Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 396 October 1848

by Various

CHAP. IV—THE EXECUTION.

The execution of Hendrik the Mariner was fixed for six in the evening. Long before the appointed hour, crowds of people, eager to see the horrible spectacle, thronged through the St George's Gate, in the direction of the place of punishment. Nothing was more seductive to the populace of that day than the sight of a grisly head rolling upon the scaffold, and reddening the boards with its blood. The Antwerp burghers were not exempt from this horrible curiosity; and Headsman's Acre, as the field was called in which capital punishments then took place, was crowded with spectators of all ages and classes, including women, many of them with their children in their arms, urchins of tender age, and old men who, already on the brink of the grave, tottered from their easy chair and chimney corner to behold a fellow-creature expiate, by a premature death, his sin against society. Noisy and merry was the mob collected round the tall black gallows and the grim rusty wheel.

In the crowd, close to the scaffold, stood Lina, her heart beating quickly and anxiously, her tears restrained from flowing only by the reflection that she was there to give Gerard courage, and that weeping was the worst way to do it. Her brother Franz stood beside her, in holiday suit, his broad-leafed Spanish hat upon his head, and his brown cloak over his shoulder, according to the fashion of the time. Lina had represented to him, in lively colours, the frightful danger incurred by Gerard; and he, with his usual rough good-heartedness, swore to break the neck of the first man who threw a stone at the new headsman.

It was late, and the shades of evening fell upon the earth, before the executioner's varlets completed the necessary arrangements on the scaffold. At the moment these terminated, a cart pierced the throng amidst general stir and hum of curiosity. The criminal, attired in a black linen gown, sat with a priest in the hinder part of the vehicle. Gerard was on the foremost bench, his broad bright sword in his hand, and one of his assistants beside him. None could divine, from his countenance, what passed in his mind; his features were fixed and rigid; his eyes, bent upon the ground, avoided the people's gaze; and but for the weapon he bore, none could have told which of the two, he or Hendrik, was the condemned man. Unconscious of his own movements, he ascended the scaffold, so confused in spirit that he saw nothing, not even Lina, although Franz several times made signs to catch his attention.

And now the varlets would have removed the prisoner from the cart to the scaffold; but he pretended he had not finished his confession, which he wished now, for the first time, to make full and complete, seeing all chance of pardon gone. Perhaps he nourished a vague hope of escape in the darkness; for heavy clouds drifted across the sky, and night approached so rapidly that already those upon the outskirts of the crowd could scarcely distinguish what passed upon the scaffold. So that the people, fearing the increasing darkness would deprive them altogether of the show they coveted, began to clamour loudly for the execution of the sentence. The culprit, still resisting, and claiming delay, was brought upon the scaffold by force, and made to kneel down. The headsman's assistant bared the condemned wretch's neck, and pointed to it with a significant look, as if to say, "Master, strike."

At sight of the naked flesh into which he was to cut, Gerard started as from a heavy sleep, and his limbs trembled till the scaffold shook under him, and the broad-bladed sword fell from his hand. The varlet picked up the weapon and gave it back to his master, who clutched it convulsively, whilst the red rod of the superintending official gave the signal to strike. But Gerard neither saw the rod nor heard the voice of its bearer. Already a murmur arose amongst the crowd. "Quick, master! quick!" said the varlet, whose ear caught the ill-omened sound.

Summoning all the strength and courage his recent sufferings had left him, Gerard raised the sword, with the fixed determination to strike a bold and steady blow, when at that moment the victim turned his head, and at sight of the impending steel, uttered a lamentable yell. No more was wanting to upset Gerard's resolution and presence of mind. They left him on the instant: his arms lost their strength, and he let the sword fall on Hendrik's shoulder, but so feebly that it did not even wound him.

At the chill touch of the blade, the criminal's whole frame quivered with agony; but the next instant, feeling himself unhurt, and perceiving the advantage to be derived from his executioner's irresolution, he sprang to his feet, and stretching out his fettered arms to the people, implored help and pity, for that he was wilfully tortured.

At this appeal the fury of the mob burst forth with uncontrollable vehemence.

"Strike him dead!" was the universal cry; "strike the torturer dead!"

And stones flew about Gerard's head, but in no great number, since, fortunately for him, they were not plentiful on the field. The unhappy youth stood for a moment stunned by the uproar; then, folding his arms, he stepped forward to the edge of the scaffold with the air of one for whom death has no terrors.

"Wolves!" he exclaimed;—"wolves in the garb of men! ye came for blood—take mine, and slake your fiendish thirst!"

This rash defiance excited to madness the fury of the rabble. Women, children, and men of the better classes, fled in all haste from the field, leaving it occupied by the very dregs and refuse of Antwerp, who pressed fiercely forward to the scaffold, making violent efforts to seize the headsman, in spite of the resistance of the police and officials. The uproar and confusion were tremendous. Around Gerard a number of officers of justice assembled—less, however, for his protection, than to prevent the escape of the culprit, who made furious efforts to get rid of his manacles, and continued to appeal to the people and shout for assistance. At this moment of confusion, when scarcely anyone knew what his neighbour did, a man ascended the scaffold, and approached the executioner. It was Franz.

"Gerard," he said, "Lina conjures you, in God's name, and by your love for her, to speak to her for one moment. She is below; follow me!" And he leaped from the scaffold, on the side where the mob was thinnest. Gerard obeyed the charm of Lina's name. How gladly, he thought, would he bid his beloved one more farewell before encountering the death he deemed inevitable. In another second he stood by her side. At the same instant Franz, stripping off his cloak, muffled Gerard in its folds, pressed his broad hat over his eyes, and placing Lina's arm in that of the bewildered headsman, drew them gently from the spot.

"Go quietly and fearlessly through the crowd," he said, "and wait for me in the copse beyond the farthest gibbet."

And seeing that Lina obeyed his directions and led away Gerard, who followed passively as a child, Franz ran round to the other side of the scaffold, and set up such a shouting, that the mob, thinking he had seized the delinquent headsman, rushed furiously in that direction, leaving a free passage to the lovers. Franz continued to shout with all his might, and to affect the most violent indignation.

"Strike him dead!" he cried; "strike him dead! Down with the base torturer! Throw his carcass to the ravens!"

And he hurled stones at the scaffold, headed a charge on the police, and behaved altogether like a madman let loose. Favoured by this attracting of the attention from them, and under cover of the darkness, Lina succeeded in getting her lover away unrecognised, for Franz's cloak and hat completely concealed the headsman's well-known costume. But before they reached the thicket, the mob got possession of the scaffold, released the prisoner, and began ill-treating the officials, to compel them to confess what had become of the executioner. On finding that this latter personage, the cause of the whole tumult, had disappeared, a man, one of the lowest of the people, who had seen Franz throw his cloak over Gerard's shoulders, and who had watched the direction taken by Lina and her disguised companion, guessed that the fugitive was no other than the headsman himself, and immediately started in pursuit. Before he could overtake them, Lina and Gerard disappeared amongst the trees. His suspicions confirmed by this mysterious conduct, the ruffian, blaspheming with exultation and fury, rushed upon the lovers; and, tearing off Gerard's cloak, beheld the headsman's livery. Thereupon, without word or question, he lifted a heavy cudgel, and struck the poor fellow violently upon the head. Gerard fell senseless to the ground. The murderer would have repeated his blow, but Lina, with the courage of a lioness defending her young, grappled him vigorously, and clasping her arms around his, impeded his further movements. The sight of her lover, stunned and bleeding at her feet, seemed to give her superhuman strength; and bethinking her that it was better to have one enemy to contend with than a hundred, she abstained from calling out, lest her cries should bring foes instead of friends. Fortunately the uproar of the mob drowned the imprecations of Gerard's assailant, who vociferated horrible curses as he strove, with brutal violence, to shake off the heroic girl. At the very moment when, her last strength exhausted, she was about to succumb, Franz entered the copse, and, seeing Gerard motionless on the ground and his sister struggling with a stranger, immediately guessed what had occurred. A cry of rage burst from his lips, and before Lina remarked his presence, his powerful hands were upon the shoulders of her antagonist, who lay, the next instant, upon the grass at his feet.

"Lina!" cried Franz, seizing the fallen man and dragging him in the direction of the scaffold, "hide Gerard in the bushes; if he still lives, he is rescued from all he most dreads. Quick! I will return."

With these words he hurried from the copse, dragging his prisoner after him so rapidly, that the prostrate man, his legs in Franz's iron grasp, his head trailing in the dust, and striking violently against each stock and stone, could make no effectual resistance. As soon as Franz was within earshot of the mob, he shouted, more loudly than ever—

"The headsman! here I have him—the headsman!"

"Death to the villain!" was re-echoed on all sides; and from all four corners of the field the mob, who had dispersed to seek the object of their hate, rushed towards Franz. When Lina's brother saw himself the centre of a dense crowd, howling and frantic for blood, he hurled amongst them the man whom he dragged by the feet, with the words—

"There is the headsman!"

"Death to him!" hoarsely repeated a hundred voices, and as many blows descended upon the shrieking wretch, whose expostulations and prayers for mercy were unheard in the mighty tumult, and whom the mob, blinded by fury, easily mistook in the darkness for the delinquent executioner. His cries were soon silenced by the cruel treatment he received; in a few minutes he was dead, his clothes were torn from his body, and his face was disfigured and mutilated so as to be wholly unrecognisable.

Leaving the mob to their bloody work, Franz returned to his sister, and found her weeping and praying beside the body of her lover, whom she believed dead. On examination, however, he found Gerard's pulse still beating. The violent blow he had received had stunned but not slain him. Fresh water thrown upon his face and chest restored him to consciousness, and to the caresses of his dear Lina, speechless and almost beside herself with joy at his recovery. When his strength returned, the trio crept stealthily from the copse, and safely reached the town, where Gerard concealed himself during the evening in the house of his mistress. When midnight came, and the streets of Antwerp were deserted, he betook himself, accompanied by Franz, to his own dwelling, and made his unexpected appearance in his father's chamber.

The old headsman, who lay broad awake upon his bed of sickness, weeping bitterly, and deploring the death of his unhappy son, deemed himself the sport of a deceitful vision when he saw the dead man approach his couch. But when convinced, by Gerard's voice and affectionate embrace, that he indeed beheld his child in solid flesh and bone, his joy knew no bounds, and for a moment inspired the young man with fears of his immediate dissolution.

"My son, my son!" he cried, "you know not half your good fortune. Not only have you miraculously escaped a cruel death, but you are also delivered from the horrible employment which has been mine, and was to be yours. The accursed obligation that weighed upon our race ceases with life, and you, my son, are dead!"

"And pure from the stain of blood!" joyfully exclaimed Gerard.

"Begone," continued the old man, "and dwell far from thine unjust brethren. Quit Antwerp, marry thy good Lina, be faithful and kind to her, and heaven bless thee in thy posterity! Thy sons will not be born to wield the axe, nor wilt thou weep over them, as I have wept over thee. The savings of thine ancestors and mine insure thee for ever from poverty; make good use of them and be happy!"

His voice grew weak with emotion, and died away in inarticulate benedictions. Gerard hung upon his father's neck, and stammered forth his thanks. The events of the day appeared to him like a dream. He could not realise the sudden transition from the depths of despair to the utmost height of happiness.

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For many years after these incidents there lived at Brussels, under an assumed name, the son of the Antwerp headsman, and his beautiful wife Lina. The old man's blessing was heard, and when Gerard's turn came to quit a world of cares for a brighter and better abode, brave sons and fair daughters wept around the dying bed of the Doomster's Firstborn.

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A FEW WORDS ABOUT NOVELS—A DIALOGUE, IN A LETTER TO EUSEBIUS.

Dear Eusebius,—Whether it be a fable or not that the Lydians invented chess, to relieve themselves from pain and trouble, and were content to eat one day and play another, unquestionably amusement is a most salutary medicine to heal the "mind diseased," and even to mitigate hunger itself.

The utilitarian ant would not have had the best of the argument with the grasshopper,—"dance now,"—if the latter had not insisted on dancing too long—a whole summer. Even hunger would do its dire work in double-quick time, if left to fret incessantly on the mind as well as the fast failing substance. Avert the thought of it, and half a loaf will keep alive longer than a whole one, eaten together with cankering care. "Post equitem sedet atra Cura," said the most amiable of satirists; but Care, the real "gentleman in black," won't always be contented to sit behind, but is apt to assume an opposite seat at the table, and, grinning horribly, to take away your appetite "quite and entirely." You may try, Eusebius, to run away from him, and bribe the stoker to seventy or eighty miles an hour, but Care will telegraph you, and thus electrify you on your arrival, when you thought him a hundred miles or so off. I have ascertained a fact, Eusebius, that Care is not out of one, but in one, and has a lodging somewhere in the stomach, where he sets up a diabolical laboratory, and sends his vile fumes up, up—and so all over the brain; and from that conjuration what blue devils do not arise, as he smokes at leisure his infernal cigar below! Charge me not, Eusebius, with being poetical—this is sober prose to the indescribable reality. Your friend has been hypochondriacal. It is a shameful truth; but confession is the demon's triumph, and so the sufferer is punished—mocked, scoffed at, unpitied, and uncured. The Lady Dorothea Dosewell had proposed a seventy-fifth remedy. My lady, I am in despair: I have not as yet completed the fifty-sixth prescription; the fifty-fifth has left me worse. The Curate, who happened to be present, laughed at me, as all do, and said, "No wonder—you are like the man who complained of inveterate deafness, had applied every recipe, and was cured by the most simple one—a cork-screw. Do set aside all your nostrums, and spend a week or two at the curacy, and I'll take care to pack in half-a-dozen novels, and you will soon forget your own in other folks' woes."

"I will go," I replied; "but I protest against any woes whatsoever. When young as you, Mr Curate, I could bear them, and sit out a tragedy stoically; but shaken nerves and increasing years won't bear the tragic phantasmagoria now. Sentimental comedy is too much, and I positively, with shame, cry over a child's book."

"I fear," quoth the Curate, "it is a sure sign your heart is hardening. The sympathy that should soften it is too easily and too quickly drawn off by the fancy to waste, and leaves the interior dry. Come to us, and alternate your feelings between fancy and active realities; between reading imaginary histories and entering practically and interestingly into the true histories of the many homes I must visit, and you will soon be fresh in spirit and sound again."

Let me, Eusebius, use the dialogue form, as in some former letters: suffice it only to tell you previously, that I took the Curate's advice and invitation, and for a time did my best to throw off every ailment, and refresh myself by country-air exercise, in the society of the happy Curate and his wife, at the vicarage of ——, which you know well by description. And here we read novels. Even at the Curate's house did we read novels—those "Satan's books," as a large body of Puritans call them, whilst they read them privately; or, if seen, ostensibly that they may point out the wickedness in them, and thus forbid the use of them; as an elder of the demure sect excused himself when detected at a theatre, that he "came to see if any of their young folk were there." How often people do what is right, and defend it as if it was a wrong, and apologise for what gives them no shame! Thus the Curate commenced the defence of novel-reading:—

Curate.—What is the meaning of the absurd cry against works of fiction? If it be true that "the proper study of mankind is man," is it not wise to foresee, as it were, life under all its possible contingencies? Are we not armed for coming events by knowing something of their nature beforehand? Who learns only from the world amid which he walks, learns from a master that conceals too much; and the greater portion of the lesson, after all, must come out of the learner's own mind, and it is a weary while before he has learnt by experience the requisite shrewdness. Life is too short to learn by a process so slow, that the pupil begins to decay before he has learnt one truth. The preparatory education is not amiss. The early tears that tales of fiction bid to flow scald not like the bitter ones of real sorrow; and they, as it were by a charm of inoculation, prepare the cheek for the after tears, that they burn not and furrow too deeply. I cannot conceive how people came to take it into their heads that plays and novels are wicked things necessarily. Your Lady Prudence will take infinite pains that her young people shall not contaminate even their fingers with the half-binding—and perhaps fail too—and for honest simplicity induce a practice of duplicity, for fiction will be read. It is the proper food to natural curiosity—an instinct given us to learn; and I dare to say that letters were invented by Cadmus purposely for that literature.

Aquilius.—Say nothing of Cadmus, or the serpent's teeth will be thrown against your argument. Their sowing was not unlike the setting up a press; and your literary men are as fierce combatants as ever sprang from the dragon's teeth, and have as strong a propensity to slaughter each other.

Curate.—Yes, and even in works of fiction we have had the conflict of authors. They write now as much against each other as formerly. Fielding proposed to himself to write down Richardson; and religious novelists of our days take the field against real or imaginary opponents. Richardson, able as he was, very cunningly set about his work—his Clarissa. By an assumed gravity, and well-managed affectation of morality, he contrived to render popular among prudes a most indecent work. The book was actually put into the hands of young people as an antidote to novels in general. This appeared to Fielding abominable hypocrisy, corrupting under disguise. And to this honest indignation are we indebted to him for his Joseph Andrews, the antidote to the very questionable morality, and unquestionable moral, of the virtue-rewarded Pamela.

Aquilius.—I was told the other day by a lady, that there are few kitchens in which Pamela is not to be found. She detected her own maid reading it, and was obliged to part with her, for setting her cap at her son, a youth just entered at College. The girl defended her conduct as a laudable and virtuous ambition, which the good author encouraged,—was not the title Virtue Rewarded? So much, for Pamela. You will not, however, surely defend the novel-writing system of nearly half a century ago—the sickly sentimentalities of the All for Love school—that restless progeny not allowed to rest on circulating library shelves till their rest was final—whose tendency was to make young persons of either sex nothing but fools.

Curate.—And whose authors had the fool's mark set upon them, not unhappily, by Jenner, in his Town Eclogues:—

"Thrice-happy authors, who with little skill
In two short weeks can two short volumes fill!
Who take some miss, of Christian name inviting,
And plunge her deep in love and letter-writing,
Perplex her well with jealous parents' cares,
Expose her virtue to a lover's snares,
Give her false friends and perjured swains by dozens,
With all the episodes of aunts and cousins;
Make parents thwart her, and her lover scorn her,
And some mishap spring up at every corner;
Make her lament her fate with ahs and ohs,
And tell some dear Miss Willis all her woes,
Whilst now with love and now with grief she rages;
Till, having brought her through two hundred pages,
Finding at length her father's heart obdurate,
Will make her take the squire, and leave the curate;
She scales the garden-wall, or fords a river,
Elopes, gets married, and her friends forgive her."

Aquilius.—And was it not whimsical enough that, in the presumption of their vanity, upstarted the Puritan school, who had ever declaimed against novels and dramas, to counteract the mischievous tendency of these silly love-tales, and wrote themselves much sillier, and quite as mischievous?

Curate.—Are you then audacious enough to pass censure upon Cœlebs, and suchlike?

Aquilius.—"Great is Diana of Ephesus!" I abominate every thing Hannah More wrote—vain, clever, idolised, spoiled woman as she was—her style all riddle-ma-ree. Read her lauded What is Prayer? and you are reading a conundrum. An affected woman, she wrote affectedly, with a kind of unwomanly dishonesty. There was good natural stuff in her too, but it was sadly spoilt in the making up.

Curate.—You will shock the good, or rather the goody folk, who will insist upon the religious and moral purpose of all her works.

Aquilius.—They may insist, for they are an obstinate race. What moral, or what religion, is inculcated in this—"A brute of a husband"—selfish, a tyrant, a gourmandiser—ill-treats an amiable wife. He scorns patient virtue, and is an infidel. He must be converted—that is the religious object. He must be metamorphosed, not after Ovid's fashion—there is the moral object. How is it done, do you remember? If not, you will never guess. By what latent virtue is he to be reclaimed? Virtue, indeed! would the indignant Puritan proclaim—what virtue is in poor human rags? He shall be reclaimed through his vice! Indeed, Madam Puritan, that is a novelty. So, however, it is. The man is a glutton. On his conversion-day he is gifted with an extraordinary appetite and discriminating taste. It is a pie—yes, a pie, that converts him to piety.

Curate.—Oh, oh, oh! you are mocking surely. A pie!

Aquilius.—Yes, a pie. It is remarkably good—quite delicious. It puts the brute in good humour with himself and every body, and he grunts applause, and promises his favour to the cook. At this stage—this incipient stage of his conversion—a pathetic butler bursts into tears, and affectionately sobs out the beautiful truth. The cook for the occasion was his mistress—the ill-treated wife. He becomes a perfect Christian on the instant; and with the conversion comes the moral metamorphosis, and the "brute of a husband" is, on a sudden, the best and most religious of men. Now, in what respect, Mr Curate, would you bid any of your flock to go and do likewise? Setting aside as worthless, then, to say the best of it, the moral, the set-up primness of the whole affair is so odious, that you long even for a little wickedness to set nature upon nature's legs, that we may at least acknowledge the presence of humanity.

Curate.—We must ask Lydia to defend the writers of her sex. You are severe upon poor Hannah, who would have been good enough in spite of her extreme vanity, if the clique had let her alone. Her Cœlebs was to be the novel par excellence, the model tale,—and with no little contempt for all others.

Aquilius.—Your Lydia has too much good sense, and too much plain honesty, to defend any thing wrong because it is found in woman. The utmost you can expect from her is not to object to the saintly Hannah, as was the charity of the Wolverhampton audience, when her play was acted there. Master Betty was hissed, and this impromptu was uttered, during a lull, from the gallery—

"The age of childhood now is o'er,
Of folly and of whim—
We dont object to Hannah More,
But we'll ha-na-more of him."

Curate.—Yet she is supposed to have done some good by her minor tales for the poor. Possibly she did—the object was at all events good.

Aquilius.—And here she was the precursor to a worse set, so bad that it can hardly be said of them that they are "daturos progeniem vitiosiorem."

Curate.—Yes, even wickedly religious. The scheme was, that the poor should teach the rich, and the infant the man. I remember reading some of these tales of Mrs Sherwood's. Is there not one where a little urchin, not long after he is able to run alone, is sent out on an errand,—an unconverted child,—commits the very natural sin of idleness, loiters by the way, and lies under a tree. There, you will suppose, sleep comes upon him—no, but grace. He rises a converted man-child, an infant apostle, goes home and converts his wicked grandfather, or great-grandfather. "Ex uno disce omnes." Great was the outcry against Maria Edgeworth's children's tales, because they did not inculcate religious dogmas. This was a great compliment to her genius, for it showed that every sect would have wished her theirs. She wisely left the catechism to fathers, mothers, and nurses, and preferred leaving to the parson of each parish the prerogative of sermonising.

Aquilius.—Some of you take your prerogative as a sanitary prescription, and sweeten your own tempers by throwing off their acerbities, ad libitum, one day in the week; abusing in very unmeasured terms all mankind, and their own congregation in particular—indeed, often in language that, used on week days, and by any other people, would be looked upon as nearly akin to what is called "cursing and swearing." So do extremes sometimes meet. A little thunder clears the air wonderfully; the lightning may not always be evident.

Curate.—All writers, especially novelists and reviewers, assume this privilege of bitterness, without the restriction to one day out of seven; hence, to say nothing of the better motives in the other case, they are more practised in acerbity than amiability. Your medicine becomes the habit, not the cure. We must have civil tongues the greater part of our lives. Your literary satirist uses the drunkard's remonstrance—

"Which is the properest day to drink—
Saturday, Sunday, Monday?
Each is the properest day, I think;
Why should you name but one day?"

Aquilius.—But to return to our subject. Novels are not objected to as they were; now that every sect in politics and religion have found their efficacy as a means, the form is adopted by all. And with a more vigorous health do each embody their principle. The sickly sentimentality school is sponged out—or nearly so. The novel now really represents the mind of a country in all its phases, and, if not the only, is nearly the best of its literature. It assumes to teach as well as to amuse. I could wish that, in their course down the stream of time, it had not taken the drama by the neck, and held it under water to the drowning.

Curate.—You are wrong. The novel has not drowned the drama. It is the goody, the Puritan school, has done the work, and will, not drown, but suffocate, the noble art that gave us Shakspeare, by stopping up all avenues and entrance to the theatres—having first filled the inside with brimstone, or at least cautioned the world that the smell of brimstone will never quit those who enter. In discussing the subject, however, I would class the play and the novel together, under "works of fiction." Why, by the way, did the self-styled religious world that set up a crusade against novelists—and "fiction-mongers"—show such peculiar favour to John Bunyan, and his Pilgrim's Progress—the most daring fiction? I believe that very imaginative, nay, very powerful work, has gone through more editions than any other in our language: a proof at least that there is something innate in us all,—a natural power of curiosity to see and hear more than actual life presents to us—that sends all, from infancy to age, in every stage of life, either openly or secretly, to the reading tales of fiction. We all like to see Nature herself with a difference; and, loving "to hold the mirror up to nature," we prefer that the glass should be coloured, or at least a shade deeper, and love the image more than the thing.

Aquilius.—Yes; and we indulge in a double and seeming contrary propensity—excitement and repose. We are safe in the storm—look out "from our loopholes of retreat," as Cowper calls them, on the busy world—and in our search after that equally evasive philosopher's stone, the "γνωθι σεαυτον," like to squint at our deformities in private, and, by seeing them in other folks, we learn our faults by deputy.

Curate.—And what a wonderful and wisely-given instinct is there in us all, that we may learn to the utmost in one short life—an instinct by which we recognise as nature, as belonging strictly to ourselves, what we have never seen or experienced, and have only portrayed to us in works of fiction. All people speak of the extensive range of Shakspeare's genius—that he appears to have been conversant with every mode of life, with the sentiments and language appropriate to each—that he is at once king, courtier, citizen, and clown; yet what do those who so admire him for this universality know themselves, but through him, of all these phases of life? We recognise them by an instinct, that enters readily into the possibilities of all nature which is akin to us; and if this be so, the busiest man who is no reader, may, in his walk through life, see much more of mankind than the reader, but know far less. Who teaches to read puts but the key of knowledge into the scholar's hand. It was well said by Aristophanes, "Masters for children, poets for men."

Aquilius.—True; and if all literary fiction could be withdrawn and forgotten, and its renovation prohibited, the greater part of us would be dolts, and, what is worse, unfeeling, ungenerous, and under the debasing dominion of the selfishness of simple reason. It has always appeared to me that those who cautiously keep novels from young people mistake the nature of mind, thinking it only intellect, and would cultivate the understanding alone. Imagination they look upon as an ignis fatuus, to be extinguished if possible—an ignis fatuus arising out of a quagmire, and leading astray into one. There is nothing good comes from the intellect alone. The inventive faculty is compound, in which imagination does the most work; the intellectual portion selects and decides, but collects not the materials. All true sentiment, all noble, all tender feeling, comes not of the understanding, but of that mind—or heart, if we so please to call it—which imagination raises, educates, and perfects. Even feelings are to be made—are much the result of education. The wildest romances will, in this respect, teach nothing wrong. If they create a world somewhat unlike the daily visible, they create another, which is a reality to the possessor, to the romantic, from which he can extract much that is practical, though it may seem not so; for from hence may spring noble impulses, generosity and fortitude. It is not true that such reading enervates the mind: I firmly believe it strengthens it in every respect, and fits it for every action, by unchaining it from a lower and cowardly caution. Who ever read a romance that inculcated listless, shapeless idleness? It encourages action and endurance. We have not high natures till we learn to suffer. I have noted much the different effects troubles have upon different persons, and have seen the unromantic drop like sheep under the rot of their calamities, while the romantic have been buoyant, and mastered them. They have more resources in themselves, and are not bowed down to one thought nor limited to one feeling: in fact, they are higher beings.

Curate.—The caution professes mainly to protect women; yet, among all the young women whom I have been acquainted with, I should say that the novel-readers are not only the best informed, but of the best nature, and some capable of setting examples of a sublime fortitude—the more sublime because shown in a secret and all-enduring patience. Who are they that will sit by the bed-side of the sick day and night, suffer privation, poverty, even undeserved disgrace, and shrink not from the self-imposed duty, but those very young women in whom the understanding and imagination have been equally cultivated, so as to render the feelings acute and impulsive?—and these are novel-readers. Love, it is said, is the only subject all novels are constructed upon; and such reading encourages extravagant thoughts, and gives rise to dangerous feelings. And why dangerous? And why should not such thoughts and feelings be encouraged? Are they bad? Are they not such as are requisite for wife and mother to hold, and best for the destiny of woman—best in every view—best if her lot be a happy one, and far best if her lot be an ill one? For the great mark of such an education is endurance—a power to create a high duty, and energy and patience where both are wanted. Women never sink under any calamity but blighted affection; and we love them not less, we admire them not less, that they do sink then, for their heroism is in the patience that brings and that awaits death.

Aquilius.—I have heard Eusebius say that he has made it a point, wherever he goes, to recommend earnestly to all young mothers to select no nurse for their children but such as have a good stock of nursery tales. He has often purposed to write an essay on the subject of the requisite education for nurses, asserting that there ought to be colleges for training to that one purpose alone; for, as the nurse gives the first education, the first impression, she gives the most important. The child that is not sung to, and whose ear has not been attentive to nursery tales, he would say, would be brought up to turn his father and mother out of doors, and deserve, if he did not come, to be hanged; and if such unfortunate child be a daughter, she would live to be a slut, a slattern, a fool, and a disgrace. He had no doubt, he said, believing that all Shakspeare's creations were realities, that Regan and Goneril were ill nursed, and no readers; and that Cordelia was in infancy well sung to, and being the youngest, was set to read romances to her old and wayward father,—

"Methinks that lady is my child Cordelia!"

How full are these few words of the old father's feeling, and reminiscent of the nursery, of songs, of tales, wherein he had seen the growth of his "child Cordelia!" Eusebius would be eloquent upon this subject: I cannot tell you half of what he thought and vigorously expressed. He used to delight in getting children together and telling them stories, and invariably began with "once upon a time," which, he used to say, had, if any words could have, a magical charm.

Curate.—Bad, indeed, was the change when story reading and telling ceased to be a part of education: and what was put in its place?—stuff that no child could understand or care about. The good old method once abandoned, there was no end to the absurdities that followed; and they who wrote them knew nothing about children, or what would amuse, and, by interesting, improve them. The false system of cramming them with knowledge, which it was impossible for them to digest, really stopped their intellectual growth, and checked the natural spring of their feelings. Wisdom-mongering went on upon the "rational plan," till the wise-heads, full-grown infant pumpkins, fatuated, empty of anything solid or digestible; and so they grew, and grew from night to morn, and morn to night, stolid boobies, lulled into a melancholy sleep by the monotonous hum of "Hymns in Prose."

Aquilius.—"Hymns in Prose!" Is not that one of Mrs Barbauld's books for children, I have often heard mothers say, "that is so very good?"

Curate.—Oh yes! Here it is in Lydia's library.

Aquilius.—Open it—any where.

Curate.—Well, now, I do not think the information given to the child here is quite correct in its order, for I think the parent of the mother must be the child's grandmother. "The mother loveth her little child; she bringeth it up on her knees; she nourisheth its body with food."

Aquilius.—A very unnatural parent if she did not. It is very new information for a child. Well, go on.

Curate.—"She feedeth its mind with knowledge. If it is sick, she nurseth it with tender love; she watcheth over it when asleep; she forgetteth it not for a moment."

Aquilius.—A most exemplary and extraordinary mother—not a moment! Go on.

Curate.—"She teacheth it how to be good; she rejoiceth daily in its growth." I do not see the connexion between the "teaching to be good" and the growth. "But who is the parent of the mother? Who nourisheth her with good things, and watcheth over her with tender love, and remembereth her every moment? Whose arms are about her to guard her from harm?"

Aquilius.—Stay a moment—whose arms? Why, the husband's to be sure; which the child may have seen, and need not have been told as a lesson.

Curate.—"And if she is sick, who shall heal her?" Now, you would say, the apothecary, and so would the child naturally answer; but that would not be according to the "rational plan." The riddle is to have a religious solution—"God is the parent of the mother; he is the parent of all, for he created all."

Aquilius.—Shut the book! shut the book! or rather put it in the fire, or one of these days one of your own babes will be so spoon-fed. So these are hymns for children! Why, the children brought up on this "rational plan" have set up themselves for teachers, and in a line, too, sometimes quite beyond Mrs Barbauld's intention. I took up a book of prayers off a goody-table the other day, written by a boy of six years old, with a preface by himself, to the purport that his object was to improve the thoughtless world. At the end were some verses—all such cherub children love to "lisp in numbers." As well as I can remember, they ran thus—they are lines on the occasion of its father's breaking his leg, or having some accidental sickness—

"O Lord! in mercy do look down,
And heal my dear papa;
Or if it please thee not to cure,
Do comfort dear mama!"

Curate.—Well, I don't think there is a pin to choose between the hymn in prose and the hymn in verse, excepting that the infant versifier is rather more intelligible. I saw the little book a month or two ago at ----. I must have called after you; for I suspect some lines in pencil at the end were your work. Did you write these?—

"Defend me from such wretched stuff
As children write and parents puff!
Put the small hypocrites to bed,
And whip the big ones in their stead!"

Aquilius.—At least I will write them in Lydia's, to protect the future. The child would have been better employed in reading Jack the Giant-killer. But what think you of Bible stories, adopted for those of somewhat more advanced childhood—a religious novel made out of the history of Joseph, price eighteenpence? I picked it up at the same house, and had permission to put it in my pocket. It is a curious story to choose, as the writer says, "to entertain my young reader without vitiating his mind." I mean not the genuine story, but such as the writer promises it to be; for he says in his preface, "I am not at all aware of having at all departed from the spirit of the text, nor from the rules of probability. I have, indeed, ventured upon a few conjectures and fictious possibilities, which some very grave reader may perhaps be offended with." The author professes his object to be, to make the Bible popular; so what the conjectures and fictious possibilities that may offend very grave people may be, we must guess by the object—to make it fashionable. But the recommendation to the young on the score of love, and the "letting down" the Bible to the capacities of the young, must be given in the author's own words: "The sacred volume is fertile of subjects calculated both to please and instruct, when let down, by proper elucidation, within the reach of young capacities. And rather than one class of readers should want entertainment, let me tell them, that the Bible contains many histories of love affairs; perhaps this may tend more to recommend it to attention than all besides which I could say." You will not, however, conclude that I object to religious novels. It is a legitimate mode of enforcing doctrines by lives, and showing the pernicious effects of what is false, and the natural result of the good.

Curate.—And will not the authority of parables justify the adoption? There may, it is true, be mischievous novels of the kind; but what is there that may not be perverted to a bad use? We had at one time irreligious and basely immoral novels; and there have been too many such recently from the Parisian press—blasphemous, immoral, seditious. The existence of such demands the antidote. You have, of course, read Miss Hamilton's "Modern Philosophers?" That work was well timed, and did its work well, so cleverly were the very passages from Godwin and others of that school brought in juxtaposition with their necessary results. It is a melancholy tale.

Aquilius.—Yes; but this quiet woman, whom, as I am told, if you had met her in society, you would never have suspected of power and shrewd observation, by her little pen scattered the philosophers right and left, and their works with them. I read the other day Godwin's "St Leon"—a most tiresome, objectless novel; the repetitions, varying with no little ingenuity of language, of the expression of the feelings of St Leon, are tiresome to a degree. In his Caleb Williams the same thing is done; but there it agrees well with the nature of the tale, and well represents the movements of the persecuting Erinnys in the mind of the victim. I read it at a great disadvantage, it must be owned, for I had just laid down that tale of singular interest, the "Kreutzner" of Mrs H. Lee. There is a slight resemblance in some points to Godwin's style, especially to this expression of the feelings of the victim; but they are exactly timed to suspend the narrative just where it ought to stay. Too rapid a succession of events would have been out of keeping with that incessant persecution, which tracks more perfectly, because more surely and slowly. The true bloodhound is not fleet. Cassandra stayed her prophetic speech; but the pause was the scent of blood, and awful was the burst that followed. Know you the Canterbury Tales?

Curate.—Oh yes; and well remember that strangely interesting and most powerful one of "Kreutzner." I have admired how, in every tale, the style is various and characteristic. I see, then, that you have taken to "light reading" of late.

Aquilius.—It is not very easy to say what light-reading is. I once heard a very grave person accused of light-reading, because he was detected with the "History of a Foundling" in his hand. He replied, "You may call it light-reading, but to me there is more solid matter in it than in most books. I find it all substance,—full weight in the scale of sense, common or uncommon, and will weigh down a library of heavy works. And yet you may pleasantly enough handle it—it fits so well, and the pressure is so convenient. You may even fancy it light too, for it imparts a vigour as you hold it. And so you can play with it for your health, as did the Greek king, in the Arabian tale, with the mallet and medicinal balls which the physician Douban gave him, with which he was lustily to exercise himself. It was all play, but the drugs worked through it. There may be something sanatory even in the 'History of the Foundling.' There is a light-reading which is the heaviest of all reading: it comes with a deadly weight upon the eyelids, and then drops like lead from your fingers,—but then, indeed, it proves light enough in escaping." Fielding's novel is not of this kind: my grave friend always read it once a-year, and said he as often found new matter in it. Did you ever—indeed I ought not to ask the question—notice Fielding's admirable English? Our best writers have had a short vocabulary, and such was the case with Fielding; but he is the perfect master of it. The manners he portrays are gone by. Some of the characters it would be impossible now to reproduce, and yet we know at a glance that they were drawn from life.

Curate.—Comparing that novel, and indeed those of that day, with our more modern, may we not say, that this our England is improved?

Aquilius.—I hope so: it is at least more refined. But there is a question, Is not the taste above the honesty? Some say, it is a better hypocrite. I do not venture an opinion, but take Dr Primrose's ingenious mode of prophecy, who, in ambiguous cases, always wished it might turn out well six months hence.

Curate.—Now, indeed, you speak of a novel sui generis—that had no prototype. It stands now unapproachable and original as the Iliad. Yet I have often wondered by what art Goldsmith invested such characters with so great interest. That in every one he put something of himself, it has been well observed; hence the strong vitality, the flesh and blood life of all. I believe the great charm lies in its simpletonianism—I coin a word; admit it. There is scarcely a character that is not more or less of the simpleton; and the more this simpletonianism is conspicuous, the more are we delighted. Perhaps the reader, whether justified or not, is all along under the conviction that he has himself more common sense than any of the company to whom he is introduced, and with whom he becomes familiar. Simplicity runs through the whole tale—a fascinating simplicity, distinct from, and yet in happy relation with, this simpletonianism. The vicar is a simpleton in more things than his controversy, and is the worthy parent of Moses of the spectacles. The eccentricity of the baronet, the over-trust and the mis-trust of mankind, at the different periods of his life, are of the simpletonian school; and not the least so that act of injurious folly, the giving up his estate to a nephew, of whom he could have known no good. Mrs Primrose is a simpleton born and bred, and in any other hands but those of charitable Goldsmith must have turned out an odious character, for she has scarcely feeling, and certainly no sense. Simpletonianism reigns, whether at the vicarage or at Farmer Flamborough's. Yet is there not a single character in this exquisitely perfect novel that you would in any one respect wish other than as put before you. There is a great charm in this simpletonianism: the reader is in perfect sympathy with the common feelings of all, yet cognisant of a simpletonianism of which none of the dramatis personæ are conscious. He thus sits, as it were, in the conclave of nature's administrators, knows the secret that fixes characters in their lines; and is pleased to see the strings pulled, and the figures move according to their kind; is delighted with their perfect harmony, and looks on with complacency and self-satisfaction, believing himself all the while, though he may in reality be something of a simpleton, a person of very superior sagacity. Follies that do not offend, amuse—they are not neutral: we cheat ourselves into an idea that we are exempt from, and are so much above them, that we can afford to look down and laugh: we say to ourselves we are wiser. May not this in some measure be the cause that all, whether children of small or of bigger growth, of three feet or six, take pleasure in the jokes, verbal and practical, of the clown Mr Merryman, and pardon the wickedness of Punch when he so adroitly slips the rope round the neck of the simpleton chief-justice, who trusted himself within reach of the knave's fingers.

Aquilius.—Your theory is plausible; be the cause what it may, our best authors seem to have been aware of the charm of simpletonianism. Never was there a more perfect master of it than Shakspeare. And how various the characters—what differences between Shallow, Slender, Malvolio, and indeed all his troop of simpletons! None but he would have thought of putting Falstaff in the category. But let no man boast of his wisdom; we had laughed with him, but laugh too at him when simpletonianised in the buck basket. The inimitable Sterne, did he not know the value of simpletonianism, and make us love it, in the weak and in the wise, in the Shandean philosophy and the no-philosophy of the misapprehending gentle Uncle Toby, and the faithful Trim, taking to himself a portion of both masters' simpletonianism? Did not Le Sage know the value of this art?—Gil Blas retaining to the last somewhat of the simpleton, and, as if himself unconscious, so naïvely relating his failure with the Archbishop of Grenada. And have we not perfect examples in the delicious pages of Cervantes?—the grave, the wise, the high-minded simpletonianism of Don Quixotte; and that contrastingly low and mother-wit kind in the credulous Sancho Panza—ignorance made mad by contact with madness engendered of reading? The very Rosinante that carried madness partakes of the sweet and insane simpletonianism, and Sancho and his ass are fellows well met, well matched.

Curate.—As he is the cleverest actor that plays the fool, so is he the wisest and ablest writer that portrays simpletonianism. I suppose it is an ingredient in human nature, and that we are none of us really exempt, but that it is kept out of sight, for the most part, and covered by the cloak of artificial manners; and so, when it does break out, the touch of human nature is irresistible; we in fact acknowledge the kinship. But the nicest painting is required; the least exaggeration turns all to caricature. Even Fielding's hand, though under the direction of consummate genius, was occasionally too unrestrained. His Parson Adams might have been a trifle more happily delineated; we see its error in the after-type, Pangloss. What a field was there for extravagance in Don Quixotte! but Cervantes had a forbearing as well as free hand. How could people mistake the aim of Cervantes, and pronounce him to be the Satirist of Romance? He was himself the most exquisite romancer. His episodes are romantic in the extreme, whether of the pastoral or more real life. Though it was not right in Avelanda to take up his tale, it must be regretted that Cervantes changed the plan of his story. What would the tournament have been? Some critics have thought all the after-part inferior: without admitting so much, he certainly wrote it in pique, and possibly might not have concluded the tale at all, if it had not been thus forced upon him.

Aquilius.—We must not omit to mention our own Addison. There is an air of simpletonianism running through all his papers, as one unconscious of his own wit, so perfect was he in his art; and as to character, the simpletonianism of Sir Roger de Coverley must ever immortalise the author—for the good eccentric Sir Roger is one of the world's characters, that can never be put by and forgotten. What nice touches constitute it!

Curate.—Yes, great nicety; and how often the little too far injures! I confess I was never so charmed with some of the characters in Sir Walter Scott's novels, from this carrying too far. Even simpletonianism must not intrude, as did sometimes Monkbarns and the Dominie: the "prodigious!" and absence of mind were beyond nature. Character should never become the author's puppets: mere eccentricity and catch phraseology do not make simpletonianism. Smollet, too, fell into the caricature. He sometimes told too much, and let his figures play antics. The fool would thereby spoil his part. There must be some repose every where, into which, as into an obscure, the mind of the reader or spectator may look, and make conjecture—some quiet, in which imagination may work. The reader is never satisfied, unless he too in a certain sense is a creator; the art is, to make all his conjectures, though seemingly his own, the actual result of the writing before him. "Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds." How much does the mind accumulate at once, to fill up the history of those few words! There is no need of more—all is told; while the spectator thinks he is making out the history himself.

Aquilius.—It is a great fault in a very popular novel writer of the day, that he will not give his readers credit for any imagination at all; every character is in extreme. To one ignorant of the world, but through books, it would appear that there is not a common middle character in life: we are to be acquainted with the minutest particulars, or rather peculiarities, of dress and manners. It is as if a painter should colour each individual in his grouping, in the most searching light. The inanimate nature must be made equally conspicuous, and every thing exaggerated. And it is often as forced in the expression as it is exaggerated in character. He has great powers, great genius, overflowing with matter, yet as a writer he wants agreeability: his satire is bitter, unnecessarily accumulated, and his choice of odious characters offers too frequently a disgusting picture of life.

Curate.—The worst is, that, with a genius for investing his characters with interest, by the events with which he links them together, in which he has so much art, that he compels persons of most adverse tastes to read him,—he is not a good-natured writer, and he evidently, it might be almost said professedly, writes with a purpose—and that I think a very mischievous one, and one in which he is to a certain extent joined by some other writers of the day—to decry, and bring into contempt as unfeeling, the higher classes. This is a very vulgar as well as evil taste, and is quite unworthy the genius of Mr Dickens. And, what is a great error in a novelist, he gives a very false view of life as it is. There is too much of the police-office reporter in all his works. Dombey and Son is, however, his greatest failure, as a whole. You give him credit for a deep plot and mystery, ere you have gone far; but it turns out—nothing. Admirable, indeed, are some things, parts and passages of wonderful power; but the spring that should have attached them has snapped, and they are, and ever will be, admired, only as scenes. The termination is miserable—a poor conclusion, indeed, of such a beginning; every thing is promised, nothing given, in conclusion. Some things are quite out of possibility. The whole conduct of the wife is out of nature. Such a character should have a deep cause for her conduct: she has none but the having married a disagreeable man, out of pique, from whom she runs away with one still more odious to herself and every one, and assumes, not a virtue which she has not, but a vice which she scorns, and glories in the stigma, because it wounds her husband. Such a high and daring mind, and from the commencement so scorning contamination, could not so degrade itself without having a stronger purpose than the given one. The entire change of character in Dombey is out of all nature—it is impossible; nor does the extraordinary affection of the daughter spring from any known principle of humanity. The very goodness of some of the accessory characters becomes wearisome, as the vice of others is disgusting.

Aquilius.—After all, he is an uncomfortable writer: he puts you out of humour with the world, perhaps with yourself, and certainly with him as a writer. Yet let us acknowledge that he has done much good. He should be immortalised, if only for the putting down the school tyrannies, exposing and crushing school pretensions, and doubtless saving many a fair intellect from withering blight and perversion. He takes in hand fools, dolts, and knaves; but Dickens wants simpletonianism. He gave some promise that way in his Pickwick Papers, but it was not fulfilled. Turn we now to Mrs Trollope. What say you to her Vicar of Wrexhill? let it have a text, and what is it? I will not suggest a text—that is your province. I dare to say you would easily find one.

Curate.—Why, I think Mrs Trollope was very unfairly dealt with. The narrative in that novel was a fair deduction from the creed of a sect; and if it does not always produce similar consequences, it is because men will be often better than their creeds. But that fact does not make her comment unfit for the text, that it told; I should judge from the abuse that has been heaped upon it—no, not upon it, but upon the authoress. Why was it not open to her to make this answer to other works of fiction, as she thought, inculcating evil? What Miss Hamilton did with the philosophers, she did with the Antinomians.

Aquilius.—It has been the fashion to call her a coarse writer—a vulgar writer. I see nothing of it in her best works. She takes vulgar and coarse people to expose them as warnings, and, if possible, to amend them. We cannot spare Mrs Trollope from our literature. I have been told by an eye-witness that her American "camp scene" is very far short of the truth, and that she could not give the details. He must surely be a bit of a bigot, who would hastily pronounce that even Greave's Spiritual Quixotte is an irreligious work. There are too many people interested in decrying the novel of so powerful a writer as Mrs Trollope, to suffer her to be without reproach both for style and object. I should rather object to her that she writes too much—for she is capable, were she to bestow due time upon it, to write something better than has yet dropped from her pen; let her give up her fashionable novels. When I say better, yet would I except the Vicar of Wrexhill: for, however unpopular with some, it places her, as a writer, very high.

Curate.—They who oppose themselves to any set of opinions must make up their minds, during the present generation at least, to receive but half their meed of praise. Was this ever proved more remarkably than in the publication of that singular novel, Ten Thousand a-Year? It is a political satire, certainly; but not only that—it has a far wider scope; but it was sufficiently so to set all the Whigs against it. And sore enough they were. But has there been any such novel since the days of Fielding? And it exhibits a pathos, and tone of high principle and personal dignity, that were out of the reach even of Fielding. This novel, and its precursor, the Diary of a Physician will—must—ever live in the standard literature of the country.

Aquilius.—And why not add Now and Then? One thing I cannot but greatly admire in Mr Warren—he is ever alive to the dignity of his profession. Hating law as I do, in all its courses, ways, contacts, and consequences, and officials, from the Lord Chief-Justice to the petty constable; and having a kind of envious dislike to the arrogation to themselves, by lawyers, of the greater part of the great profits and emoluments of the country; and seeing, besides, that most men of any station and property pay, in their course of life, as much to lawyers as in taxes, the one cried-up grievance; yet I confess that Mr Warren has put the noble portraiture of the profession, in all its dignity and usefulness, and in its high moral and intellectual acquirements and actions, so vigorously before me, that I recant, and even venerate the profession—against my will, nevertheless.

Curate.—How touching are the early struggles with his poverty, in the person of the young physician himself! with what fine taste and feeling of the gentleman and the scholar are they written! Perhaps no novel can show a more perfectly complete-in-itself character than his Gammon, in whom is the strange interweaving of the man of taste and sense—even, in some sense, better feeling—with the vile and low habits of knavery.

Aquilius.—The author differs from most novelists in this, that he does not make love, by which must be understood love-making or love-pursuing, the subject, but incidental to his subject. He sets up affection, rather, in the niche for his idolatry. Tenderness, and duty linked with it, and made sublime by it, is with him far more than the "passion," of love. It is life with love, rather than in the chase of it, that we see detailed in trial and in power.

Curate.—It is so; and yet you do not, I presume, mean to blame other authors if they have made "the passion" their subject. We are only bound to the author's choice, be it what it may—love, ambition, or, any other—we must have every feature of life, every notice of action, pictured.

Aquilius.—Surely: but there is a masculine virtue, seeing that the one field has been so decidedly occupied, in making it less prominent; and where it is thus abstinently administered, there is often a great charm in the conciseness and unexpectedness. Let me exemplify Mr Southey's Doctor. There may be, strictly speaking, or rather speaking after the fashion of novels, but little love-making; there are, nevertheless, two little scenes, that are the most touchingly effective I ever remember to have read. The one is a scene between cousins—dependent and in poverty, I think, at Salisbury; the other, the unexpected and brief courtship of Doctor Dove himself. It is many years since I read The Doctor, yet these two scenes have often been conjured up, and vividly pictured to my imagination. I doubt if Southey could have told a love-tale in any other way, and few in any way would have told one so well.

Curate.—Those who dwell too unsparingly on such scenes, and spin out their sentimental tales, and bring the loving pair incessantly before the eye, do for the most part the very thing which the nature of the passion forbids. Its whole virtue is in the secrecy. And though the writer often supposes a secrecy, by professing himself only the narrator and not the witness, yet the reader is not quite satisfied, seeing that he too is called in to look over the wall or behind the hedge; and the virtue he is willing to give the lovers is at some expense of his own, for he has a shrewd suspicion that both he and the writer are little better than spies.

Aquilius.—Surely you will admit something conventional, as you would the soliloquy on the stage—words must pass for thoughts. I find a greater fault with those kind of novels; they work, as it were, too much to a point, beyond which, and out of which aim, there is no interest. These I call melodramatic novels, in which the object seems to harrow up or continually excite the feelings, to rein the hasty course of curiosity, working chiefly for the denouement, after which there is nothing left but a blank. Curiosity, satisfied, cannot go back; the threads have all been taken up that lead out of the labyrinth—they will not conduct you back again. Novels of this kind have greater power, at first, than any other; but, the effect for which they labour fully produced, the effervescence is over; and though we remember them for the delight they have given, we do not return to them. Novels of less overstrained incident, full of a certain naiveté in the description of men and manners, from which the reader may make inferences and references out of his own knowledge, though they will not be read by so many, will be read oftener by the same persons. Perhaps there is more genius in the greater part of these novels, but the writers sacrifice to effect—to immediate effect—too much. Cooper's novels are somewhat of this kind; and may I venture to say that the Waverley novels, as they are called, assume a little more than one could wish of this character. Authors, in this respect, are like painters of effect—they strike much at first, but become even tiresome by the permanency of what is, in nature, evanescent. It is too forced for the quietness under which things are both seen and read twice. Generally, in such tales, when the parties have got well out of their troubles, we are content to leave them at the church door, and not to think of them afterwards.

Curate.—Novelists, too, seem to think that, by their very title, they are compelled to seek novelties. I have to complain of a very bad novelty. The "lived together happy for ever after" is not only to be omitted, but these last pages of happiness are sadly slurred over; as if the author was mostly gifted with the malicious propensity for accumulating trouble upon his favourites, and with reluctance registered their escape into happiness. They do out of choice what biographers do out of necessity, the disagreeable necessity of biography, and for which—I confess the weakness—I dislike it. I do not like to come to the "vanitas vanitatum"—to see the last page contradict and make naught of the vitality, the energy, the pursuit, the attainment of years. It is all true enough—as it is—that old men have rheum, but, as Hamlet says, it is villanous to set it down. You have, of course, read that powerful novel Mount Sorel. You remember the last page—the one before had been "voti compos"—all were happy; and there it should have ended. Not a bit of it. Then follows the monumental scene. You are desired to look forward, to see them, or rather to be told of their lying in their shrouds, with their feet, that recently so busily walked the flowery path of the accomplishment of their hopes, upturned and fixed in the solemn posture of death.

Aquilius.—Yes, I remember it well, and being rather nervous, declined reading Emilia Wyndham, by the same author, because I heard it was melancholy, and feared a similar conclusion. I agree with you with respect to biography: and remember, when a boy, the sickening sensation when I read at school the end of Socrates. I wish biographers would know where to stop, and save us the sad catastrophe. It is strange, that you must not read the life of a buffoon but you must see his tricks come to an end, and his whole broad farce of life suddenly drop down dead in tragedy. Whatever may be said of the biographer in his defence, I hold the novelist inexcusable.

Curate.—I should even prefer the drop-scene of novel happiness to come quietly down before the accoucheur and the registrar of births make their appearance. Why should we be told of a nursery of brats—a whole quiverful, as Lamb says, "shot out" upon you? It is better to take these things for granted. Doubtless it is as true, that the happy couple will occasionally suffer—she from nerves, and he under dyspepsia; but we do not see such matters, nor ought they to be brought forward, although I doubt not the authors might obtain a very handsome fee from an advertising doctor for only publishing the prescriptions. If they go on, however, in this absurd way, it is to be feared they will go one step further with the biographers, and publish the will, with certificate of probate and legacy-tax duly paid.

Aquilius.—We are not, however, as bad as the French. If our novels do sometimes require an epitaph at the end, they do not make death at once a lewd, sentimental, frightful, and suicidal act—and that not as a warning, but as a French sublime act.

Curate.—You have read, then, the Juif Errant. I am not very well acquainted with French novels, but have read some very pretty stories in the voluminous Balzac, most of which were not of a bad tendency. Did you ever read the Greek novels Theagenes and Chariclea, and the Loves of Ismenias and Ismene? Being curious to see how the Thessalonian archbishop, who lived in the times of Manuelis and Alexis Commenus, about the year 750, would speak the sentiments of his age on the passion of love, I lately took up his novel, the "Loves of Ismenias and Ismene."

Aquilius.—I know it not; perhaps you will give me an outline, and select passages. I have great respect for the old Homeric commentator.

Curate.—I remember a few tender passages, and graceful descriptions of gardens and fountains, and that he is not unmindful of his Homer, for he refers to the gardens of Alcinous as his model. I confess I am a little ashamed of the archbishop; but read with more than shame that Greek novel of Longus, written it is doubted whether in the second or fourth century, and to which, it is said, Eustathius was indebted for his novel. Longus's Daphnis and Chloë is a pastoral,—it would burn well. There are pleasing descriptions in both of garden scenery. Speaking of gardens and fountains reminds me of the richness of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, which I am surprised did not before come into our discussion. How strange is it that, though manners and scenes are so far from our usages and any known locality, we admit them at once within the recognised boundary of imaginative nature! They are indeed fascinating; yet have I not unfrequently met with persons who professed that they could not endure them.

Aquilius.—Were they young persons?—if so, they must be very scantily gifted with a conciliating imagination, though they may very possibly be the most reasonable of human beings. The charm that renders the Arabian Nights acceptable in all countries appears to me to arise from this—that vivid are the touches which speak of our common nature, and what is extraneous is less defined. Indeed, not unfrequently is great use made of the obscure—such obscure as Rembrandt, the master of mystery, profusely spread around the gorgeous riches of his pencil. There is here and there, too, a sprinkling of simpletonianism in a foreign shape, showing that all nations have something akin.

Curate.—Besides, they have the charm of magic, and a magic which blends very skilfully and harmoniously with the realities of every-day life. They were evidently composed in a country where magic was a creed. Could such tales have been ever the product of this country, so different from any of our "fairy tales?" though perhaps none of ours, those that delighted us in our childhood, are of English origin. Magic of some kind or other must have been adopted in tale at a very early period. Ulysses' safety girdle, which he was directed mysteriously to throw behind him, and I believe not to look back, comes undoubtedly from some far land of faery, from whence the genius of Homer took it with a willing hand.

Aquilius.—Grecian fable is steeped in the charmed fountain. The power of the Medusa's head, and the black marble prince's metamorphoses, are nearly allied. And a Circe may be discovered in many places of Arabic enchantment.

Curate.—Time converts everything into beauty. You smile, thinking doubtless that age has something to do with ugliness. Perhaps so, though it follows not but that there may be, personally speaking, to every age its own beauty, visible to eyes not human, whilst we are under earthly beauty's fascination, at any rate with regard to fact and to fable. Time unites them, as it covers the riven rock with lichen; so the shattered and ugliest idols of remotest ages doth Time hand over to Fable, to remodel and invest with garments of beauty or deformity, to suit every desire of the imagination. Strange as it may seem, it is true that there is in most of us, weary and unsatisfied with this matter-of-fact world, a propensity to throw ourselves into dream, and let fancy build up for us a world of its own, and, for a season, fit us with an existence for it—taking with us the beautiful of this, and charming what is plain under the converting influence of fiction. Who understood this as Shakspeare did? His Tempest, Midsummer's Night Dream, his Merchant of Venice, are built up out of the materials supplied by this natural propensity.

Aquilius.—How beautiful are impossibilities when genius sets them forth as truth! Who does not yield implicit belief to every creation of Shakspeare? I prefer the utter impossibilities to improbabilities converted into real substantial fact. Let us have Mysteries of Udolpho uncleared up; it is dissatisfying at the end to find you have been cheated. One would not have light let in to a mysterious obscure, and exhibit perhaps but a bare wall ten feet off. I had rather have the downright honest ghost than one, on discovery, that shall be nothing but an old stick and a few rags. The reader is put in the condition of the frogs in the fable, when they found themselves deluded into wonder and worship of an old log. I would not even clear up the darkness of ignorance respecting the Pyramids, and will believe that the hieroglyphics are the language of fables, that are better, like the mummies, under a shroud. Wherever you find a bit of the mysterious, you are sure to be under a charm. In Corinne of Madame de Stael, not the most romantic of authors, the destiny cloud across the moon you would not have resolved into smoke ascending from a house-top. Let the burial-place of Œdipus be ever hid. Imagination converts ignorance into a pleasure. There is a belief beyond, and better than that of eyes and ears.

Curate.—Not at present; at this moment I will trust both. I hear the carriage, and here is Lydia returned from ——. I hope she has picked up the parcel of books which I gathered for our reading.

Now here, Eusebius, our dialogue broke off, and we greeted the Curate's wife. The box, it seems, had not reached the little town; so, with a woman's nice tact, Lydia, the Curate's Lydia, had brought us two novels to begin with. I therefore put my letter to you by, until we had read them, and I was enabled to say something about them. You perceive, Eusebius, that I have made some mention in the dialogue of you, and your opinions upon nursery fabulous education. Lydia says—for to her we mentioned your whim—that you must come and discuss it with her; and she will, to provoke you, bring you into company with some very good people, and very much devoted to education. She tells me she has a neighbour who burnt Gay's fables, which a godfather had given to one of her children; because, said she, it taught children lying, for her children looked incredulous as one day she told them that beasts cannot speak. The Curate's wife promises herself some amusement, you perceive, when you come; you must therefore be as provoking as possible. But now, Eusebius, we have read the novels brought to us. The first, Jane Eyre, has been out some time: not so the other, Madame de Malguet, which has only now made its first appearance. I do not think it fair, though it is a common practice with critics, to give out a summary of the tales they review—for this is sure to spoil the reading. I will resume, then, the dialogue, omitting such parts as may be too searching into the story.

Lydia.—Well, I am glad we read Jane Eyre first, for I should have been sorry to have ended with tears, which she has drawn so plentifully; and not from my eyes alone, though both you men, as ashamed of your better natures, have endeavoured to conceal them in vain.

Aquilius.—It is a very pathetic tale—very singular; and so like truth that it is difficult to avoid believing that much of the characters and incidents are taken from life, though woman is called the weaker sex. Here, in one example, is represented the strongest passion and the strongest principle, admirably supported.

Curate.—It is an episode in this work-a-day world, most interesting, and touched at once with a daring, yet delicate hand. In spite of all novel rules, the love heroine of the tale has no personal beauty to recommend her to the deepest affection of a man of sense, of station, and who had seen much of the world, not uncontaminated by it. It seems to have been the purpose of the author to show that high and noble sentiments, and great affection, can be both made subservient, and even heightened, by the energy of practical wisdom. If the author has purposely formed a heroine without the heroine's usual accomplishments, with a knowledge of the world, and even with a purpose to heighten that woman in our admiration, he has made no small inroad into the virtues that are usually attributed to every lover, in the construction of a novel. He, the hero, has great faults—why should we mince the word?—vice. And yet so singular is the fatality of love, that it would be impossible to find two characters so necessary to exhibit true virtues, and make the happiness of each. The execution of the painting is as perfect as the conception.

Lydia.—I think every part of the novel perfect, though I have no doubt many will object, in some instances, both to the attachment and the conduct of Jane Eyre.

Aquilius.—It is not a book for Prudes—it is not a book for effeminate and tasteless men; it is for the enjoyment of a feeling heart and vigorous understanding.

Lydia.—I never can forget her passage across the heath, and her desolate night's lodging there.

Curate.—But you will remember it without pain, for it was at once the suffering and the triumph of woman's virtue.

Aquilius.—To my mind, one of the most beautiful passages is the return of Jane Eyre, when she sees in the twilight her "master" and her lover solitary, and feeling his way with his hands, baring his sightless sorrow to the chill and drizzly night.

Curate.—But what think you of Madame de Malguet? In a different way, that is as unlike any other novel as Jane Eyre. This, too, is written to exhibit the character of woman under no ordinary circumstances.

Aquilius.—She reminds me of the Chevalier d'Eon, whose portrait I remember to have seen years ago in the Wonderful Magazine—half man, half woman. Madame de Malguet is perhaps an amalgamation of the Chevalier and Lady Hester Stanhope. These, after all, are not the beings to be exempt from the tender passion, but it is under the strongest vagaries. Love without courtship is the very romance of the passion; and such is there in the tale of Madame de Malguet. The scene is laid in a little town, and its immediate neighbourhood, in France; and though a "Tale of 1820," carries back its interest, and much of the detail of the story, to the horrors of the first French Revolution. There is consequently a wide field for diversity of character, and for conflict of opinions, and their effects, as shown upon every grade of social life; and it is very striking that the deepest rooted prejudices, ere the conclusion, change sides, and are fitted upon characters to whom, at the commencement, they seemed but little to belong. The inborn aristocratic feelings, alike with the republican habits, meet their check; and I suppose it was the intention of the author to show the weakness of both.

Curate.—I am not certain of that, for I think the innate is preserved even through the disguise of contrary habits. I know not which is the hero—the Buonapartean soldier or the English naval captain. There are some discussions on subjects of life interspersed, which show the author to be a man of a deeply reflecting mind, and endued with no little power of expressing what he thinks and what he feels.

Aquilius.—When I found fault with this wet blanket of happiness, the monumental termination of Mount Sorel, I did not so soon expect to meet with a repetition of this fault. I must pick a quarrel with the writer for unnecessarily putting his characters hors-de-combat. I think authors now-a-days need not be afraid of the fate of Cervantes—of having them taken off their hands, and made to play their parts upon any other stages than their own.

Lydia.—You seem, both of you, to forget the real moral of the story—that a person endowed with a little more than common sense, general kindness, amiability, and energy of character, may be more useful in the world than the most accomplished hero.

Curate.—You would have found him too a hero, if his actions had been within the sphere of heroism. I hope to meet with Mr Torrens again. He has very great powers, and his conceptions are original.

And now, Eusebius, having written you this account of our dialogue, and breathed country air, and witnessed happiness, I am, yours ever, and

"Precipue sanus, nisi cùm pituita molesta est."

Aquilius.

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CONTINENTAL REVOLUTIONS—IRISH REBELLION—ENGLISH DISTRESS.

Seven months have barely elapsed since the throne of Louis Philippe was overturned, by a sudden and well-concerted urban tumult; and six have not expired since the fervour of revolution invaded the Germanic empire, and Italy, torn by the innovating passions, commenced a strife with the Austrian power. How marvellous have been the changes, how vehement the action, how powerful the reaction, since those events commenced! Involved in the whirlwind of anarchy, the greater as well as the lesser states of Germany seemed to be on the verge of destruction. Austria, tormented by diversity of lineage, race, and interest, seemed to be irrevocably broken up; and amidst the rebellion in Lombardy, the severance of Venice, the insurrection in Bohemia, and the fierce demand of the Hungarians for independence, it seemed scarcely possible to hope that the house of Hapsburg could maintain its existence, or the important element of Austria in the balance of European power be preserved. Torn by contending passions, a prey to the ambition of the republicans, the dreams of the socialists, and the indignation of the loyalists, France resembled a fiery volcano in the moment of irruption, of which the throes were watched by surrounding nations with trembling anxiety for their own existence. Italy, with Sicily severed from the throne of Naples; Rome in scarcely disguised insurrection against the Papal authority; Lombardy, Tuscany, and Venice in open revolt; and Piedmont, under revolutionary guidance, commencing the usual system of external democratic aggression, scarcely presented a spot on which the eye of hope could rest. Prussia, the first to be reached by the destructive flame, seemed so strongly excited, that it was hard to say whether its national unity or monarchical institutions would first fall to pieces. England, assailed by Chartism in the one island, and the approaching insurrection of the Irish in the other; oppressed with a debt to which its finances, under present management, seemed unequal—having borrowed £8,000,000 in a single year of general peace—seemed shaken to its foundation. The distress so generally diffused by the combined effect of free trade and a fettered currency, appeared at once to have dried up its material resources and overturned the wonted stability of the national mind: every thing seemed to be returning to chaos; and even the most sanguine advocates of human perfectibility, the most devout believers in democratic regeneration, looked on with trembling anxiety, and could hardly anticipate any other result from the disturbed passions of society, but a general and sanguinary war, terminating in the irresistible ascendency of one victorious power, or possibly a fresh inundation, over the exhausted field of European strife, of northern barbarians.

But truth is great, and will prevail. There are limits imposed by the wisdom of nature to the madness of the people, not less than the strife of the elements. Extraordinary convulsions seldom fail to restore government, after a time, to a bearable form: the letting loose of the passions of nations ere long rouses the feelings and alarms the interests, which produce reaction, and restore the subverted equilibrium of society. Men will not be permanently ruled by brutal force. Triumph reveals the latent tyranny of the multitude; power brings to light the selfishness and rapacity of their leaders. How strikingly have those truths—so often enunciated, so little attended to—been demonstrated by the events of the last summer! Six months only have elapsed, and what years, what centuries of experience have been passed during that brief period! How many delusions has it seen dispelled, and fallacies exposed; how many pretensions levelled, and expectations blasted; how many reputations withered, and iniquities detected! How much has the peril of inflammatory language been demonstrated, and the hollowness of revolutionary regeneration established! how quickly have words been blown into the air by deeds, and the men of eloquence supplanted by those of the sword! "Words," says Lamartine,[11] "set nations on fire; bayonets alone restore them to reason." Who has furnished such a commentary on these words as Lamartine himself?

Is it the doctrines of the French Revolution which were deemed seductive, its principles insinuating, its example dangerous? The Red Republicans, the insurrection of June, the slaughter of a greater number of men in a single revolt than has taken place in many a decisive battle, the withering agony of Parisian destitution, the ten thousand captives in its dungeons; the nightly transportation, for weeks together, of hundreds of deluded fanatics; the state of siege,—the prostration of freedom, a military dictatorship, rise up in grim and hideous array to dispel the illusion. Is it the Io Pæans of Italian regeneration which have caused the heart of the patriot to throb all over the world, and led the enthusiastic to anticipate a second era of Italian independence in the old age of its civilisation? The defeats on the Adige, the fall of Milan, the dispersion of the Lombard and Tuscan levies, tell us how miserable was the delusion on which such expectations rested, and how vain is the hope that a selfish and worn-out nation, destitute alike of civil firmness or military courage, can successfully establish its independence. Is it from Rome that this regeneration of society is expected to arise, and the reforming pope who is to be the Peter the Hermit of the new crusade in favour of the liberties of mankind? Behold him now trembling in his palace, bereft of authority, deprived of consideration; hated, despised, discrowned; waiting to see which of the Tramontane powers is to send a regiment of horse to receive the keys of the Eternal City, and give a lasting ruler to the former mistress of the world.

Is it Prussia that is to take the lead in the regeneration of the world, and from the north that a new Arminius is to issue, to assert the liberties of the great Teutonic family of mankind? Turn to Berlin, and see to what a pitiable degree of weakness revolutionary triumphs have reduced the monarchy of the Great Frederick. Behold its monarch and its army defeated by a band of students and shop-boys; its arsenal pillaged by an insurgent mob; and the power which withstood the banded strength of Europe, a century ago, and fronted Napoleon in the plenitude of his power, waging a doubtful and aggressive war with Denmark, a fifth-rate power, and paralysed by processions of apprentices, and the menaces of trades-unions, in the capital. Is it Ireland that is regarded as the sheet-anchor of the cause of revolution, and from the Emerald Isle that the bands of heroes are to issue who are to crush the tyranny of England, restore the freedom of the seas, and avenge the long quarrel of the Celt with the Saxon? It is in Boulagh Common that we must look for the exploits of the new Spartan heroes, and among the widow's cabbages we must search for the grave of a modern Leonidas! Is it in the energy, courage, and perseverance of the army of Tipperary, that we must find the realisation of the long-cherished hopes of Irish independence, and the demonstration of the solid foundation on which the much vaunted prospects of Hibernian success against British oppression is to be founded! It must augment the admiration which all the world must feel at the gallant conduct of the Irish, in this memorable struggle, to reflect that they owed their success to themselves alone; that none of their arms had been purchased, nor preparations made, with the wealth of the stranger; that they had spurned the charity of England as proudly as they had repelled its arms; and that, whatever could be cast up against them, this, at least, could not be said, that they had evinced ingratitude for recent benefits, or eaten the bread of their benefactor while they were preparing to pierce him to the heart!

Memorable, indeed, has been the year which has given these examples, and taught these lessons, to mankind. History will be sought in vain for a period in which, during so short a time, so many important political truths were unfolded, so many moral precepts taught, by suffering; or in which, after being for a season obscured by clouds, the polar star of religion and duty has shone forth with so bright a lustre. It is a proud thing for England to reflect on the exalted post she has occupied during this marvellous and trying time. While other nations, possessed of far greater military forces, were reeling under the shock, or prostrated by the treachery and treason of their defenders, she alone has repelled the danger by the constable's baton. She has neither augmented her army, nor increased her navy; she has not added a gun to her ships, nor a bayonet to her battalions. She has neither yielded to the violence of the Revolutionists, nor been guilty of deeds of cruelty to repress them. If her government is to blame for their conduct during the crisis, it is for having been too lenient—for having dallied too long with agitation, and winked at sedition till it grew into treason. A fault it undoubtedly has been, for it has brought matters to a crisis, and caused the ultimate outbreak to be repressed with far greater and more unavoidable severity than would have been required if the first merciful coercion had taken place. Had the Habeas Corpus Act been suspended in November, and the farce of Irish patriotism been hindered from turning into a burlesque tragedy, for one person whom it would have been necessary to imprison or transport, fifty must now undergo that punishment. Yet is this leniency or temporisation, misplaced as it was, and calamitous as it has turned out, a proud passage in England's story. It is some consolation to reflect that she conquered the revolutionary spirit, by which so many of the military monarchies of Europe had been prostrated, by moral strength alone; that scarce a shot was fired in anger by her troops, and not a drop of blood was shed on the scaffold; and that undue forbearance and lenity is the only fault which, during the crisis, can be imputed to the government which braved the storm under which the world was reeling.

Nor is the moral lesson less striking, or less important, which France, during the same period, has read to mankind. She has not, on this occasion, been assailed by the Continental powers. No Pitt or Cobourg has stood forth to mar, by ensanguined hostility, the bright aurora of her third Revolution. No Louis Philippe has stepped in, to change its character or intercept its consequences, and reap for royalty the fruits of insurrection. No bands of Cossacks or plumed Highlanders have again approached the capital of civilisation, to wrest from Freedom the rights she has acquired, or tear from her brows the glory she has won. Whatever she has gained, or suffered, or lost, has been owing to herself, and herself alone. Europe has looked on in anxious, it may be affrighted, neutrality. Though undermined every where by the spirit of propagandism, though openly assailed in some quarters by scarcely disguised attacks, the adjoining powers have abstained from any act of hostility. Albeit attacked by a revolutionary expedition, fitted out and armed by the French government at Paris, Belgium has attempted no act of retaliation. Victorious Austria, though grievously provoked, has accepted the mediation of France and England: when Turin was at his mercy, the triumphant Radetsky sheathed his victorious sword at Milan, and sought not to revenge on Piedmont the unprovoked aggression which its revolutionary government had committed on the Imperial dominions in Italy. Russia has armed, but not moved; the Czar has left to the patriotism and valour of Denmark the burden of a contest with the might of revolutionised Germany. Revolution has every where had fair play; a clear stage and no favour has been accorded to it by all the surviving monarchies in Europe. The enthusiasm of Lamartine, the intrigues of Caussidière, the dreams of Louis Blanc, the ambition of Ledru Rollin, have been allowed their full development. Nothing has intercepted the realisation of their projects. If France has suffered beyond all precedent from her convulsion; if her finances are in a state of hopeless embarrassment; if forty-five per cent has been added to her direct taxes, and the addition cannot be levied from the public distress; if three hundred thousand men have been added to her regular army; if poverty and destitution stalk through her streets; if her jails teem with ten thousand captives, and thousands of families mourn a father or a brother slain on the barricades, or transported for civil war,—the cause is to be found in the Revolution, and the Revolution alone.

The terrible and tragic result of the strife in the streets of Paris in June, has done scarcely a less service to mankind, by opening the eyes of the world to the real nature of crimes which recent events had rendered popular, and restoring their old and just appellation to acts of the deepest atrocity, which the general delusion had caused to pass for virtues. Since the successful result of the Revolt of the Barricades in 1830, the ideas of men have been so entirely subverted, that no government was practicable in France but that of corruption or the sword; and treason and sedition appeared to have been blotted out of the list of crimes in the statute-book of England. So licentious had the age become, and so much was government paralysed by terror at the unprecedented turn which the public mind had taken, that, in Ireland especially, it can scarcely be said, for the last ten years, that, in regard to state offences, there has been any government at all. The Repeal agitation—the wholesale liberation of prisoners by Lord Normanby—the unchecked monster meetings,—the quashing of O'Connell's conviction by the casting vote of one Whig peer, in opposition to the opinion of the twelve judges of England—the unparalleled and long-continued violence of the treasonable press in Dublin—the open drilling and arming of the people in the south and west of Ireland—the undisguised announcement of an approaching insurrection, of which the time was openly fixed for the completion of harvest—were so many indications that Government had become paralysed, and ceased to discharge its functions, in the neighbouring island.

If matters were not as yet so menacing in England, it was not that the executive was more powerful or efficient in this country, but that the English mind was slower to take fire than on the other side of the Channel, and that more weighty interests required to be subverted among the Saxons than the Celts, before the institutions of society were overturned, and anarchy, plunder, and spoliation, became the order of the day. Yet even here there were many indications of Government having become paralysed, and lamentable proof that the public tranquillity was preserved, more by the moderation of its assailants than the strength of its defenders. The violence and general impunity of the trades-unions, in both England and Scotland; the open and undisguised preparations of the Chartists in both countries; the toleration in the metropolis, on two different occasions, of a Chartist Convention, which aspired at usurping the government of the country; the uniform and atrocious violence of the revolutionary press; the entire impunity with which, on every occasion, the most dangerous sedition was spouted on the platform, or retailed in the columns of the journals; the open preparation, at last, of treasonable measures; and the organisation of the disaffected in clubs, where arms were distributed, and projects of rebellion, massacre, and conflagration hatched—were so many indications, and that, too, of the most alarming kind, that matters were approaching a crisis in these islands; and that the paralysis and imbecility of a Government which had ceased to discharge its functions, might prove, as it did in France in the feeble hands of Louis XVI., the precursor of a dreadful and disastrous convulsion.

Thanks to the French revolution and Irish rebellion, this state of matters has met, for the time at least, with a decisive check. The eyes of men have been opened; things are called by their right name. We again hear of treason and sedition—words, of late years, so much gone into disuse that the rising generation scarcely knew what they meant. In France the heroes of the barricades have ceased to be lauded as the greatest of men. Insurrection is no longer preached as the first of social duties. That which was the chief of civic virtues on the 24th February has become the greatest of civic crimes on the 24th June. The soldiers of treason no longer meet with an honoured sepulchre, nor, if surviving, are they fêted and caressed by royal hands. If killed, they are thrust into undistinguished graves; if taken alive, they are immured in dungeons or transported. Universal suffrage has done that which royalty was too indulgent or too timorous to do—it has ceased the dallying with treason. It has fought the Red Republic with its own weapon, and conquered in the strife. It has erected a military despotism in the great revolutionised capital. Industry, almost destroyed by, the first triumph of anarchy in France, is slowly reviving under the protection of absolute power. With suppression of the trade of the "journaliste," the "émeutier," and the "homme des barricades," other branches of employment are at length beginning to revive.[12]

Nor is the change less remarkable in Great Britain, where government have not only followed Mr Pitt's example of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, but have passed a special statute, assimilating for two years the punishment of aggravated cases of sedition to what it was by the old common law of Scotland. Great was the abuse which the Whig writers for half a century bestowed on the Scotch Judges in 1793, for applying the punishment of the Scotch law to the sedition of 1793, and transporting Muir and Fische Palmer, for trying to force on a revolution by means of a national convention. The "Martyrs' Monument" in Edinburgh stands as a durable monument of their sympathy. Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Chancellors, has in bitter terms exhaled their collected indignation. But scarcely was the ink of his lordship's lucubrations dry, when he saw fit, as a member of Lord John Russell's cabinet, to bring in a bill to assimilate the punishment of sedition in Ireland to the old law of Scotland; and under it Mitchell has been transported fourteen, and Martin ten years—the very punishments inflicted for similar offences on Muir and Fische Palmer. The difference is, that for one person transported or imprisoned under Mr Pitt's system of timely coercion and prevention, in 1793, in Great Britain and Ireland, a hundred will be transported or imprisoned under the Whig system of long temporisation and final repression, in 1848. So true it is, that undue weakness in the prevention of crime is the inevitable parent of undue sternness in its punishment, and that in troubled times government incur the reality of severity to avoid its imputation.

Not less important, to the final interests of mankind, is the exposure of the real designs and objects of the revolutionary party, over the world, which has now taken place. The days of delusion are gone past; words have ceased to mislead men as to the nature of things. For half a century, men have been continually misled by the generous and elevated language under which the democratic party veiled their real designs. The strength of revolution consists in the power it possesses of rousing effort by the language of virtue, to render it subservient to the purposes of vice. But its designs have now reached their accomplishment: men see what was intended under all this veil of philanthropic intentions. The revolutionists have been victorious in Paris; and immediately their projects of spoliation, anarchy, and plunder, were set on foot, and approached so near their accomplishment, that a desperate and last effort of all the holders of property became indispensable, to prevent the total ruin of society; and carnage to an unheard of extent for three days stained the streets of Paris, to avert the triumph of the Red Republic, and the return of the Reign of Terror. The cry for repeal turned into rebellion in Ireland; and a vast concentration of the forces of England was requisite to prevent the Emerald Isle becoming the theatre of general massacre, devastation, and ruin. For two hours the Chartists got possession of Glasgow, and instantly a general system of plunder and sacking of houses commenced. The Chartist Convention was long tolerated in England, and, in return, they tried to overturn the Government on the 10th April; and organised a general plan of plunder and conflagration, which was to have broken out in the end of August, and was only mercifully prevented by the designs of the conspirators having become known, and the timely vigour of Government having prevented their accomplishment. The ultimate objects of the enemies of society, therefore, have become apparent: deeds have told us what meaning to attach to words. Revolution in France means spoliation, and the division of property, at a convenient opportunity. Repeal in Ireland means the massacre of the Protestants, and the division of their estates at a convenient opportunity. Chartism in England means general plunder, murder, and conflagration, the moment there is the least chance of perpetrating these crimes with impunity.

Ireland has been, in an especial manner, the subject of these general delusions; and there is perhaps no subject on which foreigners, the English, and the Irish themselves, have for so long a period been entirely misled, as in regard to the real cause of the protracted, and apparently irremediable evils of that distracted country. The proneness of the English to believe, that all mankind will be blessed by the institutions under which they themselves have flourished and waxed great, and the virulence with which party ambition has fastened upon Ireland, as the battle-field on which to dispossess political opponents, and gain possession of power, are the main causes of this long-continued and wide-spread misconception. We have to thank the Irish for having, by their reception of the magnificent gift of England in 1847, and subsequent rebellion in 1848, done so much to dispel the general delusion. To aid in disseminating juster views on the subject, we shall proceed to disinter from the earlier volumes of this Magazine, an extract from the first of a series of papers on Ireland, published in 1833, immediately before Lord Grey's Coercion Act, and which might pass for an essay on present events. It affords a striking example, both of the justice of the views there enunciated, and of the pernicious and continual recurrence of those real causes of Irish suffering, which party spirit in both islands has so long concealed from the people of Great Britain.

"It is in vain to attempt to shake ourselves loose of Ireland, or consider its misery as a foreign and extraneous consideration with which the people of this country have little concern. The starvation and anarchy of that kingdom is a leprosy, which will soon spread over the whole empire. The redundance of our own population, the misery of our own poor, the weight of our own poor-rates, are all chiefly owing to the multitudes who are perpetually pressing upon them from the Irish shores. During the periods of the greatest depression of industry in this country since the peace, if the Irish labourers could have been removed, the native poor would have found ample employment; and more than one committee of the House of Commons have reported, after the most patient investigation and minute examination of evidence from all parts of the country, that there is no tendency to undue increase among the people of Great Britain, and that the whole existing distress was owing to the immigration from the sister kingdom.

"Nature has forbidden us to sever the connexion which subsists between the two countries. We must swim or sink together. It is utterly impossible to effect that disjunction of British from Irish interests, for which the demagogues of that country so strenuously contend, and which many persons in this island, from the well-founded jealousy of Catholic ascendency in the House of Commons, and the apparent hopelessness of all attempts to improve its condition, are gradually becoming inclined to support. The legislature may be separated by act of Parliament; the Government may be severed by Catholic revolts; but Ireland will not the less hang like a dead weight round the neck of England; its starving multitudes will not the less overwhelm our labourers; its passions and its jealousies will not the less paralyse the exertions of our Government. Let a Catholic Republic be established in Ireland; let O'Connell be its President; let the English landholders be rooted out, and Ireland, with its priests and its poverty, be left to shift for itself; and the weight, the insupportable weight of its misery, will be more severely felt in this country than ever. Deprived of the wealth and the capital of the English landholders, or of the proprietors of English descent; a prey to its own furious and ungovernable passions; ruled by an ignorant and ambitious priesthood; seduced by frantic and unprincipled demagogues, it would speedily fall into an abyss of misery far greater than that which already overwhelms it. For every thousand of the Irish poor who now approach the shores of Britain, ten thousand would then arrive, from the experienced impossibility of finding subsistence at home; universal distress would produce such anarchy as would necessarily lead the better classes to throw themselves into the arms of any government who would interfere for their protection. France would find the golden opportunity, so long wished for, at length arrived, of striking at the power of England through the neighbouring island; the tricolor flag would speedily wave from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear; and even if England submitted to the usurpation, and relinquished its rebellious subjects to the great parent democracy, the cost of men and ships required to guard the western shore of Britain, and avert the pestilence from our own homes, would be greater than are now employed in maintaining a precarious and doubtful authority in that distracted island.

"Whence is all this misery, and these furious passions, in a country so richly endowed by nature, and subjected to a Government whose sway has, in other states, established so large a portion of general felicity? The Irish democrats answer, that it is the oppression of the English Government which has done all these things; the editors of the Whig journals and reviews repeat the same cry; and every Whig, following, on this as on every other subject, their leaders, like a flock of sheep, re-echo the same sentiment, until it has obtained general belief, even among those whose education and good sense might have led them to see through the fallacy. Yet, in truth, there is no opinion more erroneous; and there is none the dissemination of which has done so much to perpetuate the very evils which are the subject of such general and well-founded lamentation. Ireland, in reality, is not miserable because she has, but because she has not been conquered; she is suffering under a redundant population, not because the tyranny of England, but the tyranny of her own demagogues, prevents their getting bread; and she is torn with discordant passions, not because British oppression has called them into existence, but because Irish licentiousness has kept them alive for centuries after, under a more rigorous Government, they would have been buried for ever.

"It is the more extraordinary that the popular party in both islands should so heedlessly and blindly have adopted this doctrine, when it is so directly contrary to what they at the same time maintain in regard to the causes of the simultaneous rise and prosperity of Scotland. That poor and barren land, they see, has made unexampled strides in wealth and greatness during the last eighty years: its income during that period has been quadrupled, its numbers nearly doubled, its prosperity augmented tenfold; they behold its cities crowded with palaces, its fields smiling with plenty, its mountains covered with herds, its harbours crowded with masts, the Atlantic studded with its sails; and yet all this has grown up under an aristocratic rule, and with a representative system from which the lower classes were in a great measure excluded. In despair at beholding a nation whose condition was so utterly at variance with all their dogmas of the necessity of democratic representation to temper the frame of government, they have recourse to the salutary influence of English ascendency, and ascribe all this improvement to the beneficial influence of English freedom. Scotland, they tell us, has prospered, not because she has, but because she has not, been governed by her own institutions: and she is now rich and opulent, because the narrow and jealous spirit of her own Government has been tempered by the beneficial influence of English freedom. Whether this is really the case, we shall examine in a succeeding Number; and many curious and unknown facts as to the native institutions of Scotland we promise to unfold; but, in the mean time, let it be conceded that this observation is well founded, and that all the prosperity of Scotland has been owing to English influence. How has it happened that the same influence at the same time has been the cause of all the misery of Ireland? The common answer that Scotland was always an independent country, and that Ireland was won and ruled by the sword, is utterly unsatisfactory, and betrays an inattention to the most notorious historical facts. For how has it happened that Ireland was conquered with so much facility, while Scotland so long and strenuously resisted the spoiler? How did it happen that Henry II., with eleven hundred men, achieved with ease the conquest of the one country, while Edward II., at the head of eighty thousand men, was unable to effect the subjugation of the other? How was it that Scotland, not once, but twenty times, expelled vast English armies from her territory, while Ireland has never thrown them off since the Norman standard first approached her shores? And without going back to remote periods, how has it happened that the same influence of English legislation, which, according to them, has been utterly ruinous to Ireland, has been the sole cause of the unexampled prosperity of Scotland? that the same gale which has been the zephyr of spring to the one state, has been the blast of desolation to the other? It is evident that there is a fundamental difference between the two states; and that, if we would discover the cause of the different modes in which the same legislation of the dominant state has operated in the two countries, we must look to the different condition of the people to whom it was applied.

"One fact is very remarkable, and throws a great light on this difficult subject—and that is, that at different periods opposite systems have been tried in Ireland, and that invariably the system of concession and indulgence has been immediately followed by an ebullition of more than usual atrocity and violence.

"The first of these instances is the great indulgence showed to them by James I. That monarch justly boasted that Ireland was the scene of his beneficent legislation; and that he had done more to its inhabitants than all the monarchs who had sat on the English throne since the time of Henry II. He established the boroughs; gave them a right of sending representatives to Parliament; and first spread over its savage and unknown provinces the institutions and the liberties of England. What was the consequence? Did the people testify gratitude to their benefactors? Did they prove themselves worthy of British freedom, and capable of withstanding the passions arising from a representative government? We shall give the answer in the words of Mr Hume.

"'The Irish, everywhere intermingled with the English, needed but a hint from their leaders and priests to begin hostilities against a people whom they hated on account of their religion, and envied for their riches and prosperity. The houses, cattle, goods, of the unwary English were first seized. Those who heard of the commotions in their neighbourhood, instead of deserting their habitations, and assembling for mutual protection, remained at home, in hopes of defending their property, and fell thus separately into the hands of their enemies. After rapacity had fully exerted itself, cruelty, and the most barbarous that ever, in any nation, was known or heard of, began its operations. A universal massacre commenced of the English, now defenceless, and passively resigned to their inhuman foes. No age, no sex, no condition, was spared. The wife weeping for her butchered husband, and embracing her helpless children, was pierced with them and perished by the same stroke. The old, the young, the vigorous, the infirm, underwent a like fate, and were confounded in one common ruin. In vain did flight save from the first assault: destruction was every where let loose, and met the hunted victims at every turn. In vain was recourse had to relations, to companions, to friends; connexions were dissolved, and death was dealt by that hand from which protection was implored and expected. Without provocation, without opposition, the astonished English, living in profound peace and full security, were massacred by their nearest neighbours, with whom they had long upheld a continual intercourse of kindness and good offices.

"'But death was the slightest punishment inflicted by those rebels: all the tortures which wanton cruelty could devise, all the lingering pains of body, the anguish of mind, the agonies of despair, could not satiate revenge excited without injury, and cruelty derived from no cause. To enter into particulars would shock the least delicate humanity. Such enormities, though attested by undoubted evidence, appear almost incredible. Depraved nature, even perverted religion, encouraged by the utmost license, reach not to such a pitch of ferocity, unless the pity inherent in human breasts be destroyed by that contagion of example, which transports men beyond all the usual motives of conduct and behaviour.

"'The weaker sex themselves, naturally tender to their own sufferings, and compassionate to those of others, here emulated their more robust companions in the practice of every cruelty. Even children, taught by the example, and encouraged by the exhortation of their parents, essayed their feeble blows on the dead carcasses or defenceless children of the English. The very avarice of the Irish was not a sufficient restraint of their cruelty. Such was their frenzy, that the cattle which they had seized, and by rapine made their own, were yet, because they bore the name of English, wantonly slaughtered, or, when covered with wounds, turned loose into the woods and deserts.

"'The stately buildings or commodious habitations of the planters, as if upbraiding the sloth and ignorance of the natives, were consumed with fire, or laid level with the ground. And where the miserable owners, shut up in their houses and preparing for defence, perished in the flames, together with their wives and children, a double triumph was afforded to their insulting foes.

"'If any where a number assembled together, and, assuming courage from despair, were resolved to sweeten death by revenge on their assassins, they were disarmed by capitulations and promises of safety, confirmed by the most solemn oaths. But no sooner had they surrendered, than the rebels, with perfidy equal to their cruelty, made them share the fate of their unhappy countrymen.

"'Others, more ingenious still in their barbarity, tempted their prisoners by the fond love of life, to imbrue their hands in the blood of friends, brothers, parents; and having thus rendered them accomplices in guilt, gave them that death which they sought to shun by deserving it.

"'Amidst all these enormities, the sacred name of RELIGION resounded on every side; not to stop the hands of these murderers, but to enforce their blows, and to steel their hearts against every movement of human or social sympathy. The English, as heretics, abhorred of God, and detestable to all holy men, were marked out by the priests for slaughter; and, of all actions, to rid the world of these declared enemies to Catholic faith and piety, was represented as the most meritorious. Nature, which, in that rude people, was sufficiently inclined to atrocious deeds, was farther stimulated by precept; and national prejudices impoisoned by those aversions, more deadly and incurable, which arose from an enraged superstition. While death finished the sufferings of each victim, the bigoted assassins, with joy and exultation, still echoed in his expiring ears that these agonies were but the commencement of torments infinite and eternal.'"

"This dreadful rebellion left consequences long felt in Irish government. Cromwell, the iron leader of English vengeance, treated them with terrible severity: at the storming of a single city, 12,000 men were put to the sword; and such was the terror inspired by his merciless sword, that all the revolted cities opened their gates, and the people submitted, trembling, to the law of the conqueror. The recollection of the horrors of the Tyrone rebellion was long engraven in the English legislature; and it produced, along with the terrors of religious dissension, the severe code of laws which were imposed on the savage population of the country before the close of the seventeenth century. A hundred years of peace and tranquillity followed the promulgation of these oppressive laws. That they were severe and cruel is obvious from their tenor; that they were in many respects not worse than was called for by the horrors which preceded their enactment, and followed their repeal, is now unhappily proved by the result.

"The next great period of concession commenced about the year 1772, soon after the accession of George III. The severe code under which Ireland had so long lain chained, but quiet, was relaxed; the Catholics were admitted to a full share of the representation; the more selfish and unnecessary parts of the restrictions were removed; and, before 1796, hardly any part of the old fetters remained, excepting the exclusion of Catholics from the Houses of Lords and Commons, and the higher situations in the army. Did tranquillity, satisfaction, and peace, follow these immense concessions, continued through a period of thirty years? On the contrary, they were immediately followed by the same result as had attended the concessions of James I. A new rebellion broke out; the horrors of 1798 rivalled those of 1641; and the dreadful recollection of the Tyrone massacre was drowned in the more recent suffering of the same unhappy country.

"The perilous state in which Ireland then stood, imperfectly known at the time even to the Government, is now fully developed. From the Memoirs of Wolfe Tone, recently published, it appears that 250,000 men were sworn in, organised, drilled, and regimented; that colonels and officers for this immense force were all appointed; and the whole, under the direction of the central committee at Dublin, only awaited the arrival of Hoche and the French fleet to hoist the tricolor flag, and proclaim the Hibernian Republic in close alliance with the Republic of France. With truth it may be said, that the fate of England then hung upon a thread. Napoleon, and the unconquered army of Italy, were still in Europe; a successful descent of the advanced guard, 15,000 strong, under Hoche, would immediately have been followed up by the invasion of the main body under that great leader; and the facility with which the French fleet reached Bantry Bay in February 1797, where they were only prevented from landing by tempestuous gales, proves that the command of the seas cannot always be relied on as a security against foreign invasion. Had 40,000 French soldiers landed at that time in Ireland, to organise 200,000 hot-headed Catholic democrats, and lend the hand of fraternity to their numerous coadjutors on the other side of St George's Channel, it is difficult to say what would have been the present fate of England.

"The rebellion of 1798 threw back for ten years the progress of the indulgent measures so long practised towards Ireland. But at length the spirit of clemency again resumed its sway; the system of concession was again adopted, and the last remnants of the Irish fetters removed by the liberal Tory administration of England. First, the Catholics were declared eligible to any situations in the army and navy; and at length, by the famous Relief Bill, the remaining distinctions between Catholic and Protestant were done away, and an equal share of political influence was extended to them as that of their Protestant brethren. What has been the consequence? Has Ireland increased in tranquillity since this memorable change? Have the prophecies of its advocates been verified, as to the stilling of the waves of dissension and rebellion? Has it proved true, as Earl Grey prophesied it would, in his place in the House of Lords,

Defluit saxis agitatus humor;
Concedunt venti, fugiuntque nubes;
Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto
Unda recumbit?

"The reverse of all this has notoriously been the case. Since this last and great concession, Ireland has become worse than ever. Midnight conflagration, dastardly assassination, have spread with fearful rapidity; the sources of justice have been dried up, and the most atrocious criminals repeatedly suffered to escape, from the impossibility of bringing them to justice. A universal insurrection against the payment of tithes has defied all the authority of Government, in open violation of the solemn promises of the Catholics that no invasion on the rights of the Protestant church was intended; and the starving clergy of Ireland have been thrown as a burden upon the consolidated fund of England. At this moment the authority of England is merely nominal over the neighbouring island; the Lord Lieutenant is less generally obeyed than the great Agitator, and the dictates of the Catholic leaders are looked up to in preference to the acts of the British Parliament. In despair at so desperate a state of things, so entirely the reverse of all they had hoped from the long train of conciliatory measures, the English are giving up the cause in despair; while the great and gallant body of Irish Protestants are firmly looking the danger in the face, and silently preparing for the struggle which they well know has now become inevitable.

"The result of experience, therefore, is complete in all its parts. Thrice, during the last two hundred years, have conciliatory measures been tried on the largest scale, and with the most beneficent intention; and thrice have the concessions to the Catholics been followed by a violent and intolerable outbreak of savage ferocity. The two first rebellions were followed by a firm and severe system of coercive government; as long as they continued in force, Ireland was comparatively tranquil, and their relaxation was the signal for the commencement of a state of insubordination which rapidly led to anarchy and revolt. The present revolutionary spirit has been met by a different system. Every thing has been conceded to the demagogues; their demands have been granted, their assemblies allowed, their advice followed, their leaders promoted; and the country in consequence has arrived at a state of anarchy unparalleled in any Christian state.

"What makes the present state of Ireland, and the democratic spirit of its inhabitants, altogether unpardonable is, the extreme indulgence and liberality with which, for the last fifty years, they have been treated by this country. During the whole war, Ireland paid neither income-tax nor assessed taxes; and the sum thus made a present of by England to her people, amounted at the very lowest calculation to £50,000,000 sterling. She shared in the full benefit of the war in consequence of the immense extent of the demand for agricultural produce which its expenditure occasioned, without feeling any of the burdens which neutralised its extension in this country. No poor's rates are levied on her landholders—in other words, they are levied on England and Scotland instead—and this island is in consequence overwhelmed by a mass of indigence created in the neighbouring kingdom, but which British indulgence has relieved them from the necessity of maintaining. The amount of the sums annually paid by the Parliament of Great Britain to objects of charity and utility in Ireland almost exceeds belief, and is at least five times greater than all directed to the same objects in both the other parts of the empire taken together. Yet with all their good deeds, past, present, and to come, Ireland is the most discontented part of the United Kingdom. She is incessantly crying out against her benefactor, and recurring to old oppression rendered necessary by her passions, instead of present benefactions, of which her democratic population have proved themselves unworthy by their ingratitude.

"Notwithstanding all the efforts of her demagogues to distract the country, and counteract all the liberality and beneficence of the English Government, Ireland has advanced with greater rapidity in industry, wealth, and all the real sources of happiness, during the last thirty years, than any other part of the empire. Since the Union, she has made a start both in agricultural and manufacturing industry, quite unparalleled, and much greater than Scotland had made during the first hundred years after her incorporation with the English dominions. It is quite evident that, if the demagogues would let Ireland alone—if the wounds in her political system were not continually kept open, and the passions of the people incessantly inflamed, by her popular leaders, she would become as rich and prosperous as she is populous—that, instead of a source of weakness, she would become a pillar of strength to the united empire—and instead of being overspread with the most wretched and squalid population in Europe, she might eventually boast of the most contented and happy."

So far what we wrote in December 1832. We make no apology for the length of this quotation. So precisely is it applicable to the present time, that were we to write anew on the subject, we should certainly reproduce the same ideas, and probably, in a great degree, make use of the same words. It affords a remarkable proof of the manner in which Ireland has been influenced, in all periods of its history, by the same causes; and of the way in which all its natural advantages have been thrown away, by the indolence and want of energy in its inhabitants, joined to the unhappy extension to it, through British connexion, of the privileges, excitement, and passions, consequent on a free constitution, for which it was unfitted by its character, temperament, and state of social advancement.

Need it be said how precisely the same truths have been illustrated in later times, and, most of all, in the memorable year in which we now write? The melancholy tale is known to all: it is written in characters of fire in England's annals. Such was the state of excitement, anarchy, and licentiousness to which the Irish were brought under the Whig rule, by the combined operation of the Reform mania, and the Repeal agitation, that Lord Grey, albeit the most impassioned opponent of Mr Pitt's preventive policy, was compelled to adopt it; and the celebrated Coercion Bill of 1833 invested Government with extraordinary powers, and for a time superseded, by martial law, in some districts of Ireland, the ordinary administration of justice. The result, as much as the anarchy which had preceded it, demonstrated where the secret of Ireland's ills was to be found, and what was the species of government adapted for its unsettled, impassioned, and semi-barbarous inhabitants.[13] Instantly, as if by enchantment, the disorders ceased: midnight fires no longer illuminated the heavens, midnight murders no longer struck terror into the inhabitants. The savage passions of the people, growing out of the civilised license unhappily allowed them under British rule, were rapidly coerced, and, instead of Ireland exhibiting an amount of agrarian outrage and atrocity unprecedented in any Christian land, even her worst provinces returned to their usual, though yet serious and lamentable average.[14]

The evil days of conciliation and concession, however, soon returned. When Sir R. Peel assumed the helm for a brief period in 1835, he said, that his chief difficulty was Ireland. It was so in truth—not from the difficulties, great as they were, with which the administration of Ireland was surrounded, but from the monstrous delusions on the subject with which the Whigs, then possessed of the chief influence in the state, had imbued the public mind. So feeble was Government under his successors, from 1835 to 1841—so thoroughly had they drenched the people of Great Britain with the belief that severity of rule was the sole cause of the miseries of Ireland, and that conciliation and concession were their appropriate remedy—that powers the most disastrous, privileges the most undeserved, were bestowed on the Irish people. The very agitators were lauded, flattered, and promoted. O'Connell was offered a seat on the Bench; the whole, or nearly the whole, patronage of the country was surrendered into his hands. The greater part of the police were nominated according to the suggestions of himself or his party; the Orangemen of the north—the bulwark of the throne—were vilified, prosecuted, and discouraged; self-government became the order of the day; municipal reform was conceded; an ignorant, priest-led, half-savage people were intrusted with one of the highest duties of civilised citizens—that of electing their own magistrates. O'Connell, under the new municipal constitution, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin; a majority, both of the constituency and members of Parliament, ere long became Repealers. The Whig system of governing Ireland, by yielding to its selfish passions and fostering its political vices, received its full development; Whig journals, reviews, and magazines, lauded the policy to the skies, and predicted from its effects the speedy removal of all the evils which had arisen from the Tory system of coercion and repression in the Emerald Isle.

The results were soon apparent. Assured of countenance and support from high quarters—cordially supported by the Popish hierarchy and priesthood—intrenched, beyond the power of assault, in almost all the boroughs—possessed of considerable support or connivance in the rural magistracy—backed, in many parts of the country, by the torch of the incendiary or the firelock of the assassin—wielding at once the delegated powers of Government, the daggers of desperadoes, the enthusiasm of the people, O'Connell proceeded with the step of a conqueror in the work of agitation. The Temperance movement, headed by Father Mathew, came most opportunely to aid its funds, by diverting the vast sums hitherto spent by the people on physical, to support the cause of mental agitation. Seventy temperance bands were soon established to head the temperance clubs; the uniforms of the musicians were so made, that, by being merely turned, they could be converted into the bands of so many regiments; the Rent flourished; whisky-shops were ruined; the grand Intoxicator demolished his inferior competitors; Conciliation Hall boasted of its three thousand pounds a-week! The distilleries were bankrupt. The simple, misled people of England believed that, under the combined influence of political agitation, municipal reform, and suddenly-induced sobriety, Ireland was to be effectually regenerated, and the Celt was at once to leap into the privileges of the Saxon, without going through his seven centuries of painful apprenticement. Monster meetings became general. Assemblages said to consist of eighty or a hundred thousand, and which really contained twenty or thirty thousand persons, were held in the whole south and west of Ireland. Meanwhile industry was paralysed; capital shunned the agitated shores; labour was diverted from the field to the platform; the earnings of the poor were wrenched from them, by priestly influence and the terrors of purgatory, to aid in the great work of dismembering the empire. Instead of attending to their business—instead of working at their lazy-beds or tending their cattle—instead of draining their bogs or reclaiming their wastes, the people were continually kept running about from one monster meeting to another, and taught to believe that they were to look for happiness, not through the labour of their hands, or the sweat of their brows, but in swelling seditious processions, listening to treasonable harangues, and extending the ramifications of a vast and atrocious Ribbon conspiracy throughout Ireland.

Society could not long exist under such a system; but it was long ere the Liberal party saw the error of their ways—when Sir Robert Peel's government, in 1843, at length became convinced that the evil had come to such a height that it could no longer be endured, and that society would be dissolved under its influence. The meeting, accordingly, at Clontarff was proclaimed down; O'Connell was prosecuted, and a conviction obtained. But the Whigs were not long of coming up to the rescue. A majority of three Whig law peers to two Conservative ones—Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham being in the minority—overruled the opinion of the twelve judges of England, and quashed the prosecution. Elated with this victory, agitation resumed its sway in Ireland; but it did so under darker auspices, and with more dangerous ends. Organisation, with a view to insurrection, was now avowedly set on foot; arms were purchased in large quantities; and the Whig Secretary of Ireland had the extreme imprudence to write a letter, which found its way into the public prints, and was soon placarded over Ireland, in which it was stated generally, and without qualification, that every Irishman was entitled to possess and carry arms. Nay, this was made the cheval de bataille between the two parties; and when Sir R. Peel was turned out in July 1846, it was on the question of the bill for prohibiting the possession of arms in Ireland. The Whigs came into power on the basis of the Irish peasantry being entitled to be armed. It covers, like charity, a multitude of sins in Sir R. Peel, that he left office on the same question.

But the laws of nature are more durable in their operation than the revolutions of statesmen. The effects of twenty years' agitation and disorder in Ireland ere long became apparent. The reign of murder, incendiarism, and terror, brought down an awful retribution on its authors. Agriculture, neglected for the more agreeable and gainful trade of agitation or assassination, had fallen into such neglect, that the land, in many parts of the country, had become incapable of bearing grain crops. Nothing would do but lazy-beds, in which often a wretched crop was raised in the centre of the ridge, on a third of the land, while the remaining two-thirds were under water. The potato famine came, in 1846, upon a country thus prepared for such a visitation—wasted by agitation, disgraced by murder, impoverished by the protracted reign of terror. Its effects are well known. Ireland, wholly incapable, from its infatuated system of self-government, of doing any thing for itself, fell entirely as a burden on England. Great part of Scotland was wasted by a similar calamity, and in regions—the West Highlands and Islands—far more sterile and barren than the south and west of Ireland. But Scotland had not been torn by political passions, nor palsied by repeal agitation. Scotland righted itself. It bore the visitation with patience and resignation. It neither sought nor received aid from England. Not a shilling was advanced by the Exchequer to relieve Scotch suffering. Ten millions were given by the nation to relieve that of Ireland: of this immense sum eight millions were borrowed, and remain a lasting charge on Great Britain. Hundreds of thousands, raised from the suffering and won by the labour of England and Scotland, followed in the same direction. In return, the Irish gave us contumely, defiance, and ingratitude. The Nation thundered forth weekly its fiendish vituperation against the people who had saved its countrymen. It was eagerly read by hundreds of thousands who owed their existence to British generosity. The beggar gave place to the bully. Great part of the funds, lavished with misplaced humanity on Irish suffering, was employed in the purchase of arms to destroy their benefactors; and the unparalleled munificence of England to Ireland in 1847, was succeeded by the unparalleled rebellion of Ireland against England in 1848.

He must be blind indeed who cannot read in this rapid summary the real causes of the long-continued misery and distraction of Ireland. It has arisen in a great degree from English connexion, but in a way which the Irish do not perceive, and which they will be the last to admit. It is all owing to a very simple cause—so simple that philosophers have passed it over as too obvious to explain the phenomena, and party-men have rejected it because it afforded no handle for popular declamation, and gave them no fulcrum whereon to rest the lever which was to remove an opposite party from power. It is not owing to the Roman Catholic religion,—for, if so, how have so many Roman Catholic countries been, and still are, great, and powerful, and happy? It is not owing to the confiscation of the land, for confiscation as great followed the establishment of the Normans in England, and the victories of Robert Bruce in Scotland; and yet, in process of time, the ghastly wound was healed in both these countries, and from the united effort of the Britons, Saxons, and North-men, have arisen the glories and wonders of British civilisation. It is not owing to the exclusion, from 1608 to 1829, of the Roman Catholics from Parliament; for, since they were admitted into it, the distractions of Ireland have gone on constantly increasing, and its pauperism and mendicancy have advanced in an accelerated ratio. It is entirely owing to this,—that England has given Ireland institutions and political franchises, for the exercise of which it is wholly disqualified by temperament, habit, and political advancement. We have put edged tools into the hands of children, and we are astonished that they have mangled their limbs. We have emancipated from necessary control the Bedouin or the savage, and we are disappointed he does not exercise his newly-acquired powers with the discretion of an Englishman or an American. We have plunged a youth of sixteen, without control, into the dissipation of London or Paris, and we are surprised he has run riot in excess. Thence it is that all the concessions made to Ireland have instantly and rapidly augmented its political maladies, and that the only intervals of rest, tranquillity, and happiness it has enjoyed for the last two hundred years, have been those in which it has for a brief period been coerced by the wholesome severity of vigorous government. Thence it is that Whig solicitude, fastening on the grievances of Ireland as its battle-field, and winning for the inhabitants privileges for which they are not fitted, has in every instance so grievously augmented its wretchedness and crimes. This is the true key to Irish history. Viewed in this light, it is perfectly clear, intelligible, and consistent with what has occurred in other parts of the world. Without such guidance, its annals exhibit a chaos of contradictions; and Ireland must be considered as a casus singularis—an exception from the principles which elsewhere have ever regulated mankind.

The whole machinery of a free constitution—those institutions under which the Anglo-Saxons have so long flourished on both sides the Atlantic—are utter destruction to the semi-barbarous Celtic race to which they have been extended. Grand juries and petty juries, self-governments, municipalities, county and burgh elections, popular representatives, public meetings, hustings' declarations, platform exaggerations, a licentious press, and all the other attendants on republican or semi-republican institutions, are utterly destructive to the impassioned, priest-ridden, ignorant Celtic tribes in the south and west of Ireland. A paternal despotism is what they require.

We are far from wishing that despotism to be severe—on the contrary, we would have it beneficent and humane in the highest degree—we would have it give to Ireland blessings tenfold greater than it will ever earn for itself in senseless attempts at self-government. We would commence the work by the grant of sixteen millions of British money, to set on foot the chief arteries and railroads of the country!—that grant which, proposed by the patriotic wisdom of Lord George Bentinck, was defeated by the insane resistance of the Irish members themselves.[15] We would in every imaginable shape stimulate the industry of Ireland, and aid the efforts of its really patriotic children, to extricate their country from the bottomless gulf into which selfishness, agitation, and the cry for repeal, have plunged it. But we would intrust little of this grant to the distribution of the Irish themselves. We would not again be guilty of the enormous error of committing a magnificent public grant to hands so unfit to direct it, that we know from the highest authority—that of the Lord-lieutenant himself—that great part of the fund was misapplied in private jobbing, and the remainder wasted in making good roads bad ones. We would execute the works by Irish hands, but distribute the funds, and guide the undertakings, by English heads. We would deprive the Irish, till they have shown they are fit to wield its powers, of the whole rights of self-government. We would commence with a rigorous and unflinching administration of justice, executed by courts-martial in cases of insurrection, and by judges without juries in ordinary cases. A powerful police, double its present strength, should give security to witnesses, who, if they desire it, should be provided with an asylum in the colonies at the public expense. "Every thing for the people, and nothing by them," which Napoleon described as the real principle of government at all times, should be applied to Ireland at least during the many years still to run of its national pupilage and minority.

The truth of these principles has been so signally demonstrated by the events of which Ireland has recently, and we lament to say is still, the theatre, that it has at length forced itself on the mind of the English people. Most fortunately, the Whigs being in power themselves, and having the responsibility and duties of government thrown upon them, have at length come to see the matter in its true light. The cry that all is owing to English misrule, is no longer heard in Great Britain. Its utter falsehood has been demonstrated in language too clear to be misunderstood. Even the Liberal journals, who have shown themselves most earnest in promoting the cause of reform and self-government in Great Britain, have come to see how utterly it is misapplied when attempted in Ireland. Hear the Times on this subject, one of the ablest journals which formerly supported the cause of parliamentary and municipal reform, as well in Ireland as in this country.

"The slowly gathering wrath of years has been concentrated to a point. John Bull was—as Jonathan would express it—"properly riled" at the behaviour of his once beloved fondling. He could put up with ingratitude; he could despise insolence; he could treat bravado with contempt. But here was the most wonderful combination of insolence, ingratitude, bravado, and cowardice, that history has recorded. Here were men belching out treason and fire and sword one day, and the next day sneaking between the bulwarks of a cabbage-garden, or through the loopholes of an indictment! For such, and on such, had he been expending, not only money, but care, anxiety, sympathy, and fear. He was fooled in the eyes of the world and his own! The only hope for Ireland is in rest, and a strong Government. Almost every Englishman who has regarded her with solicitude within late years, is convinced that what she and her people require, beyond all things, is discipline. Her gentry require discipline; her middle classes require discipline; her peasantry require discipline. They should altogether be disciplined in a rigid but just system, as the picked Irishmen have been who are distinguished as the best foremen in our factories, and the best non-commissioned officers in our army. Political privileges have been tried and misused; judicial forms have been tried and abused; Saxon institutions have been tried, and found not to harmonise with the Celtic mind. It cannot comprehend them; it does not appreciate them. It arrays liberty against law, and the technicalities of law against its spirit. It wants that moral sense, that instinctive justice and fairness, which have been the soul and the strength of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. This it must be taught by a strong, an irresistible, and, if need be, a coercive authority. Duty must be impressed on it as a habit, and then it will be inanealed with its sympathies. The greatest boon to Ireland would be the rule of a benevolent autocrat, who would punish all classes and all parties alike for a breach of social and civil duties—the landlords for their cruelty, the tenants for their mendacity, the priests for their neglect of their most momentous function. This boon Ireland will not get; but we can force upon her that which comes the nearest to it, the suppression of a vain, vapid, selfish, and suicidal agitation. If we do not do it while we may, we shall rue it with bitterness and humiliation hereafter."—Times, September 1847.

To the same purpose, it is observed in a late number of the Economist, also an able Liberal journal:

"Irish agitation has run its course, and shown its character. It has had 'rope enough' allowed to manifest what are its materials, and what its means—what are the objects it proposes, and of what stuff its leaders are made. It has displayed a mixture of ferocity, levity, and incapacity, which has covered with shame and confusion all its quondam sympathisers and admirers. Demagogism has been stripped naked, and has appeared as what it really is—a low, savage, dishonest enormity—an 'evil that walketh in darkness'—the epidemic malady of Ireland—an enemy which no concessions can conciliate, which no mildness can disarm, and with which, because of its dishonesty, no parley can be held.

"An open rebellion has been crushed at its first outbreak. A number of its leaders and organisers are in prison, and the Government, with a forbearance and adhesion to routine ideas which verges on the simple, and almost approaches the sublime, intrusts their punishment to the slow and uncertain processes of the law—to the courage of Irish juries, and the integrity of Irish witnesses. The Government allows rebels who have appealed to arms, and been worsted in the conflict, to retreat behind the shelter of the law. It is content to meet an armament with an indictment; nay, more, it is content to submit this indictment to the judgment of men, half of whom are in the ranks of the rebel army, and the other half in its power. It may have been well to try this hazardous experiment; but the result of it could not long be doubtful. Accordingly, we find that convictions cannot be obtained. Rebels, whose guilt is as clear as the day, are dismissed from the dock because juries will not agree upon a verdict—and are to be kept safe till March 1849, then to be let loose to recommence their work of mischief with all the increased audacity which impunity cannot fail to generate. They have taken arms against the Government, and the Government will have proved impotent to punish them.

"We are not surprised that Irish juries will not convict Irish rebels. It is too much to expect that they should do so, even when fully convinced of, and indignant at, their guilt. It would be almost too much to ask from Englishmen. Government have a right to call upon jurors to do their duty, under ordinary circumstances and in ordinary times. In like manner, Government has a right to call upon all citizens to come forward, and act as special constables, in all cases of civil commotion. But it has no right to send them forth, unexercised and unarmed, to encounter an organised and disciplined force, provided with musket and artillery: that is the business of regular troops. In like manner, Government has no right to expect jurors to act at the hazard of their lives and property. The law never contemplated that serving on a jury should be an office of danger. When it becomes such, other agencies must be brought into operation.

"It will not suffice to the Government to have acted with such skill and spirit as to have rendered abortive a formidable and organised rebellion. It must crush the rebellious spirit and the rebellious power. This can never be done by the means of juries. Punishment, to be effectual, must fall with unerring certainty on every one concerned in the crime. They must be made to feel that no legal chicanery, no illegitimate sympathy, can avail to save them. The British nation, we are sure, will never endure that men who have been guilty of such crimes as the Irish felons should escape punishment, and be again let loose on society, to mock and gibe at the impotence of power. Any termination of the crisis would be preferable to one so fatal and disgraceful."—Economist, Sept. 12, 1848.

These articles, emanating from such sources, induce us to hope that the long-protracted distractions of Ireland are about to be brought to a close; and that, after having been for above half a century the battle-field of English faction, or cursed with Liberal English sympathy, and its inevitable offspring, Irish agitation and mendacity—the real secret of its sufferings has been brought to light; and that, by being governed in a manner suitable to its character and circumstances, it will at length take its place among the really civilised nations of the world, and become fit for the exercise of those privileges which, prematurely conceded, have proved its ruin.

One circumstance induces the hope that this anticipation maybe realised, and that is, the highly honourable part which the Irish enrolled in the police have taken in the late disturbances; the fidelity of all the Irish in the Queen's service to their colours; and the general pacific conduct which has, with a few exceptions, been observed by the numerous Hibernians settled in Great Britain during the late disturbances. The conduct of the Irish police, in particular, has been in all respects admirable; and it is net going too far to assert, that to their zeal, activity, and gallantry, the almost bloodless suppression of the insurrection is mainly to be ascribed. The British army does not boast a more courageous body of men than the Irishmen in its ranks; and it is well known that, after a time, they form the best officers of a superior kind for all the police establishments in the kingdom. Although the Irish in our great towns are often a very great burden, especially when they first come over, from the vast number of them who are in a state of mendicity, and cannot at first get into any regular employment, yet when they do obtain it, they prove hardworking and industrious, and do not exhibit a greater proportion of crime than the native British with whom they are surrounded. The Irish quickness need be told to none who have witnessed the running fire of repartee they keep up from the fields with travellers, how rapid soever, on the road; their genius is known to all who are familiar with the works of Swift and Goldsmith, of Burke and Berkeley. Of one thing only at present they are incapable, and that is, self-government. One curse, and one curse only, has hitherto blasted all their efforts at improvement, and that is, the abuse of freedom. One thing, and one thing only, is required to set them right, and that is, the strong rule suited to national pupilage. One thing, and one thing only, is required to complete their ruin, and that is, repeal and independence. An infallible test will tell us when they have become prepared for self-government, and that is, when they have ceased to hate the Saxon—when they adopt his industry, imitate his habits, and emulate his virtues.

---

We have spoken of the French and the Irish, and contrasted, not without some degree of pride, their present miserable and distracted state with the steady and pacific condition of Great Britain, during a convulsion which has shaken the civilised world to its foundation. But let it not be supposed that France and Ireland alone have grievances which require redress, erroneous policy which stands in need of rectification. England has its full share of suffering, and more than its deserved share of absurd and pernicious legislation. But it is the glory of this country that we can rectify these evils by the force of argument steadily applied, and facts sedulously brought forward, without invoking the destructive aid of popular passions or urban revolutions. We want neither Red Republicans nor Tipperary Boys to fight our battles; we neither desire to be intrenched behind Parisian barricades nor Irish non-convicting juries; we neither want the aid of Chartist clubs, with their arsenals of rifles, nor Anti-corn-law Leagues, with their coffers of gold. We appeal to the common sense and experienced suffering of our countrymen—to the intellect and sense of justice of our legislators; and we have not a doubt of ultimate success in the greatest social conflict in which British industry has ever been engaged.

We need not say that we allude to the Currency—that question of questions, in comparison of which all others sink into insignificance; which is of more importance, even, than an adequate supply of food for the nation; and without the proper understanding of which all attempts to assuage misery or produce prosperity, to avert disaster or induce happiness, to maintain the national credit or uphold the national independence, must ere long prove nugatory. We say, and say advisedly, that this question is of far more importance than the raising of food for the nation; for if their industry is adequately remunerated, and commercial catastrophes are averted from the realm, the people will find food for themselves either in this or foreign states. Experience has taught us that we can import twelve millions of grain, a full fifth of the national subsistence, in a single year. But if the currency is not put upon a proper footing, the means of purchasing this grain are taken from the people—their industry is blasted, their labour meets with no reward—and the most numerous and important class in the community come to present the deplorable spectacle of industrious worth perishing of hunger, or worn out by suffering, in the midst of accumulated stores of home-grown or foreign subsistence.

The two grand evils of the present monetary system are, that the currency provided for the nation is inadequate in point of amount, and fluctuating in point of stability.

That it is inadequate in point of amount is easily proved. In the undermentioned years, the aggregate of notes in circulation in England and Wales, without Scotland and Ireland, was as follows[16]:—

		Bank of England and Provincial Banks.		Population, England and Wales.
1814,		£47,501,000		13,200,000
1815,		46,272,650		13,420,000
1816,		42,109,620		13,640,000
1817,		43,291,901		13,860,000
1818,		48,278,070		14,100,000

Including the Scotch and Irish notes, at that period about £12,000,000, the notes in circulation were about £60,000,000, and the inhabitants of Great Britain 14,000,000; of the two islands about 19,000,000—or about £3, 4s. a head.

In the year 1848, thirty years afterwards, when the population of the empire had risen to 29,000,000, the exports had tripled, and the imports and shipping had on an average more than doubled, the supply of paper issued to the nation stood thus:—

Notes.

	Aug.14, 1847.	Aug.12, 1848.	Increase.	Decrease.	Population.
Bank of England,	£18,784,890	£18,710,728	—	£74,162
Private Banks,	4,258,380	3,520,990	—	737,390	England and Wales.
Joint Stock Banks,	2,991,351	2,479,951	—	511,400	19,500,000
Total in England,	26,034,621	24,711,669	—	1,322,952
... Scotland,	3,455,651	3,035,903	—	419,748	Great Britain and Ireland.
... Ireland,	5,097,215	4,313,304	—	783,911	29,500,000
United Kingdom,	34,587,487	32,060,876	—	2,526,611

Thus showing a decrease of £1,322,952 in the circulation of notes in England, and a decrease of £2,526,611 in the circulation of the United Kingdom, when compared with the corresponding period last year.[17]—Times, Aug. 29, 1848.

Thus, in the last thirty years, the population of Great Britain and Ireland has increased from 19,000,000 to 29,500,000; while its currency in paper has decreased from £60,000,000 to £32,000,000. Above fifty per cent has been added to the people, and above a hundred per cent to their transactions, and the currency by which they are to be carried on has been contracted fifty per cent. Thirty years ago, the paper currency was £3, 5s. a head; now it is not above £1, 5s. a head! And our statesmen express surprise at the distress which prevails, and the extreme difficulty experienced in collecting the revenue! It is no wonder, in such a state of matters, that it is now more difficult to collect £52,000,000 from 29,000,000 of people, than in 1814 it was to collect £72,000,000 from 18,000,000.

The circulation, it is particularly to be observed, is decreasing every year. It was, in August 1848, no less than £2,500,000 less than it was in August 1847, though that was the August between the crisis of April and the crisis of October of that year. And this prodigious and progressively increasing contraction of the currency, and consequent drying up of credit and blasting of industry, is taking place at the precise time when the very legislators who have produced it have landed the nation in the expenditure, in three years, of £150,000,000 on domestic railways, independent of a vast and increasing import trade, which is constantly draining more and more of our metallic resources out of the country! Need it be wondered at that money is so tight, and that railway stock in particular exhibits, week after week, a progressive and most alarming decline.

But, say the bullionists, if we have taken away one-half of your paper, we have given you double the former command of sovereigns; and gold is far better than paper, because it is of universal and permanent value. There can be no doubt that the gold and silver coinage at the Mint has been very much augmented since paper was so much withdrawn; and the amount in circulation now probably varies in ordinary times from £40,000,000 to £45,000,000. There can be as little doubt that the circulation, on its present basis, is capable of fostering and permitting the most unlimited amount of speculations; for absurd adventures never were so rife in the history of England, not even in the days of the South Sea Company, as in 1845, the year which immediately followed Sir R. Peel's new currency measures, by which these dangers were to be for ever guarded against. It is no wonder it was so; for the bill of 1844 aggravates speculation as much in periods of prosperity, as it augments distress and pinches credit in times of adversity. By compelling the Bank of England, and all other banks, to hold constantly in their coffers a vast amount of treasure, which must be issued at a fixed price, it leaves them no resource for defraying its charges but pushing business, and getting out their notes to the uttermost. That was the real secret of the lowering of the Bank of England's discounts to 3 and 2-1/2 per cent in 1845, and of the enormous gambling speculations of that year, from the effects of which the nation is still so severely suffering.

But as gold is made, under the new system, the basis of the circulation beyond the £32,000,000 allowed to be issued in the United Kingdom on securities, what provision does it make for keeping the gold thus constituted the sole basis of two-thirds of the currency within the country? Not only is no such provision made, but every imaginable facility is given for its exportation. Under the free-trade system, our imports are constantly increasing in a most extraordinary ratio, and our exports constantly diminishing. Since 1844, our imports have swelled from £75,000,000 to £90,000,000, while our exports have decreased from £60,000,000 to £58,000,000, of which only £51,000,000 are British and Irish exports and manufactures.[18] How is the balance paid, or to be paid? In cash: and that is the preparation which our legislators have made for keeping the gold, the life-blood of industry and the basis of two-thirds of the circulation, in the country. They have established a system of trade which, by inducing a large and constant importation of food, for which scarcely any thing but gold will be taken, induces a constant tendency of the precious metals outwards. With the right hand they render the currency and credit beyond £32,000,000 entirely dependent on keeping the gold in the country, and with the left hand they send it headlong out of the country to buy grain. No less than £33,000,000 were sent out in this way to buy grain in fifteen months during and immediately preceding the year 1847. They do this at the very time when, under bills which themselves have passed, and the railways which themselves have encouraged, £150,000,000 was in the next three years to be expended on the extra work of railways! Is it surprising that, under such a system, half the wealth of our manufacturing towns has disappeared in two years; that distress to an unheard-of extent prevails every where; and that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been obliged to borrow £10,000,000, in the last and present session of Parliament, during general peace?

Let it not be supposed this evil has passed away. It is in full vigour at the present moment. It will never pass away as long as free trade and a fettered currency coexist in this country. The disastrous fact has been revealed by the publication of the Board of Trade returns, that while, during the first six months of this year, our imports have undergone little diminution, our exports have sunk £4,000,000 below the corresponding months in last year. In May alone, the decrease was £1,122,000; in April, £1,467,000.[19] Beyond all doubt our exports, this year, of British produce and manufactures, will sink to £45,000,000, while our imports will reach at least £85,000,000! How is the balance paid? In Specie! And still the monetary laws remain the same, and for every five sovereigns above £32,000,000 lent out, a note must be drawn in! It may be doubted whether a system so utterly absurd and ruinous ever was established in any nation, or persevered in with such obstinacy after its pernicious effects had been ascertained by experience.

The manner in which these disastrous effects resulted, necessarily and immediately, from the combined operation of the bills of 1819 and 1844, is thus clearly and justly stated by Mr Salt, in his late admirable letter to Sir R. Peel on the subject.

"The potato crop failed, and an importation of food became necessary; the food was imported at a cost not exceeding one half per cent on the national wealth. It might have been paid for in goods or in gold, and the limit of the loss would have been the amount paid—a sum too insignificant, compared to the national resources, to have been perceptible—and the national industry could have replaced it in a few weeks.

"But the bill of 1819 had made gold the basis of our whole system; and, therefore, when the gold was exported to pay for the food, the whole system was broken up; and the bill provides that this calamity shall in every case be added to that of a bad harvest; that the abstraction of an infinitesimal part of our money shall destroy our whole monetary system; that the purchase of a small quantity of food shall cause an immense quantity of starvation, by destroying the means of distributing the food, and employing labour. If this were the only evil of the bill, its existence ought not to be tolerated an hour.

"Instead of placing the national credit and solvency on the broad and indestructible basis of the national industry and wealth, you have placed all the great national interest on gold, the narrowest and most shifting, and therefore the most unfit, basis it was possible to choose. You could not have done worse.

"The gold being in quantity perfectly unequal to effect the exchanges needful for the existence of society, an immense and disproportioned superstructure of paper money and credit became a compulsory result, and a certain cause of perpetually recurring ruin.

"In framing the bill of 1819 you do not appear to have had a suspicion of this consequence; but in 1844, after an interval of a quarter of a century, this much seems to have dawned obscurely in your mind; but, alas! what was your remedy?—enlarging and securing the too narrow and shifting basis? Not at all; you crippled and limited the superstructure. You left us subject to the whole of your original error, and provided a new one!

"The bill of 1844 provides that, in proportion as the gold money shall disappear, the paper money shall disappear also! Out of the money thus doubly reduced, the unhappy people are compelled to pay unreduced taxes; and out of the inadequate remnant to discharge unreduced debts, and to provide for the unreduced necessities of their respective stations. So the leaven of the law works its way through all society. The payments cannot be made out of these reduced means, the loss of the credit follows the loss of the money; the means of exchange, employment, and consumption are destroyed, and the world looks with amazement on the consummation of your work—the wealthiest nation in the world withering up under the blight of a universal insolvency; an abundance of all things beyond compute, and a misery and want beyond relief.

"The sole aim of your bill has been to convert paper money into gold. I have shown how signally you have failed in this one object, always excepting your special claim of converting £48,000,000 of paper money into £15,000,000 of gold, for which mutation I suspect few will thank you. In all other respects, the whimsicality of your fate has been to establish a universal inconvertibility. Labour cannot be converted into wages, East India estates, West India estates, railway shares, sugar, rice, cotton goods, &c.; in short, all things are inconvertible except gold. There has been nothing like it since the days of Midas.

"The facts, sir, are of your creation, not of mine. I cannot alter or disguise them. You have had confided to your administration, by our illustrious sovereign, this most powerful state, of almost unlimited extent and fertility—a people unrivalled in their knowledge, caution, skill, and energy, possessed of unlimited means of creating wealth, and out of all these elements of human happiness your measures have produced a chaos of ruin, misery, and discontent. You can scarcely place your finger on the map, and mark a spot in this vast empire where all the elements of prosperity do not exist abundantly; you cannot point out one where you have not produced results of ruin. Every resource is paralysed, every interest deranged; the very empire is threatened with dissolution. The Canadas, the West Indies, and Ireland, are threatening secession, and England has to be garrisoned against its people as against a hostile force; the very loyalty of English hearts is beginning to turn into disaffection. Review once more these vast resources, and these wretched results, and I trust you will not make the fatal opinion of your life the only one to which you will persist in adhering."

This is language at once fearless, but measured—cutting, but respectful, which, on such an emergency, befits a British statesman. There is no appeal to popular passions, no ascribing of unworthy motives, no attempt to evade inquiry by irony; facts, known undeniable facts, are alone appealed to. Inferences, clear, logical, convincing, are alone drawn. If such language was more frequent, especially in the House of Commons, the plague would soon be stayed, and its former prosperity would again revisit the British Empire.

In opposition to these damning facts, the whole tactics of the bullionists consist in recurring to antiquated and childish terrors. They call out "Assignats, assignats, assignats!"—they seek to alarm every holder of money by the dread of its depreciation. They affect to treat the doctrine of keeping a fair proportion between population, engagements, and currency, as a mere chimera. In the midst of the deluge, they raise the cry of fire; when wasting of famine, they hold out to us the terrors of repletion; when sinking from atrophy on the way-side, they strive to terrify us by the dangers of apoplexy. The answer to all this tissue of affectation and absurdity is so evident, that we are almost ashamed to state it. We all know the dangers of assignats; we know that they are ruinous when issued to any great extent. So also we know the dangers of apoplexy and intoxication; but we are not on that account reconciled to a regimen of famine and starvation. We know that some of the rich die of repletion, but we know that many more of the poor die of want and wretchedness. We do not want to be deluged with inconvertible paper, which has been truly described as "strength in the outset, but weakness in the end;" but neither do we desire to be starved by the periodical abstraction of that most evanescent of earthly things, a gold circulation. Having the means, from our own immense accumulated wealth, of enjoying that first of social blessings, an adequate, steady, and safe currency, we do not wish to be any longer deprived of it by the prejudices of theorists, the selfishness of capitalists, or the obstinacy of statesmen. Half our wealth, engaged in trade and manufactures, has already disappeared, under this system, in two years; we have no disposition to lose the remaining half.

The duty on wheat now is only five shillings a quarter; in February next it will fall to one shilling a quarter, and remain fixed at that amount. The importation of grain, which was felt as so dreadful a drain upon our metallic resources in 1847, may, under that system, be considered as permanent. We shall be always in the condition in which the nation is when three weeks' rain has fallen in August. Let merchants, manufacturers, holders of funded property, of railway stock, of bank stock, reflect on that circumstance, and consider what fate awaits them if the present system remains unchanged. They know that three days' rain in August lowers the public funds one, and all railway stock ten per cent. Let them reflect on their fate if, by human folly, an effect equal to that of three weeks' continuous fall of rain takes place every year. Let them observe what frightful oscillations in the price of commodities follow the establishing by law a fixed price for gold. Let them ponder on the consequences of a system which sends twelve or fifteen millions of sovereigns out of the country annually to buy grain, and contracts the paper remaining in it at the same time in the same proportion. Let them observe the effect of such a system, coinciding with a vast expenditure on domestic railways. And let them consider whether all these dreadful evils, and the periodical devastation of the country by absurd speculation and succeeding ruin, would not be effectually guarded against, and the perils of an over-issue of paper also prevented, by the simple expedient of treating gold and silver, the most easily transported and evanescent of earthly things, like any other commodity, and making paper always payable in them, but at the price they bear at the moment of presentment. That would establish a mixed circulation of the precious metals and paper, mutually convertible, and allow an increased issue of the latter to obviate all the evils flowing from the periodical abstractions of the former. To establish the circulation on a gold basis alone, in a great commercial state, is the same error as to put the food of the people in a populous community on one root or species of grain. Ireland has shown us, in the two last years, what is the consequence of the one—famine and rebellion; England, of the other—bankruptcy and Chartism.

---

BYRON'S ADDRESS TO THE OCEAN.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage undertakes an Idea—that of a proud spirit, born in a castle, self-driven from the bosom of home, seeking refuge, solace, renovation, from Nature, of sensibilities worn out with enjoyment. Or, he brings into play a neglected, unused sensibility—the joy of the Sublime and the Beautiful. We receive, as given, a mind gifted with extraordinary powers of will and understanding—by the favour of birth, nursed upon the heights of society—conversant with pleasure and passion; and, bearing all this constantly in mind, we must read the poem. From it large passages might be selected, in which the scorn, despite, bitterness that elsewhere break in, disfeaturing beauty and sublimity, are silent; and the passion of divine beholding stands out alone. Is this the character—or what is the character, of the celebrated concluding Address to the Ocean? Few things in modern poetry have been more universally—more indiscriminately admired; be it ours now to recite with you the famous Stanzas—and here, sitting beneath the sea-fronting porch of our Marine Villa, indulge in a confabulatory critique.

The Wanderings are at an end. The real and the imaginary pilgrim, standing together upon Mount Albano, look out upon the blue Mediterranean. He has generously, honourably, magnanimously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion of—vary the word as he varies it—The Ocean.

Let us chant—with broken, though haply not unmusical voice—what may be called—the Hymn. That is a high term—let us not anticipate that it has been misapplied. Childe Harold, or Lord Byron—for it here little matters whether a grace of pleased fancy resolve the Two into One, or show the Two side by side, noble forms in brotherly reflection—here is at last the powerful but self-encumbered Spirit with whom we have journeyed so long in sunlight and in storm—delighted, sympathising, wondering at least, or confounded and angry when he will not let us wonder—here He is at last himself, in unencumbered strength, setting like the sun upon the sea he gazes on—the clouds broken through, dispersed, and vanquished, even if a half-tinge of melancholy remembrance hang in the atmosphere, radiant in majestic farewell.

"But I forget.—My pilgrim's shrine is won,
And he and I must part—so let it be,—
His task and mine alike are nearly done;
Yet once more let us look upon the sea;
The midland ocean breaks on him and me,
And from the Alban Mount we now behold
Our friend of youth, that Ocean, which when we
Beheld it last by Calpe's rock unfold
Those waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd

"Upon the blue Symplegades: long years—
Long, though not very many, since have done
Their work on both; some suffering and some tears
Have left us nearly where we had begun:
Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run,
We have had our reward—and it is here;
That we can yet feel gladden'd by the sun,
And reap from earth, sea, joy almost as dear
As if there were no man to trouble what is clear.

"Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements!—in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted—can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean!—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

"His steps are not upon thy paths—thy fields
Are not a spoil for him—thou dost arise,
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his Gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth;—there let him lay.

"The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals,
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

"Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wanton'd with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here."

These Stanzas may be separated from the Poem—the feeling of readers innumerable so separates them—as a Hymn to the Ocean. The passage, a great effort of a great poet, intends a final putting forth of all his power—it has been acknowledged and renowned as such; and, if it has failed, a critique showing this, and showing the ground of the failure, maybe useful to you, inexperienced yet in the criticism of poetry, though all alive to its charm.

We observe you delight in the first Four Stanzas—ay, you recite them over again after us—and the voice of youth, tremulous in emotion, is pathetic to the Old Man. He will not seek, by what might seem to you, thus moved, hypercritical objections to some of the words; but, pleased with your pleasure, he is willing to allow you to believe the stanzas entirely good in expression as in thought. For here the morbid disrelish of the sated palate is cleansed away. The obscuring cloud of the overwhelmed heart is dispersed. The joy of the wilderness here claimed is not necessarily more or other than that of every powerful and imaginative spirit, which experiences that solitude is, in simple truth, by a steadfast law of our nature, the condition under which our soul is able to wed itself in impassioned communion effectually to the glorious Universe—where, too, the subjugating footsteps of man, impairing the pure domain of free nature, are not. "Pathless," "lonely,"—of themselves bespeak neither satiety nor hostility: there is "society by the deep sea, and music in its roar!" all quite right. Here is a heart, in its thirst for sympathy, peopling the desert with sympathisers. Here is expansion of the heart; and the spirit that rejoices in the consciousness of life roused into creative activity. For an ear untuned and untuning, here is one that listens out harmonies which you, languid or inept, might not discern. "Pleasure!" "rapture!" "society!" "music!"—a chain of genialities!

"I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews."

What will you require of kindliest humanity from any poet, from any lover of nature, that is not here? The savage grandeur of earth and sea have their peril—the fleeing of human homes and haunts—the voluptuous banishment self-imposed—the caressing of dear fancies in secret invisible recesses inviolable—these tend all to engendering and nurturing an excessive self-delight akin to an usurping self-love; and the very sublimities of that wonderful intercourse, in which, upon the one part, stands the feeble dwarf Man, in his hour-lived weakness, and upon the other, as if Infinitude itself putting on cognisable forms, the imperishable Hills and the unchangeable Sea—that intercourse in which he, the pigmy, conscious of the divinity within him, feels himself the greater—he infinite, immortal, and these finite and vanishing—the power and exultation of that intercourse may well engender and nourish Pride. Self-love and Pride, tempting, decoying, bewildering, devouring demons of the inhuman Waste! But the self-reproved, repentant pilgrim has well understood these dangers. He knows that the delight of woods and waterfalls, of stars and storms, may alienate man from his fellow-man. He has guarded himself by some wise temperance. He has found here his golden mean. From thus conversing, he "loves not man the less, but nature more." Is this a young Wordsworth, beginning, in the school of nature, to learn the wisdom of humanity?

At all events, here is, for the occasion, the most express and earnest disclaimer of the mood of misanthropy; and we rejoice to hear the Pilgrim speak of interviews

"in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before."

From all! that is, from all the ungracious, the harsh, the unkind, the sore, the embittered, the angry, the miserable! Not, surely, from all the amiable and all the gladsome; and especially not from the whole personality and identity of his character. The picture he had given us of himself was that of a powerful mind, self-set at war with its kind, yet within an exasperated hate ever and anon unfolding undestroyed, sometimes hardly vitiated, some portion of its original ingenerate faculty of love. Here we behold him now as God made him, and no longer possessed by a demon. Change his rhyme into our prose—and you do not dislike our prose—and in sober and sincere sadness the Childe thus speaks—"I steal, under the power of these delicious, renovating, gladdening, hallowing influences, out of myself—out of that evil thing which man had made me—rather, alas! which I had made myself into;—and if long wandering, disuse of humanity, separation from the scene of my wrongs, and this auspicious dominion of inviolate nature have in these past years already amended me—if I have been worse than I am—even that worse and that worst these 'interviews' obliterate and extinguish." The soured milk of human kindness is again sweetened. Or, if that be too much to say, at least man, with all the dissonance that hangs by his name and recollections, is forgotten, suspended—for the time absolutely lost. If this be not the meaning, what is?

"And feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal,"

is indeed powerless writing, and the stanza merited a better close. But the whole stanza protests, proclaims the glad healing power of the natural world over him. He has described this as well as he could, and sums up with saying that by him it is indescribable. "I derive from these communions a rapturous transformation—so great, so wondrous, that my ignorant skill of words is utterly unable to render it; but, at the same time, so self-powerful, that, in despite of this my concealing inability, tones of it will outbreak, make themselves heard, felt, and understood." Thus Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean. The first Four Stanzas, therefore, be their poetry more or less, required, upon this account, enucleation; and further, dear Neophyte, inasmuch as they are particularly humane, they should take their effectual place among evidences which separate him personally from some of his poetical Timons.

You—dear Neophyte—have called the Four Stanzas beautiful,—that is enough for us,—and they recall to your heart—you say—the kindred lines of Coleridge—which we call "beautiful exceedingly."—

"With other ministrations thou! O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distemper'd child.
Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,
Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit heal'd and harmonised
By the benignant touch of love and beauty."

Thus—we repeat our words—"Byron sets the tune of his Address to the Ocean."

The poem, then, is an Address to the Ocean by a Lover of the Ocean. It seems reasonable, then, to ask, first, what is it natural to expect that such a poem should be? And if it proves to be something remarkably different, then to inquire whether any particular circumstance or condition has intervened which justifies the poet in following an unexpected course.

Now, for natural expectation, the theme is one of eulogy; and one may say, therefore, that praise customarily expresses itself in one or other of two principal ways—namely, directly or indirectly. We praise directly, for instance, when, moved by the contemplation of some great or interesting subject, we single forth, one after another, the qualities of its character, or the facts in its history, which have provoked our love, our admiration, our joy, our gratitude. Upon the other hand, we praise indirectly when we extol the subject of our eulogy by dispraising another foreign subject, which we oppose to the chosen one in the way of relief or foil; whether we establish mere comparison of contrast between the two, or cite an opposition of actual enmity between them—as if, in hymning Apollo, we should insist upon the horror and fury, the earth-pollution and the earth-affliction, of the monster Python.

A moment of reflection satisfies us that both ways are alike natural—both, with occasion, alike unavoidable; but it is impossible to help equally seeing that these two ways of eulogy differ materially from each other in two respects,—the temper of inspiration which dictates, animates, and supports the one or other manner of attributing renown, and the motive justifying the one eulogistic procedure or the other. The temper of direct praise is always wholly genial; that of lauding by illaudation has in it perforce an ungenial element. The motive to direct praise eternally subsists and is there, as long as the subject eulogised subsists and is there. This, then, is the ordinary method. If any thing has just happened that provokes the indirect way—as if Python has just been vanquished—then good and well; or if the poet, by some personal haunting sorrow, or by an unvanquished idiosyncrasy, must arrive at pleasure through pain, so be it: but this method is clearly extraordinary and exceptive to the rule; and the reason for using it must be prominent, definite, and flashing in all men's eyes. The other method never can require justifying—this does always; and if it fail conspicuously in aught, the very opposite effect to that intended is produced, and the eulogy is no laud. You may say, indeed, and say truly, that all eulogy shall be mixed—that naturally and necessarily every subject has its title to favour by sympathy and by antipathy. Which of the two shall predominate? We need scarcely answer that question. The mood of mind in which the Poet sings must be genial and benign, though he may have to deal in fierce invective.

Read then, dearest Neophyte, the first Four Stanzas—recite them again, for you have them by heart. It is not easy to imagine any thing more completely at variance with all that preamble for the hymn than the hymn itself. The poet, imbued, as we have seen, with the love of nature and of man, will breathe on both his benediction. He will glorify the Sea. And how does he attain the transported and affectionate contemplation of the abyss of waters? By the opposition of man's impotence to the might of the sea; by the opposition of the land subjected to man, mixed up in his destinies, and changeable with him, to the ocean free from all change, excepting that of its own moods, the free play of its own gigantic will. For though, philosophically speaking, the immense mass of waters is in itself inert and powerless; lifted into tides by the sun and moon; lifted into storm by raging and invisible winds; yet the poet, lawfully, and by a compulsion which lies alike upon all our minds, apprehends in what is involuntary, self-willed motion, wild changeable moods, a pleasure of rolling—sun, moon, and winds, being for the moment left utterly out of thought; and it may be that Byron here does this well. But, what is the worth, what the meaning of the first Four Stanzas—in which you have delighted, because in them the Bard you love had deliberately and passionately rejected all hostile regard of man, and reclaimed for himself his place among the brotherhood—when we see that hostile regard in all its bitterness, instantaneously return and become the predominating characteristic of the whole wrathful and scornful song?

Was his previous confession of faith utterly false and hollow? If sincere and substantial, what in a moment shattered it?

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee."

This is good in temper so far—nor in aught inconsistent with the spirit pervading the introductory Stanzas; if the ten thousand fleets are presented for the magnificence of the picture. But are they? No, already for spleen. The full verse is

"Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee—in vain!"

In vain! for what end in vain? Why for one that never was contemplated by them, nor by any rational being—that of leaving the bosom of the deep permanently furrowed by their wakes! This is a minuteness of thinking we shudder to put down—but mend the matter if you can. Try to imagine something great, if not intelligible—that the attempt which has failed was, in some titanic and mysterious way, to have established a dominion of man over the sea, to have yoked it like the earth under his hand, ploughed it, set vines and sown corn fields, and built up towered cities. But "that thought is unstable, and deserts us quite." "In vain," whatever it means, or if it means nothing—(and will no one tell us what it means?)—still proposes the sea in conflict with an adversary, and does not contemplate it for its own pure great self. The whole Hymn is founded on contrast, and therefore of indirect inspiration. To aggrandise the sea, Byron knows of no other way than to disparage the earth; and there is equally a want of truth, and of imagination and passion. If he had the capacity of worthily praising nature, if he had the genuine love and admiration for her beauty and greatness which he proudly claims, he has not shown this here; and we are induced to think that there were in his mind, faculties, intellectual and moral, stronger there than the poetical, and upon which the poetical faculty needed to stay itself—from which it needed to borrow a factitious energy—say wit and scorn, the faculties of the satirist.

"In vain," indeed! Imagination beholds ten thousand fleets sweeping over the ocean—or a hundred of them, or one—and man's exulting spirit feels that it was not in vain. The purposes for which fleets do sail—to carry commerce, to carry war, to carry colonies, to carry civilisation, to bring home knowledge, have triumphantly prospered; and, of course, are not in the meaning of the poet, although properly they alone are in the meaning of the word. But, perversely enough, the imagination of the reader accepts for an instant the pomp of the representation—"ten thousand fleets sweep over thee"—for good, as an adjunct of the ocean's magnificence; and in the confusion of thought and feeling which characterises the passage, this verse of mockery tells to the total resulting impression, in effect, like a verse of passion. The reverence which is not intended—not the contempt which is intended—for these majestic human creations, is acknowledged at last. The poet, with his living fraternal shadow beside him, is sitting upon the Italian promontory—love and wonder look through his eyes upon that sea rolling under that sky—and he speaks accordingly,—

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!"

Roll thy gentle tides on, sweet Mediterranean Sea! to beat in murmurs at my weary feet! Roll, in thine own unconfined spaces, Atlantic Ocean! with placid swell or with mounting billows, from pole to pole! Roll, circumambient World-Ocean! embracing in thy liquid arms our largest continents as thine islands, and immantling our whole globe. A fair, gentle, sedate beginning; and at the very next step—war to the knife!

The confused, unstudied impression left upon you is that of a powerful mind moving in the majesty of its power. But it is not moving in the majesty of power, after one step taken straight forwards, at the second to wheel sharply round and march off in the opposite direction. How otherwise, Homer, Pindar, Milton! They walk as kings, heroes, bards, archangels. The first canon of great, impassioned, profound writing—that the soul, filled with its theme, and with affection fitted for its theme, moves on slowly or impetuously—with a glide, or with a rush, or with a bound—but that it ever moves consistently with itself, pouring out its affection, and, in pouring it out, displaying its theme, and so evolving its work from itself in unity—is here sinned against by movements owning no law but mere caprice.

How, then, is the glorification of his subject sought here to be attained by Byron? By means of another subject shown us in hostility, and quelled. Man, in his weakness, is put in contrast and in conflict with ocean's omnipotence. Man sends out his fleets, apparently for the purpose of ruining the ocean. He cannot: he can ruin the land; but on the land's edge his deadly dominion is at an end. There the reign of a mightier and more dreadful Ruler, a greater Destroyer, a wilder Anarch, begins. The sea itself rises, wrecks the timbered vessels, drowns the crews—or at least those who fall overboard—tosses the mariner to the skies and on to shore, and swallows up fleets of war.

Such is the first movement or strain. What is the amount relatively to the purport of the poem? Why, that the first point of glorification chosen, the first utterance of enthusiastic love and admiration from the softened heart and elevated soul of a poet, who has just told us that there is such music in its roar, that by the deep sea he loves not man the less, but nature more, is, "All hail, O wrathful, dire, almighty, and remorseless destroyer!"—surely a strange ebullition of tenderness—an amatory sigh like a lion's roar—something in Polyphemus' vein—wooing with a vengeance. All this, mark ye, dear neophyte, following straight upon a proclamation of peace with all mankind—upon an Invocation to Nature for inward peace!

Grant for a moment that Man is properly to be viewed as Earth's ravager, not its cultivator, and that "his control stops with the shore," is good English in verse for "his power of desolating, or his range of desolation, is bounded by the sea-shore;" grant for a moment that it is a lawful and just practical contemplation to view him ravaging and ranging up to that edge, and to view in contrast the glad, bright, universally-laughing Ocean beyond—unravaged, unstained, unfooted, no smoke of conflagration rising, only the golden morning mist seeming all one diffused sun. Grant all this—and then what we have to complain of is, that the contrast is prepared, but not presented; and that the natural replication to "Man marks the earth with ruin," is not here. Instead of picture for picture—instead of, look on this picture and on that—we have

"on the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed."

That is to say, peace, happiness, beauty, nowhere! Man wrecks up to the shore. There the tables are turned upon him. There the sea ravages the land, and wrecks him in return. Merciful Heaven! nothing but wrecking; as if evil spirits only possessed the universe—as if the only question to be asked any where were, Who wrecks here?

Is not this a glaring instance of a false intellectual procedure arising out of a false moral temper? The unceasing call of the Hymn is for the display of the subject extolled. And here the beautiful, or the proud superiority of the "peaceful, immeasurable plain," or of the indignant, independent, thundrous sea, was imperiously suggested for some moments surely, if the Poem be one of glorification. But no! We may imagine for ourselves, if we please, the beauty, splendour, joy, tempestuous liberty of the unfettered waters; but the love of the ocean is not in the Poet's mind, as it ought to have been—only the hate of man.

As it ought to have been? Yea, verily. Had he not taken the pledge? To drink but of the purest spring of inspiration—the Fount of Love. And may he, without reproach, break it when he chooses, and we not dare to condemn? Of all promises, the promise made by poet of world-wide fame before the wide world, in his soul's best mood, and in nature's noblest inspiration, is the most sacred—to break it is a sin, and a sin that brings its appropriate punishment along with it,—loss or abeyance of the faculty divine. Byron had sworn to love man and nature, and to glorify their works, on the very instant he seeks to degrade and vilify. We listen to a religious overture—to the Devil's March. We are invited to enter with him a temple of worship—and praise and prayer become imprecations and curses. It is as if a hermit, telling his beads at the door of his cell, retired into its interior to hold converse with a blaspheming spirit. Fear not to call it by its right name—this is Hypocrisy.

So much as to the fitness of the mood; now as to the truth of the matter.

What is, justly considered, the relation of man to the sea? Is it here truly spoken? Certainly not. The Facts and the Songs of the world are all the other way. In history, the ocean is the giant slave of the magician Man—with some difficulty brought under thraldom—humorous, and not always manageable—mischievous when he gets his own way. But compare statistically the service and the detriment, for Clio must instruct Calliope and Erato. Passion that cannot sustain itself but by hiding that which has been, and accrediting that which has not been, is personal, not poetical—is mad, not inspired. The truth is, that the Ship is the glory of man's inventive art and inventive daring—the most splendid triumph of heroical art. And—for the history of man—the service of the sea to his ship has been the civilising of the earth. The wrecks are occasional—so much so that, in our ordinary estimate, they are forgotten. It would be as good poetry to say that all the inhabitants of the land live by wrecking.

In this first movement or strain, then, two great relations upheld by man are put in question,—his relation to the land, and his relation to the sea. The Basis of Song to the true and great poet is the truth of things—the truth as the historian and the philosopher know them. Over this he throws his own affection and creates a truth of his own—a poetical truth. But the truth, as held in man's actual knowledge, is recognisable through the transparent veil. Here it is distorted, not veiled. The two relations are alike falsified. For in order to bring man into conflict with the sea, where he and not the sea is to be worsted, he must first be made the foe of the earth! "Man marks the earth with ruin." Is this the history of man on the earth? Man has vanquished the Earth, but for its benefit as well as his own. He has displaced the forest and the swamp, the wild beast and the serpent. He has adorned the earth like a bride; as if he had made captive a wild Amazon, charmed her with Orphean arts, wedded and made her a happy mother of many children. Whatever impressive effect such verses may have on the inconsiderate mind, it has been illegitimately attained by a preposterous and utterly unprovoked movement of tempestuous passion, and by two utterly false contemplations of man's posture upon the globe, which two embrace about his whole mortal existence. Eloquence might condescend to this—poetry never.

Note well, O Neophyte! that the calm, contemplative, loving first line,

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean! roll!"

precludes all comparison with such sudden bursts as "Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!" &c., and "Quousque tandem abutêre, Catilina," &c.; but it does not preclude, it invites the killing comparison with

"O Thou that with surpassing glory crown'd
Look'st from thy sole dominion, like the God
Of this new world,—at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell—how glorious once above thy sphere!" &c.

Where the speaker is fraught with personal, not as a poet with impersonal affection—where he comes charged with hate, not with love; and yet how slowly, how sedately, through how many thoughts, how much admiration, and how many verses, he reaches his hate at last, which is his object! But on that soliloquy, dear Neophyte, we must discourse another day.

We must go a little—not very much—into particulars; for otherwise, O Neophyte! believe thou, whatever wiseacres say, there can be no true criticism of poetry. Let us—and that which might have been expected will appear,—a detail of moral and intellectual disorder. The stanza of which we have been speaking begins well—as we have seen and said. Thenceforth all is stamped with incongruity, and shows an effect like power, by violently bringing together, in a most remarkable manner, things that cannot consist—by the transition from the Universal to the Individual, when for

"The wrecks are all thy deed,"

which shows us a thousand ships foundering in mid ocean, and the earth's shores all strewn with fragments of oak-leviathans, we have instantaneously substituted, as if this were the same thing,

"When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown."

What has happened? What is meant? Is this literally the representation of some single human being actually dropping, as unfortunately happens from time to time, from a ship's side into the immensity of waters? And is this horrible game and triumph of Ocean, which threatened to annihilate the species, upon a sudden confined to "a man overboard?" Or are we to understand that, by a strong feat of uncreating and recreating imagination, this one man, dropped as if naked from the clouds into the sea and submerged, impersonates and impictures, by some concentration of human agony and of human impotence, that universally diffused annihilation of Man in his ships which was the matter in hand? We do not believe that any reader can give a satisfactory explanation or account of the course of thinking that has been here pursued. Upon the face of the words lies that natural pathos which belongs to the perishing of the individual, which serves to blind inquiry, and stands as a substitute for any reasonable thinking at all; and thus a grammatical confusion between Man and a man makes the whole absolute nonsense.

Then look here:—

"Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed."

This is not only not true—it is false. If man, clothed in the thunder of war, is able to strew ruin upon the land, he, militant, by the same power, strews wreck and ruin upon the waters; and so the distinction pretended, whatever it might be worth, fails. And does not the swallowing of the unknelled and uncoffined, which is attributed to the sea as the victor of man, take place as effectually when beak or broadside sends down a ship with her hundreds of souls, when the great sea, willing or unwilling, appears merely as the servile minister of insulting man's hate and fury?

"Alike the Armada's pride and spoils of Trafalgar."

"Rule Britannia" rings in our ears, and gives that assertion the lie. Does Macaulay's Ode idly recount an ineffectual muster? Did the Lord High Admiral of England, with all his commodores and captains, do nothing to the Armada? With what face dared an English Poet say to the sea that on all those days "the wrecks were all thy deed?" The storms were England's allies indeed, from Cape Clear to the Orcades. But only her allies; and, much as we respect the storms and their services, we say to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed." At Trafalgar the storms finally sided with the Spaniards. "Let the fleet be anchored," said Nelson ere he died; and, had that been possible, it had been done by Collingwood. After the fight Gravina came out to the rescue—but the sea engulfed the spoils. Yet, spite of that, we say again to the English fleet, "The wrecks were all thy deed;" and the sea answers—and will answer to all eternity—"Ay, ay, ay!"

Byron, we verily believe, was the first Great Poet that owned not a patriot's heart. No pride ever had he in his Country's triumphs either on land or sea. It seems as if he were impatient of every national and individual greatness that, however far aloof from his sphere, might eclipse his own. He has written well—but not so well as he ought to have done—of Waterloo. The glory of Wellington overshadowed him; and, by keeping his name out of his verses, he would keep the hero himself out of sight. But there he is resplendent in spite of the Poet's spleen. Verbum non amplius for Trafalgar! not one for Nelson. Not so did Cowper—the pious, peace-loving Cowper—regard his country's conflicts. At thought of these the holy Harper's soul awoke. He too sung of the sea:—

"What ails thee, restless as the waves that roar,
And fling their foam against thy chalky shore?
Mistress at least, while Providence shall please,
And trident-bearing Queen of the wide seas."

That is majestic—and this is sublime:—

"They trust in navies, and their navies fail—
God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail."

Ay, then, indeed, "ten thousand fleets sail over Thee in vain." Had Byron Cowper's great line in his mind? The copy cannot stand comparison with the original.

If we will try the poet by his words, and know whether he has mastered the consummation of his art by "writing well," we may cull from several instances of suspicious language, in this stanza, the following—

"Nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage save his own."

What is the meaning—the translation? "There is not on the ocean to be found a shadow of ravage in which man is the agent. The only ravage known on the ocean, in which man is concerned, is that which he suffers from the ocean." This, if false, is nevertheless an intelligible proposition. But "ravage" is a strange word—a shocking bad one—applied, as you presently find that it must be, to one drowning man being "ravaged" by being drowned; and even more strange still is the grammatical opposition of "his ravage," as properly signifying, the ravage which he achieves, to "his own ravage" as properly signifying the ravage which he endures!

Moreover, what is meant by "remain"? Properly, to linger for a moment ere disappearing. But the proposition is, that ruin effected by man has no place at all on the waters. The poet means, that as long as you, the contemplator, tread the land, you walk among ruins made by man. When you pass on to the sea, no shadow of such ruin any longer accompanies you,—that is, any longer remains with you.

One great fault of style which the Hymn shows is Equivocation. The words are equivocal. Hence the contradiction—as in this stanza especially—between what is promised and what is done. Weigh for a moment these lines—

"Upon the watery plain,
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,"

&c., and tell us what they seem to describe. You will find yourself in a pretty puzzle. A ship? a fleet? myriads of ships lost? or one drowning man? Surely one drowning man. His own phrase,

"the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony,"

here pre-appears. But he had bound himself quite otherwise. By his pledge he should, in contrast with man's wreck active upon shore, have given man's wreck passive upon the flood,—the earth strewn with ruin by man's hand, the sea strewn with ruin of man himself,—magnis excidit ausis.

The words "remain" and "man" have played the part here of juggling fiends,—

"They palter with us in a double sense,
They keep the word of promise to the ear,
And break it to our hope."

For lend us your ear for a few minutes. The word "remain" is originally and essentially a word of time, and means to "continue" in some assigned condition through a certain duration of time; as, for example, he "remained in command for a year." In this clause of Byron's, it has become essentially a word that has regard to space without regard to time. To see that it is so, you must begin with possessing the picture that has been set before you, and which is here the basis and outset of the thinking. This picture is—"man marks the earth with ruin." Realise the picture at the height of the words without flinching. For example, from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific, man ravages. Here Napoleon—a little farther on Mahomet the Second—farther, the Crusaders—beyond these Khuli Khan or Timour Leng—lastly, the Mogul conquerors of the Celestial Empire,—a chain of desolation from Estremadura to Corea. Had land extended around the globe, it had been a belt of desolation encircling the globe. Corn fields, vineyards, trampled under foot of man and horse,—villages, towns, and great cities, reeking with conflagration, like the smoke ascending from some enormous altar of abomination to offend the nostrils of heaven—armed hosts lying trampled in their blood—the unarmed lying scattered every where in theirs; for man has trodden the earth in his rage, and before him was as the garden of Eden, behind him is the desolate wilderness. This is a translation of the hemistich,—"Man marks the earth with ruin,"—into prose. It is a faithful, a literal translation—Byron meant as much: and you, neophyte, in an instantaneous image receive as much—perhaps with more faith or persuasion, because leaden-pacing, tardy-gaited exposition goes against such faith; but some belief will remain if we, who have put ourselves in the place of the poet, have used colours that seize upon your imagination.

Well, then, if your imagination has done that which the summary word-picture of the poet required of you, you have swept the earth, or one of its continents, with instantaneous flight from shore to shore, and seen this horrible devastation—this widely-spread ravage. You have not staid your wing at the shore, but have swept on, driven by your horror, till you have hung, and first breathed at ease, over the Mid Pacific, over the wide OCEAN OF PEACE—over the unpolluted, everlasting ocean, murmuring under your feet—the unpolluted, everlasting heavens over your head. Here is no ravage of man's: no! nor the shadow of it—

—"Nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage."

But how "nor doth remain?" The ravage has gone along with you from sea-marge to sea-marge. At sea it is no longer with you. Traversing the land it remained your companion. It remained the continual and loathed object of your eyes. Now no shadow of it is to be seen—it haunts your flight no longer. No shadow of it any longer accompanies your aerial voyage—any longer stays, abides, remains with you. If the word has not this meaning, it has no meaning here in this clause. In this clause it cannot mean this—"upon the ocean, the ravage made by man appears like a flash of lightning, seen and gone,—upon the ocean this ravage, or some shadow of this ravage, has a momentary duration, but no more than momentary, no abiding, no remaining." This cannot be the meaning, since of man it has been expressly said 'his control stops with the shore'—that is, ends there, is not on the ocean at all. Manifestly the question at issue is, not whether destruction effected by man lasts upon the waters, but whether it is at all upon the waters; and Byron's decision is plainly that it is not at all. For he has already said "upon the watery plain the wrecks are all thy deed." That is to say, any sort of wreck effected by man upon the flood at all has been twice rejected in express words; and this word "remain" must imperatively be understood consonantly to this rejection.

Byron, then, we see, in denying that wrecks made by man "remain" upon the "watery plain," takes a word which properly sets before you an extending in time, and uses it for setting before you an extending in space. The ravage of which man is the agent does not extend over the "watery plain"—no, not a shadow of it.

But pray attend to this—no sooner does the sequent clause "save his own," take its place in the verse, than the word "remain" shifts its meaning back, from the signification accidentally forced upon it as has been explained, and reverts to its original and wonted power as a word of time! The force of the united clauses now stands thus—"upon the water there cannot be found a trace of the ruin executed by man. But of the ruin suffered by him there is an apparition, a vestige, a shadow, a vanishing display, namely—

"When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths, with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd and unknown."

He plunges, and all is over. The "bubbling groan" is the momentarily remaining notice of his extinction.

Now this first equivocation has an immediate moral consequence—namely, a reaction upon the feelings of the poet. "Remain," as an "extending in space," acts upon the imagination expansively here, if it were suffered to act—and if room were given it to act upon the imagination—inasmuch as "nor doth remain," as a word of extending in space, marks or helps to mark out the two great regions into which his lordship divides the terraqueous globe—ravaged land and unravaged water. But "remain," as an "extending in time," acts here contractively; and "nor remain" means now "does not outlive the moment!" and in this manner an entirely new direction or tenor is given to thought and feeling—for the zeal of diminishing seizes on the imagination of the writer. He is led to making man insignificant by the momentariness of his perishing! He has contracted, by power of scorn, and by the trick of a word, the seventy years of man into an instant. That is one diminution, and another follows upon it. The Fleets, wrecked whenever they fight against the water, vanish from his fancy, as in the shifting of a dream; and he sees, amidst the troubled world of waters—one man perishing! One mode of insignificancy admitted, induces another. With the shrinking of time to a moment goes along, the shrinking of multitude to one!

The same double-dealing takes place with the word "Man." Man signifies the individual human being—or the race. "Of man's first disobedience"—mankind's. "Man marks the earth with ruin"—mankind does so. "Nor doth remain a shadow of man's ravage"—of mankind's ravage. "When for a moment, like a drop of rain, he sinks into thy waves "—that is now the single sailor, whom a roll of the ship has hurled from the topmast into the waters; or, when the ship has gone down, some strong swimmer who has fought in vain upon the waters, and, spent in limb and heart, sinks. And thus the reader, after stumbling for two or three steps in darkness and perplexity, within a moment of having left mankind in the annihilating embrace of Ocean, upon a sudden finds himself set face to face with one man, we shall suppose "The last man," drowning!

In the Stanza now commented on, there was a struggle depicted, a question proposed between Man and the Ocean—which shall be the Wrecker? The Ocean prevails; Man is wrecked. In the succeeding Stanza there is, it would seem, another question moved between the same disputants. No, it is the same. Let us examine well. A moment before, Man appeared as treading the earth as a Destroyer, his proud step stayed at high water-mark. Now he appears upon the earth as a traveller and a reaper—by implication or allusion—by the figure of "not."

"His steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields
Are not a spoil for him."

He walks and reaps the earth; he does not walk and reap the ocean. This is plainly the process of the "worthy cogitation;" and unquestionably the assertion is true—true to the letter, but only to the letter. For, standing on Mount Albano, or on the Land's End, or here sitting beneath the porch of our Marine Villa fronting the Firth of Forth, we are poets every one of us, and we will venture beyond the letter;—

"His steps are not upon thy paths!"

—reply—chaunter of Man's Hope, and of England's Power,—

"Thy march is o'er the mountain wave,
Thy home is on the deep."

There is a dash of sea-craft for you; and, "cheered by the grateful sound, for many a league old ocean smiles."

And for the sickle! What! must the net and the harpoon go for nothing? No harvests on the barren flood! What else are pearl-fisheries, herring-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and whale-fisheries? "The sea! The deep, deep sea!" Why, the sea cannot keep its own; cannot defend the least or the mightiest of its nurselings from the hand of the gigantic plunderer Man.

——"thy fields,
Are not a spoil for him."

The fields of earth are not. For he ploughed and sowed ere he reaped, and earned back his own. But on thy fields, no ploughing, no sowing—all reaping! Sheer spoil. Poor, helpless, tributary, rifled, ravaged Ocean!

Then follows a very eminent instance of the fault which has been urged as radical in these Stanzas—forced, unnatural, wilful, or false sequence of thought; a deliberate intention in the mind of the writer, taking the place of the spontaneous free suggestion proper to poetry. We have had man trying to produce ruin on the ocean, and wrecked, swallowed up. Now, man tries to walk and reap the ocean. The poet has outraged mother earth, and her vengeance is upon him. He has wrongfully and wilfully brought in the Earth, for its old alliance with man to hear hard words; and he suffers the penalty. Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer, for you are out of breath. Mere mouthing is not command of words; the sound we hear now is but the echo of the last stanza, and the angry Childe is unwittingly repeating himself,—

——"Thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth—there let him lay!"

Here is again the contest, again the ruining upon earth,—nay, he destroys the earth itself—again the wrecking of the ship. Surely there is great awkwardness in stepping on from the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship, to the proof of man's impotence in the sinking of his ship. "Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies" may be a vigorous verse, though we doubt it; but if the ship outlive the storm, which many a ship has done many a thousand times, it can be turned against the ocean, who has done his worst in vain. What is man's "petty hope?" and what means "again to earth?" Is it again from the skies—or back to the earth from which he embarked? Not one expression is precise; and so, with some scorn of man's old ally, who now so roughly receives him,—"there let him lay!" There is something very horrible indeed in insulting a dead man in the Cockney dialect.

In all this there is no dignity, no grandeur; Byron does not well to be angry—it is seldom that any man or poet does—for, though anger is a "short madness," it is not a "fine frenzy." Such Te Deum true Poetry never yet sang, for true Poetry never yet was blasphemous—never yet derided Man's Dread or Man's Hope, when sinking in multitudes in the sea, which God holds in the hollow of his hand.

Go on to the next Stanza—

"The armaments which thunderstrike the walls," &c.

Why, here is another shipwreck—only now a fleet of war—before, one merchant-ship perhaps. The Earth, too, is again implicated, and we have the same scornful antithesis of Earth and Ocean. Earth with her towery diadem—Earth, the nurse of nations, trembles at the approach of armaments, which the ocean devours like melting snow. There has been, then, a certain progression in the three stanzas. A drowning man—a merchant-ship tossed and stranded—an armada scattered and lost. Three striking subjects of poetical delineation, each strikingly shown with some true touches, mixed with much false writing. One may understand that in consequence from out the whirlwind and chaos of the composition, resembling the tumult of the sea, there will remain to the reader who does not sift the writing an impression of power—of some great thing done—of Man and his Earth humbled, and the Ocean exalted. In the mean time, the way of the thoughts, the course of the mind, by which this ascent or climax is obtained, is extremely hard to trace, if traceable. The critic may extricate such an order from the disorder: but observe, that the ascent or climax can be attained only by neglecting certain strong indications that go another way. Thus, in the first stanza—

"Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed,"

includes all that is or can be said more of ship or fleet. Again, in the next stanza—

"Thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction thou dost all despise"—

Here is again said all that is possible to be said. "Thou dost arise and shake him from thee" being perhaps the strongest expression obtained at all; and the "vile strength" being precisely the Armadas described immediately afterwards with so much pomp and pride. Thus there is really confusion and oscillation of thought—mixed with a progress a standing still—and this characteristic of much of Byron's poetry comes prominently out—Uncertainty. Impulses and leaps of a powerful spirit are here; but self-knowing Power, a mind master of its purposes, disciplined genius, Art accomplished by studies profound and severe, lawful Emulation of the great names that shine in the authentic rolls of immortal Fame, the sanctioned inspiration which the pleased Muses deign to their devout followers, are not here.

The strength of Man, proved in contest with Ocean and found weakness, is disposed of. The Earth, as bound up with Man and his destinies, came in for a share of rough usage. Now she takes her own turn—in connexion with Man, but now principal. Here the pride of the words is great—the meaning sometimes almost or quite inextricable. Recite the Stanza, beginning

"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee,"

and when the sonorous roll has subsided, try to understand it. You will find some difficulty, if we mistake not, in knowing who or what is the apostrophised subject. Unquestionably the World's Ocean, and not the Mediterranean. The very last verse we were afar in the Atlantic. "Thy shores are empires." The shores of the World's Ocean are Empires. There are, or have been, the British Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Empire of the Great Mogul—the Chinese Empire, the Empire of Morocco, those of Peru and Mexico, the Four Great Empires of Antiquity, the French Empire, and some others. The Poet does not intend names and things in this very strict way, however, and he will take in all great Monarchies, nor will he grudge us the imagining the whole Earth laid out in imperial dominions.

Well then—we again, dear Neophyte, bid you try to understand the Stanza, and tell us what it means. What rational thought is there here? With what propriety do we consider the whole Earth as the shores of the Ocean—when shore is exactly the interlimitation of land and sea? Is this a lawful way of celebrating the Ocean, to throw in the whole of the lately despised Earth as its brilliant appendage? The question rises, how far from the shore does the shore extend—and whether inwards or outwards?

But there is a meaning and a good one in a way. Αριστον μεν ύδωρ. The water civilises the land. 'Tis an old remark—but how? By ships. Here, then, are the tables turned. Lately the sea did nothing with ships but destroy them. Now it patiently wafts them, and by commerce and colonies the Sea civilises the Globe! Surely this is poetical injustice. The first glory of the Sea was, that Man could not sail upon its bosom. The second glory of the Sea is, that, by offering its bosom to be furrowed by Man's daring and indefatigable keels, it—ministerially then—civilises the World. The Sea is the civiliser of the Land—Man is—the Destroyer merely.

Pray, what is the meaning of saying that the Roman and the Assyrian Empires are shores of the Sea: and changed, excepting that the same waters wash the same strands? The deep inland Empires recede too much from the sea-shore to allow any hold to the relation proposed in the words, "changed in all save thee." We know the Sea as their limit—an accident, rather than as a part of their being. The meeting of sea and land being the limit of an empire, the limit remains whilst the Imperial State has withered from the land. Does the immobility of the limit belong more to one element than to the other? And is the Roman Empire, O Neophyte, more unchanged in the Mediterranean and Atlantic than it is in the Apennines, and Alps, and Pyrenees, and Helvellyn?

Every clause that regards Earth is, in one way or in another, intolerable—small or tortured. "Thy waters wasted them while they were free," means either "swallowed up their ships, or—ate away their edges!" Alas! that most unhappy meaning is the true one—and what a cogitation to come into a man's—an inspired Poet's head! "Thy waters fretted away the maritime littoral edges of the Assyrian, the Grecian, the Roman, the Carthaginian Empires, whilst those Empires flourished!" And this interesting piece of geographical, and geological, and hydrographical meditation makes part in a burst of indignant spleen which is to go near to annihilating Man from the face of the Globe! Was it possible to express more significantly the imbecility of Old Ocean? And has he not been fretting ever since? And are not the limits the same, as we were told a minute ago? Old Ocean must be in his dotage if he can do no more than that—and we must elect him perpetual President of the Fogie Club.

Such wretched writing shows, with serious warning, how a false temper, admitted into poetry, overrules the sound intellect into gravely and weightily entertaining combinations of thought which, looked at either with common sense or with poetical feeling, cannot be sustained for a moment. How many of Lord Byron's admirers believe—and, in spite of Christopher, will continue to believe—that in these almost senseless stanzas he has said something strong, poignant, cutting, of good edge, and "full of force driven home!"

"Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."

We accept the image; let us grant that the Personification is a fine one. Nevertheless it does not entirely satisfy the imagination. And why? Because the thought of the azure brow, on which time writes no wrinkles, suggests for a moment the thought of the white brow—the brow of man or woman—the human brow, on which Time does write wrinkles along with the engraver, Sorrow. For a moment! but that is not the intended pathos—and it fades away. The intended pathos here belongs to the wrinkles Time writes on the brow of the Earth—while it spares that of the Sea. But Time deals not so with our gracious Mother Earth. Time keeps perpetually beautifying her brow, while it leaves the brow of Ocean the same as it was at Creation's Dawn. How far more beautiful has the Dædal Earth been growing, from century to century, over Continent and Isle, under the love of her grateful children! The Curse has become a Blessing. In the sweat of their brow they eat their bread; but Nature's self, made lovelier by their labour of heart and hand, rejoices in their creative happiness, and troubled life prepares rest from its toil in many a pleasant place fair as the bowers of Paradise.

We approach the next Stanza reverently, for it has a religious look—an aspect "that threatens the profane."

"Thou glorious Mirror, where the Almighty's Form
Glasses itself in tempests," &c.

Suitably recited! let it be suitably spoken of—fearlessly, in truth. The vituperating spirit has exhausted itself—is dead; and all at once the Poet becomes a worshipper. From cherished exasperation with the Creature—from varying moods of hate and scorn—he turns to contemplation of the Creator. Such transition is suspicious—can such worship be sincere? Fallen, sinful—yet is man God's noblest work. In His own image did He create him; and to glorify Him must we vilify the dust into which He breathed a living soul? Let the Poet lament, with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, over what Man has made of Man! And in the multitude of thoughts within him adore his Maker—in words. But he who despises his kind, and delights, in heaping contumely on the race of man throughout all his history on earth and sea—how may he, when wearied with chiding, all at once, as if it had been not hindrance but preparation, dare to speak, in the language of worship, of the Almighty Maker of Heaven and of Earth?

The Stanza, accordingly, is not good—it is laboured, heavy, formal, uninspired by divine afflatus. There is not in it one truly sublime expression. Nothing to our mind can be worse than "where the Almighty's Form glasses itself &c.—" The one word "Form" is destructive, in its gross materialism, alike of natural Poetry and natural Religion. If it be not, show us we are wrong, and henceforth we shall be mute for ever. "In all time, calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm," is poor and prosaic; and "or storm," a pitiable platitude after "in tempests." And the conversion of a Mirror into a Throne—of the Mirror too in which the Almighty's "Form glasses itself," into the Throne of the "Invisible"—is a fatal contradiction, proving the utter want of that possession of soul by one awful thought which was here demanded, and without which the whole stanza becomes but a mere collocation and hubbub of big-sounding words. "Even from out thy slime, the monsters of the deep are made," is violently jammed in between lines that have no sort of connexion with it, and introduces a thought which, whether consistent with true Philosophy or abhorrent from it, breaks in upon the whole course of contemplation, such as it is,—to say nothing of the extreme poverty of language shown in the use of such words as "monsters of the deep" made out of the slime of the sea.

The strain—such as it is—ceases suddenly with this Stanza; and the Poet having thus got done with it, exclaiming "and I have loved thee, Ocean," proceeds forthwith to a different matter altogether—to the pleasure he was wont to enjoy, when a boy, in swimming among the breakers. The verses are in themselves very spirited; but we must think—and hope so do you—very much out of place, and a sad descent from the altitude attempted, and believed by the Poet himself to have been attained, in the preceding Stanza about the Almighty.

Why, listening Neophyte, recite both Stanzas, and then tell us whether or no you think they maybe improved by being put into—our Prose. We do not seek thereby to injure what Poetry may be in them, but to bring it out and improve it.

"Thou glorious Mirror, in which, when black with tempests, Fancy might conceive Omnipotence imaged in visible reflection!—Thou Sea, that in all thy seasons, whether smooth or agitated, whether soft or wild wind blow, in all thy regions, icy at the Pole, dark-heaving at the Equator, ever and every where callest forth our acknowledgment that Thou art illimitable, interminable, sublime; that Thou art the symbol of Eternity—(like a circle by returning into itself;) that Thou art the visible Throne of the Invisible Deity—Thou whose very dregs turn into enormous life—Thou who, possessing the larger part of every zone, art thus a King in every zone; Thou takest thy course around the Earth,—great by thine awfulness, by thine undiscoverable depth, by thy solitude!

"And I, thy Poet, was of old thy Lover! In young years my favourite disport was to lie afloat on thy bosom, carried along by Thee, passive, resigned to Thy power, one of Thy bubbles. A boy, Thy waves were my playmates, or my playthings. If, as the wind freshened, and they swelled, I grew afraid, there was a pleasure even in the palpitation of the fears, for I lived with Thee and loved Thee, even like a child of Thine, and believed that Thy billows would not hurt me, and laid my hand boldly and wantonly on their crests—as at this instant I do, here sitting upon the Alban Mount—and making (as they say) a long arm."

Ha! The Dinner-Gong!

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.

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