"Henry Barton," said she to herself, "is a good creature, as ever was born; and he has great merit, too, in cultivating his mind so sedulously, surrounded as he is only by the clodpoles his father has brought him up amongst. But, after all, he is such a mere matter-of-fact-man, that one soon tires of him—he tells one an anecdote just as he reads it, and there's an end of it. And then he moralizes, too, in such a common-place way, and wonders how the Romans could degenerate so as to suffer themselves to be conquered by the Goths, and finds out that it was an abominable thing in Henry VIII to cut off his wives' heads, and not much better in Queen Elizabeth to sign Essex's death warrant. There is no play of imagination about him—no whim, no wit—he would as soon think of launching a man of war, as maintaining a paradox."
The subjoined sentiment is beautifully expressed:
"Ah, is there any happiness like that of the affections! from the soul-absorbing influence of individual love, through all the endearing gradations of natural ties, and selected friends, down to the generalized claims of our fellow-creatures: it will ever be found that all our real enjoyments are solid only as the feelings of the heart are connected with them; and long after the traces of external objects may be effaced from the memory, the kindly sentiments and participated feelings, with which they may have been connected, remain indelible in the interior recesses of the breast, which they fill with a sweet indistinctness of recollected enjoyment."
And how much truth in Catherine's criticism of Byron:
"I cannot feel the beauties of any poetry whatsoever," said Catherine, "when I think the poet has no feeling himself—I have admired many passages in Lord Byron's earlier works, even to enthusiasm; but when I came to his most unfeeling mockery of the agonizing sympathies he had raised in his description of a storm, by the odious levity with which he concludes it, I closed the book, and never read another page of his writing. I thought of it ever after as of those monstrosities in painting, of beautiful heads, and cloven feet, and it inspired me with the same disgust."
North American Review, No. LXXXVIII: July 1835.—The last number of this periodical contains several admirable articles. We subjoin a list of its contents:
Art. I. A Tour on the Prairies, by the author of the Sketch Book.—II. The American Almanac for the year 1835.—III. Memoirs of Casanova.—IV. Machiavelli.—V. Life and Character of William Roscoe.—VI. Mrs. Butler's Journal.—VII. Dunlap's History of the Arts.—VIII. Slavery; an Appeal in favor of that Class of Americans called Africans, by Mrs. Child.—IX. Audubon's Biography of Birds.-X. Webster's Speeches.
The first article is a noble eulogy on the genius of Washington Irving, well according with the merits of the writer, and the honest pride which every American feels in the possession of such a luminary in our native literature. Great as has been the praise lavished upon his works, we feel with the reviewer that full justice has not as yet been accorded them—and it is with pleasure we perceive that the world at large is becoming more alive to his merits. The following rapid glance at the various triumphs of his genius, will be read with a general concurrence in its truth:
"Compare him," says the reviewer, "with any of the distinguished writers of his class of this generation, excepting Sir Walter Scott, and with almost any of what are called the English classics of any age. Compare him with Goldsmith, one of the canonized names of the British pantheon of letters, who touched every kind of writing, and adorned every kind that he touched. In one or two departments, it is true, that of poetry and the drama—departments which Mr. Irving has not attempted, and in which much of Goldsmith's merit lies—the comparison partly fails; but place their pretensions, in every other respect, side by side. Who would think of giving the miscellaneous writings of Goldsmith a preference over those of Irving, and who would name his historical compositions with the Life of Columbus? If in the drama and in poetry Goldsmith should seemed to have extended his province greatly beyond that of Irving, the Life of Columbus is a chef d'oeuvre in a department which Goldsmith can scarcely be said to have touched; for the trifles on Grecian and Roman history, which his poverty extorted from him, deserve to enter into comparison with Mr. Irving's great work, about as much as Eutropius deserves to be compared with Livy. Then how much wider Irving's range in that department, common to both the painting of manners and character! From Mr. Irving we have the humors of cotemporary politics and every-day life in America—the traditionary peculiarities of the Dutch founders of New York—the nicest shades of the school of English manners of the last century—the chivalry of the middle ages in Spain—the glittering visions of Moorish romance—a large cycle of sentimental creations, founded on the invariable experience—the pathetic sameness of the human heart—and lastly, the whole unhackneyed freshness of the West—life beyond the border—a camp outside the frontier—a hunt on buffalo ground, beyond which neither white nor Pawnee, man nor muse, can go. This is Mr. Irving's range, and in every part of it he is equally at home. When he writes the history of Columbus, you see him weighing doubtful facts in the scales of a golden criticism. You behold him, laden with the manuscript treasures of well-searched archives, and disposing the heterogeneous materials into a well-digested and instructive narration. Take down another of his volumes, and you find him in the parlor of an English country inn, of a rainy day, and you look out of the window with him upon the dripping, dreary desolation of the back yard. Anon he takes you into the ancestral hall of a baronet of the old school, and instructs you in the family traditions, of which the memorials adorn the walls, and depend from the rafters. Before you are wearied with the curious lore, you are in pursuit of Kidd, the pirate, in the recesses of Long Island; and by the next touch of the enchanter's wand, you are rapt into an enthusiastic reverie of the mystic East, within the crumbling walls of the Alhambra. You sigh to think you were not born six hundred years ago, that you could not have beheld those now deserted halls, as they once blazed in triumph, and rang with the mingled voices of oriental chivalry and song,—when you find yourself once more borne across the Atlantic, whirled into the western wilderness, with a prairie wide as the ocean before you, and a dusky herd of buffaloes, like the crowded convoy of fleeing merchantmen, looming in the horizon, and inviting you to the chase. This is literally nullum fere genus scribendi non tigit nullum quod titigit non ornviit. Whether anything like an equal range is to be found in the works of him on whom the splendid compliment was first bestowed, it is not difficult to say."