The Sun.
London, England, 1847-07-12 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

711 E EDINBUtiGti
~A recollection of the most brilliant days of th:
Edinburgh Review is revived by the perusal of the
,leading contribution in the number for the present
quarter. The beauty of the composition, the terse •
tress of the illustrative passages, the melody and
Volubility of the diction, the comprehensive generosity
of the sentiments—all these, and a variety of similar
characteristics, irresistibly remind us of the pal niest
days of this renowned periodical; they call to mind the
period when Brougham disdained not to become a lite-
rary critic ; when Sydney Smith, like a younger Rabe-
lais, calculated the temperament of the world by his
faolometer ; when Macaulay cast the golden glory of
his eloquence upon the pages, like the gorgeous hues
of a stained window streaming on the pavement of a
basilica; when Mackintosh lighted up the intricacies
of some mysterious theme, by the gleams of his
subtle analysis. The article we allude to is a brief but
superb biographical notice of the memorable Saint
Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan
order. And who, it may be inquired, is the author
of this striking composition ? We recognise him as
instantly and as confidently as though his name had
been prefixed to the contribution. The writer of the
opening paper in this number of the Edinburgh Re-
view is the Honourable George Percy Sydney
onlythe. We are aware that the article has been
attributed to the Right Hon. the Paymaster of her
Majesty's Forces, and we are satisfied that the
magnificent compliment implied in that mis-
take as to the paternity will be grateful
to the young and accomplished author of
"Historic Fancies." From internal evidence, how-
ever, we are convinced that the memoir of Saint
Francis of Assisi is from the pen of Mr. Smythe, and
not of Mr. Macaulay. Notwithstanding the nunsercus
beauties of the composition, we detect in it more of
the immaturity of Mr. Smythe than of the mellow-
ness of Mr. Macaulay. Not that we would here
employ the expression immaturity in its vulgar ac-
ceptation. The style of Mr. Smythe is by no
means immature from the redundancy of verbi-
age, neither is it in any manner marred by
puerile affectations, or by that tendency to over em-
bellishment which Longinus has derided with so
much earnestness. It is immature rather in those
Inequalities of tone, or, as we should say more strictly,
iof pitch, arising from a want of full reliance upon his
Own capacities. Cicero was wont, so says the Latin
authority, to practise his voice to .
the
•pipings of
flageolet. Demosthenes perfected _articulation
placing pebbles in his mouth. M. r. Smythe has not yet
succeeded so far as to be able to dispense with the pebbles
and the flageolet. To Mr. Macaulay they have long
ceased to be correctives ; and it is in this wise that
in mentioning their style together, we would speak
of the immaturity of the one, and the mellowness of
the other. A victorious athlete like Mr. Macaulay
can allow himself to be contrasted with a stripling
wrestler like Mr. Smythe, propitious as are the au-
guries, and nervous as is the ambition, of the latter.
Those who have familiarised themselves with the lite-
rary productions of the son of Lord Strangford cannot
by possibility fail to recognise his manner in
the biographical notice of Saint Francis of Assisi.
It shines visibly through the transparent mask of an
anonymous reviewer. The scholastic domino may
bide the shape, and even render the dimensions dubi-
ous ; but to the practised eye the gait and the carriage
are detectable. Even in the first two sentences—
"lt was a noble design which died with Robert
Southey. His History of the Monastic Orders'
Would not, perhaps, have poured a large tri-
bute of philosophy, divine or human, into the
Zc_eaa of knowledge ; but how graceful would have
Zeen the flow of that transparent narrative, and
'l;w Would it have reflected and enhanced the beauty
of every i
ontory rich champaign and of every towering pro-
along which it would have swept !" Again,
pro-
the identity is obvious when he depicts the merchant
li!ther of Francis, Pietro Bernadone, conjuring up
visions of glory for his offspring and mingling those
/talons with the routine of his commercial enterprise :
`Grouping into forms ever new and brilliant,
like
spangles shaken in a kaleidoscope, the ideas
of bales and bills of lading, of sea risks and
of supercargoes, had combined with those of loans to
reckless Crusaders and of the supply of hostile camps,
to form one gorgeous Eldorado. The peculiarities
of Mr. Smythe, moreover, are manifest in a multi-
tude of other and minuter characteristics. In the
/Iterations by which a sort of crescendo intensity is im-
Parted to an argument—in the vivid and almost en-
caustic colouring of the contrast of individuals, bring-
ing at once to our memory the almost gaudy lustre of
°is paper on "Grey and Spencer" in the Oxford and
Cambridge .Review—occasionally even in the use of
unusual but favourite adjectives, the hand of Mr.
Smythe is revealed, as for instance when speaking of
the authenticity of the poems attributed to St.
Francis he observes that M. Delecluse considers that
the style must have drifted far away from the
Original structure into a form at once more modern
andt more ornate." Gratified as we are in detecting
chivalrous but not et stalwart form of
thee writer of "Historic Fancies" among the lite-
rary phalanx of the Edinburgh Review, we are im-
measurably more
edi gratfi in seeing his sword
wielded with so
much skill and generosity
in a cause hitherto abandoned as hope-
less—namely, in the revival, as he himself
al of " the memory of a once famous Fa-
ther of the Church, now fallen into unmerited neglect
and indiscriminate opprobrium." The profound
earnestness with which he undertakes the exculpation
of Saint Francis end his indigent brethren, has in it
something beautiful and pathetic. Impressed with a
conviction of the advantages of the Reformation, he is
yet, like every man of liberal and unbiassed judg-
ment, ready to acknowledge the advantages which
resulted from the religious predecessors of Luther
and Melancthon. In this spirit of honesty he main-
tains that the founder of such a confederacy as the
Franciscans " must have had some of the higher
qualities of a legislator." "It would be difficult
even now," he continues, " with all the aid of
testory and philosophy, to devise a scheme
ter
adapted to restrain the licentiousness, to soften
the manners, and to mitigate all the oppressions of an
ironage." Speaking again, in another part, of the
thirdi. estate in the Franciscan Orders, namely, the
urder of Penitence," he declares that "it would be
There prejudice or ignorance to deny that it sustains
an important office in the general advancement of
civilisation and of truth." "In an age of oligarchical
i r were he persists, "they (the Mendicant Friars)
et, e. the protectors of the weak ; in an age of ignorance
inheeznstructors of mankind; and in an age of profligacy
assuredlyone
is a magnificent eulogium, and such
an
bne as
is
not applicable to many cor-
porate°dies. Biographies are always enthralling,
even
when they relate to the characters and vicissi-
tudes of nonenties or criminals. For in a very con-
siderable degree, a biography gives us the analysis of
a mind, the phases of a temperament, the varieties of
a
career, a starting point and a goal. But a bio-
kraPby of an enthusiast, such as was St. Francis of
Assisi, is in a particular manner attractive and en-
grossing. To a Roman Catholic, doubtless, the lift
of Saint Francis, even when penned with the in-
terpolated scorn of an Edinburgh Reviewer, wil.
always present a spectacle of sanctity exalted
to a sublime community with the invisible.
In the estimation of every one but a Roman
Catholic, the narrative of his eccentric course
throughout life must appear as little else than
the records of a man crazed with fanaticism—one
whose religious fervour was carried to an extrava-
gance—and whose conduct was that of a being with
a heart animated by lofty aspirations, but a brain dis-
traught with the frenzy of an ecclesiastical lunatic.
To all, without distinction of creed, how instructive
mast be that strange and fitful history, from the out-
set, when Francisco, the son of an adventurous mer-
chant of Assisi, in Umbria, by name Pietro Berna-
done di Mericona, was at once the bravest participator
• in the feats of the tournay, the brightest ornament of
the civic pageantries, and yet withal the most
assiduous in the mart and the counting-house.
A marvellous change, however, occurring in the cha-
racter of Francisco, the reader is afforded a different
Subject for contemplation. Carried to the very gates
of death, after escaping captivity among the citizens
of Perugia, Francisco is transformed from a world-
lingi into a recluse. " Long, earnest, and inquisitive,
says the reviewer, " was his gaze into the inscrutable
abyss" on which those dismal portals opened ; when
be became a valetudinarian the metamorphosis was
completed. His subsequent behaviour is then re-
counted with a sort of admiring and yet recoiling
gusto. His robing himself in the rags of a mendi-
cant ; his kissing with " courageous humility" the
ulcerated wound of a leper; his purloining a
palfrey laden with silks and embroideries for the
purpose of aiding in the rebuilding of the ruined
church, near Foligno, dedicated to St. Damian° ; his
interview with his opulent father in the streets of Assisi,
when himself squalid and emaciated ; his reverential
affection for the leprous, a sentiment springing par
tially from the bewildering hint of Isaiah, " nos putavi-
2aus eum (namely, the Messiah,) quasi leprosum, per-
cussum a Deo, et hztmiliatum ;" his wonderful exertions
Tor the restoration of the church of St. Darniano,
al ready mentioned, and of the chapel of La Porzioncula,
are facts recounted in language either of admiration
Or astonishment. What, by the way, can be the
meaning of Mr. Smythe in mentioning Porzioncula
ar, " a shrine of our Lady of Angels, of which the
remains may yet be seen, at once hallowing and
"aro rning the quiet meadow by which Assisi is sur-
ed ,the
Does he not know that in speaking thus
rerently of the Virgin he lays himself open before the
equenters of Exeter-hall to a charge of Maryolatry ?
and that to many suspicious eyes the Edinburgh
Review
the may henceforth seem little else than
quarterly organ of the Oxford tractarians ?
ernaP4 the most effective passages in this

- _
biogrophical notice of Saint Francis of Assisi
are those in which are described, first, the
c:1:
of the disciples around the foutiler—those
Barnard de Quintavalle, Peter of Catania, Dgidius,
Sabbatini, Morico, John de Capella, Sylvester, and
others of less importance ; secondly, the formation
of the confederacy near the river Tonto ; thirdly,
the supplication of Francico to Pope 'inn:cent 111.,
on the terrace of the Vatican ; fourthly, his precching in
the sacred consistory before Pope Honorius 111. ; fifthly,
his daring attempt, in the Holylands, to go unarmed
amongst the Saracens, and to convert the Soldan to
Chtistianity ; sixthly, his miraculous elevation into
the air ; and lastly, his death in the monastery of St.
Mary of Angels, after eating the cakes of Jacob a.
The final picture is simply but exquisitely pencilled.
" His last labour done, he was laid, in obedience to
his own command, on the bare ground. The even-
ing, we are told, was calm, balmy, and peaceful, the
western sky glowing with the mild and transparent
radiance which follows the setting of an autumnal sun
behind the lofty hills of central Italy. At that moment
the requiem for the dying ceased, as the faltering
voice of Francis was heard, in the language of David,
exclaiming, Voce mea al Dominum clarnavi. !"
Again we would express our satisfaction at discerning
the Honourable George Percy Sydney Smythe among
the number of the Edinburgh reviewers, for the more
closely we examine this leading article on " Saint
Francis" the more thoroughly are we convinced that
it is the effusion of his scholarly and eloquent pen. A
rich promise of the revival of the olden glory of the
Edinburgh is afforded by the acquisition of a contributor
so opulent in literary promise himself. The secon i
article is an admirable paper on Beaumont and
Fletcher, opening with a miniature memoir of Francis
Beaumont, who was born in 1585, at Gracedieu, hard
by Charnwood Forest, and died in 1616 ; and another
of John Fletcher, who was burn in 1579, at Rye, and
died of the plague in 1625 at London. Knowing
these dates, it will be well to remember one or two
others of peculiar interest—namely, that Beaumont
was younger than Fletcher by somewhere about
six years ; that they first met in 1607 ; that, reckon-
ing from 1607, their union as friends and poets con-
tinued during nine or ten years ; and that Fletcher
survived his companion nine summers. Fletcher was
poor, and wrote for his bread ; Beaumont was well-
to-do, and wrote from a pure love of the art; hence,
argues the reviewer, their literary association
with each other " must have been entirely free,"
and not have arisen front the hack partner-
ship in the composition of dramas caused by the
exigencies of a playhouse. An interesting anecdote
about Shakspere (only recently brought to light) is
given in this criticism. IVe eagerly transfer it to
our columns as we would anything new and
authentic about that God-like Genius. Edward
Alleyn, be it premised, and William Shakspere are
" the two great theatrical managers"—the managers
of the two great rival theatres of London—mentioned
below.

" Alleyn being absent in the country on a strolling
excursion, at a time when the theatres in London were
shut by reason of the plague, his wife receives in town
a visit from ' a pretty youth, and handsome in apparel,'
who assumes an aristocratic name, asks for a loan of ten
pounds, and asserts that he is known both to Mr. Alleyn
and to the other great theatrical manager. Mrs. Alleyn
who, as the step-daughter of old Philip Henslowe, had
learned economy and caution, declines to comply with
the demand till the reference shall have been verified;
and the brother manager, on being appealed to, declares
that he knew the applicant only by having heard that he
was a rogue, and is glad the money had not been given.
The impostor does not again show himself; and Joan
Alleyn, in her next letter to her husband, exultingly
tells him the story. Her friendly adviser was a per.on
of whom we are accustomed to think as discharging
higher duties to humanity than detecting swindlers. She
describes him as Mr. Shakspere of the Globe.' "
Speaking afterwards of the visible influence exercised
over his contemporaries, and his immediate succes-
sors, by the dramas of Shakspere, the reviewer
writes as follows :
" Imaginative inventors, of all ranks below the very
highest, are like planetary satellites, which revolve in-
deed each on its own axis, but are all carried round in
the orbit of their common centre; nay, to push the com-
parison a step further, Jupiter himself, as well as his
moons, gravitates in dependence on the sun. Through
the concurrence of the two impulses, the special and the
common, it is natural and inevitable, that the appear-
ance of every great work or groups of works, in litera-
ture or art, should not only produce particular and
designed imitation, but should throw over all productions
of the same class a hue which otherwise they would not
have possessed. Thus did thoughts, and feelings, and
images innumerable, sown by Shakspere beside the
highway on which he travelled, spring up there into
stately plants, and shed their seeds over every field that
lay in the neighbourhood. Even the spirit of the great
poet did in some degree rest upon his contemporaries,
when his wide mantle fell and covered them all—his
divinest moods of emotion, his most dazzling trances of
imagination, his profoundest intuitions of character, his
marvellous reaches of thought, sounding all the depths
of human nature;—these were indeed inspirations not
vouchsafed to any but himself, and apprehended but
imperfectly even by the most exquisitely endowed of
those to whom the poetic seer communicated his visions.
But there was much that could be both comprehended
and transfused; much that did pass from the most com-
prehensive of all created minds, to the finest of the
intelligences which surrounded and followed him. The
magnetic rapport between his genius and that of his
fellow dramatists, could not, it is true, qualify any of
them, even in their most intense phases of poetical
rapture, to imagine characters, or mental histories, like
those of Hamlet, of Othello and lago, of Lear, or of
Macbeth: but the relation was close enough to enable
several of them to conceive forms and incidents, feelings
and thoughts, not so very dissimilar to those of Romeo
and Juliet, of As You Like It, of Much Ado about
Nothing. That Samuel Johnson should prefer Shak-
spere's comedies to his tragedies, does not surprise us.
But that Milton should have gone to see a comedy of
Shakspere's when he was merry, and have been oblif.ed
to fall back upon Greek plays about ' Pelops' line' when
he was sad—not finding in Shakspere enough of pity
and of terror—and that Thomas Warton should have
thought he showed good taste in doing so, is more than
we can understand."
The estimate of the different plays of Beaumont and
Fletcher is generally judicious, and is penned in a
strain of encomium not one iota more than is de-
served. A glimpse at a "Whaling Cruise" is suc-
ceeded by an elaborate criticism upon Lord Sidmouth
and his biographer, the Dean of Norwich. " Robin
Hood" is a delightful scrap of antiquarian gossip upon
that renowned outlaw, all except the concluding
paragraphs, where, to our indignation, his existence
at any time is altogether discredited ! Robin Hood
and his time-honoured companions, George-a-Green,
Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Scarlet Much, and Little
John flit across the pages as vividly as though they
were in the greenwood glades, but they are invested
with awful authority as mythes. The other contri-
butions to the Edinburgh Review are clever and
miscellaneous, treating severally of Mr. Benjamin
Disraeli's Tancred, of Prussian Agrarian Legislation,
of the travels of Mrs. Quillinan and Mrs. Butler, of
Eastlake's Materials for the History of Oil Painting,
and of the important problem " What is to be done
with our Criminals?" Abetter number of this eminent
leriodical has not appeared during many past quarters.

MAGAZINES—(CONTINUED.)
THE COMIC HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
No. XIIL By Gilbert Abbott A'Beckett.
The reigns of the bloody tyrant, Henry VIII, and
of his equally bloody daughter, Mary, who, on
coming to the throne, was, says our author, "com-
paratively old, exceedingly hard, and totally void of
all the milk of human kindness," are the subjects out
of which our author has contrived to find food for
laughter in the present number. As a specimen of the
manner in which he has executed his task, we take the
admirable description of the death and character of
Henry VIII.:

" The tyrant, who had been getting physically as we
pa as
rate morallyte
nacwiteyr,sethaaetd iweoarsseb,
reelueni gntobflifteb with such des
ere being good
reason for dreading death in thoseg among whom, after a
certain age, such a cowardly fear is f. ,
ii,
would
often impiously threaten that "ho wmoualndi manifest. e
younger. people about him yet ;" and outlive
his all . the
though time
was evidently not far off, h
of his true condition. , 0 would not bear to be told
life, he devoted the wretched ret
Insteadehed of repenting of his past
doing all the mischief that hei.emnant of his existence. to.
malice to the fullest extent that
hisemi.], and venting his
would admit of. Nobody dared now failing strength
the unhappy old ;brute that he musterm resolution. to tell
until Sir Anthony Denny, a knightus very speedily die,
friend Drummond's aversion to anyhamwbhoo. shared our
of any de-
scription, boldly told old Harry that he was on the point
of visiting his redoubtable namesake.
" Finding all chance of escape cut off, he began
con-
fessing his sins ; but it was rather too late, for, had his
repentance been sincere, the catalogue of his crimes was 1
far too voluminous to allow of his getting through one
half of it before his dissolution. He had been in the
habit of adjourning that court of conscience existing in
his as well as in every man's breast, and he always post-
poned it sine die; but when the time to die actually
came, or the die was really cast, it was rather late to
move for a new trial. Henry died on the 29th. January,
1547, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, the thirty-eighth
of his reign, and at least the forty-first of his selfishness,
baseness, and brutality.
" He had been married six times, having divorced. two
of his wives, beheaded two more, and left one a widow.
Thisleaves one more—Jane Seymour—still unaccounted
for ; and indeed her death was the most wonderful of
all, because it was natural. He left behind him three
children : but he did not care a pin's head, or even—to
name an article of smaller importance to him—a wife's
head, for any one of them. Such a very bad man was
sure to be a very bad father, and he had declared two
of his children illegitimate, for it was the delight of this
monster to depreciate his own offspring in the eyes of
the world as much as possible. His religious reforms,
however wholesome in their results, were brutal in their
execution and base in their origin. His insincerity may
be gathered from the fact that he appointed masses to
be said for his own soul, though he had burnt many
persons for popery ; and he seemed to think that, by
taking up two creeds at once on his death-bed, he could
make up fur the utter irreligion of his past existence.
He is said to have contributed to the cause of enlight.

THE SUN,