tured spirit howling with rage and horror as it knows not what, save that it is the dim phantasmagoria of the hell it ever bears within itself? What are those thoughts? We must first be damned eternally ere we can know. And yet Shakespeare in half a dozen words has made us feel what they must be." If the comment is daringly expressed, at least it is in harmony with the daring mystery of the thrilling text, of imagination all compact. There is an excellent analysis of the seemingly inconsistent character of Oliver, in "As you Like It." "He is not a mere brutal, grasping elder brother; but being somewhat❘ morose and moody in his disposition, he first envied and then disliked the youth who, although his inferior in position, is so much in the heart of the world, and especially of his own people, that he himself is altogether misprised. The very moody disposition which makes him less popular than his younger brother, led him to nourish this bitter dislike, till it became at length the bitter hate which he shows in the first scene of the play. Had Oliver been less appreciative of the good in others, and less capable of it himself, he would not have turned so bitterly against Orlando. It is quite true to nature that such a man should be overcome entirely, and at once, by the subsequent generosity of his brother, and instantly subdued by simple, earnest Celia. But his sudden yielding to sweet and noble influences is not consistent with the character of the coarse, unmitigated villain whom we see upon the stage, and who is the monstrous product, not of Shakespeare, but of those who garble Shakespeare's text." Equally true is Mr. White's refusal of the stage version of Jacques, as a melancholy, tender-hearted young man, with sad eyes and a sweet voice, talking morality in most musical modulation. 66 Shakespeare's Jacques," on the contrary, "is a morose, cynical, querulous old fellow, who has been a bad young one. He does not have sad moments, but 'sullen fits,' as the Duke says. His melan choly is morbid; and is but the fruit of that utter loss of mental tone which results from years of riot and debauchery." Among other Shakspearian creations characterized by Mr. White with more or less felicity and detail, are, Falstaff, Glo'ster, Angelo, Bottom, Viola, Desdemona, Rosalind, and Imogen. But the essay on Isabella appears to us a piece of perverted ingenuity. That by a diligent aggregation of certain particulars in her actions and speeches, an air of plausibility may be thrown over Mr. White's presentment, or mispresentment of the " very virtuous maid," is true enough; but when, with every wish to rid our mind of prejudice and prepossession, we strive to realize what Shakspeare meant Isabel to be, how he regarded her, and what place he desired for her in the heart of the great world, which is just.-we find it impracticable to recognize Mr. White's version, and are only too glad to escape, in this instance, from the refracting medium of the critic to the poet's fontal light. "I shrink," says Mr. White, on one occasion," from thrusting myself between my readers and their spontaneous admiration of Shakspeare." It is not often that his presence is felt to be obtrusive, or that we are not happy in his aid; but here it is otherwise. In Isabella, Mr. White sees an "embodiment of the iciest, the most repelling continence." She is a professional pietest, chaste by the card. She is "deliberately sanctified, and energetically virtuous." She is "a pedant in her talk, a prude in her notions, and a prig in her conduct." Hers is a "porcupine purity." "She has solemnly made up her mind to be chaste." "She has a dreadfully rectangular nature, is an accomplished and not very scrupulous dialectician, and thinks it proper to be benevolent only when she has the law on her side." "She is utterly without impulse." "No wonder," Mr. White in his contemptuous bitterness can say, "that Lucio tells her, -if you should need a pin, You could not with more tame a tongue desire it. But it is very questionable whether Isabella was womanish enough to need a pin, she probably used buttons, or would have done so had she lived now-a-days. It may be uncharitable, perhaps, to accuse her of having an eye to the reversion of the points with which Claudio tied his doublet and hose; but her indifference to his death looks very like it." A sorry jest, but in keeping with the sorry argument of Shakspeare's Scholar. But again: she is a "sheriff in petticoats," of an "impassibility absolutely frightful" and "cold-blooded barbarity." Her spirit is "utterly uncompassionate," "pitiless," "inhuman, not to say unwomanly," in her interview with her doomed brother, and the language she uses repulsively "obdurate" and "savage." She is Shakspeare's ideal of the "unfeminine, repulsive, monstrous," in woman-of the too much brain and too little heart. "Its unloveliness was not to deter him from the task.... He drew an Iago and an Angelo among men ; among women, why should he hold his hand from a Lady loves him, she is jealous of his honor, and Macbeth and an Isabella?" As for her her own involved in his, and she could marriage with the irresolute laissez-faire-lov-weep tears of joy to see him bow meekly to ing, eaves-dropping Duke, which Mr. Hal- the impending fate, as the guaranty of his lam calls "one of Shakspeare's hasty half reconcilement with God, and of her union thoughts," Mr. White's only scruple, if any, with him in spirit by ties the sweetest and is, that the poor Duke had too bad a bar- most hallowed, though impalpable hencegain. "She, after having listened to his ar- forth to gross and grovelling sense, rather, guments, probably found him guilty-not of oh how much rather than tears of shame, love, that would have been unpardonable such as must scald the saintly maiden's but of preference of a female, under extenua- cheeks, to say nothing of the wasting and ting circumstances, and-married him. He corroding thoughts that lie too deep for needed a grey mare;' and Shakspeare, with tears, if her father's son made election of the his unerring perception of the eternal fitness life that now is, instead of the life which is of things, gave him Isabella." Such is Mr. to come. The shock she experiences as the White's interpretation of the character which humiliating truth dawns on her, is expressed we regard as Shakspeare's embodiment of in a vehemence of emotion, stormy enough noblest womanhood, in its religious phase, to prove that, pace Mr. White, Isabella is not a creature so pure and intense in her heaven- "utterly without impulse." But in good ward aspirations, that she cannot conceive sooth, there needs but a certain gift of spethe possibility of utter baseness and renegade cial pleading, and a steady one-sidedness of treason against Heaven, in one so near to her view, to do with any other of Shakspeare's as her brother; devoutly fixed as her own women what Mr. White has done with the eye is on things unseen and eternal, not on votaress already abused by Mrs. Lenox-to things seen and temporal; immovably fixed make Rosalind a mere prurient foul-talker, as her affections are on things above, not on Perdita a forward minx, Ophelia an impurethings on earth for she walks by faith, and minded and double-tongued trifler, Hermione not by sight; and because she loves her a harsh unforgiving piece of austerity, with brother dearly, she would have him die at no more of milk in her bosom or warm blood once, in penitence and hope, that, the once- in her veins than the statue she finally and for-all death past, the judgment after death fitly represented. may not leave him reprobate; because she THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH CONTRAS- | keep a journal of what you observe, and it is TED.-The following incident was, some years disliked extremely by the government. I ago, related by baron Brunnow, late Russian advise you to burn your journal immediately, ambassador at our court, to Dr. Lee, and otherwise you will run the risk of being which the latter has recorded in his work on thrown into prison." He immediately cast the Last Days of the Emperor Alexander," his journal into the fire, and it was consumed. etc. The anecdote, however, has previous- The same evening the English nobleman ly been published. "An English nobleman waited upon him, and M. de Montesquieu reand the celebrated M. de Montesquieu once lated the circumstance, and expressed himmet at Venice, and were comparing the En- self very uneasy at the thought of being subglish and French nations. M. de Montes-jected to imprisonment. The Englishman obquieu maintained, that the French were much more intelligent and acute than the English. The Englishman did not contradict him, although he did not give his assent entirely, being prevented by politeness from contradicting him. Every night M. de Montesquieu committed to paper what had passed during the day. On the following morning after this conversation, an Italian entered the apartments of the marquis, and said, "You served," Now you see the difference between the English and French: had this happened to an Englishman he would have considered the probability of this, or at least have endeavored to avoid it; he would certainly not have thrown his journal into the fire as you have done. I sent the Italian to see how you would act on this occasion, for the purpose of showing you the difference between the two nations." From the North British Review. WILLIAM COWPER.* IT is a favorite saying in the present day, that "the tendencies of the age are essentially prosaic." The precise meaning which these words are intended to convey may not be very clearly understood by the majority of those who utter them; but they seem to embody a general idea of the unpoetical character of the times. There is a confused notion in men's minds, that the Practical and the Ideal not only cannot associate, but cannot co-exist one with the other-that the voice of Fact must bellow down the voice of Fiction-that the clangings of our iron must drown the harpings of our bards-that because we can travel on a straight road, at the rate of forty miles an hour, the excur sions of the imagination and the wanderings of Fancy must be disregarded for evermore -that the generation which has tunnelled Box-hill can never care to climb Parnassus. All this is in effect so often repeated, in one form or another, that its truth has been taken for granted by multitudes of men who echo and re-echo the cry; and still we are told that the age is unpoetical, and that the present generation is a generation of worshippers at the great shrine of Matter-of-Fact. But what, after all, is the meaning of the cry? Does it mean, that given up as we are to materialities laying down iron roads by hundreds of miles; spanning immense rivers with arches of stone; flashing messages along electric wires with the speed of the lightning; covering the seas with magic fireships; multiplying by the same mysterious agency textile fabrics not wrought by hands, of a beauty and a splendor such as Solomon in all his glory never dreamt of-the intelligence and the inventiveness of the age expend themselves upon projects of utilitarianism, and intent upon the palpable realities before us, we have neither eyes to "glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," nor wings to bear us up in illimitable space; * Poetical Works of William Cowper. Edited by ROBERT BELL 3 Vols., 1854. [Annotated Edition of the English Poets, by ROBERT BELL, Author of the "History of Russia," "Lives of the lish Poets," &c. v. d.] g that whilst we are coining one metal into another, the brain-coinage of that great ideal currency, which is more enduring than iron and stone, must necessarily be suspended? Does it mean that the aliment of poetry is vanishing from off the face of the earth— that external and internal beauty, are both ceasing to be that inanimate nature is more formal and the human mind more prosaic; that the seasons do not alternate, nor men's hearts pulse as they were wont; that mechanism has usurped the world, and gross selfishness the people;-in a word, that the sources of imaginative inspiration are utterly dried up ? Or is it meant, that although the few may write poetry, the many will not read it; that our minds, harnessed, as it were, in a go-cart of one utilitarian pursuit or another, have no sympathy with anything of which the answer to the cui bono does not lie upon the surface; that we have by one consent adopted the Benthamite doctrine that Poetry has no greater claims than Push pin upon mankind, and in this "money making age," arrived generally at a conclusion that it "does not pay." Is it meant that we have too much to do with the literature of fact that what with our Blue Books and Statistics, our Mark-Lane Expresses, our Railway, our Mining, and our Building Journals, our Associations for the Advancement of Science, our Sanitary Commissions, and our endless official reports on every conceivable subject, we have no time to read anything that is not designed primarily to teach us to make money or to take care of ourselves? Is it meant that all iron has so eaten its way upon earth, that the sublimest and the sweetest hymnings of the bard cannot rouse in the breasts of the many one sympathetic emotion? In whichever direction the interpretation of the popular aphorism is to be found, we pronounce it without a misgiving, to be a rank and offensive fallacy. The smoke of a steam-vessel may sometimes obscure the sun from the loiterers upon deck; but all the steam in the world, or the material tendencies of which it is the representative, could as readily put out the sun as they could put | out poetry. As long as there is sunshine; as long as there are moon and stars; sky and cloud; green fields and sweet flowers; the changing ocean, and the human heart which contains the likeness of them all, the few will sing and the many will listen. To us, indeed, this would seem to be a truism scarcely worth uttering, if it had not been in effect so often contradicted. We are utterly at a loss for a reason why it should be other wise. There is room enough in the world both for Poetry and Steam. A man is not less likely to be endowed with "the vision and the faculty divine," or less likely to admire its manifestations in others, because his father goes up to London every day, with a "season ticket" in his pocket, from the fair hills of Surrey or the green woods of Berkshire, instead of travelling in the Brixton or Clapham omnibus along the old high road; or because he himself can rush from the smoke and din of the metropolis in a few hours, To see the children sporting on the shore, to bury himself deep in a mighty wood, or to ascend the rugged mountain side until he steeps himself in the clouds. If there be anything in poetical education, anything in the effect of external influences upon the poetical temperament, surely the agency which brings a man most readily within their reach-within the reach of all the beauties and benignities of Nature-is to be regarded as one of the best aids to the development of the Divine faculty, and in no sense an obstruction to it. It is not one, indeed, of the marring the beauty of the country, because here and there may be seen an unsightly embankment, consider that there are thousands and thousands amongst us, who but for these iron roads, would never see the country at all. The Rail is, indeed, the great opensesame of Nature. It is the key that unlocks her choicest treasures to the overworked clerk and the toil-worn mechanic, and brings all sweet sounds and pleasant sights and fragrant scents within the reach of men who else would know of nothing that is not foul, unsightly, and obstreperous. What is this but to say that the Rail is a great teacher, educating both head and heart, preparing the few to utter, and the many to appreciate the utterances of Poetry. All this may be conceded; and yet it may still, perhaps, be alleged that the age is essentially a prosaic one. An increasing addiction, it may be said, to the study of the exact sciences is as much an effect as a cause of all those great material improvements which are the growth and the characteristic of the civilization of the nineteenth century. And it is assumed that Science and Poetry are the antagonists, not the help-meets and handmaids of each other. But most true is it of our civilization, that— Science and Poetry and Thought So serene they curse it not. They do not enter the cottage or the mansion, to jostle and to wrestle with, but to aid, encourage, and to support each other. They may rarely find expression through the same oracular mouth-piece. But their influences upon the generation at large are conjoint and co-extensive.* The well-known, often quo least benefits which Steam has conferred upon the age, that it brings the country-ted Baconian passage, setting forth that the sea and shore, hill and valley, wood and plain, the yellow corn-fields, the winding river, the mossy turf, the fragrant wildflowers, the song of the lark, the tinkling of the sheep-bell-within the reach of the anxious town; almost as it were, to the very doors of dwellers in the heart of our cities.* Let those who talk about our iron roads ⚫ Coleridge said, apologetically, "I was reared In the great city. same age which is fertile in men of action, as warriors and statesmen, is fertile also in men of thought, as poets and philosophers, might have both a more general and a more duces giants of one kind produces giants of particular application. The age which proting upon one order of intelligence generate another. The same influences which operagreat mechanics, operating upon another will generate great poets. As with the body of an individual man, so with the body of men And saw nought lovely, but the sky and stars." in the concrete, there is a sympathy between Contrast this with Wordsworth's well-known lines, "The tall cliff Was my delight, the sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion," &c. &c. its different parts. Those salutary influences * It may be remarked, too, that men of science were never more poetical, nor poets more scientific, than at the present time. which strengthen one arm seldom fail to strengthen another. At all events, nothing can be more preposterous than to affirm that because one part thrives another must languish. The healthiness of the age manifests itself in the general developments of intellectual power of all kinds. We see it alike— In the steam-ship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind; the progress of the nineteenth century is, in a word, Catholic. But after all, the best reply to the vulgar assertion, that the tendencies of the age are essentially prosaic, is to be found in the simple material fact of the large amount of poetry that is written, and the large amount that is read. It is true that much poetry, or much that presumes to call itself poetry, is written, but never read. The volumes of poetry which issue from the press, never to be read, but by friends and critics,-and by them sparingly-are past counting. Of this phenomenon there are two noticeable things to be said. Firstly, that very much of that unread poetry would once have been largely read. Unread poetry is not always unreadable poetry. Many a poet, doomed in this nineteenth century to taste all the bitterness of neglect, would at the close of the eighteenth have made for himself a great reputation. There have been worse versi fiers included in editions of standard British poets than those, which week after week are now dismissed by our periodical critics in a few faint sentences of feeble praise. And, secondly, that poetry must, to a considerable number of people, be its own exceeding great reward, or so much would not be written for the mere pleasure of writing it. Every allowance being made for the deluding operations of hope-for all the excesses of a sanguine temperament-still the fact is mainly to be accounted for by a reference to the truth, that it. The existence of the poetical temperament is indicated even by the profitless effort, the impotent desire. It is something even to aspire to be a poet. It will, perhaps, be said, that if poetry, which would once have found many readers, now finds few or none, the age is, therefore, an unpoetical one. And so it would be, if, whilst rejecting this once tolerated mediocrity, we had nothing better to fall back upon. But the generation which can boast of Wordsworth and Shelley-Byron and CrabbCampbell and Rogers-Keats and Tennyson, -as its cotemporaries, has no need to betake itself to such mediocrity as was erst represented by Pomfret and Yalden. Has Mr. Tennyson, the most poetical of poets, any Has Elizabeth Barr tt sung to a people who reason to complain of a paucity of readers? will not hear? And, in the meanwhile, how fares it with our older bards? Are those who have sung worthily to a past generation forgotten or ne glected by the present? There is no more cogent argument to be adduced, in denial of the assumption that the tendencies of the age are essentially prosaic, than the fact that there are, at the present time, three different editions of the standard British poets in course of serial publication. Would there be this ample supply if there were no adequate demand? Would Mr. Bell, Mr. Gilfillan, and Mr. Wilmot waste their fine minds in the streneration of English poets, only to supply linnuous idleness of editing generation after geMr. Routledge, or any other publisher, sink ing for our trunks? Would Mr. Parker, or his capital in an unfathomable well of hopeless speculation? Would Mr. Cunningham and their enterprize upon new editions of and Mr. Murray fritter away their learning "Lives of the Poets," and other kindred works, if we had ceased to delight in poetry? Would minor publishers be, as they are, continually on the alert to pounce, hawk-like, on expired copyrights of popular poets, if the tendencies of the age were essentially prosaic ? As we write, a prospectus is placed before us, announcing a forthcoming serial issue of ByAnd if this pleasure be widely experienced, ron's poems, in penny numbers, under the as by its results we know it to be, at the pre- auspices of some lawful pirate, who knows sent time, the age cannot be an unpoetical that the speculation will be a profitable one. one. It matters not, in this view of the case, Already have some of the earlier poems of whether the poetry be good or bad. We speak Southey, Scott, and others, become common here of those poetical yearnings which may property-common property, which, in a profind sufficient or insufficient utterance. What-saic age, no one would have thought worthy ever may be their audible expression, whe- of the paper and print expended on its approther in immortal music or wretched stutterings, priation. Of the quantity of poetry that is there is a feeling of poetry at the source of printed in the present day, no doubt can be There is a pleasure in poetic pains, |