Downing Street. (Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. 3.) By Thomas Carlyle. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co. New York: Harper & Brothers.
We do not see as these pamphlets decrease in impudence and raciness as the author proceeds; they are among the most exhilarating of contemporary publications, and however mad in parts, are calculated to give a sharp shock to English dogmatism, if they do not succeed in ameliorating English institutions. In “Downing Street” Carlyle makes an assault on the executive department of the English government. The attack has more reason in it than the substitute proposed for the present system. In speaking of the inadequacy of Parliamentary government to obtain the best men for rulers, he refers to Robert Burns, the noblest soul of his time in England, and yet one for whom the government could find no fitter employment than to gauge ale. “And so,” remarks Carlyle, “like Apollo taken for a Neatherd, and perhaps for none of the best on the Admetus establishment, this new Norse Thor had to put up with what was going; to gauge ale, and be thankful, pouring his celestial sun-light through Scottish song-writing—the narrowest chink ever offered to a thunder-god before! And the measure Pitt, and his Dundasses and red-tape phantasms (growing very ghastly now to think of) did not in the least know or understand—the impious, god-forgetting mortals—that Heroic Intellects, if Heaven were pleased to send such, were the one salvation for the world, and for them, and all of us. No; ‘they had done very well without’ such; did not see the use of such; ‘went along very well’ without such; well presided over by singular Heroic Intellect called George the Third; and the Thunder-god, as was rather fit for him, departed early, still in the noon of life, somewhat weary of gauging ale!”
King René’s Daughter: a Danish Lyrical Drama. By Henrik Hertz. Translated by Theodore Martin. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. 1 vol. 16mo.
This drama cannot boast any remarkable imaginative power, but it is still a most exquisite creation, conceived in the spirit of the finest human sympathy, and purifying the mind which it seemingly enters merely to please. We trust that the American, as well as the English public will, in the translator’s words, have the taste to “appreciate a drama which owes its effect solely to the simplicity of its structure, the ideal beauty of its central character, and the atmosphere of poetry and old romance by which it is pervaded.” Iolanthe, the character thus indicated, has a clear and vital sweetness at the heart of her being, which wins every reader’s affection. The genius of the author may be likened to the nightingale in his own lyric —
The eagle we tell
By his sweep full well,
As proudly afar in the clouds he soars,
And the nightingale,