are translated into Italian, and sold without obstacle on the part of the censors; but the "Mystères de Paris," is strictly forbidden. Yet a month after its publication it was in all the circulating libaries, where any one known by the librarians could readily obtain it. We had more difficulty in procuring a new Neapolitan work, printed without the name of author or publisher, and suppressed almost immediately after its publication. This is a novel called "The Orphan of the Annonciata," and now known to have been written by a young man named Ranieri, who was thrown into prison as soon as this discovery was made. It is the narrative of a poor girl brought up in the orphan asylum from her earliest infancy, supposed to be related by herself. Its real object is to make known to the public the frightful abuses perpetrated within the walls of this ostensibly charitable establishment, and to give the true and exact particulars of a crime, the most appalling, committed not long ago, by a priest connected with it, and to whose care the education of the girls was partly confided. It is a work of very considerable talent, and written with a strength, eloquence, and originality, very different from the feeble imitative style of most modern Italian authors. As a picture of existing abuses, it was calculated to do much good, in a country where the atrocities it represented, had till then been carefully hidden from the eyes of the public; and though many of its details are no doubt too revolting for a work of fiction, they are necessary to fulfil the object of the author, and cannot fail, when perused, to awaken all thinking minds, not only to a perception of the degraded state of the heartless creatures, male and female, in connexion with the hospital of the Annonciata, but also of the immoral condition of the lower orders in general.

kingdom of Naples. I only regret that my powers of language are too feeble to convey to others, in their original force and brightness, the ideas of beauty, gaiety, superstition, dirt, corruption, and misery, which were there imprinted on my own mind-but that is impossible.

Yet there are inhabitants of the city who know the people well, who ever persisted in assuring me, they were a good people; that otherwise they would not submit with patience to the penury and starvation, which are the present consequences of the avarice and corrupt despotism of their governors; and that whilst a few starving creatures in despair, threw corn into the royal carriage last December, the populace in any other country would long ago have broken out into open rebellion under the pressure of such fearful deprivations as drove them here, after long suffering, to this act of famishing despair.

It may be so; but we have heard many stories which prove that in the provinces the passions of the inhabitants still exist in all the savage and untamed violence of nature, whilst from my short experience the natives of the capital, and its vicinity, appear to me to possess the true character of all slaves. Fawning and servile, when there is any thing to be gained, from the highest to the lowest, with few exceptions, education and habit have generated a most fearful indifference to all moral duties; and pride, misery, luxury, and meanness exist in conjunction. The great are deficient even in common honesty; and the poor, not content with plundering the rich, whenever an opportunity occurs, pilfer from one another, without pity or compassion for the poverty that, perhaps, exceeds their own. The populace will submit to the most insulting language without resentment, for which a Roman would take immediate vengeance with a dagger; and though their passions are violent and quickly roused, they are entirely devoid of that industry, truth, and steadiness of purpose, which constitute the force of a nation..

Were not the truth of the details he gives, on these two subjects, confirmed by the disinterested natives of the country, who have the best means of knowing the state of the establishments of which he speaks, it would be impossible for a stranger to believe that human nature could be so degraded as he has represented it. A country cannot be called civilized, where the servants of the public, the agents of charity, are permitted with impunity to inflict on helpless babes and children, the dread-racter, which has rendered its people subject for so ful sufferings there can be no doubt they endure, within the walls of these horrible prisons; for such must the Seraglio and Annonciata be called.

The price of this little work was originally only a few shillings: but it is now so difficult to be obtained, that we were asked fifteen piastres for a copy that was offered to be secretly sold.

Other books, such as a new history of the Sicilian Vespers &c., have recently been seized by the police, and are proscribed. I am incompetent to speak of their merits, having hitherto been unable to procure them. But the fact of their suppression is sufficient to prove that no amelioration is to be hoped for Naples by means of the press; a press which is forbidden to speak of abuses, or to print any work of education unless written by a priest.

Such have been some of my impressions of the

When we remember how other nations have, in their youth, shaken off the yoke of tyranny, we cannot help feeling a suspicion that in Naples there must be some great defect of national cha

many succeeding generations, either to foreign or domestic tyrants, whilst it is a remarkable fact that Naples has never produced one heretical sect in religion.

It is true, that during the present century, the Neapolitans have made more than one attempt to acquire political freedom and a just government, which, crushed by foreign interference, most sadly failed, and in their failure, brought destruction or banishment on the few virtuous and enlightened men who were capable of appreciating the grievances of their country, and endeavoured to redress them. But all that occurred in these revolutions tended to prove that no sudden changes can effect the regeneration of this beautiful but degraded country. The people are too strongly attached to their idleness, their vices, and their superstitions, to be ready for liberty; and it is very

doubtful if amongst the higher classes the materials for a liberal, just, and honest government could be found. The spirit of regeneration must come to this paralyzed nation from without; and

the whole system of education must be changed for half a century, before the inhabitants of Naples can be in any degree worthy of the beautiful land they inhabit.

NOTES ON GILFILLAN'S "GALLERY OF LITERARY PORTRAITS." *

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

(Continued from page 761 of our December number.)

|

Had it

slowly and discreetly. So first he wrote a pamphlet, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,-continued. clearly and satisfactorily explaining the necessity MR. GILFILLAN, whose eye is quick to seize of being an atheist; and, with his usual exemplary the lurking and the stealthy aspects of things, courage, (for, seriously, he was the least false of does not overlook the absolute midsummer mad- human creatures,) Shelley put his name to the ness which possessed Shelley upon the sub- pamphlet, and the name of his college. His ject of Christianity. Shelley's total nature was ultimate object was to accomplish a general altered and darkened when that theme arose apostacy in the Christian church of whatever transfiguration fell upon him. He that was so name. But for one six months, it was quite gentle, became savage; he that breathed by the enough if he caused a revolt in the Church of very lungs of Christianity-that was so merciful, England. And as, before a great naval action, so full of tenderness and pity, of humility, of love when the enemy is approaching, you throw a long and forgiveness, then raved and screamed like an shot or two by way of trying his range,―on that idiot whom once I personally knew, when offended principle Shelley had thrown out his tract in by a strain of heavenly music at the full of the Oxford. Oxford formed the advanced squadron moon. In both cases, it was the sense of perfect of the English Church; and, by way of a coup beauty revealed under the sense of morbid estrange- d'essai, though in itself a bagatelle, what if he ment. This it is, as I presume, which Mr. Gil- should begin with converting Oxford? To make fillan alludes to in the following passage, (p. 104,) any beginning at all is one half the battle; or, as "On all other subjects the wisest of the wise, the a writer in this Magazine [June 1845] suggests, a gentlest of the gentle, the bravest of the brave, good deal more. To speak seriously, there is yet, when one topic was introduced, he became something even thus far in the boyish presumption straightway insane; his eyes glared, his voice of Shelley, not altogether without nobility. He screamed, his hand vibrated frenzy." But Mr. affronted the armies of Christendom. Gilfillan is entirely in the wrong when he been possible for him to be jesting, it would not countenances the notion that harsh treatment had have been noble. But here, even in the most any concern in riveting the fanaticism of Shelley. monstrous of his undertakings, here, as always, On the contrary, he met with an indulgence to he was perfectly sincere and single-minded. Satisthe first manifestation of his anti-Christian mad- fied that Atheism was the sheet anchor of the ness, better suited to the goodness of the lunatic world, he was not the person to speak by halves. than to the pestilence of his lunacy. It was at Being a boy, he attacked those [upon a point the Oxford that this earliest explosion of Shelleyism most sure to irritate] who were gray; having no occurred; and though, with respect to secrets of station in society, he flew at the throats of none prison-houses, and to discussions that proceed but those who had; weaker than an infant for "with closed doors," there is always a danger of the purpose before him, he planted his fist in the being misinformed, I believe, from the uniformity face of a giant, saying, "Take that, you devil, of such accounts as have reached myself, that the and that, and that." The pamphlet had been following brief of the matter may be relied on. published; and though an undergraduate of Shelley, being a venerable sage of sixteen, or rather Oxford is not (technically speaking) a member of less, came to a resolution that he would convert, the university as a responsible corporation, still and that it was his solemn duty to convert, the he bears a near relation to it. And the heads of universal Christian church to Atheism or to colleges felt a disagreeable summons to an extraPantheism, no great matter which. But, as such meeting. There are in Oxford five-and-twenty large undertakings require time, twenty months, colleges, to say nothing of halls. Frequent and suppose, or even two years,-for you know, reader, full the heads assembled in Golgotha, a wellthat a railway requires on an average little less, known Oxonian chamber, which, being interShelley was determined to obey no impulse of preted, (as scripturally we know,) is "the place youthful rashness. Oh no! Down with presump- of a skull," and must, therefore, naturally be tion, down with levity, down with boyish precipi- the place of a head. There the heads met to tation! Changes of religion are awful things: deliberate. What was to be done? Most of them people must have time to think. He would move were inclined to mercy to proceed at all—was to

"A Gallery of Literary Portraits." By George Gilfillan. Edinburgh: Wm. Tait.

proceed to extremities; and, (generally speaking,) characteristic,-the habits selected, unless represento expel a man from Oxford, is to ruin his pros- tative,-must be absolutely impertinent to the true pects in any of the liberal professions. Not, identification of the man; and most of those retherefore, from consideration for Shelley's position hearsed by Mr. Gilfillan, unless where they happen in society, but on the kindest motives of forbear- to be merely accidents of bodily constitution, are ance towards one so young, the heads decided for such as all of us would be sorry to suppose natudeclining all notice of the pamphlet. Levelled at rally belonging to Shelley. To "rush out of the them, it was not specially addressed to them; and, room in terror, as his wild imagination painted to amongst the infinite children born every morning him a pair of eyes in a lady's breast," is not so from that mightiest of mothers, the press, why much a movement of poetic frenzy, as of typhus should Golgotha be supposed to have known any fever-to "terrify an old lady out of her wits," thing, officially, of this little brat? That evasion by assuming, in a stage-coach, the situation of a might suit some people, but not Percy Bysshe regal sufferer from Shakspere, is not eccentricity Shelley. There was a flaw, (was there?) in his so much as painful discourtesy-and to request of process? his pleading could not, regularly, come Rowland Hill, a man most pious and sincere," the up before the court? Very well-he would heal use of Surrey chapel," as a theatre for publishing that defect immediately. So he sent his pamphlet, infidelity, would have been so thoroughly the act with five-and-twenty separate letters, addressed to of a heartless coxcomb, that I, for one, cannot the five-and-twenty heads of colleges in Golgotha bring myself to believe it an authentic anecdote. assembled; courteously "inviting" all and every Not that I doubt of Shelley's violating at times of them to notify, at his earliest convenience, his his own better nature, as every man is capable adhesion to the enclosed unanswerable arguments of doing, under youth too fervid, wine too for Atheism. Upon this, it is undeniable that potent, and companions too misleading; but it Golgotha looked black; and, after certain forma- strikes me that, during Shelley's very earliest lities, "invited" P. B. Shelley to consider him- youth, the mere accident of Rowland Hill's being self expelled from the University of Oxford. But, a man well-born and aristocratically connected, if this were harsh, how would Mr. Gilfillan have yet sacrificing these advantages to what he thought had them to proceed? Already they had done, the highest of services, spiritual service on behalf perhaps, too much in the way of forbearance. of poor labouring men, would have laid a pathetic There were many men in Oxford who knew the arrest upon any impulse of fun in one who, with standing of Shelley's family. Already it was whis- the very same advantages of birth and position, pered that any man of obscure connexions would had the same deep reverence for the rights of the have been visited for his Atheism, whether writing poor. Willing, at all times, to forget his own to Golgotha or not. And this whisper would have pretensions in the presence of those who seemed strengthened, had any further neglect been shown powerless-willing in a degree that seems sublime to formal letters, which requested a formal answer. -Shelley could not but have honoured the same The authorities of Oxford, deeply responsible to the nobility of feeling in another. And Rowland nation in a matter of so much peril, could not have Hill, by his guileless simplicity, had a separate acted otherwise than they did. They were not hold upon a nature so childlike as Shelley's. He was severe. The severity was extorted and imposed by full of love to man; so was Shelley. He was full Shelley. But, on the other hand, in some pallia- of humility; so was Shelley. Difference of creed, tion of Shelley's conduct, it ought to be noticed however vast the interval which it created between that he is unfairly placed, by the undistinguish- the men, could not have hid from Shelley's eye the ing, on the manly station of an ordinary Oxford close approximation of their natures. Infidel by student. The undergraduates of Oxford and Cam- his intellect, Shelley was a Christian in the tenbridge, are not "boys," as a considerable propor-dencies of his heart. As to his "lying asleep on tion must be, for good reasons, in other universi- the hearth-rug, with his small round head thrust ties, the Scottish universities, for instance, of Glasgow and St. Andrew's, and many of those on the continent. Few of the English students even begin their residence before eighteen; and the larger proportion are at least twenty. Whereas Shelley was really a boy at this era, and no man. He had entered on his sixteenth year, and he was still in the earliest part of his academic career, when his obstinate and reiterated attempt to inoculate the university with a disease that he fancied indispensable to their mental health, caused his expulsion.

I imagine that Mr. Gilfillan will find himself compelled, hereafter, not less by his own second thoughts, than by the murmurs of some amongst his readers, to revise that selection of memorial traits, whether acts or habits, by which he seeks to bring Shelley, as a familiar presence, within the field of ocular apprehension. The acts selectea, unless

almost into the very fire," this, like his " basking in the hottest beams of an Italian sun," illustrates nothing but his physical temperament. That he should be seen "devouring large pieces of bread amid his profound abstractions," simply recalls to my eye some hundred thousands of children in the streets of great cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, whom I am daily detecting in the same unaccountable practice; and yet, probably, with very little abstraction to excuse it; whilst his "endless cups of tea," in so tea-drinking a land as ours, have really ceased to offer the attractions of novelty which, eighty years ago, in the reign of Dr. Johnson, and under a higher price of tea, they might have secured. Such habits, however, are inoffensive, if not particularly mysterious, nor particularly significant. But that, in defect of a paper boat, Shelley should launch upon the Serpentine a fifty pound bank note, seems to my view

"Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first

an act of childishness, or else (which is worse) angles begin! It is in verse, and forms part of those act of empty ostentation, not likely to proceed beautiful stanzas addressed to his second wife, which from one who generally exhibited in his outward he prefixed to "The Revolt of Islam." Five or deportment a sense of true dignity. He who, six of these stanzas may be quoted with a certhrough his family,* connected himself with that tainty of pleasing many readers, whilst they throw "spirit without spot," (as Shelley calls him in the light on the early condition of Shelley's feelings, "Adonais,”) Sir Philip Sidney, (a man how like and of his early anticipations with regard to the in gentleness, and in faculties of mind, to himself!) promises and the menaces of life. -he that, by consequence, connected himself with that later descendant of Penshurst, the noble martyr of freedom, Algernon Sidney, could not have degraded himself by a pride so mean as any which roots itself in wealth. On the other hand, in the anecdote of his repeating Dr. Johnson's benign act, by "lifting a poor houseless outcast upon his back, and carrying her to a place of refuge," I read so strong a character of internal probability, that it would be gratifying to know upon what external testimony it rests.

The clouds which wrap this world, from youth did

pass.

I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep; a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walk'd forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept I knew not why; until there rose,
From the near school-room, voices that, alas !
Were but one echo from a world of woes--

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
And then I clasp'd my hands, and look'd around-
(But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground,)
So without shame I spake - I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power: for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check. I then controll'd
My tears; my heart grew calm; and I was meek and

bold.

The life of Shelley, according to the remark of Mr. Gilfillan, was "among the most romantic in literary story." Every thing was romantic in his short career; every thing wore a tragic interest. From his childhood he moved through a succession of afflictions. Always craving for love, loving and seeking to be loved, always he was destined to reap hatred from those with whom life had connected him. If in the darkness he raised up images of his departed hours, he would behold his family disowning him, and the home of his infancy knowing him no more; he would behold his magnificent university, that under happier circumstances would have gloried in his genius, rejecting him for ever; he would behold his first wife, whom once he had loved passionately, through calamities arising from himself, called away to an early and A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.

a tragic death. The peace after which his heart
panted for ever, in what dreadful contrast it stood
to the eternal contention upon which his restless
intellect or accidents of position threw him like a
passive victim! It seemed as if not any choice of
his, but some sad doom of opposition from without,
forced out, as by a magnet, struggles of frantic
resistance from him, which as gladly he would
have evaded, as ever victim of epilepsy yearned to
erade his convulsions! Gladly he would have
slept in eternal seclusion, whilst eternally the
trumpet summoned him to battle.
In storms un-
willingly created by himself, he lived; in a storm,
cited by the finger of God, he died.

It is affecting, at least it is so for any one who believes in the profound sincerity of Shelley, a man (however erring) whom neither fear, nor hope, nor vanity, nor hatred, ever seduced into falsehood, or even into dissimulation,—to read the account which he gives of a revolution occurring in his own mind at school: so early did his strug

And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore:
Yet nothing, that my tyrants knew or taught,
I cared to learn; but from that secret store
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind :
Thus power and hope were strengthen'd more and
Within me,
till there came upon my mind

more

Alas, that love should be a blight and snare
To those who seek all sympathies in one !-
Such once I sought in vain; then black despair,
The shadow of a starless night, was thrown
Over the world in which I moved alone: -
Yet never found I one not false to me,
Hard hearts and cold, like weights of icy stone
Which crush'd and wither'd mine, that could not be
Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee.

Thou, friend, whose presence on my wintry heart
Fell, like bright spring upon some herbless plain;
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of Custom+ thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walk'd as free as light the clouds among,
Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain
From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung
To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long.

No more alone through the world's wilderness,
Although I trod the paths of high intent,
I journey'd now: no more companionless,
Where solitude is like despair, I went.

"Family:" i. e. The gens in the Roman sense, or collective house. Shelley's own immediate branch of the house did not, in a legal sense, represent the family of Penshurst, because the rights of the lineal descent had settled upon another branch. But his branch had a collateral participation in the glory of the Sidney name, and might, by accidents possible enough, have come to be its sole representative.

+Of Custom: This alludes to a theory of Shelley's, on the subject of marriage as a vicious institution, and an attempt to realize his theory by way of public example; which attempt there is no use in noticing more particularly, as it was subsequently abandoned. Originally he had derived his theory from the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of his second wife, whose birth in fact had cost that mother her life. But by the year 1812, (the year following his first marriage,) he had so fortified, from other quarters, his previous opinions upon the wickedness of all nuptial ties consecrated by law or by the church, that he apologized to his friends for having submitted to the narriage ceremony as for an offence; but an offence, he pleaded, rendered necessary by the vicious constitution of society, for the comfort of his female partner.

"Two counties: the frontier line between Westmoreland and Cumberland, traverse obliquely the Lake of Ulleswater, so that the banks on both sides lie partly in both counties.

"At that time!"--the reader will say, who happens to be aware of the mighty barriers which engirdle Grasmere, Fairfield, Arthur's chair, Seat Sandal, Steil Fell, &c. (the lowest above two thousand, the higher above three thousand feet high,)