We will not forestall the reader’s interest, by attempting a sketch of our author’s plot. Let it be sufficient to state that the story appears to be evolved of necessity from the agency of the actors in it, the natural result of their characters and the actions to which such characters must lead; not a tissue of ingeniously contrived plots and counterplots, into which a certain amount of sham humanity has been thrust, to give the whole a life-like air. This is a dramatic excellence, rare since the Elizabethan era, which even the glorious creations of Scott do not possess. Whoever has read “Guy Mannering,” and afterward seen its miserable dramatized counterfeit, will be able to appreciate our meaning, and to understand how sadly the works of the greatest modern novelist stand the dramatic test. After witnessing such an experiment, there will be no difficulty in recognizing the immeasurable distance between Shakspeare and Scott.
Saint Leger’s adventures are not completed at the close of the volume, and from the concluding words, we should judge the author intended a continuation of his story. We shall anxiously await the appearance of another volume; meanwhile we heartily commend this to the studious attention of our readers.
Lectures and Essays. By Henry Giles. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 2 vols. 12mo.
Mr. Giles, as a lecturer, is celebrated all over the country, and few public speakers equal him in the power of thrilling a popular audience. The present volumes prove that his influence as an orator has not been purchased at the expense of purity of style or accuracy of thought, and that as a writer he presents equally strong claims to consideration and regard. The subjects of the work run into various departments of thought and information, and they all evince meditation and study. The lecture on Falstaff, one of the best papers in the volume, exhibits the author’s philosophical discrimination, as well as his forgetive fancy and overflowing humor. The essays on Crabbe and Ebenezer Elliott are two grand expositions of individual genius, and at the same time indicate a knowledge of the condition of England’s poorer classes, and an intense sympathy with their character and sufferings, which prompt many a passage of searching and pathetic eloquence. The two lectures on Byron are hardly equaled by any other criticisms of his genius, in respect to the balance preserved between sympathy with his misfortunes and indignation at his satanic levities and caprices. Goldsmith, in another paper, is represented with a sunny warmth, and sweetness of style, which carries his image directly to the reader’s heart. Carlyle, Savage, Chatterton, and Dermody, are the subjects of the remaining articles on persons, and each is analyzed with much sympathetic acuteness.
The subjects of the other essays are The Spirit of Irish History, Ireland and the Irish, True Manhood, Patriotism, The Worth of Liberty, The Pulpit, Music, and Economies. In these Mr. Giles’s genius is admirably displayed in its peculiar sphere of action, that of great ideas and universal sentiments. He is, in many important respects, an excellent critic and expositor of men, but he is most eloquent when he commits himself daringly to a sentiment, ignores its practical limitations, and glows and gladdens in the vision of its ideal possibilities and real essence. Here he stirs the deeper fountains of the heart, makes our minds kindle and our aspirations leap to his words, and bears us willingly along on his own rushing stream of feeling. Here all his powers of fancy, humor, imagination, pathos and language, are thoroughly impassioned, and act with a vital energy directly upon the will. The communion with a mind so thoroughly alive cannot be otherwise than inspiring; and to the younger portion of readers, especially, who are finely sensitive to the heroic in conduct, and the grand in sentiment, we would commend these beautiful and quickening orations, glowing, as they are, with the loftiest moral principles, and leading, as they do, to Christian manliness of thought and conduct.
In reading the present volumes, the image of the orator instinctively starts up before the imagination, as he appears in the desk, flooding the lecture-room with his tones, and evoking tears or laughter from an audience whose sympathies he has mastered. Every note in his glorious voice, from its sweet, low, distinct undertone, to the high, shrill, piercing scream of its impassioned utterance, rings through the brain the moment the listener becomes a reader. The volumes have a sure, appreciating and extensive public, even if their circulation be confined to lecture audiences; but they are certain of a wider influence.
Montaigne’s Essays.
It is natural to inquire how often a book which has pleased us much has been the object of admiration to those who preceded us in our journey through life—a road on which a book is a “friend which never changes.” We could not help having this feeling, as we looked at a very recent edition of Montaigne’s Essays, (Philad’a. J. W. Moore, 1849,) and began to rummage up our recollections and invoke the aid of our Lowndes and Quérard—supposing that we might do a small service to the inquirer into such matters, by showing him how often the public taste of other countries had called for editions of our favorite classic—for such he is, in French as well as English.