The Press.
London, England, 1854-07-29 00:00:00

712

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philanthropy has still much less to boast of
than to achieve. When Mrs. Stowe was shown
(vol. i., 27) a " ragged school," and found the
children " anything but ragged, being tidily
" dressed, remarkably clean, with glowing
" cheeks and bright eyes," and heard them
sing,
" I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English child,"
and, moreover, found them all familiar with
the fortunes of Uncle Tom and Topsy, she
must have thought our land peculiarly
favoured. She seems never to ha% e penetrated
beyond these got-up displays. With her
sense of humour, she must have seen some
thing to smile at as well as to admire in suJi
phases of society as came under her observa-
tion ; but a feeling of delicacy, perhaps, re-
strained her from describing more than mere
externals. Be this as it may, the book touches
not one of our sore places, either in St. James's
or St. Giles's : it is silent on our faults and
our dangers—it gives us no hint of reproof or
warning—and is likely to be less acceptable
to our public for its extreme amiability of

tone.
Her friends must wish that, as this work is
issued under her own sanction, she had
bestowed a little more care on its preparation.
Making every allowance for the " sacred
simplicity " of her life in the State of Maine,
there are inexcusable mistakes in the book.
At the gathering of Stafford•house there were
present, she says (i , 290), " Lord Shaftesbury,
with his beautiful lady, and her father and
mother, Lord and Lady Palmerston." Lady
Shaftesbury's father has been dead many
years : Lord Palmerston married Lady Cowper,
her mother, but that connection cannot con-
stitute, even in common parlance, a title to
her parentage. Lady Constance Grosvenor is
said (1., 297) " to be celebrated in the annals of
" the Court Journal as one of the handsomest
" ladies in England," but what those " annals"
are we cannot tell, as we never heard of them
before. Abbotsford is stated (i., 135) "to be
" the property of Scott's only surviving
. " daughter," though Mrs. Stnw'e might surely
have learnt from her visit to the plate that
there was no daughter of Scott surviving.
Abbotsford has descended to Mr. Lock
haves daughter, Mrs. Hope. The Earl of
Albemarle is said to have " served many
years under Wellington ;" but, as the earl
ava.= born in 1799, he could only have been
sixteen at the battle of Waterloo. His chief
service, we believe, has been under Lord
John Russell as private secretary. In a
notice of Clarkson it is said that his eftbrts
were generously aided by " a Mr. Whitbread."
She is often even more careless in her language
than her facts. Describing the impression
made on her by Rubens's " Descent of the
Cross," she writes—" I was lifted eifiny.feet
as
." much as by Cologne Cathedral, or Niagara
" Falls." At Abbotsford, stating her resolve
to see Melrose by moonlight. she says—" I
" intend to walk the whole
.figure while I am
" about it: It is a pity that she should use
French words she does not understand.
Distingtof she employs as a noun. " Arrived
" at the hall, we found quite a number of
" distinguic—bishops, lords, and clergy, be-
" sides numbers of others." And the word is
used by her in this sense more than once. It
is the critic's duty to point out these blemishes,
but we arc sorry that the necessity for doing
so should exist.
Her opinions on poetry are delivered with
as much freedom as on art. Scott is one of
her favourite authors, yet we are told that
a person Christianly-educated can hardly read some of
his descriptions in " The Lady of the lake " and
" Maranon ' without an emotion of disgust like what is
excited by the saute things in Homer.
What, then, shall be said of the historioal
books of the Old Testament? In the same
spirit she asserts that
the English literature and poetry of the time of Pope
and Dryden betray a stale of association so completely
heathenised that an old Greek or Roman raised from the
dead could soiree learn from them that any change had
taken place in the religion of the world.
The " Religio Lahti" of one poet and the
" Essay ou Man " of the other, though perhaps
repugnant to the tastes of such pietists as Mr.
Sherman and Mr. Sturge, are not exactly