of our hearts crack. After our heads ache with thinking, it is fair to play the fool. The clowns were as proper an appendage to the gravity of our antique literature as fools and dwarfs were to the stately dignity of courts and noble houses in former days. Of all people, they have the best right to claim a total exemption from rules and rigid formality, who, when they have anything of importance to do, set about it with the greatest earnestness and perseverance, and are generally grave and sober to a proverb. Swift, who wrote more idle or nonsense verses than any man, was the severest of moralists; and his feelings and observations morbidly acute. (From the Same.) COLERIDGE It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge, and there is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I have. "Is there here any dear friend of Cæsar? To him I say, that Brutus's love to Cæsar was no less than his." But no matter. His Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to "conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and heedless of past, present, and to come." His tragedies (for he has written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christabel, that which contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth Alas! they had been friends in youth, Doth work like madness in the brain : Each spake words of high disdain But neither ever found another They stood aloof, the scars remaining, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, The marks of that which once hath been. It might seem insidious if I were to praise his ode entitled "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," as an effusion of high poetical enthusiasm and strong political feeling. His "Sonnet to Schiller" conveys a fine compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the state of youthful enthusiasm in which he composed it trash. Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die, If through the shudd'ring midnight I had sent That in no after moment aught less vast Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood, Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! His "Conciones ad Populum," "Watchman," etc. are dreary Of his "Friend" I have spoken the truth elsewhere. But I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything. There is only one thing he could learn from me in return, but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time [1798] had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and, raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and neverending succession, like the steps of Jacob's Ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder. And shall I, who heard him then, listen Not I!. . . That spell is broken; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more; but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound. to him now? (From English Poets.) JOHN GALT [John Galt was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, in 1779. He abandoned a post in the Custom House to embark upon a literary career in London, but was soon obliged by ill health to travel in the south of Europe and the Levant, where he came into contact with Byron and his friends. In 1826 he received an appointment in Canada, where in a short time he lost all his money, and whence he was obliged to return home. In the course of this unsettled and extremely chequered life, he produced a great mass of literary work of various degrees of merit; nor did his industry slacken until he died-a broken-down and disappointed man-in 1839.] GALT was possessed from youth of that turn for literature which is not hastily to be accounted spurious or unworthy because, unhappily, its earliest and most obvious manifestation is an invincible repugnance to professional or mercantile pursuits. How genuine and how strong this predisposition to letters was in his case needs no laboured demonstration. His youthful performances, indeed, are the merest trifling, while those of his last years are best veiled in a kindly oblivion. But three or four masterpieces of his middle life proclaim their author's genius as distinctly as they indicate the narrow compass within which it was confined. No writer was ever less versatile than Galt. Nothing could be more tedious than his pictures of polite society; while the very hair's breadth by which the Omen falls short of success, supplies the best possible proof of the limitations of his art. He touched many themes; he adorned only one. In that particular department, however, the life and manners of the Scottish lower and lowermiddle classes,-Galt must be allowed to have achieved an artistic triumph. He had a fund of observation; he was intimately conversant with the daily existence and the modes of thought and speech of the people he portrayed; and he was endowed with an insight into and a comprehension of the national character in certain ranks of life which Sir Walter Scott has not surpassed. To these high qualifications he added a literary gift which enabled VOL. V N him to select, to arrange, and to elicit the type from the individual with unerring instinct. The Ayrshire Legatees, the Steamboat, and the Entail contain a hundred happy touches; they are inferior to the Annals of the Parish, a work distinguished no less by admirable judgment and self-restraint than by an absolute fidelity to nature; and the Annals in turn must yield to the Provost, in which the progress of a "merchant" in a Scottish provincial town to the highest municipal office, and his conduct therein, are described with a grasp of character and a dry, though essentially sympathetic, humour, which can scarce be overestimated. Let it be reckoned also to Galt's credit that he entirely eschewed that cheap and gushing pathos which is peculiarly apt to intrude in tales drawn from humble Scottish life. Much of his dialogue is necessarily couched in the broad Scottish vernacular, which he employs with great vigour, purity, and freedom; while the scheme of many of his stories renders it no less imperative that the narrative portion should be strongly tinctured with the Scottish idiom. The result is a style so appropriate to the matter, and so racy as to be, upon the whole, eminently pleasing, if at times somewhat quaint and homely. When he attempted to write striking and elaborate English he generally failed; but so much trouble has evidently been spent upon making the vocabulary of the Omen choice and its style impressive, and so nearly, as has been indicated, is the author rewarded by the attainment of his end, that an extract from that work is here appended. J. H. MILLAR. |