discovery, on approaching the bay, that their pilot had previously visited that part of the island but once, and that visit was by land -then, with the rapidity of shifting a scene in a pantomime, the sky became shrouded in dense clouds, the atmosphere thick with mist, the rain fell, and the wind blew, and our heroes were compelled to flee from the approach to the shore which contained these basaltic caverns.

In their voyage back to Reikiavik the sea was so high that the yacht dipped her jib-boom under water with a force which snapped it asunder, its height, when the vessel was on an even heel or in still water, being reckoned as not less than thirty feet from the surface. The oldest seaman in the vessel was sea-sick, and remarked in a half angry tone, that he had been upwards of twelve years in the king's service, and had never before been troubled with such a complaint a complaint, however, to which Nelson himself was subject even to the close of his arduous life.

This failure was a grievous disappointment to our young author, who appears to have been most anxious, after seeing the Geysers, to visit the volcanic mountain and extraordinary caverns of Stappen. With a becoming modesty he observes—

'But though I had to sustain a great and mortifying disappointment in being obliged to desist from any further attempt to land, the extreme kindness and liberality of Sir John Stanley, since my return, have, in so far as valuable information and correct description go, more than compensated any personal gratification that I might have received, and enabled me to give a much better account of this place than I could hope to have acquired by any exertion of my own.'-p. 259.

The whole account of Sir John Stanley's visit to Stappen, and his ascent, with his companions, of the Snaefell Yokul, which seems to be a much more remarkable feature than even Hecla, is highly interesting, and we are only sorry that we have not space to dwell longer on it. The narrative will be read with interest, and the more so as no description of this adventurous ascent had before appeared in print. Mr. Barrow himself says,—

"I am not aware that it has ever been noticed by geologists, that basaltic rocks and basaltic pillars, commencing first at Fairhead and the Giants' Causeway, the most splendid examples that perhaps exist, continue to make their appearance in various places as we advance to the northward, on or near to the same meridian line, passing through the western islands of Scotland, exhibiting a magnificent display on the Island of Staffa, and from thence showing themselves in more or less perfection and beauty along the Hebrides, and as far as the Feroe Islands. Advancing still farther, with a little inclination to the westward, they are found in profusion in almost every part of Iceland, intermingled with every species of volcanic production, the whole of

this immense island evidently owing its existence to the agency of subterranean fire. Nor does the basaltic formation cease at Iceland, but, continuing northerly with a small inclination to the eastward, it breaks out again on the small island of Jan Meyen, which is also wholly of volcanic origin, consisting chiefly of the Mountain of Beerenberg, 6870 feet high; and on the sides of which are two craters, one of them, as stated by Mr. Scoresby, being six or seven hundred yards in diameter; and the belt between the mountain and the sea is composed of cinders, slags, scoriæ, and trap rocks, striking through black sand and vesicular basalt, the last of which, high up on the side of the mountain, exhibits columnar masses.

'Here, then, we have the plain and undeniable evidence of subterranean or sub-marine fire, exerting its influence under the sea, almost in a direct line, to the extent of 16 degrees of latitude, or more than 1100 statute miles. If we are to suppose that one and the same efficient cause has been exerted in heaving up this extended line of igneous formations, from Fairhead to Jan Meyen, we may form some vague notion how deep-seated the fiery focus must be to impart its force, perhaps through numerous apertures, in a line of so great an extent, and nearly in the same direction. It may probably be considered the more remarkable, that no indication whatever is found of volcanic fire on the coast-line of Old Greenland, close to the westward of the lastmentioned island, and also to Iceland, nor on that of Norway on the opposite side, nor on the islands of Spitzbergen; on these places all is granite, porphyry, gneiss, mica-slate, clay-slate, lime, marble, and sandstone.'-pp. 275-277.

We cannot draw our present article to a close without some allusion to the pains which Mr. Barrow appears to have taken in obtaining answers to a series of questions for the information of a member of the Statistical Society of London. The chapter containing this information is valuable. It states the gross amount of the population to be about 53,000—

This is but a scanty population for so extensive an island, whose surface is to that of Ireland as 1 to 11, or thereabouts; but, as I was assured, one-third part is the very least that could be assumed as wholly useless to the inhabitants. The centre of the island, being nothing but clusters of yokuls or snowy mountains, is said to be fully equal to that extent; so that the inhabited part cannot be reckoned at more than 25,000 square miles; and the population on each square mile will not exceed 2 persons. This fact alone will suffice to show to what inconveniences the inhabitants must be subject in such a country where there are no roads, and over which it is utterly impracticable to attempt to stir in the winter months while the snow is on the ground.'-p. 285.

The population of Iceland may be strictly divided into two classes, the fishing and the pastoral. The export of wool is considerable amounting of late years to from 3000 to 4000 Skippund.

This

This would give for the export of wool from 960,000 to 1,280,000 English pounds; but besides the raw wool, there are exported annually not less than 200,000 pairs of knitted stockings, and 300,000 mittens, or gloves without fingers. The Iceland sheep have remarkably fine fleeces of wool, which the farmers never shear, but in the spring of the year it is taken off whole, as if it were a skin that easily slips off." -pp. 288, 289.

'The number of sheep is about 500,000; heads of cattle, 36,000 to 40,000; horses, from 50,000 to 60,000. There being no wheelcarriages of any description on the island, there are no draught cattle.' -p. 291.

We regret that the shortness of the author's visit did not allow him to make the tour of the island, or to penetrate further towards the central mountains, which may yet be said to be a terra incognita. He has however done enough to entitle himself to a permanent place in the list of our enterprising countrymen, who have pursued their researches within recent times in Iceland;* and, we hope and believe, to stimulate fresh adventurers towards the same interesting region.

ART. IV.-Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke. By George Wingrove Cooke, Esq. In two volumes, 8vo. London. 1835.

MR.

R. COOKE sets out by observing that it is surprising that no tolerable history of Lord Bolingbroke's life has yet appeared.' We are sorry to say that the next biographer may begin with the same observation. Mr. Cooke's work, though more voluminous than the former lives, is quite as meagre, and, of course, being spun out to a greater length, much more tedious and unsatisfactory. We had thought it hardly possible that anything calling itself Memoirs of this extraordinary person could have been so dull, or that in days when the possessors of original papers are generally ready to open them to the inspection of the literary world, we should have two octavo volumes without, we believe, a single particle of matter which was not already-not merely in print, but-to be found in the commonest books. Nay, as far as we can discover, Mr. Cooke has not even attempted to seek for more secret or particular information, and we cannot but complain that he should have given his work the attractive title of 'Memoirs' when, in fact, it has as little of the distinctive character of what is generally called Memoirs as any biography we ever remember to have read. Its true designation would have * Sir Joseph Banks in 1770; Sir John Stanley, 1789; Dr. Hooker, 1809; Sir George Mackenzie, Dr. Holland, Dr. Bright, 1810; Mr. Henderson, 1814-15; Mr. Barrow, 1834.

been

been that which the recent French biographer, General Grimoard, has modestly and truly adopted, An Essay on the Life and Writ ings of Lord Bolingbroke—a critical undertaking for which Mr. Cooke may consider himself better qualified than the General, and which he may think is wanting to our literature, but which, assuredly, is a very different thing from what would be naturally expected from the Memoirs of Lord Bolingbroke.' We dare say that Mr. Cooke submitted, in the choice of his title-page, to the opinion of his publisher; but we should have thought that this very opinion might have opened his eyes to the fact, that the public do not want the crambe recocta of the Journals of Parliament, Mr. Coxe's lives of the Walpoles, and Bolingbroke's own pamphlets, though it would have received with great curiosity and interest a view of the secret springs of his public actions and of the interior and personal details of his private life. Mr. Cooke may perhaps say that he could not find any such materials, but we cannot discover that he looked for them; and at all events we think that, not having any new matter, he need not have taken the trouble of making a new book, and, above all, a new book of such size and pretensions.

But this is not our sole objection to Mr. Cooke. An historical writer may happen to have no original information, and to be therefore reduced to the necessity of compiling from other publications; yet he may still render very important and very valuable services to the subject he has undertaken by the selection and sifting of the various authorities,-the balancing of conflicting evidence, the detection of real and the explanation of apparent inconsistencies,-the induction of unavowed motives from acknowledged facts, and the general collocation and arrangement of the scattered materials into one lucid and harmonious sequence: these are the objects, and indeed we may say the duties of such an historian-but they are duties which Mr. Cooke does not seem to have thought of, and objects which assuredly he has not accomplished. Of five or six lives of Bolingbroke which are now before us, and upon the insufficiency of which Mr. Cooke grounds his undertaking, his own is, in our judgment, the most confused, and that which gives us the least distinct and satisfactory portrait of the man; he has dilated his scanty materials to a size that renders them indistinct, he has encumbered his narrative with so much idle, tedious, and disjointed surplusage that we honestly confess we have frequently, in order to understand what Mr. Cooke was about, been obliged to refer to the more succinct biographies which he mentions with so much contempt. This practice of stuffing out a work into double the size which the subject really requires, is one of the characteristics of the biographical literature of the day. If the sub

ject

ject be a poet, we are presented with striking passages from works which are already in every hand and in most memories; if a soldier, we have copious despatches from the London Gazette; if a statesman, voluminous extracts from the Parliamentary Journals and Debates; and whenever it happens that any of these sources fail, the requisite bulk of volume is attained by discursive criticisms, wide digressions, and extraneous speculations. Thus it is with Mr. Cooke. He not only interlards his meagre narrative with large quotations from Bolingbroke's best-known works, but he adds an appendix forming more than a third of his second octavo, and which contains, besides the articles of impeachment against Bolingbroke himself, extracted from the Journals of Parliament, no less than one hundred and thirty-nine pages of the proceedings in the case of LORD OXFORD, all copied from the same recondite source! This, we must say, is a downright fraud; but then how else to make two volumes out of the two pages of the article St. John' in the 'Biographia Britannica?'

But, besides Mr. Cooke's deficiency in original information, his superabundance of obsolete trash, and the disorder of his arrangement—we have still more serious objections to him even as a mere historical compiler; he seems neither to have understood the man nor the times he writes about, and although a large proportion of the work is occupied by his own observations and argumentations on well-known facts and publications, he seems strangely ignorant of the true causes of those facts, and the real spirit of those publications. He generally adopts au pied de la lettre all that has been written for or against Bolingbroke, and exercises a deal of verbose argument about alleged facts and opinions, when a more philosophical mind would have questioned, in many cases, the existence of the premises, and in all would have examined the truth of the evidence adduced before he took the trouble of arguing on its effects. Of this error his preface, and almost every other page, offer examples; for instance, we shall take the first that occurs-he says of his own qualifications for his task, that against any undue bias in favour of the political life of his hero he has been fortified, by having regarded it with the prepossessions of a Whig.'-p. 15. As if a Whig of modern times could have any prepossessions for the tenets of the Whigs' or against the tenets of the Tories of the reigns of Anne or George I.! We talk now, as they did then, of Whig and Tory, but the tenets of the two parties, as we had lately occasion to explain by an interesting extract from Lord Mahon *-have been so completely counter-changed (as the heralds express it) that a Whig of that day very much resembled a Tory of ours, and vice versa. Sup* Quarterly Review, vol. liii. P.

281.