Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

by Various

A FEW WORDS FOR BETTINA.

There seems a very general belief among sensible people that we have had enough of the Germans. What with barons, and princes, and geheimraths, and consistorialraths, and poets, and philosophers, burying their profundity in tobacco smoke, and other "reek" more impervious still, we certainly have had enough in book and essay, for the last few years, of the German Man. And, latterly, the German women have come in for their share. If the men have been puffed and praised till their very names are ridiculous and offensive, it is not so with the gracious and high-born ladies. All the old dowagers that flourish a goose-quill make a simultaneous assault on the unfortunate "frau," or "fraulein;" pedantic old bachelors are horrified at the wildness of some of the female Godwin's observations, and fall to, in the general mélée, tugging and tearing at the miserable damsel till not a shred is left to cover her; and starched old maids, who have been wondering for twenty years if Woman can etherealize society, rejoice to see the punishment of such a presuming minx, and encourage the performers with all their might. The attack may be very spirited, and the culprit properly trounced in most cases—so we are contented to leave the fantastic and philosophic heroines—so bepraised by their countrymen—to the tender mercies of our Amazons at home; but we couch the lance, in Maga's lists, on behalf of one whose name is known very widely, but whose character is little understood, and constitute ourselves champion à l'outrance of Bettina Brentano. Yes, we are in love—over head and ears—with Bettina Brentano. But we must guard ourselves a little in making this confession. It is towards the nice, clever, black-eyed, light-figured little houri of that name, in the pleasant years 1807-8-9, and 10, that we own the soft impeachment, or rather make proud profession of our feelings. With regard to the present bearer of the denomination, who has gone, in despite of our affection, and married a man of the name of Arnini, we confess we are utterly indifferent to her; and shall maintain till our dying day, that the authoress of the Letters to Goethe died in the early part of the year 1811, universally lamented, and giving promise of a mind, when matured and steadied, such as no petticoated genius—not De Staël herself—has equalled. Such letters, so full of wild fancies, poetical descriptions, and burning declarations, were never written by man to woman, or woman to man, before or since. They could not be written by woman to man—they were written by a child to Goethe. And this is the key to the wonders of the correspondence. Don't let people talk nonsense about the improprieties of her behaviour—and shake their foolish heads, and lift their puritanic eyes up to heaven: her conduct, we grant them, would have been very improper in them; but in Bettina Brentano it was beautiful, graceful, and as free from impropriety as the morning and evening walks of Paul and Virginia. Perhaps we may condescend on some of the particulars dwelt on in the accusation—but perhaps we may not—for the people who see errors and grossnesses in the language or behaviour of Bettina, blush "celestial rosy red" at the Apollo and the Venus. Let them get trousers and petticoats for the god and goddess, and leave poor Bettina alone.

There lived in Frankfort, in the summer of 1807, a little girl of fourteen or fifteen years of age, very small in stature, and so light and dancing in her movements that she might have passed for an attendant of Queen Titania; but in her deep black eyes there was a sort of light that the fairies have not yet arrived at—and her voice was musical—and her lips were rosy; and every where she was known as the cleverest little girl that ever was seen, either in fairyland or Frankfort, or any where else. She was of a sweet, affectionate, trusting nature, and entered with a romantic tenderness into an alliance with a wild, half-insane enthusiast, several years older than herself—the sister Günderode, a canoness of a convent on the Rhine. The lay-sister talked and reasoned herself into the persuasion that she would be happier out of the world than in it; so, instead of marrying the surgeon or other respectable inhabitant of the free city, and having a large family to provide for, which would have put more sensible thoughts into her head, she stabbed herself one fine day on the bank of the river—and Bettina had no longer a friend.

But there dwelt in the same town a majestic woman—strong-minded, tender-hearted—and with talent enough to compensate for the stupidity of all the other old women (male and female) in Frankfort; and her name was Madame Goethe, and she was seventy-five years old, and lived in an old house by herself. Bettina went to her, with her head sunk in grief, and her heart yearning for somebody to make a friend of, and sat down on a stool at the old lady's feet, and said, "I have lost my Günderode, will you be my friend in her stead?" And the old lady was delighted, and kissed her; and Bettina sat at her feet, day after day, from that time forth; and they were the two tenderest friends in Germany. And a pleasant thing it would be to have been a mouse in the wall to hear such conversation as was carried on by the two.

Now, in the year 1749, there was born a boy in Frankfort,—a poet, great in soul—the maker of his country's literature—no other than the illustrious Goethe—a son worthy of such a mother as Bettina's friend; and while all Germany and France—the whole civilized world in short—were almost worshipping his matured, perhaps his decaying genius, the noble mother was loud and eloquent in her description of him as a boy—as a youth—as a poet of twenty years old; and the little girl of fifteen sat and listened, till there arose in her heart—or rather in her brain, for it was a stirring of the intellect more than the affections—a feeling of intense admiration, softened under the mother's teaching into something that she herself fancied was love; for which audacious fancy the sagacious old woman gave her some raps over the knuckles—(we are not sure that they were altogether figurative either, but good substantial raps)—enough to make the fingers tingle in a very disagreeable manner indeed. But in spite of raps, whether figurative or not, she went on feeding her fancy with all these glowing accounts; and for a while we have no doubt that she never gave the almanac a thought—nor the baptismal register—nor the fact, known to all arithmeticians, that a person born in 1749 was fifty-eight years old in 1807. Fifty-eight years old, with long white hair. But Bettina had never seen him. She only knew him in his works as a poet, and as a man—or rather as a boy—in the beautiful recollections of his mother. "You don't ask after Wolfgang," says that sensible old matron in one of her letters; "I've always said to you—wait a while till some one else comes, you'll not trouble your head about him any more." But in the mean time she did trouble her head about him to an intolerable extent; and great was her rejoicing when her brother-in-law offered to take her as companion to his wife, in a journey he was forced to make to Berlin, and afterwards to Weimar. The country was at that time the seat of war; camps and positions of many different armies had to be passed through; and as a protection to the ladies they were dressed in men's clothes. Bettina sat on the box the whole time—passed as a little tiger at the inns where they slept—making herself generally useful, harnessing and unharnessing the horses—sleeping all night outside, though the weather was piercingly cold; and finally, after a week of hard travelling, arrived at the city of the sages—the literary capital of Germany. Her first care here was to change her dress, and find out her relation Wieland—from him she got a note to Goethe, and, armed with that, presented herself at his house. This is her account of the meeting in her letter to his mother:—

"The door opened, and there he stood, solemn and still, and looked steadily at me. I stretched my hands to him, I believe—but soon I was unconscious of every thing. Goethe catched me to his breast.—'Poor child, have I frightened you?' These were the first words that made their way to my heart. He led me into his room, and placed me on a sofa opposite him. We were both silent—at last he said, 'You have read in the newspapers that we have lately met with a severe loss, in the death of the Duchess Amelie.' 'Ah! I said, 'I never read the newspapers.' 'Indeed! I thought you took an interest in all that goes on at Weimar.' 'No, no, I take no interest in any thing at Weimar but you; and I have not patience enough to toil through a newspaper.' 'You are an affectionate little girl.' A long pause—I, banished all the while to the horrid sofa, and very fidgety of course. You know how impossible it is for me to sit there and do the pretty behaved. Ah, mother, can a person change his nature all at once? I said plump—'Here, on this sofa, I can't stay,' and sprang up. 'Make yourself comfortable, by all means,' said he. So I flew to him, and put my arms round his neck. He took me on his knee, and pressed me to his heart. All was still. I had not slept for such a time. I had sighed to see him for years. I fell asleep with my head on his breast; and, when I awoke, it was to a new existence;—and that is all at this present writing."

Bettina, we repeat, was fifteen—Goethe was fifty-eight; and this narrative was sent to his mother. We will only add, that Voltaire affected an interesting blush when he thought on the improprieties of the Book of Ruth. So, hold up your head, our bright-eyed, beautiful Bettina, and cheer the heart of the old man eloquent with your affection; and tell him over and over, in your own wild and captivating manner, that you love him, and worship him, and think of him always, and sing his ballads, and read his books—and nobody in their senses will think a bit the worse of you for it—not even your worthy husband, who was five or six and twenty years old when you married him; and, very likely, was nearly as enthusiastic about Wolfgang as yourself. And as to kissing and jumping on people's knees, and hugging close to the heart, these seem equivalent, among the Germans of all ranks and ages, to a good hearty shake of the hand among our more sedately behaved population; and though we think that, under ordinary circumstances, our national customs in those respects are preferable, we are not prepared to say that we should be sorry for the introduction of a little Germanism in our own case, if we were a great poet at the age of fifty-eight, and were acquainted with a lively, happy, charming little genius like Bettina, of fifteen. And that she was all that we have called her—and more—we will now proceed to show, by giving a few translations from her letters; and, if we can find an opportunity of introducing a story or two by the mother, we will not let it pass.—And here let us make a remark, savouring, perhaps, of national vanity—of which failing we have heard our countrymen not unfrequently accused. Our remark is this, that the Frau Rath, as Goethe's mother is called, has many characteristics about her which we have been in the habit of considering Scotch. If we reduced her reported conversations to our native Doric, they would read exactly like the best parts of Scott and Galt—a great deal of shrewdness, mixed with a wild sort of humour, sarcastic and descriptive; but in her, perhaps, elevated by an occasional burst of poetry into something higher than is met with in the Ayrshire Legatees, or even in Cyril Thornton. In saying this, we allude, of course, to none of the tedious "havers" contained in the book dedicated to the King of Prussia, or at least to the anti-biblical parts of them—the old Frau Rath being about the worst commentator it has ever been our fortune to meet.

But let us go back to Bettina. "Morris Bethman tells me," says the Frau Rath, in a letter to her pet, "that the De Staël is going to call on me. She has been in Weimar. I wish you were here, for I must get up my French as well as I can." And the jealousy of the fiery Bettina bursts out at the very thought of any one being at Weimar and visiting Goethe but herself.

"I have not heard from your son since the 13th of August, and here is the end of September. De Staël has made his time pass quickly, and driven me out of his head. A celebrated woman is a curiosity. Nobody else can compete with her. She is like brandy, which the poor grain it is made from can never be compared to. For brandy smacks on the tongue and gets into the heard, and so does a celebrated woman. But the simple wheat is better far to me;—the sower sows it in the loosened soil, and the bounteous sun and fruitful showers draw it from the earth again, and it makes green the whole field, and bears golden ears, and at last gives rise to a happy harvest-home. I would rather be a simple wheat-grain than a celebrated woman; and rather, far rather, that he should break me for his daily bread than that I should get into his head like a dram. And now I will tell you that I supped last night with De Staël in Maintz. No woman would sit next her at table, so I sat down beside her myself. It was uncomfortable enough; for the gentlemen stood round the table, and crowded behind our chairs, to speak to her and see her close. They bent over me. I said—'Vos adorateurs me suffoquent.' She laughed. She told me that Goethe had spoken to her of me. I would fain have sat and listened, for I should like to hear what it was he said. And yet I was wrong; for I would rather he did not speak of me to any one—and I don't believe he did—she perhaps only said so. At last so many came to speak to her, and pressed upon me so much, that I couldn't bear it any longer. I said to her—'Vos lauriers me pèsent trop sur les épaules;' and I stood up, and pushed my way through the crowd. Sismondi, her companion, came to me and kissed my hand, and told me I was very clever, and said it to the rest, and they repeated it twenty times over, as if I had been a prince whose sayings are always thought so wise though ever so commonplace.

"After that I listened to what she said about Goethe. She said she expected to find him a second Werther, but she was disappointed—neither his manners nor appearance were like it, and she was very sorry that he fell short of him so entirely. Frau Rath, I was in a rage at this, (that was of no use you will say,) and I turned to Schlegel, and said to him in German, 'Madame de Staël has made a double mistake—first in her expectation, and then in her judgment. We Germans expect that Goethe can shake twenty heroes from his sleeve to astonish the French—but in our judgment he himself is a hero of a very different sort.' Schlegel is very wrong not to have informed her better on this. She threw a laurel leaf that she had been playing with on the ground. I stamped on it, and pushed it out of the way with my foot, and went off. That was my interview with the celebrated woman."

But the De Staël is made the heroine of another letter, in which Bettina give Goethe an account of her presentation to his mother. The ceremony took place in the apartments of Morris Bethman.

"Your mother—whether out of irony or pride—had decked herself wonderfully out—but with German fancy, not in French taste; and I must tell you that, when I saw her with three feathers on her head, swaying from side to side—red, white, and blue—the French national colours—which rose from a field of sun-flowers—my heart beat high with pleasure and expectation. She was rouged with the greatest skill; her great black eyes fired a thundering volley; about her neck hung the well-known ornament of the Queen of Prussia; lace of a fine ancestral look and great beauty—a real family treasure—covered her bosom. And there she stood, with white glacée gloves;—in one hand an ornamented fan, with which she set the air in motion; with the other, which was bare, and all be-ringed with sparkling jewels, she every now and then took a pinch from the snuff-box with your miniature on the lid—the one with long locks, powdered, and with the head leant down as if in thought. A number of dignified old dowagers formed a semicircle in the bedroom of Morris Bethman; and the assemblage, on a deep-red carpet—a white field in the middle, on which was worked a leopard—looked very grand and imposing. Along the walls were ranged tall Indian plants, and the room was dimly lighted with glass-lamps. Opposite the semicircle stood the bed, on an estrade raised two steps, also covered with a deep-red carpet, with candelabra at each side.

"At last came the long-expected visitor through a suite of illuminated rooms, accompanied Benjamin Constant. She was dressed like Corinne;—a turban of aurora and orange-coloured silk—a gown of the same, with an orange tunic, very high in the waist, so that her heart had very little room. Her black eyebrows and eyelashes shone, and so did her lips also, with a mystic red. The gloves were turned down, and only covered the hand, in which she carried, as usual, the myrtle twig. As the room where she was waited for was much lower than the others, she had four steps to descend. Unluckily she lifted up her gown from the front instead of from behind, which gave a severe blow to the solemnity of her reception; for it appeared for a moment worse even than merely funny, when this extraordinary figure, dressed in strictly Oriental fashion, broke loose upon the staid and virtuous élite of Frankfort society. Your mother gave me a courageous look when they were introduced. I had taken my stand at a distance to watch the scene. I observed De Staël's surprise at the wonderful adornment of your mother, and at her manner, which was full of dignity. She spread out her gown with her left hand, giving the salute with her right which sported the fan; and, while she bowed her head repeatedly with great condescension, she said in a loud voice, that sounded distinctly through the room—'Je suis la mère de Goethe.'—'Ah, je suis charmée!' said the authoress; and then there was a solemn silence. Then followed the presentation of her distinguished companions, who were all anxious also to be introduced to Goethe's mother. She answered all their polite speeches with a new-year's wish in French, which she muttered between her teeth, with a multitude of stately curtsies. In short the audience was now begun, and must have given them a fine idea of our German grandezza. Your mother beckoned me to her side to interpret between them; the conversation was all about you—about your childhood. The portrait on the snuff-box was examined. It was painted in Leipsic before the great illness you had; but even then you were very thin. It was easy to see all your present greatness in those childish features, and particularly the author of Werther. De Staël spoke of your letter, and said she would like to see how you write to your mother, and your mother promised to show her; but, thought I, she shall never get any of your letters from me, for I don't like her. Every time your name was mentioned by those ill-shaped lips, a secret rage came upon me. She told me you called her 'Amie' in your letters. Ah! she must have seen how surprised I was to hear it; yes—and she told me more—but my patience failed. How can you be friendly to such an ugly face? Ah! there may be seen how vain you are!—or is it possible she can have been telling a story?"

With this charitable resolution of her doubts, Bettina leaves off her description of the meeting between De Staël and "la mère de Goethe." We think the affected jealousy of the little creature very amusing; and, moreover, we consider that all her words and actions in relation to Goethe, were in keeping with an imaginary character she had determined to assume. I shall be in love with him, and he shall be in love with me; and as he is a poet, I will be very poetical in my passion; as he writes tragedies, I will be dramatic; as he is "a student of the human mind," I will puzzle him with the wisdom of sixty, united to the playfulness of ten or twelve,—the flames of Sappho to the childishness of my real age and disposition. And so indeed she did. The old philosopher of Weimar did not know what to make of her. He keeps writing to her that he cannot decide whether she is most "wunderbar" or "wunderlich"—wonderful or odd. And round about his puzzled head she buzzes; now a fire-fly, nearly singeing his elevated eyebrows—now a hornet, inserting a sharp little sting in his nose—now a butterfly, lighting with beautiful wings on the nosegay in his breast; but at all times bright, brilliant, and enchanting. So, no wonder the astonished and gratified egotist called out for more; "more"—"more letters, dear Bettina," "write to me as often as you can." And to show her that her letters were useful to him, he not unfrequently sent her back long passages of her own epistles, turned into rhyme—and very good rhymes they are, and make a very respectable appearance among his collected poems. And a true philosopher old Goethe was (of the Sir Joseph Banks' school of philosophy as illustrated by Peter Pindar.) Instead of admiring the lovely wings and airy evolutions of the butterfly that rested so happily on his bouquet—he determined to examine it more minutely, and put it into his dried collection. So he laid coarse hands upon it—transfixed it with a brass pin, and listened to its humming as long as it had strength to hum; and finally transferred it to a book as an extraordinary specimen of a new species—for which astonishing discovery, he was bespattered with undeserved praises by the whole press of Germany. At this time, he was writing his Wahlverwandtshafter, or Electric Affinities; and as it introduced a young girl filled with the same wild passion for another woman's husband that Bettina affected to feel for him, letter by letter was sedulously studied, to give a new touch, either of tenderness or originality, to his contemptible Miss Ottilie. But we have already in this Magazine expressed our opinion of that performance, and of the great Goethe in general; so that we shall not return to the subject on the present occasion. Pleasanter it is to follow the fairy-footed Bettina in her scramblings over rock and fell, her wadings through rivers, and sleepings on the dizzy verge of old castle walls that look down a hundred fathoms of sheer descent into the Rhine. And pleasanter still, to hear her give utterance to sentiments—unknown to the pusillanimous, unpatriotic heart of the author of Werther—of sympathy with the noble Tyrolese in their struggles for freedom, and her generous regard for them when they were subdued.

Nothing, perhaps, is more astonishing in these letters—considering the date of them, 1809-10—than the utter silence maintained on the state of public affairs. The French are mentioned once or twice—but generally in praise—Napoleon as often; but not a word to show that there was any stirring in the German mind on the subject of their country or independence. There they went on, smoking and drinking beer, writing treatises on the Greek article, or poems on Oriental subjects, in the same prosy, dull, dreamy fashion as ever, with the cannon of Jena sounding in their ears, and the blood of Hofer fresh upon the ground. Well done, then, beautiful, merry, deep-souled, tender-hearted Bettina! From her windows at Munich, she saw the smoke of the burning villages in the Tyrol; and her constant wish is for men's clothes and a sword, to go and join the patriots, and have a dash at the stupid, dunderheaded Bavarians. But our clever little friend is not alone in her good feelings. Count Stadion, a dignitary of the church, and Austrian ambassador, is her sworn ally; and few things are more beautiful than the descriptions of the reverend diplomatist and the fiery-eyed little Bettina being united by their sympathy in what was then a fallen and hopeless cause. But there was still another sympathiser, and the discovery of his feelings we will let Bettina herself describe:—

Next day was Good-Friday. Stadion took me with him to read me mass. I told him, with many blushes, the great longing I had to join the Tyrolese. Stadion told me to depend on him; he would take a knapsack on his back and go into the Tyrol, and do all I wanted to do instead of me. This was the last mass that he could read to me, for his departure in a few days was settled. Ah me! it fell heavy on my heart that I was to lose so dear a friend. After mass, I went into the choir, threw on a surplice, and joined in Winter's Lament. In the mean time, the Crown-prince and his brother came in—the crucifix lay on the ground—both the brothers kissed it, and afterwards embraced. They had had a quarrel till that day about a court tutor, whom the Crown-prince had thought ill of, and dismissed from his brother's service. They were reconciled in the way I have said, in the old church, and it was a delightful thing to see it. Bopp, an old music-master of the Crown-prince, who also gave me some lessons, accompanied me home. He showed me a sonnet composed by the Crown-prince that morning. It speaks well for his 'inner soul,' that he feels this inclination to poetry in interesting circumstances. Nature assuredly asserts her rights in him, and he will surely not let the Tyrolese be hardly dealt with. Yes, I have great trust in him. Old Bopp told me many things that raised my opinion of him to the highest pitch. On the third holiday, he carried me to the English garden to hear the Crown-prince's address to the assembled troops, with whom he was going, to serve his first campaign. I could hear nothing distinctly, but what I did hear, I did not at all like; he spoke of their bravery, their perseverance, and loyalty, and that he, with their assistance, would bring back the Tyrolese to obedience, and that he considered his own honour conjoined to theirs, &c. &c. As I went home, this worried me very much. I saw that the Crown-prince, in the hands of his generals, would do all that his heart rebelled against. I thought, as I returned from the show, that no man in the world ever speaks truth to one in power, but rather that there are always flatterers to approve of all he does; and the worse his conduct, the greater their fear that he may doubt of their approbation. They have never the good of mankind in their eye, but only the favour of their master. So I determined to take a bold step, to satisfy my own feelings—and I hope you will excuse me if you think I did wrong.

"After expressing to the Crown-prince my love, and respect for his genius, I confessed to him my sentiments towards the Tyrolese, who were gaining such a heroic crown—my confidence that he would show mildness and forbearance, where his people were now giving way only to cruelty and revenge—I asked him if the title 'Duke of the Tyrol' had not a nobler sound than the names of the four kings who had united their power to exterminate those heroes? And, however it turned out, I hoped he would acquire from his conduct even the title of 'The Humane.'

"This was the contents of a letter that filled four pages. After writing it in the most furious excitement, I sealed it very calmly, and gave it into the music-master's hands, telling him—'This is something about the Tyrolese that may be very useful to the Crown-prince.'

"How glad a man is to make himself of importance! Old Bopp nearly tumbled down-stairs it his hurry to give such an interesting letter to the Prince; and I, with my usual light-headedness, forgot all about it. I went to Winter to sing hymns—to Tieck—to Jacobi—nowhere could I find any body to agree with me; every where there seemed nothing but fear; and if they had known what I had done, they would have forbidden me their houses. I looked bitterly on them all, and thought—Be you Bavarian and French—I and the Crown-prince are German and Tyrolese. Or he gets me put in prison—and then I am at once free and independent; and if I ever get out again, I will go over to the Tyrolese, and meet the Crown-prince on the field, and force from him what he now refuses to my entreaty.

"The old music-master came back, pale and trembling.

"'What was there in the paper you gave me for the Crown-prince?' he said. 'It may ruin me for life. The Crown-prince looked excited as he read it—ay, angry; and when he saw me there, he ordered me off without one gracious word.'

"I could not help laughing. The music-master grew more and more anxious, and I more and more delighted. I rejoiced already in my imprisonment; and I thought how I could carry on my philosophic speculations in my solitude. Once only I saw the Crown-prince at the theatre. He gave me a friendly nod. Very good. For eight days I had not seen Stadion; but, on the 10th of April, I got certain information that he had gone off by night. I was very sorry to think I had seen him for the last time; and it struck me, with strange significance, that he read his last mass on Good-Friday. At last my long repressed and dissembled feelings burst forth in tears. It is in solitude one knows his own wishes and his helplessness. I found no place of repose for my struggling heart; and, tired with weeping, I at length fell asleep. Have you ever fallen asleep worn out with weeping? But men do not weep. You have never wept so that the sobs shook your breast even in your sleep? Sobbing in my dreams, I heard my name. It was dark. By the faint glimmer of the street lamps, I perceive a man near me, in a foreign military uniform, sabre, sabretash—dark hair. I should have thought it was Black Fred, (Stadion's name among his intimates.)

"No—it is no mistake; it is indeed Black Fred, come to take his leave.

"'My carriage is at the door—I am going—as a soldier—to the Austrian army; and with regard to your Tyrolese friends, you shall have nothing to reproach me with, or you never see me more; for I give you my word of honour I will not consent to their being betrayed. I have this moment been with the Crown-prince. He drank with me the health of the Tyrolese, and a 'pereat' to Napoleon. He took me by the hand, and said—'Remember that, in the year nine, in April, during the Tyrolese rebellion, the Crown-prince of Bavaria opposes Napoleon.' And so saying, he clanged his glass on mine so, that he broke the foot of it off.'

"I said to Stadion—'Now then I am all alone, and have no friend left.'

"He smiled, and said—'You write to Goethe. Write him from me that the Catholic priest will gather laurels on the Tyrolese battle-field.'

"I said—'I shall not soon hear a mass again.'

"'And I shall not soon read one,' he answered.

"He then took up his weapons, and reached me his hand to say good-by. I am sure I shall never see him again.

"Scarcely was he gone, when a knock came to the door, and old Bopp came in. It was still dark in the room, but I knew by his voice he was in good-humour. He held out a broken glass to me; with great solemnity, and said—'The Crown-prince sends you this, and bids me tell you that he drank the health of those you take under your protection out of it; and here he sends you his cockade, as a pledge of honour that he will keep his word to you, and prevent all cruelty and injustice.'"

The fate of Hofer comes unfortunately to our memory to mar the pleasantness of this little dramatic incident; but the whole story gives a favourable impression of the Crown-prince, who is now the poetical Louis of Bavaria—the dullest and stupidest of whose works (we may observe in a parenthesis) makes a poor figure in its Greek dress, and had better be retranslated as quickly as possible into its original Teutsch.

It is curious to see the sort of society that Bettina moves in—crown-princes, and prince-bishops, and ambassadors-extraordinary—and all treating her with the greatest regard. There must have been something very taking in the bright black eyes and rosy lips of the correspondent of Goethe, and friend, apparently, of all the German magnificoes; for she uses them with very little ceremony, and holds her head as high among them as if she knew there was more in it than was contained under all their crowns and mitres. But it was not with the magnates of the land alone that she was on such terms. The literary potentates were equally pleased with her attention. If a rising artist wants encouragement, he applies to Bettina. Sculptors, painters, musicians, all lay their claims before her; and we find her constantly using her influence on their behalf with the literary dictator of Weimar. If a scholar or philosopher is sick, she sits at his bedside; and in the midst of all the playfulness, wildness, eccentricity, (and perhaps affectation,) we meet with in the letters, we see enough of right spirit and good heart to counterbalance them all; and such a malicious little minx! and such a despiser of prudery, and contemner of humbug in all its branches! It is delightful to reflect on the torment she must have been to all the silly stiff-backed old maids within reach of tongue and eye. And therefore—and for many reasons besides—we maintain that Bettina, from fifteen to seventeen, is an exquisite creature, fiery and impassioned as Juliet, and witty as Beatrix. We will also maintain till our dying day, that neither her Romeo nor Benedict was near sixty years old.

The information given by the Frau Rath about her son has already been incorporated in the thousand and one memoirs and recollections supplied by the love and admiration of his friends;—we will therefore not follow Bettina in her record of his boyish days, as gathered from his mother and reported to himself, further than to remark, that vanity seems from the very first to have been his prevailing characteristic—even to so low a pitch as the "sumptuousness of apparel." Think of a little snob in the Lawnmarket—son of a baillie—dressing himself two or three times a-day—once plainly—once half-and-half—and finally in hat and feather—silks and satins—a caricature of a courtier of Louis XIV.; and all this at the age of eight or nine!

We have said that our love for Bettina only extends to the three years of her life from 1807 to 1810. At that period it dies a natural death. She assumed at fourteen the feelings of a love-inspired, heart-devoted "character"—as fictitious, we are persuaded, as any created by dramatist or poet; and it was pleasant to see with what art and eloquence she acted up to it. It seemed a wonderful effort of histrionic skill, and superior, in an infinite degree, to the mere representation on the stage of an Ophelia or Miranda. But when years passed on, and she still continued the same "character," she strikes us with the same feelings that would be excited by some actress who should grow so enamoured of her favourite part, as to go on Opheliaizing or Desdemonaing off the stage—singing snatches of unchristian ballads, with the hair dishevelled, during prayers in church; or perpetually smothering herself with pillows on the drawing-room sofa. It is as if General Tom Thumb were to grow to a decent size, and still go on imitating Napoleon, and insisting on people paying a shilling to see his smallness. Bettina should have stopped before she grew womanly; for though we have not the least suspicion of her having had any meaning in what she did—further than to show her cleverness—still, the attitudes that are graceful and becoming in a children's dance, take a very different expression in an Indian nautch. And therefore we return to our belief at the commencement of this paper, that the "child" of Goethe's correspondence died, and was buried in a garden of roses, in the year 1810—De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

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NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.
No. VIII.

Supplement to MacFlecnoe and the Dunciad.

Well, then, we have once more—to wit a month ago—wheeled round and encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set out—John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar character, that of Avengers—to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mud-engendered monster, burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.

Dryden and Pope! Father and son—master and scholar—founder and improver. Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers?—the free composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or some special gift of the universal Mother—or the perfected art of Pope? Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.

Dryden is all power—and he knows it. He soars at ease—he sails at ease—he swoops at ease—and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable—

"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"

and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (in blanks, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet—alone of those who have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look after the rhyme—these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the clumsy clowns to glorious John:—sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile, stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth—or sitting his horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt. His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance—

"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes——
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."

But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism, however excellent, in a Supplement—and therefore gladden you all with a specimen—without note or comment—from the second part of Absalom and Achitophel.

"Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad:
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satyr,
For still there goes some thinking to ill nature:
He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made,
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.
For almonds he'll cry whore to his own mother:
And call young Absalom king David's brother.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hang'd who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key:
Let him rail on, let his invective Muse
Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence,
In fire-works give him leave to vent his spight,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show,
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year.
"Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
For here's a tun of midnight-work to come,
Og from a treason-tavern rowling home,
Round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue:
A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
As all the devils had spew'd to make the batter,
When wine has given him courage to blaspheme,
He curses God, but God before curst him;
And, if man could have reason, none has more,
That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor.
With wealth he was not trusted, for heaven knew
What 'twas of old to pamper up a Jew;
To what would he on quail and pheasant swell,
That ev'n on tripe and carrion could rebel?
But though heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making;
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing—Be thou dull:
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do any thing but write:
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,
A strong nativity—but for the pen!
Eat opium, mimic arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason botcht in rhyme will be thy bane:
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck:
Why should thy metre good King David blast?
A psalm of his will surely be thy last.
Dar'st thou presume in verse to meet thy foes,
Thou whom the penny pamphlet foil'd in prose?
Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made,
O'er-tops thy talent in thy very trade;
Doeg to thee, thy paintings are so coarse,
A poet is, though he's the poet's horse.
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason, and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hang'd for nonsense is the devil:
Had thou the glories of thy king exprest,
Thy praises had been satyr at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defy'd the Lord's anointed:
I will not rake the dunghill for thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,
May all be like the young man Absalom!
And for my foes, may this their blessing be,
To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"

This is the ne plus ultra of personal satire. Yet there are passages of comparable excellence in the Dunciad. Aha! what have we here? A contemptuous attack on Pope by—a Yankee-Cockney! What a cross! John Russell Lowell from Massachusets thus magpie-like chattereth at the Nightingale.

"Philip.—You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a French pinchbeck age.

"John.—Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affection. If I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have caught you more than once with the Tatler in your hand, and have heard you praising Dryden's prefaces.

"Philip.—You and I have very different notions of what poetry is, and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable cæsura to his verse; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savour of Jack Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp field. Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice—these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out. To the poet nothing is mean, but every thing on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty.

"But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, as the best writer of English whom that period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very much as his own 'mockery king of snow' must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those important-looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in Chaucer and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike.

"John.—Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an entirely different subject. What else can you bring forward?

"Philip.—Only the fact, that, by going back to the more natural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop, or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the walls of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the couplet."

Master Lowell gives tongue with a plagiarism from Southey. In his Life of Cowper that great writer somewhat rashly says, "The age of Pope was the golden age of poets—but it was the pinchbeck age of poetry." What is pardonable in Southey is knoutable in his ape. Think of one American Cantab playfully rating and complimenting another on having caught him more than once with the Tatler in his hand, and with having heard him praising Dryden's prefaces! What liberality—nay, what universality of taste! Absolutely able, in the reaches of his transatlantic soul, to relish Dryden's prefaces! But in his appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, Philip cannot, crop-sick, but nauseate the thought of Pope being a poet.

The whole dialogue—somewhat of the longest—tedious exceedingly—is polluted with similar impudencies. "The strong point in Pope's displays of sentiment, is in the graceful management of a cambric handkerchief. You do not believe a word that Heloïse says, and feel all the while that she is squeezing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge." Such is the effect of too copious draughts from that Hippocrene which alternately discharges cock-tail and mint-julep. John, however, does not go the whole hog with Philip. He erects his ears to their full length, and brays thus—"I do not think that you do Pope justice!" and then does Pope justice as follows: "His translation of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit!" I admit! "But surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and ingenious fancy to his 'Rape of the Lock;' nor of knowledge of life, and a certain polished classicalness, to his epistles and satires. His portraits are like those of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks and satins are the best part of them." But poor, cautious, timid, trimming, turn-about John cannot so conciliate bully Philip, who squabashes at once both poet and critic.

"Philip.—I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best pictures, the drapery, though you may almost hear it rustle, is wholly a subordinate matter. Witness some of those in our College-hall here at Cambridge—that of Madam Boylston especially. I remember being once much struck with the remark of a friend, who convinced me of the fact, that Copley avoided the painting of wigs whenever he could, thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope would have made them a prominent object. I grant what you say about the 'Rape of the Lock,' but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If you wish an instance of a poet's fancy, look into the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' I can allow that Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely not poetical. Show me a line that makes you love God and your neighbour better, that inclines you to meekness, charity, and forbearance, and I will show you a hundred that make it easier for you to be the odious reverse of all these. In many a Pagan poet there is more Christianity. No poet could write a 'Dunciad,' or even read it. You have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poet, as, in looking for a long time at a stick which we believe to be an animal of some kind, we fancy that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but do not increase one's respect for him. When you speak of his being classical, I am sure that you jest."

The waves of the Atlantic have wafted acorns dropped from the British oak to the Western shores, and a wide and strong grove is growing up there. We feel our kindred with the fellow-beings of our tongue, and rejoice with a natural and keen interest in every thing true, great, and good that is produced within the States. Powers are moving there, that may, that do, want much tempering; but of which, when tempered, we augur high things. One such tempering is reverence of the past, and Pope is one of the great names which England tenders to young America. We augur ill, and are uneasy for our cousins or nephews, when we see them giving themselves airs, and knowing better than their betters. What are we to think, when instead of the fresh vigour which should rise on the soil of the self-governed, we find repetition, for the worse, of the feeblest criticisms which have disgraced some of our own weaklings? This presumptuous youngling talks technically, and does not know what he is talking about. Pope has not but one invariable cæsura to his verse. He has an ordinary range of four places for his cæsura, and the variety and music which he manages to give his verse under that scheme, dictated by a sensitive ear, is truly wonderful. That Pope is only a satirist, and can find nothing in humanity but its faults, infirmities, and disgraces to feed upon with delight, is a shameful falsehood. He is as generous in praise as he is galling in sarcasm; and the voice of Christian Europe has pronounced him a moral and religious poet. It is rather strange to see the stickler for the beauty and exaltation of poetry, diligent in purifying and ennobling the taste of his countrymen, by raking in the dirt for disgusting and loathsome images, to express his slanderous character of a writer, eminent among the best for purity and refinement. We take leave of Mr Lowell with remarking, that his affected and hyperbolical praises heaped on the old English dramatists are as nauseous as any ignorant exaggeration can be, bombastically protruded on us at second-hand, from an article in an old number of the Retrospective Review, from which most of the little he knows is taken, and in the taking, turned into most monstrous nonsense.

Friends of our soul! Permit us, now, in this our Supplement, to suggest to your recollection, that Satire is public or private. Public satire is, or would he, authoritative, robed, magisterial censure. Private satire is private warfare—the worst plague of the state, and the overthrow of all right law. It is worse. For when baron besieges baron, there is high spirit roused, and high deeds are achieved. But private malice in verse is as if the gossiping dames of a tea-table were armed with daggers instead of words, to kill reputations—the School for Scandal turned into a tragedy. We are groaning now over the inferior versifiers. To the Poets, to the mighty ones, we forgave every thing, a month ago. We say then, again, that although duly appointed to this Chair of Justice in which we sit, and having our eyes bandaged like the Goddess whose statue is in the corner of the hall, yet our hands are open, and we are willing—as in all well-governed kingdoms judges have been willing—to take bribes. But we let it be known, we must be bribed high. Juvenal, Persius, Horace, Dryden, and Pope have soothed the itching of our palms to our heart's content; and each has gained his cause in or impartial court. Nay, we are very much afraid, that if that gall-fed, parricidal ruffian, Archilochus, who twisted his verses into a halter for noosing up his wife's father—a melancholy event to which the old gentleman, it is said, lent a helping-hand—were more to us than a tradition, we should be in danger of finding in the poignancy of his iambics a sauce too much to our relish. Avec cette sauce—cried the French gastronome, by the ecstasy of his palate bewitched out of his moral discretion—Avec cette sauce on mangerait son père!

But leaving these imaginative heights, and walking along the level ground of daily life, common sense, and sane criticism, we go on to assert that private satire, lower than the highest, is intolerable. The grandeur of moral indignation in Juvenal, never is altogether without a secret inkling of disquietude at the bottom of the breast. It may be the Muse's legitimate and imposed office to smite the offending city; but it is never her joyous task. The judge never gladly puts on the black cap. The reality oppresses us—we are sore and sick in the very breath of the contagion, even if we escape untainted by it. The power of poetry possesses us for the time, and we must submit. Perhaps it is right, if the Muse be a great magistra vitæ, that she should present life under all its aspects, and school us in all its disciplines; and the direct, real, official censure of manners may be a necessary part of her calling. But how differently does the indirect censure affect us! Shakspeare creating Iago, censures wily, treacherous, envious, malignant, cold-blooded villany, where and whensoever to be found. He does not fix the brand upon the forehead of a time, or of a profession, or of a man, or of a woman; but of a devil who is incarnate in every time, who exercises every profession, is an innate, is the householder rather, now in the steeled breast of a man, and now in woman's softest bosom. This ubiquitous possibility of the Mark's occurring—the ignorance of the archer where his gifted arrow will strike—ennobles, aggrandizes his person and his work. It does not weaken the service which the poet is called upon to render to humanity, by showing himself the foe of her foes. And we, the spectators of the drama—what is that strangely balanced and harmonized conflict of emotions, by means of which we at once loathe and endure the poisonous confidant of the Moor? From the depths of the heart abhorring the odious, execrable man, whilst our fancy hovers, fascinated, about the marvellous creation! Yet we do not call Shakspeare here a Satirist. The distinction is broad. The Satirist is, in the most confined, or in the most comprehensive sense—PERSONAL.

And now we doubt not, readers beloved, that while you have been enjoying these our reflections on Satire, you may likewise have been dimly foreseeing the purposed end towards which our drift is setting in, as on a strong tide. We have been dealing with first-raters. In them the power of the poetry reconciles us to the matter—mitigates the repugnancy otherwise ready to wait, in a well-constituted mind, upon a series of thoughts and images which studiously persevere in venting the passions of hate and scorn. The curse of the Muse on all middling poets—and upon Parnassus one is tempted to ascribe to the middle zone of the mountain, all those who do not cluster about one of the summits—the common curse seems to fall with tenfold violence upon the middling Satirist. The great poet has authority, magistery, masterdom, seated in his high spirit; and when he chooses to put forth his power, we bow before him, or stoop our heads from the descending bolt. But if one not thus privileged leap uncalled into the awful throne, to hurl self-dictated judgments, this arrogant usurpation of supremacy; justly offends and revolts us. For he who censures the age, or any notable division of contemporary society, in verse, does in fact arrogate to himself an unappealable superiority. He speaks, or affects to speak, muse-inspired, as a prophet, oracularly. He does not enquire, he thunders. Now, the thunder of a scold is any thing but agreeable—and we exclaim—

"Demens! qui nimbos et non imitabile fulmen
Ære et cornipedum cursu simulârat equorum."

Poets are the givers of renown. Their word is fame. But fame is good and ill; and therefore they speak Eulogy and Satire. They are the tongues of the world. The music of verse makes way for Lear's words to all our hearts. It makes way for the Satirist's to the heart, where they are to be mortal. If mankind justly moved condemn, the Poet will find voice for that condemnation. Wo be to those who by goading provoke him, who is the organ of the universal voice, to visit his own wrong, to wreak his own vengeance on their heads! The wrong, the wrath is private; but the voice retains its universality, and they are withered as if by the blast of the general hate or scorn—

"He was not for an age, but for all time,"

said one poet of another. There are two ways of belonging to one's age. You are born of it—you die with it. Johnson disclaims for Shakspeare the co-etaneousness by birth and by death. He is the son of all time; and the inheritor of all time. His mind is the mind of ages deceased, and of ages unborn; and his writings remain to each succeeding generation, as fresh as if it had witnessed their springing into existence. They take no date.

Something of this is common to all essential poetry—

"Vivuntque commissi calores
Æoliæ fidibus puellæ."

The loves of Sappho live. They have not passed away. They are immortally. Therefore the Poet, as we said, is the giver of fame. His praise—his scorn—lives for ever.

All who are worthy to read Us know how well the rude primeval people comprehended the worth of the poet. The song rang to the borders of the land or of the name, and that was glory or ignominy alive in every heart. Honour given by the poet was then a substantial possession; to be disgraced by his biting vituperation was like the infliction of a legal punishment. The whole condition of things—men's minds and their outward relations—corresponded to that which seems now to us an extraordinary procedure—that of constituting the poet, in virtue of that name, a state functionary, holding office, rank, and power. Now, the poet is but a self-constituted Censor. He holds office from the Muse only; or upon occasion from the mighty mother, Dulness. The Laureateship is the only office in the State of Poetry that is in the Queen's gift; and that, thanks to her benignity and the good sense of the nineteenth century, has become a sinecure conferred on an Emeritus.

"Hollo! my fancy, whether dost thou roam?"

Nay, she is not roaming at all—for we have been all along steering in the wind's eye right to a given point. We come now to say a few words of Charles Churchill.

Of him it was said by one greater far, that he "blazed the meteor of a season." For four years—during life—his popularity—in London and the suburbs—was prodigious; for forty—and that is a long time after death—he was a choice classic in the libraries of aging or aged men of wit upon town; and now, that nearly a century has elapsed since he "from his horrid hair shook pestilence and war" o'er slaves and Scotsmen, tools and tyrants, peers, poetasters, priests, pimps, and players, his name is still something more than a mere dissyllable, and seems the shadow of the sound that Mother Dulness was wont to whisper in her children's ears when fretting wakefully on her neglected breasts. The Satirist, of all poets, calls the enquiry of the world upon himself. The Censor of manners should in his own be irreproachable. The satirist of a nation should feel that in that respect in which he censures he is whole and sound; that in assailing others he stands upon a rock; that his arrows cannot by a light shifting of the wind return to his own bosom. It was not so with Churchill. But he had his virtues—and he died young.

"Life to the last enjoy'd!! here Churchill lies."

It is not of his life but his writings we purpose to speak. It is not to be thought that his reputation at the time, and among some high critics since, could be groundless. There is an air of power in his way of attacking any and every subject. He goes to work without embarrassment, with spirit and ease, and is presently in his matter, or in some matter, rarely inane. It is a part, and a high part of genius, to design; but he was destitute of invention. The self-dubbed champion of liberty and letters, he labours ostentatiously and energetically in that vocation; and in the midst of tumultuous applause, ringing round a career of almost uninterrupted success, he seldom or never seems aware that the duties he had engaged himself to perform—to his country and his kind—were far beyond his endowments—above his conception. His knowledge either of books or men was narrow and superficial. In no sense had he ever been a student. His best thoughts are all essentially common-place; but, in uttering them, there is almost always a determined plainness of words, a free step in verse, a certain boldness and skill in evading the trammel of the rhyme, deserving high praise; while often, as if spurning the style which yet does not desert him, he wears it clinging about him with a sort of disregarded grace.

The Rosciad—The Apology—Night—The Prophecy of Famine—An Epistle to William Hogarth—The Duellist—Gotham—The Author—The Conference—The Ghost—The Candidate—The Farewell—The Times—The Journey—Fragment of a Dedication—such is the list of Works, whereof all England rung from side to side—during the few noisy years he vapoured—as in the form of shilling or half-crown pamphlets they frighted the Town from its propriety, and gave monthly or quarterly assurance to a great people that they possessed a great living Poet, worthy of being numbered with their mightiest dead.

He began with the Play-house.

The theatre! Satire belongs to the day, and the theatre belongs to the day. They seem well met. The spirit of both is the same—intense popularity. Actors are human beings placed in an extraordinary relation to other human beings: public characters; but brought the nearer to us by being so—the good ones intimate with our bosoms, dear as friends. Their persons, features, look, gait, gesture, familiar to our thoughts, vividly engraven. They address themselves to every one of us personally, in tones that thrill and chill, or that convulse us with merriment—and all for pleasure! They ask our sympathy, but they task it not. No burthen of distress that they may lay upon us do we desire to rid off our hearts. We only call for more, more! They stir up the soul within us, as nothing else in which, personally, we are quite unconcerned, does. Therefore the praise or sarcasm that visits them, comes home to the privacy of our own feelings. Besides, they belong to the service of the Muse; and so the other servant of the Muse, the Satirist, as the superintendent of the household, may reasonably reprehend or commend them. Further, they offer themselves to favour and to disfavour, to praise, to dispraise; to the applauding hands or to the exploding hisses of the public. There is, then an attraction of fame-bestowing verse towards the stage. And yet does it not seem a pity that the unfortunate bad actors should "bide the pelting of this pitiless storm," over and above that of others they are liable to be assailed with? What great-minded Satirist could step down a play-bill from the first rank of performers to the second and the third—hunting out miserable mediocrities—dragging away the culprits of the stage to flagellation and the pillory? Say then, at once, that the Satirist is not great-minded, and his motives are not pure desires for the general benefit. He is by the gift of nature witty, and rather ill-natured. He very much enjoys his own wit, and he hopes that you have fun enough in you to enjoy his jests, and so he breaks them. The Rosciad is, we believe, by far the best of Churchill's performances; very clever, indeed, and characteristic; at the head of all theatrical criticism in verse; yet an achievement, in spite of the talent and ingenuity it displays, not now perusable without an accompanying feeling akin to contempt.

"Gotham" is an irregular, poetical whim, of which it is easier to describe the procedure than to assign the reasonable purpose. Gotham itself is a country unknown to our geographers, which Churchill has discovered, and of which, in right of that discovery, he assumes the sovereignty under his own undisguised name, King Churchill. After spiritedly arraigning the exercise in the real world of that right by which he rules in his imaginary kingdom—a right which establishes the civilised in the lands of the enslaved or expatriated uncivilised, he spends the rest of his first canto in summoning all creatures, rational and irrational, to join the happy Gothamites in the universal choral celebration of his mounting the throne. The second canto, for some two hundred verses, insists upon the necessity of marrying Sense with Art, to produce good writing, and Learning with Humanity, to produce useful writing; and then turns off bitterly to characterise the reigns in succession of the Stuarts, by way of warning to his Gothamites against the temptation to admit a vagrant Stuart for their king. The third canto delivers the rules by which he, King Churchill, who purposes being the father of his people, designs to govern his own reign. That is all. What and where is Gotham? What is the meaning of this royalty with which the poet invests himself? What is the drift, scope, and unity of the poem? Gotham is not, and is, England. It is not England, for he tells us in the poem that he is born in England, and that he is not born in Gotham; besides which, he expressly distinguishes the two countries by admonishing the Gothamites to search "England's fair records," for the sake of imbibing a due hatred for the House of Stuart. It is England, for it is an island which "Freedom's pile, by ancient wisdom raised, adorns," making it great and glorious, feared abroad and happy at home, secure from force or fraud. Moreover, her merchants are princes. The conclusion is, that Gotham is England herself, poetically disidentified by a very thin and transparent disguise. The sovereignty of King Churchill, if it mean any thing capable of being said in prose, may shadow the influence and authority which a single mind, assuming to itself an inborn call to ascendancy, wishes and hopes to possess over the intelligence of its own compatriot nation; and this may be conjectured in a writer who principally dedicates himself to the championship of political principles. The rules, in the Third Book, for the conduct of a prince, afford the opportunity of describing the idea of a patriot king, of censuring that which is actually done adversely to these rules; and, at the same time, they acquire something of a peculiar meaning, if they are to be construed as a scheme of right political thinking—the intelligence of the general welfare which is obligatory upon the political ruler being equally so upon the political teacher. If this kind of deliberate, allegorical design may be mercifully supposed, the wild self-imagination, and apparently downright nonsense of the First Book, may pretend a palliation of its glaring vanity and absurdity; since the blissful reign of King Churchill over Gotham, which is extolled very much like the "Jovis incrementum," in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, thus comes to mean, when translated into the language of men, the reign in England of the opinions for which Churchill battles in rhyme. Or, this may be too much attribution of plan to a caprice that meant little or nothing. The first book was published by itself, and may have aimed at something to which the author found that he could not give shape and consistency. Yet Cowper declares Gotham to be a noble and beautiful poem.

The Author might almost seem intended for a sequel to MacFlecnoe and the Dunciad. Not that it assumes, like them, a fanciful vehicle for the satire, but it undertakes the lashing of peccant authors, and recognises Dulness as an enthroned power to whose empire the writer is hostile; and where he adverts to his own early life, and clerical destination, he mentions her as the patroness upon whom his friends had relied for his future church preferment.

"But now, when Dulness rears aloft her throne,
When lordly vassals her wide empire own;
When Wit, seduced by Envy, starts aside,
And basely leagues with Ignorance and Pride, &c.
* * * *
Bred to the church, and for the gown decreed,
Ere it was known that I should learn to read;
Though that was nothing for my friends, who knew
What mighty Dulness of itself could do,
Never design'd me for a working priest,
But hoped I should have been a dean at least," &c.

The writers more formally and regularly attacked, are Smollett, Murphy, Shebbeare, Guthrie, and one Kidgell, who contrived to earn shame, in exposing to shame the printed but unpublished obscenity and blasphemy of Wilkes. Johnson gets a good word as a state-pensioner, Francis, the translator of Horace, for dulness apparently, and Mason, and even Gray, are signalized, en passant, as artificial rhymesters! The general tenor of the poem complains that in these days true learning, genius, and the honesty of authorship are of no account; whilst the political profligacy of the pen ensures favour and pay. The first hundred lines forcibly express the inspiring indignation proper to the subject, and some of them are still occasionally quoted; but how inferior all to corresponding strains in Dryden and Pope! They were poets indeed—he was not a poet. He has not fancy or imagination—they had both—they were consummate masters in their art: he was but a bold bungler after all. In proof, take the best passage in The Author.

"Is this—O death to think!—is this the land
Where merit and reward went hand in hand?
Where heroes, parent-like, the poet view'd,
By whom they saw their glorious deeds renew'd?
Where poets, true to honour, tuned their lays,
And by their patrons sanctified their praise?
Is this the land where, on our Spenser's tongue,
Enamour'd of his voice, Description hung?
Where Jonson rigid Gravity beguiled,
While Reason through her critic fences smiled?
Where Nature listening stood whilst Shakspeare play'd,
And wonder'd at the work herself had made?
Is this the land where, mindful of her charge,
And office high, fair Freedom walk'd at large?
Where, finding in our laws a sure defence,
She mock'd at all restraints, but those of sense?
Where, Health and Honour trooping by her side,
She spreads her sacred empire far and wide;
Pointed the way, Affliction to beguile,
And bade the face of Sorrow wear a smile—
Bade those who dare obey the generous call
Enjoy her blessings, which God meant for all?
Is this the land where, in some tyrant's reign,
When a weak, wicked, ministerial train,
The tools of power, the slaves of interest, plann'd
Their country's ruin, and with bribes unmann'd
Those wretches, who ordain'd in Freedom's cause,
Gave up our liberties, and sold our laws;
When Power was taught by Meanness where to go,
Nor dared to love the virtue of a foe;
When, like a lep'rous plague, from the foul head
To the foul heart her sores Corruption spread,
Her iron arm when stern Oppression rear'd,
And Virtue, from her broad base shaken, fear'd
The scourge of Vice; when, impotent and vain,
Poor Freedom bow'd the neck to Slavery's chain?
Is this the land, where, in those worst of times,
The hardy poet raised his honest rhymes
To dread rebuke, and bade Controlment speak
In guilty blushes on the villain's cheek;
Bade Power turn pale, kept mighty rogues in awe,
And made hem fear the Muse, who fear'd not law?
"How do I laugh, when men of narrow souls,
Whom folly guides, and prejudice controls;
Who, one dull drowsy track of business trod,
Worship their Mammon, and neglect their God;
Who, breathing by one musty set of rules,
Dote from their birth, and are by system fools;
Who, form'd to dulness from their very youth,
Lies of the day prefer to Gospel-truth;
Pick up their little knowledge from Reviews,
And lay out all their stock of faith in news;
How do I laugh, when creatures form'd like these,
Whom Reason scorns, and I should blush to please,
Rail at all liberal arts, deem verse a crime,
And hold not truth as truth, if told in rhyme?"

These are commendable verses, but they are not the verses of a true poet. For instance, when he will praise the greatest poets—

"Is this the land, where, on our Spenser's tongue,
Enamour'd of his voice, Description hung"—

the intention is good, and there is some love in the singling out of the name; but Description is almost the lowest, not the highest praise of Spenser. The language too is mean and trite, not that of one who is "inflammatus amore" of the sacred poet whom he praises. How differently does Lucretius praise Epicurus! The words blaze as he names him. How differently does Pope or Gray praise Dryden! Even in Churchill's few words there is the awkward and heavy tautology—tongue and voice. It is more like the tribute of duty than sensibility. The well-known distich on Shakspeare is rather good—it utters with a vigorous turn the general sentiment, the nation's wonder of its own idol. But compare Gray, who also brings Nature and Shakspeare together; or see him speaking of Dryden or Milton, and you see how a poet speaks of a poet—thrilled with recollections—reflecting, not merely commemorating, the power. Indeed, we design to have a few (perhaps twenty) articles entitled Poets on Poets—in which we shall collect chronologically the praises of the brotherhood by the brotherhood. In the mean time we do believe that the one main thing which you miss in Churchill is the true poetical touch and temper of the spirit. He is, as far as he succeeds, a sort of inferior Junius in verse—sinewy, keen—with a good, ready use of strong, plain English; but he has no rapture. His fire is volcanic, not solar. Yet no light praise it is, that he rejects frivolous ornament, and trusts to the strength of the thought, and of the good or ill within. But besides the disparity—which is great—of strength, of intellectual rank—this draws an insuperable difference in kind between him and Pope or Dryden, that they are essentially poets. The gift of song is on their lips. If they turn Satirists, they bring the power to another than its wonted and native vocation. But Churchill obtains the power only in satirizing. As Iago says—

"For I am nothing if not critical."

Is this merely a repetition of Juvenal's "facit indignatio versus," rendered in prose, "Indignation makes me a poet," who am not a poet by nature? In the first place, Juvenal prodigiously transcends Churchill in intellectual strength; and in the second, Juvenal has far more of essential poetry, although hidden in just vituperation, and in the imposed worldliness of his matter. But we must pull up.

The so-called "Epistle to Hogarth" is, after the wont of Churchill, a shapeless, undigested performance. It is nothing in the likeness of an epistle; but for three hundred lines a wandering, lumbering rhapsody, addressed to nobody, which, after abusing right and left, suddenly turns to Hogarth, whom it introduces by summoning him to stand forth at the bar in the Court of Conscience, an exemplar of iniquities worse than could have been believed of humanity, were he not there to sustain the character, and authenticate the rightful delineation. Thenceforwards obstreperously railing on, overwhelming the great painter with exaggerated reproaches for envy that persecuted all worth, for untired self-laudation, for painting his unfortunate Sigismunda; and oh! shame of song! for the advancing infirmities of old age. The merits of Hogarth, as master of comic painting, are acknowledged in lines that have been often quoted, and are of very moderate merit—not worth a rush. "The description of his age and infirmities," as Garrick said at the time, "is too shocking and barbarous." It nauseates the soul; and unmasks in the Satirist the rancorous and malignant hostility which assumes the disguise of a righteous indignation.

"Hogarth! stand forth.—Nay, hang not thus aloof—
Now, Candor! now thou shalt receive such proof,
Such damning proof, that henceforth thou shalt fear
To tax my wrath, and own my conduct clear—
Hogarth! stand forth—I dare thee to be try'd
In that great court where Conscience must preside;
At that most solemn bar hold up thy hand;
Think before whom, on what account, you stand—
Speak, but consider well—from first to last
Review thy life, weigh ev'ry action past—
Nay, you shall have no reason to complain—
Take longer time, and view them o'er again—
Canst thou remember from thy earliest youth,
And, as thy God must judge thee, speak the truth;
A single instance where, self laid aside,
And justice taking place of fear and pride,
Thou with an equal eye did'st genius view,
And give to merit what was merit's due?
Genius and merit are a sure offence,
And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.
Is any one so foolish to succeed?
On Envy's altar he is doom'd to bleed;
Hogarth, a guilty pleasure in his eyes,
The place of executioner supplies:
See how he glotes, enjoys the sacred feast,
And proves himself by cruelty a priest.
"Whilst the weak artist, to thy whims a slave,
Would bury all those pow'rs which Nature gave;
Would suffer black concealment to obscure
Those rays thy jealousy could not endure;
To feed thy vanity would rust unknown,
And to secure thy credit blast his own,
In Hogarth he was sure to find a friend
He could not fear, and therefore might commend:
But when his Spirit, rous'd by honest shame,
Shook off that lethargy, and soar'd to fame;
When, with the pride of man, resolv'd and strong,
He scorn'd those fears which did his honour wrong,
And, on himself determin'd to rely,
Brought forth his labours to the public eye,
No friend in thee could such a rebel know;
He had desert, and Hogarth was his foe.
"Souls of a tim'rous cast, of petty name
In Envy's court, not yet quite dead to shame,
May some remorse, some qualms of conscience feel,
And suffer honour to abate their zeal;
But the man truly and completely great
Allows no rule of action but his hate;
Thro' ev'ry bar he bravely breaks his way,
Passion his principle, and parts his prey.
Mediums in vice and virtue speak a mind
Within the pale of temperance confin'd;
The daring spirit scorns her narrow schemes,
And, good or bad, is always in extremes.
"Man's practice duly weigh'd, thro' ev'ry age
On the same plan hath Envy form'd her rage,
'Gainst those whom fortune hath our rivals made,
In way of science and in way of trade:
Stung with mean jealousy she arms her spite,
First works, then views their ruin with delight.
Our Hogarth here a grand improver shines,
And nobly on the gen'ral plan refines:
He like himself o'erleaps the servile bound;
Worth is his mark, wherever worth is found;
Should painters only his vast wrath suffice?
Genius in ev'ry walk is lawful prize:
'Tis a gross insult to his o'ergrown state;
His love to merit is to feel his hate.
"When Wilkes, our countryman, our common friend,
Arose, his king, his country, to defend;
When tools of pow'r he bar'd to public view,
And from their holes the sneaking cowards drew;
When Rancour found it far beyond her reach
To soil his honour and his truth impeach;
What could induce thee, at a time and place
Where manly foes had blush'd to show their face,
To make that effort which must damn thy name,
And sink thee deep, deep, in thy grave with shame?
Did virtue move thee? No; 'twas pride, rank pride,
And if thou had'st not done it thou had'st dy'd.
Malice, (who, disappointed of her end,
Whether to work the bane of foe or friend,
Preys on herself, and driven to the stake,
Gives virtue that revenge she scorns to take,)
Had kill'd thee, tott'ring on life's utmost verge,
Had Wilkes and Liberty escap'd thy scourge.
"When that Great Charter, which our fathers brought;
With their best blood, was into question bought,
When, big with ruin, o'er each English head
Vile slav'ry hung suspended by a thread;
When Liberty, all trembling and aghast,
Fear'd for the future, knowing what was past;
When ev'ry breast was chill'd with deep despair,
Till reason pointed out that Pratt was there;
Lurking most ruffian-like behind a screen,
So plac'd all things to see, himself unseen,
Virtue, with due contempt, saw Hogarth stand,
The murd'rous pencil in his palsied hand.
What was the cause of Liberty to him,
Or what was Honour? let them sink or swim,
So he may gratify without control
The mean resentment of his selfish soul;
Let freedom perish, if, to freedom true,
In the same ruin Wilkes may perish too.
"With all the symptoms of assur'd decay,
With age and sickness pinch'd and worn away,
Pale qiuv'ring lips, lank cheeks, and falt'ring tongue,
The spirits out of tune, the nerves unstrung,
The body shrivell'd up, thy dim eyes sunk
Within their sockets deep, thy weak hams shrunk,
The body's weight unable to sustain,
The stream of life scarce trembling, thro' the vein,
More than half-kill'd by honest truths, which fell
Thro' thy own fault from men who wish'd thee well,
Canst thou, ev'n thus, thy thoughts to vengeance give,
And, dead to all things else, to malice live?
Hence, Dotard! to thy closet; shut thee in;
By deep repentance wash away thy sin;
From haunts of men to shame and sorrow fly,
And, on the verge of death, learn how to die."

What was Hogarth's unpardonable sin? Nature had lodged the unlovely soul of Jack Wilkes in an unlovely and ludicrous person, which the wicked and inimitable pencil of Hogarth had made a little unlovelier perhaps, and a little more ludicrous. Horace Walpole spoke in his usual clear-cutting style of Mr Charles Pylades and Mr John Orestes. They liked one another, and ran the scent, strong as a trail of rancid fish-guts, of the same pleasures—but let not such hunting in couples profane the name of friendship.

"For me, who warm and zealous for my friend,
In spite of railing thousands, will commend,
And, no less warm and zealous 'gainst my foes,
Spite of commending thousands, will oppose—
I dare thy worst, with scorn behold thy rage;
But with an eye of pity view thy age—
Thy feeble age! in which, as in a glass,
We see how men to dissolution pass.
Thou wretched being! whom, on reason's plan,
So chang'd, so lost, I cannot call a man—
What could persuade thee at this time of life,
To launch afresh into the sea of strife!
Better for thee, scarce crawling on the earth,
Almost as much a child as at thy birth;
To have resign'd in peace thy parting breath,
And sunk unnotic'd in the arms of death.
Why would thy gray, gray hairs resentment brave,
Thus to go down with sorrow to the grave?
Now, by my soul! it makes me blush to know
My spirit could descend to such a foe:
Whatever cause the vengeance might provoke;
It seems rank cowardice to give the stroke.
"Sure 'tis a curse which angry Fates impose
To mortify man's arrogance, that those
Who're fashion'd of some better sort of clay
Much sooner than the common herd decay.
What bitter pangs must humble Genius feel
In their last hours, to view a Swift and Steele!
How must ill-boding horrors fill her breast,
When she beholds men mark'd above the rest
For qualities most dear, plung'd from that height,
And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night!
Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best
More subject to this evil than the rest;
To drivel out whole years of idiot breath,
And sit the monuments of living Death!
O! galling circumstance to human pride!
Abasing thought! but not to be deny'd.
With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought.
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her pow'rs, and leaves a blank behind,
But let not youth, to insolence ally'd,
In heat of blood, in full career of pride,
Possess'd of genius, with unhallow'd rage
Mock the infirmities of rev'rend age:
The greatest genius to this fate may bow;
Reynolds in time may be like Hogarth now."

One makes allowance, in reading, for the inflamed temper of the times, for a judgment disturbed with personal anger, and for the self-consciousness which, hardly separable from talent, stirs and sustains its energies. But—Churchill demolishing Hogarth! It is startling—rather melancholy—and very amusing. One compares fame with fame—the transitory and the imperishable. The wave, lashed into fury, that comes on, mountain-swollen, all rage, and froth, and thunder, to dash itself into spray against some Atlas of the Deep—some huge brother of Time, whose cheeks the wings of the centuries caress, and of whose hand storms that distract heaven and earth are but toys.

Of the "Prophecy of Famine," Wilkes, before its publication, said he "was sure it would take, as it was at once personal, poetical, and political." And take it did—going off in thousands, and tens of thousands. The Whig coteries, of course, cried it up to the skies; and the established authorities declared that Pope must now hide his diminished head. Such nonsense Churchill swallowed; for he had tried to take it into his head that Pope was a fool to him, and in his cups was wont to vent a wish that little Alec were alive, that he might break his heart. That was the delusion of delirium. Inflated with vanity as he was, he must, when sober, have known well he could not with his cudgel, readily though he flourished it, have lived for five minutes before that Master of the rapier.

Scotsmen as we are to the spine, it is possible that we may be incapacitated by the strength of our backbone for perceiving the mighty merit of this astonishing satire. Steeped to the lips in national prejudices in favour of Scotland, (not against England—heaven forbid!) imbibed with the first gulp of Glenlivet that more than three quarters of a century ago went gurgling down our filial throats—inured to hunger from our tenderest years—"in life's morning march when our spirits were young," ignorant of shoes, though haply not inexpert of sulphur—to us, thus born and thus bred, it may not be given to behold with our outward eyes, and feel with our inward hearts, the full glory of "The Prophecy of Famine." Boswell, with an uneasy smirk, rather than a ghastly grin, said, "It is indeed falsely applied to Scotland, but may on that account be allowed a greater share of invention." Johnson in his heart loved Scotland, as all his jeers show; and perhaps on that account was, like ourselves, no fair judge of Churchill's genius. "I called the fellow a blockhead at first—and I call him a blockhead still," comprehended all his performances in one general contempt. In later times, Jeffrey has dismissed him with little ceremony to find his place at the Third Table. Campbell, who, though a Whig, cared nothing about Churchill, acknowledges having been amused by the laughable extravagance of the "Prophecy." And Lord Mahon says, "that it may yet be read with all the admiration which the most vigorous powers of verse and the most lively touches of wit can earn in the cause of slander and falsehood."

Suppose, rough-and-ready Readers, that you judge for yourselves. You have not a copy of Churchill—so passing over the first part of the poem—about three hundred lines—as dull as ditchwater in the season of powheads—let us give you the cream, or marrow, or pith of the famous "Prophecy of Famine," before which Scotia, "our auld respectit mither," bowed down and fell, and was thought by some to have given up the ghost, or at least "tined her dam."

"Two boys, whose birth, beyond all question, springs
From great and glorious tho' forgotten kings,
Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred
On the same bleak and barren mountain's head;
By niggard Nature doom'd on the same rocks
To spin out life, and starve themselves and flocks;
Fresh as the morning which, enrob'd in mist,
The mountain's top with usual dulness kiss'd,
Jockey and Sawney, to their labours rose;
Soon clad I ween where Nature needs no clothes,
Where, from their youth inur'd to winter-skies,
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.
"Jockey, whose manly high-bon'd cheeks to crown,
With freckles spotted flam'd the golden down,
With meikle art could on the bagpipes play,
Ev'n from the rising to the setting day:
Sawney as long without remorse could bawl
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal:
Oft at his strains, all natural tho' rude,
The Highland lass forgot her want of food;
And, whilst she scratch'd her lover into rest,
Sunk pleas'd, tho' hungry, on her Sawney's breast.
"Far as the eye could reach no tree was seen,
Earth, clad in russet, scorn'd the lively green:
The plague of locusts they secure defy,
For in three hours a grasshopper must die:
No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there,
But the chameleon, who can feast on air.
No birds, except as birds of passage, flew;
No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo:
No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,
Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here:
Rebellion's spring, which thro' the country ran,
Furnish'd with bitter draughts the steady clan:
No flow'rs embalm'd the air but one White Rose,
Which on the tenth of June by instinct blows,
By instinct blows at morn, and when the shades
Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.
"One, and but one, poor solitary cave,
Too sparing of her favours, Nature gave;
That one alone (hard tax on Scottish pride!)
Shelter at once for man and beast supply'd.
Their snares without entangling briers spread,
And thistles, arm'd against the invader's head,
Stood in close ranks, all entrance to oppose,
Thistles! now held more precious than the Rose.
All creatures which, on Nature's earliest plan,
Were form'd to loathe and to be loath'd by man,
Which ow'd their birth to nastiness and spite,
Deadly to touch, and hateful to the sight;
Creatures, which, when admitted in the ark,
Their saviour shunn'd, and rankled in the dark,
Found place within. Marking her noisome road
With poison's trail, here crawl'd the bloated toad;
There webs were spread of more than common size,
And half-starv'd spiders prey'd on half-starv'd flies;
In quest of food, efts strove in vain to crawl;
Slugs, pinch'd with hunger, smear'd the slimy wall:
The cave around with hissing serpents rung;
On the damp roof unhealthy vapour hung;
And Famine, by her children always known,
As proud as poor, here fix'd her native throne.
"Here, for the sullen sky as overcast,
And summer shrunk beneath a wintry blast,
A native blast, which, arm'd with hail and rain,
Beat unrelenting on the naked swain,
The boys for shelter made: behind the sheep,
Of which those shepherds ev'ry day take keep,
Sickly crept on, and, with complainings rude,
On Nature seem'd to call and bleat for food.
"Jockey. Sith to this cave by tempest we're confin'd,
And within ken our flocks, under the wind,
Safe from the pelting of this per'lous storm,
Are laid among yon' thistles, dry and warm,
What, Sawney! if by shepherds' art we try
To mock the rigour of this cruel sky?
What if we tune some merry roundelay?
Well dost thou sing, nor ill doth Jockey play.
"Sawney. Ah Jockey, ill advisest thou, I wis,
To think of songs at such a time as this;
Sooner shall herbage crown these barren rocks,
Sooner shall fleeces clothe these ragged flocks,
Sooner shall want seize shepherds of the south,
And we forget to live from hand to mouth,
Than Sawney, out of season, shall impart
Tho songs of gladness with an aching heart.
"Jockey. Still have I known thee for a silly swain;
Of things past help what boots it to complain?
Nothing but mirth can conquer Fortune's spite;
No sky is heavy if the heart be light:
Patience is sorrow's salve: what can't be cur'd,
So Donald right areeds, must be endur'd.
"Sawney. Full silly swain, I wot, is Jockey now;
How didst thou bear thy Maggy's falsehood? how,
When with a foreign loon she stole away,
Didst thou forswear thy pipe and shepherd's lay?
Where was thy boasted wisdom then, when I
Apply'd those proverbs which you now apply?
"Jockey. O she was bonny! all the Highlands round
Was there a rival to my Maggy found?
More precious (tho' that precious is to all)
Than the rare med'cine which we Brimstone call,
Or that choice plant, so grateful to the nose,
Which in I-know-not-what-far country grows,
Was Maggy unto me: dear do I rue
A lass so fair should ever prove untrue.
"Sawney. Whether with pipe or song to charm the ear,
Thro' all the land did Jamie find a peer?
Curs'd be that year by ev'ry honest Scot,
And in the shepherds' kalendar forgot,
That fatal year, when Jamie, hapless swain!
In evil hour forsook the peaceful plain:
Jamie, when our young laird discreetly fled,
Was seiz'd, and hang'd till he was dead, dead, dead.
"Jockey. Full sorely may we all lament that day,
For all were losers in the deadly fray;
Five brothers had I on the Scottish plains,
Well dost thou know were none more hopeful swains;
Five brothers there I lost, in manhood's pride,
Two in the field, and three on gibbets dy'd:
Ah! silly swains! to follow war's alarms;
Ah! what hath shepherd's life to do with arms?
"Sawney. Mention it not—There saw I strangers clad
In all the honours of our ravish'd Plaid;
Saw the Ferrara, too, our nation's pride,
Unwilling grace the awkward victor's side.
There fell our choicest youth, and from that day
Mote never Sawney tune the merry lay;
Bless'd those which fell! curs'd those which still survive!
To mourn Fifteen renew'd in Forty-five."

As our memory of our personal experiences about the period in Scottish history at which the above scene is laid is extremely obscure, we cannot take upon ourselves to speak authoritatively of the fidelity of the picture. But Churchill, we grieve to say it, was a regular—a thorough Cockney. The instant a Cockney opens his mouth, or puts pen to paper about Scotland, he stands confessed. Here Charles's attempt at the Scottish dialect betrays the taint. Not a single one of the words he chucklingly puts into the lips of Jockey and Sawney as characteristically Scoto-Arcadian, was ever heard or seen by the breechless swains of that pastoral realm. Never does an alien look so silly to the natives, be they who they may, as when instructing them in their own language, or mimicking the niceties and delicacies of its dialects. They pardonably think him little better than a fool; nor does he mend the matter much by telling them that he is satirical and a wit.

Considerable latitude in the article of language must be allowed to the poet, who presents to us engaged in dialogue two natives of a country where clothes and victuals are nearly unknown. "Rude must they be in speech—and little graced with the set phrase of peace." Churchill was bound to have conceived for them an utterance natural to their condition, as Shakspeare did for Caliban. But over and above the Cockneyisms committed by him, he makes them twaddle like middle-aged men in middle-sized towns, who had passed all their nights in blankets, and all their days in breeches, with as liberal an allowance of food as parish paupers.

"To mock the rigour of this cruel sky,"
"In all the honours of our ravish'd plaid"—
"Unwilling grace the awkward victor's side,"

have here no dramatic propriety we opine—and show the slobberer.

The Satirist betrays the same poverty of invention in the sentiments as in the language of the Swains. They illustrate no concealed character—they reveal no latent truth.

"Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran,
Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan;"

and yet the swains are averse from war, and exclaim—

"Ah! silly swains! to follow war's alarms;
Ah! what hath shepherd's life to do with arms?"

And, at the same time, they talk of—

"the Ferrara, too, our nation's pride."

The dialogue is throughout absolutely stupid. You are not made by it either to hate or despise the Swains, nor are you led to laugh at them; but lay down the satire for minute or two, peevishly suspecting that you have been reading arrant nonsense.

You take up the trash again; and, being a Scotsman, you are perhaps not altogether quite so well pleased to find that it suddenly waxes into something very like poetry. The description of the cave had made you wince—why, you knew not; for nothing the least like it ever existed in Scotland, or out of it; and your high cheekbones had tingled. The reprobate can write, you are forced to confess, while Christopher North holds up to your confusion the picture of Famine.

"Thus plain'd the boys, when from her throne of turf
With boils emboss'd, and overgrown with scurf,
Vile humours, which, in life's corrupted well,
Mix'd at the birth, not abstinence could quell,
Pale Famine rear'd the head; her eager eyes,
Where hunger ev'n to madness seem'd to rise,
Speaking aloud her throes and pangs of heart,
Strain'd to get loose, and from their orbs to start.
Her hollow cheeks were each a deep sunk cell,
Where wretchedness and horror lov'd to dwell:
With double rows of useless teeth supply'd,
Her mouth from ear to ear extended wide,
Which when for want of food her entrails pin'd
She op'd, and, cursing, swallow'd nought but wind:
All shrivell'd was her skin; and here and there,
Making their way by force, her bones lay bare:
Such filthy sight to hide from human view
O'er her foul limbs a tatter'd plaid she threw.
"'Cease,' cry'd the goddess, 'cease, despairing swains!
And from a parent hear what Jove ordains.
"'Pent in this barren corner of the isle,
Where partial Fortune never deign'd to smile,
Like Nature's bastards, reaping for our share
What was rejected by the lawful heir;
Unknown amongst the nations of the earth,
Or only known to raise contempt and mirth;
Long free, because the race of Roman braves
Thought it not worth their while to make us slaves,
Then into bondage by that nation brought
Whose ruin we for ages vainly sought,
Whom still with unslak'd hate we view, and still,
The pow'r of mischief lost, retain the will;
Consider'd as the refuse of mankind,
A mass till the last moment left behind,
Which frugal Nature doubted, as it lay,
Whether to stamp with life or throw away;
Which, form'd in haste, was planted in this nook,
But never enter'd in Creation's book,
Branded as traitors, who, for love of gold,
Would sell their God, as once their king they sold;
Long have we borne this mighty weight of ill,
These vile injurious taunts, and bear them still;
But times of happier note are now at hand,
And the full promise of a better land:
There, like the sons of Isr'el, having trode
For the fix'd term of years ordain'd by God,
A barren desert, we shall seize rich plains,
Where milk with honey flows, and plenty reigns:
With some few natives join'd, some pliant few,
Who worship int'rest, and our track pursue;
There shall we, tho' the wretched people grieve,
Ravage at large, nor ask the owners' leave.
"'For us the earth shall bring forth her increase;
For us the flocks shall wear a golden fleece;
Fat beeves shall yield us dainties not our own,
And the grape bleed a nectar yet unknown:
For our advantage shall their harvests grow,
And Scotsmen reap what they disdain'd to sow:
For us the sun shall climb the eastern hill;
For us the rain shall fall, the dew distil:
When to our wishes Nature cannot rise,
Art shall be task'd to grant us fresh supplies;
His brawny arm shall drudging Labour strain,
And for our pleasure suffer daily pain:
Trade shall for us exert her utmost pow'rs,
Hers all the toil, and all the profit ours:
For us the oak shall from his native steep
Descend, and fearless travel thro' the deep;
The sail of commerce, for our use unfurl'd,
Shall waft the treasures of each distant world;
For us sublimer heights shall science reach;
For us their statesmen plot, their churchmen preach:
Their noblest limbs of counsel we'll disjoint,
And, mocking, new ones of our own appoint:
Devouring War, imprison'd in the north,
Shall at our call in horrid pomp break forth;
And when, his chariot wheels with thunder hung,
Fell Discord braying with her brazen tongue,
Death in the van, with Anger, Hate, and Fear,
And Desolation stalking in the rear,
Revenge, by Justice guided, in his train,
He drives inpet'ous o'er the trembling plain,
Shall at our bidding quit his lawful prey,
And to meek, gentle, gen'rous Peace give way.
"'Think not, my sons! that this so bless'd estate
Stands at a distance on the roll of Fate;
Already big with hopes of future sway,
Ev'n from this cave I scent my destin'd prey.
Think not that this dominion o'er a race,
Whose former deeds shall Time's last annals grace,
In the rough face of peril must be sought,
And with the lives of thousands dearly bought:
No—fool'd by cunning, by that happy art
Which laughs to scorn the blund'ring hero's heart,
Into the snare shall our kind neighbours fall,
With open eyes, and fondly give us all."

Alongside of any one of the masterpieces of Dryden or Pope, this, perhaps the most vigorous thing of Churchill's, is seen to be a daub. Yet Cockney connoisseurs still think it a fine picture. When fresh from the easel, it was thus praised by a metropolitan critic:—

"You'll own the great Churchill possesses, I hope,
More fancy than Cowley, more numbers than Pope;
More strength, too, than Dryden—for, think on what's past,
He has not only rivall'd, but beat them at last."

A hearty national prejudice is no bad foundation for a Poem. It implies one great requisite of success—a secure large sympathy. This "trusted home" animates the poet; and a reception, answering to the confidence, awaits the work. Moreover, ungrounded or exaggerated as these depreciations and antipathies are likely to be, they usually spring out of some deep-laid element in the character of those who entertain them, and have thus the vital warmth and strength that feed poetry, and an original truth of nature mixed up amongst fallacies of opinion. Caricatured representation is the proper vehicle. For Censure is then half disarmed, when to her exception, "This is not so," the reply lies upon the face of the performance, "Neither is it offered for true." The hyperbole of the phrase covers the distortion of the thinking. If we are to find fault with Churchill's "Prophecy of Famine," it must be upon some other ground than the injustice or cruelty of the attack upon poor Scotland, or the hardness of the hits delivered, it may be, by a fist gloved in iron.

Who grudges the attack? Not Sawney himself, if it is made in masterly style. A magnanimous combatant, who has the true enthusiasm of the fight, admires the skill of the stroke that threatens him with defeat or death. Spite, malice, aversion, enmity, are not ingratiating demonstrations. Far from it. Ill-will is naturally met with ill-will. But besides that which is unavoidably self-regarding in such a relation of parties, room is open for views of a more general feature, of a more generous complexion. John Bull scowls at Sawney, and makes mouths at his oatmeal diet, with lips to which the memory of his own roast-beef cleaves. The last-mentioned dish is not altogether unknown north of the Tweed. But John Bull knows not the unimaginable fact, or knew it not, for the barrier is now widely broken down. Sawney has humour enough to be amused by the writhing apprehension of dry and lean fare which deforms the well-fed and jocund face of the bacon-bolter.

There is in the description and Amabæan lament of the two gaunt and shivering young Arcadians, and in the cave of the tutelary Goddess, Famine, the intention at least of the picturesque and poetical. The fault is, that the thing has no bringing out or completeness. It is incomposite—as a plan, unintelligible. Are the dramatis personæ, Sawney, Jockey, and the Goddess, with Sawney's love, the whole population of Scotland? Do the two lads, and their sheep, and Famine, occupy the same sole cave which is all the houses in Scotland? Is it a comprehensive Allegory under the guise of a pastoral Idyl? A ground is laid; and it is easy to conceive that a Hogarth in verse, with his stored eye, and that hand mimic and creative, which, by some unmistaken touch of nature, sets upon capricious extravagance the known seal of truth, might have finished a picture which experience itself would have half-believed in spite of its conviction, that never had there been such an hungered race. But such a Hogarth in verse was not Churchill. Upon the ground laid, a Satire might have been made out by such a genius, exaggerated, witty, poetical—pleasing even to the posterity of the victims. But instead of crowded ideas, here are but three or four. This writing does, in fact, not express the national prejudices of South Britain against North Britain. It expresses the zeal of party and of a partizan. One can hardly conceive such an ignorance of Scotland in England, as that a man of ability wishing to traduce and ridicule the country, should sit down contented under such a paucity of mischievous information. He writes under one simple rule—negation. To deny food, to deny clothes, to deny houses, to deny sunshine, grass, rivers even, requires no mental effort of any kind, and is the part of a dunce and an ignoramus. For any thing positive, the Scotch are proud, have high cheekbones, and love brimstone and rebellion. That is the amount of the picture. Famine consoles the two hungry lads who mourn over the Fifteen and the Forty-five, with prophesying the invasion and conquest of England by the Bute Administration—a glorious hope, a national redress, and a private filling of empty purses and stomachs. Churchill was himself poverty-stricken in mind, during the composition of this blunder, to a degree that never befell any true poet.

An Englishman of this day must be puzzled to bring back the time when Scotland was so completely a terra incognita to her sister, as that this rude and unlearned caricature could pass. Indeed, he hardly understands the hate—he to whom prose and verse, from one great hand, and poetry profusedly scattered like flowers all over the soil from another, have made hallowed the land of romance, and of dreams more beautiful than romance, and for whom the words, "Caledonia, stern and wild," mean any thing but repulsion. But one must remember, that poetry was at the time at a low ebb, almost stagnant in England, and that any thing that looked like an image was aprodigy. If Gray and Collins now and then struck the lyre, they stood apart from the prevailing prosaic and common-place tone of the times. An Englishman of to-day knows the name of Home by one of the most popular tragedies on his stage, if not one of the most vigorous, yet amongst modern dramas, one of the most affecting; and he wonders when that name is introduced by Churchill for the purpose of aggravating the contempt of Scotland, represented as a region Bœotian in wit, quite as much as by its atmosphere. He understands by what attraction Collins addressed to Home his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." Political hatred, the dislike, the indignation, which may have been widely enough diffused through the nation, at the interloping of Scotchmen in the high places of power and emolument—this was the sentiment in the national bosom which gave a meaning to the poem, and found it a reception. Such a sentiment is not scrupulous or critical—it is passionate merely—and asks not the happinesses of humour, wit, fancy, of the graphical and the characteristic. It asks bitter animosity, and vile vituperation, and is satisfied.

The individuality of a nation is curiously made up. The country which they inhabit makes a part of it, the most easily understood. Their manners, customs, and institutions make another part of it, much of which is outward, picturesque, and easily seen. Their history, that which they have done, and that which they have endured, makes a part. And lastly, that which runs through all, rises out of all, animates all, their proper personality, their intellectual and moral character, makes a part—and now you have the whole. We demand of the writer who will, in earnest, paint the people, that he shall know all these things extensively, variously, profoundly. And of the Satirist, who will hold up the nation to dislike and to laughter, that he too shall show he knows them, their defects and their deformities, their crimes and their customs, their sins and their sorrows, their sufferings and their absurdities, their monstrosities and their misfortunes, God's curse or of their own consciences, that may have stricken their country and their condition, and starved the paupers in body and in soul. Such chastisement might be terrible, and not undeserved. But to inflict it, was far beyond the power of poor Charles Churchill.

"Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's enchanting stream,
Where all the little Loves and Graces dream:
Where, slowly winding, the dull waters creep,
And seem themselves to own the power of sleep;
Where on the surface lead, like feathers, swims;
There let me bathe my yet unhallow'd limbs,
As once a Syrian bathed in Jordan's flood;
Wash off my native stains, correct that blood
Which mutinies at call of English pride,
And, deaf to prudence, rolls a patriot tide."

Ay, much the better would he have been of a dip in the Tweed. He was a big, burly fellow; but, though no great swimmer, he would have found it buoyant after a debauch. His native stains, washed off, would, alas! have sadly discoloured the Angler's Delight. Worse than a hundred Sheep-washings. But at one gleam of the showery bow, the waters would have resumed their lustre. He was the last man in the world who ought to have abused brimstone; for his soul had the Itch. A wallow in the sweet mould—the pure mire of Cardronna Mains—on a dropping day, would have been of service to his body, bloated with foul blood. Smeared with that sanative soil, he might have been born again—no more a leper.

"I remember well," says Dr Kippis, "that he dressed his younger son [the son of his wife—not of the mistress for whom he abandoned her] in a Scottish plaid, like a little Highlander, and carried him every where in that garb. The boy being asked by a gentleman with whom I was in company, why he was clothed in such a manner, answered with great vivacity,—'Sir, my father hates the Scotch, and does it to plague them.'" For a father to dress up his son in the garb of a people, despised and detested with perpetual scunner, seems an odd demonstration either of party spite or of paternal fondness—about as sensible as, on the anniversary of his birth-day, in compliment to his mother, to have dressed him up like a monkey.

The Patriot Satirist! The question inevitably obtrudes itself—what is the pointing of destiny, which singles out Churchill for the indignant protector, in verse, of England's freedom and welfare? What calls his hand into the van of battle, with the strong lance of justice laid in rest, to tilt against the ill-defended breast of poor, proud, hungry, jacobinical, place-loving, coin-attached and coin-attaching, muse-left, gibbet-favoured, tartan-clad, sulphur-scented, and thistle-growing Scotland? The hero of liberty, the self-offered martyr for the rights and the wrongs of a great people, should carry on his front, one might suppose, some evidence of the over-mastering spirit which, like a necessity, finds him out, and throws him, as if a lot-drawn champion, alone into the jaws and jeopardy of the war. It should be one, of whom, if you knew him yet obscure, you might divine and say, "This is his hour—his is the mind that consecrates its possessor to a consecrated cause, that discriminates, essentially as the spirits of light as divided from the spirits of darkness, the lover of his country from the factious partizan, and from the seditious demagogue." There should be a private life and character that but repeat themselves in the public ones, on a bolder and gigantic scale. Else how ready does the apprehension rise, that the professed hostility to unjust men in power is no more than the reluctance of an ill-disciplined spirit, under the offence and constraint of institutions which set superiors over his head, and gall him by bridling an unruly will;—whilst the clamorous zeal for the general good is purely the choice of the staking gamester between red and black, and the preference of the million-headed patron to the cheapener with a few heads or with one. The two known traits, which largely comprehend the private life of Churchill, do not prepossess one in his favour. He left his profession, the church; and he exchanged his wife, after many years' cohabitation, for a mistress; two paramount desecrations unhappily met. And the trumpet-call to the war-field of patriotism sings but uncheeringly, when the blast is winded by the breath of Wilkes.

When the shame of England burns in the heart of Cowper, you must believe him; for through that heart rolled the best of England's blood. But Churchill! Faugh!

Edinburgh: Printed Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.

---

Footnotes:

[1] Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A. Composed chiefly of his Letters. By C. R. Leslie, R.A. Second Edition. Longmans.

[2] Even there we see that he viewed the matter as a task, and piqued himself only on having succeeded in a tour-de-force. Writing to Archdeacon Fisher, he says—"It was the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had on my easel. I have not flinched at the windows, buttresses, &c.; but I have still kept to my grand organ, colour, and have as usual made my escape in the evanescence of chiaroscuro."—(P. 109.)

[3] "I cannot but recall here a passage in a letter to Mr Fisher, written by Constable nearly ten years before his death, in which, after speaking of having removed his family to Hampstead, he says, 'I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my everlasting rest!'"

[4] One of the greatest and most memorable of the Turkish princes was Mahmood the Ghaznavide, who reigned in the eastern provinces of Persia, A.D. 997-1028. His father, Sebactagi, arose from the condition of a slave to the command of the city and province of Ghazna. In the fall of the dynasty of the Sammanides, the fortune of Mahmood was confirmed. For him the title of sultan (signifying lord and master) was first invented, and his kingdom was enlarged from Transoxiana to the neighbourhood of Ispahan, from the shores of the Caspian to the mouth of the Indus. The prowess and magnificence of Mahmood, his twelve expeditions into Hindostan, and the holy wars he waged against the idol-worship of that country, in one of which he destroyed an image of peculiar sanctity at Diu or Du in Guzerat, and carried off the gates of Somnauth, (so recently, once more, become a trophy of triumph and defeat,) the vast treasures amassed in his campaigns, and the extent and greatness of the Ghaznavide empire, have always been favourite subjects with Eastern historians. The instance of his justice recorded in the verses, is given by Gibbon, from whose history this note is chiefly taken.

Ghazna, from being the emporium of India, and the metropolis of a vast dominion, had almost shrunk from the eye of the geographer, until, under the modified appellation of Ghizni, it again emerged into importance in our Affghan war. A curious crowd of associations is suggested by the fact, that the town which gave its name to a dynasty that shook the successors of Mahomet on their thrones, now confers the dignity of Baron on a native of one of the obscurest villages in Ireland—Lord Keane of Ghizni, and of Cappoquin in the county of Waterford.

[5] Kaff of late years is considered to have been more a creation of Eastern mythology, than a genuine incontestable mountain. Its position is supposed to be at the highest point of the great Hindoo-Kosh range. Such was its astonishing altitude, that, says D'Herbelot, "vous trouvez souvent dans leurs anciens livres, pour exprimer le lever du soleil, cette façon de parler, aussitôt que cet astre parût sur la cime du Mont Cáf, le monde fut éclairé de sa lumière: de même pour comprendre toute l'etendue de la terre et de l'eau, ils disent Depuis Cáf à Cáf—c'est à dire, d'une de ses extremités à l'autre."

[6] The name of Sind, Attok, or Indus, is applied indifferently to the mighty stream that forms the western boundary of Hindostan.

[7] The tribes of savage warriors inhabiting the Kipchak, or table-land of Tartary, have been distinguished by the name of the Golden Hordes. There is a magnificent lyric on their Battle-charge, by Dr Croly, in the Friendship's Offering for 1834.

[8] Essays on Natural History, chiefly Ornithology. By Charles Waterton, Esq., author of "Wanderings in South America." Second Series; with a continuation of the Autobiography of the Author.

[9] "'I do hereby disclaim, disavow, and solemnly abjure any intention to subvert the present Church Establishment within this realm,' &c. In framing that abominable oath, I don't believe that Sir Robert Peel cared one fig's-end whether the soul of a Catholic went up, after death, to the King of Brightness or descended to the King of Brimstone. His only aim seems to have been to secure to the Church by law established the full possession of the loaves and fishes."—Essays, 1st series, p. 19.

[10] A long-protracted lawsuit between this artist and Prince Giustiniani has since attracted much public notice. On cleaning a painting apparently of little value, which he had purchased at a sale of the refuse of the prince's gallery, Signor Vallati detected traces of a superior production beneath that painted over it, on removing which, the long-lost duplicate of Correggio's Reading Magdalen was brought to light. A claim was now set up by Prince Giustiniani for the restitution of the picture, or payment of its full value:—but the cause, after being carried from one tribunal to another, was at last decided in favour of the right of Vallati to his prize.

[11] A close analogy, according to this system, existed between pigs and humming-birds—each representing the gliriform type in their respective circles, and resembling each other in their small eyes and suctorial propensities!—See Swainson's Classification of Birds in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, i. 43.

[12]

"Mopso Nisa datur. Quid non speremus amantes?
Jungentur jam gryphes equis."
Virgil, Eclog. viii. 26.

[13] A Popular and Practical Introduction to Law Studies, &c. &c. By Samuel Warren, Esq., F.R.S., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law.

[14] P. 71.

[15] The following extract from a memoir of Lord Wynford, written evidently by a lawyer, manifests, in rather an amusing manner, the esprit de corps of the profession, and shows how the excitement of the contest between the advocates effaces the dull interest of what are called the merits of the case. Note how combative, how military, is the style:—"He (Lord Wynford) was a dangerous, because he was a most watchful and enterprising adversary. You could not any more sleep in his neighbourhood than could the Duke while Massena was near, though he might, in the neighbourhood of others, enjoy some repose. But if you never could be sure of his not making some venturous move himself, and were thus kept on the watch, so also you could not venture upon moves in the hope of his eyes being closed. It may almost safely be pronounced that he never failed to see or to profit by the slip of his adversary; to say that he never, seldom, made slips himself, would be very wide of the truth. In fact, he was not always a safe leader. Circumspect enough to see when his antagonist failed, he took a very narrow, or very one-sided, view of his own risks. Bold to rashness, hasty in his resolutions, quick in all his thoughts and all his movements, he was often in dangers wholly needless to be encountered; and though he would occasionally, by desperate courses, escape beyond all calculation from risks, both inevitable and of his own seeking, he could not be called a successful advocate."—Article on Lord Wynford, No. III., Law Review.

[16] Correspondence between Count Münster and the Baron von Stein, in vol. ii. of the Lebensbilder aus dem Befreiungskriege, Jena: 1841.

Letters of Baron Stein to Baron Gagern, in Von Gagern's Antheil an der Politik, vol. iv. Stuttgart and Tübingen: 1833.

[17] Besides the correspondence of Münster and Gagern, which refer only to the latter part of Stein's life, from 1811 to his death, we have only a notice in the Conversations Lexikon, and a short biographical sketch by Arndt, (the Baron's secretary,) appended to his Erinnerungen, (Leipsig, 1840,) to guide us in the early part of Stein's career. There are some notices in the body of Arndt's Reminiscences, in Varnhagen's Memoirs, and in some others, none of which, however, go further back than the year 1811.

[18] In Prag halten sich die stärksten Mächte und Autriche zum Hassen gegen Napoleon Zugammengehäuft.—Varnhagen von Ense, iii. 195, first edition.

[19] "Donnerschwangere Fulgurationer."—Hormayr, in the Lebensbilder, i. 63.

[20] Scharnhorst, Count Dohna, and President von Schoen, mentioned by Stein in a previous letter not translated.

[21] Essai sur les Fictions.