UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES GIFT OF SEELET W. MUDD and GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD JAMES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI to the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SOUTHERN BRANCH JOHN FISKE \ THE WORKS OF W. H. PRESCOTT VOL. XII. The Complete Works of William Hickling Prescott Edited with the Author's Latest Corrections, by John Foster Kirk In Twelve Volumes, Vol. XII. Biographical and Critical Miscellanies In One Volume LONDON GIBBINGS & COMPANY, LIMITED MDCCCXCVII Library ' BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. MEMOIR OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, THE AMERICAN NOVELIST.* : THE class of professed men of letters, if we exclude from the account the conductors of periodical journals, is certainly not very large, even at the present day, in our country ; but before the close of the last century it was nearly impossible to meet with an individual who looked to authorship as his only, or, indeed, his prin- cipal, means of subsistence. This was somewhat the more remarkable, considering the extraordinary develop- ment of intellectual power exhibited in every quarter of the country, and applied to every variety of moral and social culture, and formed a singular contrast with more than one nation in Europe, where literature still con- tinued to be followed as a distinct profession, amid all the difficulties resulting from an arbitrary government and popular imbecility and ignorance. Abundant reasons are suggested for this by the various occupations afforded to talent of all kinds, not only in the exercise of political functions, but in the splendid career opened to enterprise of every description in our free and thriving community. We were in the morning of life, as it were, when everything summoned * From Sparks's American Biography, 1834. 174117 2 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. us to action ; when the spirit was quickened by hope and youthful confidence ; and we felt that we had our race to run, unlike those nations who, having reached the noontide of their glory or sunk into their decline, were naturally led to dwell on the soothing recollections of the past, and to repose themselves, after a tumultuous existence, in the quiet pleasures of study and contem- plation. " It was amid the ruins of the Capitol," saya Gibbon, " that I first conceived the idea of writing the History of the Roman Empire." The occupation suited well with the spirit of the place, but would scarcely have harmonized with the life of bustling energy and the thousand novelties which were perpetually stimu- lating the appetite for adventure in our new and unex- plored hemisphere. In short, to express it in one word, the peculiarities of our situation as naturally disposed us to active life as those of the old countries of Europe to contemplative. The subject of the present memoir affords an almost solitary example, at this period, of a scholar, in the enlarged application of the term, who cultivated letters as a distinct and exclusive profession, resting his means of support, as well as his fame, on his success, and who, as a writer of fiction, is still farther entitled to credit for having quitted the beaten grounds of the Old Country and sought his subjects in the untried wilderness of his own. The particulars of his unostentatious life have been collected with sufficient industry by his friend Mr. William Dunlap, to whom our native literature is under such large obligations for the extent and fidelity of his researches. We will select a few of the most prominent incidents from a mass of miscellaneous fragments and literary lumber with which his work is somewhat encum- bered. It were to be wished that, in the place of some of them, more copious extracts had been substituted for CHAELES BEOCBDEN .BROWN. 3 his journal and correspondence, which, doubtless, in this as in other cases, must afford the most interesting as well as authentic materials for biography. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN was born at Philadelphia, January 17th, 1771. He was descended from a highly respectable family, whose ancestors were of that estimable sect who came over with William Penn to seek an asylum where they might worship their Creator unmo- lested in the meek and humble spirit of their own faith. From his earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of his studious propensities, being frequently noticed by his father, on his return from school, poring over some heavy tome, nothing daunted by the formidable words it contained, or mounted on a table and busily engaged in exploring a map which hung on the parlour wall. This infantine predilection for geographical studies ripened into a passion in later years. Another anecdote, re- corded of him at the age of ten, sets in a still stronger light his appreciation of intellectual pursuits far above his years. A visitor at his father's having rebuked him, as it would seem, without cause, for some remark he had made, gave him the contemptuous epithet of "boy." " What does he mean," said the young philosopher, after the guest's departure, " by calling me boy ? Does he not know that it is neither size nor age, but sense, that makes the man ? I could ask him a hundred questions, none of which he could answer." At eleven years of age he was placed under the tuition of Mr. Kobert Proud, well known as the author of the History of Pennsylvania. Under his direction he went over a large course of English reading, and acquired the elements of Greek and Latin, applying himself with great assiduity to his studies. His bodily health was naturally delicate, and indisposed him to engage in the B 2 4 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. robust, athletic exercises of boyhood. His sedentary habits, however, began so evidently to impair his health that his master recommended him to withdraw from his books and recruit his strength by excursions on foot into the country. These pedestrian rambles suited the taste of the pupil, and the length of his absence often excited the apprehensions of his friends for his safety. He may be thought to have sat to himself for this portrait of one of his heroes. " I preferred to ramble in the forest and loiter on the hill ; perpetually to change the scene ; to scrutinize the endless variety of objects ; to compare one leaf and pebble with another ; to pursue those trains of thought which their resemblances and differences sug- gested; to inquire what it was that gave them this place, structure, and form, were more agreeable employ- ments than ploughing and threshing." " My frame was delicate and feeble. Exposure to wet blasts and vertical suns was sure to make me sick" The fondness for these solitary rambles continued through life, and the familiarity which they opened to him with the grand and beautiful scenes of nature undoubtedly contri- buted to nourish the habit of reverie and abstraction, and to deepen the romantic sensibilities from which flowed so much of his misery, as well as happiness, in after-life. He quitted Mr. Proud's school before the age of sixteen. He had previously made some small poetical attempts, and soon after sketched the plans of three several epics, on the discovery of America and the con- quests of Peru and Mexico. For some time they engaged his attention to the exclusion of every other object. No vestige of them now remains, or, at least, has been given to the public, by which we can ascertain the progress made towards their completion. The publication of such immature juvenile productions may gratify curiosity by CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 3 affording a point of comparison with later excellence. They are rarely, however, of value in themselves suffi- cient to authorize their exposure to the world, and, not- withstanding the occasional exception of a Pope or a Pascal, may very safely put up with Uncle Toby's recom- mendation on a similar display of precocity, " to hush it up, and say as little about it as possible." Among the contributions which, at a later period of life, he was in the habit of making to different journals, the fate of one was too singular to be passed over in silence. It was a poetical address to Frank'lin, prepared for the Edentown newspaper. " The blundering printer," says Brown, in his journal, "from zeal or ignorance, or perhaps from both, substituted the name of Washington. AVashington, therefore, stands arrayed in awkward colours : philosophy smiles to behold her darling son ; she turns with horror and disgust from those who have won the laurel of victory in the field of battle, to this her favourite candidate, who had never participated m such bloody glory, and whose fame was derived from the conquest of philosophy alone. The printer, by his blun- dering ingenuity, made the subject ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric was a direct slander upon Washington, and so it was regarded at the time." There could not well be imagined a more expeditious or effec- tual recipe for converting eulogy into satire. Young Brown had now reached a period of life when it became necessary to decide on a profession. After due deliberation, he determined on the law, a choice which received the cordial approbation of his friends, who saw in his habitual diligence and the character of his mind, at once comprehensive and logical, the most essential requisites for success. He entered on the studies of his profession with his usual ardour ; and the acuteness and copiousness of his arguments on various 6 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. topics proposed for discussion in a law-society over which he presided bear ample testimony to his ability and industry. But, however suited to his talents the profession of the law might be, it was not at all to his taste. He became a member of a literary club, in which he made frequent essays in composition and eloquence. He kept a copious journal, and by familiar exercise endeavoured to acquire a pleasing and graceful style of writing ; and every hour that he could steal from pro- fessional schooling was devoted to the cultivation of more attractive literature. In one of his contributions to a journal, just before this period, he speaks of " the rapture with which he held communion with his own thoughts amid the gloom of surrounding woods, where his fancy peopled every object with ideal beings, and the barrier between himself and the world of spirits seemed burst by the force of meditation. In this solitude, he felt himself surrounded by a delightful society; but when transported from thence, and compelled to listen to the frivolous chat of his fellow-beings, he suffered all the miseries of solitude." He declares that his inter- course and conversation with mankind had wrought a salutary change ; that he can now mingle in the concerns of life, perform his appropriate duties, and reserve that higher species of discourse for the solitude and silence of his study. In this supposed control over his romantic fancies he grossly deceived himself. As the time approached for entering on the practice of his profession, he felt his repugnance to it increase more and more ; and he sought to justify a retreat from it altogether by such poor sophistry as his imagination could suggest. He objected to the profession as having something in it immoral. He could not reconcile it with his notions of duty to come forward as the cham- pion indiscriminately of right and wrong ; and he con- CHARLES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 7 sidered the stipendiary advocate of a guilty party as becoming, by that very act, participator in the guilt. He did not allow himself to reflect that no more equitable arrangement could be devised, none which would give the humblest individual so fair a chance for maintaining his rights as the employment of competent and upright counsel, familiar with the forms of legal practice, neces- sarily so embarrassing to a stranger ; that, so far from being compelled to undertake a cause manifestly unjust, it is always in the power of an honest lawyer to decline it, but that such contingencies are of most rare occur- rence, as few cases are litigated where each party has not previously plausible grounds for believing himself in the right, a question only to be settled by fair discussion on both sides ; that opportunities are not wanting, on the other hand, which invite the highest display of eloquence and professional science in detecting and defeating villany, in vindicating slandered inno- cence, and in expounding the great principles of law on which the foundations of personal security and property are established ; and, finally, that the most illustrious names in his own and every other civilized country have been drawn from the ranks of a profession whose habitual discipline so well trains them for legislative action and the exercise of the highest political functions. Brown cannot be supposed to have been insensible to these obvious views ; and, indeed, from one of his letters in later life, he appears to have clearly recognized the value of the profession he had deserted. But his object was, at this time, to justify himself in his fickleness of purpose, as he best might, in his own eyes, and those of his friends. Brown was certainly not the first man of genius who found himself incapable of resigning the romantic world of fiction and the uncontrolled revels of the imagination for the dull and prosaic realities of the 8 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. law. Few, indeed, like Mansfield, have been able so far to constrain their young and buoyant imaginations as to merit the beautiful eulogium of the English poet ; while many more comparatively, from the time of Juvenal downward, fortunately for the world, have been willing to sacrifice the affections plighted to Themis on the , altars of the Muse. Brown's resolution at this crisis caused sincere regret to his friends, which they could not conceal, on seeing him thus suddenly turn from the path of honourable fame at the very moment when he was prepared to enter on it. His prospects, but lately so brilliant, seemed now overcast with a deep gloom. The embar- rassments of his situation had also a most unfavourable effect on his own mind. Instead of the careful disci- pline to which it had been lately subjected, it was now left to rove at large wherever caprice should dictate, and waste itself on those romantic reveries and specu- lations to which he was naturally too much addicted. This was the period when the French Eevolution was in its heat, and the awful convulsion experienced in one unhappy country seemed to be felt in every quarter of the globe ; men grew familiar with the wildest para- doxes, and the spirit of innovation menaced the oldest and best-established principles in morals and govern- ment. Brown's inquisitive and speculative mind par- took of the prevailing scepticism. Some of his composi- tions, and especially one on the " Rights of Women/' published in 1797, show to what extravagance a benevo- lent mind may be led by fastening too exclusively on the contemplation of the evils of existing institutions and indulging in indefinite dreams of perfectibility. There is no period of existence when the spirit of a man is more apt to be depressed than when he is about to quit the safe and quiet harbour in which he has rode CHARLES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 9 in safety from childhood, and to launch on the dark and unknown ocean where so many a gallant bark has gone down before him. How much must this disquietude be increased in the case of one who, like Brown, has thrown away the very chart and compass by which he was pre- pared to guide himself through the doubtful perils of the voyage ! How heavily the gloom of despondency fell on his spirits at this time is attested by various extracts from his private correspondence. " As for me/' he says, in one of his letters, " I long ago discovered that Nature had not qualified me for an actor on this stage. The nature of my education only added to these disqualifica- tions, and I experienced all those deviations from the centre which arise when all our lessons are taken from books, and the scholar makes his own character the com- ment. A happy destiny, indeed, brought me to the knowledge of two or three minds which Nature had fashioned in the same mould with my own, but these are gone. And, God ! enable me to wait the moment when it is thy will that I should follow them." In another epistle he remarks, " I have not been deficient in the pursuit of that necessary branch of knowledge, the study of myself. I will not explain the result, for have I not already sufficiently endeavoured to make my friends unhappy by communications which, though they might easily be injurious, could not be of any possible advantage ? I really, dear W., regret that period when your pity was first excited in my favour. I sincerely lament that I ever gave you reason to imagine that I was not so happy as a gay indifference with regard to the present, stubborn forgetfulness with respect to the un- easy past, and excursions into lightsome futurity could make me ; for what end, what useful purposes, were promoted by the discovery 1 It could not take away from the number of the unhappy, but only add to it, 10 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. by making those who loved me participate in my un- easiness, which each participation, so far from tending to diminish, would in reality increase, by adding those regrets, of which I had been the author in them, to my own original stock." It is painful to witness, the struggles of a generous spirit endeavouring to suppress the anguish thus involuntarily escaping in the warmth of affectionate intercourse. This becomes still more striking in the contrast exhibited between the assumed cheerfulness of much of his correspondence at this period and the uniform melancholy tone of his private journal, the genuine record of his emotions. Fortunately, his taste, refined by intellectual culture, and the elevation and spotless purity of his moral principles, raised him above the temptations of sensual indulgence, in which minds of weaker mould might have sought a temporary relief. His soul was steeled against the grosser seductions of appetite. The only avenue through which his principles could in any way be assailed was the understanding ; and it would appear, from some dark hints in his correspondence at this period, that the rash idea of relieving himself from the weight of earthly sorrows by some voluntary deed of violence had more than once flitted across his mind. It is pleasing to observe with what beautiful modesty and simplicity of character he refers his abstinence from coarser indulgences to his constitutional infirmities, and consequent disinclination to them, which, in truth, could be only imputed to the excellence of his heart and his understanding. In one of his letters he remarks " that the benevolence of Nature rendered him, in a manner, an exile from many of the temptations that infest the minds of ardent youth. Whatever his wishes might have been, his benevolent destiny had prevented him from running into the frivolities of youth." He ascribes to CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 11 tliis cause his love of letters, and his predominant anxiety to excel in whatever was a glorious subject of competition. " Had he been furnished with the nerves and muscles of his comrades, it was very far from im- possible that he might have relinquished intellectual pleasures. Nature had benevolently rendered him in- capable of encountering such severe trials/' Brown's principal resources for dissipating the melan- choly which hung over him were his inextinguishable love of letters, and the society of a few friends, to whom congeniality of taste and temper had united him from early years. In addition to these resources, we may mention his fondness for pedestrian rambles, which some- times were of several weeks' duration. In the course of these excursions, the circle of his acquaintance and friends was gradually enlarged. In the city of New York, in particular, he contracted an intimacy with several individuals of similar age and kindred mould with himself. Among these, his earliest associate was Dr. E. H. Smith, a young gentleman of great promise in the medical profession. Brown had become known to him during the residence of the latter as a student in Philadelphia. By him our hero was introduced to Mr. Dunlap, who has survived to commemorate the virtues of his friend in a biography already noticed, and to Mr. Johnson, the accomplished author of the New York Law Reports. The society of these friends had sufficient at- tractions to induce him to repeat his visit to New York, until at length, in the beginning of 1798, he may be said to have established his permanent residence there, passing much of his time under the same roof with them. His amiable manners and accomplishments soon recom- mended him to the notice of other eminent individuals. He became a member of a literary society, called the Friendly Club, comprehending names which have since 12 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. shed a distinguished lustre over the various walks of literature and science. The spirits of Brown seemed to be exalted in this new atmosphere. His sensibilities found a grateful exercise in the sympathies of friendship, and the powers of his mind were called into action by collision with others of similar tone with his own. His memory was en- riched with the stores of various reading, hitherto con- ducted at random, with no higher object than temporary amusement or the gratification of an indefinite curiosity. He now concentrated his attention on some determinate object, and proposed to give full scope to his various talents and acquisitions in the career of an author, as yet so little travelled in our own country. His first publication was that before noticed, en- titled " Alcuin, a Dialogue on the Rights of Women." It exhibits the crude and fanciful speculations of a theorist, who, in his dreams of optimism, charges ex- clusively on human institutions the imperfections neces- sarily incident to human nature. The work, with all its ingenuity, made little impression on the public : it found few purchasers, and made, it may be presumed, still fewer converts. He soon after began a romance, which he never com- pleted, from which his biographer has given copious extracts. It is conducted in the epistolary form, and, although exhibiting little of his subsequent power and passion, is recommended by a graceful and easy manner of narration, more attractive than the more elaborate and artificial style of his latter novels. This abortive attempt was succeeded, in 1798, by the publication of " Wieland," the first of that remarkable scries of fictions which flowed in such rapid succession from his pen in this and the three following years. In this romance, the author, deviating from the usual track CHAELES BKOCKDEN BEOWN. 13 of domestic or historic incident, proposed to delineate the powerful workings of passion displayed by a mind constitutionally excitable, under the control of some terrible and mysterious agency. The scene is laid in Pennsylvania. The action takes place in a family by the name of Wieland, the principal member of which had in- herited a melancholy and somewhat superstitious consti- tution of mind, which his habitual reading and contem- plation deepened into a calm but steady fanaticism. This temper is nourished still farther by the occurrence of certain inexplicable circumstances of ominous import. Strange voices are heard by different members of the family, sometimes warning them of danger, sometimes announcing events seeming beyond the reach of human knowledge. The still and solemn hours of night are disturbed by the unearthly summons. The other actors of the drama are thrown into strange perplexity, and an underplot of events is curiously entangled by the occur- rence of unaccountable sights as well as sounds. By the heated fancy of Wieland they are referred to super- natural agency. A fearful destiny seems to preside over the scene, and to carry the actors onward to some awful catastrophe. At length the hour arrives. A solemn, mysterious voice announces to Wieland that he is now called on to testify his submission to the divine will by the sacrifice of his earthly affections, to surrender up the affectionate partner of his bosom, on whom he had re- posed all his hopes of happiness in this life. He obeys the mandate of Heaven. The stormy conflict of passion into which his mind is thrown, as the fearful sacrifice he is about to make calls up all the tender remembrances of conjugal fidelity and love, is painted with frightful strength of colouring. Although it presents, on the whole, as pertinent an example as we could offer from, any of Brown's writings of the peculiar power and vivid- 14 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES ness of Ms conceptions, the whole scene is too long for insertion here. We will mutilate it, however, by a brief extract, as an illustration of our author's manner, more satisfactory than any criticism can be. Wieland, after receiving the fatal mandate, is represented in an apart- ment alone with his wife. His courage, or, rather, liis desperation, fails him, and he sends her, on some pretext, from the chamber. An interval, during which his in-- sane passions have time to rally, ensues. " She returned with a light ; I led the way to the chamber ; she looked round her ; she lifted the curtain of the bed ; she saw nothing. At length she fixed inquiring eyes upon me. The light now enabled her to discover in my visage what darkness had hitherto concealed. Her cares were now transferred from my sister to myself, and she said, in a tremulous voice, ' Wieland ! you are not well ; what ails you 1 Can I do nothing for you ? ' That accents and looks so winning should disarm me of my resolution was to be expected. My thoughts were thrown anew into anarchy. I spread my hand before my eyes that I might not see her, and answered only by groans. She took my other hand between hers, and, pressing it to her heart, spoke with that voice which had ever swayed my will and wafted away sorrow. ' My friend ! my soul's friend ! tell me thy cause of grief. Do I not merit to par- take with thee in thy cares ? Am I not thy wife ? ' " This was too much. I broke from her embrace, and retired to a corner of the room. In this pause, courage was once more infused into me. I resolved to execute my duty. She followed me, and renewed her passionate entreaty to know the cause of my distress. " 1 raised my head and regarded her with steadfast looks. I muttered something about death, and the injunctions of my duty. At these words she shrunk back, and looked at me with a new expression of CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 15 anguish. After a pause, she clasped her hands and ex- claimed, " ' Wieland ! Wieland ! God grant that I am mis- taken ; but surely something is wrong. I see it ; it is too plain ; thou art undone lost to me and to thyself.' At the same time she gazed on my features with intensest anxiety, in hope that different symptoms would take place. I replied with vehemence, * Undone ! No ; my duty is known, and I thank my God that my cowardice is now vanquished, and I have power to fulfil it. Catharine ! I pity the weakness of nature. I pity thee, but must not spare. Thy life is claimed from my hands : thou must die ! ' " Fear was now added to her grief. * What mean you ? Why talk you of death ? Bethink yourself, Wieland ; bethink yourself, and this fit will pass. ! why came I hither ? Why did you drag me hither ? ' " ' I brought thee hither to fulfil a divine command. I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must/ Saying this, I seized her wrists. She shrieked aloud, and endeavoured to free herself from my grasp, but her efforts were vain. " ' Surely, surely, Wieland, thou dost not mean it. Am I not thy wife ? and wouldst thou kill me ? Thou wilt not ; and yet I see thou art Wieland no longer ! A fury, resistless and horrible, possesses thee : spare me spare help help " Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help for mercy. When she could speak no longer, her ges- tures, her looks, appealed to my compassion. My ac- cursed hand was irresolute and tremulous. I meant thy death to be sudden, thy struggles to be brief. Alas ! my heart was infirm, my resolves mutable. Thrice I slackened my grasp, and life kept its hold, though in the midst of pangs. Her eyeballs started from their 16 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. sockets. Grimness and distortion took place of all that used to bewitch me into transport and subdue me into reverence. " I was commissioned to kill thee, but not to torment thee with the foresight of thy death ; not to multiply thy fears and prolong thy agonies. Haggard, and pale, and lifeless, at length thou ceasedst to contend with thy destiny. " This was a moment of triumph. Thus had I suc- cessfully subdued the stubbornness of human passions ; the victim which had been demanded was given ; the deed was done past recall. " I lifted the corpse in my arms, and laid it on the bed. I gazed upon it with delight. Such was the elation of my thoughts that I even broke into laughter. I clapped my hands, and exclaimed, ' It is done ! My sacred duty is fulfilled ! To that I have sacrificed, my God ! thy last and best gift, my wife ! ' " For a while I thus soared above frailty. I imagined I had set myself forever beyond the reach of selfishness, but my imaginations were false. This rapture quickly subsided. I looked again at my wife. My joyous ebul- litions vanished, and I asked myself who it was whom I saw. Methought it could not be Catharine. It could not be the woman who had lodged for years in my heart ; who had slept nightly in my bosom ; who had borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father ; whom I had watched with delight, and cherished with a fondness ever new and perpetually growing : it could not be the same. " Where was her bloom r ( These deadly and blood- suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream that mean- dered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid CHARLES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 17 stains and this hideous deformity. Alas ! these were the traces of agony : the gripe of the assassin had been here! " I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow. The breath of Heaven that sus- tained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into mere man. I leaped from the floor ; I dashed my head against the wall; I uttered screams of horror; I panted after tor- ment and pain. Eternal fire and the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and a bed of roses. " I thank my God that this degeneracy was transient, that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and was calm. My wife was dead ; but I reflected that, though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. If the transports of a husband were no more, the feelings of a father had still scope for exercise. When remembrance of their mother should excite too keen a pang, I would look upon them and be comforted. " While I revolved these ideas, new warmth flowed in upon my heart. I was wrong. These feelings were the growth of selfishness. Of this I was not aware ; and, to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, a new effulgence and a new mandate were necessary. "From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray that was shot into the room. A voice spake like that which I had before heard, * Thou hast done well ; but all is not done the sacrifice is incomplete thy children must be offered they must perish with their mother ! ' ' This, too, is accomplished by the same remorseless arm, although the author has judiciously refrained from attempting to prolong the note of feeling, struck with so powerful a hand, by the recital of the particulars. The wretched fanatic is brought to trial for the murder, but is acquitted on the ground of insanity. The illusion which has bewildered him at length breaks on his under- standing in its whole truth. He cannot sustain the shock, and the tragic tale closes with the suicide of the victim of superstition and imposture. The key to the whole of this mysterious agency which controls the cir- cumstances of the story is ventriloquism ! ventriloquism exerted for the very purpose by a human fiend, from no motives of revenge or hatred, but pure diabolical malice, or, as he would make us believe, and the author seems willing to endorse this absurd version of it, as a mere practical joke ! The reader, who has been gorged with this feast of horrors, is tempted to throw away the book in disgust at finding himself the dupe of such paltry jugglery; which, whatever sense be given to the term ventriloquism, is altogether incompetent to the various phenomena of sight and sound with which the story is so plentifully seasoned. We can feel the force of Dry- den's imprecation when he cursed the inventors of those fifth acts which are bound to unravel all the fine mesh of impossibilities which the author's wits had been so busy entangling in the four preceding. The explication of the mysteries of Wieland naturally suggests the question how far an author is bound to explain the super natural it ies, if we may so call them, of his fictions, and whether it is not better, on the whole, to trust to the willing superstition and credulity of tlie reader (of which there is perhaps store enough in almost every bosom, at the present enlightened day even, for poetical purposes) than to attempt a solution on purely natural or mechanical principles. It was thought no harm for the ancients to bring the use of machinery into their epics, and a similar freedom was conceded to the old English dramatists, whose ghosts and witches were placed in the much more perilous predicament of being CHAELES BROCKDEN BEOWN. 19 subjected to the scrutiny of the spectator, whose senses are not near so likely to be duped as the sensitive and excited imagination of the reader in his solitary chamber. It must be admitted, however, that the public of those days, when the " Undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders that were sung," were admirably seasoned for the action of superstition in all forms, and furnished, therefore, a most enviable audience for the melodramatic artist, whether dramatist or romance-writer. But all this is changed. No witches ride the air nowadays, and fairies no longer " dance their rounds by the pale moonlight," as the worthy Bishop Corbet, indeed, lamented a century and a half ago. Still, it may be allowed, perhaps, if the scene is laid in some remote age or country, to borrow the ancient superstitions of the place, and incorporate them into, or, at least, colour the story with them, without shocking the well-bred prejudices of the modern reader. Sir Walter Scott has done this with good effect in more than one of his romances, as every one will readily call to mind. A fine example occurs in the Boden Glass apparition in Waverley, which the great novelist, far from attempting to explain on any philosophical prin- ciples, or even by an intimation of its being the mere creation of a feverish imagination, has left as he found it, trusting that the reader's poetic feeling will readily accommodate itself to the popular superstitions of the country he is depicting. This reserve on his part, indeed, arising from a truly poetic view of the subject and an honest reliance on a similar spirit in his reader, has laid him open, with some matter-of-fact people, to the impu- tation of not being wholly untouched himself by the national superstitions. Yet how much would the whole scene have lost in its permanent effect if the author had 2 20 EIOGBAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. attempted an explanation of the apparition on the ground of an optical illusion not infrequent among the mountain- mists of the Highlands, or any other of the ingenious solutions so readily at the command of the thoroughbred story-teller ! It must be acknowledged, however, that this way of solving the riddles of romance would hardly be admis- sible in a story drawn from familiar scenes and situa- tions in modern life, and especially in our own country. The lights of education are flung too bright and broad over the land to allow any lurking-hole for the shadows of a twilight age. So much the worse for the poet and the novelist. Their province must now be confined to poor human nature, without meddling with the " Gorgons and chimeras dire " which floated through the bewildered brains of our forefathers, at least on the other side of the water. At any rate, if a writer, in this broad sunshine, ventures on any sort of diablerie, he is forced to explain it by all the thousand contrivances of trap-doors, secret passages, waxen images, and other make-shifts from the property-room of Mrs. Kadcliffe and Company. Brown, indeed, has resorted to a somewhat higher mode of elucidating his mysteries by a remarkable phenomenon of our nature. But the misfortune of all these attempts to account for the marvels of the story by natural or mechanical causes is, that they are very seldom satisfactory, or competent to their object. This is emi- nently the case with the ventriloquism in Wieland. Even where they are competent, it may be doubted whether the reader who has suffered his credulous fancy to be entranced by the spell of the magician will be gratified to learn, at the end, by what cheap mechanical contrivance he has been duped. However this may be, it is certain that a very unfavourable effect, in another CHAELES BBOCKDEN BROWN. 21 respect, is produced on his mind, after he is made ac- quainted with the nature of the secret spring by which the machinery is played, more especially when one lead- ing circumstance, like ventriloquism in Wieland, is made the master-key, as it were, by which all the mysteries are to be unlocked and opened at once. With this ex- planation at hand, it is extremely difficult to rise to that sensation of mysterious awe and apprehension on which so much of the sublimity and general effect of the narra- tive necessarily depends. Instead of such feelings, the only ones which can enable us to do full justice to the author's conceptions, we sometimes, on the contrary, may detect a smile lurking in the corner of the mouth as we peruse scenes of positive power, from the contrast ob- viously suggested of the impotence of the apparatus and the portentous character of the results. The critic, there- fore, possessed of the real key to the mysteries of the story, if he would do justice to his author's merits, must divest himself, as it were, of his previous knowledge, by fastening his attention on the results, to the exclusion of the insignificant means by which they are achieved. He, will not always find this an easy matter. But to return from this rambling digression. In the following year, 1799, Brown published his second novel, entitled " Ormond." The story presents few of the deeply agitating scenes and powerful bursts of passion which distinguish the first. It is designed to exhibit a model of surpassing excellence in a female rising superior to all the shocks of adversity and the more perilous blandish- ments of seduction, and who, as the scene grows darker and darker around her, seems to illumine the whole with the radiance of her celestial virtues. The reader is re- minded of the " patient Griselda," so delicately portrayed by the pencils of Boccaccio and Chaucer. It must be admitted, however, that the contemplation of such a 22 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. character in the abstract is more imposing than the minute details by which we attain to the knowledge of it ; and although there is nothing, we are told, which the gods looked down upon with more satisfaction than a brave mind struggling with the storms of adversity, yet, when these come in the guise of poverty, and all the train of teasing annoyances in domestic life, the tale, if long protracted, too often produces a sensation of weari- ness scarcely to be compensated by the moral grandeur of the spectacle. The appearance of these two novels constitutes an epoch in the ornamental literature of America. They arc the first decidedly successful attempts in the walk of romantic fiction. They are still farther remarkable as illustrating the character and state of society on this side of the Atlantic, instead of resorting to the exhausted springs of European invention. These circumstances, as well as the uncommon powers they displayed both of conception and execution, recommended them, to the notice of the literary world, although their philosophical method of dissecting passion and analyzing motives of action placed them somewhat beyond the reach of vulgar popularity. Brown was sensible of the favourable im- pression which he had made, and mentions it in one of his epistles to his brother with his usual unaffected mo- desty : " I add somewhat, though not so much as I might if I were so inclined, to the number of my friends. I find to be the writer of " Wieland " and " Ormond " is a greater recommendation than I ever imagined it would be." In the course of the same year, the quiet tenor of his life was interrupted by the visitation of that fearful pestilence, the yellow fever, which had for several suc- cessive years made its appearance in the city of New York, but which in 1798 fell upon it with a violence similar to that with which it had desolate Philadelphia CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 23 in 1793. Brown had taken the precaution of with- drawing from the latter city, where he then resided, on its first appearance there. He prolonged his stay in New York, however, relying on the healthiness of the quarter of the town where he lived, and the habitual abstemiousness of his diet. His friend Smith was necessarily detained there by the duties of his profession; and Brown, in answer to the reiterated importunities of his absent relatives to withdraw from the infected city, refused to do so, on the ground that his personal services might be required by the friends who remained in it, a disinterestedness well meriting the strength of attach- ment which he excited in the bosom of his companions. Unhappily Brown was right in his prognostics, and his services were too soon required in behalf of his friend Dr. Smith, who fell a victim to his own benevolence, having caught the fatal malady from an Italian gentleman, a stranger in the city, whom he received, when infected with the disease, into his house, relinquishing to him his own apartment. Brown had the melancholy satisfaction of performing the last sad offices of affection to his dying friend. He himself soon became affected with the same disorder; and it was not till after a severe illness that he so far recovered as to be able to transfer his residence to Perth Amboy, the abode of Mr. Dunlap, where a pure and invigorating atmosphere, aided by the kind attentions of his host, gradually restored him to a sufficient degree of health and spirits for the prosecution of his literary labours. The spectacle he had witnessed made too deep an im- pression on him to be readily effaced, and he resolved to transfer his own conceptions of it, while yet fresh, to the page of fiction, or, as it might rather be called, of history, for the purpose, as he intimates in his preface, of im- parting to others some of the fruits of the melancholy 24 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. lesson he had himself experienced. Such was the origin of his next novel, " Arthur Mervyn ; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793." This was the fatal year of the yellow fever in Philadelphia. The action of the story is chiefly confined to that city, but seems to be prepared with little contrivance, on no regular or systematic plan, consisting simply of a succession of incidents, having little cohesion except in reference to the hero, but affording situations of great interest and frightful fidelity of colouring. The pestilence wasting a thriving and populous city has furnished a topic for more than one great master. It will be remembered as the terror of every school-boy in the pages of Thucydides ; it forms the gloomy portal to the light and airy fictions of Boc- caccio ; and it has furnished a subject for the graphic pencil of the English novelist De Foe, the only one of the three who never witnessed the horrors which he paints, but whose fictions wear an aspect of reality which history can rarely reach. Brown has succeeded in giving the same terrible dis- tinctness to his impressions by means of individual portraiture. He has, however, not confined himself to this, but, by a variety of touches, lays open to our view the whole interior of the city of the plague. Instead of expatiating on the loathsome symptoms and physical ravages of the disease, he selects the most striking moral circumstances which attend it ; he dwells on the wither- ing sensation that falls so heavily on the heart in the streets of the once busy and crowded city, now deserted and silent, save only where the wheels of the melancholy hearse are heard to rumble along the pavement. Our author not unfrequently succeeds in conveying more to the heart by the skilful selection of a single circumstance than would have flowed from a multitude of petty details. It is the art of the great masters of poetry and painting. CHAELES BROCKDEN BROWN. 25 The same year in which Brown produced the first part of " Arthur Mervyn," he entered on the publication of a periodical entitled The Monthly Magazine and Ameri- can Review, a work that during its brief existence, which terminated in the following year, afforded abun- dant evidence of its editor's versatility of talent and the ample range of his literary acquisitions. Our hero was now fairly in the traces of authorship. He looked to it as his permanent vocation ; and the indefatigable dili- gence with which he devoted himself to it may at least serve to show that he did not shrink from his professional engagements from any lack of industry or enterprise. The publication of " Arthur Mervyn " was succeeded not long after by that of " Edgar Huntly ; or, The Adventures of a Sleepwalker," a romance presenting a greater variety of wild and picturesque adventure, with more copious delineations of natural scenery, than is to be found in his other fictions ; circumstances, no doubt, possessing more attractions for the mass of readers than the peculiarities of his other novels. Indeed, the author lias succeeded perfectly in constantly stimulating the curi- osity by a succession of as original incidents, perils, and hairbreadth escapes as ever flitted across a poet's fancy. It is no small triumph of the art to be able to maintain the curiosity of the reader unflagging through a suc- cession of incidents which, far from being sustained by one predominant passion and forming parts of one whole, rely each for its interest on its own independent merits. The story is laid in the western part of Pennsylvania, where the author has diversified his descriptions of a simple and almost primitive state of society with uncom- monly animated sketches of rural scenery. It is worth observing how the sombre complexion of Brown's imagination, which so deeply tinges his moral portraiture, sheds its gloom over his pictures of material nature. nosing the landscape into all the severe and savage pjAlimity of a SalvatOT Rosa. The awn nambiiKam of tins novel, which, like the ventriloquism of ** Wieland," is jfa> moving principle of all the machinery, has this advantage over the latter; that it does not necessarily impair the effect by perpetually suggesting a solution of mysteries, and thus dispelling the illusion on whose existence the effect of the whole story mainly depends. The adventures, indeed, built upon it are not the most probable in the world ; but, waiving this, we shall be well rewarded for such concession, there is no farther difficulty. The extract already cited by us from the first of our author's novels has furnished the reader with an illus- tration of his power in displaying the conflict of passion under high moral excitement. We will now venture another quotation from the work before us, in order to exhibit more fully his talent for the description of ex- ternal objects. Edgar Huntly, the hero of the story, is represented in one of the wild mountain-fastnesses of Xorwalk, a district in the v estern part of Pennsylvania. He is on the brink of a ravine, from which the only avenue lies over the body of a tree thrown across the chasm, through whose dark depths below a mailing torrent is heard to pour its waters. " While occupied with these reflections, my eyes were fixed upon the opposite steeps. The tops of the trees, waving to and fro in the wildest commotion, and their trunks occasionally bending to the blast, which, in these lofty regions, blew with a violence unknown in the tracts below, exhibited, an awful spectacle. At length my attention was attracted by the trunk which lay across the gulf, and which I had converted into a bridge. I perceived that it had already swerved somewhat from its CHAELES BROCKDEN BBOWN. 27 original position ; that every blast broke or loosened some of the fibres by which its roots were connected with the opposite bank ; and that, if the storm did not speedily abate, there was imminent danger of its being torn from the rock and precipitated into the chasm. Thus my retreat would be cut off, and the evils from which I was endeavouring to rescue another would be experienced by myself. " I believed my destiny to hang upon the expedition with which I should recross this gulf. The moments that were spent in these deliberations were critical, and I shuddered to observe that the trunk was held in its place by one or two fibres, which were already stretched almost to breaking. " To pass along the trunk, rendered slippery by the wet and un steadfast by the wind, was eminently danger- ous. To maintain my hold in passing, in defiance of the whirlwind, required the most vigorous exertions. For this end, it was necessaiy to discommode myself of my cloak, and of the volume which I carried in the pocket of my coat. " Just as I had disposed of these encumbrances, and had risen from my seat, my attention was again called to the opposite steep by the most unwelcome object that at this time could possibly occur. Something was perceived moving among the bushes and rocks, which, for a time, I hoped was nothing more than a raccoon or opossum, but which presently appeared to be a panther. His gray coat, extended claws, fiery eyes, and a cry which he at that moment uttered, and which, by its resemblance to the human voice, is peculiarly terrific, denoted him to be the most ferocious and untameable of that detested race. The industry of our hunters has nearly banished animals of prey from these precincts. The fastnesses of Norwalk, however, could not but afford refuge to some 28 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. of them. Of late I had met them so rarely that my fears were seldom alive, and I trod without caution the ruggedest and most solitary haunts. Still, however, I had seldom been unfurnished in my rambles with the means of defence. "The unfrequency with which I had lately en- countered this foe, and the encumbrance of provision, made me neglect, on this occasion, to bring with me my usual arms. The beast that was now before me, when -stimulated by hunger, was accustomed to assail what- ever could provide him with a banquet of blood. He would set upon the man and the deer with equal and irresistible ferocity. His sagacity was equal to his strength, and he seemed able to discover when his antagonist was armed and prepared for defence. " My past experience enabled me to estimate the full extent of my danger. He sat on the brow of the steep, eying the bridge, and apparently deliberating whether he should cross it. It was probable that he had scented my footsteps thus far, and, should he pass over, his vigilance could scarcely fail of detecting my asylum. " Should he retain his present station, my danger was scarcely lessened. To pass over in the face of a famished tiger was only to rush upon my fate. The falling of the trunk, which had lately been so anxiously deprecated, was now with no less solicitude desired. Every new gust I hoped would tear asunder its remaining bands, and, by cutting off all communication between the opposite steeps, place me in security. My hopes, however, were destined to be frustrated. The fibres of the prostrate tree were obstinately tenacious of their hold, and presently the animal scrambled down the rock and proceeded to cross it. " Of all kinds of death, that which now menaced me the most abhorred. To die by disease, or by the CHAELES BEOCKDEN BROWN. 29 hand of a fellow-creature, was propitious and lenient in comparison with being rent to pieces by the fangs of this savage. To perish in this obscure retreat by means- so impervious to the anxious curiosity of my friends, to- lose my portion of existence by so untoward and ignoble a destiny, was insupportable. I bitterly deplored my rashness in coming hither unprovided for an encounter like this. " The evil of my present circumstances consisted chiefly in suspense. My death was unavoidable, but my imagination had leisure to torment itself by antici- pations. One foot of the savage was slowly and cautiously moved after the other. He struck his claws so deeply into the bark that they were with difficulty withdrawn. At length he leaped upon the ground. We jvere now separated by an interval of scarcely eight feet. To leave the spot where I crouched was im- possible. Behind and beside me the cliff rose perpendi- cularly, and before me was this grim and terrible visage. I shrunk still closer to the ground and closed my eyes. " From this pause of horror I was aroused by the noise occasioned by a second spring of the animal. He leaped into the pit in which I had so deeply regretted that I had not taken refuge, and disappeared. My rescue was so sudden, and so much beyond my belief or my hope, that I doubted for a moment whether my senses did not deceive me. This opportunity of escape was not to be neglected. I left my place and scrambled over the trunk with a precipitation which had like to have proved fatal. The tree groaned and shook under me, the wind blew with unexampled violence, and I had scarcely reached the opposite steep when the roots were severed from the rock, and the whole fell thundering to- the bottom of the chasm. " My trepidations were not speedily quieted. I 30 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. looked back with wonder on my hairbreadth escape, and on that singular concurrence of events which had placed me in so short a period in absolute security. Had the trunk fallen a moment earlier, I should have been im- prisoned on the hill or thrown headlong. Had its fall been delayed another moment, I should have been pursued ; for the beast now issued from his den, and testified his surprise and disappointment by tokens the sight of which made my blood run cold. " He saw me, and hastened to the verge of the chasm. He squatted on his hind legs, and assumed the attitude of one preparing to leap. My consternation was excited afresh by these appearances. It seemed at first as if the rift was too wide for any power of muscles to carry him in safety over; but I knew the unparalleled agility of this animal, and that his experience had made him a better judge of the practicability of this exploit than I was. " Still, there was hope that he would relinquish this design as desperate. This hope was quickly at an end. He sprung, and his fore legs touched the verge of the rock on which I stood. In spite of vehement exertions, however, the surface was too smooth and too hard to allow him to make good his hold. He fell, and a piercing cry uttered below showed that nothing had obstructed his descent to the bottom." The subsequent narrative leads the hero through a variety of romantic adventures, especially with the savages, with whom he has several desperate rencounters and critical escapes. The track of adventure, indeed, strikes into the same wild solitudes of the forest that have since been so frequently travelled over by our ingenious countryman Cooper. The light in which the character of the North American Indian has been ex- hibited by the two writers has little resemblance. CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 31 Brown's sketches, it is true, are few and faint. As far as they go, however, they are confined to such views as are most conformable to the popular conceptions, bringing into full relief the rude and uncouth lineaments of the Indian character, its cunning, cruelty, and unmitigated ferocity, with no intimations of a more generous nature. Cooper, on the other hand, discards all the coarser elements of savage life, reserving those only of a pic- turesque and romantic cast, and elevating the souls of his warriors by such sentiments of courtesy, high-toned gallantry, and passionate tenderness as belong to the riper period of civilization. Thus idealized, the portrait, if not strictly that of the fierce and untamed son of the forest, is at least sufficiently true for poetical purposes. Cooper is indeed a poet. His descriptions of inanimate nature, no less than of savage man, are instinct with the breath of poetry. Witness his infinitely various pictures of the ocean, or, still more, of the beautiful spirit that rides upon its bosom, the gallant ship, which under his touches becomes an animated thing, inspired by a living soul ; reminding us of the beautiful superstition of the simple-hearted natives, who fancied the bark of Columbus some celestial visitant, descending on his broad pinions from the skies. Brown is far less of a colourist. He deals less in external nature, but searches the depths of the soul. He may be rather called a philosophical than a poetical writer; for, though he has that intensity of feeling which constitutes one of the distinguishing attributes of the latter, yet in his most tumultuous bursts of passion we frequently find him pausing to analyze and coolly speculate on the elements which have raised it. This intrusion, indeed, of reason, la raison froide, into scenes of the greatest interest and emotion, has sometimes the unhappy effect of chilling them altogether. 32 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. In 1800 Brown published the second part of his "Arthur Mervyn/' whose occasional displays of energy and pathos by no means compensate the violent dislo- cations and general improbabilities of the narrative. Our author was led into these defects by the unpardon- able precipitancy of his composition. Three of his romances were thrown off in the course of one year. These were written with the printer's devil literally at his elbow, one being begun before another was com- pleted, and all of them before a regular, well-digested plan was devised for their execution. The consequences of this curious style of doing business are such as might have been predicted. The incidents are strung together with about as little con- nection as the rhymes in " The House that Jack Built ; " and the whole reminds us of some bizarre, antiquated edifice, exhibiting a dozen styles of architecture, accord- ing to the caprice or convenience of its successive owners. The reader is ever at a loss for a clue to guide him through the labyrinth of strange, incongruous incident. It would seem as if the great object of the author was to keep alive the state of suspense, on the player's principle, in " The Rehearsal," that " on the stage it is best to keep the audience in suspense; for to guess presently at the plot or the sense tires them at the end of the first act. Now, here every line surprises you, and brings in new matter ! " Perhaps, however, all this proceeds less from calculation than from the embarrassment which the novelist feels in attempting a solution of his own riddles, and which leads him to put off the reader, by multiplying incident after incident, until at length, entangled in the complicated snarl of his own intrigue, he is finally obliged, when the fatal hour arrives, to cut the knot which he cannot un- ravel. There is no other way by which we can account CHAELE3 BEOCKDEN BBOWX. 3$ for the forced and violent denouements which bring up so many of Brown's fictions. Voltaire has remarked, somewhere in his Commentaries on Corneille, that " an author may write with the rapidity of genius, but should correct with scrupulous deliberation." Our author seems to have thought it sufficient to comply with the first half of the maxim. In 1801 Brown published his novel of " Clara Howard," and in 1804 closed the series with "Jane Talbot," first printed in England. They are composed in a more subdued tone, discarding those startling preternatural incidents of which he had made such free use in his former fictions. In the preface to his first romance, " Wieland," he remarks, in allusion to the mystery on which the story is made to depend, that " it is a sufficient vindication of the writer if history furnishes one parallel fact." But the French critic, who tells us le vrai pent quelquefois rfdtre pas vraisemblable, has, with more judgment, condemned this vicious recurrence to extra- vagant and improbable incident. Truth cannot always be pleaded in vindication of the author of a fiction any more than of a libel. Brown seems to have subse- quently come into the same opinion ; for, in a letter addressed to his brother James, after the publication of " Edgar Huntly," he observes, " Your remarks upon the gloominess and out of nature incidents of ' Huntly/ if they be not just in their full extent, are doubtless such as most readers will make, which alone is a sufficient reason for dropping the doleful tone and assuming a cheerful one, or, at least, substituting moral causes and daily incidents in place of the prodigious or the singular. I shall not fall hereafter into that strain." The two last novels of our author, however, although purified from the more glaring defects of the preceding, were so inferior in their general power and originality of con- 34 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ception, that they never rose to the same level in public favour. In the year 1801 Brown returned to his native city, Philadelphia, where he established his residence in the family of his brother. Here he continued, steadily pursuing his literary avocations, and in 1803 undertook the conduct of a periodical, entitled The Literary Magazine and American Register. A great change had taken place in his opinions on more than one important topic connected with human life and hap- piness, and, indeed, in his general tone of thinking, since abandoning his professional career. Brighter prospects, no doubt, suggested to him more cheerful considerations. Instead of a mere dreamer in the world of fancy, he had now become a practical man ; larger experience and deeper meditation had shown him the emptiness of his Utopian theories ; and, though his sensibilities were as ardent and as easily enlisted as ever in the cause of humanity, his schemes of amelioration were built upon, not against, the existing institutions of society. The enunciation of the principles on which the periodical above alluded to was to be conducted is so honourable every way to his heart and his understanding that we cannot refrain from making a brief extract from it : " In an age like this, when the foundations of re- ligion and morality have been so boldly attacked, it seems necessary, in announcing a work of this nature, to be particularly explicit as to the path which the editor means to pursue. He therefore avows himself to be, without equivocation or reserve, the ardent friend and the willing champion of the Christian religion. Christian piety he reveres as the highest excellence of human beings ; and the amplest reward he can seek for his labour is the consciousness of having in some degree, CHAELES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 35 however inconsiderable, contributed to recommend the practice of religious duties. As in the conduct of this work a supreme regard will be paid to the interests of religion and morality, he will scrupulously guard against all that dishonours and impairs that principle. Every thing that savours of indelicacy or licentiousness will be rigorously proscribed. His poetical pieces may be dull, but they shall at least be free from voluptuousness or sensuality ; and his prose, whether seconded or not by genius and knowledge, shall scrupulously aim at the- promotion of public and private virtue." During his abode in New York our author had formed an attachment to an amiable and accomplished young lady, Miss Elizabeth Linn, daughter of the excellent and highly-gifted Presbyterian divine, Dr. William Linn, of that city. Their mutual attachment, in which the im- pulses of the heart were sanctioned by the understanding, was followed by their marriage in November, 1804, after which he never again removed his residence from Philadelphia. With the additional responsibilities of his new station, he pursued his literary labours with increased diligence. He projected the plan of an Annual Register, the first work of the kind in the country, and in 1806 edited the first volume of the publication, which was undertaken at the risk of an eminent bookseller of Philadelphia, Mr. Conrad, who had engaged his editorial labours in the conduct of the former Magazine, begun in 1803. When it is considered that both these periodicals were placed under the superintendence of one individual, and that he bestowed such indefatigable attention on them that they were not only prepared, but a large portion actually executed, by his own hands, we shall form no mean opinion of the extent and variety of his stores of in- formation and his facility in applying them. Both D 2 36 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. works are replete with evidences of the taste and erudition of their editor, embracing a wide range of miscellaneous articles, essays, literary criticism, and scientific researches. The historical portion of " The Register" in particular, comprehending, in addition to the political annals of the principal states of Europe and of our own country, an elaborate inquiry into the origin and organization of our domestic institutions, displays a discrimination in the selection of incidents, and a good faith and candour in the mode of discussing them, that entitle it to great authority as a record of contemporary transactions. Eight volumes were pub- lished of the first-mentioned periodical, and the latter was continued under his direction till the end of the fifth volume, 1809. In addition to these regular and, as they may be called, professional labours, he indulged his prolific pen in various speculations, both of a literary and political character, many of which appeared in the pages of the "Portfolio." Among other occasional productions, we may notice a beautiful biographical sketch of his wife's brother, Dr. J. B. Linn, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Philadelphia, whose lamented death occurred in the year succeeding Brown's marriage. We must not leave out of the account three elaborate and ex- tended pamphlets, published between 1803 and 1809, on political topics of deep interest to the community at that time. The first of these, on the cession of Louisiana to the French, soon went into a second edi- tion. They all excited general attention at the time of their appearance by the novelty of their arguments, the variety and copiousness of their information, the libe- rality of their views, the independence, so rare at that affect an air of superiority, or to assume too prominent a part in the dialogue, especially in large or mixed company, where he was rather disposed to be silent,, reserving the display of his powers for the unrestrained intercourse of friendship. He was a stranger not only to base and malignant passions, but to the paltry jealousies which sometimes sour the intercourse of men; of letters. On the contrary, he was ever prompt to do- ample justice to the merits of others. His heart was warm with the feeling of universal benevolence. Too sanguine and romantic views had exposed him to some- miscalculations and consequent disappointments in youth,, from which, however, he was subsequently retrieved by the strength of his understanding, which, combining with what may be called his natural elevation of soul, enabled him to settle the soundest principles for the regulation of his opinions and conduct in after-life. His reading was careless and desultory, but his appetite was voracious ; and the great amount of miscellaneous- information which he thus amassed was all demanded' to supply the outpourings of his mind in a thousand channels of entertainment and instruction. His unwea- ried application is attested by the large amount of his works, large even for the present day, when mind seems to have caught the accelerated movement so generally given to the operations of machinery. The whole number of Brown's printed works, comprehending his editorial as well as original productions, to the former of which his own pen contributed a very disproportionate share, is not less than four-and-twenty printed volumes, not to mention various pamphlets, anonymous contributions to divers periodicals, as well as more than one compilation of laborious research which he left unfinished at his death. Of this vast amount of matter, produced within the 42 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. brief compass of little more than ten years, that por- tion on which his fame as an author must permanently rest is his novels. We have already entered too mi- nutely into the merits of these productions to require anything farther than a few general observations. They, may probably claim to be regarded as having first opened the way to the successful cultivation of ro- mantic fiction in this country. Great doubts were long entertained of our capabilities for immediate success in this department. We had none of the buoyant, stirring associations of a romantic age ; none of the chivalrous pageantry, the feudal and border story, or Eobin Hood adventure ; none of the dim, shadowy superstitions, and the traditional legends, which had gathered like moss round every stone, hill, and valley of the olden countries. Everything here wore a spic-and-span new aspect, and lay in the broad garish sunshine of every- day life. We had none of the picturesque varieties of situation or costume ; everything lay on the same dull, prosaic level : in short, we had none of the most obvious elements of poetry ; at least so it appeared to the vulgar eye. It required the eye of genius to detect the rich stores of romantic and poetic interest that lay beneath the crust of society. Brown was aware of the capabilities of our country, and the poverty of the results he was less inclined to impute to the soil than to the cultivation of it : at least this would appear from some remarks dropped in his correspondence in 1794, several years before he broke ground in this field him- self. " It used to be a favourite maxim with me, that the genius of a poet should be sacred to the glory of his country. How far this rule can be reduced to prac- tice by an American bard, how far he can prudently observe it, and what success has crowned the efforts of those who, in their compositions, have shown that CHARLES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 43 they have not been unmindful of it, is perhaps not worth the inquiry. "Does it not appear to you that to give poetry a popular currency and universal reputation a particular cast of manners and state of civilization is necessary ? I have sometimes thought so ; but perhaps it is an error, and the want of popular poems argues only the demerit of those who have already written, or some defect in their works, which unfits them for every taste or understanding." The success of our author's experiment, which was entirely devoted to American subjects, fully established the soundness of his opinions, which have been abund- antly confirmed by the prolific pens of Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, and other accomplished writers, who in their diversified sketches of national character and scenery have shown the full capacity of our country for all the purposes of fiction. Brown does not direct himself, like them, to the illustration of social life and charac- ter. He is little occupied with the exterior forms of society. He works in the depths of the heart, dwelling less on human action than the sources of it. He has been said to have formed himself on Godwin. Indeed, he openly avowed his admiration of that eminent writer, and has certainly in some respects adopted his mode of operation, studying character with a philosophic rather than a poetic eye. But there is no servile imi- tation in all this. He has borrowed the same torch, indeed, to read the page of human nature, but the lesson he derives from it is totally different. His great object seems to be to exhibit the soul in scenes of extraordinary interest. For this purpose, striking and perilous situations are devised, or circumstances of strong moral excitement, a troubled conscience, partial gleams of insanity, or bodings of imaginary evil, which haunt 44 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. the soul and force it into all the agonies of terror. IBS the midst of the fearful strife, we are coolly invited to* investigate its causes and all the various phenomena which attend it ; every contingency, probability, nay, possibility, however remote, is discussed and nicely balanced. The heat of the reader is seen to evaporate in this cold-blooded dissection, in which our author seems to rival Butler's hero, who, " Profoundly skilled in analytic, Could distinguish and divide A hair 'twixt south and south-west side." We are constantly struck with the strange contrast of over-passion and over-reasoning. But perhaps, after all, these defects could not be pruned away from Brown's composition without detriment to his peculiar excel- lences. Si non errdsset, fecerat ille minus. If so, we may willingly pardon the one for the sake of the other. We cannot close without adverting to our author's style. He bestowed great pains on the formation of it, but, in our opinion, without great success, at least in his novels. It has an elaborate, factitious air, contrasting singularly with the general simplicity of his taste and the careless rapidity of his composition. We are aware r indeed, that works of imagination may bear a higher flush of colour, a poetical varnish, in short, that must be refused to graver and more studied narrative. No- writer has been so felicitous in reaching the exact point of good taste in this particular as Scott, who on a groundwork of prose may be said to have enabled his readers to breathe an atmosphere of poetry. More than one author, on the other hand, as Florian, in French, for example, and Lady Morgan, in English, in their attempts to reach this middle region, are eternally fluttering on the wing of sentiment, equally removed from good prose and good poetry. CHARLES BEOCKDEN BEOWN. 45 Brown, perhaps willing to avoid this extreme, has fallen into the opposite one, forcing his style into unna- tural vigour and condensation. Unusual and pedantic epithets, and elliptical forms of expression, in perpetual violation of idiom, are resorted to at the expense of simplicity and nature. He seems averse to telling simple things in a simple way. Thus, for example, we have such expressions as these : " I was fraught with the persuasion that my life was endangered." " The outer door was ajar. I shut it with trembling eagerness, and drew every bolt that appended to it." "His brain seemed to swell beyond its continent" "I waited till their slow and hoarser inspirations showed them to be both asleep. Just then, on changing my position, my head struck against some things which depended from the ceiling of the closet." " It was still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and, by a common apparatus {tinder-box ?) that lay beside my bed, I could instantly produce a light." " On recovering from deliquium, you found it where it had been dropped." It is unnecessary to multiply examples which we should not have adverted to at all had not our opinions in this matter been at variance with those of more than one respectable critic. This sort of language is no doubt in very bad taste. It cannot be denied, however, that although these defects are sufficiently general to give a colouring to the whole of his composition, yet his works afford many passages of undeniable eloquence and rhetorical beauty. It must be remembered, too, that his novels were his first productions, thrown off with careless profusion, and exhibiting many of the defects of an immature mind, which longer experience and practice might have cor- rected. Indeed, his later writings are recommended by a more correct and natural phraseology, although it must be allowed that the graver topics to which they 4G BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. are devoted, if they did not authorize, would at least render less conspicuous any studied formality and artifice of expression. These verbal blemishes, combined with defects already alluded to in the development of his plots, but which all relate to the form rather than the fond of his subject, have made our author less extensively popular than his extraordinary powers would have entitled him to be. His peculiar merits, indeed, appeal to a higher order of criticism than is to be found in ordinary and superficial readers. Like the productions of Coleridge or Words- worth, they seem to rely on deeper sensibilities than most men possess, and tax the reasoning powers more severely than is agreeable to readers who resort to works of fiction only as an Epicurean indulgence. The number of their admirers is therefore necessarily more limited than that of writers of less talent, who have shown more tact in accommodating themselves to the tone of popular feeling or prejudice. But we are unwilling to part, with anything like a tone of disparagement lingering on our lips, with the amiable author to whom our rising literature is under such large and various obligations ; who first opened a view into the boundless fields of fiction which sub- sequent adventurers have successfully explored ; who has furnished so much for our instruction in the several departments of history and criticism, and has rendered still more effectual service by kindling in the bosom of the youthful scholar the same generous love of letters which glowed in his own ; whose writings, in fine, have uniformly inculcated the pure and elevated morality exemplified in his life. The only thing we can regret is that a life so useful should have been so short, if, indeed, that can be considered short which has done so much towards attaining life's great end. ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND* (July, 1830.) THERE is nothing in which the moderns surpass the ancients more conspicuously than in their noble pro- visions for the relief of indigence and distress. The public policy of the ancients seems to have embraced only whatever might promote the aggrandizement or the direct prosperity of the state, and to have cared little for those unfortunate beings who, from disease or incapacity of any kind, were disqualified from con- tributing to this. But the beneficent influence of Chris- tianity, combined with the general tendency of our social institutions, has led to the recognition of rights in the individual as sacred as those of the community, and has suggested manifold provisions for personal comfort and happiness. The spirit of benevolence, thus widely, and oftentimes judiciously, exerted, continued until a very recent period, however, strangely insensible to the claims of a large class of objects to whom Nature, and no misconduct or imprudence of their own, as is too often the case with the subjects of public charity, had denied some of the most estimable faculties of man. No suitable institu- tions, until the close of the last century, have been provided for the nurture of the deaf and dumb, or the blind. Immured within hospitals and almshouses, like so many lunatics and incurables, they have been delivered over, if they escaped the physical, to all the moral con- * An Act to Incorporate the New England Asylum for the Blind, Approved March 2nd, 1829. 48 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. tagion too frequently incident to such abodes, and have thus been involved in a mental darkness far more deplorable than their bodily one. This injudicious treatment has resulted from the erro- neous principle of viewing these unfortunate beings as an absolute burden on the public, utterly incapable of contributing to their own subsistence, or of ministering in any degree to their own intellectual wants. Instead, however, of being degraded by such unworthy views, they should have been regarded as, what in truth they are, possessed of corporeal and mental capacities per- fectly competent, under proper management, to the pro- duction of the most useful results. If wisdom from one entrance was quite shut out, other avenues for its admis- sion still remained to be opened. In order to give effective aid to persons in this predi- cament, it is necessary to place ourselves as far as possible in their peculiar situation, to consider to what faculties this insulated condition is, on the whole, most favourable, and in what direction they can be exercised with the best chance of success. Without such foresight, all our endeavours to aid them will only put them upon efforts above their strength, and result in serious mortification. The blind, from the cheerful ways of men cut off, are necessarily excluded from the busy theatre of human action. Their infirmity, however, which consigns them to darkness, and often to solitude, would seem favourable to contemplative habits and to the pursuits of abstract science and pure speculation. Undisturbed by external objects, the mind necessarily turns within, and concen- trates its ideas on any point of investigation with greater intensity and perseverance. It is no uncommon thing, therefore, to find persons setting apart the silent hours of the evening for the purpose of composition or other purely intellectual exercise. Malebranche, when he ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 49 wished to think intensely, used to close his shutters in the daytime, excluding every ray of light; and hence Democritus is said to have put out his eyes in order that he might philosophize the better, a story the veracity of which Cicero, who relates it, is prudent enough not to vouch for. Blindness must also be exceedingly favourable to the discipline of the memory. Whoever has had the mis- fortune, from any derangement of the organ, to be compelled to derive his knowledge of books less from the eye- than the ear, will feel the truth of this. The difficulty of recalling what has once escaped, of reverting to or dwelling on the passages read aloud by another, compels the hearer to give undivided attention to the subject, and to impress it more forcibly on his own mind by subsequent and methodical reflection. Instances of the cultivation of this faculty to an extraordinary extent have been witnessed among the blind, and it has been- most advantageously applied to the pursuit of abstract science, especially mathematics. One of the most eminent illustrations of these remarks is the well-known history of Saunderson, who, though deprived in his infancy not only of sight, but of the organ itself, contrived to become so well acquainted with the Greek tongue as to read the works of the ancient mathematicians in the original. He made such advances in the higher departments of the science that he was appointed, " though not matriculated at the University," to fill the chair which a short time previous had been occupied by Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge. The lec- tures of this blind professor on the most abstruse points of the Newtonian philosophy, and especially on optics, naturally filled his audience with admiration ; and the perspicuity with which he communicated his ideas is said to have been unequalled. He was enabled, by the force 50 GGBAIEICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. of his memory, to perform many long operations in arith- metic, and to carry in his mind the most complex geo- metrical figures. As, however, it became necessary to supply the want of vision by some symbols which might be sensible to the touch, he contrived a table in which pins, whose value was determined principally by their relative position to each other, served him instead of figures, while for his diagrams he employed pegs, inserted at the requisite angles to each other, representing the lines by threads drawn around them. He was so expert in the use of these materials that, when performing his calculations, he would change the position of the pins with nearly the same facility that another person would indite figures, and when disturbed in an operation would afterwards resume it again, ascertaining the posture in which he had left it by passing his hand carefully over the table. To such shifts and inventions does human ingenuity resort when stimulated by the thirst of know- ledge ; as the plant, when thrown into shade on one side, sends forth its branches eagerly in that direction where the light is permitted to fall upon it. In like manner, the celebrated mathematician Euler continued, for many years after he became blind, to indite and publish the results of his scientific labours, and at the time of his decease left nearly a hundred memoirs ready for the press, most of which have since been given to the world. An example of diligence equally indefatigable, though turned in a different channel, occurs in our contemporary Huber, who has contributed one of the most delightful volumes within the compass of natural history, and who, if he employed the eyes of another, guided them in their investigation. to the right results by the light of his own mind. Blindness would seem to be propitious, also, to the exercise of the inventive powers. Hence poetry, from ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 51 the time of Thamyris and the blind Mseonides down to the Welsh harper and the ballad-grinder of our day, has been assigned as the peculiar province of those bereft of vision, " As the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and, in shadiest cover hid, Tunes her nocturnal note." The greatest epic poem of antiquity was probably, as that of the moderns was certainly, composed in dark- ness. It is easy to understand how the man who has once seen can recall and body forth in his conceptions new combinations of material beauty ; but it would seem scarcely possible that one born blind, excluded from all acquaintance with " coloured nature," as Condillac finely styles it, should excel in descriptive poetry. Yet there Are eminent examples of this ; among others, that of Blacklock, whose verses abound in the most agreeable And picturesque images. Yet he could have formed no other idea of colours than was conveyed by their moral associations, the source, indeed, of most of the pleasures we derive from descriptive poetry. It was thus that he studied the variegated aspect of nature, and read in it the successive revolutions of the seasons, their freshness, their prime, and decay. Mons. Guillid, in an interesting essay on the instruc- tion of the blind, to which we shall have occasion re- peatedly to refer, quotes an example of the association >f ideas in regard to colours, which occurred in one of Ihis own pupils, wh->, in reciting the well-known passage in Horace, " rubeii\ \ dcxterd sacras jaculatus arces" - translated the first i "o words by "fiery" or "burning right hand." On being requested to render it literally, he called it " red right hand," and gave as the reason for his former version that he could form no positive con- ception of a red colour ; but that, as fire was said to be E 2 52 LIOGRAmiCAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. red, lie connected the idea of heat with this colour, and had therefore interpreted the wrath of Jupiter, demolish- ing town and tower, by the epithet " fiery or burning ; " for " when people are angry," he added, " they are hot, and when they are hot, they must of course be red." He certainly seems to have formed a much more accurate notion of red than Locke's blind man. But while a gift for poetry belongs only to the inspired few, and while many have neither taste nor talent for mathematical or speculative science, it is a consolation to reflect that the humblest individual who is destitute of sight may so far supply this deficiency by the per- fection of the other senses as by their aid to attain a considerable degree of intellectual culture, as well as a familiarity with some of the most useful mechanic arts. It will be easier to conceive to what extent the percep- tions of touch and hearing may be refined if we reflect how far that of sight is sharpened by exclusive reliance on it in certain situations. Thus the mariner descries objects at night, and at a distance upon the ocean, alto- gether imperceptible to the unpractised eye of a lands- man. And the North American Indian steers his course undeviatingly through the trackless wilderness, guided only by such signs as escape the eye of the most inquisi- tive white man. In like manner, the senses of hearing and feeling are capable of attaining such a degree of perfection in a blind person that by them alone he can distinguish his various acquaintances, and even the presence of persons whom he has but rarely met before, the size of the apart- ment, and the general locality of the spots in which he may happen to be, and guide himself safely across the most solitiry districts and amid the throng of towns. Dr. Bew, in a paper in the Manchester Collection of Memoirs, gives an account of a blind man of his ac- ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 53 qnaintance in Derbyshire, who was much used as a guide for travellers in the night over certain intricate roads, and particularly when the tracks were covered with snow. This same man was afterwards employed as a projector and surveyor of roads in that county. We well remember a blind man in the neighbouring town of Salem, who officiated some twenty years since as the town crier, when that functionary performed many of the advertising duties now usurped by the newspaper, making his diurnal round, and stopping with great precision at every corner, trivium or quodrivium, to "chime his melodious twang." Yet this feat, the familiarity of which prevented it from occasioning any surprise, could have resulted only from the nicest obser- vation of the undulations of the ground, or by an atten- tion to the currents of air, or the different sound of the voice or other noises in these openings, signs altogether lost upon the man of eyes. Mons. Guillie mentions several apparently well-at- tested anecdotes of blind persons who had the power of discriminating colours by the touch. One of the in- dividuals noticed by him, a Dutchman, was so expert in this way that he was sure to come off conqueror at the card-table by the knowledge which he thus obtained of his adversary's hand whenever it came to his turn to deal. This power of discrimination of colours, which seems to be a gift only of a very few of the finer-fingered gentry, must be founded on the different consistency or smoothness of the ingredients used in the various dyes. A more certain method of ascertaining these colours, that of tasting or touching them with the tongue, is frequently resorted to by the blind, who by this means often dis- tinguish between those analogous colours, as black and dark blue, red and pink, which, having the greatest apparent affinity, not unfrequently deceive the eye. 54 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. Diderot, in an ingenious letter on the blind, d, I' usage de ceux qui voient, has given a circumstantial narration of his visit to a blind man at Puisseaux, the son of a professor in the University of Paris, and well known in his day from the various accomplishments and manual dexterity which he exhibited, remarkable in a person in his situation. Being asked what notion he had formed of an eye, he replied, " I conceive it to be an organ on which the air produces the same effect as this staff on my hand. If, when you are looking at an object, I should interpose anything between your eyes and that object, it would prevent you from seeing it. And I am in the same predicament when I seek one thing with my staff and come across another." An explanation, says Diderot, as lucid as any which could be given by Des- cartes, who, it is singular, attempts, in his Dioptrics, to explain the analogy between the senses of feeling and seeing by figures of men blindfolded, groping their way with staffs in their hands. This same intelligent per- sonage became so familiar with the properties of touch that he seems to have accounted them almost equally valuable with those of vision. On being interrogated if he felt a great desire to have eyes, he answered, " Were it not for the mere gratification of curiosity, I think I should do as well to wish for long arms. It seems to me that my hands would inform me better of what is going on in the moon than your eyes and telescopes ; and then the eyes lose the power of vision more readily than the hands that of feeling. It would be better to perfect the organ which I have than to bestow on me that which I have not." Indeed, the " geometric sense * of touch, as Buffon terms it, as far as it reaches, is more faithful, and con- veys oftentimes a more satisfactory idea of external forms, than the eye itself. The great defect is that its ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 55 range is necessarily so limited. It is told of Saunderson that on one occasion lie detected by his finger a counter- feit coin which had deceived the eye of a connoisseur. We are hardly aware how much of our dexterity in the use of the eye arises from incessant practice. Those who have been relieved from blindness at an advanced, or even early, period of life, have been found frequently to recur to the old and more familiar sense of touch, in preference to the sight. The celebrated English anato- mist Cheselden mentions several illustrations of this fact in an account given by him of a blind boy whom he had successfully couched for cataracts at the age of fourteen. It was long before the youth could discriminate by his eye between his old companions the family cat and dog, dissimilar as such animals appear to us in colour and conformation. Being ashamed to ask the oft-repeated question, he was observed one day to pass his hand care- fully over the cat, and then, looking at her steadfastly, to exclaim, " So, puss, I shall know you another time." It is more natural that he should have been deceived by the illusory art of painting, and it was long before he could comprehend that the objects depicted did not possess the same relief on the canvas as in nature. He inquired, " Which is the lying sense here, the sight or the touch?" The faculty of hearing would seem susceptible of a similar refinement with that of seeing. To prove this without going into farther detail, it is only necessary to observe that much the larger proportion of blind persons are, more or less, proficients in music, and that in some of the institutions for their education, as that in Paris, for instance, all the pupils are instructed in this delight- ful art. The gift of a natural ear for melody, therefore, deemed comparatively rare with the clairvoyans, would seem to exist so far in every individual as to be capable, 56 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. by a suitable cultivation, of affording a high degree of relish, at least to himself. As, in order to a successful education of the blind, it becomes necessary to understand what are the faculties, intellectual and corporeal, to the development and exer- cise of which their peculiar condition is best adapted, so it is equally necessary to understand how far, and in what manner, their moral constitution is likely to be affected by the insulated position in which they are placed. The blind man, shut up within the precincts of his own microcosm, is subjected to influences of a very different complexion from the bulk of mankind, inasmuch as each of the senses is best fitted to the introduction of a certain class of ideas into the mind, arid he is deprived of that one through which the rest of his species receive by far the greatest number of theirs. Thus it will be readily understood that his notions of modesty and deli- cacy may a good deal differ from those of the world at large. The blind man of Puisseaux confessed that he could not comprehend why it should be reckoned im- proper to expose one part of the person rather than another. Indeed, the conventional rules, so necessarily adopted in society in this relation, might seem in a great degree superfluous in a blind community. The blind man would seem, also, to be less likely to be endowed with the degree of sensibility usual with those who enjoy the blessing of sight. It is difficult to say how much of our early education depends on the looks, the frowns, the smiles, the tears, the example, in fact, of those placed over and around us. From all this the blinu child is necessarily excluded. These, however, are the great sources of sympathy. We feel little for the joys or the sorrows which we do not witness. " Out of sight, out of mind," says the old proverb. Hence people are so ready to turn away from distress which ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 57 tbpy cannot, or their avarice will not suffer them to relieve. Hence, too, persons whose compassionate hearts would bleed at the infliction of an act of cruelty on so large an animal as a horse or a dog, for example, will crush without concern a wilderness of insects, whose delicate organization and whose bodily agonies are im- perceptible to the naked eye. The slightest injury oc- curring in our own presence affects us infinitely more than the tidings of the most murderous battle, or the sack of the most populous and flourishing city at the extremity of the globe. Yet such, without much exag- geration, is the relative position of the blind, removed by their infirmity at a distance from the world, from the daily exhibition of those mingled scenes of grief and gladness which have their most important uses, perhaps, in calling forth our sympathies for our fellow-creatures. It has been affirmed that the situation of the blind is unpropitious to religious sentiment. They are neces- sarily insensible to the grandeur of the spectacle which forces itself upon our senses every day of our existence. The magnificent map of the heavens, with " Every star Which the clear concave of a "winter's night Pours on the eye," is not unrolled for them. The revolutions of the seasons, with all their beautiful varieties of form and colour, and whatever glories of the creation lift the soul in wonder and gratitude to the Creator, are not for them. Their world is circumscribed by the little circle which they can span with their own arms. All beyond has for them no real existence. This seems to have passed within the mind of the mathematician Saunderson, whose notions of a Deity would seem to have been, to the last, exceedingly vague and unsettled. The clergy- man who visited him in his latter hours endeavoured to 58 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. impress upon him the evidence of a God as afforded by the astonishing mechanism of the universe. " Alas ! " said the dying philosopher, " I have been condemned to pass my life in darkness, and you speak to me of prodi- gies which I cannot comprehend, and which can only be felt by you and those who see like you." When re- minded of the faith of Newton, Leibnitz, and Clarke, minds from whom he had drunk so deeply of instruction, and for whom he entertained the profoundest veneration, he remarked, "The testimony of Newton is not so strong for me as that of Nature was for him : Newton believed on the word of God himself, while I am reduced to believe on that of Newton." He expired with this ejaculation on his lips : " God of Newton, have mercy on me ! " These, however, may be considered as the peevish ebullitions of a naturally sceptical and somewhat dis- appointed spirit, impatient of an infirmity which ob- structed, as he conceived, his advancement in the career of science to which he had so zealously devoted himself. It was in allusion to this, undoubtedly, that he depicted his life as having been " one long desire and continued privation." It is far more reasonable to believe that there are cer- tain peculiarities in the condition of the blind which more than counterbalance the unpropitious circumstances above described, and which have a decided tendency to awaken devotional sentiment in their minds. They are the subjects of a grievous calamity, which, as in all such cases, naturally disposes the heart to sober reflection, and, when permanent and irremediable, to passive resigna- tion. Their situation necessarily excludes most of those temptations which so sorely beset us in the world, those tumultuous passions which, in the general rivalry, divide man from man and embitter the sweet cup of ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 59 social life, those sordid appetites which degrade us to the level of the brutes. They are subjected, on the con- trary, to the most healthful influences. Their occupa- tions are of a tranquil, and oftentimes of a purely intel- lectual, character. Their pleasures are derived from the endearments of domestic intercourse, and the attentions almost always conceded to persons in their dependent condition must necessarily beget a reciprocal kindliness- of feeling in their own bosoms. In short, the uniform tenour of their lives is such as naturally to dispose them to resignation, serenity, and cheerfulness ; and accord- ingly, as far as our own experience goes, these have usuaUy been the characteristics of the blind. Indeed, the cheerfulness almost universally incident to persons deprived of sight leads us to consider blind- ness as, on the whole, a less calamity than deafness. The deaf man is continually exposed to the sight of pleasures and to society in which he can take no part. He is the guest at a banquet of which he is not per- mitted to partake, the spectator at a theatre where he cannot comprehend a syllable. If the blind man is ex- cluded from sources of enjoyment equally important, he has at least the advantage of not perceiving, and not even comprehending, what he has lost. It may be added that perhaps the greatest privation consequent on blindness is the inability to read, as that on deafness is the loss of the pleasures of society. Now, the eyes of another may be made in a great degree to supply this defect of the blind man, while no art can afford a corresponding sub- stitute to the deaf for the privations to which he is doomed in social intercourse. He cannot hear with the ears of another. As, however, it is undeniable that blindness makes one more dependent than deafness, we may be content with the conclusion that the former would be the most eligible for the rich, and the latter for 60 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES the poor. Our remarks will be understood as applying to those only who are wholly destitute of the faculties of sight and hearing. A person afflicted only with a partial derangement or infirmity of vision is placed in the same tantalizing predicament above described of the deaf, and is, consequently, found to be usually of a far more impa- tient and irritable temperament, and, consequently, less happy, than the totally blind. "With all this, we doubt whether there be one of our readers, even should he assent to the general truth of our remarks, who would not infi- nitely prefer to incur partial to total blindness, and deaf- ness to either. Such is the prejudice in favour of eyes ! Patience, perseverance, habits of industry, and, above all, a craving appetite for knowledge, are sufficiently common to be considered as characteristics of the blind, and have tended greatly to facilitate their education, which must otherwise prove somewhat tedious, and, in- deed, doubtful as to its results, considering the formid- able character of the obstacles to be encountered. A curious instance of perseverance in overcoming such ob- stacles occurred at Paris, when the institutions for the deaf and dumb and for the blind were assembled under the same roof in the convent of the Ce'lestines. The pupils of the two seminaries, notwithstanding the appa- rently insurmountable barrier interposed between them Tjy their respective infirmities, contrived to open a com- munication with each other, which they carried on with the greatest vivacity. It was probably the consideration of those moral qua- lities, as well as of the capacity for improvement which we have described as belonging to the blind, which induced the benevolent Haiiy, in conjunction with the Philanthropic Society of Paris, to open there, in 1784, the first regular seminary for their education ever at- tempted. This institution underwent several modifica- ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 61 tions, not for the better, during the revolutionary period which followed; until, in 1816, it was placed on the respectable basis on which it now exists, under the direction of Dr. Guilli^, whose untiring exertions have been blessed with the most beneficial results. "We shall give a brief view of the course of education pursued under his direction, as exhibited by him in the valuable treatise to which we have already referred, occasionally glancing at the method adopted in the cor- responding institution at Edinburgh. The fundamental object proposed in every scheme of education for the blind is, to direct the attention of the pupil to those studies and mechanic arts which he will be able afterwards to pursue by means of his own exer- tions and resources, without any external aid. The sense of touch is the one, therefore, almost exclusively relied on. The fingers are the eyes of the blind. They are taught to read in Paris by feeling the surface of metallic types, and in Edinburgh by means of letters raised on a blank leaf of paper. If they are previously acquainted with spelling, which may be easily taught them before entering the institution, they learn to dis- criminate the several letters with great facility. Their perceptions become so fine by practice that they can dis- cern even the finest print, and, when the fingers fail them, readily distinguish it by applying the tongue. A similar method is employed for instructing them in figures ; the notation-table invented by Saunderson, and once used in the Paris seminary, having been abandoned as less simple and obvious, although his symbols for the representation of geometrical diagrams are still retained. As it would be labour lost to learn the art of reading without having book? to read, various attempts have been made to supply this desideratum. The first hint of the form now adopted for the impression of these books was 62 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. suggested by the appearance exhibited on the reverse side of a copy as removed fresh from the printing-press. In imitation of this, a leaf of paper of a firm texture is forcibly impressed with types unstained by ink, and larger than the ordinary size, until a sufficiently bold relief has been obtained to enable the blind person to distinguish the characters by the touch. The French have adopted the Italian hand, or one very like it, for the fashion of the letters, while the Scotch have invented one more angular and rectilinear, which, besides the ad- vantage of greater compactness, is found better suited to accurate discrimination by the touch than smooth and extended curves and circles. Several important works have been already printed on this plan, viz., a portion of the Scriptures, catechisms, and offices for daily prayer ; grammars in the Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, and Spanish languages ; a Latin selecta, a geography, a course of general history, a selection from English poets and prose writers, a course of literature, with a compilation of the choicest speci- mens of French eloquence. With all this, the art of printing for the blind is still in its infancy. The cha- racters are so unwieldy, and the leaves (which cannot be printed on the reverse side, as this would flatten the letters upon the other) are necessarily so numerous, as to make the volume exceedingly bulky, and of course ex- pensive. The Gospel of St. John, for example, expands into three large octavo volumes. Some farther improve- ment must occur, therefore, before the invention can be- come extensively useful. There can be no reason to doubt of such a result eventually, for it is only by long and repeated experiment that the art of printing in the usual way, and every other art, indeed, has been brought to its present perfection. Perhaps some mode may be adopted like that of stenography, which, although en- ASYLUM FOB THE BLIND. 63 cumbering the learner with some additional difficulties at first, may abundantly compensate him in the con- densed forms and consequently cheaper and more nu- merous publications which could be afforded by it. Perhaps ink or some other material of greater con- sistency than that ordinarily used in printing may be devised, which, when communicated by the type to the paper, will leave a character sufficiently raised to be dis- tinguished by the touch. We have known a blind per- son able to decipher the characters in a piece of music to which the ink had been imparted more liberally than usual. In the meantime, what has been already done has conferred a service on the blind which we, who become insensible from the very prodigality of our blessings, cannot rightly estimate. The glimmering of the taper, which is lost in the blaze of day, is sufficient to guide the steps of the wanderer in darkness. The unsealed volume of Scripture will furnish him with the best sources of consolation under every privation ; the various grammars are so many keys with which to unlock the stores of knowledge to enrich his after-life ; and the selections from the most beautiful portions of elegant literature will afford him a permanent source of recrea- tion and delight. One method used for instruction in writing is, to direct the pencil, or stylus, in a groove cut in the fashion of the different letters. Other modes, however, too com- plex for description here, are resorted to, by which the blind person is enabled not only to write, but to read what he has thus traced. A portable writing-case for this purpose has also been invented by one of the blind, who, it is observed, are the most ingenious in supplying, as they are best acquainted with, their own wants. A very simple method of epistolary correspondence, by means of a string-alphabet, as it is called, consisting of a 64 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. cord or riband in which knots of various dimensions re- present certain classes of letters, has been devised by two blind men at Edinburgh. This contrivance, which is so- simple that it can be acquired in an hour's time by the most ordinary capacity, is asserted to have the power of conveying ideas with equal precision with the pen. A blind lady of our acquaintance, however, whose fine un- derstanding and temper have enabled her to surmount many of the difficulties of her situation, after a trial of this invention, gives the preference to the mode usually adopted by her of pricking the letters on the paper with a pin, an operation which she performs with astonish- ing rapidity, and which, in addition to the advantage possessed by the string alphabet of being legible by the touch, answers more completely the purposes of episto- lary correspondence, since it may be readily interpreted by any one on being held up to the light. The scheme of instruction at the institution for the blind in Paris comprehends geography, history, the Greek and Latin, together with the French, Italian, and English languages, arithmetic and the higher branches of mathematics, music, and some of the most useful me- chanic arts. For mathematics the pupils appear to discover a natural aptitude, many of them attaining such proficiency as not only to profit by the public lectures of the most eminent professors in the sciences, but to carry away the highest prizes in the lyceums in a competition with those who possess the advantages of sight. In music, as we have before remarked, they all make greater or less proficiency. They are especially instructed in the organ, which, from its frequency in the churches, affords- one of the most obvious means of obtaining a livelihood. The method of tuition adopted is that of mutual in- struction. The blind are ascertained to learn most easily and expeditiously from those in the same condition with ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 65 themselves. Two male teachers, with one female, are in this way found adequate to the superintendence of eighty scholars, which, considering the obstacles to be encoun- tered, must be admitted to be a small apparatus for the production of such extensive results. In teaching them the mechanic arts, two principles appear to be kept in view, namely, to select such for each individual respectively as may be best adapted to his future residence and destination ; the trades, for example, most suitable for a sea-port being those least so for the country, and vice versd. Secondly, to confine their at- tention to such occupations as from their nature are most accessible to, and which can be most perfectly attained by, persons in their situation . It is absurd to multiply obstacles from the mere vanity of conquering them. Printing is an art for which the blind show particular talent, going through all the processes of composing, serving the press, and distributing the types with the same accuracy with those who can see. Indeed, much of this mechanical occupation with the clairwyans (we are in want of some such compendious phrase in our language) appears to be the result rather of habit than any exercise of the eye. The blind print all the books for their own use. They are taught also to spin, to knit, in which last operation they are extremely ready, knit- ting very finely, with open work, etc., and are much employed by the Parisian hosiers in the manufacture of elastic vests, shirts, and petticoats. They make purses, delicately embroidered with figures of animals and flowers, whose various tints are selected with perfect propriety. The fingers of the females are observed to be particularly adapted to this nicer sort of work, from their superior delicacy, ordinarily, to those of men. They are employed also in manufacturing girths, in. netting in all its branches, in making shoes of list, plush r 66 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. cloth, coloured skin, and list carpets, of which a vast number is annually disposed of. Weaving is particu- larly adapted to the blind, who perform all the requisite manipulation without any other assistance but that of setting up the warp. They manufacture whips, straw bottoms for chairs, coarse straw hats, rope, cord, pack- thread, baskets, straw, rush, and plush mats, which are very saleable in France. The articles manufactured in the Asylum for the Blind in Scotland are somewhat different ; and, as they show for what an extensive variety of occupations they may be qualified in despite of their infirmity, we will take the liberty, at the hazard of being somewhat tedious, of quoting the catalogue of them exhibited in one of their advertisements. The articles offered for sale consist of cotton and linen cloths, ticked and striped Hollands, towelling and diapers, worsted net for fruit-trees ; hair cloth, hair mats, and hair ropes ; basket work of every description ; hair, India hemp, and straw door-mats ; saddle-girths ; rope and twines of all kinds ; netting for sheep-pens ; garden and onion twine nets ; fishing-nets, beehives, mattresses, and cushions ; feather beds, bolsters, and pillows ; mattresses and beds of every description cleaned and repaired. The labours in this department are performed by the boys. The girls are employed in sewing, knitting stockings, spinning, making fine banker's twine, and various works besides, usually executed by well-educated females. Such is the emulation of the blind, according to Dr. Guillie", in the institution of Paris, that hitherto there has been no necessity of stimulating their exertions by the usual motives of reward or punishment. Delighted with their sensible progress in vanquishing the difficul- ties incident to their condition, they are content if they can but place themselves on a level with the more ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND. 67 fortunate of their fellow-creatures. And it is observed that many, who in the solitude of their own homes hav^ failed in their attempts to learn some of the arts taught in this institution, have acquired a knowledge of them with great alacrity when cheered by the sympathy of individuals involved in the same calamity with them- selves, and with whom, of course, they could compete with equal probability of success. The example of Paris has been followed in the principal cities in most of the other countries of Europe : in England, Scotland, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark. These establish- ments, which are conducted on the same general principles, have adopted a plan of education more or less comprehensive, some of them, like those of Paris and Edinburgh, involving the higher branches of intellectual education, and others, as in London and Liverpool, confining themselves chiefly to practical arts. The re- sults, however, have been in the highest degree cheering to the philanthropist in the light thus poured in upon minds to which all the usual avenues were sealed up, in the opportunity afforded them of developing those latent powers which had been hitherto wasted in inaction, and in the happiness thus imparted to an un- fortunate class of beings, who now for the first time were permitted to assume their proper station in society, and, instead of encumbering, to contribute by their own exertions to the general prosperity. We rejoice that the inhabitants of our own city have been the first to give an example of such beneficent institutions in the New World. And it is principally with the view of directing the attention of the public towards it that we have gone into a review of what has been effected in this way in Europe. The credit of having first suggested the undertaking here is due to 68 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. our townsman, Dr. Joan D. Fisher, through whose exertions, aided by those of several other benevolent individuals, the subject was brought before the Legis- lature of this State, and an act of incorporation was granted to the petitioners, bearing date March 2nd, 1829, authorizing them, under the title of the "New England Asylum for the Blind," to hold property, receive donations and bequests, and to exercise the other functions usually appertaining to similar corpo- rations. A resolution was subsequently passed, during the same session, requiring the selectmen of the several towns throughout the commonwealth to make returns of the number of blind inhabitants, with their ages, periods of blindness, personal condition, etc. By far the larger proportion of these functionaries, however, with a degree of apathy which does them very little credit, paid no attention whatever to this requisition. By the aid of such as did comply with it, and by means of circulars addressed to the clergymen of the various parishes, advices have been received from one hundred and forty- one towns, comprising somewhat less than half of the whole number within the State. From this imperfect estimate it would appear that the number of blind persons in these towns amounts to two hundred and forty-three, of whom more than one-fifth are under thirty years of age, which period is assigned as the limit within which they cannot fail of receiving all the benefit to be derived from the system of instruction pursued in the institutions for the blind. The proportion of the blind to our whole population, as founded on the above estimate, is somewhat higher than that established by Zeune for the corresponding latitudes in Europe, where blindness decreases in ad- vancing from the equator to the poles, it being com- ASYLUM FOB THE BLIND. 69 puted in Egypt at the rate of one to one hundred, and in Norway of one to one thousand, which last is conformable to ours. Assuming the preceding estimate as the basis, it will appear that there are about five hundred blind persons .in the State of Massachusetts at the present moment; and, adopting the census of 1820, there could not at that time, according to the same rate, be less than six- teen hundred and fifty in all New England, one-fifth being under thirty years of age ; a number which, as the blind are usually retired from public observation, far exceeds what might be conceived on a cursory inspection. From the returns it would appear that a large pro- portion of the blind in Massachusetts are in humble circumstances, and a still larger proportion of those in years indigent or paupers. This is imputable to their having learned no trade or profession in their youth, so that, when deprived of their natural guardians, they have necessarily become a charge upon the public. Since, the year 1825 an appropriation has been con- tinued by the Legislature for the purpose of maintaining a certain number of pupils at the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb at Hartford. A resolution was obtained during the last session of the General Court, authorizing the governor to pay over to the Asylum for the Blind whatever balance of the sum thus appropriated might remain in the treasury unexpended at the end of the current year, and the same with every subsequent year to which the grant extended, unless otherwise advised. Seven hundred dollars only have been received as the balance of the past year, a sum obviously inadequate to the production of any important result, and far inferior to what had been anticipated by the friends of the measure. On the whole we are inclined to doubt 70 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. whether this will be found the most suitable mode of creating resources for the asylum. Although, in fact, it disposes only of the superfluity, it has the appearance of subtracting from the positive revenues of the Deaf and Dumb, an institution of equal merit and claims with any other whatever. The Asylum for the Blind is an establishment of too much importance to be left thus dependent on a precarious contingent, and is worthy, were it only in an economical point of view, of being placed by the State on some more secure and ample basis. As it is, the want of funds opposes a sensible ob- struction to its progress. The pressure of the times has made the present moment exceedingly unfavourable to personal solicitation, although so much has been effected in this way, through the liberality of a few individuals, that, as we understand, preparations are now making for procuring the requisite instructors and apparatus on a moderate and somewhat reduced scale. As to the comprehensiveness of the scheme of edu- cation to be pursued at the asylum, whether it shall embrace intellectual culture or be confined simply to the mechanic arts, this must, of course, be ultimately determined by the extent of its resources. We trust, however, it will be enabled to adopt the former arrangement, at least so far as to afford the pupils an acquaintance with the elements of the more popular sciences. There is such a diffusion of liberal know- ledge among all classes in this country, that if the blind are suffered to go without any tincture of it from the institution, they will always, whatever be the skill acquired by them in mechanical occupations, continue to feel a sense of their own mental inferiority. The connection of these higher with the more direct objects of the institution will serve, moreover, to give it greater ASYLUM FOE THE BLIND. 71 dignity and importance. And while it will open sources of knowledge from which many may be in a situation to derive permanent consolation, it will instruct the humblest individual in what may be of essential utility to him, as writing and arithmetic, for example, in his intercourse with the world. To what extent it is desirable that the asylum be placed on a charitable foundation is another subject of consideration. This, we believe, is the character of most of the establishments in Europe. That in Scot- land, for instance, contains about a hundred subjects, who, with their families included, amount to two hun- dred and fifty souls, all supported from the labours of the blind, conjointly with the funds of the institution. This is undoubtedly one of the noblest and most dis- criminating charities in the world. It seems probable, however, that this is not the plan best adapted to our exigencies. We want not to maintain the blind, but to put them in the way of contributing to their own maintenance. By placing the expenses of tuition and board as low as possible, the means of effecting this will be brought within the reach of a large class of them ; and for the rest, it will be obvious economy in the State to provide them with the means of acquiring an education at once that may enable them to con- tribute permanently towards their own support, which, in some shape or other, is now chargeable on the public. Perhaps, however, some scheme may be devised for ( combining both these objects, if this be deemed prefer- , able to the adoption of either exclusively. We are convinced that, as far as the institution is to rely for its success on public patronage, it will not be disappointed. If once successfully in operation and brought before the public eye, it cannot fail of exciting a very general sympathy, which, in this country, has 72 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. never been refused to the calls of humanity. No one, we think, who has visited the similar endowments in Paris or in Edinburgh will easily forget the sensations which he experienced on witnessing so large a class of his unfortunate fellow-creatures thus restored from in- tellectual darkness to the blessings, if we may so speak, of light and liberty. There is no higher evidence of the worth of the human mind than its capacity of drawing consolation from its own resources under so heavy a privation ; so that it not only can exhibit resignation and cheerfulness, but energy to burst the fetters with which it is encumbered. Who could refuse his sympathy to the success of these efforts, or withhold from the subject of them the means of attain- ing his natural level and usefulness in society, from which circumstances less favourable to him than to our- selves have hitherto excluded him I IRVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA.* (October, 1829.) ALMOST as many qualifications may be demanded for a perfect historian, indeed the Abbd Mably has enumera- ted as many, as Cicero stipulates for a perfect orator. He must be strictly impartial ; a lover of truth under all circumstances, and ready to declare it at all hazards : he must be deeply conversant with whatever may bring into relief the character of the people he is depicting, not merely with their laws, constitution, general resources,, and all the other more visible parts of the machinery of government, but with the nicer moral and social relations,, the informing spirit which gives life to the whole, but escapes the eye of a vulgar observer. If he has to do with other ages and nations, he must transport himself into them, expatriating himself, as it were, from his own, in order to get the very form and pressure of the times he is delineating. He must be conscientious in his attention to geography, chronology, etc., an inaccuracy in which has been fatal to more than one good philoso- phical history ; and, mixed up with all these drier de- tails, he must display the various powers of a novelist or dramatist, throwing his characters into suitable lights and ' : shades, disposing his scenes so as to awaken and main- tain an unflagging interest, and diffusing over the whole that finished style without which his work will only be- come a magazine of materials for the more elegant edifices of subsequent writers. He must be in short, there is * "A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada." By Fra Antonio Ag&- pida." 1829 : 2 vols. 12mo. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea & Carey. 74 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. no end to what a perfect historian must be and do. It is hardly necessary to add that such a monster never did and never will exist. But, although we cannot attain to perfect excellence in this or any other science in this world, considerable approaches have been made to it, and different indivi- duals have arisen at different periods, possessed in an eminent degree of some of the principal qualities which go to make up the aggregate of the character we have been describing. The peculiar character of these quali- ties will generally be determined in the writer by that of the age in which he lives. Thus, the earlier histo- rians of Greece and Rome sought less to instruct than to amuse. They filled their pictures with dazzling and seductive images. In their researches into antiquity, they were not startled by the marvellous, like the more prudish critics of our day, but welcomed it as likely to stir the imaginations of their readers. They seldom in- terrupted the story by impertinent reflection. They be- stowed infinite pains on the costume, the style of their history, and, in fine, made everything subordinate to the main purpose of conveying an elegant and interesting narrative. Such was Herodotus, such Livy, and such, too, the earlier chroniclers of modern Europe, whose pages glow with the picturesque and brilliant pageants of an age of chivalry. These last, as well as Herodotus, may be said to have written in the infancy of their nations, when the imagination is more willingly ad- dressed than the understanding. Livy, who wrote in a riper age, lived, nevertheless, in a court and a period where tranquillity and opulence disposed the minds of men to elegant recreation rather than to severe discipline and exertion. As, however, the nation advanced in years, or became oppressed with calamity, history also assumed a graver lEVING'S CONQUEST OP GRANADA. 75 complexion. Fancy gave way to reflection. The mind, no longer invited to rove abroad in quest of elegant and alluring pictures, was driven back upon itself, speculated more deeply, and sought for support under the external evils of life in moral and philosophical truth. Descrip- tion was abandoned for the study of character ; men took the place of events ; and the romance was converted into the drama. Thus it was with Tacitus, who lived under those imperial monsters who turned Rome into a charnel- house, and his compact narratives are filled with moral and political axioms sufficiently numerous to make a volume ; and, indeed, Brotier has made one of them in his edition of the historian. The same philosophical spirit animates the page of Thucydides, himself one of the principal actors in the long, disastrous struggle that ter- minated in the ruin of his nation. But, notwithstanding the deeper and more comprehen- sive thought of these later writers, there was still a wide difference between the complexion given to history under their hands, and that which it has assumed in our time. We would not be understood as determining, but simply as discriminating, their relative merits. The Greeks and Eomans lived when the world, at least when the mind, was in its comparative infancy, when fancy and feeling were most easily and loved most to be excited. They possessed a finer sense of beauty than the moderns. They were infinitely more solicitous about the external dress, the finish, and all that makes up the poetry of a composition. Poetry, indeed, mingled in their daily pursuits as well as pleasures ; it determined their gravest ' deliberations. The command of their armies was given, not to the best general, but ofttimes to the most eloquent orator. Poetry entered into their religion, and created those beautiful monuments of architecture and sculpture which the breath of time has not tarnished. It entered 76 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. into their philosophy ; and no one confessed its influence more deeply than he who would have banished it from his republic. It informed the souls of their orators, and prompted those magnificent rhapsodies which fall lifeless enough from the stammering tongue of the school-boy, but which once awaked to ecstasy the living populace of Athens. It entered deeply even into their latest his- tory. It was first exhibited in the national chronicles of Homer. It lost little of its colouring, though it con- formed to the general laws of prosaic composition, under Herodotus. And it shed a pleasing grace over the sober pages of Thucydides and Xenophon. The muse, indeed, was stripped of her wings ; she no longer made her airy excursions into the fairy regions of romance ; but, as she moved along the earth, the sweetest wild flowers seemed to spring up unbidden at her feet. We would not be understood as implying that Grecian history was ambitious of florid or meretricious ornament. Nothing could be more simple than its general plan and execution ; far too simple, we fear, for imitation in our day. Thus Thucydides, for example, distributes his events most in- artificially, according to the regular revolutions of the seasons ; and the rear of every section is brought up with the same eternal repetition of eros ro> TroXe/xw ere'Xeura TwSe, ov ov/a>Si8r?s vi>ypa- But in the fictitious speeches with which he has illumined his narrative he has left the choicest specimens of Attic eloquence ; and he elaborated his general diction into so high a finish that Demosthenes, as is well known, in the hope of catching some of his rhetorical graces, thought him worthy of being thrice transcribed with his own hand. Far different has been the general conception, as well as execution, of history by the moderns. In this, how- ever, it was accommodated to the exigencies of their situation, and, as with the ancients, still reflected the IBVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 77 spirit of the age. If the Greeks lived in the infancy of civilization, the contemporaries of our day may be said to have reached its prime. The same revolution has taken place as in the growth of an individual. The vivacity of the imagination has been blunted, but reason is matured. The credulity of youth has given way to habits of cautious inquiry, and sometimes to a phleg- matic scepticism. The productions, indeed, which first appeared in the doubtful twilight of morning exhibited the love of the marvellous, the light and fanciful spirit of a green and tender age. But a new order of things commenced as the stores of classical learning were un- rolled to the eye of the scholar. The mind seemed at once to enter upon the rich inheritance which the sages of antiquity had been ages in accumulating, and to start, as it were, from the very point where they had termi- nated their career. Thus raised by learning and experi- ence, it was enabled to take a wider view of its proper destiny, to understand that truth is the greatest good, and to discern the surest method of arriving at it. The Christian doctrine, too, inculcated that the end of being was best answered by a life of active usefulness, and not by one of abstract contemplation, or selfish indulgence, or passive fortitude, as variously taught by the various sects of antiquity. Hence a new standard of moral ex- cellence was formed. Pursuits were estimated by their practical results, and the useful was preferred to the ornamental. Poetry, confined to her own sphere, was no longer permitted to mingle in the councils of philo- sophy. Intellectual and physical science, instead of floating on vague speculation, as with the ancients, was established on careful induction and experiment. The orator, instead of adorning himself with the pomp and garniture of verse, sought only to acquire greater dex- terity in the management of the true weapons of debate. 78 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. The passions were less frequently assailed, the reason more. A wider field was open to the historian. He was DO longer to concoct his narrative, if the scene lay in a remote period, from the superficial rumours of oral tradi- tion. Libraries were to be ransacked ; medals and monuments to be studied*; obsolete manuscripts to be deciphered. Every assertion was to be fortified by an authority ; and the opinions of others, instead of being admitted on easy faith, were to be carefully collated, and the balance of probability struck between them. With these qualifications of antiquarian and critic, the modern historian was to combine that of the philosopher, de- ducing from his mass of facts general theorems, and giving to them their most extended application. By all this process, poetry lost much, but philosophy gained more. The elegant arts sensibly declined, but the most important and recondite secrets of nature were laid open. All those sciences which have for their object the happiness and improvement of the species, the science of government, of political economy, of education natural and experimental science were carried far beyond the boundaries which they could possibly have reached under the ancient systems. The peculiar forms of historic writing, as it exists with the moderns, were not fully developed until the last cen- tury. It may be well to notice the intermediate shape which it assumed before it reached this period in Spain and Italy, but especially this latter country, in the six- teenth century. The Italian historians of that age seem to have combined the generalizing and reflecting spirit characteristic of the moderns, with the simple and grace- ful forms of composition which have descended to us from the ancients. Machiavelli, in particular, may re- mind us of some recent statue which exhibits all the lineaments and proportions of a contemporary, but to lEVING'S CONQUEST OF QEANADA. 79 which the sculptor has given a sort of antique dignity by enveloping it in the folds of the Roman toga. No one of the Spanish historians is t6 be named with him, Mariana who enjoys among them the greatest celebrity, ' has, it is true, given to his style, both in the Latin and Castilian, the elegant transparency of an ancient classic ; but the mass of detail is not quickened by a single spark of philosophy or original reflection. Mariana was a monk, one of a community who have formed the most copious, but in many respects the most incompetent chroniclers in the world, cut off as they are from all sympathy with any portion of the species save their own order, and predisposed by education to admit as truth the grossest forgeries of fanaticism. What can then* narratives be worth, distorted thus by prejudice and cre- dulity ? The Aragonese writers, and Zurita in parti- cular, though far inferior as to the literary execution of their works, exhibit a pregnant thought and a manly independence of expression far superior to the Jesuit Mariana. The Italian historians of the sixteenth century, more- over, had the good fortune not only to have been eye- witnesses but to have played prominent parts in the events which they commemorated. And this gives a vitality to their touches which is in vain to be expected from those of a closet politician. This rare union of public and private excellence is delicately intimated in the inscription on Guicciardini's monument, " Cujus negotium, an otium, gloriosius incertum." The personage by whom the present laws of historic composition may be said to have been first arranged into a regular system was Voltaire. This extraordinary genius, whose works have been productive of so much mingled good and evil, discovers in them many traces of a humane and beneficent disposition. Nowhere is 80 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. his invective more keenly directed than against acts of cruelty and oppression, above all, of religious oppres- sion. He lived in an age of crying abuses both in Church and government. Unfortunately, he employed a weapon against them whose influence is not to be controlled by the most expert hand. The envenomed shaft of irony not only wounds the member at which it is aimed, but diffuses its poison to the healthiest and remotest regions of the body. The free and volatile temper of Voltaire forms a sin- gular contrast with his resolute pertinacity of purpose. Bard, philosopher, historian, this literary Proteus ani- mated every shape with the same mischievous spirit of philosophy. It never deserted him, even in the most sportive sallies of his fancy. It seasons his romances equally with his gravest pieces in the encyclopedia; his familiar letters and most licentious doggerel no less than his histories. The leading object of this philo- sophy may be defined by the single cant phrase, " the abolition of prejudices." But in Voltaire prejudices were too often confounded with principles. In his histories, he seems ever intent on exhibiting, in the most glaring colours, the manifold inconsisten- cies of the human race ; in showing the contradiction between profession and practice ; in contrasting the magnificence of the apparatus with the impotence of the results. The enormous abuses of Christianity are brought into juxtaposition with the most meritorious features in other religions, and thus all are reduced to nearly the same level. The credulity of one half of mankind is set in opposition to the cunning of the other. The most momentous events are traced to the most insignificant causes, and the ripest schemes of wisdom are shown to have been baffled by the inter- vention of the most trivial accidents. Thus, the con- IBVIXG'S CONQUEST OF GBANADA. 81 duct of the world seems to be regulated by chance ; the springs of human action are resolved into selfish- ness; and religion, of whatever denomination, is only a different form of superstition. It is true that his satire is directed not so much against any particular system as the vices of that system ; but the result left upon the mind is not a whit less pernicious. His philosophical romance of " Candide " affords a good exemplification of his manner. The thesis of perfect op- timism in this world, at which he levels ihisjeu d 'esprit, is manifestly indefensible. But then he supports his position with such an array of gross and hyperbolical atrocities, without the intervention of a single palliative circumstance, and, withal, in such a tone of keen deri- sion, that if any serious impression be left on the mind it can be no other than that of a baleful, withering scepticism. The historian rarely so far forgets his phi- losophy as to kindle into high and generous emotion the glow of patriotism, or moral and religious enthu- siasm. And hence, too, his style, though always graceful, and often seasoned with the sallies of a piquant wit, never rises into eloquence or sublimity. Voltaire has been frequently reproached for want of historical accuracy. But, if we make due allowance for the sweeping tenor of his reflections, and for the infinite variety of his topics, we shall be slow in giving credit to this charge.* He was, indeed, oftentimes, misled by his inveterate Pyrrhonism ; a defect, when carried to the excess in which he indulged it, almost equally fatal to the historian with credulity or super- stition. His researches frequently led him into dark, untravelled regions ; but the aliment which he imported * Indeed, Hallam and Warton the one as diligent a labourer in the field of civil history as the other has been in literary both bear testimony to his general veracity. 82 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. thence served only too often to minister to his per- nicious philosophy. He resembled the allegorical agents of Milton, paving a way across the gulf of Chaos for the spirits of mischief to enter more easily upon the earth. Voltaire effected a no less sensible revolution in the structure than in the spirit of history. Thus, instead of following the natural consecutive order of events, the work was distributed, on the principle of a Catalogue raisonn$, into sections arranged according to their sub- jects, and copious dissertations were introduced into the body of the narrative. Thus, in his Essai sur les Mceurs, etc., one chapter is devoted to letters, another to religion, a third to manners, and so on. And in the same way, in his "Age of Louis the Fourteenth," he has thrown his various illustrations of the policy of government, and of the social habits of the court, into a detached portion at the close of the book. This would seem to be deviating from the natural course of things as they occur in the world, where the multifarious pursuits of pleasure and business, the lights and shadows, as it were, of life, are daily intermingled in the motley panorama of human existence. But, however artificial this division, it enabled the reader to arrive more expeditiously at the results, for which alone history is valuable, while at the same time it put it in the power of the writer to convey with more certainty and facility his own impressions. This system was subsequently so much refined upon that Montesquieu, in his " Grandeur et Decadence des Bomains," laid no farther stress on historical facts than as they furnished him with illustrations of his particular theorems. Indeed, so little did his work rest upon the veracity of such facts that, although the industry of Niebuhr, or, rather, of Beaufort, has knocked away almost all the foundations of early Rome, Montesquieu's IBYING'S CONQUEST OP GBANADA. 83 treatise remains as essentially unimpaired in credit as before. Thus the materials which anciently formed the body of history now served only as ingredients from which its spirit was to be extracted. But this was not always the spirit of truth. And the arbitrary selection as well as disposition of incidents which this new method allowed, and the colouring which they were to receive from the author, made it easy to pervert them to the construction of the wildest hypotheses. The progress of philosophical history is particularly observable in Great Britain, where it seems to have been admirably suited to the grave, reflecting temper of the people. In the graces of narrative they have ever been unequal to their French neighbours. Their ancient chronicles are inferior in spirit and execution to those either of France or Spain ; and their more elaborate histories, down to the middle of the eigh- teenth century, could not in any way compete with the illustrious models of Italy. But soon after this period several writers appeared, exhibiting a combina- tion of qualities, erudition, critical penetration, powers of generalization, and a political sagacity unrivalled in any other age or country. The influence of the new forms of historical com- position, however, was here, as elsewhere, made too frequently subservient to party and sectarian preju- dices. Tory histories and Whig histories, Protestant and Catholic histories, successively appeared, and seemed to neutralize each other. The most venerable traditions were exploded as nursery-tales. The statues decreed by antiquity were cast down, and the charac- ters of miscreants whom the general suffrage of man- kind had damned to infamy of a Dionysius, a Borgia, or a Eichard the Third were now retraced by what Jovius distinguishes as "the golden pen" of the his- o 2 84 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. torian, until the reader, bewildered in the maze of uncertainty, is almost ready to join in the exclamation of Lord Orford to his son, " Oh, quote me not history, for that I know to be false ! " It is remarkable, indeed, that the last-mentioned monarch, Richard the Third, whose name has become a byword of atrocity, the burden of the ballad and the moral of the drama, should have been the subject of elaborate vindication by two eminent writers of the most opposite characters, the pragmatical Horace Walpole and the circumspect and conscientious Sharon Turner. The apology of the latter exhibits a technical precision, a severe scrutiny into the authenticity of records, and a nice balancing of contradictory testimony, that give it all the air of a legal investigation. Thus history seems to be con- ducted on the principles of a judicial process, in which the writer, assuming the functions of an advocate, studiously suppresses whatever may make against his own side, supports himself by the strongest array of evidence which he can muster, discredits as far as possible that of the opposite party, and, by dexterous interpretation and ingenious inference, makes out the most plausible argument for his client that the case will admit. But these, after all, are only the abuses of philo- sophical history, and the unseasonable length of remark into which we have been unwarily led in respect to them may give us the appearance of laying on them greater emphasis than they actually deserve. There are few writers in any country whose judgment has not been sometimes warped by personal prejudices. But it is to the credit of the principal British historians that, however they may have been occasionally under the influence of such human infirmity, they have con- ducted their researches, in the main, with equal in- IEVTNG'8 CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 85 tegrity and impartiality. And while they have enriched their writings with the stores of a various erudition, they have digested from these details results of the most enlarged and practical application. History in their hands, although it may have lost much of the simplicity and graphic vivacity which it maintained with the ancients, has gained much more in the amount of useful knowledge and the lessons of sound philosophy which it inculcates. There is no writer who exhibits more distinctly the full development of the principles of modern history, with all its virtues and defects, than Gibbon. His learning was fully equal to his vast subject. This, com- mencing with expiring civilization in ancient Eome, continues on until the period of its final and perfect resurrection in Italy in the fifteenth century, and thus may be said to furnish the lights which are to guide us through the long interval of darkness which divides the Old from the Modern world. The range of his subject was fully equal to its duration. Goths, Huns, Tartars, and all the rude tribes of the North are brought upon the stage, together with the more cultivated natives of the South, the Greeks, Italians, and the intellectual Arab ; and, as the scene shifts from one country to another, we behold its population depicted with that peculiarity of physiognomy and studied propriety of costume which belong to dramatic exhibition ; for Gibbon was a more vivacious draughtsman than most writers of his school. He was, moreover, deeply versed in geography, chronology, antiquities, verbal criticism, in short, in all the sciences in any way subsidiary to his art. The extent of his subject permitted him to indulge in those elaborate disquisitions so congenial to the spirit of modern history on the most momentous and interesting topics, while his early studies enabled 86 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. him to embellish the drier details of his narrative with the charms of a liberal and elegant scholarship. What, then, was wanting to this accomplished writer? Good faith. His defects were precisely of the class of which we have before been speaking, and his most elaborate efforts exhibit too often the perversion of learning and ingenuity to the vindication of precon- ceived hypotheses. He cannot, indeed, be convicted of ignorance or literal inaccuracy, as he has triumph- antly proved in his discomfiture of the unfortunate Davis. But his disingenuous mode of conducting the argument leads precisely to the same unfair result. Thus, in his celebrated chapters on the "Progress of Christianity," which he tells us were " reduced by three successive revisals from a bulky volume to their present size," he has often slurred over in the text such parti- culars as might reflect most credit on the character of the religion, or shuffled them into a note at the bottom of the page, while all that admits of a doubtful complexion in its early propagation is ostentatiously blazoned and set in contrast to the most amiable fea- tures of paganism. At the same time, by a style of innuendo that conveys " more than meets the ear," he has contrived, with lago-like dupilicity, to breathe a taint of suspicion on the purity which he dares not openly assail. It would be easy to furnish examples- of all this were this the place for them ; but the charge* have no novelty, and have been abundantly substan- tiated by others. It is a consequence of this scepticism in Gibbon, as with Voltaire, that his writings are nowhere warmed with a generous moral sentiment. The most sublime of all spectacles, that of the martyr who suffers for conscience' sake, and this equally whether his creed be founded in truth or error, is contemplated by the his- IRVING'S CONQUEST OP GEANADA. 87 torian with the smile, or, rather, sneer, of philosophic indifference. This is not only bad taste, as he is addressing a Christian audience, but he thus voluntarily relinquishes one of the most powerful engines for the movement of human passion, which is never so easily excited as by deeds of suffering, self -devoted heroism. But, although Gibbon was wholly defective in moral enthusiasm, his style is vivified by a certain exhila- rating glow that kindles a corresponding warmth in the bosom of his reader. This may perhaps be traced to his egotism, or, to speak more liberally, to an ardent attach- ment to his professional pursuits and to his inextin- guishable love of letters. This enthusiasm appears in almost every page of his great work, and enabled him to triumph over all its difficulties. It is particularly con- spicuous whenever he touches upon Rome, the alnia, mater of science, whose adopted son he may be said to have been from his earliest boyhood. Whenever he contemplates her fallen fortunes, he mourns over her with the fond solicitude that might become an ancient Eoman ; and when he depicts her pristine glories, dimly seen through the mist of so many centuries, he does it with such vivid accuracy of conception that the reader, like the traveller who wanders through the excavations of Pompeii, seems to be gazing on the original forms and brilliant colours of antiquity. To Gibbon's egotism in its most literal sense, to his personal vanity may be traced some of the peculiar defects for which his style is conspicuous. The " his- torian of the Decline and Fall" too rarely forgets his own importance in that of his subject. The conse- quence which he attaches to his personal labours is shown in a bloated dignity of expression and an osten- tation of ornament that contrast whimsically enough with the trifling topics and commonplace thoughts on SS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. which, in the course of his long work, they are occa- sionally employed. He nowhere moves along with the easy freedom of nature, but seems to leap, as it were, from triad to triad by a succession of strained, con- , vulsive efforts. He affected, as he tells us, the light, festive raillery of Voltaire ; but his cumbrous imitation of the mercurial Frenchman may remind one, to make use of a homely simile, of the ass in ^Esop's fable, who frisked upon his master in imitation of the sportive gambols of the spaniel. The first two octavo volumes of Gibbon's history were written in a comparatively modest and unaffected manner, for he was then uncer- tain of the public favour; and, indeed, his style was exceedingly commended by the most competent critics of that day, as Hume, Joseph Warton, and others, as is abundantly shown in their correspondence ; but when he had tasted the sweets of popular applause, and had been crowned as the historian of the day, his increased consequence becomes at once visible in the assumed stateliness and magnificence of his bearing. But even .after this period, whenever the subject is suited to his style, and when his phlegmatic temper is warmed by those generous emotions of which, as we have said, it was sometimes susceptible, he exhibits his ideas in the most splendid and imposing forms of which the English language is capable. The most eminent illustrations of the system of his- torical writing, which we have been discussing, that have appeared in England in the present century, are the works of Mr. Hallam, in which the author, dis- carding most of the circumstances that go to make up mere narrative, endeavours to fix the attention of the reader on the more important features of constitutional polity, employing his wide range of materials in strict subordination to this purpose. IRVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 89 But, while history has thus been conducted on nearly the same principles in England for the last century, a new path has been struck out in France, or, rather, an attempt has lately been made there to retrace the old one. M. de Barante, no less estimable as a literary critic than as an historian, in the preliminary remarks to his "Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne," considers the draughts of modern compilers as altogether wanting in the vivacity and freshness of their originals. They tell the reader how he should feel, instead of making him do so. They give him their own results, instead of enabling him, by a fair delineation of incidents, to form his own. And while the early chroniclers, in spite of their unformed and obsolete idiom, are still read with delight, the narratives of the former are too often dry, languid, and uninteresting. He proposes, therefore, by a close adherence to his originals, to extract, as it were, the spirit of their works, without any affectation, how- ever, of their antiquated phraseology, and to exhibit as vivid and veracious a portraiture as possible of the times he is delineating, unbroken by any discussions or reflec- tions of his own. The result has been a work in eleven octavo volumes, which, notwithstanding its bulk, has already passed into four editions. The two last productions of our countryman Mr. Irving undoubtedly fall within the class of narrative history. To this he seems peculiarly suited by his genius, his fine perception of moral and natural beauty, his power of discriminating the most delicate shades of character and of unfolding a series 01 events so as to maintain a lively interest in the reader, and a lactea ubertas of expression which can impart a living eloquence even to the most commonplace sentiments. Had the " Life of Columbus " been written by a historian of the other school of which we have been speaking, he would have enlarged with 90 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. greater circumstantiality on the system adopted by Fer- dinand and Isabella for the administration of their colonies and for the regulation of trade ; nor would he have neglected to descant on a topic worn somewhat threadbare, it must be owned so momentous as the moral and political consequences of the discovery of America ; neither would such a writer, in an account of the conquest of Granada, have omitted to collect such particulars as might throw light on the genius, social institutions, and civil polity of the Spanish Arabs. But all these particulars, however pertinent to a philosophical history, would have been entirely out of keeping in Mr. Irving' s, and might have produced a disagreeable discordance in the general harmony of his plan. Mr. Irving has seldom selected a subject better suited to his peculiar powers than the conquest of Granada. Indeed, it would hardly have been possible for one of his warm sensibilities to linger so long among the remains of Moorish magnificence with which Spain is covered, without being interested in the fortunes of a people whose memory has almost passed into oblivion, but who once preserved the " sacred flame " when it had become extinct in every corner of Christendom, and whose influence is still visible on the intellectual culture of Modern Europe. It has been found no easy matter, however, to compile a satisfactory and authentic account of the Arabians, notwithstanding that the number of their historians, cited by D'Herbelot and Casiri, would appear to exceed that of any European nation. The despotic governments of the East have never been found propitious to that independence of opinion so essential to historical composition : " ubi sentire quae velis, et quse sentias dicere licet." And their copious compilations, prolific in frivolous and barren detail, are too often wholly destitute of the sap and vitality of history. IBVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA. 91 The social and moral institutions of Arabian Spain experienced a considerable modification from her long intercourse with the Europeans, and she offers a nobler field of research for the chronicler than is to be found in any other country of the Moslem. Notwithstanding this, the Castilian scholars, until of late, have done little towards elucidating the national antiquities of their Saracen brethren ; and our most copious notices of their political history, until the recent posthumous pub- lication of Conde, have been drawn from the extracts which M. Cardonne translated from the Arabic Manu- scripts in the Koyal Library at Paris.* The most interesting periods of the Saracen dominion in Spain are that embraced by the empire of the Omeyades of Cordova, between the years 755 and 1030, and that of the kingdom of Granada, extending from the middle of the thirteenth to the close of the fifteenth century. The intervening period of their existence in the Peninsula offers only a spectacle of inextricable anarchy. The first of those periods was that in which the Arabs attained their meridian of opulence and power, and in which their general illumination affords a striking contrast with the deep barbarism of the rest of Europe ; but it was that, too, in which their character, having been but little affected by contact with the Spaniards, retained most of its original Asiatic peculiarities. This has never been regarded, therefore, by European scholars as a period of greatest interest in their history, nor has it ever, so far as we are aware, been selected for the * [Since this article was written, the deficiency noticed in the text has been supplied by the translation into English of Al-Makkari's " Moham- medan Dynasties," with copious notes and illustrations by Don Pascual de Gayangos, a scholar whose acute criticism has enabled him to rectify many of the errors of his laborious predecessors, and whose profound Oriental learning sheds a flood of light on both the civil and literary history of the Spanish Arabs. 1 92 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. purposes of romantic fiction. But when their territories became reduced within the limits of Granada, the Moors had insensibly submitted to the superior influences of their Christian neighbours. Their story, at this time, abounds in passages of uncommon beauty and interest. Their wars were marked by feats of personal prowess and romantic adventure, while the intervals of peace were abandoned to all the license of luxurious revelry. Their character, therefore, blending the various peculiarities of Oriental and European civilization, offers a rich study for the poet and the novelist. As such, it has been liberally employed by the Spaniards, and has not been altogether neglected by the writers of other nations. Thus, Florian, whose sentiments, as well as his style, seem to be always floundering midway between the regions of prose and poetry, has made out of the story of this people his popular romance of " Gonsalvo of C6rdova." It also forms the burden of an Italian pic, entitled "II Conquista di Granata," by Girolamo Gratiani, a Florentine, much lauded by his country- men. The ground, however, before the appearance of Mr. Irving, had not been occupied by any writer of eminence in the English language for the purposes either of romance or history. The conquest of Granada, to which Mr. Irving has confined himself, so disastrous to the Moors, was one of the most brilliant achievements in the most brilliant period of Spanish history. Nothing is more usual than overweening commendations of antiquity, the "good old times," whose harsher features, like those of a rugged landscape, lose all their asperity in the distance. But the period of which we are speaking, embracing the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, was undoubtedly that in which the Spanish nation displayed IRVING'S CONQUEST OP GBANADA. 93 the fulness of its moral and physical energies, when, escaping from the license of a youthful age, it seems to have reached the prime of manhood, and the perfect development of those faculties whose overstrained exer- tions were soon to be followed by exhaustion and prema- ture decrepitude. The remnant of Spaniards who, retreating to the mountains of the north, escaped the overwhelming inun- dation of the Saracens at the beginning of the eighth century, continued to cherish the free institutions of their Gothic ancestors. The "Fuero Juzgo," the ancient Visi-Gothic code, was still retained by the people of Castile and Leon, and may be said to form the basis of all their subsequent legislation, while in Aragon the dissolution of the primitive monarchy opened the way for even more liberal and equitable forms of government. The independence of character thus fostered by the peculiar constitutions of these petty states was still farther promoted by the circumstances of their situation. Their uninterrupted wars with the infidel the necessity of winning back from him, inch by inch, as it were, the conquered soil required the active co-operation of every class of the community, and gave to the mass of the people an intrepidity, a personal consequence, and an extent of immunities, such as were not enjoyed by them in any other country of Europe. The free cities acquired considerable tracts of the reconquered territory, with rights of jurisdiction over them, and sent their repre- sentatives to Cortes, near a century before a similar privilege was conceded to them in England. Even the peasantry, so degraded, at this period, throughout the rest of Europe, assumed under this state of things a conscious dignity and importance, which are visible in their manners at this day; and it was in this class, during the late French invasions, that the fire of ancient 94 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. patriotism revived with greatest force, when it seemed almost extinct in the breasts of the degenerate nobles. The religious feeling which mingled in their wars with the infidels gave to their characters a tinge of lofty enthusiasm ; and the irregular nature of this warfare suggested abundant topics for that popular minstrelsy which acts so powerfully on the passions of a people. The " Poem of the Cid," which appeared, according to Sanchez, before the middle of the twelfth century, contributed in no slight degree, by calling up the most inspiring national recollections, to keep alive the generous glow of patriotism. This influence is not imaginary. Heeren pronounces the " poems of Homer to have been the principal bond which united the Grecian states ; " and every one knows the influence exercised over the Scottish peasantry by the Border minstrelsy. Many anecdotes might be quoted to show the veneration universally entertained by the Spaniards, broken, as they were, into as many discordant states as ever swarmed over Greece, for their favourite hero of romance and history. Among others, Mariana relates one of a king of Navarre, who, making an incursion into Castile about a century after the warrior's death, was carrying off a rich booty, when he was met by an abbot of a neighbouring convent, with his monks, bearing aloft the standard of the Cid, who implored him to restore the plunder to the inhabitants from whom he had ravished it. And the monarch, moved by the site of the sacred relic, after complying with his request, escorted back the banner in solemn procession with his whole army to the place of its deposit. But, while all these circumstances conspired to give an uncommon elevation to the character of the ancient Spaniard, even of the humblest rank, and while the prerogative of the monarch was more precisely as well IRVING'S CONQUEST OP GEANADA. 95 as narrowly defined than in most of the other nations of Christendom, the aristocracy of the country was insensibly extending its privileges, and laying the foundation of a power that eventually overshadowed the throne and well nigh subverted the liberties of the state. In addition to the usual enormous immu- nities claimed by this order in feudal governments (although there is no reason to believe that the system of feudal tenure obtained in Castile, as it certainly did in Aragon), they enjoyed a constitutional privilege of withdrawing their allegiance from their sovereign on sending him a formal notice of such renunciation, and the sovereign, on his part, was obliged to provide for the security of their estates and families so long as they might choose to continue in such overt rebellion. These anarchical provisions in their constitution did not remain a dead letter, and repeated examples of their pernicious application are enumerated both by the historians of Aragon and Castile. The long minorities with which the latter country was afflicted, moreover, contributed still farther to swell the overgrown power of the privileged orders; and the violent revolution which, in 1368, placed the house of Trastamarre upon the throne, by impairing the revenues, and consequently the authority of the crown, opened the way for the wild uproar which reigned throughout the kingdom during the succeeding century. Alonso de Palencia, a con- temporary chronicler, dwells with melancholy minute- ness on the calamities of this unhappy period, when the whole country was split into factions of the nobles, the monarch openly contemned, the commons trodden in the dust, the court become a brothel, the treasury bank- rupt, public faith a jest, and private morals too loose and audacious to court even the veil of hypocrisy. The wise administration of Ferdinand and Isabella 96 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. could alone have saved the state in this hour of peril. It effected, indeed, a change on the face of things as * * o O magical as that produced by the wand of an enchanter in some Eastern tale. Their reign wears a more glorious aspect from its contrast with the turbulent period which preceded it, as the landscape glows with re- doubled brilliancy when the sunshine has scattered the tempest. We shall briefly notice some of the features of the policy by which they effected this change. They obtained from the Cortes an act for the re- sumption of the improvident grants made by their predecessor, by which means an immense accession of revenue, which had been squandered upon unworthy favourites, was brought back to the royal treasury. They compelled many of the nobility to resign, in favour of the crown, such of its possessions as they had acquired, by force, fraud, or intrigue, during the late season of anarchy. The son of that gallant Mar- quis Duke of Cadiz, for instance, with whom the reader has become so familiar in Mr. Irving's Chronicle, was stripped of his patrimony of Cadiz and compelled to exchange it for the humbler territory of Arcos, from whence the family henceforth derived their title. By all these expedients the revenues of the state at the demise of Isabella, were increased twelvefold beyond what they had been at the time of her accession. They reorganised the ancient institution of the " Her- mandad," a very different association, under their hands, from the " Holy Brotherhood " which we meet with in Gil Bias. Every hundred householders were obliged to equip and maintain a horseman at their joint expense; and this corps furnished a vigilant police in civil emergencies and an effectual aid in war. It was found, moreover, of especial service in suppres- sing the insurrections and disorders of the nobility. IBVINQ'S CONQUEST OP GRANADA. 97 They were particularly solicitous to abolish the right and usage of private war claimed by this haughty order, compelling them on all occasions to refer their disputes to the constituted tribunals of justice. But it was a capital feature in the policy of the Catholic sovereigns to counterbalance the authority of the aris- tocracy by exalting, as far as prudent, that of the com- mons. In the various convocations of the national legislature, or Cortes, in this reign, no instance occurs of any city having lost its prescriptive right of furnish- ing representatives, as had frequently happened under preceding monarchs, who, from negligence or policy, had omitted to summon them. But it would be tedious to go into all the details of the system employed by Ferdinand and Isabella for the regeneration of the decayed fabric of government ; of their wholesome regulations for the encouragement of industry ; of their organisation of a national militia -and an efficient marine ; of the severe decorum which they introduced within the corrupt precincts of the thousand guineas from his production. Milton received ten pounds for the two editions which he lived to see of his " Paradise Lost." The Ayrshire bard had sighed for " a lass wi' a tocher." Scott had now found one where it was hardly to be expected, in the Muse. While the poetical fame of Scott was thus at its zenith, a new star rose above the horizon, whose eccentric course and dazzling radiance completely, bewildered the spectator. In 1812, " Childe Harold " appeared, and the attention seemed to be now called for the first time from the outward form of man and visible nature to the secret depths of the soul. The darkest recesses of human pas- sion were laid open, and the note of sorrow was pro- longed in tones of agonized sensibility, the more touching M 2 164 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. as coming from one who was placed on those dazzling heights of rank and fashion, which, to the vulgar eye at least, seem to lie in unclouded sunshine. Those of the present generation who have heard only the same key thrummed ad nauseam by the feeble imitators of his lordship can form no idea of the effect produced when the chords were first swept by the master's fingers. It was found impossible for the ear, once attuned to strains of such compass and ravishing harmony, to return with the same relish to purer, it might be, but tamer melody; and the sweet voice of the Scottish minstrel lost much of its power to charm, let him charm never so wisely. While " Kokeby " was in preparation, bets were laid on the rival candidates by the wits of the day. The sale of this poem, though great, showed a sensible decline in the popularity of its author. This became still more evident on the publication of "The Lord of the Isles;" and Scott admitted the conviction with his characteristic spirit and good nature, " ' "Well, James,' " (he said to his printer,) " ' I have given you a week what are people saying about the Lord of the Isles ? ' I hesitated a little, after the fashion of Gil Bias, but he speedily brought the matter to a point. 'Come/ he said, 'speak out, my good fellow; what has put it into your head to from a simple cottage ornee, was amplified into the dimensions almost, as well as the bizarre proportions, of some old feudal castle. The furniture and decorations were of the costliest kind ; the wainscots of oak and cedar ; the floors tessellated with marbles, or woods of different dyes ; the ceilings fretted and carved with the delicate tracery of a Gothic abbey ; the storied windows blazoned with the richly-coloured insignia of heraldry,, the walls garnished with time-honoured trophies, or curious specimens of art, or volumes sumptuously bound, in short, with all that luxury could demand or ingenuity devise ; while a copious reservoir of gas sup- plied every corner of the mansion with such fountains of light as must have puzzled the genius of the lamp to. provide for the less fortunate Aladdin. Scott's exchequer must have been seriously taxed in another form by the crowds of visitors whom he enter- tained under his hospitable roof. There was scarcely a person of note, or, to say truth, not of note, who visited that country without paying his respects to the Lion of Scotland. Lockhart reckons up a full sixth of the British peerage who had been there within his recollec- tion ; and Captain Hall, in his amusing Notes, remarks that it was not unusual for a dozen or more coach-loads to find their way into his grounds in the course of the day, most of whom found or forced an entrance into the mansion. Such was the heavy tax paid by his celebrity, and, we may add, his good nature ; for if the one had SIR WALTER SCOTT. "been a whit less than the other he could never have tolerated such a nuisance. The cost of his correspondence gives one no light idea of the demands made on his time, as well as purse, in another form. His postage for letters, independently of franks, by which a large portion of it was covered, amounted to a hundred and fifty pounds, it seems, in the course of the year. In this, indeed, should be included ten pounds for a pair of unfortunate Cherokee Lovers, sent all the way from our own happy land in order to be godfathered by Sir Walter on the London boards. Per- haps the smart-money he had to pay on this interesting occasion had its influence in mixing up rather more acid than was natural to him in his judgments of our country- men. At all events, the Yankees find little favour on the few occasions on which he has glanced at them in his cor- respondence. " I am not at all surprised," he says, in a letter to Miss Edge worth, " I am not at all surprised at what you say of the Yankees. They are a people pos- sessed of very considerable energy, quickened and brought into eager action by an honourable love of their country and pride in their institutions ; but they are as yet rude in their ideas of social intercourse, and totally ignorant, speaking generally, of all the art of good breeding, which consists chiefly in a postponement of one's own petty wishes or comforts to those of others. By rude ques- tions and observations, an absolute disrespect to other people's feelings, and a ready indulgence of their own, they make one feverish in their company, though perhaps you may be ashamed to confess the reason. But this will wear off, and is already wearing away. Men, when they have once got benches, will soon fall into the use oi cushions. They are advancing in the lists of our litera- ture, and they will not be long deficient in the petite morale, especially as they have, like ourselves, the rago 170 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. for travelling." On another occasion, he does, indeed, admit having met with, in the course of his life, " four 01 five well-lettered Americans, ardent in pursuit of know- ledge, and free from the ignorance and forward pre- sumption which distinguish many of their countrymen." This seems hard measure ; but perhaps we should find it difficult, among the many who have visited this country, to recollect as great a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen to boot entitled to a higher degree of com- mendation. It can hardly be that the well-informed and well-bred men of both countries make a point of staying at home ; so we suppose we must look for the solution of the matter in the existence of some disagree- able ingredient, common to the characters of both nations, sprouting, as they do, from a common stock, which remains latent at home, and is never fully disclosed till they get into a foreign climate. But, as this problem seems pregnant with philosophical, physiological, and, for aught we know, psychological matter, we have not courage for it here, but recommend the solution to Miss Martineau, to whom it will afford a very good title for a new chapter in her next edition. The strictures we have quoted, however, to speak more seriously, are worth attending to, coming as they do from a shrewd ob- server, and one whose judgments, though here somewhat coloured, no doubt, by political prejudice, are in the main distinguished by a sound and liberal philanthropy. But were he ten times an enemy, we would say, " Fas cst ab hoste doceri." With the splendid picture of the baronial residence at Abbotsford, Mr. Lockhart closes all that at this present writing we have received of his delightful work in this country ; and in the last sentence the melancholy sound of " the muffled drum," gives ominous warning of what we are to expect in the sixth and concluding volume. SIB WALTEE SCOTT. 171 In the dearth of more authentic information, we will piece out our sketch with a few facts gleaned from the somewhat meagre bill of fare meagre by comparison with the rich banquet of the true Amphitryon afforded by the " Kecollections " of Mr. Eobert Pierce Gillies. The unbounded popularity of the Waverley Novels led to still more extravagant anticipations on the part both of the publishers and author. Some hints of a falling off, though but slightly, in the public favour, were unheeded by both parties, though, to say truth, the exact state of things was never disclosed to Scott, it being Ballantyne's notion that it would prove a damper, and that the true course was " to press on more sail as the wind lulled." In these sanguine calculations, not only enormous sums, or, to speak correctly, bills, were given for what had been written, but the author's drafts, to the amount of many thousand pounds, were accepted by Constable in favour of works the very embryos of which lay, not only unformed, but unimagined, in the womb of time. In return for this singular accommoda- tion, Scott was induced to endorse the drafts of his publisher, and in this way an amount of liabilities was incurred, which, considering the character of the house and its transactions, it is altogether inexplicable that a person in the independent position of Sir Walter Scott should have subjected himself to for a moment. He seems to have had entire confidence in the stability of the firm, a confidence to which it seems, from Mr. Cillies's account, not to have been entitled from the first moment of his connection with it. The great reputation of the house, however, the success and magnitude of some of its transactions, especially the publication of these novels, gave it a large credit, which enabled it to go forward with a great show of prosperity in ordinary times, and veiled its tottering state probably from Con- 1 72 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. stable's own eyes. It is but the tale of yesterday. Tho case of Constable & Co. is, unhappily, a very familiar one to us. But when the hurricane of 1825 came on, it swept away all those buildings that were not founded on a rock, and those of Messrs. Constable, among others, soon became literally mere castles in the air : in plain English, the firm stopped payment. The assets were very trifling in comparison with the debts; and Sir Walter Scott was found on their paper to the frightful amount of one hundred thousand pounds ! His conduct on the occasion was precisely what was to have been anticipated from one who had declared, on a similar though much less appalling conjuncture, "I am always ready to make any sacrifices to do justice to my engagements, and would rather sell any thing, or every thing, than be less than a true man to the world." He put up his house and furniture in town at auction, delivered over his personal effects at Abbotsford, his plate, books, furniture, etc., to be held in trust for his creditors (the estate itself had been recently secured to his son on occasion of his marriage), and bound himself to discharge a certain amount annually of the liabilities of the insolvent firm. He then, with his characteristic energy, set about the performance of his Herculean task. He took lodgings in a third-rate house in St. David's Street, saw but little company, abridged the hours usually devoted to his meals and his family, gave up his ordinary exercise, and, in short, adopted the severe habits of a regular Grub Street stipendiary. " For many years," he said to Mr. Gillies, " I have been accustomed to hard work, because I found it a pleasure ; now, with all due respect for FalstafFs prin- ciple, * nothing on compulsion/ I certainly will not shrink from work because it has become necessary." One of his first tasks was his "Life of Bonaparte/* SIR WALTEE SCOTT. 173 achieved in the space of thirteen months. For this he received fourteen thousand pounds, about eleven hundred per month, not a bad bargain either, as it proved, for the publishers. The first two volumes of the nine which make up the English edition were a rifacimento of what he had before compiled for the " Annual Kegister." With every allowance for the inaccuracies and the exces- sive expansion incident to such a flashing rapidity of execution, the work, taking into view the broad range of its topics, its shrewd and sagacious reflections, and the free, bold, and picturesque colouring of its narration, and, above all, considering the brief time in which it was written, is indisputably one of the most remarkable monuments of genius and industry perhaps the most remarkable ever recorded. Scott's celebrity made everything that fell from him, however trifling, the dew-drops from the lion's mane, of value. But none of the many adventures he em- barked in, or, rather, set afloat, proved so profitable as the republication of his novels with his notes and illus- trations. As he felt his own strength in the increasing success of his labours, he appears to have relaxed some- what from them, and to have again resumed somewhat of his ancient habits, and, in a mitigated degree, his ancient hospitality. But still his exertions were too severe, and pressed heavily on the springs of his health, already deprived by age of their former elasticity and vigour. At length, in 1831, he was overtaken by one of those terrible shocks of paralysis which seem to have been constitutional in his family, but which, with more precaution and under happier auspices, might doubtless have been postponed, if not wholly averted. At this time he had, in the short space of little more than five years, by his sacrifices and efforts, discharged about two- thirds of the debt for which he was responsible, an 174 BIOGRAPHICAL AND OEITICAL MISCELLANIES. astonishing result, wholly unparalleled in the history of letters. There is something inexpressibly painful in this spectacle of a generous heart thus courageously contend- ing with fortune, bearing up against the tide with un- conquerable spirit, and finally overwhelmed by it just within reach of shore. The rest of his story is one of humiliation and sorrow. He was induced to take a voyage to the Continent to try the effect of a more genial climate. Under the sunny sky of Italy he seemed to gather new strength for a while ; but his eye fell with indifference on the venerable monu- ments which in better days would have kindled all his enthusiasm. The invalid sighed for his own home at Abbotsford. The heat of the weather and the fatigue of rapid travel brought on another shock, which reduced him to a state of deplorable imbecility. In this con- dition he returned to his own halls, where the sight of early friends, and of the beautiful scenery, the creation, as it were, of his own hands, seemed to impart a gleam of melancholy satisfaction, which soon, however, sunk into insensibility. To his present situation might well be applied the exquisite verses which he indited on another melancholy occasion : " Yet not the landscape to mine eye Bears those bright hues that once it tore ; Though Evening, with her richest dye, Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore. " With listless look along the plain I see Tweed's silver current glide, And coldly mark the holy fane Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. " The quiet lake, the balmy air, The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, Are they still such as once they were, Or is the dreary change in me ? " Providence, in its mercy, did not suffer the shattered frame long to outlive the glorious spirit which had in- SIR WALTER SCOTT. 175 formed it. He breathed his last on the 21st of Sep- tember, 1832. His remains were deposited, as he had always desired, in the hoary abbey of Dryburgh, and the pilgrim from many a distant clime shall repair to the consecrated spot so long as the reverence for exalted genius and worth shall survive in the human heart. This sketch, brief as we could make it, of the literary history of Sir Walter Scott, has extended so far as to leave but little space for what Lockhart's volumes afford ample materials for his personal character. Take it for all and all, it is not too much to say that this character is probably the most remarkable on record. There is no man of historical celebrity that we now recall, who combined in so eminent a degree the highest qualities of the moral, the intellectual, and the physical. He united in his own character what hitherto had been found incompatible. Though a poet, and living in an ideal world, he was an exact, methodical man of busi- ness ; though achieving with the most wonderful facility of genius, he was patient and laborious ; a mousing antiquarian, yet with the most active interest in the present and whatever was going on around him ; with a strong turn for a roving life and military adventure, he was yet chained to his desk more hours, at some periods of his life, than a monkish recluse ; a man with a heart as capacious as his head ; a Tory, brimful of Jacobitism, yet full of sympathy and unaffected familiarity with all classes, even the humblest ; a successful author, without pedantry and without conceit ; one, indeed, at the head of the republic of letters, and yet with a lower estimate of letters, as compared with other intellectual pursuits, than was ever hazarded before. The first quality of his character, or, rather, that which forms the basis of it, as of all great characters, was his energy. We see it, in his early youth, triumphing over 176 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the impediments of nature, and, in spite of lameness, making him conspicuous in every sort of athletic exercise, clambering up dizzy precipices, wading through treach- erous fords, and performing feats of pedestrianism that make one's joints ache to read of. As he advanced in life, we see the same force of purpose turned to higher objects. A striking example occurs in his organization of the journals and the publishing house in opposition to Constable. In what Herculean drudgery did not this latter business, in which he undertook to supply matter for the nimble press of Ballantyne, involve him ! while, in addition to his own concerns, he had to drag along by his solitary momentum a score of heavier undertakings, that led Lockhart to compare him to a steam-engine with a train of coal-waggons hitched to it. " Yes," said Scott, laughing, and making a crashing cut with his axe (for they were felling larches), " and there was a cursed lot of dung-carts too." We see the same powerful energies triumphing over disease at a later period, when nothing but a resolution to get the better of it enabled him to do so. " Be as- sured," he remarked to Mr. Gillies, " that if pain could have prevented my application to literary labour, not a page of " Ivanhoe" would have been written. Now, if I had given way to mere feelings, and ceased to work, it is a question whether the disorder might not have taken a deeper root, and become incurable." But the most extraordinary instance of this trait is the readiness with which he assumed and the spirit with which he carried through, till his mental strength broke down under it, the gigantic task imposed on him by the failure of Constable. It mattered little what the nature of the task was, whether it were organizing an opposition to a political faction, or a troop of cavalry to resist invasion, or a SIB WALTER SCOTT. 177 medley of wild Highlanders or Edinburgh cockneys to make up a royal puppet-show a loyal celebration for "His Most Sacred Majesty," he was the master-spirit that gave the cue to the whole dramatis persona. This potent impulse showed itself in the thoroughness with which he prescribed not merely the general orders, but the execution of the minutest details, in his own person. Thus all around him was the creation, as it were, of his individual exertion. His lands waved with forests planted with his own hands, and, in process of time, cleared by his own hands. He did not lay the stones in mortar, exactly, for his whimsical castle, but he seems to have superintended the operation from the foundation to the battlements. The antique relics, the curious works of art, the hangings and furniture, even, with which his halls were decorated, were specially contrived or selected by him ; and, to read his letters at this time to his friend Terry, one might fancy himself perusing the correspond- ence of an upholsterer, so exact and technical is he in his instructions. We say this not in disparagement of ,his great qualities. It is only the more extraordinary; for, while he stooped to such trifles, he was equally thorough in matters of the highest moment. It was a trait of character. Another quality, which, like the last, seems to have given the tone to his character, was his social or benevo- lent feelings. His heart was an unfailing fountain, which not merely the distresses but the joys of his fellow- creatures made to flow like water. In early life, and possibly sometimes in later, high spirits and a vigorous constitution led him occasionally to carry his social propensities into convivial excess ; but he never was in danger of the habitual excess to which a vulgar mind and sometimes, alas ! one more finely tuned abandons itself. With all his conviviality, it was not the sensua 1 178 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND OEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. relish, but the social, which acted on him. He was neither gourme nor gourmand ; but his social meetings were endeared to him by the free interchange of kindly feelings with his friends. La Bruyere says (and it is odd he should have found it out in Louis the Fourteenth's court), " the heart has more to do than the head with the pleasures, or, rather, promoting the pleasures, of society ; " " Un homme est d'un meilleur commerce dans la socie'te par le cceur que par Tesprit." If report the report of travellers be true, we Americans, at least the New Englanders, are too much perplexed with the cares and crosses of life to afford many genuine specimens of this bonhommie. However this may be, we all, doubt- less, know some such character, whose shining face, the index of a cordial heart, radiant with beneficent pleasure, diffuses its own exhilarating glow wherever it appears. Earely, indeed, is this precious quality found united with the most exalted intellect. Whether it be that Nature, chary of her gifts, does not care to shower too many of them on one head, or that the public admiration has led the man of intellect to set too high a value on himself, or at least his own pursuits, to take an interest in the inferior concerns of others, or that the fear of compro- mising his dignity puts him " on points " with those who approach him, or whether, in truth, the very magnitude of his own reputation throws a freezing shadow over us little people in his neighbourhood, whatever be the cause, it is too true that the highest powers of mind are very often deficient in the only one which can make the rest of much worth in society, the power of pleasing. Scott was not one of these little great. His was not one of those dark-lantern visages which concentrate all their light on their own path and are black as midnight to all about them. He had a ready sympathy, a word of contagious kindness or cordial greeting, for all. His SIE WALTER SCOTT. 179 manners, too, were of a kind to dispel the icy reserve and awe which his great name was calculated to inspire. His frank address was a sort of open sesame to every heart. He did not deal in sneers, the poisoned weapons which come not from the head, as the man who launches them is apt to think, but from an acid heart, or, perhaps, .an acid stomach, a very common laboratory of such small artillery. Neither did Scott amuse the company with parliamentary harangues or metaphysical disquisitions. His conversation was of the narrative kind, not formal, but as casually suggested by some passing circumstance or topic, and thrown in by way of illustration. He did not repeat himself, however, but continued to give his anecdotes such variations, by rigging them out in a new * l cocked hat and walking-cane," as he called it, that they never tired like the thrice-told tale of a chronic raconteur. He allowed others, too, to take their turn, and thought with the Dean of St. Patrick's : " Carve to all, but just enough ; Let them neither starve nor stuff ; And, that you may have your due, Let your neighbours carve for you." He relished a good joke, from whatever quarter it came, and was not over-dainty in his manner of testifying his satisfaction. " In the full tide of mirth, he did in- deed laugh the heart's laugh," says Mr. Adolphus. "Give me an honest laugher," said Scott himself, on another occasion, when a buckram man of fashion had been paying him a visit at Abbotsford. His manners, free from affectation or artifice of any sort, exhibited the spontaneous movements of a kind disposition, subject to those rules of good breeding which Nature herself might have dictated. In this way he answered his own purpose admirably as a painter of character, by putting every man in good humour with himself, in the same N 2 180 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. manner as a cunning portrait-painter amuses his sitters with such store of fun and anecdote as may throw them off their guard and call out the happiest expressions of their countenances. Scott, in his wide range of friends and companions, does not seem to have been over-fastidious. In the in- stance of John Ballantyne, it has exposed him to some censure. In truth, a more worthless fellow never hung on the skirts of a great man ; for he did not take the trouble to throw a decent veil over the grossest excesses. But then he had been the school-boy friend of Scott ; had grown up with him in a sort of dependence, a rela- tion which begets a kindly feeling in the party that con- fers the benefits, at least. How strong it was in him may be inferred from his remark at his funeral. "I feel," said Scott, mournfully, as the solemnity was concluded, " I feel as if there would be less sunshine for me from this day forth." It must be admitted, however, that his intimacy with little Eigdumfunnidos, whatever apo- logy it may find in Scott's heart, was not very creditable to his taste. But the benevolent principle showed itself not merely in words, but in the more substantial form of actions. How many are the cases recorded of indigent merit which he drew from obscurity and almost warmed into life by his own generous and most delicate patronage ! Such were the cases, among others, of Leyden, Weber, Hogg. How often and how cheerfully did he supply such literary contributions as were solicited by his friends and they taxed him pretty liberally amid all the pressure of business, and at the height of his fame, when his hours were golden hours to him ! In the more vul- gar and easier forms of charity he did not stint his hand, though, instead of direct assistance, he preferred to enable others to assist themselves, in this way forti- SIB WALTER SCOTT. 181 fying their good habits and relieving them from the sense of personal degradation. But the place where his benevolent impulses found their proper theatre for expansion was his own home, surrounded by a happy family, and dispensing all the hospitalities of a great feudal proprietor. " There are many good things in life," he says, in one of his letters, "whatever satirists and misanthropes may say to the contrary ; but probably the best of all, next to a con- science void of offence (without which, by-the-by, they can hardly exist), are the quiet exercise and enjoyment of the social feelings, in which we are at once happy our- selves and the cause of happiness to them who are dearest to us." Every page of the work, almost, shows us how intimately he blended himself with the pleasures and the pursuits of his own family, watched over the education of his children, shared in their rides, their rambles and sports, losing no opportunity of kindling in their young minds a love of virtue, and honourable principles of action. He delighted, too, to collect his tenantry around him, multiplying holidays, when young and old might come together under his roof-tree, when the jolly punch was liberally dispensed by himself and his wife among the elder people, and the Hogmanay cakes and pennies were distributed among the young ones, while his own children mingled in the endless reels and hornpipes on the earthen floor, and the laird himself, mixing in the groups of merry faces, had " his private joke for every old wife or 'gausie carle,' his arch compliment for the ear of every bonny lass, and his hand and his blessing for the head of every little Eppie Daidle from Abbotstown or Broomy- Lees." "Sir Walter," said one of his old retainers, " speaks to every man as if he were his blood relation." No wonder that they should have returned this feeling with something warmer than blood relations usually do.. 182 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. Mr. Gillies tells an anecdote of the Ettrick Shepherd, showing how deep a root such feelings, notwithstanding his rather odd way of expressing them sometimes, had taken in his honest nature. "Mr. James Ballantyne, walking home with him one evening from Scott's, where,, by-the-by, Hogg had gone uninvited, happened to ob- serve, ' 1 do not at all like this illness of Scott's. I have often seen him look jaded of late, and am afraid it is serious/ ' Haud your tongue, or I'll gar you measure your length on the pavement!' replied Hogg. 'You fause, down-hearted loon that you are ; ye daur to speak as if Scott were on his death-bed ! It cannot be it must not be ! I will not suffer you to speak that gait.' The sentiment was like that of Uncle Toby at the bedside of Le Fevre ; and, at these words, the Shepherd's voice be- came suppressed with emotion/' But Scott's sympathies were not confined to his spe- cies ; and if he treated them like blood relations, he treated his brute followers like personal friends. Every one remembers old Maida and faithful Camp, the " dear old friend," whose loss cost him a dinner. Mr. Gillies tells us that he went into his study on one occasion,, when he was winding off his "Vision of Don Roderick.'* " 'Look here,' said the poet, ' I have just begun to copy over the rhymes that you heard to-day and applauded so- much. Return to supper, if you can ; only don't be late, as you perceive we keep early hours, and Wallace will not suffer me to rest after six in the morning. Come, good dog, and help the poet/ At this hint, Wallace seated himself upright on a chair next his master, who offered him a newspaper, which he directly seized, looking very wise, and holding it firmly and contentedly in his mouth. Scott looked at him with great satisfaction, for he was excessively fond of dogs. ' Very well,' said he ; ' now we shall get on.' And so I left them abruptly, knowing SIE WALTER SCOTT. 183 that my ' absence would be the best company/ " This fellowship extended much farther than to his canine fol- lowers, of which, including hounds, terriers, mastiffs, and mongrels, he had certainly a goodly assortment. We find, also, Grimalkin installed in a responsible post in the library, and, out of doors, pet hens, pet donkeys, and tell it not in Judsea a pet pig ! Scott's sensibilities, though easily moved and widely diffused, were warm and sincere. None shared more cordially in the troubles of his friends ; but on all such occasions, with a true manly feeling, he thought less of mere sympathy than of the most effectual way for miti- gating their sorrows. After a touching allusion in one of his epistles to his dear friend Erskine's death, he con- cludes, " I must turn to and see what can be done about getting some pension for his daughters/' In another passage, which may remind one of some of the exquisite touches in Jeremy Taylor, he indulges in the following beautiful strain of philosophy : "The last three or four years have swept away more than half the friends with whom I lived in habits of great intimacy. So it must be with us ' When ance life's day draws near the gloamin',' and yet we proceed with our plantations and plans as if any tree but the sad cypress would accompany us to the grave, where our friends have gone before us. It is the way of the world, however, and must be so ; otherwise life would be spent in unavailing mourning for those whom we have lost. It is better to enjoy the society of those who remain to us." His well-disciplined heart seems to have confessed the influence of this philosophy in his most ordinary relations. " I can't help it," was a favourite maxim of his, " and therefore will not think about it ; for that, at least, I can help." 184 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. Among his admirable qualities must not be omitted a certain worldly sagacity or shrewdness, which is ex- pressed as strongly as any individual trait can be in some of his portraits, especially in the excellent one of him by Leslie. Indeed, his countenance would seem to exhibit, ordinarily, much more of Dandie Dinmont's benevolent shrewdness than of the eye glancing from earth to heaven which in fancy we assign to the poet, and which, in some moods, must have been his. This trait may be readily discerned in his business transac- tions, which he managed with perfect knowledge of character as well as of his own rights. No one knew better than he the market value of an article ; and, though he underrated his literary wares as to their mere literary rank, he set as high a money value on them and made as sharp a bargain as any of the trade could have done. In his business concerns, indeed, he managed rather too much, or, to speak more correctly, was too fond of mixing up mystery in his transactions, which, like most mysteries, proved of little service to their author. Scott's correspondence, especially with his son, affords obvious examples of shrewdness, in the advice he gives as to his deportment in the novel situations and society into which the young cornet was thrown. Occa- sionally, in the cautious hints about etiquette and social observances, we may be reminded of that ancient "arbiter elegantiarum," Lord Chesterfield, though it must be con- fessed there is throughout a high moral tone, which the noble lord did not very scrupulously affect. Another feature in Scott's character was his loyalty, which some people would extend into a more general deference to rank not royal. We do certainly meet with a tone of deference, occasionally, to the privileged orders (or, rather, privileged persons, as the king, or his own chief, for to the mass of stars and garters he showed no SIB WALTER SCOTT. 185 such respect) which falls rather unpleasantly on the ear of a republican. But, independently of the feelings which rightfully belonged to him as the subject of a monarchy, and without which he must have been a false- hearted subject, his own were heightened by a poetical colouring that mingled in his mind even with much more vulgar relations of life. At the opening of the regalia in Holyrood House, when the honest burgomaster deposited the crown on the head of one of the young ladies present, the good man probably saw nothing more in the dingy diadem than we should have seen, a head- piece for a set of men no better than himself, and, if the old adage of a " dead lion " holds true, not quite so good. But to Scott's imagination other views were unfolded. "A thousand years their cloudy wings expanded" around him, and in the dim visions of distant times he beheld the venerable line of monarchs who had swayed the councils of his country in peace and led her armies in battle. The "golden round" became in his eye the sym- bol of his nation's glory ; and, as he heaved a heavy oath from his heart, he left the room in agitation, from which he did not speedily recover. There was not a spice of affectation in this, for who ever accused Scott of affec- tation ? but there was a good deal of poetry, the poetry of sentiment. We have said that this feeling mingled in the more common concerns of his life. His cranium, indeed, to judge from his busts, must have exhibited a strong deve- lopment of the organ of veneration. He regarded with reverence everything connected with antiquity. His establishment was on the feudal scale ; his house was fashioned more after the feudal ages than his own ; and even in the ultimate distribution of his fortune, although the circumstance of having made it himself relieved him from any legal necessity of contravening the suggestions 186 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. of natural justice, he showed such attachment to the old aristocratic usage as to settle nearly the whole of it on his eldest son. The influence of this poetic sentiment is discernible in his most trifling acts, in his tastes, his love of the arts, his social habits. His museum, house, and grounds were adorned with relics curious not so much from their work- manship as their historic associations. It was the an- cient fountain from Edinburgh, the Tolbooth lintels, the blunderbuss and spleughan of Rob Roy, the drinking-cup of Prince Charlie, or the like. It was the same in the arts. The tunes he loved were not the refined and com- plex melodies of Italy, but the simple notes of his native minstrelsy, from the bagpipe of John of Skye, or from the harp of his own lovely and accomplished daughter. So, also, in painting. It was not the masterly designs of the great Flemish and Italian schools that adorned his walls, but some portrait of Claverhouse, or of Queen Mary, or of "glorious old John." In architecture we see the same spirit in the singular " romance of stone and lime," which may be said to have been his own de- vice, down to the minutest details of its finishing. We see it again in the joyous celebrations of his feudal tenantry, the good old festivals, the Hogmanay, the Kirn, &c., long fallen into desuetude, when the old Highland piper sounded the same wild pibroch that had so often summoned the clans together, for war or for wassail, among the fastnesses of the mountains. To the same source, in fine, may be traced the feelings of super- stition which seemed to hover round Scott's mind like some "strange mysterious dream," giving a romantic colouring to his conversation and his writings, but rarely, if ever, influencing his actions. It was a poetic sentiment. Scott was a Tory to the backbone. Had he come SIB WALTER SCOTT. 187 into the world half a century sooner, he would, no doubt, have made a figure under the banner of the Pretender. He was at no great pains to disguise his political creed ; witness his jolly drinking-song on the acquittal of Lord Melville. This was verse ; but his prose is not much more qualified. " As for Whiggery in general," he says, in one of his letters, " I can only say that, as no man can be said to be utterly overset until his rump has been higher than his head, so I cannot read in history of any free state which has been brought to slavery until the rascal and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military despotism With these convictions, I am very jealous of Whiggery under all modifications, and I must say my acquaintance with the total want of principle in some of its warmest pro- fessors does not tend to recommend it." With all this, however, his Toryism was not, practically, of that sort which blunts a man's sensibilities for those who are not of the same porcelain clay with himself. No man, Whig or Radical, ever had less of this pretension, or treated his inferiors with greater kindness, and even familiarity, a circumstance noticed by every visitor at his hospi- table mansion who saw him strolling round his grounds, taking his pinch of snuff out of the mull of some " gray- haired old hedger," or leaning on honest Tom Purdie's shoulder and taking sweet counsel as to the right method of thinning a plantation. But, with all this familiarity, no man was better served by his domestics. It was the service of love, the only service that power cannot com- mand and money cannot buy. Akin to the feelings of which we have been speaking was the truly chivalrous sense of honour which stamped his whole conduct. We do not mean that Hotspur honour which is roused only by the drum and fife, 188 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. though he says of himself, " I like the sound of a drum as well as Uncle Toby ever did," but that honour which is deep-seated in the heart of every true gentle- man, shrinking with sensitive delicacy from the least stain, or imputation of a stain, on his faith. "If we lose everything else/' writes he, on a trying occasion, to -a friend who was not so nice in this particular, " we will &t least keep our honour unblemished." It reminds one of the pithy epistle of a kindred chivalrous spirit, Francis the First, to his mother, from the unlucky field of Pavia : *'Tout est perdu, fors 1'honneur." Scott's latter years furnished a noble commentary on the sincerity of his manly principles. Little is said directly of his religious sentiments in the biography. They seem to have harmonized well with his political. He was a member of the English Church, a staunch champion of established forms, and a sturdy enemy to everything that savoured of the sharp tang of Puritanism. On this ground, indeed, the youthful Samson used to wrestle manfully with worthy Dominie Mitchell, who, no doubt, furnished many a screed of doctrine for the Rev. Peter Poundtext, Master Nehemiah Holdenough, and other lights of the Covenant. Scott was no friend to cant under any form. But, whatever were his speculative opinions, in practice his heart over- flowed with that charity which is the lifespring of our religion ; and whenever he takes occasion to allude to the subject directly he testifies a deep reverence for the truths of revelation, as well as for its Divine original. Whatever estimate be formed of Scott's moral quali- ties, his intellectual were of a kind which well entitled him to the epithet conferred on Lope de Vega, " mon- struo de naturaleza" (a miracle of nature). His inind scarcely seemed to be subjected to the same laws that control the rest of his species. His memory, as is usual, SIB WALTEE SCOTT. 189 was the first of his powers fully developed. While an urchin at school, he could repeat whole cantos, he says, of Ossian and of Spenser. In riper years we are con- stantly meeting with similar feats of his achievement. Thus, on one occasion he repeated the whole of a poem in some penny magazine, incidentally alluded to, which he had not seen since he was a schoolboy. On another, when the Ettrick Shepherd was trying ineffectually to fish up from his own recollections some scraps of a ballad he had himself manufactured years before, Scott called to him, " Take your pencil, Jemmy, and I will tell it to you, word for word ; " and he accordingly did so. But it is needless to multiply examples of feats so startling as to look almost like the tricks of a conjuror. What is most extraordinary is, that while he acquired with such facility that the bare perusal, or the repetition of a thing once to him, was sufficient, he yet retained it with the greatest pertinacity. Other men's memories are so much jostled in the rough and tumble of life that most of the facts get sifted out nearly as fast as they are put in ; so that we are in the same dilemma with those unlucky daughters of Danaus, of school-boy memory, obliged to spend the greater part of the time in reple- nishing. But Scott's memory seemed to be hermetically sealed, suffering nothing once fairly in to leak out again. This was of immense service to him when he took up the business of authorship, as his whole multifarious stock of facts, whether from books or observation, became, in truth, his stock in trade, ready furnished to his hands. This may explain in part though it is not less mar- vellous the cause of his rapid execution of works often replete with rare and curious information. The labour, the preparation, had been already completed. His whole life had been a business of preparation. When he ven- tured, as in the case of " Rokeby " and of " Quentia 190 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIESL Durward," on ground with which he had not been familiar, we see how industriously he set about new acquisitions. In most of the prodigies of memory which we have ever known, the overgrowth of that faculty seems to have been attained at the expense of all the others ; but in Scott the directly opposite power of the imagination, the inventive power, was equally strongly developed, and at the same early age ; for we find him renowned for storycraft while at school. How many a delightful fiction, warm with the flush of ingenuous youth, did he not throw away on the ears of thoughtless childhood, which, had they been duly registered, might now have amused children of a larger growth ? We have seen Scott's genius in its prime and its decay. The frolic graces of childhood are alone wanting. The facility with which he threw his ideas into lan- guage was also remarked very early. One of his first ballads, and a long one, was dashed off at the dinner- table. His " Lay " was written at the rate of a canto a week. " Waverley," or, rather, the last two volumes of it, cost the evenings of a summer month. Who that has ever read the account can forget the movements of that mysterious hand, as described by the two students from the window of a neighbouring attic, throwing off sheet after sheet, with untiring rapidity, of the pages destined to immortality ? Scott speaks pleasantly enough of this marvellous facility in a letter to his friend Morritt : " When once I set my pen to the paper, it will walk fast enough. I am sometimes tempted to leave it alone, and see whether it will not write as well without the assistance of my head as with it. A hopeful prospect for the reader." As to the time and place of composition, he appears to have been nearly indifferent. He possessed entire SIB WALTER SCOTT. 191 power of abstraction, and it mattered little whether he were nailed to his clerk's desk, under the drowsy elo- quence of some long-winded barrister, or dashing his horse into the surf on Portobello sands, or rattling in a postchaise, or amid the hum of guests in his over- flowing halls at Abbotsford, it mattered not ; the same well-adjusted little packet, " nicely corded and sealed," was sure to be ready, at the regular time, for the Edin- burgh mail. His own account of his composition to a friend, who asked when he found time for it, is striking enough. " Oh," said Scott, "Hie simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up, and there's the time I am dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking projet de chapitre ; and when I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I often take a doze in the plantations, and while Tom marks out a dike or a drain as I have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in some other world." Never did this sort of simmering produce such a splendid bill of fare. The quality of the material, under such circumstances, is, in truth, the great miracle of the whole. The execu- tion of so much work, as a mere feat of penmanship, would undoubtedly be very extraordinary, but, as a mere scrivener's miracle, would be hardly worth recording. It is a sort of miracle that is every day performing under our own eyes, as it were, by Messrs. James, Bulwer, & Co., who, in all the various staples of " comedy, history, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral," &c., supply their own market, and ours too, with all that can be wanted. In Spain, and in Italy also, we may find abundance of improvvisatori and improwisatrici, who perform miracles of the same sort, in verse too, in lan- guages whose vowel terminations make it very easy for the thoughts to tumble into rhyme without any malice prepense. Sir Stamford Baffles, in his account of Java, 192 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. tells us of a splendid avenue of trees before his house, which in the course of a year shot up to the height of forty feet. But who shall compare the brief, transitory splendours of a fungous vegetation with the mighty monarch of the forest, sending his roots deep into the heart of the earth, and his branches, amid storm and sunshine, to the heavens? And is not the latter the true emblem of Scott? For who can doubt that his prose creations, at least, will gather strength with time, living on through succeeding generations, even when the language in which they are written, like those of Greece and Rome, shall cease to be a living language ? The only writer deserving, in these respects, to be named with Scott, is Lope de Vega, who in his own day held as high a rank in the republic of letters as our great contemporary. The beautiful dramas which he threw off for the entertainment of the capital, and whose success drove Cervantes from the stage, out- stripped the abilities of an amanuensis to copy. His intimate friend Montalvan, one of the most popular and prolific authors of the time, tells us that he under- took with Lope once to supply the theatre with a comedy in verse, and in three acts, as the Spanish dramas usually were at a very short notice. In order to get through his half as soon as his partner, he rose by two in the morning, and at eleven had completed it ; an extraordinary feat, certainly, since a play ex- tended to between thirty and forty pages, of a hundred lines each. Walking into the garden, he found his brother poet pruning an orange-tree. "Well, how do you get on ? " said Montalvan. " Very well," answered Lope. " I rose betimes, at five, and, after I had got through, eat my breakfast ; since which I have written a letter of fifty triplets, and watered the whole of the garden, which has tired me a good deal." SIB WALTEE SCOTT. 193 But a little arithmetic will best show the comparative fertility of Scott and Lope de Vega. It is so germane to the present matter that we shall make no apology for transcribing here some computations from our last July number ; and as few of our readers, we suspect, have the air-tight memory of Sir Walter, we doubt not that enough of it has escaped them by this time to excuse us from equipping it with one of those " cocked hats and walking-sticks " with which he furbished up an old story. "It is impossible to state the results of Lope de Vega's labours in any form that! will not powerfully strike the imagination. Thus, he has left twenty-one million three hundred thousand verses in print, besides a mass of manuscript. He furnished the theatre, ac- cording to the statement of his intimate friend Mont- alvan, with eighteen hundred regular plays and four hundred autos, or religious dramas, all acted. He composed, according to his own statement, more than one hundred comedies in the almost incredible space of twenty-four hours each; and a comedy averaged between two and three thousand verses, great part of them rhymed, and interspersed with sonnets and other more difficult forms of versification. He lived seventy- two years ; and supposing him to have employed fifty of that period in composition, although he filled a variety of engrossing vocations during that time, he must have averaged a play a week, to say nothing of twenty-one volumes, quarto, of miscellaneous works, including five epics, written in his leisure moments, and all now in print I " The only achievements we can recall in literary history bearing any resemblance to, though falling far short of this, are those of our illustrious contemporary Sir Walter Scott. The complete edition of his works* 194 BIOGRAPHICAL AND OEITICAL MISCELLANIES. recently advertized by Murray, with the edition of two Volumes of which Murray has not the copyright, pro- bably contains ninety volumes, small octavo. [To these should farther be added a large supply of matter for the Edinburgh Annual Register, as well as other anonymous contributions.] Of these forty-eight volumes of novels, and twenty-one of history and biography, were produced between 1814 and 1831, or in seventeen years. These would give an average of four volumes a year, or one for every three months during the whole of that period ; to which must be added twenty-one volumes of poetry and prose, previously published. The mere mechanical exe- cution of so much work, both in his case and Lope de Vega's, would seem to be scarce possible in the limits assigned. Scott, too, was as variously occupied in other ways as his Spanish rival, and probably, from the social hospitality of his life, spent a much larger portion of his time in no literary occupation at all." Of all the wonderful dramatic creations of Lope de Vega's genius, what now remains ? Two or three plays only keep possession of the stage, and few r , very few, are still read with pleasure in the closet. They have never been collected into a uniform edition, and are now met with in scattered sheets only on the shelves of some mousing bookseller, or collected in miscellaneous parcels in the libraries of the curious. Scott, with all his facility of execution, had none of that pitiable affectation sometimes found in men of genius, who think that the possession of this quality may dispense with regular, methodical habits of study. He was most economical of time. He did not, like Voltaire, speak of it as " a terrible thing that so much time should be wasted in talking." He was too little of a pedant, and far too benevolent, not to feel that there are other objects worth living for than mere SIR WALTER SCOTT. 195 literary fame; but lie grudged the waste of time on merely frivolous and heartless objects. "As for dress- ing when we are quite alone," he remarked one day to Mr. Gillies, whom he had taken home with him to a family dinner, "it is out of the question. Life is not long enough for such fiddle-faddle/' In the early part of his life he worked late at night, but subsequently, from a conviction of the superior healthiness of early rising, as well as the desire to secure, at all hazards, a portion of the day for literary labour, he rose at five the year round ; no small effort, as any one will admit who has seen the pain and difficulty which a regular bird of night finds in reconciling his eyes to daylight. He was scrupulously exact, moreover, in the distribution of his hours. In one of his letters to his friend Terry, the player, replete, as usual, with advice, that seems to flow equally from the head and the heart, he says, in reference to the practice of dawdling away one's time, " A habit of the mind it is which is very apt to beset men of intellect and talent, especially when their time is not regularly filled up, but left to their own arrangement. But it is like the ivy round the oak, and ends by limiting, if it does not destroy, the power of manly and necessary exertion. I must love a man so well, to whom I offer such a word of advice, that I will not apologize for it, but expect to hear you are become as regular as a Dutch clock, hours, quarters, minutes, all marked and appropriated'' With the same emphasis he inculcates the like habits on his son. If any man might dispense with them, it was surely Scott. But he knew that without them the greatest powers of mind will run to waste, and water but the desert. Some of the literary opinions of Scott are singular, considering, too, the position he occupied in the world of letters. "I promise you/' he says, in an epistle to o 2 196 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. an old friend, " my oaks will outlast my laurels ; and I pique myself more on my compositions for manure than on any other compositions to which I was ever accessory." This may seem badinage ; but he repeat- edly, both in writing and conversation, places literature, as a profession, below other intellectual professions, and especially the military. The Duke of Wellington, the representative of the last, seems to have drawn from him a very extraordinary degree of deference, which we cannot but think smacks a little of that strong relish for gunpowder which he avows in himself. It is not very easy to see on what this low estimate ^of literature rested. As a profession, it has too little in common with more active ones to afford much ground for running a parallel. The soldier has to do with externals; and his contests and triumphs are over matter in its various forms, whether of man or material nature. The poet deals with the bodiless forms of air, of fancy lighter than air. His business is contem- plative ; the other's is active, and depends for its success on strong moral energy and presence of mind. He must, indeed, have genius of the highest order to effect his own combinations, anticipate the movements of his nemy, and dart with eagle eye on his vulnerable point. But who shall say that this practical genius, if we .may so term it, is to rank higher in the scale than the creative power of the poet, the spark from the mind of divinity itself ? The orator might seem to afford better ground for comparison, since, though his theatre of action is abroad, he may be said to work with much the same tools as the writer. Yet how much of his success depends on qualities other than intellectual ! " Ac- tion," said the father of eloquence, " action, action, are the three most essential things to an orator." How SIB WALTEE SCOTT. 197 much depends on the look, the gesture, the magical tones of voice, modulated to the passions he has stirred, and how much on ths contagious sympathies of the audience itself, which drown everything like criticism in the overwhelming tide of emotion ! If any one would know how much, let him, after patiently standing " till his feet throb, And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath Of patriots bursting with heroic rage," read the same speech in the columns of a morning newspaper or in the well-concocted report of the orator himself. The productions of the writer are subjected to a fiercer ordeal. He has no excited sympathies of numbers to hurry his readers along over his blunders. He is scanned in the calm silence of the closet. Every flower of fancy seems here to wither under the rude breath of criticism ; every link in the chain of argument is subjected to the touch of prying scrutiny, and if there be the least flaw in it it is sure to be detected. There is no tribunal so stern as the secret tribunal of a man's own closet, far removed from all the sympathetic impulses of humanity. Surely there is no form in which intellect can be exhibited to the world so completely stripped of all adventitious- aids as the form of written composition. But, says the practical man, let us estimate things by their utility. "You talk of the poems of Homer," said a. mathematician, " but, after all, what do they prove ? " A question which involves an answer somewhat too* voluminous for the tail of an article. But if the poem& of Homer were, as Heeren asserts, the principal bond which held the Grecian states together and gave them a national feeling, they " prove " more than all the arithmeticians of Greece and there were many cun- ning ones in it ever proved. The results of military 198 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. skill are indeed obvious. The soldier, by a single victory, enlarges the limits of an empire : he may do more, he may achieve the liberties of a nation, or roll back the tide of barbarism ready to overwhelm them. Wellington was placed in such a position, and nobly did he do his work; or, rather, he was placed at the head of such a gigantic moral and physical apparatus as enabled him to do it. With his own unassisted strength, of course, he could have done nothing. But it is on his own solitary resources that the great writer is to rely. And yet who shall say that the triumphs of Wellington have been greater than those of Scott, whose works are familiar as household, words to every fireside in his own land, from the castle to the cottage, have crossed oceans, and deserts, and, with healing 43ii their wings, found their way to the remotest re- gions, have helped to form the character, until his own mind may be said to be incorporated into those of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-men ? Who is there that has not, at some time or other, felt the heaviness of his heart lightened, his pains mitigated, and his bright moments of life made still brighter by the magical touches of his genius ? And shall we speak of his victories as less real, less serviceable to humanity, less truly glorious than those of the greatest captain of his day ? The triumphs of the warrior are bounded by the narrow theatre of his own age ; but those of a Scott or a Shakspeare will be renewed with greater and greater lustre in ages yet unborn, when the victorious chieftain shall be forgotten, or shall live only in the song of the minstrel and the page of the chronicler. But, after all, this sort of parallel is not very gracious nor very philosophical, and, to say truth, is somewhat foolish. We have been drawn into it by the not ran- dom, but very deliberate, and, in our poor judgment, SIB WALTER SCOTT. 199 very disparaging estimate by Scott of his own vocation ; and, as we have taken the trouble to write it, our readers will excuse us from blotting it out. There is too little ground for the respective parties to stand on for a parallel. As to the pedantic cui bono standard, it is impossible to tell the final issues of a single act ; how can we then hope to those of a course of action ? As for the honour of different vocations, there never was a truer sentence than the stale one of Pope, stale now, because it is so true, " Act well your part there all the honour lies." And it is the just boast of our own country that in no civilized nation is the force of this philanthropic maxim so nobly illustrated as in ours, thanks to our glorious institutions. A great cause, probably, of Scott's low estimate of letters was the facility with which he wrote. What costs us little we are apt to prize little. If diamonds were as common as pebbles, and gold-dust as any other, who would stoop to gather them 1 It was the prostitu- tion of his muse, by-the-by, for this same gold-dust, which brought a sharp rebuke on the poet from Lord Byron, in his " English Bards : " " For this we spurn Apollo's venal son ;" a coarse cut, and the imputation about as true as most satire, that is, not true at all. This was indited in his lordship's earlier days, when he most chivalrously dis- claimed all purpose of bartering his rhymes for gold. He lived long enough, however, to weigh his literary wares in the same money-balance used by more vulgar manufacturers ; and, in truth, it would be ridiculous if the produce of the brain should not bring its price in this form as well as any other. There is little danger, we imagine, of finding too much gold in the bowels of Parnassus, 200 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES Scott took a more sensible view of things. In a letter to Ellis, written soon after the publication of " The Min- strelsy," he observes, " People may say this and that of the pleasure of fame or of profit, as a motive of writing ; I think the only pleasure is in the actual exertion and research, and I would no more write on any other terms than I would hunt merely to dine upon hare soup. At the same time, if credit and profit came unlocked for, I would no more quarrel with them than with the soup/' Even this declaration was somewhat more magnanimous than was warranted by his subsequent conduct. The truth is, he soon found out, especially after the Waverley vein had opened, that he had hit on a gold mine. The prodigious returns he got gave the whole thing the aspect of a speculation. Every new work was an adven- ture, and the proceeds naturally suggested the indulgence of the most extravagant schemes of expense, which, in their turn, stimulated him to fresh efforts. In this way the " profits " became, whatever they might have been once, a principal incentive to, as they were the recom- pense of, exertion. His productions were cash articles, and were estimated by him more on the Hudibrastic rule of " the real worth of the thing " than by any fanciful standard of fame. He bowed with deference to the judgment of the booksellers, and trimmed his sails dexterously as the " aura popularis" shifted. " If it's na weil bobbit," he writes to his printer, on turning out a less lucky novel, " we'll bobbit again." His muse was of that school who seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number. We can hardly imagine him invoking her like Milton : " Still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few." Still less can we imagine him, like the blind old barcJ, SIR WALTER SCOTT. 201 feeding his soul with visions of posthumous glory, and spinning out epics for five pounds apiece. It is singular that Scott, although he set as high a money value on his productions as the most enthusiastic of the " trade " could have done, in a literary view should have held them so cheap. " Whatever others may be/' he said, " I have never been a partisan of my own poetry ; as John Wilkes declared that, ' in the height of his success, he had himself never been a Wilkite/" Considering the poet's popularity, this was but an indifferent compliment to the taste of his age. With all this disparagement of his own productions, however,. Scott was not insensible to criticism. He says some- where that, " if he had been conscious of a single vul- nerable point in himself, he would not have taken up the business of writing ; " but on another occasion he writes, " I make it a rule never to read the attacks made upon me ; " and Captain Hall remarks, " He never reads- the criticisms on his books ; this I know from the most unquestionable authority. Praise, he says, gives him no> pleasure, and censure annoys him." Madame de Graf- figny says, also, of Voltaire, " that he was altogether in- different to praise, but the least word from his enemies drove him crazy." Yet both these authors banqueted on the sweets of panegyric as much as any who ever lived. They were in the condition of an epicure whose- palate has lost its relish for the dainty fare in which it has been so long revelling, without becoming less sen- sible to the annoyances of sharper and coarser flavours- It may afford some consolation to humble mediocrity, to the less fortunate votaries of the muse, that those who- have reached the summit of Parnassus are not much* more contented with their condition than those who are- scrambling among the bushes at the bottom of the moun- tain. The fact seems to be. as Scott himself intimates. 202 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. more than once, that the joy is in the chase, whether in the prose or the poetry of life. But it is higli time to terminate our lucubrations, which, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, have already run to a length that must trespass on the patience of the reader. We rise from the perusal of these delight- ful volumes with the same sort of melancholy feeling with which we wake from a pleasant dream. The con- cluding volume, of which such ominous presage is given in the last sentence of the fifth, has not yet reached us ; but we know enough to anticipate the sad catastrophe it is to unfold of the drama. In those which we have seen, we have beheld a succession of interesting characters come upon the scene and pass away to their long home. "Bright eyes now closed in dust, gay voices for ever silenced," seem to haunt us, too, as we write. The imagination reverts to Abbotsford, the romantic and once brilliant Abbotsford, the magical creation of his hands. We see its halls radiant with the hospitality of his benevolent heart ; thronged with pilgrims from every land, assembled to pay homage at the shrine of genius ; echoing to the blithe music of those festal holidays when young and old met to renew the usages of the good old times. " These were its charms, but all these charms are fled." Its courts are desolate, or trodden only by the foot of the stranger. The stranger sits under the shadows of the trees which his hand planted. The spell of the en- chanter is dissolved; his wand is broken; and the mighty minstrel himself now sleeps in the bosom of the peaceful scenes embellished by his taste, and which his genius has made immortal. CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE* (October, 1839.) THERE are few topics of greater attraction, or when properly treated, of higher importance, than literary his- tory. For what is it but a faithful register of the suc- cessive steps by which a nation has advanced in the career of civilization ? Civil history records the crimes and the follies, the enterprizes, discoveries, and triumphs, it may be, of humanity. But to what do all these tend, or of what moment are they in the eye of the philoso- pher, except as they accelerate or retard the march of civilization. The history of literature is the history of the human mind. It is, as compared with other his- tories, the intellectual as distinguished from the material, the informing spirit, as compared with the outward and visible. When such a view of the mental progress of a people is combined with individual biography, we have all the materials for the deepest and most varied interest. The life of the man of letters is not always circumscribed by the walls of a cloister, and was not, even in those days when the cloister was the familiar abode of science. The history of Dante and of Petrarch is the best commentary on that of their age. In later times, the man of letters has taken part in all the principal concerns of public and social life. But, even when the story is to derive its in- terest from personal character, what a store of entertain- * " Sketches of English Literature ; with Considerations on the Spirit of the Times, Men and Revolutions. By the VLscouut do Chateaubriand." 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1836. 204 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. xnent is supplied by the eccentricities of genius, the joys and sorrows, not visible to vulgar eyes, but which agitate his finer sensibilities as powerfully as the greatest shocks of worldly fortune would a hardier and less visionary temper ! What deeper interest can romance afford than is to be gathered from the melancholy story of Petrarch, Tasso, Alfieri, Eousseau, Byron, Burns, and a crowd of familiar names, whose genius seems to have been given them only to sharpen their sensibility to suf- fering ? What matter if their sufferings were, for the most part, of the imagination ? They were not the less real to them. They lived in a world of imagination, and, by the gift of genius, unfortunate to its proprietor, have known how, in the language of one of the most unfortunate, " to make madness beautiful '' in the eyes- of others. But, notwithstanding the interest and importance of literary history, it has hitherto received but little atten- tion from English writers. No complete survey of the treasures of our native tongue has been yet produced, or even attempted. The earlier periods of the poetical development of the nation have been well illustrated by various antiquaries. Warton has brought the history of poetry down to the season of its first vigorous expan- sion, the age of Elizabeth. But he did not penetrate beyond the magnificent vestibule of the temple. Dr. Johnson's " Lives of the Poets " have done much to supply the deficiency in this department. But much more remains to be done to afford the student anything like a complete view of the progress of poetry in Eng- land. Johnson's work, as every one knows, is conducted on the most capricious and irregular plan. The bio- graphies were dictated by the choice of the bookseller. Some of the most memorable names in British literature are omitted to make way for a host of minor luminaries. CHATEAUBEIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 205 whose dim radiance, unassisted by the critic's magnify- ing lens, would never have penetrated to posterity. The same irregularity is visible in the proportion he has assigned to each of his subjects ; the principal figures, or what should have been such, being often thrown into the background to make room for some subordinate person whose story was thought to have more interest. Besides these defects of plan, the critic was certainly deficient in sensibility to the more delicate, the minor beauties of poetic sentiment. He analyzes verse in the cold-blooded spirit of a chemist, until all the aroma which constituted its principal charm escapes in the decomposition. By this kind of process, some of the finest fancies of the Muse, the lofty dithyrambics of Gray, the ethereal effusions of Collins, and of Milton too, are rendered sufficiently vapid. In this sort of criticism, all the effect that relies on impressions goes for nothing. Ideas are alone taken into the account, and all is weighed in the same hard, matter of fact scales of common sense, like so much solid prose. What a sorry figure would Byron's Muse make subjected to such an ordeal ! The doctor's taste in composition, to judge from his own style, was not of the highest order. It was a style, indeed, of extraordinary power, suited to the expression of his original thinking, bold, vigorous, and glowing with all the lustre of pointed antithesis. But the brilliancy is cold, and the ornaments are much too florid and overcharged for a graceful effect. When to these minor blemishes we add the graver one of an obliquity of judgment, produced by inveterate political and re- ligious prejudice, which has thrown a shadow over some of the brightest characters subjected to his pencil, we have summed up a fair amount of critical deficiencies. With all this, there is no one of the works of this great and good man in which he has displayed more of the 206 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. strength of his mighty intellect, shown a more pure and masculine morality, more sound principles of criticism in the abstract, more acute delineation of character, and more gorgeous splendour of diction. His defects, how- ever, such as they are, must prevent his maintaining with ' posterity that undisputed dictatorship in criticism which was conceded to him in his own day. We must do justice to his errors as well as to his excellences, in order that we may do justice to the characters which have come under his censure. And we must admit that his work, however admirable as a gallery of splendid por- traits, is inadequate to convey anything like a complete or impartial view of English poetry. The English have made but slender contributions to the history of foreign literatures. The most important, probably, are Roscoe's works, in which literary criticism, though but a subordinate feature, is the most valuable part of the composition. As to anything like a general survey of this department, they are wholly deficient. The deficiency, indeed, is likely to be supplied, to a certain extent, by the work of Mr. Hallam, now in progress of publication, the first volume of which the only one which has yet issued from the press gives evidence of the same curious erudition, acuteness, honest impartiality, and energy of diction which distinguish the other writings of this eminent scholar. But the extent of his work, limited to four volumes, precludes anything more than a survey of the most prominent features of the vast subject he has undertaken. The Continental nations, under serious discourage- ments, too, have been much more active than the British in this field. The Spaniards can boast a general history of letters, extending to more than twenty volumes in length, and compiled with sufficient impartiality. The Italians have several such. Yet these are the lands of CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 207 the Inquisition, where reason is hoodwinked and the honest utterance of opinion has been recompensed by persecution, exile, and the stake. How can such a people estimate the character of compositions which, produced under happier institutions, are instinct with the spirit of freedom ! How can they make allowance for the manifold eccentricities of a literature where thought is allowed to expatiate in all the independence of individual caprice ! How can they possibly, trained to pay such nice deference to outward finish and mere verbal elegance, have any sympathy with the rough and homely beauties which emanate from the people and are addressed to the people ? The French, nurtured under freer forms of govern- ment, have contrived to come under a system of literary laws scarcely less severe. Their first great dramatic pro- auction gave rise to a scheme of critical legislation which has continued ever since to press on the genius of the nation in all the higher walks of poetic art. Amid all the mutations of state, the tone of criticism has remained essentially the same to the present century, when, indeed, the boiling passions and higher excite- ments of a revolutionary age have made the classic models on which their literature was cast appear some- what too frigid, and a warmer colouring has been sought by an infusion of English sentiment. But this mixture or rather confusion, of styles, neither French nor English, seems to rest on no settled principles, and is, probably, too alien to the genius of the people to continue per- manent. The French, forming themselves early on a foreign and antique model, were necessarily driven to rules, as a substitute for those natural promptings which have directed the course of other modern nations in the career of letters. Such rules, of course, while assimilating o 208 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. them to antiquity, drew them aside from sympathy with their own contemporaries. How can they, thus formed on an artificial system, enter into the spirit of other literatures so uncongenial with their own ? That the French continued subject to such a system, with little change to the present age, is evinced by the example of Voltaire, a writer whose lawless ridicule, " like the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things prone," but whose revolutionary spirit made no serious changes in the principles of the national criticism. Indeed, his commentaries on Corneille furnish evidence of a willing- ness to contract still closer the range of the poet, and to define more accurately the laws by which his move- ments were to be controlled. Voltaire's history affords -an evidence of the truth of the Horatian maxim, "naturam expellas" etc. In his younger days he passed some time, as is well known, in England, and contracted there a certain relish for the strange models which came under his observation. On his return he made many attempts to introduce the foreign school with which he had become acquainted to his own countrymen. His vanity was gratified by detecting the latent beauties of his barbarian neighbours and by being the first to point them out to his countrymen. It as- sociated him with names venerated on the other side of the Channel, and at home transferred a part of their glory to himself. Indeed, he was not backward in transferring as much as he could of it, by borrowing on his own account, where he could venture, manibus plenis, and with very little acknowledgment. The French at length became so far reconciled to the mon- strosities of their neighbours that a regular translation of :Shakspeare, the lord of the British Pandemonium, was executed by Letourneur, a scholar of no great merit; CHATEAUBETAND'S ENGLISH LITERATUBE. 209 but the work was well received. Voltaire, tlie veteran, in his solitude of Ferney, was roused, by the applause bestowed on the English poet in his Parisian costume, to a sense of his own imprudence. He saw, in imagination, the altars which had been raised to him, as well as to the other master-spirits of the national drama, in a fair way to be overturned in order to make room for an idol of his own importation. " Have you seen," he writes, speaking of Letourneur's version, " his abominable trash ? Will you endure the affront put upon France by it ? There are no epithets bad enough, nor fool's-caps, nor pillories enough in all France for such a scoundrel The blood tingles in my old veins in speaking of him. What is the most dreadful part of the affair is, the monster has his party in France ; and, to add to my shame and con- sternation, it was I who first sounded the praises of this Shakspeare, I who first showed the pearls, picked here and there, from his overgrown dung-heap. Little did I anticipate that I was helping to trample under foot, at some future day, the laurels of Racine and Corneille to adorn the brows of a barbarous player, this drunkard of a Shakspeare." Not content with this expectoration of his bile, the old poet transmitted a formal letter of remonstrance to D'Alembert, which was read publicly, as designed, at a regular stance of the Academy. The document, after expatiating at length on the blunders, vulgarities, and indecencies of the English bard, concludes with this appeal to the critical body he was addressing : *' Paint to yourselves, gentlemen, Louis the Fourteenth in his gallery at Versailles, surrounded by his brilliant court : a tatterdemalion advances, covered with rags, and proposes to the assembly to abandon the tragedies of Racine for a mountebank, full of grimaces, with nothing but a lucky hit, now and then, to redeem them." 210 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. At a later period, Duels, the successor of Voltaire, if we remember right, in the Academy, a writer of far superior merit to Letourneur, did the British bard into much better French than his predecessor ; though Ducis, as he takes care to acquaint us, " did his best to efface those startling impressions of horror which would have damned his author in the polished theatres of Paris ! " Voltaire need not have taken the affair so much to heart. Shakspeare, reduced within the compass, as much as possible, of the rules, with all his eccentricities and peculiarities all that made him English, in fact smoothed away, may be tolerated, and to a certain ex- tent countenanced, in the " polished theatres of Paris." But this is not " Shakspeare, Nature's child, Warbling his native wood-notes wild." The Germans are just the antipodes of their French neighbours. Coming late on the arena of modern litera- ture, they would seem to be particularly qualified for excelling in criticism by the variety of styles and models for their study supplied by other nations. They have, accordingly, done wonders in this depart- ment, and have extended their critical wand over the remotest regions, dispelling the mists of old prejudice, and throwing the light of learning on what before was dark and inexplicable. They certainly are entitled to the credit of a singularly cosmopolitan power of divest- ing themselves of local and national prejudice. No nation has done so much to lay the foundations of that reconciling spirit of criticism which, instead of con- demning a difference of taste in different nations as a departure from it, seeks to explain such discrepancies by the peculiar circumstances of the nation, and thus from the elements of discord, as it were, to build up a universal and harmonious system. The exclusive and CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 211 unfavourable views entertained by some of their later critics respecting the French literature, indeed, into which they have been urged, no doubt, by a desire to counteract the servile deference shown to that literature by their countrymen of the preceding age, forms an important exception to their usual candour. As general critics, however, the Germans are open to grave objections. The very circumstances of their situation, so favourable, as we have said, to the forma- tion of a liberal criticism, have encouraged the taste for theories and for system-building, always unpro- pitious to truth. Whoever broaches a theory has a hard battle to fight with conscience. If the theory cannot conform to the facts, so much the worse for the facts, as some wag has said ; they must, at all events, conform to the theory. The Germans have put together hypotheses with the facility with which children con- struct card houses, and many of thorn bid fair to last as long. They show more industry in accumulating materials than taste or discretion in their arrangement. They carry their fantastic imagination beyond the legi- timate province of the muse into the sober fields of criticism. Their philosophical systems, curiously and elaborately devised, with much ancient lore and solemn imaginings, may remind one of some of those vener- able English cathedrals where the magnificent and mysterious Gothic is blended with the clumsy Saxon. The effect, on the whole, is grand, but grotesque withal. The Germans are too often sadly wanting in dis- cretion, or, in vulgar parlance, taste. They are per- petually overleaping the modesty of nature. They are possessed by a cold-blooded enthusiasm, if we may say so, since it seems to come rather from the head than the heart, which spurs them on over the plainest P 2 212 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. barriers of common sense, until even the right becomes the wrong. A striking example of these defects is fur- nished by the dramatic critic Schlegel, whose "Lectures'* are, or may be, familiar to every reader, since they have been reprinted in the English version in this country. No critic, not even a native, has thrown such a flood of light on the characteristics of the sweet bard of Avon. He has made himself so intimately acquainted with the peculiar circumstances of the poet's age and country that he has been enabled to speculate on his productions as those of a contemporary. In this way he has furnished a key to the mysteries of his composition, has reduced what seemed anomalous to system, and has supplied Shakspeare's own countrymen with new arguments for vindicating the spontaneous -suggestions of feeling on strictly philosophical princi- ples. Not content with this important service, he, as usual, pushes his argument to extremes, vindicates ob- vious blemishes as necessary parts of a system, and calls on us to admire, in contradiction to the most ordinary principles of taste and common sense. Thus, for example, speaking of Shakspeare's notorious blun- ders in geography and chronology, he coolly tells us, " I undertake to prove that Shakspeare's anachronisms are, for the most part, committed purposely and after great consideration." In the same vein, speaking of the poet's villanous puns and quibbles, which to his shame, or rather, that of his age, so often bespangle with tawdry brilliancy the majestic robe of the Muse, he assures us that " the poet here probably, as every- where else, has followed principles which will bear a strict examination." But the intrepidity of criticism never went farther than in the conclusion of this same analysis, where he unhesitatingly assigns several apocry- phal plays to Shakspeare, gravely informing us that CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE. the last three "Sir John Oldcastle," "A Yorkshire Tragedy," and "Thomas Lord Cromwell," of which the English critics speak with unreserved contempt, " are not only unquestionably Shakspeare's, but, in his judgment, rank among the best and ripest of his works ! " The old bard, could he raise his head from the tomb where none might disturb his bones, would exclaim, we imagine, " Non tali auxilio !" It shows a tolerable degree of assurance in a critic thus to dogmatize on nice questions of verbal resem- blance which have so long baffled the natives of the country, who, on such questions, obviously can be the only competent judges. It furnishes a striking example of the want of discretion noticeable in so many of the German scholars. With all these defects, however, it cannot be denied that they have widely extended the limits of rational criticism, and, by their copious stores of erudition, furnished the student with facilities for attaining the best points of view for a comprehensive survey of both ancient and modern literature. The English have had advantages, on the whole, greater than those of any other people for perfecting the science of general criticism. They have had no academies to bind the wing of genius to the earth by their thousand wire-drawn subtleties. No inquisition has placed its burning seal upon the lip and thrown its dark shadow over the recesses of the soul. They have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of thinking what they pleased, and of uttering what they thought. Their minds, trained to independence, have had no occasion to shrink from encountering any topic, and have acquired a masculine confidence indispensable to a calm appreciation of the mighty and widely diversi- fied productions of genius, as unfolded under the influ- ences of as widely- diversified institutions and national' 214 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. character. Their own literature, with chameleon-like delicacy, has reflected all the various aspects of the nation in the successive stages of its history. The rough, romantic beauties and gorgeous pageantry of the Elizabethan age, the stern, sublime enthusiasm of the Commonwealth, the cold brilliancy of Queen Anne, and the tumultuous movements and ardent sensibilities of the present generation, all have been reflected, as in a mirror, in the current of English literature as it has flowed down through the lapse of ages. It is easy to understand what advantages this cultivation of all these different styles of composition at home must give the critic in divesting himself of narrow and local preju- dice, and in appreciating the genius of foreign litera- tures, in each of which some one or other of these different styles has found favour. To this must be added the advantages derived from the structure of the English language itself, which, compounded of the Teutonic and the Latin, offers facilities for a compre- hension of other literatures not afforded by those lan- guages, as the German and the Italian, for instance, almost exclusively derived from but one of them. With all this, the English, as we have remarked, have made fewer direct contributions to general lite- rary criticism than the Continental nations, unless, indeed, we take into the account the periodical criti- cism, which has covered the whole field with a Uaht skirmishing, very unlike any systematic plan of opera- tions. The good effect of this guerilla warfare may well be doubted. Most of these critics for the nonce (and we certainly are competent judges on this point) come to their work with little previous preparation. Their attention has been habitually called, for the most part, in other directions, and they throw off an acci- dental essay in the brief intervals of other occupation. CHATEAUBBIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 215 Hence their views are necessarily often superficial, and sometimes contradictory, as may be seen from turning over the leaves of any journal where literary topics are widely discussed ; for, whatever consistency may be demanded in politics or religion, very free scope is offered, even in the same journal, to literary specula- tion. Even when the article may have been the fruit of a mind ripened by study and meditation on con- genial topics, it too often exhibits only the partial view suggested by the particular and limited direction of the author's thoughts in this instance. Truth is not much served by this irregular process ; and the general illu- mination indispensable to a full and fair survey of the whole ground can never be supplied from such scattered and capricious gleams thrown over it at random. Another obstacle to a right result is founded in the very constitution of re view- writing. Miscellaneous in its range of topics, and addressed to a miscellaneous class of readers, its chief reliance for success in com- petition with the thousand novelties of the day is in the temporary interest it can excite. Instead of a con- scientious discussion and cautious examination of the matter in hand, we too often find an attempt to stimu- late the popular appetite by piquant sallies of wit, by caustic sarcasm, or by a pert, dashing confidence, that cuts the knot it cannot readily unloose. Then, again, the spirit of periodical criticism would seem to be little favourable to perfect impartiality. The critic, shrouded in his secret tribunal, too often demeans him- self like a stern inquisitor, whose business is rather to convict than to examine. Criticism is directed to scent out blemishes instead of beauties. " Judex damnaiur ctim nocens absolvitur " is the bloody motto of a well- known British periodical, which, under this piratical 216 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. flag, has sent a broadside into many a gallant bark that deserved better at its hands. When we combine with all this the spirit of patriotism, or, what passes for such with nine-tenths of the world, the spirit of national vanity, we shall find abundant motives for a deviation from a just, impartial estimate of foreign literatures. And if we turn over the pages of the best-conducted English journals, we shall probably find ample evidence of the various causes we have enumerated. We shall find, amid abundance of shrewd and sarcastic observation, smart skirmish of wit, and clever antithesis, a very small infusion of sober, dispas- sionate criticism ; the criticism founded on patient study and on strictly philosophical principles; the criticism on which one can safely rely as the criterion of good taste, and which, however tame it may appear to the jaded appetite of the literary lounger, is the only one that will attract the eye of posterity. The work named at the head of our article will, we suspect, notwithstanding the author's brilliant reputation, never meet this same eye of posterity. Though pur- porting to be, in its main design, an Essay on English Literature, it is, in fact, a multifarious compound of as many ingredients as entered into the witches' cauldron, to say nothing of a gallery of portraits of dead and living, among the latter of whom M. de Chateaubriand himself is not the least conspicuous. " I have treated of every- thing," he says, truly enough, in his preface, "the Present, the Past, the Future." The parts are put together in the most grotesque and disorderly manner, with some striking coincidences, occasionally, of cha- racters and situations, and some facts not familiar to every reader. The most unpleasant feature in the book is the doleful lamentation of the author over the evil times on which he has fallen. He has, indeed, lived CHATEAUBEIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUBE. 217 somewhat beyond his time, which was that of Charles the Tenth, of pious memory, the good old time of apostolicals and absolutists, which will not be likely to revisit France again very soon. Indeed, our unfortunate author reminds one of some weather-beaten hulk which the tide has left high and dry on the strand, and whose signals of distress are little heeded by the rest of the convoy, which have trimmed their sails more dexterously and sweep merrily on before the breeze. The present work affords glimpses, occasionally, of the author's hap- pier style, which has so often fascinated us in his earlier productions. On the whole, however, it will add little to his reputation, nor, probably, much subtract from it. When a man has sent forth a score or two of octavos into the world, and as good as some of M. de Chateau- briand's, he can bear up under a poor one now and then. This is not the first indifferent work laid at his door, and, as he promises to keep the field for some time longer, it will probably not be the last. We pass over the first half of the first volume, to come to the Reformation, the point of departure, as it were, for modern civilization. Our author's views in relation to it, as we might anticipate, are not precisely those we should entertain. " In a religious point of view," he says, " the Reform- ation is leading insensibly to indifference, or the complete absence of faith : the reason is, that the independence of the mind terminates in two gulfs, doubt and incredulity. " By a very natural reaction, the Reformation, at its birth, rekindled the dying flame of Catholic fanaticism. It may thus be regarded as the indirect cause of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the disturbances of the League, the assassination of Henry the Fourth, the murders in Ireland, and of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the dragonnades " / Vol. i. p. 193. 218 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. As to the tendency of the Reformation towards doubt and incredulity, we know that free inquiry, continually presenting new views as the sphere of observation is enlarged, may unsettle old principles without establishing any fixed ones in their place, or, in other words, lead to scepticism ; but we doubt if this happens more frequently than under the opposite system, inculcated by the Romish Church, which, by precluding examination, excludes the only ground of rational belief. At all events, scepticism in the former case is much more remediable than in the latter ; since the subject of it, by pursuing his inquiries, will, it is to be hoped, as truth is mighty, arrive at last at a right result ; while the Romanist, inhibited from such inquiry, has no remedy. The ingenious author of "Doblado's Letters from Spain" has painted in the most affecting colours the state of such a mind, which, declining to take its creed at the bidding of another, is lost in a labyrinth of doubt without a clue to guide it. As to charging on the Reformation the various enor- mities with which the above extract concludes, the idea is certainly new. It is, in fact, making the Protestants guilty of their own persecution, and Henry the Fourth of his own assassination ; quite an original view of the subject, which, as far as we know, has hitherto escaped the attention of historians. A few pages farther, and we find the following in- formation respecting the state of Catholicism in our own country : " Maryland, a Catholic and very populous state, made common cause with the others, and now most of the Western States are Catholic. The progress of this com- munion in the United States of America exceeds belief. There it has been invigorated in its evangelical aliment, popular liberty, while other communions decline in pro- found indifference." Vol. i. p. 201. CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 219 We were not aware of this state of things. We did indeed know that the Koman Church had increased much of late years, especially in the valley of the Mississippi; but so have other communions, as the Methodist and Baptist, for example, the latter of which comprehends five times as many disciples as the Roman Catholic. As to the population of the latter in the West, the whole number of Catholics in the Union does not amount, probably, to three-fourths of the number of inhabitants in the single Western State of Ohio. The truth is, that in a country where there is no established or favoured sect, and where the clergy depend on voluntary contribution for their support, there must be constant efforts at proselytism, and a mutation of religious opinion, according to the convictions, or fancied convictions, of the converts. What one denomination gains another loses, till, roused in its turn by its rival, new efforts are made to retrieve its position, and the equilibrium is restored. In the meantime, the popu- lation of the whole country goes forward with giant strides, and each sect boasts, and boasts with truth, of the hourly augmentation of its numbers. Those of the Roman Catholics are swelled, moreover, by a considerable addition from emigration, many of the poor foreigners, especially the Irish, being of that persuasion. But this is no ground of triumph, as it infers no increase to the sum. of Catholicism, since what is thus gained in the New World is lost in the Old. Qur author pronounces the Reformation hostile to the arts, poetry, eloquence, elegant literature, and even the spirit of military heroism. But hear his own words : "The Reformation, imbued with the spirit of its founder, declared itself hostile to the arts. It sacked tombs, churches, and monuments, and made in France and England heaps of ruins." .... 220 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. " The beautiful in literature will be found to exist in a greater or less degree, in proportion as writers have approximated to the genius of the Roman Church." . . . "If the Reformation restricted genius in poetry, elo- quence, and the arts, it also checked heroism in war, for heroism is imagination in the military order." Vol. i., pp. 194-207. This is a sweeping denunciation, and, as far as the arts of design are intended, may probably be defended. The Romish worship, its stately ritual and gorgeous ceremonies, the throng of numbers assisting, in one form or another, at the service, all required spacious and mag- nificent edifices, with the rich accessories of sculpture and painting, and music also, to give full effect to the spectacle. Never was there a religion which addressed itself more directly to the senses. And, fortunately for it, the immense power and revenues of its ministers enabled them to meet its exorbitant demands. On so splendid a theatre, and under such patronage, the arts were called into life in modern Europe, and most of all in that spot which represented the capital of Christendom. It was there, amid the pomp and luxury of religion, that those beautiful structures rose, with those exquisite crea- tions of the chisel and the pencil, which embodied in themselves all the elements of ideal beauty. But, independently of these external circumstances, the spirit of Catholicism was eminently favourable to the artist. Shut out from free inquiry from the Scriptures themselves and compelled to receive the dogmas of his teachers upon trust, the road to conviction lay less through the understanding than the heart. The heart was to be moved, the affections and sympathies to be stirred, as well as the senses to be dazzled. This was the machinery by which alone could an effectual devotion to the faith be maintained in an ignorant people. It CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 221 was not, therefore, Christ as a teacher delivering lessons of practical wisdom and morality that was brought before the eye, but Christ filling the offices of human sympathy, ministering to the poor and sorrowing, giving eyes to the blind, health to the sick, and life to the dead, It was Christ suffering under persecution, crowned with thorns, lacerated with stripes, dying on the cross. These- sorrows and sufferings were understood by the dullest soul, and told more than a thousand homilies. So with the Virgin. It was not that sainted mother of the Saviour whom Protestants venerate but do not worship ; it was the Mother of God, and entitled, like him, to- adoration. It was a woman, and, as such, the object of those romantic feelings which would profane the service of the Deity, but which are not the less touching as being in accordance with human sympathies. The respect for the Virgin, indeed, partook of that which a Catholic might feel for his tutelar saint and his mistress combined. o Orders of chivalry were dedicated to her service ; and her shrine was piled with more offerings and frequented by more pilgrimages than the altars of the Deity himself. Thus, feelings of love, adoration, and romantic honour, strangely blended, threw a halo of poetic glory around their object, making it the most exalted theme for the study of the artist. What wonder that this subject should have called forth the noblest inspirations of his genius ? What wonder that an artist like Raphael should have found in the simple portraiture of a woman and a child the materials for immortality ? It was something like a kindred state of feeling which called into being the arts of ancient Greece, when her mythology was comparatively fresh, and faith was easy, when the legends of the past, familiar as Scripture story at a later day, gave a real existence to the beings of fancy, and the artist, embodying these in forms of visible beauty, but finished the work which the poet had begun. The Reformation brought other trains of ideas, aflft with them other influences on the arts, than those of Catholicism. Its first movements were decidedly hos- tile, since the works of art with which the temples were adorned, being associated with the religion itself, became odious as the symbols of idolatry. But the spirit of the Reformation gave thought a new direction even in the cultivation of art. It was no longer sought to appeal to the senses by brilliant display, or to waken the sensibili- ties by those superficial emotions which find relief in tears. A sterner, deeper feeling was roused. The mind was turned within, as it were, to ponder on the import of existence and its future destinies ; for the chains were withdrawn from the soul, and it was permitted to wander at large in the regions of speculation. Reason took the place of sentiment, the useful of the merely ornamental. Facts were substituted for forms, even the ideal forms of beauty. There were to be no more Michael Angelos and Raphaels ; no glorious Gothic temples which consumed generations in their building. The sublime and the beautiful were not the first objects proposed by the artist. He sought truth, fidelity to nature. He stu- died the characters of his species as well as the forms of imaginary perfection. He portrayed life as developed in its thousand peculiarities before his own eyes, and the ideal gave way to the natural. In this way, new schools of painting, like that of Hogarth, for example, arose, which, however inferior in those great properties for which we must admire the masterpieces of Italian art, had a significance and philosophic depth which furnished quite as much matter for study and meditation. A similar tendency was observable in poetry, elo- quence, and works of elegant literature. The influence CHATEAUBEIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 223 of the Keformation here was undoubtedly favourable, whatever it may have been on the arts. How could it be otherwise on literature, the written expression of thought, in which no grace of visible forms and pro- portions, no skill of mechanical execution, can cheat the eye with the vain semblance of genius ? But it was not until the warm breath of the Reformation had dis- solved the icy fetters which had so long held the spirit of man in bondage that the genial current of the soul was permitted to flow, that the gates of reason were unbarred, and the mind was permitted to taste of the tree of knowledge, forbidden tree no longer. Where was the scope for eloquence when thought was stifled in the very sanctuary of the heart? for out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh. There might, indeed, be an elaborate attention to the outward forms of expression, an exquisite finish of verbal arrangement, the dress and garniture of thought. And, in fact, the Catholic nations have surpassed the Protestant in attention to verbal elegance and the soft music of numbers, to nice rhetorical artifice and brilliancy of composition. The poetry of Italy and the prose of France bear ample evidence how much time and talent have been expended on this beauty of outward form, the rich vehicle of thought. But where shall we find the powerful reasoning, various know- leige, and fearless energy of diction which stamp the oratory of Protestant England and America? In France, indeed, where prose has received a higher poLsh and classic elegance than in any other country, pulpit eloquence has reached an uncommon degree of excellence : for, though much was excluded, the avenues to the heart, as with the painter and the sculptor, were still left open to the orator. If there has been a deficiency in this respect in the English Church, which 224 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MTSCELLANTES. all will not admit, it arises probably from the fact that the mind, unrestricted, has been occupied with reasoning rather than rhetoric, and sought to clear away old prejudices and establish new truths, instead of waken- ing a transient sensibility or dazzling the imagination with poetic flights of eloquence. That it is the fault of the preacher, at all events, and not of Protestantism, is shown by a striking example under our own eyes, that of our distinguished countryman Dr. Channing, whose style is irradiated with all the splendours of a glowing imagination, showing, as powerfully as any other example, probably, in English prose, of what melody and compass the language is capable under the touch of genius instinct with genuine enthusiasm. Not that we would recommend this style, grand and beau- tiful as it is, for imitation. We think we have seen the ill effects of this already in more than one instance. In fact, no style should be held up as a model for imitation. Dr. Johnson tells us, in one of those oracular passages somewhat threadbare now, that " whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." With all deference to the great critic, who, by the formal cut of the sentence just quoted, shows that he did not care to follow his own prescription, we think other- wise. Whoever would write a good English style, we should say, should acquaint himself with the mysteries- of the language as revealed in the writings of the best masters, but should form his own style on nobody but himself. Every man, at least every man with a spark of originality in his composition, has his own peculiar way of thinking, and, to give it effect, it must find its way out in its own peculiar language. Indeed, it is impossible to separate language from thought in that CHATEAUBEIAND'S ENGLISH LITEBATUBE. 225 delicate blending of both which is called style ; at least, it is impossible to produce the same effect with the original by any copy, however literal. We may imitate the structure of a sentence, but the ideas which gave it its peculiar propriety we cannot imitate. The forms of expression that suit one man's train of think- ing no more suit another's than one man's clothes will suit another. They will be sure to be either too large or too small, or, at all events, not to make what gen- tlemen of the needle call a good Jit. If the party chances, as is generally the case, to be rather under size, and the model is over size, this will only expose his own littleness the more. There is no case more in point than that afforded by Dr. Johnson himself. His brilliant style has been the ambition of every school- boy, and of some children of larger growth, since the days of the " Rambler." But the nearer they come to it the worse. The beautiful is turned into the fantastic, elaborate criticisms: the one in the " Edinburgh Re- view," from the pen of Mr. Macaulay ; the other by Dr. Channing, in the ''Christian Examiner," since repub- lished in his own works ; remarkable performances, each in the manner highly characteristic of its author, and which have contributed, doubtless, to draw attention to the prose compositions of their subject, as the criticism of Addison did to his poetry. There is something gra- tifying in the circumstance that this great advocate of intellectual liberty should have found his most able and eloquent expositor among us, whose position qualifies us in a peculiar manner for profiting by the rich legacy of his genius. It was but discharging a debt of gratitude. Chateaubriand has much to say about Milton, for whose writings, both prose and poetry, notwithstanding the difference of their sentiments on almost all points of politics and religion, he appears to entertain the most sincere reverence. His criticisms are liberal and just; they show a thorough study of his author ; but neither the historical facts nor the reflections will suggest much OO that is new on a subject now become trite to the English reader. "We may pass over a good deal of skimble-skamble stuff about men and things, which our author may have cut out of his commonplace-book, to come to his re- marks on Sir Walter Scott, whom he does not rate so highly as most critics. " The illustrious painter of Scotland," he says, " seems to me to have created a false class ; he has, in my opinion, confounded history and romance. The novelist has set about writing historical romances, and the his- torian romantic histories/' Vol. ii. p. 306. We should have said, on the contrary, that he had improved the character of both ; that he had given new value to romance by building it on' history, and new 232 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. charms to history by embellishing it with the graces of romance. To be more explicit. The principal historical work of Scott is the "Life of Napoleon." It has, unquestion- ably, many of the faults incident to a dashing style of composition, which precluded the possibility of compres- sion and arrangement in the best form of which the sub- ject was capable. This, in the end, may be fatal to the perpetuity of the work, for posterity will be much less- patient than our own age. He will have a much heavier load to carry, inasmuch as he is to bear up under all of his own time, and ours too. It is very certain, then, some must go by the board ; and nine sturdy volumes, which is the amount of Sir Walter's English edition, will be somewhat alarming. Had he confined himself to half the quantity, there would have been no ground for dis- trust. Every day, nay, hour, we see, ay, and feel, the ill effects of this rapid style of composition, so usual with the best writers of our day. The immediate profits which such writers are pretty sure to get, notwithstanding the example of M. Chateaubriand, operate like the dressing improvidently laid on a naturally good soil, forcing out noxious weeds in such luxuriance as to check, if not ab- solutely to kill, the more healthful vegetation. Quan- tities of trivial detail find their way into the page, mixed up with graver matters. Instead of that skilful prepara- tion by which all the avenues verge at last to one point,, so as to leave a distinct impression an impression of unity on the reader, he is hurried along zigzag, in a thousand directions, or round and round, but never, in the cant of the times, "going ahead" an inch. He leaves off pretty much where he set out, except that his memory may be tolerably well stuffed with facts, which, from want of some principle of cohesion, will soon drop out of it. He will find himself like a traveller who has CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATUPE. 233 been riding through a fine country, it may be, by moon- light, getting glimpses of everything, but no complete,, well -illuminated view of the whole ("quale per incertam lunam," &c.), or, rather, like the same traveller whizzing along in a locomotive so rapidly as to get even a glimpse- fairly of nothing, instead of making his tour in such a- manner as would enable him to pause at what was worth his attention, to pass by night over the barren and unin- teresting, and occasionally to rise to such elevations as- would afford the best points of view for commanding the various prospect. The romance-writer labours under no such embarrass- ments. He may, undoubtedly, precipitate his work, so- that it may lack proportion, and the nice arrangement required by the rules which, fifty years ago, would have- condemned it as a work of art. But the criticism of the present day is not so squeamish, or, to say truth, pe- dantic. It is enough for the writer of fiction if he give- pleasure ; and this, everybody knows, is not effected by the strict observance of artificial rules. It is of little consequence how the plot is entangled, or whether it be untied or cut in order to extricate the dramatis persons At least, it is of little consequence compared with the true delineation of character. The story is serviceable only as it affords a means for the display of this ; and i the novelist but keep up the interest of his story and the truth of his characters, we easily forgive any dislocations which his light vehicle may encounter from too heedless motion. Indeed, rapidity of motion may in some sort favour him, keeping up the glow of his invention, and striking out, as he dashes along, sparks of wit and fancy, that give a brilliant illumination to his track. But in history there must be another kind of process, a process at once slow and laborious. Old parchments are to be ransacked, charters and musty records to be deciphered, 234 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. and stupid, worm-eaten chroniclers, who had much more of passion, frequently, to blind, than good sense to guide them, must be sifted and compared. In short, a sort of Medea-like process is to be gone through, and many an old bone is to be boiled over in the cauldron before it can come out again clothed in the elements of beauty. The dreams of the novelist, the poet of prose, on the other hand, are beyond the reach of art, and the magician calls up the most brilliant forms of fancy, by a single stroke of his wand. Scott, in his History, was relieved in some degree from this necessity of studious research by borrowing his theme from contemporary events. It was his duty, in- deed, to examine evidence carefully and sift out contra- dictions and errors. This demanded shrewdness and caution, but not much previous preparation and study. It demanded, above all, candour ; for it was his business not to make out a ease for a client, but to weigh both sides, like an impartial judge, before summing up the evidence and delivering his conscientious opinion. We believe there is no good ground for charging Scott with having swerved from this part of his duty. Those who expected to see him deify his hero and raise altars to his memory were disappointed ; and so were those, also, who demanded that the tail and cloven hoof should be made to peep out beneath the imperial robe. But this proves his impartiality. It would be unfair, however, to require the degree of impartiality which is to be expected from one removed to a distance from the theatre of strife, from those national interests and feelings which are so often the disturbing causes of historic fairness. An American, no doubt, would have been in this respect in a more favourable point of view for contemplating the European drama. The ocean, stretched between us and the Old World, has the effect of time, and extinguishes, or, at CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE. 235 least, cools, the hot and angry feelings which find their way into every man's bosom within the atmosphere of the contest. Scott was a Briton, with all the pecu- liarities of one, at least of a North Briton; and the future historian who gathers materials from his labours will throw these national predilections into the scale in determining the probable accuracy of his statements. These are not greater than might occur to any man, and allowance will always be made for them, on the ground of a general presumption ; so that a greater degree of impartiality, by leading to false conclusions in this re- spect, would scarcely have served the cause of truth better with posterity. An individual who felt his repu- tation compromised may have joined issue on this or that charge of inaccuracy ; but no such charge has come from any of the leading journals in the country, which would not have been slow to expose it, and which would not, considering the great popularity and, consequently, in- fluence of the work, have omitted, as they did, to notice it at all, had it afforded any obvious ground of exception on this score. Where, then, is the romance which our author accuses Sir Walter of blending with history ? Scott was, in truth, master of the picturesque. He understood, better than any historian since the time of Livy, how to dispose his lights and shades so as to pro- duce the most striking result. This property of romance he had a right to borrow. This talent is particularly ob- servable in the animated parts of his story, in his battles, for example. No man ever painted those terrible scenes with greater effect. He had a natural relish for gunpowder ; and his mettle roused, like that of the war- horse, at the sound of the trumpet. His acquaintance with military science enabled him to employ a technical phraseology, just technical enough to give a knowing air to his descriptions, without embarrassing the reader by a 236 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. pedantic display of unintelligible jargon. This is a talent rare in a civilian. Nothing can be finer than many of his battle-pieces in his "Life of Bonaparte/' unless, indeed, we except one or two in his " History of Scot- land," as the fight of Bannockburn, for example, in which Burns's "Scots, wha hae" seems to breathe in every line. It is when treading on Scottish ground that he seems to feel all his strength. " I seem always to step more firmly," he said to someone, " when on my own native heather." His mind was steeped in Scottish lore, and his- bosom warmed with a sympathetic glow for the age of chivalry. Accordingly, his delineations of this period, whether in history or romance, are unrivalled ; as supe- rior in effect to those of most compilers as the richly- stained glass of the feudal ages is superior in beauty and brilliancy of tints to a modern imitation. If this be bor- rowing something from romance, it is, we repeat, no more than what is lawful for the historian, and explains the meaning of our assertion that he has improved history by the embellishments of fiction. Yet, after all, how wide the difference between the province of history and of romance, under Scott's own hands, may be shown by comparing his account of Mary's reign in his " History of Scotland " with the same- period in the novel of " The Abbot." The historian must keep the beaten track of events. The novelist launches- into the illimitable legions of fiction, provided only that his historic portraits be true to their originals. By due- attention to this, fiction is made to minister to history, and may, in point of fact, contain as much real truth, truth of character, though not of situation. " The dif- ference between the historian and me," says Fielding,, "is that with him everything is false but the names- and dates, while with me nothing is false but these." CHATEAUBBIAND'S ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. 237 There is, at least, as much truth in this as in most witticisms. It is the great glory of Scott that, by nice attention to costume and character in his novels, he has raised them to historic importance without impairing their in- terest as works of art. Who now would imagine that he could form a satisfactory notion of the golden days of Queen Bess that had not read " Kenil worth " ? or of Richard Coeur-de-Lion and his brave paladins that had not read " Ivanhoe " ? Why, then, it has been said, not at once incorporate into regular history all these traits which give such historical value to the novel 1 Because in this way the strict truth which history requires would be violated. This cannot be. The fact is, History and Romance are too near akin ever to be lawfully united. By mingling them together, a confusion is produced, like the mingling of day and night, mystifying and distorting every feature of the landscape. It is enough for the novelist if he be true to the spirit : the historian must be true also to the letter. He cannot coin pertinent re- marks and anecdotes to illustrate the characters of his drama. He cannot even provide them with suitable costumes. He must take just what Father Time has given him, just what he finds in the records of the age, setting down neither more nor less. Now, the dull chroniclers of the old time rarely thought of putting down the smart sayings of the great people they bio- graphize, still less of entering into minute circumstances of personal interest. These were too familiar to contem- poraries to require it, and therefore they waste their breath on more solemn matters of state, all important in their generation, but not worth a rush in the present. What would the historian not give could he borrow those fine touches of nature with which the novelist illustrates the characters of his actors. natural touches, indeed, 238 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. but, in truth, just as artificial as any other part, all coined in the imagination of the writer ? There is the same difference between his occupation and that of the novelist that there is between the historical and the por- trait painter. The former necessarily takes some great subject, with great personages, all strutting about in gorgeous state attire and air of solemn tragedy, while his brother artist insinuates himself into the family groups, and picks out natural familiar scenes and faces, laughing or weeping, but in the charming undress of nature, What wonder that novel-reading should be so much more amusing than history '( But we have already trespassed too freely on the patience of our readers, who will think the rambling spirit of our author contagious. Before dismissing him, however, we will give a taste of his quality by one or two extracts, not very germane to English literature, but about as much so as a great part of the work. The first is a poetical sally on Bonaparte's burial-place, quite in Monsieur Chateaubrand's peculiar vein : " The solitude of Napoleon, in his exile and his tomb, has thrown another kind of spell over a brilliant memory. Alexander did not die in sight of Greece; he disappeared amid the pomp of distant Babylon. Bonaparte did not close his eyes in the presence of France ; he passed away in the gorgeous horizon of the torrid zone. The man who had shown himself in such powerful reality vanished like a dream ; his life, which belonged to history, co- operated in the poetry of his death. He now sleeps for ever, like a hermit or a paria, beneath a willow, in a narrow valley, surrounded by steep rocks, at the extremity of a lonely path. The depth of the silence which presses upon him can only be compared to the vastness of that tumult which had surrounded him. Nations are absent ; their throng has retired. The bird of the tropics, har- CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 239 nessed to the car of the sun, as Buffon magnificently expresses it, speeding his flight downward from the planet of light, rests alone, for a moment, over the ashes the weight of which has shaken the equilibrium of the globe. " Bonaparte crossed the ocean to repair to his final exile, regardless of that beautiful sky which delighted Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Camoens. Stretched upon the ship's stern, he perceived not that unknown constellations were sparkling over his head. His power- ful glance, for the first time, encountered their rays. What to him were stars which he had never seen from his bivouacs, and which had never shone over his em- pire ? Nevertheless not one of them has failed to fulfil its destiny : one half of the firmament spread its light over his cradle, the other half was reserved to illuminate his tomb." Vol. ii., pp. 185, 186. The next extract relates to the British statesman, Wil- liam Pitt : " Pitt, tall and slender, had an air at once melancholy and sarcastic. His delivery was cold, his intonation monotonous, his action scarcely perceptible. At the same time, the lucidness and the fluency of his thoughts, the logic of his arguments, suddenly irradiated with flashes of eloquence, rendered his talents something above the ordinary line. " I frequently saw Pitt walking across St. James's Park from his own house to the palace. On his part, George the Third arrived from Windsor, after drinking beer out of a pewter pot with the farmers of the neigh- bourhood ; he drove through the mean courts of his mean habitation in a grey chariot, followed by a few of the horse guards. This was the master of the kings of Europe, as five or six merchants of the city are the masters of India. Pitt, dressed in black, with a steel- 240 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. hilted sword by his side, and his hat under his arm, ascended, taking two or three steps at a time. In his passage he only met with three or four emigrants, who had nothing to do. Casting on us a disdainful look, he turned up his nose and his pale face, and passed on. " At home, this great financier kept no sort of order ; he had no regular hours for his meals or for sleep. Over head and ears in debt, he paid nobody, and never could take the trouble to cast up a bill. A valet de chambre managed his house. Ill-dressed, without pleasure, with- out passion, greedy of power, he despised honours, and would not be anything more than William Pitt. "In the month of June, 1822, Lord Liverpool took me to dine at his country-house. As we crossed Putney Heath, he showed me the small house where the son of Lord Chatham, the statesman who had had Europe in his pay and distributed with his own hand all the treasures of the world, died in poverty." Vol. ii., pp. 277, 278. The following extracts show the changes that have taken place in English manners and society, and may afford the " whiskered pandour " of our own day an opportunity of contrasting his style of dandyism with that of the preceding generation : lt Separated from the Continent by a long war, the English retained their manners and their national cha- racter till the end of the last century. All was not yet machine in the working-classes, folly in the upper classes. On the same pavements where you now meet squalid figures and men in frock coats, you were passed by young girls with white tippets, straw hats tied under the chin with a riband, with a basket on the arm, in which was fruit or a book : all kept their eyes cast down ; all blushed when one looked at them. Frock coats, without any other, were so unusual in London in 1793, that a woman. CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. 241 deploring with tears the death of Louis the Sixteenth, said to me, ' But, my dear sir, is it true that the poor king was dressed in a frock coat when they cut off his headr " The gentlemen farmers had not yet sold their patri- mony to take up their residence in London ; they still formed, in the House of Commons, that independent fraction which, transferring their support from the oppo- sition to the ministerial side, upheld the ideas of order and propriety. They hunted the fox and shot pheasants in autumn, ate fat goose at Michaelmas, greeted the sir- lion with shouts of ' Roast beef for ever ! ' complained of the present, extolled the past, cursed Pitt and the war, which doubled the price of port wine, and went to bed drunk, to begin the same life again on the following day. They felt quite sure that the glory of Great Britain would not perish so long as ' God save the King ' was sung, the rotten boroughs maintained, the game laws en- forced, and hares and partridges could be sold by stealth at market, under the names of lions and ostriches." Vol. ii., pp. 279, 280. "In 1822, at the time of my embassy to London, the fashionable was expected to exhibit, at the first glance,, an unhappy and unhealthy man ; to have an air of ne- gligence about his person, long nails, a beard neither entire nor shaven, but as if grown for a moment un- awares, and forgotten during the preoccupations of wretchedness ; hair in disorder ; a sublime, mild, wicked eye ; lips compressed in disdain of human nature ; a Byronian heart, overwhelmed with weariness and disgust of life. " The dandy of the present day must have a conquer- ing, frivolous, insolent look. He must pay particular attention to his toilet, wear moustaches, or a beard trimmed into a circle like Queen Elizabeth's ruff, or lika 242 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the radiant disc of the sun. He shows the proud inde- pendence of his character by keeping his hat upon his head, by lolling upon sofas, by thrusting his boots into the faces of the ladies seated in admiration upon chairs before him. He rides with a cane, which he carries like a taper, regardless of the horse, which he bestrides, as it were, by accident. His health must be per- fect, and he must always have five or six felicities upon his hands. Some radical dandies, who have ad- vanced the farthest towards the future, have a pipe. But, no doubt, all this has changed, even during the time that I have taken to describe it." Vol. ii., pp. 303, 304. The avowed purpose of the present work, singular as it may seem from the above extracts, is to serve as an introduction to a meditated translation of Milton into French, since wholly, or in part, completed by M. Chateaubriand, who thinks, truly enough, that Milton's " poetical ideas make him a man of our own epoch." When an exile in England, in his early life, during the troubles of the Eevolution, our author earned an honour- able subsistence by translating some of Milton's verses ; and he now proposes to render the bard and himself the same kind office by his labours on a more extended scale. Thus he concludes : " I again seat myself at the table of my poet. He will have nourished me in my youth and my old age. It is nobler and safer to have recourse to glory than to power." Our author's situation is an in- different commentary on the value of literary fame, at least on its pecuniary value. No man has had more of it in his day. No man has been more alert to make the most of it by frequent, reiterated appearance before the public, whether in full dress or dishabille, yet always before them ; and now, in the decline of life, we find him obtaining a scanty support by " French translation and CHATEATJBBIAND'3 ENGLISH LITEBATUEE. 243 Italian song." We heartily hope that the bard of " Paradise Lost " will do better for his translator than he did for himself, and that M. de Chateaubriand will put more than five pounds in his pocket by his literary labour. a a BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES.* (January, 1841.) THE celebrated line of Bishop Berkeley, " Westward the course of empire takes its way," is too gratifying to national vanity not to be often quoted (though not always quoted right) ; and if we look on it in the nature of a prediction, the completion of it not being limited to any particular time, it will not be easy to disprove it. Had the bishop substituted " freedom " for " empire," it would be already fully justified by experience. It is curious to observe how steadily the progress of freedom, civil and religious, of the enjoy- ment of those rights which may be called the natural rights of humanity,- has gone on from east to west, and how precisely the more or less liberal character of the social institutions of a country may be determined by its- geographical position, as falling within the limits of one of the three quarters of the globe occupied wholly or in part by members of the great Caucasian family. Thus, in Asia we find only far-extended despotisms, in which but two relations are recognized, those of master and slave : a solitary master, and a nation of slaves. No constitution exists there to limit his authority ; no- intermediate body to counterbalance, or, at least, shield the people from its exercise. The people have no poli- tical existence. The monarch is literally the state. The * " History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent By George Bancroft." Vol. iii. Boston : Charles C. Little and James Brown. 8vo. pp. 468. BANCEOFT'S UNITED STATES. 245 religion of such countries is of the same complexion with their government. The free spirit of Christianity, quick- ening and elevating the soul by the consciousness of its glorious destiny, made few proselytes there ; but Moham- medanism, with its doctrines of blind fatality, found ready favour with those who had already surrendered their wills their responsibility to an earthly master. In such countries, of course, there has been little progress in science. Ornamental arts, and even the literature of imagination, have been cultivated with various success ; but little has been done in those pursuits which depend on freedom of inquiry and are connected with the best interests of humanity. The few monuments of an archi- tectural kind that strike the traveller's eye are the cold memorials of pomp and selfish vanity, not those of public spirit, directed to enlarge the resources and civilization of an empire. As we cross the boundaries into Europe, among the people of the same primitive stock and under the same parallels, we may imagine ourselves transplanted to an- other planet. Man no longer grovels in the dust beneath a master's frown. He walks erect, as lord of the creation, his eyes raised to that heaven to which his destinies call him. He is a free agent, thinks, speaks, acts for him- self; enjoys the fruits of his own industry; follows the career suited to his own genius and taste ; explores fear- lessly the secrets of time and nature : lives under laws which he has assisted in framing ; demands justice as his right when those laws are invaded. In his freedom of speculation and action he has devised various forms of government. In most of them the monarchical principle is recognized ; but the power of the monarch is limited by written or customary rules. The people at large enter more or less into the exercise of government; and a ammerous aristocracy, interposed between them and tha- 246 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. crown, secures them from the oppression of Eastern tyranny, while this body itself is so far an improvement in the social organization that the power, instead of being concentrated in a single person, plaintiff, judge, and executioner, is distributed among a large number of different individuals and interests. This is a great advance, in itself, towards popular freedom. The tendency, almost universal, is to advance still farther. It is this war of opinion this contest between light and darkness, now going forward in most of the countries of Europe which furnishes the point of view from which their history is to be studied in the present, and, it may be, the following centuries ; for revolutions in society, when founded on opinion, the only stable foundation, the only foundation at which the friend of humanity does not shudder, must be the slow work of time ; and who would wish the good cause to be so precipitated that, in eradicating the old abuses which have interwoven themselves with every stone and pillar of the building, the noble building itself, which has so long afforded security to its inmates, should be laid in ruins ? What is the best, what the worst form of govern- ment, in the abstract, may be matter of debate ; but there can be no doubt that the best will become the worst to a people who blindly rush into it without the preliminary training for comprehending and conducting it. Such transitions must, at least, cost the sacrifice of generations ; and the patriotism must be singularly pure and abstract which, at such cost, would purchase the possible, or even probable, good of a remote posterity. Various have been the efforts in the Old World at popular forms of government, but, from some cause or other, they have failed ; and however time, a wider intercourse, a greater familiarity with the practical duties of represen- tation, and, not least of all, our own auspicious example, BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 247 may prepare the European mind for the possession of republican freedom, it is very certain that, at the present moment, Europe is not the place for republics. The true soil for these is our own continent, the New World, the last of the three great geographical divisions of which we have spoken. This is the spot on which the beautiful theories of the European philosopher who had risen to the full freedom of speculation, while action was controlled have been reduced to practice. The atmosphere here seems as fatal to the arbitrary institu- tions of the Old World as that has been to the demo- cratic forms of our own. It seems scarcely possible that any other organization than these latter should exist here. In three centuries from the discovery of the country, the various races by which it is tenanted, some of them from the least liberal of the European monarchies, have, with few exceptions, come into the adoption of institutions of a republican character. Toleration, civil and religious, has been proclaimed, and enjoyed to an extent unknown since the world began, throughout the wide borders of this vast continent. Alas for those portions which have assumed the exercise of these rights without fully comprehending their import, who have been intoxicated with the fumes of freedom instead of drawing nourishment from its living principle ! It was a fortunate, or, to speak more properly, a provi- dential thing that the discovery of the New World was postponed to the precise period when it occurred. Had it taken place at an earlier time, during the flourishing period of the feudal ages, for example, the old institu- tions of Europe, with their hallowed abuses, might have been in grafted on this new stock, and, instead of the O fruit of the tree of life, we should have furnished only varieties of a kind already far exhausted and hastening to decay. But, happily, some important discoveries in 248 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. science, and, above all, the glorious Reformation, gave an electric shock to the intellect, long benumbed under the influence of a tyrannical priesthood. It taught men to distrust authority, to trace effects back to their causes, to search for themselves, and to take no guide but the reason which God had given them. It taught them to claim the right of free inquiry as their inalienable birth- right, and, with free inquiry, freedom of action. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the period of the mighty struggle between the conflicting elements of religion, as the eighteenth and nineteenth have been that of the great contest for civil liberty. It was in the midst of this universal ferment, and in consequence of it, that these shores were first peopled by our Puritan ancestors. Here they found a world where they might verify the value of those theories which had been derided as visionary or denounced as dangerous in their own land. All around was free, free as nature herself: the mighty streams rolling on in their majesty, as they had continued to roll from the creation ; the forests, which no hand had violated, flourishing in primeval grandeur and beauty ; their only tenants the wild animals, or the Indians nearly as wild, scarcely held together by any tie of social polity. No- where was the trace of civilized man or of his curious contrivances. Here was no Star Chamber nor Court of High Commission ; no racks, nor jails, nor gibbets ; no feudal tyrant to grind the poor man to the dust on which he toiled; no Inquisition, to pierce into the thought, and to make thought a crime. The only eye that was upon them was the eye of Heaven. True, indeed, in the first heats of suffering enthusiasm they did not extend that charity to others which they claimed for themselves. It was a blot on their cha- racters, but one which they share in common with most BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 249 reformers. The zeal requisite for great revolutions, whether in church or state, is rarely attended by charity for difference of opinion. Those who are willing to do and to suffer bravely for their own doctrines attach a value to them which makes them impatient of opposition from others. The martyr for conscience' sake cannot comprehend the necessity of leniency to those who denounce those truths for which he is prepared to lay down his own life. If he set so little value on his own life, is it natural he should set more on that of others ? The Dominican, who dragged his victims to the fires of the Inquisition in Spain, freely gave up his ease and his life to the duties of a missionary among the heathen. The Jesuits, who suffered martyrdom among the American savages in the propagation of their faith, stimulated those very savages to the horrid massacres of the Protestant settlements of New England. God has not often com- bined charity with enthusiasm. When he has done so, he has produced his noblest work, a More, or a Fdnelon. But, if the first settlers were intolerant in practice, they brought with them the living principle of freedom, which would survive when their generation had passed away. They could not avoid it ; for their coming here was in itself an assertion of that principle. They came for conscience' sake, to worship God in their own way. Freedom of political institutions they at once avowed. Every citizen took his part in the political scheme, and enjoyed all the consideration of an equal participation in civil privileges ; and liberty in political matters gra- dually brought with it a corresponding liberty in religious concerns. In their subsequent contest with the mother- country they learned a reason for their faith, and the best manner of defending it. Their liberties struck a deep root in the soil amid storms which shook but could not prostrate them. It is this struggle with the mother- 250 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. country, this constant assertion of the right of self- government, this tendency feeble in its beginning, in- creasing with increasing age towards republican insti- tutions, which connects the Colonial history with that of the Union, and forms the true point of view from which it is to be regarded. The history of this country naturally divides itself into three great periods.: the Colonial, when the idea of independence was slowty and gradually ripening in the American mind ; the Revolutionary, when this idea was maintained by arms ; and that of the Union, when it was reduced to practice. The first two heads are now ready for the historian ; the last is not yet ripe for him. Important contributions may be made to it in the form of local narratives, personal biographies, political discus- sions, subsidiary documents, and memoires pour servir ; but we are too near the strife, too much in the dust and mist of the parties, to have reached a point sufficiently distant and elevated to embrace the whole field of opera- tions in one view and paint it in its true colours and proportions for the eye of posterity. We are, besides, too new as an independent nation, our existence has been too short, to satisfy the scepticism of those who distrust the perpetuity of our political institutions. They do not consider the problem, so important to humanity, as yet solved. Such sceptics are found not only abroad, but at home. Not that the latter suppose the possibility of again returning to those forms of arbitrary government which belong to the Old World. It would not be more chimerical to suspect the Emperor Nicholas, or Prince Metternich, or the citizen-king Louis Philippe, of being republicans at heart, and sighing for a democracy, than to suspect the people of this country (above all, of New England, the most thorough democracy in existence) who have inherited republican principles and feelings BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 251 from their ancestors, drawn them in with thoir mother's milk, breathed the atmosphere of them from their cradle, participated in their equal rights and glorious privileges of foregoing their birthright and falsifying their nature so far as to acquiesce in any other than a popular form of government. But there are some sceptics who, when they reflect on the fate of similar institutions in other countries, when they see our sister states of South America, after nobly winning their independence, split into insignificant fractions, when they see the abuses which from time to time have crept into our own admi- nistration, and the violence offered, in manifold ways, to the Constitution, when they see ambitious and able statesmen in one section of the country proclaiming principles which must palsy the arm of the Federal Government, and urging the people of their own quarter to efforts for securing their independence of every other quarter, there are, we say, some wise and benevolent minds among us who, seeing all this, feel a natural dis- trust as to the stability of the federal compact, and consider the experiment as still in progress. We, indeed, are not of that number, while we respect and feel the weight of their scruples. We sympathize fully in those feelings, those hopes, it may be, which animate the great mass of our countrymen. Hope is the attribute of republics : it should be peculiarly so of ours. Our fortune is all in the advance. We have no past, as compared with the nations of the Old World. Our existence is but two centuries, dating from our embryo state ; our real existence as an independent people little more than half a century. We are to look forward, then, and go forward, not with vainglorious boasting, but with resolution and honest confidence. Boasting, indecorous in all, is peculiarly so in those who take credit for the great things they are going to do, not those they 252 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. have done. The glorification of an Englishman or a Frenchman, with a long line of annals in his rear, may foe offensive ; that of an American is ridiculous. But we may feel a just confidence from the past that we shall be true to ourselves for the future ; that, to borrow a cant phrase of the day, we shall be true to our mission, the most momentous ever entrusted to a nation ; that ;there is sufficient intelligence and moral principle in the people, if not always to choose the best rulers, at least to right themselves by the ejection of bad ones when they find they have been abused ; that they have intelligence enough to understand their only consideration, their security as a nation, is in union ; that separation into smaller communities is the creation of so many hostile .states ; that a large extent of empire, instead of being an evil, from embracing regions of irreconcilable local inte- rests, is a benefit, since it affords the means of that commercial reciprocity which makes the country, by its own resources, independent of every other ; and that the representatives drawn from these " magnificent distances " will, on the whole, be apt to legislate more independently .and on broader principles than if occupied with the concerns of a petty state, where each legislator is swayed by the paltry factions of his own village. In all this we anay honestly confide ; but our confidence will not pass for argument, will not be accepted as a solution of the problem. Time only can solve it ; and until the period has elapsed which shall have fairly tried the strength of our institutions, through peace and through war, through adversity and more trying prosperity, the time will not have come to write the history of the Union.* * The preceding cheering remarks on the auspicious destinies of our country were written more than four years ago ; and it is not now as many days since we have received the melancholy tidings that the pro- ject for the Annexation of Texas has been sanctioned by Congress. The ^remarks in the text on " the extent of empire " had reference only to that BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 253 But, still, results have been obtained sufficiently glo- rious to give great consideration to the two preliminary narratives, namely, of the Colonies and the Eevolution, which prepared the way for the Union. Indeed, without these results they would both, however important in themselves, have lost much of their dignity and interest. Of these two narratives, the former, although less mo- mentous than the latter, is most difficult to treat. It is not that the historian is called on to pry into the dark recesses of antiquity, the twilight of civilization,, mystifying and magnifying every object to the senses,. nor to unravel some poetical mythology, hanging its metaphorical allusions around everything in nature,, mingling fact with fiction, the material with the spiritual,, until the honest inquirer after truth may fold his arms- in despair before he can cry evprjKa ; nor is he compelled to unroll musty, worm-eaten parchments, and dusty tomes in venerable black letter, of the good times of honest Caxton and Winken de Worde, nor to go about gleaning traditionary tales and ballads in some obsolete provincial patois. The record is plain and legible, and he need never go behind it. The antiquity of his story goes but little more than two centuries back, a very modern legitimate extent which might grow out of the peaceful settlement and civilization of a territory, sufficiently ample certainly, that already belongs to us. The craving for foreign acquisitions has ever been a most fatal symptom in the history of republics ; but when these acquisitions- are made, as in the present instance, in contempt of constitutional law and in disregard of the great principles of international justice, the evil assumes a tenfold magnitude ; for it flows not so much from the single act as from the principle on which it rests, and which may open the way to the indefinite perpetration of such acts. In glancing my eye over the text at this gloomy moment, and considering its general import, I was unwilling to let it go into the world with my name to it, without en- tering my protest, in common with so many better and wiser in our country, against a measure which every friend of freedom, both at home and abroad, may justly lament as the most serious shock yet given to tha etability of our glorious institutions. 254 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. antiquity. The commencement of it was not in the dark ages, but in a period of illumination, an age yet glowing with the imagination of Shakspeare and Spenser, the philosophy of Bacon, the learning of Coke and of Hooker. The early passages of his story coeval with Hampden and Milton and Sidney belong to the times in which the same struggle for the rights of con- science was going on in the land of our fathers as in our own. There was no danger that the light of the Pilgrim should be hid under a bushel, or that there should be any dearth of chronicler or bard such as they were to record his sacrifice. And fortunate for us that it was so, since in this way every part of this great enterprise, from its conception to its consummation, is brought into the light of day. We are put in possession not merely of the action, but of the motives which led to it, and, as to the character of the actors, are enabled to do justice to those who, if we pronounce from their actions only, would seem not always careful to do justice to them- selves. The embarrassment of the Colonial history arises from the difficulty of obtaining a central point of in- terest among so many petty states, each independent of the others, and all at the same time so dependent on a foreign one as to impair the historic dignity which attaches to great, powerful, and self-regulated com- munities. This embarrassment must be overcome by the author's detecting, and skilfully keeping before the reader, some great principle of action, if such exist, that may give unity and, at the same time, import- ance to the theme. Such a principle did exist in that tendency to independence, which, however feeble till fanned by the breath of persecution into a blaze, was nevertheless the vivifying principle, as before remarked, of our ante-revolutionary annals. BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 255 "Whoever has dipped much into historical reading is aware how few have succeeded in weaving an harmo- nious tissue from the motley and tangled skein of general history. The most fortunate illustration of this within our recollection is Sismondi's " Re'publiques Ita- liennes," a work in sixteen volumes, in which the author has brought on the stage all the various governments of Italy for a thousand years, and in almost every variety of combination. Yet there is a pervading principle in this great mass of apparently discordant interests. That principle was the rise and decline of liberty. It is the key-note to every revolution that occurs. It gives an harmonious tone to the many-coloured canvas, which would else have offended by its glaring con- trasts and the startling violence of its transitions. The reader is interested in spite of the transitions, but knows not the cause. This is the skill of the great artist. So true is this, that the same author has been able to concentrate what may be called the essence of his bulky history into a single volume, in which he confines himself to the development of the animating principle of his narrative, stripped of all the super- fluous accessories, under the significant title of "Rise Progress, and Decline of Italian Freedom." This embarrassment has not been easy to overcome by the writers of our Colonial annals. The first volume of Marshall's " Life of Washington " has great merit as a wise and comprehensive survey of this early period, but the plan is too limited to afford room for any thing like a satisfactory fulness of detail. The most thorough work, and incomparably the best, on the subject, previous to the appearance of Mr. Bancroft's, is the well-known history by Mr. Grahame, a truly valu- able book, in which the author, though a foreigner, has shown himself capable of appreciating the motives and 256 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. comprehending the institutions of our Puritan ancestors. He has spared no pains in the investigation of such original sources as were at his command, and has con- ducted his inquiries with much candour, manifesting throughout the spirit of a scholar and a gentleman. It is not very creditable to his countrymen that they should have received his labours with the apathy which he tells us they have, amid the ocean of contemptible trash with which their press is daily deluged. But, in truth, the Colonial and revolutionary story of this country is a theme too ungrateful to British ears for us to be astonished at any insensibility on this score. Mr. Grahame's work, however, with all its merit, is the work of a foreigner, and that word comprehends much that cannot be overcome by the best writer. He may produce a beautiful composition, faultless in style, accurate in the delineation of prominent events, full of sound logic and most wise conclusions, but he cannot enter into the sympathies, comprehend all the minute feelings, prejudices, and peculiar ways of think- ing, which form the idiosyncrasy of the nation. What can he know of these who has never been warmed by the same sun, lingered among the same scenes, listened to the same tales in childhood, been pledged to the same interests in manhood by which these fancies are nourished, the loves, the hates, the hopes, the fears, that go to form national character ? Write as he will, he is still an alien, speaking a tongue in which the nation will detect the foreign accent. He may produce a book without a blemish in the eyes of foreigners ; it may even contain much for the instruction of the native that he would not be likely to find in his own literature ; but it will afford evidence on every page of its exotic origin. Botta's " History of the War of the Revolution " is the best treatise yet compiled of that BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 257 event It is, as every one knows, a most classical and able work, doing justice to most of the great heroes and actions of the period ; but, we will venture to say, no well-informed American ever turned over its leaves without feeling that the writer was not nourished among the men and the scenes he is painting. With all its great merits, it cannot be, at least for Americans, the history of the Revolution. It is the same as in portrait-painting. The artist may catch the prominent lineaments, the complexion, the general air, the peculiar costume of his subject, all that a stranger's eye will demand ; but he must not hope, unless he has had much previous intimacy with the sitter, to transfer those fleeting shades of expres- sion, the almost imperceptible play of features, which are revealed to the eye of his own family. Who would think of looking to a Frenchman for a history of England ? to an Englishman for the best history of France? Ill fares it with the nation that cannot find writers of genius to tell its own story. What foreign hand could have painted like Herodotus and Thucydides the achievements of the Greeks ? Who like Livy and Tacitus have portrayed the shifting charac- ter of the Roman, in his rise, meridian, and decline ? Had the Greeks trusted their story to these same Romans, what would have been their fate with posterity ? Let the Carthaginians tell. All that remains of this nation, the proud rival of Rome, who once divided with her the empire of the Mediterranean and sur- passed her in commerce and civilization, nearly all that now remains to indicate her character is a poor proverb, Punica fides, a brand of infamy given by the Roman historian, and one which the Romans merited probably as richly as the Carthaginians. Yet America, it is too true, must go to Italy for the best history of 258 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the Revolution, and to Scotland for the best history of the Colonies. Happily, the work before us bids fair, when completed, to supply this deficiency ; and it is quite time we should turn to it. Mr. Bancroft's first two volumes have been too long- before the public to require any thing to be now said of them. Indeed, the first has already been the subject of a particular notice in this Journal. These volumes are mainly occupied with the settlement of the country by the different colonies, and the institutions gradually established among them, with a more particular illus- tration of the remarkable features in their character or policy. In the present volume the immediate point of view is somewhat changed. It was no longer necessary to treat each of the colonies separately, and a manifest advantage in respect to unity is gained by their being brought more under one aspect. A more prominent feature is gradually developed by the relations with the mother-country. This is the mercantile system, as it is called by economical writers, which distinguishes the colonial policy of modern Europe from that of .ancient. The great object of this system was to get as much profit from the colonies, with as little cost to the mother- country, as possible. The former, instead of being regarded as an integral part of the empire, were held as property, to be dealt with for the benefit of the proprietors. This was the great object of legislation, almost the sole one. The system, so different from any thing known in antiquity, was introduced by the Spaniards and Portuguese, and by them carried to an extent which no other nation has cared to follow. By the most cruel and absurd system of prohibitory legis- lation, their colonies were cut off from intercourse with all but the parent country ; and, as the latter was un- BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 259 able to supply their demands for even the necessaries of life, an extensive contraband trade was introduced, which, without satisfying the wants of the colonies, corrupted their morals. It is an old story, and the present generation has witnessed the results, in the ruin of those fine countries and the final assertion of their independence, which the degraded condition in which they have so long been held has wholly unfitted them to enjoy. The English government was too wise and liberal to press thus heavily on its transatlantic subjects; but the policy was similar, consisting, as is well known, and is ably delineated in these volumes, of a long series of restrictive measures, tending to cramp their free trade, manufactures, and agriculture, and to secure the commercial monopoly of Great Britain. This is the point from which events in the present volume are to be more immediately contemplated, all subordinate, like those in the preceding, to that leading principle of a republican tendency, the centre of attraction, controlling the movements of the numerous satellites in our colonial system. The introductory chapter in the volume opens with a view of the English Revolution in 1688, which, though not popular, is rightly characterized as leading the way to popular liberty. Its great object was the security of property ; and our author has traced its operation, in connection with the gradual progress of commercial wealth, to give greater authority to the mercantile system. We select the following original sketch of the character of William the Third : " The character of the new monarch of Great Britain could mould its policy, but not its Constitution. True to his purposes, he yet wins no sympathy. In political sagacity, in force of will, far superior to the English 8 2 260 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. statesmen who environed him, more tolerant than his. ministers or his Parliaments, the childless man seems like the unknown character in algebra, which is intro- duced to form the equation and dismissed when the problem is solved. In his person thin and feeble, with eyes of hectic lustre, of a temperament inclining to the melancholic, in conduct cautious, of a self-relying humour, with abiding impressions respecting men, he sought no favour, and relied for success on his own inflexibility and the greatness and maturity of his designs. Too wise to be cajoled, too firm to be complaisant, no address could sway his resolve. In Holland he had not scrupled to derive an increased power from the crimes of rioters and assassins ; in England, no filial respect diminished the energy of his ambition. His exterior was chilling ; yet he had a passionate delight in horses and the chase. In con- versation he was abrupt, speaking little and slowly, and with repulsive dryness ; in the day of battle he was all activity, and the highest energy of life, without kind- ling his passions, animated his frame. His trust in Providence was so connected with faith in general laws, that in every action he sought the principle which should range it on an absolute degree. Thus, uncon- scious to himself, he had sympathy with the people, who always have faith in Providence. ' Do you dread death in my company ? ' he cried to the anxious sailors, when the ice on the coast of Holland had, almost crushed the boat that was bearing him to the shore. Courage and pride pervaded the reserve of the prince who, spurning an alliance with a bastard daughter of Louis XIV., had made himself the centre of a gigantic opposition to France. For England, for the English people, for English liberties, he had no affection, indifferently employing the Whigs, who found their BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 261 pride in the Kevolution, and the Tories, who had opposed his elevation, and who yet were the fittest instruments ' to carry the prerogative high/ One great passion had absorbed his breast, the independence of his native country. The harsh encroachments of Louis XIV., which in 1672 had made William of Orange a Eevolutionary stadtholder, now assisted to constitute him a Eevolutionary king, transforming the impassive champion of Dutch independence into the defender of the liberties of Europe/' Vol. iii. pp. 2-4. The chapter proceeds to examine the relations, not always of the most friendly aspect, between England and the colonies, in which Mr. Bancroft pays a well- merited tribute to the enlightened policy of Penn and the tranquillity he secured to his settlement. At the dose of the chapter is an account of that lamentable farce, we should have called it, had it not so tragic a conclusion the Salem witchcraft. Our author has presented some very striking sketches of these deplorable scenes, in which poor human nature appears in as humiliating a plight as would he possible in a civilized country. The Inquisition, fierce as it was, and most unrelenting in its persecutions, had something in it respectable in comparison with this wretched and imbecile self-delusion. The historian does not shrink from distributing his censure in full measure to those to whom he thinks it belongs. The erudite divine, Cotton Mather, in particular, would feel little pleasure in the contemplation of the portrait sketched for him on this occasion. Vanity, according to Mr. Bancroft, was quite as active an incentive to his movements as religious zeal ; and, if he began with the latter, there seems no reason to douot that pride of opinion, an unwillingness to expose his error, so hu- miliating to the world, perhaps even to his own heart, 262 BIOGKAPHICAL AND OEITICAL MISCELLANIES. were powerful stimulants to his continuing the course he had begun, though others faltered in it. Mr. Bancroft has taken some pains to show that the prosecutions were conducted before magistrates not iippointed by the people, but the crown, and that a stop was not put to them till after the meeting of the representatives of the people. This, in our view, is a distinction somewhat fanciful. The judges held their commissions from the governor ; and if he was ap- pointed by the crown it was, as our author admits, at the suo^estion of Increase Mather, a minister of the OO 7 people. The accusers, the witnesses, the jurors, were all taken from the people. And when a stop was put to farther proceedings by the seasonable delay inter- posed by the General Court, before the assembling of the " legal colonial " tribunal (thus giving time for the illusion to subside), it was, in part, from the apprehen- sion that, in the rising tide of accusation, no man, however elevated might be his character or condition, would be safe. In the following chapter, after a full exposition of the prominent features in the system of commercial monopoly which controlled the affairs of the colonies, we are introduced to the great discoveries in the northern and western regions of the continent, made by the Jesuit missionaries of France. Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of this remarkable order than their bold enterprise in spreading their faith over this boundless wilderness, in defiance of the most appalling obstacles which man and nature could present. Faith and zeal triumphed over all, and, combined with science and the spirit of adventure, laid open unknown regions in the heart of this vast continent, then roamed over by the buffalo and the savage, and now alive with the busy hum of an industrious and civilized population. BANCKOFT'S UNITED STATES. 263 The historian has diligently traced the progress of the missionaries in their journeys into the western territory of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, down the deep basin of the Mississippi to its mouth. He has identified the scenes of some striking events in the history of discovery, as, among others, the place where Marquette first met the Illinois tribe, at Iowa. No preceding writer has brought into view the results of these labours in a com- pass which may be embraced, as it were, in a single glance. The character of this order, and their fortune, form one of the most remarkable objects for contem- plation in the history of man. Spring up, as it were, to prop the crumbling edifice of Catholicism when it was reeling under the first shock of the Reformation, it took up its residence indifferently within the precincts of palaces or in the boundless plains and forests of the wilderness, held the consciences of civilized monarchs in its keeping, and directed their counsels, while at the same time it was gathering barbarian nations under its banners and pouring the light of civilization into the farthest and darkest quarters of the globe. " The establishment of ' the Society of Jesus/ " says Mr. Bancroft, " by Loyola had been contemporary with the Reformation, of which it was designed to arrest the progress, and its complete organization belongs to the period when the first full edition of Calvin's ' Institutes ' saw the light. Its members were, by its rules, never to become prelates, and could gain power and distinction only by influence over mind. Their vows were poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, and a constant readiness to go on missions against heresy or heathenism. Their cloisters became the best schools in the world. Emanci- pated, in a great degree, from the forms of piety, sepa- rated from domestic ties, constituting a community essen- */ tially intellectual, as well as essentially plebeian, bound 264 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. together by the most perfect organization, and having for their end a control over opinion among the scholars and courts of Europe and throughout the habitable globe, the order of the Jesuits held as its ruling maxims the widest diffusion of its influence, and the closest internal unity. Immediately on its institution, their missionaries, kindling with a heroism that defied every danger and endured every toil, made their way to the ends of the earth ; they raised the emblem of man's salvation on the Moluccas, in Japan, in India, in Thibet, in Cochin China, and in China ; they penetrated Ethiopia, and reached the Abyssinians ; they planted missions among the Caffres ; in Calfornia, on the banks of the Maranhon, in the plains of Paraguay, they invited the wildest of barbarians to the civilization of Christianity. " Eeligious enthusiasm," he adds, " colonized New England ; and religious enthusiasm founded Montreal, made a conquest of the wilderness on the upper Lakes, and explored the Mississippi. Puritanism gave New England its worship and its schools ; the Roman Church created for Canada its altars, its hospitals, and its semi- naries. The influence of Calvin can be traced to every New England village ; in Canada, the monuments of feudalism and the Catholic Church stand side by side, and the names of Montmorenci and Bourbon, of Levi and Condd, are mingled with memorials of St. Athanasius and Augustin, of St. Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola." -Ibid., pp. 120, 121. We hardly know which to select from the many brilliant and spirited sketches in which this part of the Btory abounds. None has more interest, on the whole, than the discovery of the Mississippi by Marquette and his companions, and the first voyage of the white men down its majestic waters : "Behold, then, in 1673, on the tenth day of June, the BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 265 meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Mar- quette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting their two canoes on their backs and walking across the narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the Wisconsin. They reach the water-shed ; uttering a spe- cial prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave the streams that, flowing onward, could have borne their greetings to the Castle of Quebec ; already they stand by the Wisconsin. ' The guides returned/ says the gentle Marquette, ' leaving us alone in this unknown land, in the hands of Providence.' France and Christianity stood in the Valley of the Mississippi. Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers, as they sailed west, went solitarily down the stream, between alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forest : no sound broke the appal- ling silence but the ripple of their canoe and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven days ' they entered happily the Great Eiver, with a joy that could not be expressed ; ' and the two birch-bark canoes, raising their happy sails under new skies and to unknown breezes, floated gently down the calm magnificence of the ocean stream, over the broad, clear sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl, gliding past islands that swelled from the bosom of the stream, with their tufts of massive thickets, and between the wide plains of Illinois and Iowa, all garlanded as they were with majestic forests, or check- ered by island grove and the open vastness of the prairie. " About sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wis- consin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore on its sands the trail of men ; a little footpath was discerned leading into a beautiful prairie ; and, leaving the canoes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a meeting 266 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. with the savages. After walking six miles, they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two others on a slope, at a distance of a mile and a half from the first. The river was the Mou-in-gou-e-na, or Moingona, of which we have corrupted the name into Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet were the first white men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending themselves to God, they uttered a loud cry. The Indians hear ; four old men advance slowly to meet them, bearing the peace-pipe brilliant with many-coloured plumes. ' We are Illinois/ said they ; that is, when translated, ' We are men ; ' and they offered the calumet. An aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised hands, exclaiming, 'How beautiful is the sun, Frenchmen, when thou comest to visit us ! our whole village awaits thee ; thou shalt enter in peace into all our dwellings.' And the pilgrims were followed by the devouring gaze of an astonished crowd. "At the great council, Marquette published to them the one true God, their Creator. He spoke, also, of the great captain of the French, the Governor of Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and commanded peace ; and he questioned them respecting the Missis- sippi and the tribes that possessed its banks. For the Messengers who announced the subjection of the Iro- o > quois, a magnificent festival was prepared of hominy, and fish, and the choicest viands from the prairies. " After six days' delay, and invitations to new visits, the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of warriors, attended the strangers to their canoes ; and, selecting a peace-pipe embellished with the head and neck of bril- liant birds and all feathered over with plumage of various hues, they hung around Marquette the mysterious arbiter of peace and war, the sacred calumet, a safeguard among the nations. BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 267 " The little group proceeded onward. ' I did not fear death/ says Marquette ; ' I should have esteemed it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of God/ They passed the perpendicular rocks, which wore the appearance of monsters ; they heard at a distance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known to them by the Algonquin name of Pekitanoni ; and when they came to the most beautiful confluence of waters in the world where the swifter Missouri rushes like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging it, as it were, hastily to the sea the good Marquette resolved in his heart, anti- cipating Lewis and Clarke, one day to ascend the mighty river to its source, to cross the ridge that divides the oceans, and, descending a westerly-flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all the people of this New World. " In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes floated past the Ohio, which was then, and long afterward, called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by nume- rous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed under the incursions of the Iroquois. " The thick canes begin to appear so close and strong that the buffalo could not break through them ; the in- sects become intolerable ; as a shelter against the suns of July, the sails are folded into an awning. The prairies vanish ; thick forests of white wood, admirable for their vastness and height, crowd even to the skirts of the pebbly shore. It is also observed that, in the land of the Chickasas, the Indians have guns. "Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of Mitchigamea, in a region that had not been visited by Europeans since the days of De Soto. ' Now/ thought Marquette, ' we must indeed ask the aid of the Virgin/ Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and bucklers, amid continual whoops, the natives, bent on 268 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. war, embark in vast canoes made out of the trunks of hollow trees ; but, at the sight of the mysterious peace- pipe held aloft, God touched the hearts of the old men, who checked the impetuosity of the young, and, throw- ing their bows and quivers into their canoes as a token of peace, they prepared a hospitable welcome. " The next day, a long wooden canoe, containing ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten leagues, to the village of Akansea, the limit of their voyage. They had left the region of the Algonquins, and, in the midst of the Sioux and Chickasas, could speak only by an interpreter. A half-league above Akansea they were met by two boats, in one of which stood the com- mander, holding in his hand the peace-pipe, and singing as he drew near. After offering the pipe, he gave bread of maize. The wealth of his tribe consisted in buffalo- skins ; their weapons were axes of steel, a proof of commerce with Europeans. " Thus had our travellers descended below the en- trance of the Arkansas, to the genial climes that have almost no winter but rains, beyond the bound of the Huron and Algonquin languages, to the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico, and to tribes of Indians that had ob- tained European arms by traffic with Spaniards or with Virginia. " So, having spoken of God and the mysteries of the Catholic faith, having become certain that the Father of Rivers went not to the ocean east of Florida, nor yet to the Gulf of California, Marquette and Joliet left Akansea and ascended the Mississippi. " At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude they entered the river Illinois, and discovered a country without its paragon for the fertility of its beautiful prairies, covered with buffaloes and stags ; for the loveliness of its rivulets, and the prodigal abundance of wild duck and swans, BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 269 and of a species of parrots and wild turkeys. The tribe of Illinois, that tenanted its banks, entreated Marquette to come and reside among them. One of their chiefs, with their young men, conducted the party, by way of Chi- cago, to Lake Michigan ; and before the end of Septem- ber all were safe in Green Bay. " Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the discovery,, of which the fame, through Talon, quickened the ambi- tion of Colbert ; the unaspiring Marquette remained to- preach the gospel to the Miamis, who dwelt in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. Two years afterwards, sailing from Chicago to Mackinaw, he entered a little river in, Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass after the rites of the Catholic Church ; then, begging the men who conducted his canoe to leave him alone for half an hour> ' in the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks And supplication.' At the end of the half-hour they went to seek him, and he was no more. The good missionary, discoverer of a world, had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth the canoe-men dug his, grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument." Ibid.,. pp. 157-162. The list of heroic adventurers in the path of discovery is closed by La Salle, the chivalrous Frenchman of whom we have made particular record in a previous number of this Journal/"" and whose tremendous journey from the Illinois to the French settlements in Canada, a distance of fifteen hundred miles, is also noticed by Mr. Bancroft. His was the first European bark that emerged from the * See "North American Review," vol. xlviii. p. 69, et seq. 270 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. mouth of the Mississippi ; and Mr. Bancroft, as he no- tices the event, and the feelings it gave rise to in the mind of the discoverer, gives utterance to his own in language truly sublime : " As he raised the cross by the Arkansas, as he planted the arms of France near the Gulf of Mexico, he antici- pated the future affluence of emigrants, and heard in the distance the footsteps of the advancing multitude that were coming to take possession of the valley." Ibid., p. 168. This descent of the Great Kiver our author places, without hesitation, in 1682, being a year earlier than the one assigned by us in the article referred to.* Mr. Bancroft is so familiar with the whole ground, and has studied the subject so carefully, that great weight is due to his opinions ; but he has not explained the precise authority for his conclusions in this particular. This leads us to enlarge on what we consider a defect in our author's present plan. His notes are discarded altogether, and his ref ere aces transferred from the bottom of the page to the side-margin. This is very objection- able, not merely on account of the disagreeable effect produced on the eye, but from the more serious incon- venience of want of room for very frequent and accurate reference. Titles are necessarily much abridged, some- times at the expense of perspicuity. The first reference in this volume is "Hallam, iv., 374;" the second is " Archdale." Now, Hallam has written several works, published in various forms and editions. As to the se- cond authority, we have no means of identifying the passage at all. This, however, is not the habit of Mr. Bancroft where the fact is of any great moment, and his references throughout are abundant. But the practice of references in the side-margin, though warranted by * Ibid., pp. 84, 85. BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 271 high authority, is unfavourable, from want of room, for very frequent or very minute specification. The omission of notes we consider a still greater evil, It is true, they lead to great abuses, are often the vehicle of matter which should have been incorporated in the text, more frequently of irrelevant matter which should not have been admitted anywhere, and thus exhaust the reader's patience, while they spoil the effect of the work by drawing the attention from the continuous flow of the narrative, checking the heat that is raised by it in the reader's mind, and not unfrequently jarring on his feel- ings by some misplaced witticism or smart attempt at one. For these and the like reasons, many competent critics have pronounced against the use of notes, consi- dering that a writer who could not bring all he had to say into the compass of his text was a bungler. Gibbon, who practised the contrary, intimates a regret in one of his letters that he had been overruled so far as to allow his notes to be printed at the bottom of the page instead of being removed to the end of the volume. But from all this we dissent, especially in reference to a work of research like the present History. We are often de- sirous here to have the assertion of the author, or the sentiment quoted by him, if important, verified by the original extract, especially when this is in a foreign lan- guage. We want to see the grounds of his conclusions, the scaffolding by which he has raised his structure ; to estimate the true value of his authorities ; to know some- thing of their characters, positions in society, and the probable influences to which they were exposed. Where there is contradiction, we want to see it stated, the pros and the cons, and the grounds for rejecting this and ad- mitting that. We want to have a reason for our faith, otherwise we are merely led blindfold. Our guide may be an excellent guide ; he may have travelled over the 272 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. path till it has become a beaten track to him ; but we like to use our own eyesight too, to observe somewhat for ourselves, and to know, if possible, why he has taken this particular road in preference to that which his pre- decessors have travelled. The objections made to notes are founded rather on the abuse than the proper use of them. Gibbon only wished to remove his own to the end of his volume ; though in this we think he erred, from the difficulty and frequent disappointment which the reader must have experienced in consulting them, a disappoint- ment of little moment when unattended by difficulty. But Gibbon knew too well the worth of this part of his labours to him to wish to discard them altogether. He knew his reputation stood on them as intimately as on his narrative. Indeed, they supply a body of criticism, and well-selected, well-digested learning, which of itself would make the reputation of any scholar. Many ac- complished writers, however, and Mr. Bancroft among the number, have come to a different conclusion ; and he has formed his, probably, with deliberation, having made the experiment in both forms. It is true, the fulness of the extracts from original sources with which his text is inlaid, giving such life and presence to it, and the frequency of his references, supersede much of the necessity of notes. We should have been very glad of one, however, of the kind we are speaking of, at the close of his expedition of La Salle. We have no room for the discussion of the topics in the next chapter, relating to the hostilities for the acquisition of colonial territory between France and England, each of them pledged to the same system of commercial monopoly, but must pass to the author's account of the aborigines east of the Mississippi. In this division of his subject he brings into view the BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 273 geographical positions of the numerous tribes, their languages, social institutions, religious faith, and pro- bable origin. All these copious topics are brought within the compass of a hundred pages, arranged with great harmony, and exhibited with perspicuity and sin- gular richness of expression. It is, on the whole, the most elaborate and finished portion of the volume. His remarks on the localities of the tribes, instead of A barren muster-roll of names, are constantly enlivened by picturesque details connected with their situation. His strictures on their various languages are conceived in a philosophical spirit. The subject is one that has already employed the pens of the ablest philologists in this country, among whom it is only necessary to mention the names of Du Ponceau, Pickering, and Oallatin. Our author has evidently bestowed much labour and thought on the topic. He examines the peculiar structure of the languages, which, though radically different, bear a common resemblance in their compounded and synthetic organization. He has omitted to notice the singular exception to the polysynthetic formation of the Indian languages pre- sented by the Otomie, which has afforded a Mexican philologist so ingenious a parallel, in its structure, with the Chinese. Mr. Bancroft concludes his review of them by admitting the copiousness of their combina- tions, and by inferring that this copiousness is no evidence of care and cultivation, but the elementary form of expression of a rude and uncivilized people ; in proof of which he cites the example of the partially civilized Indian in accommodating his idiom gradually to the analytic structure of the European languages. May not this be explained by the circumstance that the influence under which he makes this, like his other changes, is itself European 1 But we pass to a more 274 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. popular theme, the religious faith of the red man, whose fanciful superstitions are depicted by our author with highly poetical colouring : " The red man, unaccustomed to generalization, obtained no conception of an absolute substance, of a self- existing being, but saw a divinity in every power. Wherever there was being, motion, or action, there to him was a spirit ; and, in a special manner, wherever there appeared singular excellence among beasts, or birds, or in the creation, there to him was the presence of a divinity. When he feels his pulse throb or his heart beat, he knows that it is a spirit. A god resides in the flint, to give forth the kindling, cheering fire ; a spirit resides in the mountain-cliff ; a spirit makes its abode in the cool recesses of the grottoes which nature has adorned ; a god dwells in each 'little grass ' that springs miraculously from the earth. ' The woods, the wilds, and the waters respond to savage intelligence ; the stars and the mountains live ; the river, and the lake, and the waves have a spirit.' Every hidden agency, every mysterious influence is personified. A god dwells in the sun, and in the moon, and in the firmament ; the spirit of the morning reddens in the eastern sky ; a deity is present in the ocean and in the fire ; the crag that overhangs the river has its genius ; there is a spirit to the waterfall ; a household god dwells in the Indian's wigwam and consecrates his home ; spirits climb upon the forehead to weigh down the eyelids in sleep. Not the heavenly bodies only, the sky is filled with spirits that minister to man. To the savage, divinity, broken as it were into an infinite number of fragments, fills all place and all being. The idea of unity in the creation may exist contemporaneously, but it existed only in the germ, or as a vague belief derived from the har- mony of the universe. Yet faith in the Great Spirit, BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 275 when once presented, was promptly seized and appro- priated, and so infused itself into the heart of remotest tribes that it came to be often considered as a portion of their original faith. Their shadowy aspirations and creeds, assumed, through the reports of missionaries, a more complete development, and a religious system was elicited from the pregnant but rude materials." Ibid., pp. 285, 286. The following pictures of the fate of the Indian infant, and the shadowy pleasures of the land of spirits, have also much tenderness and beauty : " The same motive prompted them to bury with the warrior his pipe and his manitou, his tomahawk, quiver, and bow ready bent for action, and his most splendid apparel ; to place by his side his bowl, his maize, and his venison, for the long journey to the country of his ancestors. Festivals in honour of the dead were also frequent, when a part of the food was given to the flames, that so it might serve to nourish the departed. The traveller would find in the forests a dead body placed on a scaffold erected upon piles, carefully wrapped in bark for its shroud, and attired in warmest furs. If a mother lost her babe, she would cover it with bark and envelop it anxiously in the softest beaver-skins ; at the burial-place she would put by its side its cradle, its beads, and its rattles, and, as a last service of maternal love, would draw milk from her bosom in a cup of bark, and burn it in the fire, that her infant might still find nourishment on its solitary journey to the land of shades. Yet the new-born babe would be buried, not, as usual, on a scaffold, but by the wayside, that so its spirit might secretly steal into the bosom of some passing matron and be born again under happier auspices. On burying her daughter, the Chippewa mother adds, not snow-shoes and beads, T 2 276 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. and moccasins only, but (sad emblem of woman's lot in the wilderness) the carrying-belt and the paddle. * I know my daughter will be restored to me/ she once said as she clipped a lock of hair as a memorial ; * by this lock of hair I shall discover her, for I shall take it with me ; ' alluding to the day when she too, with her carrying-belt and paddle, and the little relic of her child, should pass through the grave to the dwelling- place of her ancestors." " The faith, as well as the sympathies, of the savage, descended also to inferior things. Of each kind of animal they say there exists one, the source and origin of all, of a vast size, the type and original of the whole class. From the immense invisible beaver come .all the beavers, by whatever run of water they are found ; the same is true of the elk and buffalo, of the eagle and robin, of the meanest quadruped of the forest, of the smallest insect that buzzes in the air. There lives for each class of animals this invisible vast type or elder brother. Thus the savage established his right to be classed by philosophers in the rank of Eealists, and his chief effort at generalization was a reverent exercise of the religious sentiment. Where these older brothers dwell they do not exactly know; yet it may be that the giant manitous which are brothers to beasts are hid beneath the waters, and that those of the birds make their homes in the blue sky. But the Indian believes also of each individual animal that it possesses the mysterious, the indestruc- tible principle of life ; there is not a breathing thing but has its shade, which never can perish. Eegarding himself, in comparison with other animals, but as the first among co-ordinate existence, he respects the brute creation, and assigns to it, as to himself, a perpetuity of being. 'The ancients of these lands believed that BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 277 the warrior, when released from life, renews the pas- sions and activity of this world ; is seated once more among his friends ; shares again the joyous feast ; walks through shadowy forests, that are alive with the spirits of birds ; and there, in his paradise, " ' By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, In vestments for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer a shade.' " Ibid., pp. 295, 298. At the close of this chapter the historian grapples with the much-vexed question respecting the origin of the aborigines, that pons asinorum which has called forth so much sense and nonsense on both sides of the water, and will continue to do so a,s long as a new relic or unknown hieroglyphic shall turn up to irritate the nerves of the antiquary. Mr. Bancroft passes briefly in review the several argu- ments adduced in favour of the connection with Eastern Asia. He lays no stress on the affinity of languages or of customs and religious notions, considering these as spontaneous expressions of similar ideas and wants in similar conditions of society. He attaches as little value to the resemblance established by Humboldt between the signs of the Mexican calendar and those of the signs of the zodiac in Thibet and Tartary ; and as for the far-famed Digliton Rock, and the learned lucubrations- thereon, he sets them down as so much moonshine, pro- nouncing the characters Algonquin. The tumuli the- great tumuli of the West he regards as the work of no- mortal hand, except so far as they have been excavated for a sepulchral purpose. He admits, however, vestiges of a migratory movement on our continent from the north-east to the south-west, shows very satisfactorily,, by estimating the distances of the intervening islands. 278 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the practicability of a passage in the most ordinary sea- boat from the Asiatic to the American shores in the high latitudes, and, by a comparison of the Indian and Mon- golian skulls, comes to the conclusion that the two races are probably identical in origin. But the epoch of their divergence he places at so remote a period that the peculiar habits, institutions, and culture of the aborigines must be regarded as all their own, as indigenous. This is the outline of his theory. By this hypothesis he extricates the question from the embarrassment caused by the ignorance which the aborigines have manifested in the use of iron and milk, known to the Mongol hordes, but which he, of course, supposes were not known at the time of the migration. This is carrying the exodus back to a far period. But the real objection seems to be that by thus rejecting all evidence of communication but that founded on anato- mical resemblance he has unnecessarily narrowed the basis on which it rests. The resemblance between a few specimens of Mongolian and American skulls is a narrow basis indeed, taken as the only one, for so momentous a theory. In fact, this particular point of analogy does not strike us as by any means the most powerful of the arguments in favour of a communication with the East, when we consider the small number of the specimens on which it is founded, the great variety of formation in individuals of the same family, some of the specimens approaching even nearer to the Caucasian than the Mongolian, and the very uniform deviation from the latter in the promi- nence and the greater angularity of the features. This connection with the East derives, in our judg- ment, some support, feeble though ifc be, from affinities of language ; but this is a field which remains to be much more fully explored. The analogy is much more BANCBOFT'S UNITED STATES. 279 striking of certain usages and institutions, particularly of a religious character, and, above all, the mythological traditions which those who have had occasion to look into the Aztec antiquities cannot fail to be struck with. This resemblance is oftentimes in matters so purely arbitrary that it can hardly be regarded as founded in the constitution of man, so very exact that it can scarcely be considered as accidental. We give up the Dighton Rock, that rock of offence to so many anti- quaries, who may read in it the handwriting of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, or Scandinavians, quite as well as anything else. Indeed, the various fac-similes of it, made for the benefit of the learned, are so different from one another that, like Sir Hudibras, one may find in it " A leash of languages at once." We are agreed with our author that it is very good Algonquin. But the zodiac, the Tartar zodiac, which M. de Humboldt has so well shown to resemble in its terms those of the Aztec calendar, we cannot so easily surrender. The striking coincidence established by his investigations between the astronomical signs of the two nations in a similar corresponding series, moreover, although applied to different uses is, in our opinion, one of the most powerful arguments yet adduced for the affinity of the two races. Nor is Mr. Bancroft wholly right in supposing that the Asiatic hieroglyphics referred only to the zodiac. Like the Mexican, they also presided over the years, days, and even hours. The strength of evidence, founded on numerous analogies, cannot be shown without going into details, for which there is scarce room in the compass of a separate article, much less in the heel of one. Whichever way we turn, the subject is full of perplexity. It is the sphinx's riddle, and 280 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the (Edipus must be called from the grave who is to solve it. In closing our remarks, we must express our satisfac- tion that the favourable notice we took of Mr. Bancroft's labours on his first appearance has been fully ratified by his countrymen, and that his Colonial History establishes his title to a place among the great historical writers of the age. The reader will find the pages of the present volume filled with matter not less interesting and im- portant than the preceding. He will meet with the same brilliant and daring style, the same picturesque sketches of character and incident, the same acute reasoning and compass of erudition. In the delineation of events Mr. Bancroft has beea guided by the spirit of historic faith. Not that it would be difficult to discern the colour of his politics ; nor, in- deed, would it be possible for any one strongly pledged to any set of principles, whether in politics or religion, to disguise them in the discussion of abstract topics, without being false to himself and giving a false tone to- the picture ; but while he is true to himself, he has an equally imperative duty to perform, to be true to others, to those on whose characters and conduct he sits hi judgment as a historian. No pet theory nor party pre- dilections can justify him in swerving one hair's-breadth from truth in his delineation of the mighty dead, whose portraits he is exhibiting to us on the canvas of history. Whenever religion is introduced, Mr. Bancroft has shown a commendable spirit of liberality. Catholics and Calvinists, Jesuits, Quakers, and Church-of-England men, are all judged according to their deeds, and not their speculative tenets ; and even in the latter particular he generally contrives to find something deserving of admiration, some commendable doctrine or aspiration in most of them. And what Christian sect we might BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES. 281 add, what sect of any denomination is there which has- not some beauty of doctrine to admire "? Religion is the homage of man to his Creator. The forms in which it is expressed are infinitely various ; but they flow from the same source, are directed to the same end, and aB claim from the historian the benefit of toleration. What Mr. Bancroft has done for the Colonial history- is, after all, but preparation for a richer theme, the- history of the War of Independence; a subject which finds its origin in the remote past, its results in the infinite future ; which finds a central point of unity ia the ennobling principle of independence, that gives- dignity and grandeur to the most petty details of the conflict, and which has its foreground occupied by a single character, to which all others converge as to a centre, the character of Washington, in war, in peace,, and in private life the most sublime on historical record.. Happy the writer who shall exhibit this theme worthily to the eyes of his countrymen ! The subject, it is understood, is to engage the atten- tion, also, of Mr. Sparks, whose honourable labours have already associated his name imperishably with our Revo- lutionary period. Let it not be feared that there is not compass enough in the subject for two minds so gifted. The field is too rich to be exhausted by a single crop,, and will yield fresh laurels to the skilful hand that shall toil for them. The labours of Hume did not supersede those of Lingard, or Turner, or MackiDtosh, or Hallam. The history of the English Revolution has called forth,, in our own time, the admirable essays of Mackintosh and Guizot; and the palm of excellence, after the libraries that have been written on the French Revolution, has just been assigned to the dissimilar histories of Mignet and Thiers. The points of view under which a thing, may be contemplated are as diversified as mind itself.. 282 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. The most honest inquirers after truth rarely come to precisely the same results, such is the influence of educa- tion, prejudice, principle. Truth, indeed, is single, but opinions are infinitely various, and it is only by com- paring these opinions together that we can hope to ascertain what is truth. MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO.* (January, 1843.) IN the present age of high literary activity, travellers make not the least importunate demands on public at- tention, and their lucubrations, under whatever name, Eambles, Notices, Incidents, Pencillings, are nearly as important a staple for the " trade " as novels and romances. A book of travels, formerly, was a very serious affair. The traveller set out on his distant journey with many a solemn preparation, made his will, and bade adieu to his friends like one who might not again return. If he did return, the results were em- bodied in a respectable folio, or at least quarto, well garnished with cuts, and done up in a solid form, which argued that it was no fugitive publication, but destined for posterity. All this is changed. The voyager nowadays leaves home with as little ceremony and leave-taking as if it were for a morning's drive. He steps into the bark that is to carry him across thousands of miles of ocean with the moral certainty of returning in a fixed week, almost at a particular day. Parties of gentlemen and ladies go whizzing along in their steamships over the track which cost so many weary days to the Argonauts of old, and run over the choicest scenes of classic antiquity, scattered through Europe, Asia, and Africa, in less time than it * " Life in Mexico, during a Residence of Two Years in that Country. By Madame C de la B ." Boston : Little and Brown. Two volumes, 12ino. 284 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CBITICAL MISCELLANIES. formerly took to go from one end of the British isles to the other. The Cape of Good Hope, so long the great stumbling block to the navigators of Europe, is doubled, or the Ked Sea coasted, in the same way, by the fashionable tourist who glides along the shores of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Bombay, and Hindostan r farther than the farthest limits of Alexander's conquests before the last leaves of the last new novel which he has- taken by the way are fairly cut. The facilities of com- munication have, in fact, so abridged distances that geography, as we haye hitherto studied it, may be said to be entirely reformed. Instead of leagues, we now com- pute by hours, and we find ourselves next-door neigh- bours to those whom we had looked upon as at the antipodes. The consequence of these improvements in the means of intercourse is, that all the world goes abroad, or, at least, one half is turned upon the other. Nations are so mixed up by this process that they are in some danger of losing their idiosyncrasy ; and the Egyptian and the Turk, though they still cling to their religion, are be- coming European in their notions and habits more and more every day. The taste for pilgrimage, however, it must be owned, does not stop with the countries where it can be carried on with such increased facility. It has begotten a nobler spirit of adventure, something akin to what existed in the fifteenth century, when the world was new or newly discovering, and a navigator who did not take in sail,, like the cautious seamen of Knickerbocker, might run down some strange continent in the dark ; for in these times of dandy tourists and travel-mongers the boldest achievements, that have hitherto defied the most adven- turous spirits, have been performed : the Himalaya Mountains have been scaled, the Niger ascended, the- MADAME CALDEEON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 285 burning heart of Africa penetrated, the icy Arctic and Antarctic explored, and the mysterious monuments of the semi-civilized races of Central America have been thrown open to the public gaze. It is certain that this is a high-pressure age, and every department of science and letters, physical and mental, feels its stimulating influence. No nation, on the whole, has contributed so largely to these itinerant expeditions as the English. Uneasy, it would seem, at being cooped up in their little isle, they sally forth in all directions, swarming over the cultivated and luxurious countries of the neighbouring continent, or sending out stragglers on other more distant and formidable missions. Whether it be that their soaring spirits are impatient of the narrow quarters which nature has assigned them, or that there exists a supernumerary class of idlers, who, wearied with the monotony of home and the same dull round of dissipation, seek excitement in strange scenes and adventures ; or whether they go abroad for the sunshine, of which they have heard so much but seen so little, whatever be the cause, they furnish a far greater number of tourists than all the world besides. We Americans, indeed, may compete with them in mere locomotion, for our familiarity with magnificent distances at home makes us still more in- different to them abroad ; but this locomotion is generally in the way of business, and the result is rarely shown in a book, unless, indeed, it be the ledger. Yet John Bull is, on many accounts, less fitted than most of his neighbours for the duties of a traveller. However warm and hospitable in his own home, he has a cold reserve in his exterior, a certain chilling atmosphere, which he carries along with him, that freezes up the sympathies of strangers, and which is only to be com- pletely thawed by long and intimate acquaintance. But 286 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the traveller has no time for intimate acquaintances. He must go forward, and trust to his first impressions, for they will also be his last. Unluckily, it rarely falls out that the first impressions of honest John are very favourable. There is too much pride, not to say hauteur, in his composition, which, with the best intentions in the world, will show itself in a way not particularly flatter- ing to those who come in contact with him. He goes through a strange nation, treading on all their little irritable prejudices, shocking their self-love and harmless vanities, in short, going against the grain, and roughing up everything by taking it the wrong way. Thus he draws out the bad humours of the people among whom he moves, sees them in their most unamiable and by no means natural aspect, in short, looks on the wrong side of the tapestry. What wonder if his notions are some- what awry as to what he sees 1 There are, it is true, distinguished exceptions to all this, English travellers who cover the warm heart as warm as it is generally true and manly under a kind and sometimes cordial manner ; but they are the exceptions. The Englishman undoubtedly appears best on his own soil, where his national predilections and prejudices, or, at least, the in- timation of them, are somewhat mitigated in deference to his guest. Another source of the disqualification of John Bull as a calm and philosophic traveller is the manner in which he has been educated at home : the soft luxuries by which he has been surrounded from his cradle have made luxuries necessaries, and, accustomed to perceive all the machinery of life glide along as noiselessly and as swiftly as the foot of Time itself, he becomes morbidly sensitive to every temporary jar or derangement in the working of it. In no country since the world was made have all the appliances for mere physical and, we may MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 287 add, intellectual indulgence been carried to such perfection as in this little island nucleus of civilization. Nowhere can a man get such returns for his outlay. The whole organization of society is arranged so as to minister to the comforts of the wealthy ; and an Englishman, with the golden talisman in his pocket, can bring about him genii to do his bidding, and transport himself over dis- tances with a thought, almost as easily as if he were the possessor of Aladdin's magic lamp and the fairy carpet of the Arabian tales. When he journeys over his little island his comforts and luxuries cling as close to him as round his own fireside. He rolls over roads as smooth and well-beaten as those in his own park ; is swept onward by sleek and well-groomed horses, in a carriage as soft and elastic, and quite as showy, as his own equipage ; puts up at inns that may vie with his own castle in their comforts and accommodations, and is received by crowds of ob- sequious servants, more solicitous, probably, even than his own to win his golden smiles. In short, wherever he goes, he may be said to carry with him his castle, park, equipage, establishment. The whole are in move- ment together. He changes place, indeed, but changes nothing else. For travelling as it occurs in other lands, hard roads, harder beds, and hardest fare, he knows no more of it than if he had been passing from one wing of his castle to the other. All this, it must be admitted, is rather an indifferent preparation for a tour on the Continent. Of what avail is it that Paris is the most elegant capital, France the most enlightened country on the European terra jir ma, if one cannot walk in the streets without the risk of being run over for want of a trottoir, nor move on the roads without being half smothered in a lumbering vehicle, dragged by ropes at the rate of five miles an hour? 288 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. Of what account are the fine music and paintings, the architecture and art, of Italy, when one must shiver by day for want of carpets and sea-coal fires, and be thrown into a fever at night by the active vexations of a still more tormenting kind ? The galled equestrian might as well be expected to feel nothing but raptures and ravish- ment at the fine scenery through which he is riding. It is probable he will think much more of his own petty hurts than of the beauties of nature. A travelling John Bull, if his skin is not off, is at least so thin-skinned that it is next door to being so. If the European neighbourhood affords so many means of annoyance to the British traveller, they are incal- culably multiplied on this side of the water, and that, too, under circumstances which dispose him still less to charity in his criticisms and constructions. On the Continent he feels he is among strange races, born and bred under different religious and political institutions, and, above all, speaking different languages. He does not necessarily, therefore, measure them by his peculiar standard, but allows them one of their own. The dis- similarity is so great in all the main features of national polity and society that it is hard to institute a comparison. "Whatever be his contempt for the want of progress and perfection in the science of living, he comes to regard them as a distinct race, amenable to different laws, and therefore licensed to indulge in different usages, to a certain extent, from his own. If a man travels in China, he makes up his mind to chop-sticks. If he should go to the moon, he would not be scandalized by seeing people walk with their heads under their arms. He has embarked on a different planet. It is only in things which run parallel to those in his own country that a comparison can be instituted, and charity too often fails where criticism begins. MADAME CALDEBON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 289 Unhappily, in America the Englishman finds these points of comparison forced on him at every step. He ]ands among a people speaking the same language, pro- fessing the same religion, drinking at the same fountains of literature, trained in the same occupations of active life. The towns are built on much the same model with those in his own land. The brick houses, the streets, the " sidewalks," the in-door arrangements, all, in short, are near enough on the same pattern to provoke a com- parison. Alas for the comparison ! The cities sink at 'once into mere provincial towns, the language degene- rates into a provincial patois, the manners, the fashions, down to the cut of the clothes, and the equipages, all are provincial. The people, the whole nation as inde- pendent as any, certainly, if not, as our orators fondly descant, the best and most enlightened upon earth dwindle into a mere British colony. The traveller does not seem to understand that he is treading the soil of the New World, where everything is new, where anti- quity dates but from yesterday, where the present and the future are all, and the past nothing, where hope is the watchword, and " Go ahead ! " the principle of action. He does not comprehend that when he sets foot on such a land he is no longer to look for old hereditary landmarks, old time-honoured monuments and institu- tions, old families that have vegetated on the same soil since the Conquest. He must be content to part with the order and something of the decorum incident to an old community, where the ranks are all precisely and punctiliously defined, where the power is deposited by prescriptive right in certain privileged hands, and where the great mass have the careful obsequiousness of de- pendants, looking for the crumbs that fall. He is now among a new people, where everything is in movement, all struggling to get forward, and where, 290 BIOGEAPIIICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. though many go adrift in their wild spirit of adventure, and a temporary check may be sometimes felt by all, the great mass still advances. He is landed on a hemi- sphere where fortunes are to be made, and men are employed in getting, not in spending, a difference which explains so many of the discrepancies between the structure of our own society and habits and those of the Old World. To know how to spend is itself a science ; and the science of spending and that of getting are rarely held by the same hand. In such a state of things, the whole arrangement of O 7 O society, notwithstanding the apparent resemblance to that in his own country, and its real resemblance in minor points, is reversed. The rich proprietor, who does nothing but fatten on his rents, is no longer at the head of the scale, as in the Old World. The man of enter- prise takes the lead in a bustling community, where action and progress, or at least change, are the very con- ditions of existence. The upper classes if the term can be used in a complete democracy have not the luxurious finish and accommodations to be found in the other hemisphere. The humbler classes have not the poverty-stricken, cringing spirit of hopeless inferiority. The pillar of society, if it want the Corinthian capital, wants also the heavy and superfluous base. Every man not only professes to be, but is practically, on a footing of equality with his neighbour. The traveller must not expect to meet here the deference, or even the cour- tesies, which grow out of distinction of castes. This is an awkward dilemma for one whose nerves have never been jarred by contact with the profane ; who has never been tossed about in the rough-and-tumble of humanity. It is little to him that the poorest child in the community learns how to read and write ; that the poorest man can have what Henry the Fourth so good-naturedly wished MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 291 for the humblest of his subjects a fowl in his pot every day for his dinner ; that no one is so low but that he may aspire to all the rights of his fellow- men and find an open theatre on which to display his own peculiar talents. As the tourist strikes into the interior, difficulties of all sorts multiply, incident to a raw and unformed coun- try. The comparison with the high civilization at home becomes more and more unfavourable, as he is made to feel that in this land of promise it must be long before promise can become the performance of the Old World. And yet, if he would look beyond the surface, he would see that much here too has been performed, however much may be wanting. He would see lands over which the wild Indian roamed as a hunting-ground, teeming with harvests for the consumption of millions at home and abroad ; forests, which have shot up, ripened, and decayed on the same spot ever since the creation, now swept 1 away to make room for towns and villages thronged with an industrious population ; rivers, which rolled on in their solitudes, undisturbed except by the wandering bark of the savage, now broken and dimpled by hundreds of steamboats, freighted with the rich tribute of a country rescued from the wilderness. He would not expect to meet the careful courtesies of po- lished society in the pioneers of civilization, whose mission has been to recover the great continent from the bear and the buffalo. He would have some charity for their ignorance of the latest fashions of Bond Street, and their departure, sometimes, even from what, in the old country, is considered as the decorum and, it may be, decencies of life. But not so : his heart turns back to his own land, and closes against the rude scenes around him ; for he finds here none of the soft graces of cultivation, or the hallowed memorials of an early civilization ; no gray, weather-beaten cathedrals, telling of the Normans ; no u 2 292 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. Gothic churches in their groves of venerable oaks; no moss-covered cemeteries, in which the dust of his fathers has been gathered since the time of the Plantagenets ; no rural cottages, half smothered with roses and honey- suckles, intimating that even in the most humble abodes the taste for the beautiful has found its way ; no trim gardens, and fields blossoming with hawthorn hedges and miniature culture ; no ring-fences, enclosing well- shaven lawns, woods so disposed as to form a picture of themselves, bright threads of silvery water, and sparkling fountains. All these are wanting, and his eyes turn with disgust from the wild and rugged features of nature, and all her rough accompaniments, from man almost as wild ; and his heart sickens as he thinks of his own land and all its scenes of beauty. He thinks not of the poor who leave that land for want of bread and find in. this a kindly welcome and the means of independence and advancement which their own denies them. He goes on, if he be a splenetic Sinbad, discharging his sour bile on everybody that he comes in contact with, thus producing an amiable ripple in the current as he proceeds, that adds marvellously, no doubt, to his own quiet and personal comfort. If he have a true merry vein and hearty good nature, he gets on, laughing sometimes in his sleeve at others, and cracking his jokes on the unlucky pate of Brother Jonathan, who, if he is not very silly, which he very often is, laughs too, and joins in the jest, though it may be somewhat at his own expense. It matters little whether the tourist be Whig or Tory in his own land ; if the latter, he returns, probably, ten times the Conservative that he was when he left it. If Whig, or even Kadical, it matters not ; his loyalty waxes warmer and warmer with every step of his pro- gress among the republicans ; and he finds that practical democracy, shouldering and elbowing its neighbours as MADAME CALDEBON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 293 it " goes ahead," is no more like the democracy which he has been accustomed to admire in theory, than the real machinery, with its smell, smoke, and clatter, under full operation, is like the pretty toy which he sees as a model in the Patent Office at Washington. There seems to be no people better constituted for travellers, at least for recording their travelling expe- riences, than the French. There is a mixture of frivolity and philosophy in their composition which is admirably suited to the exigencies of their situation. They mingle readily with all classes and races, discarding for the time their own nationality, at least their national antipathies. Their pleasant vanity fills them with the desire of pleasing others, which most kindly reacts by their being them- selves pleased : " Pleased with, himself, whom all the world can please. The Frenchman can even so far accommodate himself to habits alien to his own, that he can tolerate those of the savages themselves, and enter into a sort of fellow- ship with them, without either party altogether discarding, his national tastes and propensities. It is Chateau- briand, if we are not mistaken, who relates that, wan- dering in the solitudes of the American wilderness, his ears were most unexpectedly saluted by the sounds of a violin. He had little doubt that one of his own coun- trymen must be at hand ; and in a wretched enclosure he found one of them, sure enough, teaching Messieurs les sauvages to dance. It is certain that this spirit of accommodation to the wild habits of their copper-coloured friends gave the French traders and missionaries formerly an ascendancy over the aborigines which was never obtained by any other of the white men. The most comprehensive and truly philosophic work on the genius and institutions of this country, the best 294 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. exposition of its social phenomena, its present condition, and probable future, are to be found in the pages of a Frenchman. It is in the French language, too, that by far the greatest work has been produced on the great Southern portion of our continent, once comprehended under New Spain. To write a book of travels seems to most people to require as little preliminary preparation as to write a letter. One has only to jump into a coach, embark on board a steamboat, minute down his flying experiences and hair-breadth escapes, the aspect of the country as seen from the interior of a crowded diligence or a van- ishing rail-car, note the charges of the landlords and the quality of the fare, a dinner or two at the minister's, the last new play or opera at the theatre, and the affair is done. It is very easy to do this, certainly ; very easy to make a bad book of travels, but by no means easy to make a good one. This requires as many and various qualifications as to make any other good book, qualifi- cations which must vary with the character of the country one is to visit. Thus, for instance, it requires a very different preparation and stock of accomplishments to make the tour of Italy, its studios and its galleries of art, or of Egypt, with its immortal pyramids and mighty relics of a primeval age, the great cemetery of antiquity, from what it does to travel understandingly in our own land, a new creation, as it were, without monuments, without arts, where the only study of the traveller the noblest of all studies, it is true is man. The inattention to this difference of preparation demanded by different places has led many a clever writer to make a very worthless book, which would have been remedied had he consulted his own qualifications instead of taking the casual direction of the first steamboat or mail-coach that lay in his way. MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 295 There is no country more difficult to discuss in all its multiform aspects than Mexico, or, rather, the wild region once comprehended under the name of New Spain. Its various climates, bringing to perfection the vegetable products of the most distant latitudes; its astonishing fruitfulness in its lower regions, and its curse of barren- ness over many a broad acre of its plateau ; its inex- haustible mines, that have flooded the Old World with an ocean of silver, such as Columbus in his wildest visions never dreamed of, and, unhappily, by a hard mischance, never lived to realize himself; its picturesque landscape, where the volcanic fire gleams amid wastes of eternal snow, and a few hours carry the traveller from the hot regions of the lemon and the cocoa to the wintry solitudes of the mountain fir ; its motley population, made up of Indians, old Spaniards, modern Mexicans, mestizos, mulattoes, and zambos ; its cities built in the clouds ; its lakes of salt water, hundreds of miles from the ocean; its people, with their wild and variegated costume, in keeping, as we may say, with its extraordi- nary scenery ; its stately palaces, half furnished, where services of gold and silver plate load the tables in rooms without a carpet, while the red dust of the bricks soils the diamond-sprinkled robes of the dancer; the costly attire of its higher classes, blazing with pearls and jewels ; the tawdry magnificence of its equipages, saddles inlaid with gold, bits and stirrups of massive silver, all executed in the clumsiest style of workmanship ; its lower classes, the men with their jackets glittering with silver but- tons, and rolls of silver tinsel round their caps ; the women with petticoats fringed with lace, and white satin shoes on feet unprotected by a stocking ; its high-born fair ones crowding to the cockpit, and solacing themselves with the fumes of a cigar ; its churches and convents, in which all those sombre rules of monastic life are main- 296 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. tained in their primitive rigour which have died away before the liberal spirit of the age on the other side of the water ; its swarms of leperos, the lazzaroni of the land ; its hordes of almost legalized banditti, who stalk openly in the streets and render the presence of an armed escort necessary to secure a safe drive into the environs of the capital ; its whole structure of society, in which a republican form is thrown over institutions as aristo- cratic and castes as nicely defined as in any monarchy of Europe ; in short, its marvellous inconsistencies and contrasts in climate, character of the people, and face of the land, so marvellous as, we trust, to excuse the un- precedented length of this sentence, undoubtedly make modern Mexico one of the most prolific, original, and difficult themes for the study of the traveller. Yet this great theme has found in Humboldt a writer of strength sufficient to grapple with it in nearly all its relations. While yet a young man, or, at least, while his physical as well as mental energies were in their meridian, he came over to this country Avith an enthu- siasm for science which was only heightened by obstacles, and with stores of it already accumulated that enabled him to detect the nature of every new object that came under his eye and arrange it in its proper class. With his scientific instruments in his hand, he might be seen scaling the snow-covered peaks of the Cordilleras, or diving into their unfathomable caverns of silver ; now wandering through their dark forests in search of neAV specimens for his herbarium, HOAV coasting the stormy shores of the Gulf and penetrating its unhealthy streams, jotting down every landmark that might serve to guide the future navigator, or surveying the crested Isthmus in search of a practicable communication between the great seas on its borders, and then, again, patiently studying the monuments and manuscripts of the Aztecs in the MADAME CALDEEON'S LIFE IN MEXICO. 297 capital, or mingling with the wealth and fashion in its saloons ; frequenting every place, in short, and everywhere at home : " Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, .... omnia novit." The whole range of these various topics is brought under review in his pages, and on all he sheds a ray, sometimes a flood, of light. His rational philosophy, content rather to doubt than to decide, points out the track which other adventurous spirits may follow up with advantage. No antiquary has done so much towards determining the original hives of the semi-civilized races of the Mexican plateau. No on, not even of the Spaniards, has brought together such an important mass of information in respect to the resources, natural products, and statistics generally, of New Spain. His explorations have identified more than one locality and illustrated more than one curious monument of the people of Anahuac, which had baffled the inquiries of native antiquaries ; and his work, while embodying the results of profound scholarship and art, is at the same time, in many respects, the very best manuel du voyageur, and, as such, has been most frequently used by subsequent tourists. It is true, his pages are some- times disfigured by pedantry, ambitious display, learned obscurity, and other affectations of the man of letters. But what human work is without its blemishes? His various writings on the subject of New Spain, taken collectively, are one of those monuments which may be selected to show the progress of the species. Their author reminds us of one of the ancient athletae, who descended into the arena to hurl the discus with a giant arm, that distanced every cast of his contemporaries. There is one branch of his fruitful subject which M. de Humboldt has not exhausted, and, indeed, has but briefly touched on. This is the social condition of the country, 298 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. especially as found in its picturesque capital. This has been discussed by subsequent travellers more fully, and Ward, Bullock, Lyons, Poinsett, Tudor, Latrobe, have all produced works which have for their object, more or less, the social habits and manners of the people. With most of them this is not the prominent object ; and others of them, probably, have found obstacles in effecting it, to any great extent, from an imperfect knowledge of the language, the golden key to the sympathies of a people, without which a traveller is as much at fault as a man without an eye for colour in a picture-gallery, or an ear for music at a concert. He may see and hear, indeed, in both ; but cui bono f The traveller, ignorant of the language of the nation whom he visits, may descant on the scenery, the roads, the architecture, the outside of things, the rates and distances of posting, the dress of the people in the streets, and may possibly meet a native or two, half denaturalized, kept to dine with strangers, at his banker's. But as to the interior mechanism of society, its secret sympathies, and familiar tone of think- ing and feeling-, he can know no more than he could of the O O* contents of a library by running over the titles of strange and unknown authors packed together on the shelves. It was to supply this deficiency that the work before us, no doubt, was given to the public, and it was com- posed under circumstances that afforded every possible advantage and facility to its author. Although the initials only of the name are given in the title-page, yet, from these and certain less equivocal passages in the body of the work, it requires no (Edipus to divine that the author is the wife of the Chevalier Calderon de la Barca, well known in this country during his long resi- dence as Spanish minister at Washington, where his amiable manners and high personal qualities secured him general respect and the regard of all who knew him. On MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IX MEXICO. 299 the recognition of the independence of Mexico by the mother-country, Senor Calderon was selected to fill the office of the first Spanish envoy to the republic. It was a delicate mission after so long an estrangement, and it was hailed by the Mexicans with every demonstration of pride and satisfaction. Though twenty years had elapsed since they had established their independence, yet they felt as a wayward son may feel who, having absconded from the paternal roof and set up for himself, still looks back to it with a sort of reverence, and, in the plenitude of his prosperity, still feels the want of the parental bene- diction. We, who cast off our allegiance in a similar way, can comprehend the feeling. The new minister, from the moment of his setting foot on the Mexican shore, was greeted with an enthusiasm which attested the popular feeling, and his presence in the capital was celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, bull-fights, illumi- nations, fetes public and private, and every possible de- monstration of respect for the new envoy and the country who sent him. His position secured him access to every place of interest to an intelligent stranger, and introduced him into the most intimate recesses of society, from which the stranger is commonly excluded, and to which, indeed, none but a Spaniard could, under any circumstances, have been admitted. Fortunately, the minister possessed, in the person of his accomplished wife, one who had both the leisure and the talent to profit by these uncommon opportunities, and the result is given in the work before us, consisting of letters to her family, which, it seems, since her return to the United States, have been gathered together and prepared for publication.* * The analysis of the work, with several pages of extracts from it, is here omitted, as containing nothing that is not already familiar to the English reader. 300 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. The present volumes make no pretensions to enlarge the boundaries of our knowledge in respect to the mine- ral products of the country, its geography, its statistics, or, in short, to physical or political science. These topics have been treated with more or less depth by the various travellers who have written since the great publications of Humboldt. We have had occasion to become tolerably well acquainted with their productions ; and we may safely assert that for spirited portraiture of society, a society unlike anything existing in the Old World or the New, for picturesque delineation of scenery, for richness of illustration and anecdote, and for the fasci- nating graces of style, no one of them is to be compared with " Life in Mexico." MO-LIERE.* (October, 1828.) THE French surpass every other nation, indeed all the other nations of Europe put together, in the amount and excellence of their memoirs. Whence comes this mani- fest superiority? The important Collection relating to the History of France, commencing as early as the thirteenth century, forms a basis of civil history more authentic, circumstantial, and satisfactory to an intelli- gent inquirer than is to be found among any other people ; and the multitude of biographies, personal anec- dotes, and similar scattered notices which have appeared in France during the two last centuries throw a flood of light on the social habits and general civilization of the period in which they were written. The Italian histories (and every considerable city in Italy, says Tiraboschi, had its historian as early as the thirteenth century) are fruitful only in wars, massacres, treasonable conspiracies, or diplomatic intrigues, matters that affect the tran- quillity of the state. The rich body of Spanish chronicles which maintain an unbroken succession from the reign of Alphonso the Wise to that of Philip the Second, are scarcely more personal or interesting in their details, unless it be in reference to the sovereign and his imme- diate court. Even the English, in their memoirs and autobiographies of the last century, are too exclusively confined to topics of public notoriety, as the only subject * " Histoire cle la Vie et cles Ouvrages de Moliere. Par J. Tasche- rcau." Pan,-. 1825. 302 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. worthy of record or which can excite a general interest in their readers. Not so with the French. The most frivolous details assume in their eyes an importance when they can be made illustrative of an eminent character ; and even when they concern one of less note, they be- come sufficiently interesting, as just pictures of life and manners. Hence, instead of exhibiting their hero only as he appears on the great theatre, they carry us along with him into retirement, or into those social circles where, stripped of his masquerade dress, he can indulge in all the natural gaiety of his heart, in those frivolities and follies which display the real character much better than all his premeditated wisdom ; those little nothings which make up so much of the sum of French memoirs, but which, however amusing, are apt to be discarded by their more serious English neighbours as something derogatory to their hero. Where shall we find a more lively portraiture of that interesting period when feudal barbarism began to fade away before the civilized in- stitutions of modern times, than in Philip de Comines' sketches of the courts of France and Burgundy in the latter half of the fifteenth century ? where a more nice development of the fashionable intrigues, the corrupt Machiavelian politics, which animated the little coteries, male and female, of Paris, under the regency of Anne of Austria, than in the Memoirs of De Eetz? to say nothing of the vast amount of similar contributions in France during the last century, which, in the shape of letters and anecdotes, as well as memoirs, have made us as intimately acquainted with the internal movements of society in Paris, under all its aspects, literary, fashion- able, and political, as if they had passed in review before our own eyes. The French have been remarked for their excellence in narrative ever since the times of the fabliaux and the MOLIEBE. 303 old Norman romances. Somewhat of their success in this way may be imputed to the structure of their lan- guage, whose general currency, and whose peculiar fit- ness for prose composition, have been noticed from a very early period. Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his Tesoro in French, in preference to his own tongue, as far back as the middle of the thirteenth cen- tury, on the ground, "that its speech was the most universal and most delectable of all the dialects of Europe." And Dante asserts in his treatise " on Vulgar Eloquence" that "the superiority of the French con- sists in its adaptation, by means of its facility and agree- ableness, to narratives in prose/' Much of the wild, artless grace, the naivete, which characterized it in its infancy, has been gradually polished away by fastidious critics, and can scarcely be said to have survived Marot and Montaigne. But the language has gained consider- ably in perspicuity, precision, and simplicity of con- struction, to which the jealous labours of the French Academy must be admitted to have contributed essen- tially. This simplicity of construction, refusing those complicated inversions so usual in the other languages of the Continent, and its total want of prosody, though fatal to poetical purposes, have greatly facilitated its ac- quisition to foreigners, and have made it a most suitable vehicle for conversation. Since the time of Louis the Fourteenth, accordingly, it has become the language of the courts and the popular medium of communication in most of the countries of Europe. Since that period, too, it has acquired a number of elegant phrases and familiar turns of expression, which have admirably fitted it for light, popular narrative, like that which enters into memoirs, letter-writing, and similar kinds of composi- tion. The character and situation of the writers themselves 304 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. may account still better for the success of the French in this department. Many of them, as Joinville, Sully, Comines, De Thou, Rochefoucault, Torcy, have been men of rank and education, the counsellors or the friends of princes, acquiring from experience a shrewd percep- tion of the character and of the forms of society. Most of them have been familiarized in those polite circles which, in Paris, more than any other capital, seem to combine the love of dissipation and fashion with a high relish for intellectual pursuits. The state of society in France, or, what is the same thing, in Paris, is admirably suited to the purposes of the memoir- writer. The cheer- ful, gregarious temper of the inhabitants, which mingles all ranks in the common pursuit of pleasure, the external polish, which scarcely deserts them in the commission of the grossest violence, the influence of the women, during the last two centuries, far superior to that of the sex among any other people, and exercised alike on matters of taste, politics, and letters, the gallantry and licentious intrigues so usual in the higher classes of this gay metro- polis, and which fill even the life of a man of letters, so stagnant in every other country, with stirring and ro- mantic adventure, all these, we say, make up a rich and varied panorama, that can hardly fail of interest under the hand of the most common artist. Lastly, the vanity of the French may be considered as another cause of their success in this kind of writing, a vanity which leads them to disclose a thousand amusing particulars which the reserve of an Englishman, and per- haps his pride, would discard as altogether unsuitable to the public ear. This vanity, it must be confessed, how- ever, has occasionally seduced their writers, under the garb of confessions and secret memoirs, to make such a disgusting exposure of human infirmity as few men would be willing to admit, even to themselves. MOLIEEE. 305 The best memoirs of late produced in France seem to have assumed somewhat of a novel shape. While they are written with the usual freedom and vivacity, they are fortified by a body of references and illustrations that attest an unwonted degree of elaboration and research. Such are those of Rousseau, La Fontaine, and Moliere, lately published. The last of these, which forms the subject of our article, is a compilation of all that has ever been recorded of the life of Moliere. It is executed in an agreeable manner, and has the merit of examining, with more accuracy than has been hitherto done, certain doubtful points in his biography, and of assembling together in a convenient form what has before been diffused over a great variety of surface. But, however familiar most of these particulars may be to the country- men of Moliere (by far the greatest comic genius in his own nation, and, in very many respects, inferior to none in any other), they are not so current elsewhere as to lead us to imagine that some account of his life and literary labours would be altogether unacceptable to our readers. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere) was born in Paris, January 15, 1622. His father was an upholsterer, as his grandfather had been before him; and the young Poquelin was destined to exercise the same hereditary craft, to which, indeed, he served an apprenticeship until the age of fourteen. In this determination his father was confirmed by the office which he had obtained for himself, in connection with his original vocation, of valet de chambre, to the king, with the promise of a re- version of it to his son on his own decease. The youth accordingly received only such a meagre elementary education as was usual with the artizans of that day. But a secret consciousness of his own powers convinced him that he was destined by nature for higher purposes than that of quilting sofas and hanging tapestry. His 306 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. occasional presence at the theatrical representations of the Hotel de Bourgogne is said also to have awakened in his mind, at this period, a passion for the drama. He therefore solicited his father to assist him in obtaining more liberal instruction ; and when the latter at length yielded to the repeated entreaties of his son, it was with the reluctance of one who imagines that he is spoiling a good mechanic in order to make a poor scholar. He was accordingly introduced into the Jesuits' College of Cler- mont, where he followed the usual course of study for five years with diligence and credit. He was fortunate enough to pursue the study of philosophy under the direction of the celebrated Gassendi, with his fellow- pupils, Chapelle the poet, afterwards his intimate friend ; and Bernier, so famous subsequently for his travels in the East, but who, on his return, had the misfortune to lose the favour of Louis the Fourteenth by replying to him, that " of all the countries he had ever seen, he pre- ferred Switzerland." On the completion of his studies, in 1641, he was required to accompany the king, then Louis the Thir- teenth, in his capacity of valet de chambre (his father being detained in Paris by his infirmities), on an ex- cursion to the south of France. This journey afforded him the opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted with the habits of the court, as well as those of the provinces, of which he afterwards so repeatedly availed himself in his comedies. On his return he commenced the study of the law, and had completed it, it would appear, when his old passion for the theatre revived with increased ardour, and, after some hesitation, he determined no longer to withstand the decided impulse of his genius. He associated himself with one of those city companies of players with which Paris had swarmed since the days of Richelieu, a minister who aspired MOLIEEE. 307 after the same empire in the republic of letters which he had so long maintained over the state, and whose ostentatious patronage eminently contributed to develop that taste for dramatic exhibition which has distinguished his countrymen ever since. The consternation of the elder Poquelin on receiving the intelligence of his son's unexpected determination may be readily conceived. It blasted at once all the fair promise which the rapid progress the latter had made in his studies justified him in forming, and it degraded him to an unfortunate profession, esteemed at that time even more lightly in France than it has been in other countries. The humiliating dependence of the comedian on the popular favour, the daily ex- posure of his person to the caprice and insults of an unfeeling audience, the numerous temptations incident to his precarious and unsettled life, may furnish abun- dant objections to this profession in the mind of every parent. But in France, to all these objections were superadded others of a graver cast, founded on religion. The clergy there, alarmed at the rapidly-increasing taste for dramatic exhibitions, openly denounced these ele- gant recreations as an insult to the Deity ; and the pious father anticipated, in this preference of his son, his spiritual no less than his temporal perdition. He actually made an earnest remonstrance to him to this effect, through the intervention of one of his friends, who, however, instead of converting the youth, was himself persuaded to join the company then organizing under his direction. But his family were never recon- ciled to his proceeding ; and even at a later period of his life, when his splendid successes in his new career had shown how rightly he had understood the character of his own genius, they never condescended to avail themselves of the freedom of admission to his theatre, x 2 308 BOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. which he repeatedly proffered. M. Bret, his editor, also informs us that he had himself seen a genealogical O " & tree in the possession of the descendants of this same family, in which the name of Moliere was not even admitted ! Unless it were to trace their connection with so illustrious a name, what could such a family want of a genealogical tree ? It was from a deference to these scruples that our hero annexed to his patronymic the name of Moliere, by which alone he has been recog- nized by posterity. During the three following years he continued play- ing in Paris, until the turbulent regency of Anne of Austria withdrew the attention of the people from the quiet pleasures of the drama to those of civil broil and tumult. Moliere then quitted the capital for the south of France. Erom this period, 1646 to 1658, his his- tory presents few particulars worthy of record. He wandered with his company through the different pro- vinces, writing a few farces which have long since perished, performing at the principal cities, and, where- ever he went, by his superior talent withdrawing the crowd from every other spectacle to the exhibition of his own. During this period, too, he was busily storing his mind with those nice observations of men and man- ncrs so essential to the success of the dramatist, and which were to ripen there until a proper time for their development should arrive. At the town of Pezenas they still show an elbow-chair of Moliere 's (as at Mont- pellier they show the gown of Eabelais), in which, the poet, it is said, ensconced in a corner of a barber's shop, would sit for the hour together, silently watching the air, gestures, and grimaces of the village politi- cians, who in those days, before coffee-houses were in- troduced into France, used to congregate in this place of resort. The fruits of this study maybe easily dis- MOLIEEE. 309 cerned in those original draughts of character from the C_J O middling and lower classes with which his pieces every- where abound. In the south of France he met with the Prince of Conti, with whom he had contracted a friendship at the college of Clermont, and who received him with great hospitality. The prince pressed upon him the office of his private secretary ; but, fortunately for letters, Moliere was constant in his devotion to the drama, assigning as his reason that "the occupation was of too serious a complexion to suit his taste, and that, though he might make a passable author, he should make a very poor secretary." Perhaps he was influenced in this refusal, also, by the fate of the pre- ceding incumbent, who had lately died of a fever, in consequence of a blow from the fire-tongs, which his highness, in a fit of ill-humour, had given him on the temple. However this may be, it was owing to the good offices of the prince that he obtained access to Monsieur, the only brother of Louis the Fourteenth, and father of the celebrated regent, Philip of Orleans, who, on his return to Paris in 1658, introduced him to the king, before whom, in the month of October fol- lowing, he was allowed, with his company, to perform a tragedy of Corneille's and one of his own forces. His little corps was now permitted to establish itself under the title of the " Company of Monsieur," and the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon was assigned as the place for its performances. Here, in the course of a few weeks, he brought out his Etourdi and Le Depit Amoureux, comedies in verse and in five acts, which he had composed during his provincial pilgrimage, and which, although deficient in an artful liaison of scenes and in probability of incident, exhibit, particularly the last, those fine touches of the ridiculous, which 310 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CBITICAL MISCELLANIES. revealed the future author of the Tartuffc and the Misanthrope. They indeed found greater favour with the audience than some of his later pieces ; for in the former they could only compare him with the wretched models that had preceded him, while in the latter they were to compare him with himself. In the ensuing year Moliere exhibited his celebrated farce of Les Precieuses Ridicules ; a piece in only one act, but which, by its inimitable satire, effected such a revolution in the literary taste of his countrymen as has been accomplished by few works of a more im- posing form, and which may be considered as the basis of the dramatic glory of Moliere, and the dawn of good comedy in France. This epoch was the com- mencement of that brilliant period in French literature which is so well known as the age of Louis the Four- teenth ; and yet it was distinguished by such a puerile, meretricious taste as is rarely to be met with except in the incipient stages of civilization or in its last decline. The cause of this melancholy perversion of intellect is mainly imputable to the influence of a certain coterie of wits, whose rank, talents, and successful authorship had authorized them in some measure to set up as the arbiters of taste and fashion. This choice assembly, consisting of the splenetic Rochefoucault, the lel-esprit Voiture, Balzac, whose letters afford the earliest example of numbers in French prose, the lively and licentious Bussy-Rabutin, Chapelain, who, as a wit has observed, might still have had a reputation had it not been for his " Pucelle," the poet Benserade, Manage, and others of less note, together with such eminent women as Madame Lafayette, Mademoiselle Scuderi (whose eternal romances, the delight of her own age, have been the despair of every other), and even the elegant Sevigne, was ac- customed to hold its reunions principally at the H6tel MOLIEEE. 311 de Kambouillet, the residence of the marchioness of that name, and which from this circumstance has acquired such ill-omened notoriety in the history of letters. Here they were wont to hold the most solemn dis- cussions on the most frivolous topics, but especially on matters relating to gallantry and love, which they de- bated with all the subtlety and metaphysical refinement that centuries before had characterized the romantic Courts of Love in the south of France. All this was conducted in an affected jargon, in which the most common things, instead of being called by their usual names, were signified by ridiculous periphrases, which, while it required neither wit nor ingenuity to invent them, could have had no other merit, even in their own eyes, than that of being unintelligible to the vul- gar. To this was superadded a tone of exaggerated sentiment, and a ridiculous code of etiquette, by which the intercourse of these exclusives was to be regulated with each other, all borrowed from the absurd ro- mances of Calprenede and Scuderi. Even the names of the parties underwent a metamorphosis, and Madame de Kambouillet's Christian name of Catherine, being found too trite and unpoetical, was converted into Arthenice, by which she was so generally recognized as to be designated by it in Flechier's eloquent funeral oration on her daughter.* These insipid affectations, which French critics are fond of imputing to an Italian influence, savour quite as much of the Spanish cultismo as of the concetti of the former nation, and may be yet more fairly referred to the same false principles of taste which distinguished the French Pleiades of the * How comes La Harpe to fall into the error of supposing that Flechier referred to Madame Montausier by this epithet of Arthenice ? The bishop's style in this passage is as unequivocal as usual. See Cours de Litterature, etc., tome vi p. 167- 312 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. sixteenth century, and the more ancient compositions of their Provencal ancestors. Dictionaries were com- piled and treatises written illustrative of this precious vocabulary ; all were desirous of being initiated into the mysteries of so elegant a science ; even such men as Corneille and Bossuet did not disdain to frequent the saloons where it was studied ; the spirit of imita- tion, more active in France than in other countries, took possession of the provinces ; every village had its coterie of precieuses after the fashion of the capital, and a false taste and criticism threatened to infect the very sources of pure and healthful literature. It was against this fashionable corruption that Moliere aimed his wit in the little satire of the Precieuses Ridi- cules, in which the valets of two noblemen are repre- sented as aping their masters' tone of conversation for the purpose of imposing on two young ladies fresh from the provinces and great admirers of the new style. The absurdity of these affectations is still more strongly relieved by the contemptuous incredulity of the father and servant, who do not comprehend a word of them. By this process Moliere succeeded both in exposing and degrading these absurd pretensions, as he showed how opposite they were to common sense, and how easily they were to be acquired by the most vulgar minds. The success was such as might have been anticipated on an appeal to popular feeling, where nature must always triumph over the arts of affectation. The piece was welcomed with enthusiastic applause, and the disciples of the H6tel Rambouillet, most of whom were present at the first exhibition, beheld the fine fabric which they had been so painfully constructing brought to the ground by a single blow. " And these follies," said Menage to Chapelain, " which you and I see so finely criticised here, are what we have been so long admiring. We MOLIERE. 313 must go home and burn our idols." " Courage, Moliere !" cried an old man from the pit ; "this is genuine comedy." The price of the seats was doubled from the time of the second representation. Nor were the effects of the satire merely transitory. It converted an epithet of praise into one of reproach ; and afemme precieuse, a style precieux, a ton precieux, once so much admired, have ever since been used only to signify the most ridiculous affectation. There was, in truth, however, quite as much luck as merit in this success of Moliere, whose production ex- hibits no finer raillery or better-sustained dialogue than are to be found in many of his subsequent pieces. It assured him, however, of his own strength, and disclosed to him the mode in which he should best hit the popular taste. " I have no occasion to study Plautus or Terence any longer," said he ; "I must henceforth study the world." The world, accordingly, was his study; and the exquisite models of character which it furnished him will last as long as it shall endure. In 1660 he brought out the excellent comedy of the Ecole des Marls, and in the course of the same month, that of the Fdclieux, in three acts, composed, learned, and performed within the brief space of a fortnight ; an expedition evincing the dexterity of the manager no less than that of the author. This piece was written at the request of Fouquet, superintendent of finances to Louis the Fourteenth, for the magnificent fete at Vaux, given by him to that monarch, and lavishly celebrated in the memoirs of the period, and with yet more elegance in a poetical epistle of La Fontaine to his friend De Maucroix. This minister had been intrusted with the principal care of the finances under Cardinal Mazarin, and had been continued in the same office by Louis the Fourteenth, on his own assumption of the government. The monarch, however, alarmed at the growing dilapidations of the 314 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. revenue, requested from the superintendent an expose of its actual condition, which, on receiving, he privately communicated to Colbert, the rival and successor of Fouquet. The latter, whose ordinary expenditure far exceeded that of any other subject in the kingdom, and who, in addition to immense sums occasionally lost at play and daily squandered on his debaucheries, is said to have distributed in pensions more than four millions of livres annually, thought it would be an easy matter to impose on a young and inexperienced prince, who had hitherto shown himself more devoted to pleasure than business, and accordingly gave in false returns, exagge- rating the expenses, and diminishing the actual receipts of the treasury. The detection of this peculation deter- mined Louis to take the first occasion of dismissing his powerful minister; but his ruin was precipitated and completed by the discovery of an indiscreet passion for Madame de la Valliere, whose fascinating graces were then beginning to acquire for her that ascendency over the youthful monarch which has since condemned her name to such unfortunate celebrity. The portrait of this lady, seen in the apartments of the favourite on the occasion to which we have adverted, so incensed Louis that he would have had him arrested on the spot but for the seasonable intervention of the queen-mother, who reminded him that Fouquet was his host. It was for this fete at Vaux, whose palace and ample domains, covering the extent of three villages, had cost their pro- prietor the sum, almost incredible for that period, of eighteen million livres, that Fouquet put in requisition all the various talents of the capital, the dexterity of its artists, and the invention of its finest poets. He was particularly lavish in his preparations for the dramatic portion of the entertainment. Le Brun passed for a while from his victories of Alexander to paint the thea- MOLIERE. 315 trical decorations ; Torelli was employed to contrive the machinery; Pelisson furnished the prologue, much ad- mired in its day, and Moliere his comedy of the Fdcheux. This piece, the hint for which may have been sug- gested by Horace's ninth satire, Ibam forte vid Sacrd, is an amusing caricature of the various bores that infest society, rendered the more vexatious by their interven- tion at the very moment when a young lover is hastening to the place of assignation with his mistress. Louis the Fourteenth, after the performance, seeing his master of the hunts near him, M. Soyecour, a personage remarkably absent, and inordinately devoted to the pleasures of the- chase, pointed him out to Moliere as an original whom he had omitted to bring upon his canvas. The poet took the hint, and the following day produced an excel- lent scene, where this Nimrod is made to go through the technics of his art, in which he had himself, with great complaisance, instructed the mischievous satirist, who had drawn him into a conversation for that very purpose on the preceding evening. This play was the origin of the comedie-ballet, after- wards so popular in France. The residence at Vaux brought Moliere more intimately in contact with the king and the court than he had before been ; and from this time may be dated the particular encouragement which he ever after received from this prince, and which eventually enabled him to triumph over the malice of his enemies. A few days after this magnificent enter- tainment, Fouquet was thrown into prison, where he was- suffered to languish the remainder of his days, " which," says the historian from whom we have gathered these details, " he terminated in sentiments of the most sincere piety ; " * a termination by no means uncommon in * Histoire de la Vie, etc., de la Fontaine, par M. Valckenaer. Paris, 1824. 316 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. France with that class of persons, of either sex, respec- tively, who have had the misfortune to survive their fortune or their beauty. In February, 1662, Moliere formed a matrimonial connection with Mademoiselle Bejart, a young comedian of his company, who had been educated under his own eye, and whose wit and captivating graces had effectually ensnared the poet's heart, but for which he was destined to perform doleful penance the remainder of his life. The disparity of their ages for the lady was hardly seventeen might have afforded in itself a sufficient objection ; and he had no reason to flatter himself that she would remain uninfected by the pernicious example of the society in which she had been educated, and of which he himself was not altogether an immaculate member. In his excellent comedy of the Ecole des Femmes, brought forward the same year, the story tuim upon the absurdity of an old man's educating a young woman for the purpose, at some future time, of marrying her, which wise plan is defeated by the unseasonable apparition of a young lover, who in five minutes undoes what it had cost the veteran so many years to contrive. The pertinency of this moral to the poet's own situa- tion shows how much easier it is to talk wisely than to act so. This comedy, popular as it was on its representation, brought upon the head of its author a tempest of parody* satire, and even slander, from those of his own craft who were jealous of his unprecedented success, and from thos, literary petits-maitres who still smarted with the stripes inflicted on them in some of his previous performances. One of this latter class, incensed at the applauses bestowed upon the piece on the night of its first repre- sentation, indignantly exclaimed, Ris done, parterre! MOLIERE. 317 ris done ! " Laugh then, pit, if you will ! " and imme- diately quitted the theatre. Moliere was not slow in avenging himself of these interested criticisms, by means of a little piece entitled La Critique de I'Ecole des Femmes, in which he brings forward the various objections made to his comedy and ridicules them with unsparing severity. These objections appear to have been chiefly of a verbal nature. A few such familiar phrases as tarte d la creme, enfans par I'oreille, etc., gave particular offence to the purists of that day, and, in the prudish spirit of French criticism, have since been condemned by Voltaire and La Harpe as unworthy of comedy. One of the personages introduced into the Critique is a marquis, who, when repeatedly interrogated as to the nature of his objections to the comedy, has no other answer to make than by his eternal tarte d la ere me. The due de Feuillade, a coxcomb of little brains but great pretension, was the person gene- rally supposed to be here intended. The peer, unequal to an encounter of wits with his antagonist, resorted to a coarser remedy. Meeting Moliere one day in the gallery at Versailles, he advanced as if to embrace him, a civility which the great lords of that day occasionally condescended to bestow upon their inferiors. As the unsuspecting poet inclined himself to receive the salute, the duke, seizing his head between his hands, rubbed it briskly against the buttons of his coat, repeating, at the same time, " Tarte d la creme, Monsieur, tarte a la crdme!" The king, on receiving intelligence of this affront, was highly indignant, and reprimanded the duke with great asperity. He at the same time encouraged Moliere to defend himself with his own weapons ; a privilege of which he speedily availed himself, in a caustic little satire in one act, entitled, Impromptu de Versailles. "The marquis," he says in this piece, "is 318 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. now-a-days the droll (le plaisant) of the comedy ; and as our ancestors always introduced a jester to furnish mirth for the audience, so we must have recourse to some ridiculous marquis to divert them." It is obvious that Moliere could never have maintained this independent attitude if he had not been protected by the royal favour. Indeed, Louis was constant in giving him this protection ; and when, soon after this period, the character of Moliere was blackened by the vilest imputations, the monarch testified his conviction of his innocence by publicly standing godfather to his child, a tribute of respect equally honourable to the prince and the poet. The king, moreover, granted him -a pension of a thousand livres annually, and to his com- pany, which henceforth took the title of " comedians of the king," a pension of seven thousand. Our author re- ceived his pension as one of a long list of men of letters who experienced a similar bounty from the royal hand. The curious estimate exhibited in this document of the relative merits of these literary stipendiaries affords a striking evidence that the decrees of contemporaries arc not unfrequently to be reversed by posterity. The obso- lete Chapelain is there recorded " as the greatest French poet who has ever existed ; " in consideration of which, his stipend amounted to three thousand livres, while Boileau's name, for which his satires had already secured an imperishable existence, is not even noticed ! It should be added, however, on the authority of Boi- leau, that Chapelain himself had the principal hand in furnishing this apocryphal scale of merit to the minister. In the month of September, 1665, Moliere produced his L' Amour Medecin, a comedie-ballet, in three acts, which from the time of its conception to that of its per- formance consumed only five days. This piece, although MOLIERE. 319 displaying no more than his usual talent for caustic raillery, is remarkable as affording the earliest demon- stration of those direct hostilities upon the medical faculty which he maintained at intervals during the rest of his life, and which he may be truly said to have died in maintaining. In this he followed the example of Montaigne, who, in particular, devotes one of the longest chapters in his work to a tirade against the profession, which he enforces by all the ingenuity of his wit and his usual wealth of illustration. In this, also, Moliere was subsequently imitated by Le Sage, as every reader of Gil Bias will readily call to mind. Both Montaigne and Le Sage, however, like most other libellers of the healing art, were glad to have recourse to it in the hour of need. Not so with Moliere. His satire seems to have been without affectation. Though an habitual valetudinarian, he relied almost wholly on the temperance of his diet for the re- establishment of his health. " What use do you make of your physician ? " said the king to him one day. " We chat together, sire," said the poet : "he gives me his prescriptions ; I never follow them, and so I get well." An ample apology for this infidelity may be found in the state of the profession at that day, whose members affected to disguise a profound ignorance of the true principles of science under a pompous exterior, which, however it might impose upon the vulgar, could only bring them into deserved discredit with the better por- tion of the community. The physicians of that time are described as parading the streets of Paris on mules, dressed in a long robe and bands, holding their conversation in bad Latin, or, if they condescended to employ the verna- cular, mixing it up with such a jargon of scholastic phrase and scientific technics as to render it perfectly unintelli- gible to vulgar ears. The following lines, cited by M. 320 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. Taschereau, and written in good earnest at the time, seem to hit off most of these peculiarities : " Affecter un air p&lantesque, Cracher du Grec et du Latin, Longue perruque, habit grotesque, De la fourrure et du satin, Tout cela r^uni fait presque Ce qu'on appelle un m^decin." * In addition to these absurdities, the physicians of that period exposed themselves to still farther derision by the contrariety of their opinions and the animosity with which they maintained them. The famous consultation in the case of Cardinal Mazarin was well known in its day, one of his four medical attendants affirming the seat of his disorder to be the liver, another the lungs, a third the spleen, and a fourth the mesentery. Moliere's raillery, therefore, against empirics, in a profession where mistakes are so easily made, so difficult to be detected, and the only one in which they are irreme- diable, stands abundantly excused from the censures which have been heaped upon it. Its effects were visible in the reform which in his own time it effected in their manners if in nothing farther. They assumed the dress of men of the world, and gradually adopted the popular forms of communication ; an essential step to improve- ment, since nothing cloaks ignorance and empiricism more effectually with the vulgar than an affected use of learned phrase and a technical vocabulary. We are now arrived at that period of Moliere's career when he composed his Misanthrope, a play which some critics have esteemed his masterpiece, and which all * A gait and air somewhat pedantic, And scarce to spit but Greek or Latin ; A long peruke and habit antic, Sometimes of fur, sometimes of satin, Form the receipt by which 'tis showed How to make doctors a In mode. MOLIEBE. 321 concur in admiring as one of the noblest productions of the modern drama. Its literary execution, too, of paramount importance in the eye of a French critic, is more nicely elaborated than in any other of the pieces of Moliere, if we except the Tartuffe, and its didactic dialogue dis- plays a maturity of thought equal to what is found in the best satires of Boileau. It is the very didactic tone of this comedy, indeed, which, combined with its want of eager, animating interest, made it less popular on its representation than some of his inferior pieces. A cir- cumstance which occurred on the first night of its per- formance may be worth noticing. In the second scene of the first act, a man of fashion, it is well known, is re- presented as soliciting the candid opinion of Alceste on a sonnet of his own inditing, though he flies into a passion with him, five minutes after, for pronouncing an unfavourable judgment. This sonnet was so artfully constructed by Moliere, with those dazzling epigram- matic points most captivating to common ears, that the gratified audience were loud in their approbation of what they supposed intended in good faith by the author. How great was their mortification, then, when they heard Alceste condemn the whole as puerile, and fairly expose the false principles on which it had been constructed ! Such a rebuke must have carried more weight with it than a volume of set dissertation on the o principles of taste. Eousseau has bitterly inveighed against Moliere for exposing to ridicule the hero of his Misanthrope, a high- minded and estimable character. It was told to the Due de Montausier, well known for his austere virtue, that he was intended as the original of the character. Much offended, he attended a representation of the piece, but, on returning, declared that " he dared hardly flatter himself the poet had intended him so great au. 322 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. honour." This fact, as has been well intimated by La Harpe, furnishes the best reply to Rousseau's invective. The relations in which Moliere stood with his wife at the time of the appearance of this comedy gave to the exhibition a painful interest. The levity and extrava- gance of this lady had for some time transcended even those liberal limits which were conceded at that day by the complaisance of a French husband, and they deeply affected the happiness of the poet. As he one day com- municated the subject to his friend Chapelle, the latter strongly urged him to confine her person, a remedy much in vogue then for refractory wives, and one, cer- tainly, if not more efficacious, at least more gallant than the " moderate flagellation " authorized by the English law. He remonstrated on the folly of being longer the dupe of her artifices. " Alas ! " said the unfortunate poet to him, " you have never loved ! " A separation, however, was at length agreed upon, and it was arranged that, while both parties occupied the same house, they should never meet except at the theatre. The respec- tive parts which they performed in this piece corre- sponded precisely with their respective situations; that of Celimene, a fascinating, capricious coquette, insensible to every remonstrance of her lover, and selfishly bent on the gratification of her own appetites ; and that of Alceste, perfectly sensible of the duplicity of his mis- tress, whom he vainly hopes to reform, and no less so of the unworthiness of his own passion, from which he as vainly hopes to extricate himself. The coincidences are too exact to be considered wholly accidental. If Moliere in his preceding pieces had hit the follies and fashionable absurdities of the age, in the Tartuffe, he flew at still higher game, the most odious of all vices, religious hypocrisy. The result showed that his shafts were not shot in the dark. The first three acts of the MOLIEKE. 323 Tartuffe, the only ones then written, made their appear- ance at the memorable fetes known under the name of " The Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," given by Louis the Fourteenth at Versailles in 1664, and of which the inquisitive reader may find a circumstantial narrative in the twenty-fifth chapter of Voltaire's history of that monarch. The only circumstance which can give them a permanent value with posterity is their having been the occasion of the earliest exhibition of this inimitable comedy. Louis the Fourteenth, who, notwithstanding the defects of his education, seems to have had a dis- criminating perception of literary beauty, was fully sen- sible of the merits of this production. The Tartuffes, however, who were present at the exhibition, deeply stung by the sarcasms of the poet, like the foul birds of night whose recesses have been suddenly invaded by a glare of light, raised a fearful cry against him, until Louis even, whose solicitude for the interests of the Church was nowise impaired by his own personal dere- lictions, complied with their importunities for imposing a prohibition on the public performance of the play. It was, however, privately acted in the presence of Monsieur, and aftewards of the great Conde. Copies of it were greedily circulated in the societies of Paris ; and, although their unanimous suffrage was an inadequate compensation to the author for the privations he incurred, it was sufficient to quicken the activity of the false zealots, who, under the mask of piety, assailed him with the grossest libels. One of them even ventured so far as to call upon the king to make a public example of him with fire and fagot ; another declared that it would be an offence to the Deity to allow Moliere, after such an enormity, " to participate in the sacraments, to be admitted to confession, or even to enter the precincts of a church, considering the anathemas which it had fulmi- Y 2 324 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. nated against the authors of indecent and sacrilegious spectacles ! " Soon after his sentence of prohibition, the king attended the performance of a piece entitled Scara- mouche Hermite, a piece abounding in passages the most indelicate and profane. " What is the reason," said he, on retiring, to the Prince of Conde, "that the persons so sensibly scandalized at Moliere's comedy take no umbrage at this?" "Because," said the prince, "the latter only attacks religion, while the former attacks themselves ; " an answer which may remind one of a remark of Bayle in reference to the Decameron, which, having been placed on the Index on account of its immorality, was, however, allowed to be published in an edition which -converted the names of the ecclesiastics into those of laymen ; " a concession," says the philosopher, " which shows the priests to have been much more solicitous for the interests of their own order than for those of heaven." Louis, at length convinced of the interested motives of the enemies of the Tartuffe, yielded to the importu- nities of the public and removed his prohibition of its performance. It accordingly was represented, for the first time in public, in August, 1667, before an over- flowing house, extended to its full complement of five acts, biTt with alterations of the names of the piece, the principal personages in it, and some of its most ob- noxious passages. It was entitled The Impostor, and its hero was styled Panulfe. On the second evening of the performance, however, an interdict arrived from the president of the Parliament against the repetition of the performance, and as the king had left Paris in order to join his army in Flanders, no immediate re- dress was to be obtained. It was not until two years later, 1669, that the Tartuffe, in its present shape, was finally allowed to proceed unmolested in its representa- MOLIEBE. 325 tions. It is scarcely necessary to add that these were attended with the most brilliant success which its author could have anticipated, and to which the in- trinsic merits of the piece, and the unmerited persecu- tions he had undergone, so well entitled him. Forty- four successive representations were scarcely sufficient to satisfy the eager curiosity of the public ; and his grateful company forced upon Moliere a double share of the profits during every repetition of its performance for the remainder of his life. Posterity has confirmed the decision of his contemporaries, and it still remains the most admired comedy of the French theatre, and will always remain so, says a native critic, "as long as taste and hypocrites shall endure in France." We have been thus particular in our history of these transactions, as it affords one of the most interesting examples on record of undeserved persecution with which envy and party spirit have assailed a man of letters. No one of Moliere's compositions is deter- mined by a more direct moral aim; nowhere has he stripped the mask from vice with a more intrepid hand ; nowhere has he animated his discourses with a more sound and practical piety. It should be added, in justice to the French clergy of that period, that the most eminent prelates at the court acknowledged the merits of this comedy, and were strongly in favour of its representation. It is generally known that the amusing scene in the first act, where Dorine enlarges so eloquently on the good cheer which Tartuffe had made in the absence of his host, was suggested to Moliere some years previous- in Lorraine, by a circumstance which took place at the table of Louis the Fourteenth, whom Moliere had ac- companied in his capacity of valet de chambre. Pere- fixe, bishop of Rhodez, entering while the king was at 326 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. his evening meal, during Lent, was invited by him to follow his example ; but the bishop declined, on the ground that he was accustomed to eat only once during the days of vigil and fast. The king, observing one of his attendants to smile, inquired of him the reason as soon as the prelate had withdrawn. The latter in- formed his master that he need be under no apprehen- sions for the health of the good bishop, as he himself had assisted at his dinner on that day, and then re- counted to him the various dishes which had been served up. The king, who listened with becoming gravity to the narration, uttered an exclamation of "Poor man!" at the specification of each new item, varying the tone of his exclamation in such a manner as to give it a highly comic effect. The humour was not lost upon our poet, who has transported the same ejaculations, with much greater effect, into the above- mentioned scene of his play. The king, who did not at first recognize the source whence he had derived it, on being informed of it, was much pleased, if we ma)?" believe M. Taschereau, in finding himself even thus accidentally associated with the work of a man of genius. In 1668, Moliere brought forward his Avare, and in the following year his amusing comedy of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in which the folly of unequal alliances is successfully ridiculed and exposed. This play was first represented in the presence of the court at Chambord. The king maintained during its performance an in- scrutable physiognomy, which made it doubtful what might be his real sentiments respecting it. The same deportment waa maintained by him during the evening towards the author, who was in attendance in his capacity of valet de ckambre. The quick-eyed courtiers, the counts and marquises, who had so often smarted MOLIEEE. 32 7 under the lash of the poet, construing this into an expression of royal disapprobation, were loud in their condemnation of him, and a certain duke boldly affirmed "that he was fast sinking into his second childhood, and that, unless some better writer soon appeared, French comedy would degenerate into mere Italian farce." The unfortunate poet, unable to catch a single ray of consolation, was greatly depressed during the interval of five days which preceded the second representation of his piece ; on returning from which, the monarch assured him that " none of his productions had afforded him greater entertainment, and that, if he had delayed expressing his opinion on the preceding night, it was from the apprehension that his judgment might have been influenced by the excel- lence of the acting." Whatever we may think of this exhibition of royal caprice, we must admire the supple- ness of the courtiers, one and all of whom straightway expressed their full conviction of the merits of the comedy, and the duke above mentioned added, in par- ticular, that " there was a vis comica in all that Moliere ever wrote, to which the ancients could furnish no parallel ! " What exquisite studies for his pencil must Moliere not have found in this precious assembly ! We have already remarked that the profession of a comedian was but lightly esteemed in France at this period. Moliere experienced the inconveniences re- sulting from this circumstance even after his splendid literary career had given him undoubted claims to consideration. Most of our readers, no doubt, are acquainted with the anecdote of Belloc, an agreeable poet of the court, who, on hearing one of the servants in the royal household refuse to aid the author of the Tartuffe in making the king's bed, courteously requested "the poet to accept his services for that 328 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. purpose." Madame Campan's anecdote of a similar courtesy on the part of Louis the Fourteenth is also well known, who, when several of these functionaries refused to sit at table with the comedian, kindly in- vited him to sit down with him, and, calling in some of his principal courtiers, remarked that " he had re- quested the pleasure of Moliere's company at his own table, as it was not thought quite good enough for his officers." This rebuke had the desired effect. How- ever humiliating the reflection may be that genius should have, at any time, stood in need of such patron- age, it is highly honourable to the monarch who could raise himself so far above the prejudices of his age as to confer it. It was the same unworthy prejudice that had so long excluded Moliere from that great object and recom- pense of a French scholar's ambition, a seat in the Academy ; a body affecting to maintain a jealous watch over the national language and literature, which the author of the Misanthrope and the Tartvffe, perhaps more than any other individual of his age, had con- tributed to purify and advance. Sensible of this merit, they at length offered him a place in their assembly, provided he would renounce his profession of a player and confine himself in future to his literary labours. But the poet replied to his friend Boileau, the bearer of this communication, that "too many individuals of his company depended on his theatrical labours for support to allow him for a moment to think of it ; " a reply of infinitely more service to his memory than all the academic honours that could have been heaped upon him. This illustrious body, however, a century after his decease, paid him the barren compliment (the only one then in their power) of decreeing to him an eloye> MOLlfcBE. and of admitting his bust within their walls, with this inscription upon it : " Nothing is wanting to his glory : he was wanting to ours." The catalogue of Academicians contemporary with Moliere, most of whom now rest in sweet oblivion, or, with Cotin and Chapelain, live only in the satires of Boileau, shows that it is as little in the power of acade- mies to confer immortality on a writer as to deprive him of it. We have not time to notice the excellent comedy of the Femmes Savantes, and some inferior pieces, written by our author at a later period of his life, and must hasten to the closing scene. He had long been affected by a pulmonary complaint, and it was only by severe temperance, as we have before stated, that he was en- abled to preserve even a moderate degree of health. At the commencement of the year 1673 his malady sensibly increased. At this very season he composed his Malade Imaginaire, the most whimsical, and per- haps the most amusing, of the compositions in which he has indulged his raillery against the faculty. On the seventeenth of February, being the clay appointed for its fourth representation, his friends would have dissuaded him from appearing, in consequence of his- increasing indisposition ; but he persisted in his de- sign, alleging "that more than fifty poor individuals depended for their daily bread on its performance."" His life fell a sacrifice to his benevolence. The exer- tions which he was compelled to make in playing the principal part of Argan aggravated his distemper, and as he was repeating the word juro in the concluding ceremony he fell into a convulsion, which he vainly endeavoured to disguise from the spectators under a forced smile. He was immediately carried to his house 330 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. in the Rue de Richelieu, now No. 34. A violent fit of coughing, 011 his arrival, occasioned the rupture of a blood-vessel ; and seeing his end approaching, he sent for two ecclesiastics of the parish of St. Eustace, to which he belonged, to administer to him the last offices of religion. But these worthy persons refused their assistance ; and before a third, who had been sent for, could arrive, Moliere, suffocated with the effusion of blood, had expired in the arms of his family. Harlay de Champvalon, at that time Archbishop of Paris, refused the rites of sepulture to the deceased poet because he was a comedian and had had the mis- fortune to die without receiving the sacraments. This prelate is conspicuous, even in the chronicles of that period, for his bold and infamous debaucheries. It is of him that Madame de Sevignd observes, in one of her letters, " There are two little inconveniences which make it difficult for any one to undertake his funeral oration, his life and his death." Father Gail lard, who at length consented to undertake it, did so on the condition that he should not be required to say anything of the cha- racter of the deceased. The remonstrance of Louis the Fourteenth having induced this person to remove his interdict, he privately instructed the curate of St. Eus- tace not to allow the usual service for the dead to be recited at the interment. On the day appointed for this ceremony, a number of the rabble assembled before the deceased poet's door, determined to oppose it. "They knew only," says Voltaire, " that Moliere was a come- dian, but did not know that he was a philosopher and a great man." They had, more probably, been collected together by the Tartuffes, his unforgiving enemies. The widow of the poet appeased these wretches by throwing money to them from the windows. In the evening, the body, escorted by a procession of about a hundred MOLIERE. 331 individuals, the friends and intimate acquaintances of the deceased poet, each of them bearing a flambeau in his hand, was quietly deposited in the cemetery of St. Joseph, without the ordinary chant, or service of any kind. It was not thus that Paris followed to the tomb the remains of her late distinguished comedian, Talma. Yet Talma was only a comedian, while Moliere, in addition to this, had the merit of being the most emi- nent comic writer whom France had ever produced. The different degree of popular civilization which this difference of conduct indicates may afford a subject of contemplation by no means unpleasing to the philan- thropist. In the year 1792, during that memorable period in France when an affectation of reverence for their illus- trious dead was strangely mingled with the persecution of the living, the Parisians resolved to exhume the remains of La Fontaine and Moliere, in order to trans- port them to a more honourable place of interment. Of the relics thus obtained, it is certain that no portion belonged to La Fontaine, and it is extremely probable that none did to Moliere. Whosoever they may have been, they did not receive the honours for which their repose had been disturbed. With the usual fickleness of the period, they were shamefully transferred from one place to another, or abandoned to neglect, for seven years, when the patriotic conservator of the Monumens Franpais succeeded in obtaining them for his collection at ihcPetits Augustins. On the suppres- sion of this institution in 1817, the supposed ashes of the two poets were, for the last time, transported to the spacious cemetery of Pere de la Chaise, where the tomb of the author of the Tartuffe is designated by an in- scription in Latin, which, as if to complete the scandal of the proceedings, is grossly mistaken in the only fact 332 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. which it pretends to record, namely, the age of the poet at the time of his decease. Moliere died soon after entering upon his fifty-second year. He is represented to have been somewhat above the middle stature, and well proportioned ; his features large, his complexion dark, and his black, bushy eye- brows so flexible as to admit of his giving an infinitely comic expression to his physiognomy. He was the best actor of his own generation, and, by his counsels, formed the celebrated Baron, the best of the succeed- ing. He played all the range of his own characters, from Alceste to Sganarelle, though he seems to have been peculiarly fitted for broad comedy. He composed with rapidity, for which Boileau has happily compli- mented him : " Kare et sublime esprit, dont la fertile vein Ignore en dcrivant le travail et la peine ; " unlike in this to Boileau himself, and to Eacine, the former of whom taught the latter, if we may credit his son, " the art of rhyming with difficulty." Of course, the verses of Moliere have neither the correctness nor the high finish of those of his two illustrious rivals. He produced all his pieces, amounting to thirty, in the short space of fifteen years. He was in the habit of reading these to an old female domestic by the name of La Foret, on whose unsophisticated judgment he greatly relied. On one occasion, when he attempted to impose upon her the production of a brother author, she plainly told him that he had never written it. Sir Walter Scott may have had this habit of Moliere's in his mind when he introduced a similar expedient into his " Chronicles of the Canongate." For the same reason, our poet used to request the comedians to bring their children with them when he recited a new play. The peculiar advantage of this humble criticism in dramatic MOLIEBE. 333 compositions is obvious. Alfieri himself, as he informs us, did not disdain to resort to it. Moliere's income was very ample, probably not less than twenty-five or thirty thousand francs, an immense sum for that day ; yet he left but little property. The expensive habits of his wife and his own liberality may account for it. One example of this is worth recording, as having been singularly opportune and well directed. When Racine came up to Paris as a young adventurer, he presented to Moliere a copy of his first crude tragedy, long since buried in oblivion. The latter discerned in it, amid all its imperfections, the latent spark of dramatic genius, and he encouraged its author by the present of a hundred louis. This was doing better for him than Corneille did, who advised the future author of Phedre to abandon the tragic walk and to devote himself alto- gether to comedy. Racine recompensed this benefaction of his friend, at a later period of his life, by quarrelling with him. Moliere was naturally of a reserved and taciturn temper, insomuch that his friend Boileau used to call him the Contemplateur. Strangers who had expected to recognize in his conversation the sallies of wit which distinguished his dramas went away disappointed. The same thing is related of La Fontaine. The truth is, that Moliere went into society as a spectator, not as an actor; he found there the studies for the characters which he was to transport upon the stage, and he occupied himself with observing them. The dreamer La Fontaine lived, too, in a world of his own creation. His friend Madame de la Sabliere paid to him this untranslatable compliment : " En verite, nion cher La Fontaine, vous seriez bien bete, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit." These unseasonable reveries brought him, it may be imagined, into many whimsical adventures. The great Corneille, 334 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. too, was distinguished by the same apathy. A gentle- man dined at the same table with him for six months without suspecting the author of the " Cid." The literary reputation of Moliere, and his amiable personal endowments, naturally led him into an intimacy with the most eminent wits of the golden age in which he lived, but especially with Boileau, La Fontaine, and Eacine; and the confidential intercourse of these great minds, and their frequent reunions for the purposes of social pleasure, bring to mind the similar associations at the Mermaid's, Will's Coffee-house, and Button's, which form so pleasing a picture in the annals of English literature. It was common on these occasions to have a volume of the unfortunate Chapelain's epic, then in popular repute, lie open upon the table, and if one of the party fell into a grammatical blunder, to impose upon him the reading of some fifteen or twenty verses of it : "a whole page/' says Louis Kacine, " was sentence of death." La Fontaine, in his Psyche, has painted his reminis- cences of these happy meetings in the colouring of fond regret ; where, " freely discussing such topics of general literature or personal gossip as might arise, they touched lightly upon all, like bees passing on from flower to flower, criticising the works of others without envy, and of one another, when any one chanced to fall into the malady of the age, with frankness." Alas that so rare a union of minds, destined to live together through all ages, should have been dissolved by the petty jealousies incident to common men ! In these assemblies frequent mention is made of Chapelle, the most intimate friend of Moliere, whose agreeable verses are read with pleasure in our day, and whose cordial manners and sprightly conversation made him the delight of his own. His mercurial spirits, how- ever, led him into too free an indulgence of convivial MOLIEEE. 335 pleasures, and brought upon him the repeated though unavailing remonstrances of his friends. On one of these occasions, as Boileau was urging upon him the impropriety of this indulgence, and its inevitable conse- quences, Chapelle, who received the admonition with great contrition, invited his Mentor to withdraw from the public street in which they were then walking into a neighbouring house, where they could talk over the matter with less interruption. Here wine was called for, and, in the warmth of discussion, a second bottle being soon followed by a third, both parties at length found themselves in a condition which made it advisable to adjourn the lecture to a more fitting occasion. Moliere enjoyed also the closest intimacy with the great Conde', the most distinguished ornament of the Court of Louis the Fourteenth ; to such an extent, indeed, that the latter directed that the poet should never be refused admission to him, at whatever hour .he might choose to pay his visit. His regard for his friend was testified by his remark, rather more candid than courteous, to an abbe* of his acquaintance, who had brought him an epitaph of his own writing upon the deceased poet. " Would to Heaven," said the prince, " that he were in a condition to bring me yours ! " We have already wandered beyond the limits which we had assigned to ourselves for an abstract of Moliere's literary labours and of the most interesting anecdotes in his biography. Without entering, therefore, into a criti- cism on his writings, of which the public stand in no need, we shall dismiss the subject with a few brief reflec- tions on their probable influence, and on the design of the author in producing them. The most distinguished French critics, with the over- weening partiality in favour of their own nation, so natural and so universal, placing Molifcre by common 336 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. consent at the head of their own comic writers, have -also claimed for him a pre-eminence over those of every other age and country. A. W. Schlegel, a very compe- tent judge in these matters, has degraded him, on the other hand, from the walks of high comedy to the writer of " buffoon farces, for which his genius and inclination seem to have essentially fitted him ; " adding, moreover, that " his characters are not drawn from nature, but from the fleeting and superficial forms of fashionable life." This is a hard sentence, accommodated to the more forcible illustration of the peculiar theory which the German writer has avowed throughout his work, and which, however reasonable in its first principles, has led him into as exaggerated an admiration of the romantic models which he prefers, as disparagement of the classical school which he detests. It is a sentence, moreover, upon which some eminent critics in his own country, who support his theory in the main, have taken the liberty to demur. That a large proportion of Moliere's pieces are con- ceived in a vein of broad, homely merriment, rather than in that of elevated comedy, abounding in forced situations, high caricature, and practical jokes ; in the knavish, in- triguing, valets of Plautus and Terence ; in a compound of that good nature and irritability, shrewdness and credulity, which make up the dupes of Aristophanes, is very true ; but that a writer distinguished by his deep reflection, his pure taste, and nice observation of cha- racter should have preferred this to the higher walks of his art, is absolutely incredible. He has furnished the best justification of himself in an apology which a con- temporary biographer reports him to have made to some one who censured him on this very ground : " If I wrote simply for fame," said he, " I should manage very dif- ferently ; but I write for the support of my company. MOLIEBE. 337 I must not address myself, therefore, to a few people of education, but to the mob. And this latter class of gentry take very little interest in a continued elevation of style and sentiment." With all these imperfections and lively absurdities, however, there is scarcely one of Moliere's minor pieces which does not present us with traits of character that come home to every heart, and felicities of expression that, from their truth, have come to be proverbial. With regard to the objection that his characters are not so much drawn from nature as from the local manners of the age, if it be meant that they are not acted upon by those deep passions which engross the whole soul, and which, from this intensity, have more of a tragic than a comic import in them, but are rather drawn from the foibles and follies of ordinary life, it is true ; but then these last are likely to be quite as permanent, and, among civilized nations, quite as universal, as the former. And who has exposed them with greater freedom or with a more potent ridicule than Moliere ? Love, under all its thousand, circumstances, its quarrels and reconciliations ; vanity, humbly suing for admiration under the guise of modesty; whimsical contradictions of profession and habitual practice ; the industry with which the lower classes ape, not the virtues, but the follies of their superiors ; the affectation of fashion, taste, science, or anything but what the party actually possesses ; the esprit de corps, which leads us to feel an exalted respect for our own profession and a sovereign contempt for every other ; the friendly adviser, who has an eye to his own interest ; the author, who seeks your candid opinion, and quarrels with you when you have given it ; the fair friend, who kindly sacrifices your reputation for a jest ; the hypocrite under every aspect, who deceives the world or himself, these form the various and motley panorama 338 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. of character which Moliere has transferred to his canvas, and which, though mostly drawn from, cultivated life, must endure as long as society shall hold together. Indeed, Moliere seems to have possessed all the essen- tial requisites for excelling in genteel comedy : a pure taste, an acute perception of the ridiculous, the tone of elegant dialogue, and a wit brilliant and untiring as Congreve's, but which, instead of wasting itself, like his, in idle flashes of merriment, is uniformly directed with a moral or philosophical aim. This obvious didactic pur- pose, in truth, has been censured as inconsistent with the spirit of the drama, and as belonging rather to satire ; but it secured to him an influence over the literature and the opinions of his own generation which has been possessed by no other comic writer of the moderns. He was the first to recall his countrymen from the vapid hyperbole and puerile conceits of the ancient farces, and to instruct them in the maxim which Boileau has since condensed into a memorable verse, that "nothing is beautiful but what is natural." We have already spoken of the reformation which one of his early pieces effected in the admirers of the Hotel de Ram- bouillet and its absurdities ; and when this confederacy afterwards rallied under an affectation of science, as it had before done of letters, he again broke it with his admirable satire of the Femmes Savantes. We do not recollect any similar revolution effected by a single effort of genius, unless it be that brought about by the Baviad and Mceviad. But Mr. Giffbrd, in the Della-Cruscan school, but " broke a butterfly upon the wheel," in com- parison with those enemies, formidable by rank and talent, whom Moliere assailed. We have noticed in its proper place the influence which his writings had in compelling the medical faculty of his day to lay aside the affected deportment, technical jargon, and other MOLIEBE. 339 mummeries then in vogue, by means of the public derision to which he had deservedly exposed them. In the same manner, he so successfully ridiculed the miserable dia- lectics, pedantry, and intolerance of the schoolmen, in his diverting dialogues between Dr. Marphurius and Dr. Pancrace, that he is said to have completely defeated the serious efforts of the University for obtaining a con- firmation of the decree of 1624, which had actually pro- hibited, under pain of death, the promulgation of any opinion contrary to the doctrines of Aristotle. The arrdt burlesque of his friend Boileau, at a later period, if we may trust the Menagiana, had a principal share in pre- venting a decree of the Parliament against the philosophy of Descartes. It is difficult to estimate the influence of our poet's satire on the state of society in general, and on those higher ranks in particular whose affectations and pretensions he assailed with such pertinacious hostility. If he did not reform them, he at least deprived them of their fascination and much of their mischievous influence, by holding them up to the contempt and laughter of the public. Sometimes, it must be admitted, though very rarely, in effecting this object he so far transgressed the bounds of decorum as to descend even to personalities. From this view of the didactic purpose proposed by Moliere in his comedies, it is obviously difficult to institute a comparison between them and those of our English dramatists, or, rather, of Shakspeare, who may be taken as their representative. The latter seems to have had no higher end in view than mere amusement : he took a leaf out of the great volume of human nature as he might find it ; nor did he accommodate it to the illustration of any moral or literary theorem. The former, on the other hand, manifests such a direct per- ceptive purpose as to give to some of his pieces the appearance of satires rather than of comedies ; argument z 2 340 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. takes the place of action, and the pro and con of the matter are discussed with all the formality of a school exercise. This essentially diminishes the interest of some of his best plays, the Misanthrope and the Femme Savantes for example, which for this reason seem better fitted for the closet than the stage, and have long since ceased to be favourites with the public. This want of interest is, moreover, aggravated hy the barrenness of action visible in many of Moliere's comedies, where he seems only to have sought an apology for bringing together his coteries of gentlemen and ladies for the purpose of exhibiting their gladiatorial dexterity in conversation. Not so with the English dramatist, whose boundless invention crowds his scene with incidents that hurry us along with breathless interest, but which sadly scandalize the lover of the unities. In conformity with his general plan, too, Shakspeare brings before us every variety of situation, the court, the camp, and the cloister ; the busy hum of populous cities, or the wild solitude of the forest, presenting us with pictures of rich and romantic beauty which could not fall within the scope of his rival, and allowing him- self to indulge in the unbounded revelry of an imagina- tion which Moliere did not possess. The latter, on the other hand, an attentive observer of man as he is found in an over-refined state of society, in courts and crowded capitals, copied his minutest lineaments with a precision that gives to his most general sketches the air almost of personal portraits ; seasoning, moreover, his discourses with shrewd hints and maxims of worldly policy. Shak- epeare's genius led him rather to deal in bold touches than in this nice delineation. He describes classes rather than individuals ; he touches the springs of the most intense passions. The daring of ambition, the craving of revenge, the deep tenderness of love, are all mate- MOLIilEE. 341 rials in his hands for comedy ; and this gives to some of his admired pieces his " Merchant of Venice " and his "Measure for Measure," for example a solemnity of colouring that leaves them only to be distinguished from tragedy by their more fortunate termination. Moliere, on the contrary, sedulously excludes from his plays whatever can impair their comic interest. And when, as he has done very rarely, he aims directly at vice instead of folly (in the Tartuffe, for instance), he studies to exhibit it under such ludicrous points of view as shall excite the derision rather than the indignation of D his audience. But, whatever be the comparative merits of these great masters, each must be allowed to have attained complete success in his way. Comedy in the hands of Shakspeare, exhibits to us man, not only as he is moved by the petty vanities of life, but by deep and tumultuous passion ; in situations which it requires all the invention of the poet to devise and the richest colouring of elo- quence to depict. But if the object of comedy, as has been said, be " to correct the follies of the age, by exposing them to ridicule/' who then has equalled Moliere ? ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY.* (October, 1824.) THE characteristics of an Italian school are nowhere so discernible in English literary history as under the reign of Elizabeth. At the period when England was most strenuous in breaking off her spiritual relations with Italy, she cultivated most closely her intellectual. It is hardly necessary to name either the contemporary dramatists, or Surrey, Sidney, and Spenser, the former of whom derived the plots of many of their most popu- lar plays, as the latter did the forms, and frequently the spirit, of their poetical compositions, from Italian models. The translations of the same period were, in several instances, superior to any which have been since pro- duced. Harrington's version of the " Orlando Furioso/' with all its inaccuracy, is far superior to the cumbrous monotony of Hoole. Of Fairfax, the elegant translator of Tasso, it is enough to say that he is styled by Dryden " the poetical father of Waller," and quoted by him, in conjunction with Spenser, as " one, of the great masters in our language." The popularity of the Italian was so great even in Ascham's day, who did not survive the iirst half of Elizabeth's reip-n, as to draw from the O ' learned schoolmaster much peevish animadversion upon what he terms " the enchantments of Circe, fond books * 1. " The Orlando Innamorato ; translated into prose and verse, from the Italian of Francesco Berni. By W. S. Pose." 8vo, pp. 279. London, 1823. 2. " The Orlando Furioso ; translated into verse from the Italian of Ludovico Ariosto. By "W. S. Rose." Vol. i. 8vo. London, 1823. ITALIAN NAEEATIVE POETBY. 343 of late translated out of Italian into English, and sold in every shop in London/' It gradually lost this wide authority during the succeeding century. This was but natural. Before the time of Elizabeth, all the light of learning which fell upon the world had come from Italy, and our own literature, like a young and tender plant, insensibly put forth its branches most luxuriantly in the direction whence it felt this invigorating influence. As it grew in years and hardihood, it sent its fibres deeper into its own soil, and drew thence the nourishment which enabled it to assume its fair and full proportions. Milton, it is true, the brightest name on the poetical records of that period, cultivated it with eminent success. Anyone acquainted with the writings of Dante, Pulci, and Tasso will understand the value and extent of Milton's obligations to the Italian. He was far from de- siring to conceal them, and he has paid many a tribute "of melodious verse" to the sources from which he drew so much of the nourishment of his exalted genius. "To imitate, as he has done," in the language of Boileau, " is not to act the part of a plagiary, but of a rival" Milton is, moreover, one of the few writers who have succeeded so far in comprehending the niceties of foreign tongue as to be able to add something to its poetical wealth, and his Italian sonnets are written with such purity as to have obtained commendations from the Tuscan critics."* Boileau, who set the current of French taste at this period, had a considerable contempt for that of his neighbours. He pointed one of his antithetical couplets * Milton, ioi his treatise on The Reason of Church Government, alludes modestly enough to his Italian pieces and the commendations bestowed upon them : " Other things, which I had shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to hatch up among them, were received with written en- comiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps." 344 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. at the " tinsel of Tasso * (" clinquant du Tasse "*), and in another he ridiculed the idea of epics in which " the devil was always blustering against the heavens." f The English admitted the sarcasm of Boileau with the cold commentary of Addison ; J and the " clinquant du Tasse " became a cant term of reproach upon the whole body of Italian letters. The French went still farther, and afterwards, applying the sarcasm of their critic to Milton as well as to Tasso, rejected both the poets upon the same principles. The French did the English as much justice as they did the Italians. No great change of opinion in this matter took place in England during the last century. The Wartons and Gray had a just estimation of this beautiful tongue, but Dr. Johnson, the dominant critic of that day, seems to have under- stood the language but imperfectly, and not to have much relished in it what he understood. In the present age of intellectual activity, attention is so generally bestowed on all modern languages which -are ennobled by a literature, that it is not singular an iicquaintance with the Italian in particular should be widely diffused. Great praise, however, is due to the labours of Mr. Koscoe. There can be little doubt that his elaborate biographies cf the Medici, which contain as much literary criticism as historical narrative, have mainly contributed to the promotion of these studies among his countrymen. These works have of late met with much flippant criticism in some of their leading journals. In Italy they have been translated, are now cited as authorities, and have received the most enco- miastic notices from several eminent scholars. These facts afford conclusive testimony of their merits. The name of Mathias is well known to every lover of the * Satire IX. t L'Art podtique, c. iii. J Spectator, No. VL ITALIAN NAERATIVE POETEY. 345 Italian tongue ; his poetical productions rank with those of Milton in merit, and far exceed them in quantity. To conclude, it is not many years since Gary gave to his countrymen his very extraordinary version of the father of Tuscan poetry, and Rose is now swelling the cata- logue with translations of the two most distinguished chivalrous epics of Italy. Epic romance has continued to be a great favourite in that country ever since its first introduction into the polished circles of Florence and Ferrara, towards the close of the fifteenth century. It has held much the same rank in its ornamental literature which the drama once enjoyed in the English, and which historical novel- writing maintains now. It hardly seems credible that an enlightened people should long continue to take great satisfaction in poems founded on the same extra- vagant actions, and spun out to the appalling length of twenty, thirty, nay, forty cantos of a thousand verses each. But the Italians, like most Southern nations, de- light exceedingly in the uncontrolled play of the imagi- nation, and they abandon themselves to all its brilliant illusions, with no other object in view than mere re- creation. An Englishman looks for a moral, or, at least, for some sort of instruction, from the wildest work of fiction. But an Italian goes to it as he would go to the opera, to get impressions rather than ideas. He is extremely sensible to the fine tones of his native lan- guage, and, under the combined influence produced by the colouring of a lavish fancy and the music of a voluptuous versification, he seldom stoops to a cold analysis of its purpose or its probability. Eomantic fiction, however, which flourished so exu- berantly under a warm Southern sky, was transplanted from the colder regions of Normandy and England. It is remarkable that both these countries, in which it had 346 BIOGRAPHICAL AND OBITIOAL MISCELLANIES. its origin, should have ceased to cultivate it at the very period when the perfection of their respective languages would have enabled them to do so with entire success. We believe this remark requires no qualification in regard to France. Spenser affords one illustrious excep- tion among the English.* It was not until long after the extinction of this species of writing in the North that it reappeared in Italy. The commercial habits and the republican insti- tutions of the Italians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were most unfavourable to the spirit of chivalry, and, consequently, to the fables which grew out of it. The three patriarchs of their literature, more- over, by the light which, in this dark period, they threw over other walks of imagination, turned the attention of their countrymen from those of romance. Dante, indeed, who resembled Milton in so many other parti- culars, showed a similar predilection for the ancient tales of chivalry. His Corn/Media contains several encomi- astic allusions to them ; but, like the English bard, he contented himself with these, and chose a subject better suited to his ambitious genius and inflexible temper.t * The influence, however, of the old Norman romances may be dis- covered in the productions of a much later period. Their incredible length required them to be broken up into fyttes, or cantos, by the min- strel, who recited them with the accompaniment of a harp, in the same manner as the epics of Homer, broken into rhapsodies, were chanted by the bards of Ionia. The minstrel who could thus beguile the tedium of u winter's evening was a welcome guest at the baronial castle and in the hall of the monastery. As Greek and Eoman letters were revived, the legends of chivalry fell into disrepute, and the minstrel gradually re- treated to the cottage of the peasant, who was still rude enough to relish his simple melody. But the long romance was beyond the comprehension or the taste of the rustic. It therefore gave way to less complicated nar- ratives, and from its wreck may be fairly said to have arisen those Border songs and ballads which form the most beautiful collection of rural min- strelsy that belongs to any age or country. t Milton's poetry abounds in references to the subjects of romantic fable ; and in his " Epitaphium Damonis " lie plainly intimates his inten- ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETEY. 347 His poem, it is true, was of too eccentric a character to be widely imitated,* and both Boccaccio and Petrarch, with less talent, had a more extensive influence over the taste of their nation. The garrulous graces of the former and the lyrical finish of the latter are still solicited in the lighter compositions of Italy. Lastly, the discoveries of ancient manuscripts at home, and the introduction of others from Constantinople, when that rich depository of Grecian science fell into the hands of the barbarian, gave a new direction to the intellectual enterprise of Italian scholars, and withdrew them almost wholly from the farther cultivation of their infant literature. Owing to these circumstances, the introduction of the chivalrous epopee was protracted to the close of the fifteenth century, when its first successful specimens were produced at the accomplished court of the Medici. The encouragement extended by this illustrious family to every branch of intellectual culture has been too often the subject of encomium to require from us any particu- lar animadversion. Lorenzo, especially, by uniting in his own person the scholarship and talent which he so liberally rewarded in others, contributed more than all to the effectual promotion of an enlightened taste among his countrymen. Even his amusements were subservient tion of writing an epic on the story of Arthur. It may be doubted whether he would have succeeded on such a topic. His austere character would seem to have been better fitted to feel the impulses of religious en- thusiasm than those of chivalry ; and England has no reason to regret that her most sublime poet was reserved for the age of Cromwell instead of the romantic reign of Elizabeth. * The best imitation of the " Divina Commedia " is probably the " Cantiba in morte di Ugo Basville" by the most eminent of the living Italian poets, Monti. His talent for vigorous delineation by a single coup de pinceau is eminently Dantcsque, and the plan of his poem is the exact counterpart of that of the " Inferno." Instead of a mortal descending into the regions of the damned, one of their number (the spirit of Basville, a Frenchman) is summoned back to the earth, to behold the crimes and miseries of his native country during the period of the Revolution. 348 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. to it, and the national literature may be fairly said at this day to retain somewhat of the character communi- cated to it by his elegant recreations. His delicious villas at Fiesole and Cajano are celebrated by the scholars who, in the silence of their shades, pursued with him the studies of his favourite philosophy and of poetry. Even the sensual pleasures of the banquet were relieved by the inventions of wit and fancy. Lyrical composition, which, notwithstanding its peculiar adaptation to the flexible movements of the Italian tongue, had fallen into neglect, was revived, and, together with the first eloquent pro- ductions of the romantic muse, was recited at the table of Lorenzo. Of the guests who frequented it, Pulci and Politian are the names most distinguished, and the only ones con- nected with our present subject. The latter of these was received into the family of Lorenzo as the preceptor of his children, an office for which he seems to have been better qualified by his extraordinary attainments than by his disposition. Whatever may have been the asperity of his temper, however, his poetical compositions breathe the perfect spirit of harmony. The most remarkable of these, distinguished as the " Verses of Politian " (Stanze di Poliziano), is a brief fragment of an epic whose pur- pose was to celebrate the achievements of Julian de' Medici, a younger brother of Lorenzo, at a tournament exhibited at Florence in 1468. This would appear but a meagre basis for the structure of a great poem. Poli- tian, however, probably in consequence of the untimely death of Julian, his hero, abandoned it in the middle of the second canto, even before he had reached the event which was to constitute the subject of his story. The incidents of the poem thus abruptly terminated are of no great account. We have a portrait of Julian, a hunting expedition, a love adventure, a digression into ITALIAN NAEEATIVE POETRY. 349 the island of Venus, which takes up about half the canto, and a vision of the hero, which ends just as the tournament, the subject of the piece, is about to begin, and with it, like the " fabric of a vision," ends the poem also. In this short space, however, the poet has concen- trated all the beauties of his art, the melody of a musical ear, and the inventions of a plastic fancy. His island of love, in particular, is emblazoned with those gorgeous splendours which have since been borrowed for the en- chanted gardens of Alcina, Armida, and Acrasia. But this little fragment is not recommended, at least to an English reader, so much by its Oriental pomp of imagery as by its more quiet and delicate pictures of ex- ternal nature. Brilliancy of imagination is the birthright of the Italian poet, as much as a sober, contemplative vein is of the English. This is the characteristic of almost all their best and most popular poetry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The two great o poets of the fourteenth approach much nearer to the English character. Dante shows not only deeper reflec- tion than is common with his countrymen, but in parts of his work, in the Purgatorio more especially, manifests a sincere relish for natural beauty, by his most accurate pictures of rural objects and scenery. Petrarch cherished the recollections of an unfortunate passion until, we may say, without any mystical perversion of language, it be- came a part of his intellectual existence.* This gave a * Whatever may be thought of the speculations of the Abbe* de Sade, no doubt can be entertained of the substantial existence of Laura, or of Petrarch's passion for her. Indeed, independently of the internal evidence afforded by his poetry, such direct notices of his mistress are scattered through liis " Letters " and serious prose compositions, that it is singular there should ever have existed a scepticism on these points. Ugo Foscolo, the well-known author of " Jacopo Ortis" has lately published an octavo volume, entitled " Essays on Petrarch." Among other particulars showing the unbounded influence that Laura de Sade obtained over the mind of her poetical lover, he quotes the following memorandum, made by 350 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. tender and melancholy expression to his poems, more particularly to those written after the death of Laura, quite as much English as Italian. Love furnishes the great theme and impulse to the Italian poet. It is not too much to say that all their principal versifiers have written under the inspiration of a real or pretended pas- sion. It is to them what a less showy and less exclu- sive sensibility is to an Englishman. The latter ac- knowledges the influence of many other affections and relations in life. The death of a friend is far more likely to excite his muse than the smiles or frowns of his mistress. The Italian seldom dwells on melancholy reminiscences, but writes under the impulse of a living and ardent passion. Petrarch did both ; but in the poetry which he composed after the death of his mistress, exalted as it is by devotional sentiment, he deviated from the customs of his nation, and adopted an English tone of feeling. A graver spirit of reflection and a deeper sympathy for the unobtrusive beauties of nature are ob- servable in some of their later writers : but these are Petrarch two months after her decease, in his private manuscript copy of Virgil, now preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan : " It was in the early days of my youth, on the sixth of April, in the morning, and in the year 1327, that Laura, distinguished by her own virtues, and celebrated in my verses, first blessed my eyes, in the church of Santa Clara, at Avignon ; and it was in the same city, on the sixth of the very same month of April, at the very same hour in the morning, in the year 1348, that this bright luminary was withdrawn from our sight, when I was at Verona, alas ! ignorant of my calamity. The re- mains of her chaste and beautiful body were deposited in the Church of the Cordeliers on the evening of the same day. To preserve the afflicting remembrance, I have taken a bitter pleasure in recording it, particularly in this book, which is most frequently before my eyes, in order that nothing in this world may have any farther attraction for me ; that, this great attachmeni to life being dissolved, I may, by frequent reflection, and a proper estimation of our transitory existence, be admonished that it is high time for me to think of quitting this earthly Babylon, which I trust it will not be difficult for me, with a strong and manly courage, to accom- plish." Page 35. ITALIAN NARBATIVE POETEY. 351 not primitive elements in the Italian character. Gay, brilliant, imaginative, are the epithets which best indicate the character of their literature during its most flourishing periods ; and the poetry of Italy seems to reflect as clearly her unclouded skies and glowing landscape as that of England does the tranquil and somewhat melan- choly complexion of her climate. The verses of Politian, to return from our digression, contain many descriptions distinguished by the calm, moral beauty of which we have been speaking. Eesem- blances may be traced between these passages and the writings of some of our best English poets. The de- scriptive poetry of Gray and of Goldsmith, particularly, exhibits a remarkable coincidence with that of Politian in the enumeration of rural images. The stanza cxxi., setting forth the descent of Cupid into the island of Venus, may be cited as having suggested a much- admired simile in Gay's popular ballad, " Black-eyed Susan," since the English verse is almost a metaphrase of the Italian : " Or poi che ad ail tese ivi pervenne, Forte le scosse, e giu calossi a piombo, Tutto serrato nelle sacre penne, Come a suo nido fa lieto Colombo." " So the sweet lark, high poised in air, Shuts close his pinions to his breast, If chance his mate's shrill call he hear, And drops at once into her nest." These " Stanze " were the first example of a happy cultivation of Italian verse in the fifteenth century. The scholars of that day composed altogether in Latin. Politian, as he grew older, disdained this abortive pro- duction of his youthful muse, and relied for his character with posterity on his Latin poems and his elaborate com- mentaries upon the ancient classics. Petrarch looked for immortality to his "Africa," as did Boccaccio to his 352 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. learned Latin disquisition upon ancient mythology.* Could they now, after the lapse of more than four cen- turies, revisit the world, how would they be astonished, perhaps mortified, the former to find that he was remem- bered only as the sonneteer, and the latter as the novelist ! The Latin prose of Politian may be consulted by an antiquary ; his Latin poetry must be admired by scholars of taste ; but his few Italian verses constitute the basis of his high reputation at this day with the great body of his countrymen. He wrote several lyrical pieces, and a short pastoral drama (Orfeo), the first of a species which afterwards grew into such repute under the hands of Tasso and Guarini. All of these bear the same print of his genius. One cannot but regret that so rare a mind should, in conformity with the perverse taste of his age, have abandoned the freshness of a living tongue for the ungrateful culture of a dead one. His " Stanze," the mere prologue of an epic, still survive amid the complete and elaborate productions of succeeding poets ; they may be compared to the graceful portico of some unfinished temple, which time and taste have respected, and which remains, as in the days of its architect, a beautiful ruin. Luigi Pulci, the other eminent poet whom we men- tioned as a frequent guest at the table of Lorenzo de* Medici, was of a noble family, and the youngest of three brothers, all of them even more distinguished by their accomplishments than by birth. There seems to be nothing worthy of particular record in his private his- tory. He is said to have possessed a frank and merry * " De Genealogia Deorum." The Latin writings of Boccaccio and Petrarch may be considered the foundation of their fame with their con- temporaries. The coronation of the latter in the Roman capitol was a homage paid rather to his achievements in an ancient tongue than to any in his own. He does not even notice his Italian lyrics in his " Letters to Posterity." IIAL1AX NAKKATIVE POETEY. 353 disposition, and, to judge from his great poem, as well as from some lighter pieces of burlesque satire, which he bandied with one of his friends whom he was in the habit of meeting at the house of Lorenzo, he was not particularly fastidious in his humour. His Morgante Maggiore is reported to have been written at the request of Lorenzo's mother, and recited at his table. It is a genuine epic of chivalry, containing twenty-eight cantos, founded on the traditionary defeat the " dolorosa rotta " of Charlemagne and his peers in the Valley of Eon- cesvalles. It adheres much more closely than any of the other Italian romances to the lying chronicle of Turpin. It may appear singular that the intention of the author should not become apparent in the course of eight-and-twenty cantos, but it is a fact that scholars both at home and abroad have long disputed whether the poem is serious or satirical. Crescimbeni styles the author " modesto e moderate," while Tiraboschi expressly charges him with the deliberate design of ridiculing Scripture, and Voltaire, in his preface, cites the Morgante as an apology for his profligate " Pucelle." It cannot be denied that the story abounds in such ridiculous eccen- tricities as give it the air of a parody upon the marvels of romance. The hero, Morgante, is a converted infidel, " un gigante smisurato," whose formidable weapon is a bell-clapper, and who, after running through some twenty cantos of gigantic valour and mountebank extravagance, is brought to an untimely end by a wound in the heel, not from a Trojan arrow, but from the bite of a crab ! We doubt, however, whether Pulci intended his satirical shafts for the Christian faith. Liberal allowance is to be conceded for the fashion of his age. Nothing is more frequent in the productions of that period than such irreverent freedoms with the most sacred topics as would be quite shocking in ours. Such freedoms, however, A A 354 BIOGE.iPH.ICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. cannot reasonably be imputed to profanity, or even levity, since numerous instances of them occur in works of pro- fessed moral tendency, as in the mysteries and moralities, for example, those solemn deformities of the ancient French and Eoglish drama. The chronicle of Turpin, the basis of Pulci's epic, which, though a fraud, was a pious one, invented by some priest to celebrate the triumphs of the Christian arms, is tainted with the same indecent familiarities.* Tempora mutantur. In a scandalous pasquinade pub- lished by Lord Byron in the first number of his Liberal, there is a verse describing St. Peter officiating as the doorkeeper of heaven. Pulci has a similar one in the Morgante (canto xxvi., st. 91), which, no doubt, fur- nished the hint to his lordship, who has often improved upon the Italian poets. Both authors describe St. Peter's dress and vocation with the most whimsical minuteness. In the Italian, the passage, introduced into the midst of a solemn, elaborate description, has all the appearance of being told in very good faith. No one will venture to put so charitable a construction upon his lordship's motives. Whatever may have been the intention of Pulci in the preceding portion of the work, its concluding cantos are animated by the genuine spirit of Christian heroism. The rear of Charlemagne's army is drawn into an am- buscade by the treachery of his confidant Ganelon. Roncesvalles, a valley in the heart of the Pyrenees, is the * This spxuious document of the twelfth century contains, in a copy which \ve have now before us, less than sixty pages. It has neither the truth of history nor the beauty of fiction. It abounds in commonplace prodigies, and sets forth Charlemagne's wars and his defeat in the valley of Roncesvalles, an event which probably never happened. Insignificant as it is in every other respect, however, it is the seed from which have sprung up those romantic fictions which adorned the rude age of the Normans, and which flourished in such wide luxuriance under Italian culture. ITALIAN NAKRATIYE POETRY. 355 theatre of action, and Orlando, with the flower of French chivalry, perishes there, overpowered by the Saracens. The battle is told in a sublime epic tone worthy of the occasion. The cantos xxvi., xxvii., containing it, are filled with a continued strain of high religious enthu- siasm, with the varying, animating bustle of a mortal conflict, with the most solemn and natural sentiment suggested by the horror of the situation. Orlando's character rises into that of the divine warrior. His speech at the opening of the action, his lament over his unfortunate army, his melancholy reflections on the battle-field the night after the engagement, are conceived with such sublimity and pathos as attest both the poetical talent of Pulci and the grandeur and capacity of his sub- ject. Yet the Morgante, the greater part of which is so ludicrous, is the only eminent Italian epic which has seriously described the celebrated rout at Koncesvalles. Pulci's poem is not much read by the Italians. Its style, in general, is too unpolished for the fastidious delicacy of a modern ear, but, as it abounds in the old- fashioned proverbialisms (riboboli) of Florence, it is greatly prized by the Tuscan purists. These familiar sayings, the elegant slang of the Florentine mob, have a value among the Italian scholars, at least among a large fraction of them, much like that of old coins with a vir- tuoso : the more rare and rusty, the better. They give a high relish to many of their ancient writers, who, with- out other merit than their antiquity, are cited as autho- rities in their vocabulary. * These ribololi are to be met with most abundantly in their old novelle, those especially which are made up of familiar dialogue be- tween the lower classes of citizens. Boccaccio has very * This has been loudly censured by many of their scholars opposed to the literary supremacy of the Della-Cruscan Academy. See, in particular, the acute treatise of Cesarotti, " Saggio sulla Filosofia delle Lingue," Parte IV. A A 2 356 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. many such ; Sacchetti has more than all his prolific tribe, and it is impossible for a foreigner to discern or to appreciate the merits of such a writer. The lower classes in Florence retain to this day much of their antique picturesque phraseology,' 55 ' and Alfieri tells us that "it was his great delight to stand in some unno- ticed corner and listen to the conversation of the mob in the market-place." With the exception of Orlando, Pulci has shown no great skill in delineation of character. Charlemagne and Ganelon are the prominent personages. The latter is a parody on traitors ; he is a traitor to common sense. Charlemagne is a superannuated dupe, with just credulity sufficient to dovetail into all the cunning contrivances of Gan. The women have neither refinement nor virtue. The knights have none of the softer graces of chivalry ; they bully and swagger like the rude heroes of Homer, and are exclusively occupied with the merciless extermi- nation of infidels. We meet with none of the imagery, the rich sylvan scenery, so lavishly diffused through the epics of Ariosto and Boiardo. The machinery bears none of the airy touches of an Arabian pencil, but is made out of the cold excrescences of Northern super- stition, dwarfs, giants, and necromancers. Before quit- ting Pulci, we must point out a passage (canto xxv., st. 229, 230) in which a devil announces to Einaldo the existence of another continent, beyond the ocean, in- habited by mortals like himself. The theory of gravita- tion is also plainly intimated. As the poem was written before the voyages of Columbus and before the physical * " The pure language of Boccaccio, and of other ancient writers, is preserved at this day much more among the lower classes of Florentine mechanics and of the neighbouring peasants than among the more polished Tuscan society, whose original dialect has suffered great mutations in their intercourse with foreigners." Pigiiotti, Storia della Toscana, torn. ii. p. 167. ITALIAN NAEEATIVE POETEY. 357 discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus, the predictions are extremely curious.* The fiend, alluding to the vulgar superstitions entertained of the Pillars of Her- cules, thus addresses his companion : " Know that this theory is false : his bark The daring mariner shall urge far o'er The western wave, a smooth and level plain, Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel. Man was in ancient days of grosser mould, And Hercules might blush to learn how far Beyond the limits he had vainly set, The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way. Men shall descry another hemisphere, Since to one common centre all things tend ; So earth, by curious mystery divine Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres. At our antipodes are cities, states, And thronged empires ne'er divined of yore. But see, the sun speeds on his western path To glad the nations with expected light." The dialogues of Pulci's devils respectiDg free will and necessity, their former glorious and their present fallen condition, have suggested many hints for our greater Milton to improve upon. The juggling frolics of these fiends at the royal banquet in Saragossa may have been the original of the comical marvels played off through the intervention of similar agents by Dr. Faust. Notwithstanding the good faith and poetical eleva- tion of its concluding cantos, the Morgante, according to our apprehension, is anything but a serious romance. Not that it shows a disposition to satire, above all, to the religious satire often imputed to it ; but there is a light banter, a vein of fun, running through the greater portion of it, which is quite the opposite of the lofty * Dante, two centuries before, had also expressed the same belief in an undiscovered quarter of the globe : " De' vostri sensi, ch'e del rimanente, Non vogliate negar Tesperienza, Diretro al sol, del mondo senza ycnfe." Inferno, canto xxvi. v. 115. 358 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. spirit of chivalry. Eomantic fiction, among our Nor- man ancestors, grew so directly out of the feudal re- lations and adventurous spirit of the age that it was treated with all the gravity of historical record. When reproduced in the polite and artificial societies of Italy, the same fictions wore an air of ludicrous extravagance which would no longer admit of their being repeated seriously. Eccommended, however, by a proper sea- soning of irony, they might still amuse as ingenious tales of wonder. This may be kept in view in following out the ramifications of Italian narrative poetry ; for they will all be found, in a greater or less degree, tinctured with the same spirit of ridicule.* The circle for whom Pulci composed his epic was peculiarly dis- tinguished by that fondness for good-humoured raillery which may be considered a national trait with his countrymen. It seems to have been the delight of Lorenzo de' Medici, as it was afterwards, in a more remarkable degree, of his son Leo Tenth, to abandon himself to the most unreserved social freedoms with the friends whom * A distinction may be pointed out between the Norman and the Italian epics of chivalry. The former, composed in the rude ages of feudal heroism, are entitled to much credit as pictures of the manners of that period ; while the latter, written in an age of refinement, have been carried by their poets into such beautiful extravagances of fiction as are perfectly incompatible with a state of society at any period. Let anyone compare the feats of romantic valour recorded by Froissart, the turbulent, predatory habits of the barons and ecclesiastics under the early Norman dynasty, as reported by Turner in his late " History of England" with these old romances, and he will find enough to justify our remark. Ste.- Palaye, after a diligent study of the ancient epics, speaks of them as ex- hibiting a picture of society closely resembling that set forth in the chronicles of the period. Turner, after as diligent an examination of early historical documents, pronounces that the facts contained in them perfectly accord with the general portraiture of manners depicted in the romances. Me'm. de 1'Acad. des Inscriptions, torn, xx., art. sur 1'Aiicien C'hevalerie. Turner's History of England from the Norman Conquest, etc., voL i. ch. vi. ITALIAN NAERATTVE POETEY. 359 he collected around his table. The satirical epigrams which passed there in perfect good humour between his guests show, at least, full as much merriment as man- ners. Machiavelli concludes his history of Florence with an elaborate portrait of Lorenzo, in which he says that "he took greater delight in frivolous pleasures, and in the society of jesters and satirists, than became so great a man." The historian might have been less austere in his commentary upon Lorenzo's taste, since he was not particularly fastidious in the selection of his own amusements.* At the close of the fifteenth century Italy was divided into a number of small but independent states, whose petty sovereigns vied with each other not merely in the poor parade of royal pageantry, but in the liberal endow- ment of scientific institutions and the patronage of learned men. Almost every Italian scholar was attached to some one or other of these courtly circles, and a generous, enlightened emulation sprang up among the states of Italy, such has had never before existed in any other age or country. Among the republics of ancient Greece the rivalship was political. Their literature, from the time of Solon, was almost exclusively Athenian. * A letter written by Machiavelli, long unknown, and printed for the first time at Milan, 1810, gives a curious picture of his daily occupations when living in retirement on his little patrimony at a distance from Florence. Among other particulars, he mentions that it was his custom after dinner to repair to the tavern, where he passed his afternoon at cards with the company whom he ordinarily found there, consisting of the host, a miller, a butcher, and a lime-maker. Another part of the epistle exhibits a more pleasing view of the pursuits of the ex-secretary : " In the evening I return to my house and retire to my study. I then take off the rustic garments which I had worn during the day, and, having dressed myself in tlu apparel which I used to wear at court and in town, I mingle in the society of the great men of antiquity. I draw from them the nourish- ment which alone is siiited to me, and during the four hours passed in this intercourse I forget all my misfortunes, and fear neither poverty nor death. In this manner I have composed a little work upon government." Tliis little u-orJc was " The Prince." 360 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. An interesting picture of the cultivated manners and in- tellectual pleasures of these little courts may be gathered from the Cortigiano of Castiglione, which contains in the introduction a particular account of the pursuits and pastimes of the court of his sovereign, the Duke of Urbino. None of these Italian states make so shining a figure in literary history as the insignificant duchy of Ferrara. The foul crimes which defile the domestic annals of the family of Este have been forgotten in the munificent patronage extended by them to letters. The librarians of the Biblioteca Estense, Muratori and Tiraboschi, have celebrated the virtues of their native princes with the encomiastic pen of loyalty; while Ariosto and Tasso, whose misfortunes furnish but an indifferent commentary upon these eulogiums, offering to them the grateful incense of poetic adulation, have extended their names still wider by inscribing them upon their immortal epics. Their patronage had the good fortune, not always attend- ing patronage, of developing genius. Those models of the pastoral drama, the Aminta of Tasso, and the Pastor Fido of Guarini, whose luxury of expression, notwith- standing the dictum of Dr. Johnson,* it has been found as difficult to imitate in their own tongue as it is im- possible to translate into any other ; the comedies and Horatian satires of Ariosto ; the Secchia Rapita of Tas- soni, the acknowledged model of the mock-heroic poems of Pope and Boileau ; and, finally, the three great epics of Italy, the Orlando Innamorato, the Furioso, and the Gerusalemme Liberata, were all produced, in the brief compass of a century, within the limited dominions of the House of Este. Dante had reproached Ferrara, in * " Dione is a counterpart to Aminta and Pastor Fido, and other trifles of the same kind, easily imitated, and unworthy of imitation." Life of Gay. ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY. the thirteenth century, with never having been illustrated by the name of a poet. Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, the author of the Orlando Innamorato, the first-born of these epics, was a subject of Hercules First, Duke of Ferrara, and by him appointed governor of Reggio. His military conduct in that office, and his learned translations from the ancient classics, show him to have been equally accomplished as a sol- dier and as a scholar. In the intervals of war, to which his active life was devoted, he amused himself with the composition of his long poem. He had spun this out into the sixty-seventh canto, without showing any dis- position to bring it to a conclusion, when his literary labours were suddenly interrupted, as he informs us in his parting stanza, by the invasion of the French into Italy in 1494 ; and in the same year the author died. The Orlando Innamorato, as it had advanced, had been read by its author to his friends ; but no portion of it was printed till after his death, and its extraordinary merits were not then widely estimated, in consequence of its antiquated phraseology and Lombard provincialisms. A rifacimento some time after appeared, by one Do- menichi, who spoiled many of the beauties, without improving the style, of his original. Finally, Berni, in little more than thirty years after the death of Boiardo, new moulded the whole poem,* with so much dexterity as to retain the substance of every verse in the original and yet to cloth them in the seductive graces of his own classical idiom. Berni's version is the only one now read in Italy, and the original poem of Boiardo is so * Sismondi is mistaken in saying that Berni remodelled the Innamorato sixty years after the original. He survived Boiardo only forty-two years,, and lie had half completed his rifacimento at least ten years before his own death, as is evident from his beautiful invi cation to Verona and the Po (canto xxx.), on whose banks he was then writing it, and where he was living, 1526, in the capacity of secretary to the Bishop of Verona. 362 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. rare in that country that it was found impossible to procure for the library of Harvard University any copy of the Tnnamorato more ancient than the reformed one by Domenichi. The history of letters affords no stronger example of the power of style than the different fate of these two productions of Berni and Boiardo. We doubt whether the experiment would have been attended with the same result among a people by whom the nicer beauties of expression are less cultivated, as with the English, for example. If we may judge from the few specimens which we have seen extracted from the Italian original, Ohaucer exhibits a more obsolete and exotic phraseology than Boiardo. Yet the partial attempt of Dryden to invest the father of English poetry with a modernised costume has had little success, and the little epic of more fully to establish our position. " Hie aliquid plus Quam satis est." We believe we are quite as weary as our readers of the very disagreeable office of dwelling on the defects of a literature so beautiful, and for which we feel so sincere an admiration, as the Italian. The severe impeachment made, both upon the spirit and the substance of our for- mer remarks, by so accomplished a scholar as the author of the " Osservazioni," has necessarily compelled us to this course in self-defence. The tedious parade of cita- tions must be excused by the necessity of buoying up our opinions in debatable matters of taste by those whose authority alone our censor is disposed to admit, that of his own countrymen. He has emphatically repeated his Essays on Petrarch, p. 93. 530 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. distrust of the capacity of foreigners to decide upon sub- jects of literary taste ; yet the extraordinary diversity of opinion manifest between him and those eminent autho- rities whom we have quoted might lead us to anticipate but little correspondence in the national criticism. An acquaintance with Italian history will not serve to dimi- nish our suspicions ; and the feuds which, from the learned but querulous scholars of the fifteenth century to those of our own time, have divided her republic of let- ters, have not been always carried on with the bloodless weapons of scholastic controversy.* That some assertions too unqualified, some errors or prejudices, should have escaped, in the course of fifty or sixty pages of remark, is to be expected from the most circumspect pen ; but a benevolent critic, instead of fas- tening upon these, will embrace the spirit of the whole, and by this interpret and excuse any specific inaccuracy. It may not be easy to come up to the standard of our author's principles, it may be his partialities, in estima- ting the intellectual character of his country ; but we think we can detect one source of his dissatisfaction with us, in his misconception of our views, which, according to him, were that "a particular knowledge of the Italian should be widely diffused in America." This he quotes and requotes with peculiar emphasis, objecting it to us as perfectly inconsistent with our style of criticism. Now, in the first place, we made no such declaration. We intended only to give a veracious analysis of one branch of Italian letters. But, secondly, had such been * Take two familiar examples : that of Caro and that of Marini. The adversary of the former poet, accused of murder, heresy, etc., was con- demned by the Inquisition, and compelled to seek his safety in exile. Tho adversary of Marini, in an attempt to assassinate him, fortunately shot only a courtier of the King of Sardinia. In both cases, the wits of Italy, ranged under opposite banners, fought with incredible acrimony during the greater part of a century. The subject of fierce dispute, in both instances, was a sonnet I DA PONTE'S OBSERVATIONS. 531 our design, we doubt exceedingly, or rather we do not doubt, whether the best way of effecting it would be by indiscriminate panegyric. The amplification of beauties, and the prudish concealment of all defects, would carry with it an air of insincerity that must dispose the mind .of every ingenuous reader to reject it. Perfection is not the lot of humanity more in Italy than elsewhere. Such intemperate panegyric is, moreover, unworthy of the great men who are the objects of it. They really shine with too brilliant a light to be darkened by a few spots ; and to be tenacious of their defects is in some measure to distrust their genius. Rien nest beau que le vrai, is the familiar reflection of a critic whose general maxims in his art are often more sound than their particular application. Notwithstanding the difficulty urged by Mr. Da Ponte of forming a correct estimate of a foreign language, the science of general literary criticism and history, which may be said to have entirely grown up within the last fifty years, has done much to eradicate prejudice and enlarge the circle of genuine knowledge. A century and a half ago, "the best of English critics,"' 55 ' in the opinion of Pope and Dryden, could institute a formal examination, and, of course, condemnation, of the plays of Shakspeare " by the practice of the ancients." The best of French critics,"]" in the opinion of every one, could condemn the " Orlando Furioso " for wandering from the rules of Horace ; even Addison, in his triumphant vindication of the " Paradise Lost," seems most solicitous to prove its conformity with the laws of Aristotle ; and a writer like Lope de Vega felt obliged to apologise for * " The Tragedies of the Last Age, considered and examined by the Practice of the Ancients," etc. By Thomas Rymer. London, 1678. t " Dissertation critique sur 1'Aventure de Joconde." (Euvres da Boileau, torn. ii. it x 2 532 BIOGBAPHIOAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. the independence with which he deviated from the dogmas of the same school and adapted his beautiful inventions in the drama to the peculiar genius of hia own countrymen.* The magnificent fables of Ariosto and Spenser were stigmatised as barbarous, because they were not classical; and the polite scholars of Europe sneered at " the bad taste which could prefer an * Ariosto to a Virgil, a Romance to an Iliad.' "t But the reconciling spirit of modern criticism has interfered ; the character, the wants of different nations and ages have been consulted ; from the local beauties peculiar to each, the philosophic inquirer has deduced certain general principles of beauty applicable to all; petty national prejudices have been extinguished ; and a difference of taste, which for that reason alone was before condemned as a deformity, is now admired as a beautiful variety in the order of nature. The English, it must be confessed, can take little credit to themselves for this improvement. Their researches in literary history amount to little in their own lan- guage, and to nothing in any other. Warton, Johnson, and Campbell have indeed furnished an accurate inven- tory of their poetical wealth ; but, except it be in the limited researches of Drake and of Dunlop, what * " Arte de hacer Comedias." Obras sueltas, torn. iv. p. 406. " Y quando he de escrihir una Comedia, Encierro los preccptos con seis llaves ; Saco a Terencio y Plauto de rni estudio, Para que no me den voces, quo suele Dar gritos la verdad en Jibros mudos," etc. t See Lord Shaftesbury's " Advice to an Author ; " a treatise of great authority in its day, but which could speak of the " Gothic Muse of Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Milton as lisping with stammering tongues, that nothing but the youth and rawness of the age could excuse ! " Sir William Temple, with a purer taste, is not more liberal. The term Gothic, with these writers, is applied to much the same subjects with the modern term Romantic, with this difference : the latter is simply dis tinctive, while the former was also an opprobrious epithet. DA PONTE'S OBSEBVATIONS. 533 record have we of all their rich and various prose ? As to foreign literature, while other cultivated nations have been developing their views in voluminous and valuable treatises, the English have been profoundly mute.* Yet for several reasons they might be expected to make the best general critics in the world, and the collision of their judgments in this matter with those of the other European scholars might produce new and important results. The author of the " Osservazioni " has accused us of being too much under the influence of his enemies the French (p. 112). There are slender grounds for this imputation. We have always looked upon this fas- tidious people as the worst general critics possible ; and we scarcely once alluded to their opinions in the course of our article without endeavouring to controvert them. The truth is, while they have contrived their own system with infinite skill, and are exceedingly acute in detecting the least violation of it, they seem incapable of understanding why it should not be applied to every other people, however opposite its character * The late translation of "Sismondi's Southern Europe " is the only one, we believe, which the English possess of a detailed literary history. The discriminating taste of this sensible Frenchman has been liberalized by his familiarity with the languages of the North. His knowledge, however, is not always equal to his subject, and the credit of his opinions, is not unfrequently due to another. The historian of the " Italian Republics " may be supposed to be at home in treating of Italian letters, and this is undoubtedly the strongest part of his work ; but in what relates to Spain he has helped himself " manibus plenis" from Bouterwek, much too liberally, indeed, for the scanty acknowledgments made by him to the accurate and learned German. Page upon page is literally translated from him. Sismondi's work, however, is intrinsically valuable for its philosophical illustrations of the character of the Spaniards by the pecu- liarities of their literature. His analysis of the national drama, as opposed to that of Schlegel, is also extremely ingenious. Is it not more sound than that of the German ? We trust that this hitherto untrodden field in our language will be entered before long by one of our own scholars, whose researches have enabled him to go much more extensively intr the Spanish department than either of his predecessors. 534 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITIOAL MISCELLANIES. from their own. The consequence is obvious. Voltaire, whose elevated views sometimes advanced him to the level of the generous criticism of our own day, is by no means an exception. His Commentaries on Corneille are filled with the finest reflections imaginable on that eminent poet, or, rather, on the French drama ; but the application of these same principles to the productions of his neighbours leads him into the grossest absurdities. " Addison's Cato is the only well- written tragedy in England." " Hamlet is a barbarous production, that would not be endured by the meanest populace in France or Italy/' " Lope de Vega and Calderon fami- liarized their countrymen with all the extravagances of a gross and ridiculous drama." But the French theatre, modelled upon the ancient Greek, can boast " of more than twenty pieces which surpass their most admirable chef-d'asuvres, without excepting those of Sophocles or Euripides." So in other walks of poetry, Milton, Tasso, Ercilla, occasionally fare no better. " Who would dare to talk to Boileau, Kacine, Moliere, of an epic poem upon Adam and Eve ? " Voltaire had one additional reason for the exaltation of his native literature at the expense 'of every other : he was himself at the head, or aspired to be, of every department in it. Madame de Stael is certainly an eminent exception, in very many particulars, to the general character of her nation. Her defects, indeed, are rather of an opposite cast. Instead of the narrowness of conventional precept, she may be sometimes accused of vague and visionary theory ; instead of nice specific details, of dealing too freely in abstract and independent propositions. Her faults are of the German school, which she may have in part imbibed from her intimacy with their literature (no common circumstance with her countrymen), from her residence in Germany, and from her long intimacy with DA PONTE'S OBSERVATIONS. 535 one of its most distinguished scholars, who lived under the same roof with her for many years. But, with all her faults, she is entitled to the praise of having shown a more enlarged and truly philosophical spirit of criticism than any of her countrymen. The English have never yielded to the arbitrary legislation of academies ; their literature has at different periods exhibited all the varieties of culture whicli have prevailed over the other European tongues; and their language, derived both from the Latin and the Teutonic idiom, affords them a much greater facility for entering into the spirit of foreign letters than can be enjoyed by any other European people, whose language is derived almost exclusively from one or the other of these elements. With all these peculiar facilities for literary history and criticism, why, with their habitual freedom of thought, have they remained in it so far behind most other cultivated nations ? SPANISH LITERATURE.* (January, 1852.) LITERARY history is the least familiar kind of his- torical writing. It is, in some respects, the most diffi- cult, requiring certainly far the most laborious study. The facts for civil history we gather from personal ex- perience, or from the examination of a comparatively few authors, whose statements the historian transfers, with such modification and commentary as he pleases, to his own pages. But in literary history the books are the facts, and pretty substantial ones in many cases, which are not to be mastered at a glance, or on the report of another. It is a tedious process to read through a library in order to decide that the greater part is probably not worth reading at all. Literary history must come late in the intellectual development of a nation. It is the history of books, and there can be no history of books till books are written. It presupposes, moreover, a critical knowledge, an acquaintance with the principles of taste, which can come only from a wide study and comparison of models. It is, therefore, necessarily the product of an advanced state of civilization and mental culture. Although criticism, in one form or another, was studied and exemplified by the ancients, yet they made no progress in direct literary history. Neither has it been cultivated by all the nations of modern * " History of Spanish Literature." By George Ticknor. New York, Harper & Brothers. 1849 : 3 vols. 8vo. SPANISH LITERATURE. 537 Europe. At least, in some of them it has met with very limited success. In England, one might have thought, from the free scope given to the expression of opinion, it would have flourished beyond all other countries. But Italy, and even Spain, with all the restraint imposed on intellectual movement, have done more in this way than the whole Anglo-Saxon race. The very freedom with which the English could enter on the career of political action has not only withdrawn them from the more quiet pursuits of letters, but has given them a decided taste for descriptions of those stirring scenes in which they or their fathers have taken part. Hence the great preponderance with them, as with us, of civil history over literary. It may be further remarked that the monastic insti- tutions of Roman Catholic countries have been peculiarly favourable to this, as to some other kinds of composition. The learned inmates of the cloister have been content to solace their leisure with those literary speculations and inquiries which had no immediate connection with party excitement and the turmoils of the world. The best literary histories, from whatever cause, in Spain and in Italy, have been the work of members of some one or other of the religious fraternities. Still another reason of the attention given to this study in most of those countries may be found in the embarrassments existing there to the general pursuit of science, which have limited the powers to the more exclusive cultivation of works of imagination, and those other productions of elegant literature that come most properly within the province of taste and of literary criticism. Yet in England, during the last generation, in which the mind has been unusually active, if there have been few elaborate works especially devoted to criticism, the 538 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIEa electric fluid has been imperceptibly carried off from a thousand minor points, in the form of essays and pe- riodical reviews, which cover nearly the whole ground of literary inquiry, both foreign and domestic. The student who has the patience to consult these scattered notices, if he cannot find a system ready made to his hands, may digest one for himself by a comparison of contradictory judgments on every topic under review. Yet it may be doubted if the multitude of cross-lights thrown at random over his path will not serve rather to perplex than to enlighten him. Wherever we are to look for the reasons, the fact will hardly be disputed, that, since Warton's learned frag- ment, no general literary history has been produced in England which is likely to endure, with the exception of Hallam's late work, that, under the modest title of an " Introduction," gives a general survey of the scientific and literary culture of Europe during three centuries. If the English have done so little in this way for their own literature, it can hardly be expected that they should do much for that of their neighbours. If they had extended their researches to the Continent, it might probably have been in the direction of Spain; for no country has been made with them the subject of so large historical investigation. One or two good histories devoted to Italy and Germany, as many to the revo- lutionary period of France the country with which they are most nearly brought into contact make up the sum of what is of positive value in this way. But for Spain, a series of writers Robertson, Watson, Duulop, Lord Mahon, Coxe, some of the highest order, all re- spectable have exhibited the political annals of the monarchy under the Austrian and Bourbon dynasties. Even at the present moment, a still livelier interest seems to be awakened to the condition of this romantic SPANISH LITERATURE. 539 land. Two excellent works, by Head and by Stirling, the latter of especial value, have made the world acquainted, for the first time, with the rich treasures of art in the Peninsula. And last, not least, Ford, in his Hand-book and other works, has joined to a curious erudition that knowledge of the Spanish character and domestic institutions that can be obtained only from singular acuteness of observation combined with a long residence in the country he describes. Spain, too, has been the favourite theme of more than one of our own writers, in history and romance ; and now the long list is concluded by the attempt of the work before us to trace the progress of intellectual culture in the Peninsula. No work on a similar extended plan is to be found in Spain itself. Their own literary histories have been chiefly limited to the provinces, or to particular depart- ments of letters. We may except, indeed, the great work of Eather Andre's, which, comprehending the whole circle of European science and literature, left but a com- paratively small portion to his own country. To his name may also be added that of Lampillas, whose work, however, from its rambling and its controversial character, throws but a very partial and unsatisfactory glance on the topics which he touches. The only books on a similar plan, which cover the same ground with the one before us, are the histories of Bouterwek and Sismondi. The former was written as part of a great plan for the illustration of European art and science since the revival of learning, projected by a literary association in Gottingen. The plan, as is too often the case in such copartnerships, was very imper- fectly executed. The best fruits of it were the twelve volumes of Bouterwek, on the elegant literature of modern Europe. That of Spain occupies one of these volumes. 540 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. It is written with acuteness, perspicuity, and candour. Notwithstanding the writer is perhaps too much under the influence of certain German theories then fashionable, his judgments, in the main, are temperate and sound, and he is entitled to great credit as the earliest pioneer in this untrodden field of letters. The great defect in the book is the want of proper materials on which to rest these judgments. Of this the writer more than once complains. It is a capital defect, not to be compensated by any talent or diligence in the author. For in this kind of writing, as we have said, books are facts, the very stuff out of which the history is to be made. Bouterwek had command of the great library of Got- tingen. But it would not be safe to rely on any one library, however large, for supplying all the materials for an extended literary history. Above all, this is true of Spanish literature. The difficulty of making a literary collection in Spain is far greater than in most other parts of Europe. The booksellers' trade there is a very different affair from what it is in more favoured regions. The taste for reading is not, or, rather, has not been, suffi- ciently active to create a demand for the republication always of even the best authors, the ancient editions of whose works have become scarce and most difficult to be procured. The impediment to a free expression of opinion has condemned many more works to the silence of manu- script. And these manuscripts are preserved, or, to say truth, buried, in the collections of old families, or of public institutions, where it requires no ordinary interest with the proprietors, private or public, to be allowed to dis- inter them. Some of the living Spanish scholars are now busily at work in these useful explorations, the result of which they are giving, from time to time, to the world in the form of livraisons or numbers, which seem likely to form an important contribution to historical SPANISH LITEEATUBE. 541 science. For the impulse thus given to these patriotic labours the world is mainly indebted to the late venerable Navarrete, who, in his own person, led the way by the publication of a series of important historical documents. It is only from these obscure and uncertain repositories, and from booksellers' stalls, that the more rare and recon- dite works in which Spain is so rich can be procured ; and it is only under great advantages that the knowledge of their places of deposit can be obtained, and that, having obtained it, the works can be had, at a price proportioned to their rarity. The embarrassments caused by this circumstance have been greatly diminished under the more liberal spirit of the present day, which on a few occasions has even unlocked the jealous archives of Simancas, that EobertsoD, backed by the personal autho- rity of the British ambassador, strove in vain to penetrate. Spanish literature occupies also one volume of Sis- mondi's popular work on the culture of Southern Europa But Sismondi was far less instructed in literary criticism than his German predecessor, of whose services he has freely availed himself in the course of his work. Indeed,, he borrows from him not merely thoughts, but language, translating from the German page after page and incor- porating it with his own eloquent commentary. He does not hesitate to avow his obligations ; but they prove at once his own deficiencies in the performance of his critical labours as well as in the possession of the requisite materials. Sismondi's ground was civil history, whose great lessons no one had meditated more deeply ; and it is in the application of these lessons to the character of the Spaniards, and in tracing the influence of that cha- racter on their literature, that a great merit of his work consists. He was, moreover, a Frenchman, or, at least, a Frenchman in language and education ; and he was prepared, therefore, to correct some of the extravagant 542 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. theories of the German critics, and; to rectify some of their judgments by a moral standard which they had entirely overlooked in their passion for the beautiful. With all his merits, however, and the additional grace of a warm and picturesque style, his work, like that of Bouterwek, must be admitted to afford only the outlines of the great picture, which they have left to other hands to fill up in detail and on a far more extended plan. To accomplish this great task is the purpose of the volumes before us; we are now to inquire with what result. But, before entering on the inquiry, we will give some account of the preparatory training of the writer, and the materials which he has brought together. Mr. Ticknor, who now first comes before the world in the avowed character of an author, has long enjoyed a literary reputation which few authors who have closed their career might not envy. While quite a young man, he was appointed to fill the chair of Modern Literature in Harvard College, on the foundation of the late Abiel Smith, Esq., a distinguished merchant of Boston. When he received the appointment, Mr. Ticknor had been some time in Europe pursuing studies in philology. He re- mained there two or three years afterwards, making an absence of above four years in all. A part of this period was passed in diligent study at Gottingen. In Paris he explored, under able teachers, the difficult Romance dia- lects, the medium of the beautiful ProvengaL During his residence in Spain he perfected himself in the Castilian, and established an intimacy with her most eminent scholars, who aided him in the collection of rare books and manuscripts, to which he assiduously devoted himself. It is a proof of the literary consideration which, even at that early age, he had obtained in the society of Madrid, that he was elected a corresponding member of the Eoyal Academy of History. His acquisitions in the SPANISH LITERATURE. 543 early literature of modern Europe attracted the nbtice of Sir Walter Scott, who, in a letter to South ey, printed in Lockhart's Life, speaks of his young guest (Mr. Ticknor was then at Abbotsford) as a "wonderful fellow for romantic lore." On his return home, Mr. Ticknor entered at once on his academic labours, and delivered a series of lectures on the Castilian and French literatures, as well as on some portions of the English, before successive classes, which he continued to repeat, with the occasional varia- tion of oral instruction, during the fifteen years he remained at the University. "We well remember the sensation produced on the first delivery of these Lectures, which served to break down the barrier which had so long confined the student to a converse with antiquity ; they opened to him a free range among those great masters of modern literature who had hitherto been veiled in the obscurity of a foreign idiom. The influence of this instruction was soon visible in the higher education as well as the literary ardour shown by the graduates. So decided was the impulse thus given to the popular sentiment that considerable apprehension was felt lest modern literature was to re- ceive a disproportionate share of attention in the scheme of collegiate education. After the lapse of fifteen years so usefully employed, Mr. Ticknor resigned his office, and, thus released from his academic labours, paid a second visit to Europe, where, in a second residence of three years, he much enlarged the amount and the value of his literary col- lection. In the more perfect completion of this he was greatly assisted by the professor of Arabic in the Uni- versity of Madrid, Don Pascual de Gayangos, a scholar to whose literary sympathy and assistance more than one American writer has been indebted, and who to a 544 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. profound knowledge of Oriental literature unites one equally extensive in the European. With these aids, and his own untiring efforts, Mr. * O ' Ticknor succeeded in bringing together a body of materials in print and manuscript, for the illustration of the Castilian, such as probably has no rival either in public or private collections. This will be the more readily believed when we find that nearly every author employed in the composition of this great work with the exception of a few, for which he has made ample acknowledgments is to be found on his own shelves. We are now to consider in what manner he has availed himself of this inestimable collection of materials. The title of the book the " History of Spanish Literature " is intended to comprehend all that relates to the poetry of the country, its romances, and works of imagination of every sort, its criticism and eloquence, in short, whatever can be brought under the head of elegant literature. Even its chronicles and regular histories are included ; for, though scientific in their import, they are still, in respect to their style and their execution as works of art, brought into the department of ornamental writing. In Spain, freedom of thought, or, at least, the free expression of it, has been so closely fettered that science, in its strictest sense, has made little progress in that unhappy country, and a history of its elegant literature is, more than in any other land, a general history of its intellectual progress. The work is divided into three great periods, having reference to time rather than to any philosophical ar- rangement. Indeed, Spanish literature affords less faci- lities for such an arrangement than the literature of many other countries, as that of England and of Italy, for example, where, from different causes, there have been periods exhibiting literary characteristics that stamp SPANISH LITEBATUBE. 545 them with a peculiar physiognomy. For example, in England we have the age of Elizabeth, the age of Queen Anne, our own age. In Italy, the philosophical arrange- ment seems to correspond well enough with the chrono- logical. Thus, the Trecentisti, the Seicentisti, convey ideas as distinct and as independent of each other as the different schools of Italian art. But in Spain, literature is too deeply tinctured at its fountain-head not to retain somewhat of the primitive colouring through the whole course of its descent. Patriotism, chivalrous loyalty, religious zeal, under whatever modification and under whatever change of circumstances, have constituted, as Mr. Ticknor has well insisted, the enduring elements of the national literature. And it is this obvious prepon- derance of these elements throughout which makes the distribution into separate masses on any philosophical principle extremely difficult. A proof of this is afforded by the arrangement now adopted by Mr. Ticknor him- self, in the limit assigned to his first period, which is considerably shorter than that assigned to it in his original Lectures. The alteration, as we shall take occasion to notice hereafter, is, in our judgment, a decided improvement. The first great division embraces the whole time from the earliest appearance of a written document in the Castilian to the commencement of the sixteenth century, the reign of Charles the Fifth, a period of nearly four centuries. At the very outset we are met by the remarkable poem of the " Cid," that primitive epic, which, like the " Nieblungenlied " or the " Iliad," stands as the tra- ditional legend of an heroic age, exhibiting all the fresh- ness and glow which belong to the morning of a nation's existence. The name of the author, as is often the case with those memorials of the olden time, when the writes X K 546 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. thought less of himself than of his work, has not come down to us. Even the date of its composition is un- certain,- probably before the year 1200 ; a century earlier than the poem of Dante ; a century and a half before Petrarch and Chaucer. The subject of it, as its name imports, is the achievements of the renowned Ruy Diaz de Bivar, the Cid, the Campeador, "the lord, the champion," as he was fondly styled by his countrymen, as well as by his Moorish foes, in commemoration of his prowess, chiefly displayed against the infidel. The ver- sification is the fourteen-syllable measure, artless, and exhibiting all the characteristics of, an unformed idiom, but, with its rough melody, well suited to the expression of the warlike and stirring incidents in which it abounds. It is impossible to peruse it without finding ourselves carried back to the heroic age of Castile ; and we feel that in its simple and cordial portraiture of existing manners we get a more vivid impression of the feudal period than is to be gathered from the more formal pages of the chronicler. Heeren has pronounced that the poems of Homer were one of the principal bonds which held the Grecian states together. The assertion may seem extravagant ; but we can well understand that a poem like that of the " Cid/' with all its defects as a work of art, by its proud historic recollections of an heroic age should do much to nourish the principle of patriotism in the bosoms of the people. From the " Cid " Mr. Ticknor passes to the review of several other poems of the thirteenth and some of the fourteenth century. They are usually of considerable length. The Castilian muse, at the outset, seems to have delighted in works of longue haleine. Some of them are of a satirical character, directing their shafts against the clergy, with an independence which seems to have marked also the contemporaneous productions SPANISH LITEEATUEE. 547 of other nations, but which, in Spain at least, was rarely found at a later period. Others of these venerable pro- ductions are tinged with the religious bigotry which enters so largely into the best portions of the Castilian literature. One of the most remarkable poems of the period is the Danza General, the " Dance of Death." The subject is not original with the Spaniards, and has been treated by the bards of other nations in the elder time. It represents the ghastly revels of the dread monarch, to which all are summoned, of every degree, from the potentate to the peasant. "It is founded on the well-known fiction, so often illustrated both in painting and in verse during the Middle Ages, that all men, of all conditions, are sum- moned to the Dance of Death ; a kind of spiritual masquerade, in which the different ranks of society, from the Pope to the young child, appear dancing with the skeleton form of Death. In this Spanish version it is striking and picturesque, more so, perhaps, than in any other, the ghastly nature of the subject being brought into a very lively contrast with the festive tone of the verses, which frequently recalls some of the better parts of those flowing stories that now and then occur in the ' Mirror for Magistrates.' " The first seven stanzas of the Spanish poem consti- tute a prologue, in which Death issues his summons partly in his own person, and partly in that of a preaching friar, ending thus : " ' Come to the Dance of Deatb, all ye whose fate By birth is mortal, be ye great or small ; And willing come, nor loitering, nor late, Else force shall bring you struggling to my thrall : For since yon friar hath uttered loud his call To penitence and godliness sincere, He that delays must hope no waiting here ; For still the ciy is, Haste ! and, Haste to a"! I ! ' N K 2 548 BIOGBAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. "Death now proceeds, as in the old pictures and poems, to summon, first the Pope, then cardinals, kings, bishops, and so on, down to day-labourers ; all of whom are forced to join his mortal dance, though each first makes some remonstrance that indicates sur- prise, horror, or reluctance. The call to youth and beauty is spirited : " ' Bring to my dance, and bring without delay, Those damsels twain you see so bright and fair ; They came, but came not in a willing way, To list my chants of mortal grief and care : Nor shall the flowers and roses fresh they wear, Nor rich attire, avail their forms to save. They strive in vain who strive against the grave j It may not be ; my wedded brides they are.' " Another poem, of still higher pretensions, but, like the last, still in manuscript, is the Poema de Jos$, the "Poem of Joseph." It is probably the work of one of those Spanish Arabs who remained under the Castilian domination after the great body of their countrymen had retreated. It is written in the Cas- tilian dialect, but in Arabic characters, as was not very uncommon with the writings of the Moriscoes. The ;story of Joseph is told, moreover, conformably to the version of the Koran, instead of that of the Hebrew Scriptures. The manner in which the Spanish and the Arabic races were mingled together after the great invasion produced a strange confusion in their languages. The Christians, who were content to dwell in their old places under the Moslem rule, while they retained their own language, not unfrequently adopted the alphabetical characters of their conquerors. Even the coins struck by some of the ancient Castilian princes, as they recovered their territory from the invaders, were stamped with Arabic letters. Not unfrequently SPANISH L1TEBATUBE. 549 the archives and municipal records of the Spanish cities, for a considerable time after their restoration to their own princes, were also written in Arabic characters. On the other hand, as the great inundation gradually receded, the Moors who lingered behind under the Spanish sway often adopted the language of their conquerors, but retained their own written alphabet.. In other words, the Christians kept their language and abandoned their alphabetical characters; while the Moslems kept their alphabetical characters and aban- doned their language. The contrast is curious, and may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that the superiority conceded by the Spaniards to the Arabic literature in this early period led the few scholars among them to adopt, for their own compositions, the charac- ters in which that literature was written. The Moris- coes, on the other hand, did what was natural when they retained their peculiar writing, to which they had been accustomed in the works of their countrymen, while they conformed to the Castiliaii language, to which they had become accustomed in daily intercourse with the Spaniard. However explained, the fact is curious. But it is time we should return to the Spanish Arab poem. We give the following translation of some of its verses by Mr. Ticknor, with his few prefatory remarks : " On the first night after the outrage, Jusuf, as he i& called in the poem, when travelling along in charge of a negro, passes a cemetery on a hillside where his mother lies buried. " And when the negro heeded not, that guarded him behind, From off the camel Jusuf sprang, on which he rode confined, And hastened, with all speed, his mother's grave to find, Where he knelt and pardon sought, to relieve his troubled mind. 550 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. "He cried,'* God's grace ;b&:with thee stilly O Lady mother dear ! . O mother, you would, sprrow, if you looked, upon me here ; For my neck is bound with chains, and I live in grief and fear, M Like a traitor by my brethren sold, like a captive to the speaf. " ' 'they have sold me ! they have sold me '! though I never did theii harm ; ... They have torn me from my father, from his strong and living arm, By art and cunning they enticed me, and by falsehood's guilty charm, And I go a base-bought captive, full of sorrow and alarm.' "But now the negro looked about, and knew that he was gone ; For no man could be seen, and the camel came alone ; i So he turned his sharpened ear, and caught the wailing tone, . . > /q Where Jusuf, by his mother's grave, lay making heavy moan. "And. the negro hurried up, and gave him there a blow ; So quick and cruel was it, that it instant laid him low : * A base-born wretch,' he cried aloud, ' a base-bom thief art thou : Thy masters, when we purchased, thee, they told us it was so.' '* But Jusuf answered straight, * Nor thief nor wretch am I ; f . rr-^.M ? My mother's grave is this, and, for pardon here I cry ;, ;.;. I cry to Allah's power, and send my prayer on high, That, since I never wronged thee, his curse may on thee lie.' "And then all night they travelled on, till dawned the coming day, WJhen the land was sore tormented with a whirlwind's furious sway ; The sun grew dark at noon, their hearts sunk in dismay, And they knew not, with their merchandise, to seek or make their way." The manuscript of the piece, containing about twelve hundred verses, though not entirely perfect, is in Mr. Ticknor's hands, with its original Arabic characters con- certed into the Castilian. He has saved it from the chances of time by printing it at length in his Appendix, accompanied by the following commendations, which, to one practised in the old Castilian literature, will probably not be thought beyond its deserts : " There is little, as it seems to me, in the early narra- tive poetry of any modern nation better worth reading than this- old Morisco version of the story of Joseph. Parts of it overflow with the tenderest natural affection ; other parts are deeply pathetic ; and everywhere it bears the impress of the extraordinary state of manners and . ...... SPANISH . LITEBATUBE. - 551 society, that igave it >birtk , From, several passages, it may be inferred .that it ; was publicly recited ; and -even .now, as- we read it, we fall unconsciously into a long- drawn chant, and seem to hear the voices of Arabian eamel-drivers, or of Spanish muleteers, as the Oriental or romantic tone happens 1x> prevail. I am acquainted with nothing in the form of the old metrical romance that is more attractive, nothing that is so peculiar, original, and separate from everything else of the same class." With these anonymous productions, Mr, Ticknor en- ters into the consideration of others from an acknow- ledged source, among which aret.those of the Prince Don Juan Manuel and Alfonso the Tenth, or Alfonso the Wise, as he is usually termed.' He was one of those rare men who seem to be possessed of an almost univer- sal genius. His tastes would have been better suited to a more refined period. He was, unfortunately, so far in advance of his* age that his age could not fully profit by his knowledge. He was raised so far above the general level of his time that the light of his genius, though- it reached to distant generations, left his own in a compa- rative obscurity. His great work was the code of the Siete PartidaSy little heeded in his own day, though destined to become the basis of Spanish jurisprudence both in the Old World and in the New. Alfonso caused the Bible, for the first time, to be trans- lated into the Castilian. He was an historian, and led the way in the long line of Castilian writers in that de- partment, by his Cronica General. He aspired also to the laurel of the Muses. His poetry is still extant in the G-allician dialect, which the monarch thought might in the end be the cultivated dialect of his kingdom. The want of a settled capital, or, to speak more cor- rectly, the want of civilisation, had left the different 552 BIOGEAPHIOAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. elements of the language contending, as it were, for the mastery. The result was still uncertain at the close of the thirteenth century. Alfonso himself did, probably, more than any other to settle it, by his prose composi- tions, by the Siete Partidas and his Chronicle, as well as by the vernacular version of the Scriptures. The Gallician became the basis of the language of the sister- kingdom of Portugal, and the generous dialect of Castile became, in Spain, the language of the court and of lite- rature. Alfonso directed his attention also to mathematical science. His astronomical observations are held in re- spect at the present day. But, as Mariana sarcastically intimates, while he was gazing at the stars he forgot the earth, and lost his kingdom. His studious temper was ill accommodated to the stirring character of the times. He was driven from his throne by his factious nobles ; and in a letter written not long before his death, of which Mr. Ticknor gives a translation, the unhappy monarch pathetically deplores his fate and the ingrati- tude of his subjects. Alfonso the Tenth seemed to have at command every science but that which would have been of more worth to him than all the rest, the science of government. He died in exile, leaving behind him the reputation of being the wisest fool in Christendom. In glancing over the list of works which, from their anomalous character as well as their antiquity, are ar- ranged by Mr. Ticknor in one class, as introductory to his history, we are struck with the great wealth of the period, not great, certainly, compared with that of an age of civilisation, but as compared with the productions of most other countries in this portion of the Middle Ages. Much of this ancient lore, which may be said to constitute the foundations of the national literature, has been but imperfectly known to the Spaniards themselves; SPANISH LITEEATUEE. 553 and we have to acknowledge our obligations to Mr. Ticknor, not only for the diligence with which he has brought it to light, but for the valuable commentaries, in text and notes, which supply all that could reason- ably be demanded, both in a critical and bibliographical point of view. To estimate the extent of this informa- tion, we must compare it with what we have derived on the same subject from his predecessors ; where the poverty of original materials, as well as of means for illustrating those actually possessed, is apparent at a glance. Sismondi, with some art, conceals his poverty, by making the most of the little finery at his command. Thus, his analysis of the poem of the Cid, which he had carefully read, together with his prose translation of no- inconsiderable amount, covers a fifth of what he has to say on the whole period, embracing more than four cen- turies. He has one fine bit of gold in his possession,, and he makes the most of it, by hammering it out into- a superficial extent altogether disproportionate to its real value. Our author distributes the productions which occupy the greater part of the remainder of his first period into four great classes, Ballads, Chronicles, Romances of Chivalry, and the Drama. The mere enumeration sug- gests the idea of that rude, romantic age, when the ima- gination, impatient to find utterance, breaks through the impediments of an unformed dialect, or, rather, converts it into an instrument for its purposes. Before looking at the results, we must briefly notice the circumstances under which they were effected. The first occupants of the Peninsula who left abiding traces of their peculiar civilization were the Romans. Six-tenths of the languages now spoken are computed to be derived from them. Then came the Visigoths, bring- ing with them the peculiar institutions of the Teutonic 554 BIOGRAPHICAL AND OEITIGAL MISCELLANIES. raees.- r And lastly, after the lapse of .uthcee centuries, came the great Saracen inundation, which covered, the whole, land up to ,the northern- mountains, and,, as it slowly receded, left a fertilizing principle^ that gave life to much that was good as well as evil in the character and literature of the Spaniards. It was near the com- mencement of the eighth century that the great battle was fought, on the banks of the -Gnuadalete, which decided the fate of Koderic, the last of the Goths, and of his monarchy. It was to the Goths--the Spaniards, as their descendants were called what the battle of Hastings was to the English. The Arab conquerors rode over the country, as completely its masters as were the Normans of Britain. But they dealt more mercifully with the vanquished. The Koran, tribute, =or the sword were the terms offered by the victors. Many were content to re- main under Moslem rule, in the tolerated enjoyment of their religion, and, to some extent, of their laws. Those of nobler metal withdrew to the rocks of the Asturias ;> and every muleteer or water-carrier who emigrates from this barren spot glories in his birthplace as of itself a patent of nobility. Then came the struggle against the Saracen invaders, that long crusade to be carried on for centuries, in which the ultimate triumph of a handful of Christians over the large and flourishing empire of the Moslems is, the most glorious of the triumphs of the Cross upon record. But it was the work of eight centuries. During the first of these the Spaniards scarcely ventured beyond their fastnesses. The conquerors occupied the land, and settled in greatest strength over the pleasant places of the South, so congenial with- their own voluptuous cli- mate in the East. Then rose the empire of C6rdova* which, under the sway of the Omeyades, rivalled in splendour and civilization the- caliphate of Bagdad* SPANISH LITERATURE. 555 Poetry, philosophy, letters, everywhere flourished. Aca- demies and gymnasiums were founded, and Aristotle was expounded by commentators who acquired a glory not inferior to that of the Stagirite himself. This state of things continued after the 6rdovan empire had been broken into fragments, when Seville, Murcia, Malaga^ and the other cities' which still flourished among the ruins continued to be centres of a civilization that shone bright amid the darkness of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the Spaniards, strong in their religion, their Gothic institutions, and their poverty, had emerged from their fastnesses in the North, and brought their vic- torious banner as far as the Douro. In three centuries more, they had advanced their line of conquest only to the Tagus. But their progress, though slow, was irre^ sistible, till at length the Moslems, of all their proud possessions, retained only the petty territory of Granada. On this little spot, however, they made a stand for more than two centuries, and bade defiance to the whole Christian power ; while at the same time, though sunk in intellectual culture, they surpassed their best days in the pomp of their architecture and in the magnificence of living characteristic of the East. At the close of the fifteenth century, this Arabian tale the most splendid episode in the Mahommedan annals was brought to an end by the fall of Granada before the arms of Ferdinand and Isabella. Such were the strange influences which acted on the Spanish character, and on the earliest development of its literature, influences so peculiar that it is no wonder they should have produced results to which no other part of Europe has furnished a parallel : the Oriental and the European for eight centuries brought into con- tact with one another, yet, though brought into contact, too different in blood, laws, and religion ever to coalesce. 556 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. Unlike the Saxons and Normans, who, sprung from a common stock, with a common faith, were gradually blended into one people, in Spain the conflicting ele- ments could never mingle. No length of time could give the Arab a right to the soil. He was still an in- truder. His only right was the right of the sword. He held his domain on the condition of perpetual war, the war of race against race, of religion against religion. This was the inheritance of the Spaniard, as well as of the Moslem, for eight hundred years. What remarkable qualities was this situation not calculated to call out ! loyalty, heroism, the patriotic feeling, and the loftier feeling of religious enthusiasm. What wonder that the soldier of the Cross should fancy that the arm of Heaven was stretched out to protect him ? that St. Jago should do battle for him with his celestial chivalry ? that mi- racles should cease to be miracles ? that superstition, in short, should be the element, the abiding element, of the national character ? Yet this religious enthusiasm, in the early ages, was tempered by charity towards a foe whom even the Christian was compelled to respect for his superior civilization. But as the latter gained the ascendant, enthusiasm was fanned by the crafty clergy into fanaticism. As the Moslem scale became more and more depressed, fanaticism rose to intolerance, and intolerance ended in persecution when the victor was converted into the victim. It is a humiliating story, more humiliating even to the oppressors than to the oppressed. The literature all the while, with chameleon-like sen- sibility, took the colour of the times ; and it is for this reason that we have always dwelt with greater satis- faction on the earlier period of the national literature, rude though it be, with its cordial, free, and high romantic bearing, than on the later period of its glory, SPANISH LITERATURE. 557 brilliant in an intellectual point of view, but in its moral aspect dark and unrelenting. Mr. Ticknor has been at much pains to unfold these peculiarities of the Castilian character, in order to explain by them the peculiarities of the literature, and indeed to show their reciprocal action on each other. He has devoted occasional chapters to this subject, not the least interesting in his volumes, making the history of the literature a running commentary on that of the nation, and thus furnishing curious information to the political student, no less than to the student of letters. His acute, and at the same time accurate, observations, imbued with a spirit of sound philosophy, give the work a separate value, and raise it above the ordinary province of literary criticism. But it is time that we should turn to the ballads, or romances, as they are called in Spain, the first of the great divisions already noticed. Nowhere does this popular minstrelsy flourish to the same extent as in Spain. The condition of the country, which converted every peasant into a soldier, and filled his life with scenes of stir- ring and romantic incident, may in part account for it. We have ballads of chivalry, of the national history, of the Moorish wars, mere domestic ballads, in short, all the varieties of which such simple poetical narratives are sus- ceptible. The most attractive of these to the Spaniards, doubtless, were those devoted to the national heroes. The Cid here occupies a large space. His love, his loyalty, his invincible prowess against the enemies of God, are all celebrated in the frank and cordial spirit of a primitive age. They have been chronologically arranged into a regular series, as far as the date could be conjectured, like the Kobin Hood ballads in England, so as to form a tolerably complete narrative of his life. It is interesting to observe with what fondness the Spaniards are ever 558 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ready to turn to their ancient hero, the very type of Castilian chivalry, and linked by so many glorious recol- lections with the heroic age of their country. The following version of one of these ballads, by Mr. Ticknor, will give a fair idea of the original. The time chosen is the occasion of a summons made by the Cid to Queen Urraca to surrender her castle, which held out against the arms of the warrior's sovereign, Sancho the Brave : '* Away ! away ! proud Roderic ! Castilian proud, away ! Bethink thee of that olden time, That happy, honoured day, When, at St. James's holy shrine, Thy knighthood first was won ; When Ferdinand, my royal sire, Confessed thee for a son. He gave thee then thy knightly arms, My mother gave thy steed ; Thy spurs were buckled by these hands, That thou no grace might'st need. And had not chance forbid the vow, I thought with thee to wed ; But Count Lozano's daughter fair Thy happy bride was led. With her came wealth, an ample store, But power was mine, and state : Broad lands are good, and have their grace, But he that reigns is great. Thy wife is well ; thy match was wise ; Yet, Roderic ! at thy side A vassal's daughter site by thee, And not a royal bride !" Our author has also given a pleasing version of the beautiful romance of " Fonte frida, fonte frida" "Cooling fountain, cooling fountain," which we are glad to see rendered faithfully, instead of following the example of Dr. Percy, in his version of the fine old ballad in a similar simple style, " Rio verde, rio verde," which we remember he translates by " Gentle river, gentle river," etc. Indeed, to do justice to Mr. Ticknor's translations we SPANISH LITERATUBE. 559 should have the text before us. Nowhere do we recall so close fidelity to the original, unless in Gary's Dante. Such fidelity does not always attain the object of con- veying the best idea of the original. But in this humble poetry it is eminently successful. To give these rude gems a polish would be at once to change their character and defeat the great object of our author, to introduce his readers to the peculiar culture of a primitive age. A considerable difficulty presents itself in finding a suitable measure for the English version of the romances. In the original they are written in the eight-syllable line, with trochaic feet, instead of the iambics usually employed by us. But the real difficulty is in the pecu- liarity of the measure, the asonante, as it is called, in which the rhyme depends solely on the conformity of vowel sounds, without reference to the consonants, as in English verse. Thus the words dedo, tiempo, viejos, are all good asonantes, taken at random from one of these old ballads. An attempt has been made by more than one clever writer to transplant them into English verse. But it has had as little success as the attempt to naturalize the ancient hexameter, which neither the skill of Southey nor of Longfellow will, probably, be able to effect The Spanish vowels have for the most part a clear and open sound, which renders the melody of the ver- sification sufficiently sensible to the ear; while the middle station which it occupies between the perfect rhyme and blank verse seems to fit it in an especial manner for these simple narrative compositions. The same qualities have recommended it to the dramatic writers of Spain as the best medium of poetical dialogue, and as such it is habitu- ally used by the great masters of the national theatre. No class of these popular compositions have greater interest than the Moorish romances, affording glimpses of a state of society in which the Oriental was strangely 560 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. mingled with the European. Some of them may have been written by the Moriscoes after the fall of Granada. They are redolent of the beautiful land which gave them birth, springing up like wild flowers amid the ruins of the fallen capital. Mr. Ticknor has touched lightly on these in comparison with some of the other varieties, perhaps because they have been more freely criticised by preceding writers. Every lover of good poetry is familiar with Mr. Lockhart's picturesque version of these ballads, which has every merit but that of fidelity to the original. The production of the Spanish ballads is evidence of great sensibility in the nation ; but it must also be referred to the exciting scenes in which it was engaged. A similar cause gave rise to the beautiful border min- strelsy of Scotland. But the adventures of robber chieftains and roving outlaws excite an interest of a very inferior order to that created by the great contest for religion and independence which gave rise to the Spanish ballads. This gives an ennobling principle to these compositions which raises them far above the popular minstrelsy of every other country. It recom- mended them to the more polished writers of a later period, under whose hands, if they have lost something of their primitive simplicity, they have been made to form a delightful portion of the national literature. We cannot do better than to quote on this the eloquent remarks of our author : " Ballads, in the seventeenth century, had become the delight of the whole Spanish people. The soldier solaced himself with them in his tent, and the muleteer amid the sierras ; the maiden danced to them on the green, and the lover sang them for his serenade ; they entered into the low orgies of thieves and vagabonds, into the sumptuous entertainments of the luxurious nobility, and SPANISH LITERATURE. 561 into the holiday services of the Church ; the blind beggar chanted them, to gather alms, and the puppet-showman gave them in recitative to explain his exhibition ; they were a part of the very foundation of the theatre, both secular and religious, and the theatre carried them everywhere, and added everywhere to their effect and authority. No poetry of modern times has been so widely spread through all classes of society, and none has so entered into the national character. The ballads, in fact, seem to have been found on every spot of Spanish soil. They seem to have filled the very air that men breathed." The next of the great divisions of this long period is the Chronicles, a fruitful theme, like the former, and still less explored. For much of this literature is in rare books, or rarer manuscripts. There is no lack of materials, however, in the present work, and the whole ground is mapped out before us by a guide evidently familiar with all its intricacies. The Spanish Chronicles are distributed into several classes, as those of a public and of a private nature, romantic chronicles, and those of travels. The work which may be said to lead the van of the long array is the " Cronica General" of Alfonso the Wise, written by this monarch probably somewhere about the middle of the thirteenth century. It covers a wide ground, from the creation to the time of the royal writer. The third book is devoted to the Cid, ever the representative of the heroic age of Castile. The fourth records the events of the monarch's own time. Alfonso's work is> followed by the " Chronicle of the Cid," in which the events of the champion's life are now first detailed in sober prose. There is much resemblance between large portions of these two chronicles. This circumstance has led to O 562 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. the conclusion that they both must have been indebted to a common source, or, as seems more probable, that the " Chronicle of the Cid " was taken from that of Alfonso. This latter opinion Mr. Ticknor sustains by internal evidence not easily answered. There seems no reason to doubt, however, that both one and the other were indebted to the popular ballads, and that these, in their turn, were often little more than a versifi- cation of the pages of Alfonso's Chronicle. Mr. Ticknor has traced out this curious process by bringing together the parallel passages, which are too numerous and nearly allied to leave any doubt on the matter. Sepulveda, a scholar of the sixteenth century, has converted considerable fragments of the " General Chro- nicle " into verse, without great violence to the original, a remarkable proof of the near affinity that exists between prose and poetry in Spain ; a fact which goes far to explain the facility and astonishing fecundity of some of its popular poets. For the Spaniards, it was nearly as easy to extemporise in verse as in prose. The example of Alfonso the Tenth was followed by his son, who appointed a chronicler to take charge of the events of his reign. This practice continued with later sovereigns, until the chronicle gradually rose to the pretensions of regular history ; when historiographers, with fixed salaries, were appointed by the crowns of Castile and Aragon ; giving rise to a more complete body of contemporary annals, from authentic public sources, than is to be found in any other country in Christendom. Such a collection, beginning with the thirteenth century, is of high value, and would be of far higher were its writers gifted with anything like a sound spirit of criticism. But superstition lay too closely at the bottom of the Castilian character to allow of this, SPANISH LITERATURE. 563 -a superstition nourished by the strange circumstances of the nation^ by the legends of the saints, by the miracles coined by the clergy in support of the . good cause, by the very ballads of which we have been treating, which, mingling fact with fable, threw a halo around both that made it difficult to distinguish the one from the other. So palpable to a modern age are many of these fictions in regard to the Cid that one ingenious critic doubts even the real existence of this personage. But this is a degree of scepticism which, as Mr. Ticknor finely remarks, " makes too great a demand on our credulity." This superstition, too deeply seated to be eradicated, and so repugnant to a philosophical spirit of criticism, is the greatest blemish on the writings of the Castilian historians, even of the ripest age of scholarship, who show an appetite for the marvellous, and an easy faith, scarcely to be credited at the present day. But this is hardly a blemish with the older chronicles, and was suited to the twilight condition of the times. They are, indeed, a most interesting body of ancient literature, with all the freshness and chivalrous bearing of the age ; with their long, rambling episodes, that lead to nothing ; their childish fondness for pageants and knightly spectacles ; their rough dialect, which, with the progress of time, working off the impurities of an unformed vocabulary, rose, in the reign of John the Second and of Ferdinand and Isabella, into pa&sages of positive eloquence. But we cannot do better than give the concluding remarks of our author on this rich mine of literature, which he has now for the first time fully explored and turned up to the public gaze. "As we close it up," he says, speaking of an old chronicle he has been criticising, " we should not forget that the whole series, extending over full two o o 2 564 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. hundred and fifty years, from the time of Alfonso the Wise to the accession of Charles the Fifth, and covering the New World as well as the Old, is unrivalled in richness, in variety, and in picturesque and poetical elements. In truth, the chronicles of no other nation can, on such points, be compared to them ; not even the Portuguese, which approach the nearest in original and early materials ; nor the French, which, in Joinville and Froissart, make the highest claims in another di- rection. For these old Spanish chronicles, whether they have their foundations in truth or in fable, always strike farther down than those of any other nation into the deep soil of the popular feeling and character. The old Spanish loyalty, the old Spanish religious faith, as both were formed and nourished in the long periods of national trial and suffering, are con- stantly coming out, hardly less in Columbus and his followers, or even amid the atrocities of the conquests in the New World, than in the half-miraculous accounts of the battles of Hazinas and Tolosa, -or in the grand and glorious drama of the fall of Granada. Indeed, wherever we go under their leading, whether to the court of Tamer- lane or to that of Saint Ferdinand, we find the heroic elements of the national genius gathered around us ; and thus, in this vast, rich mass of chronicles, containing such a body of antiquities, traditions, and fables as has been offered to no other people, we are constantly dis- covering not only the materials from which were drawn a multitude of the old Spanish ballads, plays, and ro- mances, but a mine which has been unceasingly wrought by the rest of Europe for similar purposes and still remains unexhausted." We now come to the Romances of Chivalry, to which the transition is not difficult from the romantic chro- nicles we have been considering. It was, perhaps, the SPANISH LITEEATUEE. 565 romantic character of these compositions, as well as of the popular minstrelsy of the country, which sup- plied the wants of the Spaniards in this way, and so long delayed the appearance of the true Romance of Chivalry. Long before it was seen in Spain, this kind of writing had made its appearance, in prose and verse, in other lands, and the tales of Arthur and the Round Table, and of Charlemagne and his Peers, had beguiled the long evenings of our Norman ancestors, and of their brethren on the other side of the Channel. The first book of chivalry that was published in Spain even then was not indigenous, but translated from a Portuguese work, the Amadis de Gaula. But the Portuguese, according to the account of Mr. Ticknor, probably perished with the library of a nobleman, in the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 ; so that Montal van's Castilian translation, pub- lished in Queen Isabella's reign, now takes the place of the original. Of its merits as a translation who can speak ? Its merits as a work of imagination, and, con- sidering the age, its literary execution, are of a high order. An English version of the book appeared early in the present century, from the pen of Southey, to whom English literature is indebted for more than one valuable contribution of a similar kind. We well remember the delight with which, in our early days, we pored over its fascinating pages, the bright scenes in which we revelled of Oriental mythology, the beautiful portraiture which is held up of knightly courtesy in the person of Amadis, and the feminine loveliness of Oriana. It was an ideal world of beauty and magnificence, to which the Southern imagination had given a far warmer colour- ing than was to be found in the ruder conceptions of the Northern minstrel. At a later period, we have read -. 566 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. tried to read the same story in the pages of Montalvan himself. But the age of chivalry was gone. The "Amadis" touched the right spring in the Castilian bosom, and its popularity was great and immediate. Edition succeeded edition; and, what was worse, a swarm of other knight-errants soon came into the world, claiming kindred with the Aniadis. But few of them bore any resemblance to their prototype, other than in their extravagance. Their merits were sum- marily settled by the worthy curate in " Don Quixote," who ordered most of them to the flames, declaring that the good qualities of Amadis should not cloak the sins of his posterity. i The tendency of these books was very mischievous. They fostered the spirit of exaggeration, both in lan- guage and sentiment, too natural to the Castilian. They debauched the taste of the reader, while the voluptuous images in which most of them indulged did no good to his morals. They encouraged, in fine, a wild spirit of knight-errantry, which seemed to emulate the extra- vagance of the tales themselves. Sober men wrote, preachers declaimed, against them, but in vain. The Cortes of 1553 presented a petition to the crown that the publication of such works might be prohibited, as pernicious to society. Another petition of the same body, in 1555, insists on this still more strongly, and in terms that, coming as they do from so grave an assembly, can hardly be read at the present day without a smile. Mr. Ticknor notices both these legislative acts, in an extract which we shall give. But he omits the words of the petition of 1555, which dwells so piteously on the grievances of the nation, and which we will quote, as they may amuse . the reader. "Moreover/' says the instrument, "-we say that it is very notorious what mischief has been done to young men and maidens, and SPANISH LITERATURE. 567 other persons, by the perusal of books full of lies and vanities, like Amadis, and works of that description, since young people especially, from their natural idleness, resort to this kind of reading, and, becoming enamoured of passages of love or arms, or other nonsense which they find set forth therein, when situations at all analogous offer, are led to act much more extravagantly than they otherwise would have done. And many times the daughter, when her mother has locked her up safely at home, amuses herself with reading these books, which do her more hurt than she would have received from going abroad. All which redounds not only to the dishonour of individuals, but to the great detriment of conscience, by diverting the affections from holy, true, and Christian doctrine, to those wicked vanities, with which the wits, as we have intimated, are completely bewildered. To remedy this, we entreat your majesty that no book treating of such matters be henceforth permitted to be read, that those now printed be collected and burned, and that none be published hereafter with- out special license ; by which measures your majesty will render great service to God, as well as to these king- doms," etc., etc. But what neither the menaces of the pulpit nor the authority of the law could effect was brought about by the breath of ridicule, " That soft and summer breath, whose subtile power , Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour." The fever was at its height when Cervantes sent his knight-errant into the world to combat the phantoms of chivalry ; and at one touch of his lance they disap- peared for ever. From the day of the publication of the " Don Quixote," not a book of chivalry was ever written in Spain. There is no other such triumph recorded in the annals of genius. 568 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. We close these remarks with the following extract, which shows the condition of society in Castile under the influence of these romances : " Spain, when the romances of chivalry first appeared, had long been peculiarly the land of knighthood. The Moorish wars, which had made every gentleman a soldier, necessarily tended to thiu result; and so did the free spirit of the communities, led on as they were, during the next period, by barons who long continued almost as independent in their castles as the king was on his throne. Such a state of things, in fact, is to be recognised as far back as the thirteenth century, when the Partidas, by the most minute and painstaking legislation, provided for a condition of society not easily to be distinguished from that set forth in the Amadis or the Palmerin. The poem and history of the Cid bear witness yet earlier, indirectly indeed, but very strongly, to a similar state of the country ; and so do many of the old ballads and other records of the national feelings and traditions that had come from the fourteenth century. " But in the fifteenth the chronicles are full of it, and exhibit it in forms the most grave and imposing. Dan- gerous tournaments, in some of which the chief men of the time, and even the kings themselves, took part, occur constantly, and are recorded among the important events of the age. At the passage of arms near Orbigo, in the reign of John the Second, eighty knights, as we have seen, were found ready to risk their lives for as fantastic a fiction of gallantry as is recorded in any of the romances of chivalry ; a folly of which this was by no means the only instance. Nor did they confine their extravagances to their own country. In the same reign, two Spanish knights went as far as Burgundy, professedly in search of adventures, which they strangely mingled with a pil- grimage to Jerusalem, seeming to regard both as reli- SPANISH LITEBATUBE. 569 gious exercises. And as late as the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, Fernando del Pulgar, their wise secretary, gives us the names of several distinguished noblemen, personally known to himself, who had gone into foreign countries 'in order/ as he says, 'to try the fortune of arms with any cavalier that might be pleased to adven- ture with them, and so gain honour for themselves, and the fame of valiant and bold knights for the gentlemen of Castile.' " A state of society like this was the natural result of the extraordinary development which the institutions of chivalry had then received in Spain. Some of it was suited to the age, and salutary ; the rest was knight- errantry, and knight-errantry in its wildest extravagance. When, however, the imaginations of men were so excited as to tolerate and maintain in their daily life such manners and institutions as these, they would not fail to enjoy the boldest and most free representations of a corresponding state of society in works of romantic fiction. But they went farther. Extravagant and even impossible as are many of the adventures recorded in the books of chivalry, they still seemed so little to exceed the absurdities frequently witnessed or told of known and living men, that many persons took the romances themselves to be true histories, and believed them. Thus Mexia, the trustworthy historiographer of Charles the Fifth, says, in 1545, when speaking of 'the Amadises, Lisuartes, and Clarions/ that ' their authors do waste their time and weary their faculties in writing such books, which are read by all and believed by many. For/ he goes on, 'there be men who think all these things really happened, just as they read or hear them, though the greater part of the things themselves are sinful, profane, and unbecoming.' And Castillo, another chronicler, tells us gravely, in 1587, that Philip the 570 BIOGRAPHICAL AND OBITICAL MISCELLANIES. Second, when he married Mary of England, only forty years earlier, promised that if King Arthur should return to claim the throne he would peaceably yield to that prince i all his rights; thus implying, at least in Castillo himself and probably in many of his readers, a full faith in the stones of Arthur and his Eound Table. " Such credulity, it is true, now seems impossible, even if we suppose it was confined to a moderate number of intelligent persons ; and hardly less so when, as in the admirable sketch of an easy faith in the stories of chivalry by the innkeeper and Maritornes in Don Quixote, we are shown that it extended to the mass of the people. But before we refuse our assent to the statements of such faithful chroniclers as Mexia, on the ground that what they relate is impossible, we should recollect that, in the age when they lived, men were in the habit of believing and asserting every day things no less incredible than those recited in the old romances. The Spanish Church then countenanced a trust in miracles as of constant recurrence, which required of those who believed them more credulity than the fictions of chivalry; and yet how few were found wanting in faith ! And how few doubted the tales that had come down to them of the impossible achievements of their fathers during the seven centuries of their warfare against the Moors, or the glorious traditions of all sorts that still constitute the charm of their brave old chronicles, though we now see at a glance that many of them are as fabulous as anything told of Palmerin or Launcelot ! "Buty whatever we may think of this belief in the romances of chivalry, there is no question that in Spain during the sixteenth century there prevailed a passion for them such as was never known elsewhere. The proof of it comes to us from all sides. The poetry of the country is full of it, from the romantic ballads that still SPANISH LITERATURE. 571 live in the memory of the people, up to the old plays that have ceased to be acted and the old epics that have ceased to be read. The national manners and the national dress, more peculiar and picturesque than in other countries, long bore its sure impress. The old laws, too, speak no less plainly. Indeed, the passion for such fictions was so strong, and seemed so dangerous, that in 1553 they were prohibited from being printed, sold, or read in the American colonies ; and in 1555 the Cortes earnestly asked that the same prohibition might be extended to SpaiD itself, and that all the extant copies of romances of chivalry might be publicly burned. And, finally, half a century later, the happiest work of the greatest genius Spain has produced bears witness on every page to the prevalence of an absolute fanaticism for books of chivalry, and becomes at once the seal of their vast popularity and the monument of their fate." We can barely touch on the Drama, the last of the three great divisions into which our author has thrown this period. It is of little moment, for down to the close of the fifteenth century the Castilian drama afforded small promise of the brilliant fortunes that awaited it It was born under an Italian sky. Almost its first lispings were at the vice-regal court of Naples, and under a foreign influence it displayed few of the national characteristics which afterwards marked its career. Yet the germs of future excellence may be discerned in the compositions of Encina and Naharro ; and the " Celes- tina," though not designed for the stage, had a literary merit that was acknowledged throughout Europe. Mr. Ticknor, as usual, accompanies his analysis with occasional translations of the best passages from the ancient masters. From one of these a sort of dramatic eclogue, by Gil Vicente ^ we extract the following spirited verses.; The scene represents Cassandra, the 572 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CEITICAL MISCELLANIES. heroine of the piece, as refusing all the solicitations of her family to change her state of maiden freedom for married life : " They say, ' Tis time, go, marry ! go !' But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! For I would live all carelessly, Amid these hills, a maiden free, And never ask, nor anxious be, Of wedded weal or wee : Yet still they say, ' Go, many ! go !' But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! " So, mother, think not I shall wed, And through a tiresome life be led, Or use in folly's ways instead What grace the heavens bestow. Yet still they say, ' Go, marry ! go !' But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! The man has not been born, I ween, Who as my husband shall be seen ; And since what frequent tricks have been Undoubtingly I know, In vain they say, ' Go, marry ! go !' For I'll no husband ! not I ! no !" She escapes to the woods, and her kinsmen, after in vain striving to bring her back, come in dancing and singing as madly as herself : " She is wild ! she is wild ! Who shall speak to the child ? On the hills pass her hours, As a shepherdess free ; She is fair as the flowers, She is wild as the sea ! She is wild ! she is wild ! Who shall speak to the child ?" During the course of the period we have been con- sidering there runs another rich vein of literature, the beautiful Provencal, those lays of love and chivalry poured forth by the Troubadours in the little court of Provence, and afterwards of Catalonia. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the voice of the SPANISH LITEEATUEE. 573 minstrel was hardly heard in other parts of Europe, the northern shores of the Mediterranean, on either side of the Pyrenees, were alive with song. But it was the melody of a too early spring, to be soon silenced under the wintry breath of persecution. Mr. Ticknor, who paid, while in Europe, much at- tention to the Komance dialects, has given a pleasing analysis of this early literature after it had fled from the storms of persecution to the south of Spain. But few will care to learn a language which locks up a lite- rature that was rather one of a beautiful promise than performance, that prematurely perished and left no sign. And yet it did leave some sign of its existence, in the influence it exerted both on Italian and Castilian poetry. This was peculiarly displayed at the court of John the Second of Castile, who flourished towards the middle of the fifteenth century. That prince gathered around him a circle of wits and poets, several of them men of the highest rank ; and the intellectual spirit thus exhibited shows like a bright streak in the dawn of that higher civilization which rose upon Castile in the beginning of the following century. In this literary circle King John himself was a prominent figure, cor- recting the verses of his loving subjects, and occasionally inditing some of his own. In the somewhat severe language of Mr. Ticknor, " he turned to letters to avoid the importunity of business, and to gratify a consti- tutional indolence." There was, it is true, something ridiculous in King John's most respectable tastes, re- minding us of the character of his contemporary, Rene* of Anjou. But still it was something, in those rough times, to manifest a relish for intellectual pleasures ; and it had its effect in weaning his turbulent nobility from the indulgence of their coarser appetites. 574 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. The same liberal tastes, with still better result, were shown by his daughter, the illustrious Isabella the Catholic. Not that any work of great pretensions for its poetical merits was then produced. The poetry of the age, indeed, was pretty generally infected with the meretricious conceits of the Provenal and the old Castilian verse. We must except from this reproach the " Coplas " of Jorge Manrique, which have found so worthy an interpreter in Mr. Longfellow, and whicli would do honour to any age. But the age of Isabella was in Castile what that of Poggio was in Italy. Learned men were invited from abroad, and took up their residence at the court. Native scholars went abroad, and brought back the rich fruits of an education in the most renowned of the Italian universities. The result of this scholarship was the preparation of dic- tionaries, grammars, and various philological works, which gave laws to the language and subjected it to a classic standard. Printing was introduced, and, under the royal patronage, presses were put in active operation in various cities of the kingdom. Thus, although no great work was actually produced, a beneficent impulse was given to letters, which trained up the scholar and opened the way for the brilliant civilization of the reign of Charles the Fifth. Our author has not paid the tribute to the reign of Isabella to which, in our judgment, it is entitled even in a literary view. He has noticed with commendation the various efforts made in it to introduce a more liberal scholarship, but has by no means dwelt with the emphasis they deserve on the importance of the results. With the glorious rule of Ferdinand and Isabella closes the long period from the middle of the twelfth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuiy, a period which, if we except Italy, has no rival in modern history for the SPANISH LITERATURE. 575 richness, variety, and picturesque character of its 'lite- rature. It is that portion of the literature which seems to come spontaneously like the vegetation of a virgin soil, that must lose something of its natural freshness and perfume when brought under a more elaborate culti- vation. It is that portion which is most thoroughly imbued with the national spirit, unaffected by foreign influences ; and the student who would fully comprehend the genius of the Spaniards must turn to these pure and primitive sources of their literary culture. We cannot do better than close with the remarks in which Mr. Ticknor briefly, but with his usual perspicuity, sums up the actual achievements of the period : "Poetry, or at least the love of poetry, made pro- gress with the great advancement of the nation under Ferdinand and Isabella ; though the taste of the court in whatever regarded Spanish literature continued low and false. Other circumstances, too, favoured the great and beneficial change that was everywhere becoming apparent. The language of Castile had already asserted its supre- macy, and, with the old Castilian spirit and cultivation, it was spreading into Andalusia and Aragon, and planting itself amid the ruins of the Moorish power on the shores of the Mediterranean. Chronicle-writing was become frequent, and had begun to take the forms of regular history. The drama was advanced as far as the ' Celestina ' in prose, and the more strictly scenic efforts of Torres Naharro in verse. Romance-writing was at the height of its success. And the old ballad spirit the true foundation of Spanish poetry had received a new impulse and richer materials from the contests in which all Christian Spain had borne a part amid the mountains of Granada, and from the wild tales of the feuds and adventures of rival factions within the walls of that devoted city. Every thing, indeed, announced a decided 576 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. movement in the literature of the nation, and almost every thing seemed to favour and facilitate it." The second great division embraces the long interval between 1500 and 1700, occupied by the Austrian dynasty of Spain. It covers the golden age, as gene- rally considered, of Castilian literature; that in which it submitted in some degree to the influences of the advancing European civilization, and which witnessed those great productions of genius that have had the widest reputation with foreigners, the age of Cer- vantes, of Lope de Vega, and of Calderon. The con- dition of Spain itself was materially changed. Instead of being hemmed in by her mountain-barrier, she had extended her relations to every court in Europe, and established her empire in every quarter of the globe. Emerging from her retired and solitary condition, she now took the first rank among the states of Christen- dom. Her literature naturally took the impress of this change, but not to the extent or, at least, not in the precise manner it would have done if left to its natural and independent action. But, unhappily for the land, the great power of its monarchs was turned against their own people, and the people were assailed, moreover, through the very qualities which should have entitled them to forbearance from their masters. Practising on their loyalty, their princes trampled on their ancient institutions, and loyalty was degraded into an abject servility. The religious zeal of early days, which had carried them triumphant through the Moorish struggle, turned, under the influence of the priests, into a sour fanaticism, which opened the way to the Inquisition, the most terrible engine of oppression ever devised by man, not so terrible for its operation on the body as on the mind. Under its baneful influence, literature lost its free and healthy action ; and, however high its pre- SPANISH LITERATURE. 577 tensions as a work of art, it becomes so degenerate in a moral aspect that it has far less to awaken our sym- pathies than the productions of an earlier time. From this circumstance, as well as from that of its being much better known to the generality of scholars, we shall pass only in rapid review some of its most remarkable persons and productions. Before entering on this field, we will quote some important observations of our author on the general prospects of the period he is to discuss. Thus to allow coining events to cast their shadows before, is better suited to the purposes of the literary historian than of the novelist. His remarks on the Inquisition are striking : " The results of such extraordinary traits in the national character could not fail to be impressed upon the literature of any country, and particularly upon a literature, which, like that of Spain, had always been strongly marked by the popular temperament and pecu- liarities. But the period was not one in which such traits could be produced with poetical effect. The ancient loyalty, which had once been so generous an element in the Spanish character and cultivation, was now infected with the ambition of universal empire, and was lavished upon princes and nobles who, like the later Philips and their ministers, were unworthy of its homage ; so that in the Spanish historians and epic poets of this period, and even in more popular writers, like Quevedo and Calderon, we find a vainglorious ad- miration of their country, and a poor flattery of royalty and rank, that reminds us of the old Castilian pride and deference only by showing how both had lost their dignity. And so it is with the ancient religious feeling that was so nearly akin to this loyalty. The Christian spirit, which gave an air of duty to the wildest forms of adventure throughout the country during its long contest with the power of misbelief, was now fallen away into 578 BIOGKAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. a low and anxious bigotry, fierce and intolerant towards everything that differed from its own sharply-defined faith, arid yet so pervading and so popular that the romances and tales of the time are full of it, and the national theatre, in more than one form, becomes its strange and grotesque monument. " Of course, the body of Spanish poetry and eloquent prose produced during this interval the earlier part of which was the period of the greatest glory Spain ever enjoyed was injuriously affected by so diseased a con- dition of the national character. That generous and manly spirit which is the breath of intellectual life to any people was restrained and stifled. Some departments of literature, such as forensic eloquence and eloquence of the pulpit, satirical poetry, and elegant didactic prose, hardly appeared at all; others, like epic poetry, were strangely perverted and misdirected ; while yet others, like the drama, the ballads, and the lighter forms of lyrical verse, seemed to grow exuberant and lawless, from the very restraints im- posed on the rest, restraints which, in fact, forced poetical genius into channels where it would otherwise have flowed much more scantily and with much less luxuriant results. "The books that were published during the whole period on which we are now entering, and indeed for a century later, bore everywhere marks of the subjection to which the press and those who wrote for it were alike reduced. From the abject title-pages and dedications of the authors themselves, through the crowd of certificates collected from their friends to establish the orthodoxy of works that were often as little connected with religion as fairy-tales, down to the colophon, supplicating pardon for any unconscious neglect of the authority of the Church or any too free use of classical mythology, we are continually oppressed with painful proofs not only how completely the human mind was enslaved in Spain, but SPANISH LITERATURE. 579 how grievously it had become cramped and crippled by the chains it had so long worn. "But we shall be greatly in error if, as we notice these deep marks and strange peculiarities in Spanish literature, we suppose they were produced by the direct action either of the Inquisition or of the civil govern- ment of the country, compressing, as if with a physical power, the whole circle of society. This would have been impossible. No nation would have submitted to it ; much less so high-spirited and chivalrous a nation as the Spanish in the reign of Charles the Fifth and in the greater part of that of Philip the Second. This dark work was done earlier. Its foundations were laid deep and sure in the old Castilian character. It was the result of the excess and misdirection of that very Chris- tian zeal which fought so fervently and gloriously against the intrusion of Mohammedanism into Europe, and of that military loyalty which sustained the Spanish princes so faithfully through the whole of that terrible contest; both of them high and ennobling principles, which in Spain were more wrought into the popular character than they ever were in any other country. " Spanish submission to an unworthy despotism, and Spanish bigotry, were, therefore, not the results of the Inquisition, and the modern appliances of a corrupting monarchy, but the Inquisition and the despotism were rather the results of a misdirection of the old religious faith and loyalty. The civilization that recognized such elements presented, no doubt, much that was brilliant, picturesque, and ennobling ; but it was not without its darker side ; for it failed to excite and cherish many of the most elevating qualities of our common nature, those qualities which are produced in domestic life and result in the cultivation of the arts of peace. " As we proceed, therefore, we shall find, in the full P P 2 580 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. development of the Spanish character and literature, seeming contradictions, which can be reconciled only by looking back to the foundations on which they both rest. We shall find the Inquisition at the height of its power, and. a free and immoral drama at the height of its popu- larity, Philip the Second and his two immediate suc- cessors governing the country with the severest and most jealous despotism, while Quevedo was writing his witty and dangerous satires, and Cervantes his genial and wise * Don Quixote/ But the more carefully we consider such a state of things, the more we shall see that these are moral contradictions which draw after them grave moral mischiefs. The Spanish nation and the men of genius who illustrated its best days might be light-hearted be- cause they did not perceive the limits within which they were confined, or did not, for a time, feel the restraints that were imposed upon them. What they gave up might be given up with cheerful hearts, and not with a sense of discouragement and degradation ; it might be done in the spirit of loyalty and with the fervour of reli- gious zeal : but it is not at all the less true that the hard O ' limits were there, and that great sacrifices of the best elements of the national character must follow. " Of this, time gave abundant proof. Only a little more than a century elapsed before the government that had threatened the world with a universal empire was hardly able to repel invasion from abroad, or main- tain the allegiance of its own subjects at home. Life the vigorous, poetical life which had been kindled through the country in its ages of trial and adversity was evi- dently passing out of the whole Spanish character. As a people they sunk away from being a first-rate power in Europe, till they became one of altogether inferior importance and consideration, and then, drawing back haughtily behind their mountains, rejected all equal in- SPANISH LITERATUBE. 581 tercourse with the rest of the world, in a spirit almost as exclusive and intolerant as that in which they had formerly refused intercourse with their Arab conquerors. The crude and gross wealth poured in from their Ame- rican possessions sustained, indeed, for yet another cen- tury the forms of a miserable political existence in their government ; but the earnest faith, the loyalty, the dignity of the Spanish people were gone, and little re- mained in their place but a weak subserviency to the unworthy masters of the state, and a low, timid bigotry in whatever related to religion. The old enthusiasm, rarely directed by wisdom from the first, and often mis- directed afterwards, faded away ; and the poetry of the country, which had always depended more on the state of the popular feeling than any other poetry of modern times, faded and failed with it." The first thing that strikes us, at the very commence- ment of this new period, is the attempt to subject the Castilian to Italian forms of versification. This attempt,. through the perfect tact of Boscan and the delicate genius of Garcilasso, who rivalled in their own walks the greatest masters of Italian verse, was eminently success- ful. It would indeed be wonderful if the intimate rela- tions now established between Spain and ItaJy did not lead to a reciprocal influence of their literatures on each other. The two languages, descended from the same- parent stock, the Latin, were nearest of kin to each other, in the relation, if we may so speak, of brother and sister. The Castilian, with its deep Arabic gutturals, and its clear, sonorous sounds, had the masculine cha- racter, which assorted well with the more feminine graces of the Italian, with its musical cadences and soft vowel terminations. The transition from one lansniaofe o o to the other was almost as natural as from the dialect of one province of a country to that of its neighbour. 582 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELL ANTES. The revolution thus effected went far below the sur- face of Spanish poetry. It is for this reason that we are satisfied that Mr. Ticknor has judged wisely, as we have before intimated, in arranging the division-lines of his two periods in such a manner as to throw into the former that primitive portion of the national literature which was untouched, at least to any considerable ex- tent, by a foreign influence. Yet in the compositions of this second period, it must be admitted that by far the greater portion of what is really good rests on the original basis of the national character, though under the controlling influences of a riper age of civilization. And foremost of the great writers of this national school we find the author of *' Don Quixote," whose fame seems now to belong to Europe as much as to the land that gave him birth. Mr. Ticknor has given a very interesting notice of the great writer and of his various compositions. The materials for this are, for the most part, not very difficult to be procured; for Cervantes is the author whom his country- men, since his death, with a spirit very different from that of his contemporaries, have most delighted to honour. Fortunately, the Castilian romancer has sup- plied us with materials for his own biography, which remind us of the lamentable poverty under which we labour in all that relates to his contemporary, Shak- speare. In Mr. Ticknor's biographical notice the reader will find some details probably not familiar to him, and a careful discussion of those points over which still rests any cloud of uncertainty. He inquires into the grounds of the imputation of an unworthy jealousy having existed between Lope and his illustrious rival, and we heartily concur with him in the general results of his investigation : " Concerning his relations with Lope de Vega, there SPANISH LITERATTJBE. 583 has been much discussion to little purpose. Certain it is that Cervantes often praises this great literary idol of his age, and that four or five times Lope stoops from his pride of place and compliments Cervantes, though never beyond the measure of praise he bestows on many whose claims were greatly inferior. But in his stately flight it is plain that he soared much above the author of * Don Quixote/ to whose highest merits he seemed carefully to avoid all homage ; and though I find no sufficient reason to suppose their relation to each other was marked by any personal jealousy or ill-will, as has been sometimes supposed, yet I can find no proof that it was either inti- mate or kindly. On the contrary, when we consider the good nature of Cervantes, which made him praise to excess nearly all his other literary contemporaries, as well as the greatest of them all, and when we allow for the frequency of hyperbole in such praises at that time, which prevented them from being what they would now be, we may perceive an occasional coolness in his man- ner, when he speaks of Lope, which shows that without overrating his own merits and claims, he was not in- sensible to the difference in their respective positions, or to the injustice towards himself implied by it. Indeed, his whole tone, whenever he notices Lope, seems to be marked with much personal dignity, and to be singularly honourable to him." Mr. Ticknor, in a note to the above, states that he has been able to find only five passages in all Lope de Vega's works where there is any mention of Cervantes, and not one of these written after the appearance of the " Don Quixote," during its author's lifetime, a signifi- cant fact. One of the passages to which our author refers, and which is from the " Laurel de Apolo," con- tains, he says, "a somewhat stiff eulogy on Cervantes." We quote the original couplet, which alludes to the 584 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. injury inflicted on Cervantes's hand in the great battle of Lepanto : " Porque se diga que una mano herida Pudo dar & su duefio eterna vida." Which may be rendered, " The hand, though crippled in the glorious strife, Sufficed to gain its lord eternal life." We imagine that most who read the distich the Cas- tilian, not the English will be disposed to regard it as no inelegant, and certainly not a parsimonious, tribute from one bard to another, at least, if made in the life- time of the subject of it. Unfortunately, it was not written till some fourteen years after the death of Cer- vantes, when he was beyond the power of being pleased or profited by praise from any quarter. Mr. Ticknor closes the sketch of Cervantes with some pertinent and touching reflections on the circumstances tinder which his great work was composed : " The romance which he threw so carelessly from him, and which, I am persuaded, he regarded rather as a bold effort to break up the absurd taste of his time for the fancies of chivalry than as any thing of more serious im- port, has been established by an uninterrupted, and, it may be said, an unquestioned, success ever since, both as the oldest classical specimen of romantic fiction, and as one of the most remarkable monuments of modern genius. But, though this may be enough to fill the measure of human fame and glory, it is not all to which Cervantes is entitled ; for, if we would do him the jus- tice that would have been dearest to his own spirit, and even if we would ourselves fully comprehend and enjoy the whole of his ' Don Quixote/ we should, as we read it, bear in mind that this delightful romance was not the O result of a youthful exuberance of feeling and a happy SPANISH LITEEATUEE. 585 external condition, nor composed in his best years, when the spirits of its author were light and his hopes high ; but that with all its unquenchable and irresistible humour, with its bright views of the world, and its cheerful trust in goodness and virtue it was written in his old age, at the conclusion of a life nearly every step of which had been marked with disappointed expecta- tions, disheartening struggles, and sore ciilamities ; that he began it in a prison, and that it was finished when he- felt the hand of death pressing heavy and cold upon his- heart. If this be remembered as we read, we may feel,, as we ought to feel, what admiration and reverence are due not only to the living power of ' Don Quixote,' but to the character and genius of Cervantes." The next name that meets us in the volume is that of Lope de Vega Carpio, the idol of his generation, who* lived, in all the enjoyment of wealth and worldly honours, in the same city, and, as some accounts state r in the same street, where his illustrious rival was pining in poverty and neglect. If posterity has reversed the judgment of their contemporaries, still we cannot with- hold our admiration at the inexhaustible invention of Lope and the miraculous facility of his composition. His achievements in this way, perfectly well authenti- cated, are yet such as to stagger credibility. He wrote in all about eighteen hundred regular dramas, and four hundred autos, pieces of one act each. Besides this,, he composed, at leisure intervals, no less than twenty- T one printed volumes of miscellaneous poetry, including eleven narrative and didactic poems of much length, in* ottava rima, and seven hundred sonnets, also in the Italian measure. His comedies, amounting to between two and three thousand lines each, were mostly rhymed, and interspersed with ballads, sonnets, and different kinds of versification. Critics have sometimes amused 586 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CBITICAL MISCELLANIES. themselves with computing the amount of matter thus actually thrown off by him in the course of his dramatic career. The sum swells to twenty-one million three hundred thousand verses! He lived to the age of seventy-two, and if we allow him to have employed fifty years which will not be far from the truth in his theatrical compositions, it will give an average of something like a play a week, through the whole period, to say nothing of the epics and other miscellanies ! He tells us, farther, that on one occasion he produced five entire plays in a fortnight. And his biographer assures us that more than once he turned off a whole drama in twenty-four hours. These plays, it will be recollected, with their stores of invention and fluent versification, were the delight of all classes of his countrymen, and the copious fountain of supply to half the theatres of Europe. "Well might Cervantes call him the " monstruo de naturaleza" the u miracle of nature." The vast popularity of Lope, and the unprecedented amount of his labours, brought with them, as might be expected, a substantial recompense. This remuneration was of the most honourable kind, for it was chiefly derived from the public. It is said to have amounted to no less than a hundred thousand ducats, which, estimating the ducat at its probable value of six or seven dollars of our day, has no parallel or perhaps not more than one upon record. Yet Lope did not refuse the patronage of the great. From the Duke of Sessa he is said to have received, in the course of his life, more than twenty thousand ducats. Another of his noble patrons was the Duke of Alva ; not the terrible Duke of the Netherlands, but his grandson, a man of some literary pretensions, hardly claimed for his great ancestor. Yet with the latter he has been constantly confounded, by Lord Holland, in his life of SPANISH LITERATURE. 587 the poet, by Southey, after an examination of the mat- ter, and lastly, though with some distrust, by Nicholas Antonio, the learned Castilian biographer. Mr. Ticknor shows beyond a doubt, from a critical examination of the subject, that they are all in error. The inquiry and the result are clearly stated in the notes, and are one among the many evidences which these notes afford of the minute and very accurate researches of our author into matters of historical interest that have baffled even the Castilian scholars. We remember meeting with something of a similar blunder in Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures, where he speaks of the poet Garcilasso de la Vega as descended from the Peruvian Incas, and as having lost his life before Tunis. The fact is that the poet died at Nice, and that, too, some years before the birth of the Inca Gar- cilasso, with whom Schlegel so strangely confounds him. One should be charitable to such errors, though a dog- matic critic like Schlegel has as little right as any to demand such charity, for we well know how difficult it is always to escape them, when, as in Castile, the same name seems to descend, as an heirloom, from one generation to another, if it be not, indeed, shared by more than one of the same generation. In the case of the Duke of Alva there was not even this apology. Mr. Ticknor has traced the personal history of Lope de Vega, so as to form a running commentary on his literary. It will be read with satisfaction even by those who are familiar with Lord Holland's agreeable life of the poet, since the publication of which more ample re- searches have been made into the condition of the Cas- tilian drama. Those who are disposed to set too high a value on the advantages of literary success may learn a lesson by seeing how ineffectual it was to secure the happiness of that spoiled child of fortune. We give our 588 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. author's account of his latter days, when his mind had become infected with the religious gloom which has too often settled round the evening of life with the fanatical Spaniard. " But, as his life drew to a close, his religious feelings, mingled with a melancholy fanaticism, predominated more and more. Much of his poetry composed at this time expressed them ; and at last they rose to such a height that he was almost constantly in a state of excited melancholy, or, as it was then beginning to be called, of hypochondria. Early in the month of August he felt himself extremely weak, and suffered more than ever from that sense of discouragement which was breaking down his resources and strength. His thoughts, however, were so exclusively occupied with his spiritual condition that, even when thus reduced, he continued to fast, and on one occasion went through with a private discipline so cruel that the walls of the apartment where it occurred were afterwards found sprinkled with his blood. From this he never recovered. He was taken ill the same night ; and, after fulfilling the offices prescribed by his Church with the most submissive devotion, mourning that he had ever been engaged in any occupations but such as were exclusively religious, he died on the 25th of August, 1635, nearly seventy-three years old. " The sensation produced by his death was such as is rarely witnessed even in the case of those upon whom depends the welfare of nations. The Duke of Sessa, who was his especial patron, and to whom he left his manu- scripts, provided for the funeral in a manner becoming his own wealth and rank. It lasted nine days. The crowds that thronged to it were immense. Three bishops officiated, and the first nobles of the land attended as mourners. Eulogies and poems followed on all sides > and in numbers all but incredible. Those written in SPANISH LITERATURE. 589 Spain make one considerable volume, and end with a drama in which his apotheosis was brought upon the public stage. Those written in Italy are hardly less numerous, and fill another. But more touching than any of them was the prayer of that much-loved daughter, who had been shut up from the world fourteen years, that the long funeral procession might pass by her con- vent and permit her once more to look on the face she so tenderly venerated ; and more solemn than any was the mourning of the multitude, from whose dense mass audible sobs burst forth as his remains slowly descended from their sight into the house appointed for all living." Mr. Ticknor follows up his biographical sketch of Lope with an analysis of his plays, concluding the whole with a masterly review of his qualities as a dramatic writer. The discussion has a wider import than at first appears. For Lope de Vega, although he built on the foundations of the ancient drama, yet did this in such a manner as to settle the forms of this department of literature for ever for his countrymen. It would be interesting to compare the great Spanish dramatist with Shakspeare, who flourished at the same period, and who, in like manner, stamped his own cha- racter on the national theatre. Both drew their fictions from every source indiscriminately, and neither paid regard to probabilities of chronology, geography, or scarcely history. Time, place, and circumstance were of little moment in their eyes. Both built their dramas on the romantic model, with its magic scenes of joy and sorrow, in the display of which each was master in his own way ; though the English poet could raise the tone of sentiment to a moral grandeur which the Castilian, with all the tragic colouring of his pencil, could never reach. Both fascinated their audiences by that sweet and natural flow of language, that seemed to set itself to 590 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. music as it was uttered. But, however much alike in other points, there was one distinguishing feature in each, which removed them and their dramas far as the poles asunder. Shakspeare's great object was the exhibition of cha- racter. To this everything was directed. Situation, dialogue, story, all were employed only to this great end. This was in perfect accordance with the taste of his nation, as shown through the whole of its literature, from Chaucer to Scott. Lope de Vega, on the other hand, made so little account of character that he repro- duces the same leading personages, in his different plays, over and over again, as if they had been all cast in the same mould. The galan, the dama, the gracioso, or buffoon, recur as regularly as the clown in the old English comedy, and their rdle is even more precisely defined. The paramount object with Lope was the intrigue, the story. His plays were, what Mr. Ticknor well styles them, dramatic novels. And this, as our author remarks, was perfectly conformable to the prevalent spirit of Spanish literature, clearly narrative, as shown in its long epics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its host of ballads, its gossiping chronicles, its chivalrous romances. The great purpose of Lope was to excite and maintain an interest in the story. " Keep the denoue- ment in suspense," he says : " if it be once surmised, your audience will turn their backs on you." He fre- quently complicates his intrigues in such a manner that only the closest attention can follow them. He cautions his hearers to give this attention, especially at the outset. Lope, with great tact, accommodated his theatre to the prevailing taste of his countrymen. " Plautus and Terence," he says, " I throw into the fire when I begin to write ; " thus showing that it was not by accident but SPANISH LITERATURE. 591 on a settled principle that he arranged the forms of his dramas. It is the favourite principle of modern econo- mists, that of consulting the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Lope did so, and was rewarded for it not merely by the applause of the million, but by that of every Spaniard, high and low, in the country. In all this, Lope de Vega acted on strictly philosophical prin- ciples. He conformed to the romantic, although the distinction was not then properly understood ; and he thought it necessary to defend his departure from the rules of the ancients. But, in truth, such rules were not suited to the genius and usages of the Spaniards, any more than of the English ; and more than one experi- ment proved that they would be as little tolerated by the one people as the other. It is remarkable that the Spaniards, whose language rests so broadly on the Latin, in the same manner as with the French and the Italians, should have refused to rest their literature, like them, on the classic models of antiquity, and have chosen to conform to the romantic spirit of the more northern nations of the Teutonic family. It was the paramount influence of the Gothic element in their character, co-operating with the peculiar and most stimulating influences of their early history. We close our remarks on Lope de Vega with some excellent reflections of our author on the rapidity of his composition, and showing to what extent his genius was reverenced by his contemporaries : " Lope de Vega's immediate success, as we have seen, was in proportion to his rare powers and favourable opportunities. For a long time nobody else was willingly heard on the stage ; and during the whole of the forty or fifty years that he wrote for it, he stood quite unap- proached in general popularity. His unnumbered plays and farces, in all the forms that were demanded by the 592 BIOGEAPHICAL AND CEIT1CAL MISCELLANIES. fashions of the age or permitted by religious authority, filled the theatres both of the capital and the provinces ; and so extraordinary was the impulse he gave to dramatic representations that, though there were only two com- panies of strolling players at Madrid when he began, there were about the period of his death no less than forty, comprehending nearly a thousand persons. "Abroad, too, his fame was hardly less remarkable. Jn Rome, Naples, and Milan, his dramas were performed in their original language ; in France and Italy his name was announced in order to fill the theatres when no play of his was to be performed ; and once even, and probably oftener, one of his dramas was represented in the seraglio at Constantinople. But perhaps neither all this popularity, nor yet the crowds that followed him in the streets and gathered in the balconies to watch him as he passed -along, nor the name of Lope, that was given to whatever was esteemed singularly good in its kind, is so striking a proof of his dramatic success as the fact, so often com- plained of by himself and his friends, that multitudes of his plays were fraudulently noted down as they were acted, and then printed for profit throughout Spain, and that multitudes of other plays appeared under his name, and were represented all over the provinces, that he had never heard of till they were published and performed. " A large income naturally followed such popularity, for his plays were liberally paid for by the actors ; and he had patrons of a munificence unknown in our days, and always undesirable. But he was thriftless and wasteful, exceedingly charitable, and, in hospitality to his friends, prodigal. He was, therefore, almost always embarrassed. At the end of his ' Jerusalem,' printed as early as 1609, he complains of the pressure of his domestic affairs ; and in his old age he addressed some verses, in the nature of a petition, to the still more thrift- SPANISH LITERATURE. 593 less Philip the Fourth, asking the means of living for himself and daughter. After his death, his poverty was fully admitted by his executor ; and yet, considering the relative value of money, no poet, perhaps, ever received so large a compensation for his works. "It should, however, be remembered that no other poet ever wrote so much with popular effect. For, if we begin with his dramatic compositions, which are the best of his efforts, and go down to his epics, which, on the whole, are the worst, we shall find the amount of what was received with favour, as it came from the press, quite unparalleled. And when to this we are compelled to add his own assurance, just before his death, that the greater part of his works still remained in manuscript, we pause in astonishment, and, before we are able to- believe the account, demand some explanation that will make it credible, an explanation which is the more important because it is the key to much of his personal character, as well as of his poetical success. And it is this. No poet of any considerable reputation ever had a genius so nearly related to that of an improvisator, or ever indulged his genius so freely in the spirit of impro- visation. This talent has always existed in the southern countries of Europe, and in Spain has, from the first, produced, in different ways, the most extraordinary results. We owe to it the invention and perfection of the old ballads, which were originally improvisated and then preserved by tradition ; and we owe to it the segui- dillas, the boleros, and all the other forms of popular poetry that still exist in Spain, and are daily poured forth by the fervent imaginations of the uncultivated classes of the people, and sung to the national music,, that sometimes seems to fill the air by night as the light of the sun does by day. " In the time of Lope de Vega the passion for such 10 594 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. improvisation had risen higher than it ever rose before, if it had not spread out more widely. Actors were expected sometimes to improvisate on themes given to them by the audience. Extemporaneous dramas, with all the varieties of verse demanded by a taste formed in the theatres, were not of rare occurrence. Philip the Fourth, Lope's patron, had such performed in his presence, and bore a part in them himself. And the famous Count de Lemos, the viceroy of Naples, to whom Cervantes was indebted for so much kindness, kept as an apanage to his viceroyalty, a poetical court, of which the two Argensolas were the chief ornaments, and in which ex- temporaneous plays were acted with brilliant success. " Lope de Vega's talent was undoubtedly of near kindred to this genius of improvisation, and produced its extraordinary results by a similar process and in the same spirit. He dictated verse, we are told, with ease, more rapidly than an amanuensis could take it down ; and wrote out an entire play in two days which could with difficulty be transcribed by a copyist in the same time. He was not absolutely an improvisator, for his education and position naturally led him to devote himself to written composition ; but he was continually on the borders of whatever belongs to an improvisator's peculiar province, was continually showing, in his merits and defects, in his ease, grace, and sudden resource, in his wildness and extravagance, in the happiness of his versification and the prodigal abundance of his imagery, that a very little more free- dom, a very little more indulgence given to his feelings and his fancy, would have made him at once and entirely, not only an improvisator, but the most remarkable one that ever lived/' We pass over the long array of dramatic writers who trod closely in the footsteps of their great master, as SPANISH LITEKATUBE. 595 as a lively notice of the satirist Quevedo, and come at