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fernal agents, new worlds are created, adorned with choicest delicacies and fruits.

Great pommeloes, pomegranates, tufted pines,
Like Ceres, diamonded and rubied; more
Luscious than e'en the Lotophygians 'joyed,
Then for a dessert were placed
Ready, with unimagined luxuries,
Beside, things lavendered, candied quince,
Gourds, semilucent jellies, cinnamon
Creams, tinctured syrups, spiced dainties, and
Elixirs from strange kernels, possets sweet
To plenitude, and others wanting name.

Such was the luxurious diet of our first parents, while in their state of duty and innocence; but Eve one hot day, sitting by the side of a river, looked into it and said to Adam,

-O, cried she, if thus In this true glass so beautiful we look, What are we in reality?

She then held out the forbidden apple to Adam :

So Hamlet, royal Dane, once look'd, as then, Heart-struck, lost Adam-back he started. Oh! Eve, Eve, what hast thou done?

But while he is speaking, and Eve is looking like Serena when Sir Calapine was away, Lucifer comes forward, and then the poet, stimulated to wrath, bursts into an indignant denunciation. Oh! thou Judas! thou Falsest dissembler, Simon. O thou wolf, Fleshing a virgin deer! Gamilian! thou Burglar, thou robber, thou enticer, thou Despoiler, thou defiler, &c.

When the judgment of the deluge came, with the Gog and Magog who have long been inmates of Guildhall, there were many other families of giants on the carth, the race of whom are not so familiar.

nine thousand they Hideous their names as persons-Shaphryth, Oom, Frank Hellos, Scrematry, Adsch, Na, Troundell,

And Nashmardradid over all.

Around them played the megatherium, and other gigantic animals. They brayed, squeaked, yelled, and mow'd, and moped, and munned,

And other ictions odd to see and hear,
Never conceived.

The author excels in the very difficult art of introducing proper names into poetry with effect, an art in which his great predecessor Milton is supposed also to have been successful, but

not to the same extent; let us take the following example.

what's Demosthenes when stripped Of his high-sounding words? or he who wrote That orator and augur? who Calcas And Mopsus in his equal folly scorned? Nor Livy mourning o'er Lucretia, nor Sanconiatho, Lysias, Sallust, Quintius Curtius, Tacitus, Plutarch, Gellius, Juvenal, Nicander, or Lactantius, Xenophon, Thucydides, Apollodorus, Statius, nor yet Seneca, &c.

Again, in the examination of the fallen angels

--Affrac, Harec, Esoctrac, Shry, Fok,
Sub-powers confined like him, ten thousands-
varied

Like thought, with faces green and livid, eyes
No longer fading, and such horrid looks
As threatened a dethronement,-Ugoline
De Gherardeschi, Ruggieri starved,
With all his hapless sons, never such looks
Looked, nor the sacrilegious Fucci, when
Pursued by Cacus, &c.

But we most reluctantly quit our pleasing task-time wears away-we have given enough to excite the reader's appetite for more-we shall then only add, that the poem ends as it commenced, with an address to Queen Victoria, for which the least the Queen could do in return would be to confer on the author the honour of knighthood. We hope to see the title of

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Sir Thomas Hawkins" prefixed to the next edition; an honour well and nobly earned! witness the following address-" Crowned Queen!" most queens we presume not being crowned, as Queen Caroline, &c. Well! Crowned Queen! O let the living Muses tell, Victoria thy great name, Urania! stars Worn in thy diadem as bright adorn Augusta's! thou Calliope, who, when The lightning singed my auburn locks, to me Long life and honour pronounced, if I placed Her name above the sacrilegious reach Of time.-Tis done? now, goddess, at her feet Write thou in joy and gladness, all her plebs Killing fat beeves, and sheep, and eating flesh And drinking wine, and of her revenues Gold, silver reckoned, stones, jewels, and horse,

And chariots numberless ;-of finest flour,
Harts, fowls, her servants eating, every liege
Under his vine and fig tree.-
Victoria reigns! Victoria reigns! so write
Thereafter, that her hill is as the hill
Of Bashan, that her enemies on the head
Were wounded, and the tongues of dogs licke

up

Their blood-and grace upon thy pages pour. Her garments smell of myrrh and cassia,

Her clothes of wrought gold and needlework,
Most excellent, and many her desired
For her rare beauty; and oh! thou before
Invoked, Religion, thus our Diva bless
Perpetual at her side, short time devout
Thy neophyte yet claims, &c.

There are to be sure many passages in this poem we do not, after all our endeavours, understand, as

so in a dream

Feasted the Barmecide, these presently
Reaching sardonyxes like him awake;

and others but we are very willing to say of ourselves, in confession of our ignorance, as Socrates did of He.

raclitus, "What I do understand of him is so good, that what I do not I attribute to my own incapacity, and not to any defect in him;" perhaps, however, a running commentary, like that in the Delphin classics, and some Scholia, would be advisable in the edition meant for common use, while the aristocratic copies would remain as they are. There are eleven engravings by Mr. Martin accompanying the book, as regards which all we can say is, that he is all but equal to the poet.

1. Geology: introductory, descriptive, and practical. Part I. By David Thomas Ansted, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., Professor of Geology in King's College, London.-2. The Geologist's Text Book. By the same.-3. Geology as a Branch of Education. By the same.--To all who are turning their attention to the most important science of geology, whether with the earnestness bestowed in earlier life on a chosen pursuit, or with the later desire of knowing all they can of the history of this earthly home of their mortality, while they yet remain in it, the specimens before us of Professor Ansted's works justify us in saying, that if you want a teacher who will make you love his science, and feel happy in your advancement in it, you should avail yourselves of the services of Professor Ansted. His Text Book, (No. 2,) with its analytical index of contents, gives a clear synopsis of his science, and makes an excellent finder to his great geological telescope, (No. 1), which, as he says, "is intended to teach the science thoroughly." No. 3 is a pamphlet insisting on what one would hardly expect to hear gainsaid in these days of activity in mining, engineer. ing, and agriculture,-the advantages of geology as a branch of education; but it is hard to make John Bull understand any advantage of science but that of making money by it, though his own moral ele vation would he well earned by the cultvation of it. We like geology not the least because it leads to the natural history of recent life, and gives us light to fol. low it.

A History of British Fossil Mammalia and Birds. By Richard Owen, F.R.S., F.G.S. &c. Part I.-This is a work which we think from the specimen before us must be gladly welcomed by collectors

of fossils, as well as those who cultivate the natural history of recent animal life; and should be read by all those that question the soundness of the deductions of comparative anatomists, that they may see with what extreme caution they thread the clues of induction, and how trustworthy they must be in their main conclusions.

The Syntax of the Relative Pronoun and its Cognates. By Alfred Day, LL.D.The result of very much patient reading, and a work which must be acceptable to classical teachers.

The Theogony of the Hindoos; with their Philosophy and Cosmogony. By Count M. Björnstjerna.-A welcome contribution to the history of man, giving an account of the castes, holy books, and sciences, of that most early civilized nation, the Hindoos; with the rise of Brahmaism, and the wide-spread Buddhism, (holding 380 millions of souls,) which our author has followed into China, Japan, Ceylon, Thibet, and Tartary; and identified with the doctrines of the British Druids, and even, though less convincingly to us, with those of the Northern mythology. Our author calculates that the Vedas were written about 2500 years before Christ, and the Vedanta, an abstract of them, about 500 years later; and the early civilization of the Hindoos is shown by the code of laws called the Institutions of Menu, which, as our author observes, (p. 30,) prescribed orders respecting commerce, trade, and industry, which are still convenient, fixed a rate of interest for money lent, prescribed a law respecting bills of Exchange, and made mention of a representative paper coin, a thousand years before our æra. These were afterwards followed bythe Puranas, which inculcated

the doctrine of the incarnations (avatars). In treating of the theogony of the Hindoos our author has collected with their records of the Deluge those of several other nations, the Zend-people, the Chinese, the Chaldees, the Armenians, Greeks, and Scandinavians, affording us a welcome chain of evidence in corroboration of the Mosaic account of it. From an error of the translator, as we think, we have the warrior caste called Khetrys, instead of ch,hutrys or ch,hutrees, with ch soft, as we find their name written in Hindoostanee books.

An Essay on Aerial Navigation, pointing out modes of directing balloons. By Joseph MacSweeny, M.D.-Dr. MacSweeny here gives us a slight sketch of the history. of aerostation, and affords many acceptable hints for the direction of balloons, which he believes will in time be so well understood that they will become common vehicles of transit; and we are bound to say that, however unlikely it may seem now, we do not think it impossible, as we fancy the problem of aerostation may be enounced in this shape: :-" Given an animated machine (a bird for example) which is kept up in the air and directed through it by a will exerted on material instruments by mechanical laws, to construct another machine which shall be so kept up and directed in the air by the will of a man in it, so exerted on material instruments by mechanical laws:" and this is manifestly no more absurd, primá facie, than to make a boat that may be directed by material instruments (oars) with the mechanics of a swan's legs.

The subject would be well worth the attention Dr. MacSweeny has bestowed on it, if it were only for the sake of meteorology, (in which the British Association look for some help from it,) and the exploration of new countries, since, as he says, (p. 38,) "mountains, rivers and seas will not check the aeronaut; above the gloomy forest and entangled jungle he can glide. High above the pestilential swamp or burning sand, he can safely look on clouds of sand destructive to the traveller in the desert;" and, (p. 22,) forests, plains, and lakes appear to pass for his inspection as in a moving panorama, while he feels as if he were stationary;" and, (p. 87,) 66 no giddiness is felt in a balloon, such as is experienced in looking down from the top of a high building." Dr. MacSweeny says very truly, (p. 89,) "that men invent, but they are only humble instruments permitted at certain epochs to diffuse a portion of knowledge which emanates from supreme intelligence. Without the per

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mission of the Great Lord of the creation, man is not capable of forming a single idea." Inventions are only a series of successive attainments of blessings which the mind of man is constituted to reach under successive differences of circumstances, and when they are needed he is always quickened to reach them; so that "necessitas mater artium," is the true law of nature, though it shows us that highly civilized nations may not be more happy than ruder ones, since the inventions of the former are only the answers to successive necessities which the latter may not have felt; and, though a nation may be unhappy with an unanswered necessity, they are hardly better off with an answered one than without any such one at all. an old book, lying at our side, "The Pathway to Plantations," printed in 1624, its author, while recommending emigration, says, "wood fast decaies with us, that very want of it onely, within few yeers, is like to prove exceeding hurtfull to our land, and can be no way repaired, but by transplanting the people," little thinking that this necessity would be answered by the application of the steam-engine to the draining and working of our coal mines; and that two hundred years afterwards we should have, with a tenfold consumption of fuel, a tenfold supply of it: and to the question which some have put in our own time, What shall we do when the coal mines are exhausted? we may answer that God has in store in his great scheme of universal economy all that will be necessary for the happiness of man in all circumstances into which he will bring him; and if aerostation be in his hand for us he will give it to us in his good time.

The Natural History of Animals. By Thomas Rymer Jones, F.R.S., F.Z.S. Vol. I.-This most excellent work, which contains the substance of three courses of lectures delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and of which we shall be very glad to see another volume, has all the fascination of a lively conversation, with the soundness of a strictly systematic treatise; and on the subjects of this volume-the less obvious forms of animal life in the waters-must, we think, be a well-found oracle to young and old, and an excellent sea-side companion. It is illustrated by more than a hundred admirably clear and forcible woodcuts, and we think its author has begun at the right end of the series of animal forms, the lower ones, and taken the most intelligible classification yet conceived, that afforded by the modifications of the nervous system.

A Grammar of the Cree Language; with which is combined an Analysis of the Chippeway Dialect. By Joseph Howse, Esq. F.R.G.S.- Who is there among us that can follow Mr. Catlin in his wanderings among the red men, and can hear Mr. Howse, who lived among the Crees for twenty years, speak of them (p. xiv.) as a people for whom to his latest moments he will entertain feelings of grateful and affectionate regard, and refrain from asking, what they have done that their memorial should perish forever, and not feel disposed to inquire as a Saxon, not whether he is his brother's keeper, but whether he has not been his brother's destroyer? Mr. Howse deserves the best thanks of every philologist and ethnographist, and every lover of man, for giving us a perfect grammar of a language which, being

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more than classically regular," and still in the purity of its first structure, though built on different principles from those of the tongues of the old world, affords many clues to their formation; and for putting us in communion with the very soul of the high-minded, one-God-findng, and unjustly slighted Indian, before he is lost from the earth; as well as for having afforded the missionary desirable help in preaching him the Gospel of life. We heartily wish that some one would as effectually rescue for us the dying tongue of the Mexicans while a remnant of them remains.

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their catalogue, and touching also on other points brought against the Society.

Poems. The French in Rheinstadt, &c. By James Herbert.-We do not like the subject of the first poem, though the execution is not without merit, both in language and versification. Many of the smaller poems please us better, especially the sonnets, as ex. gr.

FLORENCE.

We paused upon the hill-we saw where lay
Fair Florence, 'neath the Apennines reclining
In her sweet valley-with the Arno twining
Among majestic piles its lustrous way.
The antique walls and hoary towers look'd gay,
The dome's huge pride ever in the sunlight
shining,

Above, around, seemed heaven and earth combining,

To deck this bright flower of the Tuscan sway
With richest tints of beauty in delight
We gazed, and thought what ages had gone by
Since first the Etruscan with sagacious eye
Planted the lily in that favoured site.
Long ages! and we breathed the genial air,
Nor marvelled she had grown so passing fair.

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF FLORENCE.

Is the land lovely? is the sky serene?
Not vainly Heaven its precious dew distils,
Plenty her golden cup not vainly fills;
For no dark spirits of ungrateful mien
Expand the wealth, the luxury of the scene.
A thousand villas look down from the bills,
With white walls glittering; the brave peasant

tills

His fields with joy; still in the woodlands green,

Where trelliced vines with richest clusters

swell,

Or fig tree spreads her verdurous arms around,
Ye hear the voice of mirth and music sound.
Oh! happy land! the Tuscan loves to dwell
In his own vineyard; and majestic power
Extends her smiles unto the humblest bower.

Maurice, the Elector of Saxony, an Historical Romance. By Mrs. Colquhoun, -These volumes are appropriately dedicated to the King of Saxony, who will be doubtless pleased both with the design of the work, to do honour to the heroes of of Germany, and with the execution. The plain proof of the merit of a work like this is in its power of keeping attention alive, interested in what is past, and anxiously expecting the future; this must be done by natural and well-drawn characters, and by a judicious disposition of incidents; by a narration that never flags, and by the liveliness of the dramatie dialogue. If this is a first production, it is highly creditable to the author, and holds out great promise of future excellence. We do not say, that if like staunch and 3 X

hungry critics we were to go step by step through the narrative, we could not find out many things we wished altered, and many omitted; but what work could bear the heat of a furnace like this? If the author has a vivid conception of her subject, if she can throw her imagination and mind into the characters she creates, if she is alive to what is beautiful and true in nature, if she can be forcible without exaggeration, and pathetic without weakness; if she will write from her own feelings, without seeking to imitate the style or copy the peculiarities, or aim at the excellencies, of other writers, she may proceed with confidence in her honourable purpose of presenting the forms of history through the glass of fiction. In the present work, the private and domestic parts of the story pleased us most, and, if our attention ever languished, it was, as it always does, in great company, and in the court and camp of the elector. We wished for more of the company of the miller and his daughter, and were not uninterested in the bold sketch of Recterstein, which reminds us of a similar cha. racter in the Promessi Sposi of Manzoni.

Diary of Travels in France and Spain, chiefly in the year 1844. By the Rev. Francis Trench. 2 vols.-This is a very pleasing and interesting work. It contains a great deal of information, conveyed in a simple and unpretending form. Without any attempt at fine writing-a fault very frequent with travellers, and which weakens the force of what they say-the author has given us a plain and unvarnished narrative of what he saw and heard, exactly as he saw and heard it, without any of those additions which are sure to deprive this species of composition of the character of genuineness and truth. Mr. Trench's principal object seems to have been, to examine into the religious condition of the population of the countries which he visited; and, as the result of his investigation, he has given us some very interesting information. He appears to have been received with courtesy and attention in his character of an English clergyman by the Roman Catholic prelates and clergy, as well as by the pastors of the reformed communion in France, into the statistics of the latter of which he has inquired with great diligence. But although this was the author's chief object, he has by no means neglected other points; on the contrary, throughout his pages will be found a great deal of information with regard to the customs, manners, and mode of life, the state of society, the natural scenery, and antiquities, of those districts which he visited. We ought not to omit noticing

one circumstance, which is particularly worthy of praise. When observing upon what he sees in other countries, the author never institutes injurious comparisons to the disadvantage of his native land, but on the contrary always reverts to the land of his birth with feelings of gratitude and affection. We wish his example may be more generally followed.

The Gitana; a Tale. 3 vols.-This is a beautiful work of fancy. Judging from the delicacy of its sentiments, and the elegance of its style, we should pronounce it to be the production of a female pen. Partaking in its structure a good deal of the poetical character, it contains scattered here and there passages possessing the very essence of poetry, and bearing marks of great talent and even genius. The Gitana herself is an exquisite delineation of female character; in the earlier stage of the story, where she is presented to the reader as a simple Gitana, and in the latter portion as well, where she appears as the child of high-born parents, surrounded with all the appliances of rank and station, the portraiture is in perfect and harmonious keeping; it would be difficult, indeed, to conceive anything more really touching and pathetic than the description of her last imterview with her lover. The only fault we have to find with the work is, that the plot is rather too full of painful and horrid interest.

As

Saint Etienne; a Talc of the First Revolution. By Miss Martin. 3 vols.-This is a tale of great interest, exhibiting considerable powers of description. The scene is laid in La Vendée, during the period of that noble and heroic struggle of the selfdevoted and loyal inhabitants of that memorable district, the records of which can never be read without calling forth feelings of intense and heartfelt sympathy. might be expected, the story abounds with incidents and adventures of striking and romantic character, which are described with much spirit and animation. We can. not, however, help noticing one circumstance in the work, which we consider as a decided defect; this is, the display of a species of wish to extenuate or to soften down the proceedings of the earlier revolutionary party.

The Parliaments of England, from 1st George I. to the Present Time. By Henry Stooks Smith, of Headingley, near Leeds. 21mo. We have before spoken of the labour and care bestowed upon this work. It is now complete in two small volumes, and is a very valuable historical record for biographical purposes, as well as for the

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