The Press. — London, England, 1854-04-29 00:00:00

402 At the Sorbonne Gay Lussac lectured, that leviathan of , science, in little unprepossessing bulk. Besides these, there were Cruveilhier, great in anatomy; and Orfila, the great poison-chemist. These are men whose voices it is something to have listened to. Each in his department could get no higher—they {were planets around which a body of student satellites revolved daily. Without de tracting from the admiration which such minds drew from the ingenuous youth who listened to them, there was one effect of such converse which could not be concealed — namely, a devotion to the professional views of the teacher, on account of the man who taught them. However credit able this may be to the affection, it is fatal to the progress, of the physician ; and yet it is a feature of every school, and of every age ; part and parcel of medical science, perhaps of human nature. There is a good scene farther on, where the author, a stanch phrenologist, examines a convict on his way to gaol, whose cerebral development seems to belie his guilt. The in spection duly made, and proving its subject to be endowed with all the cardinal virtues, that of benevolence especially,— I turned rather indignantly to the badge-holder in charge of these convicts (most of whom looked as if deserving of their fate), and requested to know what connection this old man might have with such as these. This official had been accustomed to the vernacular of new arrivals, and soon arrived at my meaning. The prisoners were Thugs, con• victed of lives spent in assassination, and this old man was far before the others in " thuggee." He looked on placidly, and listened to this accunt of him ; I expected an indignant denial every moment by him, especially when it was stated that the old man had tied the " fillet " round the necks of some eleven hundred human beings. As I looked at him again, with a phrenological eye, I was within an ace of giving the lie to the native gentleman in charge, when the old man muttered : " Sutch-bat ! (or, ' just so!')" He had no wish, then, to misrepresent matters; indeed, he was unwilling to forego the renown he had acquired. That night, Phrenology and I had a strong tussel ; and she had much difficulty in re-establishing herself in my estimation, for this specimen of the " mild Hindoo " had given her the lie direct. I was not satisfied, therefore, until I had had a further confidential talk with the vene rable Thug; and thereafter Phrenology came out immacu late, for I found that this old man, born with the best of bumps, had been reared in the belief that to keep down an increasing population was a good thing, and that every Thug was sure to go to heaven, as his " thugging" fore fathers must have done before him. Old Baharee Lall, the " Thug," therefore considered that his grey hairs were going down with honour to the grave, and in the utmost odour of sancity ; and it would have given him great satis- faction to be permitted to add a few more victims to his unexampled exploits ; but to this there were objections. The book is clever, of no high merit, but quite good enough to supply an evening's en tertainment. STANDARD POETRY. The Annotated Edition of the English Poets. Poetical Works of William Cowper, Vol. I. Edited by Robert Bell. London : J. W. Parker and Son. The Poetical Works of William Cowper. With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan. Edin burgh : Nichol. LORD BYRON, in his controversy with Lisle Bowles, positively asserted that " Cowper was no poet," but the English public holds a very contrary opinion. There is an evergreen popularity in the vigorous style of Cowper that bids defiance to every vicissitude of sentiment. Nought but genius could strike such deep-rooted fame as that belonging to " The Task." Neither his diction nor the structure of his sentences re mind us of that tinselled French prettiness discernible in some of his predecessors. His mind, also, was essentially a Saxon one ; and the fidelity with which he has described its religious moods, and its tendency to grave moralising on human life, are amongst the reasons why his verse has attained such wide spread acceptance. It cannot be denied that certain phases of our popular religionism in England are portrayed in many of the passages of " The Task " with extraordinary fidelity. Christianity in Cowper was no cold assent to "the evidences" for revelation, no mere ethi cal echo of the fundamental principles of reli gion : his faith was fearfully real in its inten sity, and, we must say, deplorably narrow in some of its morbid conceptions. Not a few divines have held that certain exaggerations of Cowper are as divergent as the monasticism of Popery itself from the calmness of the humble and faithful believer in the Glad Tidings. Contortions of agony, miserable THE PRESS. months of nervous wretchedness, are certainly no necessary concomitants of faith in Him, from whose lips flowed the sermon on the Mount. Yet, it is only by fixing our attention on the gloom of Cowper's mind that we can perceive the depth of his genius. How touching must be those tones, how eloquently emphatic that anguage, which can arrest our thoughts on sub ects that most of us deem too solemn and painful for our hours of literary recreation ! " The Task " must be held to contravene the dictum of Johnson that themes of high reli gious import are not suitable to poetry. What else is that singularly original work but the religious musings, the spiritual aspirations of a nature pinioned to earth, gazing with longing eyes upon the heaven over its head, and, with the pathos of a prolonged dirge, wailing out its sorrow over the anguish of mankind? Its gloomy thoughts are forgotten by us while picturesque descriptions of the world are vividly brought before us as we read. Every-day objects, morals trite by repetition, stereotyped truths, are taken as the poet's matter, but his idealising intellect robes the commonest facts with the prismatic hues of genius. No other poet has so triumphed over the difficulty of describing common things without loss of dignity. We believe it, however, to be true that it is to the fairer and to the younger portions of society—to woman and to youth—that Cow per's verse is most dear. Men immersed in worldly toils feel that the author of " The Task " intrudes upon the preacher, and would wish to find more of the Muses and less of the Apostles in their poetical excursions. There is at times such harshness in his upbraidings of the world that in place of being pathetic he is irritating. That sanguine glow of enthusiasm, which gives vitality to the cumbrous rhetoric and wordy moralisings of Thomson in " The Seasons," is never seen in Cowper. Men like best those poets who either create a new world, and people it with "beings of the mind," or who reconcile them to the present one. Thus Shakspeare dazzles and delights, but does not cause discontent. Milton awes, without casting us into the abjectness of the Slough of Despond. But Cowper, in his gloomier moods, is apt to produce moral drea riness and a sense of aching void. His anguish wants that plaintive music which charms us again and again in the pensive verse of " The Deserted Village." Many of us "in life's early morn " have in our happiest hours hung with pleasure over the many-tinted page of Cowper, with its contrast of bright images and dark presentation of an awful back ground, and in those happy years the gloom of his song only served to give a romantic colouring to his pictures of that unknown world of which we dreamed. But, advanced on the road of life, we want some more re freshing founts of sympathy than the eloquent exaggerations of Calvinism that ever and anon burst upon us in the poet of Olney. Most of us must feel, " While thinking of the days that are no more," that we cannot in his poetry dry " Tears from the depths of a divine despair." We ask for some more tender dealing with our shortcomings and errors than is given to them by gifted, brooding, and miserable Cowper. Why did he not oftener write in the thrilling strain of the verses " On the Receipt of his Mother's Picture "? Would that he had given vent to his human sorrows more frequently in that affecting style, and we might oftener recur to his pages for refreshment in " this weary work-a-day world " ! And yet, when we remember all the pleasure that Cowper must give every fresh and vigorous mind on early acquaintance with him, we cannot but think of him but with mingled feelings. Vain would it be for criticism to disparage his genius ; and it would be nearly an impossibility not to feel tenderly for the memory of one whose name is " linked with his land's language," at the contemplation of whose sufferings sophists themselves might cease to be censorious, while beholding how much there was of the sublime and the hum bling in the richly.endowed and lamentably afflicted author of " The Task." SATURDAY, Neither of these new editions of Cowper can be commended. The life prefixed to " the annotated " one is bald in style and meagre in matter, and disagreeably contrasts with the tasteful and elaborate biography by Southey. It is little more than a cold epitome of the facts of the poet's life, without any genial or graceful illustration. Two original letters have been recovered by Mr. Bell, and are printed by him from the originals in the possession of Mr. William Bodham Donne. They are addressed to the poet's cousin, Mrs. Balls. The first of them is written in the charmingly playful vein which marks all Cowper's letters to women. It is : My dear Cousin,—l shall love the turkeys the better for having procured me a letter from you my old friend and playfellow in other days. We sent for them yesterday to the waggoner's house in a village five miles off, and they arrived safe at Weston in the evening ; safe, us I said, and in perfect health, as they desire me to tell you, and to thank you for your kind enquiries. They have also had a good night, have rested well, and feel themselves much re freshed; and will shortly be made acquainted with all our premises,—for it is early at present, and they have not yet quitted their apartment. Mrs. Unwin, truly grateful for your kindness in sending them, bids me present you her very best thanks and acknowledgments. Mine accompany hers ; and we both long for the spring, that we may thank you here in person. _ _ After some desultory remarks he then con tinues : Do you consider, child, that when you call yourself an old woman you make it impossible for me to be young? Know you not that it is forty years since we saw each other ; that I was at that time at least two years older than you, and that, consequently, I continue to be so still ? How, then, can you be old, when I who am so much your elder have still, as Falstaff says, a smatch of my youth, and am almost as active as ever? Oh, when shall we ride in a whiskum snivel again, and laugh as we have done heretofore? Should ever that day come, you must be the driver; for I have too great a value both for your neck and my own to aspire to that office myself. I never excelled in it, and have hardly been in a whiskum since. You have done wisely, I dare say, in selling your estate at Catfield ; but I should have been glad would wisdom have permitted you to keep it: for of all places in the east I love Catfield, and should then have had a chance of seeing it again. Lady Hesketh will not allow that you are unknown to her, though you call yourself so. Have you forgotten how she threatened one evening to kill you, and how you verily believed that she intended it, and were frightened out of your wits ? She, however, remembers it well ; bids me present her best compliments to you, and assure you that she has laid aside all such murtherous intentions. Adieu, my dear cousin. Let me hear from you as often as you can : and believe me with much affection yours, Wm. COWPER. The second letter is not of an interesting character. When we recollect that the work is announced as " annotated," and observe the paucity of the notes, we cannot but feel disap • pointment. The edition, however, is very cheap, and is suited for the pocket ; but until we see how the volume containing " The Task " is an• notated we must reserve our final opinion on its literary merits—a course that we will not follow in the case of that publication over which Mr. Gilfillan presides. The titlepage of the latter one announces " with life, critical " dissertation, and explanatory notes." The volume contains four hundred and sixteen pages, and there are no notes. Of the style in which the editor writes we give a spe cimen : The genius of Cowper and its fruits we reserve for an after prefatory essay. Nor need we dwell at length upon his private character. He was confessedly an amiable, modest, generous, temperate, honest, upright, and pious man. He had faults indeed, but they seemed all more or less related to his dark life•lung companion—disease. He was somewhat testy in temper, and his feelings were easily wounded. He had a morbid craving, latterly, for stimulus, and his excessive use of tea decidedly tended to increase his melancholy. In his youth he had probably dipped ha shoe in the prevailing licentiousness of the London of that age. An "after prefatory essay" ( ! ). "An amiable, " modest, generous, temperate, honest, upright, " and pious man." Verbiage of such kind is enough to indicate the worth of critical dis sertation from Mr. Gilfillan. After telling us that the poet was " honest, " he records that he was " upright," lest the reader might have misunderstood the editor. Having told us that Cowper was " temperate," he adds that " he had a morbid craving for atiniulue" (sic.); and, with an audacity of conjecture that we think extremely improper in a clerical editor, Mr. Gilfillan writes of the author of " The Olney Hymns " that " he had probably dipped " his shoe in the prevailing licentiousness of " London." The phrase " dipped his shoe "is a coarse and offensive mode of insinuating