one or two novels; but the performances she is better known by, are her miscellaneous light essays or tales, with which the periodical literature of the day is sown abundantly, and the characteristic sketches illustrative of her native Ireland, of which she published a volume not long ago, in conjunction with her husband. Her miscellaneous sketches, in general, are graceful, and womanly in the most amiable sense. Lever, well known in the popular literature of the day as " Harry Lorrequer," writes Irish novels too, and therefore is mentioned in this place. He has a large circle of readers, and many of them would say they prefer him to anybody else; but if you tried to elicit from them one good reason, they would have no better answer to give than "Oh! he's a capital fellow!" What the French call material life, is the whole life he recognizes; and that life is a jest, and a very loud one, in his philosophy. The sense of beauty and love he does not recognize at all, except in our modern condition of social animals. To read him is like sitting in the next room to an orgie of gentlemen topers, with their noisy gentility and 'hip! hip! hurras!' and the rattling din of plates and glasses. In his way, he is a very clever writer, nobody can deny; but he is contracted and conventional, and unrefined in his line of conventionality. His best descriptions are of military life. He is most at home in the mess-room. He has undoubted humour and a quick talent of invention of comic scenes, which generally end in broad farce. He does not represent fairly even the social and jovial side of men of much refinement, or, if he does, he should not represent them as he does, on all sides thus social and jovial. "A capital fellow" is Lorrequer accounted by his readers, and that expression we take to be the most compact and complete estimate of him. The sort of reader for Harry Lorrequer, is one of those right jovial blades who can dismiss his six dozen of oysters and a tankard of stout "after the play," and then adjourn with some other capital fellows to brandy-and-water and a Welsh rabbit, pleasantly relieved by poached eggs, and cigars, and a comic song; yet rise the next morning without a fraction of headache, without the knowledge of a stomach, and go to breakfast with a fox-hunter. The present period is certainly destined to display a singular variety, not only in the classes of literary production, but in the different modifications of each class. We think the most omniverous reader would be discomposed by the contrasts, if for his morning's reading he took alternately a chapter from Banim, a chapter from Lady Morgan's "Wild Irish Girl," a chapter from Mrs. S. C. Hall's "Irish Tales," a highbrogue chapter from Lover's "Rory O'More," an after-dinner scene from Harry Lorrequer, and concluded by going to a wake or a wedding with Carleton. "One midnight dark a Spirit electric came, And shot an invisible arrow through the sky!" "A poet hidden in the light of thought." "The art of the poet is to separate from the fable whatever does not essentially belong to it; whatever, in the daily necessities of real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts the progress of important actions." A. W. SCHLEGEL. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. "Break Phantasy, from thy cave of cloud, And spread thy purple wings! And various shapes of things." BEN JONSON. ROBERT BROWNING AND J. W. MARSTON. THE spirit of passionate and imaginative poetry is not dead among us in the "ignorant present "—it is alive, and of great splendour, filling the eyes and ears of those who by nature and study are fitted to receive such influences. If dazzling lines, passages, and scenes, were asked in proof of this, what an array might instantly be selected from the comparatively little known works of Mr. Browning,-Mr. Darley, the author of the "Manuscripts of Erdely," -the author of "Festus," and several others still less known. While the struggle of this spirit to ascend visibly from the denser masses around—a struggle understood by so few, interesting to fewer, believed in by fewer still-while this is going on, there is also a struggle of a more practical kind in |