The Press. — London, England, 1858-02-13 00:00:00

THt PRESS, PEBRUATIT 13, lB5B. 164 Afathiooks, who is able to furnish a remi niscence or two : Though his habits were as simple as those of a hermit and his income a thousand a year, Shelley was always in difficulties, owing to the assistance he gave to his friends, and it was very rare that he had any money in his pockets. lint while he was wandering about, he would frequently meet with fresh objects for the exercise of his benevolence. On these occasions he would write an order on Mr. Mad docks, on any slip of paper, for sixpence or threepence, as the case seemed to require; but the following anecdote serves better to illustrate the extent of his benevolence:— •` One forenoon," says my informant, "Shelley came to my house without shoes, desiring me to send a boy up to his house for a pair, be having given his own off his feet to a poor woman i❑ the street, who was limping, barefooted, over the rough stones." The following appears to be from Mr. Howitt : An old shopkeeper, a grocer, living near to the poet's residence, remembered him, and " hoped his children did not take after him, for he was a very bad men ;" hat on being interrogated as to the poet's bad actions, he explained that Shelley had not been guilty of any bad actions that he knew of--on the contrary, he was uncommonly good to the roor—but then he did not believe in the devil! The grocer's wife also bore testimony to Shelley's want of orthodoxy in this respect. The poet had christened his boat the " Vaga," and she related, with much apparent satisfaction, how a wag had on one occasion added the letters " bond " to the name printed at the stern, remarking " Mr. Shelley was not offended ; he only laughed ; fur you see he did not believe in the devil, and so he thought there could be nothing wrong." His health obli4ed him to go abroad in 1818, and to England he never returned. He visited Byron at Venice, wrote "Prometheus Un bound" and the " Cenci "at Rome. His resi dence and occupations in 1819 cannot be accu rately chronicled. In the succeeding year he took up his abode at or near Pisa, where in 1821 he wrote " Hellas " and " Adonais ;" re newed his acquaintance with Byron, who, with the Guiccioli, came also to live at Pisa, and was only driven from the place by a street quarrel with some officers. In 1822 he re moved to Spezia, and had a boat built for him at Genoa ; in which, while returning from Leghorn, where he had been to settle matters between Leigh Hunt and Byron, he and his friend IMr. Williams were drowned, on the night of the Bth of July. The burning of his body has often been considered as a wanton piece of Paganism, but the following statement seems to show that it was unavoidable : It was very natural that the friends of the departed should wish to possess their remains to bear them to such a spot as they might have desired for their last resting place, but even this consolation seemed denied them, by the quarantine laws of the coast, by which it was regulated that everything cast on shore from the sea should be burned, to prevt•nt any possibility of bringing the plague into Italy. Every exertion was made with the Lucchese and Tuscan Governments, to obtain some abatement of this regulation in the present instance, but without effect. Through the. unwearied exertions, however, of Mr. Dawkins, our Charge d'Affaires at Florence, permission was at length gained to receive the remains after they had been reduced to ashes by tire. • _ These arrangements were not completed till upwards of a month after the wreck; in the meantime, the bodies had been partially buried in the sand on the seashore, waere they had been cast by the wares. Mr. Middleton has performed his task with great diligence and conscientiouness, but he cannot be said to have produced the " Life of Shelley." There is too great a disposition to bow down before his hero, and adopt all his enmities and distorted views, and nothing like a really critical estimate of his poetry. There is also a weakness and redundancy in his style which do not bespeak a mind suffi ciently alive to the very great difficulty of the work before it. Nor is it immaculate even in smaller points : we find such expressions as " he was informed that her he adored was " wedded to another ;" " he stood in danger for " the means to live ;" " her whom he hoped had '' forgotten him ;" " the rich ignorant which " constitute the greater portion of travelling " English ;" " the objectional lines were " omitted ;" and such a confused sentence as the following:—"They visited the house of " Gibbon, and were shown the summer-house " where he finished his history, and Lord " Byron gathered some acacia leaves from the '• old acacias on the terrace, from which he saw Mont Blanc, after having written the " last sentence, to preserve in remembrance ' of him." on the other hand, he has been diligent in the collection of farts, and though there are fewer dates than could be wished, the book is, on the whole, an interesting one. The mate rials are chiefly drawn from Medwin, the Athenaum, the New Monthly, and Mrs. Shelley's notes. He has also given an account, we believe for the first time, of a singular halluci nation which took possession of Shelley while living in Wales in 1813, under which he imagined that soma one came into his room and tried to murder him. This, with the quotations we have given, and with some various readings from a Marlow MS. of" Queen Mab," are the chief novelties of the book. The volumes are readable enough, and though not affording such an account of Shelley as we should have desired t 9 see, it will probably be some time before they are superseded. The Angel in the House. By Coventry Patmore. Second Edition. London : John W. Parker and Son. THE present edition of this poem is much altered, and we think improved. There is less quaintness about it., and consequently a greater impression of reality. There is still room for greater plainness and easiness of style, for it contains many lines which would present difficulties even to an attentive reader. But on the whole it is much more readable, manage able, and interesting, than before. Though we are by no means disposed to endorse the excessive encomiums which have been lavished upon it by the Edinburgh Review, still less should we concur in the sneers of one of its early critics, who objects to the love it describes because it is "of a spiritualised, sentimental nature," and, desiderating the strains of Anacreon and Catullus, is unable to discover in Mr. Patmore's pages more " genial warmth and nature "than in the May sunbeams which have passed "through the stained-glass casement of a church." We do not, for our own part, find the "Angel in the House" deficient in ardour; nor do we imagine that a passion such as it depicts would be likely to have less duration or intensity, or prompt fewer sacrifices of self, than the "healthy animalism" which its de tractors seem so unwilling to lose. The present age is not a particularly ascetic one, and the more earthly ingredients of sexual passion may safely be left to take care of themselves. We do not feel in clined to quarrel with a writer because in a highly complex and artificial age his verses show other influences than those of mere coarse and downright feeling. He would in fact deserve more blame if, after eighteen centuries of religion and civilisation, he did not show some traces of delicacy and refine ment. As regards the poetical merit of the book— apart from its spirit—we can only say that we have found it improve upon acquaintance ; and we believe it would gain still more if the alterations which have been made were carried still further, and the reader's attention were less pointedly drawn to the subjects of its sonnet-like sections. There are many passages which are full of grace, and subtle, yet true feeling, and which will wake a kindred echo in perhaps more minds than will confess to having been touched by the associations which it awakes. The Comprehensive History of England. Edinburgh : Blackie and Son. WE have here a new attempt, and apparently a very successful one, to produce a readable and accurate history of our country. Hume is too inaccurate, Lingard too sectarian, the Pictorial too long, Mr. Knight too difficult in his style, for the average bulk of readers. We cannot presume that every one will be satisfied with Mr. Thomson, the editor of the work before us. But he has made the nearest ap proach we have yet seen to a really good compilation —for be does not come forward as au original author. His materials are derived in great measure from the " Pictorial," but are illustrated by copious notes from accredited writers such as Hallam, Pal grave, Kemble, Thierry, &c. ; the sequence of events is indicated with clearness, and the style is generally pleasing, neat, and unpretending, though here and there a bit of tinsel is to be detected. 'The book is divided into sections ; the Civil and Military History of each period being first related, then the Religious, and then the Social state. The antiquarian depart ment is very fully treated, and there are numerous and excellent woodcuts of camps, castles, ancient implements, dresses, architectural details, and the like. We doubt whether equal pains have been bestowed upon the literary Imptory. Looking by chance at the account of Willie! Oecam (here spelt Omuta), we find no specification of his peculiar philosophical doctrines,—we are not even told whether he was a Nominalist or a Realist—which is almost as great an omission in regard to the middle ages as if Mr. Macaulay's New-Zealander, in writing the history of the nineteenth century, were to neglect to state of a politician whether be was a Whig or a Tory. The amount of literary culture, however, existing at different epochs is very fairly given, and no one will find the chapters devoted to the history of society otherwise than extremely interesting. The book, of which six numbers are out, and which is to extend to about thirty, is printed in double columns, in a very char type and on good paper, and is embellished here and there with steel engravings not ill chosen. Provided the little ad juncts of genealogical tables, summaries and indexes, of the indispensableness of which we trust the edqors are duly sensible, be forthcoming in their proper places, we have no doubt that this will prove a valuable as well as an entertaining work. We shall watch attentively the appearance of the succeeding parts. Among the BOOKS OF THE WEEK are tobe recorded a third and revised edition of Bothwell (Blackwoods). Professor Aytoun, in his preface to this edition, observes:— In point of form the poem has undergone no alteration; but much care has been bestowed upon the correction of isolated passages ; some superfluous matter has been ex cised; and other amendments made, in the hope of giving more strength and vivacity to the expression, and more interest to the narrative. In particular, the concludiug canto has undergone strict revision, as, in its original form, it bore marks of a certain degree of languor, the con sequence of a temporary illness. I say this by was of explanation only, conscious that I have many shortcomings to answer for, with no finch excuse to plead. I have further to thank those of my reviewers, who, in a spirit of honesty and kindness, have referred to my de fects ; for by doing so I must needs acknowledge that they have rendered me an essential service. In these days of voluminous publication, criticism is valuable to the reader, inasmuch as it places him on his guard; but it is invaluaide to every author who has the sincere desire of cultivating his art to the utmost of his ability, because it warns him of the faults which are the most glaringly conspicuous in his style, and rebukes him for every instance of undue care lessness or neglect. The best proof of my acquiescence in the justice of some of the remarks upon the construction of certain passages of " Bothwell," is the fact that I have made emendations accordingly; but beyond that, I have altered, or recast, many passages against which no censure was directed. The truth is, that, on the eve of publication, I did not feel by any means satisfied with my own perform ance. I bad an instinctive feeling that I ought to have done it better. I was conscious that occasionally the ex pression did not adequately convey the idea, and that the versifica•ion was sometimes defective both in melody and in power. But there is a peculiarity attendant upon poetical composition, which is well known to those who practise it, though it may not be so to the general reader— and that is, that a certain period must elapse before the writer can discern the precise nature of his faults, regain the power of correcting them. So long as the heat engendered by the original effort is upon him, his attempts at emendation will be in vain. But after a time, unless he is vainglorious and egotistical in the extreme, the faults which lie has committed become as apparent to him as they were to others ; and surely, then, it is his duty to retrieve such faults, or at least to make the attempt, although it is quite possible that he may not succeed in doing that in a manner coratnensiarato with his desire. —The Royal Prioresses of England, by Mrs. M. Hall (Routledge), consists of a series of biogra phical sketches of the Royal Princesses of England, from the reign of George I. to the present day. The portrait of the young bride who has so lately left our shores is the one which will attract most interest at the present moment, Vind unfortunately it is the least satisfactory in the volume. A bare recital of her birth, christening, confirmation, public appear ance, and marriage is all that is given to us. The memoir of Sophia Dorotl:ea and that of Anne of Hanover are the two best iu the book, and we can only regret that so clever a compiler as Mrs. Matthew Hall should not have succeeded in obtaining more data for her biography of the Princess Frederick William of Prussia.—Erery-day Life (Seeleys), is a successful attempt to convey in a series of de• scriptive talcs certain social and religious les sons, which shall be the more readily remem bered by the manner of their application. —Pilgrimages in Paris (Wiliam Lay), by Miss Pardoe, is in greater part reprinted from Fraser, but it is not the less readable on that account. We can cordially recommend it for the vivacity of its style and the interest of its anecdote. It is one of the pleasantest of books. Among REPRINTS, we must notice with praise toe illustrated single-volume editions of Mr. Lever's The O'Donoghue and Jack Hinton (Chapman and Hall), and a very handsome, cheap, and convenient issue of Currer Bella Villette (Smith and Elder), which, unlike most of the railway books now pub lished, may be read without a microscope. Messrs. Longrnans send us an " authorised edition " of Mr. Herman Melville's Conftdence•Man—a sufficiently humorous set of a (ventures, but likely, we suspect, to meet with much less popular appreciation than Omoo or Typee. PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.—FEBRUART 4. BOOKS. History of the Constituent Assembly, 1789. Alphonse de Laroartine. Two Vols. Piper and Co. Blackwoods Seaside Studies. George Henry Lewes. - The Royal Sisters. By Mrs. Robert Cartwright. Two Vols. Hope 'distort/ of the Life ma Tina qf Edmund Burke. Thomas Marknight. Chapman and Hall