the Stabat Mater of Pergoleze. By degrees a voice, at first feeble, but afterwards powerful and expressive, mingled with mine. Angels must sing in heaven as Pergoleze sung. The voice suddenly became more splendid and then I heard it no more! I stopped. Behind me lay a corpse which had softly dropped upon the floor. Pergoleze was ending in heaven the notes he had begun uttering on earth! I spent the night by him in prayer, for I then prayed. Next day I expended my remaining cash upon the burial of the poor, great composer, and left for Rome with his immortal Stabat Mater. All proclaimed that unrivalled work sublime. Pergoleze's operas were revived at the theatres, and he whom the obscurity of his name had killed became renowned after his death. This is a melancholy tale, M. Weber, and yet I know one more woful still it is that of a man who has relinquished the life of a respectable tradesman to go in pursuit of fame, and who has found but misery and opprobrium. In short, M. Weber, it is my own history. When, overwhelmed with want and humiliations, I saw that I had mistaken my course, and that Heaven had not gifted me with the sacred fire of genius, I remembered poor Pergoleze's advice, and would return to my father's shop. Alas! I could no longer breathe it; it was unto me a narrow cage, wherein I felt as if I was dying, for having rashly attempted to spread my wings towards the broad heavens. To quell my despair, to forget all, I took to drinking. Such is the reason why the boys daily pursue me in the streets, shouting out, 'There goes the drunkard!' Such is the reason you have just found me rolling in the mire!' As he was uttering this he had reached the door of a wretched dwelling. His voice was no longer affected by his potations; his step had become firm and steady. Weber was touched with compassion on beholding his pale countenance expressive of deep despair. 'Master,' said the unknown, your voice, and the recollections it has revived, have destroyed in me the welcome effects of wine. This is the first time for ten years past that I re-enter this den not dead drunk. Heaven has doubtless ordained it to put an end to my miseries.' 'Yes,' exclaimed Weber, whose heart melted with pity, and who had mistook his meaning; 'yes, to-morrow I shall come and see you. Yes, I shall assist you with my advice and the interest of my friends.' The unknown shook his head, raised his eyes to heaven, and took leave of Weber. Next day, when the latter, faithful to his promise, approached the unfortunate man's house, he perceived a large crowd gathered about it. He drew near a party of police-officers: they were conveying away the corpse of a man who had hanged himself in the night, and in whose room, according to a neighbour's statement, nothing had been found but a wretched truckle-bed and a large heap of burned papers. None knew the name of the man who, for two years past, had gone out drunk every morning, and returned drunk every night. Weber recognised the dead body. Impelled by a sorrowful curiosity, he followed into the suicide's room a host of people, who amused themselves in exploring it, and he happened to pick up a fragment of music-paper. As he perused it a tear ran down his cheeks. The half-burned fragment was an admirable chorus of huntsmen. From a pious recollection of the poor unknown musician who had thus destroyed himself, Carl Maria Von Weber inserted the piece into the opera he was then composing-the immortal Der Freyschutz. HASSE'S 'TE DEUM.' THE beautiful Te Deum of Giovanni Adelfo Hasse, surnamed II Sassonis, a native of Bergedorf, near Hamburgh, born 1699, had the following singular origin:-He had been commissioned by King Augustus III. to compose a new Te Deum, but having been for some time very ill, he was not disposed to study, and was unable to please himself. Meantime, the day it was to be delivered was near at hand; almost despairing of success, he took a walk, on a fine Sunday morning, in the royal park. A lusty pea sant from Gruna, who was going to take the sacrament at a neighbouring church, overtook him near the palace, addressed him cordially, and kept close to him, notwithstanding the cool answers he received. Vexed at being thus interrupted in his meditations, he was about to turn into a side path, when suddenly a ray of invention was kindled in his soul, and the leading idea of the Te Deum flashed across his mind. Not to lose it, he impetuously desired the peasant to stand still, ran into the gardener's lodge for a piece of chalk, and was about to draw a stave across the broad shoulders of the peasant, when the latter, already amazed at the command to stand still, grew quite angry at the chalk marks on his Sunday coat, and supposing Hasse to be mad, ran full speed towards the city, followed by Hasse chalk in hand; who luckily caught him, and begged him for heaven's sake to stop, wrote his leading theme upon the black coat, and drove its owner before him (humming the notes as he went along) to the park gate, where he obtained pen, ink, and paper, and copied the whole. With this treasure Hasse hastened home, and the principal parts of the Te Deum were completed. On the following day he went to Gruna, carrying a present of a dozen of wine for the obliging peasant whose black coat had been of such essential service to him. THE DYING STUDENT. A sick'ning weight is on my heart; I feel About my limbs-and uncouth shapes of fear Of youth's high passions-its unburden'd mind? Was it for this I flung its joys away? And when the throes of wild ambition pined, Why did I learning's volumed stores unclasp, Why with rack'd brow pursue the chase for truth, To see it ever fly my toilsome grasp, Myself grown old amidst the wreck of youth? A creeping stillness fills my lonely room, No voice, no hand its palm in mine to place! Strewing my restless pillow with annoy: Is sounding near; and she, my bosom's choice, Oh, might I dream away into my rest, Might lay my fever'd temples, all thrown bare, To sleep upon her gently heaving breast, And shade them with her folds of clust'ring hair— To feels her arms about my neck-her kiss Warming my clay-cold cheek-to catch her breath Whisp'ring kind words, meet for a time like this, Might scare the horror of this drowsy death! But I am here alone-all, all alone; None near that loves me, none that I can prize; Strange voices o'er my tuneless sleep shall moan, And strangers loveless hands shall close mine eyes. How drear and dark it grows! My faithful lamp, Burn yet a little while-'twill soon bo o'er. What means this shudd'ring dread-these dews so dampThis chill all here about my heart?-No more! LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS OF THE DAY. BY GEORGE GILFILLAN. 'He was no dolt,' said once a wearied personage we knew, laying his bulky length on its usual nocturnal receptacle, who first invented a bed' (this thought, however, we have since found in Don Quixote), so the first idea of a letter was unquestionably a flash of genuine genius. The idea of extracting the private passages of one's life recording, and rolling up, and sealing down into compact unity, and sending off by trusty transmission little fragments of his soul-of circulating one's tiny griefs and fainter joys, and more evanescent emotions, as well as the larger incidents and deeper passions of existence of adding wings to conversation, and by the soft soundless touch of a paper wand, and the wave of a rod of feather, annihilating time and space, was a delicate thought and softly bodied forth.' Once launched, this little ark of a letter bore, of course, various and motley cargoes. It suited itself easily and speedily to all the possible purposes of the human mind. It accommodated itself especially to the wants, the character, the feelings, the intellect, and the domestic life of the female sex; by a mere necessity of the case, its finer and more remarkable specimens floated up into the light of publication, and became a distinct and attractive part of literature; and, after the revolution of many ages, there is no species of composition which, whether printed or not, is so generally or deservedly dear as the letter. Such is its brief history. What, it may be inquired, is the ideal of a letter? And here a great amount of nonsense has been spoken. A letter, say some, must be easily written, with no cramp words, no high-flown raptures, no elaborate discussions. And if by ease be meant the absence of stiff and set forms of phraseology, of the proud flesh and flummery of rhetoric, of the technicalities and involved terminology of a scientific style, this is true, not only of the letter, but of all lighter kinds of composition-the essay, tale, &c. This, then, is not to define a letter, but merely to describe one of these properties which it possesses, and possesses not alone. Nay, if a letter be a true thing-a mirror of the writer's heart-a miniature-mirror, if you will-and if across that heart be driven-and why not ?-abrupt, vehement, profound, tempestuous emotion, like sudden and terrible storms, why should not these also find a reflection there? Why should not a letter unite to ease the far higher qualities of earnestness, enthusiasm, philosophic reflection, or poetic feeling? Why should it not suit the subject, the state of the writer's mind, the character of the correspondent, the circumstances amid which he writes? Who, called on to read the letter of a patriot, written on the morning of his execution-or a poet's, written after the commencement, or in one of the deep lulls, or at the close of some heroic work-or of a martyr, penned an hour ere ascending to receive the eternal crown-could dare to blame them for the lack of a certain slipshod ease, and not rather rejoice that in their hands the thing had become a trumpet, and that, under their noble management, the rocking-horse had been sublimed into a fiery Pegasus? And, accordingly, in the best collections of epistolary writing extant, we find that ease, their delightful charm in general, is at one time rounded into elegance, at another strengthened into vigour; now sharpens into sarcasm, and now intensifies into invective; is perpetually exploding into eloquence, or effervescing into wit; can at one time sink into the depths of the metaphysical, and at another spring up into the sevenfold hallelujahs of the poetical. Indeed, the absurd expectation of perpetual ease in letters, has led to the very opposite artificial carelessness, no more resembling genuine ease than a harlot's affectation does a milkmaid's artlessness. Others maintain that all letters should be short; but we can hardly admit size to enter into our deliberate judgment of any artistic composition especially, as, though we did, the questions would recur, What is the particular size requisite? Into how many pages or lines must a letter be 175 289 condensed? How many penny stamps will it require? Surely these are questions for the post-office clerk, not for the critic. To close this trifling, a letter being just talk, or serious, wise or witty, flighty or fervid, discursive or written and winged, may, like talk, be short or long, trifling deep, homely or magnificent, provided it be sincere, natural, and excellent in its kind. the fine field of epistolary writing, as it stretches from the It were a pleasing task to take a retrospective look at earliest times, inclusive of Cicero and Pliny among the ancients-of Madame de Sévigné, Babet, Racine, and Voltaire, among the French-of the Italian, Ludovico Dolce, Bernardo Tasso, Pietro Aretino, and Gassparo Gozzi-of the German, Lessing, Winckelman, Jacobi, Wassa, Glam, Burger, Schiller, Goethe, &c.-and of Howel, Temple, Addison, Pope, Swift, Gay, Bolingbroke, Walpole, Lady Montague, and Lord Chesterfield among the English. But this, even were we capable of embracing it, our limits would forbid. A similar cause prevents our dilating on the application of the epistolary form to didactic purposes by Bolingbroke, Mendelsohn, Schiller, and Foster; to poetical purposes by Horace, Pope, Swift, and Akenside; to political purposes by Junius, Burke, Sidney Smith, and Bulwer; to controversial and critical purposes by Wesley, Fuller, Porson, and Priestley, &c.; or to scientific purposes by Professor Nichol, &c. All such, besides, are not letters properly so called; they are expressly written for publication. The selection of the epistolary form is almost arbitrary. They are, in fact, moral, or political, or religious as familiarity, unguardedness, delicious recumbency of treatises, broken down into letters; and of such qualities mind, free and fearless indulgence of every emotion, and expression of every sentiment, they are entirely and elaborately destitute. Nor must we stop to criticise those imitations of real correspondence which we find in the novels of Richardson, Madame D'Arblay, Mackenzie, the author and Sir Walter Scott. Our business is with the bona of Selwyn in Search of a Daughter,' Madame de Stael, fide letter-writing of the present day. say a word or two on three of the principal writers in the And yet, in spite of our previous determination, we must past-Gray, Cowper, and Burns. Gray was a cloistered. scholar, with just poetry enough to impregnate the mass of his learning, to stiffen his odes into splendour, and to make his correspondence the most instructive in the world. There is about it all a rich, oily flow of recondite learning, a gentle glow of poetic feeling, a scholar-like tone of thought, and a fine enthusiastic warmth in descriptions of scenery. He reminds you, when he steps abroad, of a school-boy let loose in vacation time amid a wilderness of picturesque and novel scenes. carrying a classical atmosphere about with him, seeing all He wanders about rocky Cumberland, things, from Skiddaw to Crossfell, in a golden haze of antique associations; little aware that there was then alive eyes and his own imagination, was destined to crown the in England a little boy, who, by the daring use of his own ground as holy and haunted as Vallambrosa or Tempe's scene with a new diadem, and to render Rydal Mount Vale. Honour, however, to the old bard, who first indicated in the Lake country the presence of transcendent beauties, and painted them with a fine and tender pencil. It is as a letter-writer that Gray will survive. His hoard of useless learning was buried with him; and though it had, like the knowledge of many great scholars, such as Bentley and Warburton, enshrined itself in some huge controversy, or piled up mountain of paradox, it had been much the same in the end. His odes, hovering between excellence and absurdity, sublimity and bombast, darkmodern Pindarics in the shadow of solid oblivion. His ness and barbaric lustre, will at last rest beside all other Elegy,' and his Eton College,' though elegant, pathetic, It is cu which they themselves least value. Thus Petrarch's sonnets live while his 'Africa' is forgotten; Tasso's first version of the Jerusalem Delivered' remains, while his darling second rots; Cowley's careless prose eclipses the 'Davideis;' Milton's Lycidas' has more admirers than the 'Paradise Regained;' Dryden's Fables' are more read than his 'Virgil;' Pope's Rape of the Lock' is thought worth a gross of his Homer;' Johnson's Table-Talk' is likely to outlive his Irene;' Thomas Brown's lectures are immeasurably superior to his poetry; and Coleridge's 'Love' is read by thousands who never heard of his Biographia Literaria,' or Friend.' Cowper, like Gray, was a recluse, but shut in by what different walls! While the one was encircled by the proud pile of an ancient college, and by a deep hedge of aged tomes, the other dwelt, wild-eyed and pale, in the dungeon of his own soul, a darkened dome above, and a weltering gulph below. And yet, through the chinks in that prisonhouse, what gleams now of beauty, and now of wild, wrinkled, distorted mirth found their way! In his correspondence he has faithfully chronicled all the sad and merry experiences of his soul. Indeed, his letter-writing is more true to the general current of his feelings, and the common habitudes of his life, than even his poetry. The latter was the product always of his studious, and often of his sadder hours; whereas the former shows him in the dishabille of his mind, feeding his hares, making his birdcages, watching with quiet twinkling eye the humours of Olney; and, in the society of his Mary, and in the light of her shining needles, almost forgetting the hateful delusion that he was subject to perdition, by the special decree of one whose name is Love! It is this which gives the letters of Cowper their peculiar charm, not merely their ease, nor their simplicity, nor their humour, nor their enthusiasm, nor their holiness, nor their sincerity, as transcripts of his feelings and pursuits; but it is the contrast between their airy buoyancy and the fixed morbid misery of their author, and the view this gives you of the irrepressible spring of enjoyment originally possessed by the mind, which not even the misery of madness could entirely choke up, and of the power of that sense of the ridiculous which could wreathe the grim features of despair into contagious smiles. And yet, when you reflect that this mirth, after all, was only sunshine on a sepulchre-hollow, galvanic laughter, or like that which the laughing-gas would force from the cheek of the criminal on the very scaffold, furnishing hardly a momentary relief to the poor riven heart within, and ending in an aggravated dreariness and a blacker gloom, you feel it to be a dreadful gaiety-you shut the book in sorrow; and, while admitting some dark original distemper in the blood, and while blaming no particular system of theology, you yet breathe a wish that the remedy of religion had been more mildly and tenderly applied to the sore, and assumed less the form of a cauterising and consuming fire, and more that of the balm of Gilead. How great the contrast between the two timid and scholarly recluses, Gray and Cowper, and the brawny, bustling, fierce, and passionate ploughman, Robert Burns! Not less the difference between their styles of correspondence the one simple, natural, quietly humorous, sustained, in some cases finely polished, the legitimate product of the cups which cheer but not inebriate,' and drunk, too, under elegant curtains, beside blazing fires, and amid the smiles of the fair; the other abrupt, wild, coarse, extravagant, roaring in their style like a spate, evidently written on the top of deal tables, or on chests of drawers, in wayside inns, and in the fire of pottledeep potations—in short, the very rinsings of a great soul. And, in thus describing the letters of Burns, we are ipso facto wiping away much stupid and worthless criticism which has been expended upon them. Men-yea, learned menhave set to work upon them, armed with line and rule, flanked with dictionary and grammar, and sought to prove them imperfect, stilted, bombastic, and so forth. In the name of wonder, how could they be aught else? Who would have been more ready than Burns himself to admit all their faults, while heaving them by chestfuls into the || fire? But it is nevertheless the glory of these letters and a feather in Burns's cap, that, written in the course of a wandering, uncertain, laborious, and dissipated life-in snatches of time, sometimes in excitement, and by a halfeducated man, they contain-while, as a whole, inferior to Cowper's and Gray's-passages superior to anything in their's, nay, equal to anything in the whole range of epistolary composition; passages soaring into eloquence and absolute poetry; and that, besides, even the fulsome flat- | tery, the fustian, the ribaldry, and the outrageous nonsense of the worst of them, are redeemed by the touches of beauty which are lavishly interspersed, and by the insane energy in which all swim. The everyday Burns, we imagine, is seen more to the life in the letters than in any part of the poems; and to them we tell those to repair who would form an idea of the rattling roving Robin' in his wilder, madder, fiercer, more absurd, more capricious moods. We lately, in a Glasgow newspaper, made an assertion in reference to the obscenity of Burns' unpublished letters, which was fiercely contested. Our authority was Byron; and we have since found a passage in one of his papers, giving more at large the character of these letters: 'I have myself seen a collection of letters of another eminent, nay, pre-eminent, deceased poet, so abominably gross, and elaborately coarse, that I do not believe they could be paralleled in our language. What is more strange, is that some of these are couched as postscripts to his serious and sentimental letters, to which are tacked either a piece of prose, or some verses of the most hyperbolical indecency. He himself says, that it''obscenity [using a much coarser word] be the sin against the Holy Ghost, he most certainly cannot be saved.' These letters are in existence, and have been seen by many besides myself.' That Byron alludes here to Burns is certain, from another passage where he expressly names him, as the author of obscene letters, and more briefly, though to the same purpose, characterises them. Let Byron's own name stand first in the catalogue of the letter-writers of our own century. And in this department, as in others, he was spurred and stung into power. Byron's earlier letters are amazingly stiff, cramp | ed, cold, heartless, worse than even Dr Johnson's, because then he was a young dissipated coxcomb; as light, but not so pure as a butterfly, and had neither fully found his intellect nor his heart. But from the date of his expulsion from England, not only did his genius rush into red and terrible blossom, but his passions also-all that he had- li his pride, his lust, his wrath, his scorn, his despair, were moved from their lowest depths; and, standing under the shadow of the Alps, or at bay by the waters of the Adriatic, he became a more exact impersonation of Lucifer than the earth ever saw before, or shall ever, we hope, see again. He was at length fairly in earnest, and from that hour there opened up in him an epistolary vein, like the minor mouth of a volcano. His letters from Italy are the fierce splashings of a desperate man. They are full of nerve, fire, fiendish scorn, angry eloquence, wild fun, dying away into wilder sobs and inarticulate shudderings. Careless in the extreme, dashed down evidently in the sullen intervals of indulgence, they resemble lampoons rather than letters. Written alongside of the wonderful poems he was then pouring out, they form the best commentary on them; and it is interesting, while these great cataracts are heaving on, to mark this attendant spray-sweat of their agonywhile those great guns are opening, one after another, at society and man, to watch this deadly small-shot which he keeps up in company. They contain, besides, the germ of some of his finest passages. They are not devoid of softening touches, like green sunshine upon lava; they are specimens of his excited talk; they cast a light far down into the depth of his godless and hopeless nature; and they tell tales as to the character of that London society, who met regularly in Murray's backshop, to laugh at the ri baldry, smile gravely at the blasphemy, and chuckle over the obscene jokes contained in those missives of Venetian lewdness, infamy, and despair. The letters of Shelley differ as widely from Byron's as do the characters of the two men, who, utterly dissimilar, were thrown together by misfortune, as might an antelope and a hyena be driven into one cavern by a thunder-storm. A great deal has been written about Shelley-we have written much ourselves-but the truth lies in a nutshell. He was a monomaniac-on one subject, alas! the most important of all, he was mad; and this furnishes the key to his correspondence. In style it is simple, clear, yet stately; in sentiment, heroic, enthusiastic; in purpose and spirit, soft and pure; in descriptions of scenery, rich and graphic; in pictures of art, transparent as painting itself; and in reflections on human life, minute and profound. But let the subject of Christianity cross the page; poison distils upon it, fury rages along the line, and under a damp dew of disgust and horror you are tempted, shuddering, to shut the book for ever. We call upon the sane of Shelley's friends to blot out from his correspondence and his poetry those miserable ravings of frenzy which they seem absurdly to mistake for the oracular dictates of inspiration. We say the sane of Shelley's friends, for that all are not deserving of this title is, we fear, but too manifest from Captain Medwyn's recent 'Life of Shelley.' That this gentleman means well to the memory of his friend we are ready to simit. For his politeness to ourselves we thank him. With his estimate of Byron and Hobhouse we, on the whole, agree; but a worse judged and a worse executed book we never read. It is neither a full and faithful life, nor is it a satisfactory apology for Shelley. It is rather a mean, waspish resuscitation of forgotten feuds and grudges of the author's own, about which the world cares precisely nothing. It shows little real insight either into Shelley's character or genius. By not frankly acknowledging his faults and errors, it loses all claim to the character of a genuine biography. What with the wretched blunders in grammar, punctuation, and taste, with which it abounds, and with the fact that it is half made up of extracts from others, we feel justified in pronouncing it a piece of bad and unblushing book-making, enough to make Shelley's dust shiver in its urn, although his bones cannot turn in their grave. Robert Hall has left a few letters, which do not reach, much less surpass, mediocrity, and the publication of which is to us a mystery, unless it were to prove that his ornate, elaborate, and refined genius was unle or unwilling to dispread its collected strength, and to unloose its golden couplets into the elegant disarrangement of a letter. Linked to a wheel of pain, besides, how could he ever be sufficiently at ease to recline on the couch of epistolary luxury? Coleridge has left behind him some fine letters-fine, however, rather as specimens of his general power of writing, than as answering to our letter-writing ideal. Witness his epistles to Cottle, conceived and written in the most awful plenitude of the spirit of a kind of composition which is exceeding rare, self-invective, in which the conscience seems to spring out of the man, to perch itself over against, and to scream out accusation to his face. Call them not letters, call them prose penitential psalms. Never were the horrors of a spirit wailing over spiritual sin, and swimming in a spiritual fire of its own kindling, more fearfully pourtrayed. But the real letters of Coleridge are his precious deposits on the margins and fly-leaves of volumes. These supply as yet the best notion of his magical talk. They are in fact epistles to himself or to the dead. They show the lazy leviathan weltering on the calm sunset waters of meditation; while around him, from the dim caves of the ocean stream of the past, gather up the kindred giant forms of Plato, Plotinus, Roger Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, and the soul of the slumberer is glad. Sidney Smith must been a rare letter-writer, if incessant smartness, springy motion, terse energy, witticisms, panting at each other's heels, and a delightful mannerism, can contribute to the perfection of the art. Yet who could have borne an incessant pelting of such letters as Peter Plymley's? It had been death without benefit of clergy. Have our readers ever heard the redoubted Sidney's joke anent Rogers? When Rogers wishes to be safely delivered of a couplet, he takes to bed, gets sawdust sprinkled before his door, and orders the servant to say to all callers that his master is as well as can be expected.' How like both parties! We have seen some specimens of Brougham's and Carlyle's style. Both were highly characteristic of the parties: the former rough, rapid, sketchy, setting polish and particularity at defiance, the skimmings of his speechification; the latter elegant miniatures of the man, equally powerful and more finished than his works, genuine seed-pearl. 'Conversation Sharp' has left some morsels in the shape of letters-short, simple, and sententious-extracts from the rich volume of his talk. He had what we beg leave to call a creaming intellect, not very powerful, but highly cultivated and chastened down to a certain simplicity. He slips out the nicest little things imaginable. Gentle concentration is his forte. Do but just go on,' he says to one pursuing the journey of life, and some unseen path will open among the hills.' His poetry is the last faint reflection of the age of Queen Anne, and amid the excited verse of the present day looks as strange and awkward as would a gentleman with bag, big wig, and sword, in a modern club-house or conversazione. His essays are delectable tid-bits, and are interesting, too, as the last flutterings, we fear, of that elegant but departing form of composition. Sir James Mackintosh was too elaborate, too scholastic, too much of a lecturer, too little of an artless man, to be a good letter-writer. Even in conversation we are told that his long-windedness was intolerable. You could see a sentence of his a quarter of an hour before he crept to it, and you knew his conclusion before he conceived it himself. He had the most extraordinary formality of phrase, yet was an amiable, courteous-mannered man, blameless, except when he began to prose; then all his virtues were expunged at once, and sentence of perpetual exile or sudden death was felt to be the only safety for the social order of the table.' And yet he has left two of the noblest letters ever penned. We refer to the two addressed to Robert Hall on his recovery from derangement, which we have elsewhere characterised as rather resembling offerings on a shrine than ordinary letters, and as forming the sublimest memorials which genius has ever consecrated to friendship. Charles Lamb-blessings on his kind heart!-could write nothing but what was full of himself and worthy of his quaint and exquisite genius. Seldom has there been such a unique being as Lamb; seldom has there been one whose mannerism was so intense, so incessant, and so delightful withal; and seldom was an author so completely seen in and identified with his works. They remind us of the Hermitage of Dunkeld, where the image of one's self is reflected at once in a hundred mirrors. Lamb could write nothing ill, simply because he could never write out of character, or travel out of himself. Every scratch of his pen was characteristic Love me, love my dog.' Love Lamb, you were compelled to love everything about himhis very errors, absurdities, nonsense, and follies; and his letters, accordingly, you must like, since they are bits of himself, peepings of his character, as when the blue sky looks down by stealth and in snatches through the riven clouds. Walter Scott was a plain, sensible, business-like letterwriter. Down upon the point he comes at once, with all the weight of his manly understanding. There is no entusymusy, no bravuras, no playful dallying, no fond, reluctant, amorous delay to leave a favourite topic, or to cease indulging a peculiar whim. All is plain sailing. His letters are intensely Scotch. Here and there, too, kindles up the irrepressible fire of the Border minstrel, and a single sentence, or the member of a sentence, or a stray figure, or one winged word, reminds you that this shrewd, clear-headed lawyer is at the same time the creator of Ivanhoe,' and the poet of Marmion.' Still, as in Boswell's Johnson, the letters are the only parts of Scott's life you are sometimes tempted to skip. Many of them are cold, dry, and naked, like boughs in winter, wanting all that soft luxury of foliage which makes a perfect tree,' or a perfect letter. Foster's letters always appear to us like the attempts of a Scandinavian giant to write English. They are rude, first copies, but done with a vast, though straggling and uneven fist. They are the curdlings of that system of which his after essays are the creation. As of his essays, so of his letters-the strongest stimulus is that of austere and holy hatred; and if Foster had been (with his peculiar tendencies) in a place where sin and evil were not, he had been a greyhound in a hareless world-an eagle reduced to prey on rock instead of roe. As it is, we are credibly informed that he has left behind him many letters of the most unsparing satire and uproarious fun, which his friends have not the courage or sense to publish. Ere describing some of the dii minorum geniium in this department, we may observe what a feast is reserved for the public in the letters of our living or recently dead men of genius, such as Southey, Wordsworth, Wilson, Chalmers (if they can be deciphered), De Quincey, Lord Jeffrey, Leigh Hunt, &c. made thin by vinegar were to mimic the roll of a portly bishop-no unmitigated and unfeminine antithesis, such as her other works abound in to repletion: her letters are, for the most part, easy and spirited-the outpourings of a young fresh mind, with an eager eye for the lofty, and a still keener eye for the ludicrous aspects of the splendid scene amid which she had been dropped down, as if from the clouds. -The same character might be repeated, toti dem verbis, of Madame D'Arblay's correspondence-only she seems to have been more spoiled by the gay circle in which she moved, and to have relished with a deeper glee the absurdities which she knew how well to caricature, and which, even previous to observation, she had, in Evelina,' as her natural game, run down.-Mrs Grant is one of the best letter-writers of those times. Her 'Letters from the Mountains' are fresh as breezes from the land of the heather; they are redolent of joy and youth. By her brief, lively touches, she brings before us the country of the grey mist, the glittering lake, the bold peak, the red clump of heath, the solitary cairn, the eagle rising from his eyrie over the arch of the rainbow, the cataract pealing forth his everlasting plaint amid the bush of the wil The females of the age ought to shine in this depart- derness, the ocean speaking in thunder up the cliff-bound ment. De Quincey somewhere says that the letters of coasts of the unconquered and unconquerable land. The ladies are the best standard and furnish the best speci- slight shade of affectation which she here and there exmens of the literary style of this age. We agree with this hibits, somehow becomes her, and you forgive it as readily sentiment-holding it, however, as part of a more general as you do the air with which a Highland maiden folds truth, that the finest wit, eloquence, elegance, purity, sim- round her her tartan shawl, or lets it float in picturesque plicity, and naiveté of any age, are to be found in those confusion, to attract the eye of a stray Sassenach among artless, earnest things which are silently exchanging be- her native hills. Manifestly she was, when she wrote these tween its private or palace homes. To a lady, a letter is a letters, a fine enthusiast; her spirit as well as her person very important affair. It is her whole literature. It is a dwelt among the moors, mountains, and wildernesses of paper receptacle for her private thoughts, ingenuous affec- her country; her step caught fire from the heather, she tions, virgin fancies,' playful gossip, and amiable spite. If was even a half-believer in the superstitions of the tradiit does not always dip down into her inmost nature, and tionary land; distance and seclusion secured to her an inbring up those lofty disinterested emotions which, more than dependent habit of thought, and you love her for fearlessly curling locks, or beaming eyes, or noble forms, are the glory expressing every idea and emotion which crossed her soul of the sex, it catches and preserves her quieter charms, her in its solitude. every-day life, the elegant undress of her spirit. Unfortu- The religious letter-writers of this and the age immenately, however, almost all female letter-writers, whose let-diately preceding have been exceedingly numerous. Herters have been published, have been blue-deeply, darkly, vey's are better than his Meditations; the tendency of beautifully blue; and this has rendered their letters colder, his taste to the vulgar florid, which misled him often, is or more affectedly warm-statelier, or more elaborately here subdued, and that heart and holiness which were his negligent-wittier, or wiser, or more learned, or more evi- principal qualities come transparently out. We think we dently intended for publication, than we could have desired. still see our own venerable father (himself the author of a There is less, too, of the genuine female character discovered volume of Letters to Afflicted Friends,' remarkable for in them than in the far humbler and much less clever effu- pathos, dignified simplicity, and a natural flow of eloquence) sions of every-day life. Their authors write too like the self-propped on his pillow, the day before his death, and correspondents of a novel. Their eloquence is apt to reading with eager look the letters of Hervey.-Newton's flutter up into that romantic falsetto, which may be en- epistles are all faithful echoes of the strange, romantic, ingedured as it issues from their most sweet voices,' but nious, yet one-sided man, whose 'Narrative' is, next to Bunwhich is intolerable in print. Their proverbial keenness yan's Grace Abounding,' the most intensely true and per of personal observation often degenerates into caricature; sonally characteristic perhaps ever written. Cardiphonia' their wit is frequently forced and uneasy; their gossip, is no misnomer-a real voice from the heart.-Mrs Huntinginuendo, scandal, &c., are generally destitute of that don, Miss Woodbury, Miss and Mrs Grahame, have all left naiveté and naturalness which, in conversation and letters examples of a style of writing which, in scriptural simplireally private, carry off the sting, and afford us a titillat- city and the majesty of naked godliness, rises far above ing stimulus. These remarks apply in part to the letters literary criticism.-Cecil's letters are quaint but rich.— of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, otherwise so lively, Foster, besides his general correspondence, has left one graphic, and instructive withal. They are still more consolatory letter (to Caroline) which reaches the sublime. strongly exemplified in those of Mrs Montague, of which Death seems to dwindle as the majestic reasoning goes on, we remember a sarcastic and ponderous critique from the and is at last swallowed up in victory.' It reminds us of pen of John Foster, in the Eclectic Review.' It reminds that lone, armless hand in the Pilgrim's Progress,' stretchus of a butterfly broken on a wheel.-But at the head of ed down to comfort Christian after his fight with Apollyon. affected, sickly, sentimental, and would-be-smart female So does this letter, as with the touch of Eternity, dry up letter-writers, stands far and facile princeps Anna Seward. the tears of Time.-Jay, James, Hawkins, Belfrage, &C., It is amusing to see how the solitary grain of cleverness have all written beautiful condoling epistles; but perhaps given to this lady seems to perk and prim itself up into the finest volume of this nature we have read is a little attitudes and airs which would be ludicrous in the most duodecimo by the late Rev. Mr Jameson, of Methven. To stupendous genius. Finding herself inserted, somehow or feel their merit fully, indeed, we should have known the other, in the centre of a ring of giants, she too must ape at man, who, in a very different way, was as unique as Elia least their grimaces and copy their faults.-The letters of and how would Lamb have rejoiced over some of them! Hannah More, though not quite free from the twaddle of Even the reader least prepared by acquaintance and symthe time, are to us the most pleasing, because natural, pathy for the perusal of this unpretending volume, cannot of all her productions. We find in them no stiff embroi- lay it down without admiration for the piety, originality, deries of style, no desperate attempts at the elephantine quaint turns of expression, searching pathos, and largeswagger of Dr Johnson, as ludicrous as though a lady heartedness of the being who felt for a friend's loss quite |