Page images
PDF
EPUB

or save the throne?" I have been anxiously considering," said that beneficent monarch, when informed of his sentence of death, "whether, during the whole course of my reign, I have done any thing to my people with which I should now reproach myself; and I solemnly declare, when about to appear at the judgment-seat of God, that I have not: that I have never wished any thing but their happiness."* And it is in the lifetime of the generation who have witnessed his execution, that the House of Peers is now called upon to plunge into the fatal career of innovation. "In the time of the civil war in England," continues the same author," we find it stated, that in the year 1646, the majorities of the Lords and Commons differed from each other upon almost every political topic; and it was only by the reluctant and ungracious yielding of the former, that business was able to proceed." What was the consequence? We turn to another page of the same History, and we find, that, on the 6th February, 1649, it was voted, that the House of Peers is useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished. "The misery and disturbances which followed these dissensions in the different branches of the legislature, are well known to all; the iron rule of Cromwell, the merciless Restoration, the tyranny and folly of the Stuart brothers." In these remarks historic truth has prevailed over party ambition. It was in consequence of the ungracious yielding” of the Lords that the House of Peers was abolished, the sovereign beheaded, and the iron rule of Cromwell established. The democratic party acquired such vigour, and so immensely increased in strength from this great victory, that, thenceforward, they became irresistible.-Let their successors hear the warning voice, and not imitate the example which brought such fatal consequences upon their forefathers.

ungra

Is it said, that it was the " cious yielding" of the Peers which produced these disastrous consequences, and that very different results would have attended their

timely submission? Here, again, history comes in to complete the lesson of experience. The French nobility tried the system of " gracious" concession; at the desire of their sovereign they yielded the great question of voting together, or in separate chambers; in one night they surrendered all their privileges-they relinquished, without a struggle, their titles of honour. The force of concession could no farther go; and in return, the throne was overturned, the aristocracy destroyed; and they were treated with a degree of seve rity to which the proscription of the Long Parliament appears to be an act of mercy.

The author of the Friendly Advice declares, that if the Reform Bill be resisted, the Peers will be the first victims. Whether this will be the case or not is discussed in another article in this Number; but experience warrants the melancholy presage, that if it is carried, the leaders of the movement will be the first to suffer from its effects. Within a few months after Neckar, the leader of the reforming ministry of France, had been recalled by the popular voice to the helm of affairs, and traversed the kingdom in all but regal procession, he was exiled, proscribed, and ruined, by the Assembly which he had first installed in popular sovereignty. Lafayette was the next object of popular execration, and his life saved only by voluntary exile; the illustrious Bailly, the next victim of democratic revenge. Within three years after Reform had been commenced amidst unanimous transports in France, every one of its early leaders had perished on the scaffold, or been driven, after their fortunes had utterly perished, into distant lands.May Heaven avert such scenes of disaster from this kingdom! but if they should occur, we shall at least have the consolation of reflecting that we have warned the authors of the measure we deplore of its consequences to themselves and their country; and incessantly presented the lessons of historic experience as the mirror of future fate.

Friendly Advice, p. 30.

* Lacretelle. Parliamentary Reform and the French Revolution, No. VII.

SOTHEBY'S HOMER.

CRITIQUE III.

We have the highest respect for Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Dr Hugh had so much taste and talent, that his mind bordered on genius. It may be said to have lived in the debateable land between the two great kingdoms of Reason and Imagination. Not that we mean to say the Doctor was in any mood a poet; but in many a mood he loved poetry, and saw and felt its beauties. It spoke to something within him, which was not mere intelligence. In short, Nature had not gifted him with Imagination active, but of Imagination passive she had given Hugh a considerable share; and thus, though it was impossible for him to originate the poetical, it was easy for him to appreciate it when set before him by the makers. A pure delight seems to have touched his heart, in contemplating the creations of genius, in listening to the inspiration of those on whom heaven had bestowed "the vision and the faculty divine." The Professor doth sometimes prose, it must be confessed. "wearisome exceedingly" but that in some measure was his vocation; and the heaviest of all vehicles is perhaps, in print, a Lecture. It was his bounden duty to be as plain as a pike-staff, perspicuous as an icicle; and rare would have been his felicity had he escaped the "timmer-tune" of the one, and the frigidity of the other, in his very elegant and useful prelections. Cowper, in one of his letters, commends Blair's good sense, but speaks most contemptuously of his utter destitution of all original power either of thought or feeling; but there the author of the Task was too severe, for compare him with the best critics going or gone, and he will appear far from barren. His manner is somewhat cold, but there is often much warmth in the matter -and let us say it at once, he had, in his way, enthusiasm. In private life Blair was a man of a constitution of character by no means unimpas

sioned; his human sensibilities were tender and acute; with finer moral, or higher religious emotions, no man was ever more familiar; and with these and other endowments, we take leave to think that he was entitled and qualified to expatiate, ex cathedra, nay, without offence, even now and then to prose and preach by the hour-glass, as if from the very pulpit, on epic poetry and poets, yea, even on Homer.

Mr Wordsworth has been pleased to say, that the soil of Scotland is peculiarly adapted by Nature for the growth of that weed, called the Critic. He instances David Hume and Adam Smith. David certainly was somewhat spoiled by an over addiction to French liqueurs; and he has indited some rare nonsense about Shakspeare. Adam, too, for poetry had a Parisian palate; and cared little for Percy's Reliques. It seems he once said that the author of the ballad of "Clym of the Cleugh," could not have been a gentleman. For this sentiment, he of the Excursion has called the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments a weed. If he be, then, to use an expression which Wordsworth has borrowed from Spenser, 'tis "a weed of glorious feature." We agree with Adam Smith in believing that the ancient balladmonger was no gentleman. But we must not "cry mew" to him on that account; for ancient balladmongers are not expected to be gentlemen; and they may write admirably of deer-stalking, of deer-shooting, and deer-stealing, though in the rule of manners they have not anticipated Chesterfield. We found fault with Mr Wordsworth for having suffered his spite towards one of its productions, the Edinburgh Review, to vitiate his judgment of the whole soil of Scotland-and to commit himself before the whole world by declaring people to be worthless and ugly weeds, who are valuable and useful flowers. David and Adam are Perennials—or, say rather,"

Immortals. Both the one and the other is

"like a tree that grows
Near planted by a river,
Which in its season yield its fruit,
And its leaf fadeth never.

So is William Wordsworth-and justifiably would he despise the person who, pitying perhaps poor Alice Fell, without seeing any thing particularly poetical or pathetic in her old or new duffle cloak, should, forgetful of all his glories, call the author of that feeble failure, a weed. True enough, he is there commonplace as a docken by the way-side; but elsewhere rare as amaranth, which only grows in heaven.

The truth seems to be, that the soil of Scotland is most happily adapted for the cultivation of philosophical criticism. There was old Kames, though flawed and cracked, a diamond almost of the first water. Hold up his Elements between your eye and the firmament, and you see the blue and the clouds. To speak sensibly, he was the very first person produced by this island of ours, entitled to the character of a philosophical enquirer into the principles of poetical composition. He is the father of such criticism in this country-the Scottish-not the IrishStagyrite. He is ours-let the English shew their Aristotle. That his blunders are as plentiful as blackberries, is most true; but that they are so is neither wonder nor pity;-for so are Burke's;-yet is his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, juvenile as it is, full of truth and wisdom. Change the image; and fling Kames's Elements of Criticism into the fanners of Wordsworth's wrath; and after the air has been darkened for a while with chaff, the barn-floor will be like a granary rich in heaps of the finest white wheat, which, baked into bolted bread, is tasteful and nutritive sustenance even for a Lake poet. By much criticism, sincerely or affectedly philosophical, has the genius of Shakspeare been lately belaboured, by true men and by pretenders-from Coleridge and Lamb, to Hazlitt and Barry Cornwall. But, after all, with the exception of some glorious things said by the Ancient Mariner and Elia, little new has been added, of much worth, to the

Essays of Professor Richardson, a forgotten work, of which a few copies have been saved by thieves from the moths. There, too, is Alison's delightful book on Taste, in which the Doctrine of Association is stated with the precision of the Philosopher, and illustrated with the prodigality of the Poet. Compare with it Payne Knight's Analytical Enquiry, and from feasting on the juicy heart of an orange, you are starving on its shrivelled skin. Of the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's Magazine,—mayhap the least said is soonest mended; but surely it may be permitted us to say this much for Francis Jeffrey, and Christopher North, that the one set agoing all the reviews, and the other all the magazines, which now periodically, that is perpetually, illumine the world; and if the Quarterly and its train have eclipsed, or should eclipse, the Blue and Yellow, and the Metropolitan and its train take the shine out of Her of the Olive, let it be remembered with grateful admiration what those planets once were; and never for one moment be forgotten the illustrious fact, that Scotland has still to herself been true; for that certain new-risen Scottish stars have outshone certain old ones; that-again to change the image-the Tweed has lent its light and music to the Thames, and made it, at once, a radiant and a sonorous river.

As to German philosophical criticism, almost all that we know of it is in Lessing, Wieland, Goethe, and the Schlegels. We understand on good authority, that of Carlisle, Moir, and Weir, that there are at least seven wise men in that land of lumber, and we understand on still better, our own, that there are at least seventy sumphs, who, were the Thames or the Rhine set on fire by us, would speedily extinguish it. But of the above said heroes, the two first, like Hercules, conquer the bulls they take by the horns; of Wilhelm Meister on Shakspeare, our friends aforesaid have expressed their reverence; but that, we hope, need not hinder us from hinting our contempt; and as for the "bletherin' brithers," as the Shepherd most characteristically called the Schlegels, they are indeed boys for darkening the

daylight and extinguishing the moon and stars. So, let us return from these few modest remarks on the former schools of Philosophical Criticism to where we set out from, namely, the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, with Dr Hugh Blair sitting in it decorously, and lecturing on Epic Poetry, particularly on Homer, and more particularly on the Iliad. The Doctor doth thus dissert on the opening of the Iliad.

The opening of the Iliad possesses none of that sort of dignity, which a modern looks for in an Epic Poem. It turns on no higher subject, than the quarrel of two chieftains about a female slave. The priest of Apollo beseeches Agamemnon to restore his daughter, who, in the plunder of a city, had fallen to Agamemnon's share of booty. He refuses. Apollo, at the prayer of his priest, sends a plague into the Grecian camp. The augur, when consulted, declares, that there is no way of appeasing Apollo, but by restoring the daughter of his priest. Agamemnon is enraged at the augur; professes that he likes this slave better than his wife Clytemnestra; but since he must restore her, in order to save the army, insists to have another in her place; and pitches upon Briseis the slave of Achilles. Achilles, as was to be expected, kindles into rage at this demand; reproaches him for his rapacity and insolence, and, after giving him many hard names, solemnly swears, that, if he is to be thus treated by the general, he will withdraw his troops, and assist the Grecians no more against the Trojans. He withdraws accordingly. His mother, the goddess Thetis, interests Jupiter in his cause; who, to avenge the wrong which Achilles had suffered, takes part against the Greeks, and suffers them to fall into great and long distress; until Achilles is pacified, and reconciliation brought about between him and Aga

memnon."

The Doctor has delivered his dictum] that the opening of the Iliad possesses none of that sort of dignity which a modern looks for in an Epic poem. It turns, quoth he, contemptuously, on no higher subject than the quarrel of two chieftains 'about a female slave. Now we wish the worthy Doctor had told us what.

is the sort of dignity which a modern looks for in an Epic poem-and that he had furnished us with a few specimens. The Doctor is not orthodox here he is a heretic-and were he to be brought to trial before the General Assembly of the Critical Kirk, his gown would, we fear, be taken from his shoulders, and himself left to become the head of a sect which assuredly, unlike some others, would not include any considerable quern of womenfolk. What higher subject of quarrel between two chieftains would Dr Blair have suggested, than a beautiful woman? That Briseis was so an exquisite creature-is proved by the simple fact of her having been the choice of Achilles. The City-Sacker, from a gorgeous band, culled that one Flower, who filled his tent with "the bloom of young desire, and purple light of love." The son of Thetis tells us that he loved her as his own wife. Nay, she was his wife-he had married her, just as if he had been in Scotland, by declaring that they two were one flesh, in presence of Patroclus, and then making a long honey-moon of it in the innermost heart of the tent. True, Briseis was a slave, but how could she help that circumstance, and was it not the merest trifle in that age? For hundreds of miles round, while Achilles Poliorcetes was before Troy, there was not a king's daughter who in a day might not be a slave. Ovid, we believe, or some other liar, says, that Briseis was a widow, and that Achilles slew her husband when he ravaged Lyrnessus. But she never was a widow in her life, till that fatal flight of the arrow of Paris. Till Achilles made her his own, she was a virgin princess.

But say that Briseis was, in matterof-fact, simply a "Female Slave." She was not a maid of all work. Her arms were not red, nor her hands horny; her ankles were not like bedposts; huggers she wore not, nor yet bauchles. Her sandals so suited her soles, and her soles her sandals, that her feet glided o'er the ground like sunbeams, as bright and as silent, and the greensward grew greener beneath the gentle pressure. Her legs were like lilies. So were her arms and hands-her shoulders, neck, and bosom; and had the Doctor

but once looked on her, he would have forgot his clerical dignity, and in place of calling her a female slave," have sworn, though a divine, by some harmless oath, that she was an angel. “A rose," Shakspeare says, "by any other name would smell as sweet." True, men call her the Queen of Flowers. And she is so. But were all the disloyal world to join in naming her the Slave of Weeds, still would she be sole sovereign of her own breathing and blushing floral kingdom. We defy humanity to discrown or dethrone her-for she is queen by divine right, and holds, by a heavenly tenure, of the sun, on condition merely of presenting him with a few dewdrops every dawn, during the months she loves best to illumine with her regal lustre. Just so was it with her whom Dr Hugh Blair chose to call “ female slave." She was free as a fawn on the hill-as a nightingale in the grove -as a dove in the air-a bright bird of beauty, that loved to nestle in the storm-laid bosom of the destroyer. Achilles was the slave. captived the invincible-hung chains round his neck, which to strive to break would have been the vainest madness-the arrow of Paris, it is fabled, smote the only vulnerable spot of the hero-his heel, and slew him-but Briseis assailed him with the archery of her eyes, and the winged wounds went to the very core of his heart, inflicting daily a thousand deaths, alternating with life-fits that in their bliss alone deserved the name of being. And what signifies it to Achilles, that Dr Blair persists, like a Presbyterian as he is, in calling his Briseis a female slave ? The Professor should have said a seraph.

Briseis

The Doctor forgot that the loss of a mistress is sadly felt by a general on foreign service. Had Agamemnon been at Argos, he might not-though there is no saying-have been so savage on the forced relinquishment of a Chryseis. Had Achilles been in Peleus' palace in Pthia, he might have better borne the want of a Briseis. In the piping times of peace, people's passions are not so impetuous as in the trumpeting times of war. Dr Blair admits that Agamemnon loved Chryseis better than Clytemnestra; indeed we have the

king of men's own word for it; and Achilles, who was the soul of truth and honour, tells us that he adored his Briseis, who, though in childhood betrothed to one of her own princes, fell into his arms a virgin, and that on his return to Pthia, he intended to make her his queen. Alas! such was not his fate! He chose death with glory, rather than life with love. And as for Agamemnon, he indeed returned to Argos; but if those Tragic Tales be true that shook the stage with terror under the genius of Eschylus, better for the king of men had he too died before Troy; for the adulterous and murderous matron slew him, even like a bull, with an axe before the domestic altar. Oh! that bloody bath! As for his lovely and delicious leman, the uncredited prophetess, the longhaired Cassandra, Clytemnestra killed her too, smiting her on the broad white forehead, with the same edge that had drank the gore of Agamemnon. But ere long came the avenger -and beneath the sacred sword of her own son, the murderess "stooped her adulterous head as low as death." Then from the infernal shades arose the Furies to dog the flying feet of the distracted parricide. But at last the god of light and the goddess of wisdom stretched the celestial shield of their pity over Orestes, and at their divine bidding, the snaky sisters, abandoning their victim restored to reason and peace, thenceforth Furies no more! all over Greece were called Eumenides!

But let us for a moment make the violent supposition-that Briseis was a black-a downright and indisputable negro. Jove, we shall suppose, made Achilles a present of her, on his return from one of his twelve days' visits to the blameless Ethiopians. What then? Although Thetis had white feet, that is no reason in the world against her son's being partial to black ones; for surely a man is not bound to love in his mistress what he admires in his mother. Neither is there any accounting for taste- nobody dreams of denying that apophthegm. As for blubberlips, we cannot say that we ever felt any irresistible inclination to taste them; yet a negress's lips are rosy, and her teeth lilies. And therefore,

« PreviousContinue »