which is essential to their just procedure, both in mat- | much which it is not the business of masters in mediters of speculation and of conduct. They would, in fine, impart to all classes of people, not those feverish impulses which impair intellectual vigor and foster an eccentric zeal; but those healthful interests which are congenial to moderation, to simplicity and to truth.'

After some reflections on utilitarianism-reflections which we dissent from because we like utilitarianism; and which therefore we shall not copy-Mr. G. has the following just and beautiful passage:

cal science to teach? And, think you, should we hear such repeated complaints of the drowsiness and the aridity of the pulpit, if preachers, less ambitious of soaring to the Alpine heights of theology, spoke more frequently the language of cultivated tastes, sympathies and affections; if, full of the momentous verities of the gospel, they were capable of imitating, however inadequately, the varied song of David, the majestic eloquence of Paul, the seraphic fervor of Isaiah ?""

And let merchants of all sorts, mechanics, and farm

'How pervading is the sense of the beautiful, anders, pay heedful attention to the following:

how full of beautiful forms is this earth on which we are appointed to dwell! Who can look upon nature in her serene aspects and wonderful transformations, and not own it a glorious privilege to comprehend other than philosophical relations, and to enjoy something beside the demonstrations of exact science? At this season of pathetic loveliness, who can look upon the memorials of the dying year, without confessing the power of imagery to wake to an eloquent response the chords of human feeling?

*

This peculiar tendency of American society, which I have cursorily considered, would be exempt from the danger of excess, if liberal studies were permitted to exert their full power of counteraction. Without rendering us impatient of dull realities, they sometimes lift us above them; they quicken within us the sensibilities of taste; they transport us into the region of hopes and fears; of the profound and the indefinite; they invite us to the contemplation of whatsoever is lovely in the sympathies of our common nature; splendid in the conquests of intellect, or heroic in the trials of virtue.'

Lawyers, physicians, clergymen,―ought to read and ponder well this paragraph:

'Professional men, sometimes ready to sink under the pressure of unvaried mental effort, find that occasional excursions into the field of elegant literature impart renewed vigor to their exhausted powers. They do not so much require complete exemption from toil, as counter excitement; and to men of refined tastes, this species of excitement is abundantly supplied by those treasures of wisdom and of wit, and those captivating forms of expression, which lie without the boundaries of exclusively professional study. Again, from the peculiar nature of their pursuits, and from the almost incessant attention which they demand, such men are liable to become somewhat narrow and perverse in their judgments. They cultivate few of the graceful sensibilities of their nature; they estrange themselves from the regions of taste; they regale their imaginations with no images of beauty. "There is perhaps nothing," says one of the most original thinkers of the age, "which more enlarges or enriches the mind, than to lay it genially open to impressions of pleasure from the exercise of every species of talent." In this disposition, with rare exceptions, professional men are wanting; and it is this disposition which liberal studies are specially fitted to create. What a reproach attaches to the lawyer who feels admiration for no science but his own? What physician is thoroughly prepared for the practice of his profession, who has not learned

Autumn.-[Ed. Mess.

The precepts and the exemple of the celebrated James Otis deserve to be commended to the attention of every young man who aspires to distinction at the Bar. We are told, by his biographer, that, after leaving College, he devoted eighteen months to the pursuit of various branches of Literature, previously to entering on the study of Jurisprudence. In a letter to his father, he says, "I shall always lament that I did not take a year or two further for more general inquiries in the Arts and Sciences, before I sat down to the laborious study of the laws of my country." He inculcated on his pupils as a maxim, "that a lawyer ought never to be without a volume of natural or public law, or

moral philosophy, on his table, or in his pocket.""

'But it is to those who are familiarly styled men of business, that liberal studies should be more particularly commended. Parents often withhold, from such of their sons as are intended for active life, an accomplished education, because they believe that success in active life is rather hindered than promoted by the liberal cultivation of the intellect. In accordance with this belief, it is often said that merchants, manufacturers, and mechanics acquire no additional skill for the conduct of their business, by an acquaintance with general literature. And what if they do not? Were they born to be merchants, and manufacturers, and mechanics, and nothing more? Are they not endowed, like other men, with the higher faculties of their being, and should not these faculties be exercised upon their proper objects? They are not, it is true, candidates for literary distinc tion; but in whatever sphere they may chance to move they are human beings, and why should they not be rational well informed, refined human beings? If their ordinary occupations be somewhat alien from the pursuits of literature, this, of itself, is a cogent reason why a taste for such pursuits should be the more carefully fostered. To the imperfect education of this large and valuable class in every community, may be ascribed the otherwise inexplicable mistakes of men who stand strong in the consciousness of rare practical sagacity. What disastrous errors would such men avoid, if they gave more repose to their passions; and if, by employing their minds upon a larger variety of objects, they sharpened their accuracy, and enlarged their comprehension!'

The concluding paragraph is pregnant with truth and power:

'Well might I be deemed an unfaithful advocate of liberal studies, if, in estimating their value, I yielded no tribute of applause to the solid provision which they make for independent individual happiness; for that happiness which is enjoyed, not so much amid the hum and shock of men, as amid the solitude of nature and of thought. Living in a land where "men act in multitudes, think in multitudes, and are free in multitudes," we are constantly tempted to forget the mysterious individuality of our being; to go out of ourselves for materials of enjoyment; to fritter away our sensibilities, and to debilitate our understandings, amid the false and hollow gaieties of the crowd. I contend for no severe estrangement from the joys of a chaste and elegant conviviality; for no exclusive intercourse with forms of inanimate beauty; for no fearful communion with the mysteries of the inner spirit. But I deprecate habits and tastes which are impatient of seclusion; which destroy all true and simple relish for nature; which scorn all quiet pleasures; which abhor alike the composure and the scrutiny of meditation. As means of reforming tastes and habits thus uncongenial to virtue and to happiness, I can hardly exaggerate the importance of liberal studies. I ascribe to them, however, no power to teach rooted sorrow the lesson of submission; to succor virtue amid mighty temptations; to dispel the awful sadness of the inevitable hour. These are the victories of christian faith; the grand, and peculiar, and imperishable evidences of its power.

The victim of a mother's wanton boast,

Beheld the rugged crags that reared their wild
And threatening heads above the stormy coast;
And as she gazed upon the sea before,

In mockery through her bosom stole a host
Of pleasant memories, while with angry roar
The death-denouncing waves broke on the rocky shore.

The ample treasure of her raven locks

In darksome beauty streaming on the wind, Upon a pedestal of blackened rocks

Like Parian statue stood the maid, confined

By chains which marred the tender wrists they bound:
The thoughts of home came thronging on her mind,---
Her bosom heaved, her eyes in tears were drowned,
And grief burst from her lips in sorrow's plaintive sound.

She thought of early childhood's summer hours,
Of sportive glee beneath the myrtle shade,
Of garlands wreathed for youthful friends in bowers

Selection from Blackwood's Magazine for 1818.

ON THE POETRY OF

SCOTT, BYRON, AND WORDSWORTH.

The three great master-spirits of our day, in the poetical world, are Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron. But there never were minds more unlike to each other than theirs are, either in original conformation or in the course of life. It is great and enduring glory to this age, to have produced three poets,-of perfectly origi nal genius,-unallied to each other,-drinking inspiration from fountains far apart,-who have built up superb structures of the imagination, of distinct orders of architecture,--and who may indeed be said to rule, each by a legitimate sovereignty, over separate and powerful provinces in the kingdom of Mind.

Though greatly inferior in many things to his illustrious brethren, Scott is perhaps, after all, the most unequivocally original. We do not know of model any after which the form of his principal poems has been moulded. They bear no resemblance, and, we must allow, are far inferior to the heroic poems of Greece;

Of myrrhine sweets, through which her feet had strayed--nor do they, though he has been called the Ariosto of

Thought of her father's halls--the dance---the lay

Of minstrel, and the mellow lute of maid...
Then of her doom; and saw with dread dismay
The monster of the deep roll on, prepared to slay.

One piercing shriek of anguish wildly rose
Above the moaning ocean---fear represt
The hapless cry of agony, and froze

The fount of life within her virgin breast;
While from each starting orb, the tear-drops, o'er
Her snowy bosom showering pearls, confessed
Her lorn despair, as rushing towards the shore
The ravenous monster seemed her beauty to explore.

She trembled like an aspen; and the blood

Was curdling in her veins, as mute she gazed Upon his bulk, now stretched upon the flood,

Now rolled in spires, as o'er the waves he raised
His towering crest, high gleaming in the air;

And marked his eyes, which like two meteors blazed
Upon his burnished front, with their red glare
Portending darksome death, destruction and despair.

Still onward rolled the portent, till his breath
Came warm upon her, and his nostrils shed
The dewy brine; and armed with pointed death
Appeared the jagged teeth within his dread

And terrible jaws, expanded to devour;

When from the upper air flashed on her head

A sudden light, and, in that fearful hour,

An unseen arm was raised that broke the monster's power.

E'en as his giant body smote the sand,

Swift rushing from the foam-engirdled tide,
With nostrils spread but breathless on the sand
He lay immense, with jaws expanded wide...
And sinews bent---but rigid as the pile

Of endless crags, that, reared on either side
With everlasting adamant did tile
The rocky ramparts of the sea-defying isle.

the North, seem to us to resemble, in any way what-
ever, any of the great poems of modern Italy. He
has given a most intensely real representation of the
living spirit of the chivalrous age of his country. He
has not shrouded the figures or the characters of his
heroes in high poetical lustre, so as to dazzle us by
resplendent fictitious beings, shining through the scenes
and events of a half-imaginary world. They are as
much real men in his poetry, as the "mighty earls" of
old are in our histories and annals. The incidents, too,
and events, are all wonderfully like those of real life;
and when we add to this, that all the most interesting
and impressive superstitions and fancies of the times
are in his poetry incorporated and intertwined with the
ordinary tissue of mere human existence, we feel our-
selves hurried from this our civilized age, back into the
troubled bosom of semibarbarous life, and made keen
partakers in all its impassioned and poetical credulities.
His poems are historical narrations, true in all things
to the spirit of history, but everywhere overspread
with those bright and breathing colors which only
genius can bestow on reality; and when it is recollected,
that the times in which his scenes are laid and his he-
roes act were distinguished by many of the most ener-
getic virtues that can grace or dignify the character of
a free people, and marked by the operation of great
passions and important events, every one must feel that
the poetry of Walter Scott is, in the noblest sense of
the word, national; that it breathes upon us the bold
and heroic spirit of perturbed but magnificent ages,
and connects us, in the midst of philosophy, science,
and refinement, with our turbulent but high-minded
ancestors, of whom we have no cause to be ashamed,
whether looked on in the fields of war or in the halls
of peace.
He is a true knight in all things,—free,
courteous, and brave. War, as he describes it, is a
noble game, a kingly pastime. He is the greatest of
all war-poets. His poetry might make a very coward

fearless. In Marmion, the battle of Flodden agitates | experience, gives to all his poetry, a very peculiar, a us with all the terror of a fatal overthrow. In the Lord of the Isles, we read of the field of Bannockburn with clenched hands and fiery spirits, as if the English were still our enemies, and we were victorious over their invading king. There is not much of all this in any modern poetry but his own; and therefore it is, that, independently of all his other manifold excellences, we glory in him as the great modern National Poet of Scotland, in whom old times revive,-whose poetry prevents history from becoming that which, in times of excessive refinement, it is often too apt to become a dead letter, and keeps the animating and heroic spectacles of the past moving brightly across our every-day world, and flashing out from them a kindling power over the actions and characters of our own age.

LORD BYRON'S FAULTS.

very endearing, and, at the same time, a very lofty character. His poetry is little colored by the artificial distinctions of society. In his delineations of passion or character, he is not so much guided by the varieties produced by customs, institutions, professions, or modes of life, as by those great elementary laws of our nature which are unchangeable and the same; and therefore the pathos and the truth of his most felicitous poetry are more profound than of any other, not unlike the most touching and beautiful passages in the sacred page. The same spirit of love, and benignity, and etherial purity, which breathes over all his pictures of the virtues and the happiness of man, pervades those too of external nature. Indeed, all the poets of the age,—and none can dispute that they must likewise be Byron is in all respects the very opposite of Scott. the best critics,-have given up to him the palm in that He never dreams of wholly giving up his mind to the poetry which commerces with the forms, and hues, and influence of the actions of men, or the events of his- odors, and sounds, of the material world. He has tory. He lets the world roll on, and eyes its wide-brightened the earth we inhabit to our eyes; he has weltering and tumultuous waves-even the calamitous made it more musical to our ears; he has rendered it shipwrecks that strew its darkness-with a stern and more creative to our imaginations. sometimes even a pitiless misanthrophy. He cannot sympathise with the ordinary joys or sorrows of humanity, even though intense and overpowering. They must live and work in intellect and by intellect, before they seem worthy of the sympathy of his impenetrable soul. His idea of man, in the abstract, is boundless and magnificent; but of men, as individuals, he thinks with derision and contempt. Hence he is in one stanza a sublime moralist, elevated and transported by the dignity of human nature; in the next a paltry satirist, sneering at its meanness. Hence he is unwilling to yield love or reverence to any thing that has yet life; for life seems to sink the little that is noble into the degradation of the much that is vile. The dead, and the dead only, are the objects of his reverence or his love; for death separates the dead from all connexion, all intimacy with the living; and the memories of the great or good alone live in the past, which is a world of ashes. Byron looks back to the tombs of those great men "that stand in assured rest ;" and gazing, as it were, on the bones of a more gigantic race, his imagination then teems with corresponding births, and he holds converse with the mighty in language worthy to be heard by the spirits of the mighty. It is in this contrast between his august conceptions of man, and his contemptuous opinion of men, that much of the almost incomprehensible charm, and power, and enchantment of his poetry exists. We feel ourselves alternately sunk and elevated, as if the hand of an invisible being had command over us. At one time we are a little lower than the angels; in another, but little higher than the worms. We feel that our elevation and our disgrace are alike the lot of our nature; and hence the poetry of Byron, as we before remarked, is read as a dark, but still a divine revelation.

[The merits of Lord Byron have been sufficiently trumpeted. No penner of choice verses in a lady's album, but has the oft-quoted beauties of Childe Harold, The Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos, at his fingers' ends. No literary dandy, who draws his morality and his prettinesses of speech from Bulwer, but lisps with equal fondness and familiarity though less knowledge, the euphonious name of 'Byron.' It is now time to hear the other side. That our readers may in part do so, we cull from our old Blackwood the following severe letter addressed to his Lordship, by a stern moralist, whose castigation is the more just and effectual, as he evidently holds the powers of the noble poet in the highest esteem.-Ed. Mess.]

ΤΟ THE AUTHOR OF BEPPO.

My Lord,-It has for many years been almost impossible that any thing should increase my contempt for the professional critics of this country; otherwise the manner in which these persons have conducted themselves towards your Lordship, would, most certainly, have produced that effect. The hyperboles of their sneaking adulation, in spite of the far-off disdain with which you seem to regard them, have probably reached, long ago, the vanity of the poet, and touched, with If Byron be altogether unlike Scott, Wordsworth is a chilling poison, some of the better feelings of the yet more unlike Byron. With all the great and essen- man. I have formed, however, a very mistaken opitial faculties of the poet, he possesses the calm and nion of your character, if, conscious as you still are of self-commanding powers of the philosopher. He looks the full vigor of youthful genius, you can allow yourover human life with a steady and serene eye; he lis-self to be permanently satisfied, either with the subjects tens with a fine ear" to the still sad music of humani- or the sources of the commendation which has been ty." His faith is unshaken in the prevalence of virtue poured upon you. If you feel not within yourself a over vice, and of happiness over misery; and in the strong and tormenting conviction, that as yet you have existence of a heavenly law operating on earth, and, done little more than exhibit to the world, the melanin spite of transitory defeats, always visibly triumphant choly spectacle of a great spirit, self-embittered, selfin the grand field of human warfare. Hence he looks wasted, and self-degraded, if, in your solitary moover the world of life, and man, with a sublime benig-ments, there shoot not sometimes across your giddy nity; and hence, delighting in all the gracious dispen-brain, the lightnings of a self-abhorrent and unhyposations of God, his great mind can wholly deliver itself critical remorse, the progress of the mental paralysis up to the love of a flower budding in the field, or of a child asleep in its cradle; nor, in doing so, feels that poetry can be said to stoop or to descend, much less to be degraded, when she imbodies, in words of music, the purest and most delightful fancies and affections of the human heart. This love of the nature to which he belongs, and which is in him the fruit of wisdom and

has been more deadly than I had been willing to believe ;--but even then, a friend of charity and of virtue may expect a ready pardon for having hoped too much, and for having spoken to you in vain.

To few men, either in ancient or in modern times, has been afforded an opening destiny more fortunate than yours. Sprung from a long line of generous ca

she produced them, and we shrink from degradation, | and unobtrusive individual? You must share the fate of lest their silent manes should reproach us. your brethren, and abide the judgment of the spectators. Having assumed for our amusement, these gaudy trappings, you must not hope to screen your blunders from our castigation, by a sudden and prudish retreat into a less glittering costume. You have made your election.-The simile which I have employed may appear inept to many; of these, I well know your Lordship is not one.

Had it been your destiny to live two centuries ago, and in the place of these illustrious spirits, to form the national poetry of England, how miserably different had been, with regard to you and to themselves, the feelings of your countrymen! In all your writings, how little is there whose object it is to make us reverence virtue, or love our country! You never teach us to despise earthly sufferings, in the hope of eternal hap- You made your debut in the utmost dignity and piness. With respect to all that is best and greatest in sadness of the Cothurnus. You were the most luguthe nature and fate of man, you preserve not merely a brious of mortals; it was the main ambition of your sorrowful, but a sullen silence. Your poetry need not vanity to attract to your matchless sorrows the overhave been greatly different from what it is, although flowing sympathies of the world. We gave you credit you had lived and died in the midst of a generation of for being sincere in your affliction. We looked upon heartless, vicious, and unbelieving demons. With you, you as the victim of more than human misery, and heroism is lunacy, philosophy folly, virtue a cheat, and sympathized with the extravagance of your public and religion a bubble. Your man is a stern, cruel, jealous, uncontrollable lamentations. It is true that no one revengeful, contemptuous, hopeless, solitary savage. knew whence your sorrow had sprung, but we were Your woman is a blind, devoted, heedless, beautiful generous in our compassion, and asked few questions. minister and victim of lust. The past is a vain record, In time, however, we have become less credulous and and the present a fleeting theatre of misery and mad-more inquisitive; the farce was so often renewed, that ness: the future one blank of horrid darkness, whereon we became weary of its wonders; we have come to your mind floats and fluctuates in a cheerless uncertain- suspect at last, that whatever sorrows you may have, ty, between annihilation and despair. they are all of your own creating; and that, whencesoever they may be, they are at least neither of so uniform nor of so majestic a character as you would fain have had us to suppose.

The interest which you have found means to excite for the dismal creations of your poetry, is proof abundant of the vigor of your genius, but should afford small consolation to your conscience-stricken mind. You are a skilful swordsman; but you have made use of poisoned weapons, and the deadliness of your wound gives no addition to your valor. You have done what greater and better men despised to do. You have brought yourself down to the level of that part of our erring and corrupted nature, which it was their pride and privilege to banish from the recollection and the sympathy of those to whom they spake. In the great struggle between the good and the evil principle, you have taken the wrong side, and you enjoy the worthless popularity of a daring rebel. But hope not that the calm judgment of posterity will ratify the hasty honors which you have extorted from the passions of your contemporaries. Believe me, men are not upon the whole quite so unprincipled, nor women quite so foolish,-nor virtue so useless,--nor religion so absurd,-nor deception so lasting,-nor hypocrisy so triumphant, as your Lordship has been pleased to fancy. A day of terrible retribution will arrive, and the punishment inflicted may not improbably consist of things the most unwelcome to a poet's view-the scorn of many, and the neglect of all. Even now, among the serious and reflective part of the men and the women of England, your poetry is read, indeed, and admired, but you yourself are never talked of except with mingled emotions of anger and pity. With what pain do the high spirits of your virtuous and heroic ancestors contemplate the degradation of their descendant. Alas! that the genius which might have ennobled any name, should have only assisted you to stamp a more lasting stain upon the pure, the generous, the patriotic, the English name of Byron.

Any other poet might complain with justice, should he see remarks of a personal nature mixed up with a criticism upon his writings. You, my Lord, can scarcely flatter yourself that you have any right to expect such forbearance. If the scrutiny of the world be disagreeable to you, either in its operation or in its effects, you need blame no one but yourself. We were well enough disposed to treat you with distant respect, but you have courted and demanded our gaze. You have bared your bosom when no man entreated you; it is your own fault if we have seen there not the scars of honorable wounds, but the festering blackness of a loathsome disease. You have been the vainest and the most egotistical of poets. You have made yourself your only theme; shall we not dare to dissect the hero, because, forsooth, he and his poet are the same? You have debased your nobility by strutting upon the stage; shall we still be expected to talk of you as of a private

There was indeed something not a little affecting in the spectacle of youth, nobility, and genius, doomed to a perpetual sighing over the treachery of earthly hopes, and the vanity of earthly enjoyments. Admitting, as we did to its full extent, the depth of your woes, it is no wonder that we were lenient critics of the works of such a peerless sufferer. We reverenced your mournful muse; we were willing to believe that, if such was her power in the midst of tears, a brighter fortune would have made it unrivalled and irresistible. The forlornness of your bosom gained you the forbearance of the most unrelenting judges. Every thing was pardoned to the chosen victim of destiny. We regarded you as the very masterpiece and symbol of affliction, and looked up to you the more that your glory had been withered

"As when Heaven's fire

Had scathed the forest oak, or mountain pine,
With singed top his stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath."

Although, however, we at the time believed what you told us, and opened all the stores of our pity to your moving tale, we have not been able to abstain, in the sequel, from considering somewhat more calmly the items of its horror. The first thing which made us suspect that we had been played upon, was the vehemence of your outcries. If your account of yourself were a true one, your heart was broken. You decked yourself in the sable trappings of a Hamlet, and, like him, you were free to confess that "the earth seemed to you only a sterile promontory, and the goodly canopy of heaven a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. You had no pleasure in man, no! nor, for all our smiling, in woman neither." You stood like another Niobe, a cold and marble statue, frozen by despair amidst the ruin of your hopes. Had your sorrow been so deep, my Lord, its echoes had been lower. The dignified sufferer needs no circle of listeners to fan, by their responding breath, the expiring embers of misery. Poetry was born within you, and you must have made it the companion of your afflictions; but your lyre, like that of the bereaved hero of old, would have uttered lonely and unobtrusive notes, had your fingers, like his, been touched with the real tremblings of agony. A truly glorious spirit, sunk in sorrow such as you assumed, might have well deserved the silent veneration of its more lowly and more happy contemplators. But it would neither have courted their notice, nor enjoyed their sympathy. Alone, in its gigantic wretchedness, it would have scorned to lay its troubles open to the