The Sun.
London, England, 1832-04-02 00:00:00

MAGAZINE DAY.

THE NE TV MONTHLY MAGAZINE.
There is much in this number that deservesl
to be remembered beyond the month. " The
Splendid Village," in particular, and the " Cha-
racter of Canning " are, each, in its own line,
admiral specimens of composition. The former
is a poem by the author of" Corn Law Rhymes,"
and contains not a few passages that may vie
with Byron in sarcasm and energy, and with
Thompson in the truth of its scenic sketches.
Spleen is the author's better genius. Indignatio
facit versus. The very title of his poem is a
bitter sneer, the " Splendid Village " being nei-
ther more nor less than a description of a once
happy, homely English hamlet, which has been
stripped of its original inhabitants, with their
snugly-sheltered bits of cottages, to make room
for great staring, awkward red mansions, in which
vegetate and grow fat whole droves of that up-
start class of gentry whose rise is coeval (or nearly
so) with the growth of last year's toad-stool.
The poem is in fact a sequel to the " Deserted
Village ;" but if it possess less grace, less polish,
less tenderness than Goldsmith's delightful work,
it is a thousand times sterner, more vigorous,
more profound in sentiment, more comprehen-
sive in thought. Women will prefer the former,
men the latter. What can be more energetic
than the author's (who describes himself as an
emigrant) details of his return to the Splendid
Village. The first object he meets is his own
brother:—
"My brother dwelt within. 'Tis true, he took
My offer'd hand, but froze me with a look
So trouble-worn and lost, so hard yet dull,
That I shrank from him, though my heart was full :
1 sought society, but stood alone,
I came to meet a man, and found a stone!
His wife, in tatters, watch'd the fireless grate ;

Three boys sate near her, all in fierce debate,
And all in rags—but one constructing snares,
With which, at night, t• choke Lord Borough's hares.
My sister Rose had parish pay,' they said,
And Ann was sent abroad, and Jane was dead;

And these misfortunes laid my sire beside
The mother, who in better days had died.'
Such welcome found the wanderer of the deep I

I had no words—l sobb'd, but could not weep."

There are few passages in Byron's satires more
powerful, none of sadder, sterner truth than this
sketch of an usher at one of our modern quack
village seminaries. The two last lines remind
us of the best and most epigrammatic parts of
Pope's epistles :

" His school is gone, but stilt we have a school,
Kept by an ignoramus—not a fool ;
For o'er his mansion, written large, we see
Mister John Suckemwell's academy ;
A boarding-school ! where gentlemen are taught
To write fine copies, which the teacher wrote.
Behold the usher !—I behold, and start !
hr in hisface I read a broken heart.
Servant of servants, browbeat by a knave
n'hy, for a coffin, labour like a slave ?
Better break granite on the King's highway,
Than earn, with Porson's powers, a pauper'. pay.
Why die to live ? I know a wiser plan,
An easier too--black shoes, and be a man."
The subjoined sketches of the village lawyer
and the curate may vie with any tiling in Crabbe,
of whom they strongly remind us
Broad Beech ! thyself a grove ! five hundred years
Speak in thy voice, of bygone hopes and fears ;
And mournfully, how mournfully! the breeze
Sighs through thy boughs, and tells of cottages
That, happy once, beneath thy shadow gaz'd
On poor men's fields, which poor men's cattle gras'd !
Now, where three cotters and their children dwelt,
The lawyer's pomp alone is seen and felt ;
And the Park-entrance of his acres three
tincrops the ground which fed a family.
What then ? All see, ho is a man of Slate,
With his three acres, and his park-like gate!
Besides, in time, if times continue dark,
His neighbour's woes may buy his gate a park!
Oh, then, let trade wear ohains, that toil may find
No harvests on the barren sea and wind ;
Nor glean, at home, the fields of every zone,
Nor make the valleys of all climes his own ;
But with the music of his hopeless sigh
charm the blind worm that feeds on poverty !
* • r 4
Two stone-throws from the Hall of Doctor Drive,
And from the village workhouse four or five,
Where the Swung Turkey, with his plumage rough,
fVelcomes all loyal nun who drink enough,
Theflying curate lodges—doom'd to say
Three well-known sermons every Sabbath-day.
His donkey, like a rat without a tail,
Cost fifty shillings, and o'er hill and dale
Bears its lean master, et a hunter's pace,
Duly as comes his weekly steeple-chase."
What a crowded series of pictures, all fresh
and glowing with life, is comprised in the fol-
lowing , is in
description
Every word its proper
Place, every character a necessary adjunct to the
scene, with the exception perhaps of the " mut-
tering bard," who might be dispensed with, as
being too artificial, and marring the propriety
and simplicity of the passage.
" Path of the quiet fields I that oft of yore
Call'd me at morn, on Shenstone's page to pore ;
Oh, poor man's footpath ! where, " at evening's close,"
He stopp'd, to pluck the woodbine and the rose,
Shaking the dewdrops from the wild-briar bowers,
That stoop'd beneath their load of summer flowers,
Then ey'd the west, still bright with fading flame,
As whistling homeward by the wood he came ;
Sweet, dewy, sunny, flowery footpath, thou
Art gone for ever, like the poor man's cow
No more the wandering Townsman's sabbath
No snore the hedger, waiting on the stile
For tardy ,lane; no more the muttering bard,
Startling the heifer, near the lone farmyard;
No more the pious youth, with book in hand,
Spelling the words he fain would understand,
Shall bless thy mazes, when the village bell
Sounds o'er the river, sgften'd up the dell.
But from the parlour of the loyal inn,
The Great Unpaid, who cannot err or sin,
Shall see, well pleas'd, the pomp of Lawyer Ridge,
And poor Squire Grub's starv'd maids, and dandy bridge,
Where yougling fishers, in the grassy lane,
Purloin'd their tackle from the brood-Tare's mane,
And truant urchins, by the river's brink,
Caught the fledged throstle as it stoop'd to drink,
Or with the ramping colt, all joyous, play'd,
Or scar'd the owlet in the blue-belled shade."

In the
whole wide range of modern poetry we
know not where to find a bolder, or more im-
passioned passage than the following. Its truth
and minuteness of observation, its condensed
energy of expression, more especially that,
striking line, ~Oh, to-morrow of the Furies!
thou art slow," may be equalled, they cannot be
Surpassed.
" When daisies blush, and windflowers wet with dew,
When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue ;
A
When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,
And, wild and wide, the plover's wail is heard,
Where melts the mist on mountains far away,
Till morn is kindled into brightest day ;
No more the shouting youngsters shall convene,
To play at leapfrog on the village green,
While lasses, ripening into love, admire,
And youth's first raptures cheer the gazing sire.
The Green is gone! and barren splendours gleam,
Where hiss'd the gander at the passing leans,
And the gay traveller from the city prais'd
iThe poor man's cow, and, weary, stoop'd and gaz'd.
Where yon broad mansion's tax-built drawing room
Displays its cornic'd-gold, dwelt Mary Broom,
(Close by the marble hearth her garden smird.)
The widow'd mother of an only child.
1 I saw her to the house of marriage move,
I
And weeping o'er the grave of hope and love,
Now, where the woe-worn and the weary rest,
The child is sleeping oil its mother's breast.
Not long she mourn'd in duty's lonely shade,
No praise expecting —and she ask'd no aid ;
But toil'd and laded silently, and stood
Alike unnoticed by the bad and good,
Dropping meek tears into the sea of days ;
Its
Lik
pensie a pale flower, that, all unseen displays
ve beauty on a river's brink,
While overhead the stars rush wild and wink,
And shadows cast on earth at night's bright noon,
,dove with the clouds that chase the full.orb'd moon.

Oh, happy ! with her own proud crust supplied,
In her own bed a Britonness the died ;
In her own shroud her modest state she keeps ;
In her own coffin, gloriously, she sleeps! -
Not thus the brother of her soul will die ;
O'er him, poor pauper, none will heave a sigh ;
No windflower, emblem of his youth, be laid,
To blush for promise in its bloom decay'd ;
Nor, emblem of his age, and hopeless pain,
The dismal daisy of sad autumn's wane ;
But workhouse idiots, and the limping slave,
In four rough boards shall bear him to his grave.
Where is the Common, once with blessings rich,
The poor man's Common ? Like the poor man's flitch
And well-fed ham, which erst his means allow'd,
'Tis gone, to bloat the idle and the proud!
To raise high rents! and lower low profits I—Oh,
To.morrow of the Furies ! thou art slow.•'

There is a stern and solemn pathos in the
author's final adieu to the Splendid Village, which
none but a poet of the highest and most ori-
ginal powers could have developed. There is 11,)
make-believe in it, no dallying with sentiment;
the feeling is strong and direct, and evidently
flows warmed and unchecked from the heart.

" Again upon the deep I toss and swing!
The bounding billow lifts me, like the wing
Of the struck eagle—and away I dart,
Bearing afar the arrow in my heart.
For thou art with me, though I see no more
Thee, stream-lov'd England! Thy impatient shore
Hath sunk beneath me—miles, a thousand miles ;
Yet, in my heart, thy verdant Eden smiles.
Land where my llannah died, and hash no tomb
Still, in my soul, thy dewy roses bloom.
Ev'n in Niagara's roar, remembrance still
Shall hear thy throstle, o'er the lucid rill,
At lucid eve--thy bee, at stillest noon ;
And when clouds chase the heart-awaking moon,
The mocking-bird, where Erie's waters swell,
Shall sing of fountain'd vales, and Philomel:
To my sick soul bring over worlds of waves,
Dew-glistening Albion's woods, and dripping caves,
But with her linnet, redbreast, lark, and wren,
Her blasted homes and much-enduring men !"

Independently of these graphic passages, the
Splendid Village teems with minor beauties of
thought and expression, such, for instance, as
" poor wanderers blue with want" —"the sweet
May morning of my Hannah's face,"—which are
perfect pictures in themselves, like the single
epithets we so often meet with in Shaks-
peare. In fact, the author every where shows
himself a poet of first-rate genius. There is no
living writer now before the public endowed
with one-hundredth part of his feeling, his
creative power, his energy, or his sweeping,
headlong sarcasm. At the present crisis, the
writings of such a man, steeped as they are in
passion and black with gall, are likely to make a
deep impression on the middle and lower orders,
for they are as intelligible anti transparent as Cob-
hetes prose, the thought being never overlaid by
the language. They afford, besides, a pregnant
sign of the times, which the Aristocracy will do
well not to disregard. Ten such forcible Eng-
lish writers, taking plain sense as their guide,
and truth as their motto, are really almost enough
(we speak it advisedly) to shake the Aristocracy
to its centre

" Percy Bysshe Shelley at Oxford," is cha-
racteristic, but we fear will be deficient in inte-
rest to the general reader. "On the Spirit of
true Criticism" contains one admirable passage,
descriptive of the moral and intellectual qualities
requisite to form the perfect critic. " The Character
of G. Canning" is a sound, discriminating ana-
lysis of character, and the cursory speculations
on what might have been this half-ultra, half_
liberal, see-sawing Statesman's fate, had he lived
to the present day, are full of sagacity. Of the
remaining articles, we have merely left ourselves
space to say that they are of the usual average in
point of excellence.