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

1.. THE PRESS, FFBIItrAIIY 13,1858. en- - -- Towards the west anti south they dipped considerably, and ve rged to an ordinary stone-colour inside ; outside they „ e re rcd awl brown all the way round the circle. Hence it „,,,,e, that when in previous months we had looked from I • s om e of the bleached interior surfaces of points • on the northern brim, being seen through and over the sonthent depression, gave us the erroneous idea of a double crater ;an exterior ring-wall of brown, and an in side one of white, material; errors of perspective it now ambeard. Some short portions of the interior of the wall are pre cipitous rock, ten to twenty feet deep. But generally the structure has so crumbled away during long ages of volcanic idleneu, that it is now, like a baron's castle of a long past feudal age, going to slow and certain ruin; falling down wards in a mass of rubbish that tends to fill up the central lollow. All about the curving floor, my wife and Dun Emiriguez wondered over the deep bed of fragments, searching for the finest specimens of stilpher ; and, with p h,, t tigrahic camera, I walked through and through the the crater more than a dozen times, in as many different three ti,,na, to take the several views,—completely disproving thereby all alleged dangers of the " awful abyss," that one tourist described looking into with fear; after he hail " crawled " up on the outside to a high pinnacle from whenoe he could safely make the survey. The result of his observations was to confirm him in his belief that the crater, if not cooling and becoming extinct, was certainly stationary in its volcanic action : As far as we could make out, the ground is heated by the steam, or at least has less temperature than the steam w hich permeates it, and which indicated in the strongest sent Wes only 150 deg.; while the boiling point of water which we ascertained by careful experiment, in a deep cleft on the western side of the crater, is 191 deg. 08 min. There would seem therefore to be no " high-pressure " at work, nor indeed any sensible difference in the effects on the whole, since the day of Captain Was, nearly a century since. We part from Professor Smyth with reluc taw.. Scientific travellers are not always agreeable writers, but the valuable matter con tained in this volume, and the peculiarly in teresting memoranda upon the natural pro ductions of the island, as well as the interest ing descriptions of the habits of the aborigines of Teneriffe, render the book as agreeable to the general reader as it is interesting to the man of science. We must not conclude with out a word upon the valuable photo-stereo graphs with which the book is profusely illu strated. In themselves the views are ex tremely intetesting, for they present to us, with exquisite accuracy, either some curious geological or botanical phenomena, of which, by a happy thought of Mr. Reeve, the pub lisher, we ore enabled to enjoy the effects either of solidity or of distance, by the appli cation of a simple invention, the " Book Stereoscope," which permits stereographs to be bound up in a volume without detri ment to stereoscopic action. It is a bold and novel attempt, which perfects materially a work of this nature. The irmstmtions are as beautiful as they are accurate, and the book, both on account of its embellishments as well as for the valuable facts it contains, and the spirit of sound observation in which it is written, is one in every respect calculated to do credit both to author and publisher. Shelley and his Writings. By Charles S. Middleton. Two Vols. London : Newby. IVE are glad that this biography has appeared, although we shall not be able unreservedly to commend the manner of its execution. Sufficient misapprehension still exists in the minds of many respectable persons as to the conduct and character of the poet, to render desirable a plain and continuous narrative of the leading facts in his history divested of the injurious colour which prejudice or enmity cast upon them even long after be himself was kyond their influence. Shelley's was one of those natures which refuse to be classified. It seems absurd to talk of him as " a man of letters." or to associate with that fervid and childlike temperament any of the ordinary incidents of a literary career. There was so much about him that admitted of misrepresen tation, and there was so little in his works which could act as an effectual counterpoise to it, that some more minute record than we Previously possessed of his actions and dis position was clearly necessary to vindicate the genuine nobleness of his heart, and operate as some set-off against the few grave errors which are undoubtedly to be laid to his charge. Of all the writers that ever lived, Shelley is, on the whole, the one who most perfectly exem plifies the abstract idea of a poet—who em bodies in their extreme all those attributes which are vaguely, but not untruly, supposed to constitute the poetical character. But his lofty and unworldly mind, and the Ariel-like spirituality of his writings, while they lift him high amid the ranks of true singers, deprive him in a proportionate degree of that fel low-feeling which guards from neglect the temples of more earthly fame. Great writers leave behind them, in the characters they have created, a sort of shadowy army which fights for their reputation even if there is not a shred of it remaining, and does more effectual service than the most ingenious biographer. Whatever might be their feelings, we should never think ill of the men who have touched us to the core, who have made us laugh and weep, who have given us Priam and Andro mache, Turnus and Dido, Cordelia, Falstaff, Jeanie Deans, and Mr. Oldbuck, Mrs. Nickleby, and Major Pendennis. Such writers make us feel that we are their kindred, and the sympathies they excite are moral rather than intellectual. The Byrn ' pathies which Shelley excites—apart, of course, from his own personal character—are intellectual, rather than moral ; and even he himself, with all his goodness and kindness, was too far removed both from the virtues and the vices of his fellows, to waken the regard of cursory acquaintances, or to escape the limbo to which the world summarily consigns " impracticable " men. There is nothing about his creations which engages our affec tion ; they are too much " off their feet," and live too much in a world of their own, to plead with us for him who called them into being. The excuse which Charles lamb invented for the dramatists of the Restoration—that their personages belong to an ideal region, in which the common obligations of life do not exist — might be applied with much more propriety to the " Revolt of Islam," than to the works of Congreve or Farquhar. But this doctrine, while it may excuse the man, and perhaps elevate the poet, places both on a chilly eminence, where the air is too rarified for the respiration of ordinary mortals. To that " bright creature of the element," the Muse of Shelley, that wanders through unap proachable solitudes amid the enchanted reve ries of a voluptuous Platonism, one feels in clined to address the idyllic invocation of a modern poet : Come down, 0 maid, from yonder mountain height: What pleasure lives in height In height and cold, the splendour of the hills? Shelley was the only son of Sir Timothy Shelley, of Castle Goring, and was born at Field-place, Horsham, in 1792. The charac ter given by Mr. Middleton of his father and mother would lead us to attribute to their neglect all the perversity of character he ever showed ; but very little seems to be really ascertained either about them or about his sisters, with whom be was brought up till about eight or ten years old. After passing four years at a school at Brentford, the master of which was a sufficiently bad scholar to be very severe on a verse of Ovid which was shown up to him in a boy's exercise, and where Shelley was narrowly prevented from jumping out of a window in a fit, of somnambu lism, he was sent in his fifteenth year to Eton. This, it is well known, was one of the most miserable periods of his life ; and it is difficult to understand how any parents could have had the cruelty to send such a boy to school at all. Mr. Middleton says : He now became a victim of the fagging system, that very amiable and enlightened custom which so pre eminently distinguishes the schools of our aristocracy. It was not surprising that his proud and sensitive spirit should rebel against this abominable practice ; and re fusing to fag at Eton, Mrs. Shelley tells us, he was treated with revolting cruelty by masters and boys. This state ment, however. I am inclined to think rather too highly coloured, for his early resistance to this species of oppres sion does not appear to have been the entire cause of the treatment he received at Eaton. The sneer against fagging is shallow, and is not warranted by anything afterwards brought forward. Whatever sufferings Shelley may have undergone, we have no doubt that they would have been much greater in a school where fagging was not authorised. Mr. Mid dleton, who, we imagine, is not himself a public-school man, does not see the obvious truth that fagging is certain to exist in some shape or other wherever boys are, and that it 163 is therefore better to prevent its abuses by placing it under regulation. The " herd " who teased and insulted Shelley appear to have consisted of his own contemporaries—not of the upper school. He never seems to have taken kindly to the studies of the place, and amused himself with chemical and astrono mical experiments and observations, and with corresponding on the same subjects, and on metaphysics, which seem to have occupied him as early as the age of seventeen. On leaving Eton he passed nearly a year at home, where he read a great deal of trash, and began a poem on the " Wandering Jew," two speci mens of which are given by Mr. Middleton. They read like a weak imitation of Scott. His six months at Oxford (in 1511), his long walks, abstemious habits, scientific experi- ments, and final expulsion, are perhaps the best known portion of his career. He had analysed " Hume's Essays," and circulated copies privately—was asked by the authorities of his college if he was author, and, on his refusal to answer, was expelled. Mr. Hogg suffered the same fate for remonstrating in his behalf. The biographer, who ought to give us something rational on the subject, has only the following vague declamation to offer : Moreover, he was a true idealist, impressed with deep, religious fervour; with the faculty of veneration, strongly developed, loving better to throw himself hack into the past, and in the gardens of Academes to contemplate the sublime vision of God and eternal Beatitude, through the medium of his Divine Teacher, (than Ito accept, without question, the dogmas before which ignorance and super stition might tremble, or which bigotry too frequently seemed determined to enforce ; and here it will be seen, on due reflection, that it was the very fact of his being so grasping in his spiritual aspirations, that his imagine fion refused to clog her wing with the flimsy conceits of schoolmen, or the mere conventionalisms of society, when they represen'ed the Infinite in any way less than the grandeur of his own conceptions. We have now to see how a mind so richly, 'yet so pecu liarly endowed, was appreciated by his superiors. His little pamphlet shortly fell into their hands, and it was impossible they should understand it, fur it was con cent:fly the nature of God, and the questions started, as subtle in their nature as those of Cyprian, in the " Majico Prodigioso "of Calderon. They had no intellect to reply to his interrogsticns, nor did they attempt it, as in com mon honesty they might have done, and had nothing to offer, but the malignity of their own minds. By his expulsion Shelley lost his first love — his cousin, Aliso Harriet Grove—and was turned adrift on London without resources, though with every disposition towards the amelioration of his species. His philanthropy was so practical that he usually gave away all be had, and once pawned his solar microscope to raise money for a charitable purpose. How he lived at all is a mystery, which is not dimi nished when we find Mr. Middleton referring to this period the story of his making a bank bill into a paper boat and sailing it on the Serpentine. His first marriage, with the ill-fated Harriet Westbrook, occurred in the same year as his expulsion from Oxford. After living at the Lakes in Wales, in Ireland, in Wales again (in 1812), in London again, where he wrote " Queen Mab " (1813), they separated (in 1814) by mutual consent. There is no truth what ever in the assertion that Shelley deserted his wife. She took with her the child already born, and remained with her own family till 1816, when she committed suicide by drowning her self in a pond—not on account of her hus band's treatment, but apparently from the mortification and annoyance she met with at home. Shelley had shortly after their sepa , ration begun to live with Mary Godwin, whom he subsequently married. The year 1814 was partly occupied by their tour in France, which came to an end for want of funds. This source of anxiety was got over at the death, in the next year, of Sir Bysshe Shelley (the poet's grandfather), when an arrangement was made that Percy should have 1,0001. a year. H• passed 1816 in moving to and fro in England and in a tour to Geneva, lasting several months, during which he made the acquaint ance of Byron. On his return from this journey occurred the suicide of his first wife, and the refusal of the Chancellor to allow him to have the custody of his children. The next year was that of his residence at Marlow, where he wrote the " Revolt of Islam " and a pamphlet on Reform, which, from the extracts given, seem to have been a more sober pro duction than might have been expected from him. Mr. Middleton has met with a Mr.