happily destitute of the one quality which might have enabled him to understand, as he never did, the spirit of human dealings, and would certainly have proved the best sedative for his overexcited sensibility. He had no humour. His sense of the cruelty which lies in the ridicule of an uncouth figure, an empty stomach, or a threadbare suit of clothes, would have sealed his eyes for ever to the infinite love and sympathy with humanity which alone can imagine a Peter Peebles or a Dominie Sampson. For he never seems to have felt or known that tenderness is more inseparable from humour, than from the finest sensibility with which poet was ever gifted. To sympathise with others is a lesson which the genuine humourist teaches better than any other preceptor. Sir Walter says very finely of the Vicar of Wakefield,' that we bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature. But far less gentle humourists than Goldsmith merit the same benediction. They reconcile us to human nature, because they teach us to understand it; and whether as a poet or a reformer, Shelley's capital defect was that he understood nothing so little. He sometimes shows us a radiant world of dazzling arms, and glorious eyes, and floating locks; sometimes a gloomy region of pale murderers, and lying ministers, and cruel priests; but in neither of these do we breathe the same atmosphere as that in which the human creatures of our actual earth live, and work, and have their being. His opinions accordingly are never applicable to the real concerns of living men. Such a mind may be gifted with the highest poetical genius, but it is evident that it differs as widely as possible from the all-comprehensive spirit of the genius essentially dramatic, and accordingly there is no better illustration of the views we have expressed than Shelley's tragedy of the 'Cenci.' Of this play Lady Shelley asserts that it comes nearer to Shakspeare than any other writer has approached since Shakspeare's time.' If this were merely a vague way of expressing admiration of the poet's genius, it might well be justified by appealing to the power with which the characters of Beatrice and her father seize upon our imagination, and the deep tragical effect of their appalling story. But when a dramatist is said to come near Shakspeare, it is implied, we presume, that he has presented his characters and handled his story in the same manner as Shakspeare would have done; and no criticism of the Cenci' could be more inaccurate. There are, indeed, many little touches throughout the poem which show a very careful study of Macbeth and King Lear. The scene where Beatrice and Lucrezia listen for Cenci's murder is an example. But But Shelley's poem does not contain the elements in which his own nature was deficient, and these are precisely the elements for which Shakspeare's plays are most remarkable. He could not represent the conflicting passions by which men's souls are agitated who commit great crimes, or who revenge them, for his own undivided mind had never been the scene of a struggle. Shakspeare in his most passionate characters never fails to show the complexity of the human mind. Shelley deals with nothing but the essential passion. Cenci is the personification of wickedness, and the poet has shown us no other aspect and no other attribute of his character. Beatrice is the personification merely of suffering and unutterable wrong. But it did not lie in Shelley's mind to depict any conflict of motives. Scruples and misgivings were all unknown to him, and therefore they are unknown to Beatrice. If this view of Shelley's character as a purely impulsive one be correct; if he acted throughout without restraint on the impulses of the heart; that heart must have been a noble one, unless the evidence of all his friends who loved him is absolutely worthless. But the good and the evil of his life were limited by his own disposition. If his impulse led him astray, he knew of no external law which demanded obedience in opposition to that. Therefore it was that when his affection for his wife had grown cold, or been displaced by passionate love for another, she was abandoned without mercy. He who has no fixed standard of morality can have no insight into the real nature of moral distinctions. This was conspicuously the case with Shelley. He is always confounding that which is right with that which is merely customary, and anathematising it accordingly. And he gravely permits himself to say of the most infamous of all crimes that it may be right or wrong according to circumstances. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism.' He did not see that, whatever the defiance of human opinion may be, the defiance of a moral law can never be either glorious or heroic, and that the general condemnation of mankind can hardly make it so. He thought it was noble for a man to brave the opinion of men, without pausing to ask himself whether that opinion was right or wrong. His own remarkable courage in exposing himself to invective was, perhaps, partly owing to this kind of oversight. It did not occur to him that the attacks of his antagonists might, by any possibility, be the honest expression of outraged morality and insulted faith. It was enough that they were a multitude and that he was alone. alone. The mere circumstance of being abused was in his eyes a testimony to his worth. This was why he called himself an atheist. I took up the word,' he said, as a knight took up a gauntlet.' 6 We must not leave the subject, however, without saying that this word is inapplicable to his later opinions. He soon became dissatisfied with the materialism which we have seen him expressing at Oxford, and which he erroneously attributed to Locke. It was this materialism which conducted him to atheism, by very intelligible stages, and it is not to be supposed that he retained the religious doctrine much longer than the philosophy on which it was founded. Even in Queen Mab' there are indications of the very different belief of which his later writings are full-a belief that, instead of annihilating Divinity, finds Divinity in everything. The peculiar modification of pantheism which he adopted is difficult to grasp, and we think it by no means necessary that we should try to explain it. It will be better, we think, to quote from 'Adonaïs,' one of the most intelligible, and certainly one of the most musical expressions of this faith: 'Peace, Peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep- "Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife He is made one with Nature: there is heard In darkness and in light, from herb and stone Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one spirit's plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there All new successions to the forms they wear, Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. The The one remains, the many change and pass, Until death tramples it to fragments.-Die If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seck, The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak!' This, as far as we can gather, was his final religious creed (if indeed we are justified in ascribing to him any serious convictions at all), and this plastic spirit is the nearest approach he seems to have attained to the idea of a personal God. Indeed, if we are at all right in what we have said hitherto, one path, at least, which leads from man to God, must necessarily have been closed to Shelley. It seemed a It seemed a melancholy thing to Shelley that men should hate their crimes, or repent of them; he could not understand the sacredness of law, or the beauty of obedience; and thus, when the idea of a Supreme Ruler presented itself to his mind, he could only think of him as an omnipotent tyrant, hostile to human liberty and human right, and rejoicing over the wickedness and suffering of mankind. It would be easy to prove this, but it would be still more painful; and no reader of Shelley's poetry can have overlooked the audacity with which this view is expressed. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to believe with Moore and De Quincey that he was in reality capable of loving that religion which he insanely hated. And we know that, though he saw no Divinity in its founder, he had come to understand that it was in Him that the spirit of love and self-sacrifice he thought so noble had found its highest development on earth. We may be permitted to believe that had he not been cut off so early, he might have advanced one step further, and have embraced the faith he rejected—the faith which ought to have transmuted his vague yearnings for the knowledge of a Central Power and an all-pervading Spirit, into knowledge and love of the Most High. ART, ART. II.-1. Reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Coal-Mines. 1859. 2. Our Coal and our Scenes around them. Coal-Pits: the People in them and the 3. The Coal-Fields of Great Britain: their History, Structure, . and Duration. By Edward Hull. 1861. 4. Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers. 1852-59. THE HERE are few of the principal elements of our commercial prosperity so little known, yet few so worthy of being universally known, as our coal-mines. Nearly seventeen millions of money represent the value of the coal raised every year at our pits' mouths. Twenty millions of money represent its mean annual value at the place of consumption, and the capital engaged and invested in our coal-mining trade (we say nothing of the value of the mines themselves) considerably exceeds twenty millions sterling. The amount of coal which we annually extract is about seventy millions of tons; indeed, it is doubtful whether this is not an under-estimate. The pecuniary results just given are based upon the estimate of 66,000,000 tons. Taking the calculation of a working collier (J. Ellwood, Moss Pit, near Whitehaven), we may state that, if 68,000,000 tons of coal were excavated from a mining gallery 6 feet high and 12 feet wide, the gallery would be no less than 5128 miles and 1090 yards in length. Or, should a pyramidal form be selected, this quantity would constitute a pyramid the square base of which would extend over 40 acres, and the height of which would be 3356 feet. There are grounds for estimating that the annual produce of the coal-fields of the world does not at present greatly exceed one hundred millions of tons, and therefore that our own country contributes more than three-fifths of the total of the world's coal-mining labour. If we divide the coal-yielding counties of Britain into four classes, so as to make nearly equal amounts of produce for each of the four, we find that Durham and Northumberland yield rather more every year than seven other counties, including Yorkshire and Derbyshire; more than another group of eight counties; and nearly as much as the whole collieries of North and South Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the annual yield of all the latter class being about seventeen million tons, and that of the two first-named northern counties about sixteen million tons. We shall proceed to speak of these counties as comprehending the Great Northern, or, as it is more commonly but less correctly termed, the Newcastle coal-field. |