Book I

. p. 46.)—Such is the text: and Mr. Shelley’s writings are a splendid commentary on one half of it. Considered in this point of view, his career may not be uninstructive even to those whom it most offended; and might be held up as a beacon and warning no less to the bigot than the sciolist. We wish to speak of the errors of a man of genius with tenderness. His nature was kind, and his sentiments noble; but in him the rage of free inquiry and private judgment amounted to a species of madness. Whatever was new, untried, unheard of, unauthorized, exerted a kind of fascination over his mind. The examples of the world, the opinion of others, instead of acting as a check upon him, served but to impel him forward with double velocity in his wild and hazardous career. Spurning the world of realities, he rushed into the world of nonentities and contingencies, like air into a _vacuum_. If a thing was old and established, this was with him a certain proof of its having no solid foundation to rest upon: if it was new, it was good and right. Every paradox was to him a self-evident truth; every prejudice an undoubted absurdity. The weight of authority, the sanction of ages, the common consent of mankind, were vouchers only for ignorance, error, and imposture. Whatever shocked the feelings of others, conciliated his regard; whatever was light, extravagant, and vain, was to him a proportionable relief from the dulness and stupidity of established opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet, jostle,—and confirm one another. The infirmities of age are a foil to the presumption of youth; and ‘there the antics sit,’ mocking one another—the ape Sophistry pointing with reckless scorn at ‘palsied eld,’ and the bed-rid hag. Legitimacy, rattling her chains, counting her beads, dipping her hands in blood, and blessing herself from all change and from every appeal to common sense and reason! Opinion thus alternates in a round of contradictions: the impatience or obstinacy of the human mind takes part with, and flies off to one or other of the two extremes ‘of affection’ and leaves a horrid gap, a blank sense and feeling in the middle, which seems never likely to be filled up, without a total change in our mode of proceeding. The martello-towers with which we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and oppression should not be castles in the air, or clouds in the verge of the horizon, but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have arisen out of their continuance. The principles of sound morality, liberty and humanity, are not to be found only in a few recent writers, who have discovered the secret of the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers, but are truths as old as the creation. To be convinced of the existence of wrong, we should read history rather than poetry: the levers with which we must work out our regeneration are not the cobwebs of the brain, but the warm, palpitating fibres of the human heart. It is the collision of passions and interests, the petulance of party-spirit, and the perversities of self-will and self-opinion that have been the great obstacles to social improvement—not stupidity or ignorance; and the caricaturing one side of the question and shocking the most pardonable prejudices on the other, is not the way to allay heats or produce unanimity. By flying to the extremes of scepticism, we make others shrink back, and shut themselves up in the strongholds of bigotry and superstition—by mixing up doubtful or offensive matters with salutary and demonstrable truths, we bring the whole into question, fly-blow the cause, risk the principle, and give a handle and a pretext to the enemy to treat all philosophy and all reform as a compost of crude, chaotic, and monstrous absurdities. We thus arm the virtues as well as the vices of the community against us; we trifle with their understandings, and exasperate their self-love; we give to superstition and injustice all their old security and sanctity, as if they were the only alternatives of impiety and profligacy, and league the natural with the selfish prejudices of mankind in hostile array against us. To this consummation, it must be confessed that too many of Mr. Shelley’s productions pointedly tend. He makes no account of the opinions of others, or the consequences of any of his own; but proceeds—tasking his reason to the utmost to account for every thing, and discarding every thing as mystery and error for which he cannot account by an effort of mere intelligence—measuring man, providence, nature, and even his own heart, by the limits of the understanding—now hallowing high mysteries, now desecrating pure sentiments, according as they fall in with or exceeded those limits; and exalting and purifying, with Promethean heat, whatever he does not confound and debase.

Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and ‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! To this band of immortals a third has since been added!—a mightier genius, a haughtier spirit, whose stubborn impatience and Achilles-like pride only Death could quell. Greece, Italy, the world, have lost their poet-hero; and his death has spread a wider gloom, and been recorded with a deeper awe, than has waited on the obsequies of any of the many great who have died in our remembrance. Even detraction has been silent at his tomb; and the more generous of his enemies have fallen into the rank of his mourners. But he set like the sun in his glory; and his orb was greatest and brightest at the last; for his memory is now consecrated no less by freedom than genius. He probably fell a martyr to his zeal against tyrants. He attached himself to the cause of Greece, and dying, clung to it with a convulsive grasp, and has thus gained a niche in her history; for whatever _she_ claims as hers is immortal, even in decay, as the marble sculptures on the columns of her fallen temples!

The volume before us is introduced by an imperfect but touching Preface by Mrs. Shelley, and consists almost wholly of original pieces, with the exception of _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_, which was out of print; and the admirable Translation of the _May-day Night_, from Goethe’s Faustus.

_Julian and Maddalo_ (the first Poem in the collection) is a Conversation or Tale, full of that thoughtful and romantic humanity, but rendered perplexing and unattractive by that veil of shadowy or of glittering obscurity, which distinguished Mr. Shelley’s writings. The depth and tenderness of his feelings seems often to have interfered with the expression of them, as the sight becomes blind with tears. A dull, waterish vapour, clouds the aspect of his philosophical poetry, like that mysterious gloom which he has himself described as hanging over the Medusa’s Head of Leonardo da Vinci. The metre of this poem, too, will not be pleasing to every body. It is in the antique taste of the rhyming parts of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson—blank verse in its freedom and unbroken flow, falling into rhymes that appear altogether accidental—very colloquial in the diction—and sometimes sufficiently prosaic. But it is easier showing than describing it. We give the introductory passage.

‘I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this: an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; and yet more Than all, with a remember’d friend I love To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening North; And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonising with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aerial merriment. So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, lingered not, But flew from brain to brain,—such glee was ours, Charged with light memories of remembered hours, None slow enough for sadness: till we came Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.’ &c. ‘Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight O’er the horizon of the mountains—Oh! How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers Of cities they encircle!—It was ours To stand on thee, beholding it: and then, Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men Were waiting for us with the gondola. As those who pause on some delightful way, Tho’ bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood, Looking upon the evening and the flood, Which lay between the city and the shore, Paved with the image of the sky; the hoar And aery Alps, towards the North, appeared, Thro’ mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared Between the east and west; and half the sky Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry, Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep west into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent Among the many-folded hills—they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peaked isles— And then, as if the earth and sea had been Dissolv’d into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,” Said my companion, “I will show you soon A better station.” So, o’er the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven. I was about to speak, when—“We are even Now at the point I meant”—said Maddalo, And bade the gondolieri cease to row. “Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.” I looked, and saw between us and the sun A building on an island, such an one As age to age might add, for uses vile— A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile; And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung, We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue: The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled In strong and black relief. “What you behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,”— Said Maddalo, “and even at this hour, Those who may cross the water hear that bell, Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, To vespers,” &c.

‘The broad star Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill; And the black bell became invisible; And the red tower looked grey; and all between, The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen Huddled in gloom. Into the purple sea The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola Conveyed me to my lodging by the way.’

The march of these lines is, it must be confessed, slow, solemn, sad: there is a sluggishness of feeling, a dearth of imagery, an unpleasant glare of lurid light. It appears to us, that in some poets, as well as in some painters, the organ of colour (to speak in the language of the adepts) predominates over that of form; and Mr. Shelley is of the number. We have everywhere a profusion of dazzling hues, of glancing splendours, of floating shadows, but the objects on which they fall are bare, indistinct, and wild. There is something in the preceding extract that reminds us of the arid style and matter of Crabbe’s versification, or that apes the labour and throes of parturition of Wordsworth’s blank verse. It is the preface to a story of Love and Madness—of mental anguish and philosophic remedies—not very intelligibly told, and left with most of its mysteries unexplained, in the true spirit of the modern metaphysical style—in which we suspect there is a due mixture of affectation and meagreness of invention.

This poem is, however, in Mr. Shelley’s best and _least mannered_ manner. If it has less brilliancy, it has less extravagance and confusion. It is in his stanza-poetry, that his Muse chiefly runs riot, and baffles all pursuit of common comprehension or critical acumen. The _Witch of Atlas_, the _Triumph of Life_, and _Marianne’s Dream_, are rhapsodies or allegories of this description; full of fancy and of fire, with glowing allusions and wild machinery, but which it is difficult to read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions, and of which, after reading them through, it is impossible, in most instances, to guess the drift or the moral. They abound in horrible imaginings, like records of a ghastly dream;—life, death, genius, beauty, victory, earth, air, ocean, the trophies of the past, the shadows of the world to come, are huddled together in a strange and hurried dance of words, and all that appears clear, is the passion and paroxysm of thought of the poet’s spirit. The poem entitled the _Triumph of Life_, is in fact a new and terrific _Dance of Death_; but it is thus Mr. Shelley transposes the appellations of the commonest things, and subsists only in the violence of contrast. How little this poem is deserving of its title, how worthy it is of its author, what an example of the waste of power, and of genius ‘made as flax,’ and devoured by its own elementary ardours, let the reader judge from the concluding stanzas.

... ‘The grove Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers, The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air Was peopled with dim forms; as when there hovers

A flock of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, Strange night upon some Indian vale;—thus were

Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves, Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

Were lost in the white day; others like elves Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

And others sate chattering shrill like restless apes On vulgar hands, * * * * * Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

Of kingly mantles; some across the tire Of pontiffs rode, like demons; others played Under the crown which girded with empire

A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made Their nests in it. The old anatomies Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes To reassume the delegated power, Array’d in which those worms did monarchize,

Who make this earth their charnel. Others more Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist On evening marshes, thronged about the brow Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist;—

And others, like discoloured flakes of snow, On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair, Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

Which they extinguished * * * * *

The marble brow of youth was cleft With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone, Desire, even like a lioness bereft

Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

In autumn evening from a poplar tree. Each like himself, and like each other were At first; but some, distorted, seemed to be

Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air; And of this stuff the car’s creative ray Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,

As the sun shapes the clouds, &c.’

Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying soul. We cannot help preferring _The Witch of Atlas_ to _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_; for, though the purport of each is equally perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental voyage through the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other. In the ‘Witch,’ he has indulged his fancy more than his melancholy, and wantoned in the felicity of embryo and crude conceits even to excess.

‘And there lay Visions, swift, and sweet, and quaint, Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis; Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;

‘And odours in a kind of aviary Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept, Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept; As bats at the wired window of a dairy, They beat their vans; and each was an adept, When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds, To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.’ p. 34.

We give the description of the progress of the ‘Witch’s’ boat as a slight specimen of what we have said of Mr. Shelley’s involved style and imagery.

‘And down the streams which clove those mountains vast, Around their inland islets, and amid The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past: By many a star-surrounded pyramid Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky, And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

· · · · ·

‘And down the earth-quaking cataracts which shiver Their snow-like waters into golden air, Or under chasms unfathomable ever Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear A subterranean portal for the river, It fled—the circling _sunbows_ did upbear Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray, Lighting it far upon its lampless way.’

This we conceive to be the very height of wilful extravagance and mysticism. Indeed it is curious to remark every where the proneness to the marvellous and supernatural, in one who so resolutely set his face against every received mystery, and all traditional faith. Mr. Shelley must have possessed, in spite of all his obnoxious and indiscreet scepticism, a large share of credulity and wondering curiosity in his composition, which he reserved from common use, and bestowed upon his own inventions and picturesque caricatures. To every other species of imposture or disguise he was inexorable; and indeed it is only his antipathy to established creeds and legitimate crowns that ever tears the veil from his _ideal_ idolatries, and renders him clear and explicit. Indignation makes him pointed and intelligible enough, and breathes into his verse a spirit very different from his own boasted spirit of Love.

The _Letter to a Friend in London_ shows the author in a pleasing and familiar, but somewhat prosaic light; and his _Prince Athanase, a Fragment_, is, we suspect, intended as a portrait of the writer. It is amiable, thoughtful, and not much overcharged. We had designed to give an extract, but from the apparently personal and doubtful interest attached to it, perhaps it had better be read altogether, or not at all. We rather choose to quote a part of the _Ode to Naples_, during her brief revolution,—in which immediate and strong local feelings have at once raised and pointed Mr. Shelley’s style, and made of light-winged “toys of feathered cupid,” the flaming ministers of Wrath and Justice.

· · · · ·

‘Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven! Elysian City which to calm enchantest The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even As sleep round Love, are driven! Metropolis of a ruined Paradise Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

· · · · ·

‘What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme Freedom and thee! thy shield is as a mirror To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer. A new Acteon’s error Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds! Be thou like the imperial Basilisk Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! Gaze on oppression, till at that dead risk Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk, Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow, And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe; If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail, Thou shalt be great—All hail!

· · · · ·

‘Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence became music? From the Æean[18] To the cold Alps, eternal Italy Starts to hear thine! The Sea Which paves the desart streets of Venice, laughs In light and music; widowed Genoa wan By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs, Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan, Within whose veins long ran The vipers[19] palsying venom, lifts her heel To braise his head. The signal and the seal (If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail) Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

‘Florence! beneath the sun, Of cities fairest one, Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation; From eyes of quenchless hope Rome tears the priestly cope, As ruling once by power, so now by admiration An athlete stript to run From a remoter station For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:— As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, So now may Fraud and Wrong!—O hail!

‘Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms Arrayed against the everliving Gods? The crash and darkness of a thousand storms Bursting their inaccessible abodes Of crags and thunder-clouds? See ye the banners blazoned to the day, Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? Dissonant threats kill Silence far away, The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden, wide With iron light is dyed! The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions, Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating; An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions And lawless slaveries,—down the aërial regions Of the white Alps, desolating, Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, Trampling our columned cities into dust, Their dull and savage lust On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating— They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

‘Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move All things which live and are, within the Italian shore; Who spreadest heaven around it, Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it: Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor, Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison From the Earth’s bosom chill; O bid those beams be each a blinding brand Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison! Bid the Earth’s plenty kill! Bid thy bright heaven above, Whilst light and darkness bound it, Be their tomb who planned To make it ours and thine! Or with thine harmonising ardours fill And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire— Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire The instrument to work thy will divine! Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards, And frowns and fears from Thee Would not more swiftly flee Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine Thou yieldest or withholdest, O let be This city of thy worship ever free!’

This Ode for Liberty, though somewhat turbid and overloaded in the diction, we regard as a fair specimen of Mr. Shelley’s highest powers—whose eager animation wanted only a greater sternness and solidity to be sublime. The poem is dated _September 1820_. Such were then the author’s aspirations. He lived to see the result,—and yet Earth does not roll its billows over the heads of its oppressors! The reader may like to contrast with this the milder strain of the following stanzas, addressed to the same city in a softer and more desponding mood.

‘The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon’s transparent light Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

‘I see the Deep’s untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone, The lightning of the noon-tide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

‘Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

‘Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan; They might lament—for I am one Whom men love not,—and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.’

We pass on to some of Mr. Shelley’s smaller pieces and translations, which we think are in general excellent and highly interesting. His _Hymn of Pan_ we do not consider equal to Mr. Keats’s sounding lines in the Endymion. His _Mont Blanc_ is full of beauties and of defects; but it is akin to its subject, and presents a wild and gloomy desolation. GINEVRA, a fragment founded on a story in the first volume of the ‘_Florentine Observer_,’ is like a troublous dream, disjointed, painful, oppressive, or like a leaden cloud, from which the big tears fall, and the spirit of the poet mutters deep-toned thunder. We are too much subject to these voluntary inflictions, these ‘moods of mind,’ these effusions of ‘weakness and melancholy,’ in the perusal of modern poetry. It has shuffled off, no doubt, its old pedantry and formality; but has at the same time lost all shape or purpose, except that of giving vent to some morbid feeling of the moment. The writer thus discharges a fit of the spleen or a paradox, and expects the world to admire and be satisfied. We are no longer annoyed at seeing the luxuriant growth of nature and fancy clipped into armchairs and peacocks’ tails; but there is danger of having its stately products choked with unchecked underwood, or weighed down with gloomy nightshade, or eaten up with personality, like ivy clinging round and eating into the sturdy oak! The _Dirge_, at the conclusion of this fragment, is an example of the manner in which this craving after novelty, this desire ‘to elevate and surprise,’ leads us to ‘overstep the modesty of nature,’ and the bounds of decorum.

‘Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d _The rats in her heart Will have made their nest_, And the worms be alive in her golden hair, While the spirit that guides the sun, Sits throned in his flaming chair, She shall sleep.’

The ‘worms’ in this stanza are the old and traditional appendages of the grave;—the ‘rats’ are new and unwelcome intruders; but a modern artist would rather shock, and be disgusting and extravagant, than produce no effect at all, or be charged with a want of genius and originality. In the unfinished scenes of Charles I., (a drama on which Mr. Shelley was employed at his death) the _radical_ humour of the author breaks forth, but ‘in good set terms’ and specious oratory. We regret that his premature fate has intercepted this addition to our historical drama. From the fragments before us, we are not sure that it would be fair to give any specimen.

The TRANSLATIONS from Euripides, Calderon, and Goethe in this Volume, will give great pleasure to the scholar and to the general reader. They are executed with equal fidelity and spirit. If the present publication contained only the two last pieces in it, the _Prologue in Heaven_, and the _May-day Night_ of the Faust (the first of which Lord Leveson Gower has omitted, and the last abridged, in his very meritorious translation of that Poem), the intellectual world would receive it with an _All Hail!_ We shall enrich our pages with a part of the _May-day Night_, which the Noble Poet has deemed untranslateable.

‘_Chorus of Witches._ The stubble is yellow, the corn is green, Now to the brocken the witches go; The mighty multitude here may be seen Gathering, witch and wizard, below. Sir Urean is sitting aloft in the air; Hey over stock; and hey over stone! ’Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done? Tell it who dare! tell it who dare!

_A Voice._ Upon a snow-swine, whose farrows were nine, Old Baubo rideth alone.

_Chorus._ Honour her to whom honour is due, Old mother Baubo, honour to you! An able sow, with old Baubo upon her, Is worthy of glory, and worthy of honour! The legion of witches is coming behind, Darkening the night, and outspeeding the wind.

_A Voice._ Which way comest thou?

_A Voice._ Over Ilsenstein; The owl was awake in the white moonshine; I saw her at rest in her downy nest, And she stared at me with her broad, bright eye.

_Voices._ And you may now as well take your course on to Hell, Since you ride by so fast, on the headlong blast.

_A Voice._ She dropt poison upon me as I past. Here are the wounds—

_Chorus of Witches._ Come away! come along! The way is wide, the way is long, But what is that for a Bedlam throng? Stick with the prong, and scratch with the broom! The child in the cradle lies strangled at home, And the mother is clapping her hands—

_Semi-Chorus of Wizards I._ We glide in Like snails when the women are all away; And from a house once given over to sin Woman has a thousand steps to stray.

_Semi-Chorus II._ A thousand steps must a woman take, Where a man but a single spring will make.

_Voices above._ Come with us, come with us, from Felunsee.

_Voices below._ With what joy would we fly, through the upper sky! We are washed, we are ’nointed, stark naked are we: But our toil and our pain is forever in vain.

_Both Chorusses._ The wind is still, the stars are fled, The melancholy moon is dead; The magic notes, like spark on spark, Drizzle, whistling through the dark. Come away!

_Voices below._ Stay, oh stay!

_Meph._ What thronging, dashing, raging, rustling; What whispering, babbling, hissing, bustling; What glimmering, spurting, stinking, burning, As Heaven and Earth were overturning. There is a true witch-element about us. Take hold on me, or we shall be divided— Where are you?

_Faust (from a distance)._ Here.

_Meph._ What! I must exert my authority in the house. Place for young Voland! Pray make way, good people. Take hold on me, Doctor, and with one step Let us escape from this unpleasant crowd: They are too mad for people of my sort. I see young witches naked there, and old ones Wisely attired with greater decency. Be guided now by me, and you shall buy A pound of pleasure with a drachm of trouble. I hear them tune their instruments—one must Get used to this damned scraping. Come, I’ll lead you Among them; and what there you do and see As a fresh compact ’twixt us two shall be. How say you now? This space is wide enough— Look forth, you cannot see the end of it— An hundred bonfires burn in rows, and they Who throng around them seem innumerable: Dancing and drinking, jabbering, making love, And cooking are at work. Now tell me, friend, What is there better in the world than this?

_Faust._ In introducing us, do you assume The character of wizzard or of devil?

_Meph._ In truth, I generally go about In strict incognito: and yet one likes To wear one’s orders upon gala days. I have no ribbon at my knee; but here At home, the cloven foot is honourable. See you that snail there?—she comes creeping up, And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something. I could not, if I would, mask myself here. Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire: I’ll be the pimp and you shall be the lover.’ p. 409.

The preternatural imagery in all this medley is, we confess, (comparatively speaking) meagre and monotonous; but there is a squalid nudity, and a fiendish irony and scorn thrown over the whole, that is truly edifying. The scene presently after proceeds thus.

‘_Meph._ Why do you let that fair girl pass from you, Who sung so sweetly to you in the dance?

_Faust._ A red mouse in the middle of her singing Sprung from her mouth!

_Meph._ That was all right, my friend; Be it enough that the mouse was not grey. Do not disturb your hour of happiness With close consideration of such trifles.

_Faust._ Then saw I—

_Meph._ What?

_Faust._ Seest thou not a pale Fair girl, standing alone, far, far away? She drags herself now forward with slow steps, And seems as if she moved with shackled feet; I cannot overcome the thought that she Is like poor Margaret!

_Meph._ Let it be—pass on— No good can come of it—it is not well To meet it.—It is an enchanted phantom, A lifeless idol; with its numbing look It freezes up the blood of man; and they Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone, Like those who saw Medusa.

_Faust._ Oh, too true! Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse Which no beloved hand has closed, alas! That is the heart which Margaret yielded to me— Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

_Meph._ It is all magic, poor deluded fool; She looks to every one like his first love.

_Faust._ Oh, what delight! what woe! I cannot turn My looks from her sweet piteous countenance. How strangely does a single blood-red line, Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife, Adorn her lovely neck!

_Meph._ Aye, she can carry Her head under her arm upon occasion; Perseus has cut it off for her! These pleasures End in delusion!’—

The latter part of the foregoing scene is to be found in both translations; but we prefer Mr. Shelley’s, if not for its elegance, for its simplicity and force. Lord Leveson Gower has given, at the end of his volume, a translation of Lessing’s Faust, as having perhaps furnished the hint for the larger production. There is an old tragedy of our own, founded on the same tradition, by Marlowe, in which the author has treated the subject according to the spirit of poetry, and the learning of his age. He has not evaded the main incidents of the fable (it was not the fashion of the dramatists of his day), nor sunk the chief character in glosses and episodes (however subtle or alluring), but has described Faustus’s love of learning, his philosophic dreams and raptures, his religious horrors and melancholy fate, with appropriate gloom or gorgeousness of colouring. The character of the old enthusiastic inquirer after the philosopher’s stone, and dealer with the Devil, is nearly lost sight of in the German play: its bold development forms the chief beauty and strength of the old English one. We shall not, we hope, be accused of wandering too far from the subject, if we conclude with some account of it in the words of a contemporary writer. ‘The _Life and Death of Dr. Faustus_, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is Marlowe’s greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realize all the fictions of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstruse reason; and for this purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with “fate and metaphysical aid.” The idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once the dread of the vulgar, and the darling of the visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of, and aspire to, more than it can achieve by natural means; and in the obscure apprehension, that the gratification of this extravagant and unauthorized desire can only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes and better prospects, to the infernal agents that lend themselves to its accomplishment. Such is the foundation of the present story. Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once, and for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is done. He calls back time past, and anticipates the future: the visions of antiquity pass before him, Babylon in all its glory, Paris and Œnone: all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute at his feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure and of learning, are centred in his person; and, from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular, and the style halts and staggers under them.’[20]

LADY MORGAN’S LIFE OF SALVATOR

VOL. XL.] [_July 1824._

We are not among the devoted admirers of Lady Morgan. She is a clever and lively writer—but not very judicious, and not very natural. Since she has given up making novels, we do not think she has added much to her reputation—and indeed is rather more liable than before to the charge of tediousness and presumption. There is no want, however, either of amusement or instruction in her late performances—and we have no doubt she would write very agreeably, if she was only a little less ambitious of being always fine and striking. But though we are thus clear-sighted to her defects, we must say, that we have never seen anything more utterly unjust, or more disgusting and disgraceful, than the abuse she has had to encounter from some of our Tory journals—abuse, of which we shall say no more at present, than that it is incomparably less humiliating to the object than to the author.

Common justice seemed to require this observation from us—nor will it appear altogether out of place when we add, that we cannot but suspect that it is to a feeling connected with that subject that we are indebted for the work now before us. Salvator Rosa was, like his fair biographer, in hostility with the High-church and High-monarchy men of his day; and the enemy of the Holy Alliance, in the nineteenth century, must have followed with peculiar interest the fortunes of an artist who was so obnoxious to the suspicions of the Holy Office in the seventeenth.

There are few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men; and, among painters, there are few names of greater note, or that have a more powerful attraction, than that of Salvator Rosa. We are not sure, however, that Lady Morgan’s work is not, upon the whole, more calculated to dissolve than to rivet the spell which these circumstances might, at first, throw over the reader’s mind. The great charm of biography consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we have formerly known only by their works or names, the absence of all exaggeration or pretension, and the immediate appeal to facts instead of theories. We are afraid, that, if tried by these rules, Lady Morgan will be found _not_ to have written _biography_. A great part of the work is, accordingly, very fabulous and apocryphal. We are supplied with few anecdotes or striking _traits_, and have few _data_ to go upon, during the early and most anxious period of Salvator’s life; but a fine opportunity is in this way afforded to _conjecture_ how he did or did not pass his time; in what manner, and at what precise era, his peculiar talents first developed themselves; and how he must have felt in certain situations, supposing him ever to have been placed in them. In one place, for example, she employs several pages in describing Salvator’s being taken by his father from his village-home to the College of Somasco, with a detailed account of the garments in which he and his father may be presumed to have been dressed; the adieus of his mother and sisters; the streets, the churches by which they passed; in short, with an admirable panoramic view of the city of Naples and its environs, as it would appear to any modern traveller; and an assurance at the end, that ‘Such was the scenery of the Vomiro in the beginning of the seventeenth century; such is it now!’ Added to all which, we have, at every turn, pertinent allusions to celebrated persons who visited Rome and Italy in the same century, and perhaps wandered in the same solitudes, or were hid in the recesses of the same ruins; and learned dissertations on the state of the arts, sciences, morals, and politics, from the earliest records up to the present day. On the meagre thread of biography, in short, Lady Morgan has been ambitious to string the flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy, and to strew over the obscure and half-forgotten origin of poor Salvator the colours of a sanguine enthusiasm and a florid imagination! So fascinated indeed is she with the splendour of her own style, that whenever she has a simple fact or well-authenticated anecdote to relate, she is compelled to apologize for the homeliness of the circumstance, as if the flat realities of her story were unworthy accompaniments to the fine imaginations with which she has laboured to exalt it.

We could have wished, certainly, that she had shown less pretension in this respect. Women write well, only when they write naturally: And therefore we could dispense with their inditing prize-essays or solving _academic questions_;—and should be far better pleased with Lady Morgan if she would condescend to a more ordinary style, and not insist continually on playing the diplomatist in petticoats, and strutting the little Gibbon of her age!

Another circumstance that takes from the interest of the present work is, that the subject of it was both an author and an artist, or, as Lady Morgan somewhat affectedly expresses it, a painter-poet. It is chiefly in the latter part of this compound character, or as a satirist, comic writer and actor, that he comes upon the stage in these volumes; and the enchantment of the scene is hurt by it.

The great secret of our curiosity respecting the lives of painters is, that they seem to be a different race of beings, and to speak a different language from ourselves. We want to see what is the connecting link between pictures and books, and how colours will translate into words. There is something mystical and anomalous to our conceptions in the existence of persons who talk by natural signs, and express their thoughts by pointing to the objects they wish to represent. When they put pen to paper, it is as if a dumb person should stammer out his meaning for the first time, or as if the bark of a tree (repeating the miracle in Virgil) should open its lips and discourse. We have no notion how Titian could be witty, or Raphael learned; and we wait for the solution of the problem, as for the result of some curious experiment in natural history. Titian’s acquitting himself of a compliment to Charles V., or Raphael’s writing a letter to a friend, describing his idea of the Galatea, excites our wonder, and holds us in a state of breathless suspense, more than the first having painted all the masterpieces of the Escurial, or than the latter’s having realized the divine idea in his imagination. Because they have a language which we want, we fancy they must want, or cannot be at home in ours;—we start and blush to find, that, though few are painters, all men are, and naturally must be, orators and poets. We have a stronger desire to see the autographs of artists than of authors or emperors; for we somehow cannot imagine in what manner they would form their tottering letters, or sign their untaught names. We in fact exercise a sort of mental superiority and imaginary patronage over them (delightful in proportion as it is mixed up with a sense of awe and homage in other respects); watch their progress like that of grown children; are charmed with the imperfect glimmerings of wit or sense; and secretly expect to find them,—or express all the impertinence of an affected surprise if we do not—what Claude Lorraine is here represented to have been out of his painting room, little better than natural changelings and drivellers. It pleases us therefore to be told, that Gaspar Poussin, when he was not painting, rode a hunting; that Nicolas was (it is pretended) a miser and a pedant—that Domenichino was retired and modest, and Guido and Annibal Caracci unfortunate! This is as it should be, and flatters our self-love. Their works stand out to ages bold and palpable, and dazzle or inspire by their beauty and their brilliancy;—That is enough—the rest sinks into the ground of obscurity, or is only brought out as something odd and unaccountable by the patient efforts of good-natured curiosity. But all this fine theory and flutter of contradictory expectations is balked and knocked on the head at once, when, instead of a dim and shadowy figure in the back-ground, a mere name, of which nothing is remembered but its immortal works, a poor creature performing miracles of art, and not knowing how it has performed them, a person steps forward, bold, gay, _gaillard_, with all his faculties about him, master of a number of accomplishments which he is not backward to display, mingling with the throng, looking defiance around, able to answer for himself, acquainted with his own merits, and boasting of them, not merely having the gift of speech, but a celebrated _improvisatore_, musician, comic actor and buffoon, patriot and cynic, reciting and talking equally well, taking up his pen to write satires, and laying it down to paint them. There is a vulgarity in all this practical bustle and restless stage-effect, that takes away from that abstracted and simple idea of art which at once attracts and baffles curiosity, like a distinct element in nature. ‘Painting,’ said Michael Angelo, is jealous, and requires the whole man to herself.’ And there is some thing sacred and privileged in the character of those heirs of fame, and their noiseless reputation, which ought not, we think, to be gossipped to the air, babbled to the echo, or proclaimed by beat of drum at the corners of streets, like a procession or a puppet-show. We may peep and pry into the ordinary life of painters, but it will not do to strip them stark-naked. A speaking portrait of them—an anecdote or two—an expressive saying dropped by chance—an incident marking the bent of their genius, or its fate, are delicious; but here we should draw the curtain, or we shall profane this sort of image-worship. Least of all do we wish to be entertained with private brawls, or professional squabbles, or multifarious pretensions. ‘The essence of genius,’ as Lady Morgan observes, ‘is concentration.’ So is that of enthusiasm. We lay down the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ therefore, with less interest in the subject than when we took it up. We had rather not read it. Instead of the old and floating traditions on the subject,—instead of the romantic name and romantic pursuits of the daring copyist of Nature, conversing with her rudest forms, or lost in lonely musing,—eyeing the clouds that roll over his head, or listening to the waterfal, or seeing the fresh breeze waving the mountain-pines, or leaning against the side of an impending rock, or marking the bandit that issues from its clefts, ‘housing with wild men, with wild usages,’ himself unharmed and free,—and bequeathing the fruit of his uninterrupted retirement and out-of-doors studies as the best legacy to posterity,—we have the Coviello of the Carnival, the _causeur_ of the saloons, the political malecontent, the satirist, sophist, caricaturist, the trafficker with Jews, the wrangler with courts and academies, and, last of all, the painter of history, despising his own best works, and angry with all who admired or purchased them.

The worst fault that Lady Morgan has committed is in siding with this infirmity of poor Salvator, and pampering him into a second Michael Angelo. The truth is, that the judgment passed upon him by his contemporaries was right in this respect. He was a great landscape painter; but his histories were comparatively forced and abortive. If this had been merely the opinion of his enemies, it might have been attributed to envy and faction; but it was no less the deliberate sentiment of his friends and most enthusiastic partisans; and if we reflect on the nature of our artist’s genius or his temper, we shall find that it could not well have been otherwise. This from a child was wayward, indocile, wild and irregular, unshackled, impatient of restraint, and urged on equally by success or opposition into a state of jealous and morbid irritability. Those who are at war with others, are not at peace with themselves. It is the uneasiness, the turbulence, the acrimony within that recoils upon external objects. Barry abused the Academy, because he could not paint himself. If he could have painted up to his own _idea_ of perfection, he would have thought this better than exposing the ill-directed efforts or groundless pretensions of others. Salvator was rejected by the Academy of St. Luke, and excluded, in consequence of his hostility to reigning authorities, and his unlicensed freedom of speech, from the great works and public buildings in Rome; and though he scorned and ridiculed those by whose influence this was effected, yet neither the smiles of friends and fortune, nor the flatteries of fame, which in his lifetime had spread his name over Europe, and might be confidently expected to extend it to a future age, could console him for the loss, which he affected to despise, and would make no sacrifice to obtain. He was indeed hard to please. He denounced his rivals and maligners with bitterness; and with difficulty tolerated the enthusiasm of his disciples, or the services of his patrons. He was at all times full of indignation, with or without cause. He was easily exasperated, and not willing soon to be appeased, or to subside into repose and good humour again. He slighted what he did best; and seemed anxious to go out of himself. In a word, irritability rather than sensibility, was the category of his mind: he was more distinguished by violence and restlessness of will, than by dignity or power of thought. The truly great, on the contrary, are sufficient to themselves, and so far satisfied with the world. ‘Their mind to them is a kingdom,’ from which they look out, as from a high watchtower or noble fortress, on the passions, the cabals, the meannesses and follies of mankind. They shut themselves up ‘in measureless content;’ or soar to the great, discarding the little; and appeal from envious detraction or ‘unjust tribunals under change of times,’ to posterity. They are not satirists, cynics, nor the prey of these; but painters, poets, and philosophers.

Salvator was the victim of a too morbid sensibility, or of early difficulty and disappointment. He was always quarrelling with the world, and lay at the mercy of his own piques and resentments. But antipathy, the spirit of contradiction, captious discontent, fretful impatience, produce nothing fine in character, neither dwell on beauty, nor pursue truth, nor rise into sublimity. The splenetic humourist is not the painter of humanity. Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy. Our artist, escaping from the herd of knaves and fools, sought out some rude solitude, and found repose there. Teased by the impertinence, stung to the quick by the injustice of mankind, the presence of the works of nature would be a relief to his mind, and would, by contrast, stamp her striking features more strongly there. In the coolness, in the silence, in the untamed wildness of mountain scenery, in the lawless manners of its inhabitants, he would forget the fever and the anguish, and the artificial restraints of society. We accordingly do not find in Salvator’s rural scenes either natural beauty or fertility, or even the simply grand; but whatever seizes attention by presenting a barrier to the will, or scorning the power of mankind, or snapping asunder the chain that binds us to the kind—the barren, the abrupt, wild steril regions, the steep rock, the mountain torrent, the bandit’s cave, the hermit’s cell,—all these, while they released him from more harassing and painful reflections, soothed his moody spirit with congenial gloom, and found a sanctuary and a home there. Not only is there a corresponding determination and singleness of design in his landscapes (excluding every approach to softness, or pleasure, or ornament), but the strength of the impression is confirmed even by the very touch and mode of handling; he brings us in contact with the objects he paints; and the sharpness of a rock, the roughness of the bark of a tree, or the ruggedness of a mountain path are marked in the freedom, the boldness, and firmness of his pencilling. There is not in Salvator’s scenes the luxuriant beauty and divine harmony of Claude, nor the amplitude of Nicolas Poussin, nor the gorgeous richness of Titian—but there is a deeper seclusion, a more abrupt and total escape from society, more savage wildness and grotesqueness of form, a more earthy texture, a fresher atmosphere, and a more obstinate resistance to all the effeminate refinements of art. Salvator Rosa then is, beyond all question, the most _romantic_ of landscape painters; because the very violence and untractableness of his temper threw him with instinctive force upon those objects in nature which would be most likely to sooth and disarm it; while, in history, he is little else than a caricaturist (we mean compared with such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, &c.), because the same acrimony and impatience have made him fasten on those subjects and aspects of the human mind which would most irritate and increase it; and he has, in this department, produced chiefly distortion and deformity, sullenness and rage, extravagance, squalidness, and poverty of appearance. But it is time to break off this long and premature digression, into which our love of justice and of the arts (which requires, above all, that no more than justice should be done to any one) had led us, and return to the elegant but somewhat fanciful specimen of biography before us. Lady Morgan (in her flattery of the dead, the most ill-timed and unprofitable, but least disgusting of all flattery) has spoken of the historical compositions of Salvator in terms that leave no distinction between him and Michael Angelo; and we could not refrain from entering our protest against such an inference, and thus commencing our account of her book with what may appear at once a piece of churlish criticism and a want of gallantry.

The materials of the first volume, containing the account of Salvator’s outset in life, and early struggles with fortune and his art, are slender, but spun out at great length, and steeped in very brilliant dyes. The contents of the second volume, which relates to a period when he was before the public, was in habits of personal intimacy with his future biographers, and made frequent mention of himself in letters to his friends which are still preserved, are more copious and authentic, and on that account—however Lady Morgan may wonder at it—more interesting. Of the artist’s infant years, little is known, and little told; but that little is conveyed with all the ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious’ authorship. It is said, that the whole matter composing the universe might be compressed in a nutshell, taking away the porous interstices and flimsy appearances: So, we apprehend, that all that is really to be learnt of the subject of these Memoirs from the first volume of his life, might be contained in a single page of solid writing.

It appears that our artist was born in 1615, of poor parents, in the Borgo de Renella, near Naples. His father, Vito Antonio Rosa, was an architect and landsurveyor, and his mother’s name was Giulia Grecca, who had also two daughters. Salvator very soon lost his full baptismal name for the nickname of Salvatoriello, in consequence of his mischievous tricks and lively gesticulations when a boy, or, more probably, this was the common diminutive of it given to all children. He was intended by his parents for the church, but early showed a truant disposition, and a turn for music and drawing. He used to scrawl with burnt sticks on the walls of his bed-room, and contrived to be caught in the fact of sketching outlines on the chapel-walls of the Certosa, when some priests were going by to mass, for which he was severely whipped. He was then sent to school at the monastery of the _Somasco_ in Naples, where he remained for two years, and laid in a good stock of classical learning, of which he made great use in his after life, both in his poems and pictures. Salvator’s first knowledge of painting was imbibed in the workshop of Francesco Francanzani (a painter at that time of some note in Naples), who had married one of his sisters, and under whose eye he began his professional studies. Soon after this he is supposed to have made a tour through the mountains of the Abruzzi, and to have been detained a prisoner by the banditti there. On the death of his father, he endeavoured to maintain his family by sketches in landscape or history, which he sold to the brokers in Naples, and one of these (his _Hagar in the Wilderness_), was noticed and purchased by the celebrated Lanfranco, who was passing the broker’s shop in his carriage. Salvator finding it in vain to struggle any longer with chagrin and poverty in his native place, went to Rome, where he met with little encouragement, and fell sick, and once more returned to Naples. An accident, or rather the friendship of an old school-fellow, now introduced him into the suite of the Cardinal Brancaccia, and his picture of Prometheus brought him into general notice, and recalled him to Rome. About the same time, he appeared in the Carnival with prodigious _eclat_ as an _improvisatore_ and comic actor; and from this period may be dated the commencement of his public life as a painter, a satirist, and a man of general talents.

Except on these few tangible points the Manuscript yawns dreadfully; but Lady Morgan, whose wit or courage never flags, fills up the hollow spaces, and ‘skins and films the _missing_ part,’ with an endless and dazzling profusion of digressions, invectives, and hypotheses. It is with pleasure that we give a specimen of the way in which she thus magnifies trifles, and enlarges on the possibilities of her subject. Salvator was born in 1615. As the birth of princes is announced by the discharge of artillery and the exhibition of fireworks, her ladyship thinks proper to usher in the birth of her hero with the following explosion of imagery and declamation.

‘The sweeping semicircle which the most fantastic and singular city of Naples marks on the shore of its unrivalled bay, from the Capo di Pausilippo to the Torrione del Carmine, is dominated by a lofty chain of undulating hills, which take their distinctive appellations from some local peculiarity or classical tradition. The high and insulated rock of St. Elmo, which overtops the whole, is crowned by that terrible fortress to which it gives its name—a fearful and impregnable citadel, that, since the first moment when it was raised by an Austrian conqueror to the present day, when it is garrisoned by a Bourbon with Austrian troops, has poured down the thunder of its artillery to support the violence, or proclaim the triumphs of foreign interference over the rights and liberties of a long-suffering and oft-resisting people.

‘Swelling from the base of the savage St. Elmo, smile the lovely heights of _San Martino_, where, through chestnut woods and vineyards, gleam the golden spires of the monastic palace of the Monks of the Certosa.[21] A defile cut through the rocks of the _Monte Donzelle_, and shaded by the dark pines which spring from their crevices, forms an umbrageous pathway from this superb convent to the _Borgeo di Renella_, the little capital of a neighbouring hill, which, for the peculiar beauty of its position, and the views it commands, is still called “_l’ameno villaggio_.” At night the fires of Vesuvius almost bronze the humble edifices of Renella; and the morning sun, as it rises, discovers from various points, the hills of Vomiro and Pausilippo, the shores of Puzzuoli and of Baiæ, the islets of Nisiti, Capri, and Procida, till the view fades into the extreme verge of the horizon, where the waters of the Mediterranean seem to mingle with those clear skies whose tint and lustre they reflect.

‘In this true “_nido paterno_” of genius, there dwelt, in the year 1615, an humble and industrious artist called Vito Antonia Rosa—a name even then not unknown to the arts, though as yet more known than prosperous. Its actual possessor, the worthy Messire Antonio, had, up to this time, struggled with his good wife Giulia Grecca and two daughters still in childhood, to maintain the ancient respectability of his family. Antonio was an architect and landsurveyor of some note, but of little gains; and if, over the old architectural portico of the Casaccia of Renella might be read,

“_Vito Antonio Rosa, Agremensore ed Architecto_;”

the intimation was given in vain! Few passed through the decayed Borgo of Renella, and still fewer, in times so fearful, were able to profit by the talents and profession which the inscription advertised. The family of Rosa, inconsiderable as it was, partook of the pressure of the times; and the pretty Borgo, like its adjacent scenery, (no longer the haunt of Consular voluptuaries, neither frequented by the great nor visited by the curious) stood lonely and beautiful—unencumbered by those fantastic _belvideras_ and grotesque pavilions, which in modern times rather deform than beautify a site, for which Nature has done all, and Art can do nothing.

‘The cells of the Certosa, indeed, had their usual complement of lazy monks and “_Frati conversi_.” The fortress of St. Elmo, then as now, manned by Austrian troops, glittered with foreign pikes. The cross rose on every acclivity, and the sword guarded every pass: but the villages of Renella and San Martino, of the Vomiro and of Pausilippo, were thinned of their inhabitants to recruit foreign armies; and this earthly paradise was dreary as the desert, and silent as the tomb.

‘The Neapolitan barons, those restless but brave feudatories, whose resistance to their native despots preserved something of the ancient republican spirit of their Greek predecessors, now fled from the capital. They left its beautiful environs to Spanish viceroys, and to their official underlings; and sullenly shut themselves up in their domestic fortresses of the Abruzzi or of Calabria. “La Civiltà,” a class then including the whole of the middle and professional ranks of society of Naples, was struggling for a bare existence in the towns and cities. Beggared by taxation levied at the will of their despots, and collected with every aggravation of violence, its members lived under the perpetual _surveillance_ of foreign troops and domestic _sbirri_, whose suspicions their brooding discontents were well calculated to nourish.

‘The people—the debased, degraded people—had reached that maximum of suffering beyond which human endurance cannot go. They were famished in the midst of plenty, and, in regions the most genial and salubrious, were dying of diseases, the fearful attendants on want. Commerce was at a stand, agriculture was neglected, and the arts, under the perpetual dictatorship of a Spanish court-painter, had no favour but for the _Seguaci_ of Lo Spagnuoletto.

‘In such times of general distress and oppression, when few had the means or the spirit to build, and still fewer had lands to measure or property to transfer, it is little wonderful that the humble architect and landsurveyor of Renella,’ &c.

And so she gets down to the humble parentage of her hero; and after telling us that his father was chiefly anxious that he should _not_ be an artist, and that both parents resolved to dedicate him to religion, she proceeds to record, that he gave little heed to his future vocation, but manifested various signs of a disposition for all the fine arts. This occasioned considerable uneasiness and opposition on the part of those who had destined him to something very different; and ‘the cord of paternal authority, drawn to its extreme tension, was naturally snapped.’—And upon this her volatile pen again takes _its roving flight_.

‘The truant Salvatoriello fled from the restraints of an uncongenial home, from Albert Le Grand and Santa Caterina di Sienna, and took shelter among those sites and scenes whose imagery soon became a part of his own intellectual existence, and were received as impressions long before they were studied as subjects. Sometimes he was discovered by the _Padre Cercatore_ of the convent of Renella, among the rocks and caverns of Baiæ, the ruined temples of Gods, and the haunts of Sibyls. Sometimes he was found by a gossip of Madonna Giulia, in her pilgrimage to a “_maesta_,” sleeping among the wastes of the Solfatara, beneath the scorched branches of a blasted tree, his head pillowed by lava, and his dream most probably the vision of an infant poet’s slumbers. For even then he was

“the youngest he That sat in shadow of Apollo’s tree,”

seeing Nature with a poet’s eye, and sketching her beauties with a painter’s hand.’ p. 45.

Now this is well imagined and quaintly expressed; it pleases the fair writer, and should offend nobody else. But we cannot say quite so much of the note which is appended to it, and couched in the following terms.

‘Rosa drew his first impressions from the magnificent scenery of Pausilippo and Vesuvius; Hogarth found his in a pot-house at Highgate, where a drunken quarrel and a broken nose “first woke the God within him.” Both, however, reached the sublime in their respective vocations—Hogarth in the grotesque, and Salvator in the majestic!’

Really these critics who have crossed the Alps do take liberties with the rest of the world,—and do not recover from a certain giddiness ever after. In the eagerness of partisanship, the fair author here falsifies the class to which these two painters belonged. Hogarth did _not_ excel in the ‘grotesque,’ but in the ludicrous and natural,—nor Salvator in the ‘majestic,’ but in the wild and gloomy features of man or nature; and in talent Hogarth had the advantage—a million to one. It would not be too much to say, that he was probably the greatest observer of manners, and the greatest comic genius, that ever lived. We know no one, whether painter, poet, or prose-writer, not even Shakspeare, who, in his peculiar department, was so teeming with life and invention, so over-informed with matter, so ‘full to overflowing,’ as Hogarth was. We shall not attempt to calculate the quantity of pleasure and amusement his pictures have afforded, for it is quite incalculable. As to the distinction between ‘high and low’ in matters of genius, we shall leave it to her Ladyship’s other critics. But shall Hogarth’s world of truth and nature (his huge total farce of human life) be reduced to ‘a drunken quarrel and a broken nose?’ We will not retort this sneer by any insult to Salvator; he did not paint his pictures in opposition to Hogarth. There is an air about his landscapes sacred to our imaginations, though different from the close atmosphere of Hogarth’s scenes; and not the less so, because the latter could paint something better than ‘a broken nose.’ Nothing provokes us more than these exclusive and invidious comparisons, which seek to raise one man of genius by setting down another, and which suppose that there is nothing to admire in the greatest talents, unless they can be made a foil to bring out the weak points or nominal imperfections of some fancied rival.

We might transcribe, for the entertainment of the reader, the passage to which we have already referred, describing Salvator’s departure, in the company of his father, for the college of the _Congregazione Somasco_; but we prefer one which, though highly coloured and somewhat dramatic, is more to our purpose—the commencement of Salvator’s studies as an artist under his brother-in-law Francanzani. We cannot, however, do this at once: for, in endeavouring to lay our hands upon the passage, we were as usual intercepted by showers of roses and clouds of perfume. Lady Morgan’s style resembles ‘another morn risen on mid-noon.’ We must make a career therefore with the historian, and reach the temple of painting through the sounding portico of music. It appears that Salvator, after he left the brotherhood of the _Somasco_, with more poetry than logic in his head, devoted himself to music; and Lady Morgan preludes her narration with the following eloquent passage.

‘All Naples—(where even to this day love and melody make a part of the existence of the people)—all Naples was then resounding to guitars, lutes and harps, accompanying voices, which forever sang the fashionable _canzoni_ of Cambio Donato, and of the Prince di Venusa.[22] Neither German phlegm, nor Spanish gloom, could subdue spirits so tuned to harmony, nor silence the passionate _serenatas_ which floated along the shores, and reverberated among the classic grottoes of Pausilippo. Vesuvius blazed, St. Elmo thundered from its heights, conspiracy brooded in the caves of Baiæ, and tyranny tortured its victim in the dungeons of the Castello Nuovo; yet still the ardent Neapolitans, amidst all the horrors of their social and political _position_,[23] could snatch moments of blessed forgetfulness, and, reckless of their country’s woes and their own degradation, could give up hours to love and music, which were already numbered in the death-warrants of their tyrants.... It was at this moment, when peculiar circumstances were awakening in the region of the syrens “the hidden soul of harmony,” when the most beautiful women of the capital and the court gave a public exhibition of their talents and _their charms_, and glided in their feluccas on the moonlight midnight seas, with harps of gold and hands of snow, that the contumacious students of the _Padri Somaschi_ escaped from the restraints of their cloisters, and the horrid howl of their _laude spirituali_, to all the intoxication of sound and sight, with every sense in full accordance with the musical passion of the day. It is little wonderful, if, at this epoch of his life, Salvator gave himself up unresistingly to the pursuit of a science, which he cultivated with ardour, even when time had preached his tumultuous pulse to rest; or if the floating capital of genius, which was as yet unappropriated, was in part applied to that species of composition, which, in the youth of man as of nations, precedes deeper and more important studies, and for which, in either, there is but one age. All poetry and passion, his young Muse “dallied with the innocence of love;” and inspired strains, which, though the simple breathings of an ardent temperament, the exuberance of youthful excitement, and an overteeming sensibility, were assigning him a place among the first Italian lyrists of his age. Little did he then dream that posterity would apply the rigid rules of criticism to the “idle visions” of his boyish fancy; or that his bars and basses would be conned and analyzed by the learned umpires of future ages—declared “not only admirable for a _dilettante_, but, in point of melody, superior to that of most of the masters of his time.”[24]

* * * * *

‘It happened at this careless, gay, but not idle period of Salvator’s life, than an event occurred which hurried on his vocation to that art, to which his parents were so determined that he should _not_ addict himself, but to which Nature had so powerfully directed him. His probation of adolescence was passed: his hour was come; and he was about to approach that temple whose threshold he modestly and poetically declared himself unworthy to pass.

“Del immortalide al tempio augusto Dove serba la gloria e i suoi tesori.”

‘At one of the popular festivities annually celebrated at Naples in honour of the Madonna, the beauty of Rosa’s elder sister captivated the attention of a young painter, who, though through life unknown to “fortune,” was not even then “unknown to fame.” The celebrated and unfortunate Francesco Francanzani, the inamorata of La Signorina Rosa, was a distinguished pupil of the Spagnuoletto school; and his picture of San Giuseppe, for the Chiesa Pellegrini, had already established him as one of the first painters of his day. Francanzani, like most of the young Neapolitan painters of his time, was a turbulent and factious character, vain and self-opinionated; and, though there was in his works a certain grandeur of style, with great force and depth of colouring, yet the impatience of his disappointed ambition, and indignation at the neglect of his acknowledged merit, already rendered him reckless of public opinion.[25]

‘It was the peculiar vanity of the painters of that day to have beautiful wives. Albano had set the example’—[as if any example need be set, or the thing had been done in concert]—‘Domenichino followed it to his cost; Rubens turned it to the account of his profession; and Francanzani, still poor and struggling, married the portionless daughter of the most indigent artist in Naples, and thought perhaps more of the model than the wife. This union, and, still more, a certain sympathy in talent and character between the brothers-in-law, frequently carried Salvator to the _stanza_ or work-room of Francesco. Francesco, by some years the elder, was then deep in the faction and intrigues of the Neapolitan school; and was endowed with that bold eloquence, which, displayed upon bold occasions, is always so captivating to young auditors. It was at the foot of his kinsman’s easel, and listening to details which laid perhaps the foundation of that contemptuous opinion he cherished through life for schools, academies, and all incorporated pedantry and pretension,[26] that Salvator occasionally amused himself in copying, on any scrap of _board_ or paper which fell in his way, whatever pleased him in Francesco’s pictures. His long-latent genius thus accidentally awakened, resembled the _acqua buja_, whose cold and placid surface kindles like spirits on the contact of a spark. In these first, rude, and hasty sketches, Francanzani, as Passeri informs us, saw “_molti segni d’un indole spirituosa_” (great signs of talent and genius); and he frequently encouraged, and sometimes corrected, the copies _which so nearly approached the originals_. But Salvator, who was destined to imitate none, but to be imitated by many, soon grew impatient of repeating another’s conceptions, and of following in an art in which he already perhaps felt, with prophetic throes, that he was born to lead. His visits to the workshop of Francanzani grew less frequent; his days were given to the scenes of his infant wanderings; he departed with the dawn, laden with his portfolio filled with primed paper, and a pallet covered with oil colours; and it is said, that even then he not only sketched, but coloured from nature. When the pedantry of criticism (at the suggestion of envious rivals) accused him of having acquired, in his colouring, too much of the _impasting_ of the _Spagnuoletto_ school, it was not aware that his faults, like his beauties, were original; and that he sinned against the rules of art, only because he adhered too faithfully to nature.’—[Salvator’s flesh colour is as remarkably dingy and _Spagnuolettish_, as the tone of his landscapes is fresh and clear.]—‘Returning from these arduous but not profitless rambles, through wildernesses and along precipices, impervious to all save the enterprise of fearless genius, he sought shelter beneath his sister’s roof, where a kinder welcome awaited him than he could find in that home where it had been decreed from his birth that _he should not be a painter_.

‘Francanzani was wont, on the arrival of his brother-in-law, to rifle the contents of his portfolio; and he frequently found there compositions hastily thrown together, but selected, drawn, and coloured with a boldness and a breadth, which indicated the confidence of a genius sure of itself. The first accents of “the thrilling melody of sweet renown” which ever vibrated to the heart of Salvator, came to his ear on these occasions in the Neapolitan _patois_ of his relation, who, in glancing by lamp-light over his labours, would pat him smilingly on the head, and exclaim, “_Fruscia, fruscia, Salvatoriello—che va buono_,” (“Go on, go on, this is good”)—simple plaudits! but frequently remembered in after-times (when the dome of the Pantheon had already rung with the admiration extorted by his Regulus) as the first which cheered him in his arduous progress.’ p. 94.

The reader cannot fail to observe here how well every thing is made out: how agreeably every thing is assumed: how difficulties are smoothed over, little abruptnesses rounded off: how each circumstance falls into its place just as it should, and answers to a preconceived idea, like the march of a verse or the measure of a dance: and how completely that imaginary justice is everywhere done to the subject, which, according to Lord Bacon, gives poetry so decided an advantage over history! Yet this is one of our fair authoress’s most severe and literal passages. Her prose-Muse is furnished with wings; and the breeze of Fancy carries her off her feet from the plain ground of matter-of-fact, whether she will or no. Lady Morgan, in this part of her subject, takes occasion to animadvert on an opinion of Sir Joshua’s respecting our artist’s choice of a particular style of landscape painting.

‘_Salvator Rosa_,’ says Sir J. Reynolds, ‘_saw the necessity of trying some new source of pleasing the public in his works. The world were tired of Claude Lorraine’s and G. Poussin’s long train of imitators._’

‘_Salvator therefore struck into a wild, savage kind of nature, which was new and striking._’

‘The first of these paragraphs contains a strange anachronism. When Salvator _struck into a new line_, Poussin and Claude, who, though his elders, were his contemporaries, had as yet no train of imitators. The one was struggling for a livelihood in France, the other was cooking and grinding colours for his master at Rome. Salvator’s early attachment to Nature in her least imitated forms, was not the result of speculation having any reference to the public: it was the operation of original genius, and of those particular tendencies which seemed to be breathed into his soul at the moment it first quickened. From his cradle to his tomb he was the creature of impulse, and the slave of his own vehement volitions.’—_Note_, p. 97–8.

We think this is spirited and just. Sir Joshua, who borrowed from almost all his predecessors in art, was now and then a little too ready to detract from them. We dislike these attempts to explain away successful talent into a species of studied imposture—to attribute genius to a plot, originality to a trick. Burke, in like manner, accused Rousseau of the same kind of _malice prepense_ in bringing forward his paradoxes—as if he did it on a theory, or to astonish the public, and not to give vent to his peculiar humours and singularity of temperament.

We next meet with a poetical version of a picturesque tour undertaken by Salvator among the mountains of the Abruzzi, and of his detention by the banditti there. We have much fine writing on the subject; but after a world of charming theories and romantic conjectures, it is left quite doubtful whether this last event ever took place at all—at least we could wish there was some better confirmation of it than a vague rumour, and an etching by Salvator of a ‘_Youth taken captive by banditti, with a female figure pleading his cause_,’ which the historian at once identifies with the adventures of the artist himself, and ‘moralizes into a thousand similes.’ We are indemnified for the dearth of satisfactory evidence on this point by animated and graceful transitions to the history and manners of the Neapolitan banditti, their physiognomical distinctions and political intrigues, to the grand features of mountain scenery, and to the character of Salvator’s style, founded on all these exciting circumstances, real or imaginary. On the death of his father, Vito Antonio, which happened when he was about seventeen, the family were thrown on his hands for support, and he struggled for some time with want and misery, which he endeavoured to relieve by his hard bargains with the _rivenditori_ (picture-dealers) in the _Strada della Carità_, till necessity and chagrin forced him to fly to Rome. The purchase of his _Hagar_ by Lanfranco is the only bright streak in this period of his life, which cheered him for a moment with faint delusive hope.

The art of writing may be said to consist in thinking of nothing but one’s subject: the art of book-making, on the contrary, can only subsist on the principle of laying hands on everything that can supply the place of it. The author of the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ though devoted to her hero, does not scruple to leave him sometimes, and to occupy many pages with his celebrated contemporaries, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Caravaggio, and the sculptor Bernini, the most splendid coxcomb in the history of art, and the spoiled child of vanity and patronage. Before we take leave of Naples, we must introduce our readers to some of this good company, and pay our court in person. We shall begin with Caravaggio, one of the _characteristic_ school both in mind and manners. The account is too striking in many respects to be passed over, and affords a fine lesson on the excesses and untamed irregularities of men of genius.

‘In the early part of the seventeenth century, the manner of the Neapolitan school was purely _Caravaggesque_. Michael Angelo Amoreghi, better known as _Il Caravaggio_ (from the place of his birth in the Milanese, where his father held no higher rank than that of a stone mason), was one of those powerful and extraordinary geniuses which are destined by their force and originality to influence public taste, and master public opinion, in whatever line they start. The Roman School, to which the almost celestial genius of Raphael had so long been as a tutelary angel, sinking rapidly into degradation and feebleness, suddenly arose again under the influence of a new chief, whose professional talent and personal character stood opposed in the strong relief of contrast to that of his elegant and poetical predecessor.

‘The influence of this “_uomo intractabile e brutale_,” this _passionate and intractable man_, as he is termed by an Italian historian of the arts, sprang from the depression of the school which preceded him. Nothing less than the impulsion given by the force of contrast, and the shock occasioned by a violent change, could have produced an effect on the sinking art such as proceeded from the strength and even coarseness of Caravaggio. He brought back nature triumphant over mannerism—nature, indeed, in all the exaggeration of strong motive and overbearing volition; but still it _was_ nature; and his bold example dissipated the languor of exhausted imitation, and gave excitement even to the tamest mediocrity and the feeblest conception.... When on his first arrival in Rome (says Bellori) the cognoscenti advised him to study from the antiques, and take Raphael as his model, he used to point to the promiscuous groups of men and women passing before him, and say, “those were the models and the masters provided him by Nature.” Teased one day by a pedant on the subject, he stopped a gipsey-girl who was passing by his window, called her in, placed her near his easel, and produced his splendid _Zingara in atto di predire l’avventure_, his well-known and exquisite Egyptian Fortune-teller. His _Gamblers_ was done in the same manner.

‘The temperament which produced this peculiar genius was necessarily violent and gloomy. Caravaggio tyrannized over his school, and attacked his rivals with other arms than those of his art. He was a professed duellist; and having killed one of his antagonists in a rencontre, he fled to Naples, where an asylum was readily granted him. His manner as a painter, his character as a man, were both calculated to succeed with the Neapolitan school; and the _maniera Caravaggesca_ thenceforward continued to distinguish its productions, till the art, there, as throughout all Europe, fell into utter degradation, and became lost almost as completely as it had been under the Lower Empire.

‘In a warm dispute with one of his own young friends in a tennis-court, he had struck him dead with a racket, having been himself severely wounded. Notwithstanding the triumphs with which he was loaded in Naples, where he executed some of his finest pictures, he soon got weary of his residence there, and went to Malta. His superb picture of the Grand Master obtained for him the cross of Malta, a rich golden chain, placed on his neck by the Grand Master’s own hands, and two slaves to attend him. But all these honours did not prevent the new knight from falling into his old habits. _Il suo torbido ingegno_, says Bellori, plunged him into new difficulties; he fought and wounded a noble cavalier, was thrown into prison by the Grand Master, escaped most miraculously, fled to Syracuse, and obtained the suffrages of the Syracusans by painting his splendid picture of the _Santa Morte_, for the church of Santa Lucia. In apprehension of being taken by the Maltese knights, he fled to Messina, from thence to Palermo, and returned to Naples, where hopes were given him of the Pope’s pardon. Here, picking a quarrel with some military men at an inn door, he was wounded, took refuge on board a felucca, and set sail for Rome. Arrested by a Spanish guard, at a little port (where the felucca cast anchor), by mistake, for another person, when released he found the felucca gone, and in it all his property. Traversing the burning shore under a vertical sun, he was seized with a brain-fever, and continued to wander through the deserts of the Pontine Marshes, till he arrived at Porto Ercoli, when he expired in his fortieth year.’ p. 139.

We have seen some of the particulars differently related; but this account is as probable as any; and it conveys a startling picture of the fate of a man led away by headstrong passions and the pride of talents,—an intellectual outlaw, having no regard to the charities of life, nor knowledge of his own place in the general scale of being. How different, how superior, and yet how little more fortunate, was the amiable and accomplished Domenichino (the ‘most sensible of painters’), who was about this time employed in painting the dome of St. Januarius!

‘Domenichino reluctantly accepted the invitation (1629); and he arrived in Naples with the zeal of a martyr devoted to a great cause, but with a melancholy foreboding, which harassed his noble spirit, and but ill prepared him for the persecution he was to encounter. Lodged under the special protection of the _Deputati_, in the _Palazzo dell’ Arcivescovato_, adjoining the church, on going forth from his sumptuous dwelling the day after his arrival, he found a paper addressed to him sticking in the key-hole of his anteroom. It informed him, that if he did not instantly return to Rome, he should never return there with life. Domenichino immediately presented himself to the Spanish viceroy, the _Conte Monterei_, and claimed protection for a life then employed in the service of the church. The piety of the count, in spite of his

## partiality to the faction [of Spagnuoletto], induced him to pledge the

word of a grandee of Spain, that Domenichino should not be molested; and from that moment a life, no longer openly assailed, was embittered by all that the littleness of malignant envy could invent to undermine its enjoyments and blast its hopes. Calumnies against his character, criticisms on his paintings, ashes mixed with his colours, and anonymous letters, were the miserable means to which his rivals resorted; and to complete their work of malignity, they induced the viceroy to order pictures from him for the Court of Madrid; and when these were little more than laid in in dead colours, they were carried to the viceregal palace, and placed in the hands of Spagnuoletto to retouch and alter at pleasure. In this disfigured and mutilated condition, they were despatched to the gallery of the King of Spain. Thus drawn from his great works by despotic authority, for the purpose of effecting his ruin, enduring the complaints of the _Deputati_, who saw their commission neglected, and suffering from perpetual calumnies and persecutions, Domenichino left the superb picture of the _Martyrdom of San Gennaro_, which is now receiving the homage of posterity, and fled to Rome; taking shelter in the solemn shades of Frescati, where he resided some time under the protection of Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini. It was at this period that Domenichino was visited by his biographer Passeri, then an obscure youth, engaged to assist in the repairs of the pictures in the cardinal’s chapel. “When we arrived at Frescati,” says Passeri in his simple style, “Domenichino received me with much courtesy; and hearing that I took a singular delight in the belles-lettres, it increased his kindness to me. I remember me, that I gazed on this man as though he were an angel. I remained till the end of September, occupied in restoring the chapel of St. Sebastian, which had been ruined by the damp. Sometimes Domenichino would join us, singing delightfully to recreate himself as well as he could. When night set in we returned to our apartment, while he most frequently remained in his own, occupied in drawing, and permitting none to see him. Sometimes, however, to pass the time, he drew caricatures of us all, and of the inhabitants of the villa; and when he succeeded to his satisfaction, he was wont to indulge in immoderate fits of laughter; and we, who were in the adjoining room, would run in to know his reason, and then he showed us his spirited sketches (_spiritose galanterie_). He drew a caricature of me with a guitar, one of Canini the painter, and one of the guarda roba, who was lame with the gout, and of the subguarda roba, a most ridiculous figure. To prevent our being offended, he also caricatured himself. These portraits are now preserved by Signor Giovanni Pietro Bellori in his study.” _Vita di Domenichino._—Obliged, however, at length, to return to Naples to fulfil his fatal engagements, overwhelmed both in mind and body by the persecutions of his _soi-disant_ patrons and his open enemies, he died, says Passeri, “_fra mille crepacuori_,” amidst a _thousand heart-breakings_, with some suspicion of having been poisoned, in 1641.’ p. 150.

We could wish Lady Morgan had preserved more of this _simple style of Passeri_. We confess we prefer it to her own more brilliant and artificial one; for instance, to such passages as the following, describing Salvator’s first entrance into the city of Rome.

‘In entering the greatest city of the world at the Ave Maria, the hour of Italian recreation’—(Why must he have entered it at this hour, except for the purpose of giving the author an apology for the following eloquent reflections?)—‘in passing from the silent desolate suburbs of San Giovanni to the Corso (then a place of crowded and populous resort), where the princes of the Conclave presented themselves in all the pomp and splendour of Oriental satraps, the feelings of the young and solitary stranger must have suffered a revulsion, in the consciousness of his own misery. Never, perhaps, in the deserts of the Abruzzi, in the solitudes of Otranto, or in the ruins of Pæstum, did Salvator experience sensations of such utter loneliness, as in the midst of this gaudy and multitudinous assemblage; for in the history of melancholy _sensations_ there are few comparable to that _sense_ of _isolation_, to that _desolateness_ of soul, which accompanies the first entrance of the friendless on a world where all, save they, have ties, pursuits, and homes.’ p. 174.

When we come to passages like this, so buoyant, so airy, and so brilliant, we wish we could forget that history is not a pure voluntary effusion of sentiment, and that we could fancy ourselves reading a page of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Italian, or Miss Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw! Presently after, we learn, that ‘Milton and Salvator, who, in genius, character, and political views, bore no faint resemblance to each other, though living at the same time both in Rome and Naples, remained mutually unknown. The obscure and indigent young painter had, doubtless, no means of presenting himself to the great republican poet of England;—if, indeed, he had then ever heard of one so destined to illustrate the age in which both flourished.’—p. 176. This is the least apposite of all our author’s critical juxtapositions; if we except the continual running parallel between Salvator, Shakspeare, and Lord Byron, as the three demons of the imagination personified. Modern critics can no more confer rank in the lists of fame, than modern heralds can confound new and old nobility.

Salvator’s first decided success at Rome, or in his profession, was in his picture of Prometheus, exhibited in the Pantheon, when he was little more than twenty, and which stamped his reputation as an artist from that time forward, though it did not lay the immediate foundation of his fortune. In this respect, his rejection by the Academy of St. Luke, and the hostility of Bernini, threw very considerable obstacles in his way. Lady Morgan celebrates the success of this picture at sufficient length, and with enthusiastic sympathy, and accompanies the successive completion of his great historical efforts afterwards, the _Regulus_, the _Purgatory_, the _Job_, the _Saul_, and the _Conspiracy of Catiline_, with appropriate comments; but, as we are tainted with heresy on this subject, we shall decline entering into it, farther than to say generally, that we think the colouring of Salvator’s flesh dingy, his drawing meagre, his expressions coarse or violent, and his choice of subjects morose and monotonous. The figures in his landscape-compositions are admirable for their spirit, force, wild interest, and daring character; but, in our judgment, they cannot stand alone as high history, nor, by any means, claim the first rank among epic or dramatic productions. His landscapes, on the contrary, as we have said before, have a boldness of conception, a unity of design, and felicity of execution, which, if it does not fill the mind with the highest sense of beauty or grandeur, assigns them a place by themselves, which invidious comparison cannot approach or divide with any competitor. They are original and _perfect_ in their kind; and that kind is one that the imagination requires for its solace and support; is always glad to return to, and is never ashamed of, the wild and abstracted scenes of nature. Having said thus much by way of explanation, we hope we shall be excused from going farther into the details of an obnoxious hypercriticism, to which we feel an equal repugnance as professed worshippers of fame and genius! Our readers will prefer, to our sour and fastidious (perhaps perverse) criticism, the lively account which is here given of Salvator’s first appearance in a new character—one of the masks of the Roman carnival—which had considerable influence in his subsequent pursuits and success in life.

‘Towards the close of the Carnival in 1639, when the spirits of the revellers (as is always the case in Rome) were making a brilliant rally for the representations of the last week, a car, or stage, highly ornamented, drawn by oxen, and occupied by a masked troop, attracted universal attention by its novelty and singular representations. The principal personage announced himself as a certain Signor Formica, a Neapolitan actor, who, in the character of Coviello, a charlatan, displayed so much genuine wit, such bitter satire, and exquisite humour, rendered doubly effective by a Neapolitan accent and national gesticulations, that other representations were abandoned; and gipsies told fortunes, and Jews hung in vain. The whole population of Rome gradually assembled round the novel, the inimitable Formica. The people relished his flashes of splenetic humour aimed at the great; the higher orders were delighted with an _improvisatore_, who, in the intervals of his dialogues, sung to the lute, of which he was a perfect master, the Neapolitan ballads, then so much in vogue. The attempts made by his fellow-revellers to obtain some share of the plaudits he so abundantly received, whether he spoke or sung, asked or answered questions, were all abortive; while he, (says Baldinucci), “at the head of every thing by his wit, eloquence, and brilliant humour, drew half Rome to himself.” The contrast between his beautiful musical and poetical compositions, and those Neapolitan gesticulations in which he indulged, when, laying aside his lute, he presented his vials and salves to the delighted audience, exhibited a versatility of genius, which it was difficult to attribute to any individual then known in Rome. Guesses and suppositions were still vainly circulating among all classes, when, on the close of the Carnival, Formica, ere he drove his triumphal car from the Piazza Navona, which, with one of the streets in the Trasevere, had been the principal scene of his triumph, ordered his troop to raise their masks, and, removing his own, discovered that Coviello was the sublime author of the Prometheus, and his little troop the “Partigiani” of Salvator Rosa. All Rome was from this moment (to use a phrase which all his biographers have adopted) “_filled with his fame_.” That notoriety which his high genius had failed to procure for him, was obtained at once by those lighter talents which he had nearly suffered to fall into neglect, while more elevated views had filled his mind.’ p. 253.

Lady Morgan then gives a very learned and sprightly account of the characters of the old Italian comedy, with a notice of Moliere, and sprinklings of general reading, from which we have not room for an extract. Salvator, after this event, became the rage in Rome; his society and conversation were much sought after, and his _improvisatore_ recitations of his own poetry, in which he sketched the outline of his future Satires, were attended by some of the greatest wits and most eminent scholars of the age. He on one occasion gave a burlesque comedy in ridicule of Bernini, the favourite court-artist. This attack drew on him a resentment, the consequences of which, ‘like a wounded snake, dragged their slow length’ through the rest of his life. Those who are the loudest and bitterest in their complaints of persecution and ill-usage are the first to provoke it. In the warfare waged so fondly and (as it is at last discovered) so unequally with the world, the assailants and the sufferers will be generally found to be the same persons. We would not, by this indirect censure of Salvator, be understood to condemn or discourage those who have an inclination to go on the same _forlorn hope_: we merely wish to warn them of the nature of the service, and that they ought not to prepare for a triumph, but a martyrdom! If they are ambitious of that, let them take their course.

Salvator’s success in his new attempt threw him in some measure, from this time forward, into the career of comedy and letters: painting, however, still remained his principal pursuit and strongest passion. His various talents and agreeable accomplishments procured him many friends and admirers, though his hasty temper and violent pretensions often defeated their good intentions towards him. He wanted to force his Histories down the throats of the public and of private individuals, who came to purchase his pictures, and turned from, and even insulted those who praised his landscapes. This jealousy of a man’s self, and quarrelling with the favourable opinion of the world, because it does not exactly accord with our own view of our merits, is one of the most tormenting and incurable of all follies. We subjoin the two following remarkable instances of it.

‘The Prince Francesco Ximenes having arrived in Rome, found time, in the midst of the honours paid to him, to visit Salvator Rosa; and, being received by the artist in his gallery, he told him frankly, that he had come for the purpose of seeing and purchasing some of those beautiful small landscapes, whose manner and subjects had delighted him in many foreign galleries.—“Be it known then to your Excellency,” interrupted Rosa impetuously, “that _I know nothing of landscape-painting_! Something indeed I do know of painting _figures_ and _historical subjects_, which I strive to exhibit to such eminent judges as yourself, in order that once for all I may banish from the public mind that fantastic humour of supposing I am a landscape, and not an historical painter.”

‘Shortly after, a very rich cardinal, whose name is not recorded, called on Salvator to purchase some pictures; and as his Eminence walked up and down the gallery, he always paused before some certain _quadretti_, and never before the historical subjects, while Salvator muttered from time to time between his clenched teeth, “_Sempre, sempre, pæsi piccoli_.” When at last the Cardinal glanced his eye over some great historical picture, and carelessly asked the price as a sort of company question, Salvator bellowed forth “_Un milione_.” His Eminence, stunned or offended, hurried away, and returned no more.’

Other stories are told of the like import. And yet if Salvator had been more satisfied in his own mind of the superiority of his historical pictures, he would have been less anxious to make others converts to his opinion. So shrewd a man ought to have been aware of the force of the proverb about _nursing the ricketty child_.

One of the most creditable _traits_ in the character of Salvator is the friendship of Carlo Rossi, a wealthy Roman citizen, who raised his prices and built a chapel to his memory; and one of the most pleasant and flattering to his talents is the rivalry of Messer Agli, an old Bolognese merchant, who came all the way to Florence (while Salvator was residing there) to enter the lists with him as the clown and quack-doctor of the _commedia della arte_.

We loiter on the way with Lady Morgan—which is a sign that we do not dislike her company, and that our occasional severity is less real than affected. She opens many pleasant vistas, and calls up numerous themes of never-failing interest. Would that we could wander with her under the azure skies and golden sunsets of Claude Lorraine, amidst classic groves and temples, and flocks, and herds, and winding streams, and distant hills and glittering sunny vales,

——‘Where universal Pan, Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, Leads on the eternal spring;’—

or repose in Gaspar Poussin’s cool grottos, or on his breezy summits, or by his sparkling waterfalls!—but we must not indulge too long in these delightful dreams. Time presses, and we must on. It is mentioned in this part of the narrative which treats of Salvator’s contemporaries and great rivals in landscape, that Claude Lorraine, besides his natural stupidity in all other things, was six-and-thirty before he began to paint (almost the age at which Raphael died), and in ten years after was—what no other human being ever was or will be. The lateness of the period at which he commenced his studies, render those unrivalled masterpieces which he has left behind him to all posterity a greater miracle than they would otherwise be. One would think that perfection required at least a whole life to attain it. Lady Morgan has described this divine artist very prettily and poetically; but her description of Gaspar Poussin is as fine, and might in some places be mistaken for that of his rival. This is not as it should be; since the distance is immeasurable between the productions of Claude Lorraine and all other landscapes whatever—with the single exception of Titian’s backgrounds.[27] Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say (such was his opinion of the faultless beauty of his style), that ‘there would be another Raphael before there was another Claude!’

The first volume of the present work closes with a spirited account of the short-lived revolution at Naples, brought about by the celebrated Massaniello. Salvator contrived to be present at one of the meetings of the patriotic conspirators by torchlight, and has left a fine sketch of the unfortunate leader. An account of this memorable transaction will be found in Robertson, and a still more striking and genuine one in the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz.

We must hasten through the second volume with more rapid strides. Salvator, after the failure and death of Massaniello, returned to Rome, disappointed, disheartened, and gave vent to his feelings on this occasion by his two poems, _La Babilonia_, and _La Guerra_, which are full of the spirit of love and hatred, of enthusiasm and bitterness.[28] About the same time, he painted his two allegorical pictures of ‘Human Frailty,’ and ‘Fortune.’ These were exhibited in the Pantheon; and from the sensation they excited, and the sinister comments that were made on them, had nearly conducted Salvator to the Inquisition. In the picture of ‘Fortune,’ more particularly, ‘the nose of one powerful ecclesiastic, and the eye of another, were detected in the brutish physiognomy of the swine who were treading pearls and flowers under their feet; a Cardinal was recognised in an ass scattering with his hoof the laurel and myrtle which lay in his path, and in an old goat reposing on roses. Some there were who even fancied the infallible lover of Donna Olympia, the Sultana Queen of the Quirinal! The cry of atheism and sedition—of contempt of established authorities—was thus raised under the influence of private pique and long-cherished envy. It soon found an echo in the painted walls where the Conclave sat “in close divan,” and it was bandied about from mouth to mouth till it reached the ears of the Inquisitor, within the dark recesses of his house of terrors.’ II. 20.

The consequence was, that our artist was obliged to fly from Rome, after waiting a little to see if the storm would blow over, and to seek an asylum in the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany at Florence. Here he passed some of the happiest years of his life, flattered by princes, feasting nobles, conversing with poets, receiving the suggestions of critics, painting landscapes or history as he liked best, composing and reciting his own verses, and making a fortune, which he flung away again as soon as he had made it, with the characteristic improvidence of genius. Of the gay, careless, and friendly intercourse in which he passed his time, the following passages give a very lively intimation.

‘It happened that Rosa, in one of those fits of idleness to which even his strenuous spirit was occasionally liable, flung down his pencil, and sallied forth to communicate the infection of his _far niente_ to his friend Lippi. On entering his _studio_, however, he found him labouring with great impetuosity on the back-ground of his picture of the _Flight into Egypt_; but in such sullen vehemence, or in such evident ill-humour, that Salvator demanded, “Che fai, amico?”—“What am I about?” said Lippi; “I am going mad with vexation. Here is one of my best pictures ruined: I am under a spell, and cannot even draw the branch of a tree, nor a tuft of herbage.”—“Signore Dio!” exclaimed Rosa, twisting the paletti off his friend’s thumb, “what colours are here?” and scraping them off, and gently pushing away Lippi, he took his place, murmuring, “Let me see! who knows but I may help you out of the scrape?” Half in jest and half in earnest, he began to touch and retouch, and change, till nightfall found him at the easel, finishing one of the best back-ground landscapes he ever painted. All Florence came the next day to look at his _chef-d’œuvre_, and the first artists of the age took it as a study.

‘A few days afterwards, Salvator called upon Lippi, found him preparing a canvas, while Malatesta read aloud to him and Ludovico Seranai the astronomer, the MS. of his poem of the Sphynx. Salvator, with a noiseless step, took his seat in an old Gothic window, and, placing himself in a listening attitude, with a bright light falling through stained glass upon his fine head, produced a splendid study, of which Lippi, without a word of his intention, availed himself; and executed, with incredible rapidity, the finest picture of Salvator that was ever painted. Several copies of it were taken with Lippi’s permission, and Ludovico Seranai purchased the original at a considerable price. In this picture Salvator is dressed in a cloth habit, with richly slashed sleeves, turnovers, and a collar. It is only a head and bust, and the eyes are looking towards the spectator.’ II. 66.

At one time, his impatience at being separated from Carlo Rossi and other friends was so great, that he narrowly risked his safety to obtain an interview with them. About three years after he had been at Florence, he took post-horses, and set off for Rome at midnight. Having arrived at an inn in the suburbs, he despatched messages to eighteen of his friends, who all came, thinking he had got into some new scrape; breakfasted with them, and returned to Florence, before his Roman persecutors or his Tuscan friends were aware of his adventure.

Salvator, however, was discontented even with this splendid lot, and sought to embower himself in entire seclusion, and in deeper bliss, in the palace of the Counts Maffei at Volterra, and in the solitudes in its neighbourhood. Here he wandered night and morn, drinking in that slow poison of reflection which his soul loved best—planning his _Catiline Conspiracy_—preparing his Satires for the press—and weeding out their Neapolitanisms, in which he was assisted by the fine taste and quick tact of his friend Redi. This appears to have been the only part of his life to which he looked back with pleasure or regret. He however left this enviable retreat soon after, to return to Rome, partly for family reasons, and partly, no doubt, because the deepest love of solitude and privacy does not wean the mind, that has once felt the feverish appetite, from the desire of popularity and distinction. Here, then, he planted himself on the Monte Pincio, in a house situated between those of Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin—and used to walk out of an evening on the fine promenade near it, at the head of a group of gay cavaliers, musicians, and aspiring artists; while Nicholas Poussin, the very genius of antiquity personified, and now bent down with age himself, led another band of reverential disciples, side by side, with some learned virtuoso or pious churchman! Meantime, commissions poured in upon Salvator, and he painted successively his _Jonas_ for the King of Denmark—his _Battle-piece_ for Louis XIV., still in the Museum at Paris—and, lastly, to his infinite delight, an Altar-piece for one of the churches in Rome. Salvator, about this time, seems to have imbibed (even before he was lectured on his want of economy by the _Fool_ at the house of his friend Minucci) some idea of making the best use of his time and talents.

‘The Constable Colonna (it is reported) sent a purse of gold to Salvator Rosa on receiving one of his beautiful landscapes. The painter, not to be outdone in generosity, sent the prince another picture, as a present,—which the prince insisted on remunerating with another purse; another present and another purse followed; and this struggle between generosity and liberality continued, to the tune of many other pictures and presents, until the prince, finding himself a loser by the contest, sent Salvator two purses, with an assurance that he gave in, _et lui céda le champ de bataille_.’

Salvator was tenacious in demanding the highest prices for his pictures, and brooking no question as to any abatement; but when he had promised his friend Ricciardi a picture, he proposed to restrict himself to a subject of one or two figures; and they had nearly a quarrel about it.

‘In April 1662,’ says his biographer, ‘and not long after his return to Rome, his love of wild and mountainous scenery, and perhaps his wandering tendencies, revived by his recent journey, induced him to visit Loretto, or at least to make that holy city the _shrine_ of a pilgrimage, which it appears was one rather of taste than of devotion. His feelings on this journey are well described in one of his own _Letters_ inserted in the Appendix. “I could not,” says Salvator, “give you any account of my return from Loretto, till I arrived here on the sixth of May. I was for fifteen days in perpetual motion. The journey was beyond all description curious and picturesque: much more so than the route from hence to Florence. There is a strange mixture of savage wildness and domestic scenery, of plain and precipice, such as the eye delights to wander over. I can safely swear to you, that the tints of these mountains by far exceed all I have ever observed under your Tuscan skies; and as for your Verucola, which I once thought a dreary desert, I shall henceforth deem it a fair garden, in comparison with the scenes I have now explored in these Alpine solitudes. O God! how often have I sighed to possess, how often since called to mind, those solitary hermitages which I passed on my way! How often wished that fortune had reserved for me such a destiny! I went by Ancona and Torolo, and on my return visited Assisa—all sites of extraordinary interest to the genius of painting. I saw at Terni (four miles out of the high road) the famous waterfal of Velino; an object to satisfy the boldest imagination by its terrific beauty—a river dashing down a mountainous precipice of near a mile in height, and then flinging up its foam to nearly an equal altitude! Believe, that while in this spot, I moved not, saw not, without bearing you full in my mind and memory.” See p. 277.

He begins another letter, of a later date, on his being employed to paint the altar of San Giovanni de Fiorentini, thus gaily:—

‘_Sonate le campane_—Ring out the chimes!—At last after thirty years existence in Rome, of hopes blasted and complaints reiterated against men and gods, the occasion is accorded me for giving one altar-piece to the public.’

His anxiety to finish this picture in time for a certain festival, kept him, he adds, ‘secluded from all commerce of the pen, and from every other in the world; and I can truly say, that I have forgotten myself, even to neglecting to eat; and so arduous is my application, that when I had nearly finished, I was obliged to keep my bed for two days; and had not my recovery been assisted by emetics, certain it is it would have been all over with me in consequence of some obstruction in the stomach. Pity me then, dear friend, if for the glory of my pencil, I have neglected to devote my pen to the service of friendship.’—_Letter to the Abate Ricciardi._

Passeri has left the following particulars recorded of him on the day when this picture (_the Martyrdom of Saint Damian and Saint Cosmus_) was first exhibited.

‘He (Salvator) had at last exposed his picture in the San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini; and I, to recreate myself, ascended on that evening to the heights of _Monte della Trinità_, where I found Salvator walking arm in arm with Signor Giovanni Carlo dei Rossi, so celebrated for his performance on the harp of three strings, and brother to that Luigi Rossi, who is so eminent all over the world for his perfection in musical composition. And when Salvator (who was my intimate friend) perceived me, he came forward laughingly, and said to me these precise words:—“Well, what say the malignants now? Are they at last convinced that I _can_ paint on the great scale? Why, if not, then e’en let Michael Angelo come down, and do something better. Now at least I have stopped their mouths, and shown the world what I am worth.” I shrugged my shoulders. I and the Signor Rossi changed the subject to one which lasted us till nightfall; and from this (continues Passeri in his rambling way[29]) it may be gathered how _gagliardo_ he (Salvator) was in his own opinion. Yet it may not be denied but that he had all the endowments of a marvellous great painter! one of great resources and high perfection; and had he no other merit, he had at least that of being the originator of his own style. He spoke, this evening, of Paul Veronese more than of any other painter, and praised the Venetian school greatly. _To Raphael he had no great leaning_, for it was the fashion of the Neapolitan School to call him hard, _di pietra_, dry,’ &c. p. 172.

Our artist’s constitution now began to break, worn out perhaps by the efforts of his art, and still more by the irritation of his mind. In a letter dated in 1666, he complains,

‘I have suffered two months of agony, even with the abstemious regimen of chicken broth! My feet are two lumps of ice, in spite of the woollen hose I have imported from Venice. I never permit the fire to be quenched in my own room, and am more solicitous than even the Cavalier Cigoli,’ (who died of a cold caught in painting a fresco in the Vatican). ‘There is not a fissure in the house that I am not daily employed in diligently stopping up, and yet with all this I cannot get warm; nor do I think the torch of love, or the caresses of Phryne herself, would kindle me into a glow. For the rest, I can talk of any thing but my pencil: my canvass lies turned to the wall; my colours are dried up now, and for ever; nor can I give my thoughts to any subject whatever, but chimney-corners, brasiers, warming-pans, woollen gloves, woollen caps, and such sort of gear. In short, dear friend, I am perfectly aware that I have lost much of my original ardour, and am absolutely reduced to pass entire days without speaking a word. Those fires, once mine and so brilliant, are now all spent, or evaporating in smoke. Woe unto me, should I ever be reduced to exercise my pencil for bread!’

Yet after this, he at intervals produced some of his best pictures. The scene, however, was now hastening to a close; and the account here given of his last days, though containing nothing perhaps very memorable, will yet, we think, be perused with a melancholy interest.

‘A change in his complexion was thought to indicate some derangement of the liver, and he continued in a state of great languor and depression during the autumn of 1672; but in the winter of 1673, the total loss of appetite, and of all power of digestion, reduced him almost to the last extremity; and he consented, at the earnest request of Lucrezia and his numerous friends, to take more medical advice. He now passed through the hands of various physicians, whose ignorance and technical pedantry come out with characteristic effect in the simple and matter-of-fact details which the good Padre Baldovini has left of the last days of his eminent friend. Various cures were suggested by the Roman faculty for a disease which none had yet ventured to name. Meantime the malady increased, and showed itself in all the life-wearing symptoms of sleeplessness, loss of appetite, intermitting fever, and burning thirst. A French quack was called in to the sufferer; and his prescription was, that he should drink water abundantly, and nothing but water. While, however, under the care of this Gallic Sangrado, a confirmed dropsy unequivocally declared itself; and Salvator, now acquainted with the nature of his disease, once more submitted to the entreaties of his friends; and, at the special persuasion of the Padre Francesco Baldovini, placed himself under the care of a celebrated Italian empiric, then in great repute in Rome, called Dr. Penna.

‘Salvator had but little confidence in medicine. He had already, during this melancholy winter, discarded all his physicians, and literally _thrown physic to the dogs_. But hope, and spring, and love of life, revived together; and, towards the latter end of February he consented to receive the visits of Penna, who had cured Baldovini (on the good father’s own word) of a confirmed dropsy the year before. When the doctor was introduced, Salvator, with his wonted manliness, called on him to answer the question he was about to propose with honesty and frankness, viz. _Was his disorder curable?_ Penna, after going through certain professional forms, answered, “that his disorder was a simple, and not a complicated dropsy, and that therefore it was curable.”

‘Salvator instantly and cheerfully placed himself in the doctor’s hands, and consented to submit to whatever he should subscribe. “The remedy of Penna,” says Baldovini, “lay in seven little vials, of which the contents were to be swallowed every day.” But it was obvious to all, that as the seven vials were emptied, the disorder of Rosa increased; and on the seventh day of his attendance, the doctor declared to his friend Baldovini, that the malady of his patient was beyond his reach and skill.

‘The friends of Salvator now suggested to him their belief that his disease was brought on and kept up by his rigid confinement to the house, so opposed to his former active habits of life; but when they urged him to take air and exercise, he replied significantly to their importunities, “I take exercise! I go out! if this is your counsel, how are you deceived!” At the earnest request, however, of Penna, he consented to see him once more; but the moment he entered his room he demanded of him, “if he _now_ thought that he was curable?” Penna, in some emotion, prefaced his verdict by declaring solemnly, “that he should conceive it no less glory to restore so illustrious a genius to health, and to the society he was so calculated to adorn, than to save the life of the Sovereign Pontiff himself; but that, as far as his science went, the case was now beyond the reach of human remedy.” While Penna spoke, Salvator, who was surrounded by his family and many friends, fixed his penetrating eyes on the physician’s face, with the intense look of one who sought to read his sentence in the countenance of his judge ere it was verbally pronounced;—but that sentence was now passed! and Salvator, who seemed more struck by surprise than by apprehension, remained silent and in a fixed attitude! His friends, shocked and grieved, or awed by the expression of his countenance, which was marked by a stern and hopeless melancholy, arose and departed silently one by one. After a long and deep reverie, Rosa suddenly left the room, and shut himself up alone in his study. There in silence, and in unbroken solitude, he remained for two days, holding no communication with his wife, his son or his most intimate friends; and when at last their tears and lamentations drew him forth, he was no longer recognisable. Shrunk, feeble, attenuated, almost speechless, he sunk on his couch, to rise no more!

‘Life was now wearing away with such obvious rapidity, that his friends, both clerical and laical, urged him in the most strenuous manner to submit to the ceremonies and forms prescribed by the Roman Catholic church in such awful moments. How much the solemn sadness of those moments may be increased, even to terror and despair, by such pompous and lugubrious pageants all who have visited Italy—all who still visit it, can testify. Salvator demanded what they required of him. They replied, “in the first instance to receive the sacrament as it is administered in Rome to the dying.”—“To receiving the sacrament,” says his confesser Baldovini, “he showed no repugnance (_non se mostrò repugnante_); but he vehemently and positively refused to allow the host, with all the solemn pomp of its procession, to be brought to his house, which he deemed unworthy of the divine presence.”

‘The rejection of a ceremony which was deemed in Rome indispensably necessary to salvation, and by one who was already stamped with the church’s reprobation, soon took air; report exaggerated the circumstance into a positive expression of infidelity; and the gossipry of the Roman Anterooms was supplied for the time with a subject of discussion, in perfect harmony with their slander, bigotry, and idleness. “As I went forth from Salvator’s door,” relates the worthy Baldovini, “I met the _Canonica Scornio_, a man who has taken out a license to speak of all men as he pleases. ‘And how goes it with Salvator?’ demands of me this Canonico. ‘Bad enough, I fear.’—‘Well, a few nights back, happening to be in the anteroom of a certain great prelate, I found myself in the centre of a circle of disputants, who were busily discussing whether the aforesaid Salvator would die a schismatic, a Huguenot, a Calvinist, or a Lutheran?’—‘He will die, Signor Canonico,’ I replied, ‘when it pleases God, a better Catholic than any of those who now speak so slightingly of him!’—and so I pursued my way.”

‘On the 15th of March Baldovini entered the patient’s chamber. But, to all appearance, Salvator was suffering great agony. “How goes it with thee, Rosa?” asked Baldovini kindly, as he approached him. “Bad, bad!” was the emphatic reply. While writhing with pain, the sufferer after a moment added:—“To judge by what I now endure, the hand of death grasps me sharply.”

‘In the restlessness of pain, he now threw himself on the edge of the bed, and placed his head on the bosom of Lucrezia, who sat supporting and weeping over him. His afflicted son and friend took their station at the other side of his couch, and stood watching the issue of these sudden and frightful spasms in mournful silence. At that moment a celebrated Roman physician, the Doctor Catanni, entered the apartment. He felt the pulse of Salvator, and perceived that he was fast sinking. He communicated his approaching dissolution to those most interested in the melancholy intelligence, and it struck all present with unutterable grief. Baldovini, however, true to his sacred calling, even in the depth of his human affliction, instantly despatched the young Agosto to the neighbouring Convent _della Trinità_, for the holy Viaticum. While life was still fluttering at the heart of Salvator, the officiating priest of the day arrived, bearing with him the holy apparatus of the last mysterious ceremony of the church. The shoulders of Salvator were laid bare, and anointed with the consecrated oil: some prayed fervently, others wept, and all even still hoped; but the taper which the Doctor Catanni held to the lips of Salvator, while the Viaticum was administered, burned brightly and steadily! Life’s last sigh had transpired, as Religion performed her last rite.’ p. 205.

Salvator left a wife and son, (a boy of about thirteen), who inherited a considerable property, in books, prints, and bills of exchange, which his father had left in his banker’s hands for pictures painted in the last few years of his life.

We confess we close these volumes with something of a melancholy feeling. We have, in this great artist, another instance added to the list of those who, being born to give delight to others, appear to have lived only to torment themselves, and, with all the ingredients of happiness placed within their reach, to have derived no benefit either from talents or success. Is it, that the outset of such persons in life (who are raised by their own efforts from want and obscurity) jars their feelings and sours their tempers? Or that painters, being often men without education or general knowledge, overrate their own pretensions, and meet with continual mortifications in the rebuffs they receive from the world, who do not judge by the same individual standard? Or is a morbid irritability the inseparable concomitant of genius? None of these suppositions fairly solves the difficulty; for many of the old painters (and those the greatest) were men of mild manners, of great modesty, and good temper. Painting, however, speaks a language known to few, and of which all pretend to judge; and may thus, perhaps, afford more occasion to pamper sensibility into a disease, where the seeds of it are sown too deeply in the constitution, and not checked by proportionable self-knowledge and reflection. Where an artist of genius, however, is not made the victim of his own impatience, or of idle censures, or of the good fortune of others, we cannot conceive of a more delightful or enviable life. There is none that implies a greater degree of thoughtful abstraction, or a more entire freedom from angry differences of opinion, or that leads the mind more out of itself, and reposes more calmly on the grand and beautiful, or the most casual object in nature. Salvator died young. He had done enough for fame; and had he been happier, he would perhaps have lived longer. We do not, in one sense, feel the loss of painters so much as that of other eminent men. They may still be said to be present with us bodily in their works: we can revive their memory by every object we see; and it seems as if they could never wholly die, while the ideas and thoughts that occupied their minds while living survive, and have a palpable and permanent existence in the forms of external nature.

AMERICAN LITERATURE—DR. CHANNING

VOL. I.] [_October 1829._

Of the later American writers, who, besides Dr. Channing, have acquired some reputation in England, we can only recollect Mr. Washington Irving, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Cooper. To the first of these we formerly paid an ample tribute of respect; nor do we wish to retract a tittle of what we said on that occasion, or of the praise due to him for brilliancy, ease, and a faultless equability of style. Throughout his polished pages, no thought shocks by its extravagance, no word offends by vulgarity or affectation. All is gay, but guarded,—heedless, but sensitive of the smallest blemish. We cannot deny it—nor can we conceal it from ourselves or the world, if we would—that he is, at the same time, deficient in nerve and originality. Almost all his sketches are like patterns taken in silk paper from our classic writers;—the traditional manners of the last age are still kept up (stuffed in glass cases) in Mr. Irving’s modern version of them. The only variation is in the transposition of dates; and herein the author is chargeable with a fond and amiable anachronism. He takes Old England for granted as he finds it described in our stock-books of a century ago—gives us a Sir Roger de Coverley in the year 1819, instead of the year 1709; and supposes old English hospitality and manners, relegated from the metropolis, to have taken refuge somewhere in Yorkshire, or the fens of Lincolnshire. In some sequestered spot or green savannah, we can conceive Mr. Irving enchanted with the style of the wits of Queen Anne;—in the bare, broad, straight, mathematical streets of his native city, his busy fancy wandered through the blind alleys and huddled zig-zag sinuosities of London, and the signs of Lothbury and East-Cheap swung and creaked in his delighted ears. The air of his own country was too poor and thin to satisfy the pantings of youthful ambition; he gasped for British popularity,—he came, and found it. He was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy: the national politeness owed him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us; and, if his notions were sometimes wrong, yet it was plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice every thing to obtain a smile or a look of approbation. It is true, he brought no new earth, no sprig of laurel gathered in the wilderness, no red bird’s wing, no gleam from crystal lake or new-discovered fountain, (neither grace nor grandeur plucked from the bosom of this Eden-state like that which belongs to cradled infancy); but he brought us _rifaciméntos_ of our own thoughts—copies of our favourite authors: we saw our self admiration reflected in an accomplished stranger’s eyes; and the lover received from his mistress, the British public, her most envied favours.

Mr. Brown, who preceded him, and was the author of several novels which made some noise in this country, was a writer of a different stamp. Instead of hesitating before a scruple, and aspiring to avoid a fault, he braved criticism, and aimed only at effect. He was an inventor, but without materials. His strength and his efforts are convulsive throes—his works are a banquet of horrors. The hint of some of them is taken from Caleb Williams and St. Leon, but infinitely exaggerated, and carried to disgust and outrage. They are full (to disease) of imagination,—but it is forced, violent, and shocking. This is to be expected, we apprehend, in attempts of this kind in a country like America, where there is, generally speaking, no _natural imagination_. The mind must be excited by overstraining, by pulleys and levers. Mr. Brown was a man of genius, of strong passion, and active fancy; but his genius was not seconded by early habit, or by surrounding sympathy. His story and his interests are not wrought out, therefore, in the ordinary course of nature; but are, like the monster in Frankenstein, a man made by art and determined will. For instance, it may be said of him, as of Gawin Douglas, ‘Of Brownies and Bogilis full is his Buik.’ But no ghost, we will venture to say, was ever seen in North America. They do not walk in broad day; and the night of ignorance and superstition which favours their appearance, was long past before the United States lifted up their head beyond the Atlantic wave. The inspired poet’s tongue must have an echo in the state of public feeling, or of involuntary belief, or it soon grows harsh or mute. In America, they are ‘so well policied,’ so exempt from the knowledge of fraud or force, so free from the assaults of _the flesh and the devil_, that in pure hardness of belief they hoot the _Beggar’s Opera_ from the stage: with them, poverty and crime, pickpockets and highwaymen, the lock-up-house and the gallows, are things incredible to sense! In this orderly and undramatic state of security and freedom from natural foes, Mr. Brown has provided one of his heroes with a demon to torment him, and fixed him at his back;—but what is to keep him there? Not any prejudice or lurking superstition on the part of the American reader: for the lack of such, the writer is obliged to make up by incessant rodomontade, and face-making. The want of genuine imagination is always proved by caricature: monsters are the growth, not of passion, but of the attempt forcibly to stimulate it. In our own unrivalled Novelist, and the great exemplar of this kind of writing, we see how ease and strength are united. Tradition and invention meet half way; and nature scarce knows how to distinguish them. The reason is, there is here an old and solid ground in previous manners and opinion for imagination to rest upon. The air of this bleak northern clime is filled with legendary lore: Not a castle without the stain of blood upon its floor or winding steps: not a glen without its ambush or its feat of arms: not a lake without its Lady! But the map of America is not historical; and, therefore, works of fiction do not take root in it; for the fiction, to be good for any thing, must not be in the author’s mind, but belong to the age or country in which he lives. The genius of America is essentially mechanical and modern.

Mr. Cooper describes things to the life, but he puts no motion into them. While he is insisting on the minutest details, and explaining all the accompaniments of an incident, the story stands still. The elaborate accumulation of particulars serves not to embody his imagery, but to distract and impede the mind. He is not so much the master of his materials as their drudge: He labours under an epilepsy of the fancy. He thinks himself bound in his character of novelist to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Thus, if two men are struggling on the edge of a precipice for life or death, he goes not merely into the vicissitudes of action or passion as the chances of the combat vary; but stops to take an inventory of the geography of the place, the shape of the rock, the precise attitude and display of the limbs and muscles, with the eye and habits of a sculptor. Mr. Cooper does not seem to be aware of the infinite divisibility of mind and matter; and that an ‘abridgment’ is all that is possible or desirable in the most individual representation. A person who is so determined, may write volumes on a grain of sand or an insect’s wing. Why describe the dress and appearance of an Indian chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes? It is mistaking the province of the artist for that of the historian; and it is this very obligation of painting and statuary to fill up all the details, that renders them incapable of telling a story, or of expressing more than a single moment, group, or figure. Poetry or romance does not descend into the particulars, but atones for it by a more rapid march and an intuitive glance at the more striking results. By considering truth or matter-of-fact as the sole element of popular fiction, our author fails in massing and in impulse. In the midst of great vividness and fidelity of description, both of nature and manners, there is a sense of jejuneness,—for half of what is described is insignificant and indifferent; there is a hard outline,—a little manner; and his most striking situations do not tell as they might and ought, from his seeming more anxious about the mode and circumstances than the catastrophe. In short, he anatomizes his subjects; and his characters bear the same relation to living beings that the botanic specimens collected in a portfolio do to the living plant or tree. The sap does not circulate kindly; nor does the breath of heaven visit, or its dews moisten them. Or, if Mr. Cooper gets hold of an appalling circumstance, he, from the same tenacity and thraldom to outward impressions, never lets it go: He repeats it without end. Thus, if he once hits upon the supposition of a wild Indian’s eyes glaring through a thicket, every bush is from that time forward furnished with a pair; the page is studded with them, and you can no longer look about you at ease or in safety. The high finishing we have spoken of is particularly at variance with the rudeness of the materials. In Richardson it was excusable, where all was studied and artificial; but a few dashes of red ochre are sufficient to paint the body of a savage chieftain; nor should his sudden and frantic stride on his prey be treated with the precision and punctiliousness of a piece of _still life_. There are other American writers, (such as the historiographer of _Brother Jonathan_,) who carry this love of veracity to a pitch of the marvellous. They run riot in an account of the dishes at a boarding-house, as if it were a banquet of the Gods; and recount the overturning of a travelling stage-waggon with as much impetuosity, turbulence, and exaggerated enthusiasm, as if it were the fall of Phaeton. ’ In the absence of subjects of real interest, men make themselves an interest out of nothing, and magnify mole-hills into mountains. This is not the fault of Mr. Cooper: He is always true, though sometimes tedious; and correct, at the expense of being insipid. His _Pilot_ is the best of his works; and truth to say, we think it a masterpiece in its kind. It has great unity of purpose and feeling. Every thing in it may be said

——‘To suffer a _sea-change_ Into something new and strange.’

His Pilot never appears but when the occasion is worthy of him; and when he appears, the result is sure. The description of his guiding the vessel through the narrow strait left for her escape, the sea-fight, and the incident of the white topsail of the English man-of-war appearing above the fog, where it is first mistaken for a cloud, are of the first order of graphic composition; to say nothing of the admirable episode of Tom Coffin, and his long figure coiled up like a rope in the bottom of the boat. The rest is _common-place_; but then it is American common-place. We thank Mr. Cooper he does not take every thing from us, and therefore we can learn something from him. He has the saving grace of originality. We wish we could impress it, ‘line upon line, and precept upon precept,’ especially upon our American brethren, how precious, how invaluable _that_ is. In art, in literature, in science, the least bit of nature is worth all the plagiarism in the world. The great secret of Sir Walter Scott’s enviable, but unenvied success, lies in his transcribing from nature instead of transcribing from books.

Anterior to the writers above mentioned, were other three, who may be named as occupying (two of them at least) a higher and graver place in the yet scanty annals of American Literature. These were Franklin, the author (whoever he was) of the _American Farmer’s Letters_, and Jonathan Edwards.

Franklin, the most celebrated, was emphatically an American. He was a great experimental philosopher, a consummate politician, and a paragon of common sense. His _Poor Robin_ was an absolute manual for a country in leading-strings, making its first attempts to go alone. There is nowhere compressed in the same compass so great a fund of local information and political sagacity, as in his _Examination before the Privy Council_ in the year 1754. The fine _Parable against Persecution_, which appears in his miscellaneous works, is borrowed from Bishop Taylor. Franklin is charged by some with a want of imagination, or with being a mere prosaic, practical man; but the instinct of the true and the useful in him, had more genius in it than all the ‘metre-ballad-mongering’ of those who take him to task.

The _American Farmer’s Letters_, (published under a feigned name[30] a little before the breaking out of the American war,) give us a tolerable idea how American scenery and manners may be treated with a lively, poetic interest. The pictures are sometimes highly coloured, but they are vivid and strikingly characteristic. He gives not only the objects, but the feelings, of a new country. He describes himself as placing his little boy in a chair screwed to the plough which he guides, (to inhale the scent of the fresh furrows,) while his wife sits knitting under a tree at one end of the field. He recounts a battle between two snakes with an Homeric gravity and exuberance of style. He paints the dazzling, almost invisible flutter of the humming-bird’s wing: Mr. Moore’s airiest verse is not more light and evanescent. His account of the manners of the Nantucket people, their frank simplicity, and festive rejoicings after the perils and hardships of the whale-fishing, is a true and heartfelt picture. There is no fastidious refinement or cynical contempt: He enters into their feelings and amusements with the same alacrity as they do themselves; and this is sure to awaken a fellow-feeling in the reader. If the author had been thinking of the effect of his description in a London drawing-room, or had insisted on the most disagreeable features in the mere littleness of national jealousy, he would have totally spoiled it. But health, joy, and innocence, are good things all over the world, and in all classes of society; and, to impart pleasure, need only be described in their genuine characters. The power to sympathize with nature, without thinking of ourselves or others, if it is not a definition of genius, comes very near to it. From this liberal unaffected style, the Americans are particularly cut off by habitual comparisons with us, or upstart claims of their own;—by the dread of being thought vulgar, which necessarily makes them so, or the determination to be fine, which must for ever prevent it. The most interesting part of the author’s work is that where he describes the first indications of the breaking out of the American war—the distant murmur of the tempest—the threatened inroad of the Indians like an inundation on the peaceful back-settlements: his complaints and his auguries are fearful. But we have said enough of this _Illustrious Obscure_; for it is the rule of criticism to praise none but the over-praised, and to offer fresh incense to the idol of the day.

It is coming more within canonical bounds, and approaching nearer the main subject of this notice, to pay a tribute to the worth and talents of Jonathan Edwards; the well-known author of the _Treatise on the Will_, who was a Massachusetts divine and most able logician. Having produced _him_, the Americans need not despair of their metaphysicians. We do not scruple to say, that he is one of the acutest, most powerful, and, of all reasoners, the most conscientious and sincere. His closeness and candour are alike admirable. Instead of puzzling or imposing on others, he tries to satisfy his own mind. We do not say whether he is right or wrong; we only say that his method is ‘an honest method:’ there is not a trick, a subterfuge, a verbal sophism in his whole book. Those who compare his arguments with what Priestley or Hobbes have written on the same question, will find the one petulant and the other dogmatical. Far from taunting his adversaries, he endeavours with all his might to explain difficulties; and acknowledges that the words _Necessity_, _Irresistible_, _Inevitable_, &c., which are applied to external force,

## acting in spite of the will, are misnomers when applied to acts, or a

necessity emanating from the will itself; and that the repugnance of his favourite doctrine to common sense and feeling, (in which most of his party exult as a triumph of superior wisdom over vulgar prejudice,) is an unfortunate stumbling-block in the way of truth, arising out of the structure of language itself. His anxiety to clear up the scruples of others, is equal, in short, to his firmness in maintaining his own opinion.

We could wish that Dr. Channing had formed himself upon this manly and independent model, instead of going through the circle of reigning topics, to strike an affected balance between ancient prejudice and modern paradox; to trim to all opinions, and unite all suffrages; to calculate the vulgar clamour, or the venal sophistry of the British press, for the meridian of Boston. Dr. Channing is a great tactician in reasoning; and reasoning has nothing to do with tactics. We do not like to see a writer constantly trying to steal a march upon opinion without having his retreat cut off—full of pretensions, and void of offence. It is as bad as the opposite extreme of outraging decorum at every step; and is only a more covert mode of attracting attention, and gaining surreptitious applause. We never saw any thing more guarded in this respect than Dr. Channing’s _Tracts_ and _Sermons_—more completely suspended between heaven and earth. He keeps an eye on both worlds; kisses hands to the reading public all round; and does his best to stand well with different sects and parties. He is always in advance of the line, in an amiable and imposing attitude, but never far from succour. He is an Unitarian; but then he disclaims all connexion with Dr. Priestley, as a materialist; he denounces Calvinism and the Church of England; but to show that this proceeds from no want of liberality, makes the _amende honorable_ to Popery and Popish divines;—is an American Republican and a French Bourbonist—abuses Bonaparte, and observes a profound silence with respect to Ferdinand—likes wit, provided it is serious—and is zealous for the propagation of the Gospel and the honour of religion; but thinks it should form a coalition with reason, and be surrounded with a halo of modern lights. We cannot combine such a system of checks and saving clauses. We are dissatisfied with the want not only of originality of view, but of moral daring. And here we will state a suspicion, into which we have been led by more than one American writer, that the establishment of civil and religious liberty is not quite so favourable to the independent formation, and free circulation of opinion, as might be expected. Where there is a perfect toleration—where there is neither Censorship of the press nor Inquisition, the public take upon themselves the task of _surveillance_, and exercise the functions of a literary police, like so many familiars of the _Holy Office_. In a monarchy, or mixed government, there is an appeal open from the government to the people; there is a natural opposition, as it were, between prejudice, or authority, and reason: but when the community take the power into their own hands, and there is but one body of opinion, and one voice to express it, there can be no _reaction_ against it; and to remonstrate or resist, is not only a public outrage, but sounds like a personal insult to every individual in the community. It is differing from the company; you become a _black sheep in the flock_. There is no excuse or mercy for it. Hence the too frequent cowardice, jesuitism, and sterility, produced by this republican discipline and drilling. Opinions must march abreast—must keep in rank and file, and woe to the caitiff thought that advances before the rest, or turns aside! This uniformity, and equal purpose on all sides, leads (if not checked) to a monstrous Ostracism in public opinion. Whoever outstrips, or takes a separate path to himself, is considered as usurping an unnatural superiority over the whole. He is treated not with respect or indulgence, but indignity.

We like Dr. Channing’s Sermons best; his Criticisms less; his Politics least of all. We think several of his Discourses do great honour to himself and his profession, and are highly respectable models of pulpit-composition. We would instance more particularly, and recommend to the perusal of our readers, that _On the Duties of Children_. The feeling, the justness of observation, the tenderness, and the severity, are deserving of all praise. The author here appears in a truly amiable and advantageous light. This composition alone makes us believe, that he is a good, and might, with proper direction and self-reliance, have been even a great man. We shall give a long extract with the more pleasure, as we are assuredly actuated by no ill-will towards the reverend author, and only wish to point out how very considerable ability, and probable uprightness of intention, may be warped and injured by a wrong bias, and candidateship for false and contradictory honours.

‘_First_, You are required to view and treat your parents with respect. Your tender, inexperienced age requires that you think of yourselves with humility, and conduct yourselves with modesty; that you respect the superior age, and wisdom, and improvements of your parents, and observe towards them a submissive deportment. Nothing is more unbecoming you; nothing will render you more unpleasant in the eyes of others, than froward or contemptuous conduct towards your parents. There are children, and I wish I could say there are only a few, who speak to their parents with rudeness, grow sullen at their rebukes, behave in their presence as if they deserved no attention, hear them speak without noticing them, and rather ridicule than honour them. There are many children at the present day who think more highly of themselves than of their elders; who think that their own wishes are first to be gratified; who abuse the condescension and kindness of their parents, and treat them as servants rather than superiors. Beware, my young friends, lest you grow up with this assuming and selfish spirit. Regard your parents as kindly given you by God, to support, direct, and govern you in your present state of weakness and inexperience. Express your respect for them in your manner and conversation. Do not neglect those outward signs of dependence and inferiority which suit your age. You are young, and you should therefore take the lowest place, and rather retire than thrust yourselves forward into notice. You have much to learn, and you should therefore hear, instead of seeking to be heard. You are dependent, and you should therefore ask instead of demanding what you desire, and you should receive every thing from your parents as a favour, and not as a debt. I do not mean to urge upon you a slavish fear of your parents. Love them, and love them ardently; but mingle a sense of their superiority with your love. Feel a confidence in their kindness; but let not this confidence make you rude and presumptuous, and lead to indecent familiarity. Talk to them with openness and freedom; but never contradict with violence; never answer with passion or contempt.

‘_Secondly_, You should be grateful to your parents. Consider how much you owe them. The time has been, and it was not a long time past, when you depended wholly on their kindness,—when you had no strength to make a single effort for yourselves,—when you could neither speak nor walk, and knew not the use of any of your powers. Had not a parent’s arm supported you, you must have fallen to the earth, and perished. Observe with attention the infants which you often see, and consider that a little while ago you were as feeble as they are: you were only a burden and a care, and you had nothing with which you could repay your parents’ affection. But did they forsake you? How many sleepless nights have they been disturbed by your cries! When you were sick, how tenderly did they hang over you! With what pleasure have they seen you grow up in health to your present state; and what do you now possess which you have not received from their hands? God, indeed, is your great parent, your best friend, and from him every good gift descends; but God is pleased to bestow every thing upon you through the kindness of your parents. To your parents you owe every comfort: you owe to them the shelter you enjoy from the rain and cold, the raiment which covers, and the food which nourishes you. While you are seeking amusements, or are employed in gaining knowledge at school, your parents are toiling that you may be happy, that your wants may be supplied, that your minds may be improved, that you may grow up and be useful in the world. And when you consider how often you have forfeited all this kindness, and yet how ready they have been to forgive you, and to continue their favours, ought not you to look upon them with the tenderest gratitude? What greater monster can there be than an unthankful child, whose heart is never warmed by the daily expressions of parental solicitude; who, instead of requiting his best friend by his affectionate conduct, is sullen and passionate, and thinks his parents will do nothing for him, because they will not do all he desires? Consider how much better they can decide for you than you can for yourselves. You know but little of the world in which you live. You hastily catch at every thing which promises you pleasure; and unless the authority of a parent should restrain you, you would soon rush into ruin, without a thought or a fear. In pursuing your own inclinations, your health would be destroyed, your minds would run to waste, you would grow up slothful, selfish, a trouble to others, and burdensome to yourselves. Submit, then, cheerfully to your parents. Have you not experienced their goodness long enough to know, that they wish to make you happy, even when their commands are most severe? Prove, then, your sense of this goodness by doing cheerfully what they require. When they oppose your wishes, do not think that you have more knowledge than they. Do not receive their commands with a sour, angry, sullen look, which says, louder than words, that you obey only because you dare not rebel. If they deny your requests, do not persist in urging them, but consider how many requests they have already granted you. Do not expect that your parents are to give up every thing to you, but study to give up every thing to them. Do not wait for them to threaten, but when a look tells you what they want, fly to perform it. This is the way in which you can best reward them for all their pains and labours. In this way you will make their house pleasant and cheerful. But if you are disobedient, perverse, and stubborn, you will make home a place of contention, noise, and anger, and your best friends will have reason to wish that you had never been born. A disobedient child almost always grows up ill-natured and disobliging to all with whom he is connected. None love him, and he has no heart to love any but himself. If you would be amiable in your temper and manner, and desire to be beloved, let me advise you to begin your life with giving up your wills to your parents.

‘Again, You must express your respect for your parents, by placing unreserved confidence in them. This is a very important part of your duty. Children should learn to be honest, sincere, open-hearted to their parents. An artful, hypocritical child is one of the most unpromising characters in the world. You should have no secrets which you are unwilling to disclose to your parents. If you have done wrong, you should openly confess it, and ask that forgiveness which a parent’s heart is so ready to bestow. If you wish to undertake any thing, ask their consent. Never begin any thing in the hope you can conceal your design. If you once strive to impose on your parents, you will be led on, from one step to another, to invent falsehoods, to practise artifice, till you will become contemptible and hateful. You will soon be detected, and then none will trust you. Sincerity in a child will make up for many faults. Of children, he is the worst who watches the eyes of his parents, pretends to obey as long as they see him, but as soon as they have turned away, does what they have forbidden. Whatever else you do, never deceive. Let your parents learn your faults from your own lips, and be assured they will never love you the less for your openness and sincerity.’—(_Sermons and Tracts_, p. 233.)

The whole discourse is prettily turned, and made out with great simplicity and feeling. There is a want neither of heart nor head. Dr. Channing here does well, for he trusts to his own observations and convictions. We may also give what he says in answer to Fenelon, on the subject of _self-annihilation_, as another favourable specimen of free enquiry, and of a higher or more philosophical cast.

‘We have said that self-crucifixion and love to God are, in Fenelon’s system, the two chief constituents, or elements, of virtue and perfection. To these we will give separate attention, although in truth, they often coalesce, and always imply one another. We begin with self-crucifixion, or what is often called self-sacrifice, and on this we chiefly differ from the expositions of our author. Perhaps the word _self_ occurs more frequently than any other in Fenelon’s writings, and he is particularly inclined to place it in contrast with, and in opposition to, God. According to his common teaching, God and self are hostile influences or attractions, having nothing in common; the one the concentration of all evil, the other of all good. Self is the principle and the seat of all guilt and misery. He is never weary of pouring reproach on self; and, generally speaking, sets no limits to the duty of putting it to a painful death. Now, language like this has led men to very injurious modes of regarding themselves and their own nature, and made them forgetful of what they owe to themselves. It has thrown a cloud over man’s condition and prospects. It has led to self-contempt, a vice as pernicious as pride. A man, when told perpetually to crucify _himself_, is apt to include under this word his whole nature; and we fear that, under this teaching, our nature is repressed, its growth stinted, its free movements chained, and, of course, its beauty, grace, and power impaired. We mean not to charge on Fenelon this error of which we have spoken, or to hold him responsible for its effects. But we do think that it finds shelter under his phraseology; and we deem it so great, so pernicious, as to need a faithful exposition. Men err in nothing more than in disparaging and wronging their own nature. None are just to themselves. The truth on this great subject is indeed so obscured, that it may startle as a paradox. A human being, justly viewed, instead of being bound to general self-crucifixion, cannot reverence and cherish himself too much. This position, we know, is strong; but strong language is needed to encounter strong delusion. We would teach that great limitations must be set to the duty of renouncing or denying ourselves, and that no self-crucifixion is virtuous but that which concurs with, and promotes self-respect. We will unfold our meaning, beginning with positions which we presume will be controverted by none.’

Dr. Channing, after showing that the mind, the body, and even self-love, are parts of our nature which cannot well be dispensed with, thus proceeds:—

‘Now, it is not true that self-love is our only principle, or that it constitutes ourselves any more than other principles; and the wrong done to our nature by such modes of speech, needs to be resisted. Our nature has other elements or constituents, and vastly higher ones, to which self-love was meant to minister, and which are at war with its excesses. For example, we have reason or intellectual energy given us for the pursuit and acquisition of truth; and this is essentially a disinterested principle, for truth, which is its object, is of a universal, impartial nature. The great province of the intellectual faculty is to acquaint the individual with the laws and order of the divine system; a system, which spreads infinitely beyond himself, and of which he forms a small part; which embraces innumerable beings equally favoured by God, and which proposes, as its sublime and beneficent end, the ever-growing good of the whole. Again, human nature has a variety of affections, corresponding to our domestic and most common relations; affections, which in multitudes overpower self-love, which make others the chief object of our care, which nerve the arm for ever-recurring toil by day, and strengthen the wearied frame to forego the slumbers of the night. Then there belongs to every man the general sentiment of humanity, which responds to all human sufferings—to a stranger’s tears and groans, and often prompts to great sacrifices for his relief. Above all, there is the moral principle, that which should especially be called a man’s self; for it is clothed with a kingly authority over his whole nature, and was plainly given to bear sway over every desire. This is evidently a disinterested principle. Its very essence is impartiality. It has no respect of persons. It is the principle of justice, taking the rights of all under its protection, and frowning on the least wrong, however largely it may serve ourselves. This moral nature especially delights in, and enjoins a universal charity, and makes the heart thrill with exulting joy, at the sight or hearing of magnanimous deeds, of perils fronted, or death endured in the cause of humanity. Now, these various principles, and especially the last, are as truly ourselves as self-love. When a man thinks of himself, these ought to occur to him as his chief attributes. He can hardly injure himself more than by excluding these from his conception of himself, and by making self-love the great constituent of his nature.

‘We have urged these remarks on the narrow sense often given to the word _self_, because we are persuaded that it leads to degrading ideas of human nature, and to the pernicious notion that we practise a virtuous self-sacrifice in holding it in contempt. We would have it understood, that high faculties form this despised self, as truly as low desires; and we would add, that when these are faithfully unfolded, this self takes rank among the noblest beings in the universe. To illustrate this thought, we ask the reader’s attention to an important, but much-neglected, view of virtue and religion. These are commonly spoken of in an abstract manner, as if they were distinct from ourselves—as if they were foreign existences, which enter the human mind, and dwell there in a kind of separation from itself. Now, religion and virtue, wherever they exist, are the mind itself, and nothing else. A good man’s piety and virtue are not distinct possessions; they are himself, and all the glory which belongs to them, belongs to himself. What is religion? Not a foreign inhabitant—not something alien to our nature, which comes and takes up its abode in the soul. It is the soul itself, lifting itself up to its Maker. What is virtue? It is the soul listening to, and revering and obeying a law which belongs to its very essence—the law of duty. We sometimes smile when we hear men decrying human nature, and in the same breath extolling religion to the skies, as if religion were any thing more than human nature acting in obedience to its chief law. Religion and virtue, as far as we possess them, are ourselves; and the homage which is paid to these attributes, is in truth a tribute to the soul of man. Self-crucifixion, then, should it exclude self-reverence, would be any thing but virtue.

‘We would briefly suggest another train of thought leading to the same result. Self-crucifixion, or self-renunciation, is a work, and work requires an agent. By whom, then, is it accomplished? We answer, by the man himself, who is the subject of it. It is he who is summoned to the effort. He is called by a voice within, and by the law of God, to put forth power over himself, to rule his own spirit, to subdue every passion. Now, this inward power, which self-crucifixion supposes and demands, is the most signal proof of a high nature which can be given. It is the most illustrious power which God confers. It is a sovereignty worth more than that over outward nature. It is the chief constituent of the noblest order of virtues; and its greatness, of course, demonstrates the greatness of the human mind, which is perpetually bound and summoned to put it forth. But this is not all; self-crucifixion has an object, an end. And what is it? Its great end is to give liberty and energy to our nature. Its aim is not to break down the soul, but to curb those lusts and passions which “war against the soul,” that the moral and intellectual faculties may rise into new life, and may manifest their divine original. Self-crucifixion, justly viewed, is the suppression of the passions, that the power and progress of thought, and conscience, and pure love, may be unrestrained. It is the destruction of the brute, that the angel may unfold itself within. It is founded on our godlike capacities, and the expansion and glory of these is the end. Thus the very duty, which by some is identified with self-contempt, implies and imposes self-reverence. It is the belief and the choice of perfection, as our inheritance and our end.’

This is extremely well meant, and very ably executed. There is a _primâ philosophiâ_ view of the subject, which is, we think, above the ordinary level of polemical reasoning in our own country. In the line of argument adopted by our author, there is a strong reflection of the original and masterly views of the innate capacity of the soul for piety and goodness, insisted on in Bishop Butler’s _Sermons_—a work which has fallen into neglect, partly because of the harshness and obscurity of its style, but more because it contains neither a libel on human nature, nor a burlesque upon religion. There is much in the above train of thought silently borrowed from this profound work. Dr. Channing’s argument is, we think, good and sound against the misanthropes in philosophy, and the cynics in religion, who alike maintain the absolute falsity of all human virtue; but the Bishop of Cambray might say, that, with respect to him, it was not a practical answer, so much as a verbal evasion; neither meeting his views nor removing the source of his complaints. Fenelon assuredly, in wishing to annihilate self, did not wish to extirpate charity and faith, but to crush the old serpent, the great enemy of these. There is no doubt of the capacity of the soul for good and evil; the only question is, which principle prevails and triumphs. The satirist and the man of the world laugh at the pretension to superior sanctity and disinterestedness; the pious enthusiast may then be excused if he weeps at the want of them.

How far does that likeness to God, and sympathy with the whole human race, which Fenelon deprecates the want of, and Dr. Channing boasts of, as the inseparable attribute and chief ornament of man, really take place or not in the present state of things, and as a preparation for another and infinitely more important one? If we regard the moral capacity of man, _self_ is a unit that counts millions. Its essence and its glory, says our optimist, is to comprehend the whole human race in its benevolent regards. Does it do so? The understanding runs along the whole chain of being; the affections stop, for the most part, at the first link in the chain. Sense, appetite, pride, passion, engross the whole of this self, and leave it nearly indifferent, if not averse, to all other claims on its attention. In order that the moral attainments should keep pace with the vaunted capacity of man, knowledge should be identified with feeling. We know that there are a million of other beings of as much worth, of the same nature, made in the image of God like ourselves. Have we the same sympathy with every one of these? Do we feel a million times more for all of them put together, than for ourselves? The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. Fenelon laments bitterly and feelingly this disparity between duty and inclination, this want of charity, and eating of self into the soul. What is the consequence of the disproportionate ratios in which the head and the heart move? This paltry _self_, looking upon itself as of more importance than all the rest of the world, fancies itself the centre of the universe, and would have every one look upon it in the same light. Not being able to sympathize with others as it ought, it hates and envies them; is mad to think of its own insignificance in the general system; cannot bear a rival or a superior; despises and tramples on inferiors, and would crush and annihilate all pretensions but its own, that it might be _all in all_. The worm puts on the monarch, or the god, in thought and in secret; and it is only when it can do so in fact, and in public, and be the tyrant or idol of its fellows, that it is at ease or satisfied with itself. Fenelon was right in crying out (if it could have done any good) for the crucifying of this importunate self, and putting a better principle in its stead.

Dr. Channing’s Essays on Milton and Bonaparte are both done upon the same false principle, of making out a case _for_ or _against_. The one is full of common-place eulogy, the other of common-place invective. They are pulpit-criticisms. An orator who is confined to expound the same texts and doctrines week after week, slides very naturally and laudably into a habit of monotony and paraphrase; is not allowed to be ‘wise above what is written;’ is grave from respect to his subject, and the authority attached to the truths he interprets; and if his style is tedious or his arguments trite, he is in no danger of being interrupted or taken to task by his audience. Such a person is unavoidably an advocate for certain received principles; often a dull one. He carries the professional license and character out of the pulpit into other things, and still fancies that he speaks ‘with authority, and not as the scribes.’ He may be prolix without suspecting it; may lay a solemn stress on the merest trifles; repeat truisms, and apologize for them as startling discoveries; may play the sophist, and conceive he is performing a sacred duty; and give what turn or gloss he pleases to any subject,—forgetting that the circumstances under which he declares himself, and the audience which he addresses, are entirely changed. If, as we readily allow, there are instances of preachers who have emancipated themselves from these professional habits, we can hardly add Dr. Channing to the number.

His notice of Milton is elaborate and stately, but neither new nor discriminating. One of the first and most prominent passages is a defence of poetry:—

‘Milton’s fame rests chiefly on his poetry; and to this we naturally give our first attention. By those who are accustomed to speak of poetry as light reading, Milton’s eminence in this sphere may be considered only as giving him a high rank among the contributors to public amusement. Not so thought Milton. Of all God’s gifts of intellect, he esteemed poetical genius the most transcendent. He esteemed it in himself as a kind of inspiration, and wrote his great works with something of the conscious dignity of a prophet. We agree with Milton in his estimate of poetry. It seems to us the divinest of all arts; for it is the breathing or expression of that sentiment which is deepest and sublimest in human nature; we mean, of that thirst or aspiration, to which no mind is wholly a stranger, after something purer and lovelier, something more powerful, lofty, and thrilling, than ordinary and real life affords. No doctrine is more common among Christians than that of man’s immortality; but it is not so generally understood, that the germs or principles of his whole future being are _now_ wrapped up in his soul, as the rudiments of the future plant in the seed. As a necessary result of this constitution, the soul, possessed and moved by these mighty though infant energies, is perpetually stretching beyond what is present and visible, struggling against the bounds of its earthly prison-house, and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen and ideal being. This view of our nature, which has never been fully developed, and which goes farther towards explaining the contradictions of human life than all others, carries us to the very foundation and sources of poetry. He who cannot interpret by his own consciousness what we have now said, wants the true key to works of genius. He has not penetrated those sacred recesses of the soul, where poetry is born and nourished, and inhales immortal vigour, and wings herself for her heavenward flight. In an intellectual nature, framed for progress and for higher modes of being, there must be creative energies, powers of original and ever-growing thought; and poetry is the form in which these energies are chiefly manifested. It is the glorious prerogative of this art, that it “makes all things new” for the gratification of a divine instinct. It indeed finds its elements in what it actually sees and experiences, in the worlds of matter and mind; but it combines and blends these into new forms and according to new affinities; breaks down, if we may so say, the distinctions and bounds of nature; imparts to material objects life, and sentiment, and emotion, and invests the mind with the powers and splendours of the outward creation; describes the surrounding universe in the colours which the passions throw over it, and depicts the mind in those moods of repose or agitation, of tenderness or sublime emotion, which manifest its thirst for a more powerful and joyful existence. To a man of a literal and prosaic character, the mind may seem lawless in these workings; but it observes higher laws than it transgresses, the laws of the immortal intellect; it is trying and developing its best faculties; and in the objects which it describes, or in the emotions which it awakens, anticipates those states of progressive power, splendour, beauty, and happiness, for which it was created.’

There is much more to the same purpose: The whole, to speak freely, is a laboured and somewhat tumid paraphrase on Lord Bacon’s definition of poetry, (which has been often paraphrased before,) where he prefers it to history, ‘as having something divine in it, and representing characters and objects not as they are, but as they ought to be.’ This is the general feature of our author’s writings; they cannot be called mere common-place, but they may be fairly termed _ambitious_ common-place: That is, he takes up the newest and most plausible opinion at the turn of the tide, or just as it is getting into vogue, and would fain arrogate both the singularity and the popularity of it to himself. He hits the public between what they are tired of hearing, and what they never heard before. He has here, however, put the seal of orthodoxy on poetry, and we are not desirous to take it off. If he is inclined to stand sponsor to the Muses, and confirm their offspring at the Fount, he is welcome to do so. It is curious to see strict Professors for a long time denouncing and excommunicating Poetry as a wanton, and then, when they can no longer help it, clasping hands with her as the handmaid of truth; and instead of making her the daughter of ‘the father of lies,’ identifying her with the vital spirit of religion and our happiest prospects.

Dr. Channing is aware, however, that poetry is sometimes liable to abuse, and has given a handle to the ungodly; and as a set-off and salvo to this objection, has a fling at Lord Byron, as the demon who scatters ‘poison and death;’ while Sir Walter Scott is the beneficent genius of poetry, unfolding and imparting new energies and the most delightful impulses to the human breast. In pronouncing the latter sentence, he bows to popular opinion; in the former he considers just as properly what he owes to his profession.

The bulk of the account of Milton, both as a poet and a prose-writer, is, we are constrained to say, mere imitation or amplification of what has been said by others. He observes, _ex cathedrâ_, and with due gravity, that the _forte_ of Milton is sublimity—that the two first books of _Paradise Lost_ are unrivalled examples of that quality. He then proceeds to show, that he is not without tenderness or beauty, though he has not the graphic minuteness of Cowper or of Crabbe; he next praises his versification in opposition to the critics—dwells on the freshness and innocence of the picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise—maintains that our sympathy with Satan is nothing but the admiration of moral strength of mind—acknowledges the harshness and virulence of Milton’s controversial writings, but blames Dr. Johnson for doing so. All this we have heard or said before. We are not edified at all, nor are we greatly flattered by it. It is as if we should convey a letter to a friend in America, and should find it transcribed and sent back to us with a heavy postage.

We do not, then, set much store by our author’s criticisms, because they sometimes seem to be, in a great measure, borrowed from our own lucubrations. We set still less store by his politics, for they are borrowed from others. We have no objection to the most severe or caustic probing of the character of the late ruler of France; but we _do_ object, in the name both of history and philosophy, to misrepresentations and falsehoods, as the groundwork of such remarks. When England has exploded them, half in shame, and half in anger, the harpy echo lingers in America. The ugly mask has been taken off; but Dr. Channing chooses to lecture on the mask in preference to the head. It would serve no useful purpose, however, to follow him in the details of his _Analysis of the Character of Bonaparte_. But we shall extract one of his most elaborate passages, in which he favours us with his opinion of the victors at Waterloo and Trafalgar:—

‘The conqueror of Napoleon, the hero of Waterloo, undoubtedly possesses great military talents; but we have never heard of his eloquence in the senate, or of his sagacity in the cabinet; and we venture to say, that he will leave the world without adding one new thought on the great themes, on which the genius of philosophy and legislature has meditated for ages. We will not go down for illustration to such men as Nelson, a man great on the deck, but debased by gross vices, and who never pretended to enlargement of intellect. To institute a comparison, in point of talent and genius, between such men and Milton, Bacon, and Shakspeare, is almost an insult to these illustrious names. Who can think of these truly great intelligences; of the range of their minds through heaven and earth; of their deep intuition into the soul; of their new and glowing combinations of thought; of the energy with which they grasped and subjected to their main purpose the infinite materials of illustration which nature and life afford; who can think of the forms of transcendent beauty and grandeur which they created, or which were rather emanations of their own minds; of the calm wisdom, and fervid, impetuous imagination which they conjoined; of the dominion which they have exercised over so many generations, and which time only extends and makes sure; of the voice of power, in which, though dead, they still speak to nations, and awaken intellect, sensibility, and genius, in both hemispheres;—who can think of such men, and not feel the immense inferiority of the most gifted warriors, whose elements of thought are physical forces and physical obstructions, and whose employment is the combination of the lowest class of objects on which a powerful mind can be employed?’

We are here forcibly reminded of Fielding’s character of Mr. Abraham Adams. ‘Indeed, if this good man had an enthusiasm, or what the vulgar call a blind side, it was this: he thought a Schoolmaster the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest of all schoolmasters, neither of which points he would have given up to Alexander the Great at the head of his army.’ So Dr. Channing very gravely divides greatness into different sorts, and places himself at the top among those who _talk_ about things—commanders at the bottom among those who only _do_ them. He finds fault with Bonaparte for not coming up to his standard of greatness; but in order that he may not, raises this standard too high for humanity. To put it in force would be to leave the ancient and modern world as bare of great names as the wilds of North America. To make common sense of it, any one great man must be all the others. Homer only sung of battles, and it was honour enough for Alexander to place his works in a golden cabinet. Dr. Channing allows Bonaparte’s supremacy in war; but disputes it in policy. How many persons, from the beginning of the world, have united the two in a greater degree, or wielded more power in consequence? If Bonaparte had not gained a single battle, or planned a single successful campaign; if he had not scattered Coalition after Coalition, but invited the Allies to march to Paris; if he had not quelled the factions, but left them to cut one another’s throats and his own; if he had not ventured on the _Concordat_, or framed a Code of Laws for France; if he had encouraged no art or science or man of genius; if he had not humbled the pride of ‘ancient thrones,’ and risen from the ground of the people to an equal height with the Gods of the earth,—showing that the art and the right to reign is not confined to a

## particular race; if he had been any thing but what he was, and had done

nothing, he would then have come up to Dr. Channing’s notions of greatness, and to his boasted standard of a hero! We in Europe, whether friends or foes, require something beyond this negative merit: we think that Cæsar, Alexander, and Charlemagne, were ‘no babies;’ we think that to move the great masses of power and bind opinions in a spell, is as difficult as the turning a period or winding up a homily; and we are surprised that stanch republicans, who complain that the world bow to birth and rank alone, should turn with redoubled rage against intellect, the instant it became a match for pride and prejudice, and was the only thing that could be opposed to them with success, or could extort a moment’s fear or awe for human genius or human nature.

Dr. Channing’s style is good, though in general too laboured, formal, and sustained. All is brought equally forward,—nothing is left to tell for itself. In the attempt to be copious, he is tautological; in striving to explain every thing, he overloads and obscures his meaning. The fault is the uniform desire to produce an effect, and the supposition that this is to be done by main force.

In one sermon, Dr. Channing insists boldly and loudly on the necessity that American preachers should assume a loftier style, and put forth energies and pretensions to claim attention in proportion to the excited tone of public feeling, and the advances of modern literature and science. He reproaches them with their lukewarmness, and points out to them, as models, the novels of Scott and the poetry of Byron. If Dr. Channing expects a grave preacher in a pulpit to excite the same interest as a tragedy hero on the stage, or a discourse on the meaning of a text of Scripture to enchain the feelings like one of the Waverley Novels, it will be a long time first. The mere proposal is _putting the will for the deed_, and an instance of that republican assurance and rejection of the idea of not being equal to any person or thing, which convinces pretenders of this stamp that there is no reason why they should not do all that others can, and a great deal more into the bargain.

FLAXMAN’S LECTURES ON SCULPTURE

VOL. I.] [_October 1829._

These Lectures were delivered at the Royal Academy in an annual Course, instituted expressly for that purpose. They are not, on the whole, ill calculated to promote the object for which they were originally designed,—to guide the taste, and stimulate the enquiries of the student; but we should doubt whether there is much in them that is likely to interest the public. They may be characterised as the work of a sculptor by profession—dry and hard; a meagre outline, without colouring or adventitious ornament. The Editor states, that he has left them scrupulously as he found them: there are, in consequence, some faults of grammatical construction, of trifling consequence; and many of the paragraphs are thrown into the form of notes, or loose memorandums, and read like a table of contents. Nevertheless, there is a great and evident knowledge of the questions treated of; and wherever there is knowledge, there is power, and a certain degree of interest. It is only a pen guided by inanity or affectation, that can strip such subjects of instruction and amusement. Otherwise, the body of ancient or of modern Art is like the loadstone, to which the soul vibrates, responsive, however cold or repulsive the form in which it appears. We have, however, a more serious fault to object to the present work, than the mere defects of style, or mode of composition. It is with considerable regret and reluctance, we confess, that though it may add to the student’s knowledge of the art, it will contribute little to the _understanding_ of it. It abounds in rules rather than principles. The examples, authorities, precepts, are full, just, and well-selected. The terms of art are unexceptionably applied; the different styles very properly designated; the mean is distinguished from the lofty; due praise is bestowed on the _graceful_, the _grand_, the _beautiful_, the _ideal_; but the reader comprehends no more of the meaning of these qualities at the end of the work than he did at the beginning. The tone of the Lectures is dogmatical rather than philosophical. The judgment for the most part is sound, though no new light is thrown on the grounds on which it rests. Mr. Flaxman is contented to take up with traditional maxims, with adjudged cases, with the acknowledged theory and practice of art: and it is well that he does so; for when he departs from the habitual bias of his mind, and attempts to enter into an explanation or defence of first principles, the reasons which he advances are often weak, warped, insufficient, or contradictory. His arguments are neither solid nor ingenious: They are merely quaint and gratuitous. If we were to hazard a general opinion, we should be disposed to say that a certain setness and formality, a certain want of flexibility and power, ran through the character of his whole mind. His compositions as a sculptor are classical,—cast in an approved mould; but, generally speaking, they are elegant outlines,—poetical abstractions converted into marble, yet still retaining the essential character of words; and the Professor’s opinions and views of art as here collected, exhibit barely the surface and crust of commonly-received maxims, with little depth or originality. The characteristics of his mind were precision, elegance, cool judgment, industry, and a laudable and exclusive attachment to _the best_. He wanted richness, variety, and force. But we shall not dwell farther on these remarks here; as examples and illustrations of them will occur in the course of this article.

The first Lecture, on the history of early British Sculpture, will be found to contain some novel and curious information. At its very commencement, however, we find two instances of perverse or obscure reasoning, which we cannot entirely pass over. In allusion to the original institution and objects of the Royal Academy, the author observes, that ‘as the study of Sculpture was at that time confined within narrow limits, so the appointment of a Professorship in that art was not required, until the increasing taste of the country had given great popularity to the art itself, and native achievements had called on the powers of native Sculpture to celebrate British heroes and patriots.’ Does Mr. Flaxman mean by this to insinuate that Britain had neither patriots nor heroes to boast of, till after the establishment of the Royal Academy, and a little before that of the Professorship of Sculpture? If so, we cannot agree with him. It would be going only a single step farther to assert that the study of Astronomy had not been much encouraged in this country, till the discovery of the _Georgium Sidus_ was thought to call for it, and for the establishment of an Observatory at Greenwich! In the next page, the Lecturer remarks, ‘Painting is honoured with precedence, because Design or Drawing is more

## particularly and extensively employed in illustration of history.

Sculpture immediately follows in the enumeration, because the two arts possess the same common principles, expressed by Painting in colour, and by Sculpture in form.’ Surely, there is here some confusion, either in the thoughts or in the language. First, Painting takes precedence of Sculpture, because it illustrates history by design or form, which is common to both; next, Sculpture comes after Painting, because it illustrates by form, what Painting does not illustrate by form, but by colour. We cannot make any sense of this. It is from repeated similar specimens that we are induced to say, that when Mr. Flaxman reasons, he reasons ill. But to proceed to something more grateful. The following is a condensed and patriotic sketch of the rise and early progress of Sculpture in our own country:

‘The Saxons destroyed the works of Roman grandeur in Britain, burnt the cities from sea to sea, and reduced the country to barbarism again; but when these invaders were settled in their new possessions, they erected poor and clumsy imitations of the Roman buildings themselves had ruined. The Saxon Painting is rather preferable to their Sculpture, which, whether intended to represent the human or brutal figure, is frequently both horrible and burlesque. The buildings erected in England from the settlement of the Saxons to the reign of Henry I., continued nearly the same plain, heavy repetitions of columns and arches. So little was Sculpture employed in them, that no sepulchral statue is known in England before the time of William the Conqueror.

‘Immediately after the Roman Conquest, figures of the deceased were carved, in bas-relief, on their gravestones, examples of which may be seen in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, representing two abbots of that church, and in Worcester Cathedral, those of St. Oswald and Bishop Wulstan. The Crusaders returned from the Holy Land; eager to imitate the arts and magnificence of other countries, they began to decorate the architecture with rich foliage, and to introduce statues against the columns; as we find in the west door of Rochester Cathedral, built in the reign of Henry I. Architecture now improved; Sculpture also became popular. The custom of carving a figure of the deceased in bas-relief on the tomb, seems likely to have been brought from France, where it was continued, in imitation of the Romans. Figures placed against columns might also be copied from examples in that country, of which one remarkable instance was a door in the church of St. Germain de Prez, in Paris, containing several statues of the ancient kings of France, projecting from columns; a work of the 10th century, of which there are prints in Montfaucon’s _Antiquities_.

‘Sculpture continued to be practised with such zeal and success, that in the reign of Henry III. efforts were made deserving our respect and attention at this day. Bishop Joceline rebuilt the Cathedral Church of Wells from the pavement, which having lived to finish and dedicate, he died in the year of our Lord 1242. The west front of this church equally testifies the piety and comprehension of the Bishop’s mind; the sculpture presents the noblest, most useful and interesting subjects possible to be chosen. On the south side, above the west door, are alto-relievos of the Creation in its different parts, the Deluge, and important acts of the Patriarchs. Companions to these on the north side are alto-relievos of the principal circumstances in the life of our Saviour. Above these are two rows of statues larger than nature, in niches, of kings, queens, and nobles, patrons of the church, saints, bishops, and other religious, from its first foundation to the reign of Henry III. Near the pediment is our Saviour come to judgment, attended by angels and his twelve apostles. The upper arches on each side, along the whole of the west front, and continued in the north and south ends, are occupied by figures rising from their graves, strongly expressing the hope, fear, astonishment, stupefaction, or despair, inspired by the presence of the Lord and Judge of the world in that awful moment. In speaking of the execution of such a work, due regard must be paid to the circumstances under which it was produced, in comparison with those of our own times. There were neither prints nor printed books to assist the artist. The Sculptor could not be instructed in Anatomy, for there were no Anatomists. Some knowledge of Optics, and a glimmering of Perspective, were reserved for the researches of so sublime a genius as Roger Bacon, some years afterwards. A small knowledge of Geometry and Mechanics was exclusively confined to two or three learned monks in the whole country; and the principles of those sciences, as applied to the figure and motion of man and inferior animals, were known to none! _Therefore_ this work is _necessarily ill drawn_, and deficient in principle, and much of the sculpture is rude and severe; yet in parts there is a beautiful simplicity, an irresistible sentiment, and sometimes a grace, excelling more modern productions.

‘It is very remarkable that Wells Cathedral was finished in 1242, two years after the birth of Cimabue, the restorer of painting in Italy; and the work was going on at the same time that Nicolo Pisano, the Italian restorer of sculpture, exercised the art in his own country: it was also finished forty-six years before the Cathedral of Amiens, and thirty-six before the Cathedral of Orvieto was begun; and it seems to be the first specimen of such magnificent and varied sculpture, united in a series of sacred history, that is to be found in Western Europe. It is, therefore, probable that the general idea of the work might be brought from the East by some of the Crusaders. But there are two arguments strongly in favour of the execution being English: the family name of the Bishop is English, “Jocelyn Troteman”; and the style, both of sculpture and architecture, is wholly different from the tombs of Edward the Confessor and Henry III., which were by Italian artists.

‘The reign of Edward I. produced a new species of monument. When Eleanor the beloved wife of that monarch died, who had been his heroic and affectionate companion in the Holy War, he raised some crosses of magnificent architecture, adorned with statues of his departed queen, wherever her corpse rested on the way to its interment in Westminster Abbey. Three of these crosses still remain, at Northampton, Geddington, and Waltham. The statues have considerable simplicity and delicacy; they partake of the character and grace particularly cultivated in the school of Pisano; and it is not unlikely, as the sepulchral statue and tomb of Henry III. were executed by Italians, that these statues of Queen Eleanor might be done by some of the numerous travelling scholars from Pisano’s school.

‘The long and prosperous reign of Edward III. was as favourable to literature and liberal arts, as to the political and commercial interests of the country. So generally were painting, sculpture, and architecture encouraged and employed, that besides the buildings raised in this reign, few sacred edifices existed, which did not receive additions and decorations. The richness, novelty, and beauty of architecture may be seen in York and Gloucester Cathedrals, and many of our other churches: besides the extraordinary fancy displayed in various intricate and diversified figures which form the mullions of windows, they were occasionally enriched with a profusion of foliage and historical sculpture, equally surprising for beauty and novelty. In the chancel of Dorchester Church, near Oxford, are three windows of this kind, one of which, besides rich foliage, is adorned with twenty-eight small statues relating to the genealogy of our Saviour; and the other two with alto-relievos from acts of his life.’

Mr. Flaxman then proceeds to trace the progress of Sculpture, and the growing passion for it in this country, through the reign of Henry VII. to the period when its prospects were blighted by the Reformation, and many of its monuments defaced by the Iconoclastic fury of the Puritans and zealots in the time of Charles I. The Lecturer seems to be of opinion that the genius of sculpture in our island was arrested, in the full career of excellence, and when it was approaching the goal of perfection, by these two events; which drew aside the public attention, and threw a stigma on the encouragement of sacred sculpture; whereas, it would perhaps be just as fair to argue, that these events would never have happened, had it not been for a certain indifference in the national character to mere outward impressions, and a slowness to appreciate, or form an enthusiastic attachment to objects that appeal only to the imagination and the senses. We may be influenced by higher and more solid principles,—reason and philosophy; but that makes nothing to the question. Mr. Flaxman bestows great and deserved praise on the monuments of Aylmer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, and Edmund Crouchback, in Westminster Abbey, which are by English artists, whose names are preserved; but speaks slightingly of the tomb of Henry VII. and his wife, in Henry VII.’s Chapel, by Torregiano; from whom, on trivial and insufficient grounds, he withholds the merit of the other sculptures and ornaments of the chapel. This is prejudice, and not wisdom. We think the tomb alone will be monument enough to that artist in the opinion of all who have seen it. We have no objection to, but on the contrary applaud the Lecturer’s zeal to repel the imputation of incapacity from British art, and to detect the lurking traces and doubtful prognostics of it in the records of our early history; but we are, at the same time, convinced that tenaciousness on this point creates an unfavourable presumption on the other side; and we make bold to submit, that whenever the national capacity bursts forth in the same powerful and striking way in the Fine Arts that it has done in so many others, we shall no longer have occasion to praise ourselves for what we either have done, or what we are to do:—the world will soon be loud in the acknowledgment of it. Works of ornament and splendour must dazzle and claim attention at the first sight, or they do not answer their end. They are not like the deductions of an abstruse philosophy, or even improvements in practical affairs, which may make their way slowly and under-ground. They are not a light placed under a bushel, but like ‘a city set on a hill, that cannot be hid.’ To _appear_ and to _be_, are with them the same thing. Neither are we much better satisfied with the arguments of the learned professor to show that the series of statuary in Wells Cathedral is of native English workmanship. The difference of style from the tombs of Edward the Confessor and Henry III. by Italians, can be of little weight at a period when the principles of art were so unsettled, and each person did the best he could, according to his own taste and knowledge; and as to the second branch of the evidence, viz. that ‘the family name of the Bishop is English, Jocelyn Troteman,’ it sounds too much like a parody on the story of him who wanted to prove his descent from the ‘Admirable Crichton,’ by his having a family cup in his possession with the initials A. C.!

We dwell the longer and more willingly on the details and recollections of the early works of which the author speaks so feelingly, as first informed with life and sentiment, because all relating to that remote period of architecture and sculpture, exercises a peculiar charm and fascination over our minds. It is not art in its ‘high and palmy state,’ with its boasted refinements about it, that we look at with envy and wonder, so much as in its first rude attempts and conscious yearning after excellence. They were, indeed, the favoured of the earth, into whom genius first breathed the breath of life; who, born in a night of ignorance, first beheld the sacred dawn of light—those Deucalions of art, who, after the deluge of barbarism and violence had subsided, stood alone in the world, and had to sow the seeds of countless generations of knowledge. We can conceive of some village Michael Angelo, with a soul too mighty for its tenement of clay, whose longing aspirations after truth and good were palsied by the refusal of his hand to execute them,—struggling to burst the trammels and trying to shake off the load of discouragement that oppressed him: What must be his exultation to see the speaking statue, the stately pile, rise up slowly before him,—the idea in his mind embodied out of nothing, without model or precedent,—to see a huge cathedral heave its ponderous weight above the earth, or the solemn figure of an apostle point from one corner of it to the skies; and to think that future ages would, perhaps, gaze at the work with the same delight and wonder that his own did, and not suffer his name to sink into the same oblivion as those who had gone before him, or as the brutes that perish;—this was, indeed, to be admitted into the communion, the ‘holiest of holies’ of genius, and to drink of the waters of life freely! Art, as it springs from the source of genius, is like the act of creation: it has the same obscurity and grandeur about it. Afterwards, whatever perfection it attains, it becomes mechanical. Its strongest impulse and inspiration is derived, not from what it has done, but from what it has to do. It is not surprising that from this state of anxiety and awe with which it regards its appointed task,—the unknown bourne that lies before it, such startling revelations of the world of truth and beauty are often struck out when one might least expect it, and that Art has sometimes leaped at one vast bound from its cradle to its grave! Mr. Flaxman, however, strongly inculcates the contrary theory, and is for raising up Art to its most majestic height by the slow and circuitous process of an accumulation of rules and machinery. He seems to argue that its advance is on a gradually inclined plane, keeping pace and co-extended with that of Science; ‘growing with its growth and strengthening with its strength.’ It appears to us that this is not rightly to weigh the essential differences either of Science or of Art; and that it is flying in the face both of fact and argument. He says, it took sculpture nine hundred or a thousand years to advance from its first rude commencement to its perfection in Greece and Egypt: But we must remember, that the greatest excellence of the Fine Arts, both in Greece, Italy, and Holland, was concentrated into little more than a century; and again, if Art and Science were synonymous, there can be no doubt that the knowledge of anatomy and geometry is more advanced in England in the present day than it was at Athens in the time of Pericles; but is our sculpture therefore superior? The answer to this is, ‘No; but it ought to be, and it will be.’ Spare us, good Mr. Prophesier! Art cannot be transmitted by a receipt, or theorem, like Science; and cannot therefore be improved _ad libitum_: It has inseparably to do with individual nature and individual genius.

The Second Lecture is on Egyptian Sculpture, and here Mr. Flaxman displays the same accurate information and diligent research as before. The Egyptian statues, the Sphinx, the Memnon, &c. were, as is well known, principally distinguished for their size, and the immense labour and expense bestowed upon them. The critic thus justly characterizes their style and merits:

‘The Egyptian statues stand equally poised on both legs, having one foot advanced, the arms either hanging straight down on each side; or, if one is raised, it is at a right angle across the body. Some of the statues sit on seats, some on the ground, and some are kneeling; but the position of the hands seldom varies from the above description; their attitudes are of course simple, rectilinear, and without lateral movement; the faces are rather flat, the brows, eyelids, and mouth formed of simple curves, slightly but sharply marked, and with little expression; the general proportions are something more than seven heads high; the form of the body and limbs rather round and effeminate, with only the most evident projections and hollows. Their tunics, or rather draperies, are in many instances without folds. Winckelman has remarked, that the Egyptians executed quadrupeds better than human figures; for which he gives the two following reasons: first, that as professions in that country were hereditary, genius must be wanting to represent the human form in perfection; secondly, That superstitious reverence for the works of their ancestors prevented improvements. This is an amusing, but needless hypothesis: for there are statues in the Capitoline Museum with as great a breadth, and choice of grand parts proper to the human form, as ever they represented in their lions, or other inferior animals. In addition to these observations on Egyptian statues, we may remark, the forms of their hands and feet are gross; they have no anatomical detail of parts, and are totally deficient in the grace of motion. This last defect, in all probability, was not the consequence of a superstitious determination to persist in the practice of their ancestors; it is accounted for in another and better way.

‘Pythagoras, after he had studied several years in Egypt, sacrificed a hundred oxen in consequence of having discovered, that a square of the longest side of a right-angled triangle is equal to the two squares of the lesser sides of the same triangle; and thence it follows, that the knowledge of the Egyptians could not have been very great at that time in geometry. This will naturally account for that want of motion in their statues and relievos, which can only be obtained by a careful observation of nature, assisted by geometry.’

This is, we apprehend, one of the weak points of Mr. Flaxman’s reasoning. That geometry may be of great use to fix and ascertain certain general principles of the art, we are far from disputing; but surely it was no more necessary for the Egyptian sculptor to wait for the discovery of Pythagoras’s problem before he could venture to detach the arms from the sides, than it was for the Egyptians themselves to remain swathed and swaddled up like mummies, without the power of locomotion, till Pythagoras came with his geometrical diagram to set their limbs at liberty. If they could do this without a knowledge of mechanics, the sculptor could not help seeing it, and imperfectly copying it, if he had the use of his senses or his wits about him. The greater probability is, that the sepulchral statues were done from, or in imitation of the mummies; or that as the imitation of variety of gesture or motion is always the most difficult, these stiff and monotonous positions were adopted (and subsequently adhered to from custom) as the safest and easiest. After briefly noticing the defects of the Hindoo and other early sculpture, the author proceeds to account for the improved practice of the Greeks on the same formal and mechanic principles.

‘We find,’ he says, ‘upon these authorities (Vitruvius and the elder Pliny), that geometry and numbers were employed to ascertain the powers of motion and proportions; optics and perspective (as known to the ancients) to regulate projections, hollows, keeping, diminution, curvatures, and general effects in figures, groups, insulated or in relief, with accompaniments; and anatomy, to represent the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins, _as they appear on the surface of the human body and inferior animals_.

‘In this enlightened age, when the circle of science is so generally and well understood—when the connexion and relation of one branch with another is demonstrated, and their principles applied from necessity and conviction, wherever possibility allows, in the liberal and mechanical arts, as well as all the other concerns of life—no one can be weak or absurd enough to suppose it is within the ability and province of human genius, without the principles of science previously acquired—by _slight observation only_—to become possessed of the forms, characters, and essences of objects, in such a manner as to represent them with truth, force, and pathos at once! No; we are convinced by reason and experience, that “life is short and art is long;” and the perfection of all human productions depends on the indefatigable accumulation of knowledge and labour through a succession of ages.’—P. 55.

This paragraph, we cannot but think, proceeds altogether on a false estimate: it is a misdirection to the student. In following up the principles here laid down, the artist’s life would not only be short, but misspent. Is there no medium, in our critic’s view of this matter, between a ‘slight observation’ of nature, and scientific demonstration? If so, we will say there can be no fine art at all: For mere abstract and formal rules cannot produce truth, force, and pathos in individual forms; and it is equally certain that ‘slight observation’ will not answer the end, if all but learned pedantry is to be accounted casual and superficial. This is to throw a slur on the pursuit, and an impediment in the way of the art itself. Mr. Flaxman seems here to suppose that our observation is profound and just, not according to the delicacy, comprehensiveness, or steadiness of the attention we bestow upon a given object: but depends on the discovery of some other object which was before hid; or on the intervention of mechanical rules, which supersede the exercise of our senses and judgments—as if the outward appearance of things was concealed by a film of abstraction, which could only be removed by the spectacles of books. Thus, anatomy is said to be necessary ‘to represent the bones, muscles tendons, and veins, as they appear on the surface of the human body;’ so that it is to be presumed, that the anatomist, when he has with his knife and instruments laid bare the internal structure of the body, sees at a glance what he did not before see; but that the artist, after poring over them all his life, is blind to the external appearance of veins, muscles, &c., till the seeing what is concealed under the skin enables him for the first time to see what appears through it. We do not deny that the knowledge of the internal conformation helps to explain and to determine the _meaning_ of the outward appearance; what we object to as unwarrantable and pernicious doctrine, is substituting the one process for the other, and speaking slightly of the study of nature in the comparison. It shows a want of faith in the principles and purposes of the Art itself, and a wish to confound and prop it up with the grave mysteries and formal pretensions of Science; which is to take away its essence and its pride. The student who sets to work under such an impression, may accumulate a great deal of learned lumber, and envelope himself in diagrams, demonstrations, and the whole circle of the sciences; but while he is persuaded that the study of nature is but a ‘slight’ part of his task, he will never be able to draw, colour, or _express_ a single object, farther than this can be done by a rule and compasses. The crutches of science will not lend wings to genius. Suppose a person were to tell us, that if he pulled off his coat and laid bare his arm, this would give us (with all the attention we could bestow upon it) no additional insight into its form, colour, or the appearance of veins and muscles on the surface, unless he at the same time suffered us to _flay it_; should we not laugh in his face as wanting common sense, or conclude that he was laughing at us? So the late Professor of Sculpture lays little stress in accounting for the progress of Grecian art on the perfection which the human form acquired, and the opportunities for studying its varieties and movements in the Olympic exercises; but considers the whole miracle as easily solved, when the anatomist came with his probe and ploughed up the surface of the flesh, and the geometrician came with his line and plummet, and demonstrated the centre of gravity. He sums up the question in these words: ‘In the early times of Greece, Pausanias informs us the twelve Gods were worshipped in Arcadia, under the forms of rude stones; and before Dædalus the statues had eyes nearly shut, the arms attached to their sides, and the legs close together! but _as geometry, mechanics, arithmetic, and anatomy improved, painting and sculpture acquired action, proportion and detailed parts_.’ As to the slight account that is made in this reasoning of the immediate observation of visible objects, the point may be settled by an obvious dilemma: Either the eye sees the whole of any object before it; or it does not. If it sees and comprehends the whole of it with all its parts and relations, then it must retain and be able to give a faithful and satisfactory resemblance, without calling in the aid of rules or science to prevent or correct errors and defects; just as the human face or form is perfectly represented in a looking-glass. But if the eye sees only a small part of what any visible object contains in it,—has only a glimmering of colour, proportion, expression &c., then this incipient and imperfect knowledge may be improved to an almost infinite degree by close attention, by study and practice, and by comparing a succession of objects with one another; which is the proper and essential province of the artist, independently of abstract rules or science. On further observation we notice many details in a face which escaped us at the first glance; by a study of faces and of mankind practically, we perceive expressions which the generality do not perceive; but this is not done by rule. The fallacy is in supposing that all that the first naked or hasty observation does not give, is supplied by science and general theories, and not by a closer and continued observation of the thing itself, so that all that belongs to the latter department is necessarily casual and slight.

Mr. Flaxman enforces the same argument by quoting the rules laid down by Vitruvius, for ascertaining the true principles of form and motion. This writer says, ‘If a man lies on his back, his arms and legs may be so extended, that a circle may be drawn round, touching the extremities of his fingers and toes, the centre of which circle shall be his navel: also, that, a man standing upright, the length of his arms when fully extended is equal to his height; thus that the circle and the square equally contain the general form and motion of the human figure.’ From these hints, and the profound mathematical train of reasoning with which Leonardo da Vinci has pursued the subject, the author adds, that a complete system of the principles followed by the ancient Greek sculptors may be drawn out: that is to say, that because all the inflections of figure and motion of which the human body is susceptible, are contained within the above-mentioned circle or square, the knowledge of all this formal generality _includes_ a knowledge of all the subordinate and implied particulars. The contortions of the Laocoon, the agony of the Children, the look of the Dying Gladiator, the contours of the Venus, the grace and spirit of the Apollo, are all, it seems, contained within the limits of the circle or the square! Just as well might it be contended, that having got a square or oval frame, of the size of a picture by Titian or Vandyke, every one is qualified to paint a face within it equal in force or beauty to Titian or Vandyke.

In the same spirit of a determination to make art a handmaid attendant upon Science, the author thus proceeds: ‘Pliny says, lib. xxxiv. c. 8, Leontius, the contemporary of Phidias, first expressed tendons and veins—_primus nervos et venas expressit_—which was immediately after the anatomical researches and improvements of Hippocrates, Democritus, and their disciples; and we shall find in the same manner all the improvements in art followed improvements in science.’ Yet almost in the next page, Mr. Flaxman himself acknowledges, that even in the best times of Grecian sculpture, and the era of Phidias and Praxiteles, dissections were rare, and anatomy very imperfectly understood, and cites ‘the opinion of the learned Professor of Anatomy, that the ancients artists owed much more to the study of living than dead bodies.’ Sir Anthony Carlisle, aware of the deficiencies of former ages in this branch of knowledge, and yet conscious that he himself would be greatly puzzled to carve the Apollo or the Venus, very naturally and wisely concludes, that the latter depends upon a course of study, and an acquaintance with forms very different from any which he possesses. It is a smattering and affectation of science that leads men to suppose that it is capable of more than it really is, and of supplying the undefined and evanescent creations of art with universal and infallible principles. There cannot be an opinion more productive of presumption and sloth.

The same turn of thought is insisted on in the Fourth Lecture, _On Science_; and indeed nearly the whole of that Lecture is devoted to a fuller developement and exemplification of what appears to us a servile prejudice. It would be unjust, however, to Mr. Flaxman, to suppose, or to insinuate, that he is without a better sense and better principles of art, whenever he trusted to his own feelings and experience, instead of being hoodwinked by an idle theory. Nothing can be more excellent than the following observations which occur towards the conclusion of the Lecture on _Composition_:

‘What has been delivered comprises some of the rules for composing, and observations on composition, the most obvious, and perhaps not the least useful. They have been collected from the best works and the best writings, examined and compared with their principles in nature. Such a comprehensive view may be serviceable to the younger student, in pointing his way, preventing error, and showing the needful materials; _but after all, he must perform the work himself_! All rules, all critical discourses, can but awaken the intelligence, and stimulate the will, with advice and directions, for a beginning of that which is to be done. They may be compared to the scaffolding for raising a magnificent palace; it is neither the building nor the decoration, but it is the workman’s indispensable help in erecting the walls which enclose the apartments, and which may afterwards be enriched with the most splendid ornaments. Every painter and sculptor feels a conviction that a considerable portion of science is requisite to the productions of liberal art; but he will be equally convinced, that whatever is produced from principles and rules only, added to the most exquisite manual labour, is no more than a mechanical work. Sentiment is the life and soul of fine art; without which it is all a dead letter! Sentiment gives a sterling value, an irresistible charm to the rudest imagery or most unpractised scrawl. By this quality a firm alliance is formed with the affections in all works of art. With an earnest watchfulness for their preservation, we are made to perceive and feel the most sublime and terrific subjects, following the course of sentiment, through the current and mazes of intelligence and passion, to the most delicate and tender ties and sympathies.’

From the account of Grecian sculpture, in the third Lecture, which is done with care and judgment, we select the following descriptions of the Minerva and Jupiter of Phidias:—

‘Within the temple (at the Acropolis of Athens) stood the statue of Minerva, thirty-nine feet high, made by Phidias, of ivory and gold, holding a victory, six feet high, in her right hand, and a spear in her left, her tunic reaching to her feet. She had her helmet on, and the Medusa’s head on her ægis; her shield was adorned with the battle of the gods and giants, the pedestal with the birth of Pandora. Plato tells us that the eyes of this statue were precious stones. But the great work of this chief of sculptors, the astonishment and praise of after ages, was the Jupiter at Elis, sitting on his throne, his left hand holding a sceptre, his right extending victory to the Olympian conquerors, his head crowned with olive, and his pallium decorated with birds, beasts, and flowers. The four corners of the throne were dancing victories, each supported by a sphinx, tearing a Theban youth. At the back of the throne, above his head, were the three horns, or seasons, on one side, and on the other the three Graces. On the bar, between the legs of the throne, and the panels, or spaces, between them, were represented many stories—the destruction of Niobe’s children, the labours of Hercules, the delivery of Prometheus, the garden of Hesperides, with the different adventures of the heroic ages. On the base, the battle of Theseus with the Amazons; on the pedestal, an assembly of the gods, the sun and moon in their cars, and the birth of Venus. The height of the work was sixty feet. The statue was ivory, enriched with the radiance of golden ornaments and precious stones, and was justly esteemed one of the seven wonders of the world.

‘Several other statues of great excellence, in marble and in bronze, are mentioned among the works of Phidias, particularly a Venus, placed by the Romans in the forum of Octavia; two Minervas, one named Callimorphus, from the beauty of its form; and it is likely that the fine statue of this goddess in Mr. Hope’s gallery is a repetition in marble of Phidias’s bronze, from its resemblance in attitude, drapery, and helmet, to the reverse of an Athenian coin. Another statue by him was an Amazon, called Eutnemon, from her beautiful legs. There is a print of this in the _Museum Pium Clementinum_.’

With the name of Phidias, Mr. Flaxman couples that of Praxiteles, and gives the following spirited sketch of him and his works:—

‘Praxiteles excelled in the highest graces of youth and beauty. He is said to have excelled not only other sculptors, but himself, by his marble statues in the Ceramicus of Athens; but his Venus was preferable to all others in the world, and many sailed to Cnidos for the purpose of seeing it. This sculptor having made two statues of Venus, one with drapery, the other without, the Coans preferred the clothed figure, on account of its severe modesty, the same price being set upon each. The citizens of Cnidos took the rejected statue, and afterwards refused it to King Nicomedes, who would have forgiven them an immense debt in return; but they were resolved to suffer any thing, so long as this statue, by Praxiteles, ennobled Cnidos. The temple was entirely open in which it was placed, because every view was equally admirable. This Venus was still in Cnidos during the reign of the Emperor Arcadius, about 400 years after Christ. Among the known works of Praxiteles are his Satyr, Cupid, Apollo, the Lizard-killer, and Bacchus leaning on a Faun.’

But we must stop short in this list of famous names and enchanting works, or we should never have done. This seems to have been the fabulous age of sculpture, when marble started into life as in a luxurious dream, and men appeared to have no other employment than ‘to make Gods in their own image.’ The Lecturer bestows due and eloquent praise on the horses in the Elgin collection, which he supposes to have been done under the superintendence, and probably from designs by Phidias; but we are sorry he has not extended his eulogium to the figure of the Theseus, which appears to us a world of grace and grandeur in itself, and to say to the sculptor’s art, ‘_Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther!_’ What went before it was rude in the comparison; what came after it was artificial. It is the perfection of _style_, and would have afforded a much better exemplification of the force and meaning of that term than the schoolboy definition adopted in the Lecture on this subject; namely, that as poets and engravers used a _stylos_, or style, to execute their works, the name of the instrument was metaphorically applied to express the art itself. _Style_ properly means the mode of representing nature; and this again arises from the various character of men’s minds, and the infinite variety of views which may be taken of nature. After seeing the Apollo, the Hercules, and other celebrated works of antiquity, we seem to have exhausted our stock of admiration, and to conceive that there is no higher perfection for sculpture to attain, or to aspire to. But at the first sight of the Elgin Marbles, we feel that we have been in a mistake, and the ancient objects of our idolatry fall into an inferior class or style of art. They are comparatively, and without disparagement of their vast and almost superhuman merit, _stuck-up_ gods and goddesses. But a new principle is at work in the others which we had not seen or felt the want of before (not a studied trick, or curious refinement, but an obvious truth, arising from a more intimate acquaintance with, and firmer reliance on, nature;)—a principle of fusion, of motion, so that the marble flows like a wave. The common _antiques_ represent the most perfect forms and proportions, with each part perfectly understood and executed; every thing is brought out; every thing is made as exquisite and imposing as it can be in itself; but each part seems to be cut out of the marble, and to answer to a model of itself in the artist’s mind. But in the fragment of the Theseus, the whole is melted into one impression like wax; there is all the flexibility, the malleableness of flesh; there is the same alternate tension and relaxation; the same sway and yielding of the parts; ‘the right hand knows what the left hand doeth’; and the statue bends and plays under the framer’s mighty hand and eye, as if, instead of being a block of marble, it was provided with an internal machinery of nerves and muscles, and felt every the slightest pressure or motion from one extremity to the other. This, then, is the greatest grandeur of style, from the comprehensive idea of the whole, joined to the greatest simplicity, from the entire union and subordination of the parts. There is no ostentation, no stiffness, no overlaboured finishing. Every thing is in its place and degree, and put to its proper use. The greatest power is combined with the greatest ease: there is the perfection of knowledge, with the total absence of a conscious display of it. We find so little of an appearance of art or labour, that we might be almost tempted to suppose that the whole of these groups were done by means of _casts_ from fine nature; for it is to be observed, that the commonest cast from nature has the same _style_ or character of union and reaction of parts, being copied from that which has life and motion in itself. What adds a passing gleam of probability to such a suggestion is, that these statues were placed at a height where only the general effect could be distinguished, and that the back and hinder parts, which are just as scrupulously finished as the rest, and as true to the mould of nature, were fixed against a wall where they could not be seen at all; and where the labour (if we do not suppose it to be in a great measure abridged mechanically) was wholly thrown away. However, we do not lay much stress on this consideration; for we are aware that ‘the labour we delight in physics pain,’ and we believe that the person who _could_ do the statue of the Theseus, _would_ do it, under all circumstances, and without fee or reward of any kind. We conceive that the Elgin Marbles settle another disputed point of vital interest to the arts. Sir Joshua Reynolds contends, among others, that grandeur of style consists in giving only the _masses_, and leaving out the details. The statues we are speaking of repudiate this doctrine, and at least demonstrate the possibility of uniting the two things, which had been idly represented to be incompatible, as if they were not obviously found together in nature. A great number of parts may be collected into one mass; as, on the other hand, a work may equally want minute details, or large and imposing masses. Suppose all the light to be thrown on one side of a face, and all the shadow on the other: the _chiaroscuro_ may be worked up with the utmost delicacy and pains in the one, and every vein or freckle distinctly marked on the other, without destroying the general effect—that is, the two broad masses of light and shade. Mr. Flaxman takes notice that there were two eras of Grecian art before the time of Pericles and Phidias, when it was at its height. In the first they gave only a gross or formal representation of the objects, so that you could merely say, ‘This is a man, that is a horse.’ To this clumsy concrete style succeeded the most elaborate finishing of parts, without selection, grace or grandeur. ‘Elaborate finishing was soon afterwards’ [after the time of Dædalus and his scholars] ‘carried to excess: undulating locks and spiral knots of hair like shells, as well as the drapery, were wrought with the most elaborate care and exactness; whilst the tasteless and barbarous character of the face and limbs remained much the same as in former times.’ This was the natural course of things, to denote first the gross object; then to run into the opposite extreme, and give none but the detached parts. The difficulty was to unite the two in a noble and comprehensive idea of nature.

We are chiefly indebted for the information or amusement we derive from Mr. Flaxman’s work, to the historical details of his subject. We cannot say that he has removed any of the doubts or stumbling-blocks in our way, or extended the landmarks of taste or reasoning. We turned with some interest to the Lecture on _Beauty_; for the artist has left specimens of this quality in several of his works. We were a good deal disappointed. It sets out in this manner: ‘That beauty is not merely an imaginary quality, but a real essence, may be inferred from the harmony of the universe; and the perfection of its wondrous parts we may understand from all surrounding nature; and in this course of observation we find, that man has more of beauty bestowed on him as he rises higher in creation.’ The rest is of a piece with this exordium,—containing a dissertation on the various gradations of being, of which man is said to be at the top,—on the authority of Socrates, who argues, ‘that the human form is the most perfect of all forms, because it contains in it the principles and powers of all inferior forms.’ This assertion is either a flat contradiction of the fact, or an _antique_ riddle, which we do not pretend to solve. Indeed, we hold the ancients, with all our veneration for them, to have been wholly destitute of philosophy in this department; and Mr. Flaxman, who was taught when he was young to look up to them for light and instruction in the philosophy of art, has engrafted too much of it on his Lectures. He defines beauty thus: ‘The most perfect human beauty is that _most free from deformity_, either of body or mind, and may be therefore defined—The most perfect soul is the most perfect body.’

In support of this truism, he strings a number of quotations together, as if he were stringing pearls:

‘In Plato’s dialogue concerning the beautiful, he shows the power and influence of mental beauty on corporeal; and in his dialogue, entitled “The greater Hippias,” Socrates observes in argument, “that as a beautiful vase is inferior to a beautiful horse, and as a beautiful horse is not to be compared to a beautiful virgin, in the same manner a beautiful virgin is inferior in beauty to the immortal Gods; for,” says he, “there is a beauty incorruptible, ever the same.” It is remarkable, that, immediately after, he says, “Phidias is skilful in beauty.” Aristotle, the Scholar of Plato, begins his Treatise on Morals thus:—“Every art, every method and institution, every action and council, seems to seek some good; therefore the ancients pronounced the beautiful to be good.” Much, indeed, might be collected from this philosopher’s treatises on morals, poetics, and physiognomy, of the greatest importance to our subject; but for the present we shall produce only two quotations from Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, which contain the immediate application of these principles to the arts of design. In the dialogue between Socrates and the sculptor Clito, Socrates concludes, that “Statuary must represent the emotions of the soul by form;” and in the former part of the same dialogue, Parrhasius and Socrates agree that, “the good and evil qualities of the soul may be represented in the figure of man by painting.” In the applications from this dialogue to our subject, we must remember, philosophy demonstrates that rationality and intelligence, although connected with animal nature, rises above it, and properly exists in a more exalted state. From such contemplations and maxims, the ancient artists sublimated the sentiments of their works, expressed in the choicest forms of nature; thus they produced their divinities, heroes, patriots, and philosophers, adhering to the principle of Plato, that “nothing is beautiful which is not good;” it was this which, in ages of polytheism and idolatry, still continued to enforce a popular impression of divine attributes and perfection.’

If the ancient sculptors had had nothing but such maxims and contemplations as these to assist them in forming their statues, they would have been greatly to seek indeed! Take these homilies on the Beautiful and the Good, together with Euclid’s Elements, into any country town in England, and see if you can make a modern Athens of it. The Greek artists did not learn to put expression into their works, because Socrates had said, that ‘statuary must represent the emotions of the soul by form;’ but he said that they ought to do so, because he had seen it done by Phidias and others. It was from the diligent study and contemplation of the ‘choicest forms of nature,’ and from the natural love of beauty and grandeur in the human breast, and not from ‘shreds and patches,’ of philosophy, that they drew their conceptions of Gods and men. Let us not, however, be thought hard on the metaphysics of the ancients: they were the first to propose these questions, and to feel the curiosity and the earnest desire to know what the _beautiful_ and the _good_, meant. If the will was not tantamount to the deed, it was scarcely their fault; and perhaps, instead of blaming their partial success, we ought rather to take shame to ourselves for the little progress we have made, and the dubious light that has been shed upon such questions since. If the Professor of Sculpture had sought for the principles of beauty in the antique statues, instead of the _scholia_ of the commentators, he probably might have found it to resolve itself (according, at least, to their peculiar and favourite view of it) into a certain symmetry of form, answering in a great measure, to harmony of colouring, or of musical sounds. We do not here affect to lay down a metaphysical theory, but to criticise an historical fact. We are not bold enough to say that beauty in general depends on a regular gradation and correspondence of lines, but we may safely assert that Grecian beauty does. If we take any beautiful Greek statue, we shall find that, seen in profile, the forehead and nose form nearly a perpendicular straight line; and that finely turned at that point, the lower part of the face falls by gentle and almost equal curves to the chin. The cheek is full and round, and the outline of the side of the face a general sloping line. In front, the eyebrows are straight, or gently curved; the eyelids full and round to match, answering to that of Belphœbe, in Spenser—

‘Upon her eyebrows many Graces sat, Under the shadow of her even brows:’

The space between the eyebrows is broad, and the two sides of the nose straight, and nearly parallel; the nostrils form large and distinct curves; the lips are full and even, the corners being large; the chin is round, and rather short, forming, with the two sides of the face, a regular oval. The opposite to this, the Grecian model of beauty, is to be seen in the contour and features of the African face, where all the lines, instead of corresponding to, or melting into, one another, in a kind of _rhythmus_ of form, are sharp, angular, and at cross-purposes. Where strength and majesty were to be expressed by the Greeks, they adopted a greater squareness, but there was the same unity and correspondence of outline. Greek grace is harmony of movement. The _ideal_ may be regarded as a certain predominant quality or character (this may be ugliness or deformity as well as beauty, as is seen in the forms of fauns and satyrs) diffused over all the parts of an object, and carried to the utmost pitch, that our acquaintance with visible models, and our conception of the imaginary object, will warrant. It is extending our impressions farther, raising them higher than usual, from the _actual_ to the _possible_.[31] How far we can enlarge our discoveries from the one of these to the other, is a point of some nicety. In treating on this question, our author thus distinguishes the Natural and the Ideal Styles:

‘The Natural Style may be defined thus: a representation of the human form, according to the distinction of sex and age, in action or repose, expressing the affections of the soul. The same words may be used to define the Ideal Style, but they must be followed by this addition—_selected from such perfect examples as may excite in our minds a conception of the preternatural_. By these definitions will be understood that the Natural Style is peculiar to humanity, and the Ideal to spirituality and divinity.’

We should be inclined to say, that the female divinities of the ancients were Goddesses because they were _ideal_, rather than that they were _ideal_ because they belonged to the class of Goddesses; ‘By their own beauty were they deified.’ Of the difficulty of passing the line that separates the actual from the imaginary world, some test may be formed by the suggestion thrown out a little way back; _viz._ that the _ideal_ is exemplified in systematizing and enhancing any idea whether of beauty or deformity, as in the case of the fauns and satyrs of antiquity. The expressing of depravity and grossness is produced here by approximating the human face and figure to that of the brute; so that the mind runs along this line from one to the other, and carries the wished-for resemblance as far as it pleases. But here both the extremes are equally well known, equally objects of sight and observation: insomuch that there might be a literal substitution of the one for the other; but in the other case, of elevating character and pourtraying Gods as men, one of the extremes is missing; and the combining the two, is combining a positive with an unknown abstraction. To represent a Jupiter or Apollo, we take the best species, (as it seems to us,) and select the best of that species: how we are to get beyond that _best_, without any given form or visible image to refer to, it is not easy to determine. The _ideal_, according to Mr. Flaxman, is ‘the scale by which to heaven we do ascend;’ but it is a hazardous undertaking to soar above reality, by embodying an abstraction. If the ancients could have seen the immortal Gods, with their bodily sense, (as it was said that Jupiter had revealed himself to Phidias,) they might have been enabled to give some reflection or shadow of their countenances to their human likenesses of them: otherwise, poetry and philosophy lent their light in vain. It is true, we may magnify the human figure to any extent we please, for that is a mechanical affair; but how we are to add to our ideas of grace or grandeur, beyond any thing we have ever seen, merely by contemplating grace and grandeur that we have never seen, is quite another matter. If we venture beyond the highest point of excellence of which we have any example, we quit our hold of the natural, without being sure that we have laid our hands on what is truly divine; for that has no earthly image or representative—nature is the only rule or ‘legislator.’ We may combine existing qualities, but this must be consistently, that is, such as are found combined in nature. Repose was given to the Olympian Jupiter to express majesty; because the greatest power was found to imply repose, and to produce its effects with the least effort. Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, was represented young and beautiful; because wisdom was discovered not to be confined to age or ugliness. Not only the individual excellencies, but their bond of union, were sanctioned by the testimony of observation and experience. Bacchus is represented with full, exuberant features, with prominent lips, and a stern brow, as expressing a character of plenitude and bounty, and the tamer of savages and wild beasts. But this _ideal_ conception is carried to the brink; the mould is full, and with a very little more straining, it would overflow into caricature and distortion. Mercury has wings, which is merely a grotesque and fanciful combination of known images. Apollo was described by the poets (if not represented by the statuary) with a round jocund face, and golden locks, in allusion to the appearance and rays of the sun. This was an allegory, and would be soon turned to abuse in sculpture or painting. Thus we see how circumscribed and uncertain the province of the _ideal_ is, when once it advances from ‘the most perfect nature to spirituality and divinity.’ We suspect the improved Deity often fell short of the heroic original; and the Venus was only the most beautiful woman of the time, with diminished charms and a finer name added to her. With respect to _ideal_ expression, it is superior to common _every-day_ expression, no doubt; that is, it must be raised to correspond with lofty characters placed in striking situations; but it is tame and feeble compared with what those characters would exhibit in the supposed circumstances. The expressions in the _Incendio del Borgo_ are striking and grand; but could we see the expression of terror in the commonest face in real danger of being burnt to death, it would put all imaginary expressions to shame and flight.

Mr. Flaxman makes an attempt to vindicate the golden ornaments, and eyes of precious stones, in the ancient statues, as calculated to add to the awe of the beholder, and inspire a belief in their preternatural power. In this point of view, or as a matter of religious faith, we are not tenacious on the subject, any more than we object to the wonder-working images and moving eyes of the patron saints in Popish churches. But the question, as it regards the fine arts in general, is curious, and treated at some length, and with considerable intricacy and learning, by the Lecturer.

‘We certainly know,’ he says, ‘that the arts of painting and sculpture are different in their essential properties. Painting exists by colours only, and form is the peculiarity of sculpture; but there is a principle common to both, in which both are united, and without which neither can exist—and this is drawing; and in the union of light, shadow, and colour, sculpture may be seen more advantageously by the chill light of a winter’s day, or the warmer tints of a midsummer’s sun, according to the solemnity or cheerfulness of the subject. These positions will be generally agreed to; but the question before us is, “How far was Phidias successful in adding colours to the sculpture of the Athenian Minerva, and the Olympian Jupiter?”—which examples were followed by succeeding artists.

‘We have all been struck by the resemblance of figures in coloured wax-work to persons in fits, and therefore such a representation is

## particularly proper for the similitude of persons in fits, or the

deceased: but the Olympian Jupiter and the Athenian Minerva were intended to represent those who were superior to death and disease. They were believed immortal, and therefore the stillness of these statues, having the colouring of life, during the time the spectator viewed them, would appear divinity in awful abstraction or repose. Their stupendous size alone was preternatural; and the colouring of life without motion increased the sublimity of the statue and the terror of the pious beholder. The effect of the materials which composed these statues has also been questioned. The statues themselves (according to the information of Aristotle, in his book concerning the world) were made of stone, covered with plates of ivory, so fitted together, that at the distance requisite for seeing them, they appeared one mass of ivory, which has much the tint of delicate flesh. The ornaments and garments were enriched with gold, coloured metals, and precious stones.

‘Gold ornaments on ivory are equally splendid and harmonious, and in such colossal forms must have added a dazzling glory, like electric fluid running over the surface: the figure, character, and splendour must have had the appearance of an immortal vision in the eyes of the votary.

‘But let us attend to the judgment passed on these by the ancients: we have already quoted Quintilian, who says, “they appear to have added something to religion, the work was so worthy of the divinity.” Plato says, “the eyes of Minerva were of precious stones,” and immediately adds, “Phidias was skilful in beauty.” Aristotle calls him “the wise sculptor.” An opinion prevailed that Jupiter had revealed himself to Phidias; and the statue is said to have been touched by lightning in approbation of the work. After these testimonies, there seems no doubt remaining of the effect produced by these coloured statues; but the very reasons that prove that colours in sculpture may have the effect of supernatural vision, _fits_, or _death_, prove at the same time that such practice is utterly improper for the general representation of the human figure: _because, as the tints of carnation in nature are consequences of circulation, wherever the colour of flesh is seen without motion, it resembles only death, or a suspension of the vital powers_.

‘Let not this application of colours, however, in the instances of the Jupiter and Minerva, be considered as a mere arbitrary decision of choice or taste in the sculptor, to render his work agreeable in the eyes of the beholder. It was produced by a much higher motive. It was the desire of rendering these stupendous forms[32] living and intelligent to the astonished gaze of the votary, and to confound the sceptical by a flash of conviction, that something of divinity resided in the statues themselves.

‘The practice of painting sculpture seems to have been common to most countries, particularly in the early and barbarous states of society. But whether we look on the idols of the South Seas, the Etruscan painted sculpture and _terra-cotta_ monuments, or the recumbent coloured statues on tombs of the middle ages, we shall generally find the practice has been employed to enforce superstition, or preserve an exact similitude of the deceased.

‘These, however, are in themselves perverted purposes. The real ends of painting, sculpture, and all the other arts, are to elevate the mind to the contemplation of truth, to give the judgment a rational determination, and to represent such of our fellow-men as have been benefactors to society, not in the deplorable and fallen state of a lifeless and mouldering corpse, but in the full vigour of their faculties when living, or in something corresponding to the state of the good received among the just made perfect.’

All this may be very true and very fine; what the greater part of it has to do with the colouring of statues, we are at a loss to comprehend. Whenever Mr. Flaxman gives a reason, it usually makes against himself; but his faith in his conclusion is proof against contradiction. He says, that adding flesh-colour to statues gives an appearance of death to them, _because the colour of life without motion argues a suspension of the vital powers_. The same might be said of pictures which have colour without motion; but who would contend, that because a chalk-drawing has the tints of flesh (denoting circulation) superadded to it, this gives it the appearance of a person in fits, or of death? On the contrary, Sir Joshua Reynolds makes it an objection to coloured statues, that, as well as wax-work, they were too much like life. This was always the scope and ‘but-end’ of his theories and rules on art, that it should avoid coming in too close contact with nature. Still we are not sure that this is not the true reason, _viz._ that the imitation ought not to amount to a deception, nor be effected by gross or identical means. We certainly hate all wax-work, of whatever description; and the idea of colouring a statue gives us a nausea; but as is the case with most bigoted people, the clearness of our reasoning does not keep pace with the strength of our prejudices. It is easy to repeat that the object of painting is colour and form, while the object of sculpture is form alone; and to ring the changes on the purity, the severity, the abstract truth of sculpture. The question returns as before; Why should sculpture be more pure, more severe, more abstracted, than any thing else? The only clew we can suggest is, that from the immense pains bestowed in sculpture on mere form, or in giving solidity and permanence, this predominant feeling becomes an exclusive and unsociable one, and the mind rejects every addition of a more fleeting or superficial kind as an excrescence and an impertinence. The form is hewn out of the solid rock; to tint and daub it over with a flimsy, perishable substance, is a mockery and a desecration, where the work itself is likely to last for ever. A statue is the utmost possible developement of form; and that on which the whole powers and faculties of the artist have been bent: It has a right then, by the laws of intellectual creation, to stand alone in that simplicity and unsullied nakedness in which it has been wrought. _Tangible form_ (the primary idea) is blind, averse to colour. A statue, if it were coloured at all, ought to be inlaid, that is, done in mosaic, where the colour would be part of the solid materials. But this would be an undertaking beyond human strength. Where art has performed all that it can do, why require it to begin its task again? Or if the addition is to be made carelessly and slightly, it is unworthy of the subject. Colour is at best the mask of form: paint on a statue is like paint on a real face,—it is not of a piece with the work, it does not belong to the face, and justly obtains the epithet of _meretricious_.

Mr. Flaxman, in comparing the progress of ancient and modern sculpture, does not shrink from doing justice to the latter. He gives the preference to scriptural over classical subjects; and, in one passage, seems half inclined to turn short round on the Greek mythology and morality, and to treat all those Heathen Gods and Goddesses as a set of very improper people:—as to the Roman bas-reliefs, triumphs, and processions, he dismisses them as no better than so many ‘vulgar, military gazettes.’ He, with due doubt and deference, places Michael Angelo almost above the ancients. His statues will not bear out this claim; and we have no sufficient means of judging of their paintings. In his separate groups and figures in the _Sistine Chapel_, there is, we indeed think, a conscious vastness of purpose, a mighty movement, like the breath of Creation upon the waters, that we see in no other works, ancient or modern. The forms of his Prophets and Sibyls are like moulds of _thought_. Mr. Flaxman is also strenuous in his praises of the _Last Judgment_; but on that we shall be silent, as we are not converts to his opinion. Michael Angelo’s David and Bacchus, done when he was young, are clumsy and unmeaning; even the grandeur of his Moses is confined to the horns and beard. The only works of his in sculpture which sustain Mr. Flaxman’s praise, are those in the chapel of Lorenzo de Medici at Florence; and these are of undoubted force and beauty.

We shall conclude our extracts with a description of Pisa, the second birth-place of art in modern times; and in speaking of which, the learned Lecturer has indulged a vein of melancholy enthusiasm, which has the more striking effect as it is rare with him.

‘The Cathedral of Pisa, built by Buskettus, an architect from Dulichium, was the second sacred edifice (St. Mark’s, in Venice, being the first) raised after the destruction of the Roman power in Italy. It has received the honour of being allowed by posterity to have taken the lead in restoring art; and indeed the traveller, on entering the city gates, is astonished by a scene of architectural magnificence and singularity not to be equalled in the world. Four stupendous structures of white marble in one group—the solemn Cathedral, in the general parallelogram of its form, resembling an ancient temple, which unites and simplifies the arched divisions of its exterior; the Baptistry, a circular building, surrounded with arches and columns, crowned with niches, statues, and pinnacles, rising to an apex in the centre, terminated by a statue of the Baptist; the Falling Tower, which is thirteen feet out of the perpendicular, a most elegant cylinder, raised by eight rows of columns surmounting each other, and surrounding a staircase; the Cemetery, a long square corridor, 400 by 200 feet, containing the ingenious works of the improvers of painting down to the sixteenth century. This extraordinary scene, in the evening of a summer’s day, with a splendid red sun setting in a dark-blue sky, the full moon rising in the opposite side, over a city nearly deserted, affects the beholder’s mind with such a sensation of magnificence, solitude, and wonder, that he scarcely knows whether he is in this world or not.’

After the glossiness, and splendour, and gorgeous perfection of Grecian art, the whole seems to sink into littleness and insignificance, compared with the interest we feel in the period of its restoration, and in the rude, but mighty efforts, it made to reach to its former height and grandeur;—with more anxious thoughts, and with a more fearful experience to warn it—with the ruins of the old world crumbling around it, and the new one emerging out of the gloom of Gothic barbarism and ignorance—taught to look from the outspread map of time and change beyond it—and if less critical in nearer objects, commanding a loftier and more extended range, like the bursting the bands of death asunder, or the first dawn of light and peace after darkness and the tempest!

WILSON’S LIFE AND TIMES OF DANIEL DEFOE

VOL. L.] [_January 1830._

This is a very good book, but spun out to too great a length. Mr. Wilson will not bate an inch of his right to be tediously minute on any of the topics that pass in review before him, whether they relate to public or private matters, the author’s life and writings, or the answers to them by Tutchin and Ridpath. He is indeed so well furnished with materials, and so full of his subject, that instead of studying to reduce the size of his work, he very probably thinks he has shown forbearance in not making it longer. We could not wish a more distinct or honest chronicler. There is scarcely a sentence, or a sentiment in his work, that we disapprove, unless we were to quarrel with what is said in dispraise of the _Beggar’s Opera_. In general, his opinions are sound, liberal, and enlightened, and as clear and intelligible in the expression as the intention is upright and manly. The style is plain and unaffected, as is usually the case where a writer thinks more of his subject than of himself. Mr. Wilson appears as the zealous and consistent friend of civil and religious liberty; and not only never swerves from, or betrays his principles, but omits no opportunity of avowing and enforcing them. He has ‘excellent iteration in him.’ If he repeats the old story over again, that liberty is a blessing, and slavery a curse,—if he depicts persecution and religious bigotry in the same unvarying and odious colours, and never sees the phantom of _divine right_ without proceeding to have a tilting-bout with it,—as honest Hector Macintire could not be prevented by his uncle, Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, from encountering a _seal_ whenever he saw one,—we confess, notwithstanding, that we like this pertinacity better than some people’s indifference or tergiversation. The biographer of Defoe, like Defoe himself, is a Whig, and of the true stamp; that is, he is a staunch and incorruptible advocate of Whig principles, and of the great aims the leaders of the Revolution had in view, as opposed to the absurd and mischievous doctrines of their adversaries; though this does not bribe his judgment, but rather makes him more anxious in pointing out and lamenting the follies, weaknesses, and perversity of spirit, which sometimes clogged their proceedings, defeated their professed objects, and turned the cause of justice and freedom into a by-word, and the instrument of a cabal.

Mr. Wilson cannot be charged with going too copiously or indiscriminately into the details of Defoe’s private life. The anecdotes and references of this kind are ‘thinly scattered to make up a show,’—_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_. Little was known before on this head, and the author, with all his diligence and zeal, has redeemed little from obscurity and oblivion. But he makes up for the deficiency of personal matter, by a superabundance of literary and political information. All that is to be gleaned of Defoe’s individual history might be stated in a short compass.

Daniel Defoe, or Foe, as the name was sometimes spelt, was born in London in the year 1661, in the parish of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. His father, James Foe, was a butcher; and his grandfather, Daniel, the first person among his ancestors of whom any thing is positively known, was a substantial yeoman, who farmed his own estate at Elton, in Northamptonshire. The old gentleman kept a pack of hounds, which indicated both his wealth and his principles as a royalist; for the Puritans did not allow of the sports of the field, though his grandson (_contra bonos mores_) sometimes indulged in them. In alluding to this circumstance, Defoe says, ‘I remember my grandfather had a huntsman, who used the same familiarity (that of giving party names to animals) with his dogs; and he had his Roundhead and his Cavalier, his Goring and his Waller; and all the generals in both armies were hounds in his pack, till, the times turning, the old gentleman was fain to scatter his pack, and make them up of more dog-like sirnames.’ It was probably from this relative that Defoe inherited a freehold estate, of which he was not a little vain; and which seems to have influenced his opinions in his theory of the right of popular election, and of the British constitution. His father was a person of a different cast—a rigid dissenter; and from him his son appears to have imbibed the grounds of his opinions and practice. He was living at an advanced age in 1705. The following curious memorandum, signed by him at this period, throws some light on his character, as well as on that of the times:—‘Sarah Pierce lived with us, about fifteen or sixteen years since, about two years, and behaved herself so well, that we recommended her to Mr. Cave, that godly minister, which we should not have done, had not her conversation been according to the gospel. From my lodgings, at the Bell in Broad Street, having lately left my house in Throgmorton Street, October 10, 1705. Witness my hand, JAMES FOE.’

Young Defoe was brought up for the ministry, and educated with this view at the dissenting academy of Mr. Charles Morton, at Newington-Green, where Mr. Samuel Wesley, the father of the celebrated John Wesley, and who afterwards wrote against the dissenters, was brought up with him. Whether from an unsettled inclination, or his father’s inability to supply the necessary expenses, he never finished his education here. He not long after joined in Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, and narrowly escaped being taken prisoner with the rest of the Duke’s followers. It is supposed he owed his safety to his being a native of London, and his person not being known in the west of England, where that movement chiefly took place. He now applied himself to business, and became a kind of hose-factor. He afterwards set up a Dutch tile-manufactory at Tilbury, in Essex, and derived great profit from it; but his being sentenced to the pillory for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, (one of the truest, ablest, and most seasonable pamphlets ever published,) and the heavy fine and imprisonment that followed, involved him in distress and difficulty ever after. He occasionally, indeed, seemed to be emerging from obscurity, and to hold his head above water for a time, (and at one period had built himself a handsome house at Stoke-Newington, which is still to be seen there,) but this show of prosperity was of short continuance; all of a sudden, we find him immersed in poverty and law as deeply as ever; and it would appear that, with all his ability and industry, however he might be formed to serve his country or delight mankind, he was not one of those who are born to make their fortunes,—either from a careless, improvident disposition, that squanders away its advantages, or a sanguine and restless temper, that constantly abandons a successful pursuit for some new and gilded project. Defoe took an active and enthusiastic part in the Revolution of 1688, and was personally known to King William, of whom he was a sort of idolater, and evinced a spirit of knight-errantry in defence of his character and memory whenever it was attacked. He was released from prison (after lying there two years) by the interference and friendship of Harley, who introduced him to Queen Anne, by whom he was employed on several confidential missions, and more particularly in effecting the Union with Scotland. His personal obligations to Harley fettered his politics during the four last years of Queen Anne, and threw a cloud over his popularity in the following reign, but fixed no stain upon his character, except in the insinuations and slanders of his enemies, whether of his own or the opposite party. It was not till after he had retired from the battle, covered with scars and bruises, but without a single trophy or reward, in acknowledgment of his indefatigable and undeniable services in defence of the cause he had all his life espoused—when he was nearly sixty years of age, and struck down by a fit of apoplexy—that he thought of commencing novel-writer, for his amusement and subsistence. The most popular of his novels, _Robinson Crusoe_, was published in the year 1719, and he poured others from his pen, for the remaining ten or twelve years of his life, as fast, and with as little apparent effort, as he had formerly done lampoons, reviews, and pamphlets.

We are in the number of those who, though we profess ourselves mightily edified and interested by the researches of biography, are not always equally gratified by the actual result. Few things, in an ordinary life, can come up to the interest which every reader of sensibility must take in the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy;’ and it cannot be denied, that the first perusal of that work makes a part of the illusion:—the roar of the waters is in our ears,—we start at the print of the foot in the sand, and hear the parrot repeat the well-known sounds of ‘Poor Robinson Crusoe! Who are you? Where do you come from; and where are you going?’—till the tears gush, and in recollection and feeling we become children again! One cannot understand how the author of this world of abstraction should have had any thing to do with the ordinary cares and business of life; or it almost seems that he should have been fed, like Elijah, by the ravens. What boots it then to know that he was a hose-factor, and the owner of a tile-kiln in Essex—that he stood in the pillory, was over head and ears in debt, and engaged in eternal literary and political squabbles? It is, however, well to be assured that he was a man of worth as well as genius; and that, though unfortunate, and having to contend all his life with vexations and disappointments, with vulgar clamour and the hand of power, yet he did nothing to leave a blot upon his name, or to make the world ashamed of the interest they must always feel for him. If there is nothing in a farther acquaintance with his writings to raise our admiration higher, (which could hardly happen without a miracle,) there is a great deal to enlarge the grounds of it, and to strengthen our esteem and confidence in him. To say nothing of the incessant war he waged with crying abuses, with priestcraft and tyranny, and the straight line of consistency and principle which he followed from the beginning to the end of his career,—he was a powerful though unpolished satirist in verse, (as his _True-born Englishman_ sufficiently proves);—was master of an admirable prose style;—in his _Review_, (a periodical paper which was published three times a week for nine years together,) led the way to that class of essay-writing, and those dramatic sketches of common life and manners, which were afterwards so happily perfected by Steele and Addison;—in his _Essays on Trade_, anticipated many of those broad and liberal principles which are regarded as modern discoveries;—in his Moral Essays, and some of his Novels, undoubtedly set the example of that minute description and perplexing casuistry, of which Richardson so successfully availed himself;—was among the first to advocate the intellectual equality, and the necessity of improvements in the education of women;—suggested the project of _Saving Banks_, and an _Asylum for Idiots_;—among other notable services and claims to attention, by his thoughts on the best mode of watching and lighting the streets of the metropolis, might be considered as the author of the modern system of police;—and even in party matters, and the heats and rancorous differences of jarring sects, generally seized on that point of view which displayed most moderation and good sense, and in his favourite conclusions and arguments, was half a century before his contemporaries, who, for that reason, made common cause against him.

Defoe ‘was too fond of the right to pursue the expedient;’ and had much too dry, hard, and concentrated an understanding of the truth, to allow of any compromise with it from courtesy to the feelings or opinions of others. This kept him in perpetual hot water. It was a virtue, but carried to a repeated excess. It set the majority against him, and turned his dearest friends into his bitterest foes. If you make no concessions to the world, you must expect no favours from it. Our author’s blindness and simplicity on this head, amount to the _dramatic_. He went on censuring and contradicting all sects and

## parties, setting them to rights, recommending peace to them, praying

each to give up its darling prejudice and absurdity; and then he wonders that ‘a man of peace and reason,’ like himself, should be the butt of universal contumely and hatred. If an individual differs from you in common with others, you do not so much mind it—it is the act of a body, and implies no particular assumption of superior wisdom or virtue; but if he not only differs from you, but from his own _side_ too, you then can endure the scandal no longer; but join to hunt him down as a prodigy of unheard-of insolence and presumption, and to get rid of him and his boasted honesty and independence together. While, therefore, the author of the _True-born Englishman_, _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, and the _Legion Petition_, thought he was deserving well of God and his country, he was ‘heaping coals of fire on his own head.’ Nothing produces such antipathy in others as a total seeming want of sympathy with them. Defoe was urged on by a straight-forwardness and sturdiness of feeling, which did not permit him to give up a single iota of his convictions; but it was ‘stuff of the conscience’ with him; there was nothing of spleen, malevolence, or the spirit of contradiction in his nature. Still, we consider him rather as an acute, zealous, and well-informed partisan, than as a general and dispassionate reasoner. He was a distinguished polemic, rather than a philosopher. Though he exercised his understanding powerfully and variously, yet it was always under the guidance of a certain banner—in support of ‘a foregone conclusion.’ He was too much in the heat of the battle—too constantly occupied in attacking or defending one side or the other, to consider fairly whether both might not be in the wrong. He asked himself, (as he was obliged to do in his own vindication,)—‘Why am I in the right?’ and gave admirable reasons for it, supposing it to be so; but he never thought of asking himself the farther question,—‘Am I in the right or no?’ This would have been entering on a new and unexplored tract, and might have led to no very welcome results. As an example of what we mean—Defoe, though a most strenuous and persevering advocate for the rights of conscience and toleration to those dissenters who, in his view, agreed with the church in the _essentials_ of Christianity, was, notwithstanding, far from being disposed to extend the same indulgence to Socinians, Anabaptists, or other heretical persons. Of course, he would conceive that he, and those with whom he acted in concert, were not criminal in excluding others from the privilege in question; but he did not enlarge his views beyond this point, so as to change places with those who entirely differed with him; and in this respect fell short of the philosophical and liberal opinions of Locke, and even Toland, who placed toleration on the broad ground of a general principle, whatever exceptions might arise from particular circumstances, and urgent political expediency. We should, therefore, hardly be warranted in admitting Defoe into the class of perfectly free and unshackled speculative thinkers; though we certainly may rank him among the foremost of polemical writers for vigour, and ability of execution.

It will be easily conceived, that in the variety of subjects of which his author treated, and in the number and importance of the events in which he took part, either in person, or with his pen, Mr. Wilson, whose industry and patience seem to have increased with the field he had to traverse, is at no loss for materials either for reflection or illustration. The only fault is, that the life of Defoe is sometimes lost in the history of the events of his time, like a petty current in the ocean. Nevertheless, the writer has traced these events and their causes so faithfully and clearly, and with such pertinent reflections, that we readily pass over this fault, and can forgive the slowness of a pencil that only _drags_ from the weight of truth and good intention.

Mr. Wilson has extracted from Defoe’s _Review_ (7. p. 296,) his account of the origin and application of the far-famed terms—Whig and Tory; and it is so curiously circumstantial, that we shall lay it before our readers, though some of them, no doubt, are already well acquainted with it.

‘The word Tory is Irish, and was first made use of there in the time of Queen Elizabeth’s wars in Ireland. It signified a kind of robber, who being listed in neither army, preyed in general upon the country, without distinction of English or Spaniard. In the Irish massacre, anno 1641, you had them in great numbers, assisting in every thing that was bloody and villainous; and particularly when humanity prevailed upon some of the Papists to preserve Protestant relations. These were such as chose to butcher brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, the dearest friends and nearest relations; these were called _Tories_. In England, about the year 1680, a party of men appeared among us, who, though pretended Protestants, yet applied themselves to the ruin and destruction of their country. They began with ridiculing the Popish plot, and encouraging the Papists to revive it. They pursued their designs, in banishing the Duke of Monmouth and calling home the Duke of York; then in abhorring, petitioning, and opposing the bill of exclusion; in giving up charters, and the liberties of their country, to the arbitrary will of their prince; then in murdering patriots, persecuting dissenters, and at last, in setting up a Popish prince, on pretence of hereditary right, and tyranny on pretence of passive obedience. These men, for their criminal preying upon their country, and their cruel, bloody disposition, began to show themselves so like the Irish thieves and murderers aforesaid, that they quickly got the name of Tories. Their real god-father was Titus Oates, and the occasion of his giving them the name as follows—the author of this happened to be present: There was a meeting of some honest people in the city, upon the occasion of the discovery of some attempt to stifle the evidence of the witnesses [to the Popish plot], and tampering with Bedloe and Stephen Dugdale. Among the discourse, Mr. Bedloe said, he had letters from Ireland, that there were some Tories to be brought over hither, who were privately to murder Dr. Oates and the said Bedloe. The Doctor, whose zeal was very hot, could never after this hear any man talk against the plot, or against the witnesses, but he thought he was one of these Tories, and called almost every man a Tory that opposed him in discourse; till at last the word Tory became popular, and it stuck so close to the party in all their bloody proceedings, that they had no way to get it off; so at last they owned it, just as they do now the name of High-flyer.

‘As to the word _Whig_, it is Scotch. The use of it began there when the western men, called Cameronians, took arms frequently for their religion. Whig was a word used in those parts for a kind of liquor the Western Highlandmen used to drink, whose composition I do not remember,[33] and so became common to the people who drank it. It afterwards became a denomination of the poor harassed people of that part of the country, who, being unmercifully persecuted by the government, against all law and justice, thought they had a civil right to their religious liberties, and therefore frequently resisted the arbitrary power of their princes. These men, tired with innumerable oppressions, ravishings, murders, and plunderings, took up arms about 1681, being the famous insurrection at Bothwell-bridge. The Duke of Monmouth, then in favour here, was sent against them by King Charles, and defeated them. At his return, instead of thanks for the good service, he found himself ill-treated for using them too mercifully; and Duke Lauderdale told King Charles with an oath, that the Duke had been so civil to Whigs, because he was a Whig himself in his heart. This made it a court-word; and in a little time, all the friends and followers of the Duke began to be called Whigs; and they, as the other party did by the word Tory, took it freely enough to themselves.’

The cruelties of this reign, and the sufferings of the people, for conscience and religion, on this and so many other occasions, formed a striking contrast to the voluptuous effeminacy and callous indifference of the court; and this insolent and pampered want of sympathy, by adding wanton insult to intolerable injury, undermined all respect for the throne in the minds of a numerous class of the community, and took away all pity for its fall in the succeeding reign. Charles, however, who seemed to oppress his subjects only for his amusement, and played the tyrant as an appendage to the character of the fine gentleman, did not proceed to extremities, or throw off the mask, whatever his secret wishes or designs might be, by openly attacking large masses of power and opinion. James was a true monk,—a blind, narrow, gloomy bigot; and did not stop short in his mad and obstinate career, till he drove the country to rebellion, and himself into exile. As the French wit said of him, seeing him coming out of a Popish chapel abroad, ‘There goes a very honest gentleman, who gave up a kingdom for a mass.’ By great good luck he succeeded, for it turned upon a nice point at last. On James’s accession to the throne, addresses of loyalty and devotion poured in from all quarters, notwithstanding his well-known principles and designs. An address from the Middle Temple expressed the sentiments of that body of scholars and gentlemen, in a strain of fulsome servility. The University of Oxford promised to obey him ‘without limitations or restrictions;’ and the king’s promise, in his speech from the throne, (says Burnet,) passed for a thing so sacred, that those were looked upon as ill-bred who put into their address, ‘our religion established by law, excepted.’ The pulpits resounded with thanksgiving sermons, and the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance; and the clergy were forward in tendering the unconditional surrender of their rights and liberties for themselves, their fellow-subjects, and their posterity. If James did not before think himself _God’s vicegerent upon earth_, he must have thought so now. But he no sooner took them at their word, and proceeded to appoint papists to be heads of colleges, and to induct them to protestant livings, and to send the bishops to the Tower for refusing to set their seal to his arbitrary mandates; that is, he no sooner alarmed the clergy for their authority spiritual, and their revenues temporal,—so that judgment began, as Dr. Sherlock expressed it, in the house of God,—than they turned round, and sent their loyalty and their monarch a-packing together. Had it not been for this attack on the Church of England, the People of England might have been left to struggle with the hand of power and oppression how they could; and would have received plenty of reproofs and taunts from orthodox pulpits, on their refractory and unnatural behaviour in resisting lawful authority. Mr. Wilson has quoted an eloquent passage from Defoe, in which he admirably exposes the indifference of the nation, at this period, to principles, and their short-sightedness as to consequences, till they actually arrived. We give the passage, both for the sense and style. It alludes to the favourers of the _Exclusion Bill_.

‘How earnestly did those honest men, whose eyes God had opened to see the danger, labour to prevent the mischiefs of a Popish tyranny? How did they struggle in Parliament, and out of Parliament, to exclude a prince that did not mock them, but really promised them in as plain language as

## actions could speak, that he would be a tyrant; that he would erect

arbitrary power upon the foot of our liberties, as soon as he had the reins in his hands? How were the opposers of this inundation oppressed by power, and borne down in the stream of it? And when they were massacred by that bloody generation, how did they warn us at their deaths of the mischiefs that were coming? Yet all this while, deaf as the adder to the voice of the charmer, stupid and hard as the nether millstone, we would not believe, nor put our hand to our deliverance, till that same Popery, that same tyranny, and that very party we struggled with, were sent to be our instructors; and then we learnt the lesson presently. Tyranny taught us the value of liberty; oppression, how to prize the fence of laws; and Popery showed us the danger of the Protestant religion. Then passive pulpits beat the ecclesiastical drum of war; absolute subjection took up arms; and obedience for conscience-sake resisted divine right. And who taught them this heterodox lesson? Truly, the same schoolmaster they had hanged us for telling them of, the same dispensing power they had enacted, and the same tyranny they had murdered us for opposing.’

Defoe gives a very curious account of the insults offered to James II. after his fall, and of which he was an eyewitness.

‘The king (after the Prince of Orange had entered London) had proceeded to the Kentish coast, and embarked on board a vessel with the intention of going to France; but being detained by the wind, Sir Edward Hales, one of his attendants, sent his footman to the post-office at Feversham, where his livery was recognised. Being traced to the vessel, it was immediately boarded by some people from the town, who, mistaking the king for a popish priest, searched his person, and took from him four hundred guineas, with some valuable seals and jewels. The rank of the individual treated with so much indignity was not long undiscovered; for, there being a constable present who happened to know him, he threw himself at his feet, and, begging him to forgive the rudeness of the mob, ordered restitution of what had been taken from him. The king, receiving the jewels and seals, distributed the money amongst them. After this, he was conducted to Feversham, where fresh insults were heaped upon fallen majesty.’—‘While there, he found himself in the hands of the rabble, who, upon the noise of the king’s being taken, thronged from all parts of the country to Feversham, so that the king found himself surrounded, as it were, with an army of furies; the whole street, which is very wide and large, being filled, and thousands of the noisy gentry got together. His majesty, who knew well enough the temper of the people at that time, but not what they might be pushed on to do at such a juncture, was very uneasy, and spoke to some of the gentlemen, who came with more respect, and more like themselves, to the town on that surprising occasion. The king told them he was in their hands, and was content to be so, and they might do what they pleased with him; but whatever they thought fit to do, he desired they would quiet the people, and not let him be delivered up to the rabble, to be torn in pieces. The gentlemen told his majesty they were sorry to see him used so ill, and would do any thing in their power to protect him; but that it was not possible to quell the tumult of the people. The king was distressed in the highest degree; the people shouting and pressing in a frightful manner to have the door opened. At length, his majesty observing a forward gentleman among the crowd, who ran from one party to another, hallooing and animating the people, the king sent to tell him he desired to speak with him. The message was delivered with all possible civility, and the little Masaniello was prevailed with to come up stairs. The king received him with a courtesy rather equal to his present circumstances than to his dignity; told him, what he was doing might have an event worse than he intended; that he seemed to be heating the people up for some mischief; and that as he had done him no personal wrong, why should he attack him in this manner; that he was in their hands, and they might do what they pleased; but he hoped they did not design to murder him. The fellow stood, as it were, thunderstruck, and said not one word. The king, proceeding, told him he found he had some influence with the rabble, and desired he would pacify them; that messengers were gone to the parliament at London, and that he desired only they would be quiet till their return. What the fellow answered to the king I know not; but as I immediately enquired, they told me he did not say much, but this—“What can I do with them? and, what would you have me do?” But as soon as the king had done speaking, he turned short, and made to the door as fast as he could to go out of the room. As soon as he got fairly to the stairhead, and saw his way open, he turns short about to the gentlemen, to one of whom he had given the same churlish answer, and raising his voice, so that the king, who was in the next room, should be sure to hear him, he says, “_I have a bag of money as long as my arm, halloo, boys, halloo!_” The king was so filled with contempt and just indignation at the low-spirited insolence of the purse-proud wretch, that it quite took off the horror of the rabble, and only smiling, he sat down and said, “Let them alone, let them do their worst.”’

It seems the man was a retired grocer; and Defoe, in his _Complete Tradesman_, (says his biographer,) relates the circumstance, to show, that to be vain of mere wealth denotes a baseness of soul, and is often accompanied by a conduct unworthy of a rational creature.

In the midst of his distress, the King, it appears, had applied for protection to a clergyman, who treated him with cool indifference. The fact is thus noticed by Defoe:

‘When the king was taken at Sheerness, and had fallen into the hands of the rabble, he applied himself to a clergyman who was there, in words to this effect: “Sir, it is men of your cloth who have reduced me to this condition; I desire you will use your endeavours to still and quiet the people, and disperse them, that I may be freed from this tumult.” The gentleman’s answer was cold and insignificant; and going down to the people, he returned no more to the king. Several of the gentry and clergy thereabouts,’ adds our author, ‘who had formerly preached and talked up this mad doctrine, (passive obedience,) never offered the king their assistance in that distress, which, as a man, whether prince or no, any one would have done: it therefore to me renders their integrity suspected, when they pretended to an absolute submission, and only meant that they expected it from their neighbours, whom they designed to oppress, but resolved never to practise the least part of it themselves, if ever it should look towards them.’

In another place, Defoe observes,

‘I never was, I thank God for it, one of those that betrayed him, or any one else. I was never one that flattered him in his arbitrary proceedings, or made him believe I would bear oppression and injustice with a tame Issachar-like temper; those who did so, and then flew in his face, I believe, as much betrayed him as Judas did our Saviour; and their crime, whatever the Protestant interest gained by it, is no way lessened by the good that followed.’

The same spirit of integrity and candour, the same desire to see fair play, and to do justice to all parties,—in a word, the same spirit of common sense and common honesty which marks this passage, runs through all Defoe’s writings; and as it raised him up a host of enemies among the abettors and abusers of power, so it left him neither friends nor shelter in his own party, to whose faults and errors he gave as little quarter; thinking himself bound to condemn them as freely and frankly. Hence he had a life of uneasiness,—an old age of pain. In reading the above description of James’s situation, the hand is passed thoughtfully over the brow, and we for a moment forget the crimes of the monarch in the misfortunes of the man. It is laid down by Mr. Burke, that none but mild, inoffensive princes, ever bring themselves to the condition of being objects of insult or pity to their subjects; and that tyrants, who deserve punishment, know well how to guard themselves against it, and ‘to keep their seats firm.’ Let us see how far this doctrine is made good in the case of James; or how far his own misdeeds brought their rare, but natural punishment upon his head. We will let Mr. Wilson speak to this point:—

‘The fate of James,’ he says, ‘would have been more entitled to pity, if he had not stained his character by so many acts of wanton and cold-blooded cruelty. That his merciless character was well known to the nation, appears by the intrepid retort of Colonel Ayloffe, who had been condemned to death, but was advised by James to make some disclosures, it being in his power to pardon. “I know,” says he, “it is in your power, but it is not in your nature, to pardon.” That compassion was a total stranger to his breast, no one can doubt who reads the following affecting narrative: Monsieur Roussel, a French protestant divine of great learning and integrity, and minister of the Reformed Church at Montpelier in France, having witnessed the demolition of his own place of worship, soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ventured, at the desire of his people, to preach in the night-time upon its ruins, and was attended by some thousands of his flock. For this offence he was condemned, by the intendant of Languedoc, to be broke upon the wheel; but, having withdrawn from the place, it was ordered that he should be hanged in effigy. After encountering numerous hazards, he succeeded in effecting his escape from France; and reaching Ireland, was chosen pastor of the French church in Dublin. James, who, for the sake of courting popularity, had formerly affected a charitable disposition towards the French refugees, threw off the mask when he landed in that country, and was surrounded by French counsellors. Being no longer under any temptation to disguise his natural temper and his hatred to the reformed religion, he committed one of those breaches of good faith which must for ever consign his name to infamy. For, instead of protecting a stranger who had been persecuted in his own country for a conscientious discharge of his religious duties, and had sought an asylum under the laws of another, where he had lived for some years in peaceable exile, the base wretch delivered up this unoffending person to the French ambassador, Count D’Avaux, who sent him in chains to France, there to undergo the terrible punishment prepared for him by his inhuman murderers.[34] Such an action requires no comment; nor can any term of reproach be too strong to designate the monster who could lend himself to its perpetration.’

Yet many people, seeing the poor and forlorn figure which the exiled sovereign made with a few followers in the remote and silent court of St. Germain’s, wanted to have him back; thinking that, to curtail him of the power to repeat such acts as that just related, and to deluge a country with blood, was the last degree of hardship, and a sad indignity offered to a king! Defoe was not in the number of these sentimentalists; and he had enough to do after his countrymen’s ‘courage had been screwed to the sticking-place,’ to keep it there, and warn them against a relapse into Popery and slavery. One of his first publications had been an Address to the Dissenters, to caution them against accepting the terms of a general Toleration, which, on his accession to the throne, James II. had insidiously held out to all parties, and which was to include Papists as well as Dissenters. This was not a bait for Defoe’s keen jealousy and strong repugnance to the encroachments of power to be taken in by. There was, however, some danger that the Dissenters, from their timidity and love of ease, and their being habitually too much engrossed by themselves and their own grievances, might be tempted to purchase the proffered grace at the price of allowing the Papists the same liberty; which was (at this period), under the barefaced pretence of liberality, and a tenderness for scrupulous consciences, to throw open the flood-gates of the most unbounded bigotry and intolerance. But the hatred and dread of Popery was, at this time, the ruling passion, in which the Dissenters shared in its utmost rancour and virulence; and this old grudge and hereditary antipathy had the effect of counteracting their natural coldness and phlegm, and a certain narrowness and formality in their views. Some of the weakest among them were, notwithstanding, for running into the snare, and did not easily forgive Defoe for pointing it out to them. The Marquis of Halifax had written a pamphlet on the same side of the question, called, ‘A Letter to a Dissenter, upon occasion of his Majesty’s late Declaration of Indulgence, 1687.’ The title of Defoe’s work is not now known. In speaking of it himself, some years after, he says,

‘The next time I differed with my friends was when King James was wheedling the Dissenters to take off the penal laws and test, which I could by no means come into. And as in the first I used to say, I had rather the Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungary than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestant and Papist by overrunning Germany; so, in the other, I told the Dissenters I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures, than that the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot.’[35]

The allusion in the foregoing passage is to an early Piece of Defoe’s, (not reprinted among his tracts), in which he had drawn his sword (for his weapon would be out) in defence of the Pope against the Turks. The occasion was this: The Hungarian Reformers having been persecuted and proscribed by the Austrian monarch, had risen in arms against him; and the Turks, availing themselves of the opportunity, had marched to their assistance, and laid siege to Vienna. Most of the English Protestants (as men think the nearest danger greatest, and hate their old enemies most,) were inclined to rejoice at this tumbling of a Popish despot, and the success of their Hungarian brethren. But Defoe, who saw farther than others, (and perhaps took a little pride in doing so,) viewed the matter in a different light, and deprecated the possible triumph of the Crescent over the Cross, and the subjugation of all Christendom, which might be the consequence. Logically speaking, he was right; but prudentially, he was perhaps wrong. The powers of Europe took the alarm as well as he, and combined to rescue the Austrian monarch from the gripe of the Mussulman. They succeeded; but could obtain no terms for the Hungarian peasants. Had the Emperor been left to fight his own battles against the Turks, he might have been frightened into measures of moderation and justice towards his own subjects; and there was, in the meantime, little probability of a Mahometan army overrunning Europe.

Defoe’s first publication was a satirical pamphlet, called _Speculum Crape-gownorum_; intended to ridicule the fopperies and affectation of the younger clergy, as a set-off to some severe attacks on the mode of preaching among the Dissenters. This performance bears the date of 1682, when Defoe was only twenty-one, so that he commenced author very young. From that period he hardly ever ceased writing for the rest of his life; and a list of his works would alone fill a long article. The pasquinade just mentioned is attributed, by Mr. Godwin, in his _Lives of the Philipses_, to John Philips; but Mr. Wilson gives it to Defoe, on his own authority; and certainly his report is to be trusted, for he was a person of unchallengeable veracity. He was always a warm partisan of the Dissenters, (among whom he was born and bred,) and was ever ready to take up their quarrel either with wit or argument, for which he got small thanks. He was not, however, to be put off by their dulness or ingratitude. He was old enough to remember the times of their persecution and ‘fiery ordeal;’ and it is at this source that the spirit of liberty is tempered and steeled to its keenest edge. Defoe’s political firmness may, in part, also be traced to this union between the feelings of civil and religious liberty. An attachment to freedom, for the advantages it holds out to society, may be sometimes overruled by a calculation of prudence, or of the opposite advantages held out to the individual; but a resistance to power for conscience-sake, and as a dictate of religious duty, rests on a positive ground, which is not to be shaken or tampered with, and has the seeds of permanence and martyrdom in it. What Mr. Burke calls ‘the _Hortus Siccus_ of Dissent’ is therefore the hotbed of resistance to the encroachments of ambition; and when, by long-continued struggles, the disqualifications of Dissenters are taken off, and the zeal which had been kept alive by hard usage and penal laws subsides into indifference or scepticism, we doubt whether there is any lever left, in mere public opinion, strong enough to throw off the pressure of unjust and ruinous power.

With these feelings, and, after the fears which he and all good men must have entertained for the safety of their religion, and the freedom of their country, it is not to be wondered at if Defoe hailed the arrival of the Prince of Orange with the greatest joy. He kept the anniversary of his landing, the 4th of November, all his life after. We find an account of him as one of those who went in procession with their Majesties to Guildhall, as a guard of honour, the year following. Oldmixon, who gives the account, has mixed up with it some of his unfounded prejudices against our author:

‘Their Majesties,’ he says, ‘attended (Oct. 29, 1689,) by their royal highnesses the Prince and Princesses of Denmark, and by a numerous train of nobility and gentry, went first to a balcony, prepared for them at the Angel in Cheapside, to see the show; which, for the great number of livery-men, the full appearance of the militia and artillery company, the rich adornments of the pageants, and the splendour and good order of the whole proceeding, out-did all that had been seen before upon that occasion; and what deserved to be particularly mentioned, says a reverend historian, was a royal regiment of volunteer-horse, made up of the chief citizens, who, being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended their Majesties from Whitehall. Among these troopers, who were, for the most part, Dissenters, was Daniel Defoe, at that time a hosier in Freeman’s-yard, Cornhill; the same who afterwards was pilloried for writing an ironical invective against the Church; and did after that list in the service of Mr. Robert Harley, and those brethren of his who broke the confederacy, and made a shameful and ruinous peace with France.’[36]

Oldmixon evidently singles out his brother author in this gallant procession with an eye of envy rather than friendship; and the invidious turn given to his politics only means, that all those were _black sheep_ who did not go the absurd lengths of Oldmixon and his party in every thing.

The joy and exultation of Defoe on this great and glorious occasion was not of long duration, but was soon turned to gall and bitterness. ‘Though that his joy was joy,’ yet both friends and foes laboured hard to ‘throw such changes of vexation on it, that it might lose all colour.’ His admiration of King William was the ruling passion of his life. He was his hero, his deliverer, his friend: he was bound to him by the ties of patriotism, of religion, and of personal obligation. But this ruling passion was also the torment of his breast, because his well-grounded enthusiasm was not seconded by the unanimous public voice, and because the services of the great champion of liberty and of the Protestant cause did not meet with that glow of gratitude and affection in the minds of the people (when their immediate danger was blown over) that they richly merited. Defoe had not only ridden in procession with his Majesty, but he was afterwards closeted with him, and consulted by him on more than one question: so that his self-importance, as well as his sense of truth and justice, was implicated in the attacks which were made on the person and character of his royal patron and benefactor. Nothing can, in our opinion, exceed the good behaviour of William, nor the ill return he received from those he had been sent for, to deliver them from Popish bondage and darkness. Being no longer bowed to the earth by a yoke that they could not lift, and having got a king of their own choosing, they thought they could not exercise their new-acquired liberty and independence better than by using him as ill as possible, and reviling him for the very blessings which he had been the chief means of bestowing on them, and which his presence was absolutely necessary to continue to them. Having seen their hereditary, _passive-obedience_ monarch, King James, quietly seated on the other side of the Channel, and being no longer in bodily fear of being executed as rebels, or burnt as heretics, the good people of England began to find a flaw in the title of the new-made monarch, because he was not, and did not pretend to be, absolute; and to sacrifice to the _manes_ of divine right, by taking every opportunity, and resorting to every artifice to insult his person, to revile his reputation, to wound his feelings, and to cramp and thwart his measures for his own and their common safety. The Tories and high-fliers lamented that the crown was without its most precious jewel and ornament, _hereditary right_; and though they acknowledged the necessity of the case upon which they themselves had acted, yet they thought the time might come when this necessity might cease, and for their lawful King to be brought back again, ‘with conditions.’ Pulpits, long accustomed to unqualified submission, now echoed the double-tongued distinction of a king _de jure_ and a king _de facto_. This party, whose old habits were inimical to the new order of things, but who made a virtue of necessity, tendered their allegiance to the Prince of Orange reluctantly and ungraciously; while the Non-jurors bearded him to his face. The Country Gentlemen, (at that time a formidable party, ‘not pierceable by power of any argument,’) only felt themselves at a loss from not having the Dissenters and Nonconformists to hunt down as usual. William they regarded as an interloper, who had no rights of his own, and who hindered other people from exercising theirs, in molesting and domineering over their neighbours. What made matters worse, was his being a foreigner; his Dutch origin was one of the things constantly thrown in his teeth, and that staggered the faith and loyalty of many of his well-meaning subjects, who could not comprehend the relation in which they stood to a sovereign of alien descent. The phrase, _True-born Englishman_, became a watchword in the mouths of the malecontent party; and at that name, (as often as it was repeated), the Whig and Protestant interest grew pale. It was to meet, and finally quell this charge, that Defoe penned his well-known poem of _The True-born Englishman_—a satire which, if written in doggerel verse, and without the wit or pleasantry of Butler’s Hudibras, is a masterpiece of good sense and just reflection, and shows a thorough knowledge both of English history and of the English character. It is indeed a complete and unanswerable exposure of the pretence set up to a purer and loftier origin than all the rest of the world, instead of our being a mixed race from all parts of Europe, settling down into one common name and people. Defoe’s satire was so just and true, that it drove the cant, to which it was meant to be an antidote, out of fashion; and it was this piece of service that procured the writer the good opinion and notice of King William. It did not, however, equally recommend him to the public. If it silenced the idle and ill-natured clamours of a party, by telling the plain truth,—that truth was not the more welcome for being plain or effectual. Though this handle was thus taken from malevolence and discontent, the tide of unpopularity had set in too strong from the first arrival of the king, not to continue and increase to the end of his reign; so that at last worn out with rendering the noblest services, and being repaid with the meanest ingratitude, he thought of retiring to Holland, and leaving his English crown of thorns to any one who chose to claim it.

The state of parties, at this period of our history, presents a riddle that has not been solved. It has been referred to the gloom and discontent of the English character; but other countries have of late exhibited the same problem, with the same result. It may be resolved into that propensity in human nature, through which, when it has got what it wants, it requires something else which it cannot have. The English people, at the period in question, wanted a contradiction,—that is, to have James and William on the throne together; but this they could not have, and so they were contented with neither. If they had recalled James, they would have sent him back again. They wanted him back again _with conditions_, and security for his future good behaviour. They wanted his title to the throne without his abuse of power; an absolute sovereign, with a reserve of the privileges of the people; a Popish prince, with a Protestant church; a deliverance from chains without a deliverer; and an escape from tyranny without the stain of resistance to it. They wanted not out of two things one which they could have, but a third, which was impossible; and as they could not have all, they were determined to be pleased with nothing. This greatly annoyed Defoe, who set his face against so absurd a manifestation of the spirit of the times. It embittered his satisfaction in the virtues of the sovereign, and the glories of his reign,—in his exploits abroad,—the moderation and justice of his administration at home; nor was he consoled for the malignity of his prince’s enemies or the indifference of his friends, either by writing _Odes_ on his battles and victories, or _Elegies_ and _Epitaphs_ on his death.

He was still less fortunate in following up the dictates of what he thought right, or in what he called ‘speaking a word in season,’ in the subsequent reign. Queen Anne, who succeeded to the crown on the death of King William, was placed in no very graceful or dutiful position, as keeping her brother from the throne, which she occupied as the next Protestant heir, but to which, in the opinion of many, and perhaps in her own, he had a prior indefeasible right. She had been brought up with bigoted notions of religion; and in proportion as she felt the political ground infirm under her feet, she wished to stand well with the Church. There was, through her whole reign, therefore, a strong increasing bias to High-Church principles. The promise of toleration to the dissenters soon sunk into an _indulgence_, and ended in the threat and the intention of putting in force the severest laws against them, under pretence that the Church was in danger. The Clergy sung the same song as the Queen, adding a burden of their own to it;—breathing nothing in their sermons but suspicion and hatred of the dissenters, reviving and inflaming old animosities, and encouraging their parishioners to proceed even to open violence against the frequenters of conventicles. Their services in bringing about the Revolution were forgotten; and nothing was insisted on but their share in the great Rebellion, and the beheading of Charles I. A university preacher (Sacheverell) talked of ‘hoisting the bloody flag’ against the dissenters, and treated all those of the Moderate Party and Low Church as false brethren, who did not enlist under the banner. Another proposed shutting up not only the dissenters’ Meeting-Houses, but their Academies, and thus taking from them the education of their children. A third was for using gentle violence with the Queen to urge her to severe and salutary measures against Nonconformists; and considered her as under _duresse_ in not being allowed to give full scope to the sentiments labouring in her bosom in favour of the Church of England. Defoe marked all this with quick and anxious eye; he saw the storm of persecution gathering, and ready to burst with tenfold vengeance, from its having been so long delayed; he thought it high time to warn his brethren of the impending mischief, and to point out to the government, in a terrible and palpable way, the dangerous and mad career to which the zealots of a party were urging them headlong. ‘So should his anticipation prevent their discovery.’ He collected all the poisoned missiles and combustible materials he could lay his hands on, and putting them together in one heap, brought out his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_. If it startled his adversaries and threw a blaze of light upon the subject, the explosion chiefly hurt himself. What beyond contradiction proved the truth of the satire was, that it was, at first, taken seriously by many of the opposite side, who thought it a well-timed and spirited Manifesto from a true son of the Church; and several young divines in the country, on perusing it, sent for more copies of it, with high commendations, as the triumph of their views and party. Their rage, when they found out their mistake, was proportionable, and no treatment was bad enough for so vile an incendiary. The book was forthwith prosecuted by authority, as a malignant slander against the Church, and a seditious libel on the government. The author, as before noticed, was sentenced to the pillory, and to a heavy fine, with imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure; which, as already mentioned, was the immediate and ultimate ruin of his affairs and prospects in life. Defoe bore his disgrace and misfortunes with the spirit of a man, and with a sort of grumbling patience peculiar to himself. He wrote on the occasion a _Hymn to the Pillory_, which contains some bad poetry and manly feeling; and indeed his apparent indifference is easily accounted for from a consciousness of the _flagrant_ rectitude of his case. Pope has made an ungenerous allusion to the circumstances in the _Dunciad_:—

‘See where on high stands unabash’d Defoe!’

Pope’s imagination had too much effeminacy to stomach, under any circumstances, this kind of petty, squalid martyrdom; nor had he strength of public principle enough to form to himself the practical antithesis of ‘dishonour honourable!’ The amiable in private life, the exalted in rank and station, alone fixed his sympathy, and engrossed his admiration. The exquisite compliments with which he has embalmed the memory of some of his illustrious friends, who stand ‘condemned to everlasting fame,’ are a discredit to his own. His apostrophe to Harley, beginning,

‘Oh soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,’

contrasts strangely with the time-serving, vain, versatile, and unprincipled character of that minister; and Mr. Wilson ought to have written a good book, for he has spoiled the effect of some of the finest lines in the English language. It was a bold step in Pope to put the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ into the _Dunciad_ at all; Swift also has a fling at him as ‘the fellow that was pilloried;’ and Gay is equally sceptical and pedantic, as to his possessing more than ‘the superficial parts of learning.’ We know of no excuse for the illiberality of the literary junto with regard to a man like Defoe, but that he returned the compliment to them; and in fact, if we were to take the character of men of genius from their judgment of each other, we must sometimes come to a very different conclusion from what the world have formed.

That Defoe should have incurred the hatred, and been consigned to the vengeance, of the High-Church party for thus honestly exposing their designs against the Dissenters, is but natural; the wonderful part is, that he equally excited the indignation and reproaches of the Dissenters themselves; who disclaimed his work as a scandalous and inflammatory performance, and called loudly (in concert with their bitterest foes,) for the condign punishment of the author. They almost with one voice, and as if seized with a contagion of folly, cried shame upon it, as an underhand and designing attempt to make a premature breach between them and the established church; to sow the seeds of groundless jealousy and ill-will; and to make them indirectly participators in, and the sufferers by, a scurrilous attack on the reverence due to religion and authority. Defoe was made the scapegoat of this paltry and cowardly policy, and was given up to the tender mercies of the opposite party without succour or sympathy. This extreme blindness to their own interests can only be explained by the consideration that the Dissenters, as a body, were at this time in a constant state of probation and suffering; they had enough to do with the evils they actually endured, without ‘flying to others that they knew not of;’ they stood in habitual awe and apprehension of their spiritual lords and masters;—would not be brought to suspect their further designs lest it should provoke them to realise their fears; and as they had not strength nor spirit to avert the blow, did not wish to see till they felt it. The alacrity and prowess of Defoe was a reproach to their backwardness; the truth of his appeal implied a challenge to meet it; and they answered, with the old excuse, ‘why troublest thou us before our time?’ The Dissenters too, at this period, were men of a formal and limited scope of mind, not much versed in the general march of human affairs; they required literal and positive proof for every thing, as well as for the points of faith on which they held out so manfully; and their obstinacy in maintaining these, and suffering for them, was matched by their timid circumspection and sluggish impracticability with respect to every thing else. Their deserting Defoe, who marched on at the head of the battle,—pushed forward by his keen foresight and natural impatience of wrong,—is not out of character; though equally repugnant to sound policy or true spirit. They fixed a stigma on him, therefore, as a breeder of strife, a false prophet, and a dangerous member of the community; and, what is certainly inexcusable, when, afterwards, his jest was turned to melancholy earnest;—when every thing he had foretold was verified to the very letter, when the whole force of the government was arrayed against them, and Sacheverell in person unfurled ‘his bloody flag,’ and paraded the streets with a mob at his heels, pulling down their meeting-houses, burning their private dwellings, and making it unsafe for a Dissenter to walk the streets,—they did not take off the stigma they had affixed to the author of _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_; did not allow that he was right and they were wrong, but kept up their unjust and illiberal prejudices, and even aggravated them in some instances, as if to prove that they were well-founded. Bodies of men seldom retract or atone for the injuries they have done to individuals. It will hardly seem credible to the modern reader, that in pursuance of this old sectarian grudge, and in conformity with the same narrow spirit, some years after this, when Queen Anne, who, from the death of her son, Prince George, had no hope of leaving an heir to the crown, turned her thoughts to the restoration of the Pretender, and when Defoe, in the general alarm and agitation which this uncertainty of the designs of the Court occasioned, endeavoured to ridicule and defeat the project, by pointing out, in his powerful and inimitable way, the incalculable benefits that would ensue from setting aside the Hanoverian succession, and bringing in the right line, one William Benson, (a Dissenter, a stanch friend to the House of Hanover, and the same who had a monument erected to Milton,) in his absurd prejudice against Defoe,—in his conviction that he was a renegado and a Marplot, and in his utter incapacity to conceive the meaning of irony,—actually set on foot a prosecution against the author as in league with the Pretender; wanted to have him accused of high treason, and obstinately persisted in, and returned to the charge; and that it was only through the friendly zeal and interest of Harley, and his representations to the queen, that he was pardoned and released from Newgate, whither he had been committed on the judges’ warrant, for writing something in defence of his pamphlet, after its presentation by the Grand Jury, and his being compelled to give bail to appear for trial! ‘The force of _dulness_ could no farther go.’

Defoe had before this given violent offence to the Dissenters, by _dissenting_ from and ‘disobliging’ them on a number of technical and doubtful points—a difference of which they seemed more tenacious than of the greatest affronts or deadliest injuries. Among others, he had opposed the principles of _occasional conformity_; that is, the liberty practised by some Dissenters, of going to church during their appointment to any public office, as they were prohibited from attending their own places of worship in their official costume. Nothing could be clearer, than that, if it was a point of conscience with these persons not to conform to the service of the established church, their being chosen mayor, sheriff, or alderman, did not give them a dispensation to that purpose. But many of the demure and purse-proud citizens of London, (among whom Mr. William Benson was a leader and a shining light,) resented their not being supposed at liberty to appear at church in their gold chains and robes of office, though contrary to their usual principles of nonconformity;—as children think they have a right to visit fine places in their new clothes on holidays. Their rage against Defoe was at its height, when he had nothing to say against Harley’s Tory administration, for bringing in _The Occasional Conformity Bill_, to debar Dissenters of this puerile and contradictory privilege. It was to the kindness and generosity of Harley, on this as well as on former occasions, in affording our author pecuniary aid, of which he was in the utmost need, (being without means, friends, and in prison,) and in rescuing him from the grasp of his own party, that we owe his silence on political and public questions during the last years of Queen Anne; and a line of conduct that, in the present day, seems wavering and equivocal. His gratitude for private benefits hardly condemned him to withhold his opinions on public matters; but at that time, personal and private ties bore greater sway over general and public duties than is the case at present. We entirely acquit Defoe of dishonest or unworthy motives. He might easily have gone quite over to the other side, if he had been inclined to make a market of himself: but of this he never betrayed the remotest intention, and merely refused to join in the hue and cry against a man who had twice saved him from starving in a dungeon. Be this as it may, Defoe never recovered from the slur thus cast upon his political integrity, and was under a cloud, and discountenanced during the following reign; though the establishment of this very Protestant succession had been the object of the labours of his whole life, and was the wish that lay nearest his heart to his latest breath.

Defoe had, in the former reign, been at various times employed at her majesty’s desire, and in her service, particularly in accomplishing the Union with Scotland in 1707. He displayed great activity and zeal in accommodating the differences of all parties; and his _History_ of that event has been pronounced by good judges to be a masterpiece. But as to the numerous transactions in which he was concerned, and his various publications and controversies, we must refer the reader to Mr. Wilson, who has furnished ample details and instructive comments. For ourselves, we must ‘hold our hands and check our pride,’ or we should never have done. Of all Defoe’s multifarious effusions, the only one in which there is a want of candour and good faith, or in which he has wilfully blunted and deadened his _moral sense_, is his Defence, or (which is the same thing) his Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe. But King William was his idol, and he could no more see any faults in him than spots in the sun. Our old friend Daniel also tries us hard, when he rails at the poor servants, or ‘fine madams,’ as he calls them, who get a little better clothes and higher wages when they come up to London, than they had in the country; when he _runs a-muck_ at stage-plays, and the triumphs of the mimic scene;—confounding ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with Lucifer, Prince of Darkness.’ But these were the follies and prejudices of the time, aided by a little tincture of vulgarity, and the sourness of sectarian bigotry.

We pass on to his Novels, and are sorry that we must hasten over them. We owe them to the ill odour into which he had fallen as a politician. His fate with his party reminds one a little of the reception which the heroine of the _Heart of Mid-Lothian_ met with from her sister, because she would not tell a lie for her; yet both were faithful and true to their cause. Being laid aside by the Whigs, as a suspected person, and not choosing to go over to the other side, he retired to Stoke-Newington, where, as already mentioned, he had an attack of apoplexy, which had nearly proved fatal to him. Recovering, however, and his activity of mind not suffering him to be idle, he turned his thoughts into a new channel, and, as if to change the scene entirely, set about writing Romances. The first work that could come under this title was _The Family Instructor_;—a sort of controversial narrative, in which an argument is held through three volumes, and a feverish interest is worked up to the most tragic height, on ‘the abomination’ (as it was at that time thought by many people, and among others by Defoe) of letting young people go to the play. The implied horror of dramatic exhibitions, in connexion with the dramatic effect of the work itself, leaves a curious impression. Defoe’s polemical talents are brought to bear to very good purpose in this performance, which was in the form of Letters; and it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen, after having been taken up for so many years with dry debates and doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting grasp. _Robinson Crusoe_, published in 1719, was the first of his performances in the acknowledged shape of a romance; and from this time he brought out one or two every year to the end of his life. As it was the first, it was decidedly the best; it gave full scope to his genius; and the subject mastered his prevailing bias to religious controversy, and the depravity of social life, by confining him to the unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart. His other works of fiction have not been read, (in comparison)—and one reason is, that many of them, at least, are hardly fit to be read, whatever may be said to the contrary. We shall go a little into the theory of this.

We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world, and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a contamination, is, _a priori_, the properest person to write novels: it is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’ Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the Devil—Sinners and Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history of _Moll Flanders_; or that his romance of _Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress_, who rolls in wealth and pleasure from one end of the book to the other, and is quit for a little death-bed repentance and a few lip-deep professions of the vanity of worldly joys, showed, in a striking point of view, the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice? It cannot be said, however, that these works have an _immoral_ tendency. The author has contrived to neutralise the question; and (as far as in him lay) made vice and virtue equally contemptible or revolting. In going through his pages, we are inclined to vary Mr. Burke’s well-known paradox, that ‘vice, by losing all its grossness, loses half its evil,’ and say that vice, by losing all its refinement, loses all its attraction. We have in them only the pleasure of sinning, and the dread of punishment here or hereafter;—gross sensuality, and whining repentance. The morality is that of the inmates of a house of correction; the piety, that of malefactors in the condemned hole. There is no sentiment, no atmosphere of imagination, no ‘purple light’ thrown round virtue or vice;—all is either the physical gratification on the one hand, or a selfish calculation of consequences on the other. This is the necessary effect of allowing nothing to the frailty of human nature;—of never strewing the flowers of fancy in the path of pleasure, but always looking that way with a sort of terror as to forbidden ground: nothing is left of the common and mixed enjoyments and pursuits of human life but the coarsest and criminal part; and we have either a sour, cynical, sordid sell-denial, or (in the despair of attaining this) a reckless and unqualified abandonment of all decency and character alike:—it is hard to say which is the most repulsive. Defoe runs equally into extremes in his male characters as in his heroines. _Captain Singleton_ is a hardened, brutal desperado, without one redeeming trait, or almost human feeling; and, in spite of what Mr. Lamb says of his lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-stricken repentance, we find nothing of this in the text: the captain is always merry and well if there is any mischief going on; and his only qualm is, after he has retired from his trade of plunder and murder on the high seas, and is afraid of being assassinated for his ill-gotten wealth, and does not know how to dispose of it. Defoe (whatever his intentions may be) is led, by the force of truth and circumstances, to give the Devil his due—he puts no gratuitous remorse into his adventurer’s mouth, nor spoils the _keeping_ by expressing one relenting pang, any more than his hero would have done in reality. This is, indeed, the excellence of Defoe’s representations, that they are perfect _fac-similes_ of the characters he chooses to pourtray; but then they are too often the worst specimens he can collect out of the dregs and sink of human nature. _Colonel Jack_ is another instance, with more pleasantry, and a common vein of humanity; but still the author is flung into the same walk of flagrant vice and immorality;—as if his mind was haunted by the entire opposition between grace and nature—and as if, out of the sphere of spiritual exercise and devout contemplation, the whole actual world was a necessary tissue of what was worthless and detestable.

We have, we hope, furnished a clue to this seeming contradiction between the character of the author and his works; and must proceed to a conclusion. Of these novels we may, nevertheless, add, for the satisfaction of the inquisitive reader, that _Moll Flanders_ is utterly vile and detestable: Mrs. Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best parts are the account of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting; the fluctuation of her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence in Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the inn door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen it. This was carrying the love of thieving to an _ideal_ pitch, and making it perfectly disinterested and mechanical. _Roxana_ is better—soaring a higher flight, instead of grovelling always in the mire of poverty and distress; but she has neither refinement nor a heart; we are only dazzled with the outward ostentation of jewels, finery, and wealth. The scene where she dances in her Turkish dress before the king, and obtains the name of Roxana, is of the true romantic cast. The best parts of _Colonel Jack_ are the early scenes, where there is a spirit of mirth and good fellowship thrown over the homely features of low and vicious life;—as where the hero and his companion are sitting at the three-halfpenny ordinary, and are delighted, even more than with their savoury fare, to hear the waiter cry, ‘Coming, gentlemen, coming,’ when they call for a cup of small-beer; and we rejoice when we are told as a notable event, that ‘about this time the Colonel took upon him to wear a shirt.’ The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ are an agreeable mixture of the style of history and fiction. These Memoirs, as is well known, imposed upon Lord Chatham as a true history. In his _History of Apparitions_, Defoe discovers a strong bias to a belief in the marvellous and preternatural; nor is this extraordinary, for, to say nothing of the general superstition of the times, his own impressions of whatever he chose to conceive are so vivid and literal, as almost to confound the distinction between reality and imagination. He could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and they ‘would come when he did call for them.’ We have not room for an enumeration of even half his works of fiction. We give the bust, and must refer to Mr. Wilson for the whole length. After _Robinson Crusoe_, his _History of the Plague_ is the finest of all his works. It has an epic grandeur, as well as heart-breaking familiarity, in its style and matter.

Notwithstanding the number and success of his publications, Defoe, we lament to add, had to struggle with pecuniary difficulties, heightened by domestic afflictions. To the last, when on the brink of death, he was on the verge of a jail; and the ingratitude and ill-behaviour of his son in embezzling some property which Defoe had made over for the benefit of his sisters and mother, completed his distress. He was supported in these painful circumstances by the assistance and advice of Mr. Baker, who had married his youngest daughter, Sophia. The subjoined letter gives a melancholy but very striking picture of the state of his feelings at this sad juncture:—

‘DEAR MR. BAKER,—I have yo^r very kind and affecc’onate Letter of the 1st: But not come to my hand till y^e 10th; where it had been delay’d I kno’ not. As your kind manner, and kinder Thought, from w^{ch} it flows, (for I take all you say to be as I always believed you to be, sincere and Nathaniel like, without Guile) was a particular satisfacc’on to me; so the stop of a Letter, however it happened, deprived me of that cordial too many days, considering how much I stood in need of it, to support a mind sinking under the weight of an afflicc’on too heavy for my strength, and looking on myself as abandoned of every Comfort, every Friend, and every Relative, except such only as are able to give me no assistance.

‘I was sorry you should say at y^e beginning of your Letter, you were debarred seeing me. Depend upon my sincerity for this, I am far from debarring you. On y^e contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than any I now enjoy, that I could have yo^r agreeable visits w^{th} safety, and could see both you and my dearest Sophia, could it be without giving her y^e grief of seeing her father _in tenebris_, and under y^e load of insupportable sorrows. I am sorry I must open my griefs so far as to tell her, it is not y^e blow I rec^d from a wicked, perjur’d, and contemptible enemy, that has broken in upon my spirit, w^{ch} as she well knows, has carryed me on thro’ greater disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, inhuman dealing of my own son, w^{ch} has both ruined my family, and, in a word, has broken my heart; and as I am at this time under a weight of very heavy illness, w^{ch} I think will be a fever, I take this occasion to vent my grief in y^e breasts who I know will make a prudent use of it, and tell you, that nothing but this has conquered, or could conquer me. _Et tu! Brute!_ I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he has no compassion, and suffers them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself, at y^e same time, living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me. Excuse my infirmity, I can say no more; my heart is too full. I only ask one thing of you as a dying request. Stand by them when I am gone, and let them not be wrong’d, while he is able to do them right. Stand by them as a brother; and if you have any thing within you owing to my memory, who have bestow’d on you the best gift I had to give, let y^m not be injured and trampled on by false pretences, and unnatural reflections. I hope they will want no help but that of comfort and council; but that they will indeed want, being too easie to be manag’d by words and promises.

‘It adds to my grief that it is so difficult to me to see you. I am at a distance from Lond^n in Kent; nor have I a lodging in London, nor have I been at that place in the Old Bailey, since I wrote you I was removed from it. At present I am weak, having had some fits of a fever that have left me low. But those things much more.

‘I have not seen son or daughter, wife or child, many weeks, and kno’ not which way to see them. They dare not come by water, and by land here is no coach, and I kno’ not what to do.

‘It is not possible for me to come to Enfield, unless you could find a retired lodging for me, where I might not be known, and might have the comfort of seeing you both now and then; upon such a circumstance, I could gladly give the days to solitude, to have the comfort of half an hour now and then, with you both, for two or three weeks. But just to come and look at you, and retire immediately, tis a burden too heavy. The parting will be a price beyond the enjoyment.

‘I would say, (I hope) with comfort, that ’tis yet well. I am so near my journey’s end, and am hastening to the place where y^e weary are at rest, and where the wicked cease to trouble; be it that the passage is rough, and the day stormy, by what way soever He please to bring me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all cases: _Te Deum Laudamus_.

‘I congratulate you on y^e occasion of yo^r happy advance in y^r employment. May all you do be prosperous, and all you meet with pleasant, and may you both escape the tortures and troubles of uneasie life. May you sail y^e dangerous voyage of life with _a forcing wind_, and make the port of heaven _without a storm_.

‘It adds to my grief that I must never see the pledge of your mutual love, my little grandson. Give him my blessing, and may he be to you both your joy in youth, and your comfort in age, and never add a sigh to your sorrow. But, alas! that is not to be expected. Kiss my dear Sophy once more for me; and if I must see her no more, tell her this is from a father that loved her above all his comforts, to his last breath.—Yo^r unhappy, D. F.

‘About two miles from Greenwich, Kent, _Tuesday, August 12, 1730_.’

‘From this scene of sorrow,’ says Mr. Wilson, ‘we must now hasten to an event, that dropped before it the dark curtain of time. Having received a wound that was incurable, there is too much reason to fear that the anguish arising from it sunk deep in his spirits, and hastened the crisis that, in a few months, brought his troubles to a final close. The time of his death has been variously stated; but it took place upon the 24th of April, 1731, when he was about seventy years of age, having been born in the year 1661. Cibber and others state that he died at his house at Islington; but this is incorrect. The parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, in which he drew his first breath, was also destined to receive his last. This we learn from the parish register, which has been searched for the purpose; and farther informs us, that he went off in a lethargy. He was buried from thence, upon the 26th of April, in Tindall’s Burying-ground, now most known by the name of Bunhill-Fields. The entry in the register, written probably by some ignorant person, who made a strange blunder of his name, is as follows: “1731, April 26. Mr. Dubow. Cripplegate.” His wife did not long survive him.’

MR. GODWIN

VOL. LI.] [_April 1830._

We find little of the author of Caleb Williams in the present work, except the name in the title-page. Either we are changed, or Mr. Godwin is changed, since he wrote that masterly performance. We remember the first time of reading it well, though now long ago. In addition to the singularity and surprise occasioned by seeing a romance written by a philosopher and politician, what a quickening of the pulse,—what an interest in the progress of the story,—what an eager curiosity in divining the future,—what an individuality and contrast in the characters,—what an elevation and what a fall was that of Falkland;—how we felt for his blighted hopes, his remorse, and despair, and took part with Caleb Williams as his ordinary and unformed sentiments are brought out, and rendered more and more acute by the force of circumstances, till hurried on by an increasing and incontrollable impulse, he turns upon his proud benefactor and unrelenting persecutor, and in a mortal struggle, overthrows him on the vantage-ground of humanity and justice! There is not a moment’s pause in the action or sentiments: the breath is suspended, the faculties wound up to the highest pitch, as we read. Page after page is greedily devoured. There is no laying down the book till we come to the end; and even then the words still ring in our ears, nor do the mental apparitions ever pass away from the eye of memory. Few books have made a greater impression than Caleb Williams on its first appearance. It was read, admired, parodied, dramatised. All parties joined in its praise. Those (not a few) who at the time favoured Mr. Godwin’s political principles, hailed it as a new triumph of his powers, and as a proof that the stoicism of the doctrines he inculcated did not arise from any defect of warmth or enthusiasm of feeling, and that his abstract speculations were grounded in, and sanctioned by, an intimate knowledge of, and rare felicity in, developing the actual vicissitudes of human life. On the other hand, his enemies, or those who looked with a mixture of dislike and fear at the system of ethics advanced in the _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_, were disposed to forgive the author’s paradoxes for the truth of imitation with which he had depicted prevailing passions, and were glad to have something in which they could sympathize with a man of no mean capacity or attainments. At any rate, it was a new and startling event in literary history for a metaphysician to write a popular romance. The thing took, as all displays of unforeseen talent do with the public. Mr. Godwin was thought a man of very powerful and versatile genius; and in him the understanding and the imagination reflected a mutual and dazzling light upon each other. His St. Leon did not lessen the wonder, nor the public admiration of him, or rather ‘seemed like another morn risen on mid-noon.’ But from that time he has done nothing of superlative merit. He has imitated himself, and not well. He has changed the glittering spear, which always detected truth or novelty, for a leaden foil. We cannot say of his last work (Cloudesley),—‘Even in his ashes live his wonted fires.’ The story is cast indeed something in the same moulds as Caleb Williams; but they are not filled and running over with molten passion, or with scalding tears. The situations and characters, though forced and extreme, are without effect from the want of juxtaposition and collision. Cloudesley (the elder) is like Caleb Williams, a person of low origin, and rebels against his patron and employer; but he remains a characterless, passive, inefficient agent to the last,—forming his plans and resolutions at a distance,—not whirled from expedient to expedient, nor driven from one sleepless hiding-place to another; and his lordly and conscience-stricken accomplice (Danvers) keeps his state in like manner, brooding over his guilt and remorse in solitude, with scarce an object or effort to vary the round of his reflections,—a lengthened paraphrase of grief. The only dramatic incidents in the course of the narrative are, the sudden metamorphosis of the Florentine Count Camaldoli into the robber St. Elmo, and the unexpected and opportune arrival of Lord Danvers in person, with a coach and four and liveries, at Naples, just in time to save his ill-treated nephew from a violent death. The rest is a well-written essay, or theme, composed as an exercise to gain a mastery of style and topics.

There is, indeed, no falling off in point of style or command of language in the work before us. Cloudesley is better written than Caleb Williams. The expression is everywhere terse, vigorous, elegant:—a polished mirror without a wrinkle. But the spirit of the execution is lost in the inertness of the subject-matter. There is a dearth of invention, a want of character and grouping. There are clouds of reflections without any new occasion to call them forth;—an expanded flow of words without a single pointed remark. A want of acuteness and originality is not a fault that is generally chargeable upon our author’s writings. Nor do we lay the blame upon him now, but upon circumstances. Had Mr. Godwin been bred a monk, and lived in the good old times, he would assuredly either have been burnt as a free-thinker, or have been rewarded with a mitre, for a tenth part of the learning and talent he has displayed. He might have reposed on a rich benefice, and the reputation he had earned, enjoying the _otium cum dignitate_, or at most relieving his official cares by revising successive editions of his former productions, and enshrining them in cases of sandal-wood and crimson velvet in some cloistered hall or princely library. He might then have courted

——‘retired leisure, That in trim gardens takes its pleasure,’—

have seen his peaches ripen in the sun; and, smiling secure on fortune and on fame, have repeated with complacency the motto—_Horas non numero nisi serenas!_ But an author by profession knows nothing of all this. He is only ‘the iron rod, the torturing hour.’ He lies ‘stretched upon the rack of restless ecstasy:’ he runs the everlasting gauntlet of public opinion. He must write on, and if he had the strength of Hercules and the wit of Mercury, he must in the end write himself down:

‘And like a gallant horse, fallen in first rank, Lies there for pavement to the abject rear, O’er-run and trampled on.’

He cannot let well done alone. He cannot take his stand on what he has already achieved, and say, Let it be a durable monument to me and mine, and a covenant between me and the world for ever! He is called upon for perpetual new exertions, and urged forward by ever-craving necessities. The _wolf_ must be kept from the door: the _printer’s devil_ must not go empty-handed away. He makes a second attempt, and though equal perhaps to the first, because it does not excite the same surprise, it falls tame and flat on the public mind. If he pursues the real bent of his genius, he is thought to grow dull and monotonous; or if he varies his style, and tries to cater for the capricious appetite of the town, he either escapes by miracle or breaks down that way, amidst the shout of the multitude and the condolence of friends, to see the idol of the moment pushed from its pedestal, and reduced to its proper level. There is only one living writer who can pass through this ordeal; and if he had barely written half what he has done, his reputation would have been none the less. His inexhaustible facility makes the willing world believe there is not much in it. Still, there is no alternative. Popularity, like one of the Danaides, imposes impossible tasks on her votary,—to pour water into sieves, to reap the wind. If he does nothing, he is forgotten; if he attempts more than he can perform, he gets laughed at for his pains. He is impelled by circumstances to fresh sacrifices of time, of labour, and of self-respect; parts with well-earned fame for a newspaper puff, and sells his birth-right for a mess of pottage. In the meanwhile, the public wonder why an author writes so badly and so much. With all his efforts, he builds no house, leaves no inheritance, lives from hand to mouth, and, though condemned to daily drudgery for a precarious subsistence, is expected to produce none but works of first-rate genius. No; learning unconsecrated, unincorporated, unendowed, is no match for the importunate demands and thoughtless ingratitude of the reading public.

——‘O, let not virtue seek Remuneration for the thing it was! To have done, is to hang, Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery;— That all, with one consent, praise new-born gaudes, Though they are made and moulded of things past; And give to dust, that is a little gilt, More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.’

If we wished to please Mr. Godwin, we should say that his last work was his best; but we cannot do this in justice to him or to ourselves. Its greatest fault is, that (as Mr. Bayes would have declared) there is nothing ‘to elevate and surprise’ in it. There is a story, to be sure, but you know it all beforehand, just as well as after having read the book. It is like those long straight roads that travellers complain of on the Continent, where you see from one end of your day’s journey to the other, and carry the same prospect with you, like a map in your hand, the whole way. Mr. Godwin has laid no ambuscade for the unwary reader—no picturesque group greets the eye as you pass on—no sudden turn at an angle places you on the giddy verge of a precipice. Nevertheless, our author’s courage never flags. Mr. Godwin is an eminent rhetorician; and he shows it in this, that he expatiates, discusses, amplifies, with equal fervour, and unabated ingenuity, on the merest accidents of the way-side, or common-places of human life. Thus, for instance, if a youth of eleven or twelve years of age is introduced upon the carpet, the author sets himself to show, with a laudable candour and communicativeness, what the peculiar features of that period of life are, and ‘takes an inventory’ of all the particulars,—such as sparkling eyes, roses in the cheeks, a smooth forehead, flaxen locks, elasticity of limb, lively animal spirits, and all the flush of hope,—as if he were describing a novelty, or some _terra incognita_, to the reader. In like manner, when a young man of twenty is confined to a dungeon as belonging to a gang of banditti, and going to be hanged, great pains are taken through three or four pages to convince us, that at that period of life this is no very agreeable prospect; that the feelings of youth are more acute and sanguine than those of age; that, therefore, we are to take a due and proportionate interest in the tender years and blighted hopes of the younger Cloudesley; and that if any means could be found to rescue him from his present perilous situation, it would be a great relief, not only to him, but to all humane and compassionate persons. Every man’s strength is his weakness, and turns in some way or other against himself. Mr. Godwin has been so long accustomed to trust to his own powers, and to draw upon his own resources, that he comes at length to imagine that he can build a palace of words upon nothing. When he lavished the colours of style, and the exuberant strength of his fancy, on descriptions like those of the character of Margaret, the wife of St. Leon, or of his musings in the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor, or of his enthusiasm on discovering the philosopher’s stone, and being restored to youth and the plenitude of joy by drinking the _Elixir Vitæ_;—or when he recounts the long and lasting despair which succeeded that utter separation from his kind, and that deep solitude which followed him into crowds and cities,—deeper and more appalling than the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor,—we were never weary of being borne along by the golden tide of eloquence, supplied from the true sources of passion and feeling. But when he bestows the same elaboration of phrases, and artificial arrangement of sentences, to set off the most trite and obvious truisms, we confess it has to us a striking effect of the _bathos_. Lest, however, we should be thought to have overcharged or given a false turn to this description, we will enable our readers to judge for themselves, by giving the passage to which we have just alluded, as a specimen of this overstrained and supererogatory style.

—‘The condition in which he was now placed could not fail to have a memorable effect on the mind of Julian. Shut up in a solitary dungeon, without exercise or amusement, he had nothing upon which to occupy his thoughts but the image of his own situation. He had hitherto lived,

## particularly during the last twelve months, in a dream. He grieved most

bitterly, most persistingly, for the death of Cloudesley (the elder). He had been instigated by his grief to seek the society of the companions he had left in the Apennines. He did not desire any new connexions; he would have shrunk from the encounter of new faces.

‘All this was well. But the case was different, when he understood from the language and manner of those who had him in custody, the only persons he saw, that he would probably barely be taken out of prison to be led to the scaffold. This was a kind of shock, greatly calculated to awaken a man out of a dream. Julian was young, and had seen little of the diversified scenes of human life. Existence is a thing that is regarded in a very different light by the young and the old. The springs of human nature are of a limited sort, and lie in a narrow compass; and when we grow old, our desires are declining, our faculties have lost their sharpness, and we are reasonably contented “to close our eyes and shut out daylight.” But to the young it is a very different thing,

## particularly perhaps at twenty years of age. We are just come into the

possession of all our faculties, and begin fully to be aware of our own independence. Every thing is new to us; and the larger half at least of what is new, is also agreeable. Pleasure spreads before us all its allurements; knowledge unrolls its ample page. We have every thing to learn, and every thing to enjoy. Ambition proffers its variegated visions; and we are at a loss on which side to fix our choice. It is easy to dally with death. The young man is like the coquette of the other sex: She has little objection to trifling with a displeasing and superannuated lover, so long as she is satisfied she is not within his clutches.

‘But all these considerations sink into nothing when contrasted with the horrible death that was prepared for him. Julian had hitherto been a stranger to adversity and pain. The path of his juvenile years had been smoothed to him by the exemplary cares of Cloudesley and Eudocia. To his own apprehension he was the favourite of fortune. All that he had read of tragic and disastrous in the annals of mankind seemed like a drama, prepared to make him wise by the sorrows of others, without costing him a particle of the bitter price of experience. All that he had encountered of displeasing was when he was the inmate of Borromeo; and this, though felt by him as intolerable, he was aware had been planned in a spirit of kindness. How terrible, therefore, was the reverse that had now fallen upon him! That he, who had never contemplated the slightest mischief to a human creature, whose life had been all kindness, and beneficence, and good humour, should suddenly be treated as the vilest of criminals, shut up in a dungeon, and destined to the scaffold, was a thought that overturned all his previous conceptions of human society and life. It filled him with wildness and horror; it drove him to frenzy. From time to time he was ready to burst into paroxysm, and dash out his desperate brains against the bars of his prison. To exchange the most beautiful scene that Paradise ever exhibited, for utter desolation and tremendous hurricane, that should tear up rocks from their foundations, and overwhelm the produce of the earth with rushing and uncontrollable waves, would feebly express the revolution that took place in his mind. He repented that he had ever again sought the society of these alluring but pernicious friends.’—Vol. III. p. 288.

Was so much circumlocution necessary to prove that it is a disagreeable thing to be shut up in a prison, and led out to the gallows? This is the style of the _orator_, where the whole object is to turn a plain moral adage in as many different ways as possible, and not that of the romance-writer, who has, or ought to have, too many rare and surprising adventures on his hands, to stoop to this trifling, snail-paced method. According to the foregoing studied description, it should seem, that for a man to feel shocked at being immured in a gaol, or broke on the wheel, is ‘a pass of wit.’ When the author has conjured up all the aggravations of the particular case, and compared it to the nicest shade of difference with his former or his future possible history, he then feels satisfied that his hero would like it little better than he does, and inflicts a tardy horror and repentance on him. With submission, this may be the scholastic or rational process for exciting pity and terror; nature takes a shorter _cut_, and jumps at a conclusion without all this formality and cool calculation of grains and scruples in the scale of misfortune.

We have a graver charge yet to bring against Mr. Godwin on the score of style, than that it leads him into useless amplification: from his desire to load and give effect to his descriptions, he runs different characters and feelings into one another. By not stopping short of excess and hyperbole, he loses the line of distinction, and ‘o’ersteps the modesty of nature.’ All his characters are patterns of vice or virtue. They are carried to extremes,—they are abstractions of woe, miracles of wit and gaiety,—gifted with every grace and accomplishment that can be enumerated in the same page; and they are not only prodigies in themselves, but destined to immortal renown, though we have never heard of their names before. This is not like a veteran in the art, but like the raptures of some boarding-school girl in love with every new face or dress she sees. It is difficult to say which is the most extraordinary genius,—the improvisatori Bernardino Perfetti, or his nephew, Francesco, or young Julian. Mr. Godwin still sees with ‘eyes of youth.’ Irene is a Greek, the model of beauty and of conjugal faith. Eudocia, her maid, who marries the elder Cloudesley, is a Greek too, and nearly as handsome and as exemplary in her conduct. Again, on the same principle, the account of Irene’s devotion to her father and her husband, is by no means clearly discriminated. The spiritual feeling is exaggerated till it is confounded with the passionate; and the passionate is spiritualized in the same incontinence of tropes and figures, till it loses its distinctive character. Each sentiment, by being overdone, is neutralized into a sort of platonics. It is obvious to remark, that the novel of Cloudesley has no hero, no principal figure. The attention is divided, and wavers between Meadows, who is a candidate for the reader’s sympathy through the first half volume, and whose affairs and love adventures at St. Petersburg are huddled up in haste, and broke off in the middle; Lord Danvers, who is the guilty sufferer; Cloudesley, his sullen, dilatory Mentor; and Julian, (the supposed offspring of Cloudesley, but real son of Lord Alton, and nephew of Lord Danvers,) who turns out the fortunate youth of the piece. The story is awkwardly told. Meadows begins it with an account of himself, and a topographical description of the Russian empire, which has nothing to do with the subject; and nearly through the remainder of the work, listens to a speech of Lord Danvers, recounting his own history and that of Julian, which lasts for six hundred pages without interruption or stop. It is the longest parenthesis in a narrative that ever was known. Meadows then emerges from his _incognito_ once more, as if he had been hid behind a curtain, and gives the _coup-de-grace_ to his own auto-biography, and the lingering sufferings of his patron. The plot is borrowed from a real event that took place concerning a disputed succession in the middle of the last century, and which gave birth not long after to a novel with the title of _Annesley_. We should like to meet with a copy of this work, in order to see how a writer of less genius would get to the end of his task, and carry the reader along with him without the aid of those subtle researches and lofty declamations with which Mr. Godwin has supplied the place of facts and circumstances. The published trial, we will hazard a conjecture, has more ‘mark and likelihood’ in it. This is the beauty of Sir Walter Scott: he takes a legend or an actual character as he finds it, while other writers think they have not performed their engagements and acquitted themselves with applause, till they have slobbered over the plain face of nature with paint and varnish of their own. They conceive that truth is a plagiarism, and _the thing as it happened_ a forgery and imposition on the public. They stand right before their subject, and say, ‘Nay, but hear me first!’ We know no other merit in the Author of Waverley than that he is never this opaque, obtrusive body, getting in the way and eclipsing the sun of truth and nature, which shines with broad universal light through his different works. If we were to describe the secret of this author’s success in three words, we should say, that it consists in the _absence of egotism_.

Mr. Godwin, in his preface, remarks, that as Caleb Williams was intended as a paraphrase of ‘Blue Beard,’ the present work may be regarded as a paraphrase of the story of the ‘Children in the Wood.’ _Multeum abludit imago._ He has at least contrived to take the sting of simplicity out of it. It is a very adult, self-conscious set of substitutes he has given us for the two children, wandering hand-in-hand, the robin-redbreast, and their leafy bed. The grand eloquence, the epic march of Cloudesley, is beyond the ballad-style. In a word, the fault of this and some other of the author’s productions is, that the critical and didactic part overlays the narrative and dramatic part; as we see in some editions of the poets, where there are two lines of original text, and the rest of the page is heavy with the lumber and pedantry of the commentators. The writer does not call characters from the dead, or conjure them from the regions of fancy, to paint their peculiar physiognomy, or tell us their story, so much as (like the anatomist) to dissect and demonstrate on the insertion of the bones, the springs of the muscles, and those understood principles of life and motion which are common to the species. Now, in a novel, we want the individual, and not the _genus_. The tale of Cloudesley is a dissertation on remorse. Besides, this truth of science is often a different thing from the truth of nature, which is modified by a thousand accidents, ‘subject to all the skyey influences;’—not a mechanical principle, brooding over and working every thing out of itself. Nothing, therefore, gives so little appearance of a resemblance to reality as this abstract identity and violent continuity of purpose. Not to say that this cutting up and probing of the internal feelings and motives, without a reference to external objects, tends, like the operations of the anatomist, to give a morbid and unwholesome taint to the surrounding atmosphere.

Mr. Godwin’s mind is, we conceive, essentially active, and therefore may naturally be expected to wear itself out sooner than those that are passive to external impressions, and receive continual new accessions to their stock of knowledge and acquirement:—

——‘A fiery soul that working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o’er-inform’d its tenement of clay.’

That some of this author’s latter works are (in our judgment) comparatively feeble, is, therefore, no matter of surprise to us, and still less is it matter of reproach or triumph. We look upon it as a consequence incident to that constitution of mind and operation of the faculties. To quarrel with the author on this account, is to reject all that class of excellence of which he is the representative, and perhaps stands at the head. A writer who gives us _himself_, cannot do this twenty times following. He gives us the best and most prominent part of himself first; and afterwards ‘but the lees and dregs remain.’ If a writer takes patterns and _fac-similes_ of external objects, he may give us twenty different works, each better than the other, though this is not likely to happen. Such a one makes use of the universe as his _common-place-book_; and there is no end of the quantity or variety. The other sort of genius is his own microcosm, deriving almost all from within; and as this is different from every thing else, and is to be had at no other source, so it soon degenerates into a repetition of itself, and is confined within circumscribed limits. We do not rank ourselves in the number of ‘those base plebeians,’ as Don Quixote expresses it, ‘who cry, _Long life to the conqueror!_’ And, so far, the author is better off than the warrior, that, ‘after a thousand victories once foiled,’ he does not remain in the hands of his enemies,

‘And all the rest forgot, for which he toil’d.’

He is not judged of by his last performance, but his best,—that which is seen farthest off, and stands out with time and distance; and in this respect, Mr. Godwin may point to more than one monument of his powers of no mean height and durability. As we do not look upon books as fashions, and think that ‘a great man’s memory may last more than half a year,’ we still look at our author’s talents with the same respect as ever—on his industry and perseverance under some discouragements with more; and we shall try to explain as briefly and as impartially as we can, in what the peculiarity of his genius consists, and on what his claim to distinction is founded.

Mr. Godwin, we suspect, regards his _Political Justice_ as his great work—his passport to immortality; or perhaps he balances between this and _Caleb Williams_. Now, it is something for a man to have two works of so opposite a kind about which he and his admirers can be at a loss to say, in which he has done best. We never heard his title to originality in either of these performances called in question: yet they are as distinct as to style and subject-matter, as if two different persons wrote them. No one in reading the philosophical treatise would suspect the embryo romance: those who personally know Mr. Godwin would as little anticipate either. The man differs from the author, at least as much as the author in this case apparently did from himself. It is as if a magician had produced some mighty feat of his art without warning. He is not deeply learned; nor is he much beholden to a knowledge of the world. He has no passion but a love of fame; or we may add to this another, the love of truth; for he has never betrayed his cause, or swerved from his principles, to gratify a little temporary vanity. His senses are not acute: but it cannot be denied that he is a man of great capacity, and of uncommon genius. How is this seeming contradiction to be reconciled? Mr. Godwin is by way of distinction and emphasis an author; he is so not only by habit, but by nature, and by the whole turn of his mind. To make a book is with him the prime end and use of creation. His is the _scholastic_ character handed down in its integrity to the present day. If he had cultivated a more extensive intercourse with the world, with nature, or even with books, he would not have been what he is—he could not have done what he has done. Mr. Godwin in society is nothing; but shut him up by himself, set him down to write a book,—it is then that the electric spark begins to unfold itself,—to expand, to kindle, to illumine, to melt, or shatter all in its way. With little knowledge of the subject, with little interest in it at first, he turns it slowly in his mind,—one suggestion gives rise to another,—he calls home, arranges, scrutinizes his thoughts; he bends his whole strength to his task; he seizes on some one view more striking than the rest, he holds it with a convulsive grasp,—he will not let it go; and this is the clew that conducts him triumphantly through the labyrinth of doubt and obscurity. Some leading truth, some master-passion, is the secret of his daring and his success, which he winds and turns at his pleasure, like Perseus his winged steed. An idea having once taken root in his mind, grows there like a germ: ‘at first no bigger than a mustard-seed, then a great tree overshadowing the whole earth.’ The progress of his reflections resembles the circles that spread from a centre when a stone is thrown into the water. Everything is enlarged, heightened, refined. The blow is repeated, and each impression is made more intense than the last. Whatever strengthens the favourite conception is summoned to its aid: whatever weakens or interrupts it is scornfully discarded. All is the effect, not of feeling, not of fancy, not of intuition, but of one sole purpose, and of a determined will operating on a clear and consecutive understanding. His _Caleb Williams_ is the illustration of a single passion; his _Political Justice_ is the insisting on a single proposition or view of a subject. In both, there is the same pertinacity and unity of design, the same agglomeration of objects round a centre, the same aggrandizement of some one thing at the expense of every other, the same sagacity in discovering what makes for its purpose, and blindness to every thing but that. His genius is not dramatic; but it has something of an heroic cast: he gains new trophies in intellect, as the conqueror overruns new provinces and kingdoms, by patience and boldness; and he is great because he wills to be so.

We have said that Mr. Godwin has shown great versatility of talent in his different works. The works themselves have considerable monotony; and this must be the case, since they are all bottomed on nearly the same principle of an uniform _keeping_ and strict totality of impression. We do not hold with the doctrines or philosophy of the _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_; but we should be dishonest to deny that it is an ingenious and splendid—and we may also add, useful piece of sophistical declamation. If Mr. Godwin is not right, he has shown what is wrong in the view of morality he advocates, by carrying it to the utmost extent with unflinching spirit and ability.

Mr. Godwin was the first _whole-length_ broacher of the doctrine of _Utility_. He took the whole duty of man—all other passions, affections, rules, weaknesses, oaths, gratitude, promises, friendship, natural piety, patriotism,—infused them in the glowing cauldron of universal benevolence, and ground them into powder under the unsparing weight of the convictions of the individual understanding. The entire and complicated mass and texture of human society and feeling was to pass through the furnace of this new philosophy, and to come out renovated and changed without a trace of its former Gothic ornaments, fantastic disproportions, embossing, or relief. It was as if an angel had descended from another sphere to promulgate a new code of morality; and who, clad in a panoply of light and truth, unconscious alike of the artificial strength and inherent weakness of man’s nature,—supposing him to have nothing to do with the flesh, the world, or the Devil,—should lay down a set of laws and principles of action for him, as if he were a pure spirit. But such a mere abstracted intelligence would not require any rules or forms to guide his conduct or prompt his volitions. And this is the effect of Mr. Godwin’s book—to absolve a rational and voluntary agent from all ties, but a conformity to the independent dictates and strict obligations of the understanding:—

‘Within his bosom reigns another lord, _Reason_, sole judge and umpire of itself.’

We own that if man were this pure, abstracted essence,—if he had not senses, passions, prejudices,—if custom, will, imagination, example, opinion, were nothing, and reason were _all in all_;—if the author, in a word, could establish as the foundation, what he assumes as the result of his system, namely, the omnipotence of mind over matter, and the triumph of truth over every warped and partial bias of the heart—then we see no objection to his scheme taking place, and no possibility of any other having ever been substituted for it. But this would imply that the mind’s eye can see an object equally well whether it is near or a thousand miles off,—that we can take an interest in the people in the moon, or in ages yet unborn, as if they were our own flesh and blood,—that we can sympathize with a perfect stranger, as with our dearest friend, at a moment’s notice,—that habit is not an ingredient in the growth of affection,—that no check need be provided against the strong bias of self-love,—that we can achieve any art or accomplishment by a volition, master all knowledge with a thought; and that in this well-disciplined intuition and faultless transparency of soul, we can take cognizance (without presumption and without mistake) of all causes and consequences, an equal and impartial interest in the chain of created beings,—discard all petty feelings and minor claims,—throw down the obstructions and stumbling-blocks in the way of these grand cosmopolite views of disinterested philanthropy, and hold the balance even between ourselves and the universe. It were ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished;’ and Mr. Godwin is not to be taxed with blame for having boldly and ardently aspired to it. We meet him on the ground, not of the desirable, but the practicable. It were better that a man were an angel or a god than what he is; but he can neither be one nor the other. Enclosed in the shell of self, he sees a little way beyond himself, and feels what concerns others still more slowly. To require him to attain the highest point of perfection, is to fling him back to grovel in the mire of sensuality and selfishness. He must get on by the use and management of the faculties which God has given him, and not by striking more than one half of these with the dead palsy. To refuse to avail ourselves of mixed motives and imperfect obligations, in a creature like man, whose ‘very name is frailty,’ and who is a compound of contradictions, is to lose the substance in catching at the shadow. It is as if a man would be enabled to fly by cutting off his legs. If we are not allowed to love our neighbour better than a stranger, that is, if habit and sympathy are to make no part of our affections, the consequence will be, not that we shall love a stranger more, but that we shall love our neighbour less, and care about nobody but ourselves. These partial and personal attachments are ‘the scale by which we ascend’ to sentiments of general philanthropy. Are we to act upon pure speculation, without knowing the circumstances of the case, or even the

## parties?—for it would come to that. If we act from a knowledge of these,

and bend all our thoughts and efforts to alleviate some immediate distress, are we to take no more interest in it than in a case of merely possible and contingent suffering? This is to put the known upon a level with the unknown, the real with the imaginary. It is to say that habit, sense, sympathy, are nonentities. It is a contradiction in terms. But if man were such a being as Mr. Godwin supposes, that is, a perfect intelligence, there would be no contradiction in it; for then he would have the same knowledge of whatever was possible, as of his gross and actual experience, and would feel the same interest in it, and act with the same energy and certainty upon a sheer hypothesis, as now upon a _matter-of-fact_. We can look at the clouds, but we cannot stand upon them. Mr. Godwin takes one element of the human mind, the _understanding_, and makes it the whole; and hence he falls into solecisms and extravagances, the more striking and fatal in proportion to his own acuteness of reasoning, and honesty of intention. He has, however, the merit of having been the first to show up the abstract, or _Utilitarian_, system of morality in its fullest extent, whatever may have been pretended to the contrary; and those who wish to study the question, and not to take it for granted, cannot do better than refer to the _first_ edition of the _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_; for afterwards Mr. Godwin, out of complaisance to the public, qualified, and in some degree neutralized, his own doctrines.

Our author, not contented with his ethical honours, (for no work of the kind could produce a stronger sensation, or gain more converts than this did at the time,) determined to enter upon a new career, and fling him into the _arena_ once more; thus challenging public opinion with singular magnanimity and confidence in himself. He did not stand ‘shivering on the brink’ of his just-acquired reputation, and fear to tempt the perilous stream of popular favour again. The success of Caleb Williams justified the experiment. There was the same hardihood and gallantry of appeal in both. In the former case, the author had screwed himself up to the most rigid logic; in the latter, he gave unbounded scope to the suggestions of fancy. It cannot be denied that Mr. Godwin is, in the pugilistic phrase, an _out-and-outer_. He does not stop till he ‘reaches the verge of all we hate:’ is it to be wondered if he sometimes falls over? He certainly did not do this in Caleb Williams or St. Leon. Both were eminently successful; and both, as we conceive, treated of subjects congenial to Mr. Godwin’s mind. The one, in the character of Falkland, embodies that love of fame and passionate respect for intellectual excellence, which is a cherished inmate of the author’s bosom; (the desire of undying renown breathes through every page and line of the story, and sheds its lurid light over the close, as it has been said that the genius of war blazes through the Iliad;)—in the hero of the other, St. Leon, Mr. Godwin has depicted, as well he might, the feelings and habits of a solitary recluse, placed in new and imaginary situations: but from the philosophical to the romantic visionary, there was perhaps but one step. We give the decided preference to Caleb Williams over St. Leon; but if it is more original and interesting, the other is more imposing and eloquent. In the suffering and dying Falkland, we feel the heart-strings of our human being break; in the other work, we are transported to a state of fabulous existence, but unfolded with ample and gorgeous circumstances. The palm-tree waves over the untrodden path of luxuriant fiction; we tread with tiptoe elevation and throbbing heart the high hill-tops of boundless existence; and the dawn of hope and renovated life makes strange music in our breast, like the strings of Memnon’s harp, touched by the morning’s sun. After these two works, he fell off; he could not sustain himself at that height by the force of genius alone, and Mr. Godwin has unfortunately no resources but his genius. He has no Edie Ochiltree at his elbow. His _New Man of Feeling_ we forget; though we well remember the old one by our Scottish Addison, Mackenzie. Mandeville, which followed, is morbid and disagreeable; it is a description of a man and his ill-humour, carried to a degree of derangement. The reader is left far behind. Mr. Godwin has attempted two plays, neither of which has succeeded, nor could succeed. If a tragedy consisted of a series of soliloquies, nobody could write it better than our author. But the essence of the drama depends on the alternation and conflict of different passions, and Mr. Godwin’s _forte_ is harping on the same string. He is a reformist, both as it regards the world and himself. If he is told of a fault, he amends it if he can. His _Life of Chaucer_ was objected to as too romantic and dashing; and in his late _History of the Commonwealth_, he has gone into an excess the other way. His style creeps, and hitches in dates and authorities. We must not omit his _Lives of Edward and John Phillips_, the nephews of Milton—an interesting contribution to literary history; and his _Observations on Judge Eyre’s Charge to the Jury in 1794_,—one of the most acute and seasonable political pamphlets that ever appeared. He some years ago wrote an _Essay on Sepulchres_, which contained an idle project enough, but was enriched with some beautiful reflections on old and new countries, and on the memorials of posthumous fame. It is a singular circumstance that our author should maintain for twenty years, that Mr. Malthus’s theory (in opposition to his own) was unanswerable, and then write an answer to it, which did not much mend the matter. It is worth knowing (in order to trace the history and progress of the intellectual character) that the author of _Political Justice_ and _Caleb Williams_ commenced his career as a dissenting clergyman; and the bookstalls sometimes present a volume of _Sermons_ by him, and we believe, an _English Grammar_.

We cannot tell whether Mr. Godwin will have reason to be pleased with our opinion of him; at least, he may depend on our sincerity, and will know what it is.

NOTES CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW

Hazlitt was a regular, though not a frequent contributor to _The Edinburgh Review_ from 1814 until 1830, the year of his death. How he came to be introduced so early to Jeffrey’s notice is not known. Possibly the introduction came through Longman & Co., who had published Hazlitt’s _Reply to Malthus_ (1807), and who had been the London publishers of the _Review_ since its foundation in 1802. Hazlitt at any rate was proud of the connection, and had a high regard for Jeffrey, whom he called ‘the prince of critics and the king of men.’ See vol. II., _Liber Amoris_, p. 314 and note, and cf. also vol. IV. _The Spirit of the Age_, pp. 310–318. In _The Atlas_ for June 21, 1829, there is a short article, ‘Mr. Jeffrey’s Resignation of the Editorship of _The Edinburgh Review_,’ which is not unlike Hazlitt, but cannot be confidently attributed to him.

In the text of the present volume are printed all Hazlitt’s contributions to _The Edinburgh Review_ as to the authorship of which there is no reasonable doubt. In the following notes two articles are included, Hazlitt’s authorship of which, though probable, cannot be regarded as certain. In addition to these, the following have been attributed to him: (1) Wat Tyler and Mr. Southey (1817, vol. XXVIII. p. 151); (2) The History of Painting in Italy (1819, vol. XXXII. p. 320); (3) Byron’s _Sardanapalus_ (1822, vol. XXXVI. p. 413); and (4) an article or articles on the Scotch Novels. See Ireland’s _List of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt_, p. 75, a letter from Mr. Ireland in _Notes and Queries_, 5th Series, XI. 165, and Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s ‘Chronological Catalogue’ of Hazlitt’s writings published in the _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, vol. I. pp. xxiv-xxx. It is almost certain that Hazlitt wrote none of these reviews, and they have therefore been excluded from the present edition. The first (Wat Tyler and Mr. Southey) is included in Lord Cockburn’s list of Jeffrey’s contributions to the _Edinburgh_ (_Life of Francis Jeffrey_, 1874 ed. p. 407). This list, it must be admitted, is not thoroughly trustworthy, but the internal evidence against Hazlitt’s authorship is very strong. It is incredible that Hazlitt could have written a long article like this on such a subject (cf. _Political Essays_, vol. III. pp. 192 _et seq._) without betraying his identity by a single phrase. The second of these articles, a review of Stendhal’s _History of Painting in Italy_, Mr. Ireland attributes to Hazlitt on merely internal evidence. Mr. W. C. Hazlitt does not include it in his Catalogue. That Hazlitt was acquainted with Stendhal and was fond of writing on Art are reasons why he might have _wished_ to review the book, but they tell strongly against his having written this particular article, which is very dull indeed, and shows not a single trace of Hazlitt’s manner from beginning to end. The review of Byron’s _Sardanapalus_ has been attributed to Hazlitt on the strength, no doubt, of a letter which he himself wrote to P. G. Patmore on March 30, 1822. In this letter he says, ‘My Sardanapalus is to be in [_i.e._ in the _Edinburgh_]. In my judgment Myrrha is most like S. W. [Sarah Walker], only I am not like Sardanapalus.’ See Mr. Le Gallienne’s edition of _Liber Amoris_ (1894) p. 212. Whatever the explanation may be, the review of _Sardanapalus_ which _did_ appear in the _Edinburgh_ was written by Jeffrey himself and is included in his _Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_ (1844), vol. II. p. 333. There is no evidence that Hazlitt wrote any of the numerous reviews of the Scotch Novels. According to Patmore (_My Friends and Acquaintance_, III. 155–157), Hazlitt was anxious to review Bulwer in _The Edinburgh Review_, and proposed the matter, first to Jeffrey, and, on his retirement, to Napier, personally in London. The subject, however, was, in Patmore’s phrase, ‘interdicted.’

DUNLOP’S HISTORY OF FICTION

PAGE

5. _Dunlop’s History of Fiction._ John Colin Dunlop’s (d. 1842) _The History of Fiction: being a Critical Account of the most celebrated Prose Fictions, from the earliest Greek Romances to the novels of the Present Age_, was published in 3 vols., 1814.

7. Νείατον ἐς κενεῶνα. _Iliad_, V. 857.

‘_Romulus_,’ _etc._ Horace, _Epistles_, II. i. 5–6.

8. _Bossu._ René Le Bossu (1631–1680), author of a _Traité du poème épique_ (1675), referred to in _Tristram Shandy_, III. 12. Dryden calls him ‘the best of modern critics’ (Preface to _Troilus and Cressida_).

9. _Bandello._ Matteo Bandello (1480–1562), whose _Tales_ appeared in four volumes, 1554–1573.

_Ariosto._ Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), whose _Orlando Furioso_ (from which the ‘contrivance’ referred to by Hazlitt was borrowed) was published in 1516–1532.

11. _Middleton._ Conyers Middleton (1683–1750). See his _Letter from Rome_, 1729.

_Bayes_. See the Duke of Buckingham’s _The Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.

13. _Quidlibet audendi, etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 10.

15. _Bell of Antermony._ John Bell (1691–1780), whose _Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia to various parts of Asia_ was published in 1763.

16. _Mr. Cumberland’s novels._ Richard Cumberland (1732–1811), author of _The West Indian_ (1771), published two novels, _Arundel_ (1789) and _Henry_ (1795).

_Marianne_. By Claude Prosper Jolyot de Marivaux (1688–1763), published between 1731 and 1741.

18. _Warburton._ Warburton’s argument is summarised by Dunlop (chap. ii.) from _The Divine Legation of Moses_.

19. _Bayes’s most expeditious recipe, etc._ _The Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.

20. _Mr. Southey’s translation._ Southey’s translation of _Amadis of Gaul_ was published in four vols. 1803.

_M. de St. Palaye._ Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697–1781), author of _Mémoires sur l’Ancienne Chevalerie_, 1759–1781.

24. _Mr. Ellis._ Scott’s friend, George Ellis (1753–1815) published his _Specimens of early English Metrical Romances_ in three vols. in 1805.

_D’Urfé._ Thomas D’Urfey (1653–1723), the dramatist and song-writer.

_Betsy Thoughtless._ Eliza Haywood’s (1693?–1756) _The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless_, published in 1751. See Dunlop’s _History of Fiction_, chap. xiv.

STANDARD NOVELS AND ROMANCES

This is ostensibly a review of Madame D’Arblay’s _The Wanderer_, published in 1814. Nearly the whole of it was incorporated by Hazlitt in his Lecture on the English Novelists. Cf. vol. VIII. pp. 106 _et seq._ and notes. In his Essay ‘A Farewell to Essay-Writing,’ Hazlitt says that this review was the result of a discussion at Lamb’s, ‘sharply seasoned and well sustained till midnight.’ Though the review cannot be considered as harsh towards Madame D’Arblay, it led to Hazlitt being dropped out of Admiral Burney’s whist parties. See Crabb Robinson’s _Diary_, chap. xiii. This fact perhaps partly accounts for Hazlitt’s contemptuous reference to the Burneys in his Essay ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters,’ where, after praising Madame D’Arblay, he says, ‘The rest have done nothing, that I know of, but keep up the name.’ See vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 209.

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25. _Crebillon._ Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777), son of the dramatist.

_The celebrated French philosopher._ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of Diderot’s well-known eulogy of Richardson (_Œuvres_, V. 212–227).

39. _The Story of Le Febre._ See _Tristram Shandy_,