The Press. — London, England, 1858-08-14 00:00:00

THE RES SI AUGUST 14i 1858. wanted. A very good life of Savonarola appeared in the Ouarrerly Review some time since, based on the work of Perrens, which Mr. Colquhoun has consulted, and avoiding an error into which he seems to us to have fallen,—that of con sidering Savonarola as anything but a Romanist. Mr. Colquhoun has evidently strong Protestant feelings, and he seems to view Savonarola as a sort of precursor of Luther, simply because he opposed the Pope. We believe that he opposed the Pope, not because he had any doubts of the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, or indeed of any part of the Romish system,—but because the Bishop of Rome happened to be Alexander the Sixth. With regard to the sketches of Marguerite d'Angouhlme and Jeanne d'Albret, we do not see that Mr. Colquhoun has at all gone beyond Miss Freer (to whose works, by the way, he seems to be a good deal indebted), or to have added anythinc , to our knowledge on the subject. The sketch of Olympia Morata stands on a different ground ; and as her story has not of late years been presented in an English dress, we are thankful to Mr. Colquhoun for his treatment of it, which is lucid and informing, though, like the rest, somewhat overlaid with ambitious fantasias on the original theme. As we have said, we have assumed this sketch to be an amplification of the one in the Dublin University Magazine. In the latter, some of Olympia's Greek compositions are quoted, and this is a point which Mr. Colquhoun would have done better not to omit in his volume ; the lady's speciality having been her scholarship quite as much as her piety. However 4 , those who come fresh to the subjects of " Life in the Olden Time" it will doubtless be found to contain a good deal that is interesting, and even the well informed will find it readable enough. We ourselves have no fault to find with it except on the score of the want of originality, both of style and matter, to which we have referred. History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merlynle, late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Vol. VI. London : Longmans. OF the writers who have undertaken during the last thirty years to describe to Englishmen the greatness and the decline of the master-states of antiquity, Mr. Merivale is now undoubtedly the third name. Nor would we presume to declare that he deserves to be placed in order of merit below die two great writers whom he succeeds in order or time. it is, however, beyond question that no fourth name ought in this department to be put in competition with the names of Thin-- wall, Grote, and Merivale. Mitford is already for gotten ; and Arnold—with a freshness of historic imagination which perhaps not one of the three his tbrianS we have mentioned naturally possessed, and in the unaffected dignity of his style easily transcending them all—was prevented by busi ness, by untimely death, by the hopeless obscurity of the period which he lived to treat, and perhaps also by some prejudices, from accomplishing all that seemed to be within his reach. Mr. Men-- vale has devoted many years of tranquil retire ment to his task, and he has chosen a field in which both much remained to be done and there were extraordinary facilities for doing it. lie has not laboured in vain : the sixth lume of his history, which has been recently presented to the public, is to our mind one of the most interesting volumes of history which have been produced in our age. Some chapters have a little disappointed us, but the fault has very possibly been rather our own than Mr. Merivale's. We had hoped for more light upon the 13atavian rebellion of Civilis than we have gained, and many passages in the previous volumes had seemed to us to con vey an intimation that Mr. Merivale expected his account of the Jewish war to be the master piece of his history. Reading it accordingly with these thoughts in our mind, we have found that most exciting contest described with a brevity and nonchalance which has surprised us. But the interest which attaches to these volunies is not due to any episodes, but springs film the intrinsic and unique peculiarity of the principal subject. And it ought to be mentioned as a capital merit in this history that it is not like a novel by Sir Walter Scott, which enlists the sympathy of the reader for every personage intro duced except the hero and heroine, and that as it is salted a " History of Rothe under the gni, 777 perors," it really is so, the author being himself at Rome in spirit throughout and keeping his readers at Rome, even when the narrative wanders for a while to the Rhine, or to old Greece, or to the stately Broadway of Antioch, or to the meet ing of the two ravines under the steep escarp ment of Mount Sion. We have, however, no intention just now of reviewing at large this beautiful and important work. We have been strongly interested by the brilliant, comprehensive, and searching examina tion which it contains of the literature of the age of Nero. If we consider literature as an index—and perhaps there is no better index—of the spirit of an age, a comparison of the books which have come down to us from the time of Nero with those of the Augustan age, furnishes a measure of the declension of Roman greatness and manners which had taken place during the interval. And it is the more important to obtain such a measure because the characteristic of Imperial Rome, and that which alone makes its history worth studying, is the progressive decline of everything distinctively Roman in virtue, in manners, in literature, in the arts of life. For models of virtue we look elsewhere; if we wish to find "what makes a nation happy and keeps "it so," Imperial Rome will not help us in our researches. But if it be important to know the causes and the symptoms of national decline, and how far the maxim of physical philosophers that birth conies out of death, and new forms out of the dissolution of forms, may be true in morals and politics, then there is no period in history which can throw half so much light upon this as the successive centuries of the gradual and orderly decline of Rome, not precipitated by foreign invasion nor interrupted by any revival of the sick and failing spirit, at whose deathbed the whole world attended in awe, in deep disgust, and in despair of the future. Mr. Merivale has now described to us the first stages of this long decay. On the present occa sion we select a single very partial aspect of an extensive subject. The following passage is to be the text ot our discourse : It had become irksome to men of age end experlefiee to mingle in public affairs which they w.'re not suffered to conduct, and the young competitors for civil distinction were left without control to indulge the ardour of specu lative opinion. There was no moral check on their thoughts, none on their speech ; the new impulse given to popular composition by the advent of Nero to power raised a lace of schoolboys to illegitimate authority in the world of letters. Young Rome of the time of Nero was eminently conceited, and, I fear, eminently shallow. Placing Seneca at their head, as is the wont of the rising genera tion to shelter under a great name its own conscious self• distrust, the favourites of the prince, accepted at the same time as the favourites of the multitude, overbore the finer taste and judgment of the veterans of literature. The faults and vices of youth were admired, humoured, and stimulated. Reserve end modesty, persevering toil, patier.t self-exami- nation, were regarded as irksome in themselves, and as a reflection on the character of the prince. Talent flobrighed in such an atmosphere as in a forcing-house, but it was no climate for the natural ripening of genius. The wit and cleverness of Lucan considering his years is preternatural; the trumpet-tones of his scorn or admiration. after more than thirty years' familiarity, still thunder in my ears with a startling intensity : but he has no divination of men anti things ; his imaginstisn never clothes itself in the costume of the past; he is never transported out of himself; be never sow the conqueror of the (huts ; he never trod the plains of lEmathia. If he is to be compared at all with the inspired singer of the /Eneid, pensige, passionate, and abstracted, I know not that anything More to his advan tage cm be said than the remark of his admirer Stating, that the epic of Liman was an earlier effort than the first prolusions of Virgil. This striking criticism is, we think, just, so far as it bears upon the class to which Lucan be longed, and upon the faults of his poem. We may remark in passing that upon the merits of the poet himself we have not the materials for forming a judgment. We know only that before he was twenty-six years of age he produced a poem of astonishing power and full of glaring Units. 'What the energy of such a mind might have accomplished if a few more years had been allowed it for growth we know no more than we could have predicted what Shakespeare was to do it' he had died immediately after writing Pericles and nits Andronicus. But it is more important to observe what a lesson the appearance of such a poet as Lucan ought to read to hasty historical generalizers. It is not uncommonly declared by such persons that all poetical energy expires under the withering breath of tyranny, and that the poets of despotism are narrow, cold, correct, while those of liberty are full of thought, various, vigorous, and perhaps irrcgular• At licoula the r i c hest tints of painting ; and as the pale , spare form of the monk arose in the pulpit, there appeared below him, thickly pressed together , a throng chequered with bright costu nirs, whose eyes were intently fixed upon him, whsle, as he looked down on the mass waving to mid fro under exc i te ment, he saw the human pavement light up and glow in the sombre nave, flashing into animation under his stirring appeals. F r om the chapter on " The Lights of Italian Lif e " we take a sketch of the villa of Lorenzo de Medici, a somewhat digressive illustration of the text that " the country residences of the gentry " are the true examples of the national taste " : If we would recall the men who were then remarkable, we must pass from the public palaces to the gardens and v illas which were the chosen residences of its nobles ; not the Frizzy) Riccardi, the home of the first Cosmo, which received kings and emperors; nor the Palazzo Viol, which reminds us of the family who were long the rivals of the Medici. We must tura to the villea which, at Fiesole or Cureggi, present to us the tastes and habits of a voluptuous but brilliant age The large rooms and ample porticos, the halls which opened on suites of chambers, to receive every breath of sir, fountains that brought to the summer heat a delicious coolness, high hedges of yew or ilex that kept off the glare of light; the grove adjoining the house, which presented so thick a shade as to defy even an Italian sure; the ewes that mixed its dark spiral form with a more spread ing foliage; the rooms filed with works of art—Roman busts, groups of statues, bronzes, vases, jewelled cops and cameos; manuscripts of various languages, the dusty trea sures of Greece and Rome : among these moved, in lite rary converse, the men of mind with whose features the great sculptors and painters have made us familiar: the grave face which we ndmire in the bust of Cosmo ; the young philosopher Ficino, the learned Leonardo from Arezzo, the monk from Camsldoli, Traversari, the femme Greek scholars, Poggio and Gnarini. hate were collected, from Switzerland and Germany and France, the moulder ing manuscripts to which we owe the recovered ,works of Lucretius, Quintilian, and Cicera. Here Aladin% came, with treasures from the East, with Plato and Lucian, with Xenophon anti Pinlar. Here merchants brought rare manuscripts, the statesman lett his office to speak of lite- rature, and the professor descended from his chair to read a Latin ode. Here were thrown out the first hints of the libraries which enriched Venice and Florence ; and in these gardens, under the shade of their trees, in the midst of statnes and busts, met the famous academy which studied the philosophy of Plato. Here afterwards might he seen the high features and graceful figure of Lorenzo ; while Marsilio Ficino reasoned of truth, and Pulci wrote Italian verses, and Accisjuoli tore himself from state papers, and Alberti explained the rules of art, and Pico di Mirandula discoursed, and Volition read and talked. Far off, near the cloister walls, under a spreading beech, was gathered a group of celebrated men, and the flow of the fountain was nut more refreshing than the flow of their thoughts; or they gathered on the nearer terraces of Fie sole and looked through cypress groves to Florence spread below them, and saw the sun go swiftly down behind its walls and battlements, while the eye passed over orchards and olives, the reddening vines and black forests, to the yellow sands and reaches of the Arno. These passages are what may be called hand sumely written, which is not the same as being well, or prettily, or beautifully written. There is a certain glow and colour and sound about them which would have been remarkable sonic years ago, before this style was as common as it has now become. But writers like Mr. Hepworth Dixon and Mr. Macknight have somewhat " blown upon " the elaborate rhetoric which pleases us in the purple patches of Hallam and the engine -turned paragraphs of Macaulay. Mr. Colquhoun is, unconsciously perhaps, an imitator of the former writer rather than of the latter; — not, indeed, of his deep research or his closely packed intbrmation, but of the occasional pas sages where he rises with his subject into a warmer and more brilliant region than that of Ducange's Glossary and Ryiner's Fcedera. 'there is a page or two in part iv., chap. 1, of "The Literature of Europe" in which the histo rian introduces a fine description of the retreat of Lorenzo de Medici at Fiesole, "in gardens which Tully might have envied," and over looking Florence, which lay before them with its amphitheatre of hills, amid meadows which teitified the statesman's genius for agriculture— "the classic diversion of a statesman's cares "-- and through which " the yellow Arno steals silently in its long reaches to the sea;" with a good deal more to the same effect. Now any one can see with half an eye that this passage, and Possibly some of a similar kind in Lord Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli, have been Mr. Coign houn's models. This would not so much matter, but the fact is that lie is not quite able to keep up the style with the same spirit ; indeed it is too much for anybody to attempt, and even the distinguished writers whom he imitates only sparingl tion. % employ such ve r y profuse ornamenta e must also say as to three of the essays that we (19 not pltosether sea that they well: