placed on the same footing as the English? Can a people be called civilized where farm-labourers work under an escort of police? where murderers are fostered, and improving landlords shot? where they harrow by the horses' tails? where ball-proof waistcoats are lucrative articles of manufacture? where they believe in O'Higgins? and up to the present moment have paid an impostor a princely income to disunite them from their only friend? In truth, when we reflect upon the scrapes which this brave, good-humoured, generous, and nose-led people have been brought into in all ages by their kings, their chiefs, their priests, and their patriots, we are astonished to read in Holinshed that "There is no Irish terme for a knave."-vol. ii. p. 266. We suppose after what we said at the beginning it is entirely needless for us to explain that in this very clever man's diatribes he has not the slightest intention of casting any disparagement on the virtues which, no less than powerful understanding and captivating manners, characterize in our time the great majority of the Irish gentry. He is as far above pandering to the narrow prejudices of the English bigot as of the Irish fanatic. He regards the questions at issue from an imperial, which is the same thing as to say from a philanthropic point of view. As We ought to mention that we had not read until our paper was done a small volume just published with the title of 'Ireland Sixty Years Ago.' If we had, we should have excepted it from our general criticism on works lately produced about Irish manners. The author has collected with diligence, and put together in a very agreeable style, a world of most striking and picturesque incidents and characters of the period immediately preceding the Union. Eminently amusing as he is, we see not the least trace of Barringtonian romance about his chapters. to his preface, he is an Irishman, though a highly cultivated one -therefore we may be pardoned for doubting whether he has not rather over-estimated the progress actually made by his countrymen, within these sixty years, towards habits of order and industry. But that they have made great progress, notwithstanding all the, as we believe, just and true pictures in Paddiana,' there can be no doubt; and most earnestly do we concur in his hope and prayer that the progress may advance henceforth with ever increasing rapidity. ART. V.-1. A Year of Consolation. By Mrs. Butler, late Fanny Kemble. 2 vols. 12mo. London: 1847. 2. Illustrated Excursions in Italy. By Edward Lear. 2 vols. folio. London: 1847. WE Το E readily cut the pages of these new books on an old subject; for heaven forefend that Italy should ever cease to interest, or her siren fascination become a fable of the past. us every touch by original hand awakens some dormant delight, every fresh view calls forth some unobserved wonder. Italy, whose fair form and pressure defies pen to exhaust, and pencil to more than outline, must be seen with painter's eye and with poet's feeling, must be loved for her own sake, and studied in her unbeaten by-ways, rather than in those tourist-haunted towns which foreigners have denationalised with their carpet civilization. We have coupled the names of Kemble and Lear, which combine well with other and older associations, because both have selected and sketched for themselves; peeping behind scenes seldom visited, and raising corners of the curtain which conceals to tramontanes the drama of Italian life. Here we have set before us a page or two of a book of beauty, which, thumbed indeed by thousands every year, remains sealed save to the initiated-and to none more so than the rank-and-file of fashion who, bored with Brighton, try a winterseason at Rome.' In both instances art has been summoned to aid representations of nature: the lady weds her prose to immortal verse; the gentleman describes his own drawings, a process unusual in illustrated works, but highly commendable when, what is still more unusual, the author is not swamped by the artist. A common yearning for consolation impelled both to seek brighter skies: one needed an anodyne for deep-rooted sorrows of the mind-the other a remedy for inveterate achings of the body; nor have their pilgrimages been in vain. Renovated in spirit by her Italian Year, Fanny Kemble (for we resume her European name, as, dismissing her Butler, she writes herself simple Fanny in the preface) has happily returned to that stage which her gifted family made their own, to delight myriads by again becoming public property. Mr. Lear in the balmy south baffled the insidious disease which under our stinted suns nips youth and talent, and, by turning to good account accomplishments, which, ere the fickle goddess frowned, were but amusements, has secured an honourable independence for those he loves the best, and has enrolled his name high in art-in that city where art is most appreciated. Thus much, by way of introduction, would have sufficed in ordinary ordinary cases; but, giving due precedence to the lady, the title, A Year of Consolation,' suggests those others, accumulative of distress, to which it was the antidote. An under-tone of woe and mystery pervades the poetic portions of our fair one's volumes, exciting a compassionate curiosity, and vividly contrasting, it must be owned, with the animal spirits and comic joyousness which flash forth in the prose narrative, like sun-beams in a wintry sky. But this is all in nature;-she is a poetess-and moreover the theatre has been her nursery and her playground. No wonder then that, whenever shadows of the past, looming across the Atlantic, darkened her present dream of peace, she poured her sadness into the serious vehicle of Il Penseroso, and sought relief from sorrow in sympathy. In the psychology of suffering the endurance of the Spartan is often coupled with the exhibition of the martyr; many there be who, even without the excuse of her professional training, can dissect with stoic pride the morbid anatomy of their hearts, and reveal to every eye festering wounds, which the tenderest hand of friend is never permitted to probe or bind up; who, masking inner depression by outward hilarity, cherish by concealment the worm in the bud, and yet bare their stuffed bosoms to the world, for daws to peck at. Her first morning at Rome is ushered in with a retrospect. She tells her tale--how all was set on one cast, and the hazard of the die a blank—and pale as moon-beam on snow-wreath is the ray of hope which lights up this autobiography of despair. These emptyings of vials of wrath, mingled with tears, recall the breathing, burning revelations of Lord Byron and Mrs. Norton. Early in life, when hope seems prophecy, And strong desire can sometimes mould a fate, Oh, Mediterranean, sea of memories! The last grim pages of my book of life, And waved me towards it. And at last I came Land-not of promise-but of consolation! To buy a store of bitter memories.'—-vol. i. p. 120. It will be observed that we have omitted lines here and therein fact we have quoted only thirty out of her hundred-and we no doubt owe Mrs. Fanny an apology for such freedom; though to be candid, we fancy we have hardly injured the piece by some of our dockings. Perilous to all well-cut pens, and fatal to not a few of them, is the facility of blank verse. The cleverest people in the world, if they happen to be great public speakers, like Lord Robertson and Mrs. Butler, are exceedingly apt to be carried too fast and too far when they trust themselves on this broadgauge railroad-and we conceive the jeopardy must be worst in the case of one suckled in the habits of theatrical intonation. Mrs. Siddons, we have read, used to ask for beef or porter at table in blank verse-we can vouch for it that glorious John Kemble occasionally grumbled about the Magnum being out, in lines as magniloquent as ever rolled from Lee's Alexander. In whatever fashion their niece exhibits herself, she will be sure to show the blood she is come of-but we very much prefer her rhyme to her blank, and the tighter the restraints she is pleased to adopt, the more she pleases us-best of all in the sonnet. Pegasus never needs the spur-the curb often. Prodigality of 'words, words, words, Horatio,' is only thus to be avoided, where, from a good ear and inveterate practice, recitative is so apt to glide into a certain cadence, that ten pages of tragic hendecasyllabics cost no more trouble than a king's speech did to William Pitt. Her The trip to Rome succeeded better than that to Cincinnati. The Transatlantic failure must cause more sorrow than surprise. Taking the fair adventurer's published opinions as exponents of her character, that underwriter was bold who insured a perfect union speculation in the United States. There be land-rats and waterrats, water-thieves and land-thieves: her wonderful wilderness,' full full as it may be of promise, was poorly calculated to administer to the wants of a patient so imaginative, exigeante, and impressionable; petted at home in public and private, impatient of unaccustomed control and contradiction, born in an old full-grown country, educated among accomplished facts' and persons-the deficiencies and discrepancies of a half-fledged people, struggling for position in the back-woods of social existence, could not but jangle, grate, and jar on the nerves of this delicate and daintily nourished organization. The faculty of highest enjoyment is counterbalanced by a corresponding capability of misery; doubleedged is poet's fancy; so long as the fine frenzy is on, non-existing charms are decked in rainbow tints; in the reaction, when the Titania illusion is over, motes are magnified into monsters, and a demigod dethroned into a donkey. Thus the daily occurrence of petty disappointments and dissatisfactions poisoned the day and night of this creature of over-exaggerated expectations, and led our Kate, untameable by any Yankee Petruchio, to repudiate 'that very great body with very little soul,' and emancipate herself from the mean and grinding martyrdom,' the slavery and 'domestic institutions' of the stripes. Far from us be any depreciation of the goods which the New World holds out to the under-fed millions of the over-crammed old one: to them it is a land both of promise and performance, where Ceres never denies her sheaves to labour, and all-bountiful Pomona need not be worshipped in temples of taxed glass. There Nature's table d'hôte is not full; still bread alone will not suffice to those who have the means of living; where the poor are filled, the rich may be sent empty away. The best of the Americans seem always too happy to escape from America. At home they are obliged to join in the universal chorus of 'Who but we?'but unless you pin them down by the paucity of private dollars, or glue them by a plaster of official ones-they are eager to stretch their wings for a flight from the vaunted Paradise of Equal Rights. Their resource, as in the slave-holding democracy of Athens, where crows pecked at eagles, is self-exile to lands of freer, purer air, where fortune, station, luxury, and above all, the priceless luxury of privacy, may be enjoyed-the 'painful proximity of the profane avoided-and the fellowship of kindred souls cultivated, without being denounced as an aristocrat, or persecuted by Plato's many-headed beast,' ever, in the words of Aristotle, despotic towards the affluent and good, who aspire to rise above its muddy level.' Experience of the day reasoneth as well as Greek philosophy of old: and, better read in Coriolanus than the Stagyrite, our auths exclaims from the bottom of her heart on leaving Franc much does |