3. Of Metaphors. Out of sixteen pages it is difficult to make a selection, but the following are striking:
"If not a prophet, torn by a secret burden, and uttering it in wild tumultuous strains,... he has found inspiration ... in the legends of other lands, whose native vein, in itself exquisite, has been highly cultivated and delicately cherished."
"Excelsion," we are told, "is one of those happy thoughts which seem to drop down, like fine days, from some serener region, or like moultings of the celestial dove, which meet instantly the ideal of all minds, and run on afterwards, and for ever, in the current of the human heart."
Does not this almost come up to Lord Castlereagh's famous metaphor? It certainly goes beyond Mr. Gilfillan's own praise of Longfellow, whose sentiment is described as "never false, nor strained, nor mawkish. It is always mild,... and sometimes it approaches the sublime." Mr. G. goes one step farther.
W. W.
Northamptonshire.
Sir Walter Raleigh.—I find the following remonstrance in defence of this distinguished man, against the imputation of Hume, in a letter addressed by Dr. Parr to Charles Butler:
"Why do you follow Hume in representing Raleigh as an infidel? For Heaven's sake, dear Sir, look to his preface to his History of the World; look at his Letters, in a little 18mo., and here, but here only, you will find a tract [entitled The Sceptic], which led Hume to talk of Raleigh as an unbeliever. It is an epitome of the principles of the old sceptics; and to me, who, like Dr. Clarke and Mr. Hume, am a reader of Sextus Empiricus, it is very intelligible. Indeed, Mr. Butler, it is a most ingenious performance. But mark me well: it is a mere lusus ingenii."
Mr. Butler appends this note:
"Mr. Fox assured the Reminiscent, that either he, or Mrs. Fox to him, had read aloud the whole, with a small exception, of Sir Walter Raleigh's History."—Butler's Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 232.
Balliolensis.