The Press. — London, England, 1855-10-20 00:00:00

tice fifteen years ago, when no such considera tions were likely to prevail. Several chapters are devoted by Major Abbott to a survey of the political situation of Russia. He thinks that the empire must break up as civilisation advances:— That so widely-spread an empire should hold together under a free constitution, seems impossible. Whenever prosperity shall have produced surplus capital, and surplus capital shall have improved communication, and improved communication shall have carried, with the tide of know ledge, its inseparable adjunct, power, this enormous empire must split into a Northern and a Southern Kingdom; and every foot of territory Russia adds to her south-western frontier is tending to hasten the dismemberment. The naval power of Russia is never to be dreaded, he thinks. Subsequent events have fully confirmed the justice of this passage, written fifteen years ago : But Russia was not designed by heaven to be a great naval power. It is not the genius of her people. They have not the enterprise, the decision, the promptitude necessary for naval exploits. They would not run, they would make a good stand-up fight, when put to it; but they had much rather leave it alone, and they are wise. It is not their province, nor ever can be. His reflections on the Russian army are equally shrewd. It must always, he thinks, be essentially weal for aggressive, or external, warfare. His reasons are given at great length, and are unquestionably sound. Russia has made her conquests by her diplomacy more than by her arms ; and the author was decidedly of opinion that she would never run the hazard of an European war. In a note to this passage he adds - - . This, which was written in 1841,1 will not alter, because it is virtually true, although Russia has at present over reached herself, and involved herself in hostilities which she had not. the remotest intention to provoke. The invasion by Russia of the Turkish empire arose in the strong assurance she had received from all her foreign agents that England would wink at the atrocity; that France, from internal discords, was powerless to oppose it ; that Austria, from gratitude, would acquiesce, and Prussia from cowardice. The cowardice of Prussia is one of these assurances confirmed by the event. And it is certain that had Lord Palmerston been Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time, the invasion would have been deferred to a more convenient moment. The high.spirited Emperor, scene. Wined to look upon himself as a god, had become too far involved to retreat, before he perceived the vigorous oppo sition awaiting him from Great Britain. It was then utterly impossible to recede. The counsels of Nesselrode, the sagest of the Russian ministers, seem to have been ever opposed to this deviation from the cautious policy heretofore pursued by the Government. In the new chapter contributed to this edition, the author enforces this view at more length; Nicholas was completely deceived by the timid tone of our Government at the be ginning of the dispute, and read in it a " con " firmation of his presumptuous hopes." Russia, he says, without the hearty aid of Austria and Prussia, is vulnerable only on two points, the coast of the Baltic and the Black Sea, but success on those points he submits would not be decisive : The allies may, undoubtedly, destroy the navy of Russia; wrest from her, for awhile, the Crimea and the southern coast of the Baltic, and drive her back along her western frontier. But even then Russia, though sorely discouraged, is not necessarily subdued. She falls back from her cul. tivated possessions to those boundless wastes, where she alone can find subsistence, and whither no army can follow her, for good. If the submit, it is from no fear of destruc tion, but merely to gain time and opportunity. active hostility, he from the sacrifices it to be this, that it rouses v forcing it to act on the _ the false proclamations acting in self•defence, and doeltade, protecting would be our wiser id would inevitably _ blockade is of all services required from a powerful navy the most wearisome and unpopular. The advo cates of this scheme seem to have forgotten that great nations cannot have little wars. The peculiar applicability of much of Major Abbott's narrative to present circumstances, mist be our excuse for quoting lib largely from a book which has long since obtained deserved popularity among narratives of travel and adventure. He is a shrewd observer, with much of that imaginative faculty which constitutes the link between the conclusions of reasoning and the inspirations of genius. We are sure the public will, like ourselves, be glad to refresh their recollection of this spirited, MilUitctiTe) Ana gentiemalq book. To our present system of a moots an objection, apart fro entails on us : Its worst effect, however, seems tc the spirit of the Russian nation, by defensive. It gives a colour to all t of the Autocrat, that he was actin, that we she the aggressors. Ite thinki a vigorotts bloc Turkey at the same time, w, policy. But a war of this kin , soon die out of itself, as 1 THE PRESS. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. A New Edition. In Six Volumes. Vol. I. " Murray's British Classics." London : Murray. " ANOTHER edition of Lord Byron !" may cry in wonder some reader distant from London, and not acquainted with the fact familiar to book buyers, that copies of the previous library editions of Byron have become extremely scarce. They bring a figure at book-auctions, and at the second-hand shops, at which we have often been surprised. As a matter of fact we know, of our own observation, that " a new edition " of this great poet is abso • lutely required. And the present publication is in the highest literary sense a " new " edition, and, judging by this volume, it is, to our taste, the most elegant and valuable that has yet appeared. In the former editions the text was often en cumbered with long passages from the con temporary reviews of the noble poet. The copiously-expressed admiration of Lord Jeffrey, and other critics whose fame is already on the wane, were felt as obtrusive by the reader of taste and genuine feeling. In the present edition the notes are all original, extracts and superfluity are carefully avoided, while Lord Byron's own notes, and those of Hobhouse, are of course retained. Prefixed to each poem is a succinct account of the circumstances under which it was produced ; and while the editor does not launch into dissertation, his remarks are always most valuable from their critical pertinence and their terseness of style. We have been so much pleased with the literary character of some of the notes and the introductions to the poems, that we shall give some specimens of them to the reader. Prefixed to the fourth canto of " Childe Harold" we find the following critical estimate of that great poem : The defects of the poem, taken as a whole, are not very serious. In places it is obscure ; the language is some times a little labored and exaggerated ; a few of the senti ments are repeated; and, for all its conciseness of phrase, the incidents are occasionally dwelt on too long. There was one subject to which his perpetual recurrence only kept alive interest. As the lyre of Anacreon, whatever topic he tried, reverted to love. so every theme conducted Lord Byron to his sorrows and wrongs. He often alludes to the pride of a heart which would rather break than re veal its woes, but in truth his passions found vent in verse, and he confided them to the public, even while daring its decrees. The most general objection made to the poem was its sombre misanthropy. He held, with Horace Wal pole, that life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel. Man was but miserable dust and ashes; honour and friendship but a name; all pursuits but vanity and vexation, and he argued that Solomon and a host of divines had declared the same. But Lord Byron did not show the emptiness of earth that he might lead to the skies, nor expose the frailty of our nature that we might tolerate it in others and subdue it in ourselves. His was that dreary, blighting philosophy Which will not look beyond the tomb, And cannot hope for rest before. A multitude of imitators borrowed his creed and per sonated his character. They imagined they became :.-.; - ‘re interesting by seeming to be miserable, and that pretend ing to despise the world was to place themselves above it. These affectations have long since passed away, and how ever much his readers may still be carried along by the dark heavings of his tempestuous soul, they stand safe at the conclusion upon the firm-set shore. Most of the critical annotations appended to this volume are penned in the critical tone of the preceding passage. Byron is neither blindly worshipped by the editor, nor is he subjected to the cant of criticism. An absence of all exaggeration of sentiment, and a calm smooth style, is visible in them all. A question has often been raised as to whe ther the " Hours of Idleness " really deserved the castigation administered in the Edinburgh Review. Were any germs of genius really discernible in them? Did they show power of versification, or indicate any originality ? We have often read them at various times, and our opinion is, that, while the most discri minative critic could not infer from them such genius as Myron displayed afterwards, they exhibit, if not originality, at least a pecu liarity of mind. There is not a little in them of the gloomy brooding which ran through all his subsequent poems. Sir Walter cott was not the only scholar or critic who discerned something more than mediocrity in the " Hours of Idleness." Sir Egerton Brydges wrote, under the notice of Byron in his "Biographical Peerage': (London 18013) : 7 -" His lordship is ", about twenty years old, but has already di s- SATURDAY, " tinguished himself in the literary world by a " volume of juvenile poems, of which the fol " lowing, as it not only possesses much merit, " but has a relation to the present subject, has " a claim to insertion in this place ;" and he then cites at length the verses "On leaving Newstead Abbey ;" and in his large " History of the Peerage " (1812), Sir Egerton again remarked, " that his lordship, by his juvenile " poems, had not only shown a mind highly " cultivated, but adorned with fancy and fk eli ing." In after times, Sir Egerton Brydges wrote with remarkable ability on the more matured exhalations of Byron's power; and, of ourselves, we cite these opinions on the " Hours of Idleness," as we have never seen them quoted, and as they corroborate the opinion of Walter Scott, as alluded to in the following judicious passage from the editor of the present publication : The injustice of the article was not, as is often alleged, in the insensibility it showed to poetic genius, for those who could see the germs of " Childe Harold " in the " Hours of Idleness," might detect the oak in an acorn. Nine pieces out of ten are rather vapid imitations of pre ceding writers, and though the acute and benignant eye of Walter Scott had already distinguished " passages of noble promise," which led him to expostulate with the editor of the Edinburgh Review upon the bitterness of the critique, yet he frankly confessed that they raised no expectation of even the dawning power which was displayed in the two first cantos of the " Pilgrimage." Many buds of better promise have never blown. But the unpretending volume of a schoolboy—clever for the age at which it was produced— might have been passed in silence, or treated with respect. There was nothing to warrant scornful jeering, and, in deed, zeal for politics, more than for poetry, is said to have inspired the article, which was dictated by the desire to humble a peer. The peer soon taught his critics that they had not set their foot upon a worm, but upon a snake that could sting, and Jeffrey then endeavoured to extenuate the wantonness of the attack by calling insulting ridicule " in nocent pleasantry and moderate castigation." The question, it appears, is still an open one, as to who was the reviewer in the Edinburgh. We are told here : It is authoritatively stated by his biographer, that Jeffrey—the editor--was not the author of the article. Lord Byron, who at first supposed him the sole aggressor, settled down later into the belief that his antagonist was the versatile Henry Brougham, to whose pen the attack is now very generally attributed. The article from the Edinburgh is reprinted in this edition. The following passage, with its bitter irony, and its involved parentheses, is like the style of Lord Brougham'— With this view, we must beg leave seriously to assure him that the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet — nay, although (which does not always happen) those feet should scan regularly, and have been all counted accu rately upon the fingers—is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of live liness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem, and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers, or differently ez.- pressed. We put it to his candour. whether there is any thing so deserving the name of poetry in verses like the following, written in 1806; and whether, if a youth of eighteen could say anything so uninteresting to his ances tors, a youth of nineteen should publish it. And then the reviewer scornfully cited the " Farewell to Newstead." For the honour of the craft of critics, it is well to recollect that the opinion of the Monthly Review on the juvenile peer's production was as follows : - - • These compositions (it said) are generally of a plaintive or an amatory cast, with an occasional mixture of satire; and they display both ease and strength—both pathos and fire. It will be expected that marks of juvenility and of baste should be discovered in these productions ; and we seriously advise our young bard to fulfil with submissive perseverance the duties of revision And correction. We discern in Lord Byron a degree of mental power, and a turn of mental disposition, which render us solicitous that both should be well cultivated and wisely directed in his career of life. On the merits of the " English Bards and Scoteh Reviewers " there is more diversity of opinion. We are inclined, with the editor, to rate the production low, and we concur with him in thinking that it would not have passed into celebrity but for the writer's sub sequent renown. It is extraordinary what a iii the of mere rubbish is often preserved n the collected works of writers in consequence of the glory of their more famous productionst There is not a couplet, not even a line, of thg " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " that has become classical, or proverbial by quota / tion. In saying that, we refer to its satirical and quasi -critical portions, as the fine apos trophe to Kirke White is not in the vein of the poem at all. His present editor's opi niou on tie satire is as follows