There were many newspapers in the room, but there was nothing in them. There was a clock, but it did not seem to go; at least, so he thought, but after looking at it for a long time he found it did go, but it went very slowly. Then he looked at his watch, and that went as slow as the clock. Then he took up the newspapers again one after the other, very deliberately. He read the sporting intelligence and the fashionable news. But he did not read very attentively, as he afterwards discovered. Then he looked at the clock again, and was almost angry at the imperturbable monotony of its face. Then he took out his pocket-book to amuse himself by reading his memorandums, but they were very few and very unintelligible. Then he rose up from his seat, and went to the window, and looked at the people in the street; he thought they looked very stupid, and wondered what they could all find to do with themselves. He looked at the carriages, and saw none with co ronets, except now and then a hackney-coach. Then he began to pick his teeth, and that reminded him of eating; and then he rang the bell, which presently brought a waiter; and he took that opportunity of drawling out the word "waiter" in such a lengthened tone, as if resolved to make one word last as long as possible. Lord Bacon says, that “Solon compared the people unto the sea, and orators and counsellors to the winds; for that the sea would be calm and quiet, if the winds did not trouble it.” NEW WORKS. Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, &c., are announced, by R. R. Madden. The author is stated to be a physician, and to have been sojourning for four years in these countries. A volume of Stories of Popular Voyages and travels, with illustrations; containing Abridged Narratives of recent travels of some of the most Popular Writers on South America, is announced for speedy publication. In the Press.-A Series of Dissertations, preliminary to a New Harmony of the Gospels, by the Rev. E. Greswell, M. A., and Fellow of C. C. C. Oxford. Captain Brooke, who is already known as a traveller by the works he has published on the northern parts of Europe, is about to present to the world an Account of an interesting Tour he has been making in Barbary and Spain. The forthcoming Historical Romance, entitled Geraldine of Desmond, is founded on the Desmond Rebellion in the Reign of Elizabeth, and delineates the customs, manners, and the leading public characters of England at that interesting epoch. A work under the title of Three Years in Canada, is announced for publication, written by Mr. Mactaggart, the engineer who was sent out by government to superintend the works at the Rideau Canal. In the literature of modern Europe, rhetoric has been cultivated with success. But this remark applies only with any force to a period which is now long past; and it is probable, upon various considerations, that such another period will never revolve. The rhetorician's art, in its glory and power, has silently faded away before the stern tendencies of the age; and if, by any peculiarity of taste, or strong determination of the intellect, a rhetorician, en grand costume, were again to appear amongst us, it is certain that he would have no better welcome than a stare of surprise as a posture-maker or balancer, not more elevated in the general estimate, but far less amusing, than the opera-dancer or equestrian gymnast. No-the age of Rhetoric, like that of Chivalry, is gone, and passed amongst forgotten things; and the rhetorician can have no more chance for returning, than the rhapsodist of early Greece, or the Troubadour of romance. So multiplied are the modes of intellectual enjoyment in modern times, that the choice is absolutely distracted; and in a boundless theatre of pleasures, to be had at little or no cost of intellectual activity, it would be marvellous indeed, if any considerable audience could be found for an exhibition which presupposes a state of tense exertion on the part both of auditor and performer. To hang upon one's own thoughts as an object of conscious interest, to play with them, to watch and pursue them through a maze of inversions, evolu36 ATHENEUM, VOL. 2, 3d series. tions, and Harlequin changes, implies a condition of society either like that in the monastic ages, forced to introvert its energies from mere defect of books; (whence arose the scholastic metaphysics, admirable for its subtlety, but famishing the mind, whilst it sharpened its edge in one exclusive direction ;) or, if it implies no absolute starvation of intellect, as in the case of the Roman rhetoric, which arose upon a considerable (though not very various) literature, it proclaims at least a quiescent state of the public mind, unoccupied with daily novelties, and at leisure from the agitations of eternal change. The very Growing out of the same condition of society, there is another cause at work which will forever prevent the resurrection of rhetoric, viz.—the necessities of public business, its vast extent, complexity, fulness of details, and consequent vulgarity, as compared with that of the ancients. same cause, by the way, furnishes an answer to the question moved by Hume, in one of his Essays, with regard to the declension of eloquence in our deliberative assemblies. Eloquence, senatorial and forensic, at least, has languished under the same changes of society which have proved fatal to rhetoric. The political economy of the ancient republics, and their commerce, were simple and unelaborate-the system of their public services, both martial and civil, was arranged on the most naked and manageable principles; for we must not confound the perplexity in our modern explanations of these things, with a perplexity in the things themselves. The foundation of these differences was in the differences of domestic life. Personal wants being few, both from climate and from habit, and in the great majority of the citizens, limited almost to the pure necessities of nature; hence arose, for the mass of the population, the possibility of surrendering themselves, much more than with us, either to the one paramount business of the state-war, or to a state of Indian idleness. Rome, in particular, during the ages of her growing luxury, must be regarded as a nation supported by other nations, by largesses, in effect, that is to say, by the plunder of conquest. Living, therefore, upon foreign alms, or upon corn purchased by the product of tribute or of spoils, a nation could readily dispense with that expansive developement of her internal resources, upon which modern Europe has been forced by the more equal distribution of power amongst the civilized world. The changes which have followed in the functions of our popular assemblies, correspond to the great revolution here described. Suppose yourself an ancient Athenian, at some customary display of Athenian oratory, what will be the topics ? Peace, or war, vengeance for public wrongs, or mercy to prostrate submission, national honor and national gratitude, glory and shame, and every aspect of open appeal to the primal sensibilities of man. On the other hand, enter an English Parliament, having the most of a popular character in its constitution and practice, that is anywhere to be found in the Europe of this day; and the subject of debate will probably be a road-bill, a bill for enabling a coal-gas company to assume certain privileges against a competitor in oil-gas; a bill for disfranchising a corrupt borough, or perhaps some technical point of form in the Exchequer bills' bill. So much is the face of public business vulgarized by details. The same spirit of differences extends to forensic eloquence. Grecian and Roman pleadings are occupied with questions of elementary justice, large and diffusive, apprehensible even to the uninstructed, and connecting themselves at every step with powerful and tempestuous feelings. In British trials, on the contrary, the field is foreclosed against any interest of so elevating a nature, because the rights and wrongs of the case are almost inevitably absorbed to an unlearned eye by the technicalities of the law, or by the intricacy of the facts. But this is not always the casedoubtless not; subjects for eloquence, and, therefore, eloquence, will sometimes arise in our senate, and our courts of justice. And in one respect our British displays are more advantageously circumstanced than the ancient, being more conspicuously brought forward into effect by their contrast to the ordinary course of business. "Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, Since seldom coming, in the long year set, Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, Or captain jewels in the carcanet."* But still the objection of Hume remains unimpeached as to the fact, that eloquence is a rarer growth of modern than of ancient civil polity, even in those countries which have the advantage of free institutions. The letter of this objection is sustained, but substantially it is disarmed, so far as its purpose was to argue any declension on the part of Christian nations, by this explanation of ours, which traces the impoverished condition of civil eloquence to the complexity of public business. But eloquence in one form or other is immortal, and will never perish so long as there are human hearts moving under the agitations of hope and fear, love and passionate hatred. And, in particular to us of the modern world, as an endless source of indemnification for what we have lost in the simplicity Shakspeare, Sonnet 52. of our social systems, we have received a new dowry of eloquence, and that of the highest order, in the sanctities of our religion-a field unknown to antiquity for the Pagan religions did not produce much poetry, and of oratory none at all. On the other hand, that cause, which, operating upon eloquence, has but extinguished it under a single direction, to rhetoric has been unconditionally fatal. Eloquence is not banished from the public business of this country, as useless, but as difficult, and as not spontaneously arising from topics such as generally furnish the staple of debate. But rhetoric, if attempted on a formal scale, would be summarily exploded as pure foppery, and trifling with time. Falstaff, on the field of battle, presenting his bottle of sack for a pistol, or Polonius with his quibbles, could not appear a more unseasonable plaisanteur than a rhetori cian alighting from the clouds upon a public assembly in Great Britain, met for the despatch of business. Under these malign aspects of the modern structure of society, a structure to which the whole world will be moulded as it becomes civilized, there can be no room for any revival of rhetoric in public speaking; and from the same and other causes, acting upon the standard of public taste, quite as little room in written composition. In spite, however, of the tendencies to this consummation, which have been long maturing, it is a fact, that next after Rome, England is the country in which rhetoric prospered most-at a time when science was unborn as a popular interest, and the commercial activities of after times were yet sleeping in their rudiments. This was in the period from the latter end of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century; and, though the English rhetoric was less true to its own ideal than the Roman, and often modulated into a higher key of impassioned eloquence, yet, unquestionably, in some of its qualities, it remains a monument of the very finest rhetorical powers. Omitting Sir Philip Sidney, and omitting his friend, Lord Brooke, (in whose prose there are some bursts of pathetic eloquence, as there is of rhetoric in his verse, though too often harsh and affectedly obscure,) the first very eminent rhetorician in the English literature is Donne. Dr. Johnson inconsiderately classes him in company with Cowley, &c., under the title of Metaphysical Poets ; but Rhetorical would have been a more accurate designation. In saying that, however, we must remind our readers, that we revert to the original use of the word rhetoric, as laying the principal stress upon the management of the thoughts, and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of style. Few writers have shown a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has ever done the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Eschylus, whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliances is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose. No criticism was ever more unhappy than that of Dr. Johnson's, which denounces all this artificial display as so much perversion of taste. There cannot be a falser thought than this; for, upon that principle, a whole class of compositions might be vicious, by conforming to its own ideal. The artifice and machinery of rhetoric furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure as any other; that the pleasure is of an inferior order, can no more attaint the idea or model of the composition, than it can impeach the excellence of an epigram that it is not a tragedy. The next writers of distinction, who came forward as rhetoricians, were Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and Milton in many of his prose works. They labor under opposite defects: Burton is too quaint, fantastic, and disjointed. Milton too slow, solemn, former with any but a limitary intel and continuous. In the one we see the flutter of a parachute ; in the other the stately and voluminous gyrations of an ascending balloon. Agile movement, and a certain degree of fancifulness, are indispensable to rhetoric. But Burton is not so much fanciful as capricious his motion is not the motion of freedom, but of lawlessness: he does not dance, but caper. Milton, on the other hand, polonaises with a grand Castilian air, in paces too sequacious and processional; even in his passages of merriment, and when stung into a quicker motion by personal disdain for an unworthy antagonist, his thoughts and his imagery still appear to move to the music of the organ. In some measure it is a consequence of these peculiarities, and so far it is the more a duty to allow for them, that the rhetoric of Milton, though wanting in animation, is unusually superb in its coloring; its very monotony is derived from the sublime unity of the presiding impulse; and hence, it sometimes ascends into eloquence of the highest kind, and sometimes even into the raptures of lyric poetry. The main thing, indeed, wanting to Milton, was to have fallen upon happier subjects: for, with the exception of the "Areopagitica," there is not one of his prose works upon a theme of universal interest, or perhaps fitted to be the ground-work of a rhetorical display. But, as it has happened to Milton sometimes to give us poetry for rhetoric, in one instance he has unfortunately given us rhetoric for poetry: this occurs in the Paradise Lost, where the debates of the fallen angels are carried on by a degrading process of gladiatorial rhetoric. Nay, even the councils of God, though not debated to and fro, are, however, expounded rhetorically. This is astonishing; for no one was better aware than Milton of the distinction between the discursive and intuitive acts of the mind, as apprehended by the old metaphysicians, and the incompatibility of the lect. Paley, from mere rudeness of metaphysical skill, has talked of the judgment and the judiciousness of God: but this is profaneness, and a language unworthily applied even to an angelic being. To judge, that is, to subsume one proposition under another, to be judicious, that is, to collate the means with the end, are acts impossible in the divine nature, and not to be ascribed, even under the license of a figure, to any being which transcends the limitations of humanity. Many other instances there are in which Milton is taxed with having too grossly sensualized his supernatural agents; some of which, however, the necessities of the action may excuse; and at the worst they are readily submitted to as having an intelligible purpose-that of bringing so mysterious a thing as a spiritual nature or agency within the limits of the representable. But the intellectual degradation fixed on his spiritual beings by the rhetorical debates, is purely gratuitous, neither resulting from the course of the action, nor at all promoting it. Making allowances, however, for the original error in the conception, it must be granted that the execution is in the best style; the mere logic of the debate, indeed, is not better managed than it would have been by the House of Commons. But the colors of style are grave and suitable to afflicted angels. In the Paradise Regained this is still more conspicuously true: the oratory there, on the part of Satan in the Wilderness, is no longer of a rhetorical cast, but in the grandest style of impassioned eloquence that can be imagined as the fit expression for the movements of an angelic despair: and in particular the speech, on being first challenged by our Saviour, beginning ""Tis true, I am that spirit unfortunate," is not excelled in sublimity by any passage in the poem. Milton, however, was not destined to gather the spolia opima of English rhetoric: two contemporaries of his |