creased poverty; not that willing poverty which weans the soul from earth, and fixes the desires on high-not that poverty which was heretofore to be found in mountain villages, in solitary dwellings midway up the bleak fell-side, where one green speck, one garden plot, a hive of bees, and a few sheep, would keep a family content-not that poverty which is the nurse of temperance and thoughtful piety; but squalid, ever-murmuring poverty, cooped in mephitic dens and sunless alleys-hopeless, purposeless, wasteful in the midst of wanta poverty which dwarfs and disfeatures body and soul; makes the capacities, and even the acquirements of intellect, useless and pernicious and multiplies a race of men without the virtues which beasts oft-times display-without fidelity, gratitude, or natural affection.

'The moral degradation of this caste may not be greater in England than elsewhere, but their physical sufferings are more constant than in the southern climates, and their tendency to increase much stronger than in the northern latitudes. But has machinery occasioned the existence or growth (?) of this class? Certainly not; for it has always existed since society assumed its present shape, and is to be found in countries like Spain and Naples, where pride and indolence are too powerful even for the desire of wealth to overcome.

But the artificial wealth which manufactures have assisted to pro-. duce has generated or aggregated a factitious population, dependent for employment and subsistence on a state of things exceedingly and incalculably precarious, and seldom able to practise, more than one department of a trade in which labour is minutely divided; a population naturally improvident in prosperity and impatient in distress, whom the first interruption of trade converts into paupers, and whom a continance of bad times is sure to fix in that permanent pauperism from which there is no redemption. Times may mend, but man, once prostrate, never recovers his upright posture-once a vagabond and always a vagabond-once accustomed to eat the bread of idleness, the operative seldom takes pains to procure employment; and having been paid something for doing nothing, thinks ever after that he is paid too little for toil, and seizes every pretext to throw up his work again. Character has little influence on a man whom the world considers, and teaches to consider himself, but as a portion of a mass. To be sensible of character, man must feel himself a responsible individual; aud to individualize the human being, not only must the reflective powers be evoked and disciplined by education, but there must be property, or profession, or political privilege, or something equivalent, a certain sphere of free-agency, to make the man revere himself as man, and respect the opinions of his fellow-men. Now it is the tendency of wealth to increase the number of those who have no property but the strength or skill which they must sell to the highest bidder who, either by labour or without labour, must live upon the property of others-and who, having no permanent mooring, are liable by every wind of circumstance to slip their cables and drift away with the idle sea-weed and the rotting wrecks of long-past tempests.

tempests. Thus, to vary the metaphor, the sediment of the commonwealth is augmented with continual fresh depositions, till the stream of society is nigh choked up, and our gallant vessels stranded on the flats and shallows. Without metaphor-so many of the people drop into the mob, that the mob is like to be too many for the people, and wealth itself to be swallowed up by the poverty itself has begotten!'p. 477.

We exceedingly regret that our limits do not permit us to bestow that particular notice on the lives of Mason and Congreve which they deserve. In these lives, Mr. Hartley Coleridge has poured forth the treasures of his mind on poetical and more especially on dramatic criticism.

Among the peculiar difficulties of dramatic composition,' says the author, in commencing a criticism on Mason's Elfrida,'' what is called the opening of the plot is one of the most formidable; and I know very few plays in which it has been skilfully surmounted. But this difficulty is materially augmented, if the unities of place and time are to be kept inviolate; for, in that case, it is impossible to represent a series of actions from their commencement: the play must begin just before the crisis, and the auditor must be put in possession of the previous occurrences as soon as possible; for if they be left in obscurity till they are naturally developed by the incidents and passions of the action itself, half the play will pass over before any one knows what is going forward, or where is the scene, or who are the dramatis persona. In written or printed plays, to be sure, we may be informed of these particulars by lists of characters, stage-directions, &c.; but no play can be regarded as a legitimate work of art which would not be intelligible in representation. The ancient dramas, so long as the genuine Greek tragedy flourished, were, with few exceptions, taken from the storehouse of mythology, which was familiar to every Greek from his childhood; and consequently the Athenian audiences were never at a loss to understand the subject of a new production. But this, though it was a great convenience, did not exonerate the poet from his duty; he was not to take it for granted that his story was known, but was to make his plot unfold itself. The chorus was of great use in this business, their odes consisting for the most part of references to the past and forebodings of the future. Prophecies and oracles to be fulfilled, old crimes to be expiated, mysterious circumstances to be cleared up, a fearful future involved in a fearful past, were the main ingredients in the choral strains, in which nothing is told-everything is assumed or hinted at, in accordance with the religious nature of Greek tragedy. But as some more straightforward exposition was deemed necessary in many instances, Euripides in particular had recourse to the very inartificial expedient of a retrospective soliloquy, sometimes spoken by a ghost, in which the history was brought down to the point at which it was convenient that the scene should open. This is but a clumsy device; but perhaps it is better than occupying the first act

with tedious narrative in which Prologue plays dialogue with Dummy; and it avoids the worst of all critical faults, that of tediousness. Such as it is, Mason has adopted it in his Elfrida, without an attempt to disguise its manifest absurdity.'-p. 417.

We have put a few lines in this passage in italics, as involving in our judgment a very valuable hint on the theory of Greek tragedy. Not less truth of moral discernment is contained in the author's remarks on Evelina's speech to the Druids, in Caractacus. 6 I know it well,

Yet must I still distrust the elder brother;

For while he talks (and much the flatterer talks),
His brother's silent carriage gives disproof

Of all his boast; indeed I marked it well,' &c.

Upon which Mr. Hartley Coleridge remarks :

This is beautifully true to nature. Men are deceived in their judgments of others by a thousand causes,-by their hopes, their. ambition, their vanity, their antipathies, their likes and dislikes, their party feelings, their nationality, but, above all, by their presumptuous reliance on the ratiocinative understanding, their disregard to presentiments and unaccountable impressions, and their vain attempts to reduce every thing to rule and measure. Women, on the other hand, if they be very women, are seldom deceived, except by love, compassion, or religious sympathy, by the latter too often deplorably; but then it is not because their better angel neglects to give warning, but because they are persuaded to make a merit of disregarding his admonitions. The craftiest Iago cannot win the good opinion of a true woman, unless he approach her as a lover, an unfortunate, or a reli-. gious confidant. Be it, however, remembered that this superior discernment in character is merely a female instinct, arising from a more delicate sensibility, a finer tact, a clearer intuition, and a natural abhorrence of every appearance of evil. It is a sense which only belongs to the innocent, and is quite distinct from the tact of experience. If, therefore, ladies without experience attempt to judge, to draw conclusions from premises, and give a reason for their sentiments, there is nothing in their sex to preserve them from error.'p. 438.

In the author's general estimate of Mason's poetry we upon the whole agree; though we cannot bring ourselves to rate the particular passages quoted in the life so highly as Mr. H. Coleridge is inclined to do. But the criticism on Congreve is, we think, excellent, both from its subtilty and its moderation. Speaking of The Way of the World,' he says,—

'That very polish, that diligent selection and considerate collocation of words--that tight-lacing of sentences into symmetry--that exquisite propriety of each part and particle of the whole-which make "The Way of the World" so perfect a model of acuminated satire,

detract

detract more from scenic illusion than they add to histrionic effect. The dialogue of this play is no more akin to actual conversation than the quick step of an opera-dancer to the haste of pursuit or terror. No actor could give it the unpremeditated air of common speech. But there is another and more serious obstacle to the success of "The Way of the World" as an acting play. It has no moral interest. There is no one person in the dramatis personæ for whom it is possible to care. Vice may be, and too often has been, made interesting; but cold-hearted, unprincipled villany never can. The conduct of every character is so thoroughly and so equally contemptible, that however you suspend the moral codes of judgment, you cannot sympathise in the success, or exult in the defeat, of any.'—p. 688.

เ

And Congreve is summed up in these words:

From a rapid survey of his life and character, he seems to have been one of those indifferent children of the earth whom the world cannot hate; who are neither too good nor too bad for the present state of existence, and who may fairly expect their portion here. The darkest at least the most enduring-stain on his memory is the immorality of his writings; but this was the vice of the time, and his comedies are considerably more decorous than those of his predecessors. They are too cold to be mischievous; they keep the brain in too incessant action to allow the passions to kindle. For those who search into the powers of intellect, the combinations of thought which may be produced by volition, the plays of Congreve may form a profitable study. But their time is fled-on the stage they will be received no more; and, of the devotees of light reading, such as could read them without disgust, would probably peruse them with little pleasure.'-p. 693.

The author ought to have borne more steadily in his mind the very early period of life at which Congreve wrote his comedies; but upon the whole, we can truly say we have not for a long time been more delighted or instructed by any essays on such subjects, than by these two Lives of Mason and Congreve. Everything, indeed, said in this work is said with an individual feeling; the force and freshness of a single and somewhat peculiar man of genius is thrown around the commonplaces of literature; and in the few particulars in which we are unable to agree with him, we recognize some unimportant circumstance of temperament or locality as the cause of what we consider the error. 'The principal defect or fault of these Essays, as pieces of biography, is precisely that which, however at once ludicrous and disgusting in the writings of small men, is never very disagreeable to the thoughtful reader of a work of real genius-we mean the frequent appearance of the author himself, with his own principles, and modes of thinking and feeling, in the midst of the narrative. There is accordingly observable in these Lives an occasional want of fusion;

fusion; the text and the comment are sometimes disproportioned, if not out of place, and the story itself is forgotten during a longer digression than the ordinary reader likes, or the just rules of narrative allow. Still the material facts of each life are detailed with fidelity and spirit; and the particular subject of the biography is not only adequately drawn up, on the whole, but is illustrated by animated comparisons with many of his contemporaries.

Mr. Hartley Coleridge does not in this work run any race with Whitaker, or Prince, or Borlase. He is not over-learned in genealogies of no importance, nor expert in blazoning an extinct coat of arms, and neither describes the devolution of estates, nor sets forth the boundaries of manors. This book is sui generis--a most agreeable and instructive compound-addressed to readers of any corner of England, and yet possessing many points of particular interest for natives of the northern counties. So much original thought is very rarely found in any modern volume; and, differing as we do from what we perceive to be the author's inclinations in certain agitated questions of politics, we can nevertheless declare, that throughout the whole work we have met with no expression which did not bear testimony to the integrity of his principles, and to the generosity of his heart. Cum talis et tantus sit speramus nostrum futurum esse.

ART. III.-Visit to Iceland in the Summer of 1894. By John Barrow, Jun. Post 8vo. London. 1835.

A PERIOD of twenty years has now elapsed since we have received any report of what has been passing in that interesting island, which, though placed within a few days' voyage, by steam, of the remotest part of the coast of England, may be said to be what the Romans applied to us-toto ab orbe divisus; and we therefore welcome even such a brief account of a Visit to Iceland' as that which a very young author has just placed before the public. This island is not enrolled among the colonies of the British empire-as, for the mutual advantage of both, we once could have wished to have been the case, and our commercial intercourse has long ceased; but the manners of its inhabitants have always been contemplated with curiosity and gratification by English travellers; and it is particularly agreeable just at present to find ourselves, even for an hour, among a simple and unchanged people.

Mr. Barrow ascribes the first account given of this island, by an eye-witness, to a Frenchman, who published in the year 1670; but, in the English translation of Von Troil's Letters,' we find a catalogue of not less than one hundred and twenty books on Ice

land