MICHAEL. "Now I would rather be on some vast plain, moon, Or on a rock where the blown thunder comes Booming along the wind. My dreams are Giants with Angels, Death with Life, With Joy-even the Great One comes in terror To me, apparelled like the fiery storm. RAFFAELLE. who have no fire of their own, may be allowed to rake and puff among decayed cinders; but we deprecate And hear the wolves upbraiding the cold such ignoble employments for those who possess even a spark of inherent genius. True, they may not be able to set the Thames on fire; but, at all events, they can kindle a blaze sufficient on a wintry day to keep their audience from shivering. We regret, therefore, to find that Mr Procter, in his art-sketches, has been simply blowing a dead coal with a pair of dilapidated bellows, raising thereby a disagreeable dust without Thy fancy was begat i' the clouds. eliciting any perceptible warmth. Michael Angelo has two especial faults. In the first place, it is entirely devoid of meaning, for it tells no story, and is apparently written without any object; in the second place, the language put into the mouth of the great painter is at once puerile and bombastic, no more imbued with high aspiration and lofty thought than the howling of an ogre in a pantomime. If this should seem harsh criticism, let the reader peruse the following lines, being Michael's preliminary sketch of his picture of The Judgment" "Here shall be seen the bless'd, and there Sinners, whom diabolic strength shall hurl Dwarfs, devils, and hideous things, and Some who make sick the moon, and some who hide Their monstrous foreheads in a reptile's mask : MICHAEL. My soul Finds best communion with both ill and good. Some spirits there are, all earth, which In wine or laughter: But my nature seeks A mountain riven-a palace sacked-a town. tore Catania from its roots, and sent it down drowned: These are my dreams If such indeed were the nature of Buonarotti's dreams, it is easy to understand why he never married. No female constitution could have endured the loss of sleep occasioned by the snortings and groanings of the artist, whose slumbers were so that this scene may have been printed malignantly haunted! It is possible before now, but if so, we have no recollection of it; and certainly its reproduction will not tend to the increase of Mr Procter's fame. We are led, from his preface, to imagine that it was written many years ago; and if, during the interval, it was Thou dost bewitch my flesh allowed to rest in the obscurity of Pale Palsy, and crook'd Spasm, and bloated And Fear, made manifest, shall fill the wind 364 Barry Cornwall. verses, and marvel, like Jack Horner, in advanced age, at the excellence and promise of their boyhood. We have been very anxious to extract a plum, for the delectation of our readers, from Mr Procter's Christmas pie; but, alas! in this instance_we have only lighted upon a sloe. Undeterred by the failure of that attempt, we have again put in our thuinb; but, we regret to say, with not much better success. For Raffaelle, though different in his kind, is not a whit more attractive than Buonarotti, at least as he appears in the pages of our author. Indeed, of the two, we rather prefer Michael. The old representative of the Counts of Canosa, was, while he lived, undeniably a bit of a bully; and therefore his swaggering in verse cannot be characterised as altogether inappropriate. But the pure and spiritual style of Raffaelle has created in our minds such an association of ideas with the person of the artist, that we are really angry when we find him portrayed as a rake, a coxcomb, and a Cockney. Had Lillo composed his play of George Barnwell in blank verse, the portraiture of the amours of the erring apprentice with Milnwood could not have materially differed from those sketches which Mr Procter gives us of the billing and cooing of Raffaelle with his frail Fornarina. That young lady, as all the world knows, was the daughter of a Roman baker, for whose advent the great painter was wont to wait, after the manner described by the facetious Bon Gaultier, in his ballad of "Bursch Groggenburg : "Stared for hours and hours together, At the baker's door, Stood, in apron white and mealy, That beloved dame, Counting out the loaves so freely, Alfred Tennyson, though he can deal fitly on occasion with princesses, has very wisely not attempted to elevate either the daughter of the miller or the daughter of the gardener beyond their proper spheres. He has surrounded them with no adventitious pageantry; and the con [March, sequence is, that we love them from their simplicity. But Mr Procter will not treat of his Fornarina so. In have been degraded by an amour his eyes, the divine Raffaelle would with a young woman who both to the public; so he changes her, by manufactured tarts and vended them a slap of his harlequin's wand, into a courtesan a Phryne surrounded by young women of equally creditable character (" wenches" the Forfrom suburban Rome to the questionnarina calls them), and the scene shifts able purlieus of St John's Wood. well, fresh from the perusal of Tooke's Here enters Raffaelle Sanzio BarnPantheon. RAFFAELLE. Ne'er loved white Leda with such ten- Pale Prosperine, as I do rage for thee. Be to me as the green is to the leaf, I am here. FORNARINA. RAFFAELLE. I love thee; dost thou hear? I lan Ay, 1 have left sweet praises for thee— Which waits upon bold men who dare Near, near; I have left-ha, ha!-a His brawny arms around a shapeless God Cupid without eyes, fish without And Galatea naked as the dawn. FORNARINA. Love! 'Tis love for thee! But, what didst paint to-day RAFFAELLE. A team of dolphins, A brace of Tritons, and a crooked shell, get. These things moon: But I have taken flight for Venus' aery, Should any of our readers ask us, why, after the cheerful recognition we have made of Mr Procter's claims to be considered as an English poet, we quote lines which are not calculated to give a high impression of his powers, we answer, that, unless we were to draw upon the old dramatic sketches, with which many are familiar, and which we are able to praise without equivocation or reserve, we can find nothing valuable to lay before them in the shape of extracts from the present volume. Very heartily indeed do we despise that kind of criticism which makes former excellence the excuse for panegyric upon present failure a practice highly derogatory to the honour of the craft, and exceedingly unfair as regards new aspirants. It is sufficient if, in cases of marked deterioration, reference is made to former excellence, with the view of preventing a catholic judgment or generally unfavourable impression being formed from an imperfect or ill-considered production. It is the more necessary to say this, because Mr Procter, as we have already remarked, has, through long silence, somewhat passed out of the public view; and we are really unwilling that this last offering should be taken as an adequate specimen of his genius. Looking to the bulk of his works, and considering them in the mass, we find that, like most other poets, he has written alternately from the heart and from the head-from the impulse of feeling, or from mere vague excitement. When his feelings are really aroused and interested when he sympathises thoroughly with his subject, and is under the influence of emotion, Mr Procter shows, or has shown himself, to be a poet of no ordinary power. When, on the other hand, he attempts to write ambitiously or artistically, without real sympathy or feeling, he fails; and his failure appears the greater on account of his previous success. In the thermometer of poetry there are various degrees. Some men never sink below the temperate mark; others go down to zero. There are authors who, by dint of rhetoric, aptitude of expression, and neatness of illustration, have been able to write verses which pass current, albeit there is in them no touch of real inspiration. Mr Procter has not that gift. When inspired, he rises rapidly upwards; when uninspired, he drops, like the mercury in the tube, when the breath of winter prepares the Serpentine for the skaters. But let it be remembered that the quality of men is to be judged from their excellences, not their failures. In default of recent exploit, we turn to previous achievement; and though Mr Procter has voluntarily chosen a career which has precluded him from cultivating to the full the talent which he no doubt yet possesses, we are not, on that account, less ready to bear our testimony to his merits, and to assign him that place which he deserves to hold in the literary roll of the century. We might easily-ev gracefully have abstained from uttering a word of censure; but that course is not in accordance with our estimate of the critic's duty, both to the author whose works he is reviewing, and to the public for whom he writes. As all honey-comb is not pure, so do Mr Procter's poems contain an admixture of what is unpalatable with what is really sweet; and as the poems are, so must be our judgment upon them. -even ARCTIC ADVENTURE. ALMA, Balaklava, Inkermann ! These three words, it may with truth be said, caused the nineteenth century to open its eyes not a little, for the world was beginning to believe that the antique Elizabethan heroism of England, if not stone-dead, was at least enjoying a spell of slumber as long as those of Nourjahad. Civilisation and its accompanying luxury seemed to have placed human life at so high a premium-at least to those endowed with the means of enjoying it to the full-that it appeared almost incredible that men, possessing every earthly advantage which rank and wealth could give them, should imperil them all in the chances of war as recklessly as in the old days of hard sleeping, hard eating, hard drinking, and hard fighting. Yet such was the fact "Groom fought like noble, squire like knight, As fearlessly and well;" and it may be added, vice versa. For the marvel was, that those who had everything to lose, with loss of life, put their lives on the hazard as easily as those who had to lose nothing but life, the gains being the same. So it is, and so it has been. The Duke of Wellington said, that for desperate service there were no heroes like the dandies of his army. But human nature furnishes an explanation. Whatever we have gained, we cease to care for, and want some new excitement; and to a man in the position of all others most complete, perhaps, on this habitable earth, that of a British peer or landed proprietor, what remains to those who, unlike Lord Rosse, have no special turn for star-gazing, but "The triumph and the vanity, To them the breath of life"? Thus, while Manchester made such a noise in the world with the racket of her spinning-jennies, that the existence of any other class but cotton cords on our island began to be ignored by the Continental million, and we were stigmatised as la nation la plus prosaïque du monde," the trumpet of war resuscitated another class, who had buried themselves in retirement, to be out of the way of the eternal clatter, and sent them, bounding with new blood, like giants refreshed with wine, into the battlefield, the descendants of the gentlemen of England, whose lances won Hastings, and the descendants of her yeomen, whose bows won Agincourt. Politically stifled, they were only too glad to assert their claims to vitality in so grand and congenial a sphere. The Saxon Briton is no coward; in him resides the indomitable pluck which enabled a handful of eight thousand to keep at bay the whole Russian army at Inkermann. But his chief triumphs are industrial, and it is especially in peace that his laurels are gathered, the laurels of conquering industry. In peace he gains ground on the Norman, and by his patience and dogged perseverance forces him to yield political and social vantage, as in earlier times he fatigued him by passive resistance into the adoption of his language. But with the Dane or Norseman who fringed with his settlements in the times before the Conquest the whole seaboard of Briton, as the Phoenicians studded with their colonies in like manner the coasts of Sicily, resides yet another energy-an energy the most eminently national of all. As the Norman's proper sphere is war, and dominion held by the sword, he being rather inclined to slumber when the trumpet is silent; as the Saxon's The Discovery of the North-West Passage, chiefly from the Journals of Sir Robert M'Clure, in 1850-54. Edited by CAPTAIN SHERARD OSBORN. Longmans. Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853-55. By ELISHA KENT KANE, M.D., U.S.N. Child & Paterson, Philadelphia. Narrative of Voyages towards the North-West, in Search of a Passage to Cathey and ia, 1496-1631. BY THOMAS RANDELL, Esq. Printed for the Hakluyt Society. proper province is peaceful industry and material progress, triumphs won over nature, time, and space, by dint of gold, iron, and steam, he looking on war as an obstructive nuisance, to be bravely endured for the sake of being the sooner rid of it,- -so the part of the Dane or Norseman is the life of maritime adventure; adventure being the essence of this life, and war and commerce, and voyages of discovery, its several developments. The genuine Norseman never can or could breathe freely but in an atmosphere of danger; and as in former times he became a sea-robber, not from innate dishonesty but innate love of peril, so now he delights in sea-fights, if they present themselves; and if they do not, in going to all points of the compass in search of a hero's death, or a hero's hair-breadth 'scapes, or, with a more humane ambition, living on the sea-shore as a boatman of Deal or Broadstairs, to rescue the lives of sailors in distress at the risk of his own. It is perhaps to the Danish element of the British nation that is due par excellence the merit of rescuing us from the reproach of an unpoetical spirit. The spirit of the religion of Odin still animates it. Those who died ingloriously, according to that creed, sunk into the dismal shades of Hela, while those who perished in the midst of bold action were carried to the Hall of Heroes, or kindly taken to the bosom of an ocean-goddess. It is difficult, without the supposition of some such hereditary bent strengthening itself in its progress downward from remote eld, to account for the multitude of expeditions which have set forth from this country, under no compulsion whatever but that of an instinct which would not be gainsaid, to explore the terrible secrets of the polar regions of the earth. The excuse has always been the advantage to commerce in finding a short cut to the Indies, or the hope of gold-mines under the ice, or something equally frivolous. The Dane has been always obliged to find some such pretext in order to throw dust in the eyes of the Saxon, and to induce him, the holder of the money-bag, to furnish the necessary funds. Of course, when we make use of these national names, we must not be understood to assume that the races have kept separate and distinct to our own time; such an assumption would be undoubtedly contrary to fact, as, in all probability, every individual Englishman and lowland Scotchman at any rate has three or four, if not five or six, sorts of blood in his veins; but at the same time, every man partakes more of the nature of one class of his progenitors than another, as we see in the same family some of the children bearing the features or nature of the father, some of the mother, and some, perhaps, recalling a grandfather or remoter ancestor. Thus, although we cannot say, from an analysis of family names, to which original stem each Briton is to be referred, we may form a more correct estimate from the analysis of his disposition. Thus, if John Smith is physically well-finished, haughty, domineering, and pugnacious, no doubt there runs in his veins some drops at least of the original sangre azul or "true blood" of the Norman aristocracy. If he is a plodding landsman, he dates from Hengist and Horsa. If he will go to sea in spite of his weeping mother, he is an irreclaimable Dane, and his weeping mother, if she is a sensible woman, will make a virtue of necessity, and let him go to sea with a good grace, for he will only run wild on dry land from snuffing the inspiring salt. That the seafaring propensity and love of maritime adventure in Britons is of Norse or Danish origin, is to be inferred from what early histories tell us of this wonderful people. In times when Greeks thought it an extraordinary feat to cross the Egean out of sight of land, and Romans scarcely dared to pass the Pillars of Hercules, creeping along shores, and drawing up their vessels at night because they could not sleep on shipboard-these Northmen. for all we know, were discoveringmerica. Certain it is that they for out Iceland and Greenland wit hart or compass; and if they cou over Greenland, it was accordi all probability that they would at the world contained nearer mn, and cross Davis' |