to be displayed on this all-important occasion, had thus been immeasurably increased, without increasing the pains and penalties of the Messiah? Does the divine mercy shine the more or the less bright, think you, for the sacrifice being delayed till millions of souls had perished? How does your system of ethics hold together here? How do you assimilate, on the occasion of this most important advent, infinite power, with infinite wisdom, and infinite mercy? Can you reconcile these incompatibilities otherwise than by repeating that priestly hush, that the ways of Heaven are inscrutable; which would be at once acknowledging the failure of your original purpose, by virtually confessing that you were unable to assert eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to man?" Surely, Milton, in these parts of your poem, your giant strength was stultified, your mind was manacled and blinded, and the priests of Dagon kept you grinding in the prison-house, like your own Agonistes. As to the superstitious special pleading about mercy and justice both being "advocated (forsooth) and satisfied, through Heaven and Earth-If either of these attributes were infinite, as the priestly doctrine pretends, the other must be annihilated: in as far as they are mingled, they are neutralised. They are elements of mutual destruction. I must here confess to you, my friend, that a prime purpose of my present visit is to induce you, now that you are blessed with Elysium and leisure,—to revise your immortal poems (more especially their machinery, as you poets term it) and expunge those passages wherein you appear to the eye of Philosophy so much to resemble your own Comus. M. My own Comus! How can I resemble Comus, if, as you have before pronounced, I am like blinded Sampson? S. I anticipated this objection, and mean to leave you to make your own election as to this parity. You will not suppose I mean to insinuate that Sampson and Comus were alike; and you may recollect, that early in our conversation I suggested my doubts as to whether or not you were trammelled or free. There lies the distinction. If you were not blinded by the religious prejudices of your time, but had your eyes open, you are like your own Comus, a powerful,-pleasing, sorcerer, offering his drugged cup "To ev'ry weary traveller :- For most do taste, through fond intemp'rate thirst, Eur""reisten x And they so perfect is their misery, Not once perceive their foul disfigurement! " Neither can less than the virtue and purity of your Lady, preserve your unwary readers from becoming tygers, hogs, and wolves. found it was A crowd was collected under the Horse-Guards, and on enquiry I see the Duke of York come out. "What went they forth for to see? see? They were son some of the lowest and most wretched of the people, and it was perhaps the sense of contrast,- a sense of which the great and mighty have always availed themselves liberally, to cherish the enthusiasm of their admirers. It was also curiosity to see a name, a sound that they had so often heard, reduced to an object of sight; a metaphysical and political abstraction actually coming out of a door with a ruddy face and a frock-coat. It was, in the first place, the Commander-in-chief, and the Commander of the troops at Dunkirk, the author of the love-letters to Mrs. Clarke and of army-circulars, the son of the King, and presumptive heir to the crown;—there were all these contradictions embodied in the same person. "Oh, the wonderful works of nature," as the Recruit in the play says on looking at the guinea which has just enlisted him: so we may say on looking at a king or a king's brother. I once pointed out the Duke of York to a Scotchman. "Is that his Grace-I mean his Royal Highness?" said the native of the North, out of breath to acknowledge the title, and pay with his tongue the instinctive adulation which his heart felt! 107 LXXV. When Effie Deans becomes a fine lady, do we not look back with regret to the time when she was the poor faded Lily of St. Leonard's, the outcast and condemned prisoner? So, should the cause of liberty and mankind ever become triumphant, instead of militant, may we not and thin heave a sigh of regret over the past, and think that poor suffering human nature, with all its wrongs and insults, trodden into the earth like a vile weed, was a more interesting topic for reflection? We need not be much alarmed for the event, even if this should be so; for the way to Utopia is not "the primrose path of, dalliance;" and at the rate we have hitherto gone on, it must be many thousand years off! TABLE TALK. 7 A writer in Blackwood is endeavouring to turn public attention to Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein, and in the progress of his task has found out a few obligations on the part of Mr. Wordsworth to this noble production. Every reader of "The Excursion" will recollect the beautiful passage on the origin of the Grecian Mythology so very generally quoted when that poem first appeared. Let them compare it with the following speech in Wallenstein: " For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place: Divinities being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty, That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanish'd. They live no longer in the faith of reason! But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinet bring back the old names. And to yon starry world they now are gone. Spirits or Gods, that used to share this earth With man as with their friend; and to the lover Yonder they move, from yonder visible sky Shoot influence down; and even at this day}/A "Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings every thing that's fair. Some people always speak of the great and the little in the way of inversion. "Elephants," says Swift, " are always dra are always drawn smaller than life-fleas, larger. "Vision," observes the same author, "is the act of seeing things in← visible." Once again, Mr. Dean-"I never knew a wag (as the term is) that was not a dunce." Barrow was the Magnus Apollo of the first Earl of Chatham, who had studied this author so constantly, as to be able to repeat his ela~ borate discourses from memory. 愈 SOLACE IN SORROW. Oh! it is sweet, amid the waste of years, To meet with one-be he till then unknown That cometh from the land where first our feet have gone. 1 When friends are lost, hopes withered, and our tears It is a soft Spring rain that doth awake The friends of youth more blessed, or dream that it is so. What though sure knowledge strive with hope, and break Is it not sweet, though sad, to prove them unforgot? ... 1. LONDON: Published by HENRY L. HUNT, 38, Tavistock-street, Covent-garden, and 22, Old Bond-street. Price Fourpence; or, if stamped for country circulation free of postage, Sevenpence. Sold by all Booksellers and Newsvenders in town; and by the following Agents in the country: Edinburgh, Messrs. Bell and Bradfute. Glasgow, W. R. Macphun. Exeter, T. Smith. T. Besley, jun. High-street. Leeds, James Mann, Duncan-street. Liverpool, T. Smith. Birmingham, J. Drake. 1 ́ Leicester, T. Thompson. Dublin, A. M. Graham, College-green. Printed by C. W. REYNELL, Broad-street, Golden-square. } Don Juan. Cantos XII. XIII. and XIV. です THE commencement of Canto XIV, is distinguished by one of those deep sceptical ponderings which so signally distinguish the poem off Don Juan both from its Italian models and every kindrede efforts Ind the following stanzas on Death, the subject of Suicide is finely, and, begging pardon of the exclusively pious, usefully illustrated, in regard to the moral and physical weakness which may lead to it: For me, I know nought; nothing I deny, so call shall be either old or new, uni qad¥. is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is pass'd in sleep. A sleep without dreams, after a rough day At once without instalments (an old way? Lets out impatiently his rushing breath Less from disgust of life than dread of death, "Tis round him, near him, here, there, every where ; The worst to know it:-when the mountains rear 'Tis true, you don't-but, pale and struck with terror, And you will find, though shuddering at the mirror To the unknown; a secret prepossession, ******** To plunge with all your fears but where? You know not, And that's the reason why you do-or do not. In allusion to the reception of his various productions, Lord Byron thus observes upon the nature of his own feelings as a writer, and upon one of the causes of the objections to Don Juan: VOL. I. 22 I think that were I certain of success namely A That no defeat can drive me from the Nine, And yet tis not affected, 1 opine! andt began on She gathers a repertory of facts, tang: f, brod 100 I Of course with some reserve and slight restriction, But mostly sings of human things and actest Tod vrcte edT For too much truth, at first sight, ne'er attracts; Proceeding to the story, we are favoured with a happy sketch of the qualities necessary to a generally agreeable man, and more especially to an uncoxcombical homme à bonnes fortunes. We find Don Juan among the foremost in manly sports and the chase, easy and alert in the succeeding festivity, elegant and dextrous in conversation, and as to the dance, our author alone can do him justice od 77 And then he danc'd all foreigners excella sol i He danced without theatrical pretence, to stil s ei oven? izao Not like a ballet-master in the van bu qaitos tired elemał Of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman and d Chaste were his steps, each kept within his Like swift Camilla, he scarce And rather held in than put forth his vigour; Which might defy a Crotchet Critic's rigour. Or, like a flying Hour before Aurora, 1982 In Guido's famous fresco, which alone'esdeve No marvel then he was a a favourite; A full-grown Cupid, very much admired; At least he kept his vanity retired. Such was his tact, he could alike delight The chaste, and those who are not so much inspired. d b c A I bial |