The Press. — London, England, 1857-10-17 00:00:00

THt PR.E SS, OCTOBER 17, 1857. gies on Crabbe, Southey, Scott, Byron, Hogg, Burns, Tennyson, and others, ho answers his own interrogatory in the negative, and pro ceeds, in sporting language, to " try back" for a more satisfactory result. The Augustan age is, however, drawn blank also ; and, thrown back on the Elizabethan, our critic can find nobody but Shakespeare to whom the author ship of a " great poem' is justly assignable. This paper contains some fine discriminative criticism, and two especially good passages about Dryden and Pope. But the most re markable judgment is that passed upon the " old English dramatists," the favourites of Sir Walter Scott, and deserving, we cann.it but think, of a more favourable verdict than is here passed upon them—e g. : It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and good taste of the people of England will not submit to be belaboured by editors and critics into un qualified admiration of such enormities. The Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Never more will they move across the stage. Scholars read them, and often with delight, admiration, and wonder; for genius is a strange spirit, and has begotten strange chit• dren on the body of the Tragic Muse. In the closet it is pleasant to peruse the countenances, at once divine, human, and brutal, of the incomprehensible monsters—to scan their forms, powerful though misshapen—to watch their movements, vigorous though distorted—and to hold up one's hands in amazement on hearing them not seldom discourse most excellent music. But we should shudder to see them on the stage enacting the parts of men and women—and call for the manager. All has been done for the least deformed of the tragedies of the Old English Drama that humanity could do, enlightened by the Chris tian religion ; but nature has risen up to vindicate herself against such misrepresentations as they afford, and some times finds it all she can do to stomach Shakespeare. Whether we agree with it or not, the above passage bears evident marks of sincerity. But we think it questionable how far the preference now accorded to vapid farces or bombastic melodramas over the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Massinger, be evidence either of good sense or good feeling. Calendar of State Papers. Domestic Series. James I. 1603-1610. Edited by Mary Anne Everett Green. London : Longmans. TH►s volume, edited by Mrs. Mary Anne Everett Green, the talented authoress of the " Lives of the Princesses of England" and other valuable works, is the second instalment of a series to be published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, with the sanction of her Majesty's Secretary of State fur the Home Department. The object of these pub lications is to afford the public the means of ascertaining the nature and properties of the papers contained in her Majesty's State Paper Office. The object is doubtless a most praise worthy one—but the natural questions which occur to every one are, why has the task been so long deferred? and if these papers are of such great interest to the people of this coun try, why have they been kept in solitary con finement for so many years past? It is difficult to find a satisfactory answer to these questions. The apathy of our cowl cillors respecting these papers—the defective system of management applied to them—and, above all, the want of a building of a size capable of affording protection to the docu ments themselves and accommodation to their readers—will doubtless be found to have more or less bearing upon their solution. For the last two or three years the State Paper Office has been amalgamated with the Public Record Department, and has thereby come under the control and superintendence of the Master of the Rolls, who, by virtue of his office as custos rotulorant, is the supreme head of the Public Record Department. Whether it be a wise thing or not to jumble together our judicial and legal records with our historical, social, and political papers, is a questionable matter ; for our own part, we think it would have been wiser to have kept them distinct and separate. There is no analogy whatever between these several classes of documents. Our " Records" are as distinct from " State Papers," properly so called, as anything can be. They spring from entirely distinct sources. Our " Records," that is to say, our strictly " legal" records, emanate directly and exclusively from the courts of law—common law as well as equity. " The State Papers"—to use the words of Air. Lemon in his preface to his " Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1547-1580," strange eventful history," once brought home at one o'clock in the morning, God knows whence or by whom, and found by the shrieking servant, sent out to listen for him in the moonlight, dead drunk on the gravel at the gate ! The paper on " Cottages" is chiefly remark able for the following vivid portrait of a drunkard : There is no occupation, small or great, insignificant or important, to which he can turn, for any length of time, his hand, his heart, or his head. He cannot angle—for his fingers refuse to tie a not, much more to busk a fly. The glimmer and the glow of the stream would make his brain dizzy— to wet his feet now would, he fears, be death. Yet he thinks that he will go out—during that sunny blink of a showery day—and try the well known pool in which he used to bathe in boyhood, with the long, matted, green trailing waterplants depending on the slippery rocks, and the water ousel gliding from beneath the arch that hides her " procreant cradle," and then sinking like a stone luddeuly in the limpid stream. He sits down on the bank, and fumbling in his pouch for his pocket-book, brings out, instead, a pocket pistol. Turning his fiery face towards the mild, blue, vernal sky, he pours the gur gling brandy down his throat—first one dose, and then * another—till, in an hour, stupified and dazed, he sees not the silvery crimsonatpotted trouts, shooting, and leaping, and tumbling, and plunging in deep and shallow; a day on which, with one of Captain Colley's March- Browns, in an hour we could fill our pannier. Or, if it be autumn or winter, he calls, perhaps, with a voice at once gruff and feeble, an old Ponto, and will take a pluff at the partridges. In former days, down they used to go, right and left, in potato or turnip field, browny brae or stubble —but now his sight is dim and wavering, and his touch trembles on the trigger. The covey whirs off, unharmed in a single feather—and poor Polito, remembering better days, cannot conceal his melancholy, falls in at his master's heel, and will range no more Out, as usual, comes the brandy-bottle—be is still a good shot when his mouth is the mark; and having emptied the fatal flask, he staggers homewards, with the muzzles of his double-barrel fre- quently pointed to his ear, both being on full cock, and his brains not blown out only by a miracle. He tries to read the newspaper—just arrived—but cannot find his spectacles. Then, by way of variety, he attempts a tune on the fiddle; but the bridge is broken, and her side cracked, and the bass.string snapped—and she is restored to her peg among the cobwebs. In comes a red-headed etoitkingless lass, with her carrots in papers, and lays the cloth for dinner—salt beef and greens. lint the Major's stomach ecunnera at the Skye.stot—his eyes roll eagerly for the hot water—and in a couple of hours he is dead drunk in his chair, or stoitering and staggering, in aimless dalliance with the scullion, among the pots and pans of an ever-disorderly and dirty kitchen. Mean people, in shabby sporting velveteen dresses, rise up, as he enters, from the dresser, covered with cans, jugs, and quaichs, and take off their rusty and greasy napless hats to the Major; and, to conclude the day worthily and consistently, he squelches himself down among the reprobate crew, takes his turn at smutty jest and smuttier song, which drive even the jades out of the kitchen—falls back insensible, exposed to gross and indecent practical jokes from the vilest of the un- hanged—and finally is carried to bed on a handbarrow, with hanging head and heels, like a calf across a butcher's cart, and, with glazed eyes and lolling tongue, is tumbled upon the quilt—if ever to awake it is extremely doubtful: bat if awake he do, it is to the same wretched round of brutal degradation—a career, of which the inevitable close is an unfriended deathbed and a pauper's grave. 0 hero! six feet high, and once with a brawn like Hercules—in the prime of life too—well born and well bred—once bearing the king's commission—and on that glorious morn, now forgotten or bitterly remembered, thanked on the field of battle b./ Piston, though he of the fighting division was a hero of few w,:rds—is that a death worthy of a man—a soldier—and a Christian? A dram drinker! Laugh! laugh! Look over—lean over that stile, where a pig lies wallowing in mire—and a voice, faint and feeble, and far off, as if it came from sotne dim and 'emote world within your lost soul, will cry, that of the two beasts, that bristly one, agrunt in sensual sleep, with its snout snoring across the husk-trough, is, as a physical, moral, and intellectual being, superior to you, late Major in his Majesty's regiment of foot, now dram-drinker, drunkard, and dotard, and self-doomed to a disgraceful and disgusting death ere you shall have completed your thirtieth year. What a changed being from that day when you carried the colours, and were found, the bravest of the brave, and the most beautitul of the beautitul, with the glorious tatters wrapped round your body all drenched in blood, your hand grasping the broken sabre, and two grim Frenchmen lying hacked and hewed at your feet ! Your fatherand your mother saw you name in the " Great Lord's" despatch; and it was as much as he could do to keep her from falling on the floor, for "her joy was like a deep alright !" Both are dead how ; and better so, for the sight of that blotched face and those glazed eyes, now and then glittering in fitful frenzy, would have killed them both, nor, after such a spectacle, could their old bones have rested in the grave. The remainder of the article is a very elegant and interesting résumé of " cottages," whether ornee or otherwise, with their inhabitants, and a humorous dissuasive against taking one of these habitations for a summer's residence. "An Hour's Talk about Poetry" is a paper full of masterly criticism written down in an unpretending style. Wilson here reviews the pretensions of the various poets and poetasters of the present day, small and great, in order to find an answer to the question " Has the present age produced a great poem ?" While taking the opportunity of. passing warm eulo- 1017 published last year, and already noticed in our columns—" spring from three great and ori " ging sources—namely, the offices of the " Secretaries of State for the Foreign, Colo. " nial, and the Home Departments ;" and these papers are consequently classified and arranged in three distinct series, as domestic, foreign, and colonial. The " domestic " series is the one now in the course of publication ; and as soon as one series is completed, another will be taken up and dealt with in the same manner. But there is no reason, as far as we can see, for limiting the term " State Papers " to so narrow an issue. Surely those documents emanating from the several other departments of the State—such as the War-office, tho Admi ralty, the Board of Trade, the Board of Con trol, the Audit Office, cunt multis aliis—have as much claim to be styled " State" papers as those which are produced directly from the offices of the Secretaries of State. This nar rowing of the definition of a " State Paper'' must be borne in mind when perusing theso " Calendars." But, whatever our opinion may he as to the limited definition of a " State Paper," we can most unhesitatingly affirm that the " selection" of them in the " Calendar" before us is any thing 'out " limited." On the contrary, there appears to have been no " selection " what. ever. Any paper, no matter what it referred to or what was its purport, has been dignified by the term of, and calendared as, a " State Paper." That we do not write without cause, the following extracts, taken haphazard from Mrs. Green's volume, will clearly demon strate : Page INB.-11105, Jan. 22. Meares&ld. 27.—Mary Ligon to her sister Mrs. Talbot. Thanks for courtesies in reference to her marriage. Remembrances to her father and mother Sherrington. Mrs. Green is undoubtedly correct in calen daring this as a " domestic " document; but it surely can lay no claim to the dignity of a " State " paper. Again : Page 307.-1007, Aug. 13. St. John's, Lichfield. 31.- 1)r. Simon Weston to Salisbury. Understanding that he is about to take a journey into Lancaiahire, invites him to his house at Lichfield. The Earl of Salisbury, son of the famols Lord Burleigh—who, under the name of Sir Robert Cecil, Knt., had for the last seven years of her reign been Secretary of State to Queen Eliza beth—on 13th Aug., 1607, he then holding the same office under James 1., receives an invi tation from Dr. Weston to visit him at Lich field on his way to Lancashire. A " domestic " document of course it is ; but what constitutes it a " State" paper ? Is it merely because it is found amongst the papers of a Secretary of State? But this, to say the least, is trifling with a great question. That an invitation from one gentleman to another to visit him at his house en route to his destination, should be gravely " calendared " as a " State" paper, is simply ridiculous. Clearly, if no discrimi nation be used in the selection of these State papers, a mass of useless rubbish will be handed down to posterity. Who knows but that some literary scavenger, grubbing amongst the documents in the State Paper Office some years hence, may not alight upon a document of this kind?— D.S.-1857, Sep. 20.—Dear Pan, bother the grouse Come to town and look after Vernon.—Yours, &c., PAN. Which little epistle would at any rate have some pretensions to the title of a " State" paper, whilst those we have extracted from Mrs. Green's volume have none whatever. As a proof of how little discrimination has been used in determining what is or what is not a " State " paper, we will in conclusion add the following : Page 456 —l6OB, Sep. 15. 17.—Sir Hen. Nevill to [ Sir Thos. Windebank]. Excuses himself for not return ing home to dine with him, having been carried as far as Cranborne in chase of a deer. Comment on this is superfluous. We must be excused if we fail to see that a refusal to dinner written by one gentleman to another, merely because it is found amongst some State papers—for neither of the above-mentioned gentlemen ever filled the office of Secretary of State—becomes once and for ever a " State " paper itself. We presume, also, from the fact of the name of Sir Thos. Windebank being in brackets, that it is not quite certain whether