chamber of their 
 heart, as Kate Wordsworth hangs in De Quincey's, and A. V. 
 hangs in our own, and who daily and nightly pay their orisons 
 to the Great God who dwelt in it for a season. We suspect 
 that scarce one who has lived to middle age but can remember 
 some such early sunbeam, which shone as only sunbeams in 
 the morning can shine, and returned with its freshness and 
 glory all untainted to the fountain whence it sprang, bearing 
 with it in its return to heaven a whole, loving, yearning, 
 broken, yet submissive heart. Perhaps, after all, this feeling 
 may have prejudiced us in favor of the " Garden and the 
 Child," but certainly it was the perusal of it which first in- 
 creased to certainty our previous notion that Mr. Smith was 
 one of our truest poets. 
 
 It convinced us, too, that he had a heart. This, we fear, 
 has of late been a vital deficiency in many of our most cele- 
 brated bards. The od/ous examples of Goethe and Byron,
 
 ALEXANDER. SMITH. 137 
 
 the constant inculcation, by critics, of the necessity of reach- 
 ing artistic merit at every expense and every hazard, and the 
 solitary or divorced life of some of our literary men, not to 
 speak of the withering effects of scepticism and of a modified 
 licentiousness, have all tended to deaden or mislead, or to ren- 
 der morbid, the feelings of our men of genius. Neither Keats 
 nor Moore, nor Tennyson nor Rogers, nor Henry. Taylor, 
 have given, in their poetry, any decided evidence of that warm, 
 impulsive, childlike glow, which all men agree in calling 
 " heart." They have proved abundantly that they are artists, 
 and even poets, but have failed to prove that they are men. 
 
 We rejoice, however, to recognize in our younger genera- 
 tion of poets in Yendys and Smith, and Bigg and Bailey 
 symptoms that a better order of things is at hand, and that 
 the principle, " the Greatest of these is Love," so long ac- 
 knowledged in religion, shall by and by be felt to be the law 
 of poetry understanding, too, by love, not a mere liking to 
 all things, not a mere indifferentism, raised on its elbow to 
 contemplate objects, but a warm, strong, and enacted prefer- 
 ence for all things that are " lovely and true, and of a good 
 report." 
 
 The great distinction between the speaker and the singer in 
 this age, as in past ages, is, perhaps, music. Many now, a,s 
 ever, possessing all other parts of the poet genius, originali- 
 ty, constructive power are doomed (sad fate !) all their lives 
 long to the level of prose by their deficiency in ear, their want 
 of music. Apollo's soul may be in them, but Apollo's lute 
 they can by no means tune. Look at Walter Savage Landor ! 
 No one can doubt that he is intensely and essentially a poet, 
 and that his prose and 'verse contain little bursts of glorious 
 poetic music. But they are brief; they are broken ; they are 
 not sustained ; they are perpetually intermingled with harsh 
 and harrow-like paragraphs, and both his prose and verse con- 
 join in proving that he never could have elaborated any long, 
 linked, and continuous harmony. Feeling all this, we have 
 watched with considerable interest and care Smith's versifica- 
 tion, trying it, however, not by any artificial standard, but 
 solely by the ear ; and our decided opinion is, that he has 
 been destined by nature to sing rather than to speak his fine
 
 138 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 thoughts to the world. His poetry abounds with every va- 
 riety of natural music. 
 
 Take that of the ballad, in this specimen : 
 
 " In winter, when the dismal rain 
 Comes down in slanting lines, 
 And Wind, that grand old harper, smote 
 His thunder harp of pines. 
 
 * * # * 
 
 " When violets came and woods were green, 
 
 And larks did skyward dart, 
 A Love alit and white did sit 
 Like an angel on his heart. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " The Lady Blanche was saintly fair, 
 
 Nor proud, but meek her look ; 
 In her hazel eyes her thoughts lay clear 
 As pebbles in a brook. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " The world is old, oh ! very old ; 
 
 The wild winds weep and rave : 
 The world is old, and grey, and cold, 
 Let it drop into its grave." 
 
 Or take a specimen of what we may call the Wordsworth- 
 ian measure, culled from the " Garden and the Child :" 
 
 " She sat on shaven plot of grass, 
 With earnest face, and weaving 
 Lilies white and freak' d pansies 
 Into quaint delicious fancies ; 
 Then, on a sudden, leaving 
 Her floral wreath, she would upspring, 
 With silver shouts and ardent eyes, 
 To chase the yellow butterflies, 
 
 Making the garden ring ; 
 Then gravely pace the scented walk, 
 Soothing her doll with childish talk." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 " That night the sky was heap'd with clouds ; 
 Through one blue gulf profound, 
 Begirt with many a cloudy crag, 
 The moon carne rushing like a stag, 
 And one star like a hound : 
 Wearily the chase I eyed, 
 AVearily I saw the Dawn's 
 Feet sheening o'er the dewy lawns. 
 
 Oh God ! that I had died. 
 My heart's red tendrils all were torn, 
 And bleeding, on that summer morn."
 
 ALEXANDER. SMITH. 139 
 
 Or take a specimen of rich voluptuous blank verse : 
 
 " I will bo kind when next he brings mo flowers 
 Pluck' d from the shining forehead of the morn, 
 Ere they have oped their rich cores to the bee ; 
 His wild heart with a ringlet will I chain, 
 And o'er him I will lean me like a heaven, 
 And feed him with sweet looks and dew-soft words, 
 And beauty that might make a monarch pale, 
 And thrill him to the heart's core with a touch : 
 Smile him to Paradise at close of eve, 
 To hang upon my lips in silver dreams." 
 
 Or hear this sterner, loftier, more epical strain : 
 
 " A grim old king, 
 
 Whose blood leap'd madly when the trumpets bray'd, 
 To joyous battle 'mid a storm of steeds, 
 Won a rich kingdom on a battle-day ; 
 But in the sunset he was ebbing fast, 
 Ring'd by his weeping lords. His left hand held 
 His white steed, to the belly plash'd with blood, 
 That seem'd to mourn him with its drooping head ; 
 His right his broken brand ; and in his ear 
 His old victorious banners flap the winds. 
 He call'd his faithful herald to his side 
 ' Go ! tell the dead I come.' With a proud smile, 
 The warrior with a stab let out his soul, 
 Which fled, and shriek'd through all the other world 
 ' Ye dead ! my master comes !' And there was pause 
 Till the great shade should enter." 
 
 Does not this description remind you of Homer's style ? 
 How rugged yet powerful its melody ! We could quote many 
 other passages, all corroborating our statement that Smith is 
 naturally a master of music, and needs only a careful culture 
 to complete the mastery. Since the appearance of the " Life 
 Drama," he published a little chant in a Glasgow newspaper, 
 entitled " Barbara," the copy of which we have mislaid, else 
 we would have quoted it as a final triumphant proof of his 
 musical power, as well as of his lyrical genius. It is one of 
 the most touching little laments in the language. But here a 
 question of greater moment occurs Has this young poet, in 
 addition to his exquisite imagery, his heart, and his music, a 
 true and deep vein of thought, and does that thought, as all 
 deep veins of reflection should do, run into religion ? What
 
 140 A CLUSTER. OF NEW POETS. 
 
 is his theory of things? Is he a Christian, or is he a mere 
 philosophic speculator, or poetic visionary ? Now here, we 
 think, is the vital defect of the poem, the one thing which pre- 
 vents us applying to it the epithet " great." Mr. Smith is, we 
 believe, no infidel ; and his poetry breathes, at times, an ear- 
 nest spirit : but his views on such subjects are extremely 
 vague and unformed. He does not seem sufficiently impressed 
 with the conviction that no poem ever has deserved the name 
 of "great" when not impregnated with religion, and when not 
 rising into worship. His creed seems too much that of 
 Keats 
 
 " Beauty is truth truth beauty." 
 
 We repeat that he should look back to the past, and think 
 what are the poems which have come down to us from it most 
 deeply stamped with the approbation of mankind, and which 
 appear most likely to see and glorify the ages of the future. 
 Are they not those which have been penetrated and inspired 
 by moral purpose, and warmed by religious feeling? We 
 speak not of sectarian song, nor of the common generation of 
 hymns and hymn writers, but we point to Dante's " Divina 
 Comedia," to all Milton's Poems, to Spenser's " Faerie Queen," 
 to Herbert's "Temple," to Young's "Night Thoughts," to 
 Thomson's " Seasons," to some of the better strains of Pope 
 and Johnson, to Cowper. to Wordsworth, Southey, and Cole- 
 ridge. These, and not Keats, or Shelley, or Tennyson, or 
 Byron, are our real kings of melody ; they are our great, 
 clear, healthy standards of song ; they are all alike free from 
 morbid weakness, moral pollution, and doubtful speculation; 
 and the poet who would not merely shine the meteor of a mo- 
 ment, the stare of fools, and the temporary pet of the public, 
 but would aspire to send his name down, in thunder and in 
 music, through the echoing aisles of the future, and become a 
 benevolent and beloved potentate over distant ages, and mil- 
 lions yet unborn, must tread in their footsteps, and seek after 
 the hallowed sources of their inspiration. 
 
 This leads us, in the last place, to give our young poet a few 
 sincere and friendly counsels. When he appeared first, he 
 was, we know, and complained that he was, " deluged with ad- 
 vice." That d luge has now subsided, and we would desire,
 
 ALEXANDER SMITH. 141 
 
 in its subsidence, to try to collect the essence of the moral it 
 has left, and to impress it on his serious attention. 
 
 We will not reiterate to him the commonplaces he must 
 have heard, ad nauseam, about bearing his honors meekly, 
 and not being dazzled and spoiled with success, &c. That 
 success has, indeed, been unparalleled for at least thirty years. 
 The last case at all in point was Pollok's " Course of Time," 
 but this, if our readers will remember, did not become popu- 
 lar till after its author's premature death had surrounded, as 
 it were, all its pages with a black border, and made it to be 
 road as men read the record of the funeral of a king. But 
 Smith "arose one morning, and found himself famous." That 
 this sudden glare of fame on a head so young, were it not as 
 strong as it is young, might have produced injurious effects, 
 was a matter of some probability. But that danger, we think, 
 is now past, and there are other dangers more to be dreaded, 
 which may be on their way. 
 
 Mr. Smith should neither, on the one hand, rest under his 
 laurels, nor, on the other, be too eager to snatch at more. Let 
 him deeply ponder on the subject of his second poem, and let 
 him carefully elaborate its execution. Let him mercilessly 
 shear away all those small mannerisms of style of which he 
 has been accused. Let him burn his Tennyson and his Keats ; 
 he has read them now long enough, and further perusal were 
 not profitable. He has lately had the opportunity of extend- 
 ing his sphere of survey ; he has seen the finest scenery in 
 Scotland and South Britain ; he has mingled with much of its 
 most distinguished literary society, and is now the secretary 
 to an illustrious university, and in the metropolis of his na- 
 tive land. Let him select a topic for his new poem which will 
 permit him to avail himself of these new advantages, and let 
 him pour into it every drop of the new blood and every ray 
 of the new light he has recently acquired. We rejoice to 
 learn that he is no improvisatore in composition ; that he 
 loves to write slowly ; .that he enjoys the labor of the file ; 
 that almost every line in his " Life Drama" was written seve- 
 ral times rejoice in this, because it assures us that his next 
 work shall be no hasty effusion, hatched up by the heat of suc- 
 cess, but that it shall be a calm and determined trial of his 
 general and artistic strength. His styles and manners are, as
 
 142 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 our extracts have proved, manifold, and he might attain mas- 
 tery in all. But we would earnestly ask him to give us more 
 of that stern Homeric grandeur we find in his picture, quoted 
 above, of the dying king : 
 
 " That strain I heard was of a higher mood." 
 
 We close this " deluge of advice," if he will call it so, by 
 other three distinct counsels: First, let him advance to 
 nobler models than those he seems hitherto, almost exclusively, 
 to have studied. We have been told that he has commenced 
 a careful reading of Goethe, which may be of considerable 
 benefit to him in the art of expression, as Goethe's style is 
 generally supposed to be nearly faultless. But let him not 
 rest there, since there are far loftier and far safer ridges on 
 the Parnassian hill. We name, as the models to which he 
 ought to give his days and his nights, Homer, Dante, Milton, 
 Shakspeare's sterner tragedies, and, above all, the poetry of 
 the Bible. That he has read all these, we doubt not. What 
 we wish him to do, is to study them ; to roll their raptures, 
 and to catch their fire ; to make them his song in the house of 
 his pilgrimage; and at their reverend and time-honored altars 
 not only to kindle the fire of his own genius, but to consume, 
 as chaff, whatever puerilities may have hitherto contributed to 
 lessen the brightness of the flame. 
 
 Secondly, he must become less sensuous. In other words, 
 he must put off the youth, and put on the man. He must 
 think and sing less about " ringlets," and " waists," and " pas- 
 sion-panting breasts," &c., &c. All such things we pardon 
 in him now, but shall be less disposed to forgive after a few 
 years have passed over his head. A boy Anacreon may be 
 borne with, but a middle-aged or old Anacreon is a nuisance, 
 especially when he might have been something far higher. 
 For the sake of poetry, let him proceed to veil the statue of 
 the Venus, and to uncover those of the Apollo, the Mars, and 
 the Jupiter. 
 
 Our last counsel is the most momentous. He has himself 
 painted in glowing colors his ideal of the poet as one who 
 shall " consecrate poetry to God, and to its own high uses." 
 Let him proceed with stern and firm step to fill up his own 
 ideal, and accomplish his own prophecy. Let him be the
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 1 43 
 
 groat sublime he draws. Of this he may be certain, that the 
 poet of the coming time must be a believer in the future as 
 well as a worshipper of the past. He may not be a sectarian, 
 but he must be a Christian. We do not want him to write 
 religious poetry in the style of Watts or Montgomery, or any 
 one else ; but we want him to devote his fine powers more 
 than he has hitherto done to the promulgation of high spirit- 
 ual truth ; if not, we foresee that one or two of his competi- 
 tors in the poetic race, whom he has meantime outstripped, 
 may overtake him, and come into the goal amid a deeper gush 
 of applause and of thankfulness, from that large class who 
 now look upon poetry as a serious thing, and are disposed to 
 consult it as a subordinate oracle of the Most High. But we 
 will not anticipate, far less despair. The vaticination of our 
 hearts tells us that, apart altogether from comparative awards 
 and successes, there are noble fields before Alexander Smith, 
 and that his own words shall not fail of fulfilment. 
 
 " I will go forth 'mong men, not mail'd in scorn, 
 But in the armor of a pure intent; 
 Great duties are before me, and great songs. 
 And, whether crown'd or crownless, when I fall, 
 It matters not, so as God's work is done. 
 I've learned to prize the quiet light'ning deed, 
 Not the applauding thunder at its heels, 
 Which mon call Fame." 
 
 NO. IIL-J. STANYAN BIGG.* 
 
 THERE are, every tyro in criticism knows, three great schools 
 or varieties in Poetry the objective, the subjective, and the 
 combination of the two. The best specimens of the first class 
 are to be found in Homer's " Iliad" and " Odyssey," in Burns's 
 poems, and in Scott's rhymed romances; of the second, in the 
 poetry of Lucretius, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, 
 and some of the Germans ; and of the combination of the two, 
 in Shakspeare, Milton, Schiller, and Byron. Of late, almost 
 
 * " Night and the Soul :" a Dramatic Poem.
 
 
 144 A CLUSTER. OF NEW POETS. 
 
 all our poets of much mark have betaken themselves to the 
 subjective. We propose, ere coming to Mr. Bigg, first, in- 
 quiring into the causes of this; and, secondly, urging our 
 young poets, by a few arguments, to intermix a larger amount 
 of the objective with their poetry. 
 
 One cause of the propensity of our rising race of poets to 
 the subjective, has undoubtedly been the force of example. 
 The poets who are at present acting with most power on the 
 young mind of the age, are intensely subjective, and some of 
 them to the brink of morbidity. The influence wielded over 
 the lovers of poetry by Homer, Scott, or Burns, is slender, 
 compared to that which Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Cole- 
 ridge, and the rest of the bardic brotherhood the sons of 
 Mist by Thunder are exerting. The writings of the former 
 arc devoured like new novels, and then thrown aside. The 
 writings of the latter are tasted slowly, and in drops are 
 studied are carried into solitude are read by the sides of 
 lonely rivers, or on silent mountain tops, and ultimately sur- 
 round the young aspirants with an atmosphere which goes 
 with them where they go, rests with them where they rest, and 
 hovers over their pens when they write. To the charm of 
 these poets, it adds mightily that they are said to be, and are, 
 more or less heterodox in their creeds. This gives a peculiar 
 gusto to their works, the reading of which becomes a sweet 
 and secret sin, smacking of the taste of the " stolen waters" 
 and the " pleasant bread." Thus are two luxuries that of 
 the indulgence of daring thought, and something resembling 
 contraband desire 'united in the perusal of our later subjec- 
 tive poets. 
 
 Secondly, we live in a period of deep thoughtfulness, and 
 great intellectual doubt. Never were there so many thinking. 
 Never was thought so much at sea. Never were there so 
 many " searchings of heart." Our blessed Lord mentions, as 
 one of the most striking signs of his second advent " per- 
 plexity." "And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the 
 moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, 
 with perplexity the sea and the waves roaring!" This sign 
 is around us, even at the doors. The political and the moral, 
 the intellectual and the religious worlds, are all equally per- 
 plexed and in darkness. It is a midnight, moaning, weltering
 
 3. STANYAN BIGG. 145 
 
 ocean, on which we are all embarked, and the day-star has not 
 yet risen. Our poetical spirits are sharing, to a very large 
 extent, in this perplexity; and this has led to incessant intro- 
 spective views and pensive contemplations. After Byron, there 
 rose a short-lived race of rhymsters, who pretended to scepti- 
 cism and gloom, but whose real object was to produce a stim- 
 ulating effect upon the minds of their readers ; and who, like 
 quack doctors, distributed drugs to others, of which they 
 themselves never tasted a drop. It is very different now. A 
 real yearning uncertainty and thirst after more light, are now 
 heard crying, if not shrieking, in many of our poets. All re- 
 cent poems of mark, such as the " Life Drama," " Balder," 
 " Festus," and " Night and the Soul, ' are more or less filled 
 with those thoughts that wander through eternity ; those beat- 
 ings of strong souls against the bars of their earthly prison- 
 house ; those profound questions uplifted to heaven " Whence 
 evil ? What the nature of man, and what his future destiny ? 
 What, who, and where is God ?" True poets must sympathise 
 with the tendency of their times, and as that at present, is 
 transitional, uncertain, and uneasy, their poetry must partake, 
 in some measure, of that uncertainty and that unrest. 
 
 In connection with this, is the prevalent study of the trans- 
 cendental philosophy by our poets. It was long imagined 
 that poetry and philosophy were incompatible that no poet 
 could be a philosopher, and that no philosopher could be a 
 poet. What God had often joined man put asunder. It has, 
 however, been for some time surmised that critics were in this 
 wrong. The fact that Milton was thoroughly conversant with 
 the philosophies of his day, and the example set by the Ger- 
 man, poets, and by the Lakers, who combined ardent poetic 
 enthusiasm with diligent and deep study of metaphysics, have 
 rectified opinion on this point, and sent our young poets to 
 their Kants, their Fichtes, and their Hamiltons, as well as to 
 their Shakspeares and their Goethes. From these and other 
 causes, it has come about, that at an age when the gifted youth 
 of the past were singing of their Helens or their Marys apos- 
 trophising their spaniels and robin-redbreasts, or describing 
 the outward forms of sky and earth around their native vil- 
 lage, their successors in the present are singing of the myste- 
 rious relations of nature to the human soul; are galloping
 
 146 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 their Pegasus from galaxy to galaxy ; and are now entering 
 the heaven of heavens, and now listening to the sound of the 
 surge of penal fire, breaking on the " murk and haggard rocks" 
 of that " Other Place." 
 
 Now, we are far from seeking to deny that this is, on the 
 whole, what it should be, as well as what, inevitably, it must 
 have been. It were as vain altogether to condemn, as at all to 
 try to resist, the stream of an age-tendency. Nay, this state 
 of things has some advantages, and teems with some promise. 
 It proves that the minds of men are becoming more serious 
 and thoughtful, when even our youths of genius are less poets 
 than preachers. It shows that we are living in a more earnest 
 period. It proves progress, since our very youth have passed 
 points where the mature manhood of the past thought it pru- 
 dent and necessary to halt. It suggests hope, that in a future 
 age there may be still higher, quicker, and more certain and 
 solid advancement. But, looking at the matter on the other 
 side, the exclusively subjective cast of much of our best poetry 
 has produced certain evils. In the first place, it has tended 
 to overcast the renown of our great objective poets, particu- 
 larly among the young. Homer, Scott, Campbell, and Burns, 
 are still, indeed, popular, but not so much, we think, as they 
 were, and are read rather for their mere interest, than for 
 their artistic and poetic excellence. Relished by many they 
 still are, as sweet morsels; but seldom, if at all, studied as 
 models. Secondly, it, on the other hand, excludes our really 
 good poets of the subjective school from many circles of read- 
 ers, who, seeking for some objective interest in poems, and 
 finding little or none, are tempted to close them in weariness, 
 or fling them away in disgust. Thomson, Cowper, Byron, as 
 well as Shakspeare and Milton, addressed themselves to all 
 classes "of minds, except the very lowest, and succeeded in 
 fascinating all. Browning, and many besides, speak only to 
 the higher minds, and verily they have their reward ; their 
 works are pronounced unintelligible and uninteresting by the 
 majority of readers, and, while loudly praised, are little read. 
 How different it had been, if these gifted men hf,d wreathed 
 their marvellous profusion of thought and imagery round 
 some striking story, or made it subservient to some well-con- 
 structed plot ! The " Paradise Lost" and the " Pilgrim's
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 147 
 
 Progress" are devoured by millions for their fable, who are 
 altogether incapable of understanding their interior meaning, 
 or perceiving their more recondite beauties. " Prometheus 
 Unbound," and " Paracelsus," are read with pleasure by the 
 more enthusiastic, but are caviare, not only to the general 
 reader, but to many thousands who love poetry with a passion. 
 Tennyson, on the other hand, with all his subtlety and refine- 
 ment, seldom forgets to throw in such touches of nature, and 
 little fragments of narrative, as secure a kindly reception for 
 his poems, at once with the severest of critics and the least 
 astute of schoolboys. Why should poets be read only by 
 poets, or by philosophical critics ? We think that every good 
 poem should be constructed on the same model with a good 
 sermon, in which the preacher, if a sensible man, takes care 
 that there shall be at once milk for babes and strong meat for 
 them that are of full age ; or upon the model of that blessed 
 book, the Bible, which contains often in the same chapter the 
 grandest poetry and the simplest pathos; here, "words unut- 
 terable," which seem to have dropped from the very lips of 
 the heavenly oracle, and there, little sentences, which appear 
 made for the mouths of babes and sucklings ; here, " deeps 
 where an elephant may swim ; and there, shallows where a 
 lamb may wade 1" 
 
 Thirdly, this systematic subjectivism is almost certain to 
 produce systematic obscurity and methodical mysticism. If 
 an original writer sit down to compose poetry, either without 
 the thought of any audience, or with only that of a few supe- 
 rior minds in view, he almost inevitably falls into peculiarities 
 of thought and idiosyncrasies of language, which suit only an 
 esoteric class of readers, and will often baffle even them. If 
 a poet only seek to " move himself," leaving it, as beneath 
 him, to the " orator," to " move others," the consequence will 
 be fatal, not only to his popularity, but to- his geimine power. 
 He will move nobody but himself. Look again to Browning's 
 poetry : a wonderful thing it is, in many points and parts ; 
 but, as a whole, it is a book of puzzles a vast enigma a tis- 
 sue of hopeless obscurity in thought, and of perplexed, bar- 
 barous, affected jargon in language. The same is true with 
 much of Emerson's volume of poems. It is easy for these 
 authors to accuse the reader of being dull in comprehension.
 
 148 A CLUSTER Of NEW POETS. 
 
 The reader thinks he has a greater right to retort the charge 
 of dulness upon the author. Where fire is, it shines; where a 
 star is, it beams : the differentia of light is to be seen. But 
 the density of much of our modern poetry is " dark as was 
 Chaos, ere the infant Sun was rolled together, or had tried his 
 beams across the gulf profound." It is amusing to watch the 
 foclish faces put on by the admirers of this kind of rhymed 
 riddles or blank-verse conundrums, when even they are unable 
 to make out the meaning of some portentous passage, through 
 which not a ray of light has been permitted to shine, and from 
 which grammar and sense have been alike divorced; and to 
 hear their mumbled apologies to the effect, " Depend on it, 
 there are sunbeams in this cucumber, provided we were able 
 to extract them ! " 
 
 Another evil is the increase of a false, pretentious, and 
 pseudo-philosophic style of criticism, which, by being con- 
 stantly exercised upon mystic or super-subtle poetry, becomes 
 altogether incapable of appreciating any other, and often finds 
 subjective meanings, where the objective alone was intended 
 by the poet. The great master of this art abroad is Ulrici, 
 whose " Midsummer Night's Dream " of Shakspeare passes 
 with many for a piece of profound and unmatched analysis. 
 Specimens of the class are rife at home, and we deplore the 
 increase amongst us of a style of criticism, which seeks to 
 illustrate the ignotum by the ignotius, as though midnight 
 could add illumination to mist. 
 
 What, then, is it asked, do we propose that our poets should 
 do ? Should they, as Professor Blackie in his late Stirling 
 speech seems to think, abandon subjective song altogether ; 
 and burning their Wordsworth and Shelley, betake themselves 
 to ballad-poetry, Homer, Scott, and Macaulay's " Lays of An- 
 cient Rome ? " By no means. This is not a legitimate con- 
 clusion from what we have now said. There remains a more 
 excellent way. The third and best style, combining the direct 
 dealing, the definite plan, and the clear purpose, the interest 
 and the simpler style of objective poetry, with the depth, the 
 thoughtfulness, the catholicity, and the universal references of 
 fcubjective, should be attempted by our rising bards. They 
 need not be at a loss either for models or subjects. All Shak- 
 epeare may become their exemplar. Let them look especially
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 149 
 
 to his " Macbeth," " Hamlet," " Lear," and " Timon," and 
 notice how, in these masterpieces of his genius, he has united 
 the subtlest reflection and loftiest imagination, to the liveliest 
 interest and the warmest human feeling. How clear he is, 
 too, amid all his depth ; how direct amid all his passion ; and 
 how masculine amid all his subtlety, not to speak of the infi- 
 nite variety produced by his interchange of the gay with the 
 grave of the comic with the tragic elements. Or let them 
 study not Shelley's "Prometheus," but his "Cenci;" and 
 take not the monstrosity of the story, but the manhood of the 
 style, for their model. Or let them read " Wallen stein," 
 and the other great dramas of Schiller. Or let them consult 
 Byron himself, and see how, in " Manfred," in " Sardanapa- 
 lus," and in " Cain," he has combined the deepest thought he 
 was capable of, and admirable artistic management of style 
 and character, with vividness of individual portraiture, and 
 intensity of interest. As to subjects, they are inexhaustible, 
 as long as there 'are so many passages and characters in his- 
 tory waiting for treatment; panting, shall we say, for that 
 incarnation which genius only can give. We point at present 
 to one, a gigantic one to Danton. Which of our young 
 poets, our Smiths, Masseys, Biggs, and Yendyses, shall win a 
 crown of immortal fame, by writing a rugged historical drama, 
 after the old "Julius Cjesar" or "Richard the Third" 
 fashion, developing the character and casting the proper glare 
 of grandeur on the death of that wild wondrous Titan of the 
 French Revolution? "Danton," said Scott, long ago, "is a 
 subject fit for the treatment of Shakspeare or Schiller." 
 
 After all the deductions and exceptions implied in the 
 foregoing remarks, we cannot but express our delight at the 
 fine flush of genuine poetry which the last few years have 
 witnessed alike in England, Ireland, and Scotland. In a 
 MS. volume we find some sentences written by us in the year 
 1835, when we were newly of age, which we transcribe, be- 
 cause they express anticipations which have been of late sig- 
 nally fulfilled. " It is objected, ' People will not now-a-days 
 read poetry.' True, they will not read what is called poetry. 
 They will not read tenth-rate imitations of Byron, They will 
 not read nursery themes for which a schoolboy would be 
 flogged. They will not read respectable commonplace. They
 
 150 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 will not read even the study-sweepings of reputed men, who 
 imagine, in their complacency, that the universe is agape for 
 the rinsings of their genius. But neither will people, if they 
 can help it, eat raw turnips, or drink ditch water, nor have 
 willingly done so, from the flood downwards, to our knowledge. 
 But people would read real poetry, were it given them. In- 
 deed, an outcry about the decline of poetry is sure, sooner or 
 later, to provoke a re-action. It will, indeed, encourage an 
 enterprising spirit. ' The field,' he will say, ' lies clear, or is 
 peopled only by Lilliputians, supplicating to be spit upon 
 rather than neglected. Why should not I enter on it ?' The 
 age is now awake. The slightest symptoms of original power 
 are now recognised. And we often figure to ourselves the rap- 
 ture with which a great poet, writing in the spirit of his age, 
 would now be welcomed by an, age whose manuals are already 
 Wordsworth and Goethe.' 1 ' 1 
 
 No mean place among our rising poets must be allowed to 
 J. Stanyan Bigg, who has once more challenged interest for 
 the lake country of Cumberland, on account of the poetic 
 genius it still inspires and fosters. He was born, we believe, 
 at least he now resides, in Ulverston. He has, we understand, 
 published some time ago, a juvenile volume of poems, but 
 this we have not seen. Part of his present work appeared, 
 like Smith's "Life Drama," piecemeal in the " Critic " that 
 admirable paper, which is now, both in character and circula- 
 tion, at the very top of the literary journals in the metropo- 
 lis ; and the G-roombridges have now placed the whole before 
 us, in the shape of this handsome, portable, and well-printed 
 volume. 
 
 Mr. Bigg although classable in strict logic and method 
 with the school of Bailey, and although bearing certain marked 
 resemblances to Alexander Smith is yet distinctively origi- 
 nal; being less mystical than Festus, less sensuous than 
 Smith more humane and more Christian, we think, than 
 either. He shines not so much in outstanding passages of 
 intense brilliance, or in single thoughts of great depth, as in 
 a certain rich pervasive spirit of poetry, in which (to use the 
 word applied to it by a generous rival-bard) all his verses are 
 " soaked." His poetry has not yet gathered into firm sunlike 
 shape, but rather resembles what Dr. Whewell in his " Plu-
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 151 
 
 rality of Worlds " supposes many of the stars still to be 
 fiery matter unconsolidated, and having hitherto cast off no 
 worlds. Yet the light and the fire are genuine, and may be 
 expected, in due time, to bring forth results both useful and 
 splendid. We seem to perceive the following peculiarities, 
 besides, in Mr. Bigg's poetry : His imagery is remarkable 
 for its boldness and variety. He has exhibited an equal ap- 
 preciation of the beautiful and the sublime. He has that 
 noble rush of thought and language which is so characteristic 
 of genuine inspiration. He has a keen perception of the ana- 
 logies subsisting between nature and the mind of man. And 
 his hope in the destiny of humanity is founded on Christian 
 grounds. These are his main merits. We shall, ere we have 
 done, notice what seem his defects. 
 
 First, Mr. Bigg's imagery is uncommonly varied and bold. 
 None of his figures are so striking, or so highly wrought, as 
 some in the " Life Drama," but there is a greater abundance 
 and variety of them. The nature of his theme ("Night") 
 leads him to select many from the scenery of that season its 
 stars, its wailing winds, the many mysterious sights and 
 sounds which haunt its solitudes. But, besides these, he 
 
 fathers analogies from a thousand other regions, and skirts 
 is Night with a bright border of Daylight imagery. Here, 
 for instance, are some sweet and soothing figures : 
 
 " Bless them, and bless the world. Oh may it rest 
 In peace upon thy bosom, like a ship 
 On the unrippled silver of the sea, 
 Or like a green tree in the circling blue 
 Of the bright joyousness of summer-morns." 
 
 Here, again, is a rich Arabian-Night kind of fancy : 
 
 "Xhou speakest in soul-pictures, yet I see 
 Thy meaning rising through them, free and simple 
 As a young princeling from the grand state-bed, 
 Where his white limbs have been enswathed all night 
 In gold and velvets." 
 
 As a proof of his variety, we give a passage containing, in 
 the space of a few lines, three figures, all good, and all so di- 
 verse from each other : 
 
 " Oh ! 'twere as if a dank dishevell'd night 
 Should rush up, madly hunted by the winds,
 
 152 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 All black as Erebus, upon the steps 
 Of a great laughing oriental day. 
 I should be wretched as a cold lane house, 
 Standing a mark upon a northern moor, 
 Eaves-deep in snow, surrounded by black pools, 
 Pelted by winter, ever anger-pale, 
 To lose you, having tasted of such bliss, 
 Such sweet companionship, such holy joy, 
 'Twere as if earth should be flung back again, 
 All singing as she is, and crown'd with flowers, 
 Into the reeking cycles of her past : 
 Instead of valleys, sedgy swamps, and fens, 
 With grim, unwieldy reptiles trailing through, 
 And in the place of singing, bellowings, 
 And the wild roar of monsters on the hills." 
 
 That " cold lone house," what a picture ! It is worthy of 
 Crabbe ; only Mr. Bigg gives it a personification more power- 
 fill than was competent to that poet, and you feel for it as if 
 it were a forlorn human being. How often we have regarded 
 houses in the country with similar emotions. One seemed 
 sheltering itself, and consciously cowering, amid the woods 
 which screened it from the northern blast. Another seemed 
 shivering on a bare and bald exposure. A third, of mean 
 aspect, but set on a hill, seemed ashamed of its exalted beg- 
 gary, and far-seen nakedness, and striving for ever in vain to 
 be hid. A fourth stood up with the majesty of an Atlas, in 
 castellated dignity beneath earth and heaven, meeting the 
 scene and the sun like an equal. A fifth seemed melancholy 
 amid its eternal moors. And a sixth, a ruin, glared through 
 the dull eyes of its broken windows and dilapidated loopholes, 
 in rage and defiance, to a landscape over which it had once 
 looked abroad in pride, protection, and love. 
 
 Secondly, Mr. Bigg seems equally attracted by, although 
 not equally successful in, the beautiful and the sublime. Spe- 
 cimens of the sublime are found in his poetry; one of the 
 finest, we think, is the following: 
 
 "Were all nature void, one human thought, 
 Self-utter'd and evolved in act, left like 
 A white bone on the brink of the abyss, 
 As the sole relic of what onoe had been ; 
 Thou, who perceivest at a glance the all 
 In one, who scannest all relationships, 
 In whom all issues meet concentrative 
 Couldst from this puny fragment of thy works
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 153 
 
 Recall, and re-arrange, and re-construct 
 The mighty mammoth-skeleton of things, 
 And fold it once more in its spotted skin. 
 And bid the Bright Beast live." 
 
 Another is this. Speaking of the pre- Adamite earth, he 
 says 
 
 " She lay desolate and dumb as they, 
 Save when volcanoes lifted up their voice 
 Olden Isaiahs in the wilderness 
 And told unto the incredulous wastes wild tales 
 Of the great after-time the age of flowers, 
 Of songs and blossoms, MAN, and grassy graves." 
 
 But it is in the region of the beautiful that our poet is 
 most at home. He has watered his muse at Grasmere 
 Springs, and at the placid Lake of Windermere, rather than 
 at the turbid waves of " grey Loch Skene," the still, slumber- 
 ing, inky depths of Loch Avon and Loch Lea, or the streams 
 of the Cona, moaning and foaming amid the rocks and gloomy 
 precipices of Glencoe. We give two specimens of the many 
 beautiful and pathetic strains with which this volume abounds. 
 The following occurs at page 33 : 
 
 " A fair young girl, 
 
 To whom one keen wo, like the scythe of Death, 
 Had sever'd at a stroke the ties of earth 
 The tender trammelage of love and hope 
 And not released the spirit from its clay, 
 But left it bleeding out at every pore, 
 Clinging with torn hands to its prison-bars, 
 And gasping out towards the light, in vain. 
 For she had loved and been deserted ; and 
 All her heart's wealth was now return'd to her 
 Base metal, and not current coin. Her love, 
 Which went forth from her bright and beautiful, 
 Came back a ghastly corpse, to turn her heart 
 Into a bier, and chill it with its weight 
 Of passive wo for ever. But the shock 
 Had turn'd the poles of being, and henceforth. 
 In circles ever narrowing, her soul 
 Went wheeling like a stricken world round, heaven. 
 
 Eyes she had, in whose dark lustre 
 Slumber 1 d wild and mystic beams ; 
 
 A brow of polish' d marble 
 Pale abode of gorgeous dreams
 
 154 A CLUSTER. OP NEW POETS. 
 
 Dreams that caught the hues and splendors 
 
 Which the radiant future shows, 
 For the post was nought but anguish, 
 
 And a sepulchre of woes ; 
 Therefore from its scenes and sorrows 
 
 All her heart and tsoul were riven, 
 And her thoughts kept ever wandering 
 
 With the angels up to heaven. 
 
 When they told her of the pleasures 
 
 Which the future had in store, 
 When her sorrows would have faded, 
 
 And her anguish would be o'er; 
 Told her of her wealth and beauty, 
 
 And the triumphs in her train ; 
 Told her of the many others 
 
 Who would sigh for her again : 
 She but caught one-half their meaning, 
 
 While the rest afar was driven : 
 ' Yes,' she murmur'd ' they are happy 
 
 They, I mean, who dwell in heaven ! ' 
 
 When they wish'd once more to see her 
 
 Mingling with the bright and fair ; 
 When they told her of the splendor 
 
 And the rank that would be there ; 
 Told her that amid the glitter 
 
 Of that brilliant living sea, 
 There were none so sought and sigLed for, 
 
 None so beautiful as she ; 
 Still she heeded not the flattery, 
 
 Heard but half the utterance given : 
 ' Yes,' she answer' d, ' there are bright ones, 
 
 Many, too, I know in heaven \ ' 
 
 When they spoke of sunlit glories, 
 
 Summer days, and moonlit hours ; 
 Told her of the spreading woodland, 
 
 With its treasury of flowers ; 
 Clustering fruits, and vales, and mountains, 
 
 Flower-banks mirror'd in clear springs, 
 Winds whose music ever mingled 
 
 With the hum of glancing wings 
 Scenes of earthly bliss and beauty 
 
 Far from all her thoughts were driven, 
 And she fancied that they told her 
 
 Of the happiness of heaven. 
 
 For one master-pang had broken 
 The sweet spell of her young life ; 
 
 And henceforth its calm and sunshine 
 Were as tasteless as its strife ; 
 
 Henceforth all its gloom and grandeur, 
 All the music of its streams,
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 155 
 
 All its thousand pealing voices, 
 
 Spoke the language of her dreams ; 
 Dreams that wander' d on, like orphans 
 
 From all earthly solace driven, 
 Searching for their great Protector, 
 
 And the palace-gates of heaven." 
 
 Thirdly, Mr. Bigg exhibits that tioble rushing motion of 
 thought and language which testifies so strongly to a genuine 
 inspiration, in which words seem to pursue each other, like 
 wheels in a series of chariots, with irresistible force and impe- 
 tuous velocity. Nowhere out of " Festus " do we find passa- 
 ges which heave and hurry along with a more genuine afflatus, 
 than in many of Mr. Bigg's pages. Take two long passages, 
 both of which are " instinct with spirit." The first will be 
 found at page 2 1 : 
 
 " The night is lovely, and I love her with 
 A passionate devotion, for she stirs 
 Feelings too deep for utterance within me. 
 She thrills me with an influence and a power, 
 A sadden'd kind of joy I cannot name. 
 So that I meet her brightest smile with tears. 
 She seemeth like a prophetess, too wise, 
 Knowing, ah ! all too much for happiness ; 
 As though she had tried all things, and had found 
 All vain and wanting, and was thenceforth steep'd 
 Up to the very dark, tear-lidded eyes 
 In a mysterious gloom, a holy calm ! 
 Doth she not look now just as if she knew 
 All that hath been, and all that is to come 1 
 With one of her all-prescient glances turn'd 
 Towards those kindred depths which slept for aye 
 The sable robe which God threw round himself, 
 And where, pavilion' d in glooms, he dwelt 
 In brooding night for ages, perfecting 
 The glorious dream of past eternities, 
 The fabric of creation, running adown 
 The long time-avenues, and gazing out 
 Into those blanks which slept before time was ; 
 And with another searching glance, turn'd up 
 Towards unknown futurities the book 
 Of unborn wonders till she hath perused 
 The chapter of its doom ; and with an eye 
 Made vague by the dim vastness of its vision, 
 Watching unmoved the fall of burning worlds, 
 Rolling along the steep sides of the Infinite, 
 All ripe, like apples dropping from their stems ; 
 Till the wide fields of space, like orchards stripp'd, 
 Have yielded up their treasures to the garner,
 
 156 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 And the last star hath fallen from the crown 
 
 Of the high heavens into utter night, 
 
 Like a bright moment swallow'd up and lost 
 
 In hours of after-anguish ; and all things 
 
 Are as they were in the beginning, ere 
 
 The mighty pageant trail'd its golden skirts 
 
 Along the glittering pathway of its God, 
 
 Save that the spacious halls of heaven are fill'd 
 
 With countless multitudes of finite souls, 
 
 With germ-like infinite capacities, 
 
 As if to prove all had not been a dream. 
 
 'Tis this that Night seems always thinking of; 
 
 Linking the void past to the future void, 
 
 And typifying present times in stars, 
 
 To show that all is not quite issueless, 
 
 But that the blanks have yielded starlike ones 
 
 To cluster round the sapphire throne of God 
 
 In bliss forever and for evermore !" 
 
 The second, still finer, meets us at page 39 : 
 
 " thought ! what art thou but a fluttering leaf 
 Shed from the garden of Eternity ? 
 The robe in which the soul invests itself 
 To join the countless myriads of the skies 
 The very air they breathe in heaven the gleam 
 That lights it up, and makes it what it is 
 The light that glitters en its pinnacles 
 The luscious bloom that flushes o'er its fruits 
 The odour of its flowers, and very soul 
 Of all the music of its million harps 
 The dancing glory of its angels' eyes 
 The brightness of its crowns, and starlike glow 
 Of its bright thrones the centre of its bliss, 
 For ever radiating like a sun 
 The spirit thrill that pulses through its halls, 
 Like sudden music vibrating through air 
 The splendor playing on its downy wings 
 The lustre of its sceptre-?, and the breeze 
 Which shakes its golden harvests into light- 
 The diamond apex of the Infinite 
 A ray of the great halo round God's head 
 The consummation and the source of all, 
 In which all cluster, and all constellate, 
 Grouping like glories round the purple west 
 When the great sun is low. For what are stars 
 But God's thoughts indurate the burning words 
 That roll'd forth blazing from his mighty lips, 
 When he spake to the breathless infinite, 
 And shook the wondrous sleeper from her dream 1 
 Thus God's thoughts ever call unto man's soul 
 To rouse itself, and let its thoughts shake off 
 The torpor from their wings, and soar and sing
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 157 
 
 Up in the sunny azure of the heavens ; 
 
 And when at length one rises from its rest, 
 
 Like the mail'd Barbarossa from his trance, 
 
 He smiles upon it in whatever garb 
 
 It is array'd : whether it stretches up 
 
 In grand cathedral spires, whose gilded vanes, 
 
 Like glorious earth-tongues, lap the light of heaven, 
 
 Or rounds itself into the perfect form 
 
 Of marble heroes looking a reproof 
 
 On their creators for not gifting them 
 
 With one spark of that element divine 
 
 Who^e words they are ; or points itself like light 
 
 Upon the retina, in breathing hues 
 
 And groups of loveliness on speaking canvas ; 
 
 Or wreaths itself in fourfold harmony, 
 
 Making the soul a sky of rainbows ; or 
 
 Sweeping vast circuits, ever stretching out, 
 
 Broad-arm'd, and all-embracing theories ; 
 
 Or harvesting its brightness focal-wise, 
 
 All centring in the poet's gem-like words, 
 
 Fresh as the odours of young flowers, and bright 
 
 As new stars trembling in the hand of God. 
 
 In all its grand disguises he beholds 
 
 And blesses his fair child. 
 
 ******** 
 
 One human thought, invested in an act, 
 
 Lays bare the heart of all humanity, 
 
 And holds up, globule-like, in miniature 
 
 All that the soul of man hath yet achieved, 
 
 Its Paradises Lost, its glorious Iliads, 
 
 Its Hamlets and Othellos, and its dreams 
 
 Eising in towering Pyramids and Fanes, 
 
 To show that earth hath raptures heavenward ; 
 
 And like the touch' d lips of a hoary saint, 
 
 Utter dim prophesies of after-worlds. 
 
 Making sweet music to the ear of God, 
 
 Like Memnon's statue thrilling at the sun ; 
 
 And as the New Year opening into life 
 
 Is all-related to the ages, so 
 
 Are man's works unto thine, Almighty God ; 
 
 And as the ages to eternity, 
 
 So are all works to thee, Great Source of all !" 
 
 Fourthly, the author of " Night and the Soul" has a quick 
 perception of those real, but mysterious analogies, which bind 
 mind and nature together. The whole poem is indeed an at- 
 tempt to show the thousand points in which Night, in its 
 brightness and blackness, its terror and its joy, its clouds and 
 its stars, its calm and its storm, comes in contact with human 
 hopes, fears, aspirations, doubts, faults, and destinies. For 
 example, he says
 
 158 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 " The solemn Night comes hooded, like a nun 
 From her dark cell, while all the laughing stars 
 Mock the black weeds of the fair anchorite. 
 Sorrow is but the sham and slave of joy ; 
 And this sweet sadness that thou wottest of 
 Is but the dusky dress in which our bliss, 
 Like a child sporting with the weeds of wo, 
 Chooses a moment to enrobe itself." 
 
 Two beautiful separate strains will show still better what 
 we mean. One we find at page 113 : 
 
 " Thou pleadest, love, and all things plead ; 
 
 For what is life but endless needing ? 
 All worlds have wants beyond themselves, 
 And live by ceaseless pleading. 
 
 The earth yearns towards the sun for light ; 
 
 The stars all tremble towards each other ; 
 And every moon that shines to-night 
 
 Hangs trembling on an elder brother. 
 
 Flowers plead for grace to live ; and bees 
 
 Plead for the tinted domes of flowers ; 
 Streams rush into the big-soul'd seas ; 
 
 The seas yearn for the golden hours. 
 
 The moon pleads for her preacher, Night ; 
 
 Old ocean pleadeth for the moon ; 
 Noon flies into the shades for rest ; 
 
 The shades seek out the noon. 
 
 Life is an everlasting seeking ; 
 
 Souls seek, and pant, and plead for truth ; 
 Youth hangeth on the skirts of age ; 
 
 Age yearneth still towards youth. 
 
 And thus all cling unto each other ; 
 
 For nought from all things else is riven ; 
 Heaven bendeth o'er the prostrate earth ; 
 
 Earth spreads her arms towards heaven. 
 
 So do thou bend above me, love, 
 
 And I will bless thee from afar ; 
 Thou shalt be heaven, and I the sea 
 
 That bosoineth the star." 
 
 The other occurs at page 117 and is a powerful collection 
 rf gloomy images : 
 
 " I stand beside thy lonely grave, my love, 
 The wet lands stretch below me like a bog ;
 
 J. STANLEY BIGG. 159 
 
 Darkness oomes showering down upon me fast ; 
 
 The wind is whining like a houseless dog ; 
 The cold, cold wind is whining round thy grave, 
 
 It comes up wet and dripping from the fen ; 
 The tawny twilight creeps into the dark, 
 
 Like a dun, angry lion to his den. 
 
 There is a forlorn moaning in the air 
 
 A sobbing round the spot where thou art sleeping ; 
 There is a dull glare in the wintry sky, 
 
 As though the eye of heavfin were red with weeping. 
 Sharp gusts of tears come raining from the clouds, 
 
 The ancient church looks desolate and wild ; 
 There is a deep, cold shiver in the earth, 
 
 As though the great world hunger'd for her child. 
 
 The very trees fling their gaunt arms on high, 
 
 Calling for Summer to come back again ; 
 Earth cries that Heaven has quite deserted her ; 
 
 Heaven answers but in showers of drizzling rain. 
 The rain comes plashing on my pallid face ; 
 
 Night, like a witch, is squatting on the ground ; 
 The storm is rising, and its howling wail 
 
 Goes baying round her, like a hungry hound. 
 
 The clouds, like grim, black faces, come and go, 
 
 One tall tree stretches up against the sky ; 
 It lets the rain through, like a trembling hand 
 
 Pressing thin fingers on a watery eye. 
 The moon came, but shrank back, like a young girl 
 
 Who has burst in upon funereal sadness ; 
 One star came Cleopatra-like, the Night 
 
 Swallow'd this one pearl in a fit of madness, 
 And here I stand, the weltering heaven above, 
 Beside thy lonely grave, my lost, my buried love !" 
 
 Fifthly, this poet deduces a grand Christian moral from his 
 story and whole poem. Alexis, his hero, after outliving many 
 difficulties, trials, and doubts, comes to a Christian conclusion, 
 in which he expresses the following magnificent passage (page 
 155) : 
 
 " The heart is a dumb angel to the soul 
 Till Christ pass by, and touch its bud-like lips. 
 Not unto thee, bold spirit on the wing, 
 Does the bright form of Truth reveal itself; 
 Soar as thou wilt, the heavens are still above, 
 And to thy questionings no answer comes 
 Only the mocking of the dumb, sad stars. 
 Awhile thy search may promise thee success, 
 And now and then wild lights may play above.
 
 160 A CLUSTER OP NEW POETS. 
 
 Which, with exultant joy, thou takest for 
 The gleaming portals of the homo of Truth 
 'Twas but a mirage where thou saw'st thyself, 
 And not the image of the passing God ! 
 
 Oh, with what joy we all set out for truth 
 
 Newer Crusaders for the Holy Land 
 
 Till one by one our guides and comrades fall, 
 
 And then some starry night, some cold bleak night, 
 
 We find we are alone upon the sands, 
 
 Far from all human aids and sympathies, 
 
 While the black tide comes roaring up the waste. 
 
 The highest truths lie nearest to the heart ; 
 No soarings of the soul can find out God. 
 I saw a bee who woke one summer night, 
 And taking the white stars for flowers, went up 
 Buzzing and booming in the hungry blue ; 
 And when its wings were weary with the flight, 
 And the cold airs of morn were coming up, 
 Lo ! the white flowers were melting out of view, 
 And it came wheeling back ah ! heavily 
 To the great laughing earth that gleaui'd below ! 
 God will not show himself to prying eyes : 
 Could Reason scale the battlements of heaven, 
 Religion were a vain and futile thing, 
 And Faith a toy for childhood or the mad ; 
 The humble heart sees farther than the soul. 
 Love is the key to knowledge to true power ; 
 And he who loveth all things, knpweth all. 
 Religion is the true Philosophy ! 
 Faith is the last great link twixt God and man. 
 There is more wisdom in a whisper* d prayer, 
 Than in the ancient lore of all the schools : 
 The soul upon its knees holds God by the hand. 
 Worship is wisdom as it is in heaven ! 
 ' I do believe ! help Thou my unbelief!' 
 Is the last, greatest utterance of the soul. 
 God canle to me as Truth I saw him not ; 
 He came to me as Love and my heart broke, 
 And from its inmost deeps there came a cry, 
 1 My Father ! oh ! my Father, smile on me ;' 
 And the Great Father smiled. 
 
 Come not to God with questions on thy lips ; 
 He will have love love and a holy trust, 
 And the self-abnegation of the child. 
 'Tis a far higher wisdom to believe, 
 Than to cry ' Question, at the porch of truth. 
 Think not the Infinite will calmly brook 
 The plummet of the finite in its deeps. 
 The humble cottager I saw last night, 
 Sitting among the shadows at his door 
 With his great Bible open on his knee
 
 J. STANYAN BIGG. 161 
 
 His grandchild sporting near him on the grass, 
 When his day's work was done and pointing still 
 With horny finger as he read the lines, 
 Had, in his child-like trust and confidence, 
 Far more of wisdom on his furrow'd brow, 
 Than Kant in proving that there is a God, 
 Or Plato buried in Atlantis dreams !" 
 
 Still more directly is the moral of the poem stated in the 
 following words, which leave Alexis a " little child :" 
 
 " The last secret that we learn is this 
 That being is a circle after all. 
 And the last line we draw in after life, 
 Rejoins the arc of childhood when complete : 
 That to be more than man is to be less." 
 
 We need not dwell on the identity of this statement with 
 the words of Jesus " Except a man become as a little child, 
 he can in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven;" nor express 
 our joy at finding these words which are at present a stum- 
 bling-block to many, in this proud and sceptical age, when 
 intellect is worshipped as a God, and humility trampled on as 
 a slave taken up, set in the splendid imagery, and sung in 
 the lofty measures of one of our most gifted young poets. 
 
 We have not analysed the story, for this reason, that story, 
 properly speaking, there is none. Two couples are the prin- 
 cipal interlocutors Ferdinand and Caroline Alexis and 
 Flora. The first are all bliss and blue sky together ; they 
 seem almost in heaven already. Alexis, again, is a kind of 
 Manfred without the melancholy end of that hero. Certain 
 spirits form a conspiracy against him, and lead him through 
 wild weltering abysses of struggle very powerfully described 
 during which he forgets poor Flora, and a lady named Edith 
 dies in love for him. When he returns to himself, and reaches 
 the solid ground of hope, he returns to Flora too, and they 
 are left in a very happy frame she blessing the hour of his 
 deliverance, and he resuming his old poetical aspirations. The 
 poem closes with a song, in the " Locksley Hall" style, on the 
 " Poet's Mission," which is not, we think, in the author's best 
 manner, and will be thought, by many, not quite in keeping 
 with the Christian moral of the poem before enunciated. 
 
 And now for fault-finding. First, we state the want of
 
 162 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 objective interest. " Night and the Soul" is just a heap of 
 fine and beautiful things. The story has no hinge. The plot 
 is nothing. You might almost begin to read the book at the 
 end, and close it at the beginning. Secondly, there is no 
 dramatic skill displayed in the management of the dialogue. 
 A.11 the characters talk equally well, and all talk too long. 
 Ml are poets or poetesses, uttering splendid soliloquies. 
 Bence inevitably arise considerable monotony and tedium. 
 Thirdly, we demur to that Spirit-scene altogether. Either 
 these beings should have been described as doing more, or 
 doing less. As it is, their introduction is a mere excrescence, 
 although it is redeemed by much striking poetry. Fourthly, 
 there is a good deal of the hideous in the poem, imitated, ap- 
 parently, from the worse passages of " Festus." We give one 
 specimen the worst, however, in the volume (page 132) : 
 
 " Last night I dream'd the universe was mad, 
 And that the sun its Cyclopean eye 
 Roll'd glaring like a maniac's in the heavens; 
 And moons and comets, link'd together, scream'd 
 Like bands of witches at their carnivals, 
 And stream' d like wandering hell along the sky ; 
 And that the awful stars, through the red light, 
 Glinted at one another wickedly, 
 Throbbing and chilling with intensest hate, 
 While through the whole a nameless horror ran ; 
 And worlds dropp'd from their place i' the shuddering. 
 Like leaves of Autumn, when a mighty wind 
 Makes the trees shiver through their thickest robes . 
 Great spheres crack'd in tne midst, and belch'd out flame, 
 And sputtering fires went crackling over heaven ; 
 And space yawn'd blazing stars ; and Time shrieked out, 
 That hungry fire was eating everything ! 
 And scorch' d fiends, down in the nether hell, 
 Cried out, ' The universe is mad is mad !' 
 And the great thing in its convulsions flung 
 System on system, till the caldron boiled 
 (Space was the caldron, and all hell the fire), 
 And every giant limb o' the universe 
 Dilated and collapsed, till it grew wan, 
 And I could see its naked ribs gleam out, 
 Beating like panting fire and I awoke. 
 'Twas not all dream ; such is the world to me." 
 
 This will never do. Fifthly, Mr. Bigg appears to us to 
 write too fast and too diffusely. Many of his passages would 
 be greatly improved by leaving out every third line.
 
 GERALD MASSEY. 163 
 
 This, however, is an ungracious task, and we must hurry it 
 over. The author of " Night and the Soul" is a genuine poet 
 He has original genius prolific fancy the resources, too, of 
 an ample scholarship an unbounded command of poetic lan- 
 guage and, above all, a deeply-human, reverent, and pious 
 spirit breathing in his soul. On the future career of such an 
 one, there can rest no shadows of uncertainty. A little prun- 
 ing, a little more pains in elaborating, and the selection of an 
 interesting story for his future poems, are all he requires to 
 rank him, by and by, with our foremost living poets. 
 
 NO. IV.-GERALD MASSEY.* 
 
 GERALD MASSEY has not the voluptuous tone, the felicitous 
 and highly-wrought imagery, or the sustained music of Smith ; 
 nor the diffusive splendor and rich general spirit of poetry in 
 which all Bigg's verses are steeped ; nor the amazing subtlety, 
 depth, and pervasive purpose of Yendys's song. His poetry 
 is neither sustained as a whole, nor highly finished in almost 
 any of its parts ; its power lies in separate sparkles of intense 
 brilliance, shining on what is generally a dark ground like 
 moonbeams gleaming on a midnight wave. Whether it be 
 from the extreme brightness of those sparkles, or from the 
 gloom which they relieve, certain we are that we have never 
 made so many marks in the same compass in any poem. In- 
 deed, we have seldom followed any such practice; but in 
 Massey's case we felt irresistibly compelled to it his beauties 
 had such a sudden and startling effect. They rose at our feet 
 like fluttered birds of game ; they stood up in our path like 
 rose-bushes amid groves of pine. Before saying anything more 
 of this poet's merits or faults, we shall transcribe some of 
 these markings. 
 
 * The Ballad of Babe Christabel, and other Lyrical Poems. With 
 additional Pieces, and a Preface. By GERALD MASSEY.
 
 164 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 " In lonely loveliness she grew 
 
 A shape all music, light, and love, 
 With startling looks so eloquent of 
 The spirit burning into view. 
 
 Her brow fit homo for daintiest dreams 
 With such a dawn of light was crown' d, 
 And reeling ringlets rippled round 
 
 Like sunny sheaves of golden beams." 
 
 ' The trees, like burdcn'd prophets, yearn'd, 
 Rapt in a wind of prophecy." 
 
 Hear this exquisite picture of a lover's heart, in the dark, 
 rising to the image of his mistress : 
 
 " Heart will plead, ' Eyes cannot see her. They are blind with tears of pain,' 
 
 And it climbeth up and straineth for dear life to look and hark 
 While I call her once again ; but there cometh no refrain, 
 And it droppeth down and dieth in the dark." 
 
 " I heard faith's low sweet singing in the night, 
 And groping through the darkness touch' d God's hand." 
 
 " Some bird in sudden sparkles of fine sound 
 Hurries its startled being into song." 
 
 " No star goes down, but climbs in other skies. 
 The rose of sunset folds its glory up, 
 To burst again from out the heart of dawn ; 
 And love is never lost, though hearts run waste, 
 And sorrow makes the chasten'd heart a seer ; 
 The deepest dark reveals the starriest hope, 
 And Faith can trust her heaven behind the veil." 
 
 " The sweetest swallow-dip of a tender smile 
 Ran round your mouth in thrillings." 
 
 " A spirit-feel is in the solemn air." 
 
 ' Unto dying eyes 
 The dark of death doth blossom into stars." 
 
 " Sweet eyes of starry tenderness, through which 
 The soul of some immortal sorrow looks !" 
 
 " Sorrow hath reveal'd what we ne'er had known, 
 With joy's wreath tumbled o'er our blinded eyes." 
 
 " Darks of diamonds, grand as nights of stars." 
 
 " 'Tis the old story ! ever the blind world 
 Knows not its angels of deliverance, 
 Till they stand glorified 'twixt earth and heaven." 
 
 " Ye sometimes lead my feet to walk the angel side of life." 
 
 ' ' Come, worship beauty in the forest temple, dim and hush, 
 Where stands magnificence dreaming ! and God burneth in the bush."
 
 GERALD MASSEY. 165 
 
 " The murkiest midnight that frowns from the skies 
 Is at heart a radiant morrow." 
 
 " The kingliest kings are crowu'd with thorn." 
 
 " When will the world quicken for liberty's birth, 
 Which she waiteth, with eager wings beating the dawn." 
 
 '' Oh, but 'twill be a merry day, the world shall set apart, 
 When strife's last brand is broken in the last crown'd tyrant's heart !" 
 
 " The herald of our coming Christ leaps in the womb of time ; 
 The poor's grand army treads the Age's march with step sublime." 
 
 " Yet she weeteth not I love her ; 
 
 Never dare I tell the sweet 
 Tale, but to the stars above her, 
 And the flowers that kiss her feet." 
 
 " And the maiden-meek voice of the womanly wife 
 
 Still bringeth the heavens nigher, 
 For it rings like the voice of God o'er my life, 
 Aye bidding me climb up higher." 
 
 " Merry as laughter 'mong the hills, 
 Spring dances at my heart !" 
 
 " Where life hath climaxt like a wave 
 That breaks in perfect rest." 
 
 We might long persist at this pleasant task of plucking wild- 
 flowers. But we hasten to speak of some of the more promi- 
 nent merits and defects of this remarkable volume. One main 
 merit of Massey is his intense earnestness, which reminds you 
 almost of Ebenezer Elliot, with his red-hot poker pen. Like 
 him, he has " put his heart" his big, burning heart into his 
 poems. Mr. Lewes, of the " Leader," opines that Massey 
 wants the power of transmuting experience into poetic forms, 
 and that nowhere does the real soul of the man utter itself : 
 two most unfortunate assertions for the evident effort, and 
 often successful attainment, of this author, more than with 
 most writers, are, to set his own life to music, and to express 
 in verse all the poetry with which it has teemed. He has been 
 a sore struggler with poverty, with a narrow sphere, with 
 doubts and darkness ; and you have this struggle echoed in 
 his rugged and fiery song. He has been a giant under Etna ; 
 and his voice is a suspirium de profundis. Although still a 
 very young man, he has undergone ages of experience ; and, 
 although we had not known all this from his preface and notes 
 we might have confidently concluded it from his poetry.
 
 166 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 In his earlier poems, we find his fire of earnestuess burning 
 in fierce, exaggerated, and volcanic forms. The poet appears 
 an incarnation of the Evil Genius of poverty, and reminds you 
 of Robert Burns in his wilder mood. He sets Chartism to 
 music. He slugs, with strange variations, " A man's a man 
 for a' that." But this springs from circumstances, not from 
 the poet himself; and you are certain that progress and change 
 of situation will elicit a finer and healthier frame of spirit 
 and so it has proved. Although his poems are not arranged 
 in chronological order, internal evidence convinces us that 
 those in which he is at once simplest and most subdued have 
 been written last. A change of the most benignant kind has 
 come o'er the spirit of his dream, and has been, we beg leave 
 to think, greatly owing to female influence. He has found 
 his better angel in that amiable wife, whose virtues he has so 
 often celebrated in his song, and in whom he sees a tenth 
 muse. 
 
 The homage done by him to the domestic affections, his ar- 
 dent worship of his own hearth, is one of the most pleasing 
 characteristics of Gerald Massey's poetry, and has been noticed 
 by more than one of his critics. It comes out, not for the 
 sake of ostentation, or artistic effect, but spontaneously and 
 irresistibly in many parts of his poems. We have great plea- 
 sure in transcribing words addressed to him by an eminent 
 writer of the day, in which we cordially concur : " One ever- 
 lasting subject of people's poetry is love, and you are at the 
 age at which a man is bound to sing it. The devil has had 
 power over love-poems too long, because the tastes of the peo- 
 ple were too gross to relish anything but indecency, because 
 the married men left the love-singing to the unmarried ones. 
 Now, love before marriage is the tragedy of ' Hamlet' with the 
 part of Hamlet left out ! Therefore the bachelor love-poets, 
 being forced to make their subject complete, to go beyond 
 mere sentiment, were driven into illicit love. I say that is a 
 shame. I say that the highest joys of love are married joys, 
 and that the married man ought to be the true love-poet. 
 Now God has given you, as I hear, in his great love and 
 mercy, a charming wife and child. There is your school. 
 There are your treasured ideas. Sing about them, and the 
 people will hear you, because you will be loving, and real, and
 
 GERALD MASSEY. 167 
 
 honest, and practical, speaking from your heart straight to 
 theirs. But write simply what you do feel and see, not what 
 you think you ought to feel and see. The very simplest love- 
 poet goes deepest. Get to yourself, I beseech you, all that 
 you can of English and Scotch ballads, and consider them as 
 what they are models. Read ' Auld Robin Gray' twenty 
 times over. Study it word for word." 
 
 The poem entitled the " Bridal" is hardly so simple as this 
 writer would wish ; but, as a rich marriage-dress, it challenges 
 all admiration. 
 
 We must quote some passages. 
 
 " Alive with eyes, the village sees 
 The Bridal dawning from the trees, 
 And housewives swarin i' the sun like bees. 
 
 Silence sits i' the belfry-choir ! 
 Up in the twinkling air the spire 
 Throbs, as itjlutter'd wings of fire. 
 
 The winking windows, stained rare, 
 Blush with their gouts of glory, fair 
 As heaven's shower-arch had melted there 
 
 But enter lordlier splendors brim, 
 Such mists of gold and purple swim, 
 And the light falls so rich and dun. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Even so doth love life's doors unbar, 
 Where all the hidden glories are, 
 That from the windows shone afar. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Sumptuous as Iris, when she swims 
 With rainbow-robe on dainty limbs, 
 The bride's full beauty overbrims. 
 
 The gazers drink rare overflows, 
 Her cheek a lovelier damask glows, 
 And on his arm she leans more close. 
 
 A drunken joy reels in his blood, 
 His being doth so bud and bud, 
 He wanders an enchanted wood. 
 
 Last night with weddable white arms, 
 
 And thoughts that throng'd with quaint alarms, 
 
 She trembled o'er her mirror' d charms.
 
 168 A CLUSTER. OF NEW POETS. 
 
 Like Eve first glassing her new life ; 
 And the Maid startled nt the Wife, 
 Heart-pained with a sweet warm strife. 
 
 The unknown sea moans on her shore 
 
 Of life ; she hears the breakers roar, 
 
 But, trusting him, she'll fea.r no more. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The blessing given, the ring is on ; 
 And at God's altar radiant run 
 The current of ttco lives in one. 
 
 Husht with happiness, every sense 
 Is crowned at the heart intense, 
 And silence hath such eloquence ! 
 
 Down to his feet her meek eyes stoop 
 As there her love should pour its cup ; 
 But like a king, ho lifts them up. 
 ****** 
 Alone they hold their marriage-feast 
 Fresh from the chrism of the priest, 
 He would not have the happiest jest 
 
 To storm her broics with a crimson fine j 
 And, sooth, they need no wings of wine 
 To float them into love's divine. 
 
 So Strength and Beauty, hand in hand, 
 Go forth into the honey "d land 
 Lit by the love-moon golden-grand, 
 
 Where God hath built their bridal bower, 
 And on the top of life they tower, 
 And taste the Eden's perfect hour. 
 
 No lewd eyes over my shoulder look ! 
 They do but ope the blessed book 
 Of marriage in their hallow'd nook. 
 
 0, flowery be the paths they press ; 
 And ruddiest human fruitage bless 
 Them with a lavish loveliness ! 
 
 Melodious move their wedded life 
 Through shocks of time and storms of strife 
 Husband true, and perfect wife !" 
 
 How genius can glorify every object or incident ! Had Mr. 
 Massey been describing the marriage of two spirits who are 
 to spend eternity together, or the nuptials of philosophy and 
 faith, he could not have expended more wealth and splendor
 
 GERALD M ASSET. 169 
 
 of imagery than he does upon what is substantially the story 
 of two children driven by a foe or storm into a nook, where 
 they fondle each other, or weep in concert, till the inevitable 
 enemy comes up and removes them both. What else is the 
 happiest mortal marriage ? Still, the spirit of the strain is 
 beautiful, and reminds us forcibly of the one song of poor 
 Lapraik to his wife, of which Burns thus writes : - 
 
 " There was ae sang amang the rest, 
 
 Aboon them a' it pleased ine best, 
 Which some kind husband had address' d 
 
 To some sweet wife. 
 It tkirl'd the heart-strings through the breast, 
 
 A' to the life." 
 
 Massey ha no elements of the epic or constructive poet 
 about him. He is simply and solely a true lyrist, and as 
 such is both strong and sweet ; but with sweetness in general, 
 although not always, rejoicing over strength sweetness, we 
 mean, of thought, rather than of language and versification. 
 Both of these are often sufficiently rugged, His sentiment 
 seldom halts, but his verse and language often do. Some of 
 his poems remind us of the dishevelled morning head of a 
 beautiful child. This, however, we greatly prefer to that 
 affectation of style, that absurd elaborate jargon, which many 
 true poets of the day are allowing to crust over their style. 
 Even our gifted friend Yendys must beware of a tendency he 
 lias lately exhibited in " Balder" to pedantry and far-fetched 
 forms of speech. Strong simple English can express any 
 thought, however subtle ; any imagination, however lofty ; 
 any reflection, however profound; any emotion, however 
 warm ; and any shade of fancy, however delicate. Massey, 
 in all his more earnest and loftier strains, shuns the faults 
 of over-elaboration and daintiness, and throws out diamonds 
 in the rough. We may refer, as one of the best specimens of 
 his stern and stalwart battle-axe manner, to " New Year's Eve 
 in Exile." Hear these lines, for instance ; 
 
 " Men who had broken battle's burning lines, 
 Dealing life with their looks, death with their hands ; 
 And strode like Salamanders through war's flame ; 
 And in the last stern charge of desperate valor 
 On death's scythe dash'd with force that turn'd its edg 
 * * * * *
 
 170 A CLUSTER OF NEW POETS. 
 
 Earnest as fire they sate, and reverent 
 As though a God were present in their midst; 
 Stern, but serene and hopeful, prayerful, brave 
 AB Cromwell's Ironsides on an eve of battle. 
 Each individual life as clench' d and knit, 
 As though beneath their robes their fingers clutched 
 The weapon sworn to strike a tyrant down ; 
 Such proud belief lifted their kindling brows ; 
 Such glowing purpose kunger'd in their eyea. 
 * * * * 
 
 The new year flashes on us sadly grand, 
 Leaps in our midst with ringing armor on, 
 Strikes a mail'd hand in ours, and bids us arm 
 Ere the first trumpet sound the hour of onset. 
 Dense darkness lies on Europe's winter world ; 
 Stealthily and grim the Bear comes creeping on 
 Out of the North, and all the peoples sleep 
 By Freedom's smouldering watch-fire ; there is none 
 To snatch the brand and dash it in his face." 
 
 This is masculine writing ; resembling thy first and be st 
 style, dear author of " The Koman " a style to which we 
 trust to see thee returning in thy future works. The grandest 
 poetry has ever been, and shall ever be, written on rocks like 
 the stony handwriting traced by the tribes in their march 
 through that great and terrible wilderness ; or like the fiery 
 lines which God's hand cut upon the two tables of the law. 
 
 We notice in Massey, as in all young poets, occasional imi- 
 tations of other writers ; nay, one or two petty larcenies. 
 For example, he says, 
 
 " She summers on heaven's hills of myrrh." 
 
 Aird had said, in his " Devil's Dream," 
 
 " And thou shalt summer high in bliss upon the hills of God." 
 
 Again, Massey says, 
 
 " The flowers fold their cups like praying hands, 
 And with droop' d heads await the blessing Night 
 Gives with her silent magnanimity/' 
 
 Aird in the same marvellous dream had used the words, 
 
 " The silent magnanimity of Nature and her God." 
 
 In the same page Massey says, 
 
 " How dear it is to mark th' immortal life 
 Deepen and darken in her large round eyes.'
 
 GERALD MASSEY. 171 
 
 In Aird's " Buy a Broom " we find the following lines, 
 quoted, however, and from what author we forget 
 
 " Like Pandora's eye, 
 Whoa first it darkened uitli immortal life." 
 
 In page 51 the following Hues occur : 
 
 " Wept glorious tears that telescope the soul, 
 And bring heaven nearer to the eyes of Faith." 
 
 We ourselves had said, " the most powerful of all telescopes 
 is a tear." These, however, are really all the distinct instan- 
 ces of plagiarism we have noticed ; and, besides being proba- 
 bly quite unintentional, they bear no proportion whatever to 
 the numerous and splendid originalities of the volume. 
 
 We have endeavored to find out from Mr. Massey's volume 
 what his religious sentiments are ; and think that, on the 
 whole, he seems to have got little further, as yet, than the 
 worship of Nature. We can forewarn him that this will not 
 long satisfy his heart. Nature, to say the least of it, is a 
 crude, imperfect process, not a complete and rounded result, 
 far less a living cause. No delusion is becoming more gen- 
 eral, and none is more contemptibly false, than a certain 
 Brahminical worship of this universe, as if it were anything 
 more than a combination of brute matter, colored by distance 
 and fancy with poetic hues. Carlyle has greatly aided our 
 young poets to the pitiful conclusion that Matter is God. 
 He cries out, " The Earth is my mother, and divine." He 
 says again, after sneering at the authority of the Bible, 
 " There is one book, of the inspiration of which there cannot 
 be any doubt," namely, Nature ; forgetting that all the diffi- 
 culties, and far more, which beset the thought that God is the 
 inspirer of the Bible, beset the notion that he is the Author 
 of nature ; and that, if earth be as a whole divine, then its 
 evils, imperfections, and unutterable woes must be divine, 
 and consequently eternal too. We must warn young poeta 
 against that excessive idolatry of light, heat, law, life, and 
 their multitudinous effects, which are leading them so terribly 
 astray, and sowing their pages with gross materialism, dis 
 guised under a transparent veil of Pantheistic mysticism. 
 They see Silenus through a dream, and think him Pan, and
 
 172 A CLUSTER Of NEW POETS. 
 
 make this Pan their only Grod. Connected with this, is that 
 worship which they say can be best performed without going 
 to church, and the fittest altars of which are 
 
 " The mountains and the ocean, 
 
 Earth, air, stars all that springs from the Great Whole, 
 Who hath produced, and will receive, the soul ;" 
 
 forgetting that this worship, being that of the imagination, 
 not of the heart, must be vague and cold ; that energy, zeal, 
 and piety have never in former times been long sustained 
 without the aid of public as well as of personal devotion ; 
 that the most of those who have thus " worshipped they knew 
 not what" in a manner they could hardly tell how, have been 
 unhappy and morbid beings; that Milton, whose example 
 they often quote, although he left his church, did not forsake 
 his Bible ; that Jesus Christ, whom they venerate, while he 
 went up again and again to a mountain to pray, himself alone, 
 far more frequently was found in the synagogues on the Sab- 
 bath-day; and that, even on merely artistic principles, no 
 finer spectacle can be witnessed on earth than a man of genius 
 not retiring into haughty isolation, and bowing the knee with 
 greater pride than if he blasphemed, but mingling quietly 
 with the common stream of the multitude which is pouring to 
 the House of God, and uniting his voice with their psalmody, 
 his heart with their thanksgiving, and his soul with their 
 adoration. 
 
 Since commencing this paper we have read a book attrib- 
 uted to Dr. Whewell, and published by Parker on " The 
 Plurality of Worlds."* Years ago, we had reached all the 
 leading conclusions in this remarkable volume. Its merit is, 
 that it bases what have long been our intuitions upon a solid 
 foundation of logic and facts, proving almost to a demonstra- 
 tion, that earth is the only part of the creation at all events, 
 of the solar system which is yet inhabited. Our object at 
 present in mentioning it, is to proclaim its value as a deadly 
 blow in the face of creation-worship and Pantheism. It de- 
 
 * See our thoughts at greater length on this subject in a recent 
 article in the " Eclectic Review," to which we are happy to say the 
 author in his " Dialogue," a masterly reply to his opponents, newly 
 published, refers with satisfaction.
 
 GERALD MASSEY. 173 
 
 monstrates that the glory of the heavenly bodies is all illusion 
 that they are really in the crudest condition that there is 
 not the most distant probability that they shall ever be fit for 
 the habitation of intelligent beings that man is totally dis- 
 tinct from all other races of beings, and is absolutely, essen- 
 tially, and for ever superior to ; and distinct from, the lower 
 animals and that, besides, he shall, in all probability, bo 
 renewed and elevated by a supernatural intervention. It 
 hints, too, at our favorite thought (stated in our paper on 
 Chalmers, in this volume), that, at death, we leave this mate- 
 rial creation for ever, and enter on a spiritual sphere, discon- 
 nected from this, and where sun, moon, and stars are the 
 <; things invisible;" that, to use the words of Macintosh to 
 Hall, " we shall awake from this dream, and find ourselves in 
 other spheres of existence." And all these, and many similar 
 ideas, are not thrown out as mere conjectures, nor even as 
 bold gleams of insight, but are shown to be favored by anal- 
 ogy nay, some of them founded on fact. We never read a 
 book with more thorough conviction that we were reading 
 what was true. Had the author gone a step or two farther 
 still, we could have followed him with confidence. Had he 
 predicted the absolute annihilation of matter, we could have 
 substantiated his statement by the words of scripture : " They 
 shall perish, but Thou remainest ; yea, all of them shall be 
 changed and folded up as a vesture ; but Thou art the same, 
 and Thy years fail not." Again, we say that we deeply value 
 this admirable book, as a tractate for the times. It should 
 be peculiarly useful to those poets who, like Mr. Massey, are 
 constantly raving about the beauty, the glory, the immensity, 
 and the divinity of Matter, each and all being palpable delu- 
 sions, since matter is neither beautiful nor glorious, nor im- 
 mense, nor divine. It will show him that the glory of the 
 moon, the planets, and the stars may be compared to the 
 effects of morning or evening sunshine upon the towers of an 
 infirmary, a prison, or some giant city of sin lending a false 
 lustre to objects which in themselves are horrible or foul. 
 
 We must now take our leave of Mr. Massey. And, not- 
 withstanding these concluding hints, we do so with every feel- 
 ing of respect, admiration, and kindly feeling. Probably since 
 Burns, there has been no such instance of a strong untaught
 
 174 A CLUSTER OF NEW ^^ 
 
 poet rising up from the ranks by a few strides, grasping emi- 
 nence by the very mane, and vaulting into a seat so command- 
 ing with such ease and perfect mastery. He has much yet, 
 however, to do to learn and, it may be, to endure. It is 
 yet all morning with him. Life's enchanted cup is sparkling 
 at the brim. From early sufferings he has passed into com- 
 fort, domestic happiness, and general fame. Many veils are 
 yet to drop from his eyes. He has yet to learn the worthless- 
 ness of human nature as a whole, the impotence of human 
 effort, the littleness of human life, and the delusive nature of 
 all joy which is not connected with our duty to God and man. 
 His present sanguine hopes and notions of humanity will 
 wither, just as the green earth and blue skies will by and by 
 appear altogether insufficient to fill and satisfy his soul. This 
 process we regard inevitable to all genuine thinkers and lofty 
 poets ; but the great question is, Does it result in souring or 
 in strengthening the man ? Carlyle and Foster both passed 
 through this disenchanting process; but how different the 
 results ! The one has become savage in his despair as a flayed 
 wild beast. The other became milder and calmer in propor- 
 tion to the depth of his melancholy. And the reason of this 
 difference is very simple. Carlyle believes in nothing but the 
 universe. Foster believed in a Father, a Savior, and a future 
 world. If Mr. Massey comes (as we trust he shall) to a true 
 belief, it will corroborate him for every trial and every sad 
 internal or external experience, and he will stand like an 
 Atlas above the ruins of a world, calm, firm, pensive, but 
 pressing ^prwards, and looking on high* 
 
 * Since this paper was written, we have read some specimens of 
 Massey's prose, in his preface to his third edition, and in his review 
 of " Balder" in the " Eclectic." It is most excellent, clear, massive, 
 masterly English, very refreshing in this age of mystical fudge.
 
 (xfosra 
 
 NO. I.-1IAZLITT AND HALLAM. 
 
 WE have chosen the above two names as representing two 
 opposite styles of criticism the impulsive and the mechanical 
 or, otherwise, the genial and the learned. In speaking of 
 Hazlitt, we have nothing to do with him as a man, a politi- 
 cian, or a historian, but simply as a critic; and, in speaking 
 of Hallam, we have nothing to do with him as a historian, but 
 solely as the writer of those literary criticisms which haye re- 
 cently been collected into a separate publication. 
 
 William Hazlitt was brutally abused while alive, and has 
 been but partially appreciated since his death. Indeed, in 
 many quarters he seems entirely forgotten. Sacrificing, as he 
 did, popular applause in search of posthumous fame, he seems 
 to have lost both like the dog in the fable, shadow and sub- 
 stance seem alike to have given him the slip. Our^ proud and 
 prosy Quarterlies, while showering praise on the misty no- 
 things which often now abuse the name of scientific or philo- 
 sophic criticism those compounds of natural and acquired 
 dulness which disguise themselves under German terminology, 
 and are deemed profound seldom name, or coldly underrate, 
 the glowingly acute, gorgeously clear, and dazzlingly deep 
 criticisms of poor Hazlitt. 
 
 Harry Cockburn thinks him ineffably inferior to Lord Jef- 
 frey. Macaulay first steals from Hazlitt, and then puffs Hal- 
 lam. Bulwer and Talfourd have done him justice, but rather 
 in a patronising way. Home did his best to imitate him, and 
 paid back the pilferings in praise. But De Quincey and one
 
 176 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 or two more seem alone aware of the fact that no thinker of 
 such rich seminal mind of such genuine originality, insight, 
 and enthusiasm, has been ever so neglected or outraged as the 
 author of " The Spirit of the Age." 
 
 Hazlitt was, in many respects, the most natural of critics. 
 lie was born to criticise, not in a small and captious way, but 
 as a just, generous, although stern and rigorous judge. Nature 
 had denied him great constructive, or dramatic, or syn- 
 thetic power the power of the highest kind of poet or phi- 
 losopher. But he possessed that mixture m proper propor- 
 tions of the acute and the imaginative, the profound and the 
 brilliant, the cool and the enthusiastic, which goes to consti- 
 tute the true critic. Hence his criticism is a fine compound 
 pleasing, on the one band, tbe lover of analysis, who feels 
 that its power can go no farther ; and, on the other, the young 
 and ardent votary of literature, who feels that Hazlitt has 
 expressed in language what he only could " with the faltering 
 tongue and the glistening eye." When he has a favorite, and 
 especially an old favorite author to discuss, it becomes as 
 great a luxury to witness as to feel his rapture. Even elder- 
 ly enthusiasts, whose ardor is somewhat passee, might contem- 
 plate him with emotions such as Scott has so exquisitely des- 
 cribed in Louis XI, when looking at the hungry Quentin 
 Durward devouring his late and well-won breakfast. Youth 
 hot, eager, joyous youth sparkles in Hazlitt's best criti- 
 cisms even to the last. And yet, beside all his bursts and 
 bravuras, there is always looking on the stern, clear, piercing 
 eye of Old Analysis. Why is it that Hazlitt, thus eminently 
 fitted to attract all classes, has failed to be generally popular ? 
 Many answers might be given to this question. There was 
 first the special victimisation he underwent during his lifetime 
 from the reviews and magazines. Old Gilford was his bitter- 
 est, although by no means his ablest opponent. The power 
 wielded thirty years ago by that little arid mass of common- 
 place and dried venom is, to us, absolutely marvellous. The 
 manner in which he exercised the critical profession showed, 
 indeed, that he was perfectly skilled in his former one, espe- 
 cially in the adroit use of the awl. He was admirable at bor- 
 ing small holes ; but beyond this he was nothing. If Shak-r 
 speare's works had appeared in his time, he would have treated
 
 HAZLITT AND HALLAM. 177 
 
 them precisely as he treated Shelley's and Keats', unless, 
 indeed, they had been submitted to his revision before, or ded- 
 icated to him at publication. Otherwise, how he would have 
 ostracised " Othello ;" mauled "Macbeth;" torn up "The 
 Tempest;" mouthed, like a dog at the moon, against the 
 " Midsummer Night's Dream;" laughed at " Lear;" raved at 
 " Romeo and Juliet;" and admitted merit only in " Timon," 
 because it suited his morbid temper, and in the " Comedy of 
 Errors," because it melted down his evil humors into grim 
 laughter. It is lamentable to think of such a man being res- 
 pected by Byron, and feared by Hunt and Lamb. It is more 
 lamentable still, to remember that he and his coadjutors were 
 able to half-madden Shelley, to kill Keats, and to add gall 
 and wormwood to the native bitterness of Hazlitt's spirit. 
 
 But he had other opponents, who, if not animated by all 
 Grifford's spirit, had ten times the talent. Wilson and Lock- 
 hart bent all their young power against a writer whom both 
 in their hearts admired, and from whom both had learned 
 much. The first twenty-five volumes of " Blackwood's Mag- 
 azine" are disgraced by incessant, furious, and scurrilous at- 
 tacks upon the person, private character, motives, talents, and 
 moral and religious principles of Hazlitt, which future ages 
 shall regard with wonder, indignation, and disgust. " Ass," 
 " blockhead," "fool," "idiot," "quack," " villian," " infidel," 
 &c., are a specimen of the epithets applied to this master- 
 spirit. " Old Maga" has greatly improved in this respect 
 since; but there is at least one of its present contributors 
 who would perpetrate, if he durst,* similar enormities of in- 
 justice, and whose maximum of will to injure and abuse all 
 minds superior to his own, is only restrained by his minimum 
 of power. Need we name the laureate of Clavers, and the 
 libeller of the noble children of the Scottish Covenant ? 
 
 We see nothing wrong in genius now and then turning 
 round to rend and trample on its pertinacious foes. But 
 Hazlitt was far too thin-skinned. He felt his wounds too 
 keenly, he acknowledged them too openly, and gave thus a 
 
 * He has since dared ! Vide that tissue of filthy nonsense, which 
 none but an ape of the first magnitude could have vomited, yclept 
 " Firmilian."
 
 1 78 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 great advantage to his opponents. This was partly accounted 
 for from his nervous temperament, and partly from his preca- 
 rious circumstances. It was very easy for Lord Jeffrey, sitting 
 in state in his palace in Moray Place, to curl his lip in cool con- 
 tempt, or even to burst outjnto laughter, over attacks on himself 
 in "Ebony ;" or for Wordsworth, in his drawing-room on Rydal 
 Mount, to grumble over the " Edinburgh," ere dashing it to 
 the other side of the room ; it is very easy still, for those of 
 us who are not dependent for subsistence on our writings, to 
 treat insolent injustice with pity or scorn ; but the tendency 
 of such attacks upon Hazlitt was to snatch the bread from 
 his mouth, to lower the opinion of his capacity with the book- 
 sellers, whose serf he was, and to drive him to mean subter- 
 fuges, which his soul abhorred, to prevent him literally from 
 starving. He is said, a little before his death, to have met 
 Home, and said to him, " I have carried a volcano in my 
 breast for the last three hours up and down Pall Mall ; I 
 have striven mortally to quench, to quell it, but it will not. 
 Can, you lend me a shilling ? I have not tasted food for two 
 days.'''' 
 
 Want of thorough early training, an unsettled and wander- 
 ing life, want of time for systematic study, and want of self- 
 control and of domestic happiness, combined to lessen the ar- 
 tistic merit, and have limited to some extent the permanent 
 power, of Hazlitt's writings. Hence they are full of faults 
 the faults never, however, of weakness, but of haste, care- 
 lessness and caprice. They swarm with gossiping anecdote, 
 with flashy clap-trap, with egotism, with jets of bitterest ven- 
 om, and with sounding paradoxes. They are cast chiefly, too, in 
 the form of slipshod essays ; nor has he ever completed any 
 great, solid, separate work, for his " Life of Napoleon" is not 
 worthy of his powers. His superficial readers especially if 
 their minds have been previously poisoned by reading the 
 " Quarterly" and " Blackwood" fasten on these faults, and 
 never get farther. " An amusing, flimsy writer" is the high- 
 est compliment they find in their hearts to bestow on one of 
 the finest and deepest thinkers of the day. Our misty G-er- 
 manisers, again, find him too clear, too brilliant, not sufficiently 
 conversant with Kant, Fichte, Schiller, and Goethe, and vote 
 him obsolete. Carlyle classes him with Dermody in one pa-
 
 HAZLITT AND HALLAM. 179 
 
 per, and in another talks of him in such terms as these : "How 
 many a poor Hazlitt must wander over God's verdant earth, 
 like the unblest over burning deserts passionately dig wells, 
 and draw up only the dry quicksand, and at last die and 
 make no sign." Such injustice is too rank long to continue 
 rampant. Hazlitt, as a man, had errors of no little magni- 
 tude ; but he was as sincere and honest a being as ever breath- 
 ed. If not practically a Christian, he respected Christianity ; 
 he saw, though he shrank from, its unique and glorious char- 
 acter ; he owned its unparalleled power ; he has praised its 
 Bible with all the enthusiasm of his heart, and with all the 
 riches of his genius ; and he would have burned his pen and 
 the hand that held it, sooner than have set himself deliber- 
 ately to sap by written inuendo, or blow up by open outrage, 
 the faith in which his good old parents died. His writings 
 constitute one of those quarries of thought, such as are also 
 Bacon's " Essays," Butler's " Sermons," Boswell's " John- 
 son," and Coleridge's " Table Talk." They abound in gems, 
 as sparkling as they are precious, and ever and anon a " moun- 
 tain of light" lifts up its shining head. Not only are they 
 full of profound critical dicta, but of the sharpest observa- 
 tions upon life and manners, upon history, and the metaphy- 
 sics of the human mind. Descriptions of nature, too, are 
 there, cool, clear, and refreshing as summer leaves. And then 
 how fine are his panegyrics on the old masters and the old po- 
 ets ! And ever and anon he floats away into long glorious 
 passages, such as that on Wordsworth and that on Coleridge, 
 in the " Spirit of the Age" such as his description of the 
 effects of the Reformation such as his panegyric on poetry 
 his character of Sir Thomas Browne and his picture of the 
 Reign of Terror ! Few things in the language are greater 
 than these. They resemble 
 
 " The long-resounding march and energy divine" 
 
 of the ancient lords of English prose the Drydens, the 
 Browns, the Jeremy Taylors, and the Miltons. 
 
 All so-called " beauties" of great authors we detest. They 
 are as dull as almanacs or jest-books. They are but torn 
 fallen feathers from the broad eagle-wing. Nor do we mean
 
 180 MODERN cranes. 
 
 to suggest that Hazlitt's works should be subjected to such an 
 equivocal process. But we should like to see his " Select 
 Works," including a selection from his essays, the whole of his 
 " Characteristics," and his " Characters of Shakspeare's Plays" 
 all his lectures delivered at the Surrey Institution a se- 
 lection from his purely metaphysical works certain passages 
 from his " Life of Napoleon" copious excerpts from his pic- 
 torial criticisms and his " Spirit of the Age" entire. It is a 
 disgrace to literature ; and while there are cheap editions of 
 Lamb and Hunt, aud clear editions of Jeffrey, Smith, and Ma- 
 cauley, there is no good edition we know of, whether cheap or 
 dear, of the works of a far more original thinker, eloquent 
 writer, and earnest man, than any of them all. 
 
 We will allude but to one other feature in Hazlitt's critical 
 character we mean his attachment to Shakspeare and Cole- 
 ridge. Others admire Shakspeare Hazlitt loves and adores 
 him ; and this soft key of love opens to him many an intricate 
 lock, and this deep light of adoration leads him safe through 
 many a dark and winding way. Many prefer Ulrici, although, 
 in fact, his work is just a " Midsummer Night's Dream 1 '' of 
 Shakspeare. It is not Shakspeare himself the clear and 
 manly Englishman, as well as the universal genius it is 
 Shakspeare seen through the mists of the Brocken, casting an 
 enormous shadow, which is mistaken for and criticised as the 
 substance. Indeed, we can conceive no spectacle more ludic- 
 rous than that of Shakspeare in the shades reading Ulrici, and 
 marvelling to find that he understood him so much better than 
 himself, and saw more in him than he ever intended nay, 
 often the reverse of what he did intend. 
 
 Hazlitt read Shakspeare with far greater perspicacity ; saw 
 his faults, and liked him better for them ; took him at his 
 word, believed what he said, and did not go about stumbling 
 and groping for recondite meanings and merits in its author. 
 Shakspeare has now a great gallery of critics : Johnson, witli 
 his sturdy generalities of encomium ; Mrs. Montague, with her 
 elegant and lady-like, if not very profound tribute ; Joseph 
 Warton's graceful papers in the " Adventurer," as well as hid 
 brother's more elaborate testimony in his " History of Eng- 
 lish Poetry;" G-oethe, in his fine remarks on "Hamlet" in 
 " Wilhelm Meister;" George Moir, in his refined and thought-
 
 IIAZLITT AND HALLAM. 181 
 
 ful " Shakspeare in Germany ;" Mrs. Jameson ; De Quincey ; 
 Carlyle's striking sketch; Coleridge's wondrous talk about 
 him; Hartley Coleridge's " Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentle- 
 man ;" Professor Wilson's scattered splendors on the subject 
 in the " Noctes," &c. But love for the subject, profound and 
 watchful study of it, the blended intellect and ardor of his 
 nature, and the graces and powers of his style, render Haz- 
 litt, in our judgment, the best limner of that standing wonder 
 of the world ; and to his warm and living portraits we most 
 fondly and frequently recur. 
 
 Coleridge, too a man resembling Shakspeare in width and 
 subtlety, although not in clearness and masculine strength and 
 directness was seen by Hazlitt as few else saw him, and shown 
 by him more eloquently and enthusiastically than by any or 
 all his other critics. He knew him in his youth. He met 
 him first at Wem, in Shropshire, where his father was minis- 
 ter ; and most beautifully has he described, in his " First Ac- 
 quaintance with Poets," his meeting with the " noticeable man 
 with large grey eyes." 'Tis to us the most delightful of all 
 Hazlitt's essays, striking as it does on some of our own early 
 associations. Like Hazlitt, the author of this sketch was the 
 son of a dissenting (though not a Unitarian) minister ; like 
 him, spent many a sad and solitary hour in the country, cheer- 
 ed, indeed, by books and by the loveliness and grandeur of 
 nature ; like him, has " shed tears over his unfinished manu- 
 script," while in vain seeking adequately to transcribe his con- 
 fused but burning impressions of nature and of literature ; and, 
 like him, has again and again been delighted and raised from 
 the dust by the visits and sermons of gifted preachers, who 
 came like sunbeams to the sequestered valley of his birth ; 
 and he can hardly, therefore, read " My First Acquaintance 
 with Poets," or several other of Hazlitt's autobiographical 
 essays, without a swelling heart and streaming eyes, as he 
 thinks of the days of his own boyhood. 
 
 No man has better described than Hazlitt, Coleridge's 
 after career, which was that of a comet among comets, more ec- 
 centric than all its lawless kindred ; now assuming the fcrni 
 of a thin and gaseous vapor, and now becoming blood-red, 
 solid-seeming, and 
 
 " Firing the length of Ophiuchus huge 
 In the Arctic sky."
 
 MODERN CRITICS 
 
 Let it ever be remembered that he fought the battle of 
 Coleridge's fame, when he was under the cloud of public opin- 
 ion, and of the opium curse; and that, although separated 
 from him afterwards by political and other differences, he 
 never ceased to be his ardent eulogist, as well as his honest 
 adviser. 
 
 Peace to the memory of William Hazlitt ! That pale, hag- 
 gard face ; those eager, restless eyes ; those dark, grey locks ; 
 that brain, ever prolific of new thoughts ; and that heart, ever 
 palpitating with new, fierce, or rapturous passions are now 
 all still and quenched in the sepulchre. We dare rear no 
 temple over his dust nor is it worthy of a pyramid ; but his 
 works form, nevertheless, a noble monument solid as marble, 
 and clear and brilliant as flame expressing at once the strength 
 and the splendor of his unrivalled critical genius. 
 
 In point of learning, culture, calmness, and the command 
 of the powers he has, Hallam, of course, excels Hazlitt, even 
 as a bust is much smoother than a man's head ; but he is al- 
 together destitute of that fine instinctive sense of poetic beauty 
 which was in Hazlitt's mind, and of that eloquent, fervid, and 
 fearless expression of it which came, like inspiration, into Haz- 
 litt's pen. The "gods have not made him poetical;" and 
 when he talks about poetry, you are reminded of a blind man 
 discoursing on the rainbow. He has far too much tact and 
 knowledge to commit any gross blunder nay, the bust seems 
 often half-alive, but it never becomes more. You never feel 
 that this man, who talks so ably about politics, and evidence, 
 and international law, has a " native and indefeasible right" to 
 speak to you about poetry. The power of criticising it is as 
 completely denied him as is a sixth sense ; and worst, he iti 
 not conscious of the want. 
 
 For he has often essayed to criticise our greatest poets, and 
 has displayed intimate knowledge of their writings, and of the 
 ages in which they lived. But it is merely mechanical know- 
 ledge. He knows poets by head-mark, not by heart-recogni- 
 tion. He may see, but he scarcely feels, their beauties. He 
 is not, indeed, one of those pitiful small snarlers, with micro- 
 scopic eyes, who pick out petty faults in works of genius, 
 blunders in syntax, perhaps, mixed metaphors, and so on, and 
 present such splinters as adequate specimens of the building.
 
 HAZL1TT AND HALLAM. 183 
 
 Nor is he, like Dr. Johnson, furnished with a blazing Cyclo- 
 pean orb on one side of his head, and an eye totally blind on the 
 other, so that his judgments, according to his position, are 
 now the truest, and now the falsest, in literature now final 
 as the laws of the Medes,and now contemptible as the opinions 
 of schoolboys. Hallam is seldom unduly minute, never un- 
 fair, and rarely one-sided ; his want is simply that of the warm 
 insight which " loosens the bands of the Orions" of poetry, 
 and gives a swift solution of all its splendid problems. 
 
 His paper on Ariosto is correct and creeping; although, 
 surely, we must demur to his dictum that he was surpassed 
 only by three of his predecessors Homer, Virgil, and Dante. 
 Has he forgotten ^schylus, Sophocles, and Lucretius ? In 
 his remarks on Tasso (which are otherwise good, Tasso being 
 quite the artificial poet that Hallam can fully appreciate), he 
 rather paradoxically says that " the ' Jerusalem' is the great 
 epic poem, in the strict sense, of modern times." Is Milton 
 not a modern, and in what strict sense is u Paradise Lost" not 
 an epic ? What condition of the Epos does it not fulfil ? His 
 remarks on " Don Quixote" are poor, compared to Hazlitt's 
 on the same subject in his paper on " Standard Novels," which 
 appeared in the " Edinburgh Review." His paper on Spenser 
 is judicious, and, on the whole, accurate, but has a general 
 coldness of tone insufferable in reference to such a rich and 
 imaginative writer, and contains one or two hyper-criticisms. 
 For instance, he objects to the much admired description of a 
 forest 
 
 " The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall, 
 The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, 
 The builder oak, sole king of forests all, 
 The aspine good for staves, the cypress funeral ;" 
 
 because, forsooth, a natural forest never contains such a vari- 
 ety of species ! This is sad work. Has he forgotten that the 
 "Fairy Queen" is not merely a poem, but a dream; and 
 should not a dream have its own dream-scenery ? We call 
 his attention to the following passage from Addison a critic 
 of a very different order a passage not less distinguished by 
 its philosophic truth, than by its exquisite beauty : 
 
 " The poet is not obliged to attend nature in the slow ad-
 
 1S4 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 vances she makes from one season to another, or to observe 
 her conduct in the successive production of plants and flowers; 
 he may draw into his description all the beauties of spring 
 and autumn, and make the whole year contribute something to 
 render it the more agreeable. His rose-trees, woodbines, and 
 jessamines may flower together, and his beds be covered at 
 the same time with lilies, violets, and amaranths. His soil is 
 not restrained to any particular set of plants ; but is proper 
 either for oaks or myrtles, and adapts itself to the products of 
 every climate. Oranges may grow wild in it ; myrrh may be 
 met with in every hedge ; and if he thinks it proper to have 
 a grove of spices, he can quickly command sun enough to raise 
 it. Nay, he can make several new species of flowers with 
 richer scents and higher colors than any that grow in the gar- 
 dens of nature. His concerts of birds may be as full and 
 harmonious, and his woods as thick and gloomy, as he pleases. 
 He is at no more expense in a long vista than in a short one, 
 and can as easily throw his cascades from a precipice of half 
 a mile high, as from one of twenty yards. He has his choice 
 of the winds, and can turn the course of his rivers, in all the 
 variety of meanders that are most delightful to the reader's 
 imagination." 
 
 Such are a poet's prerogatives, and would 
 
 " Classic Hallam, much renown'd for Greek," 
 
 snatch these from Spenser, 
 
 " High priest of all the Muses' mysteries ? " 
 
 In the same spirit he presumes, with some misgivings, how- 
 ever, to object to the celebrated stanza describing the varied 
 concert of winds, waves, birds, voices, and musical instruments 
 in the " Bower of Bliss," and compares it to that which tor- 
 mented Hogarth's " Enraged Musician ! " And this is a critic 
 on poetry ! worse, if possible, than a pre-Raphaelite on art. 
 
 His account of Shakspeare begins with the following elegant 
 sentence : " Of William Shakspeare, whom, through the 
 mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the mod- 
 ifications of his mighty mind, we seem to know better than 
 any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know 
 anything." Certainly, in another sense, he knows little of
 
 HAZLITT AND HALL AM. 185 
 
 him ! In the account that follows of Shakspeare's plays, he 
 actually sets " Love's Labor Lost," that dull tissue of " mere 
 havers," as they say in Scotland, and which many have doubt- 
 ed to be Shakspeare's, since it displays not a spark of his wit, 
 genius, or even sense, above the " Comedy of Errors," the 
 most laughable farce in the world, above the romantic " Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona," and above the " Taming of the 
 Shrew," that delightful half-plagiarism of the great drama- 
 tist's. He accuses "Romeo and Juliet" of a "want of 
 thoughtful philosophy." It is true that it does not abound in 
 set didactic soliloquies, like those of " Hamlet" or " Timon;" 
 but how much of the essence of profoundest thought has gone 
 to the production of Mercutio and of the Apothecary, and 
 that wierd shop of his. " Twelfth Night " he underrates when 
 compared to " Much Ado about Nothing." We dare to dif- 
 fer from him in this, and to prefer the humors of Sir Toby 
 and Sir Andrew not to speak of Malvolio to the immortal 
 Dogberry and Verges themselves. How feeble what he says 
 of Lear, having in madness " thoughts more profound than in 
 his prosperous hour he could have conceived," when compared 
 to Charles Lamb's remarks on the same subject, although sug- 
 gested apparently by them ! Of "Timon" he coldly predi- 
 cates, " It abounds with signs of his genius." " Timon!" the 
 grandest burst of poetic misanthropy ever written, certain 
 soliloquies, nay, sentences in which, condense all the satire of 
 Juvenal and the invective of Byron ! " What, wouldst thou 
 to Athens?" asks Apemantus. "Thee thither in a whirl- 
 wind." " What wouldst thou best liken to thy flatterers?" 
 " Women nearest, but men men are the things themselves!" 
 Another critic speaks of the excellent scolding of Timon, as 
 if it were the Billingsgate of a furious fishwoman, and not. 
 the foul spittle of an angry God. Just as we have said else- 
 where that De Quincey's third " Suspirium de Profundis " is 
 a sigh that can only be answered by the Second Advent, so 
 Shakspeare's protest in "Timon" against man as he is and 
 things as they are, lies yet, and shall lie, unlifted and unre- 
 plied to, till the great Day of Judgment. That Coriolanus 
 has the " grandeur of sculpture," is a criticism suggested 
 rather by Kemble's personation of him than by the character 
 himself. He, as Shakspeare describes him, is no more like
 
 18G MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 sculpture than Fergus Maclvor, or any other fierce, proud, 
 restless Highland chieftain. He may be, as a marble statue, 
 colossal ; but surely not, as a marble statue, calm. The rest 
 of his remarks on Shakspeare are just the thousand times 
 reiterated truisms about his creative power, knowledge of hu- 
 man nature, superiority to the dramatists of his age, and con- 
 tain nothing but what has been said before, and said far 
 better, by Johnson and Hazlitt. 
 
 His observations on Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger 
 show deep acquaintance with those writers, deeper than most 
 people who regard their own moral reputation would now care 
 to be known to possess. We may once for all tell the unin- 
 itiated that more beastly, elaborate, and incessant filth and 
 obscenity are not to be found in all literature, than in the 
 plays of these three dramatists ; and that we, at least, could 
 only read one or two of them through. They repelled us by 
 the strong shock of disgust, and we have never since been able 
 to understand of what materials the men are made who have 
 read and re-read them, paused and lingered over them, dwelt 
 fondly on their beauties, and even ventured to compare them 
 to the plays of Shakspeare; the morality of which, consider- 
 ing his age, is as wonderful as the genius. If our readers 
 think this criticism extreme, let them turn, not to the disgust- 
 ing books themselves, but to Coleridge's " Table Talk," and 
 note what he says of them. Hallam, while admitting that 
 there was much to condemn in their indecency and even licen- 
 tiousness of principle, says, " Never were dramatic poets more 
 thoroughly gentlemen, according to the standard of their 
 times." May our age be preserved from such gentility! 
 
 In his criticism on " Lycidas " occurs this sentence, which 
 we beg our readers to compare with what he had said previ* 
 ously of the forest in the " Fairy Queen :" 
 
 " Such poems as ' Lycidas ' are read with the willing aban- 
 donment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require 
 only that general possibility, that combination of images, 
 which common experience does not reject as incompatible ! " 
 
 So that thus common experience is made the guage of the 
 poet's waking dreams. Alas ! poor Shelley, Keats, and Cole- 
 ridge, what is to become of your revolts of Islam, Hyperions, 
 and Rimes of the Ancient Marinere, when tried by " common
 
 HAZLITT AND HALLAM. 187 
 
 experience," assisted in her assizes by the author of the " Con- 
 stitutional History !" 
 
 In the next paragraph but one he tells us that the " Ode on 
 the Nativity" is truly " Pindaric;" one of the most unlucky 
 epithets ever applied. What resemblance there is between 
 the swift, sharp-glancing, and fiery odes of the " inspired 
 Olympic jockey," and that slow-moving, solemn strain of the 
 English poet, we cannot even divine. In his account of " Par- 
 adise Lost," he assures us that the " subject is managed with 
 admirable skill ! " We rather like this Perge Puer style, 
 this clapping on the back, from such a man as Henry Hallam 
 to such a man as John Milton. It requires, too, a certain 
 power and courage in a man to be able so gravely to enunci- 
 ate such truisms as the above, and as the following : " The 
 Fall of Man has a more general interest than the Crusade." 
 A little farther on, however, we are startled with what is nei- 
 ther a truism, nor even true. " The first two books confirm 
 the sneer of Dryden, that Satan is Milton's hero, since they 
 develop a plan of action in that potentate which is ultimately 
 successful ; the triumph which he and his host must experi- 
 ence in the fall of man being hardly compensated by their 
 temporary conversion into serpents." As if that were the 
 only compensation ; as if the tenor of the whole argument 
 were not to show that the second Adam was to bruise the 
 Serpent's head by recovering the majority of the race from 
 Satan's grasp, and by, at last, " consuming Satan and his per- 
 verted world." The object of Satan was not only to ruin 
 man, but to rob God of glory; and the purpose of the poet is 
 to show how neither part of the plan was successful, but that 
 it all redounded to the devil's misery and disgrace, and to the 
 triumph of God and of the Messiah. So that, if it be essen- 
 tial to the hero of an epic that he be victorious, Satan is not 
 the hero of the " Paradise Lost," any more than of the "Par- 
 adise Regained," although he is undoubtedly the most inter- 
 esting and powerfully-drawn character in the former, 
 
 Or what do our readers think of this ? " Except one cir- 
 cumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than any- 
 thing else, we do not find any sign of depravity superinduced 
 upon the transgression of our first parents," Has Mr. Hal- 
 lam forgotten that magnificent scene of their mutual recrimi-
 
 188 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 nation, and of the gross injustice Adam does to Eve, by call- 
 ing her " that bad woman," " that serpent," &c. ? Was there 
 no sign of begun depravity there ? And was even " physical 
 intoxication" possible to undepraved beings ? 
 
 In the next paragraph he speaks of Homer's " diffuseness;" 
 rather a novel charge, we ween. Of repetition he has often 
 been accused, but never before of diffuseness. His lines are 
 lances, as compressed as they are keen. 
 
 A few pages afterwards Hallam says : " I scarcely think 
 that he had begun his poem before the anxiety and trouble 
 into which the public strife of the Commonwealth and the 
 Restoration had thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occu- 
 pations." Aubrey, on the contrary, expressly asserts that 
 Milton began his great work two years before the Restoration. 
 A fine sentence follows, in which the bust really seems nearly 
 alive, and you cry, O si sic omnia, or even multa! " Then 
 the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and 
 lonely path, like the moon emerging from the clouds." Then 
 follows an attempt at antithesis, which seems to us extremely 
 unsuccessful : " Milton is more a musical than a picturesque 
 poet. He describes visible things, but he feels music." 
 What does this mean ? or, at least, where is its force ? Had 
 he said, " He is," or " becomes music," it had been a novel 
 and a beautiful thought. He then brings forward the old 
 exploded objection to Milton's lists of sonorous names. Many 
 have stated, but few, we hope, have ever felt this objection. 
 To those possessed of historical lore, these names, as Macau- 
 lay remarks, are charmed names ; to others they are like a 
 foreign language spoken by a Gavazzi, or sung by a Jenny 
 Lind their music affects them almost as deeply as their 
 meaning could. If jargon, they are at least the mighty jar- 
 gon of a magician opening doors in rocks, rooting up pines, 
 and making palaces and mountains come and go at his plea- 
 sure. 
 
 After somewhat underrating " Paradise Regained," he closes 
 his estimate of Milton with a good account of " Samson Ago- 
 nistes" a poem, the " sculptural simplicity" of which seems 
 to suit his taste better than the grandeurs of the " Paradise 
 Lost," or the graces of the " Paradise Regained." 
 
 We could have gone on much longer, proving Hallam's
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 189 
 
 incapacity as a critic of poets, but must at present stop. We 
 have ventured on these remarks from no personal feeling to 
 the author ; in fact, although we have spoken of him as living, 
 we are not sure but he is dead. To detract from his fame as 
 a scholar and a historian, or rather critic on history, were a 
 hopeless and an unjust attempt. But we are sorry to see 
 powers so efficient in other fields worse than wasted upon the 
 sides of Parnassus. To warn him and such as he off that 
 sacred and secluded territory, we shall ever regard as our 
 bounden duty. 
 
 NO. II.-JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 
 
 OUR foregoing paper is on Hallam and Hazlitt. Our next is 
 on two men who also constitute types of our two main modern 
 schools of criticism namely, the Mechanical and the Impul- 
 sive although in both of them there are other elements 
 blended : Jeffrey, much more than Hallam, having the genial 
 playing above the hard surface of his mechanical judgment ; 
 and Coleridge, much more than Hazlitt, having a philosophi- 
 cal basis established below his impulsive eloquence of thought. 
 We first saw Lord Jeffrey at a meeting held in Edinburgh, 
 to erect a monument to the memory of Sir Walter Scott, then, 
 recently deceased. After the poor Duke of Buccleuch, who 
 acted as chairman, had delivered a silly speech in a hammer- 
 ing-stammering style (one of his best sentences was, " As to 
 Scott's poetry, where was there ever anything like that ?"), 
 up rose our elegant, refined, little Law-Lord, and began in a 
 shrill, sharp, yet tremulous tone, to panegyrise the memory 
 of his most formidable Scottish rival. His remarks were 
 brief and in beautiful taste, especially when he spoke of men 
 of all politics and classes having entered that hall, u as if into 
 the Temple of the Deity," to perform an act of common and 
 catholic homage to the virtues and genius of Sir Walter Scott. 
 We were too distant to see his features distinctly, but shall 
 never forget the impression made on us by his piercing rapid
 
 190 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 tones, and by the mingled dexterity and dignity of the style 
 of his address. 
 
 This was the first and last time of our hearing or seeing 
 Jeffrey. But for years before we had been familiar with his 
 fascinating articles in the " Edinburgh Review " articles 
 which now exert on us only the shadow of their original spell. 
 Certainly more graceful and lively productions are not to be 
 found in the compass of criticism ; but in depth, power, width, 
 and, above all, truth, they must take, on the whole, a second- 
 ary rank. 
 
 Lord Jeffrey had, unquestionably, many of the elements 
 which unite to form a genuine critic. He had a subtle per- 
 ception of a certain class of intellectual and literary beauties. 
 He had a generous sympathy with many forms of genius. He 
 had a keen logic with which to defend his views a lively wit, 
 a fine fancy, and a rapid, varied eloquence with which to ex- 
 pound and illustrate them. There was about his writing, too, 
 a certain inimitable ease, which looked at first like careless- 
 ness, but which on closer inspection turned out to be the com- 
 pounded result of high culture, much intercourse with the best 
 society, and much practice in public speaking. His knowledge 
 of law, too, had whetted his natural acuteuess to a razor-like 
 sharpness. His learning was not, perhaps, massive or pro- 
 found ; but his reading had been very extensive, and, retained 
 in its entireness, became exceedingly serviceable to him in all 
 his mental efforts. His genius possessed great versatility, 
 and had been fed with very various provision, so that he was 
 equally fitted to grapple with certain kinds of philosophy, and 
 to discourse on certain schools of poetry, and was familiar 
 alike with law, literature, metaphysics, and history. The 
 moral spirit of his writings was that of a gentleman and man 
 of the world, who was at all times ready to trample on mean- 
 ness, and to resent every injury done to the common codes of 
 honor, decency, generosity, and external morality. 
 
 Such is, we think, a somewhat comprehensive list of the 
 good properties of Jeffrey as a critic. But he labored not 
 less certainly under various important defects, which we pro- 
 ceed now with all candor to notice. He was not, in the first 
 place, although a subtle and acute, a profound or comprehen- 
 sive thinker. He saw the edges of a thought, but not a
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 191 
 
 thought in its length, depth, breadth, and in its relation to 
 any great scheme of principles. Hence, with all his logical 
 fence,, and clear, rapid induction of particulars, he is often a 
 shallow, and seldom a satisfactory thinker. He seems con- 
 stantly, by a tentative process, seeking for his theories, seldom 
 coining down upon them from the high summit of philosophi- 
 cal views. He has very few deep glimpses of truth, and 
 scarcely any aphoristic sentences. His language, rhetoric, 
 and fancy are often felt to be rich ; his vein of thought sel- 
 dom if ever it is diffused in long strata, not concentrated 
 into solid masses. He had no nuggets in his mines ! Hence 
 he is far from being a suggestive writer. Compare him in 
 this respect with Burke, with Coleridge, with Foster ! We 
 are not blaming him for not having been one of these men ; we 
 are merely thus severely defining what we think the exact 
 limits, and measuring the proper proportions, of his mind. 
 
 Although possessed of much and brilliant fancy, he had no 
 high imagination, and therefore little true sympathy with it. 
 The critic of the first poets must be himself potentially a poet. 
 To sec the sun, implies only eyes ; but to sing the sun aright, 
 implies a spark of his. fire in the singer's soul. Jeffrey saw 
 Milton, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and the writers of the Bi- 
 ble, but he could not sing their glories. Indeed, in reference 
 to the first three and the last of these mighty poets, he has 
 never, so far as we remember, uttered one word, or at least 
 shown any thorough or profound appreciation of their power. 
 Who quotes his panegyrics on Milton and Dante, if such things 
 there be ? Where has he spoken of Isaiah, David, or Job ? 
 Shakspeare, indeed, he has often and gracefully praised ; but 
 it is the myriad-minded in undress that he loves, and not as he 
 is bound up to the full pitch of his transcendent genius he 
 likes him better as the Shakspeare of " Romeo," and the " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream," than as the Shakspeare of " Mac- 
 beth," "Lear," and "Hamlet;" and his remarks, eloquent 
 though they are, show no such knowledge of him as is mani- 
 fested by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb. Almost all the great 
 original poets of his own time he has either underrated, or at- 
 tacked, or passed over in silence. Think of Wordsworth, 
 Southey, Coleridge, Shelley ! Many of the best English wri- 
 ters of the past are treated with indifference or neglect. Burke
 
 192 MODERN CRITICS, 
 
 he only mentions once or twice. Johnson he sometimes sneers / 
 at, and sometimes patronises. To swift as a writer he has done 
 gross injustice. Sir Thomas Browne seems unknown to him. 
 Young of the " Night Thoughts," Thomson, and Cowper, are 
 all underrated. To Jeremy Taylor, indeed, he has given his 
 due meed of praise, and to the early English dramatists much 
 more than their due. And who, on the other hand, are his 
 special favorites ? Pope he admired for his brilliant wit and 
 polish ; Crabbe for his terseness and truth ; Moore for his 
 light and airy fancy ; Campbell for his classic energy and na- 
 tional spirit ; and Byron, not for the awful horn of blasphemy 
 and creative power which rose late on his forehead in " Cain," 
 " Heaven and Earth," and the " Vision of Judgment," but for 
 his " Giaours" and " Corsairs," and the other clever centos of 
 that imitative period of his poetical life. In praising these 
 writers he was so far right, but he was not right in exalting 
 them above their greater contemporaries ; and the fact that he 
 did so, simply shows that there was in his own mind a certain 
 vital imaginative deficiency, disqualifying him from criticising 
 the highest specimens of the art of poetry. What would we 
 think of a critic on the fine arts, who should prefer Flaxmau 
 to Angelo, or Reynolds to Raphael, or Danby to Leonardo da 
 Vinci ? 
 
 In connection with this want of high imagination, there was 
 in Jeffrey a want of abandonment and enthusiasm : of false 
 enthusiasm he was incapable, although he was sometimes de- 
 ceived by it in others. But the genuine child-like ardor which 
 leads a man to clap his hands or to weep aloud as he sees some 
 beautiful landscape, or reads some noble passage of poetry or 
 prose, if it ever was in him, was early frozen up by the influ- 
 ences of the society with which he mingled in his early days. 
 We disagree with Thomas Carlyle in many, and these very 
 momentous, things but we thoroughly agree with him in his 
 judgment of the mischief which logic and speculation wrought 
 upon the brains and hearts of the Scottish lawyers and literati 
 about the end of last century and the beginning of this. We 
 have heard of him saying, " that when in Edinburgh, if he had 
 not thought there were some better people somewhere in the 
 world than those he met with there, he would have gone away 
 and hanged himself. The best he met were Whig lawyers, and
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 193 
 
 they believed in nothing except what they saw !' Among this 
 class Jeffrey was reared, and it was no wonder tnat the wings 
 of his enthusiasm, which were never of eagle breadth, were 
 sadly curtailed. Indeed the marvel is, that they were not torn 
 away by the roots, and that he has indited certain panegyrics 
 on certain favorite authors, which, if cold, resemble at least 
 cold cast, as we see sometimes in frost-work, into the form of 
 fire. 
 
 "What a propensity to sneer there was, especially in his ear- 
 lier writings ! Stab he could not at least, in the dark. He 
 left that Italian task to another and more malignant spirit, of 
 whom THIS " world is not worthy," and who, maugre Jeffrey's 
 kind interference to prevent him, often dipped his stiletto in 
 poison the poison of his own fierce passions. But Jeffrey's 
 sneers were nearly as formidable as his coaajutor's stabs. 
 They were so light, and apparently gentle ! The sneer at a 
 distance might almost have been mistaken for an infant smile; 
 and yet how thoroughly it did its work ! It was as though 
 the shadow of poison could kill. It was fortunate that alike 
 good sense and generosity taught him in general to reserve his 
 power of .sarcasm for those whom it might annoy and even 
 check in popularity, but could not harm in person or in purse. 
 Jeffrey flew at noble game at Scott, and Southey, and Words- 
 worth. This doubtless was done in part from the levity and 
 persiflage characteristic of an aspiring Edinburgh youth. 
 Truly does the writer quoted in the last paragraph say, that 
 there is " a certain age when all young men should be clapped 
 into barrels, and so kept till they come to years of discretion' 
 so intolerable is their conceit, and so absurd their projects 
 and hopes- especially when to a large quantum of impudence 
 and a minimum of true enthusiasm they add only that " little 
 learning" which is so common and so dangerous a thing in 
 this our day. Jeffrey, although rising ineffably above the 
 wretched young prigs and pretenders of his own or the present 
 time, was seldom entirely free from the spirit of intellectual 
 puppyism. There was a pertness about his general manner 
 of writing. Amazingly clever, adroit, subtle he always gave 
 you the impression of smallness ; and you fancied that you 
 saw Wordsworth, while still smarting under his arrows, lifting 
 him up in his hand, as did Gulliver a Lilliputian, and admir-
 
 194 MODERN C1UTICS. 
 
 ing the finished proportions of his tiny antagonist. And yet 
 how, with his needle-like missiles, did he shed round pain and 
 consternation upon the mightiest of the land ! How did 
 James Montgomery, and William Godwin, and Coleridge, and 
 Lamb, and Southey, and a hundred more of mark and likeli- 
 hood, groan like the wounded Cyclops and how they reeled 
 and staggered when they felt themselves blinded by weapons 
 which they despised, and victimised by an enemy they pre- 
 viously could hardly see ! 
 
 Latterly, indeed, we notice in Jeffrey's style less of the 
 mannikin, and more of the man less of the captious criti- 
 caster, and more of the large-minded judge. His paper on 
 Byron's Tragedies is a specimen of his better manner, being 
 bold and masculine ; and it does not seem, like many of hia 
 articles, as if it should have been written on a watch-paper. 
 In treating Warburton, too, he gets up on tiptoe, in sympathy 
 with the bulky bishop ; nor does he lose either his dignity or 
 balance in the effort. But his attack on Swift is by far his 
 most powerful review. We demur to his estimate of his 
 talents as a writer. Swift could have swallowed a hundred 
 Jeffreys. His power was simple and strong, as one of the 
 energies of Nature. He did by the moving of his finger what 
 others could not by the straining and agitation of their whole 
 frame. It was a stripped, concentred, irresistible force which 
 dwelt in him fed, too, by unutterable misery ; and hence 
 his power, and hence his pollution. He was strong, naked, 
 coarse, savage, and mud-loving, as one of the huge primeval 
 creatures of chaos. Jeffrey's sense of polish, feeling of ele- 
 gance and propriety, consciousness of inferiority in most things, 
 and consciousness of superiority in some, all contributed to 
 rouse his ire at Swift ; and, unequal as on the whole the 
 match was, the clever Scotchman beat the monster Paddy. 
 One is reminded of Gulliver's contest with some of the gigan- 
 tic reptiles and wasps of Brobdignag. Armed with his hanger, 
 that redoubtable traveler made them resile, or sent them 
 wounded away. And thus the memory of Swift bears Jeffrey's 
 steel-mark on it, and shall bear it for ever. 
 
 And yet, although Jeffrey was capable of high moral indig- 
 nation, he appears to have had very little religious suscepti- 
 bility. He was one of those who seem never either to have
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 195 
 
 heartily hated or heartily loved religion. He had thought on 
 the subject ; but only as he had thought on the guilt of Mary 
 Queen of Scots as an interesting historical puzzle, and not 
 as a question deeply affecting his own heart and personal in- 
 terests. We find in his writings no sympathy with the high 
 heroic faith, the dauntless resistance, and the long-continued 
 sufferings of the religious confessors and Covenanters of his 
 own country. He could lay indeed a withering touch on their 
 enemies ; but them he passed by in silence, or acknowledged 
 only by sneers. In this respect, however, as well as in his 
 literary tone and temper, we notice a decided improvement in 
 his latter days. He who, in an early number of the " Edin- 
 burgh Review," applied a dancing-master standard to brawny 
 Burns, and would have shorn and scented him down to the 
 standard of Edinburgh modish life, in a diary written a little 
 before his death, calls him a " glorious being," and wishes he 
 had been contemporary with him, that he might have called at 
 his Dumfries hovel, and comforted his unhappy spirit. And 
 he who had sneered, times and ways without number, at Scot- 
 tish Presbyterian religion, actually shed tears when he saw 
 the Free Church party leaving the General Assembly to cast 
 themselves on the Voluntary Principle; and said that no 
 country but Scotland could have exhibited a spectacle so 
 morally sublime. In both these respects, indeed, latterly, the 
 re-action becomes so complete as to be rather ludicrous than 
 edifying. Think of how, in his letters, he deals with Dickens ; 
 how he kisses and fondles him as a lady does her lap-dog ; 
 how he weeps instead of laughing over those miserable Christ- 
 mas tales of his ; how he seems to believe a pug of genius to 
 be a very lion ! How different had Dickens's worse produc- 
 tions appeared in the earlier part of Jeffrey's critical career ! 
 As to religion, his tone becomes that of childish sentimental- 
 ism ; and, unable to the last to give either to the Bible or to 
 the existence of Grod the homage of a manly belief, he can yet 
 shed over them floods of silly and senile tears. 
 
 Yet let him have his praise, as one of the acutest, most 
 fluent, lively, and on the whole amiable, of our modern Scot- 
 tish celebrities ; although not, as Cockburn calls him in that 
 lamentable life of his, at which the public have scarcely yet 
 ceased to laugh, " the first of British critics ! ! ! " His fame,
 
 19G MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 except in Edinburgh, is fast dwindling away ; and although 
 some passages in his writings may long be quoted, his memory 
 is sure of preservation, chiefly from the connection of his 
 name with that of the " Edinburgh Review," and with those 
 powerful but uncertain influences in literature, politics, philo- 
 sophy, and religion, which that review once wielded. 
 
 Coleridge was a man of another order. Indeed, we are half 
 tempted to unite with De Quincey in calling him the " largest 
 and most spacious intellect that has hitherto existed among 
 men." All men, of course, compared with God, are fragments. 
 Shakspeare himself was, and so was Coleridge. But, of all 
 men of his time (Goethe not excepted), Coleridge approached 
 nearest to our conception of a whole ; and it was his own fault 
 principally that he did not approach to this as nearly as Shak- 
 speare. He had, as he boasted of himself, " energic reason 
 and a shaping mind." He had imagination, intellect, reason, 
 logic, fancy, and a hundred other faculties, all developed in 
 nearly equal proportions, and all cultivated to nearly the same 
 degree. He had, besides, a high and solemn sense of God, 
 and a firm belief in his personality. Such powers were united 
 with all the mechanical gifts of language and musical utter- 
 ance, which tend to make them influential on the general pub- 
 lic, and with a fine bodily constitution. What then was want- 
 ing to this new Adam, thus endowed in the prodigality of 
 heaven ? Only two things a will and a wife or, more pro- 
 perly speaking, one a wife who could have become a will to 
 him, and who could have led him to labor, regularity, and vir- 
 tue. No such blessing was conferred on poor Coleridge. His 
 " pensive Sara" failed, without any positive fault on her side, 
 but from mere non-adaptation, in managing her gifted lord. 
 And thus, left to his own rudderless impulses, he drifted on in 
 a half-drunken dream, till he neared the rocks of ruin; and 
 only at the call of Cottle and Southey turned round, in time 
 to save a fraction of his intellect, of his character, and of his 
 peace. Infinite and eternal regrets must hover above the re- 
 cord which tells of the history of Coleridge ; the more as he 
 neither fully went down, nor fully escaped the Maelstrom ; in 
 either of which cases, his fate had been more instructive and 
 even less mysterious than it now is. 
 
 Yet we must here emphatically protest against Carlyle's re-
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 197 
 
 cent attempt to depreciate Coleridge. It is altogether un- 
 worthy of the author of the " Life of Schiller," although infi- 
 nitely worthy of the author of the " Model Prisons 1 * that 
 wretched inhumanity, which seemed like Swift's last ghastly 
 grin gone astray, and re-appearing on the lips of Sartor. 
 Coleridge, it seems, had nothing but " beautiful philosophic 
 moonshine." Better surely philosophic moonshine than " phi- 
 losophic reek." Better try by moonshine to calm or brighten 
 the jarring waves of this troubled age, than to darken them 
 by a mist of jargon, or churn them into wilder fury by exple- 
 tives of blasphemy. Coleridge, we admit, did not fully ac- 
 complish the task he undertook ; but it was a task, and a task 
 of heroic daring better and nobler certainly than the act of 
 lying down in the path of the world, and uttering howls of des- 
 pair and furious invectives invectives and exclamations which 
 were endured for awhile, for the sake of their music and 
 poetry; but which, having outlived that poetry and that 
 music, are now very generally and justly regarded as the out- 
 cries of one who, naturally a noble being, has been partly sour- 
 ed and partly spoiled into something we can hardly venture to 
 describe, except that it is rabidly hopeless, and hopelessly 
 rabid. Alas ! alas ! for the Carlyle of 1829, when the article 
 on Burns appeared 
 
 " If them bcest ho ; but oh ! how fallen, how changed !" 
 
 It is not our purpose to enter on the mare magnum of tlie 
 Coleridgean question as a whole ; but to speak simply and 
 shortly of him in his critical function and faculty. That par- 
 took of the vast enlargement and varied culture of his mind. 
 He arose at a time when criticism had fallen as low as poetry. 
 Haylcy was then the leading poet, and Blair the ruling critic ! 
 The " Edinburgh Review" had not risen, when a dark-haired 
 man, " more fat than bard beseems," with ivory forehead, 
 misty eye, boundless appetite for Welsh mutton, turnips, and 
 flip, " talking like an angel, and doing nothing at all," com- 
 menced to talk and lecture on poetry all along the Bristol 
 Channel in Shropshire and in Shrewsbury, in Manchester and 
 in Birmingham ; and so new and striking were his views, and 
 so eloquent his language, and so native his enthusiasm, that
 
 198 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 ill men'shearts burned within them as he spoke. He "threw," 
 says Hazlitt, " a great stone into the torpid and stagnant wa- 
 ters of criticism." He set up Shakspeare above Pope; he 
 praised Thomson and Cowper, as vastly superior to even Ad- 
 dison and Goldsmith ; he magnified Collins over Gray ; he as- 
 serted the immeasurable superiority of Burke to all his con- 
 temporaries ; he turned attention to the ancient ballad poetry 
 of Britain ; and he pointed his finger toward the great orb of 
 German genius which was then rising slowly, and amid heavy 
 clouds, over the horizon of the British mind. He did more 
 than this : he made his audiences for the first time hear poetry 
 read, not with the disgusting tricks of such elocution as was 
 then, and is still taught, but as poets should read it, and as 
 lovers of poetry should desire it to be read. And the poetry 
 he did read was sometimes his own the fine fresh incense of 
 his young enthusiasm and insight, colored by the hues of hea- 
 ven as it ascended up on high. 
 
 The effect he produced was greatly increased afterwards, by 
 the influences of a visit to Germany upon his mind and his 
 eloquence. This, instead of deadening, simply directed the 
 current of his enthusiasm. It made him a wise enthusiast. 
 He could now substantiate his statements, made at first from 
 intuitons, by critical principles, which were, indeed, just in- 
 tuitions grown old and established. He had greatly profited 
 by reading Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, and he set himself 
 to translate them, in various ways, to his countrymen. It 
 mattered i ot though his works did not circulate ; he circulat- 
 ed, and wherever he went intellectual virtue went out of him 
 He scattered critical dust and it was fire-dust along his 
 path ; and such men as Lamb, and Hazlitt, and Southey, and 
 De Quincey, and Lloyd, were ever ready to collect it, and to 
 make it, and perhaps sometimes to call it, thpir own. For 
 several years, in fact, the controversy of criticism amounted to 
 a brisk fire between the " Edinburgh Review," stationary in 
 the metropolis of Scotland, and S. T. Coleridge, wandering at 
 his own will through merry England, from London to the 
 Lakes, and from the Lakes to Bristol, or to London back 
 again. At the outset, the " Review" had the advantage ; but 
 ultimately Coleridge, "Wordsworth, and their party talked and 
 wrote its criticism down nay, best of all, converted the ' Re- 
 view" to their side, though never fully to themselves.
 
 JEFFREY AND COLERIDGE. 199 
 
 It is unfortunate that Coleridge has not condensed his criti- 
 cism into any distinct system, or wrought it out into any series 
 of critical papers. Hence we have only fragments, such as are 
 scattered through his " Friend" and " Biographia Literaria," 
 or found in his " Table Talk/' From these, however, it is 
 very easy to see the leading principles on which all his criti- 
 cism proceeds. His two great principles were, first, the differ- 
 ence between the Imagination and the Fancy; and, secondly, 
 the necessity of an organic unity to all the higher works of 
 art. The first of these, although not, we think, just, led him 
 to the strong distinction he perpetually draws between the 
 soi-disant poetry of Pope, Addison, and Darwin; and that of 
 Shakspeare, Milton, and the rest of our great poets. His 
 inculcation of organic unity in works of genius is unquestion- 
 ably pushed too far so far, indeed, that on his principles 
 thore are only one or two poems, however many poets there 
 znay be, in the world. But it has done good, notwithstand- 
 ing, in curbing that tendency to fragmentary and fugitive 
 effort which has beset so many poets ; and in opening their 
 eyes to what is certainly the most difficult peak in the poetic 
 art. Coleridge, too, has strongly insisted upon poets study- 
 ing philosophy as the basis of their song seeking to construct 
 their verse and language upon scientific principles, and con- 
 secrating their gift to the Great Giver. Were poets acting 
 on his advice, we should have every one of them ready to 
 " give a reason" for the inspiration that was in him ; and what 
 is much better, all singing harmoniously with the harps of 
 angels around the manger at Bethlehem and the empty grave 
 of the Risen Redeemer. He has also attempted to distin- 
 guish the differentia of genius finding the meaning of it in 
 the name which so closely connects it with the genial nature 
 and the spontaneous powers a distinction which De Quincey 
 Las recently borrowed, and illustrated with his usual felicity. 
 
 What a book the " Collected Criticisms of S. T. (alas not 
 St. /) Coleridge" might have been, had he written a hundred 
 papers like that he wrote about Sir T. Browne, on the blank 
 leaf of one of his volumes ! But a completed Coleridge had 
 been too noble a product for us as yet " a thing to dream of, 
 not to see," It is a curious question "Are such tantalising 
 fragments finished in another world ?" If so, how interesting
 
 200 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 the spectacle of a mild-tempered Milton a humble and bend- 
 ing Byron a Shelley on his knees a Goethe warmed into a 
 seraph, and " summering high in bliss upon the hills of God " 
 a many-sided Southey a wide-minded Wordsworth a 
 believing Godwin a healthy and happy Keats a holy Burns 
 a Poe " clothed and in his right mind" a Coleridge with 
 the crevices in his nature filled up, and his self-control made 
 equal to his transcendent genius ! Whether the future world 
 may show us such rounded harmonies as our words have thus 
 described we cannot tell ; but certainly it is very pleasant to 
 conceive of them as possible, and to form idealisms of the 
 future of men, who, on this earth compassed about with infir- 
 mities, and even betrayed into deep and fatal errors, have yet 
 forced their irresistible way into the admiration of our intel- 
 lects, and the pity or love of our hearts. 
 
 NO. III.-DELTA.* 
 
 ( This paper appeared in August, 1851.) 
 
 THE name, or rather the mark of A, is a magic mark through- 
 out the entire kingdom of British literature. The gentleman 
 who chooses thus to subscribe himself is favorably known as a 
 poet, as a writer on medical literature, as the author of a very 
 successful Scotch novel, yclept " Mansie Wauch," as one of 
 the principal contributors and conductors of " Blackwood's 
 Magazine," and as a most amiable and accomplished private 
 person. Nor are we sure, if, all things considered, any man, 
 whether in England or Scotland, could have been singled out, 
 who was likely to manage the difficult and complicated subject 
 of these lectures in a safer, a more candid, and less exception- 
 able style, than Dr. Moir especially before an audience so 
 constituted, that one-half came probably with the notion (how- 
 ever ludicrous this presumption may seem to all others) that 
 
 * Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century, 
 delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical Association, by DELTA.
 
 DELTA. 01 
 
 any one of themselves might have treated the subject better 
 than he ! 
 
 But, apart altogether from the composition of his audience 
 peculiar and unique, we believe, in the world Delta has 
 nobly eifected his purpose. That was to express honestly and 
 in simple language, without shrinking, and without show, his 
 own views and feelings as to our last half-century's poetical 
 literature. And it is fortunate for us, and all his readers, 
 that these are the views of no narrow sectarian, or soured 
 bigot, or self-conceited and solemn twaddler but of an en- 
 lightened, wide-minded, and warm-hearted man, whose very 
 errors and mistakes are worthy of respectful treatment, and 
 all of whose opinions are uttered from the sincerity of an 
 honest heart, and in the eloquent and dignified language of a 
 poet. 
 
 Had we a thousand pens, each should run on, like that of a 
 " ready writer," in the praise of poetry. Assuredly, among 
 the many sweets which Glod has infused into the cup of 
 being among the many solaces of this life, the many relics 
 of the primeval past, the many foretastes of the glorious 
 future, there are few more delicious than the influences of 
 poetry. It transports us from the dust and discord of the 
 present troubled sphere into its own fair world. It " lays 
 us," as Hazlitt beautifully says, " in the lap of a lovelier 
 nature, by stiller streams, and fairer meadows;" it invigo- 
 rates the intellect by the elevated truth which is its substance; 
 it enriches the imagination by the beauty of its pictures ; it 
 enlarges the mental view by the width and grandeur of its 
 references ; it inflames the aifections by the " touch ethereal 
 of its fiery rod ;" it purifies the morals by the powers of pity 
 and terror ; and, when concentrated and hallowed, it becomes 
 the most beautiful handmaid in the train of faith, and may be 
 seen with graceful attitude sprinkling the waters of Castalia 
 on the roses in the garden of God. The pleasures which 
 poetry gives are as pure as they are exquisite. Like the 
 manna of old, they seem to descend from a loftier climate 
 not of the earth, earthy, but of celestial birth, they point back 
 to heaven as their future and final home. They bear every 
 reflection, and they awaken no re-action. A night with the 
 Muses never produces a morning with the Fiends. The world
 
 202 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 into which poetry introduces is always the same. The " Sun 
 of Homer shines upon us still." The meadows of genius are 
 for ever fresh and green. The skies of imagination continually 
 smile. The actual world changes the ideal is always one 
 and the same Achilles is always strong Helen is always 
 fair Mount Ida continually cleaves the clouds Scamander 
 rushes ever by the Eve of Milton still stands ankle deep in 
 the flowers of her garden and the horn of Fitzjames winds 
 in the gorge of the Trosachs for evermore. And when we 
 remember that above the storms and surges of this tempestu- 
 ous world there rises in the pages of the poet a fairy realm, 
 which he who reads may reach, and straightway forget his 
 sorrow, and remember his poverty no more, we see the debt 
 of gratitude we owe to poetry, and, looking at the perennial 
 peace and loveliness which surround her wherever she goes, 
 we feel entitled to apply to her the beautiful lines originally 
 addressed to the bird of spring 
 
 " Sweet bird, thy bower is ever fair 
 
 Thy sky is ever clear ; 
 Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, 
 No winter in thy year." 
 
 Love pure, refined, insatiable affection for the beautiful 
 forms of this material universe, for the beautiful affections of 
 the human soul, for the beautiful passages of the history of 
 the past, for the beautiful prospects which expand before us in 
 the future such love burning to passion, attired in imagery, 
 and speaking in music, is the essence and the soul of poetry. 
 It is this which makes personification the life of poetry. The 
 poet looks upon nature, not with the philosopher, as com- 
 posed of certain abstractions, certain " cold material laws;" 
 but he breathes upon them, and they quicken into personal 
 life, and become objects as it wore of personal attachment. 
 The winds with him are not cold currents of air, they are mes- 
 sengers, they are couriers the messengers of destiny, the 
 couriers of God ; the rainbow is not a mere prismatic effect of 
 light ; but to the poet, in the language of the Son of Sirach, 
 " it encompasseth the heavens with a glorious circle, and the 
 hands of the Most High have bended it." The lightning is 
 not simply an electric discharge, it is a barbed arrow of ven-
 
 DELTA. 203 
 
 geance, it is winged with death ; the thunder is not so much 
 an elemental uproar, as it is the voice of God ; the stars are 
 not so much distant worlds, as they are eyes looking down on 
 men with intelligence, sympathy, and love ; the ocean is not a 
 dead mass of waters, it is a " glorious mirror to the Almighty's 
 form;" the sky is not to the poet a "foul and pestilent con- 
 gregation of vapors," it is a magnificent canopy " fretted with 
 golden fire," nay, to his anointed eye every blade of grass 
 lives, every flower has its sentiment, every tree its moral, and 
 
 " Visions, as poetic eyes avow, 
 Hang in each leaf, and cling to every bough." 
 
 This perpetual personification springs from that principle of 
 love which teaches the poet not only to regard all men as his 
 brethren, the whole earth as his home, but to throw his own 
 excess of soul into dumb, deaf, and dead things, and to find 
 even in them subjects of his sympathy, and candidates for his 
 regard. It was in this spirit that poor Burns did not disdain 
 to address the mouse running from his ploughshare as his 
 " fellow-mortal," and bespeak even the ill-fated daisy, which 
 the same ploughshare destroyed say rather transplanted into 
 the garden of never-dying song 
 
 " Wee, modest, crimson-tippet flower, 
 Thou'st met me in an evil hour, 
 And I maun crush below the stoure 
 
 Thy feeble stem ; 
 To spare thee noo is past my power, 
 
 Thou bonnie gem. 
 
 Alas ! it's no thy neebor sweet, 
 
 The blithesome lark, companion meet, 
 
 Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet, 
 
 Wi' spreckled breast, 
 While upward springing, blithe to greet 
 
 The purpling East." 
 
 Nor, so long as love and the personifying principle spring- 
 ing from it exist, are we afraid for the decline or fall of poe- 
 try. Dr. Moir, we humbly conceive, has a morbid and need 
 less horror at the progress of science ; he speaks with a sort 
 of timid hope of " poetry ultimately recovering from the 
 staggering blows which science has inflicted, in the shape of 
 steam conveyance, of electro-magnetism, of geological exposi- 
 tion, of political economy, of statistics in fact, by a series
 
 204 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 of disenchantments, original genius, in due time must from 
 new elements frame new combinations, and these may be at 
 least what the kaleidoscope is to the rainbow, or an explosion 
 of hydrogen in the gasometer to a flash of lightning on the 
 hills. But this alters not my position that all facts are 
 prose until colored by imagination or passion. From physic 
 we have swept away alchemy, incantation, and cure by the 
 royal touch ; from divinity, exorcism, and purgatory, and ex- 
 communication ; and from law, the trial by wager of battle, 
 the ordeal by touch, and the mysterious confessions of witch- 
 craft. In the foamy seas we can never more expect to see 
 Proteus leading out his flocks ; nor in the dimpling stream 
 another Narcissus admiring his own fair face ; nor Diana again 
 descending on Latinos to Endymion. We cannot hope ano- 
 ther Una ' making a sunshine in the shady place;' nor another 
 Macbeth meeting with other witches on the blasted heath ; nor 
 another Faust wandering amid the mysterious sights and 
 sounds of another May-day night. Robin Hoods and Rob 
 Roys are incompatible with sheriffs and the county police ; 
 rocks are stratified by geologists exactly as satins are mea- 
 sured by mercers; and Echo, no longer a vagrant classical 
 nymph, is compelled quietly to succumb to the laws of acous- 
 tics." 
 
 He says again, " Exactness of knowledge is a barrier to the 
 laying on of that coloring by which alone facts can be invest- 
 ed with the illusive lines of poetry." And again, he defines 
 " poetry the imaginative and limitless, and science the definite 
 and true;" and says, " Poetry has ever found ' the haunt and 
 the main region of her song' either in the grace and beauty 
 which cannot be analysed, or in the sublime of the indefinite. 
 Newton with his dissection of the rainbow, Anson with his 
 circumnavigation of the earth, and Franklin with his lightning- 
 kite, were all disenchanters. Angels no longer alight on the 
 iris ; Milton's sea-covered sea sea without shore ' is a geo- 
 graphical untruth ; and in the thunder men no more hear the 
 voice of the Deity." 
 
 Thus far, Delta and very beautiful and ingenious these 
 illustrations are. But, first, many of the things he mentions, 
 although banished from the province of belief, are not thereby 
 banished from that of poetry, or of that quasi-belief which
 
 DELTA. 205 
 
 good poetry produces. Milton, not Milton's age, believed in 
 the Heathen Mythology ; and yet how beautifully has he 
 made it subserve poetical purposes. Scott had no faith in 
 ghosts or witchcraft, or the second sight, and yet he has turned 
 them to noble imaginative account; and when he speaks of. the 
 second sight as being now " abandoned to the purposes of poe- 
 try," he truly describes a common process, the fact of which 
 is fatal to Delta's theory a process through which sublime 
 and beautiful illusions of all kinds, cast out of man's under- 
 standing, take refuge in his imagination, and become a rich 
 stock of materials for the poet. Godwin, too, did not believe 
 in alchemy, and yet he has founded a magnificent prose poem 
 upon an alchemist's imaginary story. 
 
 Nay, secondly, the farther we advance beyond the point of 
 believing such illusions, their poetic value and power are often 
 enhanced. An English boy, we venture to say, reads the 
 "Arabian Nights "with more generous gusto, with more in- 
 tense delight, than did ever a boy in Bagdad. What compar- 
 ison between all the ancient minstrels put together, and the 
 minstrel lays or minstrel prose of Scott, who wrote in the 
 nineteenth century ? What grey primeval father ever felt, or 
 could ever have expressed, the beauty of the feeling for the 
 rainbow as Campbell has done ? And did not John Keats 
 a Cockney youth breathe a new poetic spirit into the pagan 
 Mythus, and throne its gods in statelier and more starry man- 
 sions than Homer or ^schylus themselves ? Not only is a 
 " thing of beauty a joy for ever," but its beauty swells and 
 deepens with time. Ail those illusions to which Delta so elo- 
 quently refers in medicine, law, and physics although thrust 
 forth from the inner shrine of truth, linger on, in their highest 
 ideal shapes, in the beautiful porch of poetry. There stands 
 still the Alchemist, the smoke of his great sacrifice to nature 
 still crossing his countenance, and giving a mystic wildness to 
 his aspect ; there the Witch still mutters her spell, and thick- 
 ens her infernal broth; there the Ghost disturbed tells, as he 
 walks with troubled steps, the secrets of his prison-house, his 
 own shadowy hair on end in its immortal horror; there the- 
 Marinere, returned from a far countrie, speaks of antres vast 
 and deserts idle of spectre ships sailing upon windless oceans 
 of spirits sitting amid the shrowds at midnight of double
 
 200 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 suns and bloody rainbows ; there Scheherezade continues her 
 ever-wondrous and ever-widening tale ; there still twangs the 
 bow of Robin Hood, and wave the feathers of Rob Roy ; 
 there, as the Earthquake at times shakes the ground, it seems 
 the spasm of an imprisoned giant ; as a sunbeam of peculiar 
 beauty slants in, Uriel is seen descending upon it ; and as the 
 thunder utters its tremendous monotony, there are still voices 
 ready to exclaim, " God hath spoken once, yea, twice have I 
 heard this, Power belongeth unto God.' 1 Still to fancy and to 
 feeling to imagination's quick ear, and to passion's burning 
 heart " all things are possible." 
 
 Thirdly, Delta, we think, unduly restricts the domain of 
 poetry, when he strikes out from its map the provinces of the 
 definite and the true. We grant that often poetry loves to 
 wear a robe of moonlight, and a scarf of mist, as she walks 
 along in her beauty. But there is also a severe, purged, and 
 lofty poetry which delights in the naked light of truth the 
 clear shining of a morning without clouds. Such was the 
 poetry of Homer, of Chaucer, of Crabbe, and many others. 
 Such is the principal part of what is called didactic poetry. 
 Such poetry, too, is found in abundance in Scripture, and has 
 obtained from critics the name of Gnomic, or Sententious 
 Bong. Now, it is certain that the advance of definite knowl- 
 edge must tend to the perfectionment of this species of poetry, 
 since it loves to deal with direct facts, definite propositions, 
 and the higher of the works of art. 
 
 Fourthly, Delta omits to notice, that while some of those 
 indefinitudes and sublimities in which poetry has often hither- 
 to delighted to revel, may yield before advancing science and 
 civilisation, others, of perhaps a grander cast, shall take their 
 room. He is aware that in ancient dernonology, next, or even 
 superior, as an hour for starting a spirit to the noon of night, 
 was the noon of day. We are at present in a transition state. 
 The sun of science has risen, but has not reached his meridian. 
 Consequently, the poetry of science, or of philosophy, has not 
 fully arrived. But arrive it shall, in due time, and in our no- 
 tion must be of a far higher cast than the poetry of supersti- 
 tion beautiful as that was, is, and must continue to be. Lu- 
 cretius was in the rear of Epicurus Milton after Luther 
 and Scott after Chivalry. We must wait for the advent of
 
 DELTA. 207 
 
 those poets who shall set to song the great discoveries and 
 philosophies of our day. Nay, even at present, we can detect 
 the germs of poetry in our advancing knowledge. " The hea- 
 vens," says Hazlitt, " have gone farther off." - Strange, in- 
 deed, if the telescope has pushed them away ! Surely, if the 
 " cusps " of the " houses " of astrology have left us, the con- 
 stellations and firmaments of the universe have come nearer. 
 " There shall never be another Jacob's Dream." Never for 
 we have now a " more sure word of prophecy," and " new 
 heavens" are coming! We, for our parts, venture to hope 
 that the "witching time " of noon is near. "Poetry," says 
 one, " shall lead in a new age, even as there is a star in the 
 constellation Harp which shall yet, astronomers tell us, be the 
 polar star for a thousand years." May we not be fast nearing 
 that star ? All the sciences are already employed, and may 
 yet be more solemnly enlisted into the service of poetic song. 
 Botany shall go forth into the fields and the woods, collect 
 her fairest flowers, and bind them with a chaplet for the brow 
 of Poetry. Conchology from the waters, and from the ocean 
 shores, shall gather her loveliest shells, and hark ! when up- 
 lifted to the ear of Poetry, 
 
 " Pleased they remember their august abodes. 
 And murmur as the ocean murmurs there." 
 
 As Anatomy continues to lay bare the human frame, so fear- 
 fully and wonderfully made, Poetry shall breathe upon the 
 " dry bones," and they shall live. Chemistry shall lead Poe- 
 try to the side of her furnace, and show her transformations 
 scarcely less marvellous and magical than her own. Geology, 
 with bold yet trembling hand, lifting up the veil from the his- 
 tory of past worlds from cycles of ruin and of renovation 
 shall allow the eye of Poetry to look down in wonder, and to 
 look up in fire. And Astronomy shall conduct Poetry to her 
 observatory, and mingle her own joy with kers, as they behold 
 the spectacle of that storm of suns, which is blowing in the 
 midnight sky. In the prospect of the progress of this last 
 science, indeed, we see opening up the loftiest of conceivable 
 fields for the poet. Who has hitherto adequately sung the 
 wonders of the Newtonian how much less of the Herschelian 
 heavens 1 And who is waiting, with his lyre in his hands, to
 
 208 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 praise the steep-rising splendors of the Kossian skies : We 
 have the " Night Thoughts" a noble strain, but a whole 
 century behind the present stage of the science ; but who shall 
 write us a poem on " Night" worthy, in some measure, of the 
 solemn yet spirit-stirring theme ? Sootier or later it must be 
 done. The Milton of Midnight must yet arrive. 
 
 Coleridge somewhere profoundly remarks, that all knowl- 
 edge begins with wonder, passes through an interspace of ad- 
 miration mixed with research, and ends in wonder again. Now 
 what is true of knowledge is true of poetry. She, too, begins 
 with wonder ; and from this feeling have sprung her first rude 
 and stuttering strains. Admiration, culture, the artistic use 
 of the wonders of the past succeed, and to this stage we have 
 now come. But we may yet rise, and that speedily, to a 
 higher and almost ideal height, when the stationary unuttera- 
 ble wonder of the first poetic age shall be superadded to the 
 admiration and art of the second, and when the new and per- 
 fect poetry shall include both. The infant, abashed at some 
 great spectacle, covers his face with his little hands ; the man 
 stands erect, with curious kindling eye before it ; the true phil- 
 osopher imitates the attitude of the angels, who, nobler infants, 
 " veil their faces with their wings." So poetry at first prat- 
 tles bashfully, it then admires learnedly, and at last it bends, 
 yet burns, in seraphic homage. 
 
 Visions go, but truths succeed or remain. The rainbow 
 ceases to be the bridge of angels, but not to be the prism of 
 God. The thunder is no longer the voice of capricious and 
 new kindled wrath, but is it not still the echo of conscience ? 
 and does it not speak to all the higher principles in the human 
 soul ? The stars are no longer the geographical limits or 
 guides of man's history; but are they not now milestones in 
 the city not made with hands the city of God ? The uni- 
 verse has lost those imaginary shapes or forms by .which men 
 of old sought to define and bound it; but it has, instead, 
 stretched away indefinitely, and become that " sea without 
 shore " of which Milton dreamed. The Genii imagined to 
 preside over the Elements have vanished; but, instead of 
 them, the Elements themselves have gained a mystic import- 
 ance, and sit in state upon their secret thrones, till some new 
 one power, perhaps, rises to displace and include them. all.
 
 209 
 
 The car of Neptune scours the deep no more ; but th< re is, 
 instead, the great steam-vessel walking the calm waters in tri- 
 umphant beauty, or else wrestling like a demon of kindred 
 power, with the angry billows. Apollo and the Muses are 
 gone ; but in their room there stands the illimitable, uudefin- 
 able thing called Genius the electricity of the intellect the 
 divinest element in the mind of man. Newton " dissected the 
 rainbow," but left it the rainbow still. Auson " circumnavi- 
 gated the earth," but it still wheels round the sun, blots out 
 at times the moon, and carries a Hell of caverned mysterious 
 fire in its breast. Franklin brought down the lightnings on 
 his kite ; but, although they said to him, " Here we are," 
 they did not tell him, " This or that are we." In short, 
 beauty, power, all the poetical influences and elements, retire 
 continually before us like the horizon, and the end and the 
 place of them are equally and for ever unknown. 
 
 Delta is, as all who are acquainted with him know, a man 
 of genuine, though unobtrusive, piety. Every line of his po- 
 etry proves him a Christian. And it is on this account that 
 we venture to ask him, in fine, how will this theory of his con- 
 sort with the doctrine of man's immortal progress ? how 
 account for the ever-welling poetry of the " New Song ?" and 
 how explain the attitude of those beings who, knowing God 
 best, admire him the most, praise him most vehemently, and 
 pour out before him the richest incense of wonder and wor- 
 ship ? Here is poetry surviving amid the very blaze of celes- 
 tial vision ; and surely we need not expect that any stage of 
 mental advancement on earth can ever see its permanent de- 
 cline or decay. 
 
 If we have dwelt rather long upon this point, it is partly be- 
 cause we count it a question of considerable moment ; because 
 we think Delta's notion in reference to it is pushed forward 
 somewhat prominently, and more than once, and because it is 
 one of the few theories in the book which, while it has a general 
 character, is susceptible of special objections. We have in- 
 deed still one or two of his minor statements to combat. But 
 we pass, first, with sincere gratification, to speak of the main 
 merits of his book. 
 
 The most prominent, perhaps, of these, is Catholicity. Ho 
 is a generous, as well as a just, judge. He has looked over
 
 210 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 the poetry of the last fifty years with an eye of wise love. 
 Finding two schools in our literature, which, after a partial and 
 hollow truce, are gradually diverging, if not on the point of 
 breaking out, into open hostility, he has, in some measure, 
 acted as a mediator between them. Not concealing his pecu- 
 liar favor for the one, he is yet candid and eloquent in his 
 appreciation of the demi-gods of the other. Adoring Scott, 
 he is just to Shelley. He sees the fire mingled with mysticism, 
 "like tongues of flame amid the smoke of a conflagration;" 
 but he greatly prefers the swept hearth and the purged, clear, 
 columnar flames of the ancient Homeric manner. Inclining 
 to what he thinks the more excellent way, he does not denounce 
 as a dunce or an impostor every one who has chosen, or who 
 encourages others in choosing, another and a more perilous 
 style. The energy and beauty of his praise show, moreover, its 
 sincerity. False or ignorant panegyric may easily be detected. 
 It is clumsy, careless, and fulsome ; it often praises writers 
 for qualities they possess not, or it singles out their faults 
 for beauties, or by overdoing, overleaps itself, and falls on the 
 other side. It now gives black eyes to the Saxon, and now 
 fair hair to the Italian commends Milton for his equality, 
 Dryden for his imagination, Pope for his nature, and Byron 
 for his truth. Very different with honest praise. It shows, 
 first, by the stroke of a moment, the man it means, and after 
 drawing a strong and hard outline of his general character, it 
 makes the finer and warmer shades flush over it gently and 
 swiftly, as the vivid green of spring passes over the fields. 
 And such always, or generally, is the distinct, yet imaginative, 
 the clear and eloquent praise of Delta. 
 
 He goes to criticise, too, in the spirit of a poet. Prosaic 
 criticism of poetry is a nuisance which neither we nor our 
 fathers have been able to bear. A drunkard cursing the 
 moon a maniac foaming at some magnificent statue, which 
 stands serene and safe above his reach or a ruffian crushing 
 roses on his way to midnight plunder, is but a type of the sad 
 work which a clever, but heartless and unimaginative, critic 
 often makes of works of genius. Nay, there is a class, less 
 despicable, but more pernicious, who make their moods and 
 states piny the critic now the moods of their mind, and now 
 the states of their stomach, the verdicts of which, neverthe-
 
 DELTA. 211 
 
 less, issued in cold, oracular print, are received "by the public 
 as veracious. There is a set, again, whose criticisms are 
 formed upon the disgustingly dishonest principle of picking 
 out all the faults, and ignoring all the beauties, of a composi- 
 tion ; and who do not give the faults even the poor advantage 
 of showing them in their context. And there are those who 
 judge of books by their publisher, or by the nation of their 
 author, or by his profession, or by his reputed creed. It were 
 certainly contemptible to allude to the existence of such rep- 
 tiles at all, were it not that they are permitted to crawl in 
 some popular periodicals ; that they shelter under, and abuse 
 the shade of the " Anonymous;" and that they have prevailed 
 to retard the wider circulation of the writings, without being 
 able to check the spread of the fame, of some of the most 
 gifted of our living men. To take one out of many cases, we 
 simply ask the question, Have some of our leading London 
 journals ever taken the slightest notice of any one of the 
 works of perhaps the most eloquent and powerful genius at 
 present alive in Britain we mean Professor Wilson ? And 
 if this has been little loss to him, has it been less a disgrace 
 to them V Delta is altogether a man of another spirit. He 
 is at once a poet and a gentleman ; and how fortunate were 
 many of our critics, could he transfer even the lesser half of 
 this fine whole to them ! His genial enthusiasm never, or sel- 
 dom, blinds his discriminating eyesight. And throughout all 
 this volume he has praised very few indeed who have not, in some 
 field or another of poetry, eminently distinguished themselves. 
 We mention again the wide knowledge of the poetry of the 
 period which his lectures display. This bursts out, as it were, 
 at every pore of the book. There is no appearance of cram- 
 ming for his task, although here and there he does allude to 
 writers who have either, per se, or per alias, been thrust into 
 the field of his view. We notice, however, that he has made 
 one or two important omissions. His silence as to Sydney 
 Yendys, was, we understand, an oversight. The slip contain- 
 ing a criticism of " The Roman," accidentally dipped out as 
 the printing was going on. It was the same with a notice of 
 Taylor's " Eve of the Conquest." Other blanks there are, 
 but, on the whole, when we consider the width of thfi field he 
 has traversed, the marvel is that they are so few.
 
 212 MODERN CRITICS 
 
 We have a more serious objection to state. It is with re- 
 gard to the scale he has (in effect, though indirectly) con- 
 structed of our poets. Scott he sets "alone and above all;" 
 then he places Wordsworth, Byron, Wilson, and Coleridge, on 
 one level Campbell, Southey, James Montgomery, Moore, 
 and Crabbe, seem to stand in the next file; then come Pollok, 
 Aird, Croly, and Milman; then Keats, Shelley, and Tenny- 
 son ; and, in fine, the ol TTO/./.OI, the minor, or rising poets. 
 Delta will pardon us if we have mistaken his meaning, but 
 this has been the impression left on us by the perusal of his 
 lectures. Now, admitting that Scott, in breadth, variety, 
 health, dramatic and descriptive powers, was the finest writer 
 of his age, yet surely he is not to be compared as a poet with 
 many others of the time ; nor as a profound thinker and con- 
 summate artist, with such men as Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
 As a VAXES, what proportion between him and Shelley, Keats 
 and Byron ? In terseness and true vigor, he yields to Crabbe ; 
 and in lyrical eloquence and fire, to Campbell. Wilson, as a 
 man of general genius and Shakspearian all-sidcduess, is infe- 
 rior to few men of any age; but, as a poet, as an artist, as a 
 writer, has done nothing entitling him to rank with Byron, 
 Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Campbell and Crabbe arc com- 
 mensurate names, but they rank as poets much more highly 
 above Southey and Montgomery than Delta seems willing to 
 admit. And, greatly as we admire Croly, Aird, and Pollok, 
 we are forced to set Keats and Shelley above them in point of 
 richness and power of genius, as well as of artistic capacity. 
 
 Delta, in his capacity of poet, is not uniformally national ; 
 but, as a critic, his heart beats most warmly, and his language 
 flows out with most enthusiasm and fluency, toward the poets 
 of Scotland. He has mingled with some of the noblest of 
 English spirits too ; may, for aught we know, have climbed 
 Helvellyn with Wordsworth ; has, at any rate, " seated at 
 Coleridge's bedside at Hampstead, heard him recite the " Mon- 
 ody" to Chatterton, in tones " delicate, yet deep, and long 
 drawn out ;" but he has evidently been on terms of more fond 
 i;d familiar intercourse with the bards of his own country. 
 He has sat occasionally at the '' Noctes Ambrosianfe," has 
 frequently walked with Aird through the sweet gardens of 
 Dudd ings ton, listened to Wilson sounding on his way as they
 
 DELTA. 213 
 
 scaled Arthur's Seat together, or to Hogg repeating " Kil- 
 uieny," mingled souls with poor William Motherwell, and 
 crossed pipes with Dr. Macnish, the Modern Pythagorean has 
 read the " Course of Time" in MS., and now arid then seen 
 Abbotsford in its glory, while the white peak of the wizard's 
 head was still shining amid its young plantations. Hence a 
 little natural exaggeration in speaking of the men and the 
 subjects he knows best an exaggeration honorable to his 
 heart, not dishonorable to his head, and which does not detract 
 much from the value of his estimates; nay, it has enabled him, 
 in reference to Scottish genius, to write with a fine combina- 
 tion of generous ardor, and of perfect mastery. Cordially do 
 we unite with him in condemning the gross affectations, the 
 deliberate darkness, the foul smoke, and, above all, the assump- 
 tion, exclusiveness, and conceit, which distinguish the writings 
 of our minor mystics ; and we have already granted that he 
 is just in his estimate of the genius of many of the higher 
 members of the school, and sincere in his desire to produce a 
 reconciliation between them and their more lucid and classical 
 brethren. Still we could have wished that he had entered 
 more systematically and profoundly into the points of differ- 
 ence between the two schools, and the important ajsthetical 
 questions which are staked upon their resolution. He might, 
 for instance, have traced the origin of mystical poetry to the 
 fact that there are in poetry as well as in philosophy, things 
 hard to be understood, words unutterable, yet pressing against 
 the poet's brain for utterance ; have shown that the expression 
 given to such things should be as clear and simple as possible ; 
 that the known should never be passed off for the unknown 
 uuder a disguise of words (even as a full might be mistaken 
 for a crescent moon, behind a cloud sufficiently thick), that a 
 mere ambitious desire to utter the unknown should never be 
 confounded with a real knowledge of any of its mysterious 
 provinces ; that as no system of mystical philosophy is, as 
 yet, complete, so it has never yet been the inspiration of a 
 truly great and solid poem, although it has produced many 
 beautiful fragments that fragments are in the meantime the 
 appropriate tongue of the mystical, as certainly as that there 
 is no encyclopedia written in Sanscrit, and no continent com- 
 posed of aerolites that even great genius, such as Shelley's
 
 214 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 in the " Prometheus," has failed in building up a long and 
 lofty poem upon a mystical plan that alone, of British men 
 in this age, Coleridge so thoroughly comprehended the trans- 
 cendental system, as to have been able to write its epic, 
 which he has not done that much of the oracular poetry of 
 the day is oracular nonsense, the spawn of undigested learn- 
 ing, or the stuff of morbid dreams that the day for great 
 mystical poems may yet come, but that meanwhile we are 
 tempted to quote Dr. Johnson's language (whose spontaneous 
 and sincere sayings, by the way, are seldom if ever mistaken), 
 in reference to William Law, and to apply it to our Brownings, 
 Herauds, Pat mores, &c. " Law fell latterly into the reveries 
 of Jacob Behmen, whom he alleged to have been in the same 
 state with St. Paul, and to have seen unutterable things; but, 
 were it even so, Jacob would have resembled St. Paul still 
 more, by not attempting to utter them.' 1 ' 1 
 
 Chaos, no doubt, in its successive stages, was a poem, but it 
 was not till it became creation that it was said of it, " It is 
 very good." So often the crude confusions, the half-delivered 
 thoughts, the gasping utterances of a true poet of this mysti- 
 cal form, have a grandeur and an interest in them, but they, 
 rather tantalise than satisfy ; and when they pretend to com- 
 pleteness and poetic harmony, they are felt to insult as well 
 as tantalise. 
 
 So far as Delta has erred on this subject, it is in that he 
 has decried mystic poetry per se, and has not restricted him- 
 self to the particular and plentiful examples around him of 
 bad and weak poetry " hiding itself, because it was afraid," 
 among trees or clouds intricacies of verse or perplexities of 
 diction. But, even as from science advancing towards its ideal 
 there may be expected to arise a severe and powerful song, so, 
 when man becomes more conversant with the mysteries of his 
 own spiritual being more at home in those depths within 
 him, which angels cannot see and after he has formed a more 
 consistent and complete theory of himself, his position in the 
 universe, his relation to the lower animals and to the creation, 
 his relations in society and to God after, in one word, what 
 is now called mysticism has become a clear and mighty tree, 
 rising from darkness and clothing itself with day as with a 
 garment, then may it not become musical with a sweet, a full,
 
 DELTA. 215 
 
 and a far-resounding poetry, to which A himself, notwithstand- 
 ing all the characteristic triangular sharpness of his intellec- 
 tual perceptions, would listen well pleased ? It is this hope 
 alone which sustains us, as we see the new gaining so rapidly 
 upon the old, in the domain not only of thought but of poetry 
 The pseudo-transcendental must give place to the true. 
 
 It may indeed be said> " But will not thus much of what is 
 indefinite and, therefore, the fairy food of our poetic bees 
 disappear ?'' We answer, as we have replied before in refer- 
 ence to science, Yes, but only to be replaced by a more ethe- 
 real fare. The indefinite will be succeeded by other and other 
 shapes of that infinitude which eye hath not seen, nor ear 
 heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to con- 
 ceive. And, however perfect our future systems may be, 
 there will always appear along their outlines a little mist, to 
 testify that other fields and still grander generalisations lie 
 within and beyond it. 
 
 Our space is now nearly exhausted, otherwise we had some- 
 thing more to say about these lectures and their author. The 
 faults we have had occasion to mention, and others we might 
 name, have sprung from no defect of capacity or taste, but 
 partly from the accident of his local habitation, partly from 
 the generous kindliness of his heart a noble fault, and prin- 
 cipally from the false position he and all are compelled to 
 assume, who enter on that grand arena of mutual deception 
 and graceful imposture called the lecture-room. Having felt 
 long ago, by experience and by observation, what grave lies 
 lectures generally are, what poor creatures even men of genius 
 and high talents often become ere they can succeed in lecturing, 
 and how we yet want a name that can adequately discriminate 
 or vividly describe the personage who feels himself at home on 
 a lecture platform, we were abundantly prepared, by the words 
 " six lectures," to expect a certain quantity of clap-trap, and 
 are delighted to find that in the book there is so little. We 
 rejoice to see, by the way, from a recent glance at that reper- 
 tory of wit and wisdom Boswell's "Johnson" that old Sam- 
 uel entertained the same opinion with us of the inutility of 
 lectures, and their inferiority to books as a means of popular 
 education ; and that, too, many years ere they had become the- 
 standing article of disgust and necessary nuisance which thej 
 seem now to be.
 
 216 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 But, instead of dwelling on Delta's faults, or quoting any 
 of the eloquent and beautiful passages in which his lectures 
 abound, we close by calling on our readers to peruse for them- 
 selves. His book is not only worthy of his reputation, but is 
 really one of the heartiest, sincerest, and most delightful 
 works of criticism we have read for many a long year. 
 
 We almost tremble now to begin a criticism on any ad- 
 vanced and long-known author. While we were writing a 
 recent paper on Joanna Baillie, the news arrived of her death. 
 While expecting the proof of the above article on " Delta/' 
 the melancholy tidings of his sudden decease reached us. 
 Shall we say, in the language of Lalla Rookh, 
 
 " I never rear'd a fair gazelle, 
 
 To glad me with her soft black eye, 
 But when it came to know me well, 
 And love me, it was sure to die?" 
 
 About two months ago, the lamented dead opened up a 
 communication with us, which promised to ripen into a long 
 and friendly correspondence. Dis aliter visum est. Delta 
 the Delightful is no more. On a visit in search of health, he 
 reached Dumfries, a town dear to him on many accounts, and 
 principally because there sojourned a kindred spirit Thomas 
 Aird one of his oldest and fastest friends. On the evening 
 of Thursday, the 3d of July, as the amiable and gifted twain 
 were walking along the banks of the Nith, Delta was suddenly 
 seized with a renewal of his complaint rpcritonitis a pecu- 
 liar kind of inflammation, and it was with great difficulty that 
 his friend could help him home to his hotel. There, fortu- 
 nately, were his wife and one of his children. He was put 
 immediately to bed, arid every remedy that could promise 
 relief was adopted. On Friday he rallied somewhat. Dr. 
 Christisou was summoned from Edinburgh, and came, accom- 
 panied by the rest of Delta's family. On Saturday he grew 
 worse, and early on Sunday morning he expired, surrounded 
 by his dear family, and by two of his old friends, one of the
 
 DELTA. 217 
 
 Messrs. Blackwood and Mr. Aird. On Thursday the llth, 
 he was buried in Musselburgh, where he had long officiated as 
 a physician, universally respected and beloved. He was only 
 fifty-three. For nearly thirty-three years he had been a pop- 
 ular contributor to " Blackwood's Magazine." His principal 
 literary works are, " A Legend of Genevieve, with other 
 Poems" (which includes the best of his poetical contributions 
 to the magazines and annuals), " Mansie Wauch," and the 
 " Sketches of Poetical Literature," above criticised. He pub- 
 lished, also, several medical works of value, as well as edited 
 the works of Mrs. Hemaus, and wrote the " Life of John 
 Gait," &c. 
 
 We have spoken briefly, but sincerely, in the article, of 
 Delta's intellectual merits ; it remains only to add, that, al- 
 though we never met him in private, we can testify with per- 
 fect certainty, that a better man, or a lovelier specimen of the 
 literary character, did not exist : he had many of its merits, 
 and none of its defects ; he used literature as a " staff, not a 
 crutch" it was the elegant evening pastime of one vigorously 
 occupied through the day in the work of soothing human 
 anguish, and going about doing good. Hence he preserved to 
 the last his child-like love of letters ; hence he died without 
 a single enemy ; hence his personal friends and they were 
 the dite of Scotland admired and loved him with emulous 
 enthusiasm. Peace to his fine and holy dust ! reposing now 
 near that of the fine boy, whose premature fate he has sung in 
 his " Casa Wappy" one of the truest and tenderest little 
 poems in the language, to parallel which, indeed, we must go 
 back to Cowper and his verses on his Mother's Picture. In 
 all the large sanctuary of sorrow, there is no chamber more 
 sweetly shadowed than that in which the dear child reposes, 
 embalmed in the double odors of parental affection and poetic 
 genius. 
 
 Note. Since this paper appeared, Mr. Aird has collected Delta's 
 poetry into two volumes, and prefixed to them a Life, which, in beauty 
 of language, depth of feeling, and unity of artistic execution, has sel- 
 dom been equalled.
 
 218 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 NO. IV.-THACKERAY.* 
 
 WE do not intend to dwell in this paper on Thackeray's 
 merits and defects as a writer of fiction, else we might have 
 steered a course somewhat different from that of other critics ; 
 and while granting his great powers of humour, sarcasm, and 
 interesting narrative, his rare freedom from cant, and his still 
 rarer freedom from that tedious twaddle which disfigures the 
 fictions of many writers of the present day, we might have 
 questioned his true insight into, and conception of, Man, de- 
 plored his general want of spirituality, laughed over his abor- 
 tive attempts few as well as abortive to be imaginative, and 
 wondered with a great admiration at the longitude of the ears 
 of those critics who name him in the same day with the author 
 of " Rienzi," the " Last Days of Pompeii," the " Caxtons," 
 and " Zanoni." But our business now is with him entirely as 
 a critic, and his only work at present on our table is his se- 
 ries of lectures on the English Humorists of the Eighteenth 
 Century. 
 
 We may, before opening our battery of objections, first 
 premise, that, as a readable book, this has seldom been sur- 
 passed. Whatever quantity of summer-salmon, hotch-potch, 
 veal pie, and asparagus you may have been discussing, and 
 however dreary you may feel after your dinner, Thackeray's 
 amusing anecdotes and conversational style will keep you 
 awake. Next to Macaulay and Hazlitt, he is the most enter- 
 taining of critics. You read his lectures with quite as much 
 gusto as you do " Pendennis," and with infinitely more than you 
 do such dull mimicry of the past as is to be found in " Esmond." 
 Clever, too, of course, sagacious often, and sometimes power- 
 ful, are his criticisms, and a geniality not frequent in his fic- 
 tions, is often here. Sympathy with his subject is also a 
 quality he possesses and parades ; indeed, he appears as one 
 born out of his proper time, and seems, occasionally, to sigh 
 
 * Thackeray's English Humorists of the Eighteenth Centuiy. Lon- 
 don: Smith & Elder, Cornhill.
 
 THACKERAY. 219 
 
 for the age of big-wigs, bagnios, and sponging .houses. Such 
 are, we think, the main merits of this very popular volume. 
 We come now to state its defects, and to contest a few of its 
 opinions. 
 
 In the first place, Mr. Thackeray errs grievously in the title 
 of his volume. That professes to include solely the English 
 Humorists ; and yet we find in it the names of Congreve and 
 Pope, neither of whose plays nor poems, with all their bril- 
 liant wit, possessed a particle of humor ; and of Steele, whose 
 absurdities have indeed made him the " cause of humor" in 
 others, and whose pathos is sometimes very fine, but whose 
 attempts, whether at humor or wit, are in general lamentably 
 poor. Had Mr. Thackeray written a book on the " Humor- 
 ists" of the seventeenth century, he would have inserted a 
 chapter on " Butler and Milton;" Butler, for the mere wit of 
 Hudibras, and Milton, for the puns and quibbles of the rebel 
 augels ! 
 
 Secondly, Mr. Thackeray much over-estimates the size and 
 splendor of the galaxy he has undertaken to describe. Again, 
 and again he speaks of the wits of Queen Anne as incompar- 
 ably the brightest that ever shone in Britain. We dare not 
 countersign these statements, so long as we remember the 
 Elizabethan period, and the names of Shakspeare, Sidney, 
 Spenser, and Bacon ; or the era of the two last Georges, and 
 the names of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. lu 
 none of the worthies Thackeray has described, do we find the 
 element of true greatness. Swift was wondrously strong, but 
 had no moral grandeur like the fearful hybrids described iu 
 the Revelation, his power was in his tail, and with it he dealt 
 out pain, like the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a 
 man. Pope had rarest polish and point, but is seldom power- 
 ful, and never profound. Steele, Congreve, Prior, and Gay, 
 were all dii minorum gentium. Addison, next to Swift, was 
 incomparably the truest and most natural genius of his age ; 
 and yet does not appertain to the " first three." Thackeray 
 quotes Pope as thinking Bolingbroke so superior to all other 
 men, that when he saw a comet he thought it was a coach 
 come for him. And well he might, if, as many used to be- 
 lieve, comets be launched from, and return to that " Other 
 Place." But, as to his reputed powers, we recur to Lamb's
 
 220 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 inexorable principle*' Print settles all ;" and renew tie 
 question Burke asked sixty years ago, " Who now reads Bo- 
 lingbroke who ever read him through ?" To him, as to all 
 deniers, more intellectual power than he deserves has been 
 conceded. Had the " comet " carried away his works, it 
 would have cost the world nothing, although Mallett (the 
 " beggarly Scotchman " who " drew the trigger" of the blun- 
 derbuss of blasphemy) a great deal. That one man, Edmund 
 Burke, might have been split up into a hundred Boliugbrokes ; 
 and yet no one was ever heard crying out for " A comet !" " a 
 comet !" at his exit. 
 
 Thirdly, we quarrel with Thackeray for the manner and 
 style in which he has chosen to issue his lecturing lucubrations. 
 We do not know what others may think, but to us the lec- 
 tures, in manner, seem elaborate imitations of the lectures on 
 " Heroes and Hero-worship," by Thomas Carlyle. Now, the 
 oddity and egotism which we must bear in Carlyle, we cannot 
 bear in any imitator not even in Thackeray. They have a 
 fade and false air in him, and it takes all his talent to recon- 
 cile us to them. 
 
 Passing to the individual lectures, we are inclined to rank 
 Swift as the best, as it is the first, of the series. None of 
 Swift's former critics have so admirably represented the Irish- 
 man's emasculated hatred of man and woman his soundless 
 misery his outer crust of contempt, in vain seeking to dis- 
 guise the workings of his riven and tortured conscience his 
 disgust at the human race rushing up at last, as if on demon 
 wings, into a denial of their Maker ! We think that, as moral 
 monsters. Swift, and that Yankee-Yahoo, Edgar Poe, must be 
 classed together. Neither of them could believe that a race 
 which had produced them had any link relating it to the Di- 
 vine. They,saw all things and beings in the vast black sha- 
 dow cast by themselves. 
 
 Thackeray knows how easy, cheap, and worthless a feeling 
 toward a man like Swift MERE anger were. He has followed, 
 therefore, in general, the milder and surer track of pity. He 
 mourns over, as well as blames, the maimed and blinded Cy- 
 clops, that " most miserable of all human beings." He does 
 not know, or at least he tries not to reveal, the secret of his 
 wretchedness, although that, so far as physical causes are con-
 
 THACKERAY. 
 
 cerned, seems to us as transparent in the case of Swift a of 
 Pope. We confess to a greater admiration for Swift than <br 
 Pope. Swift was infinitely more a natural product than Pone ; 
 who, but for intense culture, would never have reached emi- 
 nence at all. If Pope had more polish, Swift, to use De 
 Quincey's language, was a " demon of power." Pope used 
 poisoned Lilliputian arrows, Swift directed at man and God 
 a shaft like that described by old Chapman, which was 
 
 " Shot at the sun by angry Hercules, 
 
 And into shivers by the thunder broken." 
 
 Pope did wondrously with his sparkling couplets ; Swift ef- 
 fected greater results with his careless, rambling rhymes, which 
 seemed mere child's play, but which were the sport of a Titan, 
 and often of the madman in Scripture, " casting firebrand?, 
 arrows, and death." Pope's hatred to man seems small, self- 
 ish spite, compared to that gigantic horror and disgust at his 
 species which pursued Swift all his life. Pope, in a thin, 
 cracked voice, squeaks out his irritated feelings; Swift howls 
 them forth to earth and heaven. Pope was essentially and 
 exquisitely small ; his love is an intense burning drop ; the 
 dance of his fancy reminds you of that led by angels on the 
 point of a needle ; when in the convivial vein he tipples, it is 
 in thimblefuls ; his sarcastic sting is very sharp and small, 
 and he takes care never to spill an infinitesimal of the venom. 
 Like Tom Moore after him, he is a poetic Homoeopath, and, 
 whether he try to kill you with laughter or to cure you by 
 sense, he must deal in minute and intensely concentrated doses. 
 When he invents, as in the " Rape of the Lock," it is a minute 
 machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes ; when he attacks, it is the 
 dynasty of the "Dunces," that " small infantry ;" when he 
 examines works of art, it is through a microscope ; when he 
 describes love, it is that tiny tortured mimicry of the great 
 passion, exhibited by such nauseous beings as Eloisa and Abe- 
 lard ; and when he translates, he hangs cymbals on the stal- 
 wart arms of old Homer, and turns his majestic pace into a 
 jingle of tinkling sound. Swift, on the other hand, was, if 
 not truly great, immensely large; and even in his most care- 
 less verses you see a lar^te black purpose that, namely, of a
 
 222 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 wholesale libeller, who, as he said himself, loved many men 
 but hated man looming through ; and some of his veriest 
 trifles make you tremble. 
 
 Thackeray, at page 15, says, "Swift's heart was English, 
 and in England, his habits English, his logic eminently Eng- 
 lish ; his statement is elaborately simple ; he shuns tropes and 
 metaphors; he has no profuse imagery." Here we deem 
 Thackeray mistaken. Swift had an exceedingly fertile fancy, 
 and there are more memorable sentences, each carrying an 
 image from his pen, floating through literature, than from any 
 other save Shakspeare's. We do not say that his imagery is 
 always, or very often, poetical, but it is always abundant, 
 picturesque, pointed, and new. Thackeray has been deceived 
 by Swift's coldness of manner. He does not shout " Eureka" 
 over every whole truth or half truth he sees. His figures are 
 all chased in lead. This at least is true of his later manner, 
 except when his fury at man, as in the fourth part of " Gulli- 
 ver," is fully roused, and when, as Thackeray well says, " it 
 is yahoo language ; a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing 
 imprecations against mankind, tearing down all shreds of mo- 
 desty, past all sense of manliness and shame ; filthy in word, 
 filthy in thought furious, raging, obscene." 
 
 But in his earlier writings there is far more fire of style, as 
 well as freshness of thought, and richness of imagery. Wit- 
 ness the " Tale of a Tub." Well might he say in his old age, 
 " Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book 1" 
 It is certainly his most astonishing production. You see a 
 " virgin mind crumbling down with its own riches." It is the 
 wildest, wittiest, wickedest, wealthiest book of its size iu Brit- 
 ish literature. Talk of Swift having no " profusion of figure !" 
 What would Mr. Thackeray want more than he gets in the 
 following paragraph : " The most accomplished way of using 
 books at present is twofold either, first, to serve them as 
 some men do lords learn their titles exactly, and then brag 
 of their acquaintance ; or, secondly (which is indeed the 
 choicer, the profounder, and the politer method,) to get a 
 thorough insight into the index by which the whole book is 
 governed and turned, as fishes are, by the tail. For to enter 
 the palace of learning at the great gate, requires an expense 
 of time and forms ; therefore, men of much haste and iittlo
 
 THACKERAY. 223 
 
 ceremony are content to get in by the back-door. For the 
 arts are all in a flying march, and therefore more easily sub- 
 dued by attacking them in the rear. Thus physicians discover 
 the state of the whole body, by consulting only what conies 
 from behind. Thus men catch knowledge, by throwing their 
 wit on the posteriors of a book, as boys do sparrows, by fling- 
 ing salt on their tails. Thus human life is best understood by 
 the wise man's rule of regarding the end. Thus are the sci- 
 ences found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backwards. 
 Thus are old sciences unravelled, like old stockings, by be- 
 ginning at the foot." We do not vouch for the elegance of all 
 these figures ; but, in fertility, the passage equals Jeremy 
 Taylor or Shakspeare ; and there are a hundred similar in the 
 " Tale of a Tub." 
 
 That " Swift was a pious and reverent spirit," while in the 
 very next paragraph we are told that he had put his " scepti- 
 cism and apostacy out to hire," is rather a strange assertion. 
 How can one who revels in filth and downright beastliness 
 whose miscellanies in verse are a disgrace to human nature 
 who flings ordure on that Schekinah of man's body, which 
 God's Son entered and purified who ran through the world 
 shrieking that " man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbe- 
 cile" who ruined the happiness of three females who be- 
 came, in his own words, little else than " a poisoned rat in a 
 hole" and who mocked and gibbered at the profounder mys- 
 teries of the Christian religion, be called " pious or reverent ?" 
 We are not the least charitable of critics ; and we feel deep 
 and solemn sorrow over the mountain of ghastly ruin which 
 Swift at last became : but we dare not apply to him epithets 
 which would fit a Jack Wilkes, a Mirabeau, or a Tom Paine, 
 as well as the miserable Dean of St. Patrick's. More fitly and 
 finely does Thackeray afterwards ask, " What had this man 
 done ? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart ? what 
 fever was boiling in him, that he should see all the world 
 bloodshot ? We view the world with our own eyes each of 
 us, and we make from within us the world that we see. A 
 weary heart gets no gladness out of sunshine ; a selfish man 
 is sceptical about friendship, as a man with no ear doesn't 
 care for music. A frightful self-consciousness it must have 
 been which looked on mankind so darkly through those eyes."
 
 224 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 All this sketch of Swift, indeed, with the exceptior of the 
 statements we have exposed above, a few Carlylistic abrupt- 
 nesses of style, such as " silence and utter night closed over 
 him an immense genius, an awful downfal and ruin," &c., is 
 written with great pathos and energy ; and if not so elaborate 
 as Jeffrey's celebrated paper, breathes, we think, a finer and 
 more humane spirit. 
 
 His treatment of Congreve does not call for special remark, 
 unless this, that we do not think him sufficiently severe on the 
 immorality of that writer's plays. We pause with greater 
 interest over the venerable name of Joseph Addison. There 
 are many writers, as we have hinted before, who have taught 
 us more, and whom we admire more, than Addison many 
 subtler, stronger, more complete, and profound ; but there is 
 scarce one, except John Bunyan, whom we love so well. He 
 does not suggest much ; but how h soothes ! How soft and 
 rich the everlasting April of his style ! By what green pas- 
 tures and still waters does he lead us ! What a tremble 
 there is in his beautiful sentences, like that of a twilight wave 
 just touched by the west wind's balmy breath ! How ho 
 stammers out his mild sublimities ; and how much does his 
 stammer, like a beautiful child's, add to their effect ! His 
 piety, so sweet and shepherd-like ; his kindness, so unaffected ; 
 his mannerism, so agreeable; his humor, so delicate, so sly, 
 so harmless ! What a contrast in spirit to Swift and Pope, 
 who alone of his contemporaries could vie with him in popu- 
 larity or power ! We know no better way of rounding off a 
 week's intellectual work, than amid the closing shadows of the 
 Saturday evening to lift up Addison's serious papers, and to 
 allow their honey to distil slowly upon our souls. Burke 
 spent some of the last hours of his life in listening to Addi- 
 son's papers on the Immortality of the Soul. 
 
 Thackeray by one word (a word we had applied to Addison 
 years ere we had ever read a line of the author of " Vanity 
 Fair")* gives the character of all that series of periodical lit- 
 erature, which included the " Tattler," the " Spectator," the 
 " Guardian," the " Freeholder," &c. he calls it " prattle." 
 Both Steele and Addison were fine prattlers ; only the prattle 
 
 * See " Second Gallery" article " Professor Nichul "
 
 THACKERAY. 225 
 
 of Addison was directed to higher subjects. Steele prattled, 
 often tattled rather, about politics, and the modes of the day, 
 and the fair sex. Addison prattled about the stars, and the 
 soul, and the glorious dreams of the Arabian heaven ; and it 
 seemed a divine prattle, like that of a " child-angel." A cer- 
 tain simple infantine ease and grace, which it were vain now 
 to seek to reproduce, distinguished the language of both. We 
 have mentioned the " Freeholder." This series, although so 
 strongly recommended by Johnson, is now, we fear, but very 
 little read. We only met with it a year or two since ; but we 
 can assure our readers that some of the most delectable tid- 
 bits of Addison are therein contained. There is a Tory fox- 
 hunter still riding along there, whom we advise you to make 
 up to, if you would enjoy one of the richest treats of humor ; 
 and there is a Jacobite army still on its way to Preston, the 
 only danger connected with approaching which is, lest it kill 
 you with laughter. 
 
 Well did Addison call himself the " Spectator." He could 
 not speak, but only prattle in a delightful way. But he could 
 look at all objects and persons, above, below, or around him, 
 with a keen and quiet, a mild and most observant eye. Had 
 he been as profound as he was wide as eloquent and passion- 
 ate as he was true, delicate, and refined, he had been our 
 finest prose writer. We cordially coincide with our author's 
 last paragraph : " When he turns to heaven, a Sabbath comes 
 over that man's mind, and his face lights up from it with a 
 glory of thanks and prayer. His sense of religion stirs through 
 his whole being. In the fields, in the town ; looking at the 
 birds in the trees, at the children in the streets ; in the morn- 
 ing or in the moonlight ; over his books in his own room ; in a 
 happy party good-will and peace to God's creatures, and love 
 and awe of Him who made them, fill his pure heart, and shine 
 from his kind face. If Swift's life was the most wretched, I 
 think Addison's was one of the most enviable. A life pros- 
 perous and beautiful a calm death an immense fame, and 
 affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name." 
 
 Who has not heard of Sir Kichard Steele ? Wordsworth 
 says of one of his characters 
 
 " She was known to every star, 
 And everv wind that blows."
 
 226 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 Poor Dick was known to every sponging-house, and to every 
 bailiff that, blowing in pursuit, walked the London streets. 
 A fine-hearted, warm-blooded character, without an atom of 
 prudence, self-control, reticence, or forethought quite as 
 destitute of malice and envy ; perpetually sinning, and per- 
 petually repenting; never positively irreligious, even when 
 drunk, and often excessively pious when recovering sobriety 
 Steele reeled his way through life, and died with the reputa- 
 tion of having been an orthodox Christian, and a habitual 
 drunkard ; the most faithless and most affectionate of hus- 
 bands ; a brave soldier, and an arrant fool ; a violent politi- 
 cian, and the best natured of men ; a writer extremely lively, 
 for this, among other reasons, that he wrote generally on 
 his legs, flying, or meditating flight, from his creditors, and 
 who embodied in himself the titles of his three principal pro- 
 ductions the " Christian Hero," the " Tender Husband," 
 and the " Tattler;" being a Christian hero in intention one 
 of those intentions with which a certain place is paved; a 
 " tender husband," if not a true one, in his conduct to his two 
 ladies ; and a " tattler" to all persons, in all circumstances, 
 and at all times. But besides and it is this which has made 
 him immortal, and which he himself valued more than all per- 
 sonal fame he was the friend and coadjutor of Addison. He 
 called him in early to his aid, and found himself, he said, 
 ruined by his ally, as the Britons were when they sought the 
 assistance of the Saxons, a stronger power. It is utterly 
 ridiculous, as Hazlitt and Hunt were wont, to prefer or equal 
 Steele's papers to Addison's. They are more slipshod, indeed, 
 and conversational ; they reflect more literally the outer cur- 
 rent of the then London life ; they contain some very tender 
 and some very picturesque touches, which seem sometimes 
 like the lucky chance of a painter who drops or dashes his 
 brush upon the canvas, and produces striking effects ; but in 
 matter, in polish, in delicacy and depth of humor, in beautiful 
 fancy, or in graceful language, they can only be placed beside 
 Addison's by the criticism of caprice, or by the power of pre- 
 judice. Steele has no artistic merits. His pathos is that of 
 a fine fellow, maudlin after some great loss or reverse. His 
 glee, as Thackeray well says, is that of a " box full of child- 
 ren at a pantomime." He has all Goldsmith's spirits and
 
 THACKERAY. 227 
 
 absurdities, without a tithe of his genius. His best sobriquet 
 had been " Sir Richard, or Reginald Rattle." And how poor 
 and needless in his critic to say, " Steele was not one of those 
 lonely ones of the earth whose greatness obliged them to be 
 solitary." He might as well have gravely assured us, that 
 Swift was not George Herbert; nor Rochester, Milton; nor 
 Goldsmith, Burke; nor the author of the "Book of Snobs," 
 the writer of the " Natural History of Enthusiasm." To- 
 wards the close of the chapter, however, Thackeray has an 
 admirable antithetical account of theinanner in which Steele, 
 Addison, and Swift have dealt with the one tremendous sub- 
 ject of death : Steele looking up to it with the awestruck face 
 of a child Addison looking down on it with a quiet, medita- 
 tive, half humorous eye and Swift stamping on the tomb- 
 stone, and crying, "Fools, do you know anything of this 
 mystery .?" 
 
 In his fourth lecture, after trifling very pleasantly with two 
 ingenious triflers Prior and Gay he brings forward his 
 whole strength to prove Pope the greatest literary artist that 
 England has seen, " besides being the highest among wits 
 and humorists with whom we have to rank him," and the 
 " highest among the poets," we presume of that period of po- 
 etry. And yet, ere he closes, he goes farther than this, and 
 predicates of the passage which closes the " Dunciad," that it 
 is the most " wonderful flight " of poetry, the " greatest height 
 of the sublime art." He compares his early poems, such as 
 the Pastorals, Windsor Forest, and the " Essay on Criticism," 
 to the first victories of Napoleon ! 
 
 Pope has, to do him full justice, risen sometimes into the 
 moral sublime ; but to that highest form of writing, common 
 in our great poets, which combines moral and material sublim- 
 ity into one splendid yet terrible whole, in which grand ima- 
 ges from nature flock around, and fall down before and com- 
 bine to illustrate some big emotion of the soul or heart, he has 
 never attained. The lines our author praises so highly are, 
 in our judgment, a mere hubbub of words, composed in equal 
 proportions of mixed metaphors, bombast, and absolute non- 
 sense. Yet perhaps our readers may prefer Thackeray's esti- 
 mate conveyed in the following language : 
 
 " It is the brightest ardor, the loftiest assertion of truth,
 
 228 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 the most generous wisdom, illustrated by the noblest poetic 
 figure, and spoken in words the aptest, grandest, and most 
 harmonious. It is heroic courage speaking a splendid de- 
 claration of righteous wrath ; the gauge flung down the silver 
 trumpet ringing defiance ; it is Truth the champion it is a 
 wonderful single combat !" Had Pope been alive, it would 
 have taken all the counterweight, we fear, of " Pendennis" 
 and " Vanity Fair," to have prevented him adding a codicil to 
 the " Dunciad," and inserting in it the name of his most ad- 
 miring critic. 
 
 The fifth lecture opens pleasingly on a subject ever fresh 
 and delightful, at least to us Hogarth, the greatest moral 
 painter of the world. Thackeray, so far as he goes, discour- 
 ses well on this great canvas-poet. We are no connoisseurs 
 of the " serene and silent art ;" nay, are apt to look with con- 
 siderable contempt upon the jargon of painters, the most dis- 
 gusting jargon in all the broad realms of pedantry. Our 
 only question about paintings is, how much meaning and mind 
 do they contain ? how high do they prove the tide of soul to 
 have risen in the artist ? and how high do they raise it in us ? 
 And looking at Hogarth in this light, we dare pronounce him, 
 with the exception of Michael Angelo and Raphael, the great- 
 est painter that ever lived. Nay, perhaps we should not have 
 wade these exceptions ; for, if Michael Angelo wrought on 
 more collossal materials, aimed at higher things, and reached 
 a savage grandeur unknown to the Englishman; if Raphael 
 was more graceful, holier in his purpose, more beautiful in his 
 conceptions, and more delicate in his execution, Hogarth's 
 power was magnified by the very coarseness of the materials 
 he used, and by the very commonplace of the objects he paint- 
 ed. The gift of the first two resembled wealth ; that of the 
 third was alchemy. The two first went out, so to speak, to 
 Australia, and collected its ore lying thick as morning dew ; 
 the third staid at home, and turned everything he saw into 
 gold. Most of the peculiarly Shakspearian qualities were 
 Hogarth's wide sympathy, command of tears and laughter, 
 subtle perception of analogies, unconscious power of bending 
 all things into a common centre, and causing them to promote 
 a common artistic object, so that a very fly murmuring in a 
 room where a great tragedy is concocting or taking place, be-
 
 THACKERAY. 229 
 
 comes an important element in the interest, and all " asides," 
 however insignificant apparently, serve to point the moral, or 
 to adorn the tale; and the irresistible introduction of beauty 
 into the heart of terror, and along the side of the loathsome 
 and the despicable, like the light that will shine in dark rooms 
 after every candle has been put out, and every beam of day 
 has been excluded beauty, which, in Shakspeare, sows flow- 
 ers upon the dreary crags of agony ; and in Hogarth (a thing 
 which Coleridge notices), brings in fine female faces into many 
 of the coarsest, and many of the darkest of his scenes, like 
 embodied images of Eternal Love looking down upon sorrow, 
 and sin, and rudeness, and vice, and silently whispering, " I 
 bide my time." Even his Cock-Pit, his Gin Street, his Beer 
 Lane, his Marriage a La Mode, his Rake's Progress, are all 
 haunted by the heavenly face of angelic woman ; just as in 
 Shakspeare, Cordelia bends over the dying Lear, Ophelia mur- 
 murs her tender sympathy beside the wild speeches of the mel- 
 ancholy Hamlet, Miranda uplifts her sweet face amid the 
 " Tempest," and Perdita, like a sunbeam, pierces the confused 
 mistakes and miseries of the ' Winter's Tale." Even more 
 constantly than in Shakspeare does this image of female love- 
 liness pervade the prints of Hogarth ; for while in them it is 
 rarely absent, Shakspeare has forgot to light up with its gen- 
 tle ray such deep Nights of suffering and controversy as " Ti- 
 mon" and '' Macbeth." 
 
 Following Hazlitt, Thackeray dwells lovingly on Hogarth's 
 gusto, his rich repetition of thought, as in Marriage a La 
 Mode, where " the Earl's coronet is everywhere : on his foot- 
 stool, on which reposes one gouty toe turned out ; on the 
 sconces and looking-glasses ; on the dogs ; on his very crutch- 
 es ,-" his constant moral purpose ; the faithful picture his 
 prints form of the age of the first Georges, and the compari- 
 son they suggest and enable us to substantiate between his 
 and our own time, especially between the London of 1753 and 
 the London of 1853. With the higher imaginative qualities 
 of the great painter, such as those we have enumerated, be is 
 not so familiar; and compared to the papers of Lamb and 
 Hazlitt on the subject, his may be said to be such a sketch as 
 Hogarth was wont to execute of his future pictures upon his 
 thumb nail.
 
 xibO MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 Smollett succeeds a rough, roaring, ill-natured, and yet 
 originally kind-hearted Scotchman of the last century, with 
 three powers in extraordinary development : self-will, humor, 
 and a certain strong poetical gift, which could only be, and 
 was only now and then, stung into action. To see his self- 
 will, in its last soured and savage state, let us consult his 
 " Travels." He was the " Smelfungus " of Sterne, who tra- 
 veled from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. We 
 are among the very few who have read the book. It is a suc- 
 cession of asthmatic gasps and groans, with not a particle of 
 the humor of " Humphrey Clinker." Among his novels, 
 " Roderick Random " is the most popular, " Peregrine Pickle " 
 the filthiest, " Sir Launcelot Greaves" the silliest, "Clinker" 
 the most delightful, and " Ferdinand Fathom," in parts, the 
 most original and profound. There is a robber scene in a for- 
 est, in this last novel, surpassed by nothing in Scott, or any- 
 where else. His "Ode to Independence" should have been 
 written by Burns. How that poet's lips must have watered 
 as he repeated the lines, 
 
 " Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye ; " 
 
 and remembered he was not their author ! He said he would 
 have given ten pounds to have written " Donocht-head;" he 
 would have given ten times ten, if he had had them, poor fel- 
 low ! to have written the " Ode to Independence." Thacke- 
 ray, who is in chase of Fielding, finds nothing very new to 
 say of Smollett, and ignores his most peculiar and powerful 
 works. His best sentence about him is, that he went to Lon- 
 don, " armed with courage, hunger, and keen wits." 
 
 To Fielding he goes, con amore, and shows him as " he is, 
 not robed in a marble toga, and draped and polished in a 
 heroic attitude, but with inked ruffles, and claret stains on his 
 tarnished laced coat, and on his manly face the marks of good- 
 fellowship, cf illness, of kindness, and of care." Fielding, 
 sooth to say, was, even for that age, a sad scamp. Steele pro- 
 bably lived as dissipated a life, but Steele did not put his de- 
 pravity in circulation by printing it in his books. When men 
 come to that, it is a fearful symptom. Paul speaks of those 
 who not only do ill themselves, but have pleasure in them that 
 do it. Such is the case witli authors who print their obscen-
 
 THACKERAY. 231 
 
 ities or blasphemies. They cannot write without reproducing 
 their own vices. They roll them as a sweet morsel. By be- 
 stowing them on ideal characters, they multiply their own 
 enjoyment of them. Their imagination has become so pollu- 
 ted, that it overflows on all their pages. They sometimes arc 
 actuated, it is to be feared, by a worse motive : they wish, 
 namely, to make others as wicked and miserable as them- 
 selves. Bit by hydrophobia, they run about everywhere, with 
 lolling tongues, in search of others to destroy. We do not 
 think that this latter was Fielding's motive. He, in part 
 from depraved taste, and in part from carelessness, simply 
 transferred his own character to his novels. Mr. Thackeray 
 seems to us to overrate " Tom Jones " amazingly. It is a 
 piece of admirable art, but composed of the basest materials, 
 like a palace built of dung. " Amelia " is not so corrupt, but 
 it is often coarse, and, as a whole, very poor and tedious. 
 " Joseph Andrews " is by far the most delightful of his wri- 
 tings. With less art than " Tom Jones," it has much more 
 genius. Parson Adams is confessedly one of the most original 
 and pleasing characters in fiction. Goldsmith's Vicar of 
 Wakefield, Joseph Cargill in " St. Ronan's Well," are both 
 copied from him, but have not a tithe of his deep simplicity 
 and delicious bonJiommie. We predict that, in a century 
 hence, "Joseph Andrews" will alone survive to preserve 
 Fielding's name. We wish Thackeray's plan had permitted 
 him to say a little more of Richardson's Dutch style of novel- 
 writing, and of those enormous books of his, reminding you of 
 the full-bottomed periwigs of the past, in their minute and 
 elaborate frizzle, and which yet, when shaken by the wind of 
 passion, seem sometimes to nod as grandly as the "ambrosial 
 curls " of Jove himself. 
 
 Sterne comes next, and his character meets with very se- 
 vere and summary treatment the more, perhaps, and deserv- 
 edly, as he was a clergyman. As an author, he has been the 
 father of an immense family of fiction writers. Goethe has 
 had him in his eye, both in the " Sorrows of Werter " and in 
 " Wilhelm Meister." Rousseau derived a great deal from him. 
 Jean Paul Richter, although possessing far more sincerity and 
 depth of spirit, has copied his affected manner. The Minerva 
 Press was long his feeble echo. Southey's " Doctor " was
 
 232 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 very much in his style ; and the French novelists are still em- 
 ployed in imitating his putrid sentimentalism, although inca- 
 pable of his humor and pathos. Plagiarist of passages, as he 
 has been proved, he was, on the whole, an original writer; and, 
 blackguard as he was, his vices, like those of Rousseau and 
 Goethe, have contributed to the power and piquancy of his 
 writings. We state this as a fact, not as a plea in his defence. 
 He seems to have been not merely, like Fielding, a dissipated 
 man, but, like Poe, a heartless scoundrel. It is a proof of the 
 originality of his mind and style, that he arose and flourished 
 in spite of cliques and coteries, and, as an author, lived and 
 died alone. His works are now somewhat shorn of their popu- 
 larity ; but some parts of them, in eloquence, tenderness, and 
 humor, are not surpassed in the English language. " Alas ! 
 poor Yorick !" 
 
 The last, and one of the finest sketches, is that of " poor 
 dear Goldy," as Johnson used to call him. We have already 
 tried, in a series of antitheses, to describe Steele. It would 
 require a few hundred more such to describe Goldsmith. He 
 was one of the most amiable and most envious of men. He 
 played with every child he met, and abused almost every con- 
 temporary author. Himself the most absurd of characters, 
 he had the keenest perception of absurdities in others. He 
 " wrote like an angel, and talked like poor poll." He never 
 wrote a foolish thing, and never said a wise one. He was at 
 once Harlequin, and the good Samaritan. He divided again 
 and again his last shilling with poor unfortunates, and told 
 lies by the bushel. He had a keen sense of religion, and yet 
 his life was in direct opposition to many of its precepts. 
 Johnson said of him, " Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is 
 so no more." Burke burst into tears at the news of his death. 
 Reynolds, when he heard of it, painted no more that day. As 
 a writer, he had a most enviable little garden-plot of reputa- 
 tion. We would rather have his fame than Homer's. What 
 delight his one book, " The Vicar of Wakefield," has given ! 
 What shouts, screams, sweats of laughter, have his plays 
 elicited ! How many hearts his " Deserted Village " has 
 melted within them ! How many thousands in foreign lands, 
 
 " Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, 
 Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po,"
 
 THOMAS MACAITLAY. 233 
 
 have repeated the noble lines of the " Traveler," and blessed 
 its queer, kind-hearted author ! 
 
 Thackeray closes with some striking remarks, attempting 
 to show that the calamities of authors are, in general, owing, 
 not to the neglect of the public, but to themselves. There is 
 much truth in what he says. Literary men have been often 
 improvident and immoral; but this, while it has sometimes 
 proceeded from perverted tastes, has often also proceeded from 
 the precariousness of their profession. Literary men, how- 
 ever industrious and regular, are wretchedly underpaid ; and 
 except when they have another profession or a private fortune, 
 are poor. Now, speaking generally, they are men of respect- 
 able characters, and of working habits ; and yet, does one out 
 of ten of them die, without subscriptions being organised for 
 behoof of their wives and children ? We blame not the 
 booksellers ; they cannot be expected, taking them as a whole, 
 to look at the matter except in a commercial point of view ; 
 but we blame, first of all, the government, for not devoting 
 more of the public money to pensions, prizes, and similar re- 
 wards of literary merit ; and, secondly, the public, which, 
 while spending so much upon degrading vices, or foolish friv- 
 olities, or mere passing and ephemeral light literature, has MO 
 little to spare for works of genius, and gives what little it 
 does give with an air of such supreme contempt, or such conde- 
 scending patronage, or such sublime indifference. 
 
 In fine, although we have been compelled often to differ 
 from our author, we thank him for the pleasure we have de- 
 rived from his work, arid especially for the opportunity it has 
 afforded us of retreading a very delightful field in British 
 literature. 
 
 NO. V.-THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 ONE great distinction between the great and the half-great 
 is, we think, this : the half-great man is in his own age fully 
 commented on and thoroughly appreciated ; his character is 
 faithfully inscribed in a multitude of reviews ; his career is
 
 234 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 reflected in a wall of mirrors, which image his every step, and, 
 "now in glimmer, and now in gloom," trace out his history 
 ere he be dead, and leave very little for posterity to add or to 
 take away. The great man, on the other hand, while seldom 
 quite overlooked or ignored, is as seldom during his life-tima 
 fully recognised : a shade of doubt hangs around his form, 
 like mist around a half-seen Alp ; his motions are all tracked, 
 indeed, but tracked in terror and in suspicion ; his character, 
 when drawn, is drawn in chiaro-scuro ; his faults are chroni- 
 cled more fully than his virtues ; the general sigh which arises 
 at the tidings of his death is as much that of relief as of sor- 
 row ; and not till the dangerous and infinite seeming man has 
 been committed safely to the grave, does the world awake to 
 feel that it has hid one of its richest treasures in the field of 
 death. Nor should we entirely for this blame the world. For 
 too often we believe that high genius is a mystery, and a ter- 
 ror even to itself; that it communicates with the demoniac 
 mines of sulphur, as well as with the divine sources; and that 
 only God's grace can determine to which of these it is to be 
 permanently connected ; and that only the stern alembic of 
 death can settle the question to which it has on the whole 
 turned, whether it has really been the radiant angel, or the 
 disguised fiend. 
 
 We might illustrate our first remark by a number of exam- 
 ples. But our recent readings supply us with one more than 
 sufficiently appropriate to our purpose. We have risen from 
 reading for the first time Prior's " Life of Burke," and, for 
 the tenth or twentieth time, Macaulay's "Essays," collected 
 from the " Edinburgh Review." And as we rise we are forced 
 to exclaim, " Behold a great man, fairly though faintly paint- 
 ed by another, and a half-great man, unintentionally but most 
 faithfully and fully sketched by himself." Macaulay has elo- 
 quently panegyrised Burke, and accurately discriminated him 
 i'rom inferior contemporary minds. But he seems to have no 
 idea of the great gulf fixed between Burke's nature and genius 
 and his own. He always speaks as if he and the object of 
 his panegyric were cognate and kindred minds. Nay, some of 
 his indiscriminate admirers have gone the length of equalling 
 or preferring him to the giant of the Anti-Gallican Crusade 
 Let us, for their sakes, as well as his, proceed to point out the 
 essential differences between the two.
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 235 
 
 Burke, then, was a natural, Macaulay is an artificial, man. 
 Burke was as original as one of the sources of the Nile ; Ma- 
 caulay is a tank or reservoir, brimful of waters which have 
 come from other fountains. Burke's imagination was the 
 strong wing of his strong intellect, and to think and to soar 
 were in general with him the same; Macaulay 's fancy is no 
 more native to him than was the wing of the stripling cherub 
 assumed by Satan, the hero of the " Paradise Lost," although, 
 like it, it is of many " a colored plume sprinkled with gold." 
 
 Macaulay's intellect is clear, vigorous, and logical ; but 
 Burke's was inventive and synthetic. Burke seems always re- 
 pressing his boundless knowledge; Macaulay is ostentatious 
 in the display of his. Of Macaulay's train of thought you can 
 always predict the end from the beginning ; Burke's is unex- 
 pected and changeful. Macaulay's principal powers are two 
 enormous memory and pictorial power ; Burke's are also 
 two subtle, grasping, interpenetrating intellect and imagina- 
 tion. Burke is the man of genius ; Macaulay the elaborate 
 artist. Burke is the creature of impulses and intuitions im- 
 petuous, fervid, often imprudent, and violent ; Macaulay never 
 commits himself, even by a comma, and seems, if he has im- 
 pulses, to have dipped them in snow, and, if he has intuitions, 
 to have weighed them in scales before they are produced to his 
 readers. Burke has turned away from philosophic specula- 
 tion to practical matters from choice, not necessity ; Macau- 
 lay from necessity, not choice it is an element too rare for 
 his wing. Burke, as he says of Reynolds, descends upon all 
 subjects from above ; Macaulay labors up to his loftier themes 
 from below. Burke's digressions are those of uncontrollable 
 power, wantoning in its strength ; Macaulay's are those of 
 deliberate purpose and elaborate effort, to relieve and make 
 his byways increase the interest of his highways. Burke's 
 most memorable things are strong simple sentences of wisdom 
 or epithets, each carrying a question on its point, or burning 
 coals from his flaming genius ; Macaulay's are chiefly happy 
 illustrations, or verbal antitheses, or clever alliterations. 
 Macaulay often seems, and we believe is, sincere, but he is 
 never in earnest ; Burke, on all higher questions, becomes a 
 " burning one" earnest to the brink of frenzy. Macaulay is 
 a utilitarian of a rather low type ; Burke is, at least, the bust
 
 236 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 of an idealist. We defy any one to tell whether Macaulay be 
 a Christian or no ; Burke's High Churchism is the lofty buskin 
 in which his fancy loves to tread the neighborhood of the altar, 
 while before it his heart kneels in lowly reverence. Macau- 
 lay's writings often cloy the mind of his reader you are full 
 to repletion ; from Burke's you rise unsatisfied, as from a 
 crumb of ambrosia, or a sip of nectar. Macaulay's literary 
 enthusiasm has now a far and formal air it seems an old 
 cloak of college days worn threadbare ; Burke's has about it 
 a fresh and glorious gloss it is the ever-renewed skin of his 
 spirit. Macaulay lies snugly and sweetly in the pinfold of a 
 party ; Burke is ever and anon bursting it to fragments. Ma- 
 caulay's moral indignation is too labored and antithetical to 
 be very profound : Bui-ke's makes his heart palpitate, his hand 
 clench, and his face kindle like that of Moses as he came down 
 the Mount. Burke is the prophet ; Macaulay the grown and 
 well-furnished schoolboy. Burke, during his life-time, was 
 traduced, misrepresented, or neglected, as no British man of 
 his order ever was before or since; Macaulay has been the 
 spoiled child of a too early and a too easy success. As they 
 have reaped they have sown. Macaulay has written brilliant, 
 popular, and useful works, possessing every quality except 
 original genius, profound insight, or the highest species of his- 
 torical truth ; Burke, working in an unthankful parliamentary 
 field, has yet dropped from his overflowing hand little living 
 germs of political, moral, literary, pictorial, and philosophic 
 wisdom, which are striking root downwards, and bearing fruit 
 upwards throughout the civilized world. Macaulay's works 
 hitherto consist of several octavo volumes; but "Liberated 
 America," " India set free from Tyrants," and " Infidel France 
 llepelled," are the three atlas folios which we owe to the pen 
 und the tongue of Edmund Burke. 
 
 AVe had other points of contrast, which we forbear to press. 
 Indeed, we feel ashamed at continuing so long a contrast 
 between two persons so unlike. But Macaulay's unwise 
 friends have compelled us to renew the old, and apparently 
 superfluous work, of showing the superiority of an original to 
 an imitator of a sublime genius, informed from on high, to a 
 cultured and consummate artist, galvanized from below of 
 one wearing a mantle which seemed dropped from some Fiery
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 237 
 
 Chariot of the Past, to one " of the earth, earthy" of one 
 whose flights of genius and wisdom might almost entitle him 
 to the name of the Second Plato, to one who would be proud, 
 we suspect, to bear that of the Second Bacon, even although 
 the meanness were added to the majesty, and the immortal 
 degradation to the everlasting praise of the ambiguous and all- 
 overrated name of the Chancellor of England. 
 
 We propose now, first, briefly to characterize, and in a, 
 general way, some of Macaulay's Essays ; and, secondly, to 
 bend special attention on the longest and most elaborate of 
 them all, that on " Lord Bacon." 
 
 There are in every author's works what may be called re- 
 presfintativep&Tts or papers papers or books which indicate the 
 leading qualities in his mind, or the leading stages in his in- 
 tellectual development. Thus, in the case before us, we have 
 " Milton" representing Macaulay the young and ardent 
 Scholar, " Byron" and " Johnson" representing him as the 
 full-crown Litterateur, " Warren Hastings," and a host more, 
 representing him as the budding Historian, and " Lord Ba- 
 con" as the Thinker. 
 
 We have, first, " Milton," still, in our judgment, the sin- 
 ccrest, if not the most faultless of his papers. It is the work 
 of a premature arid impassioned school-boy, with the glow of 
 the first perusal of the " Paradise Lost" extant on his cheek, 
 and with the boy's dream of liberty still beating in his heart. 
 Mr. Macaulay says, that the paper contains " scarcely a para- 
 graph of which his mature judgment approves." We may 
 add, that there are many paragraphs in it which he now nei- 
 ther could nor durst write. " Men," says James Hogg, in 
 the " Noctes," " often, as they get auld, fancy themsel's wiser, 
 whereas, in fac', they are only stoopider." It is not every one 
 who, like Robert Burns, with his early volume of poems, sees 
 at a glance that the " first bairn o' his brain is also the best." 
 Artistically, Macaulay's " Milton" is not his best ; but it is 
 the opening of his vein he throws forth in it a mass of pure 
 ore, which he has since chiefly been employed in beating thin, 
 or mixing with baser metals. Thus we find him, in many of 
 his subsequent papers, cutting and clipping at his splendid 
 picture of the Puritans a picture which we deem true to the 
 life of these illustrious men, as well as to the first sincere and
 
 238 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 burning convictions of Macaulay's young soul. He was not, 
 as Sir Daniel Sanford somewhere insinuates, " a dishonest 
 panegyrist of the Puritans." Brought up in a religious atmos- 
 phere, its influence still floated around him, as he wrote of 
 those who " looked down with contempt on the rich and the 
 eloquent, on nobles and on priests for they esteemed them- 
 selves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more 
 sublime language nobles by the right of an earlier creation, 
 and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand." But, 
 since, the giddy effects of success and the chilling influences 
 of the world have combined to damp and lower his lofty tone, 
 and he seems more than once inclined to give up the Puritans 
 as a ragged regiment, and to say, " I'll not march with them 
 through Coventry that's flat." The associate of Lord Pal- 
 merston could not latterly retain much sympathy for Harry 
 Vane. The confrere of Whately could scarcely now be honest 
 in praising John Brown. When he wrote " Milton," he was 
 a worshipper dividing his adoration between three objects 
 Poetry, Liberty, and Protestantism and all three seemed 
 robed in virgin loveliness. All have undergone a disenchant- 
 ment Poetry no longer walks the clouds, but the earth ; 
 Liberty is no more the " mountain-nymph," but the highly 
 accomplished daughter of a whig nobleman dwelling in Gros- 
 venor Square ; and Protestantism (see his review of " Ranke") 
 instead of being the true child of the Primitive Age, and the 
 destined heir of the Earth, is a candidate with nearly the 
 same chances of final success, as the " Woman sitting on the 
 scarlet-colored Beast, and with the names of Blasphemy writ- 
 ten on her forehead." 
 
 Indeed, we advise any one who wishes to compute the extent 
 and the rapidity of the cooling process which has passed over 
 Macaulay's mind, to compare his papers on " Milton" and on 
 " Ranke." In the one, he speaks with just indignation of the 
 vices of Popery, " complete subjection of reason to authority, 
 a weak preference of form to substance, a childish passion for 
 mummeries, an idolatrous veneration for the priestly charac- 
 ter, and, above all, a merciless intolerance." In his review of 
 Von Ranke, on the other hand, how tenderly does he treat 
 the Jesuits, some of whom he classes beside the Reformers ; 
 how coolly he traces the progress of the Catholic re-actions ;
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 239 
 
 with what satisfaction almost he records that Protestantism 
 has come to a stand-still, forgetting or ignoring the facts that, 
 although as a proselytising power nearly stationary in Europe, 
 it is advancing as a missionary power in every other part of 
 the globe ; that as the principal element of British progress, 
 its torch is leading the great march of general civilisation ; 
 that, in its rudest shape, as " Protestantism protesting against 
 itself," it has of late begun to heave in revolution every coun- 
 try and throne on the Continent ; and that even to hint a 
 doubt as to the ultimate result of its struggle with Popery, is 
 an act of treachery and cowardice, and betrays an ignorance 
 of its true nature and pretensions. In all his later papers, 
 Macaulay talks as if Popery and Protestantism were modifica- 
 tions of one system, instead of being opposed, as light is to 
 darkness, inertia to progress, deceit to truth, God to the 
 Devil. And while considering the attempts of such men as 
 Macaulay to fritter away to nothing the distinctions between 
 God's creed and the Devil's creed, we are tempted to use the 
 language of the prophet, " Wo to them who put darkness for 
 light and light for darkness, bitter for sweet and sweet for 
 bitter, evil for good and good for evil." The contest between 
 Popery and Protestantism is no scuffle in the dark between 
 detachments of the same army ; it is a deadly fight between 
 deadly foes, carried on in one compartment of that field, the 
 world, where the powers of light and darkness have been 
 waging for ages their ever-deepening, ever widening, but not 
 for a moment dubious engagement. 
 
 Protestantism at a stand-still ! Neither as a statement of 
 the facts at the time the paper was written, nor as a prophecy 
 of what has occurred since, is this assertion of any value. It 
 is true that nations do not of late change their creeds as indi- 
 viduals their cloaks. Islands are not now converted, as of 
 yore, by the " yellow stick" of a Protestant proprietor (see 
 Dr. Johnson's " Tour to the Hebrides"). Protestantism has, 
 like many a strong tide, been rolled back again and again in 
 its progress. Catholicism, on the other hand, has had, and 
 has at this hour, spasmodic revivals, sudden flushes, like the 
 colors of the dying dolphin. She is dying hard. Nor can she 
 fully expire till the brightness of Christ's coming surprise, 
 and the " breath of his mouth" consume, her. But, apart
 
 240 MODEEN CRITICS. 
 
 from this, we think it difficult for a candid and true-telling 
 observer to shut his eyes to the fact of a slow, steady, cumu- 
 lative advance of the part of Protestantism often repulsed, 
 sometimes driven fiercely back, but always returning to the 
 charge, and gaining sure and gradual ground with the wave of 
 each successive generation. What, after all, has she lost ? 
 At her birth, she was hailed by literature and science : they 
 on the points, at least, in which she differs from Popery 
 are on her side still. Her infant arm lifted the Printing 
 Press, the Mariner's Compass, and the Telescope. She holds 
 them now with a stronger grasp than ever. She rent then the 
 shroud from the Bible, and she still defies the Catholic world 
 to repair the rent. In Britain and the United States, and 
 the great rising colonies of the South, and in the stronger half 
 of Germany, she possesses the real keys of the intellectual 
 world keys more powerful than those fabled ones which clank 
 at the side of Peter. In our own country, she, not long ago, 
 with almost a superfluous expenditure of power and wrath, 
 repelled the insolence of Papal aggression. One thing only 
 does she want to complete the strength and dignity of her 
 attitude, that is, not to become more Popish, but to become 
 more Protestant. Without sacrificing her Bible or the lead- 
 lag principles of her creeds, without yielding to the raving 
 scepticisms of the day, she might and must accommodate her 
 spirit and language to those of the age ; she might in many 
 points abridge and modify her articles of faith; she might and 
 must get rid of the wretched incrustations of Paganism and 
 Popery which are still around her become, in short, that 
 I\ 7 ew Protestantism for which Milton's spirit long ago sighed, 
 which alone can attract and detain before the Lord the young 
 and the gifted of the age, and be thus prepared, as the " Bride, 
 the Lamb's Wife," for welcoming her Husband, when he de- 
 scends to the Universal Bridal. And then, like Milton's 
 eagle, shall this young and puissant Protestantism rise above 
 the fogs of scepticism, and the purple mists of Rome, and 
 mate her stern and starry eye with the unearthly and far- 
 streaming glory attending the steps of him " who shall come, 
 will come, and will not tarry." 
 
 In his papers on Byron and Johnson, we find his enthusiasm 
 wondrously subd-ied and united to an artistic self-command,
 
 THOMAS MACAULjlY. 241 
 
 a self-consciousness, an elaborate wit, a bitter sarcasm, and a 
 tone of society, not to be found in his first paper. With the 
 exception of his papers on Madame D'Arblay and Addisou, 
 they are the last of his purely literary articles. Before he 
 wrote them, he had entered Parliament, and there is in both a 
 great deal of the clever Parliamentary reply. The elaborate 
 carelessness of the papers on Byron is wonderful. Never was 
 art more artificially concealed. Never did a deliberate and 
 oil-smelling production seem so like an impromptu. Done in 
 the sweat of his brow, it yet reads like a private letter. Its 
 simplest- seeming sentences have probably cost him more 
 trouble. Such are a " poor lord and a handsome cripple." 
 " Lord Byron's system had two great commandments, to hate 
 your neighbor, and to love your neighbor's wife." How cool 
 such fledglings seem ! and yet they were probably hatched with 
 great care, and amid considerable heat. His character of 
 Byron is a long antithesis, and might, had it been done into 
 rhyme, have figured well in Pope's "Moral Epistles." Bits 
 of blame, and pats of praise, are distributed with exemplary 
 equality. But, to apply his own words, " it is not the busi- 
 ness of the critic to exhibit characters in this sharp, antitheti- 
 cal way." It is his business rather to show us the true nature 
 of the man at once,, by a winged word, or a simple sentence, or 
 in a figure " piercing to the dividing asunder of his soul and 
 spirit." Had he spoken of Byron's aimless earnestness, his 
 unprincipled and ill-managed power, his union of generosity 
 ttud selfishness, his strong religious tendencies, connected with 
 an utter want of definite religious or even irreligious opinions, 
 or hinted at the dark germ of derangement which was working 
 all along in his bosom, he had, in a sentence, helped us to a 
 distiucter view of the poet's charaectr, than by his whole seven- 
 teen pages of vague and unniingled brilliancy. As it is, he 
 accounts for Byron's matchless misery from his bad education, 
 the loss of his first love, the nervousness of dissipation ; from 
 every cause save the deepest of all the want of habitual in- 
 tercourse with the Father of Spirits. Byron was miserable, 
 because he felt himself an orphan, a sunbeam cut off from his 
 source, " without hope, and without God in the world." But 
 how puritanical would any statement like this have looked in 
 the eyes of the Reform Club, or of the splendid circles of 
 Holland House !
 
 242 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 To Boswell and Johnson he is, we think, unjuyt, in various 
 measures. Boswell, in his relation to Johnson, was one of the 
 most sincere and remarkable of men. Used like a spaniel by 
 his idol now caressed contemptuously, and now fiercely 
 spurned laughed at by his friends and by the world for his 
 attachment to Johnson, he remained true to him to the last, 
 and has suffered for it after as well as before death, and no- 
 where more severely than at Macaulay's hands. To worship 
 was the master instinct of his being, and he could no more 
 avoid following it, than can the moon escape the gravitation 
 of the earth. His conduct was the finer, from the contrast it 
 presented to the selfish and infidel habits of the eighteentli 
 century. Boswell had a god Johnson ; but Voltaire and 
 Hume had none, except themselves or their callous theories. 
 Boswell, in short, seems to us the first crude curdling of the 
 future Hero-worshipper, as the Alchemist was the rude fore- 
 runner of the genuine Chemist. Nor were his talents so con- 
 temptible as Macaulay alleges. He was undoubtedly a clever 
 and cultivated man. And the power to which he principally 
 pretended, that of appreciation, he possessed in a very large 
 degree. He saw Johnson as few even since have seen him ; 
 he gave him, during his life, an ante-past of the praise of 
 future ages, and he added one important item to his claims 
 for immortality. Boswell's " Life," according to many, is 
 Johnson's greatest work ; according to all, it is one of his 
 best. Nay, we cannot but fancy that Macaulay originally 
 possessed a great deal of the better element of Boswell, as 
 his " Milton" testifies, and that to clear himself of the suspi- 
 cion of being a Boswell of a bigger size, he has shed the blood 
 of his own spiritual father. 
 
 Scarcely less unjust is he to Johnson himself, who, had he 
 been alive, would certainly have turned him on the spit of one 
 of his rolling periods before the slow, grim blaze of his manly 
 indignation. " What is your opinion, Dr. J., of Thomas 
 Babington Macaulay ?" " Sir, the dog has some gifts and 
 accomplishments, but he is a Whig, a vile Whig, a trimmer, 
 sir, who would have acted as laureate to King George and the 
 Pretender at the same time. Sir, he would have written a 
 panegyric on the Pretender, on the steam of the sack which 
 the king had just sent in at his door." " Isn't he something
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 243 
 
 like Burke, sir " " No, sir ; Macaulay, sir, has not breath 
 to blow the bellows to Burke's fire. As Goldy would say, he 
 has Burke's ' tongue,' but without ' the garnish ' of his 'brains.' " 
 " What think you of his style, sir ?" " It is mine, sir, 
 docked, yet the dog turns round, and abuses the suit of clothes 
 he has not only stolen, lout mangled down, sir, to his own stat- 
 ure." " Doesn't he know a great deal, sir ?" " Yes, sir, 
 facts, not principles ; he has millions of farthings, but few 
 guineas, and no bank-bills ; he is like a school-boy, who knows 
 all the birds' nests in the parish, but can neither fly, nor lay 
 an egg, sir, nor even incubate to life the deposits of others." 
 " What think you of his religious creed, sir ?" " Why, sir, 
 it is that of one who prefers God to the Devil, because he is 
 in, and not because he ought to be in, and who is full of sa- 
 ving clauses lest the tables should one day be turned, and the 
 New Premier prove somewhat absolute. He has no creed, 
 sir, only a new credibility of God and the gospels, sir." " Isn't 
 he descended from your old friend, Miss Macaulay, sir ? " 
 " Too-too-too, sir, not from Miss Macaulay, surely, sir. His 
 grandfather was a minister in the Hebrides, and probably had 
 the second sight, which he has not left to his descendant, any 
 more than old Zachary left him his religion, sir." 
 
 Dr. Johnson's merit, according to Macaulay, has now shriv- 
 elled up into his " careless table-talk." His writings have lit- 
 tle merit . His criticisms on Shakspeare and Milton are 
 "wretched." He knew nothing of the "genus, man only of 
 the species, Londoner." His style is " systematically vicious." 
 His mannerism is " sustained only with constant effort." His 
 " big words are wasted on little things." His prejudices and 
 intellectual faults, too, are magnified by being torn from their 
 context, and set up in cluster upon one pillory. Thus com- 
 placently does he try to " write down " old Sam an ass. The 
 attempt is as insolent as we hope to show it to be vain. Now, 
 first, his table-talk was not " careless." It was the very 
 sweat of his mind. In all good society he " talked Lis best." 
 Secondly, it has discovered no new powers in Johnson's mind, 
 although it has revealed new weaknesses. It has increased 
 our notion of his variety, shrewdness, and readiness of retort, 
 but not of his power, eloquence, and deep-hearted sincerity of 
 nature. Thirdly, with regard to the prejudices and failings
 
 244 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 of this mighty man of valor, we ought to remember his time, 
 his training, the dark disease which, like the leprosy in an an- 
 cient house, sent a stream of misery and ernbryotic madnesg 
 throughout all the porticoes of his splendor, and all the col- 
 umns of his strength polluted every door, and looked out at 
 every window to remember that, strong and rock-founded 
 that house must have been, to contain unbroken such a fearful 
 guest and to remember, in fine, that he is a poor forester 
 who judges of an oak by its gnarled knots and a petty as- 
 tronomer who weighs the spots against the body of the sun. 
 Fourthly, that his criticisms on Shakspeare and Milton do 
 not bring out the minor beauties, the more delicate shades, the 
 subtler meanings, of our two great national poets, is admitted. 
 Johnson's mental, like his bodily, eye saw only tall cliffs, wide 
 fields, bold mountains, broad outlines it was not conversant 
 with details or minute varieties. But who has spoken better 
 of the more general and palpable qualities of Shakspeare, or 
 of " Paradise Lost "^the pyramid of Milton's handiwork ? 
 It he found to surpass even his own Brobdignagian stature, 
 and looking up to it in reverence, he had little leisure to mark 
 the subordinate buildings on which Milton had slowly piled 
 up its proud pinnacle. He is accused of not praising " The 
 Castle of Indolence " very warmly, but he gives its author, 
 and his far better poem " The Seasons," their full meed. He 
 called " Gray a barren rascal, and Churchill a blockhead ;" 
 but, if Mr. Macaulay had, as at other times, chosen to trans- 
 late these expressions out of Johnsonese into plain English, 
 they had just meant the truth this, namely, that Gray's ge- 
 nius was not so prolific as his learning was extensive, and that 
 Churchill was not so good as he was able, and not so able as 
 many thought. He has, indeed, admitted many stupid fellows 
 into his " Lives of the Poets;" but, as he said he would, he 
 has, in his own way, " told us that they were blockheads." 
 In fact, his real offence, as a critic, in the eyes of many, is 
 what, with us, is a merit. Himself a sincerely honest and pi- 
 ous man, an intense hater of humbug, of deceit, of brazen-fac- 
 ed infidelity, of twaddling sentimentalism, of the cant of vir- 
 tue, and of the cant of vice, he has unsparingly exposed such 
 offences wherever he found them, and many who cry out about 
 his critical, have, in fact, taken fright at his moral, severity.
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 45 
 
 Fifthly, as to the faults and mannerism of his style, we are 
 not " careful to answer in this matter," least of all, in reply 
 to the leading mannerist of this century. Johnson's is the 
 mannerism of a left-handed giant. He throws awkwardly, 
 but he throws stones which Macaulay could not lift. To say 
 that he " sustains his style by constant effort," is simply un- 
 true. It is notorious that the most sounding papers in " The 
 Rambler " were written at a sitting, and currents calamo. 
 He had but to dip his pen in ink, and there flowed out a cur- 
 rent of thought and language, wide and voluminous as the 
 Ganges in flood. We own our wrath always kindles when we 
 hear others beside Macaulay preferring Addison to Johnson. 
 We are not blind, as our former paper testifies, to his timid 
 beauties, his inimitable irony, slight and withering as the smile 
 of a scornful angel, his languid graces, the elegant negligence 
 of his costume, his sweet-blooded and subtle humor, or his 
 graver powers of contemplation and pathos; but there is this 
 important difference in Johnson's favor : Addison is chiefly a 
 mirror ; Johnson is a native mind. Addison reflects back 
 man and nature; Johnson is a thinker, penetrating into both. 
 Addison's discussions and philosophising, even when just, are 
 feeble; Johnson's, even when erroneous, are alwa}^s strorg. 
 Witness the papers on the " Paradise Lost " by the one, and 
 the " Lives of the Poets " by the other a work which, with 
 all its faults, is the most masculine and massive body of criti- 
 cism in the English tongue. Addison's may be called almost 
 a female mind of exquisite calibre ; Johnson was every inch .a 
 man, nay, a son of Anak, from the rough earth, but with a 
 heart touched, and a brow radiant with the influence and light 
 of heaven. We base, indeed, our deepest admiration of this 
 great man on his moral and religious qualities. We are nev- 
 er weary of thinking of his sterling honesty, his rugged integ- 
 rity, his fearlessness of consequences, his untaught dignity, 
 his generous sympathies for all real sorrows, his benevolence 
 bear-like in its external manifestations, lamb-like in its 
 heart the depth and profundity of his spiritual convictions, 
 the tenderness of his conscience, the firmness with which he clung 
 to Christianity, in a low and infidel age, " faithful found 
 among the faithless," his habitual fear of God yea, we are 
 not soon weary of admiring the rim of righteous anger which
 
 246 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 surrounded him at times the severity of his occasional judg- 
 ments, the fury of his assaults upon impostors of all sorts, and 
 we can even bear with his sturdy prejudices, the errors of his 
 temperament, the hasty verdicts of his excited conversation, 
 his political and religious bigotries, and the rough usage he of- 
 ten gave to his friends and worshippers. These, like the scars 
 of scrofula upon his cheek, are not beautiful, but they arc his, 
 and if they injure the grace of his aspect, they neither take a 
 cubit from his intellectual stature, nor damp the vehement, 
 though irregular flame of benevolence, sincerity, manhood, 
 and piety, which burned in his heart. Would to God that 
 some similar giant were now to tower up suddenly above the 
 crowd of our sciolists, sceptics, and small poets, and rebuke 
 them into sense, modesty, and Christianity again ! Johnson 
 was too decidedly an honest, fearless, and brawny original for 
 Macaulay's handling. He succeeds far better in depicting the 
 splendid clap-trap of Chatham, the girncrack ingenuity and 
 polished malice of Horace Walpole, the manners-painting force 
 of Madame D'Arblay, and the cultured common sense and 
 elaborate eloquence of Sir James Macintosh. He succeeds 
 better still in crushing the wasp Croker, sting, wings, bag of 
 venom, and all, by one nervous grasp of his strong, hot hand, 
 or in clapping into air, amid mimic thunder, the empty paper- 
 bags of some of our modern poets. 
 
 As Macaulay's series of papers went on, it became manifest 
 that he was gradually diverging from the flowery fields of lite- 
 rature, and turning towards the more difficult and less fre- 
 quented heights of history. His " Machiavelli," " Burleigh," 
 " Chatham," " Temple," and " Lord Clive,'' were all, in real- 
 ity, historical chapters the antennas of coining historical 
 works. Of such, by far the ablest and most brilliant is the 
 article on " Warren Hastings." Indeed, we find in it, as in a 
 microcosm, all the qualities, positive and negative, since more 
 largely displayed in his "History of England." These are 
 intimate acquaintance, not only with the leading events, but 
 with the minutiae, the gossip, the family history, and the float- 
 ing scandal of the period ; intense sympathy with the person- 
 nel of his heroes a partiality for certain characters amount- 
 ing to favoritism a hatred for others amounting to fury im- 
 mense power of painting traits in character, and scenes in his-
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 247 
 
 toric life an inferior gift of describing nature frequent, 
 cool, and refreshing literary allusions, blowing like breezes 
 across the otherwise arid or blood-dried pages of his tale 
 Whig zeal and religious indifferentism, both indifferently con- 
 cealed an occasional negligence of style more highly finished 
 in reality than the most swelling of his paragraphs great and 
 labored passages, reminding you of historical paintings, and 
 relieved by surrounding etchings of familiar life a perpetual 
 consciousness of himself, and of the artistic nature of his 
 task, which seldom permits any spontaneous betrayal of emo- 
 tion, and makes even his enthusiasm seem cold, as the hair of 
 a sculptured Moenad something of the interest and simplic- 
 ity of Hume, along with the richer tints of Robertson, and 
 the gorgeous description of Gibbon all the qualities of a 
 good novel, added to some of those of an ideal history these 
 are the leading peculiarities alike of his historical papers, 
 such as " Hastings," and of his " England," and they consti- 
 tute him a historian after this age's own heart. 
 
 Admitting right cordially the exceeding interest and graphic 
 power of the paper on Hastings, there are one or two points 
 on which we must differ. We find in it evidences of that in- 
 firmity of trimming and balancing which so easily besets our 
 author. We certainly do not think that Warren Hastings was 
 a monster. Monsters in the moral world are still rarer than 
 monsters in the natural ; but, if the half of what Burke said, 
 and the whole of what even Macaulay says against him be 
 true, he must have been one of the worst characters in history. 
 If seduction, perfidy, cruelty, greed, murder, both retail and 
 wholesale, implacable revenge, and insatiable ambition, with a 
 hundred smaller items of falsehood and corruption, are to be 
 screened by success, it is time that the Ten Commandments 
 were burned, the Sermon on the Mount buried, and the laws 
 of nations and of nature repealed. Either he was one of the 
 worst or one of the most maligned of men. Macaulay takes 
 neither view ; but between admiration of Hastings' abilities, 
 and anger at some of his actions reverence for Burke, and 
 pity for the accused sympathy with the oppressed people of 
 India, and wonder at the splendid edifice of empire which was* 
 based on their blood he himself hangs, and he suspends his 
 readers in a state of equilibrium which becomes half-painful
 
 248 MODERN CniTICS. 
 
 and half-ludicrous, and tempts you at last to exclaim, What 
 would you have us to think of this man, after all ? Was he 
 a wise governor, or a cruel and unmanly oppressor ? Shall we 
 bless, or shall we ban him ? Shall he sit in the synod of the 
 gods, or, where Burke would have placed him, in that part of 
 the Indian Pantheon where dwell the horrid deities who pre- 
 side over small-pox and murder, and who, like the tremendous 
 Three in the ' Curse of Kehama,' expecting the earning of the 
 ' Man Almighty,' might be conceived to wait impatiently for 
 his advent, ' having been found worthy ' to sit beside them on 
 a burning throne ?" 
 
 There is another point on which we crave a word : it is on 
 the authorship of the " Letters of Junius." This Macaulay, 
 somewhat dogmatically, attributes entirely to Sir Philip Francis, 
 although there is much internal evidence to prove him incapa- 
 ble of their better portions. The mere mechanism of their 
 composition, the curt style, the fierceness and occasional ma- 
 lignity of their spirit, he could have supplied, but the pro- 
 founder touches of satire, the strong clearness of diction, the 
 high, almost superhuman scorn which so often inspirits them, 
 the frequent gleams of deep political sagacity, and the figures, 
 sparing in number, but breathing an intense poetical spirit 
 all point to the darker moods and the fretted and gall-dipped 
 pen of Edmund Burke. We do not mean that he was their 
 sole or chief author, but that his subtle genius had its share in 
 their conception, even as it had in some of Barry's pictures 
 and Reynolds's discourses; and that he drew many of their 
 sharpest and finest strokes, seems to us certain, and to some 
 others, too, who can recognise that " Roman hand," and who 
 know that its versatility was equal to its power. Burke noto- 
 riously was in the secret* of their authorship. He was, ac- 
 cording to Johnson, the only man living equal to their compo- 
 sition. And as to style, neither he nor Junius were consist- 
 ent in it. Junius had three different styles that of his pri- 
 vate notes to Woodfall that of his hasty letters, such as his 
 first to Home Tooke and that of his more elaborate epistles. 
 Burke, too, strange to say, had three styles his plain style, 
 as of his charges against Hastings his middle style, as of his 
 
 * See Prior's " Burke," Vol. i.
 
 THOMAS MACAULY. 249 
 
 " Sublime and Beautiful," and " Thoughts on the Present 
 Discontents " and his ornate and poetical style, as in his 
 " French Revolution," aud his " Regicide Peace." There are, 
 besides, passages and clauses in Junius which we are as sure 
 were Burke's, as if we had seen him write, or dictate, or inter- 
 line them. Take one, " the melancholy madness of genius 
 without the inspiration." Burke once said to Boswell about 
 Herbert Croft, " He has the contortions of the sibyl ivithout 
 the inspiration." Of another we may say (accommodating 
 Macaulay's language on another occasion), "Aut Burke aut 
 Diabolus." It is in reference to Wilkes: " The gentle breath 
 of peace will leave him on the surface, unruffled and unremov- 
 ed. It is only the tempest that lifts him from his place." 
 We could add a hundred more. On the whole, were we on a 
 jury to try the question as to the authorship of " Junius," 
 we should be compelled, between the conflicting forces of the 
 external and the internal evidences, to return a verdict against 
 " Edmund Burke, Philip Francis, and other person or persons 
 unknown" 
 
 Ne sutor ultra crepidam, is a proverb so commonplace, as 
 to require an apology for its repetition. And yet we cannot 
 remember anything more appropriate to the light in which we 
 are now to regard the subject of this sketch, in connection 
 with his paper on Lord Bacon which is, Macaulay the Think- 
 er. To use his own illustration, " Hannibal at Waterloo, or 
 Wellington at Plataaa," were not more thoroughly out of place 
 than Macaulay "found" in the difficult region of intellectual 
 thought a region which he knows not fully, has seldom visit- 
 ed, has visited not in the choicest society, and where he has 
 never yet, we suspect, spent a night, the glooms and the gran- 
 deurs of which are alike unappreciated by his strong but un- 
 imaginative and uninstinctive spirit. 
 
 Had we foreseen that Macaulay meant so far to compromise 
 his reputation as to write a paper on a purely philosophical 
 subject, we should have put in a previous protest, based on the 
 following grounds : First, in all his other writings he gives no 
 evidence of possessing the elements of a genuine thinker. He 
 thinks in facts, not in figures or symbols. He estimates all 
 things by their sharp edges, not by their solid bulks or their 
 ideal shadows. He looks at them not as they are, but as they
 
 250 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 seem to him, or to the mirror from which he has caught their 
 shape. The term absolute (except in its political sense, as 
 connected with " absolute power !") has to him little or no 
 meaning. He has an outer eye of much scope and clearness, 
 but his inner eye is midnight. We dare any of his admirers 
 to quote a sentence of his writings containing in it a new 
 truth, chased in a new image " an apple of gold in a picture 
 of silver." Of poetic physics, he has some distinct idea of 
 poetic metaphysics none whatever. Nor has he given himself 
 that philosophic culture and training which would qualify him 
 for sounding metaphysical depths. With all his vast knowl- 
 edge, it is clear to us that he has only run across the surface 
 of philosophy, and studied it rather as a historian, than as a 
 profound critic of its various systems and schools. Nor has 
 his temperament or his heart ever urged him on to very ear- 
 nest personal inquiry into the grounds of belief or leading 
 principles of thought. Easily satisfied himself, he has been 
 unable to give satisfaction or even suggestive hints to earnest 
 and anxious inquirers. The profound thinker is either decid- 
 edly religious in his temperament and views, or decidedly the 
 reverse. Macaulay is neither. And hence, while he speaks 
 on historical matters with authority and power, on all abstract 
 questions he exhibits the feebleness without the modesty of a 
 child. The voice and manner are those of a master, but the 
 matter and spirit are those of an inapt and forward scholar. 
 
 Lord Bacon was a subject, certainly, more than worthy of 
 all the powers of the author. The apparent contradictions in 
 his character, the singular and humiliating events of his his- 
 tory, his position as the leader of a wide intellectual move- 
 ment, his achievements as the broad-browed parent of modern 
 method the width of his mind, which reminds you of the 
 first rude maps of the globe, where the breadth and the blun- 
 ders are alike enormous the oriental wealth and splendor of 
 his fancy, recalling to you Solomon " speaking of trees, from 
 the cedar to the hyssop," and issuing proverbs by the thou- 
 sand the proud, positive results which have sprung from his 
 system have combined to render the woolsack on which sat he 
 whom the poet calls 
 
 " The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,"
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 251 
 
 more interesting and more magnificent in many men's view 
 than the thrones of " Ormus or of Ind," and to make them 
 think of an angel seated on a planet, and looking down in su- 
 preme dominion upon the subjected provinces of a universal 
 intellectual empire. 
 
 To grapple with such a mind and character was a noble 
 task, and Macaulay has undoubtedly brought to it all the re- 
 sources of his knowledge, the strength of his ingenuity, and 
 the energies of his style. But he has at the same time ex- 
 posed himself to certain grave charges, into the proof of 
 which we must now shortly enter. 
 
 Now, first, as in reference to Hastings and other equivocal 
 characters, he has not painted Bacon well as a whole. He has 
 set the apparently contradictory parts of his character in vio- 
 lent and antithetical opposition to each other opposition so 
 violent as to produce a monstrous effect ; he has not seen or 
 shown to us any principle accounting for and unifying the 
 whole. God does not make men on the plan of antithesis. 
 Ptercdactyles and all such contradictions of chaos are long 
 extinct. Inconsistencies, of course, there are in all charac- 
 ters : but where a character is hollow and false, the intel- 
 lectual power must be partially vitiated, and where the heart 
 is extinct, the mind must have its flaws and feebleness too. 
 Had Bacon been the " greatest," he never could have been the 
 " meanest" of mankind. The charges which Macaulay so 
 ably and unanswerably urges against his morale tell, in some 
 measure, against his method of investigating truth. Who, if we 
 may accommodate Scripture language, "can bring a warm sys- 
 tem out of a cold nature, a true creed out of a false heart ?" 
 No, not one ! 
 
 There never was any such mis-creation as a great bad man, 
 although wonderful and extraordinary villains have abounded. 
 A really great man cannot be bad a bad man cannot be really 
 great. Prove the greatness, and you disprove the badness 
 or prove the badness, and you shatter down the greatness. A 
 great man may be defined as one living under a lofty ideal, and 
 having power in part to realise it. But the presence of a 
 lofty ideal proves the absence of systematic and cold-blooded 
 depravity, of abject meanness, of cowardice, cruelty, or false- 
 hood. All true greatness is more or less moral. The highest
 
 252 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 cherub is also the purest seraph. The player Shakspearo was 
 an infinitely better and greater man than the Chancellor Ba- 
 con, and would have died rather than have committed one of 
 his viler deeds, or handled one piece of his unclean gold. 
 The philosophers of Greece, whom Macaulay would crush un- 
 der Bacon's feet, had many faults, but not the worst of them 
 cuts such a disgraceful and contemptible figure as he ; aud 
 does this furnish no prestige in favor of their intuitive and 
 transcendental method ? 
 
 The extraordinary and able men of no principle or heart, 
 who abound in the history of the world, remind us of busts 
 all brow and no heart. They are the incarnations of mere un- 
 derstanding having neither, if we may use Kant's language, 
 the pure reason, which perceives the absolute as existence nor 
 the practical reason, which discerns it as moral law. The 
 great are composed of a combination, more or less varied in 
 its proportions, of the pure reason, the logical understanding, 
 the practical reason, and the imaginative sympathy. They 
 are the composites, although the combination is definite, not 
 contradictory. Whereas, the merely extraordinary man has 
 the simple positive of understanding, added to a copious list 
 of negatives. To this Bacon united the gift of a munificent 
 fancy, not to speak of his multifarious knowledge aud acquire- 
 ments. 
 
 But, secondly, and chiefly, we charge Macaulay with greatly 
 overrating Lord Bacon's philosophy, and with underrating, 
 at the same time, the philosophies which preceded him. And 
 here we mean out of his own mouth to condemn him. Now, 
 to pursue him down his paper seriatim, we find him, as to the 
 aim or end of the two philosophies, admitting, that while Ba- 
 con's sought solely the " relief of man's estate," that of the 
 ancients aimed at " moral perfection." In other words, Bacou 
 professed to cure corns, and Plato to heal consciences. Bacon 
 wished to teach men to make better ships, or, as Macaulay has 
 it, "better shoes;" and Plato to teach them to have nobler 
 and happier souls. Bacon sought " fruit," perhaps ingrafted 
 on rotten trees ; whereas Plato and his school sought, although 
 with imperfect success, to make the root of the tree sound, and 
 its circulating sap pure. Bacon sought to make men better 
 citizens of this hollow world; Plato to prepare them for the
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY 253 
 
 " City of God ' the everlasting mansions of the true, the 
 spiritual, and the happy. How significant that Bacon died, 
 in consequence of seeking to stuff a fowl with snow an apt 
 emblem of the coldness and comparative pettiness of his me- 
 thod, and rather a striking type, too, of the manner in which 
 his ablest modern panegyrist has sought to embalm a cowardly 
 nature in elegant, elaborate, and icy praise. 
 
 ''Although with ^perfect success." These words will be 
 seized on by the Baconian, and turned against us. But first, 
 we intend, ere we close, to show that the success of Bacon's 
 method has been exaggerated ; secondly, we remember the 
 words, " in great attempts 'tis glorious even to fail ;" thirdly, 
 to Plato and his direct or indirect influence, we may attribute 
 all the mere philosophic spiritualism of the cultivated world 
 which, while " far below the good, is far above the great;" 
 fourthly, Platonism was the herald of Christianity, and its 
 failure lay in the want of some elements which Christianity 
 supplied -namely, a perfect model, a supernatural power, and 
 a permanent divine influence ; fifthly, on the grounds on which 
 Macaulay claims superiority to Bacon over the Platonic school, 
 we might claim superiority for a tailor over Bacon or Plato 
 either. But we may leave the details of this startling prefer- 
 ence, although legitimately deducible from our author's pre- 
 mises, to the imagination of our readers. And, sixthly, he for- 
 gets, or overshoots while remembering, the fact, that he is 
 talking of the aim of the two systems, and not at this point 
 of their actual results. To make man better may not be so 
 practicable as to improve the strops of his razors, but surely 
 even at the first blush it is a loftier attempt. 
 
 But, according to Macaulay, contradicting old Seneca, " the 
 first shoemaker was a greater philosopher than Seneca him- 
 self." Had he said the " first maker of a foot," he would have 
 been nearer the mark. Neither Seneca nor the aboriginal 
 shoemaker strikes us as a very wonderful philosopher. Both 
 only shaped out the ideal of greater artists, the one imperfect- 
 ly that of the Plato, the Pythagoras, and the Zeno, who saw 
 the vast superiority of the soul to the body, of the next lifo 
 to this, and the other of that plastic power, which, in forming 
 a foot, silently bade man, while he covered its nakedness, to 
 emulate its symmetry and copy its curve. But dare Macaulay
 
 254 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 expect sympathy, when denying Seneca's assertion that " phi- 
 losophy lies deeper than inventing transparent windows, tubes 
 for diffusing warmth, or shorthand ?" Judging by this state- 
 ment, we should prefer Seneca as an expounder of the ideal 
 philosophy, to Macaulay as an illustrator of the utilitarian. 
 We are certain that the " three books on Anger," contain no- 
 thing so contemptible as the preference he gives, by implica- 
 tion, to " the man who teaches us to use our hands," over 
 him " whose object is to form our souls." Not in the pages 
 of Combe, or Robert Chambers, or of that Benthamite school 
 which Macaulay himself once assaulted, do we remember any- 
 thing so grossly absurd, or which more helplessly sacrifices the 
 unhappy cause committed to his advocacy. 
 
 What ! a shorthand writer equal to a philosopher or a great 
 orator Woodfall above Burke, Grurney above Canning, or 
 Macaulay seated at Highgate, and drinking in Coleridge's in- 
 spired accents, equal to the " old man eloquent." And yet, 
 such abject trash, when printed in the " Edinburgh Review," 
 or re-published by the " Historian of England," must gain un- 
 challenged acceptance, and require this humble pen to dash it 
 into exposure and contempt. 
 
 In the paragraph which follows, he throws out insinuations 
 against Seneca's character, which require only two remarks. 
 First, Seneca is no more to be taken as a fair type of the Pla- 
 tonic philosophy, than Emerson of the system of Fichte, or 
 Combe of Benehamism. He was the hard dreg of a Stoic, and 
 the Stoic was only the stony similitude of a Platonist. And, 
 secondly, should we accept this test of character in judging of 
 Seneca's system, what is there to prevent us from applying it 
 to Bacon's, upon the premises Macaulay has newly laid down, 
 namely, that Bacon, if he did not, like Seneca, " meditate 
 epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens, 
 which moved the envy of sovereigns, rant about liberty, while 
 fawning on the insolent and pampered freemen of a tyrant, nor 
 celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which 
 had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother 
 by a son" nevertheless did, and that, too, under the light of 
 Christianity in its full blaze, take bribes for justice, till cor- 
 ruption's own brazen brow grew pale, and her iron hand trem- 
 bled ; suffer the profligate minion of a monarch to influence
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 255 
 
 his most solemn judicial decisions ; pervert the old laws of 
 England to the vilest purposes of tyranny, by " tampering 
 with judges, and torturing a prisoner," who, like the laws, 
 was venerable, innocent, and old and, lastly, become the be- 
 trayer, and the public, voluntary, and malignant accuser, of 
 his own principal friend and patron ? It is from his hand, 
 be sure, and not from Seneca's, that our author would expect 
 the key of nature. The two succeeding paragraphs contain a 
 caricature of the objects and results of ancient philosophy, and 
 their sting might easily be extended to all metaphysics, and 
 to all theology. Mr. Macaulay forgets what he had so recent- 
 ly stated, that one object of academical studies is to elevate 
 and purify the soul a purpose independent o/ objective re- 
 sults : he forgets that the fruit sought being of the rarest kind, 
 and hanging on the topmost branches of the tree of knowledge, 
 cannot be gathered without long labor, and that the main- 
 tenance of a lofty spiritualism, of an attitude of wonder and 
 worship among the better minds of every succeeding age, is a 
 richer result than all the possible discoveries made under the 
 Baconian method. Who would set the history of patents above 
 that of opinions ? Because theologic science has not unrid- 
 dled the mystery of a God, or explained the conditions or the 
 localities of the future life, must the truths involved in such 
 speculations, and the influences their agitation has exerted on 
 the spiritual nature of man, be degraded in practical power 
 below gas, the steam-engine, or the diving-bell ? Are churches, 
 missionary societies, great religious movements, high spiritual 
 poems, and holy lives, not worth " fruit" ? and these, under 
 God, we in this nineteenth century owe, not to the school of 
 Bacon, but to that combination of the philosophy of Plato, 
 and the divine teaching and working of Jesus, which consti- 
 tutes the only theology, whether theoretic or practical, de- 
 serving the name the theology of Taylor, Howe, Milton, and 
 Coleridge. 
 
 The Baconian philosophy bears flowers and fruits in great 
 abundance and every year ; but the deep thought of the 
 ancient Greek mind, informed and warmed by the supernatu- 
 ral Sun of Christianity, like the aloe, brings forth, at long 
 intervals, its precious blossoms, of which you may say with 
 the poet when you contrast them with more short-lived and
 
 256 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 earthy productions "one blossom of Eden outblooms them 
 all," and the fruit of which is everlasting. For why ? Bacon 
 sowed the thin soil of the finite and the present ; Plato, the 
 deep loam of the permanent and the infinite. Bacon expected 
 and received the return of an early crop of material results ; 
 Plato's harvest lay in the slow yield of souls. " Now the 
 things seen are temporal, but the things unseen are eternal." 
 
 Macaulay next expresses a disappointed hope in the " Epi- 
 cureans." They were, according to him, mutilated utilita- 
 rians. It was even wonderful that " Epicurus' style did not 
 breed a Bacon." They approached the true and sensible 
 notion of things, in " referring all happiness to bodily plea- 
 sure, and all evil to bodily pain." But, like the gods in 
 whom they were said to believe, they were lazy, and preferred 
 lolling in the sun to constructing Novum Organons. Our 
 notion of their sense is increased by this. If all happiness 
 lies in bodily pleasure, and all evil in bodily pain, it may be a 
 question if it be not our " strength to sit still" to take the 
 good the gods provide us, or to drink our hemlock in silence, 
 instead of moving heaven and earth, and convulsing the 
 spheres, in order to wheel round to our feet new varieties of 
 the same mixed and eternal meal. It was reserved for Macau- 
 lay to trace the proud Baconian Tree, which some compare to 
 the Tree of Life, with its " many manner of fruits, and its 
 leaves for the healing of the nations," to a rejected acorn from 
 the trough of Epicurus. 
 
 That an infection of despondency seemed to lie upon other 
 shapes of the Grecian philosophy besides the Epicurean, is 
 granted to their detractor. But he has not pointed out the 
 element which would have dissipated this gloom. That was 
 Christianity, with its supernatural discoveries of the immor- 
 tality of man of his intimate relations to God and of the 
 God-Man Mediator. The ancient philosophers saw the neces- 
 sities and cravings of man's immortal nature ; they felt that 
 to seek to supply these by temporal comforts were as insulting 
 and absurd as to give rich food to a raging fever ; they felt, 
 some of them, that one great want of man was an Incarnation 
 of the Godhead, and they had even a hope of his appearance 
 saw in some measure his " day afar off, and were glad," but 
 it was only a dim prospect, after all, and they lived not to see
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 257 
 
 the culmination of their systems, and the completion of their 
 desires, in the divine Carpenter of Nazareth. Hence, their 
 systems have an imperfect aspect like the Sphinx or the 
 Tower of Babel and, because only half finished, have been 
 treated as ruins. But to call their despondency " contented" 
 is unjust. If they sought moral perfection, and sought it 
 sincerely, but found it not, how could they remain contented ? 
 Is even the maniac who tries to leap to the moon contented 
 with his fall ? On the contrary, the Baconian philosophy 
 having made its bow to Christianity, and derived from it 
 something of its liberal and unfettered spirit, has too often 
 proceeded in its investigations to ignore its existence, or to 
 treat its occasional protests with impatient scorn. 
 
 It is easy to enlarge on the errors of the schoolmen. But 
 to charge these upon the ancient philosophers is as unfair as 
 to confound Popery with Christianity. Scholasticism was the 
 putrefaction of the old philosophy deriving a two-fold viru- 
 lence from the coeval putrefaction of religion, or it might be 
 termed the dotage and driveldom of the Grecian philosophy. 
 But, though doomed to dote, that glorious thing was not doomed 
 to die. In spite of Macaulay's paean over its fall, it is alive 
 and in full vigor still, and, surviving Bacon's system, may 
 merge, like the Morning Star, only in the Sun of that divine 
 vision which we, according to His promise, expect sooner or 
 later to irradiate the evening of the world. 
 
 Mr. Macaulay, after comparing Bacon to Bonaparte a 
 comparison with two edges proceeds to make the following 
 extraordinary statement : " The object of the new philosophy 
 was the good of mankind, in the sense in which the mass of 
 mankind always understood, and will always understand, the 
 word good." Surely this gentleman was born to be a fatal 
 friend to the fame of the Baconian system. What has been 
 the object or " good" always hitherto sought or contemplated 
 by the mass of mankind ? Has it not been selfish gratification, 
 in one or other of its myriad forms ? Alas ! for Bacon and 
 his philosophy, if this was their object too ! And alas ! for 
 man, if he is never to rise to a higher purpose ; and if the 
 Baconian philosophy be merely a devil's wind to fan the sails 
 of human selfishness to the end of time ! Indeed, we are now 
 at this point tempted to ask, if Mr. Macaulay be not, after
 
 258 MODERN CHITICS. 
 
 all, conducting a long, insidious, and ironical argument against 
 Bacon's idea and method, after he had, in a former part of the 
 paper, triumphantly demolished and trampled on his personal 
 character. We defy the bitterest opponent of our English 
 sage to utter a severer sentence against his system than has 
 his eloquent and seemingly sincere eulogist. Poor Bacon ! 
 has he not fared like a man who should sit down to have his 
 features copied by an artist apparently friendly, and should 
 continue to smile, well pleased, while on the other side of the 
 canvas there was rising, to the tune of smothered laughter, 
 the most hideous of caricatures ? 
 
 But this suspicion which would save the intellect at the 
 expense of the honesty of the writer fades away and becomes 
 incredible, as we follow him a little farther. He goes on to 
 contrast the estimates Plato and Bacon have respectively 
 formed of the different branches of knowledge. Plato thought 
 that the " great office of geometry was to discipline the mind, 
 not to minister to the base wants of the body." Macaulay. 
 on the other hand, sneers at " the abstract, essential, eternal 
 truths" of this science, but passes over the great objection to 
 its study, which is, that men accustomed to mathematical evi- 
 dence become often incapable of appreciating or receiving any 
 other. There is a mist around the region of mathematics 
 colder and denser than that of metaphysics ; and he who finds 
 the darkness of problems clear, will by and by wink and be 
 struck blind by the blaze of day. But surely the idea of 
 mathematics propounded by Plato is far loftier than the other 
 unless Meyer on " Mensuration 5 * can be compared to New- 
 ton's " Principia." 
 
 In talking of their estimates of astronomy, Macaulay grants 
 that both agree in condemning the astronomy which then ex- 
 isted, and in desiderating a higher and purer ; but, strange to 
 say, he prefers Bacon's " living astronomy" which seems to 
 have been nothing else than astrology to Plato's, which was 
 a fine and large idealism. Bacon aspired to know the " nature 
 and the influences of the heavenly bodies as they really are;" 
 Plata, so attain to an astronomy to which the " stars are like 
 the figures which a geometrician draws on the sand an astro- 
 nomy ' independent of the stars.' " Suppose either of these 
 imaginary astronomies attainable, which of the two, we ask,
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 250 
 
 were the nobler ? Suppose both visionary, which vision is the 
 grander of the two ? Our common astronomy may be com- 
 pared to a measurement of the dimensions of the human brain; 
 Bacon's to a knowledge of its relations to the body and the 
 nervous system ; and Plato's to the study of the mind, of 
 which the brain is but the organ. The stars may be called 
 the developments of " God's Own Head :" our common astro- 
 nomers number them, and take their weights and sizes ; Bacon 
 wishes to know how they are connected with our evcry-day life 
 and fortunes; Plato, to read the divine idea the large thought 
 and purpose of God inscribed on them in legible tire. 
 
 It seems to us that in this science we are fast approaching 
 a point where we need the guidance rather of a new Plato 
 than of a new Bacon or Newton. The telescope of Lord 
 Rosse has sounded our present astronomy to its real depths. 
 Few more great prizes are reserved, we suspect, in that starry 
 sea. We have attained the knowledge that the stars are old, 
 that they are of one stuff, and that there is no visible end to 
 their numbers. What more of any moment, in this direction, 
 by our present methods, is ever likely to be reached by us ? 
 It is like walking through a pine forest of vast extent and uni- 
 form aspect ; a few miles tire and satisfy us. So now, the 
 news of " stars, stars, stars," pouring on us in everlasting suc- 
 cession all like each other, all distant, all inscrutable, and 
 ever silent, the moral history of all unknown produces very 
 little effect, and the midnight heavens of modern astronomy 
 become again, as to the eye of childhood, a mighty and terri- 
 ble pageant or procession^ the meaning and the purpose, the 
 whither and the whence, of which we do not understand. And 
 we are tempted to say to astronomers, as they prate of their 
 new firmaments, and planets, and comets, " We know some- 
 thing like this long ago ; can ye not give us some light on the 
 meaning of these distant orbs, or read us off some worthy 
 lessons of moral interest from that ever-widening but never- 
 clearing page ?" And to cry out to the stars, " Speak as well 
 as shine, ye glorious mutes in the halls of heaven ! Shed 
 down on some selected and favored ear the true meaning of 
 your mystic harmonies ! Hieroglyphics, traced by the finger 
 of God on the walls of night, when shall the Daniel arrive to 
 interpret you, and to tell us whether ye contain tidings of hope
 
 260 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 or of despair? Star-gazers have looked at you long enough, 
 and mathematicians weighed and measured you ; when shall 
 the eye the llossian eye of a true seer lift itself up to your 
 contemplation, and extract the heart of your mystery ? If 
 not, men may soon turn away from you in disappointment, 
 and look with as much hope on the bright foam-bells of an au- 
 tumn ocean as on you, the froth of immensity." 
 
 Plato's opinions on medicine are next brought forward 
 against him ; and yet in nothing do we perceive greater proof 
 of his profound sagacity. True, he pushes his views to ex- 
 cess; but under the veil of his extravagant statements we see 
 an idea which is gaining ground, and shall yet become univer- 
 sal that medicine, as it began in, shall return to, surgery ; 
 that, as a barber was the first, he shall be the last physician ; 
 that in a body, as well as in a mind diseased, the patient best 
 ministers to himself; that the words, " Physician, heal thy- 
 self," may be freely rendered, " Cure thee of quackery by 
 ceasing to be a physician at all;" and that nature, strong in 
 her own resources, coincides with Plato in crying out, " Throw 
 physic to the dogs ; I'll none of it." This belief, having sent 
 on before it its imperfect forerunners, of Homoeopathy and 
 Hydropathy, is following them in full force, and in a higher 
 form, and threatens soon to turn out of doors the " Royal 
 Academy of Physicians," to celebrate a universal jubilee il- 
 lumination at the death of quackery and to burn drugs, like 
 demons, in a blaze of consuming fire. Honor to old Plato for 
 having, by one glance of his eye, seen the quackery of ages 
 through and doivn to its doing day. 
 
 Grasping always at the ideals of things, Plato saw that all 
 true legislation must propound to itself a lofty end, and he 
 proclaims that end to be the " virtue of the subject." This 
 was the thought of Moses too, and the theocracy of Israel 
 was its accomplishment. It were easy to prove that it was 
 also the idea of Christ, although its realisation was deferred, 
 and he did not at that time restore the kingdom to Israel. It 
 is certainly the idea of Millennial Christianity ; but Mr. Mac- 
 aulay scouts it as Utopian, and prefers the line of legislation 
 recommended by Bacon, and, alas ! acted on by the majority 
 of human governors, which has for its watchword the low 
 word " well-leing;" which acknowledges no virtues but indus-
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 261 
 
 try and submission, and no G-od but Mammon; which is care- 
 ful to regulate and derive revenue from stews, but never inter- 
 meddles with the education of souls ; which tolerates every 
 species of corruption so long as it is profitable, and the money 
 derived from it does not smell ; which washes the outside of 
 the platter, whitens the sepulchre, and decks the corpse, but 
 neglects the weightier matters of the law judgment, mercy, 
 and faith; and seeks (not in vain) to divorce human legisla- 
 tion from Eternal Justice. Let the praises of Baconian legis- 
 lation be sung by mightier voices than ours by the whirl- 
 winds of anarchy, the blood-red trumpets of revolution, the 
 cries of tormented and fugitive slaves, and by that crash of 
 all-existing governments, which may form the first thunder- 
 step of Him who is to come, and who, in pronouncing doom 
 against them may make this the conclusive charge : " Ye 
 did not make it the principal end of your legislation to make 
 men virtuous ; ye turned my father's house into a house of 
 merchandise, nay, a den of thieves ; and ye must be scourged 
 hence /" 
 
 An antithetical comparison is introduced between the phi- 
 losophy of Plato and that of Bacon, which, as it is short, we 
 may quote : " The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to 
 exalt man into a God; the aim of the Baconian philosophy 
 was to provide man with what he requires while he continues 
 to be man. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise 
 us far above vulgar wants ; the aim of the Baconian philoso- 
 phy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was 
 noble ; but the latter was attainable. Plato drew a good 
 bow ; but, like Acestes in ' Virgil," he aimed at the stars, and, 
 therefore, though there was no want of strength or skill, the 
 shot was thrown away. His arrow was indeed followed by a 
 track of dazzling radiance, but it struck nothing. Bacon fix- 
 ed his eye on a mark which was placed on the earth, and with- 
 in bow-shot, and he hit it in the white. The philosophy of 
 Plato began in words, and ended in words ; the philosophy of 
 Bacon began in observations, and ended in arts." 
 
 Let us try a parallel on the other side of the question, 
 which, if not so pointed, is much more true. The aim of the 
 Baconian philosophy was to make the dungeon of man's irre- 
 coverable captivity as comfortable as possible, to ventilate it
 
 262 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 well, to loose everything except the chains, to cleanse the 
 floors, clear the windows of cobwebs, and to whisper the while 
 to the bondage, Esto perpetua ; that of the Platonic was to 
 set the lawful but hopeful prisoner free. The aim of the Ba- 
 conian philosophy was to cherish, expand, and cultivate the 
 animal and intellectual nature of man ; that of the Platonic 
 was to strengthen and purify the spiritual, which is the germ 
 of the Godhead in humanity. The aim of the Baconian phi- 
 losophy was to " supply man's vulgar wants," and leave him 
 content as a sated sloth with the supply; that of Plato was 
 to suggest the thrilling thought, that there are instincts and 
 wants in man which earth and time cannot satisfy, and which, 
 with their silent uplifted fingers, point to immortality. 
 
 The aim of the Baconian philosophy was, even if attainable, 
 not very noble but attainable it was not, since the sensuous, 
 as well as the spiritual, nature of man continually cries, " Give, 
 give." Bacon's system, although it had a " New Atlantis," 
 had no "Mahometan Paradise" annexed to it; the aim of 
 Plato, partaking of the eternal, demands the field of the future 
 for its development, and disdains the petty geographical 
 gauges by which it has been hitherto tried. Plato " aimed at 
 the sun," like Hercules of old ; but Macaulay has not, with 
 all his " thunder," broken the " shaft," which is still traveling 
 upwards with unabated speed in the heaven-sent breeze of 
 Christianity, and shall hit that far " White" in due time. Ba- 
 con's arrow has not pierced entirely through even his broad 
 targe this world. The " philosophy of Bacon began in ob- 
 servations and ended in arts;" Plato's began in instincts, and 
 shall end in a Daedalean crop of men. 
 
 Macaulay comes, in fine, to the question on which he lays 
 most stress that of the results of the two philosophies. On 
 this point we have touched already, but must be permitted 
 another word. Now, that many and wonderful results have 
 sprung from the pursuit of the Baconian plan of philosophis- 
 ing, is conceded at once. But are they, after all, equal to the 
 panegyrics bestowed on them ? Are they not principally 
 mechanical ? Have they made man, as a whole, much hap- 
 pier, wiser, or better ? What is " morality," or " moral 
 obligation," without "grounds" and Bacon has, according to 
 Macaulay, laid down no such grounds. He says, " he loved
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 263 
 
 to dwell on the power of the Christian religion, to effect much 
 that the ancient philosophers only promised." This might 
 have been only a compliment ; and how easy it were to turn 
 round and to say, " the objections to the ancient philosophy 
 you urge, may be urged, with equal force, against the Chris- 
 tian faith where do we find the moral perfection at which it 
 aimed? where the faultless men it sought to produce ? has 
 it not been a sublime failure ?" And so we grant it has ; un- 
 less you admit the facts of a great future, to which it points, 
 and of a supernatural intervention, which it promises. And 
 what we demand for Christianity, we demand also for the 
 Platonic philosophy. Like it, it has done much, but not 
 hitherto in proportion to the infinite scale it has itself fixed. 
 Yet we are willing to weigh even its present products against 
 Macaulay's elaborate list of the results of the Baconian me- 
 thod. " That has lengthened life" (Macaulay hopes, we sup- 
 pose, to live longer than Methuselah !), " mitigated pain" 
 (Christianity has no solace in it equal to chloroform !), " ex- 
 tinguished diseases" (by creating new ones), " increased the 
 fertility of the soil" (to the benefit of the serf, eh ?), " given 
 new securities to the mariner" (the polar star shone and the 
 needle trembled before Bacon was born), " furnished new 
 arms to the warrior" (is this a service to the human race ? 
 must the name of Bacon be written in blood ?), " spanned 
 great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to 
 our fathers" (what an achievement ! the rainbow is nothing to 
 it !), " guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to 
 earth" (shall we never hear the last of that poor, tattered, 
 tell-little kite of Franklin's, the Elijah's mantle of modern 
 philosophers ?), " lighted up the night with the splendor of 
 the day" (was it not so also in the halls of Persepolis and the 
 palaces of Babylon, or is all the glory of night included in 
 gas ?), " extended the range of the human vision, accelerated 
 motion, annihilated distance, facilitated intercourse, enabled 
 man to descend into the sea, soar into the air, penetrate into 
 the noxious recesses of the earth, traverse the land in cars 
 without horses;" and so on he goes, like the hack orator at a 
 Watt or Mechanics' Institute, through the wearisome round 
 of railways, diving-bells, baloons, safety lamps, &c. Splendid 
 toys, truly ! Childish things, fitting our present state of ad-
 
 264 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 vaucement. Nay, rather, conductors, laid out and waiting for 
 the electric influences of a better era. But to speak of them 
 as ends, as objects, as living things, as aught but dead trifles, 
 till the shadow of the divine be made to fall on them> and the 
 power of the divine to propel them, and the spirit of the di- 
 vine to animate them, is intolerable from one pretending to be 
 a philosopher. We throw into the scale over against them 
 the highest philosophy, poetry, and theology of the last two 
 centuries in Britain, Germany, and America, all of which has 
 been colored by the genius, and more or less inspired by the 
 spirit, of Plato, and also the deep spiritual effects and moral 
 movements which have sprung from these, and ask which is 
 likely to kick the beam ? And, if it be said that we are un- 
 fairly adding Christianity as a make-weight to Platonism, we 
 reply that the one is, in our notion, the other fulfilled the 
 other Deified, yet practicalized ; and that we have a right to 
 rate the system we defend at its best. 
 
 The philosophy of Bacon has sounded the ocean, but it has 
 ignored the profo under depth of the infinite in the soul of 
 man. It has brought down the lightnings on its rod, but they 
 have come reluctantly, and departed as much a mystery as 
 ever. It has told the number, but not the meaning, of the 
 stars, which roll on in their courses as inscrutable to us as 
 they were to the Chaldean shepherds. Treating man as a 
 cultivable ape, it has made his outward condition more com- 
 fortable ; it hurries him along the path to his grave on rail- 
 ways; it smooths the harsh, outward edges of his intercourse 
 with his fellow-man, but it leaves his heart as hard as it found 
 it ; it satisfies not, nor tries to satisfy, one of the deep thirsts 
 of his moral nature. It has not cast a gleam of light upon 
 the dark problems of his being, such as birth, sin, madness, or 
 death. It casts not, nor seeks to cast, a ray upon the life be- 
 yond ; it leaves a cloud of utter darkness upon his future pro- 
 gress on earth, and it neglects the care, if not denies the ex- 
 istence, of that immortal instinct which points up the poorest 
 scion of humanity to his Father in heaven. It is of the earth, 
 earthy ; nor is that earth regarded as God's footstool, or as 
 the springboard from which undying souls are to take their 
 bound upwards, but as the eternal womb, homestead, and 
 of certain erect compositions of clay, made, worked, and
 
 TttOMAS MACAULAY. 205 
 
 at last buried in night, by a mere mechanical power. Should* 
 once more the Baconian appeal to the " Great Exhibition," 
 and say, " Behold the triumph of my principles there," we 
 answer the splendor of the instance is granted ; we saw there 
 '* the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, in a mo- 
 ment of time ; M but not for the gift, instead of the sight, of 
 all this magnificence, would we bend down before the golden 
 calf. That exhibition was, after all, an exhibition of the works 
 of man's industry ; if we would see the works of God's indus- 
 try, we must look elsewhere to those books which his Spirit 
 has inspired, and to those men who bear his image, and fight 
 his battles. Millions flocked to see this great sight ; but there 
 are sentences in Plato, and far more in John, one of which is 
 worth the whole magnificent medley. And yet, were a new 
 truth of still more compact significance and grandeur, from 
 the same source, inscribed upon a pillar, and the existence of 
 that pillar announced to the ends of the earth, how few would 
 travel to read the same. So it is, but so it shall not always 
 be. Nay, it appears to us that the Great Exhibition brought 
 the Baconian system to a point ; it produced all that it could 
 do for humanity and may not this bright pinnacle of human 
 deed and skill have shone across the gulf, as a signal to the 
 superior and supernatural power, seeing in it man's splendid 
 impotence, and gilded wo, to take his case, and the remainder 
 of his otherwise hopeless destiny, by and by, into his own all- 
 wise, powerful, and merciful hands ? The cry of Plato was 
 for an avatar, and a fuller revelation of the Deity. That was 
 fulfilled in Christianity, but Christianity, in unison with crea- 
 tion, is beginning to cry aloud, in her turn, for a farther and 
 a final apotheosis. The words of John Foster are seldom to 
 be despised, and let both Baconian and Platonic Christian hear 
 him with attention, as he says, " Religion is utterly incompe- 
 tent to reform the world, till it is armed with some new and 
 most mighty powers till it appears in a new and la&t dispen- 
 sation." 
 
 Our space is exhausted, else we would have had rich pick- 
 ings of absurdity and weakness in the closing parts of Macau- 
 
 * This was written when the Great Exhibition was going on in Lon- 
 don. 
 
 10
 
 266 MODERN CRITICS. 
 
 lay's Essay where, for instance, he tells us gravely, " thai 
 the knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency to make 
 men good reasoners," an assertion equivalent to " the knowl- 
 edge of the theory of grammar has 110 tendency to make men 
 good grammarians," or, " a man may be a very good French 
 scholar, without studying French;" or where he reduces Ba- 
 con's claims to absolute zero, by telling us that his " rules are 
 not wanted, because, in truth, they only tell us to do what we 
 are all doing ;" or where, closing his estimate of what Bacon 
 has after all done, he calls him a " person who first called the 
 public attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth, which had 
 been utterly neglected, and was accessible by that road alone, 
 and thus caused that road which had been previously trodden 
 by peasants and higglers" (Platos and Aristotles ? nay, Johns 
 and Pauls ?), " to be frequented by a higher kind of travelers." 
 By-ends Bacon, we suppose, Demas Dumont, Save-all Joe 
 Hume, Hold-the- World Bentham, Young Atheist Holyoake, 
 Feel-the-Skull Combe, and My-Lord-Timeserver Mr. Ma- 
 caulay.
 
 NO. I CARLTLE AND STERLING.* 
 
 THIS volume has, for some months past, been expected, with a 
 kind of fearful curiosity, by the literary public. As for the 
 second shock of an earthquake after the first had sucked a 
 street into its jaws so had men, in silence and terror, been 
 waiting for its avatar. Every one was whispering to every 
 other, " What a bombshell is about to fall from Thomas Car- 
 lyle's battery! Nothing like it, we fear, since the 'Model 
 Prisons.' Let our theologians look to it !" Well, the book 
 has come at last, and, notwithstanding the evil animus of parts 
 of it, a milder, more tender, and more pleasant gossiping little 
 volume we have not read for many a day. The mountain has 
 been in labor, and lo ! a nice lively field-mouse, quite frisky 
 and good humored, has been brought forth. It is purely 
 ridiculous and contemptible to speak, with some of our con- 
 temporaries, of this volume as Mr. Carlyle's best, or as, in 
 any sense, a great work. The subject, as he has viewed it, 
 was not great, and his treatment of it, while exceedingly 
 graceful and pleasant, is by no means very powerful or very 
 profound. 
 
 In fact we look on it as a clever evasion of the matter in 
 hand. Why were the public so deeply interested in John 
 Sterling? Not on account of his genius, which was of a high, 
 but not the highest, order, and was not at all familiar, in its 
 fruits at least, to the generality. He was not a popular au- 
 thor. His conversational powers and private virtues were 
 
 * Life of John Sterling. By THOMAS CARLYLE.
 
 268 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 known only to his friends, But his mind had passed through 
 certain speculative changes, which invested him with a pro- 
 found and rather morbid interest, and gave him a typical or 
 representative character. He had been in youth a sceptic of 
 rather an ultra school. In early manhood he became a Cole- 
 ridgean Christian, and an active curate, and ere he died, he 
 relapsed into a modified and refined form of scepicism again. 
 This constituted the real charm which attracted men to Ster- 
 ling. This was the circle of lurid glory which bound his head, 
 and by which we tracked his steps through his devious and 
 dangerous wanderings. 
 
 But of all this there is far too little, although, in another 
 sense, that little is all too much. Sterling's private story is 
 very minutely and beautifully detailed. The current of his 
 literary career (a river flowing under ground !) is as carefully 
 mapped out as if it had been a Nile or a Ganges a broad 
 blessing to nations. But over the struggles of his inner life, 
 the steps, swift or slow, by which he passed from Radical Ra- 
 tionalism to Christianity, and thence to Straussism or Carlyl- 
 isrn, there is cast a veil, through which very little light, 
 indeed, is allowed to glimmer. To show how unfair and unsatis- 
 factory this plan of treatment is, let us conceive a new life of 
 Blanco White, in which all his changes of opinion were slurred 
 over ; or a life of Dr. Arnold, in which his achievements as a 
 schoolmaster and a politician were faithfully chronicled, but 
 the religious phases of his history were ignored. Now Ster- 
 ling's fame is, even more than theirs, based on his reputation 
 as an honest and agonised inquirer, and it is too bad to cloak 
 up the particulars of those earnest researches under general 
 terms, and to give us, instead of the information for which we 
 were panting, pictures of Welsh or West Indian scenery, one 
 or two vague ravings about the " Bedlam delusions" of our 
 day, and the " immensities and eternities" or letters so 
 selected or so garbled, that they shall cast no light upon the 
 more secret and interesting passages of his spiritual history. 
 
 The gentleness of the tone of the work, although only com- 
 parative, is an agreeable change from that of the " Latter-Day 
 Pamphlets," the language of which was frequently as coarse 
 and vulgar, as the spirit was fierce, and the views one-sided. 
 The Indian summer is often preceded by a short but severe
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING. 269 
 
 storm, and, perhaps, is softer arid more golden in prof ortion to 
 the roughness of the tempest. Mr. Carlyle, here, seems abso- 
 lutely in love ! Not above ten sentences of vituperation oc- 
 cur in the 344 pages. We suspect that the reception of the 
 " Model Prisons" has taught him that even his dynasty is not 
 infallible, and that bulls from Chelsea must modify their bel- 
 lowings, if they would not wish to be treated like bulls from 
 the Vatican. Whether he be or be not aware of the fact, his 
 giant shadow is passing swiftly from off the face of the public 
 mind, nor will the present change of tone retard its down-going. 
 It is too late. The gospel of negations has had its day, and 
 served its generation, and must give place to another and a 
 nobler evangel. 
 
 The book is most interesting from its relation to the biogra- 
 pher, and its true name is " Sterling's Carlyle." Few as the 
 religious allusions in it are, they are such as leave no doubt 
 upon our minds as to Carlyle's own views. His sneers at 
 Coleridge's theosophic moonshine at Sterling's belief in a 
 u personal God :" his suppression of an argument on this sub- 
 ject, drawn out by Sterling in a letter to himself (page 152) 
 his language in page 126, " no stars nor ever were, save cer- 
 tain old Jew ones, ^vh^ch have gone out' 1 ' 1 the unmitigated 
 contempt he pours out here and there on the clergy, and on the 
 Church, and, by inference and insinuation, upon the " tradi- 
 tions" and the "incredibilities" of Christianity all point to 
 the foregone conclusion, which he has, we fear, long ago 
 reached. With this conclusion we do not at present mean to 
 grapple; but we mean to mark, and very strongly to condemn, 
 the manner and spirit in which he has, although only here and 
 there, stated and enforced it. 
 
 Now, in the first place, although he must be sceptical, why 
 should he be profane ? He may curse, but why should he 
 sioear ? He may despise hypocrisy, and trample on cant, but 
 why should he insult sincere, albeit weak-minded belief? 
 Why such words as these, in reference to a Methodist, who 
 had displayed, in critical circumstances, a most heroic and no- 
 ble degree of courage " The last time I heard of him, he 
 wag a prosperous, modest dairyman, thankful for the upper 
 light, arid for deliverance from the warth to come ?" 
 
 Words these, " wrath to come," which shook the souls of
 
 270 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Cromwell, Milton and Howe, to their depths ; which arc still 
 capable of moving millions to fear, to faith, to morality, and 
 to love ; and which yet can only excite Mr. Carlyle to con- 
 temptuous derision. If there be one thought in the Christian 
 theology more tremendous than another, it is that of an un- 
 ceasing outflow of just vengeance, like a " pulsing aurora of 
 wrath," like an ever-rising sun of shame and fear, like a storm, 
 the clouds of which return after the rain not to be com- 
 pared to other wrathful phenomena, to the thunder-cloud 
 which gathers, bursts, passes on to other lands or to other 
 worlds, while the blue sky arises behind it in its calm im- 
 mortality ; nor to the pestilence, which breaks out like the 
 sudden springing of a mine, stamps with its foot, and awakens 
 death, but passes quickly away, and leaves the joy of health 
 and security behind; nor to the earthquake, which starts 
 up like a giant from his slumber, heaves mountains, troubles 
 oceans, swallows up cities, but speedily subsides, and again 
 the eternal hills rest and are silent ; but to itself only, for 
 it alone deserves the name of wrath ! And without dog- 
 matising or speculating on the real meaning or extent of this 
 predicted vengeance, surely a sneer can neither explain, nor 
 illuminate, nor prevent its coming ! There are many besides 
 poor Methodistic miners, who tremble at the words, " It is a 
 fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," and one 
 of them, unless we are much mistaken, is, at times, the melan- 
 choly Polyphemus of Chelsea. 
 
 Secondly, why does he so often edge his evident earnestness 
 with a levity and a mockery which remind you of Voltaire 
 himself? Why thus delight in forming an ungainly and hor- 
 rible hybrid ? Deep solemn thought is on his brow; love is 
 swimming wildly in his eye; but a sneer, keen as if it were 
 the essence of all sneers, past, present, and to come, ever and 
 anon palpitates on his lips. Why is this ? Even as an engine 
 of assault, such ridicule is powerless. Laughter, ere it can 
 kill, must be given forth with all one's heart and soul, and 
 mind and strength ; must be serious, and total. But Thomas 
 Carlyle cannot thus laugh at any sincere faith ; his mirth, like 
 Cromwell's speeches, " breaks down," chokes in his throat, or 
 dies away in a quaver of consternation. But why ever begin 
 what his heart will not permit him to finish ?
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING. 271 
 
 Thirdly, his contempt for the office of the Christian minis- 
 try is so violent, and almost ferocious, as to increase the sus- 
 picion that he loves Christianity as little as he does its clergy. 
 He speaks of Sterling's brief curateship as the great mistake 
 of his life nay, as if it amounted to a stain and crime. It 
 did not appear so to poor Sterling himself, who, when dying, 
 begged for the old Bible he used at Herstmonceux among the 
 cottages, and seems to have died with it in his arms. It does 
 not appear so to us. A curate, however mistaken, " going 
 about doing good," is a nobler spectacle, we fancy, than a 
 soured and stationary litterateur, sitting with a pipe in his 
 mouth, and, like the character in the Psalms, " puffing out 
 despite" at all his real or imaginary foes. Sir James Macin- 
 tosh thought otherwise of ministerial work, when he congratu- 
 lated Hall on having turned from philosophy and letters to 
 the " far nobler task of soothing the afflicted, succoring the 
 distressed, and remembering the forgotten." We have no 
 passion, verily for " surplices," nor respect for many whom 
 they cover ; but we know that they have been worn by men 
 whose shoe-latchets neither John Sterling nor Thomas Carlyle 
 are worthy to unloose ; and are still worn by some, at least, 
 their equals in powers and in virtues, in scrupulosity of con- 
 science, and in tenderness and dignity of walk. John Sterling 
 would have been a far better, happier, and greater man, had 
 he remained a working curate to the last, instead of becoming 
 a sort of petty Prometheus, equally miserable, and nearly as 
 idle, with a big black crow (elegantly mistaken for a vulture) 
 pecking at his morbid liver. And, for our part, we would 
 rather be a humble city missionary, grappling with vulgar sin 
 and misery, in the lanes of one of our cities nay, a little 
 child repeating, " Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me," at his 
 mother's knee, than sit with Sartor on his burning and totter- 
 ing throne ! 
 
 We have something more still to add. We respect an<? 
 love much about Mr. Carlyle ; we think him naturally a great, 
 earnest, true-hearted man. We sympathise cordially with his 
 crusade against shams. We can pardon, or at least wink hard 
 at, the recent outpourings of his wrath against the most emi- 
 nent of practical philanthropists, tracing them to a foul sto- 
 mach, and not to a black heart. But we should like him to
 
 272 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES.. 
 
 " deliver his soul" more even than here, on a topic to which 
 he often alludes, but on which he is never so explicit as he 
 should be Christianity. We think we know his sentiments 
 on the subject. He does not, we fear, acknowledge its pecu- 
 liar and divine claims. Seeing clearly that there are but two 
 alternatives, revelation or despair, he has deliberately chosen 
 the latter. The authority of the Bible is one of those things 
 " which the light of his own mind, the direct inspiration of 
 the Almighty, pronounces incredible." 
 
 But a large proportion of the public are still in the dark as 
 to his religious sentiments. We have heard him claimed by 
 intelligent ministers of the Free Church of Scotland as a 
 Christian, nay, a Puritan. Others, not quite so far astray, 
 look upon his religious opinions as uncertain, vague, indefinite, 
 perhaps not yet fully formed. This is the fault of his mystic 
 and tantalising mode of expression. Not every eye can pierce 
 through the fantastic veil he wears, and see behind it the fea- 
 tures of a mere nature and duty worshipper. That veil, we 
 think, he is, as an honest and earnest man, bound entirely to 
 drop. Masks may be pardoned in a tournament, but not in 
 hot and eager battle. The question as to the truth of Chris- 
 tianity has become the engrossing question of this age, aud we 
 cannot now bear with men who appear to halt between two 
 opinions. The cry was never more distinctly or loudly 
 sounded than it is at present, " Who is on the Lord's side, 
 who ?" Differences of opinion on minor matters of religion 
 may be pardoned ; " orthodoxy" and " heterodoxy" have be- 
 come terms equally unmeaning, and equally contemptible. 
 But this is now the point at issue : Is Christianity, as a 
 whole, a truth or a falsehood, a sham or a reality the lie of 
 the earth, or the one thing in its history worth loving, valuing, 
 or trusting in ? While the more resolute of sceptics, such as, 
 the worthies of the " Westminster Review," have taken iheir 
 stand, and proclaimed " war to the knife," and while the 
 defenders of Christianity are buckling on their armor, it will 
 not much longer do for men like Mr. Carlyle to utter an 
 uncertain sound, and to hang off on the outskirts of the great 
 battle. In this " Life of Sterling," its author had a good 
 opportunity of declaring himself fully on the subject, and the.
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING. 273 
 
 public were expecting it ; but they have been again doomed 
 to disappointment. 
 
 With regard to John Sterling, there is not very much added 
 to our previous information ; but beautiful lights, like the 
 golden gleams of an autumn afternoon, are cast upon his char- 
 acter. His " nomadic" existence a wanderer in evasion of 
 death is most picturesquely narrated. Bute, Glamorgan- 
 shire, Madeira, St. Vincent, Italy, and Clifton, all sit for por- 
 traits, which are alike faithful and poetic. Old Sterling of 
 the " Times" " Captain Whirlwind" comes and goes in a 
 very striking manner. Coleridge sits in Highgate, weaving 
 endless webs of " theosophic moonshine," or walks along both 
 sides of the garden gravel, from uncertainty as to which to 
 take ! (Hazlitt, we remember, describes him even when young 
 as perpetually crossing the road, and ascribes it to instability 
 of purpose.) And the various members of the Sterling Club, 
 including Carlyle himself, are introduced at intervals, to add 
 life and interest to the somewhat melancholy and monotonous 
 story. 
 
 It is indeed a sad narrative. John Sterling died a young 
 man , but he had passed through ages of bodily suffering and 
 mental endurance. He "lived fast," although not in the com- 
 mon sense of that expression. His life was one hectic fever ; 
 and yet his peculiarly buoyant and sanguine temperament 
 enabled him to endure with grace and dignity. His mental 
 struggles, though severe, were not of that awful earthquaking 
 kind which shook the soul of Arnold, and drove Sartor howl- 
 ing through the Everlasting No, like a lion caught in a forest 
 of fire. It was rather a swift succession of miseries, than one 
 deep devouring anguish. Yet the close was truly tragical. 
 How affecting the words of his last letter to his biographer, " I 
 tread the common road into the great darkness without any 
 thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty, 
 indeed, I have none." 
 
 He adds, in reference to Carlyle, " Towards me it is still 
 more true than towards England, that no man has been, and 
 done like you." We are tempted to a very opposite conclu- 
 sion ; we think, that unintentionally Mr. Carlyle was the 
 means of mortal injury to Sterling's mind. He shook his 
 attachment to Coleridge, and thus to Christianity; stripping
 
 /i74 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 him of that garment of " moonshine," he Itft him naked. 
 Shattering the creed Sterling had attained, he supplied him 
 with no other. That Sterling was friendly and grateful to 
 him to the last, is abundantly evident ; but that he was satis- 
 fied with his position on that cold, Goethe-like, godless crag 
 to which Mr. Carlyle's hand had helped him up, is not so 
 clear ; his calling for the Bible in his last hours is against the 
 supposition that he was.* He took, at least, a Protestant 
 extreme unction. We can almost fancy the stern Sartor in 
 his last moments doing the same ; and, as is fabulously re- 
 ported of Godwin, " making a good end as a Methodist." 
 
 The book does not at all modify our verdict of Sterling's 
 literary character. He was rather brilliant than profound ; 
 rather swift than strong; rather a man of rare ingenuity and 
 culture, than a man of transcendent genius. He was more of 
 a rapid runner than of a sturdy athlete. His powers were sin- 
 gularly varied and versatile ; and though he has left nothing 
 behind him which the world shall not willingly let die, he has 
 done so much, and that so well, as to excite keen regret at his 
 premature departure. We think prose, and not poetry, was 
 Ids proper department, and that in one region that, namely, 
 of high and solemn fiction he would have had few superiors. 
 Mr. Carlyle predicates great things of a poem on Coeur de 
 Lion, which he left unfinished. Why is it not given to the 
 world ? His " Onyx Ring" is perhaps the best of his pro 
 ductions. In it he shadows forth Goethe and Carlyle as 
 Walsingham and Collins. Both portraitures are true to the 
 life. The polished colossal coldness of the great German, and 
 the wild, unhappy fire of the Scotchman, are made to give and 
 lend illustration and relief to each other. His views of Goethe, 
 Mr. Carlyle aifirms, underwent a change, and he died, it seems, 
 a profound worshipper of the " Pagan," as he had previously 
 called him. He might, had he lived, have altered his opinion 
 again. Mr. Carlyle's inordinate attachment to Goethe has 
 always seemed to us inscrutable. It is the fire-king worship- 
 ping a gigantic iceberg a pure man adoring a splendid sen- 
 sualist a sincere man admiring a consummate courtier the 
 
 * Since writing the above, we saw an acquaintance of Sterling's, 
 who assured us that he did not die a Carlylist, but a Christian
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING. 275 
 
 most ardent worshipping the coldest of all men of genius 
 'tis verily a great mystery. We can only solve it upon the 
 principle of those marriages where the parties seem to have 
 selected each other on account of their absolute and ideal 
 unlikeuess. 
 
 We cannot close without adverting again to that topic 
 which has invested Sterling with so much painful interest his 
 unsettled religion, and the representative he thus becomes of 
 thousands iu our day. A few general remarks on this subject 
 must suffice. 
 
 That the times in which we live have assumed a dubious 
 and portentous aspect, on the subject of religion, is a fact gen- 
 erally admitted. There are, indeed, still some who persist in 
 closing their eyes to the dangers by which we are environed, 
 and in crying out, " Peace, peace, when there is no peace." 
 These men, while listening to the loud masonry of rising 
 churches, to the plaudits of May meetings, and to the far- 
 borne hum of missionary schools, have no ears for the roar of 
 the fountains of the great deep of thought which are breaking 
 up around them, or to the noise of the " multitudes, the mul- 
 titudes " rapidly convening in the valley of decision. But he 
 who can abstract himself from nearer and more clamorous 
 sounds, and from the pleasing but partial prospects which are 
 under his eye, becomes aware of many and complicated dan- 
 gers, which seem deepening into a crisis, darkening into a noon 
 of night, above the head of all the churches of Christ. Every 
 one remembers the remarkable passage in Lord Chesterfield's 
 letters, written in France before the Revolution, where he ex- 
 presses his conviction that he is surrounded by all the tokens 
 and symbols of a falling empire. So it now implies no pre- 
 tensions to prophetic insight for any one to declare that he 
 lives amid the auguries of a coming religious revolution to 
 equal which we must travel back eighteen centuries, and 
 which, like that succeeding the death of Christ, has bearings 
 and promises consequences of transcendent importance and 
 unending interest. 
 
 The symptoms of this great revolution include the general 
 indefinite panic of apprehension which prevails in the minds 
 of Christians ; the increase of a slow, quiet, but profound 
 spirit of doubt among many classes of men ; the spread of
 
 276 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Popery (the coming forth of which Beast of Darkness is it- 
 self a proof that there is a night at hand); the re-agitation of 
 many questions which, in general belief, seemed settled for 
 ever ; the fact that all churches are shaking visibly, some of 
 them, indeed, concealing their tremor under energetic convul- 
 sions ; the fact that, like those plants which close up at eve- 
 ning, a few of our rigid sects are drawing more closely within 
 themselves ; the loosening of the bands of creeds and confes- 
 sions ; the growing disregard to the wisdom, and disbelief in 
 the honesty and ward, of the men of the past ; the uprise of 
 a stern individualism and of a personal habit of analysis, 
 which leaves nothing unexamined, and takes nothing on trust ; 
 the eagerness with which every innovation is welcomed, and 
 every new cry of " Lo here, or lo there," is heard ; the signi- 
 ficant circumstance that many from the most diverse classes, 
 the litterateur, the inquiring mechanic, the statesman, the 
 youth, the accomplished lady, are united in restless dissatisfac- 
 tion with our present forms of faith, or in open protest against 
 them ; the innumerable defences of the old, which every day 
 sees procreated to leave little or no practical result ; the yawn- 
 ing chasm in the public mind, crying out, " Give, give " a 
 chasm widening continually, and into which no Curtius has 
 hitherto precipitated himself; the hurry of the weaker of the 
 community to plunge into the arms of implicit faith, or of low 
 infidelity, or of hardened indifference ; and the listening atti- 
 tude of the stronger and better of the literary man for his 
 ideal artist of the student of morals and mind for his new 
 Plato of the politician for his " coming man " of the Chris- 
 tian thinker for the Paul of the Present, if not for the Jesus 
 of the Past ; such are only a few of the phenomena which 
 prove that the silent frozen seas of an ancient era of thought 
 are breaking up, and that another is about to succeed ; that 
 " old things are passing away, and all things becoming new;" 
 and that, moreover, this mighty change will, in all probability, 
 be accompanied by the blackness, and darkness, and tempest, 
 the voices, and thunders, and lightnings, amid which, in every 
 age, great dynasties, whether temporal or spiritual, have been 
 overturned or changed. 
 
 " Overturned or changed." These are words on which 
 much depends ; and on them we join issue with Mr. Carlyle
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING. 277 
 
 and his school. Their cry, open or stifled, is, " Raze, raze it 
 to the foundations." Ours is, "Reform, rebuild." "Fight 
 on in the remaining virtue and strength of the system, till the 
 expected reserve, long promised, come up to your aid." 
 Change, vital and radical, there must be ; and the great ques- 
 tion with the intelligent is, how far is it to extend; how much 
 of the old is to be left ; and how much to be taken away ? 
 
 This question is too large for our present discussion ; but 
 this we must say, that, while we deeply condemn the destruc- 
 tive purpose and spirit of Mr. Carlyle and his party, we have 
 just as little sympathy with those who imagine that Christian- 
 ity is in a very comfortable and prosperous condition. Surely 
 these men have " eyes, but see not ; ears, but hear not ; they 
 know not, neither do they understand." We seem, on the 
 other hand, to see distinctly the following alarming facts. 
 
 First, Christianity, in its present forms, or shall we say dis- 
 guises, has ceased, to a great extent, to be considered a soli- 
 tary divine thing. It is no longer with men " the one thing 
 needful." It has come down to, or below, the level of the 
 other influences which sway our age. ' The oracular power 
 which once dwelt in the pulpit has departed to the printing- 
 press on the other side of the way. The parish church, which 
 once lorded it over the landscape, and pointed its steeple like 
 a still finger of hushing awe ; and even the Minister, lifting 
 up a broader hand of more imperative power, have found for- 
 midable rivals, not only in the dissenting chapel, but in the 
 private school, nay, in the public house of the village, where 
 men talk, and think, and form passionate purposes over new 
 journals and old ale. Sermons are now criticised, not obeyed, 
 and when our modern Pauls preach, our Felixes yawn instead 
 of trembling. Ministers have for the most part become a 
 timid and apologetic class ; the fearlessness of Knox is seldom 
 met, save among the fanatics of their number, in whom it looks 
 simply ludicrous. The thunders of the pulpit have died away, 
 or when they are awakened, it is through the preacher's deter- 
 mination to be popular, or through the agitation of his despair. 
 In general, he consults, not commands, the taste of his audi- 
 ence ; and his word, unlike that of his professed Master, is 
 ivithout authority, and, therefore, as that of the scribes, nay, 
 less powerful far than theirs. John Howe could preach six
 
 273 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 hours to unwearied throngs ; twenty years ago, Edward Irving 
 could protract his speech to midnight ; but now a sermon of 
 forty minutes, even from eloquent lips, is thought sufficiently 
 exhaustive, both of the subject and of the audience. The pri- 
 vate influence of clergymen is still considerable ; but it is that 
 of the respective individuals, not of the general class ; and 
 where now, in reference to even the best of their number, that 
 deep devotion to their persons, that submission to their slight- 
 est words, that indulgence to their frailties, and that plenary 
 confidence in their honesty, which linked our fathers to them, 
 and them to our fathers ? a submission and indulgence from 
 which, doubtless, great evils sprang, but which sprang from 
 principles deeper than the evils, and which were rooted in the 
 genuine belief of Christianity which then prevailed. 
 
 There are other ills behind. The written documents of the 
 churches have lost much of their influence ; always dry, they 
 are now summer dust. What man among twenty thousand in 
 Scotland has read the Westminster Confession ; and what man 
 in a million in England the Thirty-nine Articles ? The very 
 curses of the Athanasian Creed have become cold, and now 
 cease to irritate, because they are no longer read. Catechisms 
 chiefly rule the minds of children, who do not, however, be- 
 lieve them so firmly, or love them so well, as their fathers 
 when they were children. Even to clergymen such documents 
 have become rather fences, keeping them away from danger, 
 than living expressions of their own faith and hope. They 
 sign, and never open them any more ! And thus those un- 
 happy books, although containing in them much eternal truth, 
 although written by men of insight, learning, and profound 
 earnestness, occupy a place equally painful and ludicrous ; 
 they are attacked by few, they are defended by few, they are 
 read by none, they are allowed to sleep till an ordination day 
 comes round, and, after it is over, they lapse into dust and 
 darkness again. Sometimes editions of them are placarded on. 
 the walls as " reduced in price." Alas ! their value, too, is 
 reduced to a degree which might disturb the shades of Twiss 
 and Ridgeley. Ancient medals, marbles, fossil remains, nay, 
 modern novels, are regarded now with far more interest and 
 credence than tho.se articles of faith which originally came forth
 
 CARLYLE AND STERLING 279 
 
 baptised in the sweat and blood of our early reformers and re- 
 reformers. 
 
 Nay, to pass from man's word to God's word, the Bible 
 itself, the book of the world, the Alp of literature, the old 
 oracle of the past, the word of light, which has cast its solemn 
 ray upon all books and all thoughts, and was wont, as the sun 
 evening clouds, to transfigure even the doubts and difficulties 
 which assailed it into embers in its own burning glory ; the 
 Bible, too, has suffered from the analysis, the coldness, and 
 the uncertainty of our age. It is circulated, indeed, widely; 
 it is set in a prominent place in our exhibitions ; it lies in the 
 boudoir of our sovereign, gilded, elegantly lettered, and splen- 
 didly bound. It is quoted now in Parliament without provok- 
 ing a laugh ; its language is frequently used by our judges, 
 even when they are trampling on its precepts, and dooming poor 
 ignorant wretches to be " hanged by the neck till they be dead," 
 with sentences from the Sermon on the Mount in their wise and 
 solemn threats. It is sometimes seen on the death-bed of scep- 
 tics; when assailed, the attack is generally prefaced by a deep 
 bow of real or apparent respect ; such a reverence as might be 
 given by a revolutionist to a fallen king. But where is the 
 crown wherewith its Father crowned it ? Where the red circle 
 of Sinaitic fire about its brows? Where the halo of Calvary ? 
 Where the awful reverence which once ringed in its every page, 
 and made even its chronologies and naked names hallowed and 
 sublime? Where the feeling which dictated the title which, 
 although not expressly given by God, yet, coming out from the 
 deep heart of man's devotion, might be called divine, and 
 might be compared to God's " naming of the stars" th$ 
 "Holy Bible?" Where the thunder, blended with still 
 small voices of equal power, which once ran down the ages, 
 came all from the one Hebrew cave, and which to hear was to 
 obey, and to obey was to worship ? Has its strength gone out 
 from it ? is it dead, or has it become weak as other books ? 
 No ; its life, its divine stamp and innate worth, remain ; but 
 they are disputed, or only half acknowledged, when not alto- 
 getlaer ignored. 
 
 Such are a few of the symptoms of our spiritual disease. 
 We have not room to dilate on our conceptions of the remedy. 
 Suffice it at present to say, that our conviction is decided (an<?
 
 280 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 that of the age shall soon come to the same point), that there 
 is nothing more to be expected from Carlylism ; that bomb- 
 shell has burst, and its fragments are colored with the blood 
 of John Sterling, and hundreds besides him ! The city " No," 
 to use the prophet's language, has been long a " populous 
 city;" but its population must become thinner. The "ever- 
 lasting Yea," on the other hand, has fair turrets and golden 
 spires ; but it is a city in the clouds, abandoned, too, by its 
 builder ; there is no such place, either in this world or in that 
 which is to come. There seems nothing for it but downright 
 'naturalism, which means flat desperation, or a return to Chris- 
 tianity, in a new, higher, and more hopeful form. We, at 
 least, have made up our minds to cling to the old banner of 
 the cross ; expecting that since Jesus has already shaken the 
 world by his accents, as no man ever did, he has only to speak 
 " once more," at his own time, and in the language of the 
 " two-edged sword," which issues from his glorified lips to 
 revolutionise society, to purify the thrashing-floor of his church, 
 and to introduce that " milder day," for which, in all dialects 
 and in all ages, the true, the noble, the gifted, and the pious, 
 have been breathing their prayers. If we err in this, we err 
 in company with John Milton, and with many, only less than 
 he. 
 
 Since writing the first half of our critique, we have read the 
 " Times" on " Carlyle's Sterling." We are, in general, no 
 admirers of that " perpetual Prospectus," that gigantic Jesuit 
 of the press, that Cerberus with three heads, three tongues, 
 and no heart ; which can be bribed, though not bought ; sop- 
 ped, but not enticed to the upper air (and the Hercules to 
 drag up this Jog of darkness has not yet arrived); but we 
 have for once been delighted with an effusion from Printing- 
 house Square. The thunderbolts are well fabricated, and ar<* 
 strongly pointed at Mr. Carlyle's entirely negative and un 
 satisfactory mode of thought ; at his systematic, though sub 
 voce, depreciation of Christianity ; at the gloomy bile which 
 spots the splendor of his genius ; at the charges of " coward- 
 ice" and weakness which he dashes in the face of every one 
 who ventures to believe Christianity, or to pray to the Al- 
 mighty Father; at the deliberate darkness be piles, or at least 
 leaves unmitigated, around the religious creed and last ex-
 
 EMERSON. 
 
 periences of poor Sterling ; and at the fierce and disgusting 
 dogmatism, which is often his substitute for logic, and his pis 
 aller for inspiration. But we do not believe, with the " Times" 
 that in this book Thomas's wrath has got to its height -, for, 
 in fact, it is mere milk-and-water compared to his " Pam^ 
 phlets ;" nor do we think that his temper is his greatest fault ; 
 pride, according to the measure of a demon, is his raging sin ; 
 and no words in Scripture are more repulsive to him than 
 these, " Except a man become as a little child, he shall in no 
 wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." But none are more 
 tnic, and, to a large portion of men, none more terrible. 
 
 NO, II.-EMERSON,* 
 
 THE fame of Emerson has had a singular cycle of history, 
 within the last thirteen years, in Britain. His first Essays, 
 re-published in 1841, with a preface by Carlyle, were, on the 
 whole, coldly welcomed by the public ; with the exceptions of 
 the " Eclectic Review," which praised their genius while con- 
 demning their opinions, and " Tait's Magazine," the monthly 
 and quarterly press either ignored or abused them. Their ad- 
 mirers, indeed, were very ardent, but they were very few, and 
 principally young men, whose enthusiasm was slightly shaded 
 with a sceptical tendency. Between this period and his visit 
 to Britain, in 1848, a great revolution in his favor had taken 
 place. The publication of a second volume of Essays, still 
 more peculiar and daring than the first, the re-appearance of 
 his tractate, entitled " Nature" the most complete and 
 polished of all his works the deepening enthusiasm of his ad- 
 mirers, and the exertions of one or two of them, who had gain- 
 ed the ear of the public, and were determined to fill it with his 
 fame, as well as the real merit of his writings, had amply pre- 
 
 * The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
 
 282 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES 
 
 pared the country for his approach, when, among the last days 
 of 1847, he set the impress of his foot upon our shores. Then 
 his name and influence came to a culminating point, and ever 
 since they seem to us to have declined. For this, various 
 causes may be assigned. 
 
 In the first place, his appearance disappointed many ; they 
 did not meet the rapt, simple, dreaming enthusiast of whom 
 they had been dreaming. 
 
 Secondly, his Lectures were chiefly double entendres. There 
 were alike commissions and omissions in them, which proved 
 this to a certainty. We have seen him scanning an audience 
 ere he resolved which of two lectures he should give. Thin]; 
 of Paul on Mars Hill, balancing between two Greek variations 
 of his immortal speech, or, on consideration, choosing another 
 text than " Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye 
 worship DEMONS too much." We have heard of him, too, 
 sacrificing, to suit an audience, the principal pith, marrow, and 
 meaning of a whole lecture ; as if, in quoting the words, " thou 
 shalt worship the Lord thy God," he had slily and sub voce 
 substituted the little word " not." Nay, even when there was 
 no such disingenuous concealment or subtraction, there was a 
 game of " hide-and-seek" continually going on a use of Scrip- 
 ture phrases in an unscriptural sense, a trimming, and turn- 
 ing, and terror at the prejudices of his audience, altogether 
 unworthy of his genius. Indeed, we wonder that the tribe of 
 expectant materialists in England and Scotland, with Holy- 
 oake, MacAll, and George Combe at their head, had not, dis- 
 gusted at the doubledealing of their American champion, met 
 at Berwick-upon-Tweed, and burned him in effigy. They, at 
 least, are direct, and honest, and thoroughgoing men, we mean 
 animals, for they are perpetually boasting of their lineal de- 
 scent from brutes, and reptiles, and fishes, and slime, and 
 everything but God, and we are not disposed to deny their 
 far-come and dearly-won honors, or to quarrel, so far as they 
 are concerned, with this mud heraldry. 
 
 Thirdly, the better portion of the age is fast becoming sick 
 of all systems of mere negation. And what else is Emerson's ? 
 Any man who has ever thought for himself is competent to 
 deny, and even to make his system of denial almost impregna- 
 ble. A child of six or seven is quite able to trace the syllable
 
 EMERSON. 283 
 
 No. To use again the allusion of the prophet, " it is a popu- 
 lous city No ;" and assuredly Emerson keeps one of its prin- 
 cipal gates. But, with the exception of a mangled Platonism, 
 although he seldom if ever quotes the Greek of Plato, there is 
 not a trace of system, of consistent intuition, of progressive 
 advancement in thought, in all his writings. In one part of 
 them he makes man's soul all ; in a second, he makes nature 
 all ; and, in a third, he magnifies some shadowy abstraction 
 which he calls the " Oversoul," a sort of sublime overhead 
 negro-driver, compelling men to hell or heaven, as seems good 
 in his own blind eyes. In one place he declares that society 
 never advances, and in another he gives a chart of a Millen- 
 nium in society which love is by " pushing" to produce. Con- 
 tradictory intuitions, as he would call them, abound in al- 
 most every page, and the question naturally arises, which are 
 we to believe ? which of the deliverances of this Paul-Pyrrho, 
 this oracular sceptic, this captive tq, the " Oversoul," are we 
 to receive as his ? To refute them were difficult, because, in 
 the first place, it is not easy to see what they are ; because, 
 secondly, he often saves us the trouble, by contradicting thein 
 in the next page or volume himself; and because, thirdly, while 
 it is the simplest matter in the world to rear or to dwell in the 
 " City No," it is the most difficult matter to overturn it. It 
 is like hunting a dream, or trampling on a shade, or fitting out 
 an expedition to overset Aladdin's palace. 
 
 Such are some of the reasons why Emerson's influence over 
 the young, sincere, and liberal minds of the age must rapidly 
 go down like an October sun, very bright, but which is too 
 late for ripening anything, and which, after a brief meridian, 
 and a briefer afternoon, sinks, as if in haste and confusion, be- 
 low the horizon. Another reason we are reluctantly, and in 
 deep sorrow, compelled to add Emerson is one of the few 
 sceptics who has personally, and by name, insulted the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and, through him, that Humanity of which Je- 
 sus is the Hope, the Glory, the Ideal, and the Crown. This 
 extreme Carlyle has always avoided, and he has never spoken 
 of Christ, or of the Divine Mystery implied in him, but with 
 deep reverence. Many other of the sublimer order of doubt- 
 ers have been equally guarded. But Emerson, with Julian 
 the Apostate, Voltaire, Paine, and Francis Newman, must
 
 284 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 bear the brand of using language to Christ which no man of 
 culture would now apply to a Caesar, a Dan ton, or a Napoleon. 
 He says, " this shoves Jesus and Judas both aside." Ho 
 speaks, again, of Christ's " tropes," as if the man who died on 
 Calvary because he would not lie, was an exaggerator and a 
 rhetorician, when he said, " I and my Father are one," or, a he 
 that has seen me, has seen the Father." 
 
 We have heard a dog baying at the moon we have heard 
 of a maniac spitting foam at the stars -we have watched the 
 writhings of crushedjnediocrity as it gazed on the bright pages 
 of genius and we have understood, excused, pittied, and for- 
 given all such in their morbid or mistaken feelings. But how 
 one calling himself a man, and reputed really a man of genius, 
 could, in his most unhappy hour, have uttered a word against 
 our Brother God the Eternal Child the Babe in the 
 Manger the Boy in the Temple the Carpenter in the Shed 
 the Weeper at the Grave the Sufferer on the Cross the 
 Risen from the Tomb the Exalted to the Heavens the 
 Friend by eminence of our fallen Family the Expected from 
 the Clouds The Type and Test of whatever is holy, and 
 charitable, and lovely, and lofty in the race of man passes 
 our conceptions, and has strained to its utmost our power of 
 forgiveness. 
 
 Why, we must also inquire, has he said such things, and 
 yet not said more of Jesus ? " What thinkest thou of Christ ?" 
 If he was an impostor, say so. If he was a madman, say so. 
 If he was God in human shape, say so. If he is merely the 
 conventional ideal of human nature, say so more distinctly. 
 If he is neither, nor all of these, then what is he ? whence has 
 he come? Emerson, while striking hard, and often, and open- 
 ly, at the divinity of Jesus, and not sparing quiet sotto voce 
 insinuations against his character and his power over the 
 minds of men, has never yet propounded or sought to pro- 
 pound any probable or intelligible theory of Christ. He has 
 simply, with muttered, or more than muttered, sneers or sighs 
 over his unacknowledged claims, turned away, refusing to look 
 at or to worship this " great sight." 
 
 Man seems the Christ of Emerson. And a sorry Christ he 
 is. " Man," says Bacon, " is the god of the dog ;" but were 
 a dog fancying himself a man, it were a supposition less mon-
 
 EMERSON. 285 
 
 strous than the universal Immanuelisin of Emrfrsou. If man 
 be the Christ, where are the works which prove him so ? If 
 every man has the divinity within him, why are the majority 
 of men so corrupt and malignant ? If the history of man be 
 the history of God in human nature, why is it little else than 
 ono tissue of blood, falsehood, and low sin ? We think he 
 might far more plausibly start and defend the hypothesis that 
 man is the devil ; and that his history has hitherto been but 
 a long development of diabolism. And, in proving this, ha 
 might avail himself to great advantage of Quetelet's tables, 
 which demonstrate the significant fact, that certain works of a 
 rather infernal character, such as murder, arson, and rape, re- 
 appear in steady and mathematical succession, and no more 
 than summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, are ever to 
 cease. The presence of such an eternal law would go far to 
 prove that man was an immutable and hopeless child of hell. 
 Many strange deductions seem to follow from Emerson's 
 theory, nay, are more or less decidedly admitted by him. If 
 man be the Christ or God incarnate, then there can be no such 
 thing as guilt, uiid there ought to be no such thing as punish- 
 ment. Whatever is done, is done, not by God's permission or 
 command, but by God himself. God is at once the judge and 
 the offender. If man be God tncarnate, it follows that he is 
 the creator of all things. This Emerson repeatedly intimates. 
 The sun is but a splendid mote in man's eye ; the moon is but 
 his produced and prolonged smile ; the earth is the shadow of 
 his shape ; the stars are lustres in the room of his soul ; the 
 universe is the bright precipitate of his thought. He is the 
 Alpha and Omega, the beginning of the Creation of God, and 
 its ending too. " The simplest person," he says, " who, in his 
 integrity, worships God, becomes God." It follows, again, 
 that no supernaturalism ever did or ever could exist. It was, 
 according to Emeraon, Moses, not Jehovah, who spoke on 
 Sinai. It was Isaiah's own human soul which saw the fate of 
 empires as distinctly as we see stars falling through the mid- 
 night. It was the mere man Christ Jesus, who taught, and 
 worked, and died in Judea. The possibility, in like manner, 
 of any future revelation from heaven is ignored ignored by 
 the denial of any heaven save the mind of man. This is the 
 dunghill-Olympus on which Emerson seats his shadowy gods.
 
 286 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 And whatever strange and aerial-seeming shapes may hereaf- 
 ter appear upon its summit, are to be in reality only sublima- 
 ted mud the beauty and the strength of dirt. " Man," to 
 use Foster's language, is to produce an " apotheosis of him- 
 self, by the hopeful process of exhausting his own corruptions," 
 or sublimating them into a putrid holiness. 
 
 It follows, again, that whatever he may say in particular 
 passages, there can be no advancing or steady progress in 
 humanity. The laws which develop it are unchangeable, the 
 climate in which it lives is subject to very slight variations ; 
 its " Oversoul" is a stern demon, with, perhaps, as he says, 
 " a secret kindness in its heart," but outwardly a very Moloch 
 of equal calm and cruelty ; and under his eye, society and 
 man must work, and bleed, and suffer on, upon this rolling 
 earth, as on an eternal treadmill in a mist. 'Tis a gospel of 
 despair, which in reality he teaches, of the deepest and the 
 most fixed despair. The dungeon into which he introduces 
 his captives is cold and low ; it has no outlet : no key called 
 Promise is to be found therein ; the sky, indeed, is seen above 
 through the dome, but it is distant dark with strange and 
 melancholy stars, and but one hope, like a cup of prison- 
 water, is handed round among the dwellers in this dreary 
 abode that of Death. And yet, but of late thousands of 
 our young, rising, and gifted minds were, and many are still, 
 forsaking the free atmosphere, the strait but onward way, and 
 the high-hung star of hope, and Christianity, for this dismal, 
 insulated, and under-ground abyss, where the very light is as 
 darkness. It follows, again, that humility and all its cognate 
 virtues are mere mistakes. " Trust thyself every heart 
 vibrates to that iron string." A greater than Emerson said, 
 two thousand years ago, " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for 
 theirs is the kingdom of heaven;" and another of the same 
 school said, "When ye are weak, then are ye strong." We 
 are not defending a false or voluntary humility. But surely, 
 unless you can prove that all strength, and purity, and peace, 
 are enclosed in yourself, to bow before the higher to draw 
 strength from the stronger to worship the divine is the 
 dictate of cultured instinct, as well as of common sense. 
 Almost all the powers and elements of nature combine in 
 teaching man the one great simple word, " Bend." u Bend,"
 
 EMERSON. 287 
 
 the winds say it to the tall pines, and they gaiu the curve of 
 their magnificence by obeying. " Bend," gravitation says it 
 to the earth, as she sweeps in her course round the sun ; and 
 she knows the whisper of her ruler, and stoops and bows 
 before the skiey blaze. " Bend," the proud portals of human 
 knowledge say it to all aspirants, and were it the brow of a 
 Bacon or a Newton, it must in reverence bow. " Bend," the 
 doors, the ancient doors of heaven say it, in the music of their 
 golden hinges, to all who would pass therein ; and the Son of 
 Man himself, although he could have prayed to his Father, 
 and presently obtained twelve legions of angels, had to learn 
 obedience, to suffer, to bow the head, ere as a King of Glory 
 he entered in. " Trust thyself." No ; Christianity says, 
 " Mistrust thyself trust God. Do thy humble duty, and 
 call the while on the lofty help that is above thee." Even 
 Shelley, a far more gifted mind than Emerson, tells us, bor- 
 rowing the thought from Burke, to ''fear ourselves, and love 
 all human-kind." 
 
 It follows, finally, that there seems no hope to us from the 
 exclusive and idolatrous devotion to nature which Emerson 
 has practised and recommends. He, appearing to believe that 
 nature is his (nvn work, has conned its pages with all the 
 fondness which a young author feels for his first poems. And 
 yet he has learned from it, or at least taught us, extremely 
 little. If he has, as he says, met " God in the bush," why no 
 particulars of the interview ? Why no intelligible precept, no 
 new law from that " burning bush" of the West ? Why does 
 nature, in his hands, remain as cold, silent, enigmatic, and 
 repulsive we mean as a moral teacher as ever it was ? 
 Why does its "'old silence" remain silent still, or only insult 
 us with fragments of mysticism and echoes of blasphemy ? 
 Alas ! Emerson's " Essays" are another proof of what Hazlitt, 
 from bitter experience, said long ago, " Neither poetry nor 
 nature are sufficient for the soul of man." And although 
 Emerson has, with more sever self-purgation, if not with a 
 truer heart, approached the shrine, he has derived, or at least 
 circulated, quite as little of real knowledge, or of real satis- 
 faction and peace, as the honest but hapless author of " The 
 Spirit of the Age." 
 
 The fact is (and we are grieved to announce it), this writer
 
 388 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES 
 
 with all bis talk about spiritualism and idealism, seems to us, 
 in essence, if anything at all, a mere materialist believing 
 not, however, in the wide matter of suns and stars, but in the 
 sublimated matter of his proper brain. He has brought the 
 controversy of ages to a point the point of his own head. 
 This he claps and clasps, and says, " Talk of God, Heaven, 
 Jesus, Shakspeare, the earth, the stars-^it's all here.' 1 ' 1 Even 
 us, not long ago, we heard a poor woman, in fever, declaring 
 that there was " more sense in her head than in all the world 
 besides!" And into what wilds have some of his followers, 
 both in America and here, wandered, till, in search of their 
 master, they have lost themselves. One of them will make an 
 earth-heap among the woods, and show his companions how 
 God should make a world. Others take to living on acorns 
 and water ; and one lady, of some abilities, has lately written 
 a small volume of poems, in which, amid many other symp- 
 toms of the most rabid Emersonianism, such as sneering at 
 the power and influence of the Bible, magnifying the soul, &c., 
 she, in one little copy of verses, avows herself a worshipped 
 of the Sun it being the epic, we suppose, of her transcendent 
 spirit ! 
 
 It is high time that all such egregious nonsense should be 
 exposed ; and we only regret that our space does not permit 
 us more fully at present to expose it We "bide our time." 
 And we can speak the more freely, that we have passed 
 through a section of the Emersonian shadow ourselves never 
 into its deepest gloom, but along the outskirts of its cold and 
 hopeless darkness. We, however, never lost our faith iu 
 Jesus, nor regarded Emerson's notions of Him with any other 
 feelings but disgust and sorrow. We never " kissed our 
 hands ' to the sun. But we at one time regarded Emerson as 
 a sincere man, astray on one of the by-paths from the road 
 leading up to the " City." We have seen reason to change 
 our mind, and to say of him, and of all such, "Beware of the 
 Flatterer." His system, to our knowledge, has shaken belief, 
 has injured morality, has poisoned the purest natures, has 
 embittered the sweetest tempers, has all but maddened the 
 strongest minds, has been for years a thick cosmical cloud 
 between lofty souls and the God of their childhood and their 
 fathers, has not even led to that poor, beggarly, outwardly
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 289 
 
 clean life, in which he seems to believe all morality to consist 
 (as if the plagues of the soul were not infinitely worse than 
 the diseases of the body), and has led to life " without hope 
 and without God in the world." And without laying all the 
 blame of this and it has been the experience of hundreds 
 upon Emerson himself, we do advisedly lay it upon the back 
 of his heartless and hopeless creed. 
 
 After all this, to speak of Emerson's genius seems mere 
 impertinence. It is little to the point, and, besides, has often 
 been largely descanted on by us and others. It is undoubtedly 
 of a high order. If he cannot interpret, he can paint, nature 
 as few else can. He has watched and followed all her motions 
 like a friendly spy. He has the deepest egotistic interest in 
 her. He appropriates her to himself, and because he loves 
 and clasps, imagines that he has made her. His better writ- 
 ings seem shaken, sifted, and cooled in the winds of the Ame- 
 rican autumn. The flush on his style is like the red hue of 
 the Indian summer inscribed upon the leaf. One of the most 
 inconsistent and hopelessly wrong of American thinkers, he 
 is the greatest of American poets. We refer not to his verse 
 which is, in general, woven mist, involving little but to 
 the beautiful and abrupt utterances about nature in his prose. 
 No finer things about the outward features, and the transient 
 meanings of creation, have been said, since the Hebrews, than 
 are to be found in some of his books. But he has never, like 
 them, pierced to the grand doctrine of the Divine Personality 
 and Fatherhood. 
 
 NO. III.-OALE AID BUNYAK* 
 
 WHAT is it, it has often been asked, which gives us the strong- 
 est and liveliest idea of the infinite ? Is it the multitudinous 
 ocean, or the abyss of stars, or the incomputable sand-grains 
 
 * The Pilgrim's Progress of John Bunyan, for the Use of Children 
 in the English Church. Edited by the Rev. J. M. NKALE, M.A., War- 
 den of Sackville College.
 
 290 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 upon the sea-shore? No : these, if not numerable by human 
 arithmetic, are taken up by imagination as " but a little thing." 
 She engulfs them easily, and continues to cry, " More, more ;" 
 " Give, give." We, of course, can only speak for ourselves, 
 but certain it is that our liveliest notion of bottomless depth 
 and boundless extent, is derived from our observation of the 
 infinity of human impudence. That is a breadth without a 
 bound, an elevation without a summit, a circumference with- 
 out a centre, a length without a limit. We are perpetually, 
 indeed, led to imagine that we are nearing its bottom, when 
 lo ! some new adventurous genius takes another plunge, and 
 discovers a lower deep beyond the lowest, and we feel that the 
 insolence, bigotry, and folly of a Neale, leave all former 
 absurdity floundering far behind. 
 
 This edition of the " Pilgrim's Progress" is unquestionably 
 the most impudent book we ever read. In the infinite of im- 
 pudence, its author has earned a place similar to that of Sir 
 William Herschel in the universe of stars : like him, he has 
 outstripped all competitors ; his folly, like the other's genius, 
 is of a firmamental magnitude, and becomes magnificent from 
 its very originality and daring. Mr. Neale has accomplished 
 the poetical paradox : he has " gilded refined gold, painted the 
 lily, and thrown a perfume on the violet." He has deliberate- 
 ly sat down to improve upon John Bunyan to add and eke 
 to the "Pilgrim's Progress;" he has converted honest John 
 into a Puseyite, and changed his immortal allegory into a 
 vade-mecum for the babes and sucklings of the Tractarian 
 school. We advise him, when ho has leisure, to carry out his 
 plan as follows : Let him proceed to make Milton, in his 
 " Paradise Lost," teach passive obedience and non-resistance; 
 let him, as a slight change, insert the syllable " in " before the 
 title of Locke on " Toleration;" let him add a book to Cow- 
 per's " Task," advocating the damnation of unbaptised infants ; 
 let him show us Young, in his " Night Thoughts," defending 
 t.ransubstantiation ; let him alter Don Juan to St. Juan, and 
 turn Byron into a devout Methodist; or let him re- write 
 i Uncle Tom's Cabin," and show Eva, on her death-bed, con- 
 verted to a belief in the divinity of the cart-whip and the auc- 
 tion-block ! Not one of these would be a grosser insult to the 
 respective author, or to the public, than is this miserable
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 291 
 
 emasculation of Bunyan's allegory. Men who poison wells do 
 so generally by night, and by stealth; but this poor creature 
 sheds his small venom in open day, and raises a complacent 
 cry over it, as if he had done some good and noble action ! 
 Next to the absurdity and positive impiety of the attempt he 
 makes on the life of Bunyan's glorious book, is the silly and 
 consequential insolence with which he avows and defends it. 
 
 We say " impiety," for whatever affects the integrity of one 
 of the great classics of the world, especially if that classic be a 
 religious book, amounts to impiety and sacrilege. What 
 should we think of one who should thus practise on the Bible, 
 who should intermeddle with the sublime argument of Job, so 
 as to give it a different turn or termination ; who should add 
 his own moral to Jotham's fable ; intermingle his own plati- 
 tudes with Isaiah's divine minstrelsy ; and annex his own ap- 
 pendix to the abrupt and crag-like close of Ezekiel's prophecy ? 
 We are far enough from placing John Bunyan or his work on 
 the same level with the Scriptures. But his " Pilgrim " has 
 long been to millions a minor Bible a moon circulating round 
 that elder orb. It has lain on the same shelf with the Scrip- 
 tures, and truly been supposed to breathe the same spirit. 
 Any attempt to underrate it, or to trifle with it, or to mangle 
 and doctor it, is sure to be resented almost as keenly as an at- 
 tempt to add to or diminish from the full and rounded glory 
 of the Book of God. 
 
 Mr. Neale does, indeed, begin his consummately foolish and 
 impertinent preface, by confessing that he issues " the present 
 edition of the ' Pilgrim's Progress' with some degree of anxi- 
 ety" a feeling which, we trust, on reflection, will be ex- 
 changed for a large measure of remorse and shame. He pro- 
 ceeds to answer, anticipatively, some objections to his un- 
 heard-of procedure ; but, ere doing this, he takes care to in- 
 form us, that he " has nothing to say to those professing mem- 
 bers of the. English Church who would make the theology of 
 Bunyan their own," and that " more than one English priest 
 has, before now, honored this, his great work, with a commen- 
 tary." Honored! A good idea! A country parson, never 
 perhaps heard of beyond his own parish, or a glib city-lec- 
 turer, or a stolid, sleepy-headed bishop, honoring one of the 
 holiest, truest, and most imaginative books in literature with
 
 292 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 a commentary ! Let us next hear of the honor Caryl has con- 
 ferred on Job, Todd on Milton, poor Taafe on Dante, and 
 Ryiner on Shakspeare. The English churchman has yet to 
 be born who can be compared, in native genius, in spiritual 
 experience, and in profound piety, with the Baptist tinker, or 
 who could, as from a height above, accord him honor. The 
 highest honor the llev. J. M. Neale could ever confer on him, 
 he has conferred namely, detraction and defilement ; for, in 
 value to a man of genius, next to the applause of a demi-god, 
 is the censure or the insolent patronage of a dunce. 
 
 There are, it seems, some well-meaning members of the 
 English Church, who " look upon the ' Pilgrim' as a religious 
 classic, cannot bear the idea of its being pulled about !" and 
 who ask, " Is its doctrine so very false ? May not a child 
 read it, without noticing the implied errors ? Is not its gene- 
 ral end and aim* so excellent that minor defects may very well 
 be forgiven ?" But no ! Mr. Neale has some grave objec- 
 tions to Bunyan's theology. Although the " Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress " is characterised by Coleridge that zealous churchman 
 as the best system of divinity extant, it appears to Mr. 
 Neale to swarm with damnable heresies, and sins both of 
 omission and commission. And what, pray, inquires the 
 alarmed reader, arc these ? Has Buuyan denied the Trinity, 
 or the divinity of Christ, or the atonement, or the necessity 
 of divine grace ? Has he questioned original sin, or justifica- 
 tion by faith, or eternal punishment ? No! but he is not per- 
 fectly orthodox, according to the Anglican standard, about 
 baptism, confirmation, and the Lord's Supper ! He does not 
 believe that the Holy Ghost is given at baptism to every child ; 
 that it is renewed by the imposition of the bishop's hands at 
 confirmation; and that the "blessed Eucharist is the chief 
 means by which the life thus implanted, and thus strengthened 
 is supported and perfected." Bunyan wicked man ! has 
 said nothing about baptism or confirmation, and allows one of 
 his most eminent pilgrims Faithful, namely to pass the 
 house Beautiful without entering in ! Moreover, the reader 
 will find " the beginning of the Christian life set forth again 
 and again as Conversion." Many other parts of the story and 
 of the dialogue are exceedingly heterodox, and, to crown all, 
 Bunyan has never heard of the Council of Chalcedon!
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 293 
 
 How, then, is Mr. Neale to deal with tins dangerous book, 
 which lays so little stress upon outward observances, and so 
 much upon inward change ; which is so heinously charitable 
 to those who cannot sit down with others at the Lord's table, 
 so fond of repeating the paradox " except a man be convert 
 ed, and become as a little child, he shall in no wise enter tho 
 kingdom of heaven'' and which a great many excellent per- 
 sons will not even " allow in their houses ?" Shall ho not put 
 it at once into an Oxford Index Expurgatorius ? or agitate for 
 the entire suppression of all but its Sanscrit translation ? or 
 hire the thunders of the Vatican to crush and quell it ? Not 
 ho ! He will act a more generous and liberal part. He will 
 show himself to be a lover of literature and genius, and will 
 sacrifice some of his very serious scruples of conscience to that 
 love. That has been, indeed, so strong and discriminating, 
 that it has enabled him to see very considerable merit in this 
 heretical work. It certainly " exerts a fascination over the 
 minds of children." Some of its " particular passages" are 
 " beautiful," one is " worthy (! ! !) of St. Bernard," and there- 
 fore he is " thankful that such a book exists." And then, 
 what a glorious plan he has for putting it all right, and turn- 
 ing the heterodox tinker into a St. Buuyan. It is quite quick 
 and magical. " Presto ! begone the Baptist, and enter the 
 Bishop." " One or two insertions, a few transpositions, and 
 a good many omissions," and the thing is done. Suppose we 
 should proceed, according to Mr. Neale's principle, to operate 
 on the Lord's Prayer, how easily we could prove it to be a 
 prayer to the pope, ay, or to the devil ! The printer who 
 should omit the " not" in the seventh commandment, and in- 
 sert it in the fourth, and should so transpose the ninth and the 
 tenth verses of the 20th Exodus, as to enjoin men to rest six 
 days and to labor one, would be but a type of thee, ! J. M. 
 Neale, thou miserable ninny and bigot of the first magnitude ! 
 He is a little sore, however, at the prospect of the ridicule 
 he is rather sure he will meet. He anticipates that his under- 
 taking will be compared to Bentley's edition of Milton. We 
 can assure him that his fears on this point are quite unneces- 
 sary. Bentley's book is a " folly of the wise," and showa 
 learning and talent which only the wise could either possess 
 or pervert. Neale's book is the folly of ano who, in Touch-
 
 294 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 stone's language, is a " fool positive," and is quite character- 
 istic of such an inverted genius. Bentley boldly conjectured 
 what Milton did think, but did not write, and altered accord- 
 ingly. Neale knows what Bunyan did not think, nor write, 
 nor believe, and has made him say it through the three grand 
 magical operations of transposition, insertion, and omission. 
 But what need we say, since " under that kind of ridicule ho 
 is to be perfectly easy ?" We confess that we envy the stu- 
 pidity which does not feel, even less than the impudence which 
 provokes an expression of just and righteous scorn. But he 
 adds, " if, as I believe, the work in its original state cannot 
 safely be put into the hands of children, and if, as I also be- 
 lieve, in its present condition it can, I shall have done so good 
 a deed for Christ's little ones, that I may well bear a laugh 
 from those with whom literary merits atoue for religious de- 
 fects." As if all who laughed at him and his book were per- 
 sons disposed to tolerate religious defects for literary merits ; 
 as if the " Pilgrim's Progress" were not valued by one large 
 class less for its literary merits, than as a beautiful and life- 
 like expression of evangelical truth the creed of Calvin, il- 
 lustrated by the genius of Shakspeare and as if that class 
 were likely to approve of omissions, transpositions, and inser- 
 tions, which extract the very pith and marrow of the book's 
 belief! How Christ's little ones in the English Church may 
 relish this edition we cannot tell ; but we rather think that 
 there are myriads of little ones in Britain and America who 
 are quite able to resent the insertion of Neale's nonsense in 
 their old favorite, and that, speaking of the public at large, a 
 " dismal universal hiss " is likely to reward this new enact- 
 ment of " Hamlet " with the part of Hamlet omitted by spe- 
 cial desire. 
 
 " Yet" the author " cannot but add " a small depreciatory 
 snarl at the book he is victimising. Its style, indeed, he 
 " most firmly believes," is " on the whole a nervous specimen 
 of pure homely Saxon;" but he is not " pledged" who ever 
 wished to pledge him ? to " admire every clause, or to think 
 that not a word could be changed for the better." " Colloqui- 
 alisms are not always ease, nor is vulgarity strength." Cer- 
 tainly not, any more than superstition is piety, or baptism re- 
 generation, or a rabid attachment to forms real religion ; but
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 295 
 
 all genuine lovers of literature know that there is a charm even 
 in the faults of great works, just as there is in the record of the 
 foibles and personal peculiarities of great men, and they would as 
 soon in a portrait of Alexander omit the mention of his wry 
 neck, or turn Napoleon and Suwarrow into grenadiers six feet 
 high, as meddle with one characteristic vulgarism or gramtaat- 
 ical slip in Bunyan or Shakspeare. The man is as destitute 
 of taste as of reverence, who stands beside a masterpiece of ge- 
 nius with a microscope in his hand, and employs his leisure in 
 proving that the works of man are inferior to those of God, 
 by discovering its invisible, or exaggerating its obvious, de- 
 fects. To taste, indeed, Mr. Neale does not pretend, but to 
 reverence he does ; and we ask him, in its name, how he would 
 like the same treatment applied to those fathers and those me- 
 diaeval writers he and his party admire so much, and whose 
 inequalities and defects, in themselves far greater than those 
 of the uneducated Bunyan, are not counterbalanced by a twen- 
 tieth part of his merit ? 
 
 But, unquestionably, the most curious paragraph in this re- 
 freshingly ridiculous preface is the one that commences 
 thus : " There is yet one objection. The moral right of al- 
 tering an author's works is denied to an editor. He wrote and 
 published, it is said, what he believed the truth. To his own 
 Master he has stood or has fallen. What you now teach, 
 and teach in his name, he would have regarded as falsehood ; 
 it is dishonest to use his influence, his talents, his popularity, 
 for the purpose of overthrowing his opinions." 
 
 This seems very sound reasoning. Indeed, Mr. Neale in 
 personating, though only for a sentence, a man of sense, rises 
 above himself, and reminds us of those actors who, though 
 previously vulgar and stupid, seem to acquire gentility with 
 the parts of the gentleman, and wit with the parts of the 
 clever characters they represent. But mark how he answers 
 it ! "A reasonable defence is found in the following consider- 
 ation : The author, whose works are altered, wished, it is to 
 be assumed, to teach the truth. In the editor's judgment, the 
 alterations have tended to the more complete setting forth that 
 truth, that is, to the better accomplishment of the author's 
 design. If the editor's views of the truth, then, are correct, 
 he is justified in what he does ; if they are false, he is to be
 
 296 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 blamed for originally holding them, but cannot be called dis- 
 honest for making his author speak what he believes that, with 
 more knowledge, the author would have said." 
 
 It has been our fate to read with complicated emotions of 
 pain, pity, and weariness, thousands of senseless or imperti- 
 nent paragraphs. But we doubt whether, on the whole, we 
 ever encountered such a master-stroke of absurdity and impu- 
 dence as the above. It rises to the sublime. By boldly 
 plunging into the bathos, Mr. Neale finds the Alps of the An- 
 tipodes. 
 
 The thing is such an extraordinary specimen of its class, as 
 to demand rather a minute dissection. The fungus is so filthy, 
 and for a fungus so vast, that we must deal with it as a whole. 
 " The author," he says, " whose works are altered, wished, it 
 may be assumed, to teach the truth." Certainly; but did 
 that truth, in his view, include the semi-papal notions of Mr. 
 Neale? Was not John Bunyau, with all his catholicity, a de- 
 cided Baptist and Dissenter? "In the editor's judgment," 
 the alterations he has made may indeed " tend to the more com- 
 plete setting forth of that truth ;" but would they in the authors 
 judgment ? This is the question. Now it is clear that John Bun- 
 yan, if retaining his former sentiments, could not approve of Mr. 
 N 's tinkering. And who has told our Oxford seer that Bunyan 
 has changed them ? He may ; but we pause, and shall pause 
 long enough, for the evidence. " If the editor's views of the 
 truth are correct, he is justified in what he does." Stop a 
 moment, Mr. Neale ! Suppose you were what you are not, a 
 sage wiser than Socrates, or a prophet as profoundly inspired 
 as Isaiah, would that give you any right to intermeddle with 
 the conscientious convictions even of a child, or to cut and 
 carve on the poorest book which earnestness ever issued to the 
 world ? You have just as good a right to steal a man's purse, 
 or to mangle his person, as to mutilate, after such a fashion, 
 his book. " If they are false, he is to be blamed for originally 
 holding them; but cannot be called dishonest for making hi& 
 author speak what he believes that, with more knowledge, the 
 author would have said." As to Mr. Neale's original views of 
 confirmation and we care for this just as little as the general 
 public his holding them at least can add nothing to the 
 weight or value of their evidence. But neither we nor the
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 297 
 
 public will endure that they shall be put into the mouth of 
 John Bunyan, and even seek to share in the immortality of 
 the chcf-cFcRUVre of his genius. We feel " jealous with a godly 
 jealousy" over that book ; and, without accusing Mr. Neale of 
 dishonesty in this abortive attempt, we do accuse him of igno- 
 rance of the public feeling and taste, of gross misappreciation 
 of his author, of cool impertinence, warm bigotry, and of a stu- 
 pidity as dense as it is unconscious. He, forsooth, " believes 
 that, with more knowledge, Bunyan would have said" the 
 same with himself ! How easy it were for hundreds to make 
 a similar statement ! We are certain that, while J. M. Nealc 
 and Henry of Exeter humbly think that, with their light Bun- 
 yan would have now been a high churchman, Carlyle imagines 
 that he would have been a Sartorist ; Parker, that he would 
 have been a pilgrim on that wretched path of " Christianity 
 without facts" a path which is recognised neither by heaven 
 nor hell ; Dr. Candlish that he would have been a devoted 
 friend of the Free Church ; Macaulay, that he would have 
 been, like himself, on religious matters, a nothing-at-all ; and 
 more reasonably the Milton Club, that he would have been an 
 honorary member with them. How this age might have altered 
 the mould and shaped the fashion of a mind like Bunyan's, it 
 is hard to conjecture ; but we rather surmise that Puseyism 
 would have been his last resort, and that at all events he would 
 now say, were the apparition of this edition of the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress" to flash on his view, " Scott I know, Montgomery 
 and Cheever I know, but, Neale, who art thou ?" 
 
 We have said more than enough of this work and its author, 
 and shall forbear to enlarge on the manner in which he has ex- 
 ecuted its intolerable design. Suffice it that he has dug a well 
 before the wicket-gate kicked Sinai out of his road spirited 
 old Worldly Wiseman away altered the situation of the 
 cross given Christian tivo burdens, &c. &c. &c. in short, 
 written himself down an ass, in characters so large and legible, 
 that Dogberry himself might read them as he ran. 
 
 Apologising to our readers for dwelling thus long on such a 
 production and our only apology is the unique magnitude of the 
 impertinence, and the light it casts on the notions and feelings 
 of a large ecclesiastical party, who have it in their heart to 
 treat all the great protesting literature of the past, including
 
 298 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the Bible itself, as one of their smallest creatures has treated 
 the " Pilgrim's Progress" we propose to spend the short 
 remainder of this paper in examining a question which springs 
 naturally out of its subject, and which is of considerable prac- 
 tical importance. It is this : What is the legitimate province 
 and prerogative of an editor, in re-issuing classical and stan- 
 dard works ? What are the conditions and proper limits of 
 the power which he assumes, or which is conceded to him, over 
 his subject authors ? 
 
 There are difficulties connected with these questions, and 
 perhaps the following remarks may not be sufficient to obviate 
 them all. We must, however, state them : An editor, then, 
 of course, is bound to preserve with extreme solicitude the 
 text of his author, exactly as that author left it. He is not, 
 like Bentley, to exercise his ingenuity in finding out new read- 
 ings, which, in his judgment, are improvements. There were 
 no end to such a system, were it once begun, and its injustice 
 to the author is obvious. Indeed, we value Bentley's edition 
 of Milton as being the reductio ad absurdum of the system 
 commentators have so often adopted of cutting and carving, 
 glossing and annotating, upon the great writers of the past It 
 is ridiculous to see the airs of superiority assumed by some 
 of these wiseacres, while dealing with the works of men infi- 
 nitely superior to themselves. How charily they praise the 
 most marked and striking beauties ! How dignified they re- 
 buke ! How condescending their patronage ! How they ran- 
 sack the stores of their learning to prove their author a splen- 
 did plagiarist, and what an edifying contempt do they discover 
 for all who have gone before them in the same trade of small 
 word-catching and detection of petty larceny ! We bid any 
 one who doubts the accuracy of this description to turn to 
 Todd's edition of Milton otherwise a most praiseworthy 
 book and glance at the notes of the editor, Hurd, Dyce, 
 Warton, and twenty more, jostling against each other at the 
 foot of the page, till almost every thought and image is traced 
 to other writers, often on the most contemptibly small evidence, 
 and till the text appears literally smothered under the weight 
 of the conjectures, quotations, misplaced learning, and irrele- 
 vant discussions of the well-meaning, but wofully-misemployed, 
 commentators.
 
 NEALE AND BUNYAN. 299 
 
 In all our classics, there occur passages unworthy of their 
 genius, either from their weakness or their wickedness. Now, 
 what are editors to do with these ? Some will say that they 
 are not responsible for them, and should therefore print them 
 as they are, perhaps under an accompanying protest. This, 
 we think, however, springs from a false and mechanical notion 
 of what an editor is. His office is not that of a mere printer 
 or amanuensis. We suppose him accepting the task volunta- 
 rily, and discharging it as a guardian alike of his author's 
 fame and of his own character. We have admitted above, 
 that there is a certain charm connected with even the faults of 
 good writers, but this is true only when these are intermixed 
 with beauties. There are, on the other hand, pieces entirely 
 and disgracefully bad as literary compositions ; and why 
 should such big blots be stereotyped, especially if they are 
 such as cast no peculiar light upon the author's idiosyncrasy, 
 nor mark definitely any stage either in the process or the de- 
 cline of his mind ? An honest editor (if the plan of his pub- 
 lication at all permit) will silently drop such productions from 
 the list. 
 
 But his path becomes far more clear in reference to those 
 writings in which vice or infidelity is openly and offensively 
 exhibited. Here his moral sense and religious feelings unite 
 with his literary taste in demanding the use of the knife. 
 What man, that regards his own character, would edit some 
 of those beastly miscellanies in verse by which Swift has dis- 
 graced his talents, and pushed himself almost beyond the pale 
 of humanity, or the Merry Muses of poor Burns, or the blind 
 and raving blasphemies of " Queen Mab ?" Such things, j 
 may be said, are valuable as illustrating peculiar trai$-*m 
 eminent characters, or certain stages in their moral histo'ry, 
 and should, therefore, be preserved. Well, be it so ; only let 
 us be exempted from the sordid and disgusting task of storing 
 them up in those moral museums where alone such detestable 
 abortions are in place, or can hope to remain for ever. The 
 true editor will not shrink from coarseness, but he will from 
 corruption. He will distinguish between faults which are 
 characteristic of an age, and wilful insults to good feeling, or 
 cold, settled attempts to sap the principles of morality, as well 
 as between the language of doubt and darkness, and that of
 
 300 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 aggressive and insolent blasphemy. There is at present a rage 
 of genius-worship which would go the length of preserving the 
 very foam of its frenzy, and the very slime of its sin ; and 
 there are those who insist that productions which the men 
 themselves regretted and sought to suppress in their life-time, 
 and on which, now, it may be, they look back with shame and 
 horror, shall be bound up in the bundle of their better and im 
 perishable works. These people are constantly prating of the 
 earnestness of Shelley, for example, and asking Should even 
 the mistaken effusions of such a man be withheld from tho 
 world ? We say, Yes, if they are rather the ravings of Philip 
 drunk, than the sincere outpourings of Philip sober ; if, more- 
 over, they are calculated not only to evince, but to circulate 
 mental inebriety, and if, not satisfied with expressing his faith, 
 they grossly misrepresent, foully belie, and fiercely insult the 
 faith of the Christian world. We are far, indeed, from advo- 
 cating state prosecutions for blasphemy ; we think them ma- 
 chines of unjust power, at once cruel and clumsy ; nor will 
 we be suspected of undue straitlacedness or of bigotry at all ; 
 but we would have public opinion brought to bear, with all its 
 weight, upon the subject. We would seek to crush such un- 
 worthy memorials of genius under the silence of universal con- 
 tempt or pity. We do not wish them mutilated nor extin- 
 guished ; we wish them preserved ; but preserved as other 
 monstrosities are preserved, in secluded corners, on lofty 
 shelves, for the contemplation of those in whom curiosity over- 
 powers disgust, and who can wring a lesson and a moral even 
 from things abominable and unutterable. We are irresistibly 
 reminded of the lines of Milton in his " Battle of the An- 
 gels " : 
 
 " I might relate of thousands, and their names 
 Eternise here on earth ; but those elect 
 Angels, contented with their fame in heaven, 
 Seek not the praise of men : The other sort 
 In might though wondrous and in acts of war, 
 Nor of renown less eager, yet by doom 
 Cancell'd from heaven, and sacred memory, 
 Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell. 
 For strength from truth divided, and from just- 
 Illaudable, nought merits but dispraise 
 And ignominy ; yet to glory aspires 
 Vain glorious, and through infamy seeks fame : 
 Therefore eternal silence fe their doom."
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 301 
 
 NO. IV.-EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 ALL hail to Edmund Burke, the greatest and least appre- 
 ciated man of the eighteenth century, even as Milton had been 
 the greatest and least appreciated man of the century before ! 
 Each century, in fact, bears its peculiarly great man, and as 
 certainly either neglects or abuses him. Nor do after ages 
 always repair the deficiency. For instance, between the writ- 
 ing of the first and the second sentences of this paper, wo 
 have happened to take up a London periodical, which has 
 newly come in, and have found Burke first put at the feet of 
 Fox, and, secondly, accused of being actuated in all his politi- 
 cal conduct by two objects those of places and pensions for 
 himself and his family ; so that our estimate of him, although 
 late, may turn out, on the whole, a " word in season." It is, 
 at all events, refreshing for us to look back from the days of 
 a Derby and a Biographer Russell, to those of the great and 
 eloquent Burke, and to turn from the ravings of the " Latter- 
 Day Pamphlets," to the noble rage and magnificent philippics 
 of a " Regicide Peace." 
 
 First of all, in this paper, we feel ourselves constrained to 
 proclaim what, even yet, is not fully understood Burke's un- 
 utterable superiority to all his parliamentary rivals. It was 
 not simply that he was above them as one bough in a tree is 
 above another, but above them as the sun is above the top of 
 the tree. He was " not of their order." He had philosophic 
 intellect, while they had only arithmetic. He had genius, 
 while they had not even fancy. He had heart, while they had 
 only passions. He had widest and most comprehensive views ; 
 their minds had little real power of generalisation. He had 
 religion ; most of them were infidels of that lowest order, who 
 imagine that Christianity is a monster, bred between priest- 
 craft and political expediency. He loved literature with his 
 inmost soul ; they (Fox on this point must be excepted) knew 
 little about it, and cared less. In a word, they were men of 
 their time ; he belonged to all ages, and his mind was as 
 catholic as it was clear and vast.
 
 302 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Contrast the works and speeches of the men ! Has a sen- 
 tence of Pitt's ever been quoted as a maxim ? Does one pas- 
 sage of Fox appear in even our common books of elocutionary 
 extracts ? Are Sheridan's flights remembered except for their 
 ambitious and adventurous badness ? Unless one or two 
 showy climaxes of Grattan and Curran, what else of them is 
 extant ? How different with Burke. His works are to this 
 hour burning with genius, and swarming with wisdom. You 
 cannot open a page, without finding either a profound truth 
 expressed in the shortest and sharpest form, looking up at 
 you like an eye ; or a brilliant image flashing across with the 
 speed and splendor of a meteor ; or a description, now grotes- 
 que, and now gorgeous ; or a literary allusion, cooling and 
 sweetening the fervor of the political discussion ; or a quota- 
 tion from the poets, so pointed and pat, that it assumes the 
 rank of an original beauty. Burke's writing is almost un- 
 rivalled for its combination and dexterous interchange of ex- 
 cellences. It is by turns statistics, metaphysics, painting, 
 poetry, eloquence, wit, and wisdom. It is so cool and so 
 warm, so mechanical and so impulsive, so measured and so 
 impetuous, so clear and so profound, so simple and so rich. 
 Its sentences are now the shortest, and now the longest ; now 
 bare as Butler, and now figured as Jeremy Taylor ; now con- 
 versational, and now ornate, intense, and elaborate in the high- 
 est degree. He closes many of his paragraphs in a rushing 
 thunder and fiery flood of eloquence, and opens the next as 
 calmly as if he had ceased to be the same being. Indeed, he 
 is the least monotonous and manneristic of modern writers, 
 and in this, as in so many other respects, excels such authors 
 as Macaulay and Chalmers, who are sometimes absurdly com- 
 pared to him. He has, in fact, as we hinted above, three, if 
 not four or five, distinct styles, and possesses equal mastery 
 over all. He exhibits specimens of the law-paper style, in his 
 articles of charge against Warren Hastings ; of the calm, sober, 
 uncolored argument, in his " Thoughts on the present Discon- 
 tents;" of the ingenious, high-finished, but temperate philoso- 
 phical essay, in his " Sublime and Beautiful;" of the flushed 
 and fiery diatribe, here storming into fierce scorn and invec- 
 tive, and their soaring into poetical eloquence, in his " Letter 
 to a Noble Lord," and in his " Kegicide Peace;" and of a
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 303 
 
 style combining all these qualities, and which he uses in his 
 Speech on the Nabod of Arcot's debts, and in his " Reflec- 
 tions on the French Revolution." Thus you may read a hun- 
 dred pages of him at once, without finding any power but pure 
 intellect at work, and at other times every sentence is starred 
 with an image, even as every moment of some men's sleep is 
 spiritualised by a dream ; and, in many of them, figures clus- 
 ter and crowd upon each other. It is remarkable that his 
 imagination becomes apparently more powerful as he draws 
 near the end of his journey. The reason of this probably 
 was : he became more thoroughly in earnest towards the close. 
 Till the trial of Warren Hastings, or even on to the outbreak 
 of the French Revolution, he was a volcano speaking and 
 snorting out fire at intervals an Etna at ease; but from these 
 dates he began to pour out incessant torrents of molten lava 
 upon the wondering nations. Figures arc a luxury to cool 
 thinkers; they are a necessity to prophets. The Isaiah, Jere- 
 miah, and Ezc-kiel have no choice. Their thought MUST come 
 forth with the fiery edge of metaphor around it. 
 
 Let us look, in the course of the remarks that follow, to the 
 following points to Burke's powers, to his possible achieve- 
 ments, to his actual works, to his oratory, to his conversation, 
 to his private character, to his critics, and to the question, 
 what has been the result of his influence as a writer and a 
 thinker ? 
 
 1. We would seek to analyse shortly his powers. These 
 were distinguished at once by their variety, comprehensiveness, 
 depth, harmony, and brilliance. He was endowed in the very 
 "prodigality of heaven" with genius of a creative order, with 
 boundless fertility of fancy, with piercing acuteness and com- 
 prehension of intellect, with a tendency leading him irresisti- 
 bly down into the depths of every subject, and with an elo- 
 quence at once massive, profuse, fiery, and flexible. To these 
 powers he united, what are not often found in their company, 
 slow plodding perseverance, indomitable industry, and a cau- 
 tious, balancing disposition. We may apply to him the words 
 of Scripture, " He could mount up with wings as an eagle, 
 he could run and not be weary, he could ivalk and not be 
 faint." Air, earth, and the things under the earth, were 
 equally familiar to him ; and you are amazed to sec how easily
 
 304 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 he can fold up the mighty wings which had swept the ether, 
 and "knit" the mountain to the sky, and turn to mole-like 
 minings in the depths of the miry clay, which he found it 
 necessary also to explore. These vast and various powers he 
 had fed with the most extensive, most minute, most accurate, 
 most artistically managed reading, with elaborate study, with 
 the closest yet kindliest observation of human nature, and 
 with free and copious intercourse with all classes of men. And 
 to inspirit and inflame their action, there were a profound 
 sense of public duty, ardent benevolence, the passions of a 
 hot but generous heart, and a strong-felt, although uncanting 
 and unostentatious piety. 
 
 2. His possible achievements. To what was a man like 
 this, who could at once soar and delve, overtop the mountains, 
 skim the surface, and explore the mine, not competent ? He 
 was, shall we say, a mental camelopard patient as the camel, 
 and as the leopard swift and richly spotted. We have only in 
 his present works the fragments of his genius. Had he not in 
 some measure, 
 
 " Born for the universe, narrow'd his mind, 
 And to party given up what was meant for mankind," 
 
 what works on general subjects had he written ! It had been, 
 perhaps, a system of philosophy, merging and kindling into 
 poetry, resembling 33rown's " Lectures," but informed by a 
 more masculine genius ; or it had been, perhaps, a treatise on 
 the Science of Politics, viewed on a large and liberal scale ; 
 or it had been, perhaps, a history of his country, abounding in 
 a truer philosophy and a more vivid narrative than Hume, 
 and in pictures more brilliant than Macaulay's ; or it had 
 been, perhaps, a work on the profounder principles of litera- 
 ture or of art; or it had been, perhaps for this, too, was in 
 his power some strain of solemn poetry, rising higher than 
 Akenside or Thomson ; or else some noble argument or apo- 
 logy for the faith that was in him in the blessed religion of 
 Jesus. Any or all of these tasks we believe to have been 
 thoroughly within the compass of Burke's universal mind, 
 had his lot been otherwise cast, and had his genius not been 
 so fettered by circumstance and subject, that he seems at 
 times a splendid generaliser in chains.
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 305 
 
 3. These decided views, as to the grand possibilities of this 
 powerful spirit, must not be permitted to blind us to what he 
 has actually done. This, alike in quantity and quality, chal- 
 lenges our wonder. Two monster octavos of his works are 
 lying before us ; and we believe that, besides, there is extant 
 matter from his pen equal to another volume. What strikes 
 you most about the quality of his writing, is the amazing rest- 
 lessness and richness of his thought. His book is an ant-hill 
 of stirring, swarming, blackening ideas and images. His style 
 often reposes his mind never. Hall very unjustly accuses 
 him of amplification. There are, indeed, a few passages of 
 superb amplification sprinkled through his writings ; but this 
 is rarely his manner, and you never, as in some writers, see a 
 thought small as the body of a fly suspended between the 
 wiugs of an eagle. He has too much to say to care in general 
 about expanding or beating it thin. Were he dallying long 
 with, or seeking to distend, an image, a hundred more would 
 become impatient for their turn. Foster more truly remarks, 
 " Burke's sentences are pointed at the end instinct with 
 pungent sense to the last syllable ; they are like a charioteer's 
 whip, which not only has a long and effective lash, but cracks 
 and inflicts a still smarter sensation at the end. They are 
 like some serpents, whose life is said to be fiercest in the 
 tail." It is a mind full to overflowing, pouring out, now 
 calmly and now in tumult and heat, now deliberately and 
 now in swift torrents, its thoughts, feelings, acquirements, and 
 speculations. This rich restlessness might by and by become 
 oppressive, were it not for the masterly ease of manner and 
 the great variety, as well as quantity, of thinking. He never 
 harps too long on one string. He is perpetually making 
 swift and subtle transitions from the grave to the gay, from- 
 the severe to the lively, from facts to figures, from statistics 
 to philosophical speculations, from red-hot invective to caustic 
 irony, from the splendid filth of his abuse to the flaming cata- 
 racts of his eloquence and poetry. His manner of writing 
 has been accused of " caprice," but unjustly. Burke was a 
 great speculator on style, and was regulated in most of its 
 movements by the principles of art, as well as impelled by the 
 force of genius. He held, for instance, that every great sen- 
 tence or paragraph should contain a thought, a sentiment, and
 
 306 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 an image ; and we find this rule attended to in all his more 
 elaborate passages. He was long thought a " flowery and 
 showy" writer, and contrasted, by Parr and others, unfavor- 
 ably with such writers as Macintosh and even Paine. Few 
 now will have the hardihood to reiterate .such egregious non- 
 sense. His flowers were, indeed, numerous ; but they sprang 
 out naturally, and were the unavoidable bloom of deep and 
 noble thought. We call the foam of a little river " froth," 
 that of Niagara, or the ocean, " spray." Burke's imagination 
 was the giant spray of a giant stream, and his fancy resembled 
 the rainbows which often appear suspended in it. Besides all 
 this, he had unlimited command of words and allusions, culled 
 from every science, and art, and page of history ; and this has 
 rendered, and will ever render, his writings legible by those 
 who care very little for his political opinions, and have slender 
 interest in the causes he won or lost. His faults were not 
 numerous, although very palpable. He cannot always reason 
 with calm consecutiveness. He sometimes permits, not so 
 much his imagination as his morbidly active intellect and his 
 fierce passions, to run him into extravagance. He lays often 
 too much stress upon small causes, although this sprung from 
 what was one of his principal powers that of generalising 
 from the particular, and, Cuvier-like, seeing entire mammoths 
 in small and single bones. He is occasionally too truculent 
 in his invective, and too personal in his satire. His oracular 
 tone is sometimes dogmatic and offensive; and he frequently 
 commits errors of taste, especially when his descriptions verge 
 upon the humorous ; for, Irishman though he was, his wit and 
 humor were not quite equal to his other powers. 
 
 We select three from among his productions for short spe- 
 cial criticism : his " Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts," 
 his " Reflections on the French Revolution," and his " Letters 
 on a Regicide Peace." The first is probably the most com- 
 plete oration in literature. Henry Rogers, indeed, prefers 
 the speeches of Demosthenes, as higher specimens of pure 
 oratory ; and so they are, if you take oratory, in a limited 
 sense, as the art of persuasion and immediate effect. But 
 Burke's speech, if not in this sense equal to the " Pro Coro- 
 na," even as Milton's " Areopagitica" is not in this sense 
 equal to Sheridan on the " Begum Charge," is, in all other
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 307 
 
 elements which go to constitute the excellence of a composi- 
 tion, incomparably superior. You see a great mind meeting 
 with a great subject, and intimate with it in all its length, and 
 breadth, and depth, and thickness; here diving down into its 
 valleys, and there standing serene upon its heights ; here 
 ranging at ease through its calms, and there, witli tyrant 
 nerve, ruling its storms of passion and harrowing interest. 
 The picture of Hyder Ali, and of the " Cloud" which burst 
 upon the plains of the Carnatic, has been subjected to 
 Brougham's clumsy and captious criticism, but has come out 
 unscathed ; and we venture to say that in massive, unforced 
 magnificence it remains unsurpassed. There is no trick, no 
 heaving effort, no " double, double, toil and trouble," as in 
 many of Lord Brougham's own elaborate passages. The 
 flight is as calm and free, as it is majestic and powerful ; 
 
 " Sailing with supreme dominion, 
 Through the azure deep of air." 
 
 His " Reflections" was certainly the most powerful pamphlet 
 ever written, if pamphlet it can be called, which is only a pam- 
 phlet in form, but a book in reality. It should have been 
 called a " Reply to the French Revolution." Etna had 
 spoken, and this was Vesuvius answering in feebler, but still 
 strong and far-heard thunder. Its power was proved by its 
 effect. It did not, indeed, create the terror of Europe against 
 that dreadful Shape of Democracy which had arisen over its 
 path, and by its shadow had turned all the waters into blood ; 
 but it condensed, pointed, and propelled the common fear and 
 horror into active antagonism with its opponent. It sharpen- 
 ed the sword of the prevailing desire for the fight. It was 
 the first wild, wailing trumpet of a battle-field of twenty -four 
 years' duration. One is reminded of the contest between Fin- 
 gal and the Spirit of Loda. There seemed, at first, a great 
 disparity between the solitary warrior and the dreadful Form 
 riding upon the midnight tempest, and surrounded with his 
 panoply of clouds. But the warrior was ipse agmen his 
 steel was sharp and true ; he struck at the Demon, and the 
 Demon shrieked, rolled himself together, and retired a space, 
 to return, however, again, with his painful wound healed, and 
 the fury of his blasts aggravated, when there was no Burke to
 
 308 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 oppose him. The merits of this production are, we think, 
 greatly enhanced by the simplicity of the vehicle in which its 
 thoughts ride. The book is a letter ; but such a letter ! In 
 this simplest shape of literature, we find philosophy the most 
 subtle ; invective the most sublime ; speculation the most far- 
 stretching; Titanic ridicule, like the cachinnation of a Cy- 
 clops ; piercing pathos ; powerful historic painting ; and elo- 
 quence the most dazzling that ever combined depth with splen- 
 dor. That it is the ultimate estimate of the French Revolu- 
 tion, is contended for by no one. THAT shall only be seen 
 after the history of earth is ended, and after it is all inscribed 
 (to allude to the beautiful Arabian fable) in laconics of light 
 over " Allah's head;" but, meantime, while admitting that 
 Burke's view of it is in some points one-sided, and in others 
 colored by prejudice, we contend that he has, with general 
 fidelity, painted the thing as it then was the bloody bantling 
 as he saw it in the cradle although he did not foresee that 
 circumstances and events were greatly to modify and soften its 
 features as it advanced. Let him have praise, at least, for 
 this, that he discerned and exposed the true character of mo- 
 dern infidelity, which, amid all the disguises it has since as- 
 sumed, is still, and shall remain till its destruction, the very 
 monster of vanity, vice, malignity, and sciolism, which he has, 
 by a few touches of lightning, shown it to be. How thorough- 
 ly he comprehended the devil-inspired monkey, Voltaire ; and 
 the winged frog, Rousseau; and that iroii machine of artistic 
 murder, Carnot ; and La Fayette, the republican coxcomb ; 
 and that rude incarnation of the genius of the guillotine, Ro- 
 bespierre ! Through those strange Satanic shapes he moves 
 in the majesty of his virtue and his manly genius ; like a 
 lofty human being through the corner of a museum appropria- 
 ted to monsters not doing violence to his own senses, by seek- 
 ing to include them in the catalogue of men, nor in an attitude 
 of affected pity and transcendental charity ; but feeling and 
 saying, " How ugly and detestable these uiiscreations are, and, 
 faugh ! what a stench they emit." 
 
 In a similar spirit, and with even greater power, does he 
 seek to exorcise the evil spirit of his times, in his " Letters on 
 a Regicide Peace." These glorious fragments employed his 
 last hours, and the shadow of the grave lies solemnly upon
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 309 
 
 them. When he wrote them, although far from being a very 
 old man (he was just sixty-four), yet the curtains of his life's 
 hope had suddenly been dropped around him. It was not that 
 he and his old friends, the Whigs, had quarrelled ; it was not 
 that he had stood by the death-bed of Johnson, and had un- 
 dergone the far severer pang which attended his divorce from 
 the friendship of Fox ;. it was not that his circumstances were 
 straitened ; it was not that his motives were misrepresented ; 
 it was not that " misery had made him acquainted with strange 
 bedfellows," and driven him to herd with beings so inferior 
 and radically different as Pitt and Dundas ; but it was that 
 death had snatched away him in whom he had " garnered up 
 his heart" his son. Be it that that son was not all his father 
 had thought him to be, to others he was it all to him. If 
 not rich himself, was it nothing that his father had lavished 
 on him his boundless wealth of esteem and affection ? As it 
 is, he shines before us in the light of his father's eloquence for 
 evermore. Strange and enviable this power of genius ! It 
 can not only " give us back the dead even in the loveliest 
 looks they wore," but it can give them a loveliness they never 
 possessed ; it can dignify the obscure, it can illuminate the 
 dark, it can embalm the decayed; and, in its transforming 
 splendor, the common worm becomes a glow-worm, the com- 
 mon cloud a cloud of fire and glory, every arch a rainbow, 
 every spark a star, and every star a sun. It can preserve ob- 
 scure sorrows, arid the obscurer causes of these sorrows, and 
 hang a splendor in the tears of childhood, and eternise the 
 pathos of those little pangs which rend little hearts. How 
 Do Quincey, for example, has beautified the sorrows, and pecu- 
 liarities, and small adventures of his boyhood and in what 
 a transfiguring beam of imagination does he show the dead face 
 of his dear sist?r, Elizabeth ! And thus young Burke sleeps, 
 at once guarded and glorified, beneath the bright angel-wings 
 of his father's mighty genius. 
 
 It is most affecting to come upon those plaintive expressions 
 of desolation which abound in Burke's later works, as where 
 he calls himself an " unhappy man," and wishes to be permit- 
 ted to " enjoy in his retreat the melancholy privileges of ob- 
 scurity and sorrow;" and where he compares himself to an 
 (< old oak stripped of his honors, and torn up by the roots."
 
 310 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 But not for nothing were these griefs permitted to environ 
 him. Through the descending cloud, a mighty inspiration 
 stooped down upon his soul. Grief roused, and bared, and 
 tossed up his spirit to its very depths. He compares himself 
 to Job, lying on his dunghill, and insulted by the miserable 
 comfort of his friends. And as Job's silent anguish broke 
 out at last into sublime curses, and his dunghill heaved up 
 into a burning prophetic peak, so it was with the " old man 
 eloquent" before us. From his solitary Beaconsfield, with its 
 large trees moaning around, as if in sympathy with his incom- 
 municable sorrow, he uttered prophetic warnings, which start- 
 led Europe; he threw forth pearls of deepest thought and 
 purest eloquence ; he blew war-blasts of no uncertain sound, 
 to which armies were to move, and navies to expand their vast 
 white wings ; he poured out plaints of sorrow, which melted 
 the hearts of millions ; his " lightnings also he shot out," 
 forked bolts of blasting invective, against the enemies or pre- 
 tended friends, the impostors high or low, who dared to in- 
 trude on his sacred solitude ; and it fared alike with a Duke 
 of Bedford and a Thomas Paine, as with the rebel angels in 
 Milton :- 
 
 " On each wing 
 
 Uriel and Raphael his vaunting foe, 
 Though huge, and in a rock of diamond arm'd, 
 Yanquish'd Adramelech and Asmadai, 
 Two potent thrones, that to he less than gods 
 Disdain'd, hut meaner thoughts learn'd in their flight, 
 Mangled with ghastly wounds through plate and mail. 
 Nor stood unmindful Abdiel to annoy 
 The atheist crew, but, with redoubled blow, 
 Ariel and Arioch, and the violence 
 Of Rainiel scorch'd and blasted, overthrew." 
 
 But he had not only the inspiration of profound misery, 
 but that, also, of a power projected forward from eternity. 
 He knew that he was soon to die, and the motto of all his la- 
 ter productions might have been, " Moriturus vos saluto." 
 This gave a deeper tone to his tragic warnings, a higher digni- 
 ty to his prophetic attitude, and a weightier emphasis to his 
 terrible denunciations. He reminded men of that wild-eyed 
 prophet, who ran around the wall of doomed Jerusalem till
 
 EDMUND BUUKE. 31 I 
 
 he sank down in death, and cried out, " Wo, wo, wo, to this 
 city." In the utterance of such wild, but musical and mean- 
 ing cries, did Burke breathe out his spirit. 
 
 The " Regicide Peace" contains no passages so well known 
 as some in the " Reflections," but has, on the whole, a pro- 
 founder vein of thinking, a bolder imagery, a richer and more 
 peculiar language, as well as certain long and high-wrought 
 paragraphs, which have seldom been surpassed. Such is his 
 picture of Carnot, " snorting away the fumes of the undiges- 
 ted blood of his sovereign;" his comparison of the revolution- 
 ary France to Algiers ; his description of a supposed entrance 
 of the Regicide ambassadors into London ; and the magnificent 
 counsels he gives Pitt as to what he thought should have been 
 his manner of conducting the war. As we think this one of 
 the noblest swells of poetic prose in the language, and have 
 never seen it quoted, or even alluded to by former critics, we 
 shall give it entire : 
 
 " After such an elaborate display had been made of the in- 
 justice and insolence of an enemy, who seems to have been 
 irritated by every one of the means which had commonly been 
 used with effect to soothe the rage of intemperate power, the 
 natural result would be, that the scabbard in which we in vain 
 attempted to plunge our sword, should have been thrown 
 away with scorn, it would have been natural, that, rising in 
 the fulness of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, 
 violated justice, rejected supplication, patience goaded into fu- 
 ry, would have poured out all the length of the reins upon all 
 the wrath they had so long restrained. It might have been 
 expected, that, emulous of the glory of the youthful hero 
 (Archduke Charles of Austria) in alliance with him, touched 
 by the example of what one man, well formed and well placed, 
 may do in the most desperate state of affairs, convinced there 
 is a courage of the cabinet full as powerful, and far less vul- 
 gar, than that of the field, our minister would have changed 
 the whole line of that useless prosperous prudence, which had 
 hitherto produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If 
 he found his situation full of danger, (and I do not deny 
 that it is perilous in the extreme), he must feel that it is also 
 full of glory, and that he is placed on a stage, than which no 
 muse of fire, that had ascended the highest heaven of inveu-
 
 312 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 tion, could imagine anything more awful and august. It was 
 hoped that, in this swelling scene in which he moved, with 
 some of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, 
 and with so many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a 
 part which, as he plays it, determines for ever their destiny 
 and his own, like Ulysses in the unravelling point of the epic 
 story, he would have thrown off his patience and his rags to- 
 gether, and, stripped of unworthy disguises, he would have 
 stood forth in the form and in the attitude of a hero. On 
 that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of 
 Mars ; that he would have bid to be brought forth from their 
 hideous kennel (where his scrupulous tenderness had too long 
 immured them) those impatient dogs of war, whose fierce re- 
 gards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds 
 them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues, 
 and death, upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all 
 whose habit, order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and 
 abhorrent. It was expected that he would at last have 
 thought of active and effectual war ; that he would no longer 
 amuse the British lion in the chase of rats and mice ; that ho 
 would no longer employ the whole naval power of Great Brit- 
 ain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon the mis- 
 erable remains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did 
 not regard, and from which none could profit. It was expect- 
 ed that he would have re-asserted the justice of his cause ; 
 that he would have re-animated whatever remained to him of 
 his allies, and endeavored to recover those whom their fears 
 had led astray ; that he would have rekindled the martial ar- 
 dor of his citizens ; that he would have held out to them the 
 example of their ancestry, the asserter of Europe, and the 
 scourge of French ambition ; that he would have reminded 
 them of a posterity, which, if this nefarious robbery, under 
 the fraudulent name and false color of a government, should 
 in full power be seated in the heart of Europe, must for ever 
 be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism, and the most igno- 
 minious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause, it was 
 presumed that he would (as in the beginning of the war he 
 did) have opened all the temples, and with prayer, with fast- 
 ing, and with supplication (better directed than to the grim 
 Moloch of regicide in France), have called upon us to raise
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 313 
 
 that united cry which has so often stormed heaven, and with a 
 pious violence, forced down blessings upon a repentant people. 
 It was hoped that, when he had invoked upon his endeavors 
 the favorable regards of the Protector of the human race, it 
 would be seen that his menaces to the enemy, and his prayers 
 to the Almighty, were not followed, but accompanied, with 
 corresponding action. It was hoped that his shrilling trumpet 
 should be heard, not to announce a show, but to sound a 
 charge." 
 
 We coine now to him as an orator. And here we must cor- 
 rect a prevailing misconception. Many seem to imagine that he 
 had no power of oratorical impression ; that he was a mere 
 " dinner-bell ;" and that his speeches, however splendid, fell 
 still-born from his lips. So far was this from being the case, 
 that his very first orations in Parliament those, namely, on 
 the Stamp Act delivered when he had yet a reputation to 
 make, according to Johnson, " filled the town with wonder;" 
 an effect which, we fancy, their mere merit, if unaccompanied 
 by some energy and interest of delivery, could hardly have 
 produced. So long as he was in office under Lord llocking- 
 ham, and under the Coalition Ministry, he was listened to with 
 deference and admiration. His speech against Hastings was 
 waited for with greater eagerness, and heard with greater ad- 
 miration, than any of that brilliant series, except, perhaps, 
 Sheridan's on the Begum Charge ; and in its closing passage, 
 impeaching Hastings " in the name of Human Nature itself," 
 it rose, even as to effect, to a height incomparably above any 
 of the rest. His delivery, indeed, and voice were not first 
 rate, but only fribbles or fools regard such things much, or at 
 least long, in a true orator ; and when Burke became fully 
 roused, his minor defects were always either surmounted by 
 himself, or forgotten by others. The real secret of his parlia- 
 mentary unpopularity, in his latter years, lay, first, in the 
 envy with which his matchless powers were regarded ; secondly, 
 in his fierce and ungovernable temper, and the unguarded vio- 
 lence of his language ; thirdly, in the uncertainty of his posi- 
 tion and circumstances ; and, lastly, in the fact, as Johnson 
 has it, that " while no one could deny that he spoke well, yet 
 all granted that he spoke too often and too long. His soul, 
 
 M
 
 314 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 besides, generally soared above his audience, and sometimes 
 forgot to return. In honest Goldsmith's version of it, 
 
 " Too deep for his hearers, he went on refining, 
 And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining." 
 
 But he could never be put down to the last, and might, had he 
 chosen, have contested the cheap palm of instant popularity 
 even with the most voluble of his rivals. But the " play was 
 not worth the candle." He mingled, indeed, with their tempo- 
 rary conflicts; but it was like a god descending from Ida to 
 the plains of Troy, and sharing in the vulgar shock of arms, 
 with a high celestial purpose in view. He was, in fact, over 
 the heads of the besotted parliaments of his day, addressing 
 the ears of all future time, and has not been inaudible in that 
 gallery. 
 
 Goldsmith is right in saying that so far he "narrowed his 
 mind." But, had he narrowed it a little farther, he could 
 have produced so much the more of immediate impression, and 
 so much the more have circumscribed his future influence and 
 power. He was by nature what Clootz pretended to be, and 
 what all genuine speakers should aim at being, " an orator of 
 the human race," and he never altogether lost sight of this his 
 high calling. Hence, while a small class adored him, and a 
 large class respected, the majority found his speaking apart 
 from their purpose, and if they listened to it, it was from a 
 certain vague impression that it was something great and splen- 
 did, only not very intelligible, and not at all practical. In 
 fact, the brilliance of his imagination, and the restless play of 
 his ingenuity, served often to conceal the solid depth and prac- 
 tical bearings of his wisdom. Men seldom give a famous man 
 credit for all the faculties he possesses. If they dare not deny 
 his genius, they deny his sense ; or, if they are obliged to ad- 
 mit his sense, they question his genius. If he is strong, he 
 cannot be beautiful, and if beautiful, he must be weak. That 
 Burke suffered much from this false and narrow style of criti- 
 cism, is unquestionable ; but that he was ever the gigantic bore 
 on the floor of the House of Commons which some pretend, 
 we venture to doubt. The fact was probably this on small 
 matters he was thought prosy, and coughed down, but, when- 
 ever there was a large load to be lifted, a great question to be
 
 EDMUND BUKKE 315 
 
 discussed a Hastings to be crushed, or a French revolution to 
 be analysed the eyes of the house instinctively turned to the 
 seat where the profound and brilliant man was seated, and 
 their hearts irresistibly acknowledged, at times, what their 
 tongues and prejudices often denied. 
 
 And yet it is amusing to find, from a statement of Burke's 
 own, that the Whigs whom he had deserted solaced themselves 
 for the unparalleled success of the "Reflections on the French 
 Revolution," by underrating it in a literary point of view. Is 
 this the spirit of real or of mock humility in which he speaks, 
 in his " Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs ?" " The 
 gentlemen who in the name of the party have passed sentence 
 on Mr. Burke's book in the light of literary criticism, are 
 judges above all challenge. He did not indeed flatter himself 
 that as a writer, he could claim the approbation of men whoso 
 talents, in his judgment and in the public judgment, approach 
 to prodigies, if ever such persons should be disposed to esti- 
 mate the merit of a composition upon the standard of their 
 own ability." Surely this must be ironical, else it would seem 
 an act of voluntary humility as absurd as though De Quincey 
 were deferring in matters of philosophy or style to the " supe- 
 rior judgment" of some of our American or St. Andrews made 
 doctors ; or as though Mrs. Stowe were to dedicate her next 
 novel to the author of the " Coming Struggle." Pretty critics 
 they were ! Think of the glorious eloquence, wisdom, passion, 
 and poetry, the "burning coals of juniper, sharp arrows of the 
 strong," to be found in every page of the " Reflections," 
 sneered at by two men, at least, not one of whose works is now 
 read by the writer of a farrago like the " Spital Sermon," or 
 by the author of such illegible dulness as the " History of 
 James II.," or even by Sheridan, with his clever heartless 
 plays, and the brilliant falsetto of his speeches ; or even by 
 Macintosh, with the rhetorical logic and forced flowers of his 
 " Vindicise G-allicje." Surely Burke did, in his heart, appeal 
 from their tribunal to that of a future age. To do Macintosh 
 justice, he learned afterwards to form a far loftier estimate of 
 the author of the " Reflections." He was, soon after the pub- 
 lication of his " Vindiciae Gallicae," invited to spend some 
 days at Beaconsfield. There he found the old giant, now toy- 
 ing on the carpet with little children, now cracking bad jokes
 
 316 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES 
 
 and the vilest of puns, and now pouring out magnificent 
 thoughts and images. In the course of a week's animated dis- 
 cussion on the French Revolution, and many cognate subjects, 
 Macintosh was completely converted to Burke's views, and 
 came back impressed with an opinion of his genius and charac- 
 ter, far higher than his writings had given him. Indeed, his 
 speech in defence of Peltier by much the most eloquent of 
 his published speeches bears on it the fiery traces of the influ- 
 ence which Burke had latterly exerted on his mind. The early 
 sermons, too, and the " Apology for the Liberty of the Press," 
 by Hall, are less colored, than created by the power which 
 Burke's writings had exerted on his dawning genius. But 
 more of this afterwards. 
 
 What a pity that Boswell had not been born a twin, and 
 that the brother had not attached himself as fondly and faith- 
 fully to Burke, as Jemmy to Johnson ! Boswell's Life of 
 Burke would noiv have been even more popular than Boswell's 
 Life of Johnson. For, if Johnson's sayings were more pointed 
 and witty, Burke's were profouuder and sublimer far. John- 
 son had lived as much with books and with certain classes of 
 men, but Burke had conversed more with the silent company 
 of thoughts ; and all grand generalisations were to him palpa- 
 ble, familiar, and life-like as a gallery of pictures. Johnson 
 was a lazy, slumbering giant, seldom moving himself except to 
 strangle the flies which buzzed about his nostrils ; Burke 
 wrought like a Cyclops in his cave. Johnson, not Burke, was 
 the master of amplification, from no poverty, but from indo- 
 lence : he often rolled out sounding surges of commonplace, 
 with no bark and little beauty, upon the swell of the wave ; 
 Burke's mind, as we have seen before, was morbidly active ; it 
 was impatient of circular movement round an idea, or of noise 
 and agitation without progress : his motto ever was " On- 
 wards," and his eloquence always bore the stamp of thought. 
 Johnson looked at all things through an atmosphere of gloom ; 
 Burke was of a more sanguine temperament ; and if cobwebs 
 did at any time gather, the breath of his anger or of his indus- 
 try speedily blew them away. Johnson had mingled princi- 
 pally with scholars, or the middle class of community ; Burke 
 was brought early into contact with statesmen, the nobility and 
 gentry, and this told both upon his private manners and upon
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 317 
 
 his knowledge of human nature. Johnson's mind was of the 
 sharp, strong, sturdy order ; Burke's of the subtle, deep, re- 
 volving sort ; as Goldsmith said, he " wound into every sub- 
 ject like a serpent." Both were honest, fearless, and pious 
 men ; but, while Burke's honesty sometimes put on a court 
 dress, and his fearlessness sometimes " licked the dust," and 
 his piety could stand at ease, Johnson in all these points was 
 ever roughly and nakedly the same. Johnson, in wit, the 
 point of individual sentences, and in solemn pictures of human 
 life, its sorrows and frailties, was above Burke ; but was as far 
 excelled by him in power of generalisation, vastness of 
 range and reading, exuberance of fancy, daring rhetoric, and in 
 skilful management and varied cadence of style. Johnson had 
 a philosophical vein, but it had never received much culture ; 
 Burke's had been carefully fed, and failed only at times 
 through the subjects to which it was directed. Johnson's talk, 
 although more brilliant, memorable, and imposing was also more 
 set, starched, and produced with more effort than Burke's, 
 who seemed to talk admirably because he could not help it, or, 
 as his great rival said, " because his mind was full." John- 
 sou was, notwithstanding his large proportions, of the earth 
 earthy, after all ; his wings, like those of the ostrich, were not 
 commensurate with his size ; Burke, to vast bulk and stature, 
 added pinions which bore him from peak to peak, and from one 
 gorgeous tract of " cloudland" to another. 
 
 Boswell and Prior have preserved only a few specimens of 
 Burke's conversation, which are, however, so rich as to excite 
 deep regret that more has not been retained ; and a conviction 
 that his traditional reputation has not been exaggerated, and 
 that his talk was the truest revelation of his powers. Every 
 one knows the saying of Dr. Johnson, that you could not go 
 with Burke under a shed to shun a shower, without saying, 
 " this is an extraordinary man." Nor was this merely because 
 he could talk cleverly and at random on all subjects, and hit 
 on brilliant things ; but that he seemed to have weighed and 
 digested his thoughts, and prepared and adjusted his language 
 on all subjects, at the same time that impulse and excitement 
 were ever ready to sprinkle splendid impromptus upon the 
 stream of his speech. He combined the precision and perfect 
 preparation of the lecturer with the ease and fluency of the
 
 318 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 conversationist. He did not, like some, go on throwing out 
 shining paradoxes ; or, with others, hot gorgeous metaphors, 
 hatched between excitement and vanity ; or, with others, give 
 prepared and polished orations, disguised in the likeness of 
 extempore harangues ; or, with others, perpetually strive to 
 startle, to perplex, to mystify, and to shine. Burke's talk 
 was that of a thoroughly furnished, gifted, and profoundly 
 informed man thinking aloud. His conversation was just 
 the course of a great, rich river, winding at its sweet or its 
 wild will always full, often overflowing; sometimes calm, 
 and sometimes fretted and fierce ; sometimes level and deep, 
 and sometimes starred with spray, or leaping into cataracts ; 
 sometimes rolling through rich alluvial plains, and sometimes 
 through defiles of romantic interest. Who shall venture to 
 give us an " Imaginary Conversation" between him and John- 
 son, on the subject referred to by Boswell, about the compara- 
 tive merits of Homer and Virgil, or on some similar topic, in 
 a style that shall adequately represent the point, roughness, 
 readiness, and sense of the one, and the subtlety, varied know- 
 ledge, glares of sudden metaphoric illumination crossing the 
 veins of profound reflection, which distinguished the other 
 the " no, sirs," and the " therefores" of the one, with the 
 " buts," the " unlesses," and the terrible " excuse me, sirs," 
 of the other ? We wonder that Savage Landor has never 
 attempted it, and brought in poor Burns the only man then 
 living in Britain quite worthy to be a third party in the dia- 
 logue now to shed his meteor light upon the matter of the 
 argument ; and now, by his wit or song, to soothe and harmo- 
 nise the minds of the combatants. 
 
 Burke's talk is now, however, as a whole, irrecoverably lost. 
 What an irrepressible sigh escapes us, as we reflect that this 
 is true of so many noble spirits ! Their works may remain 
 with us, but that fine aroma which breathed in their conversa- 
 tion, that inspired beam which shone in their very eyes, are 
 for ever gone. Some of the first of men, indeed, have had 
 nothing to lose in this respect. Their conversation was infe- 
 rior to their general powers. Their works were evening sha- 
 dows more gigantic than themselves. We have, at least, their 
 essence preserved in their writings. This probably is true 
 even of Shakspeare and Milton. But Johnson, Burke, Burns,
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 319 
 
 and Coleridge, were so constituted, that conversation was the 
 only magnet that could draw out the full riches of their 
 genius ; and all of them would have required each his own 
 Siamese twin to have accompanied him through life, and, with 
 the pen and the patience of Bozzy, to have preserved the con- 
 tinual outpourings of their fertile brains and fluent tongues. 
 We are not, however, arguing their superiority to the two 
 just mentioned, or to others of a similar stamp, whose writ- 
 ings were above their talk far the reverse but are simply 
 asserting that we may regret more the comparative meagreness 
 of biography in the case of the one class than of the other. 
 
 Burke, in private, was unquestionably one of the most 
 blameless of the eminent men of his day. He was, in all his 
 married life at least, entirely free from the licentiousness of 
 Fox, the dissipation of Sheridan, and the hard-drinking habits 
 of Pitt. But he was also the most amiable and actively 
 benevolent of them. Wise as a serpent, he was harmless as a 
 dove ; and, when the deep sources of his indignation were not 
 touched, gentle as a lamb. Who has forgot his fatherly inte- 
 rest in poor Crabbe that flower blushing and drooping un- 
 seen, till Burke lifted it up in his hand, and gave his protege 
 bread and immortality ? or his kindness to rough, thank- 
 less Barry, whom he taught and counselled as wisely as if 
 he had been a prophet of art, not politics, and as if he had 
 studied nothing else but painting (proving thus, besides his 
 tender heart, that a habit and power of deep and genuine 
 thinking can easily be transferred from one branch, to all a 
 truth substantiated, besides, by the well-known aid he gave 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds in his lectures) ; or last, not least, his 
 Good Samaritan treatment of the wretched street-stroller he 
 met, took home, introduced, after hearing her story, to Mrs. 
 Burke, who watched over, reformed, and employed her in her 
 service ? " These are deeds which must not pass away." 
 Like green laurels on the bald head of a Caesar, they add a 
 beauty and softness to the grandeur of Burke's mind, and 
 leave you at a loss (fine balance ! rare alternative ! compli- 
 ment, like a biforked sunbeam, cutting two ways !) whether 
 more to love or to admire him. Fit it was that HE should 
 have passed that noble panegyric on Howard, the " Circum- 
 navigator of Charity, 1 ' which now stands, and shall long stand
 
 520 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES, 
 
 like a mountain before its black and envious shadow, over 
 against Carlyle's late unhappy attack on the unrivalled phi- 
 lanthropist. 
 
 We promised a word on Burke's critics. They have been 
 numerous and various. From Johnson, Fox, Laurence, Mac- 
 intosh, Wordsworth, Brougham, Hazlitt, Macaulay, De Quin- 
 cey, Croly, H. Rogers, &c., down to Prior, &c. Johnson 
 gave again and again his sturdy verdict in his favor, which 
 was more valuable then than it is now. " If I were," he said, 
 when once ill and unable to talk, " to meet that fellow Burke 
 to-night, it would kill me." Fox admitted that he had learned 
 more from Burke's conversation than from all his reading and 
 experience put together. Laurence, one of his executors, has 
 left recorded his glowing sense of his friend's genius and vir- 
 tues. Of Macintosh's admiration we have spoken above ; 
 although, in an article which appeared in the "Edinburgh 
 Review," somewhere in 1830, he seems to modify his appro- 
 bation ; induced to this, partly, perhaps, by the influences of 
 Holland House, and partly by those chills of age which, fall- 
 ing on the higher genius and nature of Burke, served only to 
 revive and stimulate him, but which damped whatever glow 
 Macintosh once had. Wordsworth's lofty estimate is given 
 in Lord John Russell's recent Biography of Moore, and 
 serves not only to prove what his opinion was, but to estab- 
 lish a strong distinction between the mere dilettante littera- 
 teur like Canning, and the mere statesman like Pitt, and a 
 man who, like Burke, combined the deepest knowledge of 
 politics and the most unaffected love for literature and lite- 
 rary men. Brougham's estimate, in his " Statesmen," &c., is 
 not exactly unfair, but fails, first, through his lordship's pro- 
 found uulikeness, in heart, habits, kind of culture, taste, and 
 genius, to the subject of his critique (Burke, to name two 
 or three distinctions, was always a careful, while Brougham is 
 often an extempore, thinker. Burke is a Cicero, and some- 
 thing far more ; Brougham aspires to be a Demosthenes, and 
 is something far less. Burke reasons philosophically a mode 
 of ratiocination which, as we have seen, can be employed with 
 advantage on almost all subjects ; Brougham reasons geomet- 
 rically, and is one of those who, according to Aristotle, are 
 sure to err when they turn their mathematical method to
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 321 
 
 moral or mental themes. Burke's process of thought resem- 
 bles the swift synthetic algebra ; Brougham's, the slow, plod- 
 ding, geometric analysis. Burke had prophetic insight, ear- 
 nestness, and poetic fire ; Brougham has marvellous acuteness, 
 the earnestness of passion, and the fire of temperament. Burke 
 had genuine imagination ; Brougham has little or none ; and, 
 second, through his prodigious exaggerations of Burke's rivals, 
 who, because they were near and around, appear to him cog- 
 nate and equal, if not superior ; even as St. Peter's is said to 
 be lessened in effect by some tall but tasteless buildings in 
 the neighborhood ; and as the giant Ben Macdhui was long 
 concealed by the lofty but subordinate hills which crush in 
 around him. Hazlitt, Macaulay, and De Quincey have all 
 seen Burke in a truer light, and praised him in the spirit of a 
 more generous and richer recognition. Hazlitt has made, he 
 tells us, some dozen attempts to describe Burke's style, with- 
 out pleasing himself so subtle and evasive he found its ele- 
 ments, and so strange the compound in it of matter-of-fact, 
 speculation, and poetic eloquence. His views of him, too, 
 veered about several times at least they seem very different 
 in his papers in the " Edinburgh Keview," and in his acknow- 
 ledged essays ; although we believe that at heart he always 
 admired him to enthusiasm, and is often his unconscious imi- 
 tator. Macaulay has also a thorough appreciation of Burke, 
 the more that he is said to fancy it is nothing more than a 
 fancy that there is a striking resemblance between his hero 
 and himself! De Quincey, following in this Coleridge, has 
 felt, and eloquently expressed, his immeasurable contempt for 
 those who praise Burke's fancy at the expense of his intellect. 
 Dr. Croly has published a " Political Life of Burke," full of 
 eloquence and fervid panegyric, as well as of strong discrimi- 
 nation ; Burke is manifestly his master, nor has he found an 
 unworthy disciple. Henry Rogers has edited and prefaced an 
 edition of Burke's works, but the prefixed essay, although 
 able, is hardly worthy of the author of " Reason and Faith," 
 and its eloquence is of a laborious, mechanical sort. And 
 Hall has, in his "Apology for the Liberty of the Press," 
 which was in part a reply to the " Reflections," painted him 
 by a few beautiful touches, less true, however, than they are 
 beautiful ; and his pamphlet, although carefully modelled on
 
 322 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the writings of his opponent, is not to be named beside thevn 
 in depth, compass of thought, richness of imagery, or variety 
 and natural vigor of style; his splendor, compared to Burke's, 
 is stiff; his thinking and his imagery imitative no more than 
 in the case of Macaulay do you ever feel yourself in contact 
 with a " great virgin mind," melting down through the heat 
 and weight of its own exhaustless wealth, although, in absence 
 of fault, stateliness of manner and occasional polished felicities 
 of expression, Hall is superior even to Burke. 
 
 That Burke was Junius, we do not believe : but that Burke 
 HAD TO DO with the composition of some of these celebrated 
 letters, we are as certain as if we had seen his careful front, 
 and dim, but searching eyes looking through his spectacles 
 over the MS. He was notoriously (see Prior's Life) in the 
 secret of their authorship. Johnson thought him the only 
 man then alive capable of writing them. Hall's objection, 
 that " Burke's great power was amplification, while that of 
 Junius was condensation," sprung, we think, from a totally 
 mistaken idea of the very nature of Burke's mind. There is 
 far more condensed thinking and writing in many parts of 
 Burke than in Junius the proof of which is, that no prose 
 writer in the language, except, perhaps, Dean Swift, has had 
 so many single sentences so often quoted. That the motion 
 of the mind of Junius differs materially from Burke's, is 
 granted ; but we could account for this (even although we 
 contended, which we do not, that he was the sole author), 
 from the awkwardness of the position in which the Anony- 
 mous would necessarily place him. He would become like a 
 man writing with his left hand. The mask would confine as 
 well as disguise him. He durst not venture on that free and 
 soaring movement which was natural to him. Who ever 
 heard of a man in a mask swaying a broadsword ? He always 
 uses a stiletto, or a dagger. Many of the best things in 
 " Junius" are in one of Burke's manners ; for, as we have 
 seen, many manners and styles were his. He said to Boswell, 
 in reference to Croft's " Life of Young," " It is not a good 
 imitation of Johnson : he has the nodosities of the oak, with- 
 out its strength the contortions of the sibyl, without her in- 
 spiration." Junius says of Sir W. Draper, " He has all the 
 melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration." How
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 323 
 
 like to many sentences in Burke are such expressions as these 
 (speaking of Wilkes) : " The gentle breath of peace would 
 leave him on the surface, unruffled and unremoved ; it is only 
 the tempest which lifts him from his place." We could quote 
 fifty pithy sentences from Junius and from Burke, which, 
 placed in parallel columns, would convince an unprejudiced 
 critic that they came from the same mind.* It is the union 
 in both of point, polish, and concentration a union reminding 
 you of the deep yet shining sentences of Tacitus that estab- 
 lishes the identity. Junius has two salts in his style the 
 sal acridum, and the sal Atticum. Sir Philip Francis was 
 equal to the supply of the first ; Burke alone to that of the 
 secqnd. It adds to the evidence for this theory, that Burke 
 was fond of anonymous writing, and that in it he occasionally 
 " changed his voice," and personated other minds : think of 
 his " Vindication of Natural Society in the Manner of Lord 
 Bolingbroke." He often, too, assisted other writers sub rosa, 
 such as Barry and Reynolds, in their prelections on painting. 
 We believe, in short, this to be the truth on the subject : he 
 was in the confidence of the Junius Club for a club it cer- 
 tainly was ; he overlooked many of the letters (Prior asserts 
 that he once or twice spoke of what was to be the substance of 
 a letter the day before it appeared) ; and he supplied many of 
 his inimitable touches, just as Lord Jeffrey was wont to add 
 spice even to some of Hazlitt's articles in the " Edinburgh 
 Review." So that he could thus very safely and honestly 
 deny, as he repeatedly did, that he was the author of Junius, 
 and yet be connected with the authorship of the letters. 
 
 * Amid the innumerable full-grown beauties, or even hints of beau- 
 ties, borrowed by after- writers from Burke, we have just noticed one, 
 which Macintosh, in his famous letter to Hall, has appropriated with- 
 out acknowledgment. It is where he speaks of Hall turning from 
 literature, &c., to the far nobler task of "remembering the forgotten," 
 &c. This grand simplicity, of which Macintosh was altogether in- 
 capable, may be found in Burke's panegyric on Howard. Indeed, we 
 wish we had time to go over Burke's works, and to prove that a vast 
 number of the profound or brilliant things that have since been uttered 
 (disguised or partially altered), in most of our favorite writers on 
 grave subjects, present and past, are stolen from the great fountain 
 mind of the eighteenth century. We may do so on some future oc- 
 casion ; and let the plagiarists tremble ! Enough at present.
 
 824 MISCELLAXEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 We come, lastly, to speak of the influence wliioli Burke has 
 exerted upon his and our times. This has been greater than 
 most even of his admirers believe. He was one of the few 
 parent minds which the world has produced. Well does Burns 
 call him " Daddie Burke." And both politics and literature 
 owe filial obligations to his unbounded genius. In politics he 
 haa been the father of moderate Conservatism, which is, at 
 least, a tempering of Toryism, if not its sublimation. That 
 conservatism in politics and in church matters exists now in 
 Britain, is, we believe, mainly owing to the genius of two men 
 Burke and Coleridge. In literature, too, he set an exam- 
 ple that has been widely followed. He unintentionally, and 
 by the mere motion of his powerful mind, broke the chains in 
 which Johnson was binding our style and criticism, without, 
 however, going back himself, or leading back others, to the 
 laxity of the Addisonian manner. All good and vigorous 
 English style since that of Godwin, that of Foster, that of 
 Hall, that of Horsley, that of Coleridge, that of Jeffrey, that 
 of Hazlitt, that of De Quincey, that of the " Times'" newspaper 
 are much indebted to the power with which Burke stirred 
 the stagnant waters of our literature, and by which, while pro- 
 pressedly an enemy of revolutions, he himself established one 
 of the greatest, most beneficial, and most lasting that, name- 
 ly, of a new, more impassioned, and less conventional mode of 
 addressing the intellects and hearts of men. 
 
 Latterly, another change has threatened to come over us. 
 Some men of genius have imported from abroad a mangled 
 and mystic Germanism, which has been for awhile the rage. 
 This has not, however, mingled kindly with the current of our 
 literature. The philosophic language of jargon and it is 
 partly both of the Teutons has not been well assimilated, or 
 thoroughly digested among us. From its frequent and affect- 
 ed use, it is fast becoming a nuisance. While thinkers have 
 gladly availed themselves of all that is really valuable in its 
 terminology, pretenders have still more eagerly sought shelter 
 for their conceit or morbid weakness under -its shield. The 
 stuff, the verbiage, the mystic bewilderment, the affectation, 
 the'disguised commonplace, which every periodical almost now 
 teems with, under the form of this foreign phraseology, are 
 enormous, and would require a Swift, in a new " Tale of a
 
 EDGAR A. POE. 325 
 
 Tub," or " Battle of the Books," to expose them. "We fancy, 
 however, we see a re-action coming. Great is the Anglo- 
 Saxon, the language of Shakspeare and Byron, and it shall yet 
 prevail over the feeble refinements of the small mimics of the 
 Teutonic giants. Germany was long Britain's humble echo 
 and translator. Britain, please God ! shall never become its 
 shadow. Our thought, too, and faith, which have suffered 
 from the same cause, are in due time to recover ; nay, the 
 process of restoration is begun. And among other remedies 
 for the evil, while yet it in a great measure continues, we 
 strongly recommend a recurrence to the works of our great 
 classics in the past ; and, among their bright list, let not him 
 be forgotten, who, apart from his genius, his worth, and his 
 political achievements, has in his works presented so many 
 titles to be considered not only as the facile princeps among 
 the writers of his own time (although this itself were high dis- 
 tinction), but as one of the first authors who, in any age or 
 country, ever speculated or wrote. 
 
 NO. V.-EDGAR A. POE, 
 
 WE have sometimes amused ourselves by conjecturing 
 Had the history of human genius run differently had all men 
 of that class been as wise, and prudent, and good, as too many 
 of them have been improvident, foolish, and depraved had we 
 had a virtuous Burns, a pure Byron, a Goldsmith with com- 
 mon sense, a Coleridge with self-control, and a Poe with so- 
 briety what a different world it had been ; what each of these 
 surpassing spirits might have done to advance, refine, and 
 purify society ; what a host of " minor prophets" had been 
 found among the array of the poets of our own country ! 
 For more than the influence of kings, or rulers, or statesmen, 
 or clergymen though it were multiplied tenfold is that of 
 the " Makers" whose winged words pass through all lands,
 
 326 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 tingle in all ears, touch all hearts, and in all circumstances are 
 remembered and come humming around us in the hours of 
 labor, in the intervals of business, in trouble, and sorrow, and 
 sickness, and on the bed of death itself; who enjoy, in fact, a 
 kind of omnipresence whose thoughts have over us the three- 
 fold grasp of beauty, language, and music and to whom at 
 times " all power is given" in the " dreadful trance" of their 
 genius, to move our beings to their foundations, and to make 
 us better or worse, lower or higher men, according to their 
 pleasure. Yet true it is, and pitiful as true, that these 
 " Makers" themselves made of the finest clay have often 
 been "marred," and that the history of poets is one of the 
 saddest and most humbling in the records of the world sad 
 and humbling especially, because the poet is ever seen side by 
 side with his own ideal, that graven image of himself he has 
 set up with his own hands, and his failure or fall is judged ac- 
 cordingly. Cowper says in his correspondence, " I have late- 
 ly finished eight volumes of Johnson's ' Lives of the Poets;' 
 in all that number I observe but one man whose mind seems 
 to have had the slightest tincture of religion, and he was hard- 
 ly in his senses. His name was Collins. But from the lives 
 of all the rest there is but one inference to be drawn that 
 poets are a very worthless, wicked set of people." This is 
 certainly too harsh, since these lives include the names of Ad- 
 dison, Watts, Young, and Milton ; but it contains a portion 
 of truth. Poets, as a tribe, have been rather a worthless, 
 wicked set of people ; and certainly Edgar A. Poe, instead of be- 
 ing an exception, was probably the most worthless and wicked 
 of all his fraternity. 
 
 And yet we must say, in justice, that the very greatest po- 
 ets have been good as well as great. Shakspeare, judging 
 him by his class and age, was undoubtedly, to say the least, a 
 respectable member of society, as well as a warmhearted 
 and generous man. Dante and Milton we need only name. 
 And these are " the first three" in the poetic army. Words- 
 worth, Young, Cowper, Southey, Bowles, Crabbe, Pollok, are 
 inferior but still great names, and they were all, in different 
 measures, good men. And of late years, indeed, the instances 
 of depraved genius have become rarer and rarer ; so much so, 
 that we are disposed to trace a portion of Poe's renown to
 
 EDGAR A. TOE. 327 
 
 the fact that he stood forth an exception so gross, glar- 
 ing, and defiant, to what was promising to become a general 
 rule. 
 
 In character he was certainly one of the strangest anoma- 
 lies in the history of mankind. Many men as dipsipated as he 
 have had warm hearts, honorable feelings, and have been lov- 
 ed and pitied by all. Many, in every other respect worthless, 
 have had some one or two redeeming points ; and the combi- 
 nation of " one virtue and a thousand crimes" has not been 
 uncommon. Others have the excuse of partial derangement 
 for errors otherwise monstrous and unpardonable. But none 
 of these pleas can be made for Poe. He was no more a gen- 
 tleman than he was a saint. His heart was as rotten as his 
 conduct was infamous. He knew not what the terms honor 
 and honorable meant. He had absolutely no virtue or good 
 quality, unless you call remorse a virtue, and despair a grace. 
 Some have called him mad ; but we confess we see no evi- 
 dence of this in his history. He showed himself, in many in- 
 stances, a cool, calculating, deliberate blackguard. His intel- 
 lect was of the clearest, sharpest, and most decisive kind. A 
 large heart has often beat in the bosom of a debauchee ; but 
 Poe had not one spark of genuine tenderness, unless it were 
 for his wife, whose heart, nevertheless, and constitution, he 
 broke hurrying her to a premature grave, that he might 
 write " Annabel Lee" and " The Raven !" His conduct to 
 his patron, and to the lady mentioned in his memoirs, whom 
 he threatened to cover with infamy if she did not lend him 
 money, was purely diabolical. He was, in short, a combina- 
 tion in almost equal proportions, of the fiend, the brute, and 
 the genius. One might call him one of the Gadarene swine, 
 filled with a devil, and hurrying down a steep place to perish 
 in the waves ; but none could deny that he was a " swine of 
 genius." 
 
 He has been compared to Swift, to Burns, to Sheridan, and 
 to Hazlitt ; but in none of these cases does the comparison 
 fully hold. Swift had probably as black crimes on his con- 
 science as Poe ; but Swift could feel and could create in others 
 the emotion of warmest friendship, and his outward conduct 
 was irreproachable it was otherwise with Poe. Burns had 
 many errors, poor fellow ! but they were " all of the flesh
 
 328 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES 
 
 none of the spirit ;" he was originally one of the noblest of 
 natures, and during all his career nothing mean, or dishonor- 
 able, or black-hearted was ever charged against him ; he was 
 an erring man but still a man. Sheridan was a sad scamp, 
 but had a kind of bonhommie about him which carried off in 
 part your feeling of disgust ; and, although false to his party, 
 he was in general true to his friends. Hazlitt's faults were 
 deep and dark; but he was what Poe was not an intensely 
 honest man ; and he paid the penalty thereof in unheard-of 
 abuse and proscription. In order to parallel Poe, we must 
 go back to Savage and Dermody. If our readers will turn to 
 the first or second volumes of the " Edinburgh Review," they 
 will find an account of the last-mentioned, which will remind 
 them very much of Poe's dark and discreditable history. 
 Dermody, like Poe, was a habitual drunkard, licentious, false, 
 treacherous, and capable of everything that was mean, base, 
 and malignant ; but, unlike Poe, his genius was not far above 
 mediocrity. Hartley Coleridge, too, may recur to some as a 
 case in point; but he was a harmless being, and a thorough 
 gentleman amiable, and, as the phrase goes, " nobody's ene- 
 my but his own." 
 
 How are we to account for this sad and miserable story ? 
 That Poe's circumstances were precarious from the first that 
 he was left an orphan that without his natural protector he 
 became early exposed to temptation that his life was wander- 
 ing and unsettled all this does not explain the utter and 
 reckless abandonment of his conduct, far less his systematic 
 want of truth, and the dark sinistrous malice which rankled 
 in his bosom. Habitual drunkenness does indeed tend to 
 harden the heart ; but, if Poe had possessed any heart original- 
 ly, it might, as well as in the case of other dissipated men of ge- 
 nius, have resisted, and only in part yielded to the induration; and 
 why did he permit himself to become the abject slave of the 
 vice ? The poet very properly puts " lust hard by hate" (and 
 hence, perhaps, the proverbial fierceness of the bull), and Poe 
 was as licentious as he was intemperate ; but the question re- 
 curs, Why ? We are driven to one of two suppositions : 
 either that his moral nature was more than usually depraved 
 ab origine that, as some have maintained, " conscience was 
 omitted" in his constitution ; or that, by the unrestrained in-
 
 EDGAR A. POE. 329 
 
 dulgence of his passions, he, as John Bunyan has it, u tempt- 
 ed the devil," and became the bound victim of infernal influ- 
 ence. In this age of scepticism such a theory is sure to be 
 laughed at, but is not the less likely to be true. If ever man 
 in modern times resembled at least a demoniac, " exceeding 
 fierce, and dwelling among tombs" possessed now by a spirit 
 of fury, and now by a spirit of falsehood, and now by an " un- 
 clean spirit" it was Poe, as he rushed with his eyes open in- 
 to every excess of riot ; or entered the house of his intended 
 bride on the night before the anticipated marriage, and com- 
 mitted such outrages as to necessitate a summons of the po- 
 lice to remove the drunk and raving demon ; or ran howling 
 through the midnight like an evil spirit on his way to the Red 
 Sea, battered by the rains, beaten by the winds, waving aloft 
 his arms in frenzy, cursing loud and deep man, himself, God, 
 and proclaiming that he was already damned, and damned for 
 ever. In demoniac possession, too, of a different kind, it was 
 that he fancied the entire secret of the making of the universe 
 to be revealed to him, and went about everywhere shouting, 
 " Eureka " a title, too, which he gave to the strange and 
 splendid lecture in which he recorded the memorable illusion. 
 And when the spirit of talk came at times mightily upon him 
 when the " witch element" seemed to surround him when 
 his brow flushed like an evening cloud when his eyes glared 
 wild lightning when his hair stood up like the locks of a 
 Bacchante when his chest heaved, and his voice rolled and 
 swelled like subterranean thunder men, admiring, fearing, 
 and wondering, said, " He hath a demon, yea, seven devils are 
 entered into him." His tongue was then " set on fire," but 
 set on fire of hell ; and its terrific inspiration rayed out of ev- 
 ery gesture and look, and spake in every tone. 
 
 " Madness !" it will be cried again ; but that word does not 
 fully express the nature of Poe's excitement in these fearful 
 hours. There was no incoherence either in his matter or in 
 his words. There was, amid all the eloquence and poetry of his 
 talk, a vein of piercing, searching, logical, but sinister thought. 
 All his faculties were shown in the same lurid light, and touched 
 by the same torch of the Furies. All blazed emulous of each 
 other's fire. The awful Soul which had entered his soul form- 
 ed an exact counterpart to it, and the haggard " dream was
 
 330 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 one." One is reminded of the words of Aird, in his humor 
 tai poem, tl The Demoniac :" 
 
 '' Perhaps by hopeless passions bound, 
 And render'd weak, the mastery a demon o'er him found : 
 Reason and duty all, all life, his being all became 
 Subservient to the wild, strange law that overbears his frame ; 
 And in the dead hours of the night, when happier children lie 
 In slumbers seal'd, he journeys far the flowing rivers by. 
 And oft he haunts the sepulchres, where the thin shoals of ghosts 
 Flit shiv'rhig from death's chilling dews ; to their unbodied hosts 
 That churm through night their feeble plaint, he yells; at the red morn 
 Meets the great armies of the winds, high o'er the mountains borne, 
 Leaping against their viewless rage, tossing his arms on high, 
 And hanging balanced o'er sheer steeps against the morning sky." 
 
 We are tempted to add the following lines, partly for their 
 Dantesque power, and partly because they describe still more 
 energetically than the last quotation such a tremendous pos- 
 session as was Herman's in fiction, and Poe's in reality : 
 
 " lie rose ; a smother'd gleam 
 
 Was on his brow ; with fierce motes roll'd his eye's distemper'd beam ; 
 He smiled, 'twas as the lightning of a hope about to die 
 For ever from the furrow 1 d brows of hell's eternity ; 
 Like sun-warm'd snakes, rose on his head a storm of golden hair, 
 Tangled ; and thus on Miriam fell hot breathings of despair : 
 ' Perish the breasts that gave me milk ! yea, in thy mouldering heart : 
 Good thrifty roots I'll plant, to stay next time my hunger's smart. 
 Red-vein' d derived apples I shall eat with savage haste, 
 And see thy life-blood blushing through, and glory in the taste.' " 
 
 Herman, in the poem, has a demon sent into his heart, m 
 divine sovereignty, and that he may be cured by the power of 
 Christ. But Poe had Satan substituted for soul, apparently 
 to torment him before the time ; and we do not see him ere the 
 end sitting, " clothed, and in his right mind, at the feet of Je- 
 sus." He died, as he had lived, a raving, cursing, self-con- 
 demned, conscious cross between the fiend and the genius, 
 believing nothing, hoping nothing, loving nothing, fearing 
 nothing himself his own god and his own devil a solitary 
 wretch, who had cut off every bridge that connected him with 
 the earth around and the heavens above. This, however, let 
 us say in his favor he has died " alone in his iniquity ;" he 
 has never, save by his example (so far as we know his works), 
 sought to shake faith or sap morality. His writings may be
 
 EDGAR A. POE. 331 
 
 morbid, but they are pure ; and, if his life was bad has he not 
 left it as a legacy to moral anatomists, who have met and won- 
 dered over it, although they have given up all attempt at dis- 
 section or diagnosis, shaking the head, and leaving him alone in 
 its shroud, with the solemn whispered warning to the world, and 
 especially to its stronger and brighter spirits, " Beware !" 
 
 A case so strange as Poe's compels us into new and more 
 searching forms of critical, as well as of moral analysis. Genius 
 has very generally been ascribed to him ; but some will resist 
 and deny the ascription proceeding partly upon peculiar no- 
 tions of what genius is, and partly from a very natural reluc- 
 tance to concede to a wretch so vile a gift so noble, and in a 
 degree, too, so unusually large. Genius has often been defined 
 as something inseparably connected with the genial nature. If 
 this definition be correct, Poe was not a genius any more than 
 Swift, for geniality neither he nor his writings possessed. But if 
 genius mean a compound of imagination and inventiveness, 
 original thought heated by passion and accompanied by power 
 of fancy, Poe was a man of great genius. In wanting genial- 
 ity, however, he wanted all that makes genius lovely and be- 
 loved, at once beautiful and dear. A man of genius, without 
 geniality, is a mountain clad in snow, companioned by tem- 
 pests, and visited only by hardy explorers who love sublime 
 nakedness, and to snatch a fearful joy from gazing down black 
 precipices ; a man whose genius is steeped in the genial nature, 
 is an autuma landscape, suggesting not only images of beauty, 
 and giving thrills of delight, but yielding peaceful and plente- 
 ous fruits, and in which the heart finds a rest and a home. 
 From the one the timid, the weak, and the gentle retire in a 
 terror which overpowers their admiration ; but in the other the 
 lowest and feeblest find shelter and repose. Even Dante and 
 Milton, owing to the excess of their intellectual and imagina- 
 tive powers over their genial feelings, are less loved than ad- 
 mired ; while the vast supremacy of Shakspeare is due, not 
 merely to his universal genius, but to the predominance of 
 geniality and heart in all his writings. Many envy and even 
 hate Dante and Milton; and had Shakspeare only written hia 
 loftier tragedies, many might have hated and envied him too ; 
 but who can entertain any such feelings for the author of the 
 " Comedy of Errors" and " Twelfth Night," the creator of Fal-
 
 332 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 staff, Dogberry, and Verres ? If genius be the sun geniality 
 is the atmosphere through which alone his beams can penetrate 
 with power, or be seen with pleasure. 
 
 Poe is distinguished by many styles and many manners. 
 He is the author of fictions as matter-of-fact in theii construc- 
 tion and language as the stories of Defoe, and of tales as wierd 
 and wonderful as those of Hoffman ; of amatory strains trem- 
 bling, if not with heart, with passion, and suffused with the 
 purple glow of love, and of poems, dirges either in form or in 
 spirit, into which the genius of desolation has shed its dreari- 
 est essence ; of verses, gay with apparent, but shallow joy, and 
 of others dark with a misery which reminds us of the helpless, 
 hopeless, infinite misery, which sometimes visits the souls in 
 dreams. But, amid all this diversity of tone and of subject, the 
 leading qualities of his mind are obvious. These consist of 
 strong imagination an imagination, however, more fertile in 
 incidents, forms, and characters, than in images ; keen power 
 of analysis, rather than synthetic genius ; immense inventive- 
 ness ; hot passions, cooled down by the presence of art, till 
 they resemble sculptured flame, or " lightning in the hand of a 
 painted Jupiter;" knowledge rather recherche and varied, than 
 strict, accurate, or profound ; and an unlimited command of 
 words, phrases, musical combinations of sound, and all the 
 other materials of an intellectual workman. The direction of 
 these powers was controlled principally by his habits and cir- 
 cumstances. These made him morbid ; and his writings have 
 all a certain morbidity about them. You say at once, cool 
 and clear as most of them are, these are not the productions 
 of a healthy or happy man. But surely never was there such 
 a calm despair such a fiery torment so cased in ice ! When 
 you compare the writings with the known facts of the author's 
 history, they appear to be so like, and so unlike, his character. 
 You seem looking at an inverted image. You have the fea- 
 tures, but they are discovered at an unexpected angle. You 
 see traces of the misery of a confirmed debauchee, but none of 
 his disconnected ravings, or of the partial imbecility which 
 often falls upon his powers. There is a strict, almost logical, 
 method, in his wildest productions. He tells us himself that 
 he wrote " The Raven" as coolly as if he had been working 
 out a mathematical problem. His frenzy, if that name must
 
 EDOAB. A. POK. 333 
 
 be given to the strange fire which was in him, is a conscious one; 
 he feels his own pulse when it is at the wildest, and looks at 
 his foaming lips in the looking-glass. 
 
 Poe was led by a singular attraction to all dark, dreadful, 
 and disgusting objects and thoughts : maelstroms, mysteries, 
 murders, mummies, premature burials, excursions to the moon, 
 solitary mansions surrounded by mist and weighed down by 
 mysterious dooms, lonely tarns, trembling to the winds of au- 
 tumn, and begirt by the shivering ghosts of woods these are 
 the materials which his wild imagination loves to work with, 
 and out of them to weave the most fantastic and dismal of 
 worlds. Yet there's " magic in the web." You often revolt 
 at his subjects ; but no sooner does he enter on them, than your 
 attention is riveted, you lend him your ears nay, that is a fee- 
 ble word, you surrender your whole being to him for a season, 
 although it be as you succumb, body and soul, to the dominion 
 of a nightmare. What greatly increases effect, as in " Gulli- 
 ver's Travels," is the circumstantiality with which he recounts 
 the most amazing and incredible things. His tales, too, are 
 generally cast into the autobiographical form, which adds much 
 to their living vraisemblance and vivid power. It is Cole- 
 ridge's " Old Mariner" over again. Strange, wild, terrible, is 
 the tale he has to tell ; haggard, wo-begone, unearthly is the 
 appearance of the narrator. Every one at first, like the wed- 
 ding guest, is disposed to shrink and beat his breast ; but he 
 holds you with his glittering eye, he forces you to follow him 
 into his own enchanted region, and once there, you forget every- 
 thing, your home, your friends, your creed, your very personal 
 identity, and become swallowed up like a straw in the maelstrom 
 of his story, and forget to breathe till it is ended, and the 
 mysterious tale-teller is gone. And during all the wild and 
 whirling narrative, the same chilly glitter has continued to 
 shine in his eye, his blood has never warmed, and he has never 
 exalted his voice above a thrilling whisper. 
 
 Poe's power may perhaps be said to be divisible into two 
 parts : first, that of adding an air of circumstantial verity to 
 incredibilities ; and, secondly, that of throwing a wierd lustre 
 upon commonplace events. He tells fiction so minutely, and 
 with such apparent simplicity and sincerity, that you almost 
 believe it true ; and he so combines and so recounts such inci-
 
 334 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 dents as you meet with every day in the newspapers, that you 
 feel truth to be stranger far than fiction. Look, as a speci- 
 men of the first, to his " Descent into the Maelstrom," and to 
 his " Hans Pfaal's Journey to the Moon." Both are impos- 
 sible the former as much so as the latter but he tells them 
 with such Dante-like directness, and such Defoe-like minute- 
 ness, holding his watch, and marking, as it were, every second 
 in the progress of each stupendous lie, that you rub your eyes 
 at the close, and ask the question, Might not all this actually 
 have occurred ? And then turn to the " Murders in the Rue 
 St. Morgue," or to the " Mystery of Marie Roget," and see 
 how, by the disposition of the drapery he throws over little or 
 ordinary incidents, connected, indeed, with an extraordinary 
 catastrophy, he lends 
 
 " The light which never was on sea or shore" 
 
 to streets of revelry and vulgar sin, and to streams whose 
 sluggish waters are never disturbed save by the plash of mur- 
 dered victims, or by the plunge of suicides desperately hurl- 
 ing their bodies to the fishes, and their souls to the flames. 
 
 In one point, Poe bears a striking resemblance to his own 
 illustrious countryman, Brockden Brown neither resort to 
 agency absolutely supernatural, in order to produce their ter- 
 rific effects. They despise to start a ghost from the grave 
 they look upon this as a cheap and facie expedient they ap- 
 peal to the " mightier might" of the human passions, or to 
 those strange unsolved phenomena in the human mind, which 
 the terms mesmerism and somnambulism serve rather to dis- 
 guise than to discover, and sweat out from their native soil 
 superstitions far more powerful than those of the past. Once 
 only does Poe approach the brink of the purely preternatural 
 it is in that dreary tale, the " Fall of the House of Usher;" 
 and yet nothing so discovers the mastery of the writer as the 
 manner in which he avoids, while nearing, the gulf. There is 
 really nothing, after all, in the strange incidents of that story 
 but what natural principles can explain. But Poe so arranges 
 and adjusts the singular circumstances to each other, and 
 weaves around them such an artful mist, that they produce a 
 most unearthly effect. Perhaps some may think that he has 
 fairly crossed the line in that dialogue between Charmian and
 
 EDGAR A. POE. 335 
 
 Iras, describing the conflagration of the world. But, even 
 there, how admirably does he produce a certain feeling of pro- 
 bability by the management of the natural causes which he 
 brings in to produce the catastrophe. He burns his old witch- 
 mother, the earth, scientifically ! We must add that the above 
 is the only respect in which Poe resembles Brown. Brown 
 was a virtuous and amiable man, and his works, although 
 darkened by unsettled religious views, breathe a fine spirit of 
 humanity. Poe wonders at, and hates man ; Brown wonders 
 at, but at the same time pities, loves, and hopes in him. 
 Brown mingled among men like a bewildered angel ; Poe like 
 a prying fiend. 
 
 We have already alluded to the singular power of analysis 
 possessed by this strange being. This is chiefly conspicuous 
 in those tales of his which turn upon circumstantial evidence. 
 No lawyer or judge has ever equalled Poe in the power he 
 manifests of sifting evidence of balancing probabilities of 
 finding the multum of a large legal case in the parvum of 
 some minute and well-nigh invisible point and in construct- 
 ing the real story out of a hundred dubious and conflicting 
 incidents. What scales he carries with him ! how fine and 
 tremulous with essential justice ! And with what a micro- 
 scopic eye he watches every footprint ! Letters thrown loose 
 on the mantel-piece, bell-ropes, branches of trees, handker- 
 chiefs, &c., become to him instinct with meaning, and point 
 with silent finger to crime and to punishment. And to think 
 of this subtle algebraic power, combined with such a strong 
 ideality, and with such an utterly corrupted moral nature ! 
 Surely none of the hybrids which geology has dug out of the 
 graves of chaos and exhibited to our shuddering view is half so 
 strange a compound as was Edgar A. Poe. We have hitherto 
 scarcely glanced at his poetry. It, although lying in a very 
 short compass, is of various merit : it is an abridgment of the 
 man in his strength and weakness. Its chief distinction, as a 
 whole, from his prose, is its peculiar music. That, like all 
 his powers, is fitful, changeful, varying ; but not more so than 
 to show the ever-varying moods of his mind, acting on a pecu- 
 liar and indefinite theory of sound. The alpha and omega of 
 that theory may be condensed in the word " reiteration." 
 He knows the effect which can be produced by ringing changes
 
 336 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHED 
 
 on particular words. The strength of all his strains conse- 
 quently lies in their chorus, or " oure turn," as we call it in 
 Scotland. We do not think that he could have succeeded in 
 sustaining the harmonies or keeping up the interest of a large 
 poem. But his short flights are exceedingly beautiful, and 
 some of his poems are miracles of melody. All our readers 
 are familiar with " The Raven." It is a dark world in itself; 
 it rises in your sky suddenly as the cloud like a man's hand 
 rose in the heaven of Palestine, and covers all the horizon 
 with the blackness of darkness. As usual in his writings, it 
 is but a common event idealised ; there is nothing supernatu- 
 ral or even extraordinary in the incident recounted ; but the 
 reiteration of the one dreary word "nevermore;" the effect 
 produced by seating the solemn bird of yore upon the bust of 
 Pallas ; the manner in which the fowl with its fiery eyes be- 
 comes the evil conscience or memory of the lonely widower ; 
 and the management of the time, the season, and the circum- 
 stances all unite in making the Raven in its flesh and blood 
 a far more terrific apparition than ever from the shades made 
 night hideous, while " revisiting the glimpses of the moon." 
 The poem belongs to a singular class of poetic uniques, each 
 of which is itself enough to make a reputation, such as Cole- 
 ridge's " Rime of the Anciente Marinere," or " Christabel," 
 and Aird's " Devil's Dream upon Mount Acksbeck" poems 
 in which some one new and generally dark idea is wrought 
 out into a whole so strikingly complete and self-contained as 
 to resemble creation, and in which thought, imagery, language, 
 and music combine to produce a similar effect, and are made 
 to chime together like bells. What entireness of effect, for 
 instance, is produced in the " Devil's Dream," by the unearthly 
 theme, the strange title, the austere and terrible figures, the 
 singular verse, and the knotty and contorted language; and 
 in the " Rime of the Anciente Marinere," by the ghastly form 
 of the narrator the wild rythm, the new mythology, and the 
 exotic diction of the tale he tells ! So Poe's " Raven" has 
 the unity of a tree blasted, trunk, and twigs, and root, by a 
 flash of lightning. Never did melancholy more thoroughly 
 "mark for its own" any poem than this. All is in intense 
 keeping. Short as the poem is, it has a beginning, middle, 
 and end. Its commencement how abrupt and striking the
 
 EDGAR. A. TOE. 337 
 
 time a December midnight the poet a solitary man, sitting, 
 " weak and weary," poring in helpless fixity, but with no 
 profit or pleasure, over a black-letter volume ; the fire half 
 expired, and the dying embers haunted by their own ghosts, and 
 shivering above the hearth ! The middle is attained when the 
 raven mounts the bust of Pallas, and is fascinating the soli- 
 tary wretch by his black, glittering plumage, and his measured, 
 melancholy croak. And the end closes as with the wings of 
 night over the sorrow of the unfortunate, and these dark words 
 conclude the tale : 
 
 " And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, 
 Shall be lifted Nevermore." 
 
 You feel as if the poem might have been penned by the finger 
 of one of the damned. 
 
 The same shadow of unutterable wo rests upon several of 
 his smaller poems, and the efiect is greatly enhanced by their 
 gay and song-like rhythm. That madness or misery which 
 sings out its terror or grief, is always the most desperate. It 
 is like a burden of hell set to an air of heaven. " Ulalume" 
 might have been written by Coleridge during the sad middle 
 portion of his life. There is a sense of dreariness and deso- 
 lation as of the last of earth's autumns, which we find nowhere 
 else in such perfection. What a picture these words convey 
 to the imagination : 
 
 " The skies they were ashen and sober ; 
 The leaves they were crisped and sere 
 The leaves they were withering and sere, 
 It was night in the lonesome October 
 Of my most immemorial year. 
 It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 
 In the misty mid-region of Weir 
 It was down by the dark tarn of Auber, 
 In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 
 
 These to many will appear only words ; but what wondrous 
 words. What a spell they wield ! Like a wasted haggard 
 face, they have no bloom or beauty ; but what a tale they tell ! 
 Weir Auber where are they ? They exist not, except in 
 the writer's imagination, and in yours, for the instant they are 
 uttered, a misty picture, with a tarn, dark as a murderer's 
 15
 
 538 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 eye, below, and the last thin, yellow leaves of October flutter- 
 ing above exponents both of a misery which scorns the name 
 of sorrow, and knows neither limit nor termination is hung 
 up in the chamber of your soul for ever. What power, too, 
 there is in the " Haunted Palace," particularly in the last 
 words, "They laugh, but smile no more!" Dante has no- 
 thing superior in all those chilly yet fervent words of his, 
 where " the ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect 
 of fire." 
 
 We must now close our sketch of Poe ; and we do so with 
 feelings of wonder, pity, and awful sorrow, tempted to look up 
 to heaven, and to cry, " Lord, why didst thou make this man 
 in vain ?" Yet perhaps there was even in him some latent 
 spark of goodness, which may even now be developing itself 
 under a kindlier sky. He has gone far away from the misty 
 mid-region of Weir; his dreams of cosmogonies have been 
 tested by the searching light of Eternity's truth ; his errors 
 have received the reward that was meet ; and we cannot but 
 say, ere we close, Peace even to the well-nigh putrid dust of 
 Edgar A. Poe. 
 
 NO. VI.-SIR EDWARD LITTON BULWER.* 
 
 THE attention of the Scottish public has of late been strong- 
 ly attracted to Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, through his visit 
 to Edinburgh ; and the elegant and scholarly addresses he de- 
 livered there. We propose taking the opportunity so lawfully 
 and gracefully furnished by his recent appearances among us, 
 to analyse again at some length, and in a critical yet kindly 
 spirit, the leading elements of his literary character and genius. 
 
 Bulwer has been now twenty-seven years before the public, 
 and has, during that period, filled almost every phase of au- 
 thorship and of thought. He has been a critic, an editor a 
 
 * The Novels and Romances of Sir E. B. Lyttou, Bart.
 
 SIR EDWARD LVTTON BULWER. 339 
 
 dramatist, a historian, a politician, a speculator in metaphy- 
 sics, a poet, a novelist, the editor of a magazine, a member of 
 Parliament, a subject of the cold-water cure, a philosophical 
 Radical, and a moderate Conservative. In his youth, he wor- 
 shipped Hazlitt and Shelley ; in his middle age, he vibrated 
 between Brougham and Coleridge; and, of late, he associates 
 with Alison and Aytoun ! He has poured out books in all 
 manners, on all subjects, and in all styles ; and his profusion 
 might have seemed that of a spendthrift, if it had not been for 
 the stores in the distance which even his scatterings by the 
 wayside revealed. For versatility of genius, variety of intel- 
 lectual experience, and the brilliant popularity which has fol- 
 lowed him in all Ins diversified career, he reminds us rather 
 of Goethe or Voltaire than of any living author. Like them 
 he has worshipped the god Proteus, and so devoutly and 
 diversely worshipped him, that he might almost, at times, be 
 confounded with the object of his adoration. 
 
 We think decidedly, however, that this boundless fertility 
 and elasticity have tended to lessen the general idea of Bul- 
 wer's powers, and to cast an air of tentative experiment and 
 rash adventure over many of his works. Had he concen- 
 trated himself upon some grand topic, his fame had now been 
 equally wide, not less brilliant, and much more solid than it 
 is. Had he taken some one lofty Acropolis by storm, and 
 shown the flag of his genius floating on its summit, instead of 
 investing a hundred at once, he had been, and been counted, a 
 greater general. We would willingly have accepted two or 
 three superb novels, one large conclusive history, along with a 
 single work of systematic and profound criticism, in exchange 
 for all that motley and unequal, although most varied and 
 imposing mass of fiction, history, plays, poems, and politics, 
 which forms the collected works of Sir E. Lytton Bulwer. 
 
 Some of Sir Edward's admirers have ventured to compare 
 him to Shakspeare and to Scott. Such comparisons are not 
 just. Than Shakspeare he owes a great deal less to nature, 
 and a great deal more to culture, as well as to that indomi- 
 table perseverance to which he has lately ascribed so much of 
 his success, so that we may indeed call the one the least, and 
 the other the most cultivated of great authors ; and to Scott 
 he is vastly inferior in that simple power, directness of aim,
 
 340 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 natural dignity, manly spirit, fire, and health, which rank him 
 immediately below Homer. We may here remark that, not- 
 withstanding all that has been said and sung about the g<nius 
 of Scott, we are convinced that justice has never been done 
 to one feature of his novels we mean their excellence as 
 specimens of English style. 9 Except in Burke and De Quin- 
 cey, whose mode of thinking is so very different, we know of 
 no passages in English prose which approach the better parts 
 of the Waverley series in the union of elegance and strength, 
 in manly force, natural grace, and noble rhythmical cadence. 
 Would that any word of ours could recall the numerous ad- 
 mirers of the morbid magnificence and barbarous dissonance 
 of Carlyle's style ; of the curt affected jargon which mars the 
 poetic beauty of Emerson's ; of the loose fantastic verbiage 
 in which Dickens chooses to indite most of his serious pas- 
 sages; and of the labored antithesis, uneasy brilliance, and 
 assumed carelessness of Macaulay ; and induce them to take 
 up again the neglected pages of Burke, with all the wondrous 
 treasures of wisdom, knowledge, imagery, and language they 
 contain, and to read night and day Scott's novels not for 
 their story, or their pictures of national manners, but for the 
 sake of their wells of English undefiled ; the specimens of pic- 
 turesque, simple, rich, and powerful writing which they so 
 abundantly contain. 
 
 Bulwer, too, although even in his most favored hours he 
 cannot write like Scott, is distinguished by the merit of his 
 style. It has more point, if not so much simplicity ; if pos- 
 sessing less strength, it has far more brilliance; and it has, 
 moreover, a certain classical charm a certain Attic elegance 
 a certain tinge of the antique which few writers of the age 
 can rival. If Disraeli's mode of writing remind you of the 
 gorgeous dress of Jewish females, with their tiaras shining on 
 the brow, their diamond necklaces gleaming above the breast, 
 the vivid yellow or deep red of their garments, their broidered 
 hair, and pearls, and costly array, Bulwer's. in his happier 
 vein, reminds you of the attire of the Grecian women, shod 
 with sandals, clothed with the simple yet elegant tunic, and 
 bearing each on her head a light and tremulous urn. 
 
 Passing from his style, we have some remarks to make on 
 the following points connected with him the alleged non-
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 341 
 
 poetical nature of his mind, his originality, the impersonal 
 faculty he possesses to such a degree, his remaikable width 
 of mind, his dramatic power, the fact that with all his fre- 
 quent flippancy, levity, and excess of point, he is equal to all 
 the great crises of his narrative ; and finally, to that power or 
 principle of growth which has been so conspicuous in his lite- 
 rary history. 
 
 First, not a few have maintained that Bulwer, with all his 
 brilliant effect and eloquence, is not, properly speaking, a poet. 
 An eloquent detractor of his has said : " The author is an 
 orator, and has tried to be a poet. Dickens's John the Car- 
 rier was perpetually on the verge of a joke, but never made 
 one : Bulwer's relation to poetry is of the same provoking 
 kind. The lips twitch, the face glows, the eyes light ; but the 
 joke is not there. An exquisite savoir faire has led him 
 within sight of the intuitions of poetic instinct. Laborious 
 calculation has almost stood for sight, but his maps and charts 
 are not the earth and the heavens. His vision is not a dream, 
 but a nightmare ; you have Parnassus before you, but the 
 light that never was on sea or shore is wanting. The whole 
 reminds you of a lunar landscape, rocks and caves to spare, 
 but no atmosphere. It is fairy-land travelled by dark. How 
 you sigh even for the chaos, the discordia semina of genius, 
 while toiling through the impotent waste of this sterile ma- 
 turity." 
 
 This is vivid and vigorous, but hardly just. We need meet 
 it only by pronouncing one magic word " Zanoni." Who 
 that ever read that glorious romance, with its pictures of love, 
 and life, and death, and the mysteries of the unseen world ; 
 the fine dance of the human and the preternatural elements 
 which are in it, and keep time so admirably to the music of 
 the genius which has created both, and the melting sublimity 
 of its close will deny the author the name of poet? Or 
 who that has ever read those allegories and little tales which 
 are sprinkled through " The Student," and the " Pilgrims of 
 the Rhine," can fail to see in them the creative element ? Or, 
 take the end of his Harold, the death of Kienzi, the Hell scene 
 in " Night and Morning," and the closing chapters of the 
 " Last Days of Pompeii" the terms " oratory" or " art" will 
 not measure these they are instinct with power ; their words
 
 342 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 are the mighty rushing wings of a supernal tempest ; and to 
 us, at least, they always, even at the twentieth perusal, give 
 that deep delightful shiver, that thrill of awful joy, which pro- 
 claims that the Spirit of Genius is passing by, and is making 
 every hair on our flesh start up to do him obeisance. 
 
 True genius is, and must be, original ; so that the terms 
 " original genius" are a poor pleonasm. Now, we think that 
 Bulwer can be proved to have originality; and originality in 
 any department of the fine arts is genius. His thought, his 
 imagery, his style, his form of fiction, are all intensely his 
 own ; and, therefore, since exerted on ideal subjects, all are 
 those of a poet. He began his career indeed, as most writers 
 do, with imitation. He found certain models in vogue at the 
 time, besides some which, although not generally popular, 
 were recommended to him by his own taste. Hence, in his 
 early novels, he has now Godwin, now Scott, and now the 
 authors of what were then called the fashionable novels, such 
 as Tremaine and Almacks, in his eye. But he soon soared 
 out of these trammels, and exhibited and began to realise his 
 own ideal of fiction, the peculiarity of which perhaps lies in the 
 extreme breadth of the purpose he seeks through the novel and 
 romance to fulfil. He has tried to make it a cosmopolitan 
 thing a mirror not of low or high life exclusively, not of 
 the everyday or the ideal alone, not of the past, or present, or 
 future, merely ; but of each and all ; each set in its proper 
 proportions, and all shown in a brilliant light. Ward, and 
 the whole of that school, including Disraeli in his " Vivian 
 Grey" and " Young Duke," wrote for the fashionable classes. 
 Godwin wrote for political and moral philosophers. Dickens 
 writes for Londoners, Lever for Irishmen, and Thackeray for 
 the microscopic students of human nature everywhere. Even 
 Scott neither expressed the spirit of his own age, nor ever 
 attempted to reproduce the classical periods ; nor has he dis- 
 covered any sympathy with the mighty metaphysical, moral, 
 and religious problems with which all thinkers are now com- 
 pelled to grapple. But Bulwer has written of the world, and 
 for the world, in the broadest sense ; has described society, 
 from the glittering crown of its head, to the servile sole of its 
 foot ; has painted all kinds of life, the high, the middle, the 
 mean, the town and the country, the convulsive and the calm
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 343 
 
 that of noblemen, of gamesters, of students, of highwaymen, 
 of murderers, and of milliners ; has mated with the men and 
 manners of all ages ; has reproduced, with startling vraisein- 
 blance, the ancient Roman times, and breathed life into the 
 gigantic skeletons of Herculaueum and Pompeii ; has coped 
 with many of the social and moral questions, as well as faith- 
 fully reflected the salient features of our own wondrous 
 mother-age ; and has with bold foot invaded those regions of 
 speculation which blend with the shadows and splendors of 
 the life to come. It is this wide and catholic character which 
 makes his writings so popular on the Continent. We do not, 
 indeed, say that he has completely filled up the broad outline 
 of his purpose ; otherwise he had been the greatest novelist, 
 perhaps also the greatest writer, in the world. But he has 
 succeeded so far as to induce us to class him with the first 
 authors of his time. He has, although with much effort, long 
 training, and over consciousness both of the toil and the tri- 
 Tiniph, fairly lifted himself above this " ignorant present time," 
 and caught on his wings the wide calm light of the universe. 
 Yet, with all this Goethe-like breadth, he has none of his icy 
 indifference ; but is one of the most fervid and glowing, as 
 well as clear and cosmopolitan, of modern writers. 
 
 His depth has often been denied, nor are we careful to 
 maintain it. There are in some of our authors certain quiet 
 subtle touches, certain profound " asides," certain piercing 
 single thoughts, which proclaim a native vein, communicating 
 directly with the great Heart of Being ; but which we seldom 
 if ever, find in Bulwer. Although he be, in our judgment, a 
 true poet, he is not a poet of the very highest order. But, 
 perhaps, his exceeding width may be taken as in some meas- 
 ure a compensation for his deficiency in depth. Indeed, some 
 may even contend that if there be the same amount of mind, 
 it is of little consequence whether it be diffused over a hun- 
 dred intellectual regions, or gathered together in one or two 
 profound pits ; that as depth and height are only relative 
 terms, so it is with width and depth ; and that as you call the 
 sky indifferently either lofty or profound, so a very wide man 
 is deep in one way and direction, and a very deep man 
 is wide in another. Be this as it may, and there seems a pro- 
 portion of truth as well as of fallacy in it, we contend that
 
 344 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the writer who, like Bulwer, has traversed such varied regions, 
 found and filled, or made and inspired, so many characters, im- 
 bibed the spirit, talked the language, and reproduced the soul 
 of so many times, must be a great uian r whether we call him 
 or not a GREAT poet. 
 
 One element, of poetic power he unquestionably has : he is 
 impersonal ; and, on the whole, very little of an egotist. In 
 " Pelhani," indeed, and one or two more of his earlier novels, 
 while he was yet trifling with his pen, and had not taken any 
 full or calm aim at his object, he seemed often to be glancing 
 obliquely at his own image in the mirror of self-conceit, partly 
 from a wish to re-assure his confidence in himself, and partly 
 from that spirit of indolent vacancy which often falls upon a 
 writer who is only half-hearted in his task, and who must stir 
 himself to renewed action by the spur of vanity. But latter- 
 ly, he has risen to a higher region, and has contrived, while 
 " shooting his soul " into a thousand personages, fictitious or 
 real, high and low, wicked and good, commonplace and roman- 
 tic, to forget his own elegant and recherche person his own 
 fastidious habits and tastes, his own aristocratic birth and 
 training, and to remember nothing save the subject or idea 
 which has entered, filled, and transfigured him. For example, 
 Eugene Aram, though a monster, is not a mere distorted shad- 
 ow of the author ; Kienzi is not Bulwer, nor is Walter Mon- 
 treal, nor is Harold the last of the Saxon kings, nor is War- 
 wick the King-maker. These, and many of his other heroes, 
 are not projections of the writer's image ; but are either bold 
 individual creations, or sternly true to the truth of history. 
 Wordsworth has accused even Goethe of multiplying his own 
 image under the Protean disguises ; and of being an egotist 
 under the semblance of an absolute and colorless catholicity ; 
 and on this account most justly ranks him beneath Shakspeare, 
 who can become, and is delighted to become, everybody ex- 
 cept himself. Bulwer, on the contrary, has often approached 
 the Shakspearian method, with this difference, that while the 
 novelist passes from soul to soul with labor dire and weary 
 wo, and like the magician in the story of Eadlallah, has to di 
 in agony out of his own idiosyncrasy, ere he is born in joy 
 and exultation into that of others, Shakspeare melts into the 
 being of all other men as softly as snow into a river, and as
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON SULWER. 345 
 
 easily as one dream slides within and becomes a part and por- 
 tion in another or another series of dreams. But the power 
 in the novelist, as well as in the world-poet, is magical, and of 
 itself suffices to prove him a writer of genius. 
 
 His dramatic quality is in fact only a form or alias of his 
 great width and the impersonal habit of his mind, and need 
 not be dilated on. We prefer to say something about the 
 power he has of rising to the level of most of the great criti- 
 cal points in the stories which he narrates. It is, we grant 
 again, often by effort, by a sweat like that of Sisyphus, that 
 he gets his big stone to the top of the hill, but once there, it 
 remains a triumphal mark a far-seen trophy of perseverance 
 and power. We grant him, in his general style, too uniform- 
 ly lively and brilliant. He is like those writers of whose 
 works it has been said, " the whole is not always a poem, 
 while every sentence is poetry." But, first, this is compli- 
 mentary to his powers, few are so Australian in their intellec- 
 tual wealth ; and, were, secondly, the charge pressed, Bulwer 
 might reply as a student is once said to have done : '' Your 
 papers are all equally excellent," said his professor. " Then," 
 replied he, " I'll take care that in my next some parts shall 
 be divine." And thus sometimes our author does answer in 
 this matter. He approaches great and noble topics, each one, 
 like the brethren of Jerubbaal, " resembling the son of a king ;" 
 he girds up his loins to mate with their majesty ; he effects 
 his purpose ; and what Hazlitt says of Milton becomes nearly 
 true of him " he is always striving to say the finest things 
 in the world, and he does say them." Effort, when united 
 with weakness, and ending in the fate of the frog in the fable, 
 is a pitiable spectacle ; but not so that effort which is prompt- 
 ed by manly ambition, which is sustained by genuine and 
 growing strength, and which, when it has gained the success 
 it deserves, appears only less wonderful and less sublime than 
 that perfect ease of nature with which another very rare class 
 of writers work their still mightier works. We have specified 
 already a few of those superb passages by which Bulwer has 
 made out his claim to be the Milton, while Scott is the Shak- 
 speare, of novelists. Even Scott has seldom surpassed the 
 death of Walter Montreal, or the picture of Vesuvius drunk 
 with devouring fire, and staggering in his terrible vomit. 
 
 1 K*
 
 316 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCUE8. 
 
 What is genius ? is a question to which many answers have 
 teen returned. It is, says De Quincey, " mind steeped and 
 saturated in the genial nature." It is, say others, " impas- 
 sioned truth thought become phosphorescent !" It is, say 
 others, " original imagination united with constructive power." 
 Without discussing these definitions, or propounding another, 
 we shall state one element which is essential to genius Ge- 
 nius is Growth. A man of genius is always a man of limit- 
 less growth, with a soul smitten with a passion for growth, and 
 open to every influence which promotes it one who grows al- 
 ways like a tree, by day and by night, in calm and in storm, 
 through opposition and through applause, in difficulty and in 
 despair nay, on the chill death-bed itself his soul continues 
 to grow, and never more rapidly than there, when he some- 
 times says, with the dying Schiller, " many things are becom- 
 ing plain and clear to me." It Is this which, perhaps, proves 
 best his greatness and his relation to the Infinite. The man 
 of talent grows to a certain point, and there stops ; Genius 
 knows of no stops, and no periods. Even the wings of eagles, 
 " knitting," though they do, the mountain with the sky have 
 their severe limit fixed in the far ether ; but the wings of an- 
 gels have none. Emerson speaks of nature as saying, in an- 
 swer to all doubts and difficulties, " I grow, I grow." So 
 there hums through the being of a true poet the low everlast- 
 ing melody (truer than that fabled of nature, since the growth 
 of matter is only temporary, while that of mind is eternal), 
 " I also grow, and shall grow for ever." This growth may 
 sometimes seem to retrograde, just as there are, it is said, cer- 
 tain plants which grow downwards, but downwards in search 
 of light ; and so the poet-soul, when it stoops, is only stoop- 
 ing to see, and when it turns, is only turning to conquer. 
 This growth may sometimes be lost sight of amid the dark- 
 ness of neglect, or covered up in the night of calamity, or 
 buried in foliage produced by its own vigor ; but, even as fai- 
 ries were said to hear the flowers growing, there are ears of 
 fairy fineness, which never cease to be aware of the musical 
 growth of men of the true and sovereign seed, springing up 
 like flowers to everlasting life arising in harmony and in in- 
 cense toward the heavens of God. 
 
 Yes ! For this growth is often, if not always, holy and ce-
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 347 
 
 lestial, as well as poetical and harmonious. The man who re- 
 ally grows, grows in wisdom, love, and purity, as well as in 
 genius and artistic excellence. It is as a whole that he grows, 
 it is in God and toward God that his being develops itself. 
 Not a few gifted persons, indeed, have been arrested in their 
 career by early death or by dissipation, and appear now in 
 stunted or blasted forms along the horizon of history. But 
 it is a remarkable fact, that most men of genius who have 
 been permitted to outlive the dangerous period of the passions, 
 and to attain the majestic noon of middle life, or the still 
 evening of old age, have become either pious, or at least mor- 
 al, good-tempered, and exemplary men. We need only name 
 Young, Johnson, Southey, Coleridge, Goethe, even Moore in 
 some measure, Shelley, and, so far as we can ascertain, Shak- 
 speare himself, in proof of this. Time, which so often freezes 
 and contracts men of more prosaic mould into a shrivelled 
 selfishness, which seems chiller than death itself, in the case 
 of those whose minds had originally burned like a furnace 
 seven times heated, only modifies the flame, mingles with it 
 the salt of common sense, if not the frankincense of piety, 
 and renders it more kindly in its outgoings to men, if it does 
 not turn it upward in tongues of sacrifice and worship to the 
 great Fountain of Light and Father of Spirits. And when 
 piety mingles with the maturity of genius in any gifted soul, 
 it becomes a sight more beautiful than any that this fair crea- 
 tion can show us. The man, then, instead of standing with 
 the mere moralist, and the mere cold speculator, on the out- 
 side of things, becomes a "partaker of the divine nature;" 
 does not with others discern with lack-lustre eye merely the fiery 
 fences and outward semblances of the Infinite, but sees, and 
 swims, and grows IN that holy and boundless element itself. 
 
 That Bulwer has as yet attained the consummation so de- 
 voutly to be wished, which our last sentence describes, we 
 dare not affirm. But certainly he has grown, and his growth 
 has been of a total and vital sort. His first two or three 
 works were distinguished chiefly by sentimentalism and clever- 
 ness a sentimentalism scarcely amounting to genius, and 
 a cleverness hardly attaining to wit. In " Eugene Aram" he 
 displayed a morbid and melodramatic earnestness, strongly 
 characteristic of that uneasy and thick-sighted mood of mind,
 
 348 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES 
 
 which was his at the time, and which he was increasing by the 
 study of the " French School of Desperation." In the " Last 
 Days of Pompeii" and " Ricnzi," you saw him throwing out 
 his mind upon subjects which carried him as far as possible 
 away from his own unsatisfied reason, torturing doubts, and 
 agitating passions. Then, in " Zanoni," the strong spirit was 
 heard beating against the bars of its misery and its life; and 
 asking in its despair questions at Destiny and the world un- 
 seen. Then, in his " Ernest Maltravers," his " Alice," and 
 his " New Timon," he seemed backing out of spiritual specu- 
 lations into a certain sneering voluptuousness worthy of Wie- 
 land, of Byron, or of Voltaire. And lastly, in his " Caxtons" 
 and " My Novel," there seems to have risen on his path what 
 the Germans call an " aftershine" of Christianity a mild, be- 
 lated, but divine-seeming day, in which he is walking on still, 
 and which he doubtless deeply regrets had not sooner gleamed 
 over his chequered way. His allusions to the experiences of 
 Robert Hall, and to the benignant influence of the Christian 
 faith in soothing the woes of humanity, which abound in the 
 " Caxtons" especially, are exceedingly beautiful, and have 
 opened to Bulwer's genius the doors of many a heart that 
 were obstinately shut against him before. The moral tone of 
 these latter novels, too, is much sweeter, healthier, and purer 
 than that of his earlier tales. Their artistic execution is not 
 only equal, but we think in many respects superior. If there 
 is in them less artifice, there is more real art ; and if they 
 have less of the glare and bustle of rhetoric, they have more 
 of the soul of poetry. If they dazzle and astonish less, they 
 are infinitely more pleasing, and if they abound not so much 
 in rapid adventures, thrilling situations, and romantic interest, 
 they idealise common life, and show the element of poetic 
 interest as well as the soul of goodness which are found 
 amongst the middle classes of society. One character in his 
 last novel is perhaps the finest of all his creations we mean, 
 of course, Burley. In the very daring implied in taking up 
 the name of the most original character Scott ever drew, old 
 John Balfour, the stern homicide of Magus Muir, and connect- 
 ing it with the most novel and striking character Bulwer ever 
 depicted, there was genius. Who would venture even to call 
 the hero of a new play Macbeth, or Lear, or Hamlet ? Unless
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 349 
 
 the play were of transcendent merit, the very name so pre- 
 sumptuously assumed would condem it as assuredly as John 
 Gait's " Lady Macbeth" was condemned. But, in spite of 
 this preliminary prejudice, Bulwer's Burley is not only as en- 
 tirely different from Scott's, as a rough literary man of the 
 nineteeth century must be from a rough soldier of the seven- 
 teenth ; but as a picture of a strange, wild, half-mad man of 
 genius, full, nevertheless, of the milk of human kindness, and 
 of the warmest and noblest feelings, it is almost perfect, and 
 of itself sufficient to immortalise the author. 
 
 In contemplating Bulwer's career, we are impressed, in fine, 
 with one or two reflections of a somewhat interesting and im- 
 portant kind. It teaches us the might and worth which lie in 
 determined struggle and invincible perseverance. We do not, 
 by any means, dislike those splendid coup de mains of literary 
 triumph we find in such cases as Byron, Macaulay, Charles 
 Dickens, and Alexander Smith, all of whom " arose one morn- 
 ing and found themselves famous." Nay, we glory in them, 
 as proofs of the power of the human mind, and as auguries of 
 the more illustrious successes reserved for yet brighter and 
 purer spirits in the future. They show what man can do, and 
 hint what man yet may do. But we love still better to see a 
 strong spirit slowly urging his way against opposition, often 
 driven back but never discouraged, often perplexed but never 
 in despair, often cast down but never destroyed, often falling 
 but never fallen, and at last gaining a victory as undeniable as 
 that of a jubilant summer sun. Such was Milton, such John- 
 son, such Burke, such Wordsworth, such Disraeli, and such 
 Bulwer. The success of these men looks less like the result 
 of accident, or of popular caprice, or of magic, and more like 
 the just and lawful, although late, reward of that high merit 
 which unites moral energy with intellectual prowess, and be- 
 comes thus far more useful as an example and a stimulus to 
 others. Not one in a hundred millions can expect such a 
 tropical sunrise of success as befell Byron ; but any one who 
 unites a considerable degree of capacity with indomitable de- 
 termination, may become, if not a Bulwer, yet in his own 
 department an eminent and influential man. 
 
 We are still more struck with this perseverance, when we 
 remember Bulwer's position in society. Possessed of rank
 
 350 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 and ample fortune, he has labored as hard as any bookseller's 
 hack in the empire ; proving thus that his love for literature 
 was as sincere as his ideal of it was high, and redeeming it 
 from a certain shade of contempt which has of late, justly or 
 unjustly, rested upon it. It cannot be denied that various 
 causes, such as the poverty of many of our authors, and the 
 mean shifts to which it has often reduced them ; the dissipa- 
 tion and blackguardism of a few others ; the envious spirit and 
 quarrelsome disposition of a third class ; the vast amount of 
 mediocre writing which now pours from the press ; the num- 
 ber of pretenders whom the hot and sudden sunlight of ad- 
 vancing knowledge has prematurely quickened into reptile life ; 
 not to speak of the engrossment of the public mind with com- 
 mercial speculation and politics, and the contemptuous indif- 
 ference of many of our aristocracy and many of our clergy to 
 literary things and literary men, have all combined rather to 
 lower Polite Letters in the eyes of the public. And nothing, 
 on the other hand, can tend, or has tended more to reinstate 
 it in its proper place of estimation than the fact, that not a 
 few, distinguished and successful in other professions, in arts 
 or in arms, at the bar or in the pulpit, have gloried in casting 
 in their lot with this despised profession have submitted to 
 its drudgeries, borne its burdens, and aimed at and gained its 
 laurels. Eminent lawyers have become literateurs. Eminent 
 officers have become writers of travels. Eminent clergymen 
 have become editors of periodicals and authors of scientific 
 treatises. Eminent physicians, men of fashion, barristers, 
 lords of session, and even peers of the realm, have all aspired 
 to the honor connected with the name of Poet. And Bulwer 
 has brought this to a bright climax, by blending the lustre of 
 rank and riches with the distinctions of the highest literary 
 celebrity. We fear that literature, as a profession, will never 
 thrive to any great extent in this country. The gains of au- 
 thors are becoming smaller and smaller in each section of the 
 century ; and the fact that all our literature threatens soon to 
 be " afloat in the great gulf-stream of cheapness," will probably, 
 we at least think, reduce them further still. In this case, we 
 must depend more than ever upon the supplies from non-pro- 
 fessional men, non-commissioned officers, shall we call them ? 
 in the great literary army. Nor need we fear that this will at
 
 SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. 351 
 
 all deteriorate the value of literary productions. It will have, 
 we think, precisely the opposite effect. Professional litera- 
 teurs are often forced by necessity to put to press productions 
 totally unworthy of their talents, and in general to dilute and 
 weaken by diffusion their powers. It is obvious that those 
 who write only when leisure permits, and the spur of impulse 
 excites, are less liable to this temptation. And looking both 
 to the past and present, we find that the greatest and best, on 
 the whole, of our writers have not been authors by profession. 
 Shakspeare's profession was not authorship, but the stage. 
 Milton was a schoolmaster and a secretary. Addison, too, was 
 a secretary of state. Pope was a man of private fortune. 
 Fielding was a justice. Richardson kept a shop so did God- 
 win. Cowper lived on his patrimony, and on gifts from his 
 relatives. Wordsworth was a starnpmaster. Croly is a rec- 
 tor. John Wilson was a professor. Shelley was a gentleman 
 of fortune, and heir to a baronetcy. Byron was a peer. Car- 
 lyle has an estate. Browning is a man of fortune and family. 
 Of Jeffrey, Macaulay, Sidney Smith, Hall, and Foster, we need 
 not speak. And our present hero is the proprietor of Kneb- 
 worth, as well as a scholar, orator, wit, novelist, and poet. 
 
 We close this paper by expressing our very hearty congratu- 
 lations to Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer on his recent reception 
 and appearances in Edinburgh ; our warm gratitude for the 
 hours of pleasure and profit his numerous works have given 
 us ; and an ardent wish that his future life may be calm and 
 bright ; and that the current of thought and feeling in his 
 future works may take, still more decidedly than of late, a 
 practical and a Christian course, and catch on its last waves the 
 hues of heaven's light, blended with the tints of fancy and of 
 poetry !
 
 352 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 NO. VII.-BENJAMIN DISRAELI.* 
 
 THERE are two races, the contrast between whose former 
 and present position is so deep and marked, as to produce the 
 most melancholy reflections. We refer, of course, to the 
 Greeks and the Jews. The ancient Greek was the noblest of 
 nature's children ; he was not so much a man as he was a petty 
 god or, rather, some statue that had walked down from its 
 pedestal. Mrs. Jameson says of the Venus de Medici, that 
 she looks as if she would come down if she could, while the 
 Hercules Farnese looks as if he could come down if he would. 
 Were he thus to descend, he were the alter idem of the nobler 
 of the ancient Greeks, in whom beauty and grandeur met to- 
 gether elegance and energy embraced each other and in 
 whom, if symmetry seemed sometimes to disguise strength, 
 strength was ever present, albeit half-seen, to support the sym- 
 metry. Their very children were taught to contend for prizes 
 for beauty, and had statues erected to them if they succeeded. 
 Their style of dress was itself a dream of beauty. Their lan- 
 guage was as picturesque as it was expressive and rich. They 
 inhabited a country which to all the romantic variety of Scot- 
 tish landscape added the richness and warmth of an oriental 
 clime ; now towering up into the snowy grandeur of Olympus, 
 and now softening into the unparalleled luxuriance of the Vale 
 of Tempe; here rugged as the defile of Thermopylse, and there 
 panoramic as the Bay of Athens. The creations of their 
 genius were just the projected images of their own beautiful 
 selves. The heroes of their song were themselves, in shapes 
 of sublime trial and ideal contest. Their gods were them- 
 selves walking on the mountain-tops of imagination, and 
 covered with celestial glory as with snow. Their hell was the 
 contorted reflections of their own Macedonian defiles or Alba- 
 nian deserts ; and their heaven was the colored image of their 
 own Cretan vales. Towering over this magnificent people 
 the heroes of a hero-land, the Mont Blancs of a mountain re- 
 gion were the grand men of Greece, men whose names sound 
 
 * The Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, M. P. : a Literary and Political 
 Biography, addressed to the New Generation. Tancred. By B. DISRAELI.
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. 353 
 
 yet like peals of thunder Pericles, Epaminondas Dtmos- 
 thenes, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander, Plato, Homer in 
 whom the beauty of the land became all but divine, its strength 
 Herculean, and its sublimity that of an Alp in the evening 
 sun, or a hero of celestial race when his set time is come, and 
 when he feels himself growing into a god. And then its statu- 
 ary, so cool, and clear, and bright ; and its oratory and logic, 
 naked, nervous, and gigantic as a Thracian gladiator ; and its 
 drama, at once formal and fiery, passionate as the bosoms and 
 one as the wall of Pandemonium ; and its philosophy, seeking 
 to draw down the secrets of the gods to men, even as Frank- 
 lin afterwards led down the lightning from its cavern like a 
 lion in a leash, and yoked it to the majestic car of human pro- 
 gress ; and its poetry, either in its narratives and pictures, 
 clear and literal as a mirror in the state-chamber of kings 
 or, in its choruses and dramatic raptures, deep and dithyrarn- 
 bic as that melancholy music which seeks, it is said, not 
 altogether in vain, to soothe the agonies of the lost, and 
 
 " To mitigate and suage, 
 
 With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase 
 Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain, 
 From mortal or immortal minds !" 
 
 Such was Greece, such were the Grecians. What is it, and 
 what are they, now ? Even in their late won and blocd-ce- 
 mented freedom, what are they ? Alas ! we must still say, 
 
 "'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more;" 
 
 and throw the shroud of silence over the corpse of the beautiful ! 
 Still more striking, however, is the contrast between the 
 ancient and the modern Jews. As the Greeks were the favor- 
 ite people of nature, the Jews were the chosen people of God. 
 As the Greeks seemed their own deities come down to men, 
 the Jews were the representatives of that inscrutable ONE who 
 filleth immensity, and the praises thereof. In Him they 
 lived, and moved, and had their being. As a nation, they 
 rose and sunk on God as on a wave now heaven-high, and 
 now deep as the centre. Their progress seemed the progress 
 of God's plan in the world ; their decline the temporary re- 
 treat of the awful billow. In their prosperity they were like 
 angels basking in the face of their Father under their beat-
 
 354 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 ings and burdens they still continued, like Balaam's ass, to 
 see God where none else beheld him. Along with the meteors 
 which marked their advance in the wilderness the pillars of 
 fire and of cloud there hung a mystic haze of miraculous 
 destiny over all their motions. God cut a passage for them 
 through the water of the Red Sea, and through the fire of that 
 great and terrible wilderness. He translated them while yet 
 alive to himself, and lo ! the nation became as insulated as it 
 was powerful ; and was verily " a royal nation and a peculiar 
 people." He fed them with meat from heaven, and gave them 
 drink from the depths which slumber under the rocks of 
 the desert. When he slew them, it was by no hand but 
 his own Abraham slaying, as it were, his son ; and heaps 
 on heaps their " carcasses fell in the wilderness." As he had 
 lighted up the wilderness with strange splendors during their 
 passage, and made Sinai speak to them in thunder, so, wheji 
 he brought them into the Promised Land, it began to flow with 
 milk and honey, to gleam with supernatural glory, and to ring 
 with divine voices. In the midst of that land there arose, like 
 a high palace, the Temple, with its marble and gold, its pro- 
 found symbols, and mute and mighty prophecies ; around were 
 seen the stately steps of kings, walking like gods in the earth, 
 because bearing in their hands the sceptres which God had 
 lent, and was to resume; up steamed the smoke of incense, 
 which, though ascending in volumes, hiding the sun, hid not 
 the white garments and the oracular gems of the ministering 
 priests ; on every side were heard the cries of prophets speak- 
 ing from the immediate inspiration of the Most High, and 
 whose eyes shone with the lustre of very visions of God ; and 
 behold ! to it at length arrived God's only begotten Son, meek 
 and lowly, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, riding upon an as, and 
 yet welcomed by hosannas, which first echoed by allJerusalem, 
 at last were taken up by distant lands, and have swelled into a 
 diapason as wide as the world. A nation so peculiar and so 
 sacred were the Jews, that, even when bowed, broken, and dis- 
 persed at last, it was under a burden no less weighty than the 
 blood of the Eternal Son of God. His blood, invoked by, fell on 
 them like a fiery rain ; and, staggering and shrieking under it, 
 they have wandered ever since among the nations. 
 
 Such were they ; but how great the change ! Hear the
 
 BENJAMIN bISRAELI. 355 
 
 words of that master in our literary Israel, Scott, on this sub- 
 ject: " ' Thou hast spoken the Jew,' said Rebecca to Bois- 
 Guilbert, ' as the persecution of such as thou art has made 
 him. Heaven in ire has driven him from his country, but 
 industry has opened up to him the only road to power and to 
 influence, which oppression has left unbarred. Eead the his- 
 tory of the ancient people of God, and tell me if those by 
 whom Jehovah wrought such marvels among the nations were 
 then a people of misers and usurers ! And know, proud knight, 
 we number names amongst us to which your boasted northern 
 nobility is as the gourd compared to the cedar names that 
 ascend far back to those high times when the Divine Presence 
 shook the mercy-seat between the cherubim, and which derive 
 their splendor from no earthly prince, but from the awful voice 
 which bade their fathers be nearest of the congregation to the 
 Vision. Such were the princes of the House of Jacob.' Re- 
 becca's color rose as she boasted the ancient glories of her 
 race ; but faded, as she added with a sigh, ' Such WERE the 
 princes of Judah now such no more. They are trampled 
 down like the shorn grass, and mixed with the mire of the 
 ways.' ' 
 
 The spectacle of the decay of the Greeks is not nearly so 
 melancholy as that of the Jews. The Greeks resemble de- 
 throned kings ; the Jews banished angels. The one nation has 
 fallen from an earthly height ; the other, like Lucifer, from 
 heaven. The Greeks have always met with sympathy ; there 
 is, even still, a strong and fierce prejudice burning against the 
 Jews. The Greeks have made very considerable efforts to re- 
 cover from their degradation ; the Jews, as a class, are still 
 writhing in the dust of mean callings, and of the still lower 
 spirit of contempt with which these are regarded, No one, 
 when a Greek passes, cries out in scorn, " There's a Greek;" 
 but many, when they see the dark eye and bent figure of a son 
 of Abraham passing by, still sneer out the bitter taunt, 
 " There's a Jew." Still, too true is the memorable contrast 
 of Coleridge, as expressing the two uttermost poles of national 
 condition between the cry of Isaiah, " Hear, oh heavens, and 
 give ear, oh earth !" and that of " Old Clo' " from a street- 
 broker. 
 
 We fancy that we perceive the continued prevalence of this
 
 356 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 ungenerous feeling in the recent attacks of a large portion if 
 the press upon Benjamin Disraeli ; and we shall try, in this 
 paper, to do all we can to counteract it. We are no Jews nor 
 Greeks either ; no admirers of Disraeli's political character, or 
 of all his literary works ; but we love fair play ; we know 
 Disraeli to be a man of high genius, and altogether indepen- 
 dent of our praise ; but we know also, how easy it is for base 
 underlings, and an irresponsible gang of minor and malignant 
 critics, to injure any reputation, and derogate from any name, 
 and wish to devote a paper to place this brilliant man's lite- 
 rary merits in a proper point of view. 
 
 Before giving our own opinion of Disraeli's literary and 
 intellectual qualities, we have a few remarks to make on that 
 biography of him which now lies before us. It is an able 
 production, but it is neutralised in a great measure by its spi- 
 rit of fierce, slow, partisan, bloodhound hatred. Every line 
 of it is written in revenge as in red ink. We know nothing 
 positively of the author ; but one might imagine that it was 
 the work of the dismissed secretary, or the disgraced valet 
 of the brilliant Hebrew. Since Bourrienne's Life of Napo- 
 leon Bonaparte, we remember no book which sets itself with 
 such deliberate determination, with such unflagging animosity, 
 with such remorseless malignity of purpose, to damage a pub- 
 lic character. Even its concessions are meant to be fatal, and 
 its praise is always the prelude to a sentence of perdition. 
 Emerson speaks of some whose " blame is a kind of praising" 
 this author's praise is a kind of blaming. To renew a former 
 figure, you hear the voice the sleuth-hound in every paragraph. 
 Now it is a deep-mouthed, incessant bay; now it is the growl 
 of disappointment at finding the scent cold ; and now it is the 
 cry of fresh delight at coming upon it again. Were there but 
 two beings in the earth, and these two enemies, they would 
 but typify Benjamin Disraeli and his unknown biographer. 
 The latter, at least, writes as if he were created for the purpose 
 of trying to degrade and dishonor the name of the former. 
 
 Now, without judging as to the motives, we beg leave to de- 
 mur as to the wisdom of the course here pursued. If Disraeli 
 be such a tenth-rate man as this biography would imply, 
 whence this extreme eagerness to vilify and blacken him ? 
 If he be little else than a fool, why be at such pains to prove
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. 357 
 
 him a villain? The very effort and elaboration exerted in 
 demonstrating the latter of these propositions, show that the 
 former is felt to be a falsehood. The two parts of the biogra- 
 phy the " literary" and the " political" in fact, clash 
 against and extinguish each other. 
 
 We promised in the introduction not to enter on Disraeli's 
 political career. We have not, in fact, studied it closely, ex- 
 cept in the pages of this biography ; but these, while profess- 
 ing to teach the contrary, have convinced us that, more than 
 nine-tenths of our statesmen, Disraeli has been guided by a 
 thought a great, glittering, one " Star" suspended in the sky 
 of his soul which, be it from heaven or hell, he has faithfully 
 followed, so faithfully, that its revolutions and changes have 
 been confounded with Ms ! 
 
 But we pass to his literary character ; and here his biogra- 
 pher has done him very gross injustice. Whoever this writer 
 may be, he is but a sorry judge of literature. The only indi- 
 cation of good taste he gives is his unbounded admiration of 
 the wisdom and genius of Edmund Burke. While coinciding 
 to the depths of our heart with this, we venture, first, to ask 
 if Burke was, outwardly, the most consistent of authors or 
 statesmen ; and, secondly, would recommend to this author 
 Burke's style, as a better model, both for political and literary 
 discussion, than those he seems to have copied. He has not, 
 indeed, imitated the insufferable verbiage, misty bewilderment, 
 and stilted platitudes which cripple the writings of the power- 
 ful and highly cultured William Gladstone, of whom he is 
 such an admirer ; but he has evidently read too long and too 
 lovingly the lucubrations of the " Morning Chronicle," and 
 similar scribes of the London press, and should, like other 
 half-trained boys (young or old), be remanded to his studies. 
 We had not, we must say, read " Alroy," till our attention 
 was pointed to it by the abuse of this writer. We thank him, 
 with all our soul, for that emasculated and envious attack ! 
 It has introduced us to one of the finest of modern prose- 
 poems. There are, indeed, two objections which may be 
 started to it: one, its form, which is too Frenchified, remind- 
 ing you, in its short chapters, and abrupt transitions, and 
 glancing hints of thought, of " Candide ;" and the second 
 (one which his biographer presses against him with all his
 
 358 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 might), the peculiar rhythm of the more ambitious passages> 
 which makes parts of it seem hybrids between poetry and prose- 
 But, after deducting these faults, the tale is one of uncom- 
 mon interest. Some of the situations are thrilling to sub* 
 limity, and the language and imagery are intensely oriental, 
 and in general as felicitous as they are bold. Yet this biogra- 
 pher denies that " Alroy" is a poem, that its language is poet- 
 ical ; and even wonders that its author has thought it worth 
 while to republish it ! In disproof of these assertions, we sim- 
 ply refer our readers to the picture of Alroy's flight into the 
 wilderness ; to the description of the simoon ; to the visit of 
 Alroy to the sepulchres of the kings ; to his immurement in 
 the dungeon; to the escape of Abidau; and to the closing 
 scene. These passages we consider equal io interest, in terse 
 description, in rapid power, and in frequent grandeur to any- 
 thing iu the whole compass of fictitious literature. The book 
 altogether ranks very near " Caliph Vathek," and is incompar- 
 ably superior to all other modern imitations of the oriental 
 manner, unless we except " Salathiel," that eloquent and pow- 
 erful product of Dr. Croly's genius. The biographer before 
 us whom again we proclaim, although a sagacious and clever 
 man, to be no judge of poetry or literary merit tears some 
 of the more extravagant passages from the context, and makes 
 them look ludicrous enough. This is not fair. In proof of 
 this, we can say that one or two of them, which seemed absurd 
 as transferred to his cold and critical page, and contrasted 
 with his occidental and icy spirit, when read by the glowing 
 eastern day shed through Disraeli's genius over the whole of 
 this prose " Thalaba," assumed to us a very different aspect j 
 and if we still call them " barbaric pearl," we felt that, never- 
 theless, pearl they were. Few things can be more beautiful, 
 in its own warm, voluptuous, Song-of-Solomon style, than the 
 following (which the biographer, had he quoted, would have 
 pronounced ridiculous) : 
 
 " It is the tender twilight hour, when maidens in their lonely 
 bower, sigh softer than the eve. The languid rose her head 
 upraises, and listens to the nightingale, while his wild and 
 thrilling praises from his trembling bosom gush ; the languid 
 rose her head upraises, and listens with a blush. In the clear 
 and rosy air, sparkling with a single star, the sharp and spiry
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. 359 
 
 cypress-tree rises like a gloomy thought, amid the flow of 
 revelry. 
 
 " A singing bird, a single star, a solemn tree, an odorous 
 flower, are dangerous in the tender hour, when maidens, in 
 their twilight bower, sigh softer than the eve ! The daughter 
 of the caliph comes forth to breathe the air : her lute her only 
 company. She sits down by a fountain's side, and gazes on 
 the waterfall. Her cheek reclines upon her arm, like fruit 
 upon a graceful bough. Very pensive is the face of that 
 bright and beauteous lady. She starts : a warm voluptuous 
 lip presses her soft aud idle hand. It is her own gazelle. 
 With his large aud lustrous eyes, more eloquent than many a 
 tongue, the fond attendant asks the cause of all her thought- 
 fulness." 
 
 This we do not call perfect writing; it does not answer to 
 our highest standard of even the prosaico-poetic style ; but, 
 separated from its context as it is, will any one say that it is 
 absurd ? Will any man connected with literature, unless he 
 be a hired hack-accuser, pretend that it is not poetry ? 
 
 Still finer and loftier things than what we have quoted 
 abound in this poem ; and " Iskander," which is bound up 
 along with it, is worthy of the fellowship ; for, if less poetical 
 and brilliant, it is equally interesting, and much more nervous 
 and simple in style. In one thing Disraeli excels all novelists 
 we mean rapidity of narration. With what breathless speed 
 does he hurry his reader along ! Iskander at the bridge re- 
 minds you of Macaulay's Horatius in the first of his " Lays 
 of Ancient Rome :" the story is somewhat similar, and is told 
 with the same animation, and the same eager rush of power. 
 
 We do not think it necessary to continue the examination 
 of his works individually. 'We may say, however, that " Tan- 
 cred" contains much of the same poetic matter with " Alroy ;" 
 but is chastened down with severer taste, and displays a vastly 
 more matured intellect. His pictures of Grethsemane of 
 Bethany of Sinai, are never to be forgotten. They serve 
 better than a thousand books of travels to bring before our 
 view that land where God did desire to dwell ; and every spot 
 in which, from Lebanon to the Dead Sea from Bashan to 
 Carmel from the borders of Tyre to Hebron from the 
 Lake of Galilee to the Brook Kishon, is surrounded with the
 
 360 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 halo of profound and unearthly interest. In one point we notice 
 an improvement on " Alroy." There is in " Tancred " a dis- 
 tinct recognition of the mission of Jesus Christ ; and the allu- 
 sions to him and his history are full of fervid admiration and 
 solemn reverence. Disraeli has at last learned that it is the 
 sublimest distinction of his race that from it sprang One 
 whose name has been a Crown to the earth more magnificent 
 than though a brighter ring than Saturn's had been folded 
 around it ; whose character has formed the ideal of God, the 
 pattern of man, and the moral spring of society who has 
 carried Jewish blood with him aloft to the very Throne of 
 God ; and in whose steadfast smile, streaming forth from 
 Jerusalem, all nations and all worlds are yet to be blessed. 
 
 We pass to analyse, in a general way, Disraeli's intellectual 
 powers. These are exceedingly varied. He has one of the 
 sharpest and clearest of intellects, not, perhaps, of the most 
 philosophical order, but exceedingly penetrating and acute. He 
 has a fine fancy, soaring up at intervals into high imagination, 
 and marking him a genuine child of that nation from whom 
 came forth the loftiest, richest, and most impassioned song 
 which earth has ever witnessed the nation of Isaiah, Ezekiel, 
 Solomon, and Job. He has little humor, but a vast deal of 
 diamond-pointed wit. The whole world knows his powers of 
 sarcasm. They have never been surpassed in the combination 
 of savage force, and, shall we say, Satanic coolness, of energy 
 and of point, of the fiercest animus within, and the utmost 
 elegance of outward expression. He wields for his weapon a 
 polar icicle gigantic as a club glittering as a star deadly 
 as a scimitar and cool as eternal frost. His style and lan- 
 guage are the faithful index of these varied and brilliant pow- 
 ers. His sentences are almost always short, epigrammatic, 
 conclusive pointed with wit and starred with imagery and 
 so rapid in their bickering, sparkling progress ! One, while 
 reading the better parts of his novels, seems reading a record 
 of the conversations of Napoleon. 
 
 We saw, in a late Edinburgh journal, a comparison of Dis- 
 raeli to Byron ; he seems to us to bear a resemblance, still 
 more striking, to Bonaparte. The same decisive energy ; the 
 same quick, meteoric motions ; the same sharp, satiric power ; 
 the same insulation, even while mingling among men ; the
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. 361 
 
 same heart of fire, concealed by an outside of frost ; the same 
 epigrammatic conciseness of style, alternating with barbaric 
 brilliance ; the same decidedly Oriental tastes, in manner, lan- 
 guage, equipage, everything; the same rapidity of written and 
 spoken style; the same inconsistency, self-will, self-reliance, 
 belief in race and destiny ; the same proneness to fatal blun- 
 ders, and the same power of recovering from their effects, and 
 of drowning the noise of the fall in that of the daring flight 
 which instantly succeeds it, distinguish both the soldier and the 
 statesman. Indeed, the character and history of David Alroy 
 seem a fictitious representation of Napoleon, as well as a 
 faintly-disguised alias of the author's own character and anti- 
 cipated career. Napoleon himself, we have always thought, 
 had more of the Jew in him than of either the Frenchman or 
 the Italian, although he unquestionably combined something 
 of all the three. He had the Frenchman's bustling activity 
 and fiery irritability of temper ; the Italian's slow, deep, long- 
 winded subtlety of revenge ; and the Jew's superstition (al- 
 though not his religion), his high-toned purpose, his hot blood, 
 and his figurative fancy. He was infinitely more of an ori- 
 ental sultan than of an occidental prince; and had he, instead 
 of seeking in vain to conciliate the Mahometans by a pretended 
 faith in their prophet, given himself out as the Messiah of the 
 Jews, the whole Hebrew race would have flocked to his stand- 
 ard. As it was, he did visit the Holy Land, he " set up his 
 standard on the glorious holy mountain" gave battle under 
 the shadow of Tabor and received in Palestine the first 
 whiff of that fell blast which was ultimately to overthrow his 
 empire, and to reduce it to the most magnificent of ruins 
 the Coliseum of fallen monarchies. 
 
 To return to Disraeli, our great plea for him is this he 
 has fought in his own person the battle of a whole race ; 
 baffled oft, he has perpetually returned to the charge ; placed 
 at desperate odds, and opposed by strongest prejudices, he has, 
 by energy, intellect, and indomitable perseverance, triumphed 
 over them all. We care not what his enemies may choose to 
 call him an adventurer, a puppy, a roue, a charlatan, are a 
 few of the hard names which have been flung against him, and 
 they may contain in them a degree of truth; but no such 
 shower of hailstones can prevail to hide from our view that
 
 362 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Figure sitting down amid the hisses and laughter of a whole 
 House of Commons, with the words, " I will sit down now, 
 but the time will come when you will listen, to me." This 
 was not the language of mere petulance and injured conceit. 
 It was that of a man driven, by. insult and obloquy, to consult 
 the very depths of his self-consciousness, which sent up an 
 answer in oracle and in prophecy. The proof of anything that 
 professes to be prophetic, lies, of course, in the fulfillment. 
 And his prediction was, need we say, fulfilled. Within seven 
 years or less, this rejected and despised member of the Com- 
 mons is speaking to the largest, most attentive, and most 
 amused and thrilled assemblages ever convened within its 
 walls is castigating Sir Kobert Peel, and drawing blood at 
 every blow is ruling the Conservative party and is treated 
 with respect even by O'Connell, his erst most contemptuous 
 and formidable foe. A year or two more, he is the leader of 
 the Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This 
 we say, is true power, and we cannot but exult, much as we 
 do differ in many important matters from Disraeli, in witness- 
 ing the rapid rise of this scion of a despised and proscribed 
 family to the height of reputation and influence ; and cannot 
 but compare it to the history of the shepherd-boy of Bethle- 
 hem, who passed, by a few strides, from waiting on the ewes 
 with young to the summit of fame as a poet, and of power as 
 a king. 
 
 We like, we must say again, the merit that struggles into 
 success infinitely more than that which attains an early, and 
 quick, and easy triumph. Look at the career of Macaulay, 
 and compare it with Disraeli's. The former rose instantly in- 
 to popularity as a writer ; he rose instantly into fame as a par- 
 liamentary orator. Till his richly-deserved rejection by Edin- 
 burgh, there was not a single " crook" in his " lot." Even 
 that city has since degraded itself by kneeling, " like a tame ele- 
 phant," to receive once more its imperious rider. Disraeli's mot- 
 to, on the other hand, like Burke's, was Nitar in adversum ; 
 and, like him, at every turnpike he had to present his pass- 
 port. If Macaulay seem more consistent, it has been because 
 he has always run in the rut of a party, and never entertained 
 really bold, broad, and independent views. Macaulay, once 
 exalted, can kick at those who are farther down than himself ;
 
 BENJAMIN DISttAELl. 363 
 
 but he never could have had the moral heroism to have looked 
 up from the dust of contempt into which he had been hurled 
 by six hundred of his peers, and to have said, " the time will 
 come that you will listen to me." We are far from compar- 
 ing Disraeli to Macaulay, in point of learning, taste, or ner- 
 vous energy of style ; but we are convinced that, in inventive- 
 ness, ingenuity, originality, and natural power of genius, he is 
 superior. 
 
 At the word " originality," we see some of our readers 
 starting, and recalling to their minds the " plagiarisms" of 
 Disraeli. We have often had occasion to despise popular 
 clamors against public men, especially when swelled by the 
 voices of a needy, mendacious, and profligate press ; but there 
 has been seldom a clamor more utterly contemptible than that 
 raised against Disraeli for plagiarism. There lives not, nor 
 ever perhaps lived, a literary, or clerical, or parliamentary 
 man, who has not now and then, in the strong pressure of 
 haste, been driven to avail himself of the labors of others, 
 whether by the appropriation of thought or of language, of 
 principles or of passages. Think of Milton, Mirabeau, Fox, 
 Chalmers, Hall all these were guilty of appropriations con- 
 siderably larger than any charged against Disraeli. Milton 
 has been called the " celestial thief;" Mirabeau got the ablest 
 of his speeches from Dumont ; Fox was often primed by 
 Burke. Most of the thinking in Chalrner's " Astronomical 
 Discourses" is derived from Andrew Fuller's " Gospel its own 
 Witness." Many of Hall's brightest gems of figure are taken 
 from others from Burke, Grattan, and Warburton and one 
 or two of them have been retaken by Macaulay from Hall. 
 Plagiarism, in the shape of petty larceny, is so general, that 
 it has ceased to be counted a crime ; it is only the habitual 
 thief, the man who lives by plunder, and who plunders on a 
 large scale, that deserves the halter. Now Disraeli is not 
 such a man. His works and speeches are before the world ; 
 the Argus-eyes of a multitudinous envy have long been fixed 
 upon them, and the result has been that not above two or 
 three passages have been proved to be copied from other 
 writers, and all his more brilliant and characteristic works 
 " Alroy," " Iskander," " Coningsby," " Contarini Fleming," 
 " The Young Duke," and " Tancred" are, intus et in cute,
 
 364 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 his own. Are there ten living writers of whom the same, or 
 anything approaching to the same statement, can be made ? 
 
 We know not a little of the workings, open or secret, both 
 of the clerical and of the literary worlds ; and are certain that 
 there never was a period in which more mean, malignant, and 
 deplorable envy and detraction were working, whether openly 
 or covertly, both among authors and divines an envy that 
 spares not even the dead, that spits out its venom against 
 names which have long been written as if in stars on the firma- 
 ment of reputation, but which wars especially with those liv- 
 ing celebrities who are too honest to belong to any party, too 
 progressive to be chained to any formula, too great to be put 
 down, but not too great to be reviled and slandered, and whose 
 very independence and strongly pronounced individuality be- 
 come the principal charges against them. Who shall write 
 the dark history of that serpentine stream of slander which is 
 winding through all our literature at present like one of the 
 arms of Acheron, and which is damaging the public and the 
 private characters, too, of many a man who is entirely unaware 
 jof the presence and the progress of the foul and insidious 
 poison ? He that would lay bare the shameful secret history 
 of many of our influential journals, and of our church cliques, 
 would be a benefactor to literature, to morality, to religion, 
 and to man. 
 
 Since beginning this paper, our attention has been called to 
 the onslaught of the " Times" on Disraeli. It has forcibly 
 recalled to our mind the words of Burns 
 
 " Oh, wad some power the giftie gi'e us, 
 To see ourselves as ithers see us !" 
 
 In describing Disraeli as the incarnation of genius without 
 conscience, how faithfully has the " Times" described the gen- 
 eral notion in reference to itself, provided the word " intellect" 
 be substituted for "genius." For, with all the talent of the 
 " Times," we doubt if it has ever displayed true genius, or if 
 one paragraph of real inspiration can be quoted from amid its 
 sounding commonplaces and brilliant insincerities. But talent, 
 without even the pretence of principle, is so notoriously its 
 characteristic, that we marvel at the coolness with which it 
 takes off its own sobriquet, and sticks it on the brow of an-
 
 BENJAMIN DISRAELI. 365 
 
 other marvel till we remember that the impudence of the 
 leading journal is, like all its other properties, its mendacity, 
 its mystery, its inconsistency, its tergiversation, its circulation, 
 and its advertising, on a colossal scale. 
 
 We are not prepared as yet to predict the future history or 
 the ultimate place of Benjamin Disraeli. One thing in him 
 is most hopeful. He does not know, any more than Welling- 
 ton or Byron, what it is to be beaten. His motto is, " Never 
 say die." When newly down he is always most dangerous. 
 Prodigious as is the amount of abuse and detraction he is now 
 enduring, it may be doubted if he were ever so popular, or if 
 there be a single man alive who is exciting such interest, or 
 awakening such expectation. This proves, first, that he is no 
 temporary rage or pet of the public ; secondly, that he has 
 something else than a selfish object in view ; and, thirdly, that 
 there is a certain inexhaustible stuff in him which men call 
 genius, and which is sure to excite hope in reference to its 
 possessor till the last moment of his earthly existence. Glad- 
 stone is a man of high talent ; but few expect anything extra- 
 ordinary from his future exertions. Disraeli is a man of 
 genius, and many look for some grand conclusive display or 
 displays of its power. Let him gird himself for the task. 
 Let him forget the past. Let him pay no heed whatever to 
 his barking, snarling opponents. Let him commit himself to 
 some great new idea, or, at least, to some new and wider 
 phase of his old one. He has been hitherto considerably like 
 Byron in his undulating and uneven course, in the alternate 
 sinking and swelling of the wave of his Destiny. Let him 
 ponder that poet's last noble enterprise, by which he was 
 redeeming at once himself and a whole nation when he died. 
 Let Disraeli address himself to some kindred undertaking in 
 reference to the children of his people ; and then, as Byron 
 died amid the blessings of the Greeks, may he inherit, in life, 
 in death, and in all after-time, the gratitude and praises of 
 God's ancient and still much-loved children the Jews. We 
 are hopeful that there is some such brilliant achievement be- 
 fore one of the few men of genius the House of Commons now 
 contains.
 
 366 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 NO. VIII PROFESSOR WILSON. 
 
 IN our paper on Alexander Smith, we said that there was 
 something exceedingly sweet and solemn in the emotions with 
 which we watch the uprise of a new and true poet. And we 
 now add, that exceedingly sad and solemn are the feelings 
 with which we regard the downgoing and departure of a great 
 old bard. We have analogies with which to compare the first 
 of these events, such as the one we selected that of the 
 appearance of a new star in the heavens. But we have no an- 
 alogy for the last, for we have never yet seen a star or sun 
 setting for ever. We have seen the orb trembling at the gates 
 of the west, and dipping reluctantly in the ocean ; but we knew 
 that he was to appear again, and take his appointed place in 
 the firmament, and this forbade all sadness except such as is 
 always interwoven with the feeling of the sublime. But were 
 the nations authentically apprised that on a certain evening 
 the sun was to go down to rise no more, what straining of 
 eyes, and heaving of hearts, and shedding of tears would there 
 be ! what climbing of loftiest mountains to get the last look 
 of his beams ! what a shriek, loud and deep, would arise when 
 the latest ray had disappeared ! how many would, in despair 
 and misery, share in the death of their luminary ! what a 
 " horror of great darkness" would sink over the earth when he 
 had departed ! and how would that horror be increased by 
 the appearance of the fixed stars, 
 
 " Distinct, but distant clear, but ah, bow cold !" 
 
 which in vain came forth to gild the gloom and supply the 
 blank left by the departed king of glory ! With some such 
 emotions as are suggested by this supposition, do men witness 
 the departure of a great genius. His immortality they may 
 firmly believe in ; but what is it to them ? He has gone, they 
 know, to other spheres, but has ceased to be a source of light, 
 and warmth, and cheerful genial influence to theirs for ever 
 and ever. Just as his life alone deserved the name of life 
 native, exuberant, overflowing life so his death alone is 
 worthy of the name the blank, total, terrible name of death.
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 367 
 
 The place of the majority of men can easily be supplied, nay, 
 is never left empty ; but his cannot be filled up in scecula scec- 
 ulorum. Hence men are sometimes disposed, with the ancient 
 poets, to excuse the heavens of envy in removing the great 
 spirit from among them. But the grief becomes profounder 
 still when the departed great one was the last representative 
 of a giant race the last monarch in a dynasty of mind. Then 
 there seem to die over again in him all his intellectual kin- 
 dred ; then, too, the thought arises, who is to succeed ? and 
 in the shadow of his death-bed youthful genius appears for a 
 time dwindled into insignificance, and we would willingly pour 
 out all the poetry of the young age as a libation on his grave. 
 
 Such emotions, at least, are crossing our minds as we con- 
 template the death of Christopher North, and remember that 
 he was one of the last of those mighty men the Coleridges, 
 Wordsworths, Byrons, Campbells, Shelleys who cast such a 
 lustre on the literature and poetry of the beginning of the 
 century. They have dropped away star by star, and not 
 above two or three of the number continue now to glimmer : 
 they can hardly be said to shine. 
 
 Wilson's death had been long expected, and yet it took the 
 public by surprise. It seemed somehow strange that such a 
 man could die. The words, " death of Professor Wilson," 
 seemed paradoxical, so full was he of the riotous and over- 
 flowing riches of bodily and of mental being ; and the excla- 
 mation " Impossible," we doubt not, escaped from the lips of 
 many who could not think of him except as moving along in 
 the pride of his magnificent personality a walking world of 
 life. 
 
 We propose while his grave is yet green, throwing a frail 
 chaplet upon it, in addition to our former tribute, which, we 
 are proud to say, was not rejected or despised by the great 
 man to whom it was paid. We mean, first, to sketch rapidly 
 the events of his history, and then to speak of his personal 
 appearance, his character, his genius in its native powers and 
 aptitudes, his achievements as a critic, humorist, writer of fic- 
 tion, professor, poet, and periodical writer ; his relation to his 
 age ; his influence on his country ; and the principal defects 
 in his character and genius. 
 
 We may premise that in the following outline of his life we
 
 >68 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 pretend to do nothing except state a few facts concerning him 
 which are generally known. His full story must be told by 
 others ; if, indeed, it shall ever be fully told at all. 
 
 John Wilson was born in Paisley in the year 1785. We 
 once, indeed, heard a sapient bailie, in a speech at a Philo- 
 sophical soiree in Edinburgh, call him a " native of the mod- 
 ern Athens," but, although the statement was received with 
 cheers, and although the worthy dignitary might have had 
 sources of information peculiar to himself on the subject, we 
 are rather inclined to hold by the general notion that he was 
 a Paisley body, with a universal soul. In Paisley they still 
 show the house where he was born, and are justly proud of the 
 chief among their many native poets. No town in Scotland in 
 proportion to its size, has produced more distinguished men 
 than Paisley Tannahill, Alexander Wilson, Motherwell (who 
 spent bis boyhood and youth, at least, in Paisley), and 
 Christopher North, are only a few of its poetic sons. Wil- 
 son's father was a wealthy manufacturer in the town; his 
 mother was a woman of great good sense and piety, and he 
 imbibed from her a deep sense of religion. Paisley is a dull 
 town in itself, but is surrounded by many points of interest. 
 Near it is the hole in the canal where poor Tannahill drowned 
 himself; farther off are the Braes of Gleniffer, commemorated 
 in one of the same poet's songs. The river Cart a river 
 sung by Campbell runs through the town, after passing 
 through some romantic moorlands. Mearns Muir is not far 
 away a muir sprinkled with lochs, which Wilson has often 
 described in his articles in " Blackwood," and on the remoter 
 outskirts of which stands the farm-house where Pollok was 
 born, and whence he saw daily the view so picturesquely repro- 
 duced by him in the " Course of Time," of 
 
 " Scotland's northern battlement of hilK" 
 
 All these were early and favorite haunts of Wilson, who ap- 
 pears to have been what is called in Scotland a " royd' boy 
 (roystering), fond of nutting, cat-shooting, fishing, and orchard- 
 robbing expeditions ; the head of his class in the school, and 
 the leader of every trick and mischief out of it. At an early 
 age he was sent to the Highlands, to the care of Dr. Joseph 
 Maclntyre of Grlenorchy, an eminent clergyman of the Church
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 369 
 
 of Scotland, who besides multifarious labors as a minister and 
 a farmer, found time to superintend an academy for boarders. 
 Our worthy father knew him well, and told us some curious 
 traits of his character. He was a pious, laborious, intelligent, 
 and, at the same time, a shrewd, knowing, somewhat close-fist- 
 ed old carle. To his care Wilson, then a loose-hanging, tall, 
 thin, bright-eyed boy, was sent by his father, and the doctor 
 was very kind to him. He spent his holidays in rambling 
 among the black mountains which surround the head of Loch 
 Lomond, sailing on the lake, conversing with the shepherds, 
 and picking up local traditions, which, on his return to the 
 manse, he used to repeat to the doctor with such eloquence 
 and enthusiasm, that the old man, his eyes now filled with 
 tears, and now swimming with laughter, said again and again, 
 " My man, you should write story-books." Wilson told us 
 that this advice rang in his ears till it set him to writing the 
 " Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." So let us honor the 
 memory of the good old Oberlin of Glenorchy, whenever we 
 read those immortal sketches. Maclntyre also, (who, though 
 an eccentric and pawky, was a truly good man) did, we believe, 
 not a little to rivet on the poet's mind the religious advices 
 and instructions of his mother. It was probably owing to 
 this, too, that Wilson displays in all his writings such a re- 
 spect for the clerical character, and uniformly uses the word 
 " manse" as if it were the word home. 
 
 From the school at Glenorchy he was sent to the University 
 of Glasgow, which then mustered a very admirable staff of 
 professors, as well as a noble young race of rising students. 
 There was (a relative of our own, by the way) Richardson, 
 Professor of Latin, a highly accomplished scholar and elegant 
 writer, but whose works seem now in a great measure forgot- 
 ten. There was Jardine of the Logic, a man of great indus- 
 try, method, communicative gift, and fatherly interest in h?'s 
 students ; in fact, as Lord Jeffrey and many others of his em- 
 inent pupils confessed, one of the best of conceivable teachers. 
 There was Millar, the eminent writer on the Laws of Nations. 
 And there was Young of the Greek chair, a man of burning 
 enthusiasm, as well as of vast erudition, whose readings and 
 comments on Homer made his students thrill and weep by 
 turns. Our readers will find a glowing picture of him in 
 ifi*
 
 370 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 "Peter's Letters." The prelections of these men must have 
 tended mightily to develop the mind of Wilson. He was ben- 
 efitted, too, by intimacy with many distinguished contempo- 
 rary students. There was a little later in the classes, but 
 still contemporaneous Lockhart, afterwards his associate in 
 many a fair and many a foul-foughten field of letters. There 
 was Michael Scott, author of " Tom Cringle's Log," who be- 
 came a West Indian merchant, but returned to his native city, 
 Glasgow, aad wrote those striking naval narratives, under an 
 assumed name in " Blackwood," without being discovered, till 
 some little allusions to early days in one of the chapters be- 
 trayed the secret to Wilson, who cried out, " Aut Michael aut 
 Diabolus !" his old college companion standing detected. There 
 was a man, since well known in Scotland, and assuredly a per- 
 son of very rare gifts of natural eloquence and humor Dr. 
 John Ritchie, late of Potterrow, Edinburgh who used to con- 
 tend with Wilson at leaping, football, and other athletic exer- 
 cises, at which both were masters, and nearly matched. And 
 there was Thomas Campbell, with whom Wilson passed many 
 a joyous hour, both in Glasgow, and in frequent excursions, 
 on their holidays, or in the summer vacation, into the near 
 Highlands, and who in spite of diversities of taste and of pol- 
 itics, continued on friendly terms with him to the last. 
 
 At college, Wilson was, we believe, distinguished, as he had 
 been at school, by irregular diligence, and by frequent fits of 
 idleness, by expertness when he pleased at his studies, and 
 by expertness at all times in games, frolics, and queer adven- 
 tures From Glasgow, he was sent to Magdalene College, 
 Oxford, and there his character retained and deepened all 
 its peculiar traits. He now read, and now dissipated hard, 
 as most Oxford students of that day did. He took several 
 college honors, and was the first boxer, leaper, cock-fighter, 
 and runner among the students. He gained the Newdegate 
 prize for poetry, and became in politics a Radical so flaming, 
 that it is said he would not allow a servant to black his shoes, 
 but might be seen the yellow-haired, glorious savage of a 
 morning performing that interesting operation himself ! He 
 was contemporary with De Quincey, but they never met, at 
 least wittingly although we imagine the little bashful scholar 
 must have sometimes seen, and rather shrunk, from the tall
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 37. 
 
 athlete, rushing like a tempest on to the yards, or parading 
 under the arches of the old Mediaeval University. 
 
 At Oxford, Wilson became acquainted with Wordsworth's 
 poetry. It made a deep and permanent impression upon his 
 mind. He imagined that he found in it a union of the severe 
 grandeur of the Grecian, with the wild charm of the Romantic 
 school of poetry. It determined his bias toward subjective 
 instead of objective song; materially, as we think, to his dis- 
 advantage. Wilson was by nature fitted to be, as a poet, a 
 great compound of the subjective, and the subjective with the 
 objective somewhat preponderating, but the influence of Words- 
 worth, counteracted only in part by that of Scott, made the 
 subjective predominate unduly in his verse; and he who might 
 have been almost a Shakspeare, had he followed his native ten- 
 dency, became, in poetry, only a secondary member of the 
 Lake School. 
 
 When he left Oxford, he betook himself to the Lake coun- 
 try, where his father had purchased the estate of Elleray, sit- 
 uated upon the beautiful shores of Windermere ; and there be- 
 came speedily intimate with Wordsworth, Southay, Coleridge, 
 and De Quincey. This last describes him as being then a tall, 
 fresh, fine-looking youth, dressed like a sailor, and full of 
 frankness, eccentricity, and fire. He was at that time vibrat- 
 ing between various schemes of life, all more or less singular. 
 He was now projecting an excursion into the interior of Af- 
 rica, for he had always a strong passion for travel, and now 
 determining to be^for life, a writer of poetry. He contribut- 
 ed some fine letters to Coleridge's " Friend," under the signa- 
 ture of Mathetes. A misunderstanding, however, arose be- 
 tween them, and they became estranged for a season. Words- 
 worth's overbearing dogmatism, too, was rather much for 
 Wilson. In truth, he felt himself somewhat overcrowed, and 
 knew in his heart that he had no right to be so, yet he con- 
 tinued to admire both these Lake Denriurgi, and became their 
 most eloquent interpreter to the public. 
 
 While at Elleray, but considerably later than this (in the 
 year 1810, we think), he met and married his amiable wife. 
 His life previous to this had been a very romantic and adven- 
 turous one. We might recount a hundred floating stories about 
 it, but were assured a little before his death, upon his own au-
 
 372 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 thority, that they were in general a "pack of lies;" so that 
 we refrain from more than alluding to them. He was always 
 gipsy, or no gipsy waiter, or no waiter the gentleman, the 
 genius, and the kind-hearted, affable man. His first poem 
 was the " Isle of Palms," which was welcomed as a very prom- 
 ising slip of the Lake poetic tree, and criticised with consider- 
 able favor by Jeffrey, who showed in the article a desire to 
 wean the young bard from his favorite school of " pond poets." 
 In 1814, he came to reside in Edinburgh, and was called, nom- 
 inally, to the bar. We are not certain, however, if he ever 
 had a single brief, or pled a single case. But what an appa- 
 rition among the lawyers of that day, who, if Carlyle may be 
 credited, " believed in nothing in earth, heaven, hell, or under 
 the earth," must have been this wild-eyed and broad-shoulder- 
 ed enthusiast, with his long-flowing locks ! In 1817 " Black- 
 wood's Magazine" was started, and shortly after, Wilson, 
 who was now dividing his time between Edinburgh and Elle- 
 ray, was added to its staff, and began that wondrous series of 
 contributions, grave and gay, satiric and serious, mad and 
 wise, nonsensical and profound, fierce and genial, which were 
 destined to irradiate or torment its pages for a quarter of a 
 century. Lockhart became his principal coadjutor, and they 
 both set themselves to write up Toryism, to write down the 
 " Edinburgh Review," to castigate the Cockney School, and to 
 illustrate the manners, and maintain the name among the na- 
 tions of the earth, of " puir auld Scotland." The success of 
 " Blackwood" was not, as seems now generally thought, instan- 
 taneous and dazzling ; it was slow and interrupted ; it had 
 to struggle against great opposition, and many prejudices. It 
 got into some disgraceful scrapes, particularly in the case of 
 the melancholy circumstances that led to the death of poor 
 John Scott circumstances still somewhat shrouded in mys- 
 tery, but which certainly reflected very little credit on either 
 of the editors of " Ebony." " Blackguard's Magazine" was 
 its sobriquet for many a long year, and not till Lockhart and 
 MacGinn had left it for England, did the kindlier and better 
 management of Wilson give it that high standing, which un- 
 der the coarse and clumsy paws of his son-in-law the " Lau- 
 reate of Clavers" it is again rapidly losing. 
 
 Between the starting of " Blackwood" and Wilson's elec-
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 373 
 
 tion to the Moral Philosophy chair, we remember nothing 
 very special in his history, except his writing his first and last 
 paper in the " Edinburgh Review," which was a brilliant arti- 
 cle on Byron's fourth Canto of " Childe Harold." and the ap- 
 pearance of his " City of the Plague." From this much was 
 expected, but it rather disappointed the public. It had beau- 
 tiful passages, but, as a whole, was " dull, somehow dull." It 
 aspired to be both a great drama and a great poem and was 
 neither. Two or three pages of it are still remembered, but 
 the poem itself has gone down, or, rather, never rose. 
 
 Galled at its reception, the author mentally resolved, and 
 he kept his resolution, to publish no more separate poems. 
 In 1820 Dr. Thomas Brown died, and Wilson was urged by 
 his friends, especially by Sir Walter Scott, to stand a candi- 
 date for the vacant chair of Moral Philosophy. It was desir- 
 able, they thought, that that should be filled by one who was 
 a Conservative (Wilson had long ago renounced his Radical- 
 ism), and who had genius and mettle besides. It was thought 
 good, too, that such a man should now have a settled position 
 in society. His pretensions were fiercely opposed. When a 
 boy, we fell in with a file of old " Scotsmans," dated 1820, 
 and assure our readers that they could scarcely credit the 
 terms in which Wilson was then assailed. (And yet why say 
 this, after the recent brutal assaults on his dust by the crea- 
 tures of the " .Ass-enaeum," and others of the London press ?) 
 He was accused of blasphemy, of writing indecent parodies on 
 the Psalms, of being a turncoat, of having no original genius, 
 of having written a bad bombastic paper in the " Edinburgh 
 Review," &c. &c. The "Scotsman" did not then seek to 
 " damn with faint praise," but spoke out loud and bold. It 
 had then, too, some critical, as well as much political, power. 
 The fact was, party spirit was at that time running mountains 
 high in Scotland, fomented greatly by the Queen's case ; Wil- 
 son, besides, was as yet very little known ; his poetry was not 
 popular ; his powers as a periodical writer were yet in blos- 
 som, and only his early eccentricities seemed to mark him out 
 from the roll of common men. His opponent, Sir William 
 Hamilton, too, was known to have devoted immense talent and 
 research to the study of moral and mental science, while Wil- 
 son, it was shrewdly suspected, required to cram himself for
 
 374 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 tbe office. Through dint of party influence, however, he was 
 elected ; and certainly none of the numerous c ] an of Job-sons 
 has ever done more to redeem the character of the tribe. He 
 cast a lustre even upon the mean and rotten ladder by which 
 he had risen. 
 
 Scott had told "Wilson (see " Scott's Life"), that when 
 elected to the chair he must " forswear sack, purge, and live 
 cleanly like a gentleman.'' And on tliis hint he proceeded to 
 act. He commenced to prepare his lectures with great care ; 
 and his success in the chair was such as to abash his adver- 
 saries, and astonish even his friends. He became the darling 
 of his students ; and the publication of his " Lights and Sha- 
 dows," and the " Trials of Margaret Lyndsay," contributed 
 to raise his reputation, not only as a writer but as a man. 
 
 He continued still to write in " Blackwood," and when 
 Lockhart, in 1826, went to London to edit the " Quarterly 
 Review," Wilson became the unrestricted lord, although not 
 the ostensible editor, of that magazine, with the history of 
 which for ten years he was identified. How the public did, iu 
 these days, watch and weary for each First of the Month ! for 
 sure it was to bring with it either a sunny and splendid morn- 
 ing of poetic eloquence, or a terrible and sublime tornado of 
 invective and satiric power. " Who is next," was the general 
 question, " to be crowned as by the hand of Apollo, or to be 
 scorched as by a wafture from the torch of the Furies . ? " The 
 " Noctes Arnbrosianse" especially intoxicated the world. They 
 resembled the marvels of genius, of the stage, and of ventrilo- 
 quism united to produce one bewitching and bewildering whole. 
 The author seemed a diffused Shakspeare, or Shakspeare in a 
 hurry, and with a printer's " devil" waiting at his door. 
 Falstaff was for a season eclipsed by the " Shepherd," and 
 Mercutio and Hamlet together had their glories darkened by 
 the blended wit and wisdom, pathos and fancy, of Christopher 
 North. The power of these dialogues lay in the admirable 
 combination, interchange, and harmonious play of the most 
 numerous, diverse, and contradictory elements and characters. 
 Passages of the richest and most poetical eloquence were inter- 
 mixed with philosophical discussion, with political invectives, 
 with literary criticism, with uproarious fun and nonsense, with 
 the floating gossip of the day, and with the sharpest of small
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 375 
 
 talk. The Tragedy, the Comedy, and the Farce were all 
 there, and the farce was no afterpiece, but intermingled with 
 the entire body of the play. The author interrupts a descrip- 
 tion of Glencoc or Ben Nevis, to cry out for an additional 
 sausage, and breaks away from a discussion on the origin of 
 evil to compound a tumbler of toddy. While De Quincey is 
 explaining Kant's " Practical Reason," the Shepherd is grunt- 
 ing " Glorious" over a plate of hotch-potch ; and from under 
 North, who is painting a Covenanting martyrdom, Tickler 
 suddenly withdraws the chair, and the description falls with 
 the old man below the table. Each dialogue is in fact a 
 miniature " Don Juan," jerking you down at every point from 
 the highest to the lowest reaches of feeling and thought ; and 
 driving remorselessly through its own finest passages, in order 
 to secure the effects of a burlesque oddity, compounded of the 
 grave and the ludicrous, the lofty and the low. Each number 
 in the series may be compared to a witch's cauldron, crowded 
 and heaving with all strange substances, the very order of 
 which is disorganisation, but with the weird light of imagina- 
 tion glimmering over the chaos, and giving it a sort of un- 
 earthly unity. Verily, they are Walpurgis Nights, these 
 " Noctes Ambrosianas." The English language contains no- 
 thing so grotesque as some of their ludicrous descriptions, no- 
 thing so graphic, so intense, so terrible, as some of their 
 serious pictures ; no dialogue more elastic, no criticism more 
 subtle, no gossip more delightful, no such fine diffusion, like 
 the broad eagle wing, and no such vigorous compression, like 
 the keen eagle talon ; but when we remember, besides, that 
 the " Noctes" contain all these merits combined into a wild 
 and wondrous whole, our admiration of the powers displayed 
 in them is intensified to astonishment, and, if not to the pitch 
 of saying, " Surely a greater than Shakspeare is here," cer- 
 tainly to that of admitting a mind of cognate and scarce infe- 
 rior genius. 
 
 Thus, for ten years did Wilson continue, in " Noctes," in 
 reviews, in pictures of Scottish scenery and life, in criticisms 
 on Homer, and Spencer, and the other great poets of the 
 world, with undiminished freshness and force, to disport his 
 leviathan powers. Sport, indeed, it was, for he seldom, it is 
 said, employed more than three or four days in the month in
 
 376 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the preparation of his articles. When Magazine-day ap- 
 proached, his form ceased to be seen on Prince's Stieet, 
 except at the stated hour when he walked to his class. He 
 shut himself up, permitted his beard to grow, kept beside him 
 now a tea-pot and now a series of soda-water bottles, and 
 poured out his brilliant extemporisations, page after page, as 
 fast as his broad quill could move, till perhaps the half of a 
 " Maga" is written, and for another month the lion is free. 
 In this improvisatore fashion, it is said, he wrote his Essay on 
 Burns within a single week. Such irregular Titanic work, 
 however, brought its penalties along with it, and he began by 
 and by to " weary in the greatness of its way." His gentle 
 wife was removed, too, about this time by death from his side, 
 and the shock was terrible. It struck him to the ground. It 
 unstrung a man who seemed before to possess the Nemean 
 lion's nerve. He was found at this time, by a gentleman who 
 visited him at Lasswade, feeble, almost fatuous, miserable, 
 and unable to do aught but weep and moan, like a heartbro- 
 ken child. But the end was not yet. He recovered by a 
 mighty bound his elasticity of mind and energy of frame. He 
 carried on his professional labors with renewed vigor and suc- 
 cess. He bent again the Ulysses bow of " Blackwood," but 
 never, it must be admitted, with the same power. His " Dies 
 Boreales," Compared to the " Noctes Ambrosianse," were but 
 as the days of Shetland in January, compared to the nights 
 of Italy or of Greece in June. 
 
 We may here appropriately introduce the reminiscences of 
 our own intercourse with him, which indeed was very slight 
 and occasional. We had often gone in to hear him in his 
 class, although our curriculum of study had taken place in 
 another university ; had not been fascinated at first, but had 
 ultimately learned enthusiastically to admire his manner of 
 teaching of which more afterwards. In 1834, anxious to 
 gain a verdict from a critic so distinguished, we ventured on 
 an experiment, at the recollection of which we yet blush. We 
 sent him in some Essays, professing to be by another. The 
 result was of a sort we had not in our wildest dreams ima- 
 gined. Suffice it that he spoke of them (without knowing 
 their author) in a manner which not only bound us to him for 
 life, but cheered and encouraged us mightily at that early
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 377 
 
 stage of our progress. When, years afterwards, the papers 
 of the " First Gallery" appeared seriatim in the " Dumfries 
 Herald," Wilson was no niggard encomiast, and it was greatly 
 owing to his kindly words that we were induced to collect 
 them into a volume. To himself, however, we had all this 
 while never spoken, except for a few minutes in his class-room, 
 till we called on him in 1844, along with a friend. At first 
 the servant was rather shy, and spoke dubiously of the visi- 
 bility of the professor ; but, upon our sending up our names, wo 
 heard him on the top of the stairs growling out a hearty com- 
 mand to admit us. In a little he appeared, and such an appa- 
 rition ! Conceive the tall, strong, savage-looking man, with a 
 beard wearing a week's growth, his hair half a twelvemonth's, 
 no waistcoat, no coat, a loose cloak flung on for the nonce, a 
 shirt dirty, and which apparently had been dirty for days, 
 and, to crown all, a huge cudgel in his hand. He saluted us 
 with his usual dignified frankness, for in his undress of man- 
 ner as well as of costume, he was always himself; and, after 
 asking us both to sit, and sitting down himself, he commenced 
 instantly to converse on the subject nearest to him at the 
 moment. He had been recently up at Loch Awe, for he loved, 
 he said, to " see the spring come out in the Highlands." He 
 had, besides, been visiting many of his old acquaintances there, 
 " shepherds and parish ministers;" and then he enlarged on 
 the character of his old friend Dr. Maclntyre. There was a 
 full-length picture of Wilson when a boy on one side of the 
 room, representing him as standing beside a favorite horse, 
 and, sooth to say, somewhat " shauchly" he seemed in his 
 juvenile form. The picture, he said, had been taken at the 
 especial desire of his mother, and the terms in which he spoke 
 of her were honorable to both parties. He then launched out 
 on literary topics in his usual free but fiery style. He spoke 
 a great deal about De Quincey, and with profound admiration. 
 To Coleridge as a man, his feelings were less cordial. Alto- 
 gether, we left deeply impressed with his affability and kindli- 
 ness, as well as with his great mental powers. 
 
 We met him bat once more, at Stirling, on occasion of a 
 great literary conversazione, held in that town, on the 10th 
 January, 1849. His coming there had been announced i but 
 was expected by no one, as it was during the Session of Col-
 
 378 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 lege. Thither, however, he came, like a splendid meteor and 
 was received with boundless enthusiasm. We remember, 
 while walking along with him from dinner to the place of 
 meeting, that some one remarked how singular it was (fact), 
 " that Cholera and Christopher North had entered Stirling 
 the same day." " And I the author of the ' City of the 
 Plague,' too," was his prompt rejoinder. Never had there 
 been such a night in Stirling, nor is there ever likely to be an- 
 "other such. His spirits rose, he threw his soul amidst his au- 
 dience, like a strong swimmer in a full-lipped sea, touched by 
 turns their every passion, and at last, by the simple words, 
 rendered more powerful by the proximity of the spot, " One 
 bloody summer-day at Bannockburn," raised them all to their 
 feet in one storm of uncontrollable enthusiasm. More elab- 
 orate prelections from his lips we have heard, but never any- 
 thing better calculated to move and melt, to thrill and carry 
 away, and that, too, without an atom of clap-trap, a popular 
 assembly. 
 
 We have, in common with many, seen and heard him in va- 
 rious other of his moods. We have seen him in the street, or 
 in the Parliament House, or in the Exhibition, surrounded 
 three deep by acquaintances, male and female, whom he was 
 keeping in a roar of laughter, or sometimes hushing into a lit- 
 tle eddy of silence, which seemed startling amidst the torrent 
 of noisy life which was rushing around. We have watched 
 him followed at noonday, through long streets, by enthusiasts 
 and strangers, who hung upon his steps, and did " far off his 
 skirts adore," and have seen him monstrari digito, a thousand 
 times ; sometimes we have thus followed, and thus pointed him 
 out ourselves. And we have heard him again and again in 
 the Assembly Rooms, and in his own class-room, addressing 
 audiences, whom he melted, electrified, subdued, exploded in- 
 to mirth, or awed into solemnity, at his pleasure, while he 
 was discovering the secret springs of beauty and sublimity, of 
 delight and of terror, of laughter and of tears. 
 
 In 1852 he saw the necessity of resigning his chair, owing 
 to the increasing weakness of his frame. A pension of 200 
 was granted him by Lord John Russell. About a year ago 
 symptoms of decay in his mental faculties are said to have 
 been observed. From his cottage in Lasswade he was renio/
 
 PROFESSOR. WILSON. 379 
 
 ed to Edinburgh, and after various fluctuations, his spirit 
 was at last mercifully released from that body which had be- 
 come a " body of death," at twelve ou the morning of Mon- 
 day the 3d April. 
 
 We come now to the second part of our task to speak of 
 him critically as a Man and an Author. And in looking to 
 him as a Man, we are compelled, first, to think of that mag- 
 nificent presence of his to which we have alluded often, and 
 may allude yet again, which ever haunts us, and all who have 
 seen it. In the case of many the body seems to belong to the 
 mind ; in the case of Wilson, the mind seemed to belong to 
 the body. You were almost tempted to believe in materi- 
 alism, as you saw him, so intensely did the body seem alive, 
 so much did it appear to ray out meaning, motion, and power, 
 from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. You 
 thought, at other times, of the first Adam the stately man 
 of red clay, rising from the hand of the Almighty Potter. 
 Larger and taller men we have seen, figures more artistically 
 framed we have seen, faces more chastely chiselled, and " sick- 
 lied o'er with the pale cast of thought," are not uncommon ; 
 but the power and peculiarity of Wilson's body lay in tho 
 combination of all those qualities which go to form a model 
 man. There was his stature, about six feet two inches. There 
 were his erect port and stately tread. There was his broad 
 and brawny chest. There was a brow lofty, round, and 
 broad. There were his eyes, literally flames of fire, when 
 roused. There were a nose, mouth, and chin, expressing, by 
 turns, firmest determination, exquisite feeling, humor of the 
 drollest sort, and fiery rage. And flowing round his temples, 
 but not ( ' beneath his shoulders broad," were locks of the true 
 Celtic yellow, reminding you of the mane worn by the ancient 
 bison in the Deu-Caledouian forests. " You are a man," said 
 Napoleon, when he first saw Goethe. Similar exclamations 
 were often uttered by strangers, as they unexpectedly encoun- 
 tered Wilson in the streets. Johnson said of Burke, that you 
 could not converse with him for five minutes under a shed with- 
 out saying, " this is an extraordinai-y man." But Burke had to 
 open his mouth ; his presence was by no means remarkable. 
 In Wilson's case there was no need for uttering a single word; 
 his face, his eye, his port, his chest, all united in silently shin-
 
 380 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 ing out the tidings of what he was the most gifted, and one 
 of the least cultured of the sons of men. 
 
 " Cultured," we mean in the ordinary sense of that word, 
 for unquestionably he had received or given himself an educa- 
 tion as extraordinary as was his genius. Yet there was a 
 want of polish and finish about his look, his hair, his dress, 
 and gesture, that seemed outre and savage, and which made 
 some hypercritics talk of him as a splendid beast a cross be- 
 tween the man, the eagle, and the lion. You saw at least one 
 who had been much among the woods, and much among the 
 wild beasts, who, like Peter Bell, had often 
 
 "Set his face against the sky, 
 On mountains and on lonely moors," 
 
 who had slept for nights among the heather, who had bathed 
 in midnight lakes, and shouted from the top of midnight hills, 
 and robbed eagles' eyries, and made snow-men, and wooed sol- 
 itude as a bride ; and yet, withal, there was something in his 
 bearing which showed the scholar, the gentleman, the man of 
 the world, and the waggish observer ; and if one presumed on 
 his oddity, and sought to treat him as a simpleton, or semi- 
 maniac, he could resent the presumption by throwing at him 
 a word which withered him to the bone, or darting at him a 
 glance which shrivelled him up into remorse and insignificance. 
 His eye was indeed a most singular eye. Now it glittered 
 like a sharp sunlit sword ; now it assumed a dewy expression 
 of the slyest humor ; now it swam in tears ; now it became 
 dim and deep under some vision of grandeur which had come 
 across it ; now it seemed searching every heart among his hear- 
 ers ; and now it appeared to retire and communicate directly 
 with his own. And wo to those against whom it did rouse in 
 anger ! It was then Coeur De Leon in the " Talisman," with 
 his hand and foot advanced to defend the insulted banner of 
 England. 
 
 Indeed, we marvel that no critic hitherto has noticed the 
 striking similitude between Wilson, and Scott's portraiture 
 of Richard the Lion-hearted. We are almost inclined to 
 think that Sir Walter had him in his eye. Many of their 
 qualities were the same. The same leonine courage and no- 
 bility of nature ; the same fierce and ungovernable passions ;
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 381 
 
 the same high and generous temper ; the same love of adven- 
 ture and frolic ; the same taste for bouts of pleasure and 
 lowly society ; the same love of song and music ; the same im- 
 prudence and improvidence ; the same power of concentrating 
 the passions of hot hearts and amorous inclinations upon their 
 wives ; and the same personal appearance to the very letter 
 in complexion, strength, and stature distinguish the King 
 and the Poet. Neither Richard nor Christopher was always 
 a hero. The former enjoyed the humors of Friar Tuck as 
 heartily as he did the minstrelsy of Blondel ; and our lion- 
 hearted Laker could be as much at home among peasants and 
 smugglers, as he ever was with Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
 
 We have often heard Americans preferring the personal 
 presence of Daniel Webster to that of Wilson. Webster we 
 never saw, but, from descriptions and portraits, we have him 
 somewhat clearly before our mind's eye. He was in appear- 
 ance a tall, solemn, swarthy, thundrous-looking Puritan cler- 
 gyman, clad always in black, not unlike James Grahame of 
 the " Sabbath," Wilson's friend, but with a prodigiously more 
 powerful expression on the eye and brow. He looked, in 
 short, morally the very reverse of what he was ; he seemed 
 the model of a high-principled and conscientious man. Wil- 
 son's face and form were equally massive, far sunnier and far 
 truer to his genial and unlimited nature. 
 
 As a man, Wilson was much misunderstood. Not only 
 were his personal habits grossly misrepresented, but his whole 
 nature was belied. He was set down by many as a strange 
 compound of wilful oddity, boisterous spirits, swaggering os- 
 tentation, and* true genius. Let us hear, on the other side, 
 one who knew him intimately, and loved him as a son a father 
 our friend Thomas Aird. His words written since Wilson's 
 decease, are identical with all his private statements to us on 
 the same subject : " He was singularly modest, and even de- 
 ferential. His estimates of life were severely practical; he 
 was not sanguine ; he was not even hopeful enough. Those 
 who approached the author of the ' Noctes' in domestic life, 
 expecting exchanges of boisterous glee, soon found out their 
 mistake. No writing for mere money, no ' dabbling in the 
 pettiness of fame,' with this great spirit, in its own negligent 
 grandeur, modest, quiet, negligent, because, amidst all the
 
 382 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 beauty and joy of the world, it stood waiting an.i wondering 
 on vaster shores than lie by the seas of time." 
 
 These words are not only beautiful, but true, although they 
 represent Wilson only in his higher moods. He could, and 
 often did, indulge in boisterous glee, while, like many humor- 
 ists, his heart within, was serious, if not sad enough. And this 
 leads us to the question as to his faith what was it ? He 
 was unquestionably of a deeply religious temperament; but he 
 had not given it a proper culture. He was not, we think, sat- 
 isfied with any of the present forms of the Christian religion ; 
 yet there was something in him far beyond nature-worship. His 
 attitude indeed, was just that described by Aird. Like the spi- 
 rits of Foster, Coleridge, Arnold, and many others in our 
 strange era, while accepting Christianity as a whole, Wilson's 
 spirit was " waiting and wondering" till the mighty veil 
 should drop, and show all mysteries made plain in the light 
 of another sphere. Had he more resolutely lived the Chris- 
 tian life in its energetic activities, and approved himself 
 more a servant of duty, his views had perhaps become clearer 
 and more consoling. And yet, what can we say ? Arnold 
 was a high heroic worker, nay, seemed a humble, devoted 
 Christian, and yet died with a heart broken by the uncertain- 
 ties of this transition and twilight age. 
 
 Many thought and called Wilson a careless, neglectful man. 
 He was not indeed so punctual as the Iron Duke in answering 
 letters, nor could he be always "fashed" with young aspi- 
 rants. But this arose more from indolence than from indif- 
 ference. He was to many men a generous and constant friend 
 and patron. Few have had encouraging letters from him, but 
 many have had cheering words, and a word from him went as 
 far as a letter, or many letters from others. 
 
 We pass to speak of the constituents of his genius. These 
 were distinguished by their prodigal abundance and variety. 
 He was what the Germans call an " all-sided man." He had, 
 contrary to common opinion, much metaphysical subtlety, 
 which had not indeed been subjected, any more than some of 
 his other faculties, to careful cultivation. But none can read 
 some of his articles, or could have listened to many of his lec- 
 tures, without the conviction that the metaphysical power was 
 strong within him, and that, had he not by instinct been
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 383 
 
 taught to despise metaphysics, he might havo become a met- 
 aphysician, as universally wise, as elaborately ingenious, as 
 captiously critical, as wilfully novel, and as plausibly and pro- 
 foundly wrong, as any of the same class that ever lived. But 
 he did despise this science of pretensions, and used to call it 
 " dry as the dust of summer." Of his imagination we need 
 not speak. It was large, rich, ungovernable, fond alike of 
 the Beautiful and the Sublime, of the Pathetic and the Ter- 
 rible. His wit was less remarkable than his humor, which 
 was one of the most lavish and piquant of his faculties. Add 
 to this great memory, keen, sharp intellect, wide sympathies, 
 strong passion, and a boundless command of a somewhat loose, 
 but musical and energetic diction, and you have the outline of 
 his gifts and endowments. He was deficient only in that 
 plodding, painstaking sagacity which enables many common- 
 place men to excel in the physical sciences. If he ever cross- 
 ed the " Ass' Bridge," it must have been at a flying leap, and 
 with recalcitrating heels, and he was much better acquainted, 
 we suspect, with the " Fluxions" of the Tweed, than with 
 those of Leibnitz and Newton. 
 
 His powers have never, we think, found an adequate devel- 
 opment. It is only the bust of Wilson we have before us. 
 Yet let us not, because he has not done mightier things, call 
 his achievements small ; they are not only very considerable in 
 themselves, but of a very diversified character. He was a 
 critic, humorist, writer of fiction, professor, poet, and periodi- 
 cal writer. And, first, as a critic, criticism with him was not 
 an art or an attainment; it was an insight and an enthusiasm, 
 He loved everything that was beautiful in literature, and ab- 
 horred all that was false and affected, and pitied all that was 
 weak and dull; and his criticism was just the frank, fearless, 
 and eloquent expression of that love, that abhorrence, and that 
 pity. Hence his was a catholic criticism; hence his canons 
 were not artificial ; hence he abhorred the formal, the mysti- 
 cal, and the pseudo-philosophic schools of criticism ; hence the 
 reasons he gave for his verdicts were drawn, not from arbitra- 
 ry rules, but directly from the great principles of human na- 
 ture. With what joyous gusto did he approach a favorite 
 author ! His praise fell on books like autumn sunshine, and 
 whatever it touched it gilded and glorified. And when, on
 
 384 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the other hand, he was disgusted or offended, with what vehe- 
 ment sincerity, with what a noble rage, with what withering 
 sarcasm, or with what tumultuous invective, did he express 
 his wrath. His criticisms are sometimes rambling, sometimes 
 rhapsodical, sometimes overdone in praise or in blame ; often 
 you are compelled to differ from his opinions, and sometimes 
 to doubt if they are fully formed in his own mind, and in pol- 
 ish, precision, and depth, they are inferior to a few others ; 
 but, in heartiness, eloquence, variety, consummate ease of mo- 
 tion, native insight, and sincerity, they stand alone. 
 
 We have alluded to his extraordinary gift of humor. It 
 was not masked and subtle, like Lamb's ; it was broad, rich, 
 bordering on farce, and strongly impregnated with imagina- 
 tion. It was this last characteristic which gave it its peculiar 
 power, as Patrick Robertson can testify. This gentleman 
 possesses nearly as much fun as Wilson, but in their conversa- 
 tional contests, Wilson, whenever he lifted up the daring wing 
 of imagination, left him floundering far behind. 
 
 Good old Dr. Maclntyre, we have seen, thought Wilson's 
 forte was fiction. We can hardly concur with the doctor 
 in this opinion, for although many of his tales are fine, they 
 are so principally from the poetry of the descriptions which 
 are sprinkled through them. He does not tell a story well, 
 and this because he is not calm enough. As Cowper says, he 
 prefers John Newton, as a historian, to Gibbon and Robert- 
 son ; because, while they sing, you say your story ; and his- 
 tory is a thing to be said, not sung. Before we met this re- 
 mark, we had made it in reference to Wilson and Scott. 
 Scott says his stories, and Wilson sings them. Hence, while 
 Wilson in passages is equal to Scott, as a whole, his works of 
 fiction are greatly less interesting, and seem less natural. 
 Wilson is a northern Scald, not so much narrating as pouring 
 out passionate poetic rhapsodies, thinly threaded with inci- 
 dent ; Scott is a Minstrel of the border, who can be poetical 
 when he pleases, but who lays more stress upon the general 
 interest of the tale he tells. Even in description he is not, 
 in general, equal to Scott, and that for a similar reason. Wil- 
 son, when describing, rises out of the sphere of prose into a 
 kind of poetic rhythm ; Scott never goes beyond the line which 
 separates the style of lofty prose from that of absolute poe-
 
 PK.OFESSOR WILSON. 385 
 
 try. Wilson is too Ossianic in his style of narration and 
 description ; and had he attempted a novel in three or four 
 volumes, it had been absolutely illegible. Even " Margaret 
 Lindsay," his longest tale, rather tires before the close, 
 through its sameness of eloquence and monotony of pathos ; 
 only very short letters should be all written in tears and 
 blood. And his alternations of gay and grave are not so well 
 managed in his tales as in his " Noctes." Yet nothing can be 
 fiuer than some of his individual scenes and pictures. Who 
 has forgotten his Scottish Sunset, which seems dipped in fiery 
 gold, or that Rainbow which bridges over one of his most pa- 
 thetic stories, or the drowning of Henry Needhani, or the 
 Elder's Death-bed, or that incomparable Thunderstorm, which 
 seems still to bow its giant wing of gloom over Ben Nevis 
 and the glen below ? In no modern, not even Scott, do we 
 find prose passages so gorgeous, so filled with the intensest 
 spirit of poetry, and rising so finely- into its language and 
 rhythm as these. 
 
 We have of late frequently applied, to apparently fine prose 
 writing, the test of reading it aloud, and have judged accord- 
 ingly of its rhythm, as well as of its earnestness and power. 
 Few authors, indeed, can stand this. MacAll of Manchester's 
 high-wrought paragraphs seem miserably verbose and empty 
 when read aloud ; Hamilton of Leeds' sentences are too short 
 and disjointed to stand this test ; and even Ruskin's most 
 sounding and labored passages assume an aspect of splendid 
 disease, of forced and factitious enthusiasm, when thus tried. 
 All the better passages, on the other hand, of Hall, Chalmers, 
 Foster, Scott, Croly, De Quincey, and, we add, of Macaulay, 
 triumphantly pass the ordeal ; and so, too, the descriptions in 
 the "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." 
 
 " Come back into memory, thou most brilliant and genial of 
 all professors, as we have seen thee in the days of other years !" 
 We enter the class-room, and take, we shall suppose, the most 
 remote seat in the sloping array of benches. We find our- 
 selves surrounded by youths of all varieties of appearance and 
 diversities of standing, waiting, some eagerly, others with an 
 air of perfect indifference, for the entrance of the professor. 
 Yonder two are discussing the question whether Wilson be a 
 real Christian, or a true poet. One is preparing his pencil for
 
 386 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 making a caricature of his illustrious teacher another is 
 mending his pen for the purpose of taking down notes of the 
 lecture. A few are knocking their heels against the ground, 
 because the morning is cold, and, perhaps, in a loud whisper 
 discussing the merits of the leading " star" in the Royal The- 
 atre, where they had been over night. Here and there you 
 see strangers some enthusiastic youths from England, or 
 some clerical-looking gentlemen from the north of Scotland 
 whose fidgetty air tells you they are wearying for the appear- 
 ance of the lion, and who seem regarding his class with feel- 
 ings of unmixed contempt. At last you hear a certain bustle, 
 and immediately after, there comes rushing along from the 
 left-hand side a tall, yellow-haired man, in a gown, who steps 
 up to the platform, and turns toward you eyes, a brow, a 
 cheek, a chin, a chest, and a port, which instantly stamp him 
 a Titan among the children of men. His hair rolls down his 
 temples like a cataract of gold ; his eyes are light-blue, spark- 
 ling, and at times so fierce, that they seem two loopholes open- 
 ing into a brain of fire ; his cheek is flushed by exercise and 
 air into a rich manly red ; his chin is cut like that of a 
 marble Antinous; his chest is broad and ample, and seems 
 ready either as a bulwark to break, or as a floodgate to let 
 forth strong emotion ; his lips are firmly set, yet mild ; the 
 aspect of the lower face is that of peach-like bloom, and 
 peach-like peace, the aspect of the upper is that of high, rapt 
 enthusiasm, like that of Apollo, looking up after the path of 
 one of his sunny arrows ; the port is erect yet not haughty 
 high, yet not overbearing or contemptuous and, ere he has 
 opened his lips, you say internally, " I have found a man of 
 the old heroic breed, strength and stature." He begins his 
 lecture. For a little you are disappointed. His voice is 
 deep, but seems monotonous ; his utterance is slow ; his pro- 
 nunciation is peculiar ; his gesture uncouth ; what he says, 
 is a rather confused and embarrassed repetition of a past lec- 
 ture ; and you are resigning yourself to a mere passive and 
 wondering gaze at the personnel of the man, expecting nothing 
 from his mouth, when the progress of his discussion compels 
 him to quote a few lines of poetry, and then his enthusiasm 
 appears, not rapidly bursting, but slowly defiling like a great 
 army into view, his eye kindles, enlarges, and seems to embrace
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 387 
 
 the whole of his audience in one glance, his chest, heaves, his 
 arms vibrate, sometimes his clenched hand smites the desk 
 before him, and his tones deepen and deepen down into abysses 
 of pathos and melody, as if searching for the very soul of sound, 
 to bring it into upper air. And, after thus having arrested 
 you, he never for an instant loses his grasp, but, by successive 
 shock after shock of electric power, roll after roll of slow 
 thunder, he does with you what he wills, as with his own, and 
 leaves you in precisely the state in which you feel yourself 
 when awakening from some deep, delightful dream. He had, 
 besides, certain great field-days, as a lecturer, in which, from 
 beginning to end, he spoke with sustained and accelerating 
 power : as when he advocated the Immortality of the Soul ; 
 describing the sufferings of Indian prisoners; explained his 
 ideas of the Beautiful ; or described the character of the 
 Miser. The initiated among the students used to watch and 
 weary for these grand occasions, and all who heard him then, 
 felt that genius and eloquence could go no further, and that 
 they were standing beside him on the pinnacle of intellectual 
 power. 
 
 His poetry proper has been generally thought inferior to his 
 prose, and beneath the level of his powers. Yet, if we admire 
 it less, we at times we love it more. It is not great, or intense, 
 or highly impassioned, but it is true, tender, and pastoral. It 
 has been well called the " poetry of peace ;" it is from " towns 
 and toils remote." In it the author seems to be exiled from 
 the bustle and conflict of the world, and to inhabit a country 
 of his own, not an entirely " Happy Valley," for tears there 
 fall, and clouds gather, and hearts break, and death enters, but 
 the tears are quiet, the clouds are windless, the hearts break in 
 silence, and the awful Shadow comes in softly, and on tiptoe 
 departs. Sometimes, indeed, the solitude and silence are dis- 
 turbed by the apparition of a " wild deer," and the poet is 
 surprised into momentary rapture, and a stormy lyric is flung 
 abroad on the winds. But, in general, the region is calm, and 
 the very sounds are all in unison and league with silence. As a 
 poet, however, Wilson was deficient, far more than as a prose 
 writer, in objective interest, as well as in concentration of pur- 
 pose. His poetry has neither that reflective depth which 
 causes you to recur so frequently to the poetry of Wordsworth,
 
 388 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 nor that dazzling lightness and brilliance of movement which 
 fascinates you in Scott. It is far, too, from being a full reflec- 
 tion of his multifarious and powerful nature ; it represents 
 only a little quiet nook in his heart, a small sweet vein in his 
 genius, as though a lion were to carry somewhere within his 
 broad breast a little bag of honey, like that of the bee. It 
 does not discover him as he is, but as he would wish to have 
 been. His poetry is the Sabbath of his soul. And there are 
 moods of mind quiet, peaceful, autumnal moments in which 
 you enjoy it better than the poetry of any one else, and find a 
 metaphor for its calm and holy charm in the words of Cole- 
 ridge 
 
 " The moonbeams steeped in sikntness, 
 The steady weathercock." 
 
 The revolving, impatient wheel, the boundless versatility of 
 Wilson's genius, quieted and at rest, as we see it in his poetry, 
 could not be better represented than in these lines. In Cole- 
 ridge, indeed, as in some true poets, we find all characters and 
 varieties of intellect represented unconsciously and by antici- 
 pation, even as frost, fire, and rock-work each contains all 
 architecture and all art, silently anticipated in its varied forms 
 and prophetic imitations. 
 
 In his periodical writings alone do we find anything like an 
 adequate display of his varied powers. You saw only the 
 half-man in the professor's chair, and only the quarter-man in 
 his poetry ; but in the " Noctes," and the satirico-serious 
 papers he scattered over " Blackwood," you saw the whole 
 Wilson the Cyclops now at play, and now manufacturing 
 thunderbolts for Jove; now cachinnating in his cave, now 
 Mirowing rocks and mountains at his enemies, and now pour- 
 ing out awful complaints, and asking strange, yet reverent 
 queries in the ear of the gods. 
 
 Wilson's relation to his age has been, like Byron's, some- 
 what uncertain and vacillating. He has been, on the whole, a 
 " lost leader." He has, properly speaking, belonged neither 
 to the old nor new, neither to the conservative nor to the 
 movement, neither to the infidel nor the evangelical sides 
 Indeed, our grand quarrel with him is, that he was not sum 
 ciently in earnest ; that he did not with his might what his
 
 PROFESSOR WILSON. 389 
 
 hand found to do ; that he hid his ten talents in a napkin ; 
 that he trifled with his inestimable powers, and had not a 
 sufficiently strong sense of stewardship on his conscience. 
 This has been often said, and we thought it generally agreed 
 on, till our attention was turned to a pamphlet, entitled 
 " Professor Wilson a Memorial and Estimate," which, amid 
 tolerably good points and thoughts here and there, is written 
 in a style which, for looseness, inaccuracy, verbosity, and 
 affected obscurity, baffles description, besides abounding in 
 flagrant and, we fear, wilful mis-statements, and in efforts at 
 fine writing, which make you blush for Scottish literature. 
 The poor creature who indites this farrago of pretentious non- 
 sense asserts that the " Life of Wilson seems to have been as 
 truly fruitful as that of any author within the range of Eng- 
 lish literature," and proves the statement by the following 
 portentous query : " That ivild air of the unexpressed poet, 
 the inglorious Milton, the Shakspeare that might have been, 
 what was it but a rich spice of the fantastic humor of the 
 man, a part of that extraordinary character which so delighted 
 in its sport, that, whether he jested on himself, or from behind 
 a mask might be making some play of you, you knew not, nor 
 were sure if it meant mirth, confidence, or a solemn earnest 
 such as lie only could appreciate ?" What this may mean we 
 cannot tell ; but the writer becomes a little more intelligible 
 when he speaks, in some later portion of his production, of 
 the great popularity which Wilson's redacted and collected 
 works are to obtain, not appearing to know the fact that the 
 " Recreations of Christopher North," published some twelve 
 years ago, have never reached a second edition, and that old 
 William Blackwood, one of the acutest bibliopoles that ever 
 lived, refused to republish Wilson's principal articles in 
 '' Maga;" nor did the " Recreations" appear till after Black- 
 wood's death. Splendid passages and inestimable thoughts, 
 of course, abound in all that Wilson wrote, but the want of 
 pervasive purpose, of genuine artistic instinct, of condensation, 
 and of finish, has denied true unity, and perhaps permanent 
 power, to his writings. He will probably be best remembered 
 for his " Lights and Shadows" a book which, although not 
 a full discovery of his powers, lies in portable compass, and 
 embalms that fine nationality which so peculiarly distinguished
 
 390 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 his genius. Probably a wise selection from his " Noctes," 
 too, might become a popular book. 
 
 Wilson had every inducement to have done more than he 
 did. He was a strong healthy nature ; he had much leisure ; 
 he had great, perhaps too great facility of expression. He 
 was the pet of the public for many years. But he did not, 
 alas ! live habitually in his " great Taskmaster's eye." We 
 quarrel not with his unhappy uncertainties of mind; they 
 are but too incident to all imaginative and thoughtful spirits. 
 We quarrel not with his " waiting and wondering" on the 
 brink of the unseen, but his uncertainty should not have para- 
 lysed and emasculated a man of his gigantic proportions. If 
 beset by doubts and demons, he ought to have tried at least 
 to fight his way through them, as many a resolute spirit has 
 done before him. What had he to endure compared to Cow- 
 per, who for many years imagined that a being mightier than 
 the fallen angels Ahrimanes himself held him as his pro- 
 perty, and yet who, under the pressure of this fearful delusion, 
 wrote and did his best, and has left some works which, while 
 satisfying the severest critics, are manuals and household 
 words everywhere ? Wilson, on the other hand, seldom wrote 
 anything except from the compulsion of necessity. Although 
 not a writer for bread, much of his writing arose to the tune 
 of the knock of the printer's " devil;" and his efforts for the 
 advancement of the race, although we believe really sincere, 
 were to the last degree fluctuating, irregular, and uncertain. 
 
 It is a proof, we think, of Wilson's weakness, as well as of 
 his power, that he has been claimed as a possible prize on so 
 many and such diverse sides. He might have been, says one, 
 the greatest preacher of the age. He might have been, says 
 another, the greatest actor of the day. He might have been, 
 says a third, the greatest dramatist, next to Shakspeare, that 
 ever lived. He might have been, says a fourth, a powerful 
 parliamentary orator. He might have been, says a fifth, a 
 traveller superior to Bruce or Park. Now, while this proves 
 the estimation in which men hold his vast versatility, it proves 
 also that there was something wrong and shattered in the 
 structure of a mind which, while presenting so many angles to 
 BO many objects, never fully embraced any of them, and while 
 displaying powers so universal, has left results so compara- 
 tively slender.
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 391 
 
 Nevertheless, after all these deductions, where shall we 
 look for his like again ? A more generous, a more wide- 
 minded, a more courteous, and a more gifted man, probably 
 never lived. By nature he was Scotland's brightest son, not, 
 perhaps, even excepting Burns; and he, Scott, and Burns, 
 must rank everlastingly together as the first Three of her men 
 of genius. A cheerless feeling of desolation creeps across us, 
 as we remember that majestic form shall press this earth no 
 more ; those eyes of fire shall sound human hearts no more ; 
 that voice, mellow as that of the summer ocean breaking on a 
 silver strand, shall swell and sink no more ; and that large 
 heart shall no more mirror nature and humanity on its stormy 
 yet sunlit surface. Yet long shall Scotland, ay, and the world, 
 continue to cherish his image and to bless his memory ; and 
 whether or not he obtain a splendid mausoleum, he will not 
 require it, for he can (we heard him once quote the words in 
 reference to Scott, as he only could quote them) 
 
 " A mightier monument command 
 The mountains of his native land." 
 
 NO. IX.-IIEMY ROGERS. 
 
 MR. ROGERS has only risen of late into universal reputation, 
 although he had long ago deserved it. It has fared with him 
 as with some others who had for many years enjoyed a dubious 
 and struggling, although real and rising fame, till some signal 
 hit, some " Song of the Shirt," or " Eclipse of Faith," intro- 
 duced their names to millions who never heard of them before, 
 and turned suddenly on their half-shadowed faces the broadest 
 glare of fame. Thus, thousands upon thousands who had 
 never heard of Hood's " Progress of Cant," or his " Comic 
 Annuals," so soon as they read the " Song of the Shirt," 
 inquired eagerly for him, and began to read his earlier works 
 And so, although literary men were aware of Mr. Rogers' 
 existence, and that he was an able contributor to the " Edin-
 
 392 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 burgh Review," the general public kuew not even his name 
 till the " Eclipse of Faith" appeared, and till its great popu- 
 larity excited a desire to become acquainted with his previous 
 lucubrations. We met with the " Eclipse of Faith" at its 
 first appearance, but have only newly risen from reading his 
 collected articles, and propose to record our impressions while 
 they are yet fresh and warm. 
 
 Henry Rogers, as a reviewer and writer, seems to think 
 that he belongs to the school of Jeffrey and Macaulay, although 
 possessed of more learning and imagination than either, of a 
 higher moral sense i\nd manlier power than the first, and of a 
 freer diction and an easier vein of wit than the seco'ad ; and 
 the style of deference and idolatry he uses to them and to Mac- 
 intosh, might almost to his detractors appear either shameful 
 from its hypocrisy, ludicrous from its affectation, or silly from 
 the ignorance it discovers of his own claims and comparative 
 merits. We defy any unprejudiced man to read the two vol- 
 umes he has reprinted from the " Edinburgh Review," and not 
 to feel that be has encountered, on the whole, the most accom- 
 plished, manliest, healthiest, and most Christian writer who 
 ever adorned that celebrated periodical. If he has contribut- 
 ed to its pages no one article equal in brilliance to Jeffrey's 
 papers on Alison and Swift, or to Macaulay's papers on Milton 
 and Warren Hastings, his papers, taken en masse, are more 
 natural, less labored, full of a richer and more recondite learn- 
 ing, and written in a more conversational, more vigorous, and 
 more thoroughly English style. His thought, too, is of a pro- 
 founder, and, at the same time, clearer cast. Jeffrey had the 
 subtlety of the lawyer, rather than the depth of the philoso- 
 pher. Macaulay thinks generally like an eloquent special 
 pleader. Henry Rogers is a candid, powerful, and all-sided 
 thinker, and one who has fed his thought by a culture as diver- 
 sified as it is deep. He is a scholar, a mathematician, a phi- 
 losopher, a philologist, a man of taste and virtu, a divine, and 
 a wit, and if not absolutely a poet, yet he verges often on po- 
 etical conception, and his free and fervid eloquence often kin- 
 dles into the fire of poetry. 
 
 Every one who has read the " Eclipse of Faith" and who 
 1 as not ? must remember how that remarkable work has col- 
 lected all these varied powers and acquisitions into one burn-
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 393 
 
 ing focus, and must be ready to grant that, since Pascal, no 
 knight has entered into the arena of religious controversy bet- 
 ter equipped for fight, in strength of argument, in quickness of 
 perception, in readiness and richness of resource, in command 
 of temper, in pungency of wit, in a sarcasm which " burns 
 frore" with the intense coolness of its severity, and in a species 
 of Socratic dialogue which the son of Sophroniscus himself 
 would have envied. But, as the public and the press gener- 
 ally have made up their minds upon all these points, as also 
 on the merits of his admirable " Defence," and have hailed the 
 author with acclamation, we prefer to take up his less known 
 preceding efforts in the " Edinburgh Review," and to bring 
 their merits before our readers, while, at the same time, we 
 hope to find metal even more attractive in the great names 
 and subjects on which we shall necessarily be led to touch, as, 
 under Mr. Rogers' guidance, we pursue our way. We long, 
 too, shall we say to break a lance here and there with so dis- 
 tinguished a champion, although assuredly it shall be all in 
 honor, and not in hate. 
 
 From his political papers we abstain, and propose to confine 
 ourselves to those on letters and philosophy. His first, and 
 one of his most delightful papers, is on quaint old Thomas 
 Fuller. It reminds us much of a brilliant paper on Sir 
 Thomas Browne, contributed to the same journal, we under- 
 stand, by Bulwer. Browne and Fuller were kindred spirits, 
 being both poets among wits, and wits among poets. In 
 Browne, however, imagination and serious thought rather pre- 
 ponderate, while wit unquestionably is, if not Fuller's princi- 
 pal faculty, the faculty he exercises most frequently, and with 
 greatest delight. Some authors have wit and imagination in 
 equal quantities, and it is their temperament which determines 
 the question which of the two they shall specially use or culti- 
 vate. Thus, Butler of " Hudibras" had genuine imagination 
 as well as prodigious wit, and, had he been a Puritan instead 
 of a Cavalier, he might have indited noble serious poetry. 
 Browne again, was of a pensive, although not sombre dispo- 
 sition, and hence his " Urn-burial" and " Religio Medici" are 
 grave und imaginative, although not devoid of quaint, queer 
 fancies and arabesque devices, which force you to smile. 
 Fuller, on the other hand, was of a sanguine, happy, easy
 
 J94 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 temperament, a jolly Protestant father confessor, and this 
 attracted him to the side of the laughing muse. Yet he 
 abounds in quiet, beautiful touches both of poetry and pathos. 
 Burke had, according to Mr. Rogers, little or no wit, although 
 possessing a boundless profusion of imagery. To this we de- 
 mur. His description of Lord Chatham's motley cabinet ; his 
 picture, in the " Regicide Peace," of the French ambassador 
 in London; his description of those " who are emptied of their 
 natural bowels, and stuffed with the blurred sheets of the 
 'Rights of Man;'" his famous comparison of the "gestation 
 of the rabbit and the elephant ;" his reply to the defence put 
 in for Hastings, that the Hindoos had erected a temple to 
 him (" He knew something of the Hindoo Mythology. They 
 were in the habit of building temples not only to the gods of 
 light and fertility, but to the demons of small-pox and murder, 
 and he, for his part s had no objection that Mr. Hastings 
 should be admitted into such a Pantheon") these are a few 
 out of many proofs that he often exercised that most brilliant 
 species of wit which is impregnated with imagination. But 
 the truth is, that Burke, an earnest, if not a sad-hearted man, 
 was led by his excess of zeal to plead the causes in which he 
 was interested in general by serious weapons, by the burning 
 and barbed arrows of invective and imagination, rather than 
 by the light-glancing missiles of wit and humor. Jeremy 
 Taylor, with all his wealth of fancy, was restrained from wit 
 partly by the subjects he was led through his clerical profes- 
 sion to treat, and partly from his temperament, which was 
 quietly glad, rather than sanguine and mirthful. Some writ- 
 ers, again, we admit, and as Mr. Rogers repeatedly shows, 
 vibrate between wit and the most melancholy seriousness of 
 thought; the scale of their spirits, as it rises or sinks, either 
 lifts them up to piercing laughter, or depresses them to 
 thoughts too deep and sad for tears. It was so with Plato, 
 with Pascal, with Hood, and is so, we suspect, with our author 
 himself. Shakspeare, perhaps, alone of writers, while possess- 
 ing wit and imaginative wisdom to the same prodigious degree, 
 has managed to adjust them to each other, never allowing either 
 the one or the other unduly to preponderate, but uniting them 
 into that consummate whole, which has become the admiration, 
 the wonder, and the despair of the world.
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 395 
 
 Mr. Rogers, alluding to the astonishing illustrative powers 
 of Jeremy Taylor, Burke, and Fuller, says finely, " Most 
 marvellous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can 
 adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and 
 dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowerets bloom 
 even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better 
 can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into 
 moss and lichens. This faculty is incomparably the most 
 important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to 
 the minds of men." We quote these sentences, not merely as 
 being true, so far as they go, but because we want afterwards 
 to mark a special inconsistency in regard to them which he 
 commits in a subsequent paper. 
 
 We have long desired, and often expressed the desire, to 
 see what we call ideal geography i. e., the map of the earth 
 run over in a poetic and imaginative way, the breath of genius 
 passing over the dry bones of the names of places, and through 
 the link of association between places and events, characters 
 and scenery, causing them to live. Old Fuller gives us, if 
 not a specimen of this, something far more amusing ; he gives 
 us a geography of joke, and even from the hallowed scenery 
 of the Holy Land, he extracts, in all reverence, matter for 
 inextinguishable merriment. What can be better in their 
 way than the following ? " Gilboa. The mountain that 
 David cursed, that neither rain nor dew should fall on it ; but 
 of late some English travellers climbing this mountain were 
 well wetted, David not cursing it by a prophetical spirit, but in 
 a poetic rapture. Edrei: The city of Og, on whose giant- 
 like proportions the rabbis have more giant-like lies. Pis- 
 gah. Where Moses viewed the land ; hereabouts the angel 
 buried him, and also buried the grave, lest it should occasion 
 idolatry." And so on he goes over each awful spot, chuckling 
 in harmless and half-conscious glee, like a schoolboy through a 
 morning churchyard, which, were it midnight, he would travel 
 in haste, in terror, and with oft-reverted looks. It is no wish 
 to detract from the dignity and consecration of these scenes 
 that actuates him ; it is nothing more nor less than his irre- 
 sistible temperament, the boy-heart beating in his veins, and 
 which is to beat on till death. 
 
 Down the halls of history, in like manner, Fuller skips
 
 396 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 along, laughing as he goes ; and even when he pauses to mor- 
 alise or to weep, the pause is momentary, and the tear which 
 had contended during its brief existence with a sly smile, is 
 " forgot as soon as shed." His wit is often as withering as it 
 is quaint, although it always performs its annihilating work 
 without asperity, and by a single touch. Hear this on the 
 Jesuits : " Such is the charity of the Jesuits, that they never 
 owe any man any ill-will making present payment thereof." 
 Or this on Machiavel, who had said, " that he who undertakes 
 to write a history must be of no religion;" "if so, Machiavel 
 himself was the best qualified of any in his age to write a 
 history." Of modest women, who nevertheless dress them- 
 selves in questionable attire, he says, " I must confess some 
 honest women may go thus, but no whit the honester for going 
 thus. That ship may have Castor and Pollux for the sign, 
 which notwithstanding has St. Paul for the lading." His 
 irony, like good imagery, often becomes the shorthand of 
 thought, and is worth a thousand arguments. The bare, bald 
 style of the schoolmen he attributes to design, " lest any of 
 the vermin of equivocation should hide themselves under the 
 nap of their words." Some of our readers are probably smil- 
 ing as they read this, and remember the DRESS of certain re- 
 ligious priests, not unlike the schoolmen in our day. After 
 commenting on the old story of St. Dunstan and the Devil, he 
 cries out, in a touch of irony seldom surpassed, " But away 
 with all suspicions and queries. None need to doubt of the 
 truth thereof, finding it on a sign painted in Fleet Street, near 
 Temple Bar." 
 
 In these sparkles of wit and humor, there is, we notice, not 
 a little consciousness. He says good things, and a quiet 
 chuckle proclaims his knowledge that they are good. But his 
 best things, the fine serious fancies, which at times cross his 
 mind, cross it unconsciously, and drop out like pearls from 
 the lips of a blind fairy, who sees not their lustre, and knows 
 not their value. Fuller's deepest wisdom is the wisdom of 
 children, and his finest eloquence is that which seems to cross 
 over their spotless lips, like west win^s over half-opened rose- 
 buds breathings of the Eternal Spirit, rather than utterances 
 of their own souls. In this respect and in some others, he 
 much resembled John Bunyan, to whom we wonder Rogers
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 307 
 
 has not compared him. Honest John, we verily believe, 
 thought much more of his rhymes, prefixed to the second part 
 of the " Pilgrim's Progress," and of the little puzzles and 
 jokes he has scattered through the work, than of his divinely 
 artless portraiture of scenery, passions, characters, and inci- 
 dents in the course of the wondrous allegory. Mr. Rogers 
 quotes a good many of Fuller's precious prattlings ; but Lamb, 
 we think, has selected some still finer, particularly his picture 
 of the fate of John Wickliff's ashes. Similar touches of ten- 
 der, quaint, profound, and unwitting sublimity, are found 
 nearly as profusely sprinkled as his jests and clenches through 
 his varied works, which are quite a quarry of sense, wit, truth, 
 pedantry, learning, quiet poetry, ingenuity, and delightful non- 
 sense. Rogers justly remarks, too, that notwithstanding all 
 the rubbish and gossip which are found in Fuller's writings, 
 he means to be truthful always ; and that, with all his quaint- 
 ness and pedantry, his style is purer and more legible than 
 that of almost any writer of his age. It is less swelling and 
 gorgeous than Browne's, but far easier and more idiomatic; 
 less rich, but less diffuse, than Taylor's ; less cumbered with 
 learning than Burton's ; and less involved, and less darkened 
 with intermingling and crossing beams of light than that of 
 Milton, whose poetry is written in the purest Grecian manner, 
 whilst his English prose often resembles not G-othic, but 
 Egyptian architecture, in its chaotic confusion and mispropor- 
 tioned magnificence. 
 
 Mr. Rogers' second paper is on Andrew Marvel, and con- 
 tains a very interesting account of the life, estimate of the 
 character, and criticism of the writings of this " Aristides- 
 Butler," if we may, in the fashion of Mirabeau, coin a com- 
 bination of words, which seems not inapt, to represent the 
 virtues of that great patriot's life, and the wit and biting sar- 
 casm of his manner of writing. He tells the old story of his 
 father crossing the Humber with a female friend, and perish- 
 ing in the waters ; but omits the most striking part of the 
 story, how the old man in leaving the shore, as the sky was 
 scowling into storm, threw his staff back on the beach, and 
 cried out, "Ho, for Heaven!" The tradition of this is at 
 least still strong in Hull. Nothing after Marvel's integrity, 
 and his quiet, keen, caustic wit, so astonishes us as the fact
 
 398 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 that he never opened his lips in Parliament ! He was " No- 
 speech Marvel." He never got the length of Addison's " I 
 conceive, I conceive, I conceive." There are no authentic 
 accounts of even a " Hear, hear !" issuing from his lips. 
 What an act of self-denial in that of bad measures and bad 
 men ! How his heart must sometimes have burned, and his 
 lips quivered, and yet the severe spirit of self-control kept 
 him silent ! What a contrast to the infinite babblement of 
 senators in modern days ! And yet was not his silence very 
 formidable ? Did it not strike the Tories as the figure of the 
 moveless Mordecai at the king's gate struck the guilty 
 Haman ? There, night after night, in front of the despots, 
 sat the silent statue-like figure, bending not to their autho- 
 rity, unmovable by their threats, not to be melted by their 
 caresses, not to be gained over by their bribes, perhaps with a 
 quiet, stern sneer resting as though sculptured upon his lips, 
 and, doubtless, they trembled more at this dumb defiance than 
 at the loud- mouthed attacks and execrations of others ; the more 
 as, while others were sometimes absent he was always there, a 
 moveless pillar of patriotism, a still libel of truth, for ever 
 glaring on their fascinated and terror-stricken eyes. Can we 
 wonder that they are very generally supposed to have removed 
 him from their sight, in the only way possible in the circum- 
 stances, by giving him a premature and poisoned grave ? 
 
 In his third paper, Rogers approaches a mightier and more 
 eloquent, but not a firmer or more sincere spirit than Marvel 
 Martin Luther. Here he puts forth all his strength, and 
 has, we think, very nobly vindicated both Luther's intellect- 
 ual and moral character. Hallam (a writer whom llogers 
 greatly over-estimates, before whom he falls down with " awful 
 reverence prone," from whom he ventures to differ with u a 
 whispered breath and bated humbleness," which seem, consid- 
 ering his own calibre, very laughable, yet of whose incapacity 
 as a literary critic, and especially as a judge of poetry, he 
 seems to have a stifled suspicion, which comes out in the paper 
 on Fuller, whom Hallam has slighted) has underrated Lu- 
 ther's talents, because, forsooth, his works are inferior to his 
 reputation. Why, what was Luther's real work ? It was the 
 Heformation. What library of Atlas folios ay, though Sbak 
 speare had penned every line in it could have been compared
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 89^ 
 
 to the rending of the shroud of the Christian church ? As 
 soon accuse an earthquake of not being so melodious in its 
 tones as an organ, as demand artistic writings from Luther. 
 His burning of the Pope's bull was, we think, and Mr. Rogers 
 thinks with us, a very respectable review. His journey to 
 Worms was as clever as most books of travel. His marriage 
 with Catharine Bora was not a bad epithalamium. His ren- 
 dering of the Bible into good German was nearly as great a 
 work as the " Constitutional History." Some of those winged 
 words which he uttered against the Pope and for Christ have 
 been called "half-battles." He held the pen very well, too, 
 but it was only with one of his hundred arms. His works 
 were his actions. Every great book is an action ; and the 
 converse is also true- every great action is a book. Crom- 
 well, Mr. Rogers says, very justly, cannot be judged by his 
 speeches, nor Alexander. Neither, we add, could Caesar by 
 his " Commentaries," which, excellent as they are, develop 
 only a small portion of the " foremost man of all this world;" 
 nor could Frederick of Prussia by his French verses ; nor 
 could Nelson by his letters to Lady Hamilton ; nor could 
 even Hall, Chalmers, and Irving, by their orations and dis- 
 courses. There is a very high, if not the highest order of 
 men, who find literature too small a sheath for the broadsword 
 of their genius. They come down and shrink up when they 
 commence to write; but they make others write for them. 
 Their deeds supply the material for ten thousand historians, 
 novelists, and poets. We find Lord Holland, in his " Me- 
 moirs," sneering at Lord Nelson's talents, because his writings 
 were careless and poor. Nelson did not pretend to be a writ- 
 er or an orator; he pretended only to do what he did to 
 sweep the seas with his cannon, and be the greatest naval 
 commander his country ever produced. Mungo Park and 
 Ledyard were no great authors, but they were, what they 
 wished to be, the most heroic of travellers. Danton never 
 published a single page, but he was incomparably a greater 
 man than Canaille Desmoulins, who wrote thousands. Would 
 it have added an inch to the colossal stature, or in any meas- 
 ure enhanced the lurid grandeur, of Satan, had Milton ascrib- 
 ed to him the invention, not of fire-arms, but of the printing- 
 press, and made him the author of a few hundred satires
 
 400 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 a^iinst Omnipotence ? Channing in his Essay on Napoleon, 
 has contributed to the circulation of this error. He gives 
 there a decided preference to literary over other kinds of 
 power. But would even he have compared Brougham or Dan- 
 iel Webster to Washington ? It seems to us that the very 
 highest style of merit is when the powers of actions and author- 
 ship are combined in nearly equal proportions. They were so 
 in Milton, who was as good a schoolmaster and secretary as 
 he was an author. They were so in Bacon, who was an able, 
 if not a just, chancellor and statesman, as well as the most 
 richly-minded of men. Notwithstanding Mr. Rogers, they 
 were so, we think, in Napoleon, whose bulletins and speeches, 
 though often in false taste, were often as brilliant as his bat- 
 tles. They were so in Burke, who was a first-rate business 
 man, and a good farmer, as well as a great orator, statesman, 
 and writer. They were so in poor Burns, who used the 
 plough as well as he used the pen. And they were so in 
 Scott, who was an excellent Clerk of Session, and capital 
 agriculturist and landlord, besides being the first of all fiction- 
 ists, except Cervantes, who, by the way, fought bravely at Le- 
 panto, as well as wrote " Don Quixote." Even in Luther's 
 case, Mr. Hallam is proved by Rogers to be sufficiently harsh 
 in his judgment. Luther's productions, occasional as most of 
 them, and hastily written as all of them, were, are not the me- 
 diocre trash which Hallam insinuates them to be. If tried 
 by the standard of that species of literature to which they all 
 in reality belong, they will not be found wanting. They are 
 all letters, the shorter or longer epistles of a man greatly en- 
 grossed during his days, and who at evening dashes off his care- 
 less, multifarious, but characteristic correspondence. Mark, 
 too, everything he wrote was sent, and sent instantly, to the 
 press. Who would like this done in his own case ? What 
 divine, writing each week his two sermons, would care about 
 seeing them regularly printed the next day, and dispersed over 
 all the country? Who, unless he were a man of gigantic 
 genius and fame, would not be sunk under such a process, and 
 run to utter seed ? The fact that Luther did publish so 
 much, and did nevertheless retain his reputation, proves, that, 
 although much which he wrote must have been unworthy of 
 his genius, yet, as a whole, his writings were characteristic of
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 40 * 
 
 his powers, and contributed to the working out of his purpose. 
 They were addressed, Mr. Ilogers justly says, chiefly to tha 
 people, and many of his strangest and strongest expressions 
 were uttered on plan. His motto, like Danton's, was, " to dare 
 and to dare, and to dare." He felt that a timid reformer, like 
 a timid revolutionist, is lost, and that a lofty tone, whether in bad 
 or good taste, was essential to the success of his cause. Even 
 as they are, his writings contain much " lion's marrow," stern 
 truth, expressed in easy, homespun language, savage invec- 
 tive, richly deserved, and much of that noble scorn with which 
 a brave honest man is ever fond of blowing away, as through 
 snorting nostrils, those sophistries, evasions, and meannesses in 
 controversy, which are beneath argument, baffle logical expo- 
 sure, and which can only be reached by contempt. Add to 
 all this, the traditionary reputation of his eloquence, and those 
 burning coals from that great conflagration which have come 
 down to us uncooled. For our parts, we had rather possess 
 the renown of uttering some of these, than have written all 
 Chillingworth's and Barrow's controversial works. Think of 
 that sentence which he pronounced over the Bull as ho burned it, 
 surely one of the most sublime and terrible that ever came from 
 human lips : " As thou hast troubled and put to shame the 
 Holy One of the Lord, so be thou troubled and consumed in 
 eternal fires of hell ;" or that at "Worms "' Here I stand ; I can- 
 not do otherwise : God help me." Such sentences soar above 
 all the reaches of rhetoric, of oratory, even of poetry, and rank 
 in grandeur with the great naked abstractions of eternal truth. 
 They thrill not the taste, nor the passions, nor the fancy, but 
 the soul itself. And yet they were common on the lips of 
 Luther the lion-hearted the 
 
 " Solitary monk that shook the world." 
 
 Mr. Rogers, besides, culls several passages from his familiar 
 epistles, which attain to lofty eloquence, and verge on the finest 
 prose poetry. His occasional grossness, truculence, and per- 
 sonality, are undeniable ; but they were partly the faults of his 
 age, and sprung partly from the vehemence of his temperament, 
 and the uncertainty of his position. He was, during a large 
 section of his life, at bay, and if he had not employed every 
 weapon in his power his teeth, his horns, and his hoofs to
 
 402 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 defend himself, he had inevitably perished. We have not time 
 to follow further Rogers' defence of Luther ; suffice it to say, 
 that he does full justice to Luther's honesty of purpose, his 
 deep religious convictions, and his general wisdom and pru- 
 dence of conduct. His errors were all of the blood and 
 bodily temperament, and none of the spirit. Cajetan called 
 him " a beast with deep-set eyes, and wonderful speculations 
 in his head." If so, he was a noble savage a king of beasts, 
 and his roar roused Europe from its lethargy, dissolved the 
 dark spell of spiritual slavery, and gave even to Popery all the 
 vitality it has since exhibited. He resembled no class of men 
 more than some of the ancient prophets of Israel. He was 
 no Christian father of the first centuries, sitting cobwebbed 
 among books, no evangelist even of the days of the apostles, 
 going forth, meek and sandalled, with an olive branch in his 
 hand ; he reminds us rather, in all but austerity and absti- 
 nence, of the terrible Tishbite conflicting with Baal's prophets 
 on Carmel, and fighting with fire the cause of that God who 
 answereth by fire from heaven. But, unlike him, Luther came 
 eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and has 
 been reproached accordingly. 
 
 Mr. Rogers' next paper is on Leibnitz, whom he justly ranks 
 with the most wonderful men of any age and who, in that 
 variety of faculty that plethora of power that all-sidedness 
 which distinguished him, resembled a monster rather than a 
 man. A sleepless soul, who often, for weeks together, con- 
 tented himself with a few hours' slumber in his arm-chair, 
 without ever discomposing his couch ! A lonely spirit with 
 no tender family ties but entirely devoted to inquiry and 
 investigation, as though he had been one separated Eye, for 
 ever prying into the universe ! A wide eclectic catholic mind, 
 intermeddling with all knowledge, and seeking, if possible, to 
 bind mathematics, metaphysics, poetry, philology, all arts and 
 sciences, into the unity of a coronet around his own brow ! 
 A soul of prodigious power as well as of ideal width ; the 
 inventor of a new and potent calculus the father of geology 
 the originator of a new form of history, which others have 
 since been seeking to fill up and the author of a heroic, if 
 not successful, effort to grapple with the question of ques- 
 tions the problem of all ages-r-" Whence evil, and why per-
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 403 
 
 twitted in God's world ?" A genius for whom earth seemed 
 too narrow a sphere, and threescore-and-ten years too short a 
 period, so much had he done ere death, and so much did there 
 seem remaining for him to do in truth, worthy of an antedi- 
 luvian life ! A mind swarming more than even that of Cole- 
 ridge with seed-thoughts, the germs of entire encyclopaedias in 
 the future ; and, if destitute of his magical power of poetic 
 communication, possessing more originality, and more practi- 
 cal energy.* A man who read everything and forgot nothing 
 a living dictionary of all the knowledge which had been accu- 
 mulated by man and a living prophecy of all that was yet to 
 be acquired a universal preface to a universal volume " a 
 gigantic genius born to grapple with whole libraries." Such 
 is Leibnitz known by all scholars to have been. His two 
 positive achievements, however, the two pillars on which he 
 leans his Samson-like strength, are the differential " Calculus," 
 and the " Theodicee." Mr. Rogers' remarks on both these 
 are extremely good. In the vexed question as to the origi- 
 nation of the " Calculus," between Leibnitz and Newton he 
 seems perfectly impartial ; and, while eagerly maintaing New- 
 ton's originality, he defends Leibnitz with no less strength, 
 from the charge of surreptitious plagiarism from Newton. 
 Both were too rich to require to steal from one another. In 
 " Theodicee," Leibnitz undertook the most daring task ever 
 undertaken by thinker, that of explaining the origin of evil by 
 demonstrating its necessity. That he failed in this, Voltaire 
 has proved, after his manner, in " Candide," the wittiest and 
 wickedest of his works, and Rogers, in a very different spirit and 
 style, has demonstrated here. Indeed, the inevitable eye of 
 common sense sees at a glance that a notion of this earth being 
 the best of all possible worlds is absurd and blasphemous. 
 This system of things falls far below man's ideal, and how can 
 it come up to G-od's ? The shadows resting upon its past and 
 present aspect are so deep, numerous, and terrible, that nothing 
 
 * Since writing this, we have lighted on a paper by De Quinccy, in 
 the " London Magazine," containing an elaborate comparison coinci- 
 dent with our views between Leibnitz and Coleridge, " who both 
 united minds distinguished by variety and compass of power to a 
 bodily constitution resembling that of horses. They were centaurs ; 
 heroic intellects, with brutal capacities of body."
 
 404 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 hitherto, but, first, simple, child-like faith ; but, secondly, the 
 prospect of a better time at hand; and, thirdly, the discove- 
 ries of Jesus Christ, can convince us that they do not spring 
 either from malignity of intention or weakness of power. The 
 time has not yet come for a true solution of this surpassing 
 problem; which, moreover, though it were given, would not 
 probably find the world ripe for receiving it. We are inclined, 
 in opposition to Mr. Rogers, to suppose that it shall yet be 
 solved ; but to look for its solution in a very different direc- 
 tion from the ground taken, whether by Leibnitz, by Bailey of 
 " Festus," or by the hundred other speculators upon the mys- 
 terious theme. Meanwhile, we may, we think, rest firmly upon 
 these convictions first, that evil exists is a reality, not a 
 negation or a sham ; secondly, that it is not God's ; and that, 
 thirdly, it shall yet cease, on earth at least, to be man's. All 
 attempts to go further than this have failed ; and failed, we 
 think, from a desire to find a harmony and a unity where no 
 such things are possible or conceivable. 
 
 One is tempted to draw a kind of Plutarchian parallel be- 
 tween Leibnitz and Newton so illustrious in their respective 
 spheres and whose contest with one another " in their 
 courses" forms such a painful, yet instructive, incident in the 
 history of science. Newton was more the man of patient 
 plodding industry; Leibnitz the man of restless genius. 
 Newton's devotion was limited to science and theology ; Leib- 
 nitz pushed his impetuous way into every department of 
 science, literature, philosophy, and theology; and left traces of 
 his power even in those regions he was not able fully to sub- 
 due. Newton studied principally the laws of matter; Leib- 
 nitz was ambitious to know these chiefly, that he might recon- 
 cile, if not identify, them with the laws of mind. Newton 
 was a theorist but the most practical of theorists. Leib- 
 nitz was the most theoretical of practical thinkers. Newton 
 was the least empirical of all philosophers ; Leibnitz one of 
 the most so. Newton shunned all speculation and conjecture 
 which were not forced upon him; Leibnitz revelled in these at 
 all times and all subjects. Newton was rather timid than 
 otherwise, he groped his way like a blind Atlas, while stepping 
 from world to world ; Leibnitz saw it as he sailed along in 
 supreme dominion on the wings of his intellectual imagina-
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 405 
 
 tion. Newton was a deeply humble Leibnitz, a dauntless 
 and daring thinker. Newton did his full measure of work, 
 and suggested little more that he was likely to do ; Leibnitz, 
 to the very close of his life, teemed with promise. The one 
 was a finished, the other a fragmentary production of larger 
 size. The one was a rounded planet, with its corner-stones all 
 complete, and its mechanisms all moving smoothly and harmo- 
 niously forward ; the other, a star in its nebulous mist, and 
 with all its vast possibilities before it. Newton was awe- 
 struck, by the great and dreadful sea of suns in which he 
 swam, into a mute worshipper of the Maker; Leibnitz sought 
 rather to be his eloquent advocate 
 
 " To assert Eternal Providence, 
 And justify the ways of God to man." 
 
 To Pascal, Mr. Rogers proceeds with a peculiar intensity 
 of fellow-feeling. He has himself, sometimes, been compared 
 to Pascal, both in the mirthful and the pensive attributes of 
 his genius. Certainly, his sympathies with him are more 
 thorough and brotherly than with any other of his poetico- 
 metaphysico-theosophical heroes. He that loves most, it has 
 often been said, understands best. And this paper of Rogers 
 sounds the very soul of Pascal. Indeed, that presents fewer 
 difficulties than you might at first suppose. Pascal, with his 
 almost superhuman genius, was the least subtle, and most 
 transparent of men. In wisdom almost an angel, he was in 
 simplicity a child. His single-mindedness was only inferior 
 to, nay, seemed a part of, his sublimity. He was from the 
 beginning, and continued to the end, an inspired infant. A 
 certain dash of charlatanerie distinguishes Leibnitz, as it does 
 all those monsters of power. The very fact that they can do 
 so much tempts them to pretend to do, and to be what they 
 cannot and are not. Possessed of vast knowledge, they affect 
 the airs of omniscience. Thus Leibnitz, in the universal lan- 
 guage he sought to construct, in his " swift-going carriages," 
 in his " Pre-established Harmony," and in his " Monads," 
 seems seeking to stand behind the Almighty, to overlook, 
 direct, or anticipate him at his work. Pascal was not a mon- 
 ster ; he was a man nay, a child ; although a man of pro- 
 foundest sagacity, and a child of transcendent genius. Chil-
 
 406 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 dren feel far more than men the mysteries of being, although 
 the gaiety and light-heartedness of their period of life pre- 
 vent the feeling from oppressing their souls. Who can answer 
 the questions or resolve the doubts of infancy ? We remem- 
 ber a dear child, who was taken away to Abraham's bosom at 
 nine years of age, saying that her two grand difficulties were, 
 " Who made God ? and How did sin come into the world ?" 
 These an uncaused cause, and an originated evil are the 
 great difficulties of all thinking men, on whom they press more 
 or less hardly in proportion to their calibre and temperament. 
 Pascal, adding to immense genius a child-like tenderness of 
 heart and purity of conduct, was peculiarly liable to the tre- 
 mendous doubts and fears forced on us all by the phenomena 
 of man and the universe. He felt them, at once, with all the 
 freshness of infancy and with all the force of a melancholy 
 manhood. He had in vain tried to solve them. He had 
 asked these dreadful questions at all sciences and philosophies, 
 and got no reply. He had carried them up to heights of 
 speculation, where angels bashful look, and down into depths 
 of reflection, such as few minds but his own have ever sounded, 
 and all was dumb. Height and depth had said, " Not in us." 
 The universe of stars was cold, dead, and tongueless. He felt 
 terrified at, not instructed by it. He said, " The eternal 
 silence of these infinite spaces affrights me" He had turned 
 for a solution from the mysterious materialism of the heavenly 
 bodies to man, and had found in him his doubts driven to con- 
 tradiction and despair ; he seemed a puzzle so perplexed, a 
 chaos so disorderly. He was thus rapidly approaching the 
 gulf of universal scepticism, and was about to drop in like a 
 child over a precipice, when,, hark ! he heard a voice behind 
 him ; and turning round, saw Christianity like a mother fol- 
 lowing her son to seek and to save him from the catastrophe. 
 Her beauty, her mildness of deportment, her strange yet regal 
 aspect, and the gentleness of those accents of an unknown 
 laud, which drop like honey from her lips, convince him that 
 she is divine, and that she is his mother, even before he 
 has heard or understood her message. He loves and be- 
 lieves her before he knows that she is worthy of all credence 
 and all love. And when, afterwards he learns in some mea- 
 sure to understand her tar foreign speech, he perceives her
 
 HENRY ROGERS. -10 / 
 
 still more certainly to be a messenger from heaven. She 
 does not, indeed, remove all his perplexities ; she allows the 
 deep shadows to rest still on the edge of the horizon, and 
 the precipices to yawn on ; but she creates a little space of 
 intense clearness around her child, and she bridges the remoter 
 gloom with the rainbow of hope. She does not completely 
 satisfy, but she soothes his mind, saying to him as he kneels 
 before her, and as she blesses her noble son, "Remain on him, 
 ye rainbowed clouds, ye gilded doubts, by your pressure purify 
 him still more, and prepare him for higher work, deeper 
 thought, and clearer revelation ; teach him the littleness of 
 man and the greatness of God, the insignificance of man's life 
 on earth and the grandeur of his future destiny, and impress 
 him with this word of the Book above all its words, ' That 
 which thou knowest not now, thou shalt hereafter know, if 
 thou wilt humble thyself, and become as a little child.' " 
 Thus we express in parable the healthier portion of Pascal's 
 history. That latterly the clouds returned after the rain, 
 that the wide rainbow faded into a dim segment, and that his 
 mother's face shone on him through a haze of uncertainty and 
 tears, seems certain ; but this we are disposed to account for 
 greatly from physical causes. By studying too hard, and 
 neglecting his bodily constitution, he became morbid to a 
 degree which amounted, we think, to semi-mania. In this sad 
 state, the more melancholy, because attended by the full pos- 
 session of his intellectual powers, his most dismal doubts came 
 back at times, his most cherished convictions shook as with 
 palsy, the craving originally created by his mathematical 
 studies for demonstrative evidence on all subjects, became 
 diseasedly strong, and nothing but piety and prayer saved 
 him from shoreless and bottomless scepticism. Indeed, his 
 great unfinished work on the evidences of Christianity, seems 
 to have been intended to convince himself quite as much as to 
 convince others. But he has long ago passed out of this mys- 
 terious world ; and now, we trust, sees " light in God's light 
 clearly." If his doubts were of an order so large and deep, 
 that they did not " go out even to prayer and fasting," he was 
 honest in them ; they did not spring either from selfishness of 
 life Or pride of intellect ; and along with some of the child's 
 doubts, the child's heart remained in him to the last.
 
 408 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES* 
 
 His " Thoughts" what can be said adequately of those 
 magnificent fragments ? They are rather subjects for 
 thoughts than for words. They remind us of aerolites, the 
 floating fractions of a glorious world. Some of them, to use 
 an expression applied to Johnson's sayings, " have been rolled 
 and polished in his great mind like pebbles in the ocean." 
 He has wrought them, and finished them, as carefully as if 
 each thought were -a book. Others of them are slighter in 
 thinking and more careless in style. But, as a whole, the 
 collection forms one of the profoundest and most living of 
 works. The "Thoughts" are seed-pearl, and on some of them 
 volumes might be, and have been, written. We specially 
 admire those which reflect the steadfast but gentle gloom of 
 the author's habit of mind, the long tender twilight, not with- 
 out its stars and gleams of coming day, which shadowed his 
 genius, and softened always his grandeur into pathos. He 
 is very far from being a splenetic or misanthropic spirit. 
 Nothing personal is ever allowed either to shade or to 
 brighten the tissue of his meditations. He stands a passion- 
 less spirit, as though he were disembodied, and had forgot hi.s 
 own name and identity, on the shore which divides the world 
 of man from the immensity of God, and he pauses and pon- 
 ders, wonders and worships there. He sees the vanity and 
 weakness of all attempts which have hitherto been made to 
 explain the difficulties and reconcile the contradictions of our 
 present system. Yet, without any evidence for all quasi- 
 evideuce melts in a moment before his searching eye into 
 nothing he believes it to be connected with one Infinite 
 Mind ; and this springs in him, not as Cousin pretends, from 
 a determination blindly to believe, but from a whisper in his 
 own soul, which tells him warmly to love. But it is not, after 
 all, the matter in the universe which he regards with affection, 
 it is the God who is passing through it, and lending it the 
 glory of his presence. Mere matter he tramples on and 
 despises. It is just so much brute light and heat. He does 
 not, and cannot, believe that the throne of God and of the 
 Lamb is made of the same materials, only a little sublimated, 
 as yonder dunghill or the crest of yonder serpent. He is an 
 intense spiritualist. He cries out to this proud process of 
 developing matter, this wondrous Something sweltering out
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 409 
 
 suns in its progress " Thou mayest do thy pleasure on me, 
 thou mayest crush me, but I will know that thou art crushing 
 me, whilst thou shalt crush blindly. I should be conscious 
 of the defeat. Thou shouldst not be conscious of the victory." 
 Bold, certainly, was the challenge of this little piece of inspired 
 humanity, this frail, slender invalid, but divinely gifted man, 
 to the enormous mass of uninspired and uuinstinctive matter 
 amid which he lived. He did not believe in law, life, or blind 
 mechanism, as the all-in-all of the system of things. He be- 
 lieved rather in Tennyson's Second Voice 
 
 " A little whisper breathing low, 
 I may not speak of what I know." 
 
 He felt, without being able to prove, that God was in this 
 place. 
 
 Pascal's result of thought was very much the same as John 
 Foster's, although the process by which he reached it was dif- 
 ferent. Pascal had turned, so to speak, the tub of matter 
 upside down, and found it empty. Foster had simply touched 
 its sides, and heard the ring which proclaimed that there was 
 nothing within. The one reached at once, and by intuition, 
 what was to the other the terminus of a thousand lengthened 
 intellectual researches. Both had lost all hope in scientific 
 discoveries and metaphysical speculations, as likely to bring 
 us a step nearer to the Father of Spirits, and were cast, there- 
 fore, as the orphans of Nature, upon the mercies and blessed 
 discoveries of the Divine Word. Both, however, felt that 
 THAT, too, has only very partially revealed Truth, that the 
 Bible itself is a " glass in which we see darkly," and that the 
 key of the Mysteries of Man and the Universe is as yet in the 
 keeping of Death. Both, particularly Foster, expected too 
 much, as it appears to us, from the instant transition of the 
 soul from this to another world. Both clothed their gloomy 
 thoughts, thoughts " charged with a thunder" which was never 
 fully evolved, in the highest eloquence which pensive thought 
 can produce when wedded to poetry. But, while Pascal's 
 eloquence is of a grave, severe, monumental cast, Foster's is 
 expressed in richer imagery, and is edged by a border of fiercer 
 sarcasm ; for, although the author of the " Thoughts" was 
 the author of the " Provincial Letters," and had wit and sar* 
 
 13
 
 410 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 casm at will, they are generally free from bitterness, and are 
 rarely allowed to intermingle with his serious meditations. 
 (In these remarks, we refer to Foster's posthumous journal 
 rather than to his essays.) Both felt that Christianity was yet 
 in bud, and looked forward with fond yet trembling anticipa- 
 tion to the coming of a "new and most mighty dispensation," 
 when it shall, under a warmer and nearer sun, expand into a 
 tree, the leaves of which shall be for the healing of the nations, 
 and the shade of which shall be heaven begun on earth. We 
 must say that we look on the religion of such men, clinging 
 each to his plank amid the weltering wilderness of waves, and 
 looking up for the coming of the day a religion so deep- 
 rooted, so sad as regards the past and present, so sanguine in 
 reference to the future, so doubtful of man and human means, 
 so firm in its trust on divine power and promise, with far more 
 interest and sympathy than on that commonplace, bustling 
 Christianity which abounds, with its stereotyped arguments, 
 its cherished bigotry and narrowness, its shallow and silly glad- 
 ness, its Goody Twoshoes benevolence, its belief in well-oiled 
 machineries, Evangelical Alliances, Exeter Hall cheers, the 
 power of money, and the voice of multitudes. True religion 
 implies struggle, doubt, sorrow, and these are indeed the main 
 constituents of its grandeur. It is just the sigh of a true and 
 holy heart for a better and brighter sphere. In the case of 
 Pascal and Foster, this sigh becomes audible to the whole 
 earth, and is re-echoed through all future ages. 
 
 It was during the brief sunshine hour of his life, that Pas- 
 cal wrote his " Provincial Letters." On these, Rogers dilates 
 with much liveliness and power. He can meet his author at 
 all points, and is equally at home when taking a brisk morning 
 walk with him along a breezy summit, the echoes repeating 
 their shouts of joyous laughter ; and when pacing at midnight 
 the shades of a gloomy forest discolored by a waning moon, 
 which seems listening to catch their whispers as they talk of 
 death, evil, and eternity. The " Provincial Letters" are, on 
 the whole, the most brilliant collection of controversial letters 
 extant. They have not the rounded finish, the concentration, 
 the red-hot touches of sarcasm, and the brief and occasional 
 bursts of invective darkening into sublimity, which distinguish 
 the letters of Junius. Nor have they the profound asides of
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 411 
 
 reflection, or the impatient power of passion, or the masses of 
 poetical imagery, to be found in Burke's " Letter to a Noble 
 Lord," and " Letters on a Regicide Peace;" but they excel 
 these and all epistolary writings in dexterity of argument, in 
 power of irony, in light, hurrying, scorching satire, a " fire 
 running along the ground," in grace of motion, and in Attic 
 salt and Attic elegance of style. He has held up his enemies 
 to immortal scorn, and painted them in the most contemptible 
 and ludicrous attitudes on a Grecian urn. He has preserved 
 those wasps and flies in the richest amber. Has he not 
 honored too much those wretched sophisters, by destroying 
 them with the golden shafts of Apollo ? Had not the broad 
 hoof of Pan, or the club of Hercules, been a more appropriate 
 weapon for crushing and mangling them into mire ? But, had 
 he employed coarser weapons, although equally effective in 
 destroying his enemies, he had gained less glory for himself. 
 As it is, he has founded one of his best claims to immortality 
 upon the slaughter of these despicabilities, like the knights of 
 old, who won their laurels in clearing the forests from wild 
 swine and similar brutes. And, be it remembered, that, 
 though the Jesuits individually were for the most part con- 
 temptible, their system was a very formidable one, and required 
 the whole strength of a master hand to expose it. 
 
 We close this short notice of Pascal with rather melan- 
 choly emotions. A man so gifted in the prodigality of heaven, 
 and so short-lived (just thirty-nine at his death !) A man so 
 pure and good, and in the end of his days so miserable ! A 
 sun so bright, and that set amid such heavy clouds ! A 
 genius so strong and so well-furnished, and yet the slave in many 
 things of a despicable superstition ! One qualified above his 
 fellows to have extended the boundaries of human thought, 
 and to have led the world on in wisdom and goodness, and yet 
 who did so little, and died believing that nothing was worth 
 being done ! One of the greatest thinkers and finest writers 
 in the world, and yet despising fame, and at last loathing all 
 literature except the Lamb's Book of Life! Able to pass 
 from the Dan to the Beersheba of universal knowledge, and 
 forced to exclaim at the end of the journey, "All is barren!" 
 Was he in this mad or wise right or wrong ? We think the 
 truth lies between. He was right and wise in thinking that
 
 412 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 man can do little at the most, know little at the clearest, 
 and must be imperfect at the best ; but he was wrong and mad 
 in not attempting to know, to do, and to be the little within 
 his own power, as well as in not urging his fellow-men to know, 
 be, and do the less within theirs. Like the wagoner in fable, 
 and Foster in reality, while calling on Hercules to come down 
 from the cloud, he neglected to set his shoulder to the wheel. 
 He should have done both, and thus, if he had not expedited 
 the grand purpose of progress so much as he wished, he would 
 at least have delivered his own soul, secured a deeper peace jn 
 his heart, and in working more, would have suffered less. 
 While Prometheus was chained to his rock, Pascal voluntarily 
 chained himself to his by the chain of an iron-spiked girdle, 
 and there mused sublime musings, and uttered melodious 
 groans, till merciful Death released him. He was one of the 
 very few Frenchmen who have combined imagination and 
 reverence, with fancy, intellect, and wit. 
 
 In his next paper, Mr. Rogers approaches another noble 
 and congenial theme Plato, and his master Socrates. It is 
 a Greek meeting a Greek, and the tug of war, of course, 
 comes a generous competition of kindred genius. We have 
 read scores of critiques by Landor, by Shelley, by Bulwer, 
 by Sir Daniel Sandford, by Emerson and others, on these 
 redoubted heroes of the Grecian philosophy; but we forget if 
 any of them excel this of our author in clearness of state- 
 ment, discrimination, sympathy with the period, and apprecia- 
 tion of the merits of the two magnificent men. Old Socrates, 
 with his ugly face, his snub nose, his strong head for standing 
 liquor, his restless habits, his subtle irony, the inimitable 
 dialogue on which he made his enemies to slide down as on a 
 mountain-side of ice, from the heights of self-consequent secu- 
 rity to the depths of defeat and exposure; his sublime com- 
 mon sense; his subtle, yet homely dialectics,opening up mines 
 of gold by the wayside, and getting the gods to sit on the 
 roof of the house ; his keen raillery, his power of sophiscat- 
 iug sophists, and his profound knowledge of his own nes- 
 cience, is admirably daguerreotyped. With equal power, the 
 touches lent to him by the genius of his disciple are discrimi- 
 nated from the native traits. Plato, to say the least of it, has 
 colored the calotype of Socrates with the tints of his own fine
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 413 
 
 and fiery imagination ; or he has acted as a painter, when he 
 puts a favorite picture in the softest and richest light; or as 
 a poet, when he visits a beautiful scene by moonlight ; or as a 
 lover, when he gently lifts up the image of his mistress across 
 the line which separated it from perfection. We often hear of 
 people throwing themselves into such and such a subject ; 
 there is another process still -that of adding one's-self to 
 such and such a character. You see a person, who, added to 
 yourself, would make, you think, a glorious being, and you 
 proceed to idealise accordingly; you stand on his head, and 
 out-tower the tallest ; you club your brains with his, and are 
 wiser than the wisest ; you add the heat of your heart to his, 
 and produce a very furnace of love. Thus Solomon might 
 have written David's romantic history, and given the latter, in 
 addition to his courage, sincerity and lyric genius, his own 
 voluptuous fancy and profound acquirements. All biographers, 
 indeed, possessed of any strong individuality themselves, act 
 very much in this way when narrating the lives of kindred 
 spirits. And, certainly, it was thus that Plato dealt with 
 Socrates. The Platonic Socrates is a splendid composite, 
 including the sagacity, strength, theological acumen, and grand 
 modesty, as of the statue of a kneeling god, which distin- 
 guished the master ; and the philosophic subtlety, the high 
 imagination, the flowing diction, and the exquisite refinement 
 of the disciple. Yet, even Socrates in the picture of Plato is 
 not, for a moment, to be compared to the Carpenter of Naza- 
 reth, as represented by his biographer, John the Fisherman of 
 Galilee. We shall quote, by and by, the fine passage in which 
 Mr. Rogers draws the comparison between the two. 
 
 To Plato as a thinker and Avriter ample justice is done. 
 Perhaps too little is said against that slip-slop which in his 
 writings so often mingles with the sublimity. They are often, 
 verily, strange symposia which he describes a kind of Noctes 
 Amb?-osian(Z, swarming here with bacchanalian babblement, 
 and there with sentences and sayings which might have been 
 washed down with nectar. They are intensely typical of the 
 ancient Grecian mind, of its heights and its depths, its unna- 
 tural vices and its lofty ideals of art. In their conception of 
 beauty, the Greeks approximated the ideal, but their views of 
 God and of man were exceedingly imperfect. Hence their
 
 414 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 disgusting vices; hence their sacrifice of everything to the 
 purposes of art ; hence the sensuality of their genius when 
 compared to that of the Gothic nations ; hence the resistance 
 offered by their philosophers to Christianity, which appeared 
 to them " foolishness ;" hence Platonism, the highest effort of 
 their philosophy, seems less indigenuous to Greece than Aristo- 
 telianisrn, and resembles an exotic transplanted from Egypt 
 or Palestine. Except in Plato and JEschylus, there is little 
 appr6aeh in the productions of the Greek genius to moral sub- 
 limity or to a true religious feeling. Among the prose writ- 
 ers of Greece, Aristotle and Demosthenes more truly reflected 
 the character of the national mind than Plato. They were 
 exceedingly ingenious and artistic, the one in his criticism, and 
 the other in his oratory, but neither was capable of the lowest 
 flights of Plato's magnificent prose-poetry. Aristotle was, as 
 Macaulay calls him, "the acutest of human beings;" but it 
 was a cold, needle-eyed acuteness. As a critic, his great 
 merit lay in deducing the principles of the epic from the per- 
 fect example set by Homer, like a theologian forming a per- 
 fect system of morality from the life of Christ ; but this, 
 though a useful process, and one requiring much talent, is not 
 of the highest order even of intellectual achievements, and has 
 nothing at all of the creative in it. It is but the work of an 
 index-maker on a somewhat larger scale. Demosthenes, Mr. 
 Rogers, with Lord Brougham and most other critics, vastly 
 over-rates. His speeches, as delivered by himself, must have 
 been overwhelming in their immediate effect, but really consti- 
 tute, when read, morsels as dry and sapless as we ever tried to 
 swallow. They are destitute of that " action, action, action," 
 on which he laid so much stress, and having lost it, they have 
 lost nearly all. They have a good deal of clear pithy state- 
 ment, and some striking questions and apostrophes, but have 
 no imagery, no depth of thought, no grasp, no grandeur, no 
 genius. Lord Brougham's speeches we have called " law-pa- 
 pers on fire;" the speeches of Demosthenes are law-papers 
 with much less fire. To get at their merit we must apply the 
 well-known rule of Charles James Fox. He used to ask if 
 such and such a speech read well; " if it did, it was a bad 
 speech, if it did not it was probably good." On this principle
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 415 
 
 the orations of Demosthenes must be the best in the world, 
 since they are about the dullest reading in it. 
 
 Far otherwise with the golden sentences of Plato. Dry 
 argument, half hot with passion, is all Demosthenes can fur- 
 nish. Plato 
 
 " Has gifts in their most splendid variety and most harmo- 
 nious combinations ; rich alike in powers of invention and 
 acquisition ; equally massive and light ; vigorous and muscu- 
 lar, yet pliable and versatile ; master at once of thought and 
 expression, in which originality and subtlety of intellect are 
 surrounded by all the ministering aids of imagination, wit, hu- 
 mor, and eloquence, and the structure of his mind resembles 
 some masterpiece of classic architecture, in which the marble 
 columns rise from their deep foundation exquisitely fashioned 
 and proportioned, surmounted with elaborate and ornamented 
 capitals, and supporting an entablature inscribed with all 
 forms of the beautiful. 
 
 "Plato's style," Mr. Rogers proceeds, "is unrivalled; he 
 wielded at will all the resources of the most copious, flexible, 
 and varied instrument of thought through which the mind of 
 man has ever yet breathed the music of eloquence. Not less 
 severely simple and refined when he pleases than Pascal, be- 
 tween whom and Plato many resemblances existed as in 
 beauty of intellect, in the delicacy of their wit, in aptitude for 
 abstract science, and in moral wisdom ; the Grecian philoso- 
 pher is capable of assuming every mood of thought, and of 
 adopting the tone, imagery, and diction appropriate to each. 
 Like Pascal, he can be by turns profound, sublime, pathetic, 
 sarcastic, playful; but with a far more absolute command 
 over all the varieties of manner and style. He could pass, by 
 the most easy and rapid transitions, from the majestic elo- 
 quence which made the Greeks say, that if Jupiter had spoken 
 the language of mortals he would have spoken in that of Plato, 
 to that homely style of illustration and those highly idiomatic 
 modes of expression which mark the colloquial manner of his 
 Socrates, and which, as Alcibiades in his eulogium observes, 
 might induce a stranger to say that the talk of the sage was 
 all about shoemakers and tailors, carpenters and braziers." 
 p. 334. 
 
 We promised to quote also his closing paragraph. Here it
 
 416 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 is, worthy in every respect of the author of the " Eclipse of 
 Faith," and equal to its best passages : 
 
 " We certainly hold the entire dramatic projection and rep- 
 resentation of Socrates in the pages of Plato, to be one of the 
 most wonderful efforts of the human mind. In studying him, 
 it is impossible that his character as a teacher of eth,ics, and 
 and his life-like mode of representation, should not suggest to 
 us (mother character yet more wonderfully depicted, and by 
 the same most difficult of all methods that of dramatic evolu- 
 tion by discourse and action ; of one who taught a still, purer, 
 subliiaer, and more consistent ethics, pervaded by a more in- 
 tense spirit of humanity, of one whose love for our race was 
 infinitely deeper and more tender, who stands perfectly free 
 from those foibles which history attributes to the real, Socra- 
 tes, and from that too Protean facility of manners which, 
 though designed by Plato as a compliment to the philosophic 
 flexibility of his character of Socrates, really so far assimilat- 
 ed him with mere vulgar humanity ; of one, too, whose sublime 
 and original character is not only exhibited with the most 
 wonderful dramatic skill, but in a style as unique as the cha- 
 racter it embodies a style of simple majesty, which, unlike 
 that of Plato, is capable of being readily translated into every 
 language under heaven ; of one whose life was the embodiment 
 of that virtue which Plato affirmed would entrance all hearts 
 if seen, and whose death throws the prison-scenes of the ' Phse- 
 do' utterly into the shade; of one, lastly, whose picture has 
 arrested the admiring gaze of many who have believed it to be 
 only a picture. Now, if we feel that the portraiture of Soc- 
 rates in the pages of Plato involved the very highest exercise 
 of the highest dramatic genius, and that the cause was no 
 more than commensurate with the effect, it is a question 
 which may well occupy the attention of a philosopher, how it 
 came to pass that in one of the obscurest periods of the his- 
 tory of an obscure people, in the dregs of their literature and 
 the lowest depths of superstitious dotage, so sublime a con- 
 ception should have been so sublimely exhibited ; how it was 
 that the noblest truths found an oracle in the lips of the 
 grossest ignorance, and the maxims of universal charity advo- 
 cates in the hearts of the most selfish of narrow-minded big- 
 ots; in a word, who could be the more than Plato, (or rather
 
 HENRY HOOER.S. 417 
 
 the many each more than Plato), who drew that radiant por- 
 trait, of which it may be truly said, ' that a far greater than 
 Socrates is here ?' "pp. 366, 377. 
 
 Passing over a very ingenious paper on the " Structure of 
 the English Language," we come to one on the " British Pul- 
 pit," some of the statements in which are weighty and power- 
 ful, but some of which we are compelled to controvert. Mr. 
 Rogers begins by deploring the want of eloquence and of ef- 
 fect in the modern pulpit. There is, undoubtedly, too much 
 reason for this complaint, although we think that in the pres- 
 ent day it is not so much eloquence that men desiderate in 
 preaching, as real instruction, living energy, and wide variety 
 of thought and illustration. Mr. Rogers says very little 
 about the substance of sermons, and, in what he does say, 
 seems to incline to that principle of strait-lacing which we 
 thought had been nearly exploded. No doubt every preacher 
 should preach the main doctrines of the gospel, but, if he 
 confine himself exclusively to these, he will limit his own 
 sphere of power and influence. Why should he not preach the 
 great general moralities as well ? Why should he not tell, 
 upon occasion, great political, metaphysical, and literary 
 truths to his people, turning them, as they are so susceptible 
 of being turned, to religious account ? It will not do to tell 
 us that preachers must follow the Apostles in every respect. 
 Christ alone was a perfect model, and how easy and diversified 
 his discourses ! He had seldom any text. He spake of sub- 
 jects as diverse from each other as are the deserts of Gralilee 
 from the streets of Jerusalem; the summit of Tabor from 
 the tower of Siloam ; the cedar of Lebanon from the hyssop 
 springing out of the wall. He touched the political affairs of 
 Judea, the passing incidents of the day, the transient contro- 
 versies and heartburnings of the Jewish sects, with a finger as 
 firm and as luminous as he did the principles of morality and 
 of religion. Hence, in part, the superiority and the success 
 of his teaching. It was a wide and yet not an indefinite and 
 baseless thing. It swept the circumference of nature and of 
 man, and then radiated on the cross as on a centre. It gath- 
 ered an immense procession of things, thoughts, and feelings, 
 and led them through Jerusalem and along the foot of Cal- 
 vary. It bent all beings and subjects into its grand purpose. 
 
 IS*
 
 418 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 transfiguring them as they stooped before it. It was this 
 catholic eclectic feature in Christ's teaching which, while it 
 made many cry out, " Never man spake like this man," has 
 created also some certain misconceptions of its character. 
 Many think that he was at bottom nothing more than a Pan- 
 theistic poet, because he shed on all objects on the lilies of 
 the valley, the salt of the sea, the thorns of the wilderness, 
 the trees of the field, the rocks of the mountain, and the sands 
 of the sea-shore that strange and glorious light which he 
 brought with him to earth, and poured around him as from 
 the wide wings of an angel, as from the all-beautifying beams 
 of dawn. 
 
 We think that, if Christ's teaching be taken as the test and 
 pattern, Mr. Rogers limits the range of preaching too much 
 when he says his principal characteristics should be " practi- 
 cal reasoning and strong emotion." Preaching is not a mere 
 hortatory matter. Sermons are the better of applications, 
 but they should not be all application. Ministers should 
 remember to address mankind and their audiences as a whole, 
 and should seek here to instruct their judgments, and there to 
 charm their imagination ; here to allure, and there to alarm; 
 here to calm, and there to arouse ; here to reason away their 
 doubts and prejudices, and there to awaken their emotions. 
 Mr. Rogers disapproves of discussing first principles in the 
 pulpit, and says that " the Atheist and Deist are rarely found 
 in Christian congregations." We wish we could believe this. 
 If there are no avowed Atheists or Deists in our churches, 
 there are, we fear, many whose minds are grievously unsettled 
 and at sea on such subjects, and shall they be altogether- 
 neglected in the daily ministrations ? Of what use to speak 
 to them of justification by faith, who think there is nothing 
 to be believed, or of the New Birth, who do not believe in the 
 Old, but deem themselves fatherless children in a forsaken 
 world ? We think him decidedly too severe, also, in his con- 
 demnation of the use of scientific and literary language in the 
 pulpit. Pedantry, indeed, and darkening counsel by techni- 
 cal language, we abhor, but elegant and scholarly diction may 
 be combined with simplicity and clearness, and has a tendency 
 to elevate the minds and refine the tastes of those who listen 
 to K It is of very little use coming down, as it is called, to
 
 HENRY ROGERS. 419 
 
 men's level ; now-a-days, if you do so, you will get 'nothing 
 but contempt for your pains you cannot, indeed, be too intel- 
 ligible, but you may be so while using the loftiest imagery 
 and language. Chalmers never " came down to men's level." 
 and yet his discourses were understood and felt by the hum- 
 blest of his audience, when by the energy of his genius and 
 the power of his sympathies he lifted them up to his. 
 
 Mr. Rogers thinks that all preachers aspiring to power and 
 usefulness will " abhor the ornate and the florid," and yet it 
 is remarkable that the most powerful and the most useful, too, 
 of preachers have been the most ornate and florid. Who more 
 ornate than Isaiah ? Who spoke more in figures and parables 
 than Jesus? Chrysostom, of the "golden mouth," belonged 
 to the same school. South sneers at Jeremy Taylor, and 
 Rogers very unworthily re-echoes the sneer; but what com- 
 parison between South the sneerer, and Taylor, the sneered 
 at, in genius or in genuine power and popularity ? To how 
 many a cultivated mind has Jeremy Taylor made religion 
 attractive and dear, which had hated and despised it before ? 
 Who more florid than Isaac Taylor, and what writer of this 
 century has done more to recommend Christianity to certain 
 classes of the community? He, to be sure, is no preacher, 
 but who have been or are the most popular and most powerful 
 preachers of the age ? Chalmers, Irving, Melville, Hall ; 
 and amid their many diversities in point of intellect, opinion, 
 and style, they agree in this that they all abound in figura- 
 tive language and poetical imagery. And if John Foster 
 failed in preaching, it was certainly not from want of imagi- 
 nation, which formed, indeed, the staple of all his best dis- 
 courses. Mr. Rogers, to be sure, permits a " moderate use. 
 of the imagination;" but, strange to say, it is the men who 
 have made a large and lavish use of it in preaching who have 
 most triumphantly succeeded. Of course they have all made 
 their imagination subservient to a high purpose ; but we 
 demur to his statement that no preacher should ever employ 
 his imagination merely to delight us. He should not, indeed, 
 become constantly the minister of delight; but he should, and 
 must occasionally, in gratifying himself with his own fine 
 fancies, give an innocent and intense gratification to others, 
 and having thus delighted his audience, mere gratitude on
 
 420 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 their part will prepare them for listening with more attention 
 and interest to his solemn appeals at the close. He says that 
 the splendid description in the " Antiquary" of a sunset would 
 be altogether out of place in the narrative by a naval historian 
 of two fleets separated on the eve of engagement by a storm, 
 or in any serious narrative or speech, forgetting that the " An- 
 tiquary" professes to be a serious narrative, and that Burke, 
 in his speeches and essays, has often interposed in critical 
 points of narration descriptions quite as long and as magnifi- 
 cent, which, nevertheless, so far from exciting laughter, pro- 
 duce the profoundest impression, blending, as they do, the 
 energies and effects of fiction and poetry with those of prose 
 and fact. 
 
 That severely simple and agonistic style, which Mr. Kogers 
 recommends so strongly, has been seldom practised in Britain, 
 except in the case of Baxter, with transcendent effect. At all 
 events, the writings of those who have followed it, have not 
 had a tithe of the influence which more genial and fanciful 
 authors have exerted. For one who reads South, ten thou- 
 sand revel in Jeremy Taylor. Howe, a very imaginative and 
 rather diffuse writer, has supplanted Baxter in general esti- 
 mation. In Scotland, while the dry sermons of Ebenezer 
 Erskine are neglected, the lively and fanciful writings of his 
 brother Ralph have still a considerable share of popularity. 
 The works of Chalmers and Gumming, destined as both are 
 in due time to oblivion, are preserved in their present life by 
 what in the first is real, and in the second a semblance of 
 imagination. Of the admirable writings of Dr. Harris, and 
 of Hamilton, we need not speak. Latimer, South, and Bax- 
 ter, whom Rogers ranks so highly, are not classics. Even 
 Jonathan Edwards and Butler, with all their colossal talent, 
 are now little read on account of their want of imagination. 
 The same vital deficiency has doomed the sermons of Tillot- 
 son, Atterbury, Sherlock, and Clarke. Indeed, in order to 
 refute Mr. Rogers, we have only to recur to his own words, 
 quoted above " this faculty fancy, namely is incomparably 
 the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of 
 truth to the minds of men.'' It follows, that, since the great 
 object of preaching is to exhibit truth to the minds of men, 
 fancy is the faculty most needful to the preacher, and that the
 
 HEXRY ROGERS. 421 
 
 want of it is the most fatal of deficiencies. In fact, although 
 a few preachers have, through the agonistic methods, hy pure 
 energy and passion, produced great effects, these have been 
 confined chiefly to their spoken speech, have not been trans- 
 ferred to their published writings, and have speedily died 
 away. It is the same in other kinds of oratory. Fox's elo- 
 quence, which studied only immediate effect, perished with 
 him, and Pitt's likewise. Burke's, being at once highly ima- 
 ginative and profoundly wise, lives, and must live for ever. 
 
 We have not room to enlarge on some other points in the 
 paper. We think Mr. Rogers lays far too much stress on the 
 time a preacher should take in composing his sermons. Those 
 preachers who spend all the week in finical polishing of peri- 
 ods, and intense elaboration of paragraphs, are not the most 
 efficient or esteemed. A well-furnished mind, animated by 
 enthusiasm, will throw forth in a few hours a sermon incom- 
 parably superior, in force, freshness, and energy, to those dis- 
 courses which are slowly and toilsomely built up. It may be 
 different sometimes with sermons which are meant for publica- 
 tion. Yet some of the finest published sermons in literature 
 have been written at a heat. 
 
 From the entire second volume of these admirable essays, 
 we must abstain. " Reason and Faith" would itself justify a 
 long separate article. Nor can we do any more than allude, 
 at present, to that noble " Meditation among the Tombs of 
 Literature," which closes the first volume, and which he enti- 
 tles the " Vanity and Grlory of Literature." It is full of sad 
 truth, and its style and thinking are every way worthy of its 
 author's genius.
 
 422 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 jftSCHYLtJS; PKOMETHEUS BOUND AND TJNBOMD.* 
 
 PROFESSOR BLACKIE has lately translated the " Prometheus 
 Vinctus" into English verse. Without much ease, or grace, 
 or melody, his translation is very spirited, and gives a more 
 vivid idea of ^Eschylus, in his rugged energy and rapturous 
 enthusiasm, than any other verse rendering we have read. 
 But we are mistaken if the mere English reader does not de- 
 rive a better notion of ^Eschylus still from the old prose ver- 
 sions. Best of all were such a translation as Dr. John Carlyle 
 has executed of Dante, distinguished at once by correctness 
 and energy. What a thing his brother Thomas could make 
 of the " Prometheus" in his prose ! 
 
 The sympathy which this great poet felt for the ancient my- 
 thology of his country, for gods to whom Jove was but a 
 beardless boy, was strictly a fellow-feeling. He was a Titan 
 among men ; and we fancy him, sick of the present, and re- 
 verting to the past, tired of the elegant mannikins around, 
 and stretching forth his arms to grasp the bulky shades of a 
 bygone era. He had been a soldier, too, and this had pro- 
 bably infused into his mind a certain contempt for mankind as 
 they were. He that mingles and takes a part in a battle-field, 
 would require to be more than mortal to escape this feeling, 
 seeing there, as he must, man writhen into all varieties of 
 painful, shameful, despicable, and horrible attitudes. It was, 
 indeed, at Marathon, Salamis, and perhaps" Plataea, that he 
 mingled in warfare ; but the details of even these world-fa- 
 mous fights of freedom must have been as mean and disgust- 
 ing as those of Borodino or Austerlitz. From man JEschj- 
 lus turned pensively and proudly to the gods ; first, to the 
 lower circle of Jove and Apollo, but, with deeper reverence 
 and fonder love, to that elder family whom they had supplant- 
 ed. Of that fallen house he became and continued the laure- 
 ate, till the boy Keats, with hectic heat and unearthly beauty, 
 sang " Hyperion." 
 
 * " Prometheus Bound" and " Unbound ;" Blackie's " ^Eschylus :'' 
 Shelley's " Prometheus."
 
 PROMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND. 423 
 
 More strictly speaking, ^schylus was the poet of destiny, 
 duty, and other great abstractions. He saw these towering 
 over Olympus, reposing in his sleeping Furies, and shining 
 like stars through the shadows of his gods. To him, whether 
 consciously or unconsciously, the deities were . embodied 
 thoughts, as those of all men must in some measure be ; and 
 his thoughts, being of a lofty transcendental order, found fit- 
 ter forms in the traditionary members of the Saturnian house, 
 than in the more recent and more sharply-defined children of 
 Jove. 
 
 His genius was lofty and bold, but rather bare and stern. 
 Luxuriance and wealth of thought and imagination were 
 hardly his ; they are seldom found so high as the Promethean 
 crags, although they sometimes appear in yet loftier regions, 
 such as Job, Isaiah, and the " Paradise Lost." His language 
 is the only faculty he ever pushes to excess. It is sometimes 
 overloaded into obscurity, and sometimes blown out into 
 extravagance. But it is the thunder, and no lower voice, 
 which bellows among those lonely and difficult rocks, and it 
 must be permitted to follow its own old and awful rhythm. 
 
 At Gela in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, died 
 this Titan banished, as some think, at all events alienated, 
 from his native country. It was fitting that he should have 
 found a grave in the land of Etna and the Cyclopses. There, 
 into the hands of his Maker, he returned the " blast of the 
 breath of his nostrils;" and a prouder and a more powerful 
 spirit never came from, and never returned to God. 
 
 " Prometheus Bound" is not the most artistic or finished 
 of j3Bschylus' plays ; but it is the most characteristic and sub- 
 lime. There are more passion and subtlety in the " Agamem- 
 non;" but less intensity and imagination. The "Agamem- 
 non" is his " Lear;" and the " Prometheus" his " Macbeth." 
 It was natural that a mind so lofty and peculiar as this poet's 
 should be attracted towards the strange and magnificent myth 
 of Prometheus. It seemed a fable waiting for his treatment. 
 Thus patiently, from age to age, have certain subjects, like 
 spirits on the wrong side of Styx, or souls in their antenatal/ 
 state, seemed to icait till men arose able to incarnate them in 
 history or song. And it matters not how many prematurely 
 try to give them embodiment ! Their time is not yet, and
 
 424 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 they must tarry on. Twenty plays on Lear might have been 
 written, and yet the subject had remained virgin for Shak- 
 speare. The subject of Faust had been treated, -well or ill, 
 before G-oethe; but his is now the "Faust." So of Prome- 
 theus the Titan there had been many drawings or busts be- 
 fore, in antique Greek poetry ; but it was reserved for .ZEschy- 
 lus to cast him in colossal statuary, with head, limbs, and all 
 complete. 
 
 Many were the attractions of the subject for him. First 
 of all, Prometheus was a Titan one of the old race, who 
 reigned ere evil was ; secondly, he was a benevolent and pow- 
 erful being, suffering a subject to meet and embrace which, 
 all the noble sympathies of the poet's nature leaped up; 
 thirdly, the story was full of striking points, peculiarly adapt- 
 ed both for the lyric and the drama; and, fourthly, there was 
 here a gigantic mask ready, from behind which the poet could 
 utter unrebuked his esoteric creed, and express at once his 
 protest against things as they are, his notion of what they ought 
 to be, and his anticipation of what they are yet to become. 
 For these and other reasons, while the vulture fastens upon the 
 liver of Prometheus, JEschylus leaps into, and possesses his 
 soul. 
 
 The fable is as follows : Prometheus, son of Japetus and 
 Themis, or Clymene, instead of opposing Jove, as his brother 
 Titans had, by force, employs cunning and counsel. He rears 
 up and arms man as his auxilary against Heaven. He be- 
 stows on him, especially the gift of fire, and enables him there- 
 with to cultivate the arts, and to rise from his degradation. 
 For this crime, Jove dooms him to be chained to a rock, 
 with a vulture to feed upon his liver. But Prometheus, 
 knowing that from lo's race would spring a demigod (Hercu- 
 les), who would deliver him from his chains, suffered with he- 
 roic firmness ; he was even acquainted with the future fate of 
 Jove, which was unknown to the god himself. When this irre- 
 sistible enemy of Jupiter should appear, Prometheus was to 
 be delivered from his sufferings. The reconciliation of Jupi- 
 ter with his victim was to be the price of the disclosure of the 
 danger to his empire, from the consummation of his marriage 
 with Thetis. Thetis was, in consequence of his disclosure, 
 given in marriage to Peleus; and Prometheus, with the per-
 
 PROMETHEUS BOUND AN! UNBOUND. 425 
 
 mission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules 
 Such is the story which ^Eschylus extended through three 
 lyrical dramas, the first and last of which are irrecoverably 
 lost. 
 
 A difficulty here arises, which has puzzled and disunited the 
 critics and commentators. Does, or does not, ^schylus mean 
 to represent Jupiter as a tyrant ? If not, why do neither 
 Mercury nor Ocean, who are introduced as his ministers, seek 
 to defend his character against the attacks of the Titan ? 
 And yet, if he does, why should he afterwards, as Shelley 
 remarks, intend a " catastrophe so feeble as the reconciliation 
 of the champion with the oppressor of mankind ?" To evade 
 this difficulty, Shelley, in his play, overthrows Jupiter before 
 Prometheus and Hercules combined. The champion triumphs 
 over the oppressor. Professor Blackie, on the other hand 
 denies that it was the purpose of the poet to represent Jove 
 as a tyrant ; but that he meant ultimately, in the closing 
 drama, to unite the jarring claims of both of Prometheus as 
 the umpire between gods and men, and of Jove as possessing 
 the supreme right to rule and to punish. But, first, he does 
 not explain the silence of Jove's ministers as to the character 
 of their calumniated lord ; secondly, as a writer in the 
 " Eclectic" shows, he wrests the words, and misrepresents the 
 character of Ocean, whom JBschylns means manifestly for a 
 time-server; thirdly, he does not answer the complaints of 
 Prometheus himself, which seem to us on his theory quite 
 overwhelming; and, lastly, he does not throw out the faintest 
 glimpse of what could be the medium of reconciliation which 
 the last play was to develop. 
 
 Two theories occur to us as to this knotty point. One is, 
 that ^Eschylus, in his " Prometheus I/abound," meant to 
 represent Jove as repentant ; and, by timely penitence, saving 
 his throne, and regaining his original character. Prometheus, 
 according to this view, would assume the sublime attitude of 
 the forgiver instead of the forgiven. The second and more 
 probable theory is, that, in the last play, .ZEschylus meant to 
 make it appear that Jove had been " playing a part ;" though 
 for the wisest and noblest reasons " hiding himself," as we 
 might say, and that he meant to surprise Prometheus, as well 
 as bis own servants, and the universe, by producing suddenly
 
 426 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 the reasons which had made him assume the aspect of the op 
 pressor, and convince even his victim that his sufferings had 
 been disguised benefits. These, however, are only conjectures. 
 The poet's solution of the self-involved problem is hid in im- 
 penetrable darkness. 
 
 Were, however, the second of those conjectures allowed, it 
 would, we think, give a clear, consistent, and almost a Chris- 
 tian meaning to the whole fable of the " Prometheus." Man 
 and God are at variance : the one is abject and degraded the 
 other seems cold, distant, and cruel. Mediators, numerous, 
 wise, and benevolent, rise up to heal, but seem rather to widen, 
 the breach. They become victims before High Heaven. The 
 divine vengeance, like a vulture, covers them with its vast 
 wing. All their inventions add little, whether to their own 
 happiness or to that of the species. They bear, however, on 
 the whole, bravely ; they suffer, on the whole, well. Their 
 melodious groanings, become the poetry and the philosophy of 
 the world. Their tragedies are sublime and hopeful. A 
 golden thread of promise passes, from bleeding hand to bleed- 
 ing hand, down the ages. The reconciliation is at last effected, 
 by the interposition of a divine power. A Hercules is at last 
 born, and glorified, who effects this surpassing labor. He 
 shows that God has all along hid intolerable love and light 
 under the deep shadows of this present time. He has punished 
 Prometheus ; he has allowed himself to be misrepresented ; 
 he has suffered man to fall ; he has made the wisest of the 
 race tenfold partakers of the common misery, that he might at 
 last surprise them by dropping the veil of ages, and showing 
 a face of ineffable love, the more glorious for the length of the 
 obscuration and the suddenness of the discovery. The result 
 is heaven on earth man, his Titan instructors, his Hercu- 
 lean deliverer, and his Heavenly Father, united in one family 
 of changeless peace, and progressive felicity and glory. 
 
 Our readers will perceive in this a rude sketch of the great 
 Christian scheme, rescued from the myths and shadows of 
 Paganism. We by no means offer it with dogmatic confidence, 
 as the one true explication. Tnere are, we admit, subordinate 
 parts in the fable which it leaves unexplained ; and it assumls 
 a termination to the last play of the " Trilogy" which is neces- 
 sarily gratuitous. But it seems as probable as any other we
 
 PROMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND. 4'27 
 
 have met. It affords a striking and curious coincidence with 
 some of our Christian verities. And, were it admitted, its 
 effect would be to cast a more pleasing light upon the old 
 world-moving story. The storm-beaten rock in the Scythian 
 desert the far lands below the everlasting snows around 
 the bare head of the solitary, unsleeping, uuweeping Titan 
 the blistering sun of noon the cold Orion, and the Great 
 Bear of night, which seem carrying tidings of his fate to dis- 
 tant immensities the faithful vulture, " that winged hound" 
 of hell, tapping at his side with her slow red beak the sym- 
 pathies of visiters the stern succession of duty-doing minis- 
 ters of wrath and, lastly, the avatar of the long-expected 
 Deliverer, shaking the Caucasus at his coming; and the meet- 
 ing in mid-air of the two reconciled parties, amid the jubilant 
 shouts of earth and heaven all this would then shine upon 
 us in a gleam, however remote and faint, from the Christian 
 Sun. 
 
 From " Prometheus Bound" the Mystery, let us turn to look 
 at it in a moment more, as " Prometheus Bound" the Poem. 
 It is the only play in which you do not regret the rigid pre- 
 servation of unity of place ; for the place is so elevated, com- 
 mands such a prospect, and is so strictly in keeping with the 
 character and the subject, that you neither wish, nor could bear 
 it shifted. The play is founded on a rock ; and there it must 
 stand. The action and the dialogue are severely simple and 
 characteristic. Might and Force are strongly drawn. They 
 are alike, but different. Might talks confidently, like a 
 favored minion. Force is like a giant Nubian slave " made 
 dumb by poison." He speaks none, but his silent frown unites 
 with Might's loquacity in compelling Hephaestus to do his 
 reluctant part in chaining the Titan to the rock. The Oceani- 
 des utters glorious asides. Has not every noble sufferer since 
 the world began had his chorus, visible or invisible, to sym- 
 pathise and to soothe him ? Is not this a benevolent arrange- 
 ment of the great Hidden Being who permits or presides over 
 the tragedy ? Socrates had friends wise and immortal as him- 
 self around him when he drank the hemlock. When Lord 
 Ru'ssell was riding up Tower Hill, the multitude thought they 
 saw " Liberty aud Justice seated at his side." And, if we 
 may dare the reference, did not, near a greater sufferer than
 
 428 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 them all, in the Garden, " an angel appear from heaven 
 strengthening him ?" Even when men supply the other ele- 
 ments of the tragedy, God provides the music, which is to 
 soften, to sublimate, and to harmonize the whole. In conso- 
 nance with this, the Grecian chorus may be called the divine 
 commentary, or the running consolation made in music upon 
 the dark main business of the play. 
 
 Ocean is a plausable sycophant. lo, although necessary, 
 has the effect of an excrescence, albeit a beautiful one. The 
 prophetic tale of her wanderings is one of those delicious pas- 
 sages, rarely to be found except in the Greeks, or in Milton, 
 in which mere names of places become poetical by the artful 
 opposition of associations connected with them. In this, 
 which we call in a former paper ideal geography, Homer, 
 .ZEschylus, and Milton are the three unequalled masters. 
 Hear .ZEschylus : 
 
 " First, lo, what remains 
 
 Of thy far sweeping wanderings hear, and grave 
 My words on the sure tablets of thy mind. 
 When thou hast pass'd the narrow stream that parts 
 The continents to the far flame-faced East, 
 Thou shalt proceed the highway of the sun ; 
 Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reach 
 Cisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwell 
 Phorcy's three daughters. Them Phoebus, beamy-bright, 
 Beholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near them 
 Their winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire. 
 
 One more sight remains, 
 That fills the eye with horror : mark me well ; 
 The sharp-beaked griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid, 
 Fell dogs that bark not, and the one-eyed host 
 Of Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofs, 
 Beating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto. 
 A distant land, a swarthy people next 
 Eeceives thee ; near the fountains of the sun 
 They dwell by JEthiop's wave. This river trace, 
 Until thy weary feet shall reach the pass 
 Whence from the Bybline heights the sacred Nile 
 Pours his salubrious flood. The winding wave 
 Thence to triangled Egypt guides thee, where 
 A distant home awaits thee, fated mother 
 Of no unstoried race." 
 
 Compare this with Milton's list of the fallen angels, or his 
 
 description of the prospect from the Mount of the Temptation. 
 
 But Prometheus himself absorbs almost all the interest, and
 
 PROMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND. 429 
 
 utters almost all the poetry in the play. He 1 as been com- 
 pared to Satan, and certainly, in grandeur of utterance, dig- 
 nity of defiance, and proud patience of suffering, is comparable 
 to no other. But there are important differences which, in 
 our notion, elevate Prometheus as a moral being above, and 
 sink him, as a brave and intellectual being, far below, that 
 tremendous shadow of Milton's soul. Prometheus deems 
 himself, and is, in the right ; Satan is, and knows he is, in the 
 wrong. Prometheus anticipates ultimate restoration ; Satan 
 expects nothing, and hardly wishes aught but revenge. Pro- 
 metheus is waited on by the multitudinous sympathies of in- 
 nocent immortals ; Satan leans on his own soul alone, for the 
 feeling of his fallen brethren toward him is rather the rever- 
 ence of fear than the submission of love. Prometheus carries 
 consciously the fate of the Thunderer in his hands; Satan 
 knows the Thunderer has only to be provoked sufficiently to 
 annihilate him. Prometheus on Caucasus is not unvisited or 
 uncheered ; Satan on Niphates Mount is utterly alone, and 
 though miserable, is undaunted, and almost darkens the sun 
 by his stern soliloquy. In one word, Prometheus is a great, 
 good being, mysteriously punished; Satan is a great, bad 
 being, reaping with quick and furious hand what he had sown ; 
 nay, warring with the whirlwind which from that sad sowing 
 of the wind had sprung. 
 
 It was comparatively easy for .ZEschylus to enlist our sym- 
 pathies for Prometheus, if once he were represented as good 
 and injured. But, first, to represent Satan as guilty; again, 
 to wring a confession of this from his own lips ; and yet, 
 thirdly, to teach us to admire, respect, pity, and almost love 
 him all the while, was a problem which only a Milton was able 
 either to state or to solve. 
 
 The words of Prometheus are consonant with his character. 
 The groans of a god should be melodious ; and not more so 
 were those of Ariel from the centre of his cloven pine, where 
 he "howled away twelve winters," than those of Prometheus 
 from his blasted rock. As Professor Blackie remarks, he 
 remained silent so " long as the ministers of justice are doing 
 their duty." It were beneath him to quarrel with the mere 
 ministers of another's pleasure. Nor does he deem those 
 myrmidons worthy of hearing the plaints of his sublime wo.
 
 430 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 But no sooner have they left him alone than he finds a fitter 
 audience assembled around him in the old elements of nature ; 
 and, like the voice of one of their own tameless torrents, does 
 he break out into his famous (miscalled) soliloquy. Soliloquy 
 it is none, for he was never less alone than when now alone. 
 
 " Oh ! divine ether, and swift-wing' d winds, 
 And river-fountains, and of ocean waves 
 The multitudinous laughter, and thou earth, 
 Boon mother of us all, and thou bright round 
 Of the all-seeing sun, you I invoke ! 
 Lehold what ignominy of causeless wrong 
 I suffer from the gods, myself a god." 
 
 We are glad to find that the professor uses the word 
 " laughter," instead of " dimple," of the ocean waves. It is 
 stronger, and more suited to the lofty mood of the supposed 
 speaker. But in what " part of the Old Testament" is the 
 "broad, strong word laugh retained in descriptions of nature?" 
 The floods, indeed, are said, by a still bolder image, to " clap 
 hands," but nowhere to laugh. It is the Lord in the heavens 
 who laughs ; or it is the war-horse who laughs at the shaking 
 of a spear. Inanimate objects are never said to laugh, al- 
 though it were but in unison with the spirit of Hebrew poetry. 
 The word " multitudinous" does not exactly please us, nor 
 give the full sense of avapid/iov. We are almost tempted to 
 coin a word, and to translate it the " unarithmeticable laugh- 
 ter of an ocean's billows." 
 
 Lines are scattered throughout which, in their strong, pike- 
 pointed condensation, remind you of Satan's terrible laconic- 
 isms. The chorus, for instance, says 
 
 " Dost thou not blench to cast such words about thee 1" 
 
 Prometheus replies 
 
 " How should I fear, who am a God, and deathless ?' 
 
 Satan says 
 
 " What matter where, if / be still the same 1 ?" 
 
 In the interview with Hermes, he retains the dignity of his 
 bearing and the fearlessness of his language. And how he 
 mingles poetry the loftiest, and protest the most determined,
 
 PROMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND. 431 
 
 in the description of the new horrors which he sees approach- 
 ing his rock the " pangs unfelt before" the hell charged 
 upon hell that are at hand ! The earth begins to quake 
 below him. The sky gets dark over his head. The thunder 
 bellows in his ears. Hermes leaves him, and the lightning 
 succeeds, and "wreaths its fiery curls around him." The 
 dust of a whirwind covers him. Winds from all regions meet, 
 and fight, and fluctuate around his naked body. In the dis- 
 tance, the ocean, laughing no more, appears, mingling its 
 angry billows with the stars. And as this many-folded gar- 
 ment of wrath wraps round, and conceals Prometheus from 
 view, his voice is heard screaming out above all the roar of 
 the warring elements the closing words 
 
 " Mighty mother, worshipp'd Themis, 
 Circling Ether that diffusest 
 Light, a common joy to all, 
 Thou beholdest these iny wrongs!" 
 
 Shelley was, and had a right to be, a daring genius. He 
 had the threefold right of power, despair, and approaching 
 death. He felt himself strong ; he had been driven desper- 
 ate ; and he knew that his time was short. Hence, as a poet, 
 he aimed at the boldest and greatest things. He must leap 
 into death's arms from the loftiest pinnacle possible. But all 
 his genius, determination, and feeling of having no time to 
 lose, were counteracted in their efforts by a certain morbid 
 weakness, which was partly the result of bodily suffering, and 
 partly of the insulated position into which his melancholy 
 creed had thrown him. He was a hero in a deep decline. 
 Tall, swift, and subtle, he wanted body, sinews, and blood. 
 His genius resembled a fine voice cracked. The only thor- 
 oughly manly and powerful things he has written are some 
 parts of the " Revolt of Islam," the " Cenci" as a whole, and 
 the commencement and one or two passages throughout the 
 " Prometheus." The rest of his writings even when beauti- 
 ful as they generally are, and sincere, as they are always arc 
 more or less fantastical and diseased. The " Ceuci" itself, 
 the most calm and artistic of his works, could never have been 
 selected as a subject by a healthy or perfectly sane mind. 
 
 " Prometheus Unbound" is the most ambitious of his poems.
 
 432 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 But it was written too fast. It was written, too, in a state 
 of over-excitement, produced by the intoxication of an Italian 
 spring, operating upon a morbid system, and causing it to 
 flush over with hectic and half-delirious joy. Above all, it 
 was written twenty years too soon, ere his views had consoli- 
 dated, and ere his thought and language were cast in their 
 final mould. Hence, on the whole, it is a strong and beauti- 
 ful disease. Its language is loose and luxuriant as a " Moe- 
 nad's hair;" its imagery is wilder and less felicitous than in 
 some of his other poems. The thought is frequently drowned 
 in a diarrhoaa of words ; its dialogue is heavy and prolix ; 
 and its lyrics have more flow of sound than beauty of image 
 or depth of sentiment ; it is a false gallop rather than a great 
 kindling race. Compared with the " Prometheus" of ./Eschy- 
 lus, Shelley's poem is wordy and diffuse; lacks unity and 
 simplicity ; above all, lacks whatever human interest is in the 
 Grecian work. Nor has it the massive strength, the piled-up 
 gold and gems, the barbaric but kingly magnificence of Keats' 
 " Hyperion." 
 
 Beauties, of course, of a rare order it possesses. The 
 opening speech of Prometheus his conversation with the 
 Earth the picture of the Hours one or two of the cho- 
 ruses and, above all, the description of the effects of the 
 "many-folded shell," in regenerating the world, are worthy of 
 any poet or pen; and the whole, in i'ts wasted strength, mixed 
 with beautiful weakness, resembling a forest struck with pre- 
 mature autumn, fills us with deep regrets that his life had not 
 been spared. Had he, twenty years later, a healthier, hap- 
 pier, and better man, " clothed, and in his right mind," ap- 
 proached the sublime subject of the " Prometheus," no poet, 
 save Milton and Keats, was ever likely to have so fully com- 
 pleted the j3Bschylean design. 
 
 The last act of this drama is to us a mere dance of dark- 
 ness. It has all the sound and semblance of eloquent, musi- 
 cal, and glorying nonsense. But, apart from the mystic mean- 
 ings deposited in its lyrics, Shelley's great object in this play, 
 as in his " Queen Mab" and " Revolt of Islam," is to predict 
 the total extinction of evil, through the progress and perfection- 
 ment of the human race. Man is to grow into the God of the 
 world. We are of this opinion, too, provided the necessity of
 
 PIIOMETHEUS BOUND AND UNBOUND. 433 
 
 divine sunshine and showers to consummate this growth be 
 conceded. But Shelley's theory seems very hopeless. We 
 may leave it to the scorching sarcasm, invective, and argument 
 of Foster, in his " Essay on the Term Romantic." The 
 Ethiop is to wash himself white ; the leaper is to bathe away 
 his leprosy in Abana and Pharpar, not in Jordan ! We will 
 believe it, as soon as we are convinced that human philosophy 
 has of itself made any human being happy, and that there is 
 not something in man requiring both a fiercer cautery and a 
 robler balm to cure. " The nature of man still casts ' omi- 
 nous conjecture on the whole success.' Till that be changed, 
 extended plans of human improvement, laws, new institutions, 
 and systems of education, are only what may be called the 
 sublime mechanics of depravity." And what, we may add, 
 can change that, short of an omnipotent fiat as distinct as that 
 which at first spake darkness into light chaos into a world ? 
 Of lyrics, and dramas, and poetic dreams, and philosophic 
 theories, we have had enough ; what we want is, the one mas- 
 ter-word of Him who " spake with authority, and not as the 
 scribes." 
 
 The great Promethean rock shall be visited by poet for 
 poetic treatment no more again for ever. It is henceforth 
 " rock in the wilderness," smitten not into water, but into 1 
 eternal sterility. But, atlhough no poet shall ever seek in it the 
 materials of another lofty song, yet its memory shall continue 
 dear to all lovers of genius and man. Many a traveller, look- 
 ing northward from the banks of the Kur, or southward from 
 the sandy plains of Russia, to the snowy peaks of the Cau- 
 casus, shall think of Prometheus, and try to shape out his 
 writhing figure upon the storm-beaten cliffs. Every admirer 
 of Grecian or of British genius shall turn aside, and see the 
 spectacle of tortured worth, crushed dignity, and vicarious 
 valor, exhibited with such wonderful force and verisimilitude 
 by JEschylus and his follower. 
 
 And those who see, or think they see, in the story of this sub- 
 lime, forsaken, and tormented Titan the virtuous, the benevo- 
 lent, the friend of man -a faint shadow of the real tragedy 
 of the cross, where the God-Man was "nailed," as Prometheus 
 is said to have been, was exposed to public ignominy, had his 
 heart torn by the vulture of a world's substitutionary anguish, 
 19
 
 434 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 and at last, at the crisis of his agony, and w,hile earth, and 
 hell, and heaven were all darkening around him, cried out, 
 " Why hast thou forsaken me ?" (a fearful question, where 
 you dare not lay the emphasis on any one, Hut must on all 
 the words), cannot but feel more tender and awful emotions 
 as they contemplate this outlying and unacknowledged type of 
 the Crucified, suspended among the crags of the Caucasian 
 wilderness. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE.-A LECTURE.* 
 
 IF a clergyman, thirty years ago, had announced a lecture 
 on Shakspeare, he might, as a postscript, have announced the 
 resignation of his charge, if not the abandonment of his office. 
 Times are now changed, and men are changed along with them. 
 The late Dr. Hamilton of Leeds, one of the most pious and 
 learned clergymen in England, has left, in his " Nugao Lite- 
 ,riae," a general paper on Shakspeare, and was never, so far as 
 know, challenged thereanent. And if you ask me one rea- 
 son of this curious change, I answer, it is the long-continued 
 presence of the *pirit of Shakspeare, in all its geniality, 
 breadth, and power, in the midst of our society and literature. 
 He is among us like an unseen ghost, coloring our language, 
 controlling our impressions, if not our thoughts, swaying our 
 imaginations, sweetening our tempers, refining our tastes, puri- 
 fying our manners, and effecting all this by the simple magic 
 of his genius, and through a medium that of dramatic writing 
 and representation originally the humblest, and not yet the 
 highest, form in which poetry and passion have chosen to ex- 
 hibit themselves. Waiving, at present, the consideration of 
 Shakspeare in his form the dramatist, let us look at him now 
 
 * This having been originally delivered as a lecture, we have decided 
 that it should retain the shape. " Shakspeare ; a Sketch," would look, 
 and be, a ludicrous idea. As weH a mountain in a flower-pot, as Shak- 
 speare iu a single sketch. A sketch seeks to draw, at least, an outline 
 of a whole. From a lecture, so much is not necessarily expected.
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 435 
 
 in his essence the poet. But, first, does any one ask, What 
 is a poet ? What is the ideal of the somewhat indefinite, but 
 large and swelling term poet? I answer, the greatest poet is 
 the man who most roundly, clearly, easily, and strikingly, 
 reflects, represents, and reproduces, in an imaginative form, 
 his own sight or observation, his own heart or feeling, his own 
 history or experience, his own memory or knowledge, his own 
 imagination or dream sight, heart, history,- memory, and 
 imngination, which, so far as they are faithfully represented 
 from his conciousness, do also reflect the consciousness of 
 general humanity. The poet is more a mirror than a maker ; 
 he may, indeed, unite with his reflective power others, such as 
 that of forming, infusing into his song, and thereby glorifying 
 a particular creed or scheme of speculation ; but, just as 
 surely as a rainbow, rising between two opposing countries or 
 armies, is but a feeble bulwark, so, the real power of poetry 
 is, not in conserving, nor in resisting, nor in supporting, nor. 
 in destroying, but in meekly and fully reflecting, and yet 
 
 an 
 lwt 
 
 recreating and beautifying alwthings. Poetry, said Aris- 
 totle, is imitation this celebrated ephorism is only true in 
 one acceptation. If it mean that poetry is in the first instance 
 prompted by a conscious imitation of the beautiful, which 
 gradually blossoms into the higher ehapc of unconscious, resem- 
 blance, we demur. But if by imitation is meant the process 
 by which love for the beautiful in art or nature, at first silent 
 and despairing, as the child's affection for the star, strengthens, 
 and strengthens still, till the admired quality is transfused into 
 the very being of the admirer, who then pours it back in elo- 
 quence or in song, so sweetly and melodiously, that it seems to 
 be flowing from an original fountain in his own breast ; if this 
 be the meaning of the sage when he says that poetry is imita- 
 tion, he is unquestionably right. Poetry is just the saying 
 Amen, with a full heart and a clear voice, to the varied sym- 
 phonies of nature, as they echo through the vaulted and solemn 
 aisles of the poet's own soul. 
 
 It follows, from this notion of poetry, that in it there is no 
 such thing as absolute origination or creation ; its Belight 
 simply evolves the element which already has existed amidst 
 the darkness it does not call it into existence. It follows, 
 again, that the grand distinction between philosophy and
 
 436 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 poetry is, that while the former tries to trace things to their 
 causes, and to see them as a great naked abstract scheme, 
 poetry catches them as they are, in the concrete, and with all 
 their verdure and flush about them ; for even philosophical 
 truths, ere poetry will reflect them, must be personified into 
 life, and thus fitted to stand before her mirror. The ocean 
 does not act as a prism to the sun does not divide and analyse 
 his light but simply shows him as he appears to her in the 
 full crown-royal of his beams. It follows still farther, that 
 the attitude of the true poet is exceedingly simple and sub- 
 lime. He is not an inquirer, asking curious questions at the 
 universe not a tyrant speculator, applying to it the splendid 
 torture of investigation ; his attitude is that of admiration, 
 reception, and praise. He loves, looks, is enlightened, and 
 shines even as Venus receives and renders back the light of 
 her parent sun. 
 
 If, then, the greatest poet be the widest, simplest and clear- 
 est reflector of nature and man, surely we may claim this high 
 honor for Shakspearc the d^hth -wonder of the world. " Of 
 11 men," says Dryden, ' hejiacl the largest and most compre- 
 Insive soul!" You find everything included in him, just as 
 you find that the blue sky folds around all things, and after 
 every new discovery made in her boundless domains, seems to 
 retire' 'quietly back into her own'- greatness, like a queen, and 
 to say, " I am richer than all my possessions;" thus Shak- 
 speare never suggests the thought 01 being exhausted, any 
 more than the sigh of an zEolian lyre, as the breeze is spent, 
 intimates that the mighty billows of the air shall surge no 
 more, llesponsive as such a lyre to all the sweet or strong 
 influences of nature, she must cease to speak, ere he can cease 
 to respond. I can never think of that great brow of his, but 
 as a large lake-looking-glass, on which, when you gaze, you see 
 all passions, persons, and hearts : here, suicides striking their 
 own breasts, there, sailors staggering upon drunken shores ; 
 here, kings sitting in purple, and there, clowns making mouths 
 behind their backs ; here, demons in the shape of man, and 
 there angels in the form of women ; here, heroes bending their 
 mighty bows, and there, hangmen adjusting their greasy ropes ; 
 here, witches picking poisons, and culling infernal simples for 
 their caldron, and there, joiners and weavers enacting their
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 437 
 
 piece of very tragical mirth, amid the moonlight of the " Mid" 
 summer Night's Dream;" here statesmen uttering their an- 
 cient saws, and there watchmen finding " modern instances" 
 amid the belated revellers of the streets ; here, misanthropes 
 cursing their day, and there, pedlars making merry with the 
 lasses and lads of the village fair ; here, Mooncalfs, like Cali- 
 ban, throwing forth eloquent curses and blasphemy, and there, 
 maidens, like Miranda, "sole-sitting" by summer seas, beauti- 
 ful as foam-bells of the deep ; here, fairies dancing like motes 
 of glory across the stage, and there, hush ! it is the grave that 
 has yawned, and, lo ! the buried majesty of Denmark has join- 
 ed the motley throng, which pauses for a moment to tremble 
 at his presence. Such the spectacle presented on that great 
 mirror ! How busy it is, and yet how still ! How melan- 
 choly, and yet how mirthful ! Magical as a dream, and yet 
 sharp and distinct as a picture ! How fluctuating, yet how 
 fixed ! "It trembles, but it cannot pass away." It is the 
 world- the world of every age the miniature of the universe ! 
 The times of Shakspeare require a minute's notice in our 
 hour's analysis of his genius. They were times of a vast up- 
 heaving in the public mind. Protestantism, that strong man- 
 child, had newly been born on the Continent, and was making 
 wild work in his cradle. Popery, the ten-horned monster, was 
 dying, but dying hard; but over England there lay what 
 might be called a " dim religious light" being neither, the gross 
 darkness of mediaeval Catholicism, nor the naked glare of Non- 
 conformity a light highly favorable to the exercise of imagin- 
 ation in which dreams seem realised, and* in which realities 
 were softened with the haze of dreams. The Book of G-od 
 had been brought forth, like Joseph from his dungeon, freed 
 from prison attire and looks although it had not yet, like 
 him, mounted its chariot of general circulation, and been car- 
 ried in triumphal progress through the land. The copies of 
 the Scriptures, for the most part, were confined to the libra- 
 ries of the learned, or else chained in churches. Conceive the 
 impetus given to the poetical genius of the country, by the 
 sudden discovery of this spring of loftiest poetry conceive it 
 by supposing that Shakspeare's works had been buried for 
 ages, and been dug up now. Literature in general had reviv- 
 ed ; and the soul of man, like an eagle newly fledged, and
 
 438 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 looking from the verge of her nest, was smelling from afar 
 many a land of promise, and many a field of victory. Add to 
 this, that a New World had recently been discovered ; and if 
 California and Australia have come over us like a summer's 
 (golden) cloud, and made not only the dim eye of the old 
 miser gleam with joy, and his hand, perhaps, relax its hold of 
 present, in the view of prospective gold, but made many a 
 young bosom, too, leap at the thought of adventure upon 
 those marvellous shores and woven, as it were, a girdle of 
 virgin gold round the solid globe what must have been the 
 impulse and the thrill, when first the bars of ocean were bro- 
 ken up, when all customary landmarks fled away, like the 
 islands of the Apocalyptic vision, and when in their room 
 a thousand lovely dreams seemed retiring, and beckoning as 
 they retired, toward isles of palms, and valleys of enchant- 
 ment, and mountains ribbed with gold, and seas of perfect 
 peace and sparkling silver, and immeasurable savannahs and 
 forests hid by the glowing west; and when, month after 
 month, travelers and sailors were returning to testify by their 
 tales of wonder, that such dreams were true, must not such an 
 ocean of imaginative influence have deposited a rich residuum 
 of genius ? And that verily it did, the names of four men be- 
 longing to this period are enough to prove ; these are, need I 
 say? Edmund Spenser, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and 
 William Shakspeare. 
 
 The Life of Shakspeare I do not seek to write, and do not 
 profess to understand, after all that has been written regard- 
 ing it. Still he seems to me but a shade, without shape, limit, 
 or local habitation ; having nothing but power, beauty, and 
 grandeur. I cannot reconcile him to life, present or past. 
 Like a Brownie, he has done the work of his favorite house- 
 hold, unheard and unseen. His external history is, in his own 
 language, a blank ; his internal, a puzzle, save as we may du- 
 biously gather it from the escapes of his Sonnets, and the 
 masquerade of his Plays. 
 
 " Cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, 
 Or but a wandering voice 1" 
 
 A munificent and modest benefactor, he has knocked at the 
 door of the human family at night; thrown in inestimable
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 439 
 
 wealth as if he had done a guilty thing ; and the sound of his 
 feet dying away in the distance is all the tidings he has given 
 of himself. 
 
 Indeed, so deep still are the uncertainties surrounding the 
 history of Shakspeare, that I sometimes wonder that the pro- 
 cess applied by Strauss to the Life of our Saviour has not 
 been extended to his. A Life of Shakspeare, on this worthy 
 model, would be a capital exercise for some aspiring sprig of 
 Straussism ! 
 
 I pass to speak of the qualities of his genius. First of 
 these, I name a quality to which I have already alluded his 
 universality. He belongs to all ages, all lands, all ranks, all 
 faiths, all professions, all characters, and all intellects. And 
 why ? because his eye pierced through all that was conven- 
 tional, and fastened on all that was eternal in man. He knew 
 that in humanity there was one heart, one nature, and that 
 " G-od had made of one blood all nations who dwell on the 
 face of the earth." He saw the same heart palpitating 
 through a myriad faces the same nature shining amid all va- 
 rieties of customs,- manners, languages, and laws the same 
 blood rolling red. and warm below innumerable bodies, dresses 
 and forms. It was not, mark you, the universality of indif- 
 ference it was not that he loved all beings alike it was not 
 that he liked lago as .well as Imogen, Bottom or Bardolph as 
 well as Hamlet or Othello ; but that he saw, and showed, and 
 loved, in proportion to its degree, so much of humanity as all 
 possessed. Nature, too, he had watched with a wide yet keen 
 eye. Alike the spur of the rooted pine-tree and the " grey" 
 gleam of the willow leaf drooping over the death-stream of 
 Ophelia (he was the first in poetry, says Hazlitt, to notice that 
 the leaf is grey only on the side which bends down) the nest 
 of the temple-haunting martlet with his " loved mansionry," 
 and the eagle eyrie which " buildeth on the cedar's top, and 
 dallies with the wind and scorn's the sun" the forest of Ar- 
 den, and the " blasted heath of Forres" the " still vexed Ber- 
 moothes, and the woods of Crete" " the paved fountains,''' 
 " rushing brooks," " pelting rivers," " the beached margents of 
 the sea," " sweet summer buds," " hoary headed-frosts," 
 " childing autumn," " angry winter," the "sun robbing the 
 vast sea," and the " m^anJier pale fire snatching from the sun !"
 
 440 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 " Flowers of all hues 
 Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, 
 The marigold that goes to bed with the sun, 
 And with him rises weeping, daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
 Or Cytherea's breath pale primroses, 
 That die unmarried ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength 
 
 bold oxlips and 
 
 The Crown, Imperial lilies of all kinds' 7 
 
 such are a few of the natural objects which the genius of Shak- 
 speare has transplanted into his own garden, and covered with 
 the dew of immortality. He sometimes lingers beside such 
 lovely things, but more frequently he touches them as he 
 is hurrying on to an object. He paints as does the lightning, 
 which while rushing to its aim, shows in fiery relief all inter- 
 mediate objects. Like an arrowy river, his mark is the sea, 
 but every cloud, tree, and tower is rejected on its way, and 
 serves to beautify and to dignify the waters. Frank, all-em- 
 bracing, and unselecting is the motion of Hjs genius. Like the 
 sun-rays, which, secure in their own purityid directness, pass 
 fearlessly through all deep, dark, intricate,*! unholy places 
 equally illustrate the crest of a serpent aucbfte wing of a bird, 
 pause on the summit of an ant-hillock as well as ou the brow 
 of Mont Blanc take up as a little tbiijg alike the crater of 
 the volcano and the shed cone of the pine, and after they have, 
 in one wide charity, embraced all shaped and sentient things, 
 expend their waste strength and beauty upon the inane space 
 beyond thus does the imagination of Shakspeare count no 
 subject or object too low, and none too high, for its compre- 
 hensive and incontrollable sweep. 
 
 I have named impersonality, as his next quality. The term 
 seems strange and rare the thing is scarcer still : I mean by 
 it that Shakspeare, when writing, thought of nothing but his 
 subject, never of himself. Snatching from an Italian novel, 
 or an ill-translated Plutarch's lives, the facts of his play, his 
 only question was, Can these dry bones live ? How shall I 
 impregnate them with force, and make them fully express the 
 meaning and beauty which they contain ? Many writers set 
 to work in a very different style : one in all his writings wishes
 
 SHEKSPEARE. 44 1 
 
 to magnify his own powers, and his solitary bravo is heard re- 
 sounding at the close of every paragraph. Another wishes to 
 imitate another writer a base ambition, pardonable only in 
 children. A third, scorning slavish imitation, wishes to emu- 
 late some one school or class of authors. A fourth writes de- 
 liberately and professedly ad captandum vvlgus. A fifth, 
 worn to dregs, is perpetually wishing to imitate his former 
 doings, like a child crying to get yesterday back again. Shak- 
 speare, when writing, thought no more of himself, or other 
 authors, than the Sun when shining thinks of Sirius, of the 
 stars composing the Great Bear, or of his own proud array of 
 beams. 
 
 This unconsciousness, or impersonality, I have always held 
 to be the highest style of genius. I am aware, indeed, of a 
 subtle objection. It has been said by a high authority John 
 Sterling that men of genius are conscious, not of what is pe- 
 culiar in the individual, but of what is universal in the race ; of 
 what characterises, not a man, but man ; not of their own 
 individual genius, but of the Great Spirit moving within their 
 minds. Yet what in reality is this but the unconsciousness for 
 which the author, to whom Sterling is replying, contends. 
 When we say that men of genius, in their highest moods, are 
 unconscious, we mean, not that these men become the mere 
 tubes through which a foreign influence descends, but that cer- 
 tain emotions or ideas so fill and possess them, as to produce 
 temporary forgetfulness of themselves, save as the passive 
 though intelligent instruments of the feeling or the thought. 
 It is true that afterwards self may suggest the reflection the 
 fact that we have been selected to receive and convey such 
 melodies proves our breadth and fitness it is from the oak, 
 not the reed, that the wind elicits its deepest music; but, in 
 the first place, this thought never takes place at the same time 
 with the true afflatus, and is almost inconsistent with its pre- 
 sence it is a mere after inference; an inference, secondly, 
 which is not always made ; nay, thirdly, an inference which 
 is often rejected, when the prophet, off the stool, feels tempted 
 to regard with suspicion or shuddering disgust the result of 
 his raptured hour of inspiration. Milton seems to have shrunk 
 back at the retrospect of the height he had reached in the 
 " Paradise Lost," and preferred his " Paradise Regained." 
 19*
 
 442 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Shakspeare, having written his tragic miracles under a more 
 entire self-abandonment, became in his sonnets, owing to a re- 
 flex act of sagacity, aware of what feats he had done. Bun- 
 yan is carried on, through all the stages of his immortal pil- 
 grimage, like a child in the leading-strings of her nurse, but, 
 after looking back upon its contemplated course, begins, with all 
 the harmless vanity of a child (see the prefatory poem to the 
 second part), to crow over the achievement. Burns, while 
 composing " Tarn o' Shanter," felt little else than the animal 
 rapture of the excitement ; it dawned on him afterwards that 
 he had produced his finest poem. Thus all gifted spirits do 
 best when they know not what they do. The boy Tell was 
 great, 
 
 " Nor knew how great he was." 
 
 I mention next his humanity. It was said of Burns, that 
 if you had touched his hand it would have burned yours. 
 And although Shakspeare, bein.^ a far broader and greater, 
 was, consequently, a calmer man, yet I would not have advised 
 any very timid person to have made the same experiment with 
 him. Poor Hartley Coleridge wrote a clever paper, in " Black- 
 wood," entitled " Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentleman ;" I 
 wish some one had answered it, under the title, " Shakspeare 
 a Kadical and a Man." A man's heart beats in his every 
 line. He loves, pities, feels for, as well as with, the meanest 
 of his fellow " human mortals." He addresses men as bro- 
 thers, and as brothers have they responded to his voice. 
 
 I need scarcely speak of his simplicity. He was a child as 
 well as a man. His poetry, in the language of Pitt, comes 
 " sweetly from nature." It is a " gum" oozing out without 
 effort or consciousness : occasionally, indeed (for I do not, like 
 the Germans, believe in the infallibility of Shakspeare,) he con- 
 descends to indite a certain swelling, rumbling bombast, 
 especially when he is speaking through the mouth of kings ; 
 but even his bombast comes rolling out with an ease and a 
 gusto, a pomp and prodigality, which are quite delightful. 
 Shakspeare's nonsense is like no other body's nonsense. It is 
 always the nonsence of a great genius. A dignitary of the 
 Church of England went once to hear Eobert Hall. After 
 listening with delight to that great preacher, he called at hia
 
 SHAKSPEAIIE. 443 
 
 house. Ho found him lying on the floor, with his children 
 performing somersets over him. He lifted up his hands in 
 wonder, and exclaimed, " Is that the great Robert Hall ?" 
 " Oh," replied Hall, " I have all my nonsense out of the 
 pulpit, you have all yours in it." So Shakspeare, after having 
 done a giant's work, could take a giant's recreation ; and were 
 he returning to earth, would nearly laugh himself dead again, 
 at the portentous attempts of some of his critics to prove his 
 nonsense sense, his blemishes beauties, and his worst puns fine 
 wit! 
 
 The subtlety of Shakspeare is one of his most wonderful 
 qualities. Coleridge used to say, that he was more of a phi- 
 losopher than a poet. His penetration into motives, his dis- 
 cernment of the most secret thoughts and intents of the heart, 
 his discrimination of the delicate shades of character, the man- 
 ner in which he makes little traits tell large tales, the com- 
 plete grasp he has of all his characters, whom he lifts up and 
 down like ninepins, the innumerable paths by which he reaches 
 similar results, the broad, comprehensive maxims on life, man- 
 ners, and morals, which he has scattered in such profusion 
 over his writings, the fact, that he never repeats a thought, 
 figure, or allusion, the wonderful art he has of identifying him- 
 self with all varieties of humanity all proclaim the inexhausti- 
 ble and infinite subtlety of his genius, and when taken in con- 
 nection with its power and loftiness, render him the prodigy 
 of poets and of men. I once, when a student, projected a 
 series of essays, entitled " Sermons on Shakspeare," taking for 
 my texts some of those profound and far-reaching sentences, 
 which abound in him, where you have the fine gold, which. is 
 the staple of his works, collected in little knots, or nuggets of 
 thick gnarled magnificence. It was this quality in him which 
 made a French author say, that, were she condemned to select 
 three volumes for her whole library, the three would be Ba- 
 con's Essays, the Bible, and Shakspeare. You can never open 
 a page of his dramas without being startled at the multitude 
 of sentences which have been, and are perpetually being, 
 quoted. The proverbs of Shakspeare, were they selected, 
 would be only inferior to the proverbs of Solomon. 
 
 When I name purity as another quality of this poet, I may 
 be thought paradoxical. And yet, when I remember his peri-
 
 444 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 od, his circumstances, the polluted atmosphere which ho 
 breathed; when I compare his writings with those of contem- 
 porary dramatists ; when I weigh him in the scales with 
 many of our modern authors ; and when I remember that his 
 writings never seek to corrupt the imagination, to shake the 
 principles, or to influence the passions of men, I marvel how 
 thoroughly his genius has saved him, harmless, amid formida- 
 ble difficulties, and say, that Marina in his own " Pericles," 
 did not come forth more triumphantly scathless, than does her 
 poet. Let those who prate of Shakspeare's impurity first of 
 all read him candidly ; secondly, read, if they can, Massinger, 
 or Beaumont and Fletcher ; and thirdly, if they have Bowd- 
 ler's contemptible " Family Shakspeare," fling it into the fire, 
 and take back the unmutilated copy to their book-shelves and 
 their bosoms. The moonlight is not contaminated by shin- 
 ing on a dunghill, and neither is the genius of Shakspeare by 
 touching transiently, on its way to higher regions, upon low, 
 loathsome or uncertain themes. His language is sometimes 
 coarse, being that of his age ; his spirit belonging to no age 
 (would I could say the same of Burns, Byron, Moore, and 
 Eugene Sue), is always clean, healthy, and beautiful. 
 
 His imagination and fancy are nearly equal, and, like two 
 currents of air, are constantly interpenetrating. They seem 
 twins the one male, the other female. Not only do both 
 stand ever ready to minister to the subtlest and deepest mo- 
 tions of his intellect, and all the exigencies of his plots (like 
 spray, which decorates the river, when running under ground, 
 as well as when shining in the sunlight), but he has, besides, 
 committed himself to several distinct trials of the strength of 
 both. The caldron in " Macbeth" stands up an unparalleled 
 collection of dark and powerful images, all shining as if shown in 
 hell-fire, and accompanied by a dancing, mirthful measure, which 
 adds unspeakably to their horror. It is as though a sentence 
 of death were given forth in doggerel. And, for light and 
 fanciful figures, we may take either Titania's speech to the 
 Fairies, or the far-famed description of Queen Mab by Mercu- 
 tio. In these passages, artistic aim is for a season abandon- 
 ed. A single faculty, like a horse from a chariot stud, breaks 
 loose, and revels and riots in the fury of its power. 
 
 Shakspeare's wit and humor are bound together in general
 
 SHAKSPEAIIE. 445 
 
 6y the amiable band of good-nature. What a contrast to 
 Swift ! He loathes ; Shakspeare, at the worst, hates. His is 
 the slavering and ferocious ire of a maniac ; Shakspeare's that 
 of a man. Swift broods like their shadow over the festering 
 sores and the moral ulcers of humanity ; Shakspeare touches 
 them with a ray of poetry, which beautifies, if it cannot heal. 
 " G-ulliver" is the day-book of a fiend ; " Timon" is the mag- 
 nificent outbreak of an injured angel. His wit, how fertile, 
 quick, forgetive ! Congreve and Sheridan are poor and forced 
 in the comparison. How long they used to sit hatching some 
 clever conceit ; and what a cackling they made when it had 
 chipped the shell ! Shakspeare threw forth a Mercutio or a 
 Falstaff at once, each embodying in himself a world of laugh- 
 ter, and there an end. His humor, how broad, rich, subtle, 
 powerful, and full of genius and geniality, it is ! Why, Bar- 
 dolph's red nose eclipses all the dramatic characters that have 
 succeeded. Ancient Pistol himself shoots down the whole of 
 the Farquhars, Wycherleys, Sheridans, Goldsmiths, and Col- 
 mans, put together. Dogberry is the prince of Donkeys, past, 
 present, and to come. When shall we ever have such another 
 tinker as Christopher Sly ? Sir Andrew Aguecheek ? the 
 very name makes you quake with laughter. And like a vast 
 sirloin of English roast beef, rich and dripping, lies along the 
 mighty Falstaff, with humor oozing out of every corner and 
 cranny of his vast corporation. 
 
 Byron describes man as a pendulum, between a smile and 
 tear. Shakspeare, the representative of humanity, must weep 
 as well as laugh, and his tears, characteristically, must be 
 large and copious. What variety, as well as force, in his pa- 
 thetic figures ! Here pines in the center of the forest the mel- 
 ancholy Jacques, musing tenderly upon the sad pageant of 
 human life, finding sermons in stones, although not " good in 
 everything," now weeping beside a weeping deer, and now 
 bursting out into elfish laughter, at the " fool" he found in the 
 forest. Here walks and talks, in her guilty and desperate 
 sleep, the Fiend Queen of Scotland, lighted on her way by the 
 fire that never shall be quenched, which is already kindled 
 around her, seeking in vain to sweeten her "little" hand, on which 
 there is a spot with which eternity must deal, and yet moving 
 you to weep for her as you tremble. Here turns away from men
 
 446 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 for ever the haughty Timon, seeking his low grave beside, and 
 his only mourner in, the everlasting brine of the sea. Here 
 the noble Othello, mad with imaginary wrongs, bends over the 
 bed of Desdemona, and kisses ere he kills the purest and best 
 of women. Here Juliet awakes too late for her fatal sleep, 
 and finds a dead lover where she had hoped to find a living 
 husband. Here poor Ophelia, garlanded with flowers, sinks 
 into her pool of death a, pool which might again and again 
 have been replenished from the tears which her story has 
 started. And here, once king of England, but now king of 
 the miserable in every clime once wise in everything but 
 love, now sublime in madness once wearing a royal coronet, 
 now crowned with the howling blackness of heaven above his 
 grey dishevelled locks once clad in purple, now wreathing 
 around him fantastic wreaths of flowers it is Lear who cries 
 aloud 
 
 " Ye heavens ! 
 
 If ye do love old men, if your sweet sway 
 Hallow obedience, if yourselves arc old, 
 Make it your cause avenge me of my daughters." 
 
 That Shakspeare is the greatest genius the world ever saw, 
 is acknowledged now by all sane men ; for even France has, 
 at last, after many a reluctant struggle, fallen into the pro- 
 cession of his admirers. But that Shakspeare also is out of 
 all sight and measure the finest artist that ever constructed a 
 poem or drama, is a less general, and yet a growing belief. 
 By no mechanical rules, indeed, can his works be squared. 
 But tried, as all great works should be, by principles of their 
 own principles which afterwards control and create their true 
 criticism (for it is the office of the critic to find out and ex- 
 pound the elements which mingled in the original inspiration 
 not to test them by a preconceived and arbitrary standard), 
 and when, especially, you remember the object contemplated 
 by the poet, that of mirroring the motly life of man, his works 
 appear as wonderful in execution as in conception. Their 
 very faults are needed to prove them human, otherwise their 
 excellencies would have classed them with the divine. 
 
 It is amusing to read the criticism which the eighteeth cen- 
 tury passed upon Shakspeare. They did not, in fact, know 
 very well what to make of him. They walked and talked
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 447 
 
 " about him. and about him." I am reminded of the aston- 
 ishment felt by the inhabitants of Lilliput at the discovery of 
 Gulliver, the " Man Mountain." One critic mounted on q, 
 ladder to get a nearer view of the phenomenon. Another 
 peered at him through a telescope. A third insisted on strap- 
 ping him down by the ligatures of art. A fourth measured 
 his size geometrically. But all agreed, that although much 
 larger, he was much coarser and uglier than themselves ; and 
 expressed keen regret that so much strength was not united 
 with more symmetry. He seemed to them a monster, not a 
 man. Voltaire, with the dauntless effrontery of a monkey, 
 called him an enormous dunghill, with a few pearls scattered 
 upon it unconsciously thereby re-enacting the part of Dog- 
 berry, and degrading from the monkey into the ass. 
 
 In our day all this is changed. Shakspeare no more seems 
 a large lucky barbarian, with wondrous powers growing wild 
 and straggling, but a wise man, wisely managing the most 
 magnificent gifts. His art whether you regard it as mould- 
 ing his individual periods, or as regulating his plays seems 
 quite as wonderful as his genius. Men criticise now even the 
 successful battles of Napoleon, and seek very learnedly to 
 show that he ought not to have gained them, and that by all 
 the rules of war it was very ridiculous in him to gain them. 
 But Shakspeare's great victories can stand every test, and are 
 seen not only to be triumphs of overwhelming genius, but of 
 consummate skill. 
 
 Ere glancing at his plays individually, I would, first of all, 
 try to divide them under various classes. The division which 
 occurs to me as the best, is that of his metaphysical, his imagi- 
 native, his meditative, his passionate, his historical, and his 
 comic dramas. His metaphysical plays are, properly speak- 
 ing, only two " Macbeth" and " King Lear." I call them 
 metaphysical, not in the common sense, but in Shakspeare's 
 own sense of the word. Lady Macbeth says 
 
 "Hie tliee hither, 
 
 That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, 
 And chastise with the valour of my tongue, 
 All that impedes thee from the golden round, 
 Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem, 
 To have thee crown'd withal."
 
 448 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 Metaphysics means here an agency beyond nature, and at the 
 same time evil. Now, in " Macbeth," it is this metaphysical 
 power which, through the witches, controls like destiny the 
 whole progress of the play. In " Lear," not only does des- 
 tiny brood over the whole, but the hell-dog of madness 
 which in Shakspeare is metaphysical power is let loose. In 
 some other plays, it is true, he introduces superhuman agents, 
 but in these two alone all the springs seem moved by a dark 
 unearthly power. By his imaginative plays, I mean those 
 where his principal object is to indulge that one stupendous 
 faculty of his. Such are the "Tempest" and the " Midsum- 
 mer Night's Dream." These are selections from his dream- 
 book. By his meditative plays, I mean those in which inci- 
 dent, passion, and poetry are made subservient to the work- 
 ings of subtle and restless reflection. Such are " Hamlet," 
 " Timon," and "Measure for Measure." His passionate 
 plays for example " Othello" and " Romeo and Juliet" 
 are designed to paiut, whether in simple or compound form, 
 whether stationary, progressive, or interchanging, the passions 
 of humanity. His historical and comic plays explain them- 
 selves. All his plays, indeed, have more or less of all those 
 qualities, "floating, mingling, interweaving." But I have 
 thus arranged them according to the master element and pur- 
 pose of each. 
 
 Let me select one of the different classes for rapid analysis. 
 And I feel myself, first of all, attracted toward the wierd 
 and haggard tragedy of " Macbeth." And, first, in this play 
 we must notice again its metaphysical character. A night- 
 mare from hell presses down all the story and all the charac- 
 ters. From the commencement of the race to its close, there 
 is a fiend the fiend sitting behind the rider, and at every 
 turn of the dark descending way you hear his suppressed or 
 his resounding laughter. All is out of nature. The ground 
 reels below you. The play is a caldron, mixed of such ingre- 
 dients as the Wierd Sisters, a blasted heath, an air-drawn dag- 
 ger, the blood-boltered ghost of a murdered man rising to sup 
 with his murderer, lamentings heard in the air, strange 
 screams of death, horses running wild and eating each other, 
 a desperate king asking counsel at the pit of Acheron, an 
 armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned and with a tree
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 449 
 
 in his hand, and eight kings rising from the abyss to answer 
 his questions, a moving forest, a sleep-walking and suicide 
 queen such are some of the ingredients which a cloudy hand 
 seems to shed into the broth, till it bubbles over with terror 
 and blood. It is not a tragedy, but a collection of tragedies 
 the death of Duncan being one, that of Banquo another, that 
 of Macduff's family another, that of Lady Macbeth another, 
 and that of Macbeth himself a fifth. And yet the master 
 has so managed them, by varying their character and circum- 
 stances, and relieving them by touches of imagination, that 
 there is no repletion we " sup," but not " full," of horrors. 
 By his so potent art, he brings it about, that his supernatural 
 and human persons never jostle. You never wonder at find- 
 ing them on the stage together ; they meet without a start, 
 they part without a shiver ; they obey one power, and you 
 feel, that not only does one touch of nature make the "whole 
 world kin," but that it can link the universe in one brother- 
 hood. It is the humanity which bursts out of every corner 
 and crevice of this drama, like grass and wild flowers from a 
 ruin, that reconciles you to its otherwise intolerable desolation. 
 This crowding in, and heaping up, distinguish the style, 
 sentiment, imagery, and characters, as well as the incidents 
 of " Macbeth." It is a short play, but the style is uniformly 
 massive the sentiment and imagery are rich to exuberance 
 the characters stand out, anild or terrible wholes, distinct from 
 each other as statues, even when dancing their wild dance to- 
 gether, to the music of Shakspeare's magical genius. Banquo, 
 Duncan, Macduff, and Malcolm, have all this distinct colossal 
 character. . But the most interesting persons in the drama are 
 the Witches, Macbeth, and his dark Ladye! What unique 
 creations the witches are ! Borderers between earth and hell, 
 they have most of the latter. Their faces are faded, and their 
 raiment withered in its fires. Their age seems supernatural ; 
 their ugliness, too, is not of the earth. A wild mirth mingles 
 with their malice ; they have a certain strange sympathy with 
 their victims ; they fancy them and toy with Macbeth while 
 destroying him, as a cat with a mouse. They do not ride on 
 broomsticks, nor even on winds ; their motions have a dream- 
 like rapidity and ease. They are connected, too, with a my- 
 thology of Shakspeare's own making, perfectly new and com
 
 450 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 pletc. They come and go, and you are left in total uncer- 
 tainty as to their nature, origin, and history, and must merely 
 say, " the air hath bubbles as the water hath. And these are 
 of them." Altogether, they are the most singular daughters 
 of Shakspeare ; and you wonder what Desdemona, Cordelia, 
 and Imogen would have thought of their Wierd Sisters. 
 
 Next comes the gloomy tyrant of Scotland. I figure him 
 as a tall, strong, dark-haire<l, dark-eyed, black-browed moun- 
 taineer, possessing originally a strong, if not a noble nature. 
 Ambition is dropped like hagseed by the fiends into his bosom, 
 and in the progress of its growth makes him first a murderer, 
 and ultimately a desperate madman. Not natively cruel, he 
 at last, from the necessities of his career, must dine, breakfast, 
 and supper on blood. Yet there is something to me exceed- 
 ingly pensive as well as sublime in all the actions and utter- 
 ances of Macbcth's despair. It is a powerful nature at bay, 
 and his language in its fierce sweep its lurid magnificence 
 its lofty yet melancholy tone its wild moralising, reminds us 
 of that which Milton puts into the mouth of the Prince of 
 Darkness. Hear t*he celebrated lines : 
 
 " Wherefore was that cry 1 
 
 Sey. The queen, my lord, is dead. 
 
 Mac. She should have died hereafter, 
 
 There would have been time for such a word 
 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow ; 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
 To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle, 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
 And then is heard no more ; it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing." 
 
 How terribly has despair concentrated and sharpened the 
 intellect which can, in the crisis of its fate, thus moralise. I 
 have sometimes compared Macbeth to Saul the unhappy King 
 of Israel. Like him he has risen from a lower station ; like 
 him, he has cemented his tottering throne by blood ; like him, 
 he is possessed by an evil spirit ; like him, at last he becomes 
 desperate. Macbeth hies to consult the Wierd Sisters ; Saul, 
 the Philistines being upon him David at a distance Samuel
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 45 1 
 
 dead God refusing to answer him by Urim, or prophets, or 
 dreams goes in his extremity and knocks at the door of Hell. 
 About Lady Macbeth there has been much needless critical 
 discussion. Some have painted her in colors supernaturally 
 dark and deformed, another and more hideous Hecate. Oth- 
 ers have, in defending, gone so far as to make her almost ami- 
 able ; who, I suppose, kissed as she killed the sleeping grooms. 
 I can coincide with neither of those notions if, indeed, the 
 latter have formed itself into a proper and solid notion. I 
 look upon Lady Macbeth as a female shape of her husband his 
 shadow in the other sex a specimen of the different effects 
 which the same passion produces upon different sexes. The bet- 
 ter the sex, the worse are the evil consequences, corruptio op- 
 tunics pessuma. Even as a female infidel, or a female de- 
 bauchee, is incomparably worse than a male in similar predic- 
 aments ; so with a female murderer one drained of all the 
 feelings of humanity by the prevalence of a bad ambition. 
 Foster speaks of Lady Macbeth's pure demoniac firmness 
 meaning to intimate that she was originally worse than her 
 husband, but, in reality, well describing the more total and 
 terrible induration which vice or cruelty produces in a female 
 bosom. It makes man a butcher, and woman a fiend. These 
 very terms, indeed, are applied through Malcolm to the pair : 
 
 " This dead butcher and his fiend-like queen." 
 
 words which, though uttered through the voice of an enemy, 
 seem intended to convey Shakspeare's own notion of their 
 ultimate characters : only Macbeth must be admitted to have 
 become an inspired butcher ere the close ! 
 
 And how thoroughly in keeping their different dooms ! 
 Macbeth, having sinned as a man, dies like a man, in broad 
 battle, with harness on his back, yielding rather to destiny 
 than to the foe. His lady, having offended against the nobler 
 code, and the higher nature of woman, has a different fate. 
 After long internal anguish, expressed not to the full, even by 
 her awful sleep, she perishes by her own hand. Woman, infe- 
 rior it may be to man in intellect, is so far superior in moral 
 qualities, that when these are violated, the pillars of human- 
 ity shake, and destruction, in one or other of its forms, must
 
 452 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 avenge the outrage committed against the very highest feelings 
 of human nature. 
 
 From his imaginative plays I select " The Tempest." I 
 said before, that in poetry there was no absolute origination. 
 If anything could induce me to recall this opinion, it were the 
 recollection of this marvellous play. It rises before us as the 
 New World to the eye of Columbus, fresh, peopled with 
 strange forms, glittering with dew, and radiant in sunshine. 
 As in " Macbeth," all is strange, but, unlike it, all is glad 
 aud genial. Its magic is mild and harmless. The lightnings 
 of this tempest affright, but they do not burn. The " Isle" is 
 full of noises, but they are most of them soothing and musical 
 
 "Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
 Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 
 Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices, 
 That if I waked after long sleep, 
 Will make me sleep again." 
 
 Here all the stern laws both of nature and of the world are 
 repealed. The very villains of the play are treated with len- 
 ity exposed countermined but not punished. And what 
 beauty shines in this lonely place from the face of Miranda, 
 the fairest, simplest, noblest female, ever made by genius. 
 And what aerial life is given to the scene, by the presence of 
 Ariel, that gay creature of the elements, light as the down of 
 the thistle, yet powerful as the thunderbolt, so " delicate 1 ' 1 in 
 the discharge of his mighty tasks, possessed at once of omnip- 
 otence and of tact, and whose songs have in them a snatch of 
 the sphere music. Hear him, in the prospect of liberty, 
 singing 
 
 " Where the bee sueks, there suck I ; 
 In a cowslip's bell I lie : 
 There I couch where owls do cry, 
 On the bat's back I do fly, 
 After summer, merily : 
 Merrily, merrily, shall I live now, 
 Under the blossom that hangs from the bough." 
 
 And what a savage seal-skin ornament to the whole is the 
 redoubted Caliban the misshapen Mooncalf rude, revenge- 
 ful, ignorant, lustful, and who yet caught in this enchanted 
 circle, and surrounded by the influences of this magic isle,
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 453 
 
 when sober speaics, and when drunk belches out the finest im~ 
 agination and poetry. 
 
 Surely Shakspeare, when he wrote the " Tempest," must 
 have been in the gladdest of al] his moods. I fancy him writ- 
 ing it on the first week of a beautiful spring, when nature 
 leaps at once out of the icy grasp of winter into summer's full 
 flush and glory, and when every heart leaps in unison, and 
 finds a new joy and life-like heaven suddenly infused into it, 
 and life, love, beauty, and joy, seem for a season to compose 
 all the categories of being. 
 
 " Hamlet" is Shakspeare's grand poetical puzzle, confess- 
 edly the most intellectual of all his dramas, and expresses 
 most fully, although by no means most clearly, the results of 
 his deep, subtle, and long-continued musings upon man, and 
 all the strange phenomena by which, in this little life of his, 
 he is surrounded. 
 
 Coleridge once remarked, that Shakspeare never seems to 
 have come to his full height, else he had not been a man, but 
 a monster. Had he written, we may add, ten plays equal to 
 " Hamlet," this monstrous growth had been complete. Its 
 wisdom, so deep and varied its calm mastery its profusion 
 of incidents and characters the skill with which the most con- 
 tradictory elements, from a ghost to a gravedigger, are harmon- 
 ised the philosophic self-possession, united to the burning 
 passion and the imaginative interest the combination of 
 breadth and length, of height and depth the mere size of the 
 canvas chosen the mystic uncertainty of the whole co-exist- 
 ing with singular clearness and finish in most of the parts 
 the rapidity of the transitions the unflagging spirit of the 
 dialogue, and the energy of the soliloquies all go to consti- 
 tute it a unique amidst a world of uniques, the most wonder- 
 ful of wonders, the most Shakspearian of Shakspeare's works. 
 Shakspeare in " Hamlet," seems growing into that somewhat 
 greater than himself, for which at present we want a name, 
 and was arrested, we might almost think, while becoming the 
 tertium quid between man and a superior crder of intelli- 
 gences. 
 
 It is the point of view maintained in " Hamlet" which 
 gives it its peculiar power as a meditative play. Hamlet is a 
 man loosened in a great measure from earth, although not
 
 454 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 utterly exasperated against it. He sees it not at the point of 
 the misanthrope, nor altogether at that of the maniac, but at 
 that of one who as half-way toward both these characters. His 
 sadness casts a moonlight of contemplation around all things, 
 which, as it shines, now twists them into odd and mirthful atti- 
 tudes, invests them now with shadowy horror, and now with 
 pleasing gloom. Man and woman have both ceased to delight 
 him, but have not ceased to be objects of eager interest, curi- 
 osity, and speculation. Driven by circumstances and tempera- 
 ment toward an insulated position, he pauses, in his full 
 retreat from mankind, to record his impressions of them. 
 Madame Roland, on her way to the scaffold, wished she had 
 been able to record the strange thoughts which were rising in 
 her mind. So Hamlet a wounded deer seeking the forest of 
 death, separated from men for ever has, in immortal solilo- 
 quies, in pungent lines, in wild and whirling words, or in 
 wilder laughter, uttered the strange ideas which he felt flock- 
 ing around his mind. Profound as wisdom itself are many of 
 these thoughts, and expressed in sentences of the most com- 
 pact significance. 
 
 But this characteristic extends to the whole play. Hamlet 
 has infected all the subordinate characters with his own wis- 
 dom. Old Polonius talks at times like another Dr. Johnson ; 
 Ophelia is far too wise for one so young; the king him- 
 self hiccups aphorisms ; and the ghost, while he says, ' Brief 
 must I be, I smell the hour of dawn," makes up for the bre- 
 vity by the pith of his speeches. Indeed, had " Hamlet" ap- 
 peared in this century, we should have said, that it was con- 
 structed on the principle of bringing in all the fine thoughts 
 which had been accumulating for years on the pages of its 
 author's note-book. But such a practice was, in Shakspcare's 
 day, unknown; and, in a writer of his rich and spontaneous 
 power, is unlikely, if not impossible. 
 
 In " Hamlet," strong distemperaturc of mind ministers the 
 principal part of the interest. It is so, too, with his- "Winter's 
 Tale," his " Othello," his " Timon of Athens," his " King 
 Lear," and his " Macbeth." These are. dreams of Shakspeare's 
 darker moods, for the smile of the " gentle Willy" disguised 
 often wild tumults of thought and feeling, and resembled 
 that red morning sunshine which introduces long days of tein-
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 455 
 
 pest. There was a vein in Shakspeare's heart running in a 
 deep and secret channel seldom disclosed, but which found now 
 and then a fearful vent in his impersonations of the jealous 
 lover, the maniac, the misanthrope, the murderous king, or the 
 wild, changeful, witty, exasperated, and more than half mad- 
 dened prince. In these he is thoroughly in earnest ; the large 
 iron which has pierced a large soul is boldly displayed ; and, 
 under a thin mask, you see the biggest of human hearts agita- 
 ted to agony, and the most sweet-blooded of men doing well to 
 be angry even unto death. It is terribly sublime to stand by 
 the shore of an angry Shakspeare, and to see him, like the 
 troubled sea, casting out a furious, yet rainbow-tinted spray, 
 against the hollowness and the abuses of human society, and 
 making sport, for a season, of man himself! Thus Timon 
 seems to fling his platters of hot water past his flatterers upon 
 humanity at large ; thus Lear shrieks up questions to the 
 heavens, which make the gloomy curtains of night to shiver ; 
 thus Macbeth, when not hewing at his enemies, is cutting, with 
 a like desperate hand, at the problems of human life and des- 
 tiny ; and thus Hamlet, while dafhcing on his wild erratic way 
 to his uncle's death, tramples on many an ancient saw, and 
 makes many a popular error to tremble below Ins uncontrolla- 
 ble feet. 
 
 This did not, as some might imagine, arise from the neces- 
 sity of fully impersonating certain eccentric characters ; for, 
 first, why did he create or select such characters at all ? and, 
 secondly, could he have presented them with such effect with- 
 out profound sympathy for them ? Shakspeare was not a 
 mere mimic or mocking-bird : he spoke out of the abundance 
 of a universal heart, he reproduced himself in many of his 
 characters, and his frequent choice and con amore treatment of 
 dark and morbid subjects, seem conclusively to show that there 
 was a fever somewhere in his own system, although it has often 
 been identified, and that, on the whole, justly, with all that is 
 genial and gentle. It was, indeed, a priori impossible that a 
 being who formed the microcosm and mirror of humanity 
 should not reflect its shadows as well as its lights ; and that, 
 as the representative of man, he should not pass through man's 
 hour of darkness. 
 
 There is no play in all Shakspeare's works, if we, perhaps,
 
 456 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 except " Timon" and " Lear," where the interest and power 
 are so inextricably interwoven with the main character as in 
 " Hamlet." He is the play. Compared to him, the other 
 characters seem shadows as unsubstantial as his father's ghost. 
 That ghost himself is hardly so interesting as his son. Like 
 shadows swaying to the motions of their substances, do the 
 various characters obey Hamlet's changeful whims, yield to 
 his tempestuous rage, and echo his wild wisdom. Never was 
 the overbearing influence of one driven on the wind of destiny, 
 over idle and commonplace personages, more powerfully dis- 
 played. Truly, the slightest whisper of real despair is thun- 
 der, its merest touch is iron, its breath an irresistible tem- 
 pest ! It will bespeak a visiter from the other world, 
 " although all hell should yawn;" it will make "a ghost" of 
 any one who dares to stand in its fierce way. 
 
 Many critics, while seeking to unravel the mystery of Ham- 
 let's character, have omitted to notice what is the main moral 
 and purpose of the play that is, unquestionably, to show the 
 ramified wretchedness springing from crime. This it is which 
 is the root of all the mischief and calamity in the play. This 
 disturbs the grave, embroils the state, infuriates and half de- 
 ranges the great soul of Hamlet, and is avenged by the suc- 
 cessive deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet, the king, the 
 queen, and Laertes. This object of the poet is thoroughly 
 gained. Nemesis is left sitting upon heaps of carcasses, and 
 purveying with an iron smile the manifold and mingling 
 streams of blood, which are all traceable to the one murder in 
 the garden. And the moral is crime never speaks without 
 being answered by echo upon echo from the rocks of eternal 
 justice ; and, in the ruin which follows, the innocent are often 
 as deeply involved as the guilty. 
 
 Shakspeare, no doubt, puts into the mouths of his charac- 
 ters words which might seem to accuse Providence. Ham- 
 let, in one of his last speeches, calls it a " harsh world." 
 And Horatio's language, when, in summing up the whole event- 
 ful history, he speaks of 
 
 " Cruel, bloody, and unnatural acts, 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, 
 Purposes mistook,"
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 457 
 
 is hardly that of profound faith. But both are speaking from 
 partial and one-sided points of view; whereas the spirit of the 
 whole play, and many of the words, go to teach us that in 
 everything there is a purpose, that Providence " commends the 
 poisoned chalice" to the lips of those who have mingled it, 
 and that the inequalities and gaps which do exist in the ad- 
 ministration of human affairs are but the open mouths of a 
 general cry for a scene of more perfect retribution in another 
 world 
 
 But two deductions from the catastrophe of Hamlet seem 
 possible : the one, that this world is a mere atheistic hubbub, 
 the scene of innumerable wrongs wrongs, too, mixing and 
 intertwining for evermore, and which are never to be redressed ; 
 or that there must be a future state. We advise any one who 
 is doubtful as to which of these conclusions Shakspeare wished 
 us to draw, first to ponder the impression left on his own 
 mind as he rises from the perusal of the play, for that, let him 
 depend on it, is the impression the poet meant to leave ; and 
 then to read carefully Hamlet's several soliloquies, and the 
 soliloquy of the miserable king. In these, and throughout 
 the play, the power of conscience, the supremacy of the 
 " canons of the Eternal," the existence of a future world, and 
 the influence of prayer with Grod, are recognised in language 
 so decided, and in a manner so sincere, that we are led, and 
 many may be driven, to the conviction, that this most profound 
 of dramas this broadest of all panoramic views of human 
 nature, and life, and destiny a view caught on the shudder- 
 ing brink and from the fearful angle of all but madness is 
 not a libel upon the Divine Author like the " Cenci," nor a 
 paean sheathed in blasphemy like the " Faust " but that, in 
 spirit, tone, and language, it doth 
 
 " Assert Eternal Providence, 
 And vindicate the ways of God to man." 
 
 And if " Hamlet" explains not, and if it even deepens in some 
 measure the mystery of human guilt, it at the same time pro- 
 claims, trumpet-tongued, the clear certainty of present punish- 
 ment, and the strong probability of future retribution. 
 
 What Shakspeare's theological creed was, wo do not profess 
 to know. An author recently maintains that he was an ideal
 
 458 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 pantheist, and quotes in proof of it his words iii " Macbeth" - 
 " we are such stuff as dreams are made of," and the famous 
 finale of Prospero. But Prospero's speech is merely a para- 
 phrase of the Scripture statement " all these things shall be 
 dissolved." And Macbeth's words are more in keeping with 
 the moment in his history, when, in the prospect of death, and 
 in the madness of desperate guilt, all things were becoming 
 unreal and swimming around his vision, than they are expres- 
 sive of his Creator's calm and settled opinion. The murderer 
 is hunted back into the refuge of atheism, and sleepless him- 
 self, would seek to identify sleep and death. " Our little life 
 is rounded with a sleep." As if he said, with a ghastly 
 smile " sleep has forsaken me, and thus rendered my life a 
 hideous fragment, a yawning chasm ; but death cannot so fly : 
 it must close and complete my career." But he who speaks 
 of " sleep" with Macbeth, speaks also of " dreams" with 
 Hamlet. Whatever Shakspeare's notion of religious matters, 
 however, might be, it is interesting to know that his theory of 
 morals, as it may be gathered from his greater and more 
 serious plays, is essentially sound. This may not appear to 
 some a matter of much consequence ; but, as it is pleasing 
 now and then to turn from commonplace clocks, and to learn 
 the hour from a sun-dial, so we like sometimes to look away 
 from systems of moral philosophy, to the living and sunlit 
 tables of this great master of human nature. To others, 
 again, his deliverances on such subjects may possibly seem 
 oracular, as from a new Dodona seated among the oaks of the 
 Avon. 
 
 The intellectual and poetical qualities of Shakspeare find 
 in " Hamlet" ample scope for display. It is the longest of 
 his dramas, and at the same time, the richest. The sun of 
 semi-madness, vertical above, has produced a wild and tropical 
 luxuriance of imagery. Every sentence is starred. No play 
 of his contains at once so much sense and so much nonsense, 
 so much bombastic verse and so much dense and pointed 
 prose, so much extravagant license of fancy and so much pro- 
 found insight. And so broad is the canvas, that there is ample 
 room in it for all those extremes : they never interfere or jos- 
 tle; the profoundest practical philosophy and the wildest 
 raving here meet together : " vice and a ridiant angel" em-
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 459 
 
 brace each other; and Billinsgate like that of a drab, and 
 eloquence and apprehension like that of a god, are united, if 
 not reconciled. It is this exceeding comprehension of view 
 which has rendered " Hamlet" the true " Psalm of Life," ex- 
 hibiting it, not partially, or by selection, or in colors, but calo- 
 typing it calmly and sternly as a mystic, fantastical, but real 
 whole. 
 
 Across this broad picture, Shakspeare has caused to shoot one 
 ray from the unseen world. We refer, of course, to the ghost. 
 There is nothing which shows more the delicate and masterly 
 handling of a Creator (who loves, understands, and treats ten- 
 derly his own children, not, like a plagiarist and stepfather, 
 ignorantly and despitefully uses them) than the management 
 of this awful visiter. The words " horribly beautiful" are 
 applicable to him, and to him alone. There is not one vulgar 
 element about him. He is shall we say ? a perfect gentle- 
 man, and has a " courteous action." One desire, that of 
 revenge, burns in his bosom, but it burns rather against the 
 crime than the criminal. He leaves his wife " to Heaven, and 
 to the thorns" in her own breast. In his last appearance, 
 while the queen is affrighted at Hamlet's ecstacy, he tells him, 
 in compassion, to " step between her and her fighting soul." 
 And how admirably has Shakspeare caught the true shape, 
 form, and figure of a spiritual being, such as we at present con- 
 ceive of it! He is not a vague vapour: he is "clad in com- 
 plete steel;" his beard is visible, "a sable silvered;" his 
 " beaver is up;" his countenance is "very pale," but "more 
 in sorrow than in anger;" he has come from literal "fire," 
 and his thoughts, feelings, and language, resemble those of one 
 still in the flesh. And yet, around the steel, and the beaver, 
 and the beard, there hangs a haze of spiritual mystery and 
 terror, which lends and receives effect from the materialism of 
 the apparition. He " vanishes at the crowing of the cock." 
 He passes, like heat, through the solid ground. Shakspeare 
 has thus avoided the extremes of representing a ghost in too 
 shadowy or too gross a light of spinning this grisly thread 
 too thickly or too thin to homespun or to gossamer. His 
 shadow is something of a substance, and his substance is some- 
 thing of a shade. 
 
 And such a nondescript form, too, appears at first Hamlet
 
 460 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHS. 
 
 himself a ghost among men, the phantom son of a phantom 
 sire, neither a hero nor a coward, neither right flesh and blood 
 nor a mere abstraction, armed, like Satan, " with what seemed 
 both sword and shield," and yet, like him, shrinking away, at 
 times, from the contest. He stands between the living and the 
 dead, and seems to disdain all critical classification. He may 
 be compared to one of those shifting shapes, met with in 
 water, mist, or cloud, which appears, at one angle and from one 
 distance, a palace; at another, a temple; at a third, a mis- 
 shapen monster ; and at a fourth, a man. Thus, Hamlet, at 
 one time, and to one observer, seems the bravest and strongest 
 of men; anon, the weakest and most cowardly : at one time, 
 devout and rational ; at another, a fierce and profane babbler : 
 now, an ardent lover ; and now, a heartless insulter of the 
 woman be had professed to love : now, prompt in action to 
 rashness; and now, slow to indolence and fatuity: now, a 
 counterfeit of madness ; and now, really insane : now, the most 
 cunning, and now the most careless, of men : now a rogue, 
 now a fool, now a wise man, and now a heterogeneous com- 
 pound of all three. Twenty theories have been propounded 
 of him ; all have been plausibly based on particular points in 
 his character; and yet no theory hitherto is entirely, or even 
 approximately, complete; each is serviceable chiefly in blow- 
 ing out the one immediately before itself: and still Hamlet 
 seems, as he stands, shrouded and shifting to every breath, to 
 say to his critics, as he said to Hosincrantz and Guildenstern 
 "You would play upon me; you would seem to know my 
 stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you 
 would sound me from the lowest note to the top of my com- 
 pass ; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little 
 organ, yet cannot you make it speak." 
 
 We happen at present to have beside us only two of those 
 twenty " soundings," and beg leave to say something of them, 
 ere propounding our own view. The first is that of Dr. John- 
 son. It comes, as Hamlet would say, " trippingly off the 
 tongue," and is written with more than his usual careless rotun- 
 dity and lazy elaboration of style. It commences by prais- 
 ing, very properly, the " variety" of the play. But what does 
 the doctor mean by the " merriment" it excites ? Surely it is 
 " very tragical mirth." Even in the laughter of this drama,
 
 SHAKSPEARE, 46 1 
 
 its heart is sad. Hamlet and a gravedigger are the two jest- 
 ers ! And while the wit of the one is wild, reckless, turbu- 
 lent, like the glee of the damned, that of the other has a death- 
 rattle in its throat, and, returned to us on the echoes of the 
 grave, produces an unspeakably dreary effect. Dr. Johnson 
 adds, " The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth." 
 This we question. At least us it has always impressed with a 
 feeling of melancholy. Indeed, the lighter parts of the play, 
 consisting more of wit than of humor, excite rather wonder 
 at the sharp turns, lively sallies, and fierce retorts of a stung 
 spirit, than any broad and genial laughter. He says, that 
 " some scenes neither forward nor retard the action." This 
 we may grant ; but are not these in fine keeping with the 
 " slow, reluctant" delay of the hero ? Shakspeare must lin- 
 ger, in sympathy with Hamlet ! Nay, this was sometimes, as 
 we have seen, the manner of the poet. An inspired loiterer, 
 he now and then leans over some beautiful stream, or pauses 
 at some fine point of prospect, or strikes into some brief by- 
 way of humor, or character, o-r pathos, even when his day's 
 journey, and the day itself, are both drawing to a close. For 
 why ? He was a man, not a railway machine ; and, besides, 
 as his soul had its habitual dwelling in summer, his days were 
 all long. 
 
 He says, that " Hamlet was an instrument rather than an 
 agent," but suggests no reason why Shakspeare has made him 
 so. He charges, finally, the play with a lack of poetical jus- 
 tice and poetical probability. The apparition left the regions 
 of the dead to little purpose. The revenge which he demands 
 is not obtained but by the death of him who is required to 
 take it ; and the gratification which would arise from the de- 
 struction of a usurper and a murderer is abated by the death 
 of Ophelia, the young and beautiful, the harmless and the 
 pious." But, first, the apparition's object was gained the 
 ghost did not leave the grave in vain the murderer was de- 
 tected and died ; and, secondly, Shakspeare probably consult- 
 ed something higher than our " gratification." He sought, 
 probably, the broad moral purpose we have already expressed ; 
 and, if questioned as to poetical justice, might have replied in 
 words similar to those of Scott perhaps the noblest passage 
 in a moral point of view, in all that writer's works " A cha-
 
 462 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 racter of a lofty stamp is degraded, rather than exalted, by an 
 attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is 
 not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of 
 suffering merit, and it is a dangerous and fatal doctrine, that 
 rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied 
 with, or adequately rewarded by, the gratification of our pas- 
 sions, or attainment of our wishes. In a word, if a virtuous 
 and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, 
 greatness, or rank, the reader will be apt to say, ' Verily, vir- 
 tue has had its reward.' But a glance at the great picture of 
 life will show that duty is seldom thus remunerated." And 
 what is true of the apportionment of the gifts of Providence 
 is true also of its evils. It were degrading to a lofty charac- 
 ter, net only to enrich it with uniform good fortune, but to 
 give it an unnatural insulation from the great and wide ruin 
 which is produced by guilt. 
 
 We pass to Goethe's far more celebrated account of " Ham 
 let," of which the " Edinburgh Review 1 ' declares, that there 
 is " nothing so good in all our own commentators nothing at 
 once so poetical, so feeling, and so just." After a beautiful 
 picture of Hamlet's original character, and a paraphrase of 
 his story, Groethe says, " to me it is clear that Shakspeare 
 meant to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a 
 soul unfit for the performance of it." And then follows the 
 well-known and exquisitely-beautiful figure " An oak-tree is 
 planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant 
 flowers in its bosom : the roots expand, the jar is shivered. 
 A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the 
 strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burdcu 
 which it cannot bear, and must not cast away." This is very 
 fine, but is it true? .Does it open the lock of Hamlet's 
 character ? Does it account foi all, or for the most, of the 
 mysteries connected with it ? 
 
 Now, we do not find any proofs that Hamlet was peculiarly 
 weak of nerve ; nay, we find many proofs to the contrary. 
 Did he not front his father's spirit in arms ? Did he not 
 rebuke his mother, and pink old Polonius, mistaking him for 
 his uncle ? Did he not bravely confront Laertes, and at last 
 stab the king ? These actions and others seem to prove him 
 endowed with the " Nemean lion's nerve;" and, although he
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 463 
 
 inore than once charges himself with cowardice, yet this occurs 
 always in passages where he seems to be beating about in 
 search of causes for his conduct, and to be lashing himself, by 
 imaginary arguments, into rage. Nor does Shakspeare wish 
 to represent him as peculiarly delicate and tender. He seems 
 rather an oak than a flower-jar, though it be an oak shaken by 
 the wind. No namby-pamby sentimentalist had he ever been, 
 but a brave, strong man, whose melancholy and exasperation 
 bring forth, in tumultuous profusion, the excessive riches of 
 a prematurely thoughtful and very powerful soul. His is 
 manifestly no weakly, elegant and graceful nature unhinged ; 
 .but a strong, rarely-gifted, and bold spirit, in anguish, uncer- 
 tainty, aberration, and despair. Though there were no other 
 evidence, the vigor and tact discovered in the trick passed 
 upon Rosincrantz and Guildenstern, in sending them to be 
 executed instead of himself, prove that he was an energetic 
 and not a feeble character. So that, although G-oethe has ex- 
 tracted " music" from this strange instrument, he has not 
 " plucked out" the heart of its mystery. 
 
 Let us now come to state our own impressions, which we do 
 not propound as dogmatically certain, but simply as highly 
 probable. 
 
 First, then, we do not think that Shakspeare ever intended 
 Hamlet for a thoroughly consistent and regular character, 
 swayed always by intelligible motives, and adjusted, in his 
 actions, either according to fixed principles or to steady cur- 
 rents of passion. He meant to show us a mind of great gene- 
 ral powers and warm passions, liable to every species of whim 
 and caprice, and at last, through the force of melancholy and 
 mingling circumstances, partially unhinged aware, however, 
 of this, and with astuteness enough to turn the real aberration 
 into a means for supplying evidence for the existence of the 
 assumed. Such a nondescript being, hovering between the 
 worlds of reality and insane dream, Shakspeare chose, that he 
 might survey mankind from a new and strange angle, and 
 through a medium which should bring out more forcibly the 
 mysterious contrasts of human life. Hamlet is a being all 
 but loosened from humanity, whom we see bursting tie after 
 tie which had bound him to his kind, and surveying them at 
 last almost from an ideal altitude. He is a " chartered liber-
 
 464 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 tine," with method in his madness, and with madness in his 
 method, and who, whether he rushes or pauses on his uncertain 
 path now with the rush of the cataract above, and now with 
 the pause of the deep pool below is sure to dash a strong 
 and lawless light upon the subjects or the persons he encoun- 
 ters. He becomes thus a quaint and mighty mask, from 
 behind which Shakspeare speaks out sentiments which he could 
 not else have so freely disclosed ; and shall we say ? the 
 great dramatist has used Hamlet as Turpin did Black Bess 
 he has drenched him with the wine of demi-derangernent, and 
 then accomplished his perilous ride. 
 
 Secondly, Hamlet's conduct is entirely what might have 
 been expected from the construction of his mind, and the effect 
 sad circumstances have produced upon him. He is " every- 
 thing by turns, and nothing long." No deep passion of any 
 kind can root itself in his mind, although a hundred passions 
 pass and repass, and rage and subside within his soul. He 
 well speaks of himself as consisting of divers "parts." His 
 very convictions are not profound. He at first implicitly be- 
 lieves the word of the ghost as to his uncle's guilt, but after- 
 wards his belief falters, and he has to be re-assured by the mat- 
 ter of the play. The mask of total madness he snatches up, 
 wears con-amore for awhile, and then wearies of it, and drops 
 it, and then resumes it again. This, too, explains his conduct 
 to Ophelia. He loves her ; but his love, or its expression, 
 yields for a time to the paroxysm of the passions excited by 
 the ghost; it returns, like a demon who had been dismissed, in 
 sevenfold force, and he rushes into her apartment, and goes 
 through antics, partly to sustain his assumed character of 
 madness, but principally as the wild outcome of real love ; his 
 passion is again overlaid by the whirling current of events, but 
 breaks out at last, like a furnace, at her grave. So, too, with 
 his desire for vengeance on his father's murderer. It has 
 lighted, not as Goethe has it, on a feeble, but on a flighty 
 nature ; the oak is not in a tiny jar, it is planted in a broad 
 field, but a field wher3 there is not much " depth of earth," 
 and where many other trees growing beside draw a portion 
 of the depth away. It is not the want of nerve : he could kill 
 the king, in a momentary impulse, as he killed Polonius, but 
 he cannot form or pursue any strong and steady plan for his
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 465 
 
 destruction ; if that plan, at least, required time for its de 
 velopment. Other feelings, too, interfere with its accomplish 
 ment. There is at times in his mind a reluctance to the task 
 as a work of butchery the butchery of an uncle and a step- 
 father. Regard for his mother's feelings, and the consequences 
 to result on her, is no stranger to his soul, and serves to cool 
 his ardor and to excuse his delay. The desire of vengeance 
 never, in short, becomes the main and master passions of his 
 mind, and this, simply, because that powerful, but morbid and 
 jangled mind is incapable of a master passion, and of the ex- 
 ecution of a fixed purpose. One consistency only is there in 
 Hamlet's character, that of subtle and poetic intellect. This 
 penetrates with its searching light every nook and corner of 
 the play, follows him through all the windings of his course, 
 unites in some measure the contradictory passions which roll 
 and fluctuate around him, inspirits his language into eloquence, 
 wit, and wisdom, and makes him the facile princeps of Shak- 
 speare's fools those illustrious personages who " never say a 
 foolish thing, and never do a wise one." Such a " foremost 
 fool of all this world," with brilliant powers, uncertain will, 
 and " scattery" purposes and passions, is Hamlet the Dane, as, 
 at least, he appears to us after much and careful pondering of 
 his character. Thow into the crucible strong intellect, vivid 
 fancy, irregular will, fluctuating courage, iupulsive and incon- 
 sistent feelings, an excitable heart, a melancholy temperament, 
 and add to these the damaging, weakening, yet infuriating in- 
 fluences of a father's murder, a mother's marriage, the visit of 
 a ghost, an unsettled passion for Ophelia, the meddling inter- 
 ference of a weak father-in-law, the spectacle of a disturbed 
 and degraded country, the feeling of his own incapacity for 
 fixed resolve or permanent energy of passion, and from this 
 wierd mixture there will come out a Hamlet, in all his strength 
 and weakness, wisdom and folly, energetic commencements and 
 lame and impotent conclusions, insane and aimless fury, and 
 strong, sudden gleams of resolution and valor, vain and sound- 
 ing bombast, and clear, terse, and inspired eloquence. What 
 weakness he has does not lie so much in any one part of his 
 mind, as in the want of proper management and grasp of his 
 powers as a whole. Partially insane he is, but his insanity is 
 the reverse of a monomania ; it arises from the confusion and
 
 466 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 too rapid succession of moods and feelings, which ho cannot 
 consolidate into a whole, or press into one strong, narrow cur 
 rent, running on to his purpose. 
 
 " As tho Pontick sea 
 To the Propontick and the Hellespont." 
 
 Is it too much to call him a sublime and sententious, an 
 earnest and eloquent fool ? 
 
 Yet it is clear that Shakspeare had a peculiar and profound 
 sympathy with Hamlet. He lingers beside him long. He 
 lavishes all his wealth upon him. He seems to love to look 
 out at mankind through the strange window of those wild eyes. 
 Was this because Hamlet was (as is generally supposed) the 
 child of his mature age, or was it from a certain fellow-feeling? 
 Hamlet is what Shakspeare would have been, had he ever been 
 thoroughly soured, and had that magnificent head of his ever 
 begun to reel and totter. Had Shakspeare, like Swift, John- 
 son, Byron, and Scott, a fear of " dying a top," and has he 
 shot out that awful fear into his impersonation of the Prince 
 of Denmark, and thus relieved and carried it off? 
 
 The general moral of the play has been stated above ; but 
 there are besides numberless minor morals, as well as separate 
 beauties, scattered in golden sentences throughout, which must 
 be familiar to all. There is the picture of man, in his strange 
 contrarieties of wormhood and godhood his head of gold, 
 and his feet of miry clay compacted out of all contradic- 
 tions ; and who even as the Andes include in their sweep, 
 from the ocean below to the hoary head of Chimborazo above, 
 all climates, seasons, and productions of earth touches, as 
 he ascends, all conditions of being, and runs parallel to all the 
 gradations of the universe. Pascal, Herbert, Young and 
 Pope, have written in emulous and eloquent antithesis on the 
 same theme ; but they all pale before this one expression of 
 Hamlet's (after a matchless enumeration of man's noble quali- 
 ties) " this quintessence of dust}' 1 Where in literature such 
 an anti-climax ? such a jerking down of proud pretensions ; 
 such two worlds of description and satire condensed into two 
 words ? This, and many other expressions here, and in other 
 of Shakspeare's works, prove what an accusing spirit, what a 
 myriad-armed and tongued misanthrope, he might have been .'
 
 4G7 
 
 But a soured Shakspeare is a thought difficult to be enter- 
 tained. 
 
 The two famous soliloquies, again, seem " God's canon 
 against self-slaughter" versified. They have, we doubt not, 
 deterred many a rash spirit from suicide. If they do not op- 
 pose it upon the highest ground, they do it on one generally 
 intelligible and powerful. The prayer of the guilty king is 
 worth a thousand dull homilies on the subject. It points to 
 the everlasting distinction between a sinful, and a sinner's 
 prayer. The advice of Polonius to his son is full of practical 
 wisdom ; but owing to the contrast with the frozen stupidity 
 of the man from whom it comes, reminds us of a half-melted 
 and streaming mass of ice. The irony and quaint moral which 
 gild the skull in the graveyard, till it glares and chatters, are 
 in keeping with the wild story and wilder characters, but are 
 not devoid of edifying instruction to those who can surpass 
 the first shudder of disgust. And the character and fate of 
 Ophelia convey, in the most plaintive manner, a still tenderer 
 and more delicate lesson. 
 
 Surely Shakspeare was the greatest and most humane of all 
 mere moralists. Seeing more clearly than mere man ever saw 
 into the evils of human nature and the corruptions of society, 
 into the natural weakness and the acquired vice of man, he 
 can yet love, pity, forget his anger, and clothe him in the mel- 
 low light of his genius, like the sun, who, in certain days of 
 peculiar balm and beauty, seems to shed his beams, like an 
 amnesty, upon all beings. But we must not forget that Shak- 
 speare is no pattern for us that this very generosity of heart 
 seems, we fear, to have blinded him to the special character 
 and adaptations of the Christian scheme and that we, as 
 Christians, and not mere philanthropists, are bound, while 
 pitying the guilty, to do indignant and incessant battle against 
 the giant Something, for which sin is but a feeble name, which 
 slew our Saviour, and which has all but ruined our race. 
 
 I have dwelt so long on "Hamlet," that I must now hurry 
 to a close. 
 
 With regard to Shakspeare's critics and commentators I 
 will not say, with Hazlitt, that " if you would see the great- 
 ness of human genius, read Shakspeare ; if you would see the 
 smallness of human learning, read his commentators." But
 
 468 MISCELLANEOUS SKETCHES. 
 
 I will say, that I have learned more of Shakspeare from Haz- 
 litt, than from any other quarter, except from Shakspeare 
 himself. 
 
 In preparing these cursory remarks upon Shakspeare, I have 
 studiously avoided re-reading any works upon the subject. I 
 may, however, recommend to those who wish to sail out farther 
 upon this great ocean Johnson's " Preface to Shakspeare" 
 (excellent so far as it goes), Hazlitt's " Characters of Shak- 
 speare's Plays," Schlegel's " Lectures on Dramtic Litera- 
 ture," Mrs. Jameson on Shakspeare's Female Characters, and 
 an admirable series which appeared in " Blackwood," entitled 
 " Shakspeare in Germany." 
 
 I close by claiming a high place for this poet among the 
 benefactors of this kind. With august philanthropists, How- 
 ard or Wilberforce, we may not class him. Into that seventh 
 heaven of invention, where Milton and Dante dwelt, he came 
 only sometimes, not for want of power, but because his sphere 
 was a wider and larger one he had business to do in the veins 
 of the earth as well as in the azure depth of air. But if 
 force of genius sympathy with every form and every feeling of 
 humanity the heart of a man united to the imagnation of a 
 poet, and wielding the Briarean hand of a demigod if the writ- 
 ing of thirty-two plays which are coloring to this hour the litera- 
 ture of the world if the diffusion of harmless happiness in 
 immeasurable quantity if the stimulation of innumerable 
 minds if the promotion of the spirit of charity and of uni- 
 versal brotherhood if these constitute for mortal man titles 
 to the name of benefactor, and to that praise which ceases not 
 with the sun, but expands into immortality, the name and the 
 praise must support the throne which Shakspeare has estab- 
 lished over the minds of the inhabitants of an earth which 
 may be known in other parts of the universe as " Shakspeare's 
 world.'
 
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 We are confident there are thousands in our land who would delight in this volume of 
 poems by the estimable and devoted wife of one of the greatest men of modem time.- . 
 
 IRVING'S ONE THOISAND RECEIPTS; or Modern and Domestic 
 
 Cookery. A complete direction for carving, pastry, cooking, preserving, pickliug, making 
 wines, jellies, &c., &c. With a complete table of Cooking for Invalids. By LUCRCTIA IUVIXG. 
 216 pp. 1-mo. Muslin. Price 75 cents. 
 
 TIIE PASTOR'S HANDBOOK. Comprising Selections of Scripture, 
 arranged for various occasions of Official Duty; Select Formulas for the Marriage Cere 
 mony, &c.; Rules of Order for Churches, Ecclesiastical and other Deliberate Assemblies, 
 and Tables fur Statistical Record. By Kev. W. W. EVEKTS. 60 cents. 
 
 The following recommendations from ministers of different denominations, set forth the 
 character and claims of the book : 
 
 " It contains Scriptures arranged for occasions of official duty, as funerals, the visitation 
 of the sick, the celebration of marriage ; also several marriage forms suited to various modes 
 of the celebration of that institution; also devotional excerpta for the celebration of marriage, 
 for funerals, and for the Lord's Supper ; also rules for professional life and services, com- 
 piled from distinguished divines ; also rules of order for ecclesiastical and other deliberative 
 assemblies, together with various ecclesiastical formulas ; and finally, several tables by 
 which may be preserved from year to year a statistical record of professional services, of the 
 history of churches, of religious denominations, and of Christian missions. Though repu- 
 diating cumbersome and restrictive form books, we believe that a book of this kind has long 
 been felt to be a desideratum amongst Protestant clergymen of all denominations, and are 
 persuaded that this volume, so comprehensive in plan, so various in matter, pointing out 
 rules of professional service approved by the most eminent divines, and withal gotten up in 
 a. form and binding so convenient for use, will be found exceedingly serviceable to pastors 
 generally. We cordially commend it to the attention of all, and especially young clergymen. 
 Thomas H. Skinner, D. 1). B. T. Welch, D. D. 
 
 George Peck, D. 1). John Cowling, D. D. 
 
 G. B. Cheever, D. D. Noah Levings. D. D. 
 
 William K. Williams, D. D. Rev. H. Davis, 
 
 Chas. Pitman, D. D. Rev. J. L. Hodge, 
 
 S. H. Cone, D. D. Rev. Edward lathrop, 
 
 Thomas De Witt, D. D. Rev. 0. B. Judd." 
 
 THE POWER OF ILLUSTRATION; An Element of Success in Preach- 
 ing and Teaching. By JOHN DOWUNG, D.D. 18mo. 30 cents. 
 
 ' ' This is an admirable book, though small, and treats of an highly important subject, 
 which yet has never, so far as we are aware, been handled before in a distinct treatise- 
 Would that tl">re were some law to compel every candidate for the ministry to possess this 
 little volume ! We imagine that there would be less complaint of the dullness of sermons.' 1 
 Boston Recorder. 
 
 "We would recommend its careful perusal, not only to every clergyman and Sabbath- 
 School teacher, but to every public speaker. No one, we think, can give it a reading with- 
 out being convinced of the great advantage, not to say, necessity, of illustration, in order 
 to ensure success in teaching or preaching. 
 
 " The writer attempts to I. Explain the science of illustration, and specify the principal 
 classes of analogies which it employs, with examples for the use of each. II. What is meant 
 by the power of illustration, and gives some directions for its successful cultivation and im- 
 provement." Alabama Baptist. 
 
 " Modifications have been made for the general benefit, and to adapt the principle to 
 teachers of every gradation, including especially those of the Sabbath School. The author 
 has done a good service, by furnishing the pregnant hints and significant examples, ivhici. 
 will raise thought and incite to eifort, to make the acquisition of the power of illustration. " 
 Clt.risl.ian Mirror. 
 
 ' ' Dr. Dowling treats his subject con amore, and we hope, for goodness' sake, ho may suc- 
 ceed in convincing a great many clergymen and other public speakers." Christian hiquirer 
 
 " Every Minister of Jesus Christ's Gospel should be possessed of this work. It is the most 
 complete instructor of parabolical composition that we have ever studied." BaylUlTdctjraph. 
 
 X
 
 Books Published ly Sheldon, Lamport $ Blaktman. 
 
 HOMOEOPATHIC PRACTICE OF MEDICINE. A book for the Family. 
 
 By XI Aims FRKUfiii, M.D.. Embracing the history, diagnosis, and tivntmcnt of diseases in 
 general; including those peculiar to females, and the managemor. of children. 1-mo. 
 Muslin, $1 50. Svo, $'2. 
 
 Kia'OJiJiK.xn.vTKO's FKOM SKVKIUL OF OUK MOST nisn.vGrisiiKD rjucrmo.vKss, SOME OF WHOM ARB 
 AISO AUTHORS. 
 
 From f. Vanderlurg, M. D. 
 
 New Haven, .rjin. 1'Jtli. 
 " I doubt not the history of medical science will record the influence of'your work through 
 
 centuries to come." 
 
 From Alfred Freeman, M.D., 48 East Nineteenth Street.. 
 
 New York, Pec. 2?, 1853. 
 
 ' ; I'r. M. Freligh, I have examined your volume on ' The Homoeopathic Practice of Medi- 
 cine,' with great pleasure and satisfaction. It is well adapted to serve the three-fold pur- 
 pose intended." 
 
 From C. C. Kiersted, M.D., 145 West Thirty-fourth Street. 
 
 " I regard it better adapted to the wants of the student than any other extant. Almost 
 indispensable to the young practitioner, and better calculated for the laity, than any other 
 work with which I am acquainted." 
 
 From G. Lorillard, M. D. 
 
 Bhinebeck, Dec. 15, 1853. 
 
 " Dr. Freligh has succeeded admirably ill carrying out the design of his Homoeopathic 
 Practice of Medicine. It is truly a text-book for the student, ' a concise book of reference 
 for the profession;' and by its simplicity, setting forth the various conditions of disease, 
 and the adaptation of the remedies, place it foremost as a domestic guide." 
 
 From R, Barllett, M. D. Harlem, Dec 10, 1853 
 
 "I regard 'Homoeopathic Practice,' by Dr. M. Freligh, as a 'desideratum.' It is more 
 complete than any other similar work." 
 
 From Hudson Kinsley, AI. />., Ill Amity Street. 
 
 New York, Dec. 23. 1853. 
 
 ' l>r. Freligh. Dear Sir, I have examined your ' Homoeopathic Practice of Medicine ' 
 v.'iili increasing pleasure, and I unhesitatingly pronounce it one of the very best guides, 
 now extant, for domestic use." 
 
 From Geo. BeaJdey, M. D., 35 Clinton Place. 
 
 New York, Jan. 14, 1854. 
 
 " It is a work that has been long needed by the profession, and in my opinion, adds much, 
 and strengthens a system which only demands that clear and enlightened view which you 
 have given to it, to disperse all the hasty conclusions and misunderstandings in reference 
 
 to it." 
 
 From Samuel B. liarlow, M. D., 222 Tuiclfth Sired. 
 
 New York, Jan. 17, 1854. 
 
 "Dr. M. Freligh. Dear Sir, I gladly tender you my most hearty commendation of the 
 work. Its arrangement is excellent, and there is a perspicuity in the indication of remedies, 
 which is unequaled in any work of the kind with which 1 am acquainted. I think it is 
 destined to an emminent usefulness in the hands of students and practitioners of the Ho- 
 moeopathic Art, as well as to the lay-practitioner. I wish you success in the publication." 
 
 From C. Kiersted, M. D., West Tldrty fourth Sired. 
 
 " A careful examination of the System of ' Homoeopathic Practice of Medicine ' by Dr. M. 
 Freligh, enables me to recommend it as a work far superior to any other extant; and the 
 accuracy of its description of diseases, and the concise adaptation of remedies, must rccoui 
 mend it, not only to the laity, but also to the regular practitioner." 
 
 On.vioxs OF THE PRESS. 
 
 From the Buffalo Express. " It is intelligent and intelligible treating every ailment with 
 precision, and' entering into details that leave no room for questions or doubts. It traces 
 each disease from its first symptoms to the last stage; describes its various mutations, and 
 points out the exact remedy which it is necessary to apply, according to its cause and pro- 
 gress. We regard it as the very book that was wanted, and welcome it as a messenger of good. 
 
 Also The Ulster Republican. " This is doubtless the most perfect work of thekterl T^ 
 issued."
 
 * Books Published ly Sheldon, Lamport tj- Llukeman. 
 THE LAND OF THE (LESAR AND DOGE. Historical and artistic, 
 
 personal and literary. By Wn. FURXESS, Esq. SS4 pp. 12mo. Price, $1. y 
 
 " His descriptive powers are of the first order, and he has the taste to select the most 
 striking points to bring forward. We predict for this work a popularity beyond that of thtj 
 mere crowd f hooks of travel." Albany Express. 
 
 THE LIFE, CHARACTER, AND ACTS OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 
 
 and the relation of his Ministry to the Christian dispensation, based upon the Johannes 
 der Tiufer, of L. vox ROHDEX, by the Rev. WM. C. DUXCAX, II. A. , Professor of the Greek 
 and Latin Languages and Literature in Louisiana University. 1 vol. 12mo. 261 page.-*. 
 Price 75 cents. 
 
 "The work as we have it in this volume, and so far as we have been able to examine it, 
 is thorough, learned and decidedly able." Puritan Becorder. 
 
 " It is the only complete work on this subject in English, and we need no other; we hope 
 no one will fail to procure the work." AT. Y. Chronide.- 
 
 "This is an acceptable addition to religious literature indeed the only work in the lan- 
 guage exclusively devoted to the life and ministry of the Baptist. It is based upon von 
 Rohden's German treatise, which Neander so warmly commends; and. indeed, the whole 
 of von Rohden's work is comprised in this volume, but with very considerable additions of 
 original matter, which give it increased value to the biblical student, and ako better 
 adapt it to the wants of the general reader." 
 
 MEMOIR OF S. B. JUDSON. By Mrs. E. C. JUDSOX. Forty thousand 
 
 gold. 1 vol. 18mo. 300 pages. Goth 60 cents. Cloth, gilt edge, SI. 
 
 "Rarely have we read a more beautiful sketch of female loveliness, devoted piety, mis- 
 sionary zeal, fortitude, sacrifice and success, than is here drawn by a pen that is well known 
 to the readiug world. We trust its wide perusal will awaken the mission spirit in the hearts 
 of thousands." New York Observer. 
 
 " ' Beautiful exceedingly,' is this portraiture of female loveliness, piety and heroism, drawn 
 by the graceful pencil, and embellished by the delicate hues of the f.iir author's poetic fancy. 
 All who are acquainted with the eventful life of that heroine of missionaries. Ann Hasscl- 
 tine Judson. will be doubly interested in this memoir of one whose gentleness, patient enilu- 
 rance of suffering, and cultivated tastes, renderered her no unworthy successor, either in 
 domestic seclusion, or on the field of action, of that energetic martyr in the missionary 
 cause. ' ' Newark Advertiser. 
 
 " We commend this book as the portraiture of a very lovely, accomplished, nnd Christian 
 woman." Christian Register. 
 
 " In preparing this work, the gifted authoress found a theme worthy of her classic pen, 
 nnd thoteands will rejoice in the addition she has given to religious literature, and to mis- 
 sionary biography. We shall be very much mistaken if this beautiful volume does not se- 
 cure a very wide and extensive circulation." New York Baptist Register. 
 
 " lake all the other writings Of this distinguished author, this book most happily com- 
 bines interest with instruction. It cannot be read without adding refinement to the feelings 
 and making the heart better ; and if commenced, will not be laid aside till fiuj.shed.' Neio 
 York Evening Post. 
 
 " We hail this ' Memoir' with much pleasure, and tender our thanks to the enterprising 
 publishers for the copy sent us. It is a memoir of a very interesting personage, written In 
 a highly fascinating style, bya polished and justly distinguished writer." Christian Index. 
 
 " Tin's little volume is full of religious thought and experience, and i.s so judiciously and 
 tastefully compiled that the reader cannot fail to derive both pleasure and benefit from 
 its perusal." The Banner and Pioneer. 
 
 ' A most admirable little book it is. and its publication is a valuable addition to the list 
 of religious memoirs." Southern Preslylerian. 
 
 " ' Memoir of Sarah B Judson, by Fanny Forrester,' is before us. We have perused the 
 pa?es of this popular authoress with unusual interest ; and unhesitatingly pronounce ilia 
 ' Memoir' in our judgement a work of decided merit nnd not inferior to the rco^t iii.i.-.Lt-d 
 production from the pen of this graphic writer." M'Graiui-Hle Express. 
 
 T
 
 s^ Published by Sheldon, Lamport * Blakeman. 
 
 THE NAPOLEON DYNASTY; or the History of the Bonaparte Family. 
 
 An entirely new work by the Berkeley Men. With 22 authentic Portraits. 1 vol. 8vo. 
 6-24 pp. Trice, S2 50. 
 
 A very handsome volume, in paper, typography P.nd plates, greets us under the title hcvt 
 given and after the numberless books heretofore published in the shape of memoirs, bio- 
 graphies and histories, about the Bonapartes, and him in particular who was the Bot)- 
 parte it will be fonnd fresh and new in many of its details, and attractive by its dashing 
 style and rapid narrative. All the members of the family, including the young brevet lieu- 
 tenant in the U. S. Army, who has just been graduated from West Point, and who bears tiro 
 name bolh of his grand-father and his grand-uncle Napoleon Jerome Bonaparte arc duly 
 chronicled here ; and among the documents new to us, and we believe before unpublished, 
 contained in this work, is the correspondence between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII., rela- 
 tive to the divorce which Napoleon urged the Holy Father to pronounce between Jerome and 
 his American wife, Hiss Patterson and the absolute refusal of the Sovereign Pontiff to com- 
 ply with his request. There is much dignity and manliness in the letter of the Pope, and 
 exceeding littleness in that of the Emperor. 
 
 Josephine, Hortense, Maria Louisa, Joseph Beauharnais, Murat, and indeed all the race, 
 figure in these pages; and each has a portrait said to be, and with great probability, accu- 
 rate likenesses." Courier and Enquirer. 
 
 "We heartily commend it to the attention of our readers, as one of the most valuable 
 \vorkswhich has recently been published." Evening Mirror. 
 
 " A work of deep interest and undoubted authenticity. "Journal of Commerce. 
 
 " The Berkeley Men have produced a Book which forms a valuable addition to the bio- 
 graphical literature of the world, and bears on its face the impress of great historical 
 research and ability. There is not a dry page in it." Sunday Atlas. 
 
 ' This work is surpassingly beautiful." Boston Evening Gazette. 
 
 ' We feel assured that we may commend it for its eloquent and brilliant character as a 
 literary work. Pens of more than ordinary power having evidently been engaged in it3 
 production." Philadelphia Courier. 
 
 " The design of the book is carried out with great skill; the style is terse, but glowing; 
 the typography of the highest order, and the portraits from original sources, executed with 
 care and truthfulness. We do not see how it can fail to acquire a popularity and circula- 
 tion seldom equaled by any biographical production." JV. T. Times. 
 
 NOUVELLETTES OF THE MUSICIANS. By Mrs. E. F. ELLET, Authoi 
 
 of the "Women of the Revolution." 1 vol. 8vo. 353pp. Muslin, Gilt Edge. Price $1 75. 
 
 Embellished with portraits of Hayden, Handel, Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and 
 
 Francis Liszt. 
 
 PRKFACE. In the following series of Nouvellettes, something higher has been attempted 
 than merely the production of amusing actions. Each is founded on incidents that really 
 occurred in the artist's life, and present? an illustration of his character, and the style of 
 his works. 
 
 The view given of the scope and tendency of the works of different artists, and their rela. 
 tion to personal character, may also enforce a striking moral; showing the elevating in- 
 fluence of virtue, and the power of vice to distort even the loveliest gift of Heaven into a 
 curse and reproach. 
 
 Of the tales "Tartini," "Two periods in the life of Hayden," "Mozart'* first visit to 
 Paris," "The Artist's Lesson," "The Mission of Genius," "The young Tragedian," and 
 " Tamburini," only are original; the others are adapted from the "Kunsiiwixllen " of Lyser 
 and Rellstab. 
 
 The sketch of the great Pianist Liszt is translated from a memoir by CHRISTER*, a distin- 
 guished professor of Music in Hamburg. 
 
 THE NEIGHBORS. A story of every day life. By FREDERIKA BKKMEB. 
 Translated from the Swedish by Mary Houritt. Author's Edition, with a new Preface, I vol 
 12ino 439 pp. Trice $1. 
 
 V
 
 Books Published by Sheldon, Lamport Sf Blakeman. 
 
 MAPLETON; or More "Work for the Maine Law By PHARCKLLUS CHURCH. 
 
 1 volume, 12mo., of about four hundred and fifty pages. Price, $1. Cloth. Four Editions 
 have been called for in a few weeks. 
 
 What the Press says of it. 
 
 " No book that we have recently read has so wrought upon our feelings as this."; JMM 
 Traveller. 
 
 " It is a powerful work, combining the dramatic interest and vivid character- painting of 
 fiction with the deep insight and comprehensive views of a mature and able thinker." 
 /*'. T. Recorder. 
 
 "Kemarkable for the insight which it exhibits into human character, and powerful in 
 tlie grasp of the subject which is manifested, Mapleton comes to us with a freshness of 
 thought, a vigor of expression, and a power of argument, calculated at once to charm the 
 fancy, to attract the imagination, and to influence the judgment." Mass. Life Bool. 
 
 'The narrative is so diversified in its scenery and persons, the plan so striking, the Geld 
 to large, and the descriptions so graphic, the progress towards the result itself so unex- 
 pected at least it was so to me that I cannot but think the author is conferring a benefit 
 on the United States, at least, if not on the world." Communicated to thefuri/an Recorder 
 
 " Though a fiction, the characters are drawn to life, and we see plainly before us, pano- 
 rama-like, in living pictures, the horrid effects of the use of intoxicating liquors. It is 
 not onlr a very interesting book, but one peculiarly adapted to the times." American News, 
 Keene, ~N. H. 
 
 " The writer has portrayed, in a clear and energetic style, the different characters which 
 are introduced, and sustains them with great tact, having evidently seen life above stairs 
 and below stairs too." Maine Farmer. 
 
 li It is written with a good deal of power, possesses a tragic interest, and portrays only 
 too vividly the direct and indirect, the immediate and remote consequences of the fearful 
 evil it would help to remove." Boston Christian Register. 
 
 'This powerful work is destined to exert a mighty influence upon the masses towards 
 the enactment and enforcement of the Maine Law. Already has the press throughout the 
 country teemed with its praises. It presents many graphic pictures, and the story is ex- 
 tremely interesting, ahd is well interwoven with arguments which make it a valuable a 
 well as interesting work. We have read it with as much satisfaction as we took in poring 
 over the pages of ' Uncle Tom. ' " Mass. Teacher. 
 
 "A book of thrilling interest, written in a pleasing style, and with great power." 2V 
 Adam's Weekly Transcript. 
 
 "Written in a pleasing, familiar style, and in many passages most thrilling." Eastern 
 Argus. 
 
 " It has the merit of transcending in extent of plot, and felicity of narrative, all its com 
 peers. There is much to commend in the clear and vigorous style of the composition." 
 'Jhunton Daily Gazette. 
 
 " Many of its scenes are sketched with the skill of a artist." Dedham Democrat. 
 
 " It is well written abounding in impressive lessons." Worcester National JEgi*. 
 
 " A story of thrilling interest." Christian Freeman. 
 
 " It is well calculated to arouse and keep awake the masses on the subject of temper- 
 ance." Plymouth Rock. 
 
 "The work is well worth a perusal, and we assure our readers that if they road the firrt 
 three chapters, they will not fail to read the remainder." Andooer (Mass.) Advertiser. 
 
 " The plot is well laid; the moral is excellent. It leaves the mind of its reader in a pure 
 and healthful state." Star Spangled Banner. 
 
 " This is a vigorously written volume, ' painting ' in vivid and glowing colors the horrors 
 of the Rum Traffic." 
 
 " The book is fall of dramalic interest which never flags from commencement to close." 
 Tanlxe Blade. 
 
 " Mapleton is a powerfully written work. It is a book that ought to be circulated far and 
 wide." Literary Museum. 
 
 " Its style is exceedlingly attractive; its incidents are adroitly combined, and its temper 
 partakes less of fanaticism, than of an honest conscientious Christian conviction that in 
 temperance is the greatest evil that afflicts humanity." Albany Journal.
 
 Jifornia, Los Angele 1 
 
 College 
 Library
 
 University of California, Los Angeles 
 
 L 005 432 127 8 
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PR 
 99 
 G39 
 ser.3 
 
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