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of the maniac blasts from their caverns? And! We should be sorry to stake our faith in a why does the former operation end exactly higher Power on Mr. Robert Montgomery's when the latter commences?

We cannot stop over each of Mr. Robert Montgomery's descriptions. We have a shipwrecked sailor, who "visions a viewless temple in the air;"-a murderer, who stands on a heath, "with ashy lips, in cold convulsion spread;"- -a pious man, to whom, as he lies in bed at night,

"The panorama of past life appears,

Warms his pure mind and melts it into tears;"→

a traveller, who lose. his way, owing to the thickness of the "cloud-battalion," and the want of "heaven-lamps, to beam their holy light." We have a description of a convicted felon, stolen from that incomparable passage in! Crabbe's Borough, which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child. We can, however, conscientiously declare, that persons of the most excitable sensibility may safely venture upon it in Mr. Robert Montgomery's alteration. Then we have the "poor, mindless, pale-faced, maniac boy," who

"Rolls his vacant eye,

To greet the glowing fancies of the sky."
What are the glowing fancies of the sky?
And what is the meaning of the two lines which
almost immediately follow?

"A soulless thing, a spirit of the woods,

He loves to commune with the fields and floods."

How can a soulless thing be a spirit? Then comes a panegyric on the Sunday. A baptism follows:-after that a marriage; and we then proceed, in due course, to the visitation of the sick, and the burial of the dead.

Often as death has been personified, Mr. Montgomery has found something new to say

about him.

"O Death! thou dreadless vanquisher of earth,
The Elements shrank blasted at thy birth!
Careering round the world like tempest wind,
Martyrs before, and victims strew'd behind;
Ages on ages cannot grapple thee,
Dragging the world into eternity!"

If there be any one line in this passage about
which we are more in the dark than about the
rest, it is the fourth. What the difference may
be between the victims and the martyrs, and
why the martyrs are to lie before Death, and
the victims behind him, are to us great myste-
ries.

We now come to the third part, of which we may say with honest Cassio, "Why, this is a more excellent song than the other." Mr. Robert Montgomery is very severe on the infidels, and undertakes to prove that, as he elegantly expresses it,

"One great Enchanter helm'd the harmonious whole." What an enchanter has to do with helming, or what a helm has to do with harmony, we do not quite understand. He proceeds with his argument thus:

logic. Does he believe that lightning, and bub bles, and the phenomena of dreams, are designless and self-created? If he does, we cannot conceive why he may not believe that the whole universe is designless and self-created. A few lines before, he tells us that it is the Deity who bids "thunder rattle from the skiey deep." His theory is therefore this, that God made the thunder, but that the lightning made itself.

But Mr. Robert Montgomery's metaphysics are not at present our game. He proceeds to

set forth the fearful effects of atheism.
"Then, blood-stain'd Murder, bare thy hideous arm,
And thou, Rebellion, welter in thy storm:
Awake, ye spirits of avenging crime;
Burst from your bonds, and battle with the time!”
fication, and belongs, we need not say, to that
Mr. Robert Montgomery is fond of personi-
school of poets who hold that nothing more is
necessary to a personification in poetry than to
begin a word with a capital letter. Murder
may, without impropriety, bare her arm,-as
she did long ago, in Mr. Campbell's Pleasures
of Hope. But what possible motive Rebellion
can have for weltering in her storm,-what
avenging crime may be,-who its spirits may
be,-why they should burst from their bonds,
-what their bonds may be,-why they should
battle with the time,-what the time may be,
-and what a battle between the time and the
spirits of avenging crime would resemble, we
must confess ourselves quite unable to under-
stand.

"And here let Memory turn her tearful glance
On the dark horrors of tumultuous France,
When blood and blasphemy defiled her land,
And fierce Rebellion shook her savage hand."
Whether Rebellion shakes her own hand,
shakes the hand of Memory, or shakes the
hand of France, or what any one of the meta-
phors would mean, we know no more than we
know what is the sense of the following pass-
age:

"Let the foul orgies of infuriate crime
Picture the raging havoc of that time,
When leagued Rebellion march'd to kindle man,
Fright in her rear, and Murder in her van.
And thou, sweet flower of Austria, slaughtered
Queen,

Who dropped no tear upon the dreadful scene.
When gushed the life-blood from thine angel form,
And martyr'd beauty perish'd in the storm,
Once worshipp'd paragon of all who saw,
Thy look obedience, and thy smile a law," &c.
What is the distinction between the foul orgies
and the raging havoc which the foul orgies are
to picture? Why does Fright go behind Re
bellion, and Murder before? Why should not
Murder fall behind Fright? Or why should
not all the three walk abreast? We have read
of a hero who had

"Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind."

Gray, we suspect, could have given a reason for disposing the allegorical attendants of Ed

And dare men dream that dismal Chance has framed ward thus. But to proceed.-" Flower of Aus

All that the eye perceives, or tongue has named;

The spacious world, and all its wonders, born

Designless, self-created. and forlorn;

Like to the flashing bubbles on a stream,

Fire from the cloud, or phantom in a dream?”

tria" is stolen from Byron. "Dropped" is false English. "Perish'd in the storm" means nothing at all; and "thy look obedience" means

the very reverse of what Mr. Robert Montgomery intends to say.

Our poet then proceeds to demonstrate the immortality of the soul:-

"And shall the soul, the fount of reason, die,
When dust and darkness round its temple lie?
Did God breathe in it no ethereal fire,
Dimless and quenchless, though the breath expire."

The soul is a fountain; and therefore it is not
to die, though dust and darkness lie round its
temple, because an ethereal fire has been
breathed into it, which cannot be quenched
though its breath expire. Is it the fountain,
or the temple, that breathes, and has fire
breathed into it?

Mr. Montgomery apostrophizes the

"Immortal beacons,-spirits of the just."

and describes their employments in another world, which are to be, it seems, bathing in light, hearing fiery streams flow, and riding on living cars of lightning. The deathbed of the sceptic is described with what we suppose meant for energy.

See how he shudders at the thought of death!
What doubt and horror hang upon his breath,
The gibbering teeth, glazed eye, and marble limb.
Shades from the tomb stalk out and stare at him."

is

A man as stiff as marble, shuddering and gibbering violently, would certainly present so curious a spectacle, that the shades, if they came in his way, might well stare.

The

ner of the Morning Post-can produce emolu. ment and fame? The circulation of this writer's poetry has been greater than that of Southey's Roderic, and beyond all comparison greater than that of Carey's Dante, or of the best works of Coleridge. Thus encouraged, Mr. Robert Montgomery has favoured the public with volume after volume. We have given so much space to the examination of his first and most popular performance, that we have none to spare for his Universal Prayer, and his smaller poems, which, as the puffing journals tell us, would alone constitute a sufficient title to literary immortality. We shall pass at once to his last publication, entitled Satan.

This poem was ushered into the world with the usual roar of acclamation. But the thing was now past a joke. Pretensions so unfounded, so impudent, and so successful, had aroused a spirit of resistance. In several magazines and reviews, accordingly Satan has been handled somewhat roughly, and the arts of the puffers have been exposed with good sense and spirit. We shall, therefore, be

very

concise.

Of the two poems, we rather prefer that on the Omnipresence of the Deity, for the same reason which induced Sir Thomas Moore to rank one bad book above another. "Marry, this is somewhat. This is rhyme. But the other is neither rhyme nor reason." Satan is in five or six thousand lines of blank verse, a long soliloquy, which the Devil pronounces concerning geography, politics, newspapers, Sir Walter Scott's novels, Lord Byron's poetry, fashionable society, theatrical amusements, and Mr. Martin's pictures. The new designs for Milton have, as was natural, particularly attracted the attention of a personage who occupies so conspicuous a place in them. Mr. Martin must be pleased to learn, that, whatever may be thought of those performances on earth, they give full satisfaction in Pandemonium, and that he is there thought to have hit off the likenesses of the various thrones and dominations very happily.

We then have the deathbed of a Christian made as ridiculous as false imagery and false English can make it. But this is not enough: The Day of Judgment is to be described, and a roaring cataract of nonsense is poured forth upon this tremendous subject. Earth, we are told, is dashed into Eternity. Furnace blazes wheel round the horizon, and burst into bright wizard phantoms. Racing hurricanes unroll and whirl quivering fire-clouds. white waves gallop. Shadowy worlds career around. The red and raging eye of Imagination is then forbidden to pry further. But fur-from the Book of Job:-"Whence comest The motto to the poem of Satan is taken ther Mr. Robert Montgomery persists in pry-thou? From going to and fro in the earth, and ing. The stars bound through the airy roar. The unbosomed deep yawns on the ruin. The billows of Eternity then begin to advance. The world glares in fiery slumber. A car comes forward driven by living thunder.

walking up and down in it." And certainly, his hero go to and fro, and walk up and down. Mr. Robert Montgomery has not failed to make With the exception, however, of this propensity to locomotion, Satan has not one Satanic "Creation shudders with sublime dismay, quality. Mad Tom had told us, that "the And in a blazing tempest whirls away." prince of darkness is a gentleman;" but we And this is fine poetry! This is what ranks had yet to learn that he is a respectable and its writer with the master-spirits of the age! pious gentleman, whose principal fault is, that This is what has been described over and over he is something of a twaddle, and far too liberal again, in terms which would require some of his good advice. That happy change in his qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost! character which Origen anticipated, and of It is too much that this patchwork, made by which Tillotson did not despair, seems to be stitching together old odds and ends of what, rapidly taking place. Bad habits are not eradi. when new, was, for the most part, but tawdry|cated in a moment. It is not strange, therefore, frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable specimen of art. And what must we think of a system, by means of which verses like those which we have quoted-verses fit only for the poet's cor

that so old an offender should now and then relapse for a short time into wrong disposi tions. But to give him his due, as the proverb recommends, we must say, that he always returns, after two or three lines of impiety, to his preaching tone. We would seriously advise

Mr. Montgomery to omit, or alter, about a hun- | dred lines in different parts of this large volume, and to republish it under the name of "Gabriel." The reflections of which it consists would come less absurdly, as far as there is a more and a less in extreme absurdity, from a good than from a bad angel.

We can afford room only for a single quotation. We give one taken at random-neither worse nor better, as far as we can perceive, than any other equal number of lines in the book. The Devil goes to the play, and moralizes thereon as follows:

"Music and pomp their mingling spirit shed
Around me; beauties in their cloud-like robes
Shine forth,-a scenic paradise, it glares
Intoxication through the reeling sense
Of flushed enjoyment. In the motley host
Three prime gradations may be ranked: the first,
To mount upon the wings of Shakspeare's mind,
And win a flash of his Promethean thought,~~
To smile and weep, to shudder and achieve
A round of passionate omnipotence,

Attend the second, arc z sensual tribe,
Convened to hear romaniic Larles sing.
On forms to banquet a lascivious gaze,
While the bright perfidy of wanton eyes
Through brain and spirit darts delicious fire:
The last, a throng most pitiful! who seem,
With their corroded figures, rayless glance
And death-like struggle of decaying age,
Like painted skeletons in charnel pomp
Set forth to satirize the human kind!-
How fine a prospect for demoniac view!
'Creatures whose souls outbalance worlds awake!
Methinks I hear a pitying angel cry."

Here we conclude. If our remarks give pain to Mr. Robert Montgomery, we are serry for it. But, at whatever cost of pain to indi viduals, literature must be purified of this taint. And, to show that we are not actuated by any feelings of personal enmity towards him, we hereby give notice, that, as soon as any book shall, by means of puffing, reach a second edition, our intention is, to do unto the writer of it as we have done unto Mr. Robert Montgomery.

CIVIL DISABILITIES OF THE JEWS.*

THE distinguished member of the House of | to say, some person or persons must have a Commons who, towards the close of the late right to political power. Parliament, brought forward a proposition for the relief of the Jews, has given notice of his intertion to renew it. The force of reason, in the last session, carried the measure through one stage, in spite of the opposition of power. Reason and power are now on the same side; and we have little doubt that they will conjointly achieve a decisive victory. In order to contribute our share to the success of just principles, we propose to pass in review, as rapidly as possible, some of the arguments, or phrases claiming to be arguments, which have been employed to vindicate a system full of absurdity and injustice.

It is because men are not in the habit of considering what the end of government is, that Catholic disabilities and Jewish disabilities have been suffered to exist so long. We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the ma chinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief ob ject. If there is any class of people who are not interested, or who do not think themselves interested, in the security of property and the

no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing property and maintaining order. But why a man should be less fit to exercise those powers because he wears a beard, because he does not eat ham, because he goes to the synagogue on Saturdays instead of going to the church on Sundays, we cannot conceive.

The constitution, it is said, is essentially Christian; and therefore to admit Jews to office is to destroy the constitution. Nor is the Jew injured by being excluded from political power. For no man has any right to his property; a man has a right to be protected from personal injury. These rights the law allows to the Jew; and with these rights it would be atrocious to inter-maintenance of order, that class ought to have fere. But it is a mere matter of favour to admit any man to political power; and no man can justly complain that he is shut out from it. We cannot but admire the ingenuity of this contrivance for shifting the burden of the proof from those to whom it properly belongs, and who would, we suspect, find it rather cumbersome. Surely no Christian can deny that every numan being has a right to be allowed every The points of difference between Christianity gratification which produces no harm to others, and Judaism have very much to do with a and to be spared every mortification which man's fitness to be a bishop or a rabbi. But produces no good to others. Is it not a source they have no more to do with his fitness to be of mortification to a class of men that they are a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of excluded from political power? If it be, they finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. have, on Christian principles, a right to be Nobody has ever thought of compelling cobfreed from that mortification, unless it can be blers to make any declaration on the true faith shown that their exclusion is necessary for the of a Christian. Any man would rather have averting of some greater evil. The presump-his shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than tion is evidently in favour of toleration. It is for the persecutor to make out his case.

The strange argument which we are considering would prove too much even for those who advance it. If no man has a right to political power, then neither Jew nor Gentile has such a right. The whole foundation of go. vernment is taken away. But it government be taken away, the property and the persons of men are insecure; and it is acknowledged that men have a right to their property and to personal security. If it be right that the property of men should be protected, and if this can only be done by means of government, then it must be right that government should exist. Now there cannot be government unless some person or persons possess political power. Therefore it is right that some person or persons should possess political power. That is

by a person who had subscribed all the thirtynine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But it would be monstrous, say the persecu tors, that Jews should legislate for a Christian community. This is a palpable misrepresen. tation. What is proposed is, not that the Jews should legislate for a Christian community, but that a legislature composed of Christians and Jews should legislate for a community com posed of Christians and Jews. On nine hundred and ninety-nine questions out of a thousand, on all questions of police, of finance, of civi 352

• Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations af- and criminal law, of foreign policy, the Jew

facting Jews in England. 8vo. London: 1829.

VOL. V.-84

as a Jew, has no interest hostile to that of the money-market, and the money-market may Christian, or even to that of the Churchman. govern the world. The minister may be in Un questions relating to the ecclesiastical doub, as to his scheme of finance till he has establishment, the Jew and the Churchman been closeted with the Jew. A cougress of may differ. But they cannot differ more widely sovereigns may be forced to summon the Jew than the Catholic and the Churchman, or the to their assistance. The scrawl of the Jew on Independent and the Churchman. The princi- the back of a piece of paper may be worth ple that Churchmen ought to monopolize the more than the royal word of three kings, or whole power of the state would at least have the national faith of three new American rean intelligible meaning. The principle that publics. But that he should put Right HonourChristians ought to monopolize it has no mean- able before his name would be the most fright ing at all. For no question connected with ful of national calamities. the ecclesiastical institutions of the country can possibly come before Parliament, with respect to which there will not be as wide a difference between Christians as there can be between any Christian and any Jew.

It was in this way that some of our politi cians reasoned about the Irish Catholics. The Catholics ought to have no political power. The sun of England is set for ever if the Catholics exercise political power. Give the Catholics every thing else; but keep political power from them. These wise men did not see that, when every thing else had been given, political power had been given. They cos

In fact, the Jews are not now excluded from any political power. They possess it; and as long as they are allowed to accumulate large fortunes, they must possess it. The distinction which is sometimes made between civil privi-tinued to repeat their cuckoo song, when it leges and political powers is a distinction without a difference. Privileges are power. Civil and political are synonymous words, the one derived from the Latin, the other from the Greek. Nor is this mere verbal quibbling. If we look for a moment at the facts of the case, we shall see that the things are inseparable, or rather identical.

That a Jew should be a judge in a Christian country would be most shocking. But he may be a juryman. He may try issues of fact; and no harm is done. But if he should be suffered to try issues of law, there is an end of the constitution. He may sit in a box plainly dressed, and return verdicts. But that he should sit on the bench in a black gown and white wig, and grant new trials, would be an abomination not to be thought of among baptized people. The distinction is certainly most philosophical.

What power in civilized society is so great as that of the creditor over the debtor? If we take this away from the Jew, we take away from him the security of his property. If we leave it to him, we leave to him a power more despotic by far than that of the king and all his cabinet.

It would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament. But a Jew may make money; and money may make members of Parliament. Gatton and Old Sarum may be the property of a Hebrew. An elector of Penryn will take ten pounds from Shylock rather than nine pounds nineteen shillings and eleven pence three farthings from Antonio. To this no objection is made. That a Jew should possess the substance of legislative power, that he should command eight votes on every division as if he were the great Duke of Newcastle himself, is exactly as it should be. But that he should pass the bar and sit down on those mysterious cushions of green leather, that he should cry "hear" and "order," and talk about being on his legs, and being, for one, free to Fay this and to say that, would be a profanation sufficient to bring ruin on the country.

That a Jew should be privy-councillor to a Christian king would be an eternal disgrace to the nation. But the Jew may govern the

was no longer a question whether Catholics should have political power or not, when a Catholic Association bearded the Parliament, when a Catholic agitator exercised infinitely more authority than the lord-lieutenant.

If it is our duty as Christians to exclude the Jews from political power, it must be our daty to treat them as our ancestors treated them, to murder them, and banish them, and rob them. For in that way, and in that way alone, can we really deprive them of political power. If we do not adopt this course, we may take away the shadow, but we must leave them the substance. We may do enough to pain and irri tate them; but we shall not do enough to secure ourselves from danger, if danger really exists. Where wealth is, there power must inevitably be.

The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or a Portuguese Jew as his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want of patrietic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political functions.

The argument has in it something plausible: but a close examination shows it to be quite unsound. Even if the alleged facts are admit ted, still the Jews are not the only people who have preferred their sect to their country. The feeling of patriotism, when society is in a healthful state, springs up, by a natural and inevitable association, in the minds of citizens who know that they owe all their comforts and pleasures to the bond which unites them in one community. But, under a partial and oppressive government, these associations cannot acquire that strength which they have in a better state of things. Men are compelled to seek from their party that protection which they ought to receive from their country, and they, by a natural consequence, transfer to their party that affection which they would other wise have felt for their country. The Hugue nots of France called in the help of England against their Catholic kings. The Catholics

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