Tuckerman's Characteristics of Literature is briefly noticed in the London Athenæum, as a "series of suggestive papers," whose "criticisms are for the most part sound and moderate, but exhibiting no great extent of reading, nor any profound and subtle appreciation of literary beauty. Sometimes they remind us of Channing—of whose style Mr. Tuckerman is evidently an admirer; but they lack his clearness of thought and brilliancy of color, his intensity of conviction, and continual reference to fixed canons and principles." The Athenæum is systematically cold to American writers; nor does it do justice to Mr. Tuckerman in its criticism; yet it is right in tracing the influence of Channing both in his style and turn of thought. No one who was conversant with that "old man eloquent" in the latter years of his life could escape all tincture of the love of moral beauty which was the master principle of his nature. His contagious influence is seen in the harmonic proportions, the clearness of expression, the equilibrium of thought, and, we may add, the sensitive timidity of opinion which mark the writings of his unconscious disciple almost as decidedly as they did his own.—Dr. Ungewitter's Europe, Past, and Present, is spoken of in the same journal in terms of lukewarm approval.
The Copyright Question, so far as the English courts of law is concerned, stands thus.—The Court of Exchequer is at variance with the Court of Queen's Bench:—and the case on which the next decision will be made, is that of Murray v. Bohn with respect to the copyright of certain works of Washington Irving. Mr. Routledge, against whom Mr. Murray had brought the law to bear, has surrendered, and admitted that he has injured the plaintiff to the extent of two thousand pounds. Mr. Bohn, however, stands out; and the point which he has now to prove in an English court of law is, priority of publication of Mr. Irving's works in America. Plaintiff and defendant have each, we are informed, sent a special commissioner over to America on the subject.
The death of Mr. Gibbon, one of the most munificent patrons of modern British art, is announced. In the genre school he has the credit of having called into existence some of the best efforts of many young artists of celebrity, by whom his liberality and protection will be gratefully remembered. To that and landscape pictures he principally confined himself as a collector, having little sympathy, so far as collection is a test, with the historical school of painting.
At Clifton, on Friday the 1st of August, died the patriarch of English authoresses—we might add of English authors—Miss Harriet Lee, at the age of ninety-five. To most of the generation now busied with fiction, drama, and poetry, this announcement will be a surprise: so long protracted was Miss Lee's life, and so many years have elapsed since her last appearance in the world of imaginative creation took place. To readers of our time, Miss Lee is best known as having in her "German's Tale" of the "Canterbury Tales" (a miscellany of little romances by herself and her sister), furnished Lord Byron with the plot of his play of "Werner." More old-fashioned novel readers, who are given to weary at the philanthropy, philosophy, and preaching which threaten to turn our thousand and one tales into something more like "Evening Services" than "Arabian Nights," will find in her vigor and clearness of invention a merit which of itself deserves to keep the name of the novelist alive. Miss Lee's further title to mortuary honors is a play, or plays, acted with small success—and which has, or have, gone the way of Hannah More's triumphant "Percy," and Madame d'Arblay's withdrawn tragedy. Harriet Lee survived her sister Sophia twenty-seven years: Sophia having died at Clifton, in 1824.——In London on the 4th died Lady Louisa Stuart—aged nearly ninety-four—the youngest daughter of the Minister, Earl of Bute, and the grand-daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montague—the lady to whom we owe the charming "Introductory Anecdotes," prefixed to the late Lord Wharncliffe's edition of Lady Mary's Works. Lady Louisa remembered to have seen her grandmother, Lady Mary—when at old Wortley's death that celebrated woman returned to London after her long and still unexplained exile from England. Lady Louisa herself was a charming letter-writer; and her correspondence with Sir Walter Scott will, it is said, fully sustain the Wortley reputation for wit, and beauty of style, while it will exhibit a poet in a very different character from that in which another poet figures in his celebrated correspondence with her grandmother, Lady Mary. Some of Scott's letters to Lady Louisa are included in Mr. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter.
A pert English traveler, of a class which has shared too largely in the hospitalities of facile Americans, gives an amusing caricature of a New York Literary Soiree, to which he had by some chance gained admittance:—"I went to stay at a Mr. S.'s country house, about six miles out town, and was there introduced to his father, who has one of the best collections of pictures in New York. They were kind enough to take me to a literary réunion given by one Miss ——, an American authoress of some note, who always opens her house on that evening, and to point out to me many of the notabilities in the New York world of letters. Many of them were real 'lions,' and not a few only wore the skin. The latter classes made themselves undesignedly very amusing, and were mostly little men, who had published and circulated a novel or two largely among their friends, which in their own opinions entitled them to turn down their shirt collars, allow their hair and beards to grow at random, and to assume the appearance of men in whom mind had become so predominant over body, as to render the latter quite a minor consideration. They did not open their lips all the evening, but were to be seen in pensive attitudes with their arms leaning on chimney pieces, and looking pleasantly at vacancy, or seated on solitary ottomans, contemplating the company with a sort of cynical stare. They wished, in fact, to be considered as living in an atmosphere of dreams, and nobody offered to disturb them. Mr. N. P. Willis, to whom I was introduced, afforded a very pleasant contrast to these little lions, and laughed and talked on many subjects like an ordinary being. Miss ——, too, has nothing of the pedant, and very little of the professed 'blue' about her, and wound up the amusements of the evening by gracefully leading off in a polka. During the evening a 'hush' was circulated all round the room, and on inquiry I found that a Herr something, very like Puddlewitz, 'was going to play his thoughts,' and forthwith a foreign gentleman with as much hair as one face could conveniently carry, sat down at the piano. From the nature of the music, I should say that Puddlewitz's thoughts were of a remarkably mild and sentimental nature, and not at all in keeping with his ferocious aspect. After the polka the little lions began to rouse themselves and dispel the mental web which their thoughts had been working round them for the last two or three hours, and we all gradually dispersed."