And of these the only translated words are those printed in italics; while, on the other hand, the words so printed in our extract from Lord Macaulay, which give most of its force and beauty to the stanza, are entirely his. It is quite clear, therefore, that, by him, the dictum of Roscommon, that "tis much safer to leave out than add," was entirely disregarded; for he freely did both. It was one of the qualities of his mind. Whether as translator or critic, he seized upon the subject before him as its master. From what he calls "big bad" volumes, he gave us those biographies of Clive and Warren Hastings which it is almost needless to name, and would be mere repetition to praise. The translation of Filicaia is in the same spirit: he is "no longer his interpreter," but his better self; giving to the lofty feelings of the Italian a vigour and beauty of his own. In a short translation from the French of Arnault there is the same freedom. The lines De ta tige détachée, Pauvre feuille desséchée, Où vas-tu ? Je vais où le vent me mène, Macaulay renders thus : Thou poor leaf, so sere and frail, Wheresoe'er the wind is blowing, Amongst the other pieces in verse which are now collected, there is a noble ballad on the Battle of Naseby; and a very graceful love-song— though the latter is somewhat injured in its effect by the equivocal use of the term "Madonna." It is not our intention, at present, to notice the remaining contents of these volumes. They are carefully and judiciously edited; and comprise, in addition to the biographies reprinted from the Encyclopædia Britannica, some contributions to the Edinburgh Review, which were omitted, for reasons stated in the preface, in the former collection of his Essays; and also his earlier contributions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. One or two of them are certainly unworthy of his name. Of the "Dialogue between Milton and Cowley," we are told that "he spoke, many years after its publication, as that one of his works which he remembered with most satisfaction," and it justifies his own estimate; but such pieces as the "Account of the Great Lawsuit"-though it sometimes slightly reminds us of Swift, and more especially the "Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem," might have been omitted with advantage. There are few of the republished biographies of greater value than his masterly estimate of the character of Pitt, to whose high qualities he seems always to have done justice with an enthusiasm scarcely reconcilable with his feelings as a Whig. In one of his earliest attempts in verse, he calls upon "Britain" to Remember the man who, in sorrow and danger, Preserved her to conquer, and saved her to save; and, nearly half a century later, his feelings were unchanged. Taken altogether-both for their own value, and as illustrating his mental development-these volumes are an acceptable addition to his works; and we may regard them as "stones cast upon the cairn of a great and lamented chief." LUCILE.* WERE it not impertinent to speculate on this author's motive in assuming a pseudonym-for such an assumption on his part, we assume on ours-we should conjecture it to be, an honourable desire of doing no discredit to a family name so distinguished in the world of letters. Let me be recognised as a not unworthy representative of that name, we can suppose him to have said to himself, before I write it in full on any titlepage of mine. Let me approve myself strong enough and skilled enough to bend my father's bow, before I go abroad under his patronymic.Some such motive we may conjecture to have been the meaning of "Owen Meredith" on the title-page of "Clytemnestra." But then we are at fault. For that volume contained poems, "The Earl's Return" for instance, that rendered any further masquing superfluous. The next volume, "The Wanderer," more than redeemed the pledge given by the first. And now comes a third, richer in a variety of ways, than either of its forerunners-though not without the faults incidental to, if not characteristic of, so affluent a poetic nature-and still the author writes himself Owen Meredith, and thereby, at this stage of an advanced progress, when widely and unequivocally recognised as a true minstrel, seems to prove our conjecture futile and beside the mark. But what business have we with any man's exquisite reasons? We are committing, in effect, the very sin we hinted at on hypothesis-that of impertinence, though (let us hope) in the grammatical only, not the conventional sense of that term. At the first glimpse of "Lucile" we fancied a second copy of "Aurora Leigh" had arrived by mistake-the outward semblance, the "getting *By Owen Meredith, Author of "The Wanderer," "Clytemnestra," &c London: Chapman and Hall. 1860. up," was so very like. Nor did the first glance into the interior efface the resemblance. Like Mrs. Browning's latter-day epic, "Lucile" is a modern metrical romance, or rather a versified novel, and deals freely and forcibly with the current issues of social and individual life. It is even more easy-going and jaunty in its colloquial slap-dash than the other. This effect is rendered the more palpable by the metre which is selected, not too happily, we think, for so long a work. Twelve cantos of canter, without once subsiding into a trot, much less into a walking pace, are and must be trying to the reader, whatever they may have been to the writer. Canter is surely a fair description of the movement of such lines as— Now in May Fair, of course-in the fair month of May*— Fly about like white butterflies-gay little motes In his Dedication "To My Father," the writer speaks of himself as abandoning in this poem those forms of verse with which he had most familiarised his thoughts, and as endeavouring to follow a path on which he could discover no footprints before him, either to guide or to warn. The enterprising novelty of the essay may have been one of its main attractions to the adventurer; but we are bound to confess that, admirably as this type of versification embodies certain of his moods, and harmoniously as it expresses some of his conceptions and reflections, it is felt at times to be exceptionable and not i' the vein-out of time, as a musician would say ;-out of place; occasionally, too, out of breath. At the same time we cannot but own the surprising mastery the poet displays over the plastic potentialities of this metre-the fluent, flexible uses to which he turns it, from grave to gay, from lively to severe-whether in gorgeous description of sunset among the mountains, or trivial record of boudoir badinage-whether in some impassioned outburst of irrepressible anguish, or some sarcastic photograph of matter-of-fact manhood. Such essential variety under the constraints of a form so apparently monotonous, it is a rare triumph to have achieved. Into the story of Lucile we do not propose to enter. Suffice it here to *By the way, our author has a fondness for this sort of play upon words, which constitutes, we may say, one of his minor mannerisms. Thus Matilda is described (p. 22) "As airy and blithe as a blithe bird in air." So again this couplet, at p. 32, of one who "Resigning the power he lack'd power to support, Or again, p. 166, of the bliss "Which his science divine seem'd divinely to miss." Or, p. 211, of one blest "With a pretty young wife, and a pretty full purse." † Another instance of the jeux-de-mots just indicated. intimate the conclusion, which bears witness to the nature of her mission, the mission of genius on earth-viz., To uplift, Purify, and confirm by its own gracious gift, The world, in despite of the world's dull endeavours And to soothe, and to solace, to help and to heal The sick world that leans on her. This was Lucile. (p. 359.) Her portrait is painted, under several aspects, in colours of the richest,— see pp. 13, 45, 69, 81, &c. That of the English beauty, Miss Darcy, is equally artistic and graceful in its way. Lord Alfred and the Duc de Luvois are, each of them, elaborate studies of character, and portrayed with not less delicacy of detail than breadth of outline. Sir Ridley Mac Nab is a bit of ugly real life, a hardly caricatured contemporary of Sir John Dean Paul and the "religious world" that banks with him. We have incidental sketches, too, such as these of a lady aggressively fat, and so on. THE STATE OF LUNACY.* To expound the "state of lunacy," would appear, at the first blush, a task of no small magnitude. But when we come to understand that by such an exposition it is not meant to unfold the new phases of mental aberration induced by the evolution of time and conditions of humanity, or by the incidents of the day, as exemplified in High Church ecstatics and Low Church obstinacy, in budget and treaty vagaries, in TurcoRussian antipathies, Hungarian aspirations, Austrian malversations, Schleswig-Holstein perplexities, Italian frenzies and Napoleonic enigmas, but simply to treat of the existing state of the provisions for the insane, and the enactments of the Legislature for the protection of those so sorely afflicted, we feel that the field of inquiry becomes more limited, and the chances of arriving at a few sane conclusions is very much increased. There are many difficulties in the way of arriving at a correct knowledge of the number of insane in this our country alone, and which combine to render official returns imperfect. The number of unreported "private" lunatics, criminal lunatics in prison, and the fact that pauper lunatics are not all enumerated in official returns, all contribute to these difficulties, but taking all these into estimation, Dr. Arlidge says the figures stood thus on the 1st of January, 1858: Dr. Arlidge estimates the annual gross increase of lunatics at 1600 per annum; hence, on the 1st of January, 1859, there would be 41,157, and on the 1st of January of the present year some 42,757, or nigh 42,000 -in round numbers, for many must die off-persons of unsound mind, or to employ the legal phraseology, lunatics and idiots. "It perhaps should be explained," Dr. Arlidge adds, " and more particularly with reference to those detained in workhouses, or supported by their parishes at their own houses, that, besides idiots, or those congenitally deficient, a very large proportion of them is composed of weak and imbecile folk, who would, in olden times, have been considered and called "fools," and not lunatics, and been let mix with their fellow-men, serve as their sport or their dupes, and exhibit their hatred and revenge by malicious mischief and fiendish cruelty. But, thanks to modern civilisation and benevolence, these poor creatures are rightly looked upon as proper objects for the supervision, tending, and kindness of those whom Providence has favoured with a higher degree of intelligence. This act of philanthropy, effected at a great cost, elevates at the same time very materially the ratio of insane persons to the population, and thereby gives cause of alarm at the prevalence of mental disorder, and makes our sanitary statistics contrast *On the State of Lunacy, and the Legal Provision for the Insane, with Observations on the Construction and Organisation of Asylums. By John T. Arlidge, M.B. (Lond.), &c. John Churchill. |