By fierce collision from the flint and steel;
Or mark with shining letters Kunkel’s name
In the pale phosphor’s self-consuming flame.
So the chaste heart of some enchanted maid
Shines with insidious light, by love betray’d;
Round her pale bosom plays the young desire,
And slow she wastes by self-consuming fire.”
These poems, produced in that dreary time for English poetry which elapsed between the disappearance of Cowper and Burns and the advent of Scott and Byron, had, in spite of their glaring absurdities, no lack of warm admirers. Miss Seward, in her Life of Dr. Darwin, published in 1804, sets no limits to her admiration:—“We are presented,” she says, “with an highly imaginative and splendidly descriptive poem, whose successive pictures alternately possess the sublimity of Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of Titian; whose landscapes have, at times, the strength of Salvator, and at others the softness of Claude; whose numbers are of stately grace, and artful harmony; while its allusions to ancient and modern history and fable, and its interspersion of recent and extraordinary anecdotes, render it extremely entertaining. * * * Each part is enriched by a number of philosophical notes. They state a great variety of theories and experiments in Botany, Chemistry, Electricity, Mechanics, and in the various species of Air, salubrious, noxious, and deadly,” &c.]
THE SCOTTISH “POLITICAL MARTYRS”.
[Thomas Muir, the younger, of Hunter’s Hill, a promising young advocate of the Scottish Bar, and of nigh respectability, was tried at Edinburgh, 30th and 31st of August, 1793, before Lord Justice Clerk (Braxfield), Lords Henderland, Swinton, Dunsinnan, and Abercromby, for Sedition. The weightiest charge against him was that of “lending” a copy of Paine’s Rights of Man to a person who begged a reading of that popular book. He was found guilty, and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. On the 17th of the ensuing month, the Rev. Thos. Fyshe Palmer, a Unitarian Minister of Dundee, and an ex-fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, was tried at Perth for publishing a seditious Address, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. On their arrival at Woolwich, in a revenue cutter, they were put on board separate hulks, and assisted at the common labour on the banks of the river. Muir, soon after his arrival in New South Wales, effected his escape, in an American vessel, to South America, whence he proceeded to Spain. During this voyage, in an action with a British frigate, he received a wound in the head, from which he recovered; but on his arrival at his destination, he was imprisoned by the Spanish authorities, until, on the application of M. de Talleyrand in the name of the then government of France, he obtained his release. He then went to France, and died at Bourdeaux [or Chantilly] in 1799; aged 33. Palmer served out his seven years, but died on the homeward voyage.