We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent and constant zeal for religion, which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot, distinguished Barère; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonour on religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barère was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a sceptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is a pious treatise, entitled, "Of Christianity and of its Influence." Another consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doubtless greatly console and edify the church. Greaten, and that not less eminent philosopher | mote the honour of our country; but that little Mr Mackenzie Cofhis. In spite, however, of he did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, his connection with these well-known orna- traitor, slave, coward, liar, slanderer, murderer, ments of our country, he was so ill informed hack-writer, police-spy-the one small service about us as to fancy that our government was which he could render to England, was to hate always laying plans to torment him. If he her: and such as he was may all who hate was hooted at Saintes, probably by people her be. whose relations he had murdered, it was because the cabinet of St. James had hired the mob. If nobody would read his bad books, it was because the cabinet of St. James had secured the reviewers. His accounts of Mr. Fox, of Mr. Pitt, of the Duke of Wellington, of Mr. Canning, swarm with blunders, surpassing even the ordinary blunders committed by Frenchmen who write about England. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two different reigns. Mr. Pitt's sinking fund was instituted in order to enable England to pay subsidies to the powers allied against the French Republic. The Duke of Wellington's house in Hyde Park was built by the nation, which twice voted the sum of £200,000 for the This makes the character complete. Whatpurpose. This, however, is exclusive of the soever things are false, whatsoever things are cost of the frescoes, which were also paid for dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatout of the public purse. Mr. Canning was the soever things are impure, whatsoever things first Englishman whose death Europe had rea- are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil reson to lament; for the death of Lord Ward, a port, if there be any vice, and if there be any relation, we presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr. infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended Cef his, had been an immense benefit to man-in Barère. But one thing was still wanting, kind. and that M. Hyppolyte Carnot has supplied. Ignorant, however, as Barère was, he knew When to such an assemblage of qualities a enough of us to hate us; and we persuade our-high profession of piety is added, the effect selves that, had he known us better, he would have hated us more. The nation which has combined, beyond all example and all hope, the blessings of liberty with those of order, might well be an object of aversion to one who had been false alike to the cause of order and to the cause of liberty. We have had amongst us intemperate zeal for popular rights; we Something more we had to say about him. have had amongst us also the intemperance of But let him go. We did not seek him out, and loyalty. But we have never been shocked by will not keep him longer. If those who call such a spectacle as the Barère of 1794, or as themselves his friends had not forced him on the Barère of 1804. Compared with him, our our notice, we should never have vouchsafed fiercest demagogues have been gentle; com- to him more than a passing word of scorn and pared with him, our meanest courtiers have abhorrence, such as we might fling at his been manly. Mix together Thistlewood and brethren, Hébert and Fouquier Tinville, and Bubb Dodington, and you are still far from Carrier and Lebon. We have no pleasure in having Barère. The antipathy between him seeing human nature thus degraded. We turn and us is such, that neither for the crimes of with disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos his earlier, nor for those of his later life, does of the fiction; and the filthiest and most spiteour language, rich as it is, furnish us with ade-ful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble creature quate names. We have found it difficult to relate his history without having perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary of baseness. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct in the Convention, without using those emphatic terms, guillotinade, noyade, fusillade, nitraillade. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct under the consulate and the empire, without borrowing such words as mouchard and mouton. We, therefore, like his invectives against us much better than any thing else that he has written; and dwell on them, not merely with complacency, but with a feeling akin to gratitude. It was but little that he could do to pro becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this beatified athlete of the faith, Saint Bertrand of the Carmagnoles. when compared with the Barère of history. But what is no pleasure, M. Hyppolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is no light thing, that a man in high and honourable public trust, a man who, from his connections and position, may not unnaturally be supposed to speak the sentiments of a large class of his countrymen, should come forward to demand approbation for a life, black with every sort of wickedness, and unredeemed by a single virtue. This M. Hippolite Carnot has done. By attempting to enshrine this Jacobin carrion, he has forced us to gibbet it; and we venture to say that, from the eminence of infamy on which we have placed it, he will not easily take it down MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, APRIL, 1830.] THE wise men of antiquity loved to convey worth the telling, lies on the surface. The instruction under the covering of apologue; writer evidently means to caution us against and, though this practice of theirs is generally the practices of puffers,-a class of people thought childish, we shall make no apology for who have more than once talked the public adopting it on the present occasion. A gene- into the most absurd errors, but who surely ration which has bought eleven editions of a never played a more curious, or a more diffipoem by Mr. Robert Montgomery, may well cult trick, than when they passed Mr. Robert condescend to listen to a fable of Pilpay. Montgomery off upon the world as a great poet. A pious Brahmin, it is written, made a vow In an age in which there are so few readers that on a certain day he would sacrifice a that a writer cannot subsist on the sum arising sheep, and on the appointed morning he went from the sale of his works, no man who has forth to buy one. There lived in his neighbour-not an independent fortune can devote himself hood three rogues who knew of his vow, and to literary pursuits, unless he is assisted by laid a scheme for profiting by it. The first met patronage. In such an age, accordingly, men him and said, "Oh, Brahmin, wilt thou buy a of letters too often pass their lives in dangling sheep? I have one fit for sacrifice."-"It is at the heels of the wealthy and powerful; and for that very purpose," said the holy man, all the faults which dependence tends to pro"that I came forth this day." Then the im- duce, pass into their character. They become postor opened a bag, and brought out of it an the parasites and slaves of the great. It is unclean beast, an ugly dog, lame and blind. melancholy to think how many of the highest Thereon the Brahmin cried out, " Wretch, who and most exquisitely formed of human inteltouchest things impure, and utterest things un-lects have been condemned to the ignominious true, callest thou that cur a sheep?"-"Truly," answered the other, "it is a sheep of the finest fleece, and of the sweetest flesh. Oh, Brahmin, it will be an offering most acceptable to the gods."—"Friend," said the Brahmin, "either thou or I must be blind." Just then one of the accomplices came up. "Praised be the gods," said this second rogue, "that I have been saved the trouble of going to the market for a sheep! This is such a sheep as I wanted. For how much wilt thou sell it?" When the Brahmin heard this, his mind waved to and fro, like one swinging in the air at a holy festival. "Sir," said he to the new comer, "take heed what thou dost; this is no sheep, but an unclean cur."-"Oh, Brahmin," said the new comer, "thou art drunk or mad!" labor of disposing the commonplaces of adulation in new forms, and brightening them into new splendour. Horace invoking Augustus in the most enthusiastic language of religious veneration,-Statius flattering a tyrant, and the minion of a tyrant, for a morsel of bread,— Ariosto versifying the whole genealogy of a niggardly patron,-Tasso extolling the heroic virtues of the wretched creature who locked him up in a mad-house,-these are but a few of the instances which might easily be given of the degradation to which those must submit, who, not possessing a competent fortune, are resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read. This evil the progress of the human mind tends to remove. As a taste for books becomes more and more common, the patronage of individuals becomes less and less necessary. In the earlier part of the last century a marked change took place. The tone of literary men, both in this country and in France, became higher and more independent. Pope boasted that he was the "one poet" who had "pleased by manly ways;" he derided the soft dedica tions with which Halifax had been fed,asserted his own superiority over the pen sioned Boileau,-and glorified in being not the follower, but the friend, of nobles and princes. At this time the third confederate drew near. "Let us ask this man," said the Brahmin, "what the creature is, and I will stand by what he shall say." To this the others agreed; and the Brahmin called out, "Oh, stranger, what dost thou call this beast ?"-" "Surely, oh, Brahmin," said the knave, "it is a fine sheep." | Then the Brahmin said, "Surely the gods have taken away my senses,”—and he asked pardon of him who carried the dog, and bought it for a measure of rice and a pot of ghee, and offered it up to the gods, who, being wroth at this un-The explanation of all this is very simple. clean sacrifice, smote him with a sore disease in all his joints. Pope was the first Englishman who, by the mere sale of his writings, realized a sum which enabled him to live in comfort and in perfect independence. Johnson extols him for the magnanimity which he showed in inscribing his Iliad, not to a minister or a peer, but to Congreve. In our time, this would scarcely when Mr. Moore pays a compliment of this be a subject for praise. Nobody is astonished kind to Sir Walter Scott, or Sir Walter Scott | upon with a despicable ingenuity by people to Mr. Moore. The idea of either of those engaged in a pursuit which never was, and gentlemen looking out for some lord who never will be, considered as a mere trade by would be likely to give him a few guineas in any man of honour and virtue. A butcher of return for a fulsome dedication, seems laugh- the higher class disdains to ticket his meat. A ably incongruous. Yet this is exactly what mercer of the higher class would be ashamed Dryden or Otway would have done; and it to hang up papers in his window inviting the would be hard to blame them for it. Otway is passers-by to look at the stock of a bankrupt, said to have been choked with a piece of bread all of the first quality, and going for half the which he devoured in the rage of hunger; and, value. We expect some reserve, some decent whether this story be true or false, he was, be- pride, in our hatter and our bootmaker. But yond all question, miserably poor. Dryden, at no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained near seventy, when at the head of the literary is thought too abject for a man of letters. men of England, without equal or second, received three hundred pounds for his Fables -a collection of ten thousand verses,-and such verses as no man then living, except himself, could have produced. Pope, at thirty, had laid up between six and seven thousand pounds, the fruits of his poetry. It was not, we suspect, because he had a higher spirit, or a more scrupulous conscience, than his predecessors, but because he had a larger income, that he kept up the dignity of the literary character so much better than they had done. It is amusing to think over the history of most of the publications which have had a run during the last few years. The publisher is often the publisher of some periodical work. In this periodical work the first flourish of trumpets is sounded. The peal is then echoed and re-echoed by all the other periodical works over which the publisher or the author, or the author's coterie, may have any influence. The newspapers are for a fortnight filled with puffs of all the various kinds which Sheridan recounted, -direct, oblique, and collusive. Sometimes the praise is laid on thick for simple-minded people. "Pathetic," "sublime," " splendid," and other phrases equally flattering, fall in a shower as thick and as sweet as the sugarplums at a Roman carnival. Sometimes greater art is used. A sinecure has been offered to the writer if he would suppress his work, or if he would even soften down a few of his incomparable portraits. A distinguished military and From the time of Pope to the present day, the readers have been constantly becoming more and more numerous: and the writers," graceful, brilliant wit," "exquisite humour," consequently, more and more independent. It is assuredly a great evil, that men fitted by their talents and acquirements to enlighten and charm the world, should be reduced to the necessity of flattering wicked and foolish patrons in return for the very sustenance of life. But though we heartily rejoice that this evil is removed, we cannot but see with con-political character has challenged the inimita cern that another evil has succeeded to it. ble satirist of the vices of the great; and the The public is now the patron, and a most libe- puffer is glad to learn that the parties have ral patron. All that the rich and powerful been bound over to keep the peace. Somebestowed on authors from the time of Mæcenas times it is thought expedient that the puffer to that of Harley would not, we apprehend, should put on a grave face, and utter his panemake up a sum equal to that which has been gyric in the form of admonition! "Such atpaid by English booksellers to authors during tacks on private character cannot be too much the last thirty years. Men of letters have condemned. Even the exuberant wit of our accordingly ceased to court individuals, and author, and the irresistible power of his withhave begun to court the public. They for-ering sarcasm, are no excuses for that utter merly used flattery. They now use puffing. disregard which he manifests for the feelings Whether the old or the new vice be the of others. We cannot but wonder that the worse, whether those who formerly lavished writer of such transcendent talents,—a writer insincere praise on others, or those who now who is evidently no stranger to the kindly contrive by every art of beggary and bribery charities and sensibilities of our nature, should to stun the public with praises of themselves, show so little tenderness to the foibles of noble disgrace their vocation the more deeply, we and distinguished individuals, with whom, it is shall not attempt to decide. But of this we clear, from every page of his work, that he are sure, that it is high time to make a stand must have been constantly mingling in socieagainst the new trickery. The puffing of ty." These are but tame and feeble imitations books is now so shamefully and so success- of the paragraphs with which the daily papers fully practised, that it is the duty of all who are filled whenever an attorney's clerk or an are anxious for the purity of the national taste, apothecary's assistant undertakes to tell the or for the honour of the literary character, to public, in bad English and worse French, how join in discountenancing it. All the pens that people tie their neckcloths and eat their din ever were employed in magnifying Bish's nors in Grosvenor Square. The editors of the lucky office, Romanis's fleecy hosiery, Pack- higher and more respectable newspapers wood's razor strops, and Rowland's Kalydor, usually prefix the words "Advertisement," or all the placard-bearers of Dr. Eady,-all the "From a Correspondent," to such paragraphs. wall-chalkers of Day and Martin-seem to But this makes little difference. The panegyhave taken service with the poets and novel-ric is extracted, and the significant heading ists of this generation. Devices which in the omitted. The fulsome eulogy makes its arlowest trades are considered as disreputable, pearance on the covers of all the Reviews and are adopted without scruple, and improved Magazines, with "Times" or "Globe" affixed, though the editors of the Times and the Globe | tised judges can; that he is not familliar with have no more to do with it than with Mr. Goss's the finest models; that he has never looked at way of making old rakes young again. That people who live by personal slander should practise these arts is not surprising. Those who stoop to write calumnious books may well stoop to puff them;-and that the basest of all trades should be carried on in the basest of all manners, is quite proper, and as it should be. But how any man, who has the least self-respect, the least regard for his own personal dignity, can condescend to persecute the public with this rag-fair importunity, we do not understand. Extreme poverty may, indeed, in some degree, be an excuse for employing these shifts, as it may be an excuse for stealing a leg of mutton. But we really think that a man of spirit and delicacy would quite as soon satisfy his wants in the one way as in the other. them with close attention; and that, when the general effect of a piece has pleased him, or displeased him, he has never troubled himself to ascertain why. When, therefore, people whom he thinks more competent to judge than himself, and of whose sincerity he entertains no doubt, assure him that a particular work is exquisitely beautiful, he takes it for granted that they must be in the right. He returns to the examination, resolved to find or imagine beauties; and if he can work himself up into something like admiration, he exults in his own proficiency. Just such is the manner in which nine readers out of ten judge of a book. They are ashamed to dislike what men, who speak as having authority, declare to be good. At pre sent, however contemptible a poem or a novel may be, there is not the least difficulty in procuring favourable notices of it from all sorts of publications, daily, weekly, and monthly. In the mean time, little or nothing is said on the other side. The author and the publisher It is no excuse for an author, that the praises of journalists are procured by the money or influence of the publisher, and not by his own. It is his business to take such precautions as may prevent others from doing what must degrade them. It is for his honour as a gentle-are interested in crying up the book. Nobody man, and, if he is really a man of talents, it has any very strong interest in crying it down. will eventually be for his honour and interest Those who are best fitted to guide the public as a writer, that his works should come before opinion, think it beneath them to expose mere the public, recommended by their own merits nonsense, and comfort themselves by reflecting alone, and should be discussed with perfect that such popularity cannot last. This confreedom. If his objects be really such as he temptuous lenity has been carried too far. It may own without shame, he will find that they is perfectly true, that reputations which have will, in the long run, be better attained by suf- been forced into an unnatural bloom, fade alfering the voice of criticism to be fairly heard. most as soon as they have expanded; nor have At present, we too often see a writer attempt- we any apprehensions that puffing will ever ing to obtain literary fame as Shakspeare's raise any scribbler to the rank of a classic. It usurper obtains sovereignty. The publisher is, indeed, amusing to turn over some late volplays Buckingham to the author's Richard. umes of periodical works, and to see how Some few creatures of the conspiracy are dex- many immortal productions have, within a few terously disposed here and there in a crowd. months, been gathered to the poems of BlackIt is the business of these hirelings to throw up more and the novels of Mrs. Behn; how many their caps, and clap their hands, and utter their "profound views of human nature," and "exquivivas. The rabble at first stare and wonder, site delineations of fashionable manners," and and at last join in shouting for shouting's sake; "vernal, and sunny, and refreshing thoughts," and thus a crown is placed on the head which and "high imaginings," and "young breathhas no right to it, by the huzzas of a few ser-ings," and "embodyings," and "pinings," and vile dependants. "minglings with the beauty of the universe," The opinion of the great body of the reading and "harmonies which dissolve the soul in a public is very materially influenced even by passionate sense of loveliness and divinity," the the unsupported assertions of those who as-world has contrived to forget. The names of sume a right to criticise. Nor is the public the books and the writers are buried in as deep altogether to blame on this account. Most, an oblivion as the name of the builder of Stoneeven of those who have really a great enjoy-hedge. Some of the well-puffed "fashionable ment in reading, are in the same state, with respect to a book, in which a man, who has never given particular attention to the art of painting, is with respect to a picture. Every man who has the least sensibility or imagination, derives a certain pleasure from pictures. Yet a man of the highest and finest intellect might, unless he had formed his taste by contemplating the best pictures, be easily persuaded by a knot of connoisseurs that the worst daub in Somerset-house was a miracle of art. If he deserves to be laughed at, it is not for his ignorance of pictures, but for his ignorance of men. He knows that there is a delicacy of taste in painting which he does not possess; that he cannot discriminate hands, as prac novels" of the last, hold the pastry of the present year; and others of the class, which are now extolled in language almost too high-flown for the merits of Don Quixote, will, we have no doubt, line the trunks of eighteen hundred and thirty-one. But though we have no apprehensions that puffing will ever confer permanent reputation on the undeserving, we still think its influence most pernicious. Men of reai merit will, if they persevere, at last reach the station to which they are entitled, and intruders will be ejected with contempt and derision. But it is no small evil that the avenues to fame should be blocked up by a swarm of noisy, pushing, elbowing pretenders, who, though they will not ultimately be able to make gooʻl their own entrance, hinder, in the mean time, | those who have a right to enter. All who will not disgrace themselves by joining in the unseemly scuffle, must expect to be at first hustled and shouldered back. Some men of talents, accordingly, turn away in dejection from pursuits in which success appears to bear no proportion to desert. Others employ in selfdefence the means by which competitors, far inferior to themselves, appear for a time to obtain a decided advantage. There are few who have sufficient confidence in their own powers, and sufficient elevation of mind, to wait with secure and contemptuous patience, while dunce after dunce presses before them. Those who will not stoop to the baseness of the modern fashion are too often discouraged. Those who stoop to it are always degraded. "But who could trace Thine unrestricted course, But nature owns thy plastic influence there! The last two lines contain an excellent specimen of Mr. Robert Montgomery's Turkey carpet style of writing. The majestic view of earth is the mirror of God's presence; and on this mirror Mr. Robert Montgomery paints God's presence. The use of a mirror, we submit, is not to be painted upon. A few more lines, as bad as those which we have quoted, bring us to one of the most amusing instances of literary pilfering which we remember. It might be of use to plagiarists to know as a general rule, that what they steal is, to employ a phrase common in advertisements. of no use to any but the right owner. We never fell in, however, with any plunderer who so little understood how to turn his booty to good account as Mr. Montgomery. Lord Byron, in a passage which every body knows by heart, has said, addressing the sea, "Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow." "And thou, vast Ocean, on whose awful face We have of late observed with great pleasure some symptoms which lead us to hope, that respectable literary men of all parties are beginning to be impatient of this insufferable nuisance. And we purpose to do what in us lies for the abating of it. We do not think that we can more usefully assist in this good work, than by showing our honest countrymen what that sort of poetry is which puffing can drive through eleven editions; and how easy any bellman might, if a bellman would stoop to the necessary degree of meanness, become Mr. Robert Montgomery very cooly appro "a master-spirit of the age." We have no en-priates the image, and reproduces the stolen mity to Mr. Robert Montgomery. We know goods in the following form: nothing whatever about him, except what we have learned from his books, and from the portrait prefixed to one of them, in which he appears to be doing his very best to look like a man of genius and sensibility, though with less success than his strenuous exertions deserve. We select him, because his works have received more enthusiastic praise, and have deserved more unmixed contempt, than any which, as far as our knowledge extends, have appeared within the last three or four years. His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture There are colours in the Turkey carpet, out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's verses, which when disposed in certain orders and combinations, have made, and will again make, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle, in such a manner as to give no image of any thing in the "heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth." The poem on the Omnipresence of the Deity commences with a description of the creation, in which we can find only one thought which has the least pretension to ingenuity, and that one thought is stolen from Dryden, and marred in the stealing "Last, softly beautiful as music's close, Angelic woman into being rose." The all-pervading influence of the Supreme Being is then described in a few tolerable lines borrowed from Pope, and a great many intolerable lines of Mr. Robert Montgomery's own. The following may stand as a specimen So may such ill-got gains ever prosper! "Oh! never did the dark-soul'd ATHEIST stand, If Mr. Robert Montgomery's genius were not far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax, we should suppose that it is at the nod of the Atheist that creation såndders, and that it is this same dark-souled Atheist who hurls billowy crags upon the shore. A few more lines bring us to another instance of unprofitable theft. Sir Walter Scott has these lines in the Lord of the Isles, "The dew that on the violet lies, Mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes." This is pretty, taken separately, and, as is almost always the case with good things of good writers, much prettier in its place than can even be conceived by those who see it only detached from the context. Now for Mr. Montgomery "And the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies, Like liquid rapture upon beanty's eyes.” The comparison of a violet, bright with the dew, to a woman's eyes, is as perfect as a comparison can be. Sir Walter's lines are part of a song addressed to a woman, and the |