The Sun.
London, England, 1846-04-30 00:00:00

speak) solid and picturesque. Witness that passage
uttered by the secretary:—

" -- Here I sit your scribe,
And in and out goes Luria, days and nights ;
This Paccio comes; the Moor his other friend,
llusain ; they talk—all that's feigned easily;
He speaks (1 woKld not listen if I could),
Reads, orders, counsels; but he rests sometimes—
/ see him stand and eat, sleep stretched an hour
On the lynx-skins yonder; hold his bared black arms
Into the sun from the tent-opening; laugh
When his horse drops the forage from his teeth
And neighs to hear him hum his Moorish songs :
That man believes in Florence, as the saint
Tied to the wheel believes in God!"
One who can write such sp,ntaneous music is surely
capable of better things than this jumble of bells and
pomegranates ; the keen limning of that single incident
is in itself eminently beautiful—the tawny barbarian
holding his " bared arms into the sun," through the
cool doorway of the tent, laughing when his horse
starts from its meal upon the sward, and neighs to hear
its master humming some well-remembered " Moorish
song," is most happily grouped—grouped as a poet alone
could group it. Besides which it is suffused with a
tender air of melancholy, clearly felt, but indefinable
withal. "Bells and Pomegranates" are finished and
have failed—we would fain cry with Sir Hugh Evans,
There be pippins and cheese to come yet," trustful that
Robert Browning will in the end afford us some sterling
English poetry.

THE CONFESSIONS OF A PRETTY WOMAN.
By Miss Pardoe. 3 Vols.
The title of this- novel no doubt an attractive one,
but the contents are most unsatisfactory. It is brilliant,
effective, certainly clever, but there is a want of truth in
the characters so admirably delineated—of reality in
the incidents so graphically described. Truth is as es-
sential to a novel as to a history; the one is a record of
events, and facts, and dates—of the outward deeds and
doings of men ; the other should lay bare their secret
thoughts and feelings—should give a faithful picture of
life —a veritable history of the human heart. These
volumes may do this, but we can hardly think it. They
certainly convey a moral lesson; they tend to expose
the fatal influence of a worldly spirit and a perverted
education; on every page is stamped " all, all is vanity."
The confessions are supposed to be written by
one whose youth was blighted, whosew bole hope and
happiness withered by the moral contagion to which she
was exposed ; one endowed with " the fatal gift of
beauty;" a woman, and a woman of fashion, even from
her cradle, panting for admiration, yet dreaming of
better things without the courage to pursue or the hap-
piness to obtain them. Every hope vanished, every
prospect destroyed, in seclusion and solitude she mourns
over her sorrows and the sins which caused them. So
far a lesson, and a good lesson, may be learned; and
yet we cannot lay aside these really interesting and at-
tractive volumes without feeling considerable doubt as to
the truth of their representations, or having our good
opinion of human nature greatly lowered—and the
former alternative we should most certainly prefer. We
cannot, we will not, believe that the brilliant and fan-
tastic heroes and heroines of the tale are faithful
transcripts of real men and women. We cannot be-
lieve that a Lady Madeleine ever existed—a woman
whose vanity and whose passion for adulation cast a
blight upon all who approached her—friends, admirers,
husband, children ; neither will we believe Sir James
Dornton ever to have had a living prototype. His cha-
racter is revolting, for it is unnatural. Many things
have been done for the sate of gaining money, yet it
will-hardly be credited that a man—not a hardened, des-
perate character, but an easy, spoiled man of fashion—
anxious to retrieve his fortune, after proposing to the
rich widow, and being refused, enters into an engage-
ment with her daughter, who loves him devotedly, and
to whom he is also attached, and then, at the capricious
desire of the mother, becomes the husband of the sister
of his promised bride. The forsaken one dies of a broken
heart; while the wretched wife, hating her husband,
flies for happiness to society and finds only despair. We
trust that Miss Pardoe will in future devote her powerful
pen to a more pleasing theme; there are flowers as well
weeds in the human garden, and we trust to receive a
bouquet of sweets from her hand. In the meanwhile
these volumes may interest and amuse ; they will do no
harm, for they carry their own antidote.

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. No. CLXVIH

Our blue and buff philosopher concludes his eighty-
third volume with more than usual vigour and variety.
Foremost undoubtedly in importance, and possibly in
literary merit, as it actually is in position, the article on
" The„Lord Chancellors of England" engages our espe
cial notice. Whether the three volumes recently issued
by Lord Campbell (and upon which this preliminary
article is founded) be regarded as the production of a
liberal ex-Chancellor, the fruits.of a career of untiring
erudition, or the effusion of a purely analytical intellect,
they must be looked upon es volumes of no ordinary
character. Through the intervals of his Parliamentary
occupations, Lord Campbell has striven, with no puny
or unsuccessful effort, to erect a- monument by
which he may at once ensure the per-
petuity of his fame, and throw a stream of elucidatory
light into many of the most dusky and impenetrable
wailers of history. A most splendid section of bio-
gi•aphy was to be devoted to the romance, the dignity,
V.e wisdom, the grandeur, the power, and( the ac-
quirements of the Lord Chancellors of Great Bri-
tain, a line of men which Mr. Addison has correctly
declared to have accumulated in itself more intellectual
and worldly capacities, and to be, in all essential parti-
culars, more truly ustrious than any other office or
profession possibly in the world. From the accession of
William the Conqueror to our own immediate genera-
tion, the seals and the royal conscience have remained in
the custody of men remarkable for some one or other, or
occasionally for a combination of all the lofty qualities
which we have just enumerated. Whether we regard
the gorgeous integrity of Becket, the protracted influ-
ence of Burnel, and the imperial magnificence and pon-
tifical supremacy of Wolsey, or descend to a considera-
tion of personages no less extraordinary who have in these
modern times presided over the High Courts of Chancery
—Eldon, and Brougham, and Cottenham, and Lyndhurst
—there was almost every accessory attraction combined
in the theme undertaken by Lord Campbell ; there were
abstruse inquiries for the scholar, incidental discoveries
for the antiquary of letters, romantic alternations of
fortune for the indolent, sagacious inferences for the mo-
ralist, texts of thought in almost every page for the
philosopher, instruction for the sedate, amusement for
the volatile. Every grade of intellectual capacity, every
shade of temperament, every bias acquired in educa
tion was separately appealed to by the very title of the
literary venture. " The Lives of the Lord Chancellors
of England." Attention was thus excited towards
and interest engaged in the undertaking : the
first series of the work has already appeared
and its reception has been commensurate with its pro-
mise. From the woolsack, and in the presence of the
assembled peers, the author has been complimented
for the work by the Lord Chancellor, Lynd-
hurst ; criticism has pronounced in its favour ;
even the Edinburgh Review, whose reluctance
to praise has become proverbial, says, in regard to the
labour and the labourer—" We must not wish that Lord
Campbell may be permitted to finish his Lives of the
Chancellors of England' in the uninterrupted leisure
of a man of letters ; but it is a great pleasure to us to
find that his well-earned leisure is so happily em-
ployed." A concession that ! drawn forth by the
greatness of the subject, and the skilfulness with
which it has been accomplished. Almost the entire
of the criticism—if it can be so designated—
in the. Edinburgh Review, is devoted to a dry
owacrhceoovuhenratirro:fnfithe rise and establishment of the Chancellor-
ship, an account which can be gleaned from almost any
encyclopaedia.
yelotphmadtia,;ffin Two waroeonselyleoctfed fortherensocwrnuteidnymbeyn
the reviewer—both of them great men, one of them as
good as he was great, the
recoil even from
confessing to ourselves the ignominy which is attached
to the lustrous and unfading memory of Francis Bacon ;
as we linger over the moral beauty of Sir Thomas
More with astonishment and rapture. The latter, so
gentle, so guileless, so witty, so wise, so genuine in his moral attainments (we might almost call them his mo-
ral perfection), so dignified in his simplicity, and yet of
such " homespun" excellence, as Sir James Mackintosh
has happily expressed it. The former, so majestic in
his genius, so profuse in his capacity, so flawed and tar-
nished in his principles of morality, but more espe-
cially as regards the virtues of probity and indepen-
dence: " dedicated by nature a high priest of knowledge,
human and divine;" fallen to a proportionate lowliness
in the estimation of a lamenting but reverential
posterity. Whether we accumulate our information
respecting Sir Thomas More from
otlfiethtee greatnderr Chancel-
lor'sevelations
of Roper, or the precisenarrative
whether we ceolieecntthemraateemrinalss,
of
grandsonhisesreer
fsruommthrye correspondence
p ndee of Erasmus,
the the careful
ma
thatten bymasstierrpi
James of
biography
his life as
Mackintosh,writ-
deston, or from
we cannot but
revere More for the angelic purity of his heart
love
hi
m
for the exceeding and unaffected tenderness
ofe e hispe
st nature,
admiration andf
entertain e r t a
thein sentimentsseeurat
ebalance
of the
d
•
and lofty capabilities of hisintellect. Ad-
mirably is he christened by the historian "a martyr to
truth ;" his name, if not the prondeslti,eids, winiththoeut oneF
moment's
question, the most unsul
his-
torical records of our country. or thepersecimuSoun-
tations of intolerance and religiouseast upon the memory of More, by our re-
viewer, are, we undertake to a=sert, based upon his own
contorted view of passages in the " Apology," and upono.h
the questionable evidence of Fox. For a thorough
refutation of these accusatory remarks we
refer our readers, and the reviewer himself, to the pages
of Mackintosh, which, notwithstanding the writer al-
ludes to as familiar to himself. we conjecture, have not
met his perusal very recently, or in that case have been
consulted with random precipitation. Of Bacon our
language is too feeble to express our feelings of
admiration, and our admiration too exalted and sin-
cere to allow us to expatiate upon the demerits
—" for," as the writer of this article in the
Edinburgh Revview exclaims, " his genius, and
for the glory of it, the world is not large enough
to contain them." An after-observation, in the same
article, is beautiful in its emphasis, in its expressions of
awe, and the mournful hopelessness of its desires, It is
this—" Our reverence for the genius of Bacon is so
great ; we have that sense of what we owe him
for the delight and profit mankind have reaped
from his immortal writings ; we feel so deeply
what it is we lose in hope and glory, andhow
all that is most magnificent in the prospects
of human nature is clouded over by that melan-
choly antithesis which holds forth ' Bacon as
at once the wisest and the meanest of
mankind ; that nothing can be thought of in the way
of monument or reward which ought not to be gratefully
bestowed, not only by fellow-countrymen, but by fellow-
men, for a nobler restoration of attainted blood'than ever
fell to the offico of any herald; upon the man who should