The Press. — London, England, 1858-04-24 00:00:00

894 Unless the fish was too sluggish to take the bait, an answer of refutation was forwarded to an appointed address in London, and then in a vigorous reply he would fall upon the unwary disputant, and break his bones. The strenuous attack sometimes provoked a rejoinder more carefully pre. pared, and an animated and protracted debate ensued ; the party cited, having put in his answer, was fairly in court, and he might get oat of it as he could. It cannot be matter for surprise that a person acting systematically on the plan here de scribed should have become an object of an tipathy and suspicion, and his expulsion from the University could have been only a ques tion of time. Mr. Hogg gives a detailed ac count of the expulsion, but that is not new to us; and he also gives a minute sketch of Shelley's father, for whose pained feelings at the disgrace of his son one cannot help feel ing much sympathy, in spite of the ridicule with which the author endeavours to invest him. • Here is the way in which Mr. Hogg intro duces Shelley's father to us : Shelley took me one Sunday to dine with his father, by invitation, at Miller's hotel, over Westminster-bridge. We breakfasted early, and sallied forth, taking, as usual, a long walk. He told me that his father would behave strangely, and that I must be prepared tor him ; and he described his ordinary behaviour on such occasions. I thought the portrait was exaggerated, and I told him so; he assured me that it was not. Shelley had, generally, one volume at least in his pocket, whenever he went out to walk. He produced a little book, and read various passages from it aloud. It was an un favourable and unfair criticism on the Old Testament, some work of Voltaire's if I mistake not, which he had lately picked up on a stall. He found it amusing, and read many pages aloud to me, laughing heartily at the ex- cessive and extravagant ridicule of the Jewish nation, their theocracy, laws, and peculiar usages. We arrived at the appointed hour of five at the hotel, but dinner had been postponed until six. Mr. Graham, whom I had seen before, was there. Mr. Timothy Shelley re ceived me kindly; but he presently began to talk in an odd, unconnected manner; scolding, crying, swearing, and then weeping again : no doubt, he went on strangely. " What do you think of my father ?" Shelley whispered to me. J had my head filled with the book which I had beard read aloud all the morning, and I whispered in answer : " Oh, he is not your father. It is the God of the Jews; the Jehovah you have been reading about!" Shelley was sitting at the moment, u be often used to sit, quite oa the edge of his chair. Not only did he laugh aloud, with a wild, demoniacal burst of laughter, hut he slipped from his seat, and fell on his back at full length on the floor. " What is the matter, Bysshe? Are you ill? are you dead? are you mad ? Why do you laugh?" It was not easy to return a satisfactory answer to his father, or to Mr. Graham, who came to raise him from the ground. The irreverence and coarseness of the two young men need not be commented upon. The work abounds in passages of a similar kind, and many readers will find much to con demn in its style of execution. There are also some passages of poetry from Shelley's pen which have not been printed. We cite the best of them : TO THE MOONBEAM. Moonbeam, leave the shadowy vale, To bathe this burning brow. Moonbeam, why art thou so pale, As thou walkest o'er the dewy dale, Where humble wild flowers grow ? Is it to mimic me? But that can never be ; For thine orb is bright, And the clouds are light, That at intervals shadow the star studied night. Now all is deathly still on earth, Nature's tired frame reposes, And ere the golden morning's birth Its radiant hues discloses, Flies forth its balmy breath. But mine is the midnight of Death, And Nature's morn, To my bosom forlorn, Brings but a gloomier night, implants a deadlier thorn. Wretch! Suppress the glare of madness Struggling in thine haggard eye, For the keenest throb of sadness, Pale Despair's most sickening sigh, Is but to mimic me ; And this must ever be, When the twilight of care, And the night of despair, Seem in my breast but joys to the pangs, that wake there. Some other fragments in verse, printed for the first time here, are in the " prose run mad" style. We shall return. to this work on another day. Violet Bank and its Inmates. London : Hurst and Blackett. THE characters in this novel are few and simple. There are a comely widow, Mrs. Lloyd, her ( of course) beau tiful daughter Grace. wd her son Frank. Grace is THE PRESS, APRIL 24, 1 engaged to be married to a physician, Dr. Mansel, who is handsome and prepossessing, but whose cha racter, on his first appearance, betrays tokens of temper and selfishness, which he is at little pains to hide. These prognostications are fully realized when shortly afterwards the family of his fiancee is ruined by the dishonesty of a trustee, and Dr. Mansel finds Grace unwilling to force herself upon a purse-proud neighbour, in order to further his canvass for an appointment for which he is a candidate. In pur suing this object in person, he meets with a dan geeous flaxen-haired fairylike young person, who rushes into a flirtation with him, and soon supplants his former love, in spite of the opposition of whose family the marriage takes place, with. out much inquiry as to the bridegroom's antece dents. When it is too late, it appears that he has a sister in America whose fortune be has embezzled, and is unable to replace it with his bride's money, which is settled on herself. After suffering by the dis appointment of his expected wealth, and by his wife's exacting jealousy (in the description of which, by the way, the writer somewhat exceeds probabilio ), fate overtakes him in the shape of his sister's hus. band, who comes to demand her fortune. Having nothing to pay it with, he obtains a cheque from his wife and alters it to the required amount; but by crossing it delays the payment for twenty-four hours, and the American, who is hurried, quits the country without cashing it. When Grace's brother has obtained a situation in a bank, and the proper amount of poverty has been undergone by the family in general, the bead of the bank (tall and yellow, but endowed with every virtue) falls in love with Grace, and marries her. Retribution overtakes Dr. Mansel by the forged cheque being sent to Grace from the dying and repentant trustee, into whose hands it happens to have passed. As Dr. Mansel has taken care to forge the counter cheque as well, his wife is obliged to pay it, but an eternal quarrel ensues, and the Mansels, in spite of an accession of wealth, live unhappy ever after. The book is amusing enough, but there is nothing in the style or matter to lift it above the crdinary rank of three. volume novels. There is a very good tiger story, which, from certain details, would appear to Le derived from an authentic source. The writer is not proportionally conversant with the habits of his (her ?) own species. She describes an officer being appointed A.D.C. on his marriage —a post for which a married man, being required to form part of the commander in-cbiet's family, would be obviously ineligible. It is also a violation of probability to describe the sisters of Mr. Millar as breaking up their circle and going out into various occupations simply in consequence of his marriage ; and the character of Sylvia is marked by a good deal of exaggeration. On the other hand, the characters of Mr. Hitzig and of Flora Maynard seem studied from life. The latter is a flirt, amusing and not vulgar, and comes to a tolerably good end in the third volume. The faults of "Violet Bank" are venial, and its merits such as will make it acceptable in novel reading circles. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.—Apnn, 22. BOOKS. Historical Revelations. Inscribed to Lord Normanby. Louis Blanc. Chapman and Hall. Violet Bank and its Inmates. Three Vols. Hurst and Blackett. Essays—Scientific, Political, and Speculative. Herbert Spencer. Longmans. The Cure of Souls. Rev. G. Arden, M.A. J H. and J. Parker. The Worship of God and Fellowship among Men. Macmillan and Co. Lives of the Sovereigns of Russia. George Fowler, EN' Two Vole, Sampson Low. A Lady's Diary of the Siege of Lurknow. Murray. The Sepoy Revolt ; its Causes and its Consequences. Henry Mead. Routledge. Hardy and Hunter. A Boys Own Story. Mrs. Ward. Ditto. The Rich Husband. A Novel of Real Life. By the Author of The Ruling Passion." Skett. Lectures, Conversations, and Recollec.lions of S. T. Coleridge. Edited by Thomas Alleop. Groomhridge snd Sons. The Life and Correspondence of Charles Lord Metcalfe. John William Kaye. Two Vols. Smith and Elder. Autubiography of Lutfullah,a Mohamedan Gentleman. Edited by Ed. B. Eastwick, F.R.S., F.S.A. Smith and Elder. Palestine Revisited, and Other Poems. F. Mitchell, M.A. W. and A. Webster. The Web of L;fe. Allan Park Paton. Longmans. The Indian Religions; or,Results of the Mysterious Buddhism By an Indian Missionary. Newby PAMPHLETS. Nova Scotia Considered as a Friend for Emigration. W eale--The Mutinies, the Government, and the People. By a Hindu —Some Observations on the Litany in Church Synods, J. H. and J. Parker--Bow we Tax India. W. E. Forster—Report of the Sub• Committee of the Fund fur the Relief of Sufferers by the Present Disturbances in India; Feb. 4,1868—.1 Letter to the Editor oJthe " Times" and " Evening Mail" on the Religious Observances of Jan. 0, May '29, and Nov. O. Presbyter Anglican us. Whittaker and t 'o.— The Christmas !Mummers. Mnzley—The Speech of Edwin James in Defence of S. Bernard. Wilson —The Familiar Epistles of Mr. John Company to Mr. John Bug Blackwood and Sons, USZC. THE NEW PHILHARMONIC S OCIETY was always a mysterious body, a shrouded form, a veiled figure, having members in outward appearance only—so, at least, many people said. Some, indeed, asserted that, just as the worshipper who longed to see the face of his goddess found, when he had chipped away the veil, only a rough lump of stone, a similar treatment of the society would disclose nothing more than Dr. Wylde. These statements may have been, as the French say, "completely inexact; " we only know that the veiled figure has just disappeared from its pedestal, and that. the Doctor now occupies the vacant place. In short, the society is broken up--disbanded —dispersed—and " the performances will take place in future under the title of ' The New Philharmonic Concerts,' and will be under the sole direction of the original promoter." The first of these concerts took place last Monday evening, and, judging from the pro gramme, we should say that Dr. Wylde is a very good director. The first part was selected entirely from Beethoven, and included the overture to Egmont, the pianoforte concerto in E flat, and the symphony in C minor; between which were inserted a duet from The Mount of Olives and an air from Fidelio. To follow this, a butter second part could not have been devised than the overture to Der Freischutz, three lively songs by Rossini, Auher, and Donizetti, and the overture to Masaniello. The concert was over some minutes before eleven o'clock, and could be heard from beginning to end without fatigue. But the director and "criginal promoter" was also the conductor, and whoever would occupy this position ought to possess something beyond the mere common sense which can put together a good programme. When a child is taken to a concert for the first time, he generally asks, "What is that man with the stick in bis band doing 7" and the usual answer he gets is, " Beating time, my dear." If this answer were full and complete, it would matter little whether the man with the stick in his hand were Dr. Wylde or any one else ; but a conductor has something to do besides beating time. He has to be neither more nor less than the mind and soul of the orchestra ; he has first to gain a conception of his author's meaning, and then to make his con ception intelligible to every member of the band. We do not think that these qualities meet in Dr. Wylde: be has a n exce ll en t b o d y o f in strumentalists under his orders, but he has not the art of ruling ; they are individually excellent, but the ensemble is not. There was plenty of vigour ID the playing, but not a spark of esprit from first to last. The concerto was played by Miss Arabella Goddard with her usual quiet confidence and her usual success. Mme. Castellan and Mme. Bor chardt were the vocali s t s , an d me t w ith consider• able applause; the latter lady was assisted in Beethoven's duet by Mr. Tennant. The second concert is to include a selection from( Mozart. AT Sr. MARTIN'S HALL last Wednesday Mr. Hullah gave Handel's oratorio of Samson, or rather a selec tion, comprising about three fifths of the entire work. His version varied little from that used by the Sacred Harmonic Society ; the insertion of the contralto air, " 0 mirror of our fickle state," and the omission of the chorus, " To man God's universal law," being the chief points of difference. Most of Handel's oratorios are subjected to this sort of cur tailment, and it is worth while to notice how little they suffer from it. It is, doubtless, owing in some measure to the nothingness of the poems upon which Handel employed himself, and the utter meanness of which he seems never to have felt. Of the two which are selected, and well selected, from the Scriptures, the Israel in Egypt cannot, it is true, be mutilated, but The Messiah is rather a collection of anthems than one connected work—glorious anthems, indeed, but not very closely related to one another. Half a dozen may be left out, and gener ally are left out, without being much missed; and almost every piece in the oratorio can be extracted and sung by itself. Imagine the Elijah with half a dozen pieces omitted. We have as great a venera tion as any one for Handel, but it is absurd to deny that the dramatic purpose and unity of design which Mendelssohn introduced into the modern oratorio are vast improvements upon the old forms used by Handel. And yet there are some persons who are accuston.ed to compare the contest of the Israelite and Philistine worshippers, which occurs in the second part of the Samson, with the scene upon Mount Carmel in the Elijah, and to assert the dramatic superiority of the earlier composer. We really can hardly discover ground upon which to base a comparison at all ; the two situations are wholly different. Mendelssohn has contrasted the calm, earnest, confident supplication of the prophet with the bewildered frenzy of the priests of Baal—the wild prayer that sounds more than half like a drinking song, as a great contemner of the modern school once said to us. Both priests and prophet are asking for the same thing, but the deities who are invoked do not differ more widely than the prayer.