plague, smote her first born from year to year. An evil phantom of glory was sent before her, only to lead her deeper into the desert. The final retribution came. That spectral and ominous shape of military fame sank into the earth; and the infidel strength, that had defied the living God, was driven back with protracted defeat and misery, with innumerable wounds streaming in succession upon her, step after step, stripped of armour and spoils, and renown and courage, till at last the corpse was flung into the grave. This was the dominion of the populace urged to its consummation. The noblest contrast of the prosperity of a religious and loyal people was to be found by its side. This appears to us not to be less powerful than true: as a contrast to the appalling picture, we are proud and happy to be able to present, by the same author, a glorious compendium of England's conduct during this convulsion. 66 England was the only nation, that, in the midst of universal overthrow, never suffered a signal casualty in arms. She went on, still protected. She had the blessing of the prophet; in the midst of her warfare, peace was within her walls, and plente ousness within her palaces.". She purchased her renown by no interruption of her native pursuits, and she did not draw back a single step in science, in accomplished literature, in noble discovery, in munificent charity, in the purity of her laws, in the sincerity of her established faith; while her walls were beleaguered with the warfare of the world, she held her gates open, day and night, to the exile and the fallen. Like an earthly providence, "she cared for all." In the very whirlwind of her power, she provided for the world's health-her fleets of war spread the Scriptures round the globe! To those who saw that time of the distress and perplexity of nations the universal polity, like a sea up turned by storms, men's hearts failing them for fear, the mighty of the earth calling to the caves and mountains to hide them ;England-stately and unshaken, standing in a towering and solitary splendour, which grew with the deepening of the storm, her hand stretched out unweariedly to save, and her serene eye fixed on heaven-might have looked less like a being that felt hourly exposed to the common convulsion and decay, than the minister and angel of a superior throne-a being beyond the touch of casualty, impassive and immortal. The triumphs of peace followed the triumphs of war. Her old rival was destined to receive a king only at her hands. The usurper of France was destined to be given up to her only, as her slave. She was yet to wear the noble crown of moral glory. She VOL. III. As the had abolished the slave trade. We will not apologize for giving rescue of Christians from an infidel captivity-these are exploits upon which both royalist and radical may look, and feel his country warm within him, as he be holds them. When all recollection of the war shall vanish, and the French Revolution shall no longer blot the page of freedom, or fright the memory of tyrants; such deeds as these shall associate themselves with our island throne, at once ennobling itself, and consecrating the ho mage of which it is the object. The poem opens with an apostrophe to the Carousel, and proceeds to a minute and very poetic descrip→ tion of the Louvre, then daily restoring to Europe the spoils of which it had deprived her. The Venetian horses have their due share of honour from the poet, and not undeservedly: perhaps, there was no one trophy of the war,-we might go farther-and say, not one dynasty which waged it, which had withstood so many revo lutions, and survived through such convulsions, as those far-famed steeds. Torn from Corinth by the Consul 2 S Mummius, they were transferred to Rome, which capital they graced for nearly five hundred years. They then went with Constantine to his new metropolis, and for eight hundred years more adorned Constantinople; from this latter city, they were by the Latins, in 1204, transferred to Venice, whence, after a sojournment of six hundred years, Napoleon carried them to Paris, and now Venice has again received them as her ancient property! We question much, whether even Bucephalus, himself has ever received the homage of so many potentates. It was Caligula, we believe, who threatened to make his horse a consul; but what was that dignity, compared to the rival love of kings, and emperors, and republicans! It would be a curious subject of speculation to discover what future chieftain shall next yoke them to his car of victory! Venice, however, is the only city which has had the honour hitherto of twice possessing them ; Back to the Adriatic queen have gone train. We could linger long with Mr. Croly, amid the "living minds," which breathed throughout the Louvre, and almost wish we could with him have witnessed, its just, perhaps, but melancholy dismember ment. Strange scene! of wanderers hasting to and fro, And soldiers on their posts parading slow, And the fix'd native with his livid glare, And woman with her ready burst of woe, And eager artists, scaffolded in air, Catching its pomps before that gorgeous wall is bare. We do not wonder at it, and are more than inclined to doubt the stern justice which disrobed that wall, and thereby for ever deprived art of an asylum for study, such as human ingenuity had never formed before. The world had never witnessed such a pantheon of genius— Corregio, Titian, Raphael, Angelo, Who made their age a wonder and despair To all the future might by their combination have inspired some youthful genius to a no ble rivalry. Those who have risen to eminence, almost in every profession, have generally had to struggle, at the commencement, with the res angustæ domi, and to such, the sight almost of any one of those masters is now out of the question. The loss to the world may be irreparable. Of course, we do not mean to doubt the justice of the reprisal ; but it was at best, a little peddling reprisal, and it disfigured much the spectacle of assembled Europe triumphing, as they said, in the cause of humanity and freedom, to see her mightiest potentates struggling, and almost squabbling, about their division of the booty. When Napoleon plundered, he made his spoliation subservient to the cause of intellect and art. When the Allies reclaimed the spoil, they thought of nothing, except a mercenary appropriation. But we hurry from this subject to one, which we doubt not, will be more agreeable to the reader, as well as to ourselves. We mean to the fine poetry, in which a kindred spirit is thus apostrophised. Resplendent Titian! What a host of thoughts, What memories of stars and midnight There lies the house of bondage, let it lie The ransom'd slave's gone forth—his freedom was to die. I have descended to the ancient vault, And held communion with the remnants What saw I then? I saw the velvet rot; A wreck of man; from which the reptile Scared by the light. Decaying slumberer, The thunders on thine ear unheard might roll! Is this pale ruin, the tomb, the temple of the soul! But the freed spirit's gone;-upon the floods. That wing not in the light of star or sun, This we conceive to be very finely imagined, and very finely expressed. But comments upon such passages are superfluous. The reader's heart must make its own comments upon subjects of this nature, and there is no heart, be it ever so insensible, by which they will not, at some time, make themselves felt; and few, be they ever so libertine, into which they can intrude, without advantage. The following two stanzas are in a different style, and give a very picturesque description of the motley military crowd, which, fatally for Paris, fulfilled the prophetic slang of her revolution; and, for the time, did indeed make her inhabitants, however unwillingly, citizens of the world. That crowd itself a wonder; half the world Seem'd to have sent it for some final deed. There gazed the deep brow'd Calmuck, that unfurl'd His flag by China's wall :-in wolf skin weed, Till the last debt is paid to bitter memory. There the green Russian, that across thy The lordly Briton, by whose lance was borne The GODLESS to the earth, no more to rise! Champion of man and heaven! the ran som'd world's his prize. These two or three last lines remind us of almost the only topic in these pages, on which we feel in clined to remonstrate with Mr. Croly; we allude to the incessant and rancorous abuse of Bonaparte. We can feel as proudly as any one, the signal and glorious triumph of our country; but we would not sully that triumph by any ungenerous denunciation of a prostrate adversary. But from this subject we turn with great pleasure to one upon which no Briton can differ from our poet, and which every Briton should be proud to see so represented. We allude to the following beautiful description of the virtues, afflictions, and funeral of George the Third. We earnestly recommend its universal perusal. After lamenting the misfortune which deprived the king of a personal participation in the triumphs of the alliance, he goes on It was in mercy! thou hast spared the blow, Worse than the worst that bruised our vic tor crest: Thou didst not see her beauty pale and low, Whose infancy was to thy bosom prest. She bloom❜d before thee, and thine age was blest. And it was spared the after pang that wrung An empire's heart, and she was laid to rest, Beneath the banner on thy turrets hung; Thou knew'st not that she slept, thy beautiful, thy young. Thou didst not stand and mourn beside the bed That held the dying partner of thy throne. Thou didst not bend a father's hoary head In hopeless sorrow o'er thy princely son. Servant of God! thy pilgrimage was done! And dreams of heaven were round thy lonely tower; Still lived to thee each loved and parted one; Till on thine eye-ball burst th' immortal hour, And the dead met thy gaze in angel light and power. We talk not of the parting rites-the pomp Our heart above our father's grave decays. Yet all was regal there; the silver trump, The proud procession through the Gothic maze, The silken banner, thousand torches blaze, Gilding the painted pane, and imaged stone; The chapel's deeper glow,-the cresset's rays, Still lives the vision of the kingly hall, All bending on a central pall the eye, A purer heart than now beneath that crown is cold. Raise we his monument! what giant pile HAZLITT'S TABLE TALK.* THIS work contains some of the most valuable of those treasures which its author has produced from his vast stores of feeling, and of thought. Admirable as his critical powers are, he is, perhaps, most felicitous when he discusses things rather than books-when he analyzes social manners, or fathoms the depths of the heart, or gives passionate sketches of the history of his own past being. We are acquainted with no other living writer, who can depict the intricacies of human character with so firm and masterly a hand -who can detect with so fine an intuition the essences of opinion and prejudice or follow with so unerring a skill the subtle windings of the deepest affections. The most distinguishing quality of Mr. Hazlitt's essays is that which makes them, in a great degree, creations. They have in them a body of feeling and of wisdom, rarely to be found in the works of a professed observer. They do not merely guide us in our estimate of the works of others, or unravel the subtleties of habit, or explain the mysteries of the heart; but they give us pieces of sentiment in themselves worthy of a high place in the chambers of memory. He clothes abstract speculations with human thoughts, hopes, and fears. He embodies the shadowy, and brings the distant home to the bosom. If he gives a character of a favorite book, he not merely analyzes its beauties, but makes us partakers of the first impression it left on his own heart, recalling some of the most precious moments of his existence, and engrafting them into our own. We, too, seem to have been stunned with him on the first perusal of the Robbers, to have luxuriated with John Buncle, to have shed over the Confessions of Rousseau delicious tears, to have "taken our ease at our inn," on the borders of Salisbury Plain, and "shaken hands with Signor Orlando Frescobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance we have." There is no other critic who thus makes his comments part of our selves for ever after, as is the poet's sweetest verse, or the novelist's most vivid fiction. His hearty manner of bringing before us the finest characters of romance, as Don Quixote, Parson Adams, Lovelace, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, has stamped them with a more assured reality than they had to us, before he wrote. There is the same substantiality, or even more, in his metaphysical speculations; and in his remarks on men and things. In the first, if he does not, like Rousseau, puzzle us amidst flowery paths, and thickets of freshest green; or, like Coleridge, bewilder us in golden mazes; still less does he, like the tribe of philosophers, lead us up a steep and stony ascent, to a cold eminence above the mists of error, and the warmth of humanity. He not only defines the dim verge of the horizon of our being, but fills all the foreground with busy hope, with stately recollection, with forms of old and undying love. He puts a heart into his abstrusest theories. No other writer mingles so much sturdiness with so much pathos; or makes us feel so well the strength of the most delicate affections. He estimates human nature in all its height, and breadth, and depth. He does not, with some who regard themselves as the only philanthropists, think of it as mighty, only in reference to certain glittering dreams of its future progress;-but takes into his account all it is and has been. With him it is not like the fairy bean-stalk, sprung up in a day from a little root, slender in its stem, and bearing out of sight at its top, an enchanted castle, but rooted far in the earth by innumerable fibres, and lifting up a noble trunk, the more venerable because it has outlasted "a thousand storms, a thousand winters." Of all Mr. Hazlitt's acknowledged works, that which is now before us is the best example of the hasty character we have ventured to sketch of his powers. It is, we think, the most substantial of any that he has * Table Talk, or Original Essays; 8vo. by William Hazlitt. Warren. London, 1821. |