which cannot be quenched though its breath expire. Is it the fountain, or the temple, that breathes, and has fire breathed into it?

Mr. Montgomery apostrophizes the "Immortal beacons,- spirits of the just,"

and describes their employments in another world, which are to be, it seems, bathing in light, hearing fiery streams flow, and riding on living cars of lightning.

The deathbed of the

sceptic is described with what we suppose is meant for energy. We then have the deathbed of a Christian made as ridiculous as false imagery and false English can make it. But this is not enough. The Day of Judgment is to be described, and a roaring cataract of nonsense is poured forth upon this tremendous subject. Earth, we are told, is dashed into Eternity. Furnace blazes wheel round the horizon, and burst into bright wizard phantoms. Racing hurricanes unroll and whirl quivering fire-clouds. The white waves gallop. Shadowy worlds career around. The red and raging eye of Imagination is then forbidden to pry further. But further Mr. Robert Montgomery persists in prying. The stars bound through the airy roar. The unbosomed deep yawns on the ruin. The billows of Eternity then begin to advance. The world glares in fiery slumber. A car comes forward driven by living thunder,

produce emolument and fame? The circulation of this writer's poetry has been greater than that of Southey's Roderick, and beyond all comparison greater than that of Cary's Dante or of the best works of Coleridge. Thus enCouraged Mr. Robert Montgomery has favoured the public with volume after volume. We have given so much space to the examination of his first and most popular performance that we Prayer, and his smaller poems, which, have none to spare for his Universal as the puffing journals tell us, would

alone constitute a sufficient title to

literary immortality. We shall pass at once to his last publication, entitled Satan.

This poem was ushered into the world with the usual roar of acclamation.

But the thing was now past a joke. Pretensions so unfounded, so impudent, of resistance. In several magazines and and so successful, had aroused a spirit handled somewhat roughly, and the reviews, accordingly, Satan has been with good sense and spirit. We shall, arts of the puffers have been exposed therefore, be very concise.

Satan

that on the Omnipresence of the Deity, Of the two poems we rather prefer for the same reason which induced Sir Thomas More to rank one bad book what. This is rhyme. But the other above another. "Marry, this is someis neither rhyme nor reason." is a long soliloquy, which the Devil "Creation shudders with sublime dismay, And in a blazing tempest whirls away." pronounces in five or six thousand lines of bad blank verse, concerning geoAnd this is fine poetry! This is graphy, politics, newspapers, fashionwhat ranks its writer with the master-able society, theatrical amusements, spirits of the age! This is what has Sir Walter Scott's novels, Lord Byron's been described, over and over again, in poetry, and Mr. Martin's pictures. The terms which would require some quali- new designs for Milton have, as was fication if used respecting Paradise natural, particularly attracted the atLost! It is too much that this patch-téntion of a personage who occupies so work, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable specimen of art. And what must we think of a system by means of which verses like those which we have quoted, verses fit only for the poet's corner of the Morning Post, can

conspicuous a place in them. Mr Martin must be pleased to learn that, whatever may be thought of those performances on earth, they give full satisfaction in Pandemonium, and that he is there thought to have hit off the likenesses of the various Thrones and Dominations very happily.

The motto to the poem of Satan is taken from the Book of Job: "Whence

comest thou? From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it." And certainly Mr. Robert Montgomery has not failed to make his hero go to and fro, and walk up and down. With the exception, however, of this propensity to locomotion, Satan has not one Satanic quality. Mad Tom

While the bright perfidy of wanton eyes
Through brain and spirit darts delicious
fire;

The last, a throng most pitiful! who seem,
With their corroded figures,rayless glance,
And death-like struggle of decaying age,
Like painted skeletons in charnel pomp
Set forth to satirize the human kind!-
How fine a prospect for demoniac view!
'Creatures whose souls outbalance worlds
awake!'

Methinks I hear a pitying angel cry."

Here we conclude. If our remarks

give pain to Mr. Robert Montgomery, we are sorry for it. But, at whatever cost of pain to individuals, literature must be purified from this taint. And, to show that we are not actuated by any feeling of personal enmity towards him, we hereby give notice that, as soon as any book shall, by means of puffing, reach a second edition, our intention is to do unto the writer of it as we have

had told us that "the prince of darkness is a gentleman;" but we had yet to learn that he is a respectable and pious gentleman, whose principal fault is that he is something of a twaddle and far too liberal of his good advice. That happy change in his character which Origen anticipated, and of which Tillotson did not despair, seems to be rapidly taking place. Bad habits are not eradicated in a moment. It is not strange, therefore, that so old an offender should now and then relapse for a short time into wrong disposi-done unto Mr. Robert Montgomery. tions. But to give him his due, as the proverb recommends, we must say that he always returns, after two or three lines of impiety, to his preaching style. We would seriously advise Mr. Montgomery to omit or alter about a hundred lines in different parts of this large volume, and to republish it under the name of "Gabriel." The reflections of which it consists would come less absurdly, as far as there is a more and a less in extreme absurdity, from a good than from a bad angel.

We can afford room only for a single quotation. We give one taken at random, neither worse nor better, as far as we can perceive, than any other equal number of lines in the book. The Devil goes to the play, and moralises thereon as follows:

JOHN BUNYAN. (DECEMBER, 1830.)

The Pilgrim's Progress, with a Life of John
Bunyan. By ROBERT SOUTHEY, Esq.
LL. D. Poet Laureate. Illustrated with
Engravings. 8vo. London: 1830.

THIS is an eminently beautiful and
splendid edition of a book which well
deserves all that the printer and the
engraver can do for it. The Life of
Bunyan is, of course, not a perform-
ance which can add much to the lite-
rary reputation of such a writer as
Mr. Southey. But it is written in ex-
cellent English, and, for the most part,
in an excellent spirit. Mr. Southey
propounds, we need not say, many
opinions from which we altogether dis-
sent; and his attempts to excuse the
odious persecution to which Bunyan
was subjected have sometimes moved
our indignation. But we will avoid
this topic. We are at present much
more inclined to join in paying homage
to the genius of a great man than to
engage in a controversy concerning
church-government and toleration.

We must not pass without notice the engravings with which this volume is decorated. Some of Mr. Heath's woodcuts are admirably designed and executed. Mr. Martin's illustrations do

unseasonably as Varelst introduced his flower-pots and nosegays. If Mr. Martin were to paint Lear in the storm, we suspect that the blazing sky, the sheets of rain, the swollen torrents, and the tossing forest, would draw away all attention from the agonies of the insulted king and father. If he were to paint the death of Lear, the old man, asking the by-standers to undo his button, would be thrown into the shade by a vast blaze of pavilions, standards, armour, and heralds' coats. Mr. Martin would illustrate the Orlando Furioso well, the Orlando Innamorato still better, the Arabian Nights best of all. Fairy palaces and gardens, porticoes of agate, and groves flowering with emeralds and rubies, inhabited by people for whom nobody cares, these are his proper domain. He would succeed admirably in the enchanted ground of Alcina, or the mansion of Aladdin. But he should avoid Milton and Bunyan.

not please us quite so well. His Valley | immeasurable spaces, his innumerable of the Shadow of Death is not that multitudes, his gorgeous prodigies of Valley of the Shadow of Death which architecture and landscape, almost as Bunyan imagined. At all events, it is not that dark and horrible glen which has from childhood been in our mind's eye. The valley is a cavern: the quagmire is a lake: the straight path runs zigzag and Christian appears like a speck in the darkness of the immense vault. We miss, too, those hideous forms which make so striking a part of the description of Bunyan, and which Salvator Rosa would have loved to draw. It is with unfeigned diffidence that we pronounce judgment on any question relating to the art of painting. But it appears to us that Mr. Martin has not of late been fortunate in his choice of subjects. He should never have attempted to illustrate the Paradise Lost. There can be no two manners more directly opposed to each other than the manner of his painting and the manner of Milton's poetry. Those things which are mere accessories in the descriptions become the principal objects in the pictures; and those figures which are most prominent in the descriptions can be detected in the pictures only by a very close scrutiny. Mr. Martin has succceded perfectly in representing the pillars and candelabras of Pandæmonium. But he has forgotten that Milton's Pandemonium is merely the background to Satan. In the picture, the Archangel is scarcely visible amidst the endless colonnades of his infernal palace. Milton's Paradise, again, is merely the background to his Adam and Eve. But in Mr. Martin's picture the landscape is every thing. Adam, Eve, and Raphael attract much less notice than the lake and the mountains, the gigantic flowers, and the giraffes which feed upon them. We read that James the Second sat to Varelst, the great flower-painter. When the performance was finished, his Majesty appeared in the midst of a bower of sun-flowers and tulips, which completely drew away all attention from the central figure. All who looked at the portrait took it for a flower-piece. Mr. Martin we think, introduces his

The characteristic peculiarity of the Pilgrim's Progress is that it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. Other allegories only amuse the fancy. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears. There are some good allegories in Johnson's works, and some of still higher merit by Addison. In these performances there is, perhaps, as much wit and ingenuity as in the Pilgrim's Progress. But the pleasure which is produced by the Vision of Mirza, the Vision of Theodore, the genealogy of Wit, or the contest between Rest and Labour, is exactly similar to the pleasure which we derive from one of Cowley's odes or from a canto of Hudibras. It is a pleasure which belongs wholly to the understanding, and in which the feelings have no part whatever. Nay, even Spenser himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the

House of Temperance. One unpar- the iron cage, the palace, at the doors donable fault, the fault of tediousness, of which armed men kept guard, and pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. on the battlements of which walked We become sick of cardinal virtues persons clothed all in gold, the cross and deadly sins, and long for the and the sepulchre, the steep hill and society of plain men and women. Of the pleasant arbour, the stately front the persons who read the first canto, of the House Beautiful by the wayside, not one in ten reaches the end of the the chained lions crouching in the first book, and not one in a hundred porch, the low green valley of Huperseveres to the end of the poem. miliation, rich with grass and covered Very few and very weary are those with flocks, all are as well known to who are in at the death of the Blatant us as the sights of our own street. Beast. If the last six books, which are Then we come to the narrow place said to have been destroyed in Ireland, where Apollyon strode right across the had been preserved, we doubt whether whole breadth of the way, to stop the any heart less stout than that of a com-journey of Christian, and where aftermentator would have held out to the end.

It is not so with the Pilgrim's Progress. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. Doctor Johnson, all whose studies were desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an exception in favour of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work was one of the two or three works which he wished longer. It was by no common merit that the illiterate sectary extracted praise like this from the most pedantic of critics and the most bigoted of Tories. In the wildest parts of Scotland the Pilgrim's Progress is the delight of the peasantry. In every nursery the Pilgrim's Progress is a greater favourite than Jack the Giant-killer. Every reader knows the straight and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought. There is no ascent, no declivity, no resting-place, no turn-stile, with which we are not perfectly acquainted. The wicket gate, and the desolate swamp which separates it from the City of Destruction, the long line of road, as straight as a rule can make it, the Interpreter's house and all its fair shows, the prisoner in

wards the pillar was set up to testify how bravely the pilgrim had fought the good fight. As we advance, the valley becomes deeper and deeper. The shade of the precipices on both sides falls blacker and blacker. The clouds gather overhead. Doleful voices, the clanking of chains, and the rushing of many feet to and fro, are heard through the darkness. The way, hardly discernible in gloom, runs close by the mouth of the burning pit, which sends forth its flames, its noisome smoke, and its hideous shapes to terrify the adventurer. Thence he goes on, amidst the snares and pitfalls, with the mangled bodies of those who have perished lying in the ditch by his side. At the end of the long dark valley he passes the dens in which the old giants dwelt, amidst the bones of those whom they had slain.

Then the road passes straight on through a waste moor, till at length the towers of a distant city appear be fore the traveller; and soon he is in the midst of the innumerable multitudes of Vanity Fair. There are the jugglers and the apes, the shops and the puppet-shows. There are Italian Row, and French Row, and Spanish Row, and British Row, with their crowds of buyers, sellers, and loungers, jabbering all the languages of the earth.

Thence we go on by the little hill of the silver mine, and through the meadow of lilies, along the bank of that pleasant river which is bordered on both sides by fruit-trees. On the left branches off the path leading to the

horrible castle, the court-yard of which | geous Pantheon, full of beautiful, mais paved with the skulls of pilgrims; jestic, and life-like forms. He turned and right onward are the sheepfolds atheism itself into a mythology, rich and orchards of the Delectable Mountains.

Festivity, so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process, and to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical

with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias, or From the Delectable Mountains, the the virgin saints that smile on us from way lics through the fogs and briers the canvass of Murillo. The Spirit of the Enchanted Ground, with here of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the and there a bed of soft cushions spread Principle of Evil, when he treated of under a green arbour. And beyond is them, ceased to be abstractions. They the land of Beulah, where the flowers, took shape and colour. They were no the grapes, and the songs of birds never longer mere words; but "intelligible cease, and where the sun shines night forms;" "fair humanities;" objects of and day. Thence are plainly seen the love, of adoration, or of fear. As there golden pavements and streets of pearl, can be no stronger sign of a mind deson the other side of that black and titute of the poetical faculty than that cold river over which there is no bridge. tendency which was so common among All the stages of the journey, all the the writers of the French school to turn forms which cross or overtake the pil-images into abstractions, Venus, for grims, giants, and hobgoblins, ill-example, into Love, Minerva into Wisfavoured ones, and shining ones, the dom, Mars into War, and Bacchus into tall, comely, swarthy Madam Bubble, with her great purse by her side, and her fingers playing with the money, the black man in the bright vesture, Mr. Worldly Wiseman and my Lord Hategood, Mr. Talkative, and Mrs. and ethical theories of Shelley were Timorous, all are actually existing beings to us. We follow the travellers through their allegorical progress with interest not inferior to that with which we follow Elizabeth from Siberia to Moscow, or Jeanie Deans from Edinbargh to London. Bunyan is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors, men are mere personifications. We have not a jealous man, but jealousy; not a traitor, but perfidy; not a patriot, but patriotism. The mind of Bunyan, on the contrary, was so imaginative that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. Α ὁ Δάφνις ἔβα ῥόον ἔκλυσε δίνα dialogue between two qualities, in his τὸν Μώσαις φίλον ἄνδρα, τὸν οὐ Νύμφαισιν dream, has more dramatic effect than ἀπεχθῆ. a dialogue between two human beings But we must return to Bunyan. in most plays. In this respect the The Pilgrim's Progress undoubtedly genius of Bunyan bore a great resem- is not a perfect allegory. The types blance to that of a man who had very are often inconsistent with each other; little else in common with him, Percy and sometimes the allegorical disguise Bysshe Shelley. The strong imagina- is altogether thrown off. The river, tion of Shelley made him an idolater in for example, is emblematic of death; his own despite. Out of the most in- and we are told that every human definite terms of a hard, cold, dark, being must pass through the river. metaphysical systera, he made a gor-But Faithful does not pass through it.

certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art, but an inspiration. Had he lived to the full age of man, he might not improbably have given to the world some great work of the very highest rank in design and execution. But, alas !