From the New Monthly Magazine. DONALD G. MITCHELL.-"IK MARVEL." IK MARVEL enjoys a comfortable income of reputation as the author of the "Lorgnette," "Dream-Life," and the "Reveries of a Bachelor." His delight it seems to be to put on record Those sun-dyed fancies, airy reveries, which indeed "fade into nothing if uncropt, if seized on while yet fresh This lofty ideal is, however, a degree or two north of lk Marvel's whereabouts. Rather he reminds us of Christopher North's description of his fashion of reducing thick-coming fancies to the prose requirements of "copy' —of making an "article" of a reverie. "Alter walking up and down my room for half an hour," saith Sir Kit, "with my cigar in my mouth, thinking of all things in the heavens, and the earth, and the waters under the earth-friends long since dead and buriedplaces once familiar that I shall never set mortal eye on again-books in posse-bores in esse-last summer's butterflies-chateaux the grate," a "companionable form" capable of eliciting "dim sympathies" from his "idlin g spirit"— everywhere Echo or mirror seeking of itself, Ik Marvel's book of Reveries consists, main- The Reveries he thus translates into trivial fond records, are four in number. One, over a wood-fire-where the smoke is made to An reverie, concerning the morning, which is the past; noon, which is the present; and evening, which is the future. signify doubt, (the question being "wife or no wife," and the pros and cons summed up in an almost odious spirit of calculation,) while the blaze signifies cheer, and the resultant ashes desolateness and bereavement. other, by a city grate-plied first with seaA third, over coal, and then with anthracite. a cigar-lighted successively with a coal, a And a last en Espagne, no matter how high or how low-wisp of paper, and a match. Suddenly the cigar's out, and by a natural instinct, as it were, I place myself at the table and begin writing. What suggests the first sentence? Probably the title of a book lying uncut on the desk. What the next? course some turn in the first sentence which suggested itself during the operation of penning that," and so on, till the mouth begins to feel uneasy, and then the scribe exchanges his quill for another cheroot, and walks up and down reverie-ing ut supra. Such the mood of Coleridge, when his large gray eyes were fixed by "that film which fluttered on Edward Quillinan's Poems. Of The earlier portion of these desultory sketches-which, with more unity of design, the author is of opinion would have made a respectable novel, but which he preferred setting down, in what he calls "the honester way," just as they came seeething from his piping-hot brain-pan, "with all their crudities and contrasts uncovered"-the incipient stage bird note, which is by no means the key-note of these reveries is marked by a mockingof the volume. Badinage and banter-never ill-natured in the least, nor in any degree harsh and grating-are freely employed in the bachelor's preliminary cogitations; and he takes care to prevent your ultimately resolving him into a mawkish, or miss-mollyish sentimentalist, by approving himself, in limine, a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, sharp-spoken fellow. The same man who means to tax your lachrymal glands to the utmost before he has done, and to make a rapid succession of cambric concomitants necessary to every young lady-reader, begins by all sorts of sordid and most unromantic disquisitions on wiyes by hypothesis. A possible Peggy, for instance, is introduced, who harasses her spouse by filling his house with plaguy relations, and who is suddenly, or by quick gradations of decay, discovered to be a fright; and who comes down to breakfast with a rough shock of hair, and in such infernal slippers; and whose apology for the cold coffee is, that the complainant should not have been so long dressing,-while, as for the uneatable butter, she has no other, and hopes he'll not raise a storm about butter a little turned. There is an "I calculate" tone about the bachelor's method of striking the balance, in his matrimonial speculations, that has set some of Peggy's sex against him, and hardened their tender hearts against giving him their full sympathy when his hour of affliction (in reverie) is fully come. In his wailings of bereavement they regard him, therefore, only with the half-pity one vouchsafes to the Admetus of Euripides, who mourns his Alcestis in such self-occupied fashion as this: Ah, what worse ill has man through life Faugh! thou Benthamized old widower! Howl on, with thy monotonous 'ai 'ai, to the pathos of which we, remembering what Alcestis was, and what thou art, are as the deaf adder that will not be charmed, charm thou never so wisely. We are more interested in the rude seaman's "Ay, ay, Sir," than in thine. And herewith we crave Ik Marvel's forbearance for hinting a comparison with one who "riles" us till analogy and good manners are forgotten. And from the "Reveries" pass we on to "Dream-Life!" Who has not a knowledge of, who has not an open or a sneaking kindness for that? Who welcomes not at times that sleep to his eyes, that slumber to his eyelids, and in sluggard mood indulges himself with yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep? We dream, and are happy again, young again, prosperous again, hopeful, heart - whole, strong. Zauberisch erneuen Sich die Fantaseien Meiner Kindheit hier so licht! Ein elysich Traumgesicht.* Ik Marvel's "Dream-Life" passes successively in review the dreams of fond boyhood, whose eye sees rarely below the surface of things; the delicious hopes of sparklingblooded youth; manhood's dreams of sober trustfulness, of practical results, of hardwrought world-success, and perhaps of love and joy; and age's dreams of what is gone, a wide waste, a mingled array of griefs and delights-its dreams, too, of what is to come, of an advent Rest which already hath garners ed in the darlings of its heart. Dream-land, says the author, will never be exhausted until we enter the land of dreams; and until, in "shuffling off this mortal coil," thought will become fact, and all facts will be only thought. And thus he can conceive no mood of mind more in keeping with what is to follow upon the grave, than "those fancies which warp our frail hulks toward the ocean of the infinite." And in working up this "fable of the seasons," from the spring of childhood to the winter of hoary eld, he is content that the "facts" should be false, if but the "feeling" be real-content, if he can catch the bolder and richer truth of feeling, that the types of it should be all confessed fabrications. "If," he argues, "if I run over some sweet experience of love, must I make good the fact that the loved one lives, and expose her name and qualities to make your sympathies sound? Or shall I not rather be working upon higher and holier ground, if I take the passion for itself, and so weave it into words, that you, and every willing sufferer, may recognize the fervor, and forget the personality?" Life, by his estimate, being, after "Matthison: Der Wald." all, but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and positive development, but rarely reaching it, he holds himself to be as truly dealing with life when recalling these hints, and tracing them in fancy to their issues, as if his life had dealt them all to him. Hence, in this volume of "Dream-Life" his purpose is, to catch up here and there the "shreds of feeling which the brambles and roughnesses of the world have left tangling" on his heart, and weave them into shapely and harmonious tissue. If there are not enough elements of truth, honesty and nature in his pictures, to make them believed, he repudiates the notion of swearing to their credibility, declaring it a shabby truth that wants an author's affidavit to make it trustworthy. bridge, as a scarlet-bricked Little Bethel baptistery is to Canterbury Cathedral. In such a scene, good it is to find our dreamer satirizing the dreams of "first ambition" about genius-the quotient of crude imaginings, and strong coffee, and whiskey-toddy-as though there were a certain faculty of mind, first developed in colleges, which can with impunity despise painstaking, and on the strength of intuitions and instincts can do without means and processes; nor can he be a dreamer and nothing besides, who so enforces the doctrine, that there is no genius in life like the genius of energy and ambitionno rivals, to college or worldly ambition, so formidable as those earnest, determined minds which achieve eminence by persistent application. The chapter on College Romance is pitched in the same key; that on the "First Look of the World" is an excellent example of Ik Marvel's composite manner-the alliance of sagacious raillery and pathetic sentiment. Perhaps his forte lies chiefly in the delineation of domestic sorrow, wherein his power and reality are even painfully felt; but is he not too apt to protract and intensify such delineation, line upon line--and indeed to dally with ideal affliction, and pursue its lurking details too far, until the reader impatiently recoils from what takes the shape of a morbid anatomy, an experimentalizing upon his tenderest sympathies, an almost wanton empiricism in matters of life and death? To be woven into "such stuff as dreams are made of," these threads of wak The dream-life of spring, or boyhood, takes us to school, where sketches are drawn that show, more definitely than need be, the sketcher's acquaintanceship with the manner of Dickens, to whom and to Washington Irving this volume owes not a little of its "inspiration." Boy Sentiment is illustrated, and Boy Religion disturbed, by an ineradicable dislike of long sermons, and a hopeless incapacity to get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts's which likens heaven to a never-ending Sabbath; or indeed to long much for heaven, if it is to be full of certain potent, grave, and reverend seniors, such as are the bane of the boy's life below. "There is very much religious teaching, even in so good a country as New England"-and quite possibly Old England has this among the faults, despite all which we love her still-"which is far too harsh, too dry, too cold for the heart of a boy. Longing anguish are too fine-spun, too long-drawn sermons, doctrinal precepts, and such tedious-out, too intricately netted with the heartly-worded dogmas as were uttered by those honest, but hard-spoken men, the Westminster divines, fatigue, and puzzle, and dispirit him." Then we have the boy on a visit to a NewEngland squire, (after Geoffrey Crayon's own heart,) and at the country church, with its unadmired parson, its precentor, (remarkable for clearing his throat by a sonorous ahem, followed by a powerful use of his Sunday bandanna, and imposing manipulations with his tuning-fork,) its stout old deacon, the weazen-faced farmer, the dowdy farmers' daughters, and heavy-eyed youngsters that there do congregate. With summer open the dreams of youth. The scene changes to the cloisters of a college -if cloisters must be the word for those "long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New England"as much akin to the grand old structures of what Mr. Thackeray calls Camford and OxVOL. XXXI. NO. III. strings. And the heart is apt to resent this, as among the unwarrantable gratuities of Fiction. The charm of melancholy may be overstrained, till exhaustion ensues, and collapse; and then such woe-worn broodings are shunned, and exiled from The cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne'er will gather strength, nor find a home again.* Under the "Autumn" division there is some fine healthy writing, always tender, and generally true, on manly hope and manly love with wholesome sarcasm on that "kind of Pelhamism," affecting ignorance of plain things and people, and knowingness in brilliancies, "that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood"-when the law is, to conceal what tells of the man, and * Shelley. 23 years, not in heart, and the marriage of sons and daughters, and the birth of grandchildren. The old man enters feebly, and with floating glimpses of glee, into the cheer and rejoicings of the young people's festive days. And then cover it with what smacks of the roué. | Home peace and sanctity is reverently described, and so we land in the "Winter" quarter-Age-when the "sweeping outlines of life, that once lay before the vision -rolling into wide billows of years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain range-now seem close-packed together as with a Titan hand; and you see only crowded, craggy heights, the old man falls asleep, past earthly waking like Alpine fastnesses, parted with glaciers" to sleep, perchance to dream," elseof grief, and leaking abundant tears.' Then where, and to be disturbed by the rustling comes the death of the true wife, aged in of Time's curtains never more. Eve saddens into Night of Cork and Orrery, who, with rather questionable taste, modernized both style and orthography. After being for a long time scarce, an edition, containing many valuable notes, was published in Edinburgh forty-five years ago, since which time, the work has not been much known, except among antiquaries. ROBERT CARY, Earl of Monmouth, seems | the original MS. by his descendant, the Earl in many respects to have been the prototype of the celebrated Pepys. His Lordship's autobiography lacks the quaintness of Lord Braybrooke's hero, and certainly Cary's tastes were not so general as those of Pepys, who, in addition to a rigid eye to his own interests, found leisure to cultivate the pleasures of the drama, to frequent balls, and to keep company with the fashionable and the gay; but still there are so many points of resemblance, that the admirers of Pepys will find much in Cary that is calculated to throw amusing light on the history of the times. His career is that of a pure, unmitigated time-server, one determined to achieve court preferment at whatever cost of dignity or self-respect-promotion being the polestar of his life, and self-aggrandizement his only glory. He makes no secret as to the idols whom he served, or as to the degradation which their worship involved; nor does he seek to assume the office of historian in the larger sense of the term; but his position is such that he cannot tell his own story without furnishing numerous incidental illustrations of the characters of his regal contemporaries; and as incidental information of this kind is always more truthful (because more unguarded) than direct narrative, Lord Monmouth's contributions to historical literature are of no mean value. Cary's Memoirs were first published from Cary was the son of Sir Robert Cary, afterwards Lord Hunsdon, who held office in the court of Elizabeth, so that in respect of court life, our author was literally "to the matter born." At the outset of his career, he endeavored to attract the attention of the virgin queen by his style of living. "I lived in court," says he, "had small means of my friends, yet God so blessed me that I was ever able to keep company with the best. In all triumphs, I was one; either at tilt, tourney, or barriers; in masque or balls. I kept men and horses far above my rank, and so continued a long time." It does not appear that Cary had, like Pepys, any innate love of pleasure, and accordingly, he did not maintain similar style when he came to obtain office. At the beginning he simply affected splendor as part of his stock-in-trade. His bidding for employment was not unobserved, and his first royal commission was a message to King James, relative to the infamous execution of his mother, the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots. left Carlisle, where he had been residing with his wife, in order to attend to some law business in London. The time was auspicious, for it was the anniversary of the coronation, and the fêtes were to be of unwonted splendor. "I prepared a present for her Majesty," says our hero, "which, with my caparisons, cost me above four hundred pounds. I came "Few or none in the court being willing | to undertake that journey, her Majesty sent me to the King of Scots to make known her innocence (?) of her sister's death, with letters of credence from herself, to assure all that I should affirm." The mission was one of extreme danger, as the Scotch were incensed at the murder of their queen, and would not have hesitated to exercise lynch-into the triumph [one of the fêtes] unknown law on the London emissary; and James, who already was aspiring to Elizabeth's sceptre, dissembled, as to make his subjects believe that he was also sharing in the national grief at the consummation of such a tragedy. He loudly threatened revenge on Elizabeth; and simple Archbishop Spottiswoode has it, that "Solomon" denied audience to Cary, refused his letters, and that they reached the Council only in consequence of two officials having unauthorizedly received them. The truth is, that James sent two of his household to Berwick, with a civil message to Cary, that his life would be in danger if he came to Edinburgh, and that he should deliver his despatches to the two messengers. Cary, who had verbal communications to make, wrote to the Queen for instructions, and she authorized him to comply with the King's proposal. After some services on the Continent, and on the Scotch border, Cary married, and so jeopardized his popularity with Elizabeth, who invariably "took the pet," when any one of her attachés assumed the fetters of wedlock. "I married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Hugh Trevannion, a gentlewoman, more for her worth than her wealth; for her estate was but five hundred pounds a year jointure, and she had between five and six hundred pounds in her purse. Neither did she marry me for any great wealth; for I had in all the world but one hundred pounds a year pension out of the exchequer, and that was but during pleasure, and I was near a thousand pounds in debt; besides, the Queen was mightily offended with me for marrying, and most of my best friends; only my father was no ways displeased at it, which gave me great content.' Mrs. Cary, however deficient in dowry, had, like her lord, a sharp instinct towards the main chance, and it was doubtless this identity of disposition that formed the basis of their attachment. The wedding being over, Cary was anxious for a renewal of the royal favor, but this was a matter of great difficulty, as it was not easy for Queen Bess to overlook the peculiar offence of which the culprit had been guilty. Cary made the attempt. He of any one. I was the forsaken knight, that had vowed solitariness, but hearing of this great triumph, thought to honor my mistress. with my best service, and then to return to my wonted mourning. The triumph. ended, and all things well passed over to the Queen's liking. I then made myself known in court; and for the time I staid there, was daily conversant with my old companions and friends; but it soon fell out that I made no long stay." Elizabeth was aware of his presence, and as her resentment had not had time to subside, she took means to get rid of him, and the service on which he was ordered off was significant of the temper of the royal mind. Cary's brother was marshal of Berwick, and King James had desired an interview with him, at the boundary road between the two kingdoms, in order to send a communication to his sister of England. It would have been no great matter for the Berwick functionary to have stepped to the Scotch border, but simple as it was, he dared not do it, without the express sanction of his sovereign. "My brother," says the exile, "sent notice to my father of the King's desire. My father showed the letter to the Queen. She was not willing that my brother should stir out of Berwick; but knowing, though she would not know, that I was in court, she said, I hear your fine son, that has lately married so worthily, is hereabouts; send him, if you will, to know the King's pleasure.' My father answered, he knew I would be glad to obey her commands.' But Elizabeth was not to be so caught: 'No,' said she, do you bid him go, for I have nothing to do with him.”” Thus, then, John Cary, who might have crossed the street in order to meet the Scotch monarch, was ordered to remain at home, while Robert, who was upwards of three hundred miles from the scene of action, had to do duty in his stead. Most men would have revolted from a mistress so capricious; but the supple Robert bent like a twig before the storm, and in due season was raised again. It is not stated on what business he was sent to James; but he went to the border and met him according to arrangement; and returned |