The Press.
London, England, 1854-08-05 00:00:00

736

M. Gautier very candidly states that during
the whole of his residence in Constantinople
he met with but one very slight adventure,
though he indicates in a paragraph whole
volumes of Eastern romance :
Nothing is more charming in an Eastern tale than to
read how an old woman in a deserted street made you
a sign to follow her cautiously and at a dis'Ance, and intro-
duced you by a secret door into an apartment heaped with
all the luxuries of the Orient, where, reclining upon a
superb divan, a sultana gleaming with jewels, which, how.
ever, paled beside her superb loveliness, impatiently
awaited your coming, and received yon with smiles of
tenderness and welcome. In due course, the adventure
should terminate by the sudden arrival of the master, who
scarcely leaves you time to fly by the back-door ; unless,
indeed, a more tragical climax is attained, by a contest
from which you barely escape with life, and the plunge
into the Bosphorus, at dead of night, of a sack which bears
some vague resemblance to the human form.
Such adventures have in general no better
origin than an Armenian intrigue :
For this it suffices to have an old woman, who arranges
her plans with a pretty young A rnienian coquette, a rather
credulous and romantic young man, and a rendezvous in a
lonely house. Vanity does the rest, and the adventure
generally terminates in the extortion of a sum of money,
an insignificant circumstance, omitted from the subsequent
narrative of the deluded *our, who imagines in his
heroine at least a favourite slave of a pacha, if not one of
the harem of the Grand Seignior himself.
Our author's own adventure was simple
enough. Riding one evening through the im-
mense cemetery which stretches from the Seven
Towers to the hills of Eyoub, he observed a
young girl, veiled with a transparent yach-
mack, and wrapped in a feredge of green,
sitting beside a tomb with flowers in her hand.
As the stranger approached she raised her
head, revealing through her transparent veil a
face of surpassing loveliness, and with timid
grace offered him a rose from her bouquet.
At the moment our author was joined by his
companion, who had lagged behind, and to
him the like grace was accorded ; then some
attendants of the beauty came up, and she was
lost in an instant in the shade of overhang-
ing cypresses. " Thus," says M. Gautier,
pathetically,
thus terminated the only conquest I can boast among
the Turkish fair ones. But I have never forgotten those
luminous black eyes with their rich drooping lashes ; and
I still preserve with care the rose she gave me, and which I
shall ever guard as a precious relic.
In fact, Turkish ladies are so carefully
watched, and such intense jealousy is mani-
fested at the approach of a giaour, that a
stranger, however gallant his disposition, has
not the slighest chance of gratifying it. A
Moslem resents the slightest allusion to his
harem as an insult; and a French ambassa-
dress who wished to make the favoured ladies
of Redschid Pasha a present of some superb
Lyons silk sent it to him with the brief inti-
mation :—" Pray accept some silks, which you
" will know better than any one how to use."
It is likely enough, however, that Turkish
ladies, in spite of their seclusion, may conduct
intrigues after a strictly Turkish fashion little
known to us. It would be strange, indeed, if
all those stories of love and faithlessness
which have descended to us from the days of
the Arabian nights downwards were void of
foundation.
This amusing volume is marked through.
out by picturesque description. The author
makes some strange mistakes in his allusions
to English life, but the general tenor of his
narrattve is as faithful as it is animated. The
translation, by Mr. Gould, is more than com
monly spirited, and the volume is illustrated
by plates from photographic pictures.

The Poetical Works of Gray, Collins. Parnell,
T. Warton, and Green. 1 vol. Edited by
the Rev. R. A. Willmott. London : Rout-
ledge and Co.
THIS is a very pleasing volume, containing
some works that, though small in space, will
be lasting in time. It is edited, with copious
notes, by Mr. Willmott, who is thoroughly
familiar with his authors, and has illustrated
the text with criticisms for the most part
graceful and judicious. He is sometimes too
lenient as a critio and too prone to yield his
enthusiasm, and he overestimates the merits
of the purely academical in style. He looks
at nature through a literary atmosphere, and
likes that authors should be strictly orthodox
in not violating the traditional canons.

v.' • vor vlr•
. •
TrIE PRESS. --------

Like many other accomplished men of
the age, his tendency is towards autho-
rity in criticism and to prescriptive forms
in style. We have ourselves been so often
offended with mock genius and the spurious
original that we cannot find heart to blame
the cautious school of criticism of which Mr.
Willmott is an example.
The poets in this volume have a generic
affinity. They wrote in the eighteenth cen-
tury, and, even when most affecting the su-
blime, they studiously laboured for the correct.
They sought to unite the emotional with the
exact, and to express raptures without one
semitone too much of vehemence. They did
not so much love the beautiful and grand as
shrink from any expression that might possi-
bly have suggested aught that was capable of
being turned into ridicule. They wrote as
authors, rather than sung like poets, and com-
posed with fastidious elegance if they did not
create with the inventive faculty of sublime
genius. We feel that verse was with them a
brilliant accomplishment rather than a daily
inspiration. They had not that "mighty
" hunger of the heart " which in every age has
driven forward the great poets to live only for
their sublime privilege of evoking tones of
divine melody from the harp. Their strains
are sweet, rich in cadences, and quaintly orna-
mented with many devices of art ; but we feel
that the artificial picturesque was constantly
before them, and the sublime grandeurs, as
well as the simpler graces, of nature were
beyond such melodious mechanicians.
It would be impossible to conceive of the
period when English poetry could be read and
Gray's " Elegy" forgotten. Through all vi-
cissitudes of taste it has held its popularity :
it fascinates upon a first reading, and con-
tinues to please while intellect and memory
remain. Though often made a school task, it
reads with freshness in after life. It contains
single lines which are poems by themselves.
What sonnet was ever so suggestive as the
verse,
The breezy call of incense•breathing morn,
or where he alludes to evening,
And drowsy tiuklings lull the distant folds.
But verbal felicity and musical sweetness,
though it abounds in both, are far from being
the best merits of the "Elegy." It contains a
variety of poetical ideas, sometimes pathe-
tic and sometimes picturesque, occasionally
uniting both qualities, and appealing at once
to fancy and feeling. Thus,
Na children run to lisp their sire's return,
And climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
touches a chord in every nature. Then we
have the sentimental in feeling, and the poe-
tical graphic realised at once in the vivid pic-
ture :

- -
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
None but a poet could produce such lines. A
mere rhetorician would jingle through a vo-
lume of verse without giving us such a sense
of the ideal as some single lines of Gray.
Word-painting was not the only resource
which he employed to produce his effects.
Several of his stanzas are instinct with human
feeling. Thus, after noting the texts in the
churchyard,
That teach the rustic moralist to die,
how finely he bursts forth
For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind.

One is almost surprised that a poet who could
produce such verses did not give us more of
them. But Gray blotted every verse that he
thought was mediocre. Thus he omitted the
following from the " Elegy," as they did not
please him sufficiently :
Hark ! how the sacred calm that breathes around
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease ;
In still small accents whisperinc from the ground,
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.
Him have we seen the greenwood-side along,
While o'er the heath we hied, our labour done,
What time the woodlark piped her farewell song,
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground•

SATURDAY,

These stanzas are sweet in themselves, and
the last two lines are prettily touching; but
we do not concur with Mr. Willmott, who
" supposes that every reader numbers them
" amongst the treasures of his memory."
Placed beside the context of the rest of the
"Elegy," they would appear indistinct in
ideas, and rather tame in utterance.
Goldsmith was right in tracing the influ-
ence of Spenser over the mind of Gray. Many
passages in " The Faerie Queene " are in-
spired by that " divine despair " which has
filled the greatest poetical natures. The quaint
and variously-fashioned ornaments of Spenser,
and the richness of his diction, were especially
calculated to charm Gray. The melancholy
that occasionally is heard in his verse is
of a philosophical rather than poetical
nature. Mr. Willmott deals tenderly with
Gray's religious character. After citing some
consolatory remarks, written as a Deist might
utter them, Mr. Willmott says:—
These are the consolations of a philosopher, the richest
gleams of Deism on its side of glory. Did Gray go beyond
it ? And was there before his eyes the one shadow of the
cross over life ? In want of direct evidence, we can only
look at his works, and their voice gives an uncertain
sound. \Vise lessons, tender morals, pathetic pictures,
instruct and enchant us ; but we discover no angel in his
churchyard, sitting on a tomb. He pursues the insect
through its summer day, sees time and grief spoiling its
wings of the fair colours, and leaves it with a sigh in the
dust. The fact is, that theology was the element of learning
in which Gray was weak. Mason could never persuade
him to read Jeremy Taylor.
As we have intimated, Gray wanted potion
to be a truly great poet. Sensibility alone
will not give power in any mental pursuit
unless there be sustained intensity and strong
reality of purpose. We are thankful for what
Gray has given us, and it would be impossible
to unite such exquisite felicity of execution
with prolific variety of design. The late Isaac
D'lsraeli compared his poems to a rich tissue
woven on the frames and with the gold threads
of others. To us they are rather suggestive
of an Italian garden, in which ancient and
modern art are combined to rival nature ;
where old statues and classical arbours with
mosaic pavements divert the eye from the
flowers and verdure, and yet where only the
peevish critics could disparage the beautiful
ingenuity of the artist presiding over the
scene.
Collins, often confounded with the school of
Gray, belonged to a different class of mind.
He had far less reach of understanding than
Gray, who was a profound thinker and va-
riously-learned scholar in the strictest sense
of the terms. But, with less attainment and
inferior mastery over language, Collins had
more natural intensity of genius. He was
not great enough to conquer circumstances.
The teasing vulgarities of a narrow sphere of
life stifled his intellect. To some sensitive
minds poverty is as bad as a gaol. Its tyranny
is felt to degrade them in the opinion of their
neighbours, who are "the world" to them;
and its effect is still worse when its victims,
in some respects, have, like Collins, brought it
on themselves. It is only charitable to con-
clude that the madness which afflicted the
closing scenes of the life of Collins had in-
fected him in earlier years. We know nothing
more disheartening in literary history than
the fact that Collins died before his fame had
begun to dawn on the public ; and there is
scarcely another instance in which produc-
tions of genius like his excellent odes re-
ceived such a cheerless reception.
It
seems strange that the " Ode to the Passions"
did not at once commend the author to ap-
plause. Amidst the few fragments bequeathed
to us by his hapless genius we can discern the
union of the contemplative with the intense.
We have lately been wearied with reading the
endless landscapes on paper drawn by some of
our rhetorical verse-makers. Let us see how
real genius, with a few magic words, unfolds a
vast landscape to the eye. There is some-
thing truly admirable in these verses from the
" Ode to Evening " :
Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene;
Or find some ruin, 'midst its dreary dells,
Whose walls more awful nod
By thy religious gleams.
Or, if chill blustering winds, or driving rain,
Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut,
That, from the mountain's side,
Views wilds, and swelling floods,

AUGUST 5 1854. _

And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires ;
And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all
Thy dewy fingers draw
The gradual dusky veil.
The vivid and the vast are rarely realised in
so few words. If a poet who could produce
such strains had leisurely strolled through the
Alps and along the base of the Apennines,
and breathed forth his emotions as he wan
dered amidst these sublime scenes, what
delicious poetry he would have produced ! In
his own words, he could make us feel
the glowing mind,
Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined.
In stud) ing the more brilliant passages of
Collins we can plainly see that, as in the case
of wit, brevity is a great source of the sublime.
No dirge has yet been sung over the grave of
the hero of Silistria, the gallant Butler, that
worthy scion of the house of Ormonde ; but
Collins has written in twelve brief lines an
immortal requiem over fallen heroes of all
climes :
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring. with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung ;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung ;
There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay,
And Freedom shall a-while repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there !
The remarks of Mr. Willmott upon the life of
Collins are very interesting, and will repay
perusal.
Passing on to the other poets, we admit that
they have claims to remembrance, but we
think that the volume would have been more
complete if the poetical piecen of Johnson and
Goldsmith had been substituted in place of
the works of T. Warton and Green. We do
not think much of Warton. His most. affecting
poem is " The Suicide," which has some touch-
ing stanzas, but from a strain of high poetry
it gradually falls off into a sermon in verse.
he poem is not so much known as Mr. Will-
mott appears to think. The dreariness of its
subject is repulsive, but there is awful gloom
and a weird solemnity in the appalling picture
of the selfslayer, and the poetical accessories
are tastefully introduced. This picture is
vivid with genius :
Beneath the beech, whose branches bare,
Smit with the lightning's livid glare,
• O'erhang the craggy road,
And whistle hollow as they wave ;
Within a solitary grave,
A slayer of himself holds his accurs'd abode.
Lower'd the grim morn, in murky dyes
Damp mists involv'd the scowling skies,
And dimm'd the struggling day ;
As by the brook, that ling ring laves
Yon rush-grown moor with sable waves,
Full of the dark resolve he took his sullen way.
mark'd his desultory pace,
His gestures strange, and varying face,
With many a mutter'd sound ;
And alt ! too late aghast I view'd
The reeking blade, the hand embru'd ;
He fell, and groaning grasp'd in agony the ground.
• • • • •
Full oft, unknowing and unknown,
He wore his endless noons alone,
Amid the autumnal wood :
Oft was he wont, in hasty fit,
Abrupt the social board to quit,
And gaze with eager glance upon the tumbling flood.
These are certainly the most powerful lines
that Warton ever wrote. With respect to
Green's poems we do not concur with Mr.
Willmott. "The Spleen" has much clever-
ness, but modern readers, especially the fair,
will find it coarse, and several of its illustra-
tions and words are very broad. It contains
some quaint and witty couplets, but its oeto-
syllabic metre is monotonous, and, on the
whole, we do not think it superior to those
verses of society which wits like the late
Henry Luttrell could easily produce. The
foliating passage is very like the manner of
Luttrell in his happiest vein :
Since mirth is good in this behalf,
At some particulars let us laugh.
Witlings, brisk fools, curs'd with half sense,
That stimulates their impotehce ;
Who buzz in rhyme, and, like blind flies,
Err with their wings, for want of eyes,
Poor authors worshipping a calf,
Deep tragedies that make us laugh,
A strict dissenter saying grace,
A lecturer preaching for a plade,

THE PRESS.

Folks, things prophetic to dispense,
Making the past the future tense,
The popish dubbing of a priest,
Fine epitaphs on knaves deceas'd,
Greeu-apron'd Pythonissa's rage,
Great fEsculapius on his stage,
A miser starving to be rich,
The prior of Newßate's dying speech,
A jointurA widow's ritual state,
Two Jews disputing tete,
New almanacs compos'd by seers,
Experiments on felon's ears,
Disdainful prudes, who ceaseless ply
The superb muscle of the eye,
A coquet's April-weather face,
A Queenborough-mayor behind his maco,
And fops in military shew,
Are sovereign for the ease in view.
Some of these lines are graphic.

Who buzz in rhyme, and, like blind flies,
Err with their wings, for want of eyes,
is a couplet worthy of the author of " Hudi-
bras."

A coquet's April-weather face
is au image that could not be improved by
another word. But these, after all, are small
merits. We confess, too, that in our appre-
hension Mr. Willmott places too high an
estimate on Parnell. When he says, "He
" (Parnell) is an earlier Goldsmith, with a scho-
" larly taste," his praise is perfectly extravagant.
Parnell never could have produced the deli-
cious pathos of " The Deserted Village," with
its unrivalled sketches from simple life. Its
beautiful imagery is altogether beyond Par-
nell. Some of the secondary passages in
" The Traveller" he might have penned, but
he could not write the lines that Johnson
repeated with rapture, in which Englishmen
are described. There is one touch in that
passage entirely beyond the merely correct
school of Parnell—
" True to imagined right, above control "
a line in which the characteristic love of the
Anglo-Saxons for personal freedom is faithfully
described in a single stroke.
There is, however, so much good sense and
such pleasant literary illustration in Mr. Will-
mott's notes and prefatory sketches, that we
gladly transfer this volume to our poetical
shelves. It is well suited for a present to
youth, and Etonians will take pleasure in
perusing the Latin verses of Gray and Warton,
which are printed at full length. Its pictorial
ornaments are only tolerable, but its typogra-
phy is neatly executed, and we have no doubt
that it will receive a wide appreciation.

Charles 11. in the Channel Islands. A Contri-
bution to his Biography and to the History
of his Age. By S. Elliott Hoskins, M.D.
London : Bentley.
HISTORICAL collections relating to the great
civil war of the seventeenth century have of
late years been chiefly made for the purpose
of justifying that Cromwell-worship which has
set in like an epidemic amongst the school of
philosophical Radicals and dilletanti sedition
ists of the time. Whether iu the declamations
in favour of Cromwell's despotism where
Thomas Carlyle strews our language with
truly " barbaric pearls," or in that dry and
meagre bill of indictment against the King
called by M. Guizot a " History of the Revolu
tion of 1640," Charles I. is judged by a kind of
Neapolitan procedure, condemned first and the
evidence collected afterwards. The later
works which have appeared relating to the
period when, as Henry Martin, the runaway
of Reading, informed Hyde, "as they rode in
" the fields at Chelsea," "no one man was
" wise enough to govern England," have all
tended to glorify with indiscriminating praise
every person concerned against the Crown,
from Cromwell himself, who was saved from
betraying " the good cause," for the titles of
Earl of Essex and Knight of the Garter, by
finding Charles's letter in the saddle " at the
"Blue Boar in Holborn," down to the zealous
sentinel who spat in the King's face. Except
our belief that Bradshawe sought no other
object than human liberty, and that Barillon
wrote maliciously a false private paper to
Louis XIV. with the intent of charging Alger-
non Sidney with being bribed, we have not
sufficient faith for the school of the Cromwell-
worshippers.
Now, tho truth is that the great question
between Charles I. and the Republican mem-

'l3l'

tiers of the House of Commons can only be
decided by the consideration of a very long
train of evidence, often of a minute character.
What efforts were made to " treat " and to
" accommodate "—how often the deputies of
the Parliament were instructed to make a
breach—and how certainly the Republican
members had predetermined that the King
should at least be deposed—these aro the
questions really at issue, and questions on
several parts of which at account of the pro-
ceedings in the Channel Islands might have
thrown considerable light. Dr. Hoskins
would seem to have kad before him MSS.
which promised more than was to he found in
them, and the result is a book of precisely
similar character
It is founded on a "Journal and Collection
of Remarkable Events in the Isle of Jersey
during the Civil Wars in the Reigns of Charles
I. and II.," described by Dr. Hoskins as
being "considered by local historians a sort of
" semi-official authority," and the author has
had the further advantage of access to a
curious MS. entitled by the rather strangely-
applied derivative " Pseudo-Mastix, the Lyar's
Whipp," written by three expatriated Jersey
jurats. These papers, however, have not
enabled Dr. Hoskins to add much to the
history of that period in Jersey, so far as that
history bears on the general results of
the great struggle. Yet they have enabled him
to give some lifelike details of local
events and popular feelings, and there is
scattered throughout the work much that
future writers may find useful in illustrating a
period which was one of the most critical in
the history of the war.
We took up Dr. Hoskins's book with the
hope that we should find a narrative of a most
interesting episode in that strange and fasci•
tutting story, when, once only in their history,
Englishmen became enthusiasts, not for indi-
viduals but for principles. In this we were
disappointed. Dr. Hoskins, partly from the
meagre nature of his materials, has given us
no such personal narrative as we might have
expected from the title of the work. Of all
our monarchs Charles 11. was the most suitable
subject for a personal memoir of his life and
sayings, and, as regards the part of his life
spent in the Channel Islands, we should have
wished to see more personal traits and anev.
dotical memoir.
On the whole, however, Dr. Hoskins has
put together much that is interesting ; and
perhaps the disappointment the reader may
feel arises, in fact, from the anticipations
raised by the great interest of the subject
rather than the author's failure in treating it.

A Military Tour in European Turkey, the Crimea,
and on the Eastern Shores of the Black Sea.
By Major-General A. F. Macintosh. Lou-
don: Longmans.
THIS is a book of solid merit, not amusing as
a tour, but interesting as a military and topo-
graphical report, which in fact it professes to
be. General Mackintosh travelled, in 1886,
over the neighbourhood of Constantinople,
Bulgaria, the Balkan, the country round Erze-
roum, Koordistan, Georgia, the Caucasus, and
the Crimea, examining with a soldier's eye the
fortresses, passes, and natural features of the
lands through which he passed. As these last
remain unaltered, his account of them is still
valuable. We select and abridge a few de-
scriptions which at the present moment seem
interesting.
Constantinople, according to the author, is
badly defended : the batteries which line the
Dardanelles are, in his view, insufficient to
stop even sailing-ships with the wind in their
favour. They are numerous and powerful, but
unskilfully disposed. The immense cannon
of which we hear so much, throwing stone
balls of enormous weight, appear wellnigh
useless : they can only tire a single shot each
at vessels passing, and the castle of which
they form the armament is defenceless on the
land side. In short, the coast line of the
straits requires to be fortified anew, and the
lines now projected at Gallipoli (of which
General Macintosh seems to have suggested
the first idea) are necessary for the safety of
the capital. To the northward of Constanti-
nople there are strong positions, which have