did more. Indeed, splendid as the palace | of the palace precincts extended across had been, it was Henry who made it the what is now the road and abutted on to, noble seat that for a century and a half it the Park. Where part of the Horse continued to be. A most interesting plan, Guards stands was the tilt-yard, in which published in 1680, shows Whitehall very magnificent joustings were held, and a much as it was left by Henry a hundred little nearer Downing Street was the tenand thirty years before. The river front- nis-court; while, as far as may be judged age extended from a point in a line with from old engravings, the present house of the present Northumberland Avenue, the first lord of the treasury is nearly, nearly to where Westminster Bridge if not exactly; on the site of Henry VIII.'s now stands. The Privy Garden-long cockpit! But old Whitehall, during since built upon by the houses still called Henry's reign, did not look down merely Whitehall Gardens was laid out in six- on tournaments and revelries. Here it teen plots. Further south was the or- was that he first met Anne Boleyn, and it chard, and beyond this a large, smooth- was here that he was privately married to shaven bowling-green. Then among the her on January 25, 1533. Early in the heterogeneous mass of buildings we find morning, Dr. Lee, at that time one of the the wine cellar, the great hall, the chapel, king's chaplains and afterward Bishop of the vestry, the pantry, the priory buttery, Lichfield and Coventry, was sent for to the cofferer's cellar, the spicery, the kitch-perform mass in Henry's closet. en, the small-beer buttery, and many other offices, each set aside for some one department of royal state and luxury. Then comes Scotland Yard, so called from the suite of apartments therein which was used by the Scottish kings when they made their yearly journey to London to do homage and fealty for Scotland before the English monarch. But a large part

Be

sides the king, he found there Anne Boleyn and her train-bearer, Mrs. Savage, who was afterwards Lady Berkeley, and some grooms of the bed-chamber; and Lord Herbert of Cherbury affirms that Cranmer assisted at the ceremony. And it was here that Henry, about whom historians have agreed to differ so widely, old, diseased, and almost deserted, died.

THE VOICE OF LIZARDS.

A correspondent writes to Land and Water: "During the last few weeks I have seen it discussed in the columns of the public press whether lizards are voiceless; also if they possess venomous organs. Some years since, when at Moulmein with my lamented friend, the late Dr. F. Stoliczka (where we were engaged in collecting zoological objects), the latter question arose regarding the large tuck-too lizard, so common in all dwellings iu that country, and to the bite of which some Burmese attribute venomous qualities. They likewise assert that every succeeding year following their birth the number of too's at the end of its speech increases by one more, so that at four years old, when giving tongue, it would vociferate fuck-too-too-too-too. Everybody who has been in Burmah (unless deaf) must be acquainted with the voice of the tuck-too, while the little cheep' of the wall-lizard may be heard anywhere in the East. The succeeding Sunday I went to church, where the service was attended by the civil and military officials, as well as by the rank and fashion of the station. The chaplain, having completed the service, had entered the pulpit prior to commencing his sermon, when a curious interrup. tion occurred. The text was duly enunciated, and the Padré was about to begin his discourse, when a large tuck-too appeared on a desk just below his reverence, and lifting up

its head in front of the congregation, showed that it possessed a voice, by giving an unearthly tuck-too-too-too-too, every succeeding too apparently louder than the previous one, and a considerable interval elapsing between each. With every call it elevated its head and distended its throat, while during this performance the clergyman had to stop, as his words were drowned by the voice of his lacertilian opponent. That evening, while we were at dinner, and discussing the voice of the tucktoo, regretting that so far we had been unsuccessful in collecting good examples, we heard from one corner of the ceiling one of these lizards commencing his call. We speedily obtained a long bamboo, and by a fortunate stroke knocked the tuck-too down. My friend at once pounced upon his prey, but the lizard was active and seized its captor by one finger, inflicting a severe wound. Down went the tuck-too, the non-venomous qualities of which were no longer discussed, warm water was brought, the wound well cleansed, and everything done appropriate to a venomous bite, which symptoms fortunately never supervened. During this time our little dog had destroyed the value of the lizard as a specimen by biting it to pieces, in doing which it appeared to think it was avenging its master's injuries as well as performing an immensely courageous act."

Fifth Series, Volume XL.

}

No. 2000.-October 21, 1882.

{

From Beginning,
Vol. CLV.

CONTENTS.

I. THE LITERARY RESTORATION, 1790-1830, Cornhill Magazine,

II. THE BARONESS HELENA von SaaRFELD,

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1790-1830.

as his sublimity. The first burst of joy over, we see a softer and more pensive air stealing over literature: the boyish vigor of one age passing into the gallantry, the loyalty, and the spiritual fervor of the next; the progression from Shake

terity. By the great religious and literary movement of the sixteenth century the human mind was set free almost like THE process of transition by which the a child from school. We might almost English literature of the eighteenth cen- illustrate its liberation by the famous tury passed into that of the nineteenth, is simile of the horse in the Iliad, the most only one of many analogous processes perfect picture, perhaps, of buoyant and which, commencing about a hundred years exulting freedom to be found in the whole ago, and working themselves out towards compass of poetry. Then came an age the beginning of the Victorian age, make of marvels, an age of discovery, of daring up the complete transformation of enterprises, of light-hearted, reckless adthought, manners, and customs which the venture, of imagination strung to its highEnglish nation underwent coincidently est pitch. The spirit of the time finds its with the French Revolution. The trans- faithful reflection in Shakespeare, whose formation is singularly interesting, be- blithesomeness is at least as remarkable cause it is not so remote but that men were still alive in our youth who had passed through it, and who remembered the ancient régime as we remember the Corn Laws. Thus we are brought into almost living contact with a state of society which would seem as strange to our-speare through the Caroline poets down selves, could we actually awake in it, as it to Milton, is perfectly natural and logical. in turn would have seemed to the En- With Milton the procession closes. The gland of Elizabeth, perhaps even stranger. curtain falls upon the age of imagination It is this combined nearness to, and re- and rises on the age of reason. Dryden moteness from ourselves which lends its fills up the interval, occupying much the special interest to the period in question, same position in relation to the sevenwhether we contemplate it in its political teenth and eighteenth centuries as Byron or religious, its social or its literary as did in relation to the eighteenth and ninepects. And to the lady who has under-teenth. The natural bent of his mind was taken to illustrate the latter, all lovers of towards the school of the future. He was the subject must acknowledge themselves to be deeply indebted. We propose on this occasion to glance at a few of the salient characteristics of the generation which she passes in review: at the position which it occupies in the history of English literature; and its connection with preceding and subsequent literary developments.

English modern history is marked off into three very distinct periods by the great events of the Reformation, the English Revolution, and the French Revolution. We are still living in the third, and cannot tell, what it may yet have in store for us. Of the other two no doubt we still continue to feel the effects, and to work on the results; but for all that, each admits of being regarded as something complete within itself, and possessing peculiarities of its own which have not descended with its other legacies to pos

the founder of the new versification which Pope brought to perfection. Circumstances made him the poet of an imaginative creed, but nature meant him rather for satire and for criticisın, for moral and didactic poetry, and the very excellence of his prose is perhaps some testimony to the truth of the assertion.

However, not to spend more time upon particular individuals, we find the second of the epochs of literature starting from the English Revolution and full developed in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Several influences were at work to mould it into the form which it as sumed. The effect of all revolutions is to breed a spirit of scepticism and to damp the spirit of reverence. Where the revolution, like the French, is accompanied by a burst of political fanaticism, one kind of enthusiasm may simply take the place of another: the enthusiasm of liberty

66

succeed to the enthusiasm of loyalty. If, as we shall presently endeavor to Where this is not the case, as in the En- show, the great feature of the transition glish Revolution, where the doctrine of which Mrs. Oliphant has undertaken to hereditary right, the divinity that doth delineate, is the restoration of the imagihedge a king, is overthrown, not by an native element to its place in literature, imaginative creed more powerful than it may be as well to state very briefly what itself, but by a purely rationalistic one, we mean by the word; because of what the scepticism is likely to be accompanied is commonly called such the eighteenthby a mingled spirit of utilitarianism and century poets have abundance. We mean cynicism. This is what took place in this by imagination the power of vividly realcountry between 1690 and 1720. Obedi-izing conceptions which are beyond the ence to authority was to rest on reason scope of the senses. These are not necand on no original and underived title. essarily supernatural, they may be hisPoetry stooped to truth." Prose be- torical, or they may be the offspring of came familiar and easy, and busy with the pure meditation unfed from any external ordinary concerns of life. Religion, source. Milton's Pandemonium with Christianity, theology, were to make themselves useful to enforce morality. Imagination took wings and flew away. Pope was largely endowed with it by nature, but the reaction was too much for him. Akenside wrote upon the subject only to show that he had it not. Ideas had brought much evil on the world. They were the parents of both Puritanism and Jacobitism; and the great bulk of the English people were sick of both. To this sceptical, materialistic, and utilitarian spirit of the age, therefore, which was one direct product of the Revolution, we owe the practical character of the eighteenthcentury literature. To the leisure which life acquired through the settlement of all the great questions by which it had so long been agitated, we owe its other distinctive characteristic, its form and finish, or what Pope called its correctness. age much harassed by spiritual and social problems is impatient of form both in religion and in literature. An age of repose has time for it. The manner of a work becomes almost as important as the matter. Appreciation of elegance does not make too severe a demand on our intellectual energies. A lower level of thought and a higher level of style than prevailed in the seventeenth century is the combination which greets us in the eighteenth; and attractive as it is at its best, it is easy to see that in its decay and its corruption it would present a rather sorry spectacle.

An

A thousand demigods on golden thrones, Scott's reproduction of the feudal ages, Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Ancient Mariner," Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," are all specimens of imagi nation of the purest kind. A highly developed power of comparison, the power of seeing resemblances between apparently dissimilar objects, which applied to one kind of subject matter we term wit, applied to others we call poetry; imagery, metaphor, felicitous epithets, vivid and impressive descriptions of scenes which we have witnessed, appeals to passions or sentiments which stir us to enthusiasm or to tears, are all generally supposed to be the work of the imagination; and we have neither time nor space to invent another word instead of it. But it is evident that between the one kind of imagi nation and the other there is a difference not only in degree but in kind; and we wish our readers to understand that for the purposes of this essay we use the word exclusively in its former sense.

The writer who undertakes to act as our guide through any period of history or literature, must necessarily start from some beginning. Mrs. Oliphant takes the year 1790 as the commencement of the transition period; and if we must take any one date, it is perhaps the best we can choose. But the two periods — the old and the new - run into one another so much that it is difficult to say

Macaulay has gone out of his way to misrepresent exactly where the one begins and the

what Pope meant by being "correct."

other ends. On the whole, we should