" depicted there, but that it is one over which calamity and sorrow can only cast the most temporary shade. In his deepest distress, the Vicar has but to remember how much kinder Heaven is to us, than we are to ourselves, and how few are the misfortunes of Nature's making, to recover his cheerful patience. There never was a book in which indulgence and charity made virtue look so lustrous. Nobody is straight-laced, if we except Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, whose pretensions are summed up in Burchell's noble monosyllable. Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?' Fudge.' When worldly reverses visit the good Doctor Primrose, they are of less account than the equanimity they cannot deprive him of; than the belief in good, to which they only give wider scope; than the happiness which, even in its worldliest sense, they ultimately strengthen by enlarged activity, and increased necessity for labour. It is only when struck through the sides of his children, that for an instant his faith gives way. Most lovely is the pathos of that scene; so briefly and beautifully told. The little family at night are gathered round a charming fire, telling stories of the past, laying schemes for the future, and listening to Moses's thoughtful opinion of matters and things in general, to the effect that all things, in his judgment, go on very well, and that he has just been thinking, when sister Livy is married to Farmer Williams, they'll get the loan of his cyder-press and brewing-tubs for nothing. The best gooseberry wine has been this night much in request. Let us have one bottle more, Deborah, my life,' says the Vicar, 'and, Moses, give us a good song. But where is my darling Olivia ?' Little Dick comes running in. O papa, papa, she is gone from us, she is gone from us, my sister Livy is gone from us for ever! 'Gone, child!' 'Yes, she is gone off with two gentlemen in a post-chaise, and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her; and she cried very much, and was for coming back; but he persuaded her again, and she went into the chaise, and said, O what will my poor papa do when he knows I am undone! 'Now then, my children, go and be miserable, for we shall never enjoy one hour more;' and the old man, struck to the heart, cannot help cursing the seducer. But Moses is mindful of happier teaching, and with a loving simplicity rebukes his father. 'You should be my mother's comforter, sir, and you increase her pain. You should not have curst him, villain as he is.' 'I did not curse him, child, did I?' 'Indeed, sir, you did; you curst him twice.' Then may Heaven forgive me and him if I did.' Charity resumes its place in his heart with forgiveness, happiness half visits him again; by kindly patience even Deborah's reproaches are subdued and stayed; he takes back with most affecting tenderness his penitent child; and the voices of all his children are heard once more in their simple concert on the honeysuckle bank. We feel that it is better than cursing; and are even content that the rascally young squire should have time and hope for a sort of shabby repentance, and be allowed the intermediate comfort (it seems, after all one hardly knows why or wherefore, the most appropriate thing he can do) of 'blowing the French horn.' Mr. Abraham Adams has infinite claims on respect and love, nor ever to be forgotten are his groans over Wilson's worldly narrative, his sermon on vanity, his manuscript Eschylus, his noble independence to Lady Booby, and his grand rebuke to Peter Pounce; but he is put to no such trial as this which has been illustrated here, and which sets before us with such blended grandeur, simplicity, and pathos, the Christian heroism of the loving father, and forgiving ambassador of God to man. It was not an age of a particular earnestness, this Hume and Walpole age: but no one can be in earnest himself without in some degree affecting others. I remember a passage in the Vicar of Wakefield,' said Johnson, a few years after its author's death, which Goldsmith was afterwards fool enough to expunge. I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing. The words were little, since the feeling was retained; for the very basis of the little tale was a sincerity and zeal for many things. This indeed it was, which, while all the world were admiring it for its mirth and sweetness, its bright and happy pictures, its simultaneous movement of the springs of laughter and tears, gave it a rarer value to a more select audience, and connected it with not the least memorable anecdote of modern literary history. It had been published little more than four years, when two Germans, whose names became afterwards world-famous, one a student at that time in his twentieth, the other a graduate in his twenty-fifth year, met in the city of Strasburg. The younger, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a law scholar of the university with a passion for literature, sought knowledge from the elder, Johann Gottfried Herder, for the course on which he was moved to enter. Herder, a severe and masterly though somewhat cynical critic, laughed at the likings of the young aspirant, and roused him to other aspirations. Producing a German translation of the Vicar of Wakefield, he read it out aloud to Goethe in a manner which was peculiar to him; and as the incidents of the little story came forth in his serious simple voice, in one unmoved unaltering tone (just as if nothing of it was present before him, but all was only historical; as if the shadows of this poetic creation did not affect him in a life-like manner, but only glided gently by '), a new ideal of letters and of life arose in the mind of his listener. Years passed on; and while that younger student raised up and reestablished the literature of his country: and came at last, in his prime and in his age, to be acknowledged for the wisest of modern men, he never ceased throughout to confess what he owed to those old evenings at Strasburg. The strength which can conquer circumstance; the happy wisdom of irony which elevates itself above every object, above fortune and misfortune, good and evil, death and life, and attains to the possession of a poetical world; first visited Goethe in the tone with which Goldsmith's tale is told. The fiction became to him life's first reality; in country clergymen of Drusenheim there started up Vicars of Wakefield; for Olivias and Sophias of Alsace, first love fluttered at his heart; and at every stage of his illustrious after career, its impressions still vividly recurred to him. He remembered it, when, at the height of his worldly honour and success, he made his written Life ('Wahrheit und Dichtung ') record what a blessing it had been to him; he had not forgotten it when, standing, at the age of eighty-one, on the very brink of the grave, he told a friend that in the decisive moment of mental development the Vicar of Wakefield had formed his education, and that he had lately, with unabated delight, read the charming book again from beginning to end, not a little affected by the lively recollection' how much he had been indebted to the author sixty years before. 321. THE MODERN DRAMATIC POETS.-II. MANFRED. BYRON. ['MANFRED,' obscure and mystical, is unfitted for the Stage; but there are passages in it of surpassing power and beauty. The following Scene between Manfred and the Chamoishunter is in the truest dramatic spirit.] C. Hun. No, no-yet pause-thou must not yet go forth Thy mind and body are alike unfit To trust each other, for some hours, at least; Man. It imports not: I do know My route full well, and need no further guidance. C. Hun. Thy garb and gait bespeak thee of high lineage-- To bask of the huge hearths of those old halls, Man. 'T has thawed my veins among our glaciers, now Man. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim ! Will it then never-never sink in the earth? C. Hun. What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee. Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours And loved each other as we should not love, Colouring the clouds that shut me out from heaven, Where thou art not-and I shall never be C. Hun. Man of strange words, and some half-maddening sin Which makes thee people vacancy, whate'er Thy dread and sufferance be, there's comfort yet— The aid of holy men, and heavenly patience Man. Patience and patience! Hence-that word was made For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey; Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine, I am not of thine order. Man. I tell thee, man! I have lived many years, Many long years, but they are nothing now To those which I must number: ages-ages Space and eternity-and consciousness, With the fierce thirst of death-and still unslaked! Man. Think'st thou existence doth depend on time? Innumerable atoms; and one desert, Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break, But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks, C. Hun. Alas! he's mad—but yet I must not leave him. Would be but a distemper'd dream. C. Hun. And spirit patient, pious, proud, and free ; It matters not-my soul was scorched already! C. Hun. And wouldst thou then exchange thy lot for mine? My lot with human being: I can bear However wretchedly, 'tis still to bear In life what others could not brook to dream, But perish in their slumber. C. Hun. And with this, But can endure thy pity. I depart— 'Tis time-farewell!-Here's gold, and thanks for thee No words-it is thy due.-Follow me not I know my path-the mountain peril's past : [MR. MILMAN'S Fazio' had a singular fate. It was written while he was at Oxford, and was published soon after he had taken his first degree. One of the Minor Theatres seized upon it, and brought it out with success under the name of 'The Italian Wife.' The robbery was repeated at Covent Garden; and the managers had not even the decency to consult the author upon the matter, or to show him the slightest courtesy when it was crowned with the highest success in the performance of Miss O'Neill. These things are better regulated now. The story of Fazio is that of a poor man discovering and appropriating the treasure of one who is murdered. The possession of riches corrupts him; he leaves his wife, Bianca, for the caresses of a profligate woman; the wife, in the distraction of her wrongs, betrays to the Duke of Florence the appropriation of the hoarded gold; he is unjustly accused of the murder and dies on the scaffold. The following scene exhibits Bianca's agony before she rushes to impeach her husband, in the sole idea that, being deprived of his fatal riches, he will be restored to her affections.] Bianca. Not all the night, not all the long, long night, I wander up and down these long arcades; A moment to distract my busy spirit From its dark dalliance with that cursed image! "Comes my lord home to-night?"—and when I say, "I know not," their coarse pity makes my heartstrings Throb with the agony.-[Enter PIERO.]-Well, what of my lord? Thou raven, croak it out if it be evil : |