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to be the true Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, (all in one,) of Great Britain. Look at Mr Brougham, who has lived, in a great measure, for twenty years of his life, by writing in the Edinburgh Review, and see with what face he can bear to hear the Edinburgh Review puffing him as the "immortal statesman and legislator" of the age. See the radical Examiner praising the borough-mongering Edinburgh Review, and the Pope-worshipping Edinburgh Review praising the little painted crockery-pots of Mr Leigh Hunt. See Hazlitt writing in the Edinburgh Review, and Hazlitt praised in the Edinburgh Review. See Wordsworth quizzed in the Edinburgh Review, and Keates and Cornwall patted on the back in it.-[Poor Keates! I cannot pass his name without saying that I really think he had some genius about him. I do think he had something that might have ripened into fruit, had he not made such a mumbling work of the budssomething that might have been wine, and tasted like wine, if he had not kept dabbling with his fingers in the vat, and pouring it out and calling so lustily for quaffers, before the grounds had time to be settled, or the spirit to be concentrated, or the flavour to be formed. Still poorer Barry! The Edinburgh Review compares you to Lord Byron. Upon my honour you ought not to swallow such utter humbug. You are very far from being, or even for promising to be even a Keates; for there is more merit in thrumming on the craziest spinnet in the world, however miserably, than in making the prettiest barrel-organ in the world "discourse excellent music."]

Now, these things are all very bad, but they are merely the bad things of detail. The system out of which they proceed is the real evil, and, unless the system be guarded against, there is no more use in pointing out the subordinate absurdities, than there is in cropping off the head of a toadstool, and leaving the vile root in the ground. The whole system of your modern journal is a piece of utter dishonesty from the foundation. The only supposition upon which any man of sense would put any faith in such a work, is the supposition that it speaks to the particulars of literature from the generals of literature-that it considers individual works in relation to the

whole literary treasures of the world, and pronounces of them accordingly— that it expresses, concerning every thing, the judgment of the same spirit or spirits, judging of every thing or the same principles, and by the same standards. No English journal has ever exhibited any thing like what I would wish to describe; but they have all exhibited its contraries, (even Blackwood has done so,)—and so you may form some notion of what I would say. Without unity of principle and purpose, nothing honest can be accomplished; and pray, what unity, either of literary principle, or of literary purpose, can any one suppose to exist in a work, in which it is the toss-up of a halfpenny, whether a new poem shall be reviewed by Mr Southey, or Mr Milman, or Mr Gifford, or Mr Croker, or by Mr Jeffrey, or Mr Brougham, or Sir James Macintosh, or Mr Hazlitt. It is utter nonsense to talk about Editors, and to say that they, as things go, can model what passes through their hands, so as to make every thing express, upon the whole, or in the main, their own opinion. If it were so in regard to such Editors as I have been speaking of, it would be no great matter; but it is not so, and it never can be so, unless "all old things pass away," and the Edinburgh and Quarterly become as much forgotten as two" withered scrolls." Who supposes that the editor of a Review can afford to give serious disgust to a regular, clever, and effectual writer in his book?-that Mr Gifford would afford to damn an author, patronized really and du bon cœur by Mr Southey or to refuse praising such an author, if Mr Southey chose to make a point of it? There may, for ought I know, be not one, nor three, but three dozen literary men, in regard not only to one and all of whom, but to one and all of whose friends, Mr Gifford feels himself as effectually fettered as if he were tied with all the cords that Sampson broke, and that nobody but Sampson could have dreamed of breaking. It must be just the same with Mr Jeffrey; indeed he himself, in one of his late Reviews, had the candour to say, almost in so many words, that it is so. To please one person, an editor must puff this man; and, if he have to do with men of a certain sort of temper, there is perhaps no way of pleasing

but by DAMNING that man, and ainsi va le monde. Not Creevy himself could compute the extent to which the ramifications of this vile system may extend-nor calculate from how many scores of dirty puddles the same trimly-foliaged poison-tree may be sucking its continual nutriment.

My Lord Byron, in that prime specimen of humbug, his Letter to Bowles, gives that gentleman a castigation for his complaint to Mr Gifford, on the subject of an article in the Quarterly Review on Spence's Anecdotes. Mr Bowles wrote a letter to Mr Gifford, lamenting over some cuts at a publication of his own in that article, and wondering how such cuts could have been permitted against a publication which he says Mr Southey, the most able and eloquent writer in the Quarterly Review, approved." Lord Byron tells Mr Bowles, that it was a very foolish thing of him to imagine that the Quarterly Review either does, or pretends to express the opinions of one man, and lauds, in a certain sort, the impartiality of the editor of the Quarterly, who allowed Mr Bowles to be cut up, even though Mr Southey approved of Mr Bowles. Mr Bowles is, indeed, somewhat too sensitive, and he never shewed that more clearly, than by making any complaint to any body at all about such a matter as a cut in a Review. But if he had been to make any complaint upon this paltry occasion, he should evidently have addressed it, not to Mr Gifford, but to Mr Southey; for nothing could ever make Southey and Gifford think in the same way of Pope; but every body knows, that if Mr Southey had chosen to put himself to any trouble, there would have been no such thing as any cuts at Mr Bowles in the Quarterly Review. There is Mr Wordsworth now, who has blasphemed all his life against Pope; why was no notice taken of the blasphemy of such a sturdy heretic as this, while such grievous notice was taken of Mr Bowles? Does not every body know that Wordsworth was spared, because the Quarterly Reviewers know any attack upon the first of Lakers would infallibly offend the second of the Lakers? and that Mr Bowles was sacrificed, because they knew that Laker the second would not care one single hexameter for the fate of Mr Bowles? Patet; this is all

VOL. XI.

as clear as possible. There is hum bug on every hand, and I know not where there is most of it. There is much humbug in the article in the Quarterly Review, although Lord Byron calls it "able;" for there is more sense in three lines of Lord Byron's own pamphlet, than in the whole of its smartness. There is much humbug again in any pretence, (either from the Quarterly or Lord Byron). that Pope stands in need of being defended-for nobody abuses Pope except Wordsworth and Southey, whom every body pities for conceit and prejudice, and Barry Cornwall, and the like, whom every one despises for utter incapacity. There is some humbug in Mr Bowles's pathetic address to Mr Gifford; and there is also very exquisite humbug in Lord Byron's method of commenting on that performance.

I say there is exquisite humbug; and Lord Byron knows it is; and I confess this is one piece of his Lordship's humbug, to discover the motive of which I am excessively puzzled. Perhaps it was only to try what people would swallow-but people have not swallowed, and never will swallow, an assertion from Lord Byron, that he (Lord Byron) thinks, if the English nation were to perish, Milton and Shakespeare" would perish along with it, and Pope survive." If the English nation were to perish to-morrow, I have no doubt each of those three poets would survive, because the French and Italians would take care of Pope, and the Germans and other bibbers of Rhenish would take exceeding good care of the rest. But if Lord Byron had really looked back on the history of other literatures, I don't say he would not have formed, but he would not have ventured to feign such an opinion as this about the probable fate of English literature in a very improbable situation. If he had asked himself, for example, who they are that have survived the national ruin of the Greeks and Romans, what would he have found? Would he not have found, that the authors, which are the greatest favourites with the world now, are precisely those who stood to the people for whom they wrote most nearly in the same relations in which Milton and Shakespeare do now stand to the English people? Is Shakespeare more decidedly an English author than

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Homer or Aristophanes was a Greek author? Is his spirit more decidedly English than theirs Greek? Is his language more intensely English than theirs was Greek? Is Milton, either in thought or in style, more peculiarly an English author than Plato is a Greek author? Never was any species of hum more entirely exploded, than that old Frenchified species of abusing authors for addressing themselves, with all their pith and power, to the peculiar nations of whose "mother tongues" they make use. All authors must do so, if they are to produce a great effect while they are new, and, in spite of what Byron says, if they are to sustain their character with posterity. If I were a civilized African or American, living in the year of God four thousand and twenty-two, I would feel more curiosity to read an English author expressing fervidly the spirit, character, manners, and habits of the English people, as they existed in the year 1822, than I would to read any piece of didactic poetry, or didactic prose, that ever has been, or ever will be produced, either in England or in any other country under heaven. Take even a didactic author, and ask of yourself what is the part of his works you feel most interest in reading. What do you read the oftenest in Cicero ?-not surely his dissertations about the utile and the pulchrum, but his speeches which lay before us the picture of a high-bred Roman's mind, as affected by matters of Roman interest-and his letters, which shew how a great man, of a nation extinct for so many centuries, conducted himself in his private circle-how he addressed himself to his friend-his son -his daughter. What is it you read with most interest in Pope himself? Not certainly his exquisite versifications of Lord Bolingbroke's didactic prose, but his inuch more exquisite

pictures of manners and characters ob served by his own keen eye, and peculiarly English-his letters-his satires

his Rape of the Lock-any thing rather than his Essay on Man, or his Elegy on the Unfortunate Lady-the very two of his works that one could the most easily imagine to have been written not by an Englishman; and if the French and Italians be not of the same way of thinking about Pope, that is only one instance more that there is very little of just or tasteful criticism in France and Italy. Take any other author of the present day, and apply the principle to him. Is there any man now living, or will there be any man living a hundred years hence, who would rather read Campbell's verses against scepticism than his " British Soldier's Dream ?" Is there any body who wishes Sir Walter Scott to publish three volumes of Sermons every three months? Does any one prefer Lord Byron's un-English verses on Talavera, to his English verses upon Waterloo? Who likes Wordsworth, when he writes of "man," and "fate," and "loyalty," and "religion?"-And who does not like him when he describes a common Cumberland beggar, travelling his rounds in a sequestered valley, carrying the news of one hamlet to another, and so forming a sort of bond between the good English country people, who give him their alms? No-There is nothing for it but sticking to life and nature, and the people we live among. By not doing so, Mr Southey has written many heavy scores of dead and dying books; and, by doing so, he has written one that is life and health all over, and bids fair for immortality his Life of Nelson.

**

ADAM BLAIR.

Ir is not possible to take up a volume that treats of Scottish character, under the guise of fictitious narrative, without thinking of the genius and achievements of the great Unknown. A sort of unconscious comparison is made, as we proceed in the perusal of any such work, between the representations there given, and those which have already held us enthralled in delight and wonder. And we have no doubt, that such comparison, if necessarily prolonged by similarity of subject, could not but prove fatal to the success of any new writer, however powerful his genius. But, on the other hand, if it be immediately dismissed from the view, and the work which at first occasioned it, appear to be one original in its subject and execution, and in no way interfering with, or trespassing upon the provinces of the Magician, though belonging to the same land, then the effect produced on the reader by that unconscious comparison, is a genial one, and the new author enjoys the benefit of it, in meeting with an earnest and an eager attention. We are pleased to find that he is not an imitator; and equally so, to find that he has opened up to us unsuspected sources of amusement or instruction, in a region familiar to us, and of which we had perhaps supposed we already knew the extent, or at least the nature of all the riches.

Such was the case with us when we first read the " Annals of the Parish." The author spoke of Scotland, and of nothing else. Every thing was Scottish. Yet no one could have discovered that he had ever read the works of our great national novelist. The scenery-the characters-the incidentsthe reflections-the feelings-all were different, as if they had belonged to another people, and another land, yet were they all perfectly true to the same. "The Annals of the Parish," were absurdly and ignorantly said, in the Quarterly Review, to belong (we forget how) to what are called the Scotch Novels. It is true that they were published after about fifty of these volumes;

but they have no other relation to them, than of time and place. Accordingly the "Annals of the Parish," is a book which will keep its station in our literature. Its claims are not high or obtrusive. But it is original, and true to nature, and therefore it must live.

Unless we are greatly mistaken, the very remarkable volume, entitled, "Some Passages in the Life of MrAdam Blair," possesses this independent and original character. Every page of it is Scottish-yet there is not in it all one page that seems to have been suggested by any picture or representation in the great Novels. In like manner, its principal character is a Scottish clergyman, and drawn with great power and truth, yet those who have rested with calm satisfaction on the simple, innocent, and primitive character of Micah Balwhidder, in the Manse of Dalmailing, will be no less pleased to be introduced to the impassioned, erring, and interesting Adam Blair in that of the parish of Cross-Meikle.

The author of this book seems to be a man possessing very deep insight into the passionate nature of the human soul; and has ventured to place the entire interest of his work, it may be said, on the display of passion in one obscure individual. He keeps close to his subject, and feels his power over it. His picture is never feebly drawn, though sometimes the colours are laid on with a somewhat too dashing hand; and though there are passages in this volume that will bear comparison with the most vivid and forcible delineations of human nature to be found in our literature, yet the general impression left on the reader's mind by the whole, is, that the author is easily capable of better and greater things, and cannot fail, if he chooses to exert his noble powers to the utmost, to take his place in the first rank of modern genius.

We are aware, that out of Scotland, the incident on which the whole interest of this narrative rests, may scarcely seem suited or equal to produce that utter prostration of mind,

Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair. Post 8vo. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood; and T. Cadell, London. 1822.

and that long remorse, which are here so ably depicted. But the sanctity of the clerical character, owing to many causes, is in Scotland a part of the national belief and feeling; and such violation of it as Adam Blair is guilty of, necessarily involves the perpetrator in almost irremediable ruin, and gives a shock to the whole moral and religious associations of every mind in the country. In Scotland, therefore, such a crime committed by a minister of religion, be the circumstances what they may, is a sufficient ground on which to build up a story, terminating in the most fatal and rueful catastrophes. We make this remark, because, without insinuating in the most remote degree, that such a crime is held light in any other civilized and Christian country, yet it is certain, that even in England, for example, a country of which the clergy are, generally speaking, a most moral class of men, and where no immoral clergyman can escape contempt, the banishment and sufferings of Adam Blair will be considered by many as too great for his sin; whereas, in Scotland, his sin will be considered by many as too great to justify his restoration to his sacred office, even after years of humiliation and repentance.

Unless it be deeply and truly felt that the crime of which Adam Blair has been guilty must have produced in his mind an incurable and overwhelming remorse, and also utterly ruined and degraded him in his sacred profession, this book cannot powerfully affect the reader, for it must then appear to give an exaggerated account of an unnatural state of mind. But to all who feel otherwise, its character must be tragic. To them it will seem, with a just representation of human nature in the abstract, to combine much that is interesting, pathetic, and beautiful, in individual character and situation in life. Just as cowardice is a vital sin in a soldier, they will feel incontinence to be so in a minister of religion; but while the character of the first, once degraded and disgraced, seems irretrievable, even in imagination, that of the latter may outlive its shame and its guilt, and reappear, after a due period of penitence, as pure and more solemn than before, combining the melancholy and mournful associations of human temptation, trial, and trans

gression, with those of renovated hope, meek faith, and humble piety. To awaken such feelings, and to imprint such impressions, seems to have been the aim and object of the author of "Adam Blair;" and although we think he has occasionally failed in the subordinate details, in the main he has been eminently successful.

Adam Blair, the actor and sufferer in this little volume, is a Scottish clergyman, settled in his small quiet Manse, in a small quiet parish. He has been married for ten years to the woman whom he tenderly loved, and who was worthy of his love. He has been perfectly happy-and we may say, perfectly virtuous. But his children die one by one of consumptionall but his sweet Sarah; and the mother, from whom they inherited that beautiful and fatal disease, soon follows them to the grave. Then a new and a different life lies upon Adam Blair-a life of gloom, sadness, silence, and desolation, instead of light, glee, music, and happiness. Hitherto he had been supported on the wings of happiness in the calm air of peace; but how he must support himself. Hitherto his soul was calm, but now there are waves; and he perceives and feels that a man's nature is not known to him until it has been tried in affliction as well as enjoyment. But Adam Blair is a sincere believer in that Christianity which he has taught; and therefore, though sad and dejected, even miserable at times, and in despair, yet his soul is strengthened by devotion; and when he looks on his only young and beautiful daughter, he is willing to face the light, and to endure existence. The first chapters of the volume describe this bereavement, this agony, and this resignation. They describe it beautifully and well; nor do we know where could be found united so much tenderness and so much passion. The author gains our hearts at the first meeting; and we feel-not that we have formed an acquaintance, but that we have found a friend, who has an original and interesting character, and will soon possess a close hold on our affections.

While the widower is in this state of mind, and in solitude, one whom he had known in former happy days, and who had been bride's-maid to her he has lost, offers a visit, and comes to the Manse of Cross-Meikle. This

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