The Sun.
London, England, 1832-10-01 00:00:00

FRASER'S MAGAZINE.

The present number opens with a translation
of one of Goethe's tales, styled in Germany, par
excellence—as the translator assures us—" the
Tale." We must confess we see no reason for
such an emphatic exclusive title ; the tale is at
best but a misty allegory without any very de,

finite aim or end. Occasionally there is some
sparkling imagery ; but as a whole the thing is
heavy, and almost unintelligible. However, the
translation is spirited. " Discoveries of Modern

Geologists is a scientific treatise, penned in a
very agreeable, succinct style. " The School-
master's Experience in Newgate " is a valuable
paper, from which our present Home-Secretary
may derive many useful, practical hints. In
real downright usefulness it is far superior to
the general run of magazine contributions.

" The late Sir James Macintosh and the Law
Magazine " is a clever, satirical attack on one of
Sir James's would-be friends and advocates, who,

like most such, has striven hard to throw oh•

loquy on his memory. The following sketch o
Wordsworth, to which a portrait, tolerahl3
faithful, is attached, is penned in a fair, tern.

perate spirit :
" No mtn of his generation has been so much praised
and abused. He truly prophesied, in his preface to Lyri-
cal Ballads, that these poems would be enthusiastically
admired, or consigned to the uttermost contempt. Not
long after their publication, the cackling brood of the
Edinburgh reviewers came into existence, and they were
determined to cross down Wordsworth. Some local
Westmoreland spite actuated Brougham ; and Jeffery was
from the beginning, as he will be to the end, a mean and
petty creature. Accordingly, the Lyrical Ballads, and all
that ever fell from Wordsworth's muse, were decried as
the most unmeaning nonsense that ever emanated from
the brain of a driveller; and though they fought their way
gallantly up in the world, in the teeth of this adverse cri-

-..-
ticistn, and much more founded upon it (for of hack critics
it is true, as of doge, that the filth of one acts as an incen-

Live to the filth of another), yet, to the very last of Jef-
fery's career, Wordsworth was set down as an ass, great as
that belaboured by Peter Bell. A criticism even on the
Excursion , the greatest didactic poem in our language,
commenced with ' This will never do.'

" He may now despise the Edinburgh reviewers, and
all that to them appertains ; but they had their effect in
their day. Even Lord Byron, when attacking the crew
in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, fell into
their slang ; and the strictures which he poured forth so
unsparingly on Wordsworth—simple Wordsworth—were
taken from the Edinburgh Review. It will be seen, by
the edition of his works now editing for Murray, that his
Lot dship repented afterwards of his injustice, and described
his sarcasms as unfair and illiberal. Without this testi-
mony, we might have inferred the fact from the circum-
stance of his having imitated the great Laker in some half
dozen of his poems, and transferred some of the most
striking passages of him whom, in Don Juan, he stigma-
titled as mad beyond all hope,' into the most celebrated
of his own productions.
" The reaction which took place in Lord Byron's mind,
has taken place in the mind of the reading populace in ge-
neral, and people are now good enough to admit that the
author of the Sonnets to Liberty, Liodarnia, Dion, the
Song in Brougham Castle, the 01,1 Cumberland Beggar,
the ' Sweet Highland Girl,' Yarrow Unvisited, the White
Doe of Rylstone, and fifty other things, any of which
would immortalise an ordinary writer, is something of a
poet, to be named in the days which have produced an
Alaric Watts or a Robert Montgomery. His fame will
increase, and the more steadily the more such productions
as the Idiot Boy, and Alice Fell, and all the rest of that
tribe of compositions, are forgotten.
This he will not believe. Talk to Wordsworth of the
Idiot Boy, at which all mankind have laughed, and he
will tell you, with a most solemn intonation of voice, and
great magniloquence of style, that Charles Fox was most
particularly struck with admiration of that very poem,
and caution you against committing the rash act of cen-
suring a production written by such a poet as Wordsworth,
and panegyrised by such a critic as Fox. The various
other pieces of nonsense which he has published are
furnished with sponsors equally famous; and as parents
are generally strenuous in defence or patronage of their
rickety children, so does the 0-70ritl of our poet shine
most conspicuously in favour of those compositions, which,
to eyes not parental, appear the most deformed and un-
sightly. Any man of common sense in half an hour
would, by blotting a couple of dozen pages from Words-
worth's works, render them secure from criticism; but
these very couple of dozen are the pages which he would
most strenously insist on retaining, stunning you with ora-
tory to prove them the most superb things ever composed.
" For the rest, he is a good sturdy Tory, a most ex-
emplary man in all the relations of life, and a statnp-
master void of reproach."

" My Contemporaries" contains some amusing
anecdotes of the most eminent lawyers of the
last generation. " Ensign O'Donaghue's First
Battle " is a lively tale, in the old Blackwood
style of serious banter.