The Press. — London, England, 1858-01-16 00:00:00

. • 66 THE PRESS, JANUARY 16, 1858 . 3, 'Are lhias cow,. —;th the his 1ing0.... Reda _xu e , '..ets 01 L..- - 41 " :4 01 . 11 b to, --Nw box, tu, scene of the play, where Merope is about to mill her sleeping son, who has come from Arcadia in the guise of a messenger with the !feigned intelligence of her son's death. She acts under the belief that the youthful mes senger is himself the murderer : [htssopE advances towards the skeping Emus, with the axe uplifted. At the same moment ARCAS retiorna. ARCAS ( to the Chorus). Not with him to council did the King Carry his messenger, but left him here. [sees Mr.aops and Xrrrus. 0 Gods ! . . . MEROPZ. Foolish old man, thou spoil'st my blow I What do I see? . . . Therefore no words t KZUOPE. A murderer at death's door. A murderer? . . . XEROPE. And a captive To the dear neat-of-kin of him he morder'd, Stand, and let vengrauee pass ! AlicAs, Hold, 0 Queen, bold I Thou knotest not whom thou etrik'st. . . . . I know his crime. Unhappy one ! thou strik : ;- ---- MEROPE. A most just blow. ARCAS. No, by the Gods, thou slay'st-- xsuom. Stand off! anus. Thy son ! The fleet, desperate hunter, The sout.hful Areas, born of Zeus, His Seeing mother, Transform'd Cellist°, Unwitting fullow'd— And rais'd his spear. Turning, with piteous Distressful longing, Sad, eager eyes, Mutely she regarded Her well-known enemy. Low moans half utter'd What speech refus'd her; Tears courted, tears human, Down those disfigued Once human cheeks. With unutterable foreboding Her eon, heart-stricken, ey'd her. The Gods had pity, made them Stars. Stars now they sparkle In the northern Heaven; The guard Arcturus, The guard-watah'd Bear. So, o'er thee and thy child, Some God, Merope, now, In dangerous hour, stretches his hand. So, like a star, dawns thj son, Radiant with fortune and joy. The play contains other fine passages, espe cially the account of the death of lEpytus and Merope's soliloquy over the supposed mur derer, but still nothing to redeem it, in our opinion, front the radical weakness under which it labours, or to make us cease to regret that Mr. Arnold should expend his great gifts on what we cannot but regard as a crotchet. Ah I . . . . [She lege the are drop, mid foils insensible. How many readers will such scenes as these conduct "to the pure ray of ancient light," as Lord Wellesley expressed himself? It is, how ever, in the choruses that Mr. Arnold displays big best powers. The following is really a wonderful, and, if we may be pardoned the paradox. an original, imitation of the Greek : Fifty Years' Reoolleetions, Literary and Personal. With Observations on Men and Things. By Cyrus Redding. Three Vols. London : Skeet. Mr. Redding is of Cornish extraction, and, having been educated partly by his fath er and partly at a school in the west, set out at the age of twenty for London. Bath was then in its glory ; Hounslow-heath was still place where travellers cocked their pistols and peered anxiously into the darkness ; Pitt was just dead. The old coffee-house system still lingered, not yet superseded by clubs, which to Mr. Redding are " sullen and silent" insti tutions, and objects of natural aversion to one who has " trifled with the cruet," and expe. rienced in their full glory the narrow box, the sanded floor, the alternate " chop" and " steak" and the long pipe, not unaccompanied with discussion of higher themes : TICE CHORUS. I often dined at the Mitre and the Cheshire Cheese ' • Johnson and his friends, I was informed, used to d o t h e same, and I was told I should meet individuals who bad met them there ; this I found to be correct. The company then was more select than in later times...... The evening was the time we thus met, when the day's business was over. Few then, comparatively, lived at a distance from their offices or shops ; if they did, it was mostly in country residences, some way beyond the suburbs of town, to which they repaired on the Satutday, returning on the Monday morning...... The left.hand room on entering the " Cheshire," and the table on the right on entering that room, having the window at the end, was the table oc cupied by Johnson and his friends almost uniformly. This table and the room are now as they were when I first us them, having had the curiosity to visit them recently. They were and are, too, as Johnson and his friends left them in their time. Johnson's seat was always in the window, and Goldsmith sat on his left hand. But these places had their drawbacks : The coffee-houses used to be crowded in the evenineq; the conversation often generaL I believe the air in such places to have been impure ; ventilation was little re. garded. Many young men died early after their initiation into a London atmosphere, who had come from breathing the oxygen of the west of England, and that of the moun tain country of Wales in particular, especially those who had a tendency to consumption, of which I remember several painful instances among my acquaintances and countrymen. I believe a London life to be much more favourable to health now than it was then, nor do I state my belief unreflectingly. Our improved mode of living has increased longevity, for, after all, our climate cannot be materially changed. O Son and Mother, Whom the Gods o'ershadow, In dangerous trial, With certainty of favour I As erst they shadow'd Your race's founders From irretrievable woe : When the seed of Lycaoa Lay fo, lore, lay outcast, Vallisto and her Boy. What deep•grsw'd meadow At the meeting valleys— Where clear-flowing Ladon, Moat beautiful of waters, Receives the river Whose trout are vocal, The Aroanian stream— Without home, without mother, Hid the babe, hid Areas, The nursling of the dells? But the sweet-smelling myrtle, And the pink-flower'd oleander, And the green *gnus-entire, To the West-Wind's murmur, Rustled round his cradle; And Maia rear'd him. Then, a boy, he startled In the snow-fill'd hollows Of hi Cyllene The white mountain-binds ; To a great part of the present generation Mr. Redding is, we believe, only known as the author of the " History of Wines," and as a prolific writer in magazines. But he has been devoted to literature almost all his life, has known many of the celebrities of the earlier part of the present century, and has had great opportunities of observation. Most persons who have lived in the world fifty years have something to tell, if they only know how to tell it and the volumes before us are by no means destitute of interest, though they have failed in many respects to meet our expectations. Mr. Redding does not seem to have been in the habit of keeping a diary, and dates are consequently scarce in his pages. No one would wish a book of remi niscences to be formally arranged, but some trace of method is desirable, if only to avoid puzzling the reader, who cannot be expected to take the trouble of verifying all the events mentioned by reference to more exact autho rities. We are surprised, too, to find that a writer so long accustomed to the pen as Mr. Redding should have paid so little attention to style. There is certainly less to complain of iu the outset of the book, but the manner of expression is everywhere careess—some times unintelligible, and sometimes approaches vulgar pedantry. We meet with such expres • sions as " attempts to reduce the liberty of the "press to nihility"—" the individual to which the " above correspondence alluded "—" my mind " was not levigated " : such spelling as " ana " lize " and " censoriutn " ; and such sen tences as the following—" An incident oc " curred on seeing the sudden death of a lady " in the newspapers to which it may not be " amiss to make allusion" (vol iii. p. 54 " Irving cannot but be happy to have escaped " from the intrigues of State affairs and the " class of those whose polished manners only " add a grace to the unseemliness of conve " nience " (ii. p. 350). The press has been clumsily corrected, and some of the mistakes are due to the printer, whose punctuation is of the very worst, and renders many sentences unintelligible on a first perusal. If these de fects have habitually characterised Mr. Red ding's productions, we can hardly wonder that he has attained no higher rank or greater emolument in his profession. Still, he has something to say, and though we cannot agree with most of his opi nions, the world will doubtless be grateful for the traits he has in some instances added to its conception of well-known characters, and those who take up his volumes will probably skim them to the end. Or surpris'd, in the glens, The basking tortoises, Whose strip'd shell founded In the hand of Hermes The glory of the lyre. But his mother, Callisto, In her hiding-place of the thickets Of the lentisk and ilex, In ber rough form, fearing The hunter on the outlook, Poor changeling! trembled. Or the children, plucking In the thornishok'd gullies Wild gooseberries, scar'd her, The shy mountain•besr. Or the shepherds, on slopes With pale•spik'd lavender And crisp thyme tufted, Came upon her stealing At day-break through the dew. Once, 'mid the gorges, Spray-drizzled, lonely, Unclimb'd by man— O'er whose cliffs the townsmen Of crag-percli'd Nonacris Behold in summer The slender torrent 4 f Styx come dancing, A wind blown thread— By the precipices of Khelmos, The following, though not exactly a literary anecdote, is too good to be omitted : I remember a country friend of mine had his pocket picked of a handkerchief, and was grievously annoyed. He regarded it as a species of reflection upon his own vigilance. Determined to be revenged upon some of the pickpocket tribe, he procured fish-hooks, and had them fastened into the pockets of an old coat with the barbs downwards. He, thus accoutred, sallied forth into the Strand in the dusk of the evening. Amid a crowd at Charing-cross, be felt a hand in his pocket, and giving himself • jerk as he said to get the hooks well into the rogue's flesh, he moved on with his prey closely following. He then quickened his pace, giving every now and then another jerk. In this mode, affecting no. to feel the fish he had hooked, he led the knave clear of the crowd to a bye street. " Now my fine fellow I have you, don't fish in my pockets again." He unbuttoned his coat to slacken the pocket, but in vain did the thief endeavour to extricate himself, the hooks were too deep in the hand, so my acquaintance took out his knife, and whipped off the skirt of the old coat he had used for the trap, and bade the pickpocket walk off to a surgeon, as he thought he had been tolerably well punished. Mr. Redding, a native of Falmouth, and conductor for some years of a Plymouth paper, has much to say on the c►uelties practised in the navy during the war, and corroborates all we have heard of unjast courts-martial, and of captains to serve under whom was almost worse than death. Such matters gave a "public-spirited editor" a fine field for expo sures. Jekyl at that time went the Western Circuit, and there are so few anecdotes extant •to justify his immense social reputation that we are glad to see the following, slender as its wit is : I remember a good.natureti solicitor, who had a large practice at Tavistock, and kept excellent claret, for whom Jekyl was retained. This limb of the law wore an enor mous white cravat at all times. The witty lawyer began : " Gentlemen of the jury, I am counsel in this case for a gentleman well known throughout the county of Devon, Mr. Frank NV—, remarkable in general for wearing I pillow about his neck, but sometimes a bolster." I recol lect another case by which he set a jury in good humour. An apothecary kept a villa near the town where he practised; Jekyl contended he should have been at his business. " Methinks, gentlemen of the jury, I see this modern :Esculaoius retired to his Saline farm, cultivating his plants with his spatula, watering them with his syringe, and reclining under the shade of his Peruvian bark." As we have intimated, Mr. Redding's opi nions on literary matters are hardly those which will find favour at the present day. lie appears to belong to the " classical" school ; thinks Burke overrated ; gives Scott's poetry