The Press. — London, England, 1854-08-05 00:00:00

AUGUST 5 1854. _ And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires ; And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. The vivid and the vast are rarely realised in so few words. If a poet who could produce such strains had leisurely strolled through the Alps and along the base of the Apennines, and breathed forth his emotions as he wan dered amidst these sublime scenes, what delicious poetry he would have produced ! In his own words, he could make us feel the glowing mind, Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined. In stud) ing the more brilliant passages of Collins we can plainly see that, as in the case of wit, brevity is a great source of the sublime. No dirge has yet been sung over the grave of the hero of Silistria, the gallant Butler, that worthy scion of the house of Ormonde ; but Collins has written in twelve brief lines an immortal requiem over fallen heroes of all climes : How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes blest! When Spring. with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallow'd mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. By fairy hands their knell is rung ; By forms unseen their dirge is sung ; There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay, And Freedom shall a-while repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there ! The remarks of Mr. Willmott upon the life of Collins are very interesting, and will repay perusal. Passing on to the other poets, we admit that they have claims to remembrance, but we think that the volume would have been more complete if the poetical piecen of Johnson and Goldsmith had been substituted in place of the works of T. Warton and Green. We do not think much of Warton. His most. affecting poem is " The Suicide," which has some touch ing stanzas, but from a strain of high poetry it gradually falls off into a sermon in verse. he poem is not so much known as Mr. Will mott appears to think. The dreariness of its subject is repulsive, but there is awful gloom and a weird solemnity in the appalling picture of the selfslayer, and the poetical accessories are tastefully introduced. This picture is vivid with genius : Beneath the beech, whose branches bare, Smit with the lightning's livid glare, • O'erhang the craggy road, And whistle hollow as they wave ; Within a solitary grave, A slayer of himself holds his accurs'd abode. Lower'd the grim morn, in murky dyes Damp mists involv'd the scowling skies, And dimm'd the struggling day ; As by the brook, that ling ring laves Yon rush-grown moor with sable waves, Full of the dark resolve he took his sullen way. mark'd his desultory pace, His gestures strange, and varying face, With many a mutter'd sound ; And alt ! too late aghast I view'd The reeking blade, the hand embru'd ; He fell, and groaning grasp'd in agony the ground. • • • • • Full oft, unknowing and unknown, He wore his endless noons alone, Amid the autumnal wood : Oft was he wont, in hasty fit, Abrupt the social board to quit, And gaze with eager glance upon the tumbling flood. These are certainly the most powerful lines that Warton ever wrote. With respect to Green's poems we do not concur with Mr. Willmott. "The Spleen" has much clever ness, but modern readers, especially the fair, will find it coarse, and several of its illustra tions and words are very broad. It contains some quaint and witty couplets, but its oeto syllabic metre is monotonous, and, on the whole, we do not think it superior to those verses of society which wits like the late Henry Luttrell could easily produce. The foliating passage is very like the manner of Luttrell in his happiest vein : Since mirth is good in this behalf, At some particulars let us laugh. Witlings, brisk fools, curs'd with half sense, That stimulates their impotehce ; Who buzz in rhyme, and, like blind flies, Err with their wings, for want of eyes, Poor authors worshipping a calf, Deep tragedies that make us laugh, A strict dissenter saying grace, A lecturer preaching for a plade, THE PRESS. Folks, things prophetic to dispense, Making the past the future tense, The popish dubbing of a priest, Fine epitaphs on knaves deceas'd, Greeu-apron'd Pythonissa's rage, Great fEsculapius on his stage, A miser starving to be rich, The prior of Newßate's dying speech, A jointurA widow's ritual state, Two Jews disputing tete, New almanacs compos'd by seers, Experiments on felon's ears, Disdainful prudes, who ceaseless ply The superb muscle of the eye, A coquet's April-weather face, A Queenborough-mayor behind his maco, And fops in military shew, Are sovereign for the ease in view. Some of these lines are graphic. Who buzz in rhyme, and, like blind flies, Err with their wings, for want of eyes, is a couplet worthy of the author of " Hudi bras." A coquet's April-weather face is au image that could not be improved by another word. But these, after all, are small merits. We confess, too, that in our appre hension Mr. Willmott places too high an estimate on Parnell. Wh en he says, "He " (Parnell) is an earlier Goldsmith, with a scho " larly taste," his praise is perfectly extravagant. Parnell never could have produced the deli cious pathos of " The Deserted Village," with its unrivalled sketches from simple life. Its beautiful imagery is altogether beyond Par nell. Some of the secondary passages in " The Traveller" he might have penned, but he could not write the lines that Johnson repeated with rapture, in which Englishmen are described. There is one touch in that passage entirely beyond the merely correct school of Parnell— " True to imagined right, above control " a line in which the characteristic love of the Anglo-Saxons for personal freedom is faithfully described in a single stroke. There is, however, so much good sense and such pleasant literary illustration in Mr. Will mott's notes and prefatory sketches, that we gladly transfer this volume to our poetical shelves. It is well suited for a present to youth, and Etonians will take pleasure in perusing the Latin verses of Gray and Warton, which are printed at full length. Its pictorial ornaments are only tolerable, but its typogra phy is neatly executed, and we have no doubt that it will receive a wide appreciation. Charles 11. in the Channel Islands. A Contri bution to his Biography and to the History of his Age. By S. Elliott Hoskins, M.D. London : Bentley. HISTORICAL collections relating to the great civil war of the seventeenth century have of late years been chiefly made for the purpose of justifying that Cromwell-worship which has set in like an epidemic amongst the school of philosophical Radicals and dilletanti sedition ists of the time. Whether iu the declamations in favour of Cromwell's despotism where Thomas Carlyle strews our language with truly " barbaric pearls," or in that dry and meagre bill of indictment against the King called by M. Guizot a " History of the Revolu tion of 1640," Charles I. is judged by a kind of Neapolitan procedure, condemned first and the evidence collected afterwards. The later works which have appeared relating to the period when, as Henry Martin, the runaway of Reading, informed Hyde, "as they rode in " the fields at Chelsea," "no one man was " wise enough to govern England," have all tended to glorify with indiscriminating praise every person concerned against the Crown, from Cromwell himself, who was saved from betraying " the good cause," for the titles of Earl of Essex and Knight of the Garter, by finding Charles's letter in the saddle " at the "Blue Boar in Holborn," down to the zealous sentinel who spat in the King's face. Except our belief that Bradshawe sought no other object than human liberty, and that Barillon wrote maliciously a false private paper to Louis XIV. with the intent of charging Alger non Sidney with being bribed, we have not sufficient faith for the school of the Cromwell worshippers. Now, tho truth is that the great question between Charles I. and the Republican mem- 'l3l' tiers of the House of Commons can only be decided by the consideration of a very long train of evidence, often of a minute character. What efforts were made to " treat " and to " accommodate "—how often the deputies of the Parliament were instructed to make a breach—and how certainly the Republican members had predetermined that the King should at least be deposed—these aro the questions really at issue, and questions on several parts of which at account of the pro ceedings in the Channel Islands might have thrown considerable light. Dr. Hoskins would seem to have kad before him MSS. which promised more than was to he found in them, and the result is a book of precisely similar character It is founded on a "Journal and Collection of Remarkable Events in the Isle of Jersey during the Civil Wars in the Reigns of Charles I. and II.," described by Dr. Hoskins as being "considered by local historians a sort of " semi-official authority," and the author has had the further advantage of access to a curious MS. entitled by the rather strangely applied derivative " Pseudo-Mastix, the Lyar's Whipp," written by three expatriated Jersey jurats. These papers, however, have not enabled Dr. Hoskins to add much to the history of that period in Jersey, so far as that history bears on the general results of the great struggle. Yet they have enabled him to give some lifelike details of local events and popular feelings, and there is scattered throughout the work much that future writers may find useful in illustrating a period which was one of the most critical in the history of the war. We took up Dr. Hoskins's book with the hope that we should find a narrative of a most interesting episode in that strange and fasci• tutting story, when, once only in their history, Englishmen became enthusiasts, not for indi viduals but for principles. In this we were disappointed. Dr. Hoskins, partly from the meagre nature of his materials, has given us no such personal narrative as we might have expected from the title of the work. Of all our monarchs Charles 11. was the most suitable subject for a personal memoir of his life and sayings, and, as regards the part of his life spent in the Channel Islands, we should have wished to see more personal traits and anev. dotical memoir. On the whole, however, Dr. Hoskins has put together much that is interesting ; and perhaps the disappointment the reader may feel arises, in fact, from the anticipations raised by the great interest of the subject rather than the author's failure in treating it. A Military Tour in European Turkey, the Crimea, and on the Eastern Shores of the Black Sea. By Major-General A. F. Macintosh. Lou don: Longmans. THIS is a book of solid merit, not amusing as a tour, but interesting as a military and topo graphical report, which in fact it professes to be. General Mackintosh travelled, in 1886, over the neighbourhood of Constantinople, Bulgaria, the Balkan, the country round Erze roum, Koordistan, Georgia, the Caucasus, and the Crimea, examining with a soldier's eye the fortresses, passes, and natural features of the lands through which he passed. As these last remain unaltered, his account of them is still valuable. We select and abridge a few de scriptions which at the present moment seem interesting. Constantinople, according to the author, is badly defended : the batteries which line the Dardanelles are, in his view, insufficient to stop even sailing-ships with the wind in their favour. They are numerous and powerful, but unskilfully disposed. The immense cannon of which we hear so much, throwing stone balls of enormous weight, appear wellnigh useless : they can only tire a single shot each at vessels passing, and the castle of which they form the armament is defenceless on the land side. In short, the coast line of the straits requires to be fortified anew, and the lines now projected at Gallipoli (of which General Macintosh seems to have suggested the first idea) are necessary for the safety of the capital. To the northward of Constanti nople there are strong positions, which have