THE NEW QUARTERLY QUARTERLY REVIEW. RETROSPECT OF THE LITERATURE OF THE QUARTER. THE literary parturitions of the last quarter have been extraordinarily fast and frequent, and we have to register as diversified an assemblage of subjects as ever fell to the lot of a biographer of races to record. The yield of history, biography, and poetry is unusually large, and, like the late harvest, not a little deceptive; a fact which, in some few cases, may be accounted for by the lightness of the soil, and the great area of common, if not rugged, surface traversed. From all the great names we have contributions. After an eight years' prolonged and somewhat abnormal gestation, sadly piquing conjectural old gentlemen, and provoking the most Joblike of printers to a very unchristian extent, Mr. Macaulay stops the boy no longer. To the hypothetical miles of type his sixteen hundred pages have consumed the number of roods and acres of earth this instalment of his history, if interred, would render unprofitable-how many workers at case, folders, stitchers, binders, packers, porters, draymen, and drays the progress of his work, up to the present time, has employed, and other like meritorious calculations, we shall not add a single word, except so far as to hope that any torturing results founded thereon may not act as a complete discouragement to any future historian of England. Mr. Smith O'Brien, when an exile at the antipodes, as he has recently informed us, was deterred from writing a history of Ireland (and can we be too thank ful?) by the want of material, or what, now-adays, seems to be the same-the lack of that brilliant surmise wherein the function of an historian is smothered, and "nothing is, but what is not;" a lack which the accomplished member for Edinburgh most assuredly does not suffer, his long-looked-for pages being as splendid, as scenic, and as mirage-like as before. No doubt of their popularity, or of the single combats the author will have to fight against deputations of indignant Scotchmen, Irishmen, and clergymen. Presbyterian and Puseyite will be equally wrathful-the one doing battle on account of Glencoe, and the other advancing to the rescue of Bishop Patrick. If history be nothing but a series of tableaux vivants, a procession of gay, féte-like figures, wherein each member of the train, each garment, each acolyte must be portrayed with a minuteness and brilliancy of colour resembling Mr. Harding's festival of the Madonna; and not only that, but the whole suffused in an Italian translucency of sunshine, and made the medium of apotheosis for some imaginary hero, then goodbye to the continuity of historic event, to organic truth, and to the laws of visible fact. If we can project ourselves, our prejudices, our sympathies and aversions, apply them to some given period, wheel opposite events rapidly together as children wheel a chromatrope, we shall be contributing as greatly to the popular delight as Mr. Macaulay too often does in the pages before us. To track the low concord of truth amid the mazy discords of error; to discriminate it, as the magician did the footfall of Aladdin, among the multitudinous sounds and currents of a crowded city; to epitomize, select, omit, and transmute into as bright a whole as a dewdrop exhibits compared with a sun, is, if not quite all, yet not a small part, of the quality of veritable history. Tacitus and Thucydides have given us results in as compendious and as arid a way as Hallam. Is there to be no middle path between Livy and Polybius-between Hume and Hallam? Must Gibbon always be to us in history what the Germans call Jean Paul-our only one? Mr. Macaulay's history begins with the proclamation of William and Mary, 1689, (most heraldically described,) and ends with the peace of Ryswick-a rate of description which would commence the narrative of the American war in the twenty-fourth volume from this, or in Mr. Macaulay's hundred and fiftieth year. One of the most finished pictures in the work is the account of the siege of Derry. As an example of Mr. Macaulay's smart, disillusive style, take this delicious and Creswicklike tone,- —a peep into Kerry : : The mountains, the glens, the capes stretching far into the Atlantic, the crags on which the eagles build, the rivulets brawling down rocky passes, the lakes overhung by groves in which the wild deer find covert, attract every summer crowds of wanderers sated with the business and the pleasures of great cities. The beauties of that country are, indeed, too often hidden in the mist and rain which the west wind brings up from a boundless ocean. But, on the rare days when the sun shines out in all his glory, the landscape has a freshness and a warmth of colouring seldom found in our latitude. The myrtle loves the soil. The arbutus thrives better than even on the sunny shore of Calabria. The turf is of livelier hue than elsewhere; the hills glow with a richer purple; the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brighter green. But during the greater part of the seventeenth century this paradise was as little known to the civilized world as Spitzbergen or Greenland. If ever it was mentioned, it was mentioned as a horrible desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets, and precipices, where the she-wolf still littered, and where some half-naked savages, who could not speak a word of English, made themselves burrows in the mud, and lived on roots and sour milk. Over the impeccability of Dutch Will (in spite of his being, as a Yankee would say, "a whale at green peas), or the pleasant foibles of Mary her kakography, her mania for mottled-green china, and such other ancient gewgaws as many female connoisseurs still admire at Hampton Court-we care not to break a lance with Mr. Macaulay now. From the Prince of Orange, and arch-idol of the history, to Philip II., and Mr. Prescott's History of his Reign,* is as strange an alternation as passing from a Covent Garden morning pantomime performance, with all its magnificent gas-light effects, at once into the day-light, working-day world of calm, inexorable reality. The range of this delightful book is panoramic, and, in picturesque detail, in swift fleeting inci * London, Bentley. 2 Vols. dent, and in patient and wise discrimination, is inferior to none of the author's popular works. Original as well as reliable in its materials, sedulously collected from all the great libraries of Europe, it exhibits the gloomy grandeur of the reign of Mary's consort with a vigour and freedom that remind us of Velasquez. Who could infer any dimness of vision in the following depiction of Mary's wedding ?— Some embarrassment occurred as to the person who should give the queen away,-a part of the ceremony not provided for. After a brief conference, it was removed by the Marquis of Winchester and the Earls of Pembroke and Derby, who took it on themselves to give her away in the name of the whole realm; at which the multitude raised a shout that made the old walls of the cathedral ring again. The marriage service was then concluded by the Bishop of Winchester. Philip and Mary resumed their seats, and mass was performed, when the bridegroom, rising, gave his consort the "kiss of peace," according to the custom of the time. The whole ceremony occupied nearly four hours. At the close of it, Philip, taking Mary by the hand, led her from the church. The royal couple were followed by the long train of prelates and nobles, and were preceded by the Earls of Pembroke and Derby, each bearing aloft a naked sword, the symbol of sovereignty. The effect of the spectacle was heightened by the various costumes of the two nations,-the richly-tinted dresses of the Spaniards, and the solid magnificence of the English and Flemings, mingling together in gay confusion. The glittering procession moved slowly on, to the blithe sounds of festal music, while the air was rent with the loyal acclamations of the populace, delighted, as usual, with the splendour of the pageant. 66 From Spain to Piedmont is not a wide excursion, though the detail that Signor Gallenga (quondam Mariotti), History of Piedmont," * expends on that now interesting country is by no means so exact or discriminating as the work of Mr. Prescott. Why, too, he should have tunnelled so far into hoar antiquity, we know not, actually beginning au commencement du monde, as the old French avocats used to do; in rejoinder to which, we feel inclined to adopt the judge's wit, and say, Pass au deluge. All that we care to know about Piedmont dates There is no lack of from Charles Albert. vigour, though too much diffuseness, however, in his portrait of the husband destined by Spanish Philip for Elizabeth-Emanuel Philibert, king of Piedmont : His stature somewhat below the middle size, the broad shoulders, the naturally delicate frame inured to great hardships by early military training, the cold grey eye, the arched brow, the slightly protruding nether lip, the fair curly hair, the short thick beard, not streaked with silver in mature age, the small round the nether limbs somewhat bent outwardly, "all' Erhead-the " Ironhead "-all is known to us, even to colina," as the Italians have it-a blemish which he turned to good account, since "no man ever had a more firm or elegant seat on the saddle." We are equally acquainted with his habits-regular, punctual; By Antonio Gallenga, 3 Vols. London, Chapman and Hall. Among the last class, how shall we sufficiently THE BATTLE OF LIMERICK. Who look with veneration, And Ireland's desolation onsaycingly deplore; Attend to the thransaction upon Shannon shore. When William, Duke of Schumbug, his strict and sparing distribution of time, the account A tyrant and a humbug, cannon and with thunder on our city bore, To rispict the galliant Irish upon Shannon shore. No city in this nation As Limerick prodigious, A chief of ancient line, Reprisints this darling Limerick, this ten years or more. To see him on the flure, woods and mountains of Bresse, where he was almost And the ships up to the windies of the Shannon shore. alone in at the death, having distanced the one hundred aud fifty men of his retinue, and where, on putting up for the evening at a farm-house, he would snatch the hatchet from the good man who was splitting wood for his supper, and bustle about till the repast was ready; then, hardly allowing himself five minutes at table, he again sallied forth into the field, and beguiled the hours by shooting at a target, or by other manly games, till late in the night, to the great wonder and dismay of the sleek, long robed Venetian who had scampered That land of Revolution, that grows the tricolor; after him in the chase, and who, with all the rest of the company, was now hardly able to stand. The clear atmosphere of Italy, its sunny, drowsy landscape, and what can be seen from And thrimble at the Cicero from Shannon shore! And to welcome his returrn We invited him to tay on the Shannon shore. the Pisgah-like hill of Superna, are prettily 'Tis he will sheathe that battle-axe in Saxon gore; enough reflected in the book. And Mitchil of Belfast, We bade to our repast, To dthrink a dish of coffee on the Shannon shore. Convaniently to hould We tuck the opportunity of Tim Doolan's store; The "Island Empire," (by the author of "Blondelle") is a compendium, in the best manner of historical travel, of Elba, its chalybeate resources and pleasantly-diversified to pography. Cheerful insight, too, we obtain into its classic customs, its boisterous festivities, its Cyclopean mirth; how frowning We made the loviest tay-room upon Shannon shore. Corydons don the shifts of their Galateas, all too flowing and dissipated behind. rollicking and eastern abandon there is over the catching of the tunny is all noted with an accuracy and a picturesque humour that recall To Herodotus. What Dr. Liddell gives us the "History of Rome,"† from the earliest times to the Empire, and, collecting his details wisely, and in a scholarlike way, has falsified the old joke about historians of Rome, by living to finish the book. The rare and the high character of the author insure it a ready success, even beside its great merits in an educational point of view. The "Twould binifit your sowls To see the butthered rowls, sugar-tongs and sandwidges and craim galyore, And the muffins and the crumpets, And the bands of harps and thrumpets, celebrate the sworry upon Shannon shore. That Sure the Imperor of Bohay Would be proud to dthrink the tay Misthress Biddy Rooney for O'Brine did pour; Mitchil And, since the days of Strongbow, There never was such Congodthrank six quarts of it-by Shannon shore. But Clarndon and Corry Connellan beheld this sworry With rage and imulation in their black hearts' core; To interrupt the muffins, And the fragrance of the Congo on the Shannon shore. Of poetry we have no lack-imaginative, fantastical, and humorous, of which Thackeray's "Miscellanies"‡ unite many specimens. But juice a one could hear him, for a sudden roar * London, Bosworth. + London, Murray. London, Bradbury and Evans. O'Brine began to spake, Of a ragamuffin rout And frighten the propriety of Shannon shore. As Smith O'Brine harrangued, Tim Doolan's doors and windies down they tore; Purshuing of their shindies upon Shannon shore. With throwing of brickbats, These ruffin democrats themselves did lower; Cabbage-stalks, and wooden legs, They flung among the patriots of Shannon shore. O the girls began to scrame, And upset the milk and crame; Kneel undisturb'd, fair Saint! I will not enter there, But suffer me to pace Like outcast spirits who wait While Mr. Thackeray is reiterating his suave And the honourable gintlemin, they cursed and swore: manly English and honest, impartial criticisms And Mitchil of Belfast, 'Twas he that looked aghast, When they roasted him in effigy by Shannon shore. O the lovely tay was spilt [shore. "This conduct would disgrace any blackamore;" Was to cut his own stick from the Shannon shore. And he rushed upon his foes, [roar; But they hit him on the nose by the Shannon shore. Then the Futt and the Dthragoons With their music playing chunes, down upon us bore; And they bate the rattatoo, But the Peelers came in view, And ended the shaloo on the Shannon shore. to American ears, it is right pleasant to find the earlier and more fugitive foundlings of his brain, his ballads and stories, gathered into little cheerful volumes, very seasonable and welcome, and Christmas-like. We have not space to do more than glance line like a snake in the otter's mouth-or at Mr. Browning's tortuous versification—each the metrical feud which Mr. Longfellow's Hiawatha" has raised as to whether it is Finnish or trochaic in its origin, Mr. Freiligrath having set that at rest by the relation of his readings in Scandinavian literature with Longfellow at Bonn; nor shall we dilate upon the mystic-or, more properly, the mistake of the author of "Festus," as ungrammatical as it is turgid; nor the atra-bilious character of "Within and Without," by Mr. Macdonald, regretting that we can only point to the purer poetry of Allingham, twice poetical from Rosetti and Miller's illustrations. The wide field of biography we can but skim, calling attention to the "Life of Goethe," + Or, in the first category, this bit of true poetic upon which we have an elaborate article; or the tenderness: AT THE CHURCH GATE, And near the sacred gate, The Minster bell tolls out And noise and humming: She 's coming, she's coming! My lady comes at last, Timid, and stepping fast, And hastening hither, With modest eyes downcast; She comes-she's here-she's past May Heaven go with her! very careful and original "History of Fielding;"; or the Rousseau-like "Autobiography of a Beggar Boy;" or the surprising English and clever evolution of " Antonio Benoni." || "Little Dorritt," too, most attractive in its commencement, and " Zaidee," reprinted from "Blackwood," very minute and home-like in its depiction, we must postpone, merely yielding our warm and cordial laudation to the ability of the respective authors. For the many novels and works of a miscellaneous character published during the past quarter we refer our readers, with confidence, to the ensuing pages. |