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