'he knows all qualities with a learned spirit,' probably he may be aware of this practical defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and pettifogging bigot ry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is, much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of the Scotch Novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterise him as 'The wisest, meanest of mankind.' "Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian, A COLD-BLOODED HYPOCRITE, PANDER, AND INTRIGUER; yet a man of prodigious talent, of great versatility,—of unalterable self-possession and good humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch Novels ?" [Sic in the first copies of the London Magazine for February 1823, p. 205-206. In the copies, as now published, it does not appear, and the space it occupied in the page is supplied by a piece of balaam, being an anecdote of Dr Franklin.] Well, reader, what do you think of that? Here is a wretch directly calling one of the greatest and best men of the country, a toad-eater, a hack, a suborner, a slanderer, a Jack Ketch,a man intolerant, mercenary, and mean, and, by implication, a coldblooded hypocrite, a pander, and an intriguer. Is it expected that we should say a word in answer? No, we leave you to decide on the construction of the head and heart of him who wrote it, without adding a word. This man is, if we may trust the chatter of booksellers' shops, MR TAYLOR, senior partner of the house of Taylor and Hessey, 90, Fleet Street, and 13, Waterloo Place. We take a pleasure in hanging him upon a gibbet as a fit object for the slow-moving finger of scorn, with the appropriate label of," This is Mr Taylor, who wrote the review of Peveril of the Peak for his Fleet Street Miscellany." After it was printed, terror seized the owardly spirit of the proprietor, and after having disposed of two or three hundred of them, they were called in with the most breathless rapidity. Some, however, were out of their reach, and from one of them is printed the above. What a combination of filth there is in the whole transacfalsehood, the low and ridiculous tion! The paltry motive, the direct envy, the mean venom of the composition, well harmonize with the poor and snivelling poltroonery of its suppression. It says as plainly as a fact can speak, We would be assassins if we durst. Our cowardice, and not our will, prevents. Enough of this. We have just one observation to make, and we conclude. The pretext alleged in the above extract for insulting Sir Walter Scott, is his connexion, his "secret moving hand in certain Scotch newspapers and magazines." There is no need of blinking the question in mentioning his connexion with magazines. It is insinuated that Sir Walter writes for us; and that such a procedure, on his part, would be construed into a high crime by those whom we have demolished, is natural enough. They, however, who know Edinburgh society in almost any of its branches, know well, how little need we have of even his powerful assistance, and how completely free he has always stood from any connexion, real or suspected, with the various literary squabbles in which it has been our lot to have been implicated. The allusion to the newspaper is to the Beacon business, and there, too, it was evident as the sun at noon-day, that he had nothing whatever to do with that unfortunate paper. Chucklepated indeed must that critic be, who, after having perused a column of it, could have suspected such a man of dabbling in so feckless a concern. This we know to be mere waste of words in Edinburgh, or for the decent circles of London. But let us for a moment conceive the possibility of Sir Walter Scott's having not merely a secret moving hand in certain obnoxious Scottish publications, but suppose him actually to have written the papers on the Cockney School of Poetry, the Letters on Professor Leslie's ignorance of Hebrew, the Pilgrimage to the Kirk of Shotts, the Sorrows of the Stot, the Chaldee MS., the Review of the Age of Bronze, the Hore Scandicæ,-in short, all the articles of this Magazine which crushed our enemies to the earth; or to have been the au thor of the exposure of Lord Archibald Hamilton, which cost the proprietors of the Beacon the sum of twelve pence; or all and sundry, the pungent, or would-be-pungent articles in the Beacon and Sentinel, and any other newspaper which has given of fence to those eminent friends of the liberty of the press, the Whigs of Scotland. Suppose him the very concentrated and embodied essence of all this, and then let us look at the different conduct of Whig and Tory, under the same circumstances. Had he done this, and more than this, he never would have been in any proportion so unsparing and so unfeeling a libeller of the Whigs, as Lord Byron or Mr Thomas Moore have been of the Tories. We put it out of the question, that all our Tory attacks on the Whigs were TRUE, while all their Whig attacks upon us have been false, wishing merely to measure the compositions of both parties, as nothing but emanations of party hostility; and to deny that all the papers above enumerated, and as many more of the same nature as the most eager investigator of such a subject can hunt up, amount in violence to the avowed publications of Moore and Byron. Have we insulted female character and outraged female feeling, as the author of the infamous Twopenny Post-Bag? have we ransacked all the rancorous records of political hate, to scrape up the vile personal attacks upon private life, which form the attraction of the equally infamous Fudge Family? have we, like the author of these books, made women the constant and never-failing butt for scurrilous and unmanly wit, as he has done in his "friend Mr Perry's" paper? for all which things-even now when they are forgotten, and their piquancy lost by the utter disproval of all their slanders and insinuations are praised as most admirable effusions by the Westminster Reviewers. Has any Tory writer insulted the memory of a man who perished in one of the most awful visitations which can befall humanity, as Lord Byron has done to Lord Castlereagh?-a piece of heartless rascality, rendered more hideous by the studied and cold-blooded defence set up for it by the nauseating creatures of the Liberal. When has there flowed from our pens such sarcastic pry ings into the domestic circumstances of family as displayed in Don Juan, wherever its author had to speak of Dr Southey, or his friends? In a word, is there anything that has ever been said or feigned of the atrocity and recklessness of uncalled-for libel which cannot be matched from the writings of the two most eminent of the Whig poets? Nothing. Now, here is the contrast of Whig and Tory complete. Because Sir Walter Scott is supposed to have " had a hand” in writing attacks on Whigs for Tory Magazines or Newspapers-truly or falsely supposed-it happens to be falsely, but that does not at all affect the question under consideration--he is to be laid open to the unsparing calumny of the Whig press-and even a work of imagination attributed to his pen, cannot be reviewed without spiteful insinuations. On the contrary, the only men whom the Whig party can at all be conceived to put forward as his equals in talent, are avowedly the authors of most insolent and false libels on the Tory party; and when did that circumstance ever influence any of our critiques? No-everywhere due credit is given to the talent displayed by their productions-they are never made at all the objects of personal hostility. So far from having the circumstances of their private life looked into, their very peccadilloes (we use a light word designedly) are concealed from inspection; and when one of them, Moore, falls into difficulty, that very government and its supporters, whom he has been so long and so actively calumniating, come forward to give him every helping hand in their power, while, at the same time, a gentleman under similar misfortune, (but produced by far less blameable and injurious circumstances,) Mr Hook, is persecuted with a rabidity of hatred unparalleled in the annals of political hostility. We have said, perhaps, more than enough on this subject, but it is one which cannot be too often inculcated on the minds of the Tory party. They may depend upon it, that the Whigs, particularly the low writers of the faction, hate them, and that no weapon is too dirty or too deadly, which will not be used by the faction. We have, besides, an underplot of our own, which we shall explain in a line. Let our readers go back and see what has been said of Sir Walter Scott by this Whig Magazine-and then let them listen to the peddling and pitiful out cries against what we have said about the Cockney creatures, with what appetite they may. "It differs from that noble master-piece in this, that Sir Walter," p. 205.-And again, "Now, Sir Walter Scott only recalls to us what we already knew," p. 206.-London Magazine for February 1823. In a stupid attempt at wit in the same number, a poor devil, who signs himself Edward Herbert, calls Sir Walter Scott" alias the GREAT UNKNOWN, alias BILL BEACON, alias CUNNING WALTER."-London Magazine for February 1823, p. 160. Poor Driveller! MUSIC, A SATIRE.† WHENEVER the word Music is mentioned, there comes into our mind a story of an old friend of ours, from about the Passes-" Aberdeen awa," who had not a small smatch of the hot Highland blood about him. He was a great pibroch-player; and of course as testy and bigoted about his country tunes as a Cameronian, who has lived fifty-five years upon oatmeal, can be about his religion. He had gone to the South of England upon some business, and unfortunately got engaged one day at the house of a Dilletante of the first water, who, as the devil would have it, had an Amateur Concert for that very evening. The instruments assembled accordingly, and the usual routine of overtures, quintetts, and concertos, went on. Our friend waxed more and more uneasy; he fidgetted mightily on his chair; applied ever and anon to his "mull," and took glass after glass of what the sideboard afforded. He was no quieter. nether man still swayed uneasily about, and his face grew redder and redder. His deafness to all queries, as to "how he was entertained," evidently increased upon him; and his gruff replications became more and more unintelligible. At last the host, after some elaborate overture, put the question direct," Had he ever heard such music before?"-" Na; God be thankit," was the gruff response. "What? wasn't he musical? didn't he like it ?"-" Like it!" quoth he, taking the last violent pinch of sneesh, "Troth, it may be guid mathematics, nae dcot; but I'll be d-d if it be music!" His In our youth, to our shame be it spoken, we were something of a fiddler. We left it off because we thought it not very creditable. We did not choose to run the risk, like Doctor Middleton, of being called "fiddling Kit." Nay, we believe that at one time we were even a pipe-player, though we have always thought it best to keep that a secret; and as our forte, to confess a truth, lay less in execution than in pathos, we always had a sort of grudge at those coxcombs who found a sort of harlequin-like fame upon making slight-of-hand shifts upon the violin, or tongueing turkeycock arpeggios on the German flute, to the utter discomfiture of all melody. We own that we once aided and abetted in scattering some white hellebore amongst a party of glee-singers, who made a sudden finale in a sneezing trio, and at another time lent Odoherty a box of lip salve, which we happened to have in our waistcoat pocket, to grease the fiddlestick of a deaf amateur, who shall be nameless. How we enjoyed his airs and flourishes, and "damnable faces," whilst he imagined he was leading a noisy concertante with a fiddle all the while as dumb as old Luckie Wanless the spae-wife! There surely is (more is the pity) a pleasure in the "lex talionis.' In our younger days we remember being cut, as the present fashionable phrase goes, by a man with red hair, harsh voice, disagreeable manners, no brains, and spectacles, who for some inexplicable reason suspected himself of being a man of consequence. This, no doubt, mortified us excessively. But we were amply repaid by seeing the cutter cut, the week after, by an officer of a crack regiment of dragoons, We shall not easily forget the satisfactory sardonic smile which we felt unctuously playing over our counte + Music, a Satire, by Simeon Sharp, Esq. 12mo. pp. 348. 4s. 6d. Longman, London. nance at that lucky minute. We never pass that corner of Prince's Street, without a feeling of the gratified. It was, we confess, with something of this feeling, with a touch of mischievous satisfaction, that we took up this little Brochure. In fact, it came over us like a deviled gizzard upon a retiring nausea. But the reader must judge for himself. We shall not waste time in dilating upon the plan of a satire, the subject of which the title sufficiently elucidates. The author after some preliminary invocations O ye, if any such are to be found, Who, Harmonists, yet leave not sense for sound; Who, Melodists, are not yet crotchet-mad, dashes into his subject, slashing right and left, something after the manner of the but comparisons are odious. The sacrifice of meaning to execution, is one of the great objects of his indignation. When Casuists of Demosthenes inquired That gift, by orators the most desired, 'Tis said the sage, to their full satisfaction, Spoke in brief thunders, "Action; Action; Action!" Forgot in pulpits, gives a fiddler law, Calls down coy Fame, and regulates the doom And hark! the Dilletantis' general roar- * To Stringo's feats I have no sort of grudge- Of horn and hautboy, great drum and great fiddle- I bear no grudge-yet who will not turn sick, So it shall pass beneath its proper name, And we shall cease to hope and cease to blame. * ** In days when true ambition had control, The ear was but the entrance to the soul, The ivory gate through which the minstrel's strain Sport saw the chase; Desire his mistress charms; The next passage we would seriously recommend to the attention of the Amateurs of the Society for " Ancient Music." When they have fairly got through the anthems, and motets and fugues of Doctor Bull or Dr Blow, why It would not go back again? 'twould be variety. The idea is certainly new. be as good as a double in hare-hunt, with all the beagles in full cry, precisely over the ground they had just run— Why-if in quavery labyrinths ye delight, "Runs up," so high they're almost out of sight, The following shrewd rule is addressed to those who would shine as concert performers. We quote it for the benefit of those whom it may concern. VOL. XVI. A concert? If in concerts thou would'st shine, Take, once for all, this simple rule of mine— Who makes his instrument a something else. To run a jig upon the double bass; Whilst, hark! Clementi might and main lays on If Puzzi came, they might as well be mute, 2 A |