“A Lecture on German Literature,” by George H. Calvert, of Baltimore, is a pregnant outline of a great deal that is inestimable in the literary store houses of probably the most enlightened nation (if we set aside politics) on earth.
We welcome No. IV. of “Readings with my Pencil,” from a practised pen, and full, cultivated mind.
The article headed “Verbal Criticism,” is of a sort which all the repositories and guardians of Literature ought oftener to contain: brief reprehensions of too prevalent errors in language; interspersed with curious philological remarks.
The somewhat long essay on “Social Elevation” has much that is praiseworthy, neatness (sometimes force) of style, and in the main, great justness of thought. Its aim is, to expose and rebuke those two ruling passions of our countrymen, the love of money, and the love of political preferment. It justly and forcibly shews how these obstruct our progress in knowledge, virtue, liberty, and happiness, by merging all enlarged patriotism in the most narrowly selfish considerations. Bent on wealth, half our people forget their country's weal, in contemplating the increase of their private hoards. Bent on rising in the State (as it is called,) or on ministering to those who do wish to rise, the other half sacrifice their country to their party, or to its leaders. God speed the Essayist in the wide, the universal dissemination of the views on this subject!
After all, the “Critical Notices” of the Editor have afforded us by no means the least pleasure. They are acute, just, and pungent. There is one thing we particularly like in the criticisms of the Messenger. While it displays a becoming pride in whatever excellences our country and its literature possesses, it does not hold itself bound, like many of our journalists, to applaud every thing that is American, and to admit the justice of no animadversions upon us and ours, from foreign tongues or pens. Thus, in an article on Mr. Cooper's “Sketches of Switzerland,” it joins him in a just fillip to our national vanity, which has made us believe for many years past, that “the name of an American is a passport all over Europe,” a boast which Mr. C. says is refuted by many mortifying tokens wherever an American travels in Germany, France, Switzerland, or Italy. In a review of Mrs. Trollope's Paris and the Parisians, the Messenger again justly rebukes the same American weakness, by averring (what we have always upheld) that her book upon the “Domestic Manners” of America had many more truths than our self love would let us acknowledge. “We have no patience,” says the Messenger, “with that atrabilious set of hyper-patriots, who find fault with Mrs. T.'s flumflummery about the good people of the Union. The work appeared to us an unusually well written performance in which, upon a basis of downright and positive truth, was erected, after the fashion of a porcelain pagoda, a very brilliant, although a very brittle fabric of mingled banter, philosophy and spleen.”... “We do not hesitate to say, that she ridiculed our innumerable moral, physical, and social absurdities with equal impartiality, true humor and discrimination; and that the old joke about her Domestic manners of the Americans being nothing more than the Manners of the American Domestics, is, like most other very good jokes, excessively untrue.” Of all people on earth, it might be supposed that we, rational American freemen, would be most ready to bear with unpalatable truths told us of ourselves, and to profit by the admonitions those truths involve: that we would most willingly pray
“O would some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!
It would frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.”
But instead of doing so, we wince, swear, and call names, at the slightest hint from a foreigner that our country and all belonging to it, are not the very beau ideal of perfection. It must be thus, if we would make those advances towards perfection which the true patriot covets for his country. Pope's precept applies no less to nations than to individuals—
“Trust not yourself; but your defects to know,
Make use of every friend, and every foe.”
“Paulding's Washington,” “Anthon's Sallust,” “Walsh's Didactics,” “Mellen's Poems,” and Lieutenant Slidell's “Spain Revisited,” (all native American works) are reviewed in a manner at once kind, just, and interesting.
The Number contains a good deal of original Poetry; the merits of which we must consign to the judgment of those who have more pretensions to taste in poetry than we have.