Chapter 2

THE PALIMPSEST.

You know perhaps, masculine reader, better than I can tell you, what is a _Palimpsest_. Possibly you have one in your own library. But yet, for the sake of others who may _not_ know, or may have forgotten, suffer me to explain it here: lest any female reader, who honours these papers with her notice, should tax me with explaining it once too seldom; which would be worse to bear than a simultaneous complaint from twelve proud men, that I had explained it three times too often. You therefore, fair reader, understand that for _your_ accommodation exclusively, I explain the meaning of this word. It is Greek; and our sex enjoys the office and privilege of standing counsel to yours, in all questions of Greek. We are, under favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. So that if, by accident, you know the meaning of a Greek word, yet by courtesy to us, your counsel learned in that matter, you will always seem _not_ to know it.

A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed of its manuscript by reiterated successions.

What was the reason that the Greeks and the Romans had not the advantage of printed books? The answer will be, on ninety-nine persons in a hundred--Because the mystery of printing was not then discovered. But this is altogether a mistake. The secret of printing must have been discovered many thousands of times before it was used, or _could_ be used. The inventive powers of man are divine; and also his stupidity is divine--as Cowper so playfully illustrates in the slow development of the _sofa_ through successive generations of immortal dulness. It took centuries of blockheads to raise a joint stool into a chair; and it required something like a miracle of genius, in the estimate of elder generations, to reveal the possibility of lengthening a chair into a _chaise-longue_, or a sofa. Yes, these were inventions that cost mighty throes of intellectual power. But still, as respects printing, and admirable as is the stupidity of man, it was really not quite equal to the task of evading an object which stared him in the face with so broad a gaze. It did not require an Athenian intellect to read the main secret of printing in many scores of processes which the ordinary uses of life were _daily_ repeating. To say nothing of analogous artifices amongst various mechanic artisans, all that is essential in printing must have been known to every nation that struck coins and medals. Not, therefore, any want of a printing art--that is, of an art for multiplying impressions--but the want of a cheap material for _receiving_ such impressions, was the obstacle to an introduction of printed books even as early as Pisistratus. The ancients _did_ apply printing to records of silver and gold; to marble and many other substances cheaper than gold and silver, they did _not_, since each monument required a _separate_ effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a cheap material for receiving impresses, which froze in its very fountains the early resources of printing.

Some twenty years ago, this view of the case was luminously expounded by Dr Whately, the present archbishop of Dublin, and with the merit, I believe, of having first suggested it. Since then, this theory has received indirect confirmation. Now, out of that original scarcity affecting all materials proper for durable books, which continued up to times comparatively modern, grew the opening for palimpsests. Naturally, when once a roll of parchment or of vellum had done its office, by propagating through a series of generations what once had possessed an interest for _them_, but which, under changes of opinion or of taste, had faded to their feelings or had become obsolete for their understandings, the whole _membrana_ or vellum skin, the twofold product of human skill, costly material, and costly freight of thought, which it carried, drooped in value concurrently--supposing that each were inalienably associated to the other. Once it had been the impress of a human mind which stamped its value upon the vellum; the vellum, though costly, had contributed but a secondary element of value to the total result. At length, however, this relation between the vehicle and its freight has gradually been undermined. The vellum, from having been the setting of the jewel, has risen at length to be the jewel itself; and the burden of thought, from having given the chief value to the vellum, has now become the chief obstacle to its value; nay, has totally extinguished its value, unless it can be dissociated from the connexion. Yet, if this unlinking _can_ be effected, then--fast as the inscription upon the membrane is sinking into rubbish--the membrane itself is reviving in its separate importance; and, from bearing a ministerial value, the vellum has come at last to absorb the whole value.

Hence the importance for our ancestors that the separation _should_ be effected. Hence it arose in the middle ages, as a considerable object for chemistry, to discharge the writing from the roll, and thus to make it available for a new succession of thoughts. The soil, if cleansed from what once had been hot-house plants, but now were held to be weeds, would be ready to receive a fresh and more appropriate crop. In that object the monkish chemists succeeded; but after fashion which seems almost incredible; incredible not as regards the extent of their success, but as regards the delicacy of restraints under which it moved; so equally adjusted was their success to the immediate interests of that period, and to the reversionary interests of our own. They did the thing; but not so radically as to prevent us, their posterity, from _un_doing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field for the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. Could magic, could Hermes Trismegistus, have done more? What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this--to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after that, but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions, sinking into night or blazing into day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa, and the English river Mole--or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river, now diving below the water, now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of alternations? Such a problem, you say, is impossible. But really it is a problem not harder apparently than--to bid a generation kill, but so that a subsequent generation may call back into life; bury, but so that posterity may command to rise again. Yet _that_ was what the rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming into combination with the reaction from the more refined chemistry of our own. Had _they_ been better chemists, had _we_ been worse--the mixed result, viz. that, dying for _them_, the flower should revive for _us_, could not have been effected: They did the thing proposed to them: they did it effectually; for they founded upon it all that was wanted: and yet ineffectually, since we unravelled their work; effacing all above which they had superscribed; restoring all below which they had effaced.

Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained some Grecian tragedy, the Agamemnon of Æschylus, or the Phoenissæ of Euripides. This had possessed a value almost inappreciable in the eyes of accomplished scholars, continually growing rarer through generations. But four centuries are gone by since the destruction of the Western Empire. Christianity, with towering grandeurs of another class, has founded a different empire; and some bigoted yet perhaps holy monk has washed away (as he persuades himself) the heathen's tragedy, replacing it with a monastic legend; which legend is disfigured with fables in its incidents, and yet, in a higher sense, is true, because interwoven with Christian morals and with the sublimest of Christian revelations. Three, four, five, centuries more find man still devout as ever; but the language has become obsolete, and even for Christian devotion a new era has arisen, throwing it into the channel of crusading zeal or of chivalrous enthusiasm. The _membrana_ is wanted now for a knightly romance--for "my Cid," or Coeur de Lion; for Sir Tristrem, or Lybæus Disconus. In this way, by means of the imperfect chemistry known to the mediæval period, the same roll has served as a conservatory for three separate generations of flowers and fruits, all perfectly different, and yet all specially adapted to the wants of the successive possessors. The Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled its own period. One harvest after another has been gathered into the garners of man through ages far apart. And the same hydraulic machinery has distributed, through the same marble fountains, water, milk, or wine, according to the habits and training of the generations that came to quench their thirst.

Such were the achievements of rude monastic chemistry. But the more elaborate chemistry of our own days has reversed all these motions of our simple ancestors, with results in every stage that to _them_ would have realized the most fantastic amongst the promises of thaumaturgy. Insolent vaunt of Paracelsus, that he would restore the original rose or violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion--_that_ is now rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each successive handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles; and, as the chorus of the Athenian stage unwove through the antistrophe every step that had been mystically woven through the strophe, so, by our modern conjurations of science, secrets of ages remote from each other have been exorcised[9] from the accumulated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, a witch as potent as the Erictho of Lucan, (_Pharsalia_, lib. vi. or vii.,) has extorted by her torments, from the dust and ashes of forgotten centuries, the secrets of a life extinct for the general eye, but still glowing in the embers. Even the fable of the Phoenix--that secular bird, who propagated his solitary existence, and his solitary births, along the line of centuries, through eternal relays of funeral mists--is but a type of what we have done with Palimpsests. We have backed upon each Phoenix in the long _regressus_, and forced him to expose his ancestral Phoenix, sleeping in the ashes below his own ashes. Our good old forefathers would have been aghast at our sorceries; and, if they speculated on the propriety of burning Dr Faustus, _us_ they would have burned by acclamation. Trial there would have been none; and they could no otherwise have satisfied their horror of the brazen profligacy marking our modern magic, than by ploughing up the houses of all who had been parties to it, and sowing the ground with salt.

Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, illustrative or allusive, moves under any impulse or purpose of mirth. It is but the coruscation of a restless understanding, often made ten times more so by irritation of the nerves, such as you will first learn to comprehend (its _how_ and its _why_) some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record, which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent of laughter; or, even if laughter _had_ been possible, it would have been such laughter as often times is thrown off from the fields of ocean[10]--laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gaiety, as oftentimes for the ear they raise echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir-voices of an angry sea.

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other _diplomata_ of human archives or libraries, there is any thing fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man's life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled in the retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.

Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I mentioned a case of that nature communicated to me by a lady from her own childish experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age; and I may mention--that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but, on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh perhaps, and gloomy--indulgent neither to others nor herself. And, at the time of relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her ninth year, when playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye _can_ have looked that had permission to return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike her--phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eye-balls; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act--every design of her past life lived again--arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards into the shades of infancy, as the light perhaps which wrapt the destined apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review.

This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time by some critics. But besides that it has since been confirmed by other experiences essentially the same, reported by other parties in the same circumstances who had never heard of each other; the true point for astonishment is not the _simultaneity_ of arrangement under which the past events of life--though in fact successive--had formed their dread line of revelation. This was but a secondary phenomenon; the deeper lay in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for what had so long slept in the dust. A pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are exposed. Here was the greater mystery: now this mystery is liable to no doubt; for it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated by opium, for those who are its martyrs.

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping. In the illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some individual palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was _not_ displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was _not_ displaced, by the knightly romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The romance has perished that the young man adored. The legend has gone that deluded the boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that can scorch away these immortal impresses. And the dream which closed the preceding section, together with the succeeding dreams of this, (which may be viewed as in the nature of choruses winding up the overture contained in Part I.,) are but illustrations of this truth, such as every man probably will meet experimentally who passes through similar convulsions of dreaming or delirium from any similar or equal disturbance in his nature.[11]

LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW.

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the newborn infant the earliest office of ennobling kindness--typical, by its mode, of that grandeur which belongs to man every where, and of that benignity in powers invisible, which even in Pagan worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the ground. _That_ might bear different interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart--"Behold what is greater than yourselves!" This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that mysterious lady, who never revealed her face, (except to me in dreams,) but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) _levare_, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen that some people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. She, that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development of his powers. She therefore watches over human education. Now, the word _educo_, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a process often exemplified in the crystallization of languages) from the word _educo_, with the penultimate long. Whatsoever _educes_ or developes--_educates_. By the education of Levana, therefore, is meant--not the poor machinery that moves by spelling-books and grammars, but that mighty system of central forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life, which by passion, by strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, works for ever upon children--resting not day or night, any more than the mighty wheel of day and night themselves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glimmering[12] for ever as they revolve.

If, then, _these_ are the ministries by which Levana works, how profoundly must she reverence the agencies of grief! But you, reader! think--that children generally are not liable to grief such as mine. There are two senses in the word _generally_--the sense of Euclid where it means _universally_, (or in the whole extent of the _genus_,) and a foolish sense of this world where it means _usually_. Now I am far from saying that children universally are capable of grief like mine. But there are more than you ever heard of, who die of grief in this island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton require that a boy on the _foundation_ should be there twelve years: he is superannuated at eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but _that_ it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed more than ever have been counted amongst its martyrs.

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake man's heart: therefore it is that she doats upon grief. "These ladies," said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the _Graces_ are three, who dress man's life with beauty; the Parcæ are three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always with colours sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black; the _Furies_ are three, who visit with retributions called on the other side of the grave offences that walk upon this; and once even the _Muses_ were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last words I say _now_; but in Oxford I said--"one of whom I know, and the others too surely I _shall_ know." For already, in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly relieved upon the dark background of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful sisters. These sisters--by what name shall we call them?

If I say simply--"The Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sorrow--separate cases of sorrow,--whereas I want term expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations, that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore, _Our Ladies of Sorrow_. I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? Oh, no! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound--eternal silence reigns in _their_ kingdoms. _They_ spoke not as they talked with Levana. _They_ whispered not. _They_ sang not. Though oftentimes methought they _might_ have sung; for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure, not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven--by changes on earth--by pulses in secret rivers--heraldries painted on darkness--and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. _They_ wheeled in mazes; _I_ spelled the steps. _They_ telegraphed from afar; _I_ read the signals. _They_ conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness _my_ eye traced the plots. _Theirs_ were the symbols,--_mine_ are the words.

What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their presence; if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline; or presence it were that for ever advanced to the front, or for ever receded amongst shades.

The eldest of the three is named _Mater Lachrymarum_, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, when a voice was heard of lamentation--Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds; oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than Papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over _her_; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is _now_ within a second and a deeper darkness. This _Mater Lachrymarum_ also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of "Madonna."

The second sister is called _Mater Suspiriorum_, Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever; for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic; raging in the highest against heaven; and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in Mediterranean galleys, of the English criminal in Norfolk island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England, of the baffled penitent reverting his eye for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for _him_ a stepmother, as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against _him_ sealed and sequestered;[13]--every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients;--every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsmen, whom God will judge;--every captive in every dungeon;--all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of _hereditary_ disgrace--all these walk with "Our Lady of Sighs." She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads.

But the third sister, who is also the youngest----! Hush! whisper, whilst we talk of _her_! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybèle, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high, _might_ be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers--for noon of day or noon of night--for ebbing or for flowing tide--may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And _her_ name is _Mater Tenebrarum_--Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the _Semnai Theai_, or Sublime Goddesses[14]--these were the _Eumenides_, or Gracious Ladies, (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation)--of my Oxford dreams. MADONNA spoke. She spoke by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to Our Lady of Sighs; and _what_ she spoke, translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) no man reads, was this:--

"Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now to _thy_ heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou"--turning to the _Mater Tenebrarum_, she said--"wicked sister, that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from _her_. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope--wither the relentings of love--scorch the fountains of tears: curse him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace--so shall he see the things that ought _not_ to be seen--sights that are abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again _before_ he dies. And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had--to plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."[15]

THE APPARITION OF THE BROCKEN.

Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the Brocken of North Germany. The dawn opened in cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but, as the hours advance, her youngest sister April, that sometimes cares little for racing across both frontiers of May, frets the bridal lady's sunny temper with sallies of wheeling and careering showers--flying and pursuing, opening, and closing, hiding and restoring. On such a morning, and reaching the summits of the forest-mountain about sunrise, we shall have one chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the Brocken.[16] Who and what is he? He is a solitary apparition, in the sense of loving solitude; else he is not always solitary in his personal manifestations, but on proper occasions has been known to unmask a strength quite sufficient to alarm those who had been insulting him.

Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious apparition, we will try two or three experiments upon him. What we fear, and with some reason, is, that as he lived so many ages with foul Pagan sorcerers, and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, his heart may have been corrupted; and that even now his faith may be wavering or impure. We will try.

Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether he repeats it, (as, on Whitsunday,[17] he surely ought to do.) Look! he _does_ repeat it; but the driving showers perplex the images, and _that_, perhaps, it is which gives him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively. Now, again, the sun shines more brightly, and the showers have swept off like squadrons of cavalry to the rear. We will try him again.

Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones which once was called the sorcerer's flower,[18] and bore a part perhaps in his horrid ritual of fear; carry it to that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen altar, and once was called the sorcerer's altar[18]; then, bending your knee, and raising your right hand to God, say,--"Father, which art in heaven--this lovely anemone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has travelled back into thy fold; this altar, which once reeked with bloody rites to Cortho, has long been rebaptized into thy holy service. The darkness is gone--the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred; the moans have passed away which the victims uttered; the cloud has vanished which once sate continually upon their graves--cloud of protestation that ascended for ever to thy throne from the tears of the defenceless, and the anger of the just. And lo! I thy servant, with this dark phantom, whom, for one hour on this thy festival of Pentecost, I make _my_ servant, render thee united worship in this thy recovered temple."

Look, now! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places it on an altar; he also bends his knee, he also raises his right hand to God. Dumb he is; but sometimes the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs to you, that perhaps on this high festival of the Christian Church, he may be overruled by supernatural influence into confession of his homage, having so often been made to bow and bend his knee at murderous rites. In a service of religion he may be timid. Let us try him, therefore, with an earthly passion, where he will have no bias either from favour or from fear.

If, then, once in childhood you suffered an affliction that was ineffable; If once, when powerless to face such an enemy, you were summoned to fight with the tiger that couches within the separations of the grave; in that case, after the example of Judæa (on the Roman coins)--sitting under her palm-tree to weep, but sitting with her head veiled--do you also veil your head. Many years are passed away since then; and you were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above six years old; or perhaps (if you durst tell all the truth) not quite so much. But your heart was deeper than the Danube; and, as was your love, so was your grief. Many years are gone since that darkness settled on your head; many summers, many winters; yet still its shadows wheel round upon you at intervals, like these April showers upon this glory of bridal June. Therefore now, on this dovelike morning of Pentecost, do you veil your head like Judæa in memory of that transcendant woe, and in testimony that, indeed, it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils _his_ head, after the model of Judæa weeping under her palm-tree, as if he also had a human heart, and that _he_ also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols to breathe a sigh towards heaven in memory of that affliction, and by way of record, though many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable by words.

This trial is decisive. You are now satisfied that the apparition is but a reflex of yourself; and, in uttering your secret feelings to _him_, you make this phantom the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to the daylight what else must be hidden for ever.

Such a relation does the Dark Interpreter, whom immediately the reader will learn to know as an intruder into my dreams, bear to my own mind. He is originally a mere reflex of my inner nature. But as the apparition of the Brocken sometimes is disturbed by storms or by driving showers, so as to dissemble his real origin, in like manner the Interpreter sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien natures. I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion. What he says, generally is but that which _I_ have said in daylight, and in meditation deep enough to sculpture itself on my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his words alter; and they do not always seem such as I have used, or _could_ use. No man can account for all things that occur in dreams. Generally I believe this--that he is a faithful representative of myself; but he also is at times subject to the action of the god _Phantasus_, who rules in dreams.

Hailstone choruses[19] besides, and storms, enter my dreams. Hailstones and fire that run along the ground, sleet and blinding hurricanes, revelations of glory insufferable pursued by volleying darkness--these are powers able to disturb any features that originally were but shadow, and to send drifting the anchors of any vessel that rides upon deeps so treacherous as those of dreams. Understand, however, the Interpreter to bear generally the office of a tragic chorus at Athens. The Greek chorus is perhaps not quite understood by critics, any more than the Dark Interpreter by myself. But the leading function of both must be supposed this--not to tell you any thing absolutely new, _that_ was done by the actors in the drama; but to recall you to your own lurking thoughts--hidden for the moment or imperfectly developed, and to place before you, in immediate connexion with groups vanishing too quickly for any effort of meditation on your own part, such commentaries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral or deciphering the mystery, justifying Providence, or mitigating the fierceness of anguish, as would or might have occurred to your own meditative heart--had only time been allowed for its motions.

The Interpreter is anchored and stationary in my dreams; but great storms and driving mists cause him to fluctuate uncertainly, or even to retire altogether, like his gloomy counterpart the shy Phantom of the Brocken--and to assume new features or strange features, as in dreams always there is a power not contented with reproduction, but which absolutely creates or transforms. This dark being the reader will see again in a further stage of my opium experience; and I warn him that he will not always be found sitting inside my dreams, but at tines outside, and in open daylight.

FINALE TO PART I.--SAVANNAH-LA-MAR.

God smote Savannah-la-Mar, and in one night, by earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God said--"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an air-woven awning above the silent encampment, mariners from every clime look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number the spires of her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and _has_ been for many a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a _Fata-Morgana_ revelation, as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air.

Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the peace of human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the gleam of marble altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, oftentimes in dreams did I and the dark Interpreter cleave the watery veil that divided us from her streets. We looked into the belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; together we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no _jubilates_ for the ear of Heaven--that sang no requiems for the ear of human sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the children were all asleep, and _had_ been asleep through five generations. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered the Interpreter to himself; "and, when _that_ comes, the bells and the organs will utter a _jubilate_ repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then, turning to me, he said--"This is sad: this is piteous: but less would not have sufficed for the purposes of God. Look here: put into a Roman clepsydra one hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an hourglass; every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour. Now, count the drops as they race along; and, when the fiftieth of the hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they have perished; and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see, therefore, how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is _infinitely_ false. For again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-sixth millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore, also, even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight, is more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can overtake. The time which _is_, contracts into a mathematic point; and even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite; but in God there is nothing transitory; but in God there _can_ be nothing that tends to death. Therefore, it follows--that for God there can be no present. The future is the present of God; and to the future it is that he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works by earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the ploughing of earthquake! Oh, deep," [and his voice swelled like a _sanctus_ rising from the choir of a cathedral,]--"oh, deep is the ploughing of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for the agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant, he raises oftentimes, from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been. Less than these fierce ploughshares would not have stirred the stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, our planet--for earth itself as the dwelling-place of man. But the other is needed yet oftener for God's mightiest instrument; yes," [and he looked solemnly at myself,] "is needed for the mysterious children of the earth!"

END OF PART I.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: Some readers may be apt to suppose, from all English experience, that the word _exorcise_ means properly banishment to the shades. Not so. Citation _from_ the shades, or sometimes the torturing coercion of mystic adjurations, is more truly the primary sense.]

[Footnote 10: "_Laughter from the fields of ocean._"--Many readers will recall, though at the moment of writing my own thoughts did _not_ recall, the well-known passage in the Prometheus--

[Greek:----ôonliôn te chymapôn 'Anêzithmon Gelasma.]

"Oh multitudinous laughter of the ocean billows!" It is not clear whether Æschylus contemplated the laughter as addressing the ear or the eye.]

[Footnote 11: This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of experience; but, as an argument for this mysterious power lurking in our nature, I may remind the reader of one phenomenon open to the notice of every body, viz. the tendency of very aged persons to throw back and concentrate the light of their memory upon scenes of early childhood, as to which they recall many traces that had faded even to _themselves_ in middle life, whilst they often forget altogether the whole intermediate stages of their experience. This shows that naturally, and without violent agencies, the human brain is by tendency a palimpsest.]

[Footnote 12: "_Glimmering._"--As I have never allowed myself to covet any man's ox nor his ass, nor any thing that is his, still less would it become a philosopher to covet other people's images, or metaphors. Here, therefore, I restore to Mr Wordsworth this fine image of the revolving wheel, and the glimmering spokes, as applied by him to the flying successions of day and night. I borrowed it for one moment in order to point my own sentence; which being done, the reader is witness that I now pay it back instantly by a note made for that sole purpose. On the same principle I often borrow their seals from young ladies--when closing my letters. Because there is sure to be some tender sentiment upon them about "memory," or "hope," or "roses," or "reunion:" and my correspondent must be a sad brute who is not touched by the eloquence of the seal, even if his taste is so bad that he remains deaf to mine.]

[Footnote 13: This, the reader will be aware, applies chiefly to the cotton and tobacco States of North America; but not to them only: on which account I have not scrupled to figure the sun, which looks down upon slavery, as _tropical_--no matter if strictly within the tropics, or simply so near to them as to produce a similar climate.]

[Footnote 14: "_Sublime Goddesses._"--The word [Greek: semnos] is usually rendered _venerable_ in dictionaries; not a very flattering epithet for females. But by weighing a number of passages in which the word is used pointedly, I am disposed to think that it comes nearest to our idea of the _sublime_; as near as a Greek word _could_ come.]

[Footnote 15: The reader, who wishes at all to understand the course of these Confessions, ought not to pass over this dream-legend. There is no great wonder that a vision, which occupied my waking thoughts in those years, should re-appear in my dreams. It was in fact a legend recurring in sleep, most of which I had myself silently written or sculptured in my daylight reveries. But its importance to the present Confessions is this--that it rehearses or prefigures their course. This FIRST part belongs to Madonna. The THIRD belongs to the "Mater Suspiriorum," and will be entitled _The Pariah Worlds_. The FOURTH, which terminates the work, belongs to the "Mater Tenebrarum," and will be entitled _The Kingdom of Darkness_. As to the SECOND, it is an interpolation requisite to the effect of the others; and will be explained in its proper place.]

[Footnote 16: "_Spectre of the Brocken._"--This very striking phenomenon has been continually described by writers, both German and English, for the last fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these descriptions: and on _their_ account I add a few words in explanation; referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David Brewster's "Natural Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human figure, or, if the visitors are more than one, then the spectres multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the dark ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked; and wakens to the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself. This Titan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious, vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only the phenomenon can be manifested: the sun must be near to the horizon, (which of itself implies a time of day inconvenient to a person starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode;) the spectator must have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapour--but _partially_ distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the same three conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the following eight lines. I give them from a corrected copy: (the apostrophe in the beginning must be understood as addressed to an ideal conception):--

"And art thou nothing? Such thou art as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head: This shade he worships for its golden hues, And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues."]

[Footnote 17: "_On Whitsunday._"--It is singular, and perhaps owing to the temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer, that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day.]

[Footnote 18: "_The sorcerer's flower_," and "_the sorcerer's altar_."--These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar-shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and it is not doubted that they both connect themselves through links of ancient tradition with the gloomy realities of Paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but perishing idolatry.]

[Footnote 19: "_Hailstone choruses._"--I need not tell any lover of Handel that his oratorio of "Israel in Egypt" contains a chorus familiarly known by this name. The words are--"And he gave them hailstones for rain; fire, mingled with the hail, ran along upon the ground."]

HANNIBAL.[20]

Two thousand one hundred years ago[21] a boy was born at Carthage, whose name and exploits have rendered his country immortal. His character stands forth with unparalleled lustre even on the bright pages of ancient story. It is hard to say whether he was greater as a patriot, statesman, or a general. Invincible in determination, inexhaustible in resources, fertile in stratagem, patient of fatigue, cautious in council, bold in action, he possessed also that singleness of purpose, that unity of object, which more than all is the foundation of great achievements. Love of his country was his one and ruling principle. Hatred of its enemies his lasting and indelible passion. To these objects he devoted throughout life his great capacity: for this he lived, for this he died. From the time that he swore hatred to the Romans, while yet a boy, on the altars of Carthage, he never ceased to watch their designs, to contend with their forces, to resist their ambition. Alone of all his countrymen he measured the extent of the danger with which his fatherland was threatened by the progress of their power. Alone he stood forth with the strength of a giant to combat it. But for the shameful desertion of his victorious army, by the jealousy of the rival faction at Carthage, he would have crushed the power of the legions, and given to Carthage, not Rome, the empire of the world. As it was, he brought them to the brink of ruin, and achieved triumphs over their armies greater than all other nations put together. After he was overthrown, it was comparatively an easy task to conquer the world. For this he received in life exile, disgrace, and death: for this he has since obtained immortality. At his name the heart of the patriot has thrilled through every subsequent age. To illustrate his virtues, genius and learning have striven in every succeeding country; and the greatest praise which the world can yet bestow on warriors is to compare them to Hannibal.

No name, even in the majestic annals of Roman victories, stands forth with lustre equal to that of the Carthaginian hero. They were made by their countrymen, but his countrymen were made by him. Scipio, Pompey, Cæsar himself, did not evince equal capacity: they had lesser difficulties to contend with; they owed more to the support of others, and did not do so much by the strength of their individual arm, by the energy of their individual will. The institutions, the laws, the ideas, the manners, the very language of the Romans, were made for conquest: they sprang up from the earth a race of armed men. Virtue with them was derived from "manly valour:" an army was designated by a word which signified "exercised:"[22] their generals were borne aloft to conquest on the shields of the legions. Such was the spirit of the soldiers, that they were fairly compelled to victory by the presence which urged them on; such the determination of the people, that the armies were pressed forward to the conquest of the world as by a supernatural power. The purposes of Providence, mysterious at the time, apparent afterwards, never were more clearly evinced than in the peculiar impress communicated to the Roman institutions. But the Carthaginians were a race, not of warriors, but of colonists. They rose to greatness, not by their military spirit, but by their commercial prosperity; their outposts were, not the fortified camp, but the smiling seaport. Extending as far as the waters of the Mediterranean roll, they spread inwards from the sea-coast, not outwards from the camp; the navy was the arm of their strength, not their land forces. Their institutions, habits, national spirit, and government, were all adapted to the extension of commerce, to the growth of manufactures, to the spread of a colonial empire. What, then, must have been the capacity of the man who could, by his single efforts, alter the character of a whole people; chain victory at land to the standards of a maritime republic; and bow down to the earth, on their own territory, that rival power, whose legions erelong triumphed over the armies of all the military monarchies of the world?

The auxiliaries formed a considerable part, in point of numbers, of the Roman forces; but the strength of the legions was to be found in the Roman citizens. It was that indomitable body of men, ever flowing out, yet ever full, animated with fiery passions, but directed by consummate prudence, panting for rapine and conquest, but patient of all the toils by which they were to be attained, which constituted the strength of the armies which conquered the world. But the Carthaginians had no body of citizens capable of forming such a force. They were nothing but a great and powerful seaport town, with its adjacent villas spreading along the coast of Africa. The people of Dido had not, like those of Romulus, established off-shoots in the interior. No three-and-thirty colonies awaited the commands of the senate of Carthage, as they did of the consuls in the time of Fabius, to recruit the national armies. Twenty thousand native citizens was all, at its last extremity at Zama, that this mighty republic, which had so nearly achieved the conquest of the Capitol, could fit out to defend their country. The strength of the Punic armies consisted in what was merely an accessory to the Roman, the auxiliaries. It was the Numidian horse, the Balearic slingers, the Spanish infantry, the Gaulish broadswords, which proved so formidable in the ranks of Hannibal. It was literally, as Livy says, a "colluvies omnium gentium," which rolled down from the Alps, under his direction, to overwhelm the Romans on their own hearths. Twenty different languages, Polybius tells us, were not unfrequently spoken at the same time in the Carthaginian camp. What, then, must have been the capacity of the general who could still the jealousies, and overcome the animosities, and give unity to the operations of a vast army, composed of so many different tribes and people, and mould them all into so perfect a form, that, for fifteen years that he remained in Italy after the first great defeats, the consuls never once ventured to measure their strength with him in a pitched battle?

If there is any thing more astonishing than another in the history of the Roman Republic, it is the unconquerable spirit, the persevering energy, the invincible determination with which, under every calamity, and often in the very extremity of adverse fortune, they combined to struggle for the superiority, and at length attained it--not so much by conquering as by wearing out their adversaries. In no period of their long and glorious annals was this transcendent quality more strikingly evinced than in the second Punic War, when, after the battle of Cannæ, Capua, the second city of Italy, yielded to the influence of Hannibal, and nearly a half of the Roman colonies, worn out by endless exactions in men and money, refused to send any further succours. The heroic spirit the Roman senate then evinced, the extraordinary sacrifices they made, may, without exaggeration, be pronounced without parallel in the annals of mankind, if we reflect on the length of time during which these sacrifices were required. But while this invincible spirit augments our admiration of the Roman character, and makes us feel that they indeed deserved that mighty dominion which they afterwards attained, it takes much from the merit of their individual commanders. It was almost impossible to avoid ultimate success with such armies to lead, and so heroic a people to sustain the efforts and furnish the muniments of war. But the case was very different at Carthage. So vehement was the spirit of party which had seized upon its inhabitants, in consequence of the great accession of democratic power which had been conceded, fatally for the state, as Polybius tells us, a short time before to the people, that Hannibal could rely on no assistance on his own government. Though he brought the Romans to the very brink of ruin, and placed final victory within the grasp, as it were, of his country, yet they would not put out their hand to snatch it. They were more jealous of him than afraid of their enemies. Though he descended to the southern extremity of Italy, and drew near to Sicily, in order to obtain from the African shores the necessary succours to recruit his armies, wasted by the very number of his victories; and though they had during great part of the time the superiority at sea--yet he received no supplies of men or money from home during the fifteen years he carried on the war in Italy, with the exception of the army which his brother Hamilcar raised in Spain, and led across the Pyrenees and the Alps to perish on the Metaurus. What he did, he did by himself, and by his own unaided efforts. It was the contributions levied on the cities he conquered, which furnished his supplies; it was the troops who flocked to his standard from the provinces he wrested from the Romans, which filled up the chasms in the ranks he led from Saguntum. Not more than twenty-six thousand men descended with him from the Alps; of forty-eight thousand who fought at Cannæ, thirty thousand were Gaulish auxiliaries. There is no example recorded in history of a general doing things so great with means so small, and support from home so inconsiderable.

Every great commander of whom we read in military annals, possessed in a considerable degree the art of securing the affections and inspiring the confidence of his soldiers. Alexander the Great, Cæsar, Charles XII., Napoleon, exercised this ascendancy in the highest degree. The anecdotes preserved in the pages of Plutarch, and which every schoolboy knows by heart, prove this beyond a doubt of the heroes of the ancient world; the annals of the last century and our own times demonstrate that their mantle had descended to the Swedish and French heroes. The secret of this marvellous power is always to be found in one mental quality. It is magnanimity which entrances the soldier's heart. The rudest breasts are accessible to emotion, from the display of generosity, self-denial, and loftiness of purpose in their commanders. When Alexander in the deserts of Arabia, on his return from India, poured the untasted water on the sand, he assuaged the thirst of a whole army; when Cæsar addressed the Tenth Legion in mutiny by the title of "Quirites," the very word, which told them they were no longer the comrades of their general, subdued every heart; when Charles XII., on his officers declaring themselves unable to undergo the fatigue of further watching, desired them to retire to rest, for he would go the rounds himself, he silenced every murmur in his army; when Napoleon yielded up his carriages to the wounded in the Russian retreat, or drew aside his suite to salute, uncovered, the Austrian wounded conveyed from Austerlitz, and said, "Honour to the brave in misfortune!" he struck a chord which vibrated in every heart of his vast array. No general, ancient or modern, possessed this key to the generous affections in a higher degree than Hannibal; and none ever stood so much, or so long, in need of its aid. In truth, it was the secret of his success; the magic power which so long held together his multifarious array. We have few anecdotes indicating this ascendancy; for the historians of the Romans, or their subjects the Greeks, were in no hurry to collect traits to illustrate the character of their enemy. But decisive evidence of its existence, and almost supernatural power, is to be found in the fact, that without the aid of reinforcements, and scarce any remittances, from Carthage, he maintained the war in the heart of Italy with mercenary troops collected from every country of the earth, against the native soldiers of the bravest and most warlike people on the earth. We read of no mutinies or disobedience of orders among his followers. It were hard to say whether the fiery Numidian, the proud and desultory Spaniard, the brave but inconstant Gaul, or the covetous Balearic, was most docile to his direction, or obedient to his will. Great indeed must have been the ascendency acquired by one man over such various and opposite races of men, usually the prey of such jealousies and divisions; and whom the most powerful coalition in general finds so much difficulty in retaining in subjection.

Of Hannibal's political wisdom and far-seeing sagacity, ancient history is full. Alone of all his contemporaries, he clearly, and from his very infancy, perceived the extent of the danger which threatened his country from the insatiable ambition and growing power of the Romans; alone he pointed out the only mode in which it could be successfully combated. He was at once the Burke, the Pitt, and the Wellington of his country. Beyond all doubt, if his advice had been followed, and his enterprises duly supported, Carthage would have been victorious in the second Punic War. It was because his countrymen were not animated with his heroic spirit, nor inspired with his prophetic foresight, that they failed. They were looking after gain, or actuated by selfish ambition, while he was straining every nerve to avert danger. When he swore hatred to the Roman on the altar at nine years of age, he imbibed a principle which the judgment of his maturer years told him was the only means of saving his country. To the prosecution of this object he devoted his life. From his first entrance into public duty till his last hour, when he swallowed poison to avoid being delivered up to the Romans, he never ceased to combat their ambition with all the powers of his gigantic intellect. If history had preserved no other proof of his profound political discernment, it would be sufficiently established by the memorable words he addressed to the senate of Carthage on the probable fate of Rome:--"Nulla magna civitas diu quiescere potest. Si fores hostem non habet, domi invenit; ut prævalida corpora ab externis causis tutæ videntur, sed suis ipsa viribus conficiuntur. Tantum nimirum ex publicis malis sentimus quantum ad res privatas attinet, nec in eis quidquam acrius quàm pecuniæ damnum stimulat." If anyone doubts the truth and profound wisdom of these remarks, let him reflect on the exact demonstration of these truths which was afforded two thousand years after, in the British empire. "Si monumentum quæris, circumspice."

He constantly affirmed that it was in Italy alone that Rome was vulnerable, and that by striking hard and often there, she might be conquered. He did not despair of effecting the deliverance of the world by a conflict on their own shores, even after the battle of Zama had to all appearance decisively settled the conflict in favour of the Capitol, and nothing remained to combat the legions but the unwarlike soldiers of the Eastern monarch. His own campaigns demonstrate that he was right: the Gauls and the Carthaginians in different ages brought the Romans to the brink of ruin; but it was by victories on the Tiber that Brennus and Hannibal penetrated to their gates. Nor is it difficult to see to what cause this comparative weakness at home of so great a military power was owing. Rome was not merely a powerful state, but the head of a great military confederacy; the resources which, partly by force, partly by inclination, and the natural appetite of mankind for victory and plunder, were ranged on her side, were in great part derived from foreign states. When she carried the war into foreign states, this formidable mass of auxiliaries doubled the strength of her legions; when she was assailed at home, one half of them were lost, or appeared in the ranks of her enemies. The same cause appeared at a subsequent period in the campaigns of Napoleon: his armies were innumerable, his force irresistible, as long as he headed the forced confederacy of western Europe, and he invaded Russia with five hundred thousand men; but when the disaster of Moscow, and the resurrection of Germany, brought the Russians into France, the boasted strength of the empire disappeared, its allies passed over to the other side, and the mighty conqueror was reduced to a painful defensive with fifty thousand men on the plains of Champagne.

The Roman historians affirm that these great military virtues were balanced by corresponding vices. Every scholar knows the inimitable description of his character drawn by Livy. "Has tantas viri virtutes ingentia vitia æquabant:--inhumana crudelitas; perfidia plusquam Punica; nihil veri, nihil sancti; nullus deoram metus, nullum jusjurandum, nulla religio." This, however, was his character as drawn by his enemies; and by enemies who had suffered so much from his ability, that they were incapable of forming a correct judgment on the subject. But the truth of modern history has dispelled the illusion, and gathered facts sufficient even from their prejudiced sources to demonstrate that the moral virtues of Hannibal equalled his intellectual capacity. Certain it is, by their own admission, that his generosity on several important occasions afforded a example which the Romans would have done well to imitate, but which they shewed themselves incapable of following. It was the judicious clemency which he showed to the allies, which at length won over so many of the Italian states to his side; and if this is to be ascribed to policy, what are we to say to the chivalrous courtesy which prompted him to send back the dead body of his inveterate enemy Marcellus, surprised and slain by his Numidian horsemen, to obtain the honours of sepulture from his countrymen? The Romans complained of his cruelty; but men feel cruelty keenly when it is exercised on themselves; and there are no instances recorded of his exceeding the established and universal customs, ruthless as they were, of ancient warfare. Certain it is, that nothing he ever did equalled the savage and cold-blooded atrocity with which they tortured and massacred the citizens of Capua and Syracuse, when they were again subdued by their arms. Hannibal's disposition appears to have been gay and cheerful; there are many instances recorded of his indulgence, in presence of danger, in a gaiety of temper more akin to that of Henry IV. than the usual stern determination of ancient warriors. On one memorable occasion, when his army was in danger, and the spirit of his troops unusually depressed, he indulged in mirth and jests to such an extent in his tent, that he set his whole officers in a roar of laughter; and these joyful sounds, heard by the soldiers without, restored confidence to the army, from the belief that no anxious thoughts clouded the brows of their chiefs. Hannibal, it is known, preserved a diary, and wrote a history of his campaigns, which was extant at a very late period in the ancient world. What an inestimable treasure would the journal of the private thoughts of such a man have been! Modern times have no more irreparable loss to mourn.

The just pride and elegant flattery of the French historians has often led them to compare Napoleon's passage of the Great St Bernard to Hannibal's passage of the Pennine Alps: but without detracting from the well-earned fame of the French general, it may safely be affirmed that his achievement will bear no sort of comparison with that of the Carthaginian hero. When Napoleon began the ascent of the Alps from Martigny, on the shores of the Rhone, above the lake of Geneva, he found the passage of the mountains cleared by the incessant transit of two thousand years. The road, impracticable for carriages, was very good for horsemen and foot passengers, and was daily traversed by great numbers of both in every season of the year. Comfortable villages, on the ascent and the descent, afforded easy accommodation to the wearied soldiers both by night and by day; the ample stores of the monks at the summit, and the provident foresight of the French generals, had provided a meal to every man and horse that passed. No hostile troops opposed their passage: the guns were drawn up in sledges made of hollowed firs; and in four days from the time that they began the ascent from the banks of the Rhone, the French troops, without losing a man, stood on the Doria Baltea, the increasing waters of which flowed towards the Po, amidst the gardens and vineyards, and under the sun of Italy. But the case was very different, when Hannibal crossed from the shores of the Durance to the banks of the Po. The mountain sides, not yet cleared by centuries of laborious industry, presented a continual forest, furrowed at every hollow by headlong Alpine torrents; bridges there were none to cross these perpetually recurring obstacles; provisions, scanty at all times in those elevated solitudes, were then nowhere to be found, having been hid by the affrighted inhabitants on the approach of the invaders; and a powerful army of mountaineers occupied the entrance of the defiles, defended with desperate valour the gates of their country, and, when dispersed by the superior discipline and arms of Hannibal's soldiers, still beset the ridges above their line of march, and harassed his troops by continual hostility. When the woody region was passed, and the vanguard emerged into the open mountain pastures, which lead to the verge of perpetual snow, fresh difficulties awaited them. The turf, from the gliding down of newly fallen snow on those steep declivities, was so slippery, that it was often scarcely possible for the men to keep their feet; the beasts of burden lost their footing at every step, and rolled down in great numbers into the abysses beneath; the elephants became restive amidst privations and a climate to which they were totally unaccustomed; and the strength of the soldiers, worn out with incessant marching and fighting, began to sink before the continued toil of the ascent. Horrors, formidable to all, but in an especial manner terrible to African soldiers, awaited them at the summit. It was now the end of October; winter in all its severity had already set in on those lofty solitudes; the mountain sides, silent and melancholy even at the height of summer, when enamelled with flowers and dotted with flocks, presented then an unbroken sheet of snow; the blue lakes which are interspersed over the level valley at their feet, were frozen over, and undistinguishable from the rest of the dreary expanse, and a boundless mass of snowy peaks arose on all sides, presenting apparently an impassable barrier to their further progress.

But it was then that the greatness of Hannibal shone forth in all its lustre. "That great general," says Arnold, "who felt that he now stood victorious on the ramparts of Italy, and that the torrent which rolled before him was carrying its waters to the rich plains of Cisalpine Gaul, endeavoured to kindle his soldiers with his own spirit of hope. He called them together; he pointed out the valley beneath, to which the descent seemed the work of a moment. 'That valley,' he said, 'is Italy; it leads us to the country of our friends the Gauls, and yonder is our way to Rome!' His eyes were eagerly fixed on that point of the horizon, and as he gazed, the distance between seemed to vanish, till he could almost fancy that he was crossing the Tiber and assailing the Capitol[23]." Such were the difficulties of the passage and the descent on the other side, that Hannibal lost thirty-three thousand men from the time he left the Pyrenees till he entered the plains of Northern Italy; and he arrived on the Po with only twelve thousand Africans, eight thousand Spanish infantry, and six thousand horse. Napoleon's army which fought at Marengo was only twenty-nine thousand, but he had lost no men in the passage of the Alps, and only a few in the difficult passage across the precipices of Mont Albaredo, opposite the fort of Bard, in the valley of the Doria Baltea. It is ridiculous, after this, to compare the passages of the Alps by Napoleon to their crossing by Hannibal. The French emperor has many other titles, too well founded, to warrant a comparison with the Carthaginian hero, to render it necessary to recur to one which is obviously chimerical.

It is a question which has divided the learned since the revival of letters, by what pass Hannibal crossed the Alps. The general opinion of those who have studied the subject, inclines to the opinion that he crossed by the Little St Bernard; and to this opinion Arnold inclines. He admits, however, with his usual candour, that, "in some respects, also, Mont Cenis suits the description of the march better than any other pass[24]." After having visited and traversed on foot both passes, the author of this paper has no hesitation in expressing his decided conviction, that he passed by Mont Cenis. His reasons for this opinion are these:--1. It is mentioned by Polybius, that Hannibal reached the summit of the Alps on the _ninth_ day after he had left the plains of Dauphiné. This period coincides well with what might have then been required to ascend, as the country was, on the neighbourhood of Grenoble or Echelles; while the ascent to the summit of the Little St Bernard, would not require more than half the time. 2. The narrow defile of St Jean de Maurienne, which leads from the plain of Montmelian to the foot of Mont Cenis, corresponds much more closely with the description, given both in Livy[25] and Polybius[26], of that in which the first serious engagement took place between Hannibal and the Mountaineers, two days after they had left the plains of Dauphiné, than the comparatively open valley which leads to the foot of the Little St Bernard. 3. From the summit of the Little St Bernard you can see nothing of Italy, nor any thing approaching to it; a confused sea of mountains alone meets the eye on every side. Whereas, from the southern front of the summit of Mont Cenis, _not only the plains of Piedmont are distinctly visible_ at the opening of the lower end of the valley of Susa, which lies at your feet, _but the Appenines beyond them can be seen_. To settle this important point, the author made a sketch of both on the spot, on the 24th October, the very time of Hannibal's passage, which is still in his possession. How precisely does this coincide with the emphatic words of Hannibal, as recorded by Polybius, showing to them the plains around the Po, ([Greek: "ta peri ton Padon pedia,"]) and, reminding them of the good disposition of the Gauls who dwelt there, he further showed them the situation of Rome itself.[27] The Appenines, beyond the plain of Piedmont, seen from Mont Cenis, might correctly be taken as the direction, at least, where Rome lay. 4. The steep and rocky declivity by which the _old_ road formerly descended to the valley of Susa, and where the travellers descended in sledges, till Napoleon's magnificent _chaussée_ was formed, which makes great circuit to the westward, corresponds perfectly to the famous places mentioned both by Livy and Polybius, where the path had been torn away by a recent avalanche, and the fabulous story of the vinegar was placed. This place in Mont Cenis is immediately below the summit of the pass, and may now be seen furrowed by a roaring torrent, amidst dark ledges of rock; the corresponding chasm on the southern side of the Little St Bernard is _below_ the reach of avalanches.[28] 5. On the summit of Mont Cenis is still to be seen a "_white_ rock" called the "Roche Blanche," which answers to the [Greek: "leuchopetron,"] mentioned by Polybius, on the summit of the Alps which Hannibal crossed, whereas there is nothing like it on the Little St Bernard, at least of such magnitude as to have formed a place of night refuge to Hannibal. 6. What is perhaps most important of all, it is expressly mentioned by Polybius, that "_in one day's time_ the chasm in the mountain sides was repaired, so that there was room for the horses and beasts of burden to descend. They were immediately conducted down, _and having gained_ the plains, were sent away to pasture in places where no snow had fallen. * * * * * Hannibal then descended last, with all the army, and thus, on the _third day_, gained the plains[29]." This description of the distances tallies perfectly with the passage by Mont Cenis, for it is only half a day's journey to descend from the summit of that pass to Susa, at the head of the wide and open valley of the same name, where ample pasturage is to be found; and short day's journey more brings the traveller to the plain of Piedmont. But it is utterly irreconcilable with the idea that the Carthaginians passed by the Little St Bernard; for from its summit to the plains of Ivrea is four days' hard marching for an army, through the narrow valley of Aosta, destitute for the most part of forage. 7. This valley of Aosta is very rocky and narrow, and affords many positions where a handful of men can arrest an army; in one of which, that of Bard, a small Austrian garrison stopped Napoleon for twenty-four hours; yet Polybius and Livy concur in stating, that after he descended the mountains, the Carthaginians experienced no molestation on their way to the Insubrians, their allies, on the banks of the Po. This is inexplicable if they were struggling for three days through the narrow and rocky defiles of the valley of Aosta, but perfectly intelligible if they were traversing in half a day the broad and open valley of Susa, offering no facilities to the attacks of the mountaineers.

But if Napoleon's passage of the St Bernard can never be compared to that of Hannibal over Mont Cenis, it is impossible to deny that there is a marked and striking similarity, in some respects, between the career of the two heroes. Both rose to eminence, for the first time, by the lustre of their Italian campaigns; the most brilliant strokes of both were delivered almost on the same ground, immediately after having surmounted the Alps; both headed the forces of the democratic party in the country whose warriors they led, and were aided by it in those which they conquered; both had a thorough aversion for that party in their hearts; both continued, by their single genius, for nineteen years in hostility against a host of enemies; both were overthrown at last, in a single battle, on a distant shore, far from the scene of their former triumphs; both were driven into exile by the hatred or apprehensions of their enemies; both, after having reached the summit of glory, died alone and unbefriended in a distant land; both have left names immortal in the rolls of fame. It is no wonder that such striking similarities should have forcibly struck the imaginations of men in every land. It is remarkable that many of the greatest patriots who ever existed have died in exile, after having rendered inestimable services to their country, by which they were persecuted or betrayed. Themistocles, Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon, belong to this bright band. It is not difficult to see that the cause of it is to be found in their very greatness itself. They were too powerful to be tolerated by their countrymen: they were too formidable to be endured by their enemies.

It is hard to say whether Hannibal's military capacity appeared most strongly in strategy, that is, the general direction of a campaign, or in tactics, that is, the management of troops on the field of battle. In both he was unrivalled in ancient times. His wonderful ability in strategy, and in preparing his multifarious forces for the grand enterprise for which they were destined, appears from the very outset of his military career. Devoted to the destruction of Rome from his youth upwards, and steady in the determination to over-throw that inveterate enemy to his country, he had yet the difficult and apparently hopeless task of accomplishing this by land warfare, when Carthage had no native born army in the slightest degree commensurate to its execution. To form such an army was his first object, and this he accomplished by his successes in Spain, before the second Punic War began. In the interval between the first and the second of those dire contests, he was assiduously employed in conquering, organizing, and disciplining the forces by which his great object was to be effected; and such was his capacity, that, notwithstanding the untoward issue of the first Punic War, the Carthaginians gradually regained the ascendant in the Peninsula, while his manners were so winning, that erelong he attracted all its military strength to his standard. The Roman influence was limited to the narrow and broken territory which lies between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, and forms the modern province of Catalonia, while all the rest of the Peninsula obeyed the orders of Hannibal. It was in Spain that he formed that great military force which so soon after shook to its foundation the solid fabric of Roman power; he there erected the platform on which his engines of assault were placed. When he began his triumphant march from Saguntum to attempt the conquest of Rome, after surmounting both the Pyrenees and the Alps, he was at the head of a splendid army of ninety thousand foot, and twelve thousand horse, with forty elephants; the most powerful array, if the quality and discipline of the troops is taken into account, which Europe had yet seen. Of this great force, not more than a fourth part were Carthaginian soldiers; so mightily had the military force of Hannibal increased with the prosperous issue of his Peninsular campaigns.

Had the Carthaginian general succeeded in reaching the banks of the Tiber with the half even of this force, the fate of Rome was sealed, and the glories of the Capitol were extinguished for ever. But he had innumerable difficulties to contend with--physical, warlike, and moral--before he reached the Italian plains. His march from the Ebro to the Po was a continued combat. The mountain tribes of Catalonia, celebrated in every age for their obstinate and persisting hostility, were then firm in the Roman interest. The mountain strength of the Pyrenees; the rapid currents of the Rhone; the cruel warfare, and yet more dangerous peace of the Gauls; the desperate valour of the inhabitants of the Alps; the inclemency of the weather on their snowy summits, all required to be overcome, and they thinned his ranks more than all the swords of the legions. Instead of ninety thousand foot, and twelve thousand horse, with which he broke up from Saguntum, he brought only twenty thousand infantry, and six thousand horse to the fields of Piedmont. No less than seventy-six thousand men had been lost or left to preserve the communications, since they left the Valencian plains. So slender was the force with which this great commander commenced, on its own territory, the conflict with a power which ere three years had elapsed, carried on the war with fourteen legions, numbering an hundred and seventy thousand combatants, between the auxiliaries and Roman soldiers. It is in the magnitude of this disproportion, and the extremely small amount of the reinforcement which he received from home during the next fifteen years that the war lasted, that the decisive proof of the marvellous capacity of the Carthaginian general is to be found. It is a similar disproportion which has marked the campaigns of Napoleon in Italy in 1796, and in France in 1814, with immortality.

The first necessity was to augment his numbers, and fill up the wide chasm in his ranks, by fresh enrolments in the territory in which he had entered. The warlike habits and predatory dispositions of the Cisalpine Gauls afforded the means of obtaining this necessary succour. The victory over the Roman horse on the Ticino, when the superiority of the Numidian cavalry was first decisively displayed, had an immediate effect in bringing a crowd of Gaulish recruits to his standard. The Carthaginian general was careful in his first engagement to hazard only his cavalry, in which arm he was certain of his superiority. The battle of the Trebia which followed, and which first broke the strength of the legions, excited an unbounded ferment in Lombardy, and brought the Gaulish youths in crowds, to follow the career of plunder and revenge under his victorious standards. Recruits speedily were not awanting; the only difficulty was to select from the crowds which presented themselves for enrolment. It was like the resurrection of Prussia in 1813, against the tyrannic domination of the French emperor. Winter was spent in organizing these rude auxiliaries, and reducing them to something like military discipline; and so effective was their co-operation, and so numerous the reinforcements which their zeal brought to his standard, that in the following spring he crossed the Apennines, and traversed the marshes of Volterra, at the head of nearly fifty thousand men, of whom above one half were Gaulish recruits. And when the Consul Flaminius attempted to stop him on the margin of the Thrasymene Lake, where the stream still called "_Sanguinetto_" murmurs among the old oaks, the children of the soil, the total defeat of his army with the loss of thirty thousand men, lost the Romans the whole north of Italy, and carried consternation to the gates of the Capitol.

After so great a victory within a few days' march of the Tiber, and no considerable army intervening to arrest the advance of the conqueror, it may seem extraordinary that Hannibal did not advance straight to the capital, and terminate the war by its destruction: still more inexplicable does it at first sight appear, that, instead of doing so, he should have turned to the left, and passing Rome, moved into the south of Italy; thus losing in a great measure his communication with Lombardy, which had hitherto proved so invaluable a nursery for his army. But it was in these very movements, more perhaps than in any others of his life, that the wisdom and judgment of this great general's conduct were conspicuous. The chief difficulty he had now to contend with in Italy was the reduction of its fortified towns. The innumerable wars which had so long prevailed in the southern parts of the Peninsula, between the Etruscans, the Romans, and the Samnites, had studded the declivities of the Apennines with castles and fortified burghs, the walls of which in great part still remain, and constitute not the least of the many interesting objects which Italy presents to the traveller. Towards the reduction of those cities, the tumultuary array of the Gauls, numerous and efficient as they were in the field, could not afford any assistance. Engines for assault or the reduction of walls they had none; funds for the maintenance of a protracted methodical warfare were not to be looked for, in their savage and half-cultivated plains. The communication with Spain by the circuitous route of the Pyrenees and Alps, had been found, by dear-bought experience, to be difficult in the extreme. It could only be opened again, by an army nearly as powerful as that which had first penetrated through it, under the guidance of his energetic will. It was in the south of the Peninsula, amidst its opulent cities and long-established civilization, that the resources for a war of sieges could alone be looked for. It was there, too, that the most direct, the shortest, and in fact the only secure channel of communication with Carthage could be opened: to a Punic as to a British army, the true base of operations is the sea, the worst possible base for that of any other military power. Beyond all question, it was to the judicious choice of the south of Italy as his stronghold, and the combined skill and policy by which he contrived to detach a large part of its rich republics, with their harbours and places of strength, from the Roman alliance, that the subsequent protraction of the war for fifteen years is to be ascribed.

Such, however, was the terror of the Roman arms, and the influence acquired by the combined steadiness and severity of their rule, that this irruption into the south of Italy was not at first attended with the desired effect. In vain he had, in all preceding engagements sent back all the prisoners from the allies without any ransom, and treated them in the most generous manner; in vain, in all preceding marches, he had cautiously abstained from pillaging or laying waste their lands. Still the Roman influence was predominant. Not one state in alliance had revolted: not one Roman colony had failed in its duty to the parent state. The Gauls alone, who now formed half his army, had repaired in crowds to his standard since he had descended from the Alps. A long season of inactivity followed, during which the Romans were too prudent to hazard a conflict with Hannibal in the field, and he was too weak in siege artillery to attempt the reduction of any of their fortified cities. But the time was not lost by that indefatigable commander, and the following passage from Arnold will both show how it was employed, and serve as a fair specimen of the style of that powerful and lamented writer:--

"Never was Hannibal's genius more displayed than during this long period of inactivity. More than half of his army consisted of Gauls, of all barbarians the most impatient and uncertain in their humour, whose fidelity, it was said, could only be secured by an ever open hand; no man was their friend any longer than he could gorge them with pay or plunder. Those of his soldiers who were not Gauls, were either Spaniards or Africans; the Spaniards were the newly conquered subjects of Carthage, strangers to her race and language, and accustomed to divide their lives between actual battle and the most listless bodily indolence; so that when one of their tribes first saw the habits of a Roman camp, and observed the centurions walking up and down before the prætorium for exercise, the Spaniards thought them mad, and ran up to guide them to their tents, thinking that he who was not fighting could do nothing but lie at his ease and enjoy himself. Even the Africans were foreigners to Carthage; they were subjects harshly governed, and had been engaged within the last twenty years in a war of extermination with their masters. Yet the long inactivity of winter quarters, trying to the discipline of the best national armies, was borne patiently by Hannibal's soldiers; there was neither desertion nor mutiny amongst them; even the fickleness of the Gauls seemed spell-bound; they remained steadily in their camp in Apulia, neither going home to their own country, nor over to the enemy. On the contrary, it seems that fresh bands of Gauls must have joined the Carthaginian army after the battle of Thrasymenus, and the retreat of the Roman army from Ariminum. For the Gauls and the Spaniards and the Africans were overpowered by the ascendancy of Hannibal's character; under his guidance they felt themselves invincible; with such a general the yoke of Carthage might seem to the Africans and Spaniards the natural dominion of superior beings; in such a champion the Gauls beheld the appointed instrument of their country's gods to lead them once more to assault the Capitol."--Vol. iii. 131-132.

It was the battle of Cannæ which first shook the fidelity of the Roman allies, and by opening to the Carthaginians the gates of Capua, gave them the command of a city in the south of Italy, second only to Rome herself in wealth and consideration. Of this great and memorable battle, when upwards of eighty thousand Romans fell, and their power was, to all appearance, irrecoverably broken, Arnold give the following interesting account:--

"The skirmishing of the light-armed troops preluded as usual to the battle; the Balearian slingers slung their stones like hail into the ranks of the Roman line, and severely wounded the consul Æmilius himself. Then the Spanish and Gaulish horse charged the Romans front to front, and maintained a standing fight with them, many leaping off their horses and fighting on foot, till the Romans, outnumbered and badly armed, without cuirasses, with light and brittle spears, and with shields made only of ox-hide, were totally routed and driven off the field. Hasdrubal, who commanded the Gauls and Spaniards, followed up his work effectually; he chased the Romans along the river, till he had almost destroyed them, and then, riding off to the right, he came up to aid the Numidians, who, after their manner, had been skirmishing indecisively with the cavalry of the Italian allies. These, on seeing the Gauls and Spaniards advancing, broke away and fled; the Numidians, most effective in pursuing a flying enemy, chased them with unweariable speed, and slaughtered them unsparingly; while Hasdrubal, to complete his signal services on this day, charged fiercely upon the rear of the Roman infantry.

"He found its huge masses already weltering in helpless confusion, crowded upon one another, totally disorganized, and fighting each man as he best could, but struggling on against all hope, by mere indomitable courage. For the Roman columns on the right and left, finding the Gaulish and Spanish foot advancing in a convex line or wedge, pressed forwards to assail what seemed the flanks of the enemy's column; so that, being already drawn up with too narrow a front by their original formation, they now became compressed still more by their own movements, the right and left converging towards the centre, till the whole army became one dense column, which forced its way onwards by the weight of its charge, and drove back the Gauls and Spaniards into the rear of their own line. Meanwhile, its victorious advance had carried it, like the English column at Fontenoy, into the midst of Hannibal's army; it had passed between the African infantry on its right and left, and now, whilst its head was struggling against the Gauls and Spaniards, its long flanks were fiercely assailed by the Africans, who, facing about to the right and left, charged it home, and threw it into utter disorder. In this state, when they were forced together into one unwieldy crowd, and already falling by thousands, whilst the Gauls and Spaniards, now advancing in their turn, were barring further progress in front, and whilst the Africans were tearing their mass to pieces on both flanks, Hasdrubal, with his victorious Gaulish and Spanish horsemen, broke with thundering fury upon their rear. Then followed a butchery such as has no recorded equal, except the slaughter of the Persians in their camp, when the Greeks forced it after the battle of Platæa. Unable to fight or fly, with no quarter asked or given, the Romans and Italians fell before the swords of their enemies, till, when the sun set upon the field, there were left, out of that vast multitude, no more than three thousand men alive and unwounded, and these fled in straggling parties, under cover of the darkness, and found a refuge in the neighbouring towns. The consul Æmilius, the proconsul Cn. Servilius, the late master of the horse M. Minucius, two quæstors, twenty-one military tribunes, eighty senators, and eighty thousand men, lay dead on the field of battle. The consul Varro, with seventy horsemen, had escaped from the rout of the allied cavalry on the right. The loss of the victors was only six thousand men."--ARNOLD, iii. 140-143.

The dreadful battle of Cannæ bears a close resemblance in many important particulars to two of the most important which have been fought in modern times--those of Agincourt and Aspern. The close agglomeration of legionary soldiers in the Roman centre, the tempest of stones which fell on their ranks from the slings of the Balearic marksmen, and the laying bare of the huge unwieldy mass by the defeat of the cavalry on their flanks was precisely the counterpart of what occurred in the army of Philippe of Valois in the first of these memorable fields, when the French men-at-arms, thirty-two deep, were thrown into confusion by the incessant discharges of the English archers, their flanks laid open by the repulse of the vehement charge of their horse by Henry V., and their dense columns slaughtered where they stood, unable alike to fight or to fly, by the general advance of the English billmen. Still closer, perhaps, is the resemblance to the defeat of the French centre under Lannes, which penetrated in a solid column into the centre of the Austrian army at Aspern. Its weight, and the gallantry of the leading files, brought the huge mass even to the reserves of the Archduke; but that gallant prince at length stopped their advance by six regiments of Hungarian grenadiers; the German artillery and musketry tore their flanks by an incessant discharge on either side; and at length the formidable column was forced back like an immense wild beast bleeding at every pore, but still combating and unsubdued, to the banks of the Danube. The repulse of the formidable English column, fourteen thousand strong, which defeated in succession every regiment in the French army except the last reserve of two regiments of guards at Fontenoy, and the still more momentous defeat of the last attack of the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, also bear a striking and interesting resemblance to the rout of the Roman centre after it had penetrated the Carthaginian line at the battle of Cannæ. In truth, the attack in column, formidable beyond measure if not met by valour and combated with skill, is exposed to the most serious dangers if the line in its front is strong and resolute enough to withstand the impulse, till its flanks are overlapped and enveloped by a cross fire from the enemies' lines, converging inwards, as Colborne and Maitland did at Waterloo on the flank of the Old Guard; and thence it is that the French attack in column, so often victorious over the other troops in Europe, has never succeeded against the close and destructive fire of the English infantry; guided by the admirable dispositions with which Wellington first repelled that formidable onset.

Arnold, whose account of Hannibal's campaigns in Italy is by much the best which has been given in modern times to the world, and more scientific and discriminating than either of the immortal narratives of the ancient historians, has clearly brought out two important truths from their examination. The first is, that it was Hannibal's superiority in cavalry, and, above all, the incomparable skill and hardihood of his Numidian horse, which gave him what erelong proved an undisputed superiority in the field; the second, that it was the strength of the towns in the Roman alliance in the south of Italy, and the want of siege artillery on the side of the Carthaginian general, which proved their salvation. So undisputed did the superiority of the invading army become, that, after the battle of Cannæ, it was a fixed principle with the Roman generals, during the thirteen subsequent campaigns that ensued in Italy, never on any occasion, or with any superority of force whatever, to hazard a general battle. Such was their terror of the African horse, that the sight of a few Numidian uniforms in the fields was sufficient to make a whole consular army stand to its arms. So paralysed was the strength of Rome by the slaughter of Cannæ, that Capua soon after revolted and became the headquarters of Hannibal's army; and, out of the thirty Roman colonies, no less than twelve sent in answer to the requisitions of the consuls, that they had not a man or a penny more to send, and that Rome must depend on its own resources. Never, not even when the disasters of Thrasymene and Cannæ were first heard, was such consternation apparent in Rome, as when that mournful resolution was communicated in the Forum.

In truth, such was the prostration of the strength of Rome by these terrible defeats, that the republic was gone but for the jealousy of the Carthaginian government, which hindered them from sending any efficient succours to Hannibal, and the unconquerable spirit of the Roman aristocracy, which rose with every disaster which ensued, and led them to make efforts in behalf of their country which appear almost superhuman, and never have been equalled by any subsequent people on earth. Republican as he is in his ideas, Arnold, with his usual candour as to facts, admits, in the strongest manner, those prodigious efforts made by the patricians of Rome on this memorable occasion; and that the issue of the contest, and with it the fate of the civilized world, depended on their exertions. Out of 270,000 men, of whom the citizens of Rome consisted before the war, no less than seventy thousand were in arms in its fourth year. No such proportion, has ever since been heard of in the world. One in a hundred of the whole population is the utmost which experience has shown a state is capable of bearing, for any length of time, in her regular army. "As Hannibal," says he, "utterly eclipses Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit, and wisdom, and power of Rome. The senate, which voted its thanks to its political enemy Varro, 'because he had not despaired of the commonwealth,' and which disdained either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused to send their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than the conqueror of Zama. Never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered; his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations, and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can, in one generation, effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama, should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead; and consider how the isolated Phoenician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilization of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organized empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe."[30]

Such was Hannibal; a man capable by his single capacity of arresting and all but overturning a nation, destined by Providence for such mighty achievements, such lasting services to the human race. His combat with Rome was not that of a general with a general, of an army with an army; it was like the subsequent contest between Napoleon and England, the contest of a man with a nation; and in both cases, the nation, after being reduced to the most grievous straits, proved victorious over the man. But Hannibal was not supported as the French emperor was during the great part of his splendid career; no nation with forty millions of souls laid its youth at his feet; no obsequious senate voted him two millions of men in fifteen years; he did not march with the military strength of the half of Europe at his back. Alone, unaided, unbefriended, with the Roman legions in front, and the jealous Carthaginian senate in rear, without succour, reinforcements, or assistance from home, he maintained the contest for fifteen years in Italy, against the might, the energy, and the patriotism of Rome. Such was the terror inspired by his name and exploits, that it rendered even the fierce plebeians of Rome, usually so jealous of patrician interference with their rights, obsequious even in the comitia to their commands. "Go back," said Fabius, when the first centuries had returned consuls of their own choice, whom he knew to be unfit for the command, "and bid them recollect that the consuls must head the armies, and that Hannibal is in Italy." The people succumbed, the votes were taken anew, and the consuls whom he desired were returned.

After the battle of Cannæ had rendered hopeless any further contest in the field, the war in Italy degenerated into a mere succession of attempts to gain possession of fortified towns. Hannibal's total want of siege artillery left him no resource for this but stratagem or internal assistance, and in gaining both his great capacity was eminently conspicuous. Capua, Beneventum, Tarentum, and a great many others, were successively wrested or won from the Romans; and it at one period seemed exceedingly doubtful whether, in this war of posts and stratagems, the Carthaginian would not prevail over them, as he had done in the field. This war, and from the influence of the same necessity in both cases, much resembled the wars of the League and Henry IV. in France; and the military conduct of Hannibal bore alternately a striking resemblance to the skill and resources of the chivalrous king of Navarre, and the bold daring of the emperor Napoleon. The gallant irruption, in particular, of the Carthaginian general, by which he relieved Capua when closely besieged by the Roman forces, bears, as Arnold has observed, the most remarkable resemblance to the similar march of Napoleon from Silesia to relieve Dresden, when beset by the Allied armies under the command of Schwartzenberg in 1813. Nor did the admirable skill of the consul Nero--who took advantage of his interior line of communication, and brought a decisive superiority of force from the frontiers of Apulia to bear on the army which Hamilcar had led across the Pyrenees and the Alps, to aid his brother in the south of Italy, and thus decide the war in Italy--bear a less striking analogy to Napoleon's cross marches from Rivoli to the neighbourhood of Mantua in 1796, to the able movement of the Archduke Charles on the Bavarian plains to the banks of the Maine, which proved the salvation of Germany in 1796, or to the gallant irruption of Napoleon, first into the midst of Blucher's scattered columns on the plains of Champagne, and then against the heads of Schwartzenberg's weighty columns at the bridge of Montereau in 1814, during his immortal campaign in France.

Eight years have now elapsed since we had the gratification of reviewing, on its publication, the first volume of Arnold's Rome; and we then foretold the celebrity which that admirable writer was qualified to attain.[31] The publication since that period of two additional volumes has amply verified that prediction; and augmented the bitterness of the regret which, in common with all his countrymen, we felt at his untimely death. It is clear that he was qualified beyond any modern writer who has yet undertaken the glorious task, to write a history of the Rise and Progress of the Roman Republic. What a work would eight volumes such as that before us on Hannibal have formed, in conjunction with Gibbon's immortal Decline and Fall! His ardent love of truth, his warm aspiration after the happiness of the human race, his profound and yet liberal religious feeling, as much gave him the spirit requisite for such an undertaking, as his extensive scholarship, his graphic power, his geographical eye, and brilliant talents for description, fitted him for carrying it into execution. It is one of the most melancholy events of our times, which has reft one of the brightest jewels from the literary crown of England, that such a man should have been cut off at the zenith of his power, and the opening of his fame. Arnold was a liberal writer; but what then? We love and respect an honest opponent. He was candid, ingenuous, and truth-loving; and if a historian is such, it matters not what his political opinions are, for he cannot avoid stating facts that support the conservative side. His errors, as we deem them, in politics, arose from the usual causes which mislead men on human affairs, generosity of heart and inexperience of mankind. He could not conceive, with an imagination warmed by the heroes of antiquity, what a race of selfish pigmies the generality of men really are. No man of such an elevated cast can do so, till he is painfully taught it by experience. Arnold died of a disease of the heart, which physicians have named by the expressive words "_angina pectoris_." They were right: it was anxiety of the heart which brought him to an untimely grave. He died of disappointed hope, of chilled religious aspirations, of mortified political expectations of social felicity. Who can estimate the influence, on so sensitive and enthusiastic a disposition, of the heart-rending anguish which his correspondence proves he felt at the failure of his long-cherished hopes and visions of bliss in the Reform Bill, and all the long catalogue of political and social evils, now apparent to all, it has brought in its train?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: _History of Rome._ By THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D. London: 1843. Vol. 3.]

[Footnote 21: Hannibal was born in the year 247 before Christ, or 2092 before this time.]

[Footnote 22: _Virtus_ from _vir_--_exercitus_ from _exerceo_.]

[Footnote 23: Arnold, iii. 89.]

[Footnote 24: _Ibid._ iii. 486, note.]

[Footnote 25: Livy, xxi. 33.]

[Footnote 26: Polybius, iii. 52.]

[Footnote 27: _Ibid._ iii. 54.]

[Footnote 28: "The way on every side was utterly impassable, through an accident of a peculiar kind, which is peculiar to the Alps. The snows of the former years _having remained_ unmelted upon the mountains, were now covered over by that which had fallen in the present autumn, and when the soldiers feet went through the latter they fell, and slid down with great violence."--POLYBIUS, iii. 54. This shows the place was within the circle of perpetual snow; whereas that on the Little St Bernard is much below it, and far beneath any avalanches.]

[Footnote 29: Polybius, iii. 54.]

[Footnote 30: Arnold, iii. 64, 65]

[Footnote 31: See Arnold's Rome, Blackwood's Magazine, July 1837.]

STANZAS WRITTEN AFTER THE FUNERAL OF ADMIRAL SIR DAVID MILNE, G.C.B.

BY DELTA.

Another, yet another! year by year, As time progresses with resistless sweep, Sever'd from life, the patriots disappear, Who bore St George's standards o'er the deep;--

Heroic men, whose decks were Britain's trust, When banded Europe scowl'd around in gloom; Nor least, though latest Thou, whose honour'd dust Our steps this day live follow'd to the tomb.

Yet, gallant Milne, what more could'st thou desire, Replete in fame, in years, and honours, save To wrap thy sea-cloak round thee, and expire, Where thou had'st lived in glory, on the wave?

From boyhood to thy death-day, 'mid the scenes Where love is garner'd, or the brave have striven, With scarce a breathing-time that intervenes, Thy life was to our country's service given.

A British sailor! 'twas thy proud delight Up glory's rugged pathway to aspire; Ready in council, resolute in fight, And Spartan coolness temper'd Roman fire!

Yes; sixty years have pass'd, since, in thy prime, Plunging from off the shatter'd Blanche, o'erboard Amid the moonlight waves, twas thine to climb La Pique's torn side, and take the Frenchman's sword.

And scarcely less remote that midnight dread, Or venturous less that daring, when La Seine Dismay'd, dismasted, cumber'd with her dead, Struck to the ship she fled--and fought in vain.

And veterans now are all, who, young in heart, Burn'd as they heard, how o'er the watery way, Compell'd to fight, yet eager to depart, The Vengeance battled through the livelong day--

Battled with thee, who, steadfast, on her track, Not to be shaken off, untiring bent; And how awhile the fire from each grew slack, The shatter'd masts to splice, and riggings rent,--

And how, at dawn, the conflict was renew'd, Muzzle to muzzle, almost hand to hand, Till useless on the wave, and carnage-strew'd, The foe lay wreck'd on St Domingo's strand,--

And how huzza'd his brave triumphant crew! And how the hero burn'd within his eye, When Milne beheld upon the staff, where flew The Tricolor, the flag of Britain fly!!

And yet once more thy country calls!--beneath The towers and demi-lune of dark Algiers The Impregnable is anchor'd, in the teeth Of bomb-proof batteries, frowning, tiers on tiers.

Another day of triumph for the right,-- Of laurels fresh for Exmouth and for thee,-- When Afric's Demon, palsied at the sight Of Europe's Angel, bade the slave go free!

But when away War's fiery storms had burn'd, And Peace re-gladden'd Earth with skies of blue, Thy sword into the pruning-hook was turn'd, And Cæsar into Cincinnatus grew.

The poor's protector, the unbiass'd judge, 'Twas thine with warm unwearied zeal to lend Time to each duty's call, without a grudge; The Christian, and the Patriot, and the Friend.

Farewell! 'tis dust to dust within the grave; But while one heart beats high to Scotland's fame, Best of the good, and bravest of the brave, The name of Milne shall be an honour'd name.

STANZAS TO THE MEMORY OF THOMAS HOOD.

BY B. SIMMONS.

I. Take back into thy bosom, Earth, This joyous, May-eyed morrow, The gentlest child that ever Mirth Gave to be rear'd by Sorrow. 'Tis hard--while rays half green, half gold, Through vernal bowers are burning, And streams their diamond-mirrors hold To Summer's face returning-- To say, We're thankful that His sleep Shall never more be lighter, In whose sweet-tongued companionship Stream, bower, and beam grew brighter!

II. But all the more intensely true His soul gave out each feature Of elemental Love--each hue And grace of golden Nature, The deeper still beneath it all Lurk'd the keen jags of Anguish; The more the laurels clasp'd his brow, Their poison made it languish. Seem'd it that like the Nightingale Of his own mournful singing[32], The tenderer would his song prevail While most the thorn was stinging.

III. So never to the Desert-worn Did fount bring freshness deeper, Than that his placid rest this morn Has brought the shrouded sleeper. That rest may lap his weary head Where charnels choke the city, Or where, mid woodlands, by his bed The wren shall wake its ditty: But near or far, while evening's star Is dear to hearts regretting, Around that spot admiring Thought Shall hover unforgetting.

IV. And if _this_ sentient, seething world Is, after all ideal, Or in the Immaterial furl'd Alone resides the Real, FREED ONE! there's wail for thee this hour Through thy loved Elves' dominions[33]; Hush'd is each tiny trumpet-flower, And droopeth Ariel's pinions; Even Puck, dejected, leaves his swing[34], To plan, with fond endeavour, What pretty buds and dews shall keep Thy pillow bright for ever.

V. And higher, if less happy, tribes-- The race of earthly Childhood, Shall miss thy Whims of frolic wit, That in the summer wild-wood, Or by the Christmas hearth, were hail'd And hoarded as a treasure Of undecaying merriment And ever-changing pleasure. Things from thy lavish humour flung, Profuse as scents are flying This kindling morn, when blooms are born As fast as blooms are dying.

VI. Sublimer Art own'd thy control, The minstrel's mightiest magic, With sadness to subdue the soul, Or thrill it with the Tragic. How, listening Aram's fearful dream, We see beneath the willow, That dreadful THING,[35] or watch him steal, Guilt-lighted, to his pillow.[36] Now with thee roaming ancient groves, We watch the woodman felling The funeral Elm, while through its boughs The ghostly wind comes knelling.[37]

VII. Dead Worshipper of Dian's face, In solitary places Shalt thou no more steal, as of yore, To meet her white embraces?[38] Is there no purple in the rose Henceforward to thy senses? For thee has dawn, and daylight's close Lost their sweet influences? No!--by the mental might untamed Thou took'st to Death's dark portal, The joy of the wide universe Is now to thee immortal!

VIII. How fierce contrasts the city's roar With thy new-conquer'd Quiet! This stunning hell of wheels that pour With princes to their riot,-- Loud clash the crowds--the very clouds With thunder-noise are shaken, While pale, and mute, and cold, afar Thou liest, men-forsaken. Hot Life reeks on, nor recks that One --The playful, human-hearted-- Who lent its clay less earthiness Is just from earth departed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: In his beautiful _Ode to Melancholy;_ originally published in Blackwood's Magazine.]

[Footnote 33: See his _Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, a poem perfectly unrivalled for the intimate sense of nature, tender fancy, and pathetic playfulness displayed in it.]

[Footnote 34:

"Pity it was to hear the Elfins' wail Rise up in concert from their mingled dread, Pity it was to see them all so pale Gaze on the grass as for a dying bed. But Puck was seated on a spider's thread That hung between two branches of a brier, And 'gan to swing and gambol, heels o'er head, Like any Southwark tumbler on a wire, For him no present grief could long inspire."

_Plea of the Midsummer Fairies._]

[Footnote 35: Witness the terror of Aram _after_ his victim lies dead before him--(we quote from memory.)

"Nothing but lifeless flesh and bone That could not do me ill! And yet I fear'd him all the more For lying there so still; _There was a manhood in his look_ _That murder could not kill._"

_Dream of Eugene Aram._]

[Footnote 36:

"For Guilt was my grim chamberlain Who lighted me to bed, And drew my midnight curtains round With fingers bloody red."

_Dream of Eugene Aram._]

[Footnote 37: See his impressive poem on _The Elm-Tree_. It appeared, a couple of years back, in _The New Monthly Magazine_.]

[Footnote 38:

"Before I lived to sigh, Thou wert in Avon, and a thousand rills, Beautiful Orb! and so, _whene'er I lie_ _Trodden_, thou wilt be gazing from thy hills. Blest be thy loving light, where'er it spills, And blessed be thy face, O Mother Mild!"

_Ode to the Moon, published likewise in Blackwood_, 1829.]

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

NO. V.

DRYDEN ON CHAUCER.--_Concluded._

Dryden's poetical power appears most of all, perhaps, in his translations; and his translation of the most vulgar renown is that which unites his name to that of the great Roman epopeist; but it is not his greatest achievement. The tales modernized and paraphrased from Chaucer, and those filled up into poetical telling from Boccacio, as they are the works of Dryden's which the most fasten themselves with interest upon a mind open to poetry and free from preconceived literary opinion, so do they seem to us to be, after all, those which a versed critic must distinguish as stamped, beyond the others, with the skilled ease, the flow as of original composition, the sustained spirit, and force, and fervour--in short, by the mastery, and by the keen zest of Writing. They are the works of his more than matured mind--of his waning life; and they show a rare instance of a talent so steadfastly and perseveringly self-improved, as that, in life's seventh decennium, the growth of Art overweighed the detriment of Time. But, in good truth, no detriment of time is here perceptible; youthful fire and accomplished skill have the air of being met in these remarkable pieces. Chaucer, in his last and greatest labour, the _Canterbury Tales_, first effectually creating his own style, and his translator, Dryden, at about the same years, excelling himself to infuse renovated life into the _Canterbury Tales_--are brought singularly together.

The age of Chaucer was widely and variously different from that of Dryden. Knowledge, taste, art, had advanced with strides between the two dates; and the bleak and stormy English political atmosphere of the fourteenth century had changed, notwithstanding the commotion of the later civil war, into a far milder and more settled element when the seventeenth drew towards close. Genius, likewise, in the two poets, was distinguished by marked differences. Strength, simplicity, earnestness, human affection, characterize Chaucer. Dryden has plenty of strength, too, but it shows itself differently. The strength of Chaucer is called out by the requisition of the subject, and is measured to the call. Dryden bounds and exults in his nervous vigour, like a strong steed broke loose. Exuberant power and rejoicing freedom mark Dryden versifying--a smooth flow, a prompt fertility, a prodigal splendour of words and images. Old Chaucer, therefore, having passed through the hands of Dryden, is no longer old Chaucer--no longer Chaucer. But the well-chosen, and well-disposed, and well-told tale, full of masculine sense, lively with humour, made present with painting--for all this Chaucer brings to Dryden--becomes, by nothing more than the disantiquating and the different hand, a new poem.

Place the two side by side, and whilst you feel that a total change has been effected, you shall not always easily assign the secret of the change wrought. There then comes into view, it must be owned, something like an unpractised awkwardness in the gait of the great elder bard, which you less willingly believe, or to which you shut your eyes, when you have him by himself to yourself. The step of Dryden is rapid, and has perfect decision. He knows, with every spring he takes, where he shall alight. Now Chaucer, you would often say, is retarded by looking where he shall next set down his foot. The old poetry details the whole series of thinking. The modern supposes more. That is the consequence of practice. Writer and reader are in better intelligence. A hint goes further--that which is known to be meant needs not be explicitly said. Style, as the art advances, gains in dispatch. There is better keeping, too, in some respects. The dignity of the style--the purpose of the Beautiful--is more considerately maintained. And perhaps one would be justified in saying, that if the earnestness of the heart, which was in the old time the virtue of virtues, is less--the glow of the fancy, the tone of inspiration, is proportionally more. And if any where the thought is made to give way to the straits of the verse, the modern art more artfully hides the commission.

In our preceding paper, in which we spoke at large of the genius of Chaucer, we gave some very noble extracts from Dryden's version of the Knight's Tale. But we did not then venture to quote any long passages from the original, unassured how they might look on our page to the eyes of Young Britain. Having good reason to know that Young Britain desires some veritable Chaucer from the hands of Maga, we shall now indulge her with some specimens; and as we have been given to understand that Dryden's versions of the same passages will be acceptable for comparison, they shall be now produced, while the wishes of Young Britain shall be further gratified with an occasional running commentary from our popular pen on both poets. We shall confine ourselves to the Knight's Tale, with which all who love us are by this time familiar.

Let us lead off with one or two short specimens, and be not frightened, Fair-eyes, with the seemingly strange, mayhap obsolete-looking, words of the ancient bard. Con them over a few times, and they will turn into letters of light.

CHAUCER.

Thus passeth yere by yere, and day by day, Till it felle onès in a morwe of May, That Emelie, that fayrer was to sene Than is the lilie upon the stalkè grene, And fressher than the May with flourès newe (For with the rosè colour strof hire hewe; I n'ot which was the finer of hem two) Er it was day, as she was wont to do, She was arisen, and all redy dight, For May wol have no slogardie a-night. The seson priketh every gentil herte, And maketh him out of his slepe to sterte, And sayth 'arise, and do thin observance.'

This maketh Emelie have remembrance To don honour to May, and for to rise. Yclothed was she fresshe for to devise. Hire yelwe here was broided in a tresse, Behind hire back, a yerdè long I guess. And in the garden at the sonne uprist She walketh up and down where as hire list. She gathereth flourès, partie white and red, To make a sotel gerlond for hire hed, And as an angel hevenlich she sang, &c.

DRYDEN.

Thus year by year they pass, and day by day, Till once--'twas on the morn of cheerful May-- The young Emilia, fairer to be seen Than the fair lily on the flowery green, More fresh than May herself in blossoms new, For with the rosy colour strove her hue, Waked, as her custom was, before the day, To do the observance due to sprightly May; For sprightly May commands our youth to keep The vigils of her night, and breaks their sluggard sleep; Each gentle breast with kindly warmth she moves, Inspires new flames, revives extinguish'd loves.

In this remembrance, Emily, ere day, Arose, and dress'd herself in rich array; Fresh as the month, and as the morning fair, Adown her shoulders fell her length of hair; A ribband did the braided tresses bind, The rest was loose, and wanton'd in the wind: Aurora had but newly chased the night, And purpled o'er the sky with blushing light, When to the garden-walk she took her way, To sport and trip along in cool of day, And offer maiden vows in honour of the May.

At every turn she made a little stand, And thrust among the thorns her lily hand To draw the rose; and every rose she drew, She shook the stalk, and brush'd away the dew; Then party-colour'd flowers of white and red She wove, to make a garland to her head. This done, she sung and caroll'd out so clear, That men and angels might rejoice to hear. Even wondering Philomel forgot to sing, And learn'd from her to welcome in the spring.

What can you wish more innocently beautiful than Chaucer's--what more graceful than Dryden's Emelie? And now look at Arcite--how he, too, does his observance of the May.

CHAUCER.

The besy lark, the messenger of day, Saleweth in hire song the morwè gray; And firy Phoebus riseth up so bright That all the orient laugheth of the sight, And with his stremès drieth in the greves The silver dropès hanging on the leves, And Arcite that is in the court real With Theseus the squier principal, Is risen, and loketh on the mery day. And for to don his observance to May, Remembring on the point of his desire He on his courser, sterting as the fire, Is ridden to the feldès him to play, Out of the court, were it a mile or tway. And to the grove of which that I you told, By aventure his way he 'gan to hold, To maken him a gerlond of the greves, Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leves, And loud he song agen the sonnè shene.

O May, with all thy flourès and thy grene, Right welcome be thou fairè freshè May, I hope that I some grene here getten may.

DRYDEN.

The morning lark, the messenger of day, Saluted, in her song, the morning gray; And soon the sun arose with beams so bright, That all the horizon laugh'd to see the joyous sight. He, with his tepid rays, the rose renews, And licks the drooping leaves, and dries the dews; When Arcite left his bed, resolved to pay Observance to the month of merry May: Forth, on his fiery steed, betimes he rode, That scarcely prints the turf on which he trode:

At ease he seem'd, and prancing o'er the plains, Turn'd only to the grove his horse's reins, The grove I named before, and lighting there A woodbine garland sought to crown his hair; Then turn'd his face against the rising day, And raised his voice to welcome in the May:-- For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear, If not the first, the fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats, with venom'd teeth, thy tendrils bite. As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek my brows to bind.

In Chaucer, Arcite's address to the "mery May" is but of three plain lines, and they suffice; in Dryden, of ten ornate, and they suffice too--"alike, but oh! how different!" The plain three are more in character, for Arcite was thinking of Emelie all the while--but the ornate ten are in season now, for summer has come at last, and recite them to yourself and Amaryllis in the shade.

But now for a loftier strain. Palamon and Arcite are about to fight for Emelie--and lo and behold their auxiliar kings!

Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon Licurge himself, the gretè king of Trace: Blake was his berd, and manly was his face. The cercles of his eyen in his head They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red, And like a griffon loked he about, With kemped herès on his browès stout; His limmès gret, his brawnès hard and stronge, His shouldres brode, his armès round and longe. And as the guisè was in his countree, Full high upon a char of gold stood he, With fourè whitè bollès in the trais. Instead of cote-armure on his harnais, With naylès yelwe, and bright as any gold, He had a berès-skin, cole-blake for old. His longè here was kempt behind his bak, As any ravenes fether it shone for blake. A wreth of gold arm-gret, of hugè weight, Upon his hed sate ful of stonès bright, Of finè rubins and of diamants. About his char ther wenten white alauns Twenty and mo, as great as any stere, To hunten at the leon or the dere, And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound, Colered with gold, and torettes filed round. A hundred lordès had he in his route, Armed full wel with hertès sterne and stoute.

With Arcite, in stories as men find, The gret Emetrius, the King of Inde, Upon a stedè bay, trapped in stele, Covered with cloth of gold diapered well, Came riding like the god of armès, Mars. His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars, Couched with perlès, white, and round, and grete. His sadel was of brent gold new ybete: A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging, Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling. His crispè here like ringès was yronne, And that was yelwe, and glittered as the sonne. His nose was high, his eyen bright eitrin, His lippès round, his colour was sanguin, A fewè fraknes in his face yspreint, Betwixen yelwe and blake somdel ymeint, And as a leon he his loking caste. Of five-and-twenty yere his age I caste. His berd was wel begonnen for to spring; His vois was as a trompè thondering. Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene A gerlond fresshe, and lusty for to sene. Upon his hond he bare for his deduit An egle tame, as any lily whit. An hundred lordès had he with him there All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere, Full richèly in allè manere thinges. For trusteth wel, that erlès, dukès, kinges, Were gathered in this noble compagnie, For love, and for encrease of chevalrie. About this king ther ran on every part Full many a tame leon and leopart.

What a plenitude of brilliant and powerful description! Every verse, every half verse, adds a characterizing circumstance, a vivifying image. And what an integrity and self-completeness has the daring and large conception of either martial king! And how distinguishably the two stand apart from each other! But above all, what a sudden and rich addition to our stock of heroic poetical portraitures! Here is no imitation. Neither Lycurge nor Emetrius is any where in poetry but here. Not in the _Iliad_-not in the _Æneid_. You cannot compose either of them from the heroes of antiquity. Each is original--new--self-subsisting. The monarch of Thrace is invested with more of uncouth and savage terror. He is bigger, broader. Might for destroying is in his bulk of bone and muscle. Bulls draw him, and he looks taurine. A bear-skin mantles him; and you would think him of ursine consanguinity. The huge lump of gold upon his raven-black head, and the monster hounds, bigger than the dog-kind can be imagined to produce, that gambol about his chariot, all betoken the grosser character of power--the power that is in size--material. The impression of the portentous is made without going avowedly out of the real. His looking is resembled to that of a griffin, because in that monster imagined at or beyond the verge of nature, the ferocity of a devouring, destroying creature can be conceived as more wild, and grim, and fearful than in nature's known offspring, in all of whom some kindlier sparkles from the heart of the great mother, some beneficently-implanted instincts are thought of as tempering and qualifying the pure animal fierceness and rage.

The opposed King of Inde has also of the prodigious, within the limits of the apparently natural. He is also a tremendous champion; but he has more fire, and less of mere thewes, in the furnishing of his warlike sufficiency. There is more of mind and fancy about him. His fair complexion at once places him in a more gracious category of death-doers. Compare to the car drawn by four white bulls, the gallant bay charger barded with steel, and caparisoned with cloth of gold. Compare to that yellow-nailed, swart bear-skin, the coat-armour made with cloth of Tars, the mantelet thick-sown with rubies; for the locks like the raven's plumage, the curls like Apollo's tresses. He is in the dazzling prime of youth. Black Lycurge, without question, has more than twice his years. The beard that yet springs, joined close to the voice that is like a trumpet, is well found for raising the expression of native power in that thundering voice. The laurel wreath for the ponderous golden diadem--the white eagle on the wrist for the snowy alauns, are all studied to carry through the same opposition. Emetrius is a son of chivalry; Lycurge might be kin or kith, with a difference for the better, of that renowned tyrant Diomedes, who put men's limbs for hay into his manger, and of whom Hercules had, not so long ago, ridded the world. _His_ looking, too, is paralleled away from humanity, but it is by the kingly and generous lion. Observe that the companions of the two kings are described, whether through chance or choice, in terms correspondingly opposite. The Thracian leads a hundred lords, with hearts stern and stout. The Indian's following, earls, dukes, kings, have thronged to him, for the love and increment of chivalry. The lions and leopards, too, that run about him have been tamed. They finish the Indian picture.

How does Dryden acquit himself here? Grandly.

DRYDEN.

With Palamon, above the rest in place, Lycurgus came, the surly king of Thrace; Black was his beard, and manly was his face: The balls of his broad eyes roll'd in his head, And glared bewixt a yellow and a red; He look'd a lion with a gloomy stare, And o'er his eye-brows hung his matted hair; Big-boned, and large of limbs, with sinews strong, Broad-shoulder'd, and his arms were round and long. Four milk-white bulls (the Thracian use of old,) Were yoked to draw his car of burnish'd gold. Upright he stood, and bore aloft his shield, Conspicuous from afar, and overlook'd the field. His surcoat was a bear-skin on his back; His hair hung long behind, and glossy raven-black. His ample forehead bore a coronet With sparkling diamonds, and with rubies set; Ten brace, and more, of greyhounds, snowy fair, And tall as stags, ran loose, and coursed around his chair, A match for pards in flight, in grappling for the bear. With golden muzzles all their mouths were bound, And collars of the same their necks surround. Thus through the field Lycurgus took his way; His hundred knights attend in pomp and proud array.

To match this monarch, with strong Arcite came Emetrius, king of Inde, a mighty name! On a bay courser, goodly to behold, The trappings of his horse emboss'd with barbarous gold. Not Mars bestrode a steed with greater grace; His surcoat o'er his arms was cloth of Thrace, Adorn'd with pearls, all orient, round, and great; His saddle was of gold, with emeralds set; His shoulders large a mantle did attire, With rubies thick, and sparkling as the fire; His amber-coloured locks in ringlets run, With graceful negligence, and shone against the sun. His nose was aquiline, his eyes were blue, Ruddy his lips, and fresh and fair his hue; Some sprinkled freckles on his face were seen, Whose dusk set off the whiteness of the skin. His awful presence did the crowd surprise, Nor durst the rash spectator meet his eyes, Eyes that confess'd him born for kingly sway, So fierce, they flash'd intolerable day. His age in nature's youthful prime appear'd, And just began to bloom his yellow beard. Whene'er he spoke, his voice was heard around, Loud as a trumpet, with a silver sound; A laurel wreath'd his temples, fresh and green, And myrtle sprigs, the marks of love, were mix'd between. Upon his fist he bore, for his delight, An eagle well reclaim'd, and lily white.

His hundred knights attend him to the war, All arm'd for battle, save their heads were bare. Words and devices blazed on every shield, And pleasing was the terror of the field. For kings, and dukes, and barons you might see, Like sparkling stars, though different in degree, All for the increase of arms, and love of chivalry. Before the king tame leopards led the way, And troops of lions innocently play. So Bacchus through the conquer'd Indies rode, And beasts in gambols frisk'd before the honest god.

Dryden, you will have noticed, smooths down, in some places, a little the savagery of the Thracian. He has let go the fell gryphon, borrowing instead the lion's glances of Emetrius. For the more refined poetical invention of the advanced world, the opposition of the two animals for contrasting the two heroes, had possibly something of the burlesque. To Chaucer it was simply energetic. Or Dryden perhaps had not taken up a right view of the gryphon's looking, or he thought that his readers would not. He compensates Emetrius with plainly describing his eyes, in four very animated verses. Lycurge's combed eye-brows are a little mitigated, as is his ferocious bear-skin; and the ring of gold, as thick as a man's arm, has become merely a well-jewelled coronet. The spirit of the figure is, notwithstanding, caught and given. Dryden intends and conveys the impression purposed and effected by Chaucer.

If the black and sullen portrait loses a little grimness under the rich and harmonious pencil of Dryden, the needful contradistinction of the two royal auxiliars is maintained by heightening the favour of the more pleasing one. Throughout, Dryden with pains insists upon the more attractive features which we have claimed for the King of Inde. Grace is twice attributed to his appearance. He has gained blue eyes. His complexion is carefully and delicately handled, as may be especially seen in the management of the freckles. The _blooming_ of his yellow beard, the thundering of the trumpet changed into a silvery sound, the myrtle sprigs mixed amongst the warlike laurel--all unequivocally display the gracious intentions of Dryden towards Emetrius--all aid in rendering effective the opposition which Chaucer has deliberately represented betwixt the two kings. Why the surly Thracian should be rather allied to the knight who serves Venus, and the more gallant Emetrius to the fierce Arcite, the favourite of the War-god, is left for the meditation of readers in all time to come.

The two opposed pictures are perhaps as highly finished as any part of the version. The words fall into their own places, painting their objects. The verse marches with freedom, fervour, and power. Translation has then reached its highest perfection when the suspicion of an original vanishes. The translator makes the matter his own, and writes as if from his own unassisted conception. The allusion to Bacchus is Dryden's own happy addition.

Now read with us--perhaps for the first time--the famous recital of the death of Arcite.

CHAUCER.

Nought may the woful spirit in myn herte Declare o point of all my sorwès smerte To you, my lady, that I lovè most; But I bequethe the service of my gost To you aboven every creature, Sin that my lif ne may no longer dure. Alas the wo! alas the peinès stronge That I for you have suffered, and so longe! Alas the deth! Alas min Emilie! Alas departing of our compagnie! Alas min hertès quene! alas my wif! My hertès ladie, ender of my lif! What is this world? what axen men to have? Now with his love, now in his coldè grave Alone withouten any compagnie. Farewel my swete, farewel min Emilie, And softè take me in your armès twey, For love of God, and herkeneth what I sey.

I have here with my cosin Palamon Had strif and rancour many a day agon For love of you, and for my jealousie. And Jupiter so wis my soulè gie, To speken of a servant proprely, With allè circumstancè trewèly, That is to sayn, trouth, honour, and knighthede, Wisdom, humblesse, estat, and high kinrede, Fredom, and all that longeth to that art, So Jupiter have of my soulè part, As in this world right now ne know I non So worthy to be loved as Palamon, That serveth you, and wol don all his lif. And if that ever ye shal ben a wif, Foryete not Palamon, the gentil man.

And with that word his speech faillè began. For from his feet up to his brest was come The cold of death, which had him overnome. And yet moreover in his armès two, The vital strength is lost, and all ago. Only the intellect, withouten more, That dwelled in his hertè sike and sore, Gan faillen, whan the hertè feltè deth; Dusked his eyen two, and failled his breth. But on his ladie yet cast he his eye; His lastè word was: Mercy, Emilie! His spirit changed hous, and wentè ther, As I came never I cannot tellen wher. Therefore I stent, I am no divinistre; Of soulès find I not in this registre. Ne me lust not th' opinions to telle Of hem, though that they writen wher they dwelle. Arcite is cold, ther Mars his soulè gie. Now wol I speken forth of Emilie.

Shright Emilie, and houleth Palamon, And Theseus his sister toke anon Swouning, and bare hire from the corps away. What helpeth it to tarien forth the day, To tellen how she wep both even and morwe? For in swiche cas wimmen haven swiche sorwe, Whan that hir housbondes ben fro hem ago, That for the morè part they sorwen so, Or ellès fallen in swiche maladie, That attè lastè certainly they die.

Infinite ben the sorwes and the teres Of oldè folk, and folk of tendre years In all the toun for deth of this Theban: For him, ther wepeth bothè child and man: So gret a weping was there non certain, When Hector was ybrought, all fresh yslain To Troy: alas! the pitee that was there, Cratching of chekès, rending eke of here. Why woldest thou be ded? the women crie, And haddest gold enough, and Emilie.

The death of Arcite is one of the scenes for which the admirers of Chaucer feel themselves entitled to claim, that it shall be judged in comparison with analogous passages of the poets that stand highest in the renown of natural and pathetic delineation. The dying words of the hero are as _proper_ as if either great classical master of epic propriety--the Chian or the Mantuan--had left them to us. They are thoroughly sad, thoroughly loving, and supremely magnanimous. They have a perfect simplicity of purpose. They take the last leave of his Emelie; and they find for her, if ever she shall choose to put off her approaching estate of unwedded widowhood, a fit husband. They have answerable simplicity of sentiment and of language. He is unable to utter any particle of the pain which he feels in quitting her; but since the service which living he pays her, draws to an end, he pledges to her in the world whither he is going, the constant love-fealty of his disembodied spirit. He recalls to her, with a word only, the long love-torments he has endured for her, exchanged, in the hour when they should have been crowned with possession, for the pains of death. He heaps endearing names upon her. He glances at the vanity of human wishes imaged in himself, and he bids her farewell. That is his first heart-offering towards herself. Can a death-severed heart's elocution be imitated more aptly, more touchingly? He then turns to praising his rival. The jealousy, which had so long been the madness of both, filling the two kindred, brotherly, once-affectionate bosoms with hate, has, in his, melted away with life, thence melting away; and Arcite, with his last intelligible breath, describes Palamon briefly, point by point, as he knew him when he best loved him. He does not implore Emelie to remain for his sake single. He does not pretend, if she shall marry, to govern her choice; but he simply requests her, if the season shall ever arrive of such a choice, that she will not "forget Palamon." But the death-frost creeps on--his eyes darken--and the suspiration which finally wafts the soul from the body, beseeches the favour of her, only to earn whose favour he lived, and with earning whose favour he dies. Her name leaves his lips last. Could Shakspeare have helped Chaucer? The whole speech is admirably direct and short. We shall presently have to deal with one from the same poem, which wants that virtue.

The clamorous outbreak that follows, first of the private, and, supervening upon that, of the public grief, if not altogether couched in Homeric phraseology or numbers, has an air, however, of the Homeric painting. But, indeed, neither is the language deficient in fanciful significancy, nor the measure in good old melody.

DRYDEN.

No language can express the smallest part Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart, For you, whom best I love and value most: But to your service I bequeath my ghost; Which, from this mortal body when untied, Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side; Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend, But wait officious, and your steps attend. How I have loved--excuse my faltering tongue! My spirit's feeble and my pains are strong: This I may say I only grieve to die, Because I lose my charming Emily. To die when heaven had put you in my power! Fate could not choose a more malicious hour. What greater curse could envious fortune give, Than just to die when I began to live? Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave, Now warm in love, now withering in the grave! Never, O never more to see the sun! Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone! This fate is common; but I lose my breath Near bliss, and yet not bless'd, before my death. Farewell! but take me dying in your arms, 'Tis all I can enjoy of all your charms: This hand I cannot but in death resign; Ah, could I live! but while I live 'tis mine. I feel my end approach, and thus embraced, Am pleased to die; but hear me speak my last. Ah, my sweet foe! for you, and you alone, I broke my faith with injured Palamon: But love the sense of right and wrong confounds; Strong love and proud ambition have no bounds. And much I doubt, should Heaven my life prolong, I should return to justify my wrong; For, while my former flames remain within, Repentance is but want of power to sin. With mortal hatred I pursued his life, Nor he, nor you, were guilty of the strife; Nor I, but as I loved; yet all combined, Your beauty, and my impotence of mind; And his concurrent flame that blew my fire; For still our kindred souls had one desire. He had a moment's right, in point of time; Had I seen first, then his had been the crime. Fate made it mine, and justified his right; Nor holds this earth a more deserving knight, For virtue, valour, and for noble blood, Truth, honour, all that is comprised in good; So help me Heaven, in all the world is none So worthy to be loved as Palamon. He loves you, too, with such a holy fire, As will not, cannot, but with life expire; Our vow'd affections both have often tried, Nor any love but yours could ours divide. Then, by my love's inviolable band, By my long-suffering, and my short command, If e'er you plight your vows when I am gone, Have pity on the faithful Palamon.

This was his last; for Death came on amain, And exercised below his iron reign. Then upward to the seat of life he goes; Sense fled before him, what he touch'd he froze: Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw, Though less and less of Emily he saw; So, speechless for a little space he lay; Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away. But whither went his soul, let such relate Who search the secrets of the future state: Divines can say but what themselves believe; Strong proofs they have, but not demonstrative; For, were all plain, then all sides must agree, And faith itself be lost in certainty. To live uprightly, then, is sure the best; To save ourselves, and not to damn the rest. The soul of Arcite went where heathens go, Who better live than we, though less they know.

In Palamon a manly grief appears; Silent he wept, ashamed to show his tears. Emilia shriek'd but once; and then, oppress'd With sorrow, sunk upon her lover's breast: Till Theseus in his arms convey'd, with care, Far from so sad a sight the swooning fair. 'Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate; Ill bears the sex a youthful lover's fate, When just approaching to the nuptial state: But, like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast, That all at once it falls, and cannot last. The face of things is changed, and Athens now, That laugh'd so late, becomes the scene of woe: Matrons and maids, both sexes, every state, With tears lament the knight's untimely fate. Nor greater grief in falling Troy was seen For Hector's death, but Hector was not then. Old men with dust deform'd their hoary hair; The women beat their breasts, their cheeks they tear: Why wouldst thou go, (with one consent they cry,) When thou hadst gold enough, and Emily?

Dryden, you observe, exhibits various changes. Are they for the better or the worse? In the first place, he introduces a new motive into the conduct of Arcite--remorse of conscience. When fate has declared against him, and he finds that he cannot enjoy the possession of the prize which he has wrongfully won, his eyes open upon his own injustice, and he acknowledges the prior right of Palamon, who first had seen Emilie.

Does this innovation make good an ethical want in the rough and unschooled original? Or does it perplex the old heroic simplicity with a modern and needless refinement? By right of arms, by gift of the king, with her own gentle consent, Emelie was Arcite's. Death unsinews the hand that held her against the world. Let a few winged moments fleet, and she is his no more. He bows, conquered by all-conquering, alone unconquerable necessity. His love, which had victoriously expelled his cousin's from the field of debate, he carries with him to the melancholy Plutonic kingdom, and leaves the field of debate still--Palamon victor, and Emelie free. Really there seems to be something not only simpler in art, but more pathetic, and even morally greater, in the humble submission of the fierce and giant-like spirit to inevitable decree--in the spontaneous return of the pristine fraternal appreciation when death withdraws the disturbing force of rivalry--and in his voluntarily appointing, so far as he ventures to appoint, his brother in arms and his bride to each other's happiness--than in the inventive display of a compunction for which, as the world goes, there appears to be positively no use, and hardly clear room. Loftily viewing the case, a wrong has been intended by Arcite to Palamon, but no wrong done. He has been twice hacked and hewed a little--that is all; and it cannot be said that he has been robbed of her who would not have been his. Indeed, the current of destiny has so run, that the quarrel of the two noble kinsmen has brought, as apparently it alone could bring, the survivor to wedlock with his beloved. We suspect, then, that the attribution of the motive is equally modern with the style of the not ill-contrived witticism which accompanies the first mention of it--

"Conscience, that of all physick works the last, Caused him to send for Emily in haste."

But that which, upon the general comparison of the two speeches, principally strikes us, is the great expansion, by the multiplying of the thoughts to which expression is given, by Dryden. With old Geoffrey, the weight of death seems actually to lie upon the tongue that speaks in few interrupted accents. Dryden's Moribund runs on, quite at his ease, in eloquent disquisition. Another unsatisfactory difference is the disappearing of that distinct, commanding purpose or plan, and the due proportion observed upon in the original. That mere cleaving desire to Emelie, felt through the first half in word after word gushing up from a heart in which life, but not love, ebbs, gets bewildered in the modern version among explications of the befallen unhappiness, and lost in a sort of argumentative lamentation. And do but just look how that "in his coldè grave," the only word, one may say, in the whole allocution which does not expressly appertain to Emelie, and yet half belongs to her by contrast--is extended, in Dryden, as if upon recollection of Claudio's complaint in "Measure for Measure," until, like that complaint, it becomes selfish.

But there is small pleasure in picking out the poetical misses of John Dryden. It was to be foreseen that he would be worsted in this place of the competition; for the pathetic was not his _forte_, and was Chaucer's. So, too, instead of the summary and concise commendation of his happier cousin to the future regard of the bereaved bride, so touching in Chaucer, there comes in, provoked by that unlucky repentance, an expatiating and arguing review of the now extinct quarrel, showing a liberty and vigour of thought that agree ill with the threatening cloud of dissolution, and somewhat overlay and encumber the proper business to which the dying man has now turned himself--made imperative by the occasion--the formal and energetic eulogy on Palamon. The praise, however, is bestowed at last, and handsomely.

Have we, think ye, gentle lovers of Chaucer, rightly understood the possibly somewhat obscure intention of the two verses at the beginning of our extract--

"But I bequethe the service of my gost To you?"

We have accepted "service" in the sense which, agreeably to our erudition, it eminently holds the old love-vocabulary--homage, devotion, LOVE; the pure and entire dedication by the lover of his whole being to his lady. In this meaning, the heart continually _serves_, if there should be no opportunity of rendering any useful offices. You will see that Dryden has taken the word in what strikes us as an inferior sense--namely, available service; but then his verses are exquisite. And why, gentle lovers of Chaucer, why think ye does the expiring Arcite, at that particular juncture of his address, crave of his heart's queen softly to take him in her arms? Is it not that he is then about pouring out into her ear his dying design for her happiness? Received so, the movement has great originality and an infinite beauty. His heart yearns the more towards her as he is on the point of giving utterance to his generous proposal. He will, by that act of love upon her part, and that mutual attitude of love, deepen the solemnity, truth, power, impression of his unexpected request. Will he perchance, too, approach her ear to his voice, that grows weaker and weaker?

The two verses appear by their wording to intimate something like all this.

"And softè take me in your armès twey, For love of God, _and herkeneth what I sey_."

If Chaucer had any such meaning, it vanishes wholly in Dryden's version.

On re-surveying the matter at last, we feel the more that the passing over of Emelie from the dead Arcite to the living Palamon, in Chaucer, is by much more poetical when viewed as the voluntary concession and gift of the now fully heroic Arcite, than as, in Dryden, the recovered right of the fortunate survivor. However, the speech, as Dryden has it, is vigorous, numerous, spirited, eloquent, touched with poetry, and might please you very well, did you not compare it with the singular truth, feeling, fitness of Chaucer's--that unparalleled picture of a manly, sorely-wrung, lovingly-provident spirit upon its bed of untimely death.

The process of dying has been considerately delineated by Chaucer. Death creeps from the feet upwards to the breast--it creeps up and possesses the arms. But the intellect which dwelled in the heart 'gan fail only when the very heart felt death. Then dimness fell upon the eyes, and the breath faltered. One more look--one more word--and the spirit has forsaken its tenement. Dryden generalizes all this particularity--and therein greatly errs. But the last four flowing verses of the death-scene are in his more inspired manner, and must be held good for redeeming a multitude of peccadilloes and some graver transgressions. Read them over again--

"Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw, Though less and less of Emily he saw; So, speechless for a little space he lay; Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away."

When years rolling have in a manner exhausted the tears due to the remembrance of the heroic Arcite, a parliament, held upon matters of public interest, gives occasion to Theseus of requiring the attendance of Palamon from Thebes to Athens. The benign monarch, however, is revolving affairs of nearer and more private concern. The national council is assembled; Palamon is in his place, and Emelie has been called into presence. His majesty puts on a very serious countenance, fixes his eyes, heaves a sigh, and begins unburthening his bosom of its concealed purposes. He "begins from the beginning" in this fashion:--

"When the First Mover established the great chain of love, in which he bound the four elements, the mighty ordering proceeded of high wisdom. The same author, himself inaccessible to alteration, has appointed to all natural things the law of transiency and succession. The kinds endure; the individuals pass away. Nature examples us with decay. Trees, rivers, mighty towns, wax and wane--much more we. All must die--the great and the small: and the wish to live is an impiety. Better it is to fall in the pride of strength and in the splendour of renown, than to droop through long years into the grave; and the friend who survives should rejoice in his friend's happy and honourable departure. Wherefore, then, shall we longer mourn for Arcite?" This is the copious preamble. The conclusion is more briefly dispatched. Emelie must accept the hand of her faithful servant Palamon. He wants no persuasion; and the knot of matrimony happily ties up at last their destinies, wishes, and expectations, which the Tale in its progress has spun.

The royal harangue is long; and marked, doubtless, with a sort of artificial solemnity. However, it has a deliberative stateliness and a certain monarchal tone. _We_ do not now, in the Speeches from the Throne, begin regularly from the Creation--but that is a refinement. There has been eloquence of which Chaucer's deep display of philosophy and high deduction of argument is no ill-conceived representation. There is a grandeur in the earthly king's grounding his counsels in those of the heavenly King; and in his blending his own particular act of exerted kingly sway into the general system of things in the universe. The turn from the somewhat magniloquent dissertation to the parties immediately interested--the gentle disposing, between injunction and persuasion, of Emelie's will, and the frank call upon Palamon to come forward and take possession of his happiness, are natural, princely, and full of dramatic grace. Thus,--

CHAUCER.

Lo the oke that hath so long a norishing Fro the time that it ginneth first to spring, And hath so long a lif, as ye may see, Yet at the lastè wasted is the tree. Considereth eke, how that the hardè stone Under our feet, on which we trede and gon, It wasteth as it lieth by the way; The brodè river some time waxeth dry; The gretè tounès see we wane and wende; Then may ye see that all things hath an end. Of man and woman see we wel also, That nedès in on of the termès two, That is to sayn, in youth or ellès age, He mote be ded, the king as shall a page; Som on his bed, some on the depè see, Som in the largè field, as ye may see; Ther helpeth nought, all goth that ilkè wey; Than may I say that allè things mote dey. What maketh this but Jupiter the king? The which is prince, and cause of allè thing, Converting allè unto his propre will, From which it is derived, soth to telle. And herè againes no creature on live Of no degree availeth for to strive. Then is it wisdom, as it thinketh me, To maken virtue of necessite, And take it wel, that we may not eschewe, And namèly that to us all is dewe. And who so grutcheth ought, he doth folie, And rebel is to him that all may gie. And certainly a man hath most honour To dien in his excellence and flour, Whan he is siker of his goodè name. Than hath he don his friend, ne him, no shame; And glader ought his friend been of his deth Whan with honour is yelden up his breath, Than whan his name appalled is for age; For all foryetten is his vassalagè Than is it best, as for a worthy fame, To dien when a man is best of name. The contrary of all this is wilfulnesse. Why grutchen we? Why have we heavinesse, That good Arcite, of chivalry the flour, Departed is, with dutee and honour, Out of this foulè prison of this lif? Why grutchen here his cosin and his wif Of his welfare, that loven him so wel? Can he hem thank? Nay, God wot, never a del, That both his soulè, and eke himself offend, And yet they mow hir lustres not amend.

What may I conclude of this longè serie, But after sorwe I rede us to be merie, And thanken Jupiter of all his grace, And er that we departen from this place, I redè that we make of sorwes two O parfit joyè lasting evermo; And loketh now wher most sorwe is herein, Ther wol I firste amenden and begin.

Sister (quod he) this is my full assent, With all the avis here of my parlement, That gentil Palamon, your owen knight, That serveth you with will, and herte and might, And ever hath done, sin ye first him knew, That ye shall of your grace upon him vew, And taken him for husbond and for lord: Lene me your hand, for this is oure accord.

Let see now of your womanly pitee. He is a kingè's brother's sone pardee, And though he were a pourè bachelere, Sin he hath served you so many a yere, And had for you so gret adversitie, It mostè ben considered, leveth me. For gentil mercy oweth to passen right.

Then sayd he thus to Palamon the knight: I trow ther nedeth little sermoning To maken you assenten to this thing. Cometh ner, and take your lady by the hond.

Betwixen hem was maked anon the bond, That highte matrimoine or mariage, By all the conseil of the baronage. And thus with allè blisse and melodie Hath Palamon ywedded Emilie. And God, that all this widè world hath wrought, Send him his love, that hath it dere ybought. For now is Palamon in allè wele, Living in blisse, in richisse, and in hele, And Emelie him loveth so tendrely, And he hire serveth all so gentilly, That never was ther no word hem betwene Of jalousie, ne of non other tene.

Thus endeth Palamon and Emilie And God save all this fayrè compagnie.

The whole oration is rendered by Dryden with zealous diligence in bringing out the sense into further effect, and with a magnificent sweep of composition. If there is in the fine original any thing felt as a little too stiffly formal, this impression is wholly obliterated or lost in the streaming poetry of the translator. Dryden may not, on his own score, have been much of a philosopher; but he handles a philosophical thought in verse with a dexterity that is entirely his own. The sharpness and swiftness of intellectual power concurring in him, join so much ease with so much brevity, that the poetical vein flows on unhindered, even when involved with metaphysical notions and with scholastic recollections. The comparison of the following noble strain with the original now quoted, decisively and successfully shows the character of an embellishing transformation, which we have all along attributed to Dryden's treatment of Chaucer. The full thought of the original is often but as the seed of thought to the version, or at least the ungrown plant of the one throws out the luxuriance and majesty of leaves, blossoms, and branches in the other. The growth and decay of the oak in the two, and still more of the human being, are marked instances. Dryden does not himself acknowledge the bold license which he has used in regenerating; he does himself less than justice. The worth of his work is not the giving to modern England her ancient poet, without the trouble of acquiring his language, or of learning to sympathize with his manner. It would almost seem as if that were an enterprise which there is no accomplishing. Rightly to speak, it was not Dryden's. He really undertook, from a great old poem lying before him, to write a great modern poem, which he has done; and in the new Knight's Tale, we see Dryden, the great poet--we do not see Chaucer, the greater poet. But we see in it presumptive proof that the old poem worked from was great and interesting; and we must be lazy and unprofitable students if we do not, from the proud and splendid modernization, derive a yearning and a craving towards the unknown simple antique. Unknown to us, in our first studies, as we read upward from our own day into the past glories of our vernacular literature; but which, when, with gradually mounting courage, endeavour, and acquirement, we have made our way up so far, we find

"Worthy to have not remain'd so long unknown."

So, Dryden has done honour and rendered service to his mighty predecessor--truer honour and better service--not by superseding, but by guiding and impelling towards the knowledge of the old Knight's Tale.

DRYDEN.

The monarch oak, the patriarch of the trees, Shoots rising up, and spreads by slow degrees; Three centuries he grows, and three he stays, Supreme in state, and in three more decays: So wears the paving pebble in the street, And towns and towers their fatal periods meet: So rivers, rapid once, now naked lie, Forsaken of their springs and leave their channels dry: So man, at first a drop, dilates with heat; Then form'd the little heart begins to beat; Secret he feeds, unknowing in the cell; At length, for hatching ripe, he breaks the shell, And struggles into breath, and cries for aid; Then helpless in his mother's lap is laid. He creeps, he walks, and, issuing into man, Grudges their life, from whence his own began; Retchless of laws, affects to rule alone, Anxious to reign, and restless on the throne; First vegetive, then feels, and reasons last; Rich of three souls, and lives all three to waste. Some thus, but thousands more, in flower of age, For few arrive to run the latter stage. Sunk in the first, in battle some are slain, And others whelm'd beneath the stormy main. What makes all this but Jupiter the king, At whose command we perish, and we spring? Then 'tis our best, since thus ordain'd to die, To make a virtue of necessity; Take what he gives, since to rebel is vain; The bad grows better, which we well sustain; And could we choose the time, and choose aright, 'Tis best to die, our honour at the height. When we have done our ancestors no shame, But served our friends, and well secured our fame, Then should we wish our happy life to close, And leave no more for fortune to dispose. So should we make our death a glad relief From future shame, from sickness, and from grief; Enjoying, while we live, the present hour, And dying in our excellence and flower. Then round our death-bed every friend should run, And joyous of our conquest early won; While the malicious world, with envious tears, Should grudge our happy end, and wish it theirs. Since then our Arcite is with honour dead, Why should we mourn that he so soon is freed, Or call untimely what the gods decreed? With grief as just, a friend may be deplored, From a foul prison to free air restored, Ought he to thank his kinsman or his wife, Could tears recal him into wretched life? Their sorrow hurts themselves; on him is lost; And worse than both, offends his happy ghost. What then remains, but after past annoy, To take the good vicissitude of joy; To thank the gracious gods for what they give, Possess our souls, and while we live, to live? Ordain we then two sorrows to combine, And in one point the extremes of grief to join; That thence resulting joy may be renew'd, As jarring notes in harmony conclude. Then I propose, that Palamon shall be In marriage join'd with beauteous Emily; For which already I have gain'd the assent Of my free people in full parliament. Long love to her has borne the faithful knight, And well deserved, had fortune done him right; 'Tis time to mend her fault, since Emily, By Arcite's death, from former vows is free.-- If you, fair sister, ratify the accord, And take him for your husband and your lord, 'Tis no dishonour to confer your grace On one descended from a royal race; And were he less, yet years of service past, From grateful souls, exact reward at last. Pity is heaven's and your's; nor can she find A throne so soft as in a woman's mind--

He said: she blush'd; and, as o'erawed by might, Seem'd to give Theseus what she gave the knight. Then, turning to the Theban, thus he said:-- Small arguments are needful to persuade Your temper to comply with my command: And, speaking thus, he gave Emilia's hand. Smiled Venus to behold her own true knight Obtain the conquest, though he lost the fight; And bless'd, with nuptial bliss, the sweet laborious night. Eros and Anteros, on either side, One fired the bridegroom, and one warm'd the bride; And long-attending Hymen, from above, Shower'd on the bed the whole Idalian grove. All of a tenor was their after-life, No day discolour'd with domestic strife; No jealousy, but mutual truth believed Secure repose, and kindness undeceived. Thus Heaven, beyond the compass of his thought, Sent him the blessing he so dearly bought.

So may the Queen of Love long duty bless, And all true lovers find the same success.

The time is come in which a curious and instructive chapter in English criticism--a long one too, possibly--might be written on the Versification of Chaucer, and upon the history of opinions respecting it. Tyrwhitt laid the basis, in his edition of the _Canterbury Tales_--the only work of the ancestral poet that can yet fairly be said to have found an editor--by a text, of which the admirable diligence, fidelity, skill, and sound discretion, wrung energetic and unqualified praise from the illaudatory pen of Ritson. But the Grammar of Chaucer has yet to be fully drawn out. The profound labours of the continental scholars, late or living, on the language that was immediate mother to our own, the Anglo-Saxon, makes that which was in Tyrwhitt's day a thing impossible to be done, now almost an easy adventure. Accomplished, it would at once considerably rectify even Tyrwhitt's text. The Rules of the Verse, which are many, and evince a systematic and cautious framing, no less than a sensitive musical ear in the patriarch, would follow of themselves. In the mean time, a few observations, for which the materials lie at hand, are called for in this place, by the collision of the two great names, Chaucer and Dryden. Dryden says--

"The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonious to us, but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was _auribus istius temporis accommodata_. They who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries:--there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense (which is a rule in every thing but matters of faith and revelation) must convince the reader that equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these last appeared."

Strange to say, by the changing pronunciation of the language, there grew with time upon the minds of men a doubt, whether or no the Father of our Poetry _wrote verse_! The tone of Dryden, in the above passage, when animadverting upon Speght, shows that that editor, in standing up for ten syllables, put forth an unusual opinion; whilst the poet, in alleging the deficiency, manifestly agrees with the opinion of the antique versification that had become current in the world. _He_ taxes Chaucer, it will be observed, with going wrong on the side of deficiency, not of excess; nor does he blame the interchange even of deficiency and excess, as if the syllables were often nine and often eleven. His words leave no room for misconception of their meaning. They are as definite as language can supply. "Thousands of the verses are lame for want of half a foot, or of a whole one." In this sense, then, he intends: "That equality of numbers, in every verse which we call heroic, was either not known, or not always practised in Chaucer's age."

But as Dryden has been severely taken to task by some insignificant writers of our day for the above passage, let us, not for his vindication, but excuse, take a moment's glance at Speght's edition (1602,) which, in Dryden's day, was in high esteem, and had been at first published on the recommendation of Speght's "assured and ever-loving friend," the illustrious Francis Beaumout. In his preface, Speght says--"and his verses, although in divers places they may seem to us to stand of unequal measures, yet a skilful reader that can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse here and there fal out a sillable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of Adam Scrivener, that I may speak as Chaucer doth, than to any unconning or oversight in the Author. For how fearful he was to have his works miswritten, or his verse mismeasured, may appear in the end of his fifth book of Troilus and Cresside, where he writeth thus:--

'And for there is so great diversitie, In English and in writing of our tongue, So pray I God, that none miswrite thee, Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tongue'" &c.

How Speght made up the measure to his own satisfaction does not appear; nor what those methods of pronunciation may have been which Dryden tried, and which left some thousand verses deficient by half a foot, or a foot.

But believing Speght's text to be accurate, Dryden could not but believe in the artlessness and irregularity of Chaucer's versification. Speght's text is most inaccurate, and altogether undeserving of his own very high opinion, thus expressed in the Dedication to Sir Robert Cecil--"Now, therefore, that both by old written copies, and by Master William Thynn's praiseworthy labours, I have reformed the whole worke, whereby Chaucer for the most part is restored to his owne antiquitie." In _his_ Chaucer, Dryden met every where such lines as these--

"When that April with his shours sote."

"And small foules maken melodie That slepen all night with open eie."

"It befell that season on a day."

"Ready to wend in my pilgrimage."

"That toward Canterbury would ride-- The chambres and stables weren wide."

"To tell you all the condition."

"Full worthy was he in his lords warre."

"Aboven all nations in Pruce."

"For to tell you of his array."

We suspect that there was all along a lingering tradition amongst the learned about the virtue of the Mute E's. Vestiges of the use occur in the poets of Elizabeth's time. Wallis, the celebrated grammarian, says, that "with our early poets it is found that that (final) E did or did not constitute an additional syllable, just as the stricture of the verse required it." Urry, whose edition of Chaucer was published, not long after his death, in 1721, knows for vocal the termination in ES, of genitive singular and of the plural--also the past tense and participle in ED, which, however, can hardly be thought much of, as it is a power over one mute E that we retain in use to this day. The final E, too, he marks for a syllable where he finds one wanted, but evidently without any grammatical reason. Urry was an unfortunate editor. Truly does Tyrwhitt say of him, that "his design of restoring the metre of Chaucer by a collation of MSS., was as laudable as his execution of it has certainly been unsuccessful." The natural causes of this ill success are thus severely and distinctly stated, "The strange license in which he appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text of Chaucer in his edition by far the worst that was ever published." One is not surprised when Tyrwhitt, the model of gentlemanly and scholarly editor, a very pattern of temperate, equitable, and merciful criticism, cannot refrain from closing his preface with this extinguishing censure of his wilful predecessor--"Mr Urry's edition should never be opened by any one for the purpose of reading Chaucer."

Morell, a scholar, published in 1737 the Prologue and the Knight's Tale--and he, too, marked at need the Mute E's in his text, but by what rule Tyrwhitt does not intimate, nor do we now distinctly recollect. He courageously holds that the numbers of Chaucer "are always musical, whether they want or exceed the complement." But that cannot well be; for except in very peculiar cases--such, for example, as the happy line, "Gingling in the whistling wind full clear"--if the MS. have it so--a line of nine syllables only must be a _lame_ one--and their frequent recurrence would be the destruction of all music.

Tyrwhitt urges the reason of pronouncing the final E; namely, that it remains to us from a language in which it formed a syllable. So from the Norman French we have _fac_-E, _host_-E, _chang_-E, &c. This is basing the matter on its true ground. It must, however, be acknowledged with some sorrow, that this well-schooled, clear-minded, and most laborious editor did not feel himself bound, for the behoof of his author, to master, as far as the philology of the day might have enabled him, the Saxon tongue itself, and learn from the fountain what might, and what could not be--the language of Chaucer. Imperfect as the study of the Anglo-Saxon then was, he would thus have possessed a needful mastery over the manuscripts, upon which, as it was, he wholly depended; and he would have been saved from some unguarded philological assertions and whimsical speculations. Wanting this guidance, the work, so well executed as it is, is a monument only the more to be wondered at of his indefatigable industry and extraordinary good sense.

Upon any where opening Chaucer, of the many seemingly defective verses, (Dryden in saying thousands may have exaggerated the number even in Speght,) by far the greater part will be found recoverable to measure by that restitution of the Mute E which we since, too exclusively perhaps, connect with the name of Tyrwhitt. The confidence felt in his text, however--the only one upon which a metrical scholar dares work--in some sort justifies the honour. Meanwhile, this metrical theory, from his time, has been generally received; and the renown of the founder of our poetry settled on all the wider and firmer basis, when he appears as the earliest skilled artificer of the verse itself--the ten-syllabled or now national verse, of Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope.

One starts, therefore, to find a name of such distinction as the late Laureate's formally opposed to Tyrwhitt, and committed to the opinion which may seem to have been Dryden's, that the verse of Chaucer is "rhythmical, not metrical." This hardly self-explicating distinction of Dr Geo. Fred. Nott's, Southey in his Life of Cowper has explained in set terms--a verse for which the number of beats or accents is ruled is rhythmical--for example, the verse of Coleridge's _Christabel_. In that beautiful poem, the verse is fixed at four beats or accents, but is free syllabled, having six, seven, ten, twelve, or fourteen. Southey cannot believe that the prudent and practical Chaucer would have placed his verse, intended for general reception, in the jeopardy of a reader's discretion for determining when the verse required the sounding, and when the silence, of a vowel, by its nature free to be sounded or left silent, as exigency might require. But he misapprehends the proposed remedy; and the discretion which he supposes is not given. In the two languages from which ours is immediately derived, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman-French, there are found many final syllables, entirely dropped in our pronunciation, and many of them in our writing, but which in the time of Chaucer were all still written, and all with the same vowel E. The metrical hypothesis, to which Tyrwhitt's labours gave a lustre, much heightened by the Anglo-Saxon studies abroad and at home of the present century, bears--first, that in the language of Chaucer's day these syllables were still audible; and secondly, that Chaucer consequently employed them in his verse, like any other syllables, with the due metrical value:--herein not, as the Laureate thought, overruling, but conforming himself to the use of his mother tongue. To this more than plausible view, which, if the late studies that have been taken in the intelligence of Alfred's speech had been made in Tyrwhitt's day, would not have waited till now for its full establishment, no objection has yet been raised that seems to deserve the slightest attention. The Laureate's vanish upon the mere statement. For Dr Nott, on whom he triumphantly builds, and whose proofs he seems to adopt--he is the weakest and most wrongheaded of all possible prosers; and, what is more, his opinions, if they deserve the name, differ _toto coelo_ from Southey's. For we have seen that Southey's ground of distinction is the number of syllables unrestrained or varying, as in _Christabel_. But Nott says repeatedly, that the number of syllables is fixed, namely, to ten; and of the five beats he says not a word.

To extricate Nott's argument (in his edition of Surrey) from entanglement would not repay a tithe of the trouble; suffice it to say that he holds that as English verse, before Chaucer, was rhythmical, it is not likely that Chaucer all at once made it metrical. We answer first--the question is of a fact offering its own evidence, not of an anterior likelihood. Secondly--Tyrwhitt's theory that Chaucer, from his intimacy with the more advanced French and Italian poetry, adopted their measure, and stamped art upon a poetry till then rude and helpless, has high natural probability, and agrees to the vehement early extollings of Chaucer as sovereign master of art. Thirdly--we desire a better proof and explanation of the difference between rhythmical and metrical verse than Dr Nott has given, who has placed some extracts from these anterior poets at the side of some from Chaucer, which prove just nothing. Fourthly, there _was_ metrical verse in England before Chaucer, eight-syllabled and _fifteen_-syllabled--if no others. Mr Hallam (_Introduction to the Literature of Europe_) writes with more commendation of Dr Nott's accomplishments than they merit; but in the following excellent passage he shows his usual knowledge of his subject, and his usual judgment.

"It had been supposed to be proved by Tyrwhitt, that Chaucer's lines are to be read metrically, in ten or eleven syllables, like the Italian, and, as I apprehend, the French of his time. For this purpose, it is necessary to presume that many terminations, now mute, were syllabically pronounced; and where verses prove refractory after all our endeavours, Tyrwhitt has no scruple in declaring them corrupt. It may be added, that Gray, before the appearance of Tyrwhitt's essay on the versification of Chaucer, had adopted without hesitation the same hypothesis. But, according to Dr Nott, the verses of Chaucer, and of all his successors down to Surrey, are merely rhythmical, to be read by cadence, and admitting of considerable variety in the number of syllables, though ten may be the more frequent. In the manuscripts of Chaucer, the line is always broken by a cæsura in the middle, which is pointed out by a virgule; and this is preserved in the early editions down to that of 1532. They come near, therefore, to the short Saxon line, differing chiefly by the alternate rhyme, which converts two verses into one. He maintains that a great many lines of Chaucer cannot be read metrically, though harmonious as verses of cadence. This rhythmical measure he proceeds to show in Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, and even Wyatt; and thus concludes, that, it was first abandoned by Surrey, in whom it very rarely occurs. This hypothesis, it should be observed, derives some additional plausibility from a passage in Gascoyne's 'Notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English,' printed in 1575. 'Whosoever do peruse and well consider his (Chaucer's) works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one selfsame number of syllables, yet being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse, and that which hath most syllables in it, will fall (to the ear) correspondent unto that which hath fewest syllables; and likewise that which hath fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such natural sound, as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents.'

"A theory so ingeniously maintained, and with so much induction of examples, has naturally gained a good deal of credit. I cannot, however, by any means concur in the extension given to it. Pages may be read in Chaucer, and still more in Dunbar, where every line is regularly and harmoniously decasyllabic; and though the cæsura may perhaps fall rather more uniformly than it does in modern verse, it would be very easy to find exceptions, which could not acquire a rhythmical cadence by any artifice of the reader. The deviations from the normal type, or decasyllable line, were they more numerous than, after allowance for the license of pronunciation, as well as the probable corruption of the text, they appear to be, would not, I conceive, justify us in concluding that it was disregarded. These aberrant lines are much more common in the dramatic blank verse of the seventeenth century. They are, doubtless, vestiges of the old rhythmical forms; and we may readily allow that English versification had not, in the fifteenth or even sixteenth centuries, the numerical regularity of classical or Italian metre. In the ancient ballads, Scots and English, the substitution of the anapaest for the iambic foot, is of perpetual recurrence, and gives them a remarkable elasticity and animation; but we never fail to recognize a uniformity of measure, which the use of nearly equipollent feet cannot, on the strictest metrical principles, be thought to impair."

Mr. Guest, in his work, of which we hope erelong to give an account, brings to the story of English verse far more extensive research than had hitherto been bestowed upon it; and that special scholarship which was needed--the Anglo-Saxon language, learned in the new continental school of Rask and Grimm. His examination of our subject merges in a general history of the Language, viewed as a metrical element or material; and hence his exposition, which we rapidly collect _seriatim_, is plainly different in respect of both order and fulness from what it would have been, had the illustration of Chaucer been his main purpose. He follows down the gradual Extinction of Syllables; and in this respect, our anciently syllabled, now mute E, takes high place, and falls first under his consideration.

This now silent or vanished Vowel occurred heretofore, with metrical power, in adopted FRENCH Substantives, as--eloquenc-E, maladi-E; and in their plurals, as--maladi-ES. And in Adjectives of the same origin, as--larg-E.

It remained from several parts of the ANGLO-SAXON grammar.--From A, E, U, endings of Anglo-Saxon substantives--as nam-A, nam-E; tim-A, tim-E; mon-A, (the moon,) mon-E; sunn-E, (the sun,) sonn-E; heort-E, (the heart,) hert-E; ear-E, (the ear,) er-E; scol-U, (school,) scol-E; luf-U, lov-E; sceam-U, sham-E; lag-A, law-E; sun-U, (a son,) son-E; wud-U, (a wood,) wod-E.--(To Mr Guest's three vowels, add O:--as bræd-O (breadth) bred-E.)--From the termination THE; as--streng-THE; yow-THE.--From a few adjectives ending in E; as--getrew-E, trew-E; new-E, new-E.--From adverbs, formed by the same vowel from adjectives; as from beorht, (bright,) is made, in Anglo-Saxon, beorht-E, (brightly,) remaining with Chaucer, as bright-E.--Inflexion produces the final E. In substantives, the prevalent singular dative of the mother speech was in E. Chaucer, now and then, seems to present us with a dative; as in the second verse of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, from rot, (root,) rot-E. And Mr Guest thinks that he has found ONE instance of a genitive plural E from A; namely, from the earlier ath, (an oath,) genitive plural, ath-A; with Chaucer--oth, oth-E.

The German family of languages exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity--a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains as the regular plural termination of the adjective to Chaucer. Thus we have, in the more ancient language--eald; plural, eald-E; with Chaucer--old; plural, old-E, &c.

The rule of the extraordinary (or Definite) declension, is thus generally given by Mr Guest for Chaucer. "When the adjective follows the definite article, or the definite pronoun, _this_, _that_, or any one of the possessive pronouns--_his_, _her_, &c.--it takes what is called its definite form."--(Vol. i. p. 32.) From the Anglo-Saxon definite declension (running through three genders, five cases, and two numbers,) remains, to the language that arose after the Conquest, ONE final E. _E.g._ Indefinite--strong; definite, strong-E;--indefinite--high; definite--high-E.

The Verb ends the first person singular, and the three persons plural, of the present tense, and makes imperative and infinitive, in E. The past tense generally ends in DE or EDE; (Mr Guest has forgotten TE;) sometimes in ED.

As for those two principal endings, the genitive singular in ES, which is the Anglo-Saxon termination retained, and the plural in ES, which is the Anglo-Saxon ending obscured--they happen hardly to fall under Mr Guest's particular regard; but it is easily understood that the Anglo-Saxon hlaford, (lord,) gen. sing. hlaford-ES, had, in Chaucer's day, become lord, lord-ES;--and that scur, (shower,) plural scur-AS, of our distant progenitors had bequeathed to his verse--shour, shour-ES.

Legitimate scepticism surely ceases when it thus appears that ignorance alone has hastily understood that this vowel, extant in this or that word, with a quite alien meaning and use, (--_e.g._ for lengthening a foregoing vowel--softening an antecedent consonant,)--or with none, and through the pure casualty of negligence or of error, might at any time be pressed irregularly into metrical service. Assuredly Chaucer never used such blind and wild license of straightening his measure; but an instructed eye sees in the Canterbury Tales--and in all his poetry of which the text is incorrupt--the uniform application of an intricate and thoroughly critical rule, which fills up by scores, by hundreds, or by thousands, the time-wronged verses of "the Great Founder" to true measure and true music.

To sum up in a few words our own views--First, if you take NO account of the mute E, the great majority of Chaucer's verses in the only justifiable text--Tyrwhitt's Canterbury Tales--are in what we commonly call the TEN-syllabled Iambic metre.

Secondly, if you take account of the metrical E, the great majority of them appear, if you choose so to call them, as ELEVEN-syllabled Iambic verses, or as the common heroic measure with a supernumerary terminal syllable.

Thirdly, if you take NO account of the disputed E, a very large number of the verses, but less apparently than the majority, appear as wanting internally one or two syllables.

Fourthly, if you take account of the said troublesome E, almost universally these deficient measures become filled up to the due complement--become decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic, as the case may be.

Fifthly, if you consent to take account of this grammatical metrical E, no inconsiderable number of the verses--ten-syllabled or eleven-syllabled, by technical computation--acquire one or two supernumerary syllables distributed, if one may so speak, _within_ the verse--and to be viewed as enriching the harmony without distorting or extending the measure, after the manner of the _Paradise Lost_.

Finally, (for the present,) whether the verses in general fall under our usual English scheme of the one-syllabled ending, or end, as the Italian for the most part do, dissyllabically, has been disputed by those who agree in the recognition of the metrical E. To wit--shall the final E of Mr Guest's rule, ending the verse, and where it would, consequently, make a hypercatalectic eleventh syllable, still be pronounced--as Tyrwhitt, although not anxiously, contends? If the grammatical rule is imperative within the verse, as much, one would think, must it be so at its termination. That Chaucer admits the doubled ending we see by numerous unequivocal instances from all moods of the verse, mirthful and solemn; these show a versification friendly to the doubled ending; and must go far to remove any scruple of admitting Tyrwhitt's conception of it as generally hendecasyllabic.

Let the position of Chaucer in the history of his art be considered, and it will be seen that those who maintain a systematic art in him have a relief from objections greater than those who should enquire concerning perhaps any other poet. In the formation of his verse, and the lifting up of a rude language, more than Dante himself, a creator! What wonder, then, if he should sometimes make mistakes, and that some inconsistencies remain at last irreducible? If the method undertaken draws the irreducible cases into a narrower and a narrower compass, that sufficiently justifies the theory of the method against all gainsayers.

This copious, and, possibly, tedious grammatical display of this once active metrical element, was forced from us as the only proper answer to the doubt revived in our own day on the versification of Chaucer. We are too prone to believe that our forefathers were as rude as their speech, and their speech as they; but this multitude of grammatical delicacies, retained for centuries after the subjection of the native language by conquest, and systematically applied in the versification of the great old poet, shows a feeling of language, and an authentic stamp of art, that claim the most genial and sympathizing respect of a refined posterity, to their not wholly unrefined, more heroic ancestors.

INDEX TO VOL. LVII.

About a bonnet, 242.

Aden, town of, 206.

Advice to an author, on the novel and the drama, 679.

Æsthetics of dress: --A case of hats, 51 --No. II. about a bonnet, 242 --No. III. the cut of a coat and the good of a gown, 608 --No. IV. minor matters, 731.

Affliction of childhood, the, by the English Opium-Eater, 274.

Agriculture, Practical, 298.

Almaden, the quicksilver mines of, 186.

Anacreon's grave, from Goethe, 175.

Apparition of the Brocken, the, by the English Opium-Eater, 747.

Ariosto, remarks on, 404.

Arnold's history of Rome, vol. iii., review of, 752.

Betham's Etruria Celtica, review of, 474.

Blind girl, to a, 98.

Bonnet, about a, 242.

Book of the Farm, review of, 298.

Borodino, an ode, 30.

Bravo, character of, 601.

Breeze, the, from Goethe, 173.

British critics, North's specimens of, No. I. Dryden, 133 --No. II. Dryden and Pope, 369 --No. III. Dryden, 503 --No. IV. Dryden on Chaucer, 617 --No. V. the same, concluded, 771.

British history during the eighteenth century, 353.

Brothers, the, from Goethe, 176.

Cairo, town of, 210.

Calm at sea, the, from Goethe, 173.

Campagna of Rome, the, 546.

Case of hats, a, 51.

Cattaro, sketches of, 34.

Cavalier's choice, from Goethe, 174.

Cennino Cennini on painting, 717.

Cervantes, remarks on, 8.

Ceylon, sketch of, 204.

Chapman's Homer, remarks on, 381.

Chaucer, Dryden on, 617, 771.

Chosen rock, the, from Goethe, 177.

Coleridge and opium-eating, 117.

Comfort in tears, from Goethe, 170.

Confessions of an English Opium-eater, a sequel to. Introductory notice, 269 --Part I. The affliction of childhood, 274 --Part I. continued, 489. --Part I. concluded, The Palimpsest, 739 --Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, 743 --The apparition of the Brocken, 747 --Finale to Part I., Savannah-la-Mar, 750.

Critics, the British--_see_ British.

Cuba, insurrection in, 605.

Cut of a coat, the, 608.

Dance of death, from Goethe, 167.

Dante, characteristics of, 2, 9.

Death trance, from Goethe, 177.

Delta, stanzas written after the funeral of Sir David Milne, by, 766.

Desert, journey across the, 204.

Draining land, on, 299.

Drama and the novel, the, 679.

Dress, æsthetics of, a case of hats, 51 --No. II. about a bonnet, 242 --No. III. The cut of a coat and the good of a gown, 608.

Dryden as a critic, 133, 369, 503--as a translator, 511--on Chaucer, 617, 771.

Dumas, M., the three guardsmen by, 59.

Egypt, sketches of, 286.

Englishwoman in Egypt, the, 286.

Etruria Celtica, review of, 474.

Etudes des Sciénces Sociales, review of, 529.

Evening, from Goethe, 173.

Exculpation, from Goethe, 179.

Fairest flower, the, from Goethe, 168.

Fasti of Ovid, translation from the, 94.

Forced sale, the, 99 --Chap. II., 103 --Chap. III, 107 --Chap. IV., 111.

France, state of manners, &c., in, before the Revolution, 705.

George III., review of Walpole's memoirs of, 353.

German-American romances --The Viceroy and the Aristocracy, or Mexico in 1812 --Part I., Introduction, 251 --Chap. I., 257--Chap. XI., 262 --Part II., 331 --Chap. XVIII., 333 --Chap. XIX., 340 --Chap. XX., 345 --Chap. XXIII., 349 --Part III., 561 --Chap. XLI., 572 --Chap. XLII., 575.

Gillman's life of Coleridge, strictures on, 117.

Glance at the Peninsula, 595.

Goethe--_see_ Poems.

Good of a gown, the, 608.

Grant to Maynooth, the, 647.

Hannibal, 752.

Hats, a case of, 51.

History, on translating, 507.

Holy family, the, from Goethe, 178.

Homer, on the translation of, 507.

Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo, 1.

Homeward bound, 18.

Hood, Thomas, stanzas to the memory of, by B. Simmons, 768.

Husbandman, the, from Goethe, 175.

Isabel, Queen of Spain, character of 598.

Janus, from the Fasti of Ovid, 94.

J.D. To a Blind Girl, by, 98 --Stanzas by, 314.

Juvenal, remarks on, 516.

King in Thule, the, from Goethe, 166.

Lebrun's Lawsuit, 705.

Leon, General, 606.

Letters of the Dead, by B. Simmons, 114.

Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, by the English Opium-Eater, 743.

Lopez, character of, 601.

Love's Hour-Glass, from Goethe, 176.

Lucretius, remarks on, 517.

Malmesbury's Diary and Correspondence, review of, 315.

Malta, 215.

Marriage unequal, from Goethe, 178.

Marston; or, Memoirs of a Statesman --Part XV., 75 --Part XVI., 461 --Part XVII., 679.

Matanzas, insurrection at, 605.

Maynooth, 647.

Merrifield, Mrs., translation of Cennino Cennini on Painting, by, 717.

Mesmerism, 219.

Mexico in 1812 --Part I., 251 --Part II., 331 --Part III., 561.

Michael Angelo, 1, 15.

Midnight Watch, the --Chap. I., 424 --Chap. II., 431 --Chap. III., 439 --Chap. IV., 444.

Milne, Sir David, stanzas written after the funeral of, by Delta, 766.

Milton, critiques on, 5, 503.

Modern Political Economy, remarks on, 529.

Mohammed Ali, 215.

Montenegro, a ramble in, 33.

Muse's mirror, from Goethe, 179.

My first spec in the Biggleswades, 549.

Narvaez, characte of, 599.

New love, from Goethe, 179.

North's Specimens of the British Critics, No. I., Dryden, 133 --No. II., Dryden and Pope, 369 --No. III., Dryden, 503 --No. IV, Dryden on Chaucer, 617 --the same, concluded, 771.

Novel and the Drama, the, 679.

O'Donnell, governor of Cuba, 605.

Opium-Eater, a sequel to the confessions of the, introductory notice, 269 --Part I. The affliction of childhood, 274 --Part I. continued, 489 --concluded; the Palimpsest, 739 --Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, 743 --the apparition of the Brocken, 747 --Finale to Part I., Savannah-la-Mar, 750.

Overland passage, the, 204.

Ovid's Fasti, translation from, 94.

Painting, Cennino Cennini on, 717.

Park, the, from Goethe, 178.

Parting precepts, by B. Simmons, 114.

Pauperism, increase of, 531.

Peel, E. Borodino, an ode by, 30.

Peninsula, a glance at the, 595.

Perfect bliss, from Goethe, 176.

Philomela, from Goethe, 177.

Phoebus and Hermes, from Goethe, 179.

Ping-Kee's view of the stage, 415.

Poems and ballads of Goethe, No. III. The waterman, 165 --the king in Thule, 166 --the dance of death, 167 --the fairest flower, 168 --sorrow without consolation, 170 --comfort in tears, ib. --to a golden heart, 171 --welcome and departure, 172 --evening, 173 --a calm at sea, ib. --the breeze, ib. --the cavalier's choice, 174 --retribution, 175 --poems after the manner of the antique; the husbandman, ib. --Anacreon's grave, ib. --the brothers, 176 --Love's hourglass, ib. --warning, ib. --solitude, ib. --perfect bliss, ib. --the chosen rock, 177 --the death-trance, ib. --Philomela, ib. --sacred ground, ib. --the park, 178 --the teachers, ib. --marriage unequal, ib. --holy family, ib. --exculpation, 179 --the muses' mirror, ib. --Phoebus and Hermes, ib. --a new love, ib. --the wreaths, 180 --the Swiss Alp, ib.

Poetry: --Borodino, an ode, by E. Peel, 30 --Janus, from the Fasti of Ovid, 94 --to a blind girl, 98 --Vanities in verse, by B. Simmons, 114 --the tower of London, by Thomas Roscoe, 158 --the poems and ballads of Goethe, No. III. 165 --stanzas by J. D., 314 --stanzas written after the funeral of Sir David Milne, by Delta, 766 --stanzas to the memory of Thomas Hood, by B. Simmons, 768.

Poetry, on the translation of, 507.

Political economy, remarks on modern, 529.

Pompeii, 218.

Poole's Englishwoman in Egypt, review of, 286.

Pope, critique on, 369.

Practical agriculture, 298.

Púshkin, the Russian poet, No. I., by Thomas B. Shaw, 657.

Race, the, a Red River recollection, 21.

Ragusa, sketch of, 41.

Ramble in Montenegro, a, 33.

Raphael, characteristics of, 17 --critique on, 411.

Rector's daughter, the Chap. I., 580 --Chap. II., 582 --Chap. III., 585 --Chap. IV., 588 --Chap. V., 590 --Chap. VI., 592 --Chap. VII., 593.

Red River recollections, Chap. I., homeward bound, 18 --Chap. II., the race, 21 --Chap. III., the stag-hunt, 26.

Red Sea, navigation of the, 208.

Retribution, from Goethe, 175.

Revelations of Spain, by an English resident, review of, 595.

Reviews: --Gillman's life of Coleridge, 117 --Widdrington's Spain and the Spaniards, 181 --Griffith's journey across the desert, 204 --Townsend's facts in mesmerism, 219 --Mrs Poole's Englishwoman in Egypt, 286 --Stephens' book of the farm, 298 --Lord Malmesbury's diaries and correspondence, 315 --Walpole's memoirs of the reign of George III., 353 --Vestiges of the natural history of creation, 448 --Betham's Etruria Celtica, 474 --Sismondi's études des sciénces sociales, 529 --Revelations of Spain, by an English resident, 595 --Cennino Cennini on painting, 717 --Arnold's history of Rome, vol. iii., 752.

Revolution, effects of the, 355.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16.

Rome, causes of the decline of, 546.

Roscoe, Thomas, the tower of London, by, Part I., 158 --Part II., 161.

Sacred ground, from Goethe, 177.

Savannah-la-Mar, by the English Opium-Eater, 750.

Scott, Sir Walter, critique on, 8.

Settled at last, or Red River recollections; Chap. I., homeward bound, 18 --Chap. II., the race, 21 --Chap. III., the stag-hunt, 26.

Shaw, Thomas B., sketch of the life of Púshkin, by, 657.

Simmons, B., vanities in verse by --letters of the dead, 114 --parting precepts, 115 --stanzas to the memory of Thomas Hood, by, 768.

Sismondi, 529.

Slavery in the Spanish colonies, 605.

Solitude, from Goethe, 176.

Sorrow without consolation, from Goethe, 170.

Spain as it is, 181 --present condition of, 595.

State, Ping-Kee's view of the, 415.

Stag-hunt, the, a Red-River recollections, 21.

Stanzas to the memory of Sir David Milne, by Delta, 766 --of Thomas Hood, by B. Simmons, 768.

Stephens' book of the farm, review of, 298.

Superfluities of life, the, a tale from Tieck, Chap. I., 194 --Chap. II., 198.

Suspiria de profundis; being a sequel to the confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Introductory notice, 269 --Part I., the affliction of childhood, 274 --Part I. continued, 489 --Part I. concluded, the Palimpsest, 739 --Levana and our Ladies of Sorrow, 743 --the apparition of the Brocken, 747 --Finale to Part I., Savannah-la-Mar, 750.

Swiss Alp, the, from Goethe, 180.

Tasso, critique on, 405.

Teachers, the, from Goethe, 178.

Three guardsmen, the, 59.

Tieck, the superfluities of life by, Chap. I., 194 --Chap. II., 198.

To a blind girl, 98.

To a golden heart, from Goethe, 170.

To Livia, by B. Simmons, 114.

Tower of London, the, by Thomas Roscoe, Part I., 158 --Part II., 161.

Townsend's facts in mesmerism, review of, 219.

Translation, remarks on, 507.

Vanities in verse, by B. Simmons --Letters of the dead, 114 --parting precepts, 115.

Vestiges of the natural history of creation, review of, 448.

Viceroy and the aristocracy, or Mexico in 1812 --Part I., 251 --Part II., 331 --Part III., 561.

Virgil, remarks on Dryden's translation of, 520.

Virgil, Tasso, and Raphael, 401.

Walpole's memoirs of the reign of George III., review of, 353.

Warning, the, from Goethe, 176.

Waterman, the, from Goethe, 165.

Welcome and departure, from Goethe, 170.

Widdrington's Spain and the Spaniards, review of, 181.

Wreaths, the, from Goethe, 180.

* * * * *

_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work._