The Sun.
London, England, 1868-02-19 00:00:00

lively to severe," his survey passes from Sir Thomas
Browne to Charles Lamb, from Oliver Goldsmith
io Pym versus Falkland ! The felicities at once of
thought and of expression upon all those varying
themes crowding upon our attention as we turn the
pages, and surviving long after we have closed the
volumes in our delighted recollection. How happily,
for example, when speaking of Goldsmith, does he
refer to leim as a sort of Irish Gil Blas, terminating
in a Fabricio instead of a Minister's Secretary. And
when referring afterwards to what he aptly speaks
of as the inimitable sense of proportion and fit-
ness of adjustment between the thought and ex-
pression of each, how felicitously he indicates a
resemblance between the prose of "Elia" and the verse
of Horace—remarking elsewhere of the former that
there is no malice in the smile of Lamb—Lamb's
keenest sarcasm, quoth he, being his archest pleasan-
try ! Often enough, as a matter of course, do we find
occasion here to differ from our author in regard to
many of his deductions, though never with-
out recognising the ingenuity with which
his arguments are enforced. His estimate of Ilazlitt,
for example, to our judgment is throughout far too
depreciatory ; while his disintegration, so to speak,
of the component parts of what must always still re-
main for us the inimitable whole of Gray's Elegy in
a Country Churchyard—seemingly to Lord Lytton
a chaotically jumbled though, of course, a by no
means simply fortuitous concurrence of atoms—is
cruel to the extent of being absolutely pitiless. As
to the general arrangement of the contents of the
three remarkable volumes here submitted to our
consideration, no other as it seems to us than the
very order in which they are herein placed could
have been at one and at the same time so simple
and so symmetrical. Firstly, that is as constituting
the contents of the first volume, we have
the criticisms hitherto unacknowledged con-
tributed by Lord Lytton to the principal Re-
views, to.the Quarterly, the Edinburgh, the Foreign
Quarterly, and the London and Westminster. Ap-
pended to these criticisms—perhaps the most re-
markable among all which is the masterly paper
ou " Pitt and Fox "—being the exquisitely appre-
ciative "Life of Schiller," originally prefixed to the
translation of the poems of that Ministrel-Drama-
tist, to whom he admirably well applies the phrase
in which Herder was designated by Jean Paul Rich-
ter, namely, when pronouncing him "less a Poet than
a Poem." Secondly, as the contents of the second
volume, we have the Essays written in Youth, those
mingled criticisms and apologues in other words,
which were formerly published under the title of
" The Student"—appended to these, also, being
another paper of separate and very singular interest,
not, however, as in the instance of the biography
of Friedrich Schiller, a reprint from a volume al-
ready published, but a paper " Never Before Pub-
lished !" A paper written only half-a-dozen years
ago, namely, in 1862—descriptive, first of all, of
an exquisite pseudo-classic Garden Retreat, con-
structed by our author in the immediate neigh-
bourhood of his ancestral mansion of Knebworth,
.a garden in honour oP Horace and his
Contemporaries, chief among the latter being of
course Augustus, and Maecenas, and Virgil—de-
scriptive afterwards of two strikingly contrasted
interlocutors, who are here designated respectively
Metellus and Gallus—the whole of this graceful
preamble leading up very naturally and very charm-
ingly to a disquisition by Metellus " On the in-
fluence of Love on Literature and Real Life."
Finally, as the contents of the third or con-
cluding volume, we have the collection
of Essays written in Maturity, and al-
ready widely and honourably known under the
title of " Caxtoniana." Considering these later
essays as the product of Lard Lytton's intellect
now in its prime, we have, to adopt a phrase
of his own already referred to, a consciousness
of the inimitable sense of proportion and fitness of
adjustment, we will not say here merely between
thought and expression, but between theme and
treatment, between the subject under the Essayist's
consideration and his own philosophic estimate of
its intrinsic value or importance. Our meaning
here we could hardly illustrate more aptly perhaps
than by echoing a charming thought that recurs
to us from that gentler Rochefoucault and more
graceful Montaigne, the inimitable La Bruyere.
"Aux enfans," says he, somewhere in his Carac-
teres, "aux enfans tout parait grand, les tours,
les jardins, les edifices, les meubles, les hommes,
les anirnaux ; aux hommes, les chosen du monde
paraissent ainsi, et j'ose dire, par la memo
raison, parcequ'ils soot petits." How pathetically
just, how mournfully wise, how lamentably true as
applied to men—aux hommes—to the generality.
To a cynical giant like Swift, it is otherwise, and
that diametrically. Ho stalks among his fellow
mortals not so much like a Lemuel Gulliver as like
a scornfully colossal sage from Brobdingnag among
the Lilliputians—becoming at last " mad for the
sight of his eyes that he did see," when those poor
diseased eyes of his showed him, through their dis-
torting lenses, the human form divine diabolically
caricatured into the Yahoo Among those rarer
intellects, on the other hand, who have won for
themselves the Platonic balance, who have grown
to the full altitude out of the dwarfed condition
hinted at by La Bruyere, men and things—all
those varied themes for philosophic consideration
here descanted upon by Lord Lytton—assume in the
end their just and accurate proportions. It is the
sense of this which constitutes in effect the crowning
charm of these ripened products of the intellect
and judgment of Lord Lytton in his twofold
character as a Poet and as a Philosopher. So
regarded, they have an especial value and
importance of their own, even among the more
highly elaborated masterpieces, whether of dramatic,
epic, satiric, historic, lyrical, critical, oratorical, or
romantic art contributed by the same affluent
and masterhand to the stores of our national lite-
rature.

POLICE INTELLIGENCE.—This Day.

GUILDHALL.

BOASTING OF BEING A FENlAN.—Edward Cotton,
an ivory turner, living at 19, Charterhouse-square,
was brought before Alderman Finnis, charged with
being drunk and disorderly.
Henry Southerwood, 488, said that morning,
at a quarter to one o'clock, the defendant was in
Earl-street, Blackfriars, drunk. He refused to go
home, declaring that he was a Fenian, and conti-
nually throwing himself down on the ground. He
declared himself to be a Fenian, and said he carried
a sword-stick. Witness, seeing his wife carrying
two sticks, asked to be allowed to look at them, and
found one really to be a sword-stick.
Prisoner was fined ss. for being drunk.