And thou hast bound me with thy spell,
And stolen all my heart.
Horace.
LITERARY NOTICES.
Curiosities of Literature, and the Literary Character Illustrated. By I. C. D’Israeli, Esq., D. C. L., F. S. A. With Curiosities of American Literature. By Rufus W. Griswold. Complete in one volume. New-York: D. Appleton and Company, Broadway.
The ensuing remarks refer rather to the Supplement to D’Israeli’s ‘Curiosities of Literature,’ edited by Rev. Rufus W. Griswold, than to the well-known work to which it adds its attractions. It is an excellent collection of the many odd and quaint and foolish and good things which our forefathers ‘did and performed.’ Mr. Griswold has spiced his work with a variety, though he has done it more judiciously than a splenetic author whom he introduces in his work, who, in a vexatious mood at some severe criticisms on a former book, puts a dozen or more rows of interrogation and exclamation-points, commas, semicolons, etc., and tells his readers ‘they may pepper and salt it as they please.’ Mr. Griswold well understands the history of American literature; and we venture to say there is no man in the country who knows the names and contents of so many American books as he. This knowledge he has found of great service to him, enabling him to lay his hand at once on those things most worthy of preservation. If he had understood the linking process a little better, it would perhaps have added to the interest of his work. A sort of running commentary would have given greater vivacity to the numerous extracts. The way isolated specimens of an author are introduced affects very much the impression they make. But Mr. Griswold has succeeded well in gathering up the ravelled ends of our early literature; and the present edition of D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature will be the only one for the future in the American market. The most ‘curious’ part of our literary history is embraced in the revolution, with the short period preceding and following it. The British and Tories furnished endless themes to the pasquinader and ballad-maker, while the grave rights involved in the struggle called forth the efforts of more serious and thoughtful pens. The Puritans of New-England wrote most; and there is a union of the soundest sense with the most childish folly, the strongest character with the weakest prejudices in our good Yankee forefathers, that is quite incomprehensible. Like the Puritans of England in the time of Cromwell, when called into the hall of debate to discuss the rights of man, or into the field to battle for them, he were a bold man who dare smile at them. Yet in their religious acts they were often bigoted, intolerant and puerile. The same incongruity is seen in their tastes. Men of deep poetical sentiment, they often murdered poetry for conscience sake. A man who could write a defence of the colonies with a pen that fairly glowed with the burning Saxon that fell from it, would not be shocked at all at the impropriety of the following epitaph on a tomb-stone:
‘Here lies Jonathan Auricular,
Who walked in the ways of God perpendicular.’
Mr. Griswold gives us a specimen of the versification of the 137th psalm, in the Bible; one of the sweetest lyrics ever written, beginning ‘By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion; we hanged our harps upon the willows,’ etc. This psalm, whose exquisite beauties are so well preserved in our common English version, was put into verse with the rest of the psalms, by our pious forefathers. To their credit we can say, however, that the authors of the first version declare that they ‘have attended to conscience rather than to elegance’ in completing their work. We cannot excuse President Dunster of Harvard College, so easily, who revised the edition and sent it forth with the advertisement that they had in it a ‘special eye both to the gravity of the phrase of sacred writ, and to the sweetness of the verse;’ especially when we find this same sweet psalm completely murdered by him. After stumbling along through two stanzas, he thus paraphrases. ‘They that led us into captivity,’ he says:
Required of us a song, and thus