moment his prudent guardian writes to him, (not to know why he has left his college and gone strolling through Europe at the age of seventeen years and seven months,) but to dissuade him from marrying Madame Dalmatiani who is only twice as old as himself. This beautiful and parental epistle concludes in these words: 'Let not the country that can boast a Grattan, a Curran, a Moore, an Edgeworth, a Lady Morgan, a Phillips, a Shiel, reckon a character so degraded among those of her children! Even this pathetic apostrophe might have failed, and Charles De Courcy might have disgraced the country of Charles Phillips, but that he hears from an acquaintance just arrived from Ireland that Eva is dying-not a sham Irish death,--but really and bonâ fide dying. This fatal intelligence strikes him to the heart-it is his own death-wound; his constitution, never strong, is suddenly impaired, and his conscience as suddenly awakened; he hastens back to Ireland to attend the bed-side of Eva. Zaira is heart-broken at his evasion, and as near death's door as either Eva or De Courcy-but she musters up strength to follow him. Then comes the usual death-bed eclaircissement-the old hag from whom De Courcy had rescued Eva, and who figures on sundry occasions throughout the work, in all the squalid distraction of an Irish pauper lunatic, turns out to have been once a most beautiful young peasant girl seduced by a man of fortune-Zaira, the young, the elegant, the intellectual, is her bastard daughter, who ran away with an Italian fiddler, and Eva is the child of Zaira and grand-child of the beggar woman! The conclusion now becomes easy-Eva, De Courcy, and the beggar-woman all die on the spot, and Madame Dalmatiani is left, like Moonshine and Wall, to bury the dead! Such is the story; and we believe our readers will now agree that it presents a collection of all the extravagancies of all novels which none but a master-hand would have made. It is now time to show that the execution surpasses the design; ' materiam superat opus,' as Madame Dalmatiani would have said. The imitations of Corinne are too diffuse to be extracted; some of them are very comical, but in others truth obliges us to say there is somewhat of exaggeration. Corinne never talks either Greek or Hebrew; while Zaira is a perfect Polyglott, quotes all the mottos of the Spectators and Ramblers in the original tongue-and talks you -Greek As naturally as pigs squeak. For For instance, when she thinks she is dying the following are represented as her meditations. 'Then crowded on her mind the awful story of that night in Alexandria, when the sound of subterranean music and revelry, passing out towards the enemy's camp, was heard by those who were feasting with Antony and Cleopatra at their last banquet, reminding them terribly of the contrasted splendour of their former destiny, and the gloom of that which was approaching. Then followed the tremendous METαCaμła STEUBE, of the Jewish history, when God left them for ever; when Ichabod was pronounced by the voice of the Eternal Judge, and the glory of their hierarchy and their temple departed from them for ever.'-vol. iii. p. 272, 273. This is but a small sample of Zaira's erudition-the reverend author has artfully contrived to communicate under her name all he knows, and, we sometimes suspect, a little more. Let us observe how naturally he beguiles his young readers into historical, classical, and scientific knowledge in extracts of a letter from Zaira to Delphine, a French lady of her acquaintance. You cannot comprehend what I have felt, since I learned the object of his (De Courcy's) attachment is an evangelical female. You do not exactly understand this phrase, Delphine. You can explain it to yourself by the puritans of Cromwell's time with whose history you are well acquainted. Mezentius, who united a dead body to a living one, was guilty of a less crime and less cruelty than he who unites De Courcy with this girl.-With her sect all the enjoyments, all the privations of life, are to be viewed exactly in the same plane.-Like the Arabian chief when he was going to burn the library of Alexandria, they would have employed the short dilemma.--Would not Guido's Aurora, and Raphael's Cartoons, and Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, be all mortgaged at this moment for the vile wooden cut of an evangelical preacher, with his lank hair and Iscariot visage?-Would not Sculpture, if she pleaded for her life with Laocoon in one hand and Niobe in the other, be rejected for some spruce monument over Dr. Coke or Dr. Huntington-vol. ii. p. 139--148. Thus in order to comprehend the single word evangelical, a young lady may be induced to inform herself concerning the puritans of the seventeenth century and the tyrant Mézentius, whose history she cannot have cheaper than in Lempriere's classical dictionary or Dryden's Virgil; the phrase of seen in the same plane will force her into geometry; the Alexandrian library will open to her the history of Mahomet and his followers. As for dilemmas, Auroras, Iscariots, Cartoons, Laocoons, and Niobes, we suppose she may already have heard of them; but we marvel where she is to look, for the two doctors:—and we are obliged to confess our suspicions, that, in speaking of Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, the reverend author himself hallucinates, and that for Rem brandt brandt we should read Rubens. See then what a store of knowledge these passages force upon the reader! 6 Delphine's answer,' we are told, contained that mixture of frivolity, wordliness, &c. &c. which formed her character.'—p. 149. It is impossible that you can longer deceive yourself. You never deceived me. You love this man. For it happens that we never dream of commencing friends, till we have actually taken our degrees as lovers in the last stage. Then your tirade against that poor girl and her religion. Can any power on earth persuade me, that you would sit down to study divinity, for the sake of abusing a set of people, whom you would care no more about than the Camisards of France; only that you choose to be in love with a boy whom one of these pretty puritans has captivated? Fear not, my charming Zaira! there will always be enough to love the world, if all the begging Bonzes of the East were united with all the mendicant orders of Europe, and they again backed by the ghosts of the RUMP-parliament, raised from the dead for the purpose. Do you remember your admirable Shakspeare? "Thinkest thou, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Yea, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot in the mouth too!" And now, my dear Zaira, that I have removed your apprehensions about the world being turned upside down by these moral Archimedes's, have the goodness to remove mine (if you can) about yourself. All my levity forsakes me when I think of your situation. Waken, waken, my charming Zaira, from your dream! it is but a dream; or sleep on and perish, as the botanists did in their tour of exploration on the coasts of New Holland. The cant of university-commencements-the Camisards of France -the begging bonzes-the RUMP Parliament-Shakspeare, Archimedes, and Sir Joseph Banks!-A young lady may well exclaim, If Delphine be frivolous, what must I be, who, except Shakspeare and that parliament with the queer name, have never heard of any of these affairs? Emulation will be thus generated; information will follow, and boarding-school girls will be as profound as the reverend author of Bertram. This correspondence concludes with a pleasant ridicule of the inconsistency into which novelists are often betrayed by labouring after consistency. This same learned lady, because she is a French woman, and of course frivolous, must write thus of the capture of Paris. "“Mon dieu!—The allies are absolutely within a few leagues of Paris. What horrors surround us! I know not how mon joli chat will escape. They say those Cossacks eat cats! Horrible, I will rather perish first. "Ah, my beautiful Zaira, the artillery of the allies is sending its thunders from the heights of Montmartre. What an event! How astonishing! What a disgrace to the history of civilised nations! Y 3 Paris, Paris, the metropolis of the world, invested by hostile forces! Paris, that like Sparta, never saw the smoke of an enemy's camp! After this, the sacking of Rome by pagan Goths, or by catholic imperialists in the time of Clement, may be read with very little emotion. Ah, my God! what will become of my cat if the Cossacks eat him?'—vol. ii. p. 161 -163. Sparta, Rome, Brennus, Pope Clement, and my cat! We have examples in abundance of all kinds of absurdity in Greek, Latin, Italian, and above all in English, with which the author endeavours to amuse us, but we have not room to spare for any more extracts. Parodies, as we once before said, should be short-Mr. Mathurin's, though admirably sustained, is too long, and we may venture to say also that the mask is never sufficiently removed--we know that the reverend author means to be merry at the expense of novel writers and port-folio pedants, but we regret to say that we have heard that some persons, mistaking his book for a serious production, have censured it as degrading, by its folly, its ignorant pedantry, its constant fustian, and its occasional blasphemy, the character of a clerical author; while others, equally well disposed, but more simple, have looked upon it not only as serious but as meritorious, and have praised it as having all the qualities of an excellent novel. Though both these opinions are alike unfounded, we would advise the writer to take warning from them. We are satisfied that he would repel either imputation with equal indiguation, but he ought not to expose himself to such misapprehension; and we are glad to see that instead of the perplexing riddle of a mock romance, he has been employing himself, to the same moral end, on a volume of Sermons' which we have seen advertised, and which we have no doubt will be as excellent in their way as' Bertram' or Women,' and at least by their name and character be sacred from any of the misconstructions put on the volumes we have just endeavoured to vindicate. ART. III. Samor, Lord of the Bright City. An Heroic Poem. By the Rev. H. H. Milman, M.A. 8vo. pp. 374. London. 1818. THERE is scarcely any department of literature, indeed we might say of any art or science, in which certain characteristic changes may not be remarked in almost every age, either as to the manner or the degree in which it is pursued. These changes it is always interesting to notice, either for the causes from which they flow, or the consequences to which they give birth. If we mistake not, a revolution of this nature has been observable of late years in the criticism of this country, especially in that department of it which professes to regulate poetical taste, and assign the rewards of of poetical merit; and we shall, perhaps, experience the indulgence of our readers if we take the opportunity, afforded to us by a poem of great power, of explaining the nature of the occasional change alluded to, and of making a few remarks on the consequences resulting from it. Poetical criticism of old was a laborious task, undertaken with a due respect for the subject of its animadversions, yet sustained with a due sense of its own importance; it was open and responsible; professedly, perhaps ostentatiously, scientific; directed to its own proper objects, and confined within the limits of its own province. Ignorance in the individual might occasionally make this criticism contemptible, or malevolence render it odious; the witlings too of every age have claimed a prescriptive right of amusing themselves at the expense of the critics. But these were not axéa Béλn; they fell innocuous-and, on the whole, however its comparative rank in the scale of literature might vary at different periods, poetical criticism was, and could not fail to be, highly respectable. We have said that it was confined to the limits of its own proper province; if we were required to explain what we understand that to be, we should say that poetical criticism should properly be conversant with every thing in poetry, but that which flows exclusively and directly from the native power of the poet. It should watch over the correctness of language, metre, imagery, metaphor, the appropriateness of all these both to the character of the whole, and to the particular part under examination. This is one class of its duties; another, though less strictly so, is to observe upon the positive richness and variety of these ingredients, the force and glow of the language, the harmony and changing cadence of the versification, the perfection and grouping of the imagery, the number and vividness of the metaphors. Rising still higher, but still within the same limits, its duty is to consider the choice of the subject in many different points of view, the relation of the parts to each other, the unity of the whole; the conception, the sustainment, the contrast of the personages, the purity of the thoughts and the general moral effect of the poem. Our readers may perhaps smile at the terms confined,' and limits,' when they consider the arduous, and extensive province which we have assigned to the poetical critic; and we are aware that it might be hard for us to instance any single individual who had filled up with success the outline of duties here sketched. But it is not necessary for our argument that we should do so—it is enough if we have represented fairly the general system on which poetical criticism then proceeded, and the objects usually kept in view by it. The practice, at least of the present day, is very different-poetical criticism is no longer a laborious, or a responsible Y 4 task |