"Song of the Shirt" was recited towards the conclusion. Every verse he delivered was with deathly exhaustion, and the hollow tones of his voice, the difficulty with which he drew his breath, and, above all, the tremor with which he absolutely gasped "Work-workwork," sent such a thrill through the nerves, that we never experienced before the highest efforts of dramatic representation. It was a perfect, although painful, realisation of the exhausted state of the poor sempstress, and never did the magical power of Hood's verse come so forcibly upon our minds as in this truthful interpretation. If the "Song of the Shirt" does not penetrate the depths of the human heart, nothing else can:

O! Men, with Sisters dear!

O! Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creature's lives!
Stitch-stitch-stitch,

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt!

But why do I talk of Death?

That phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own-
It seems so like my own,

Because of the fasts I keep,-
Oh God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!

Who could confront such burning language as this, and not feel the enormity of the siu denounced? You, who drive hard bargains-you, who in your support of cheap wares grind down the impoverished-you, who heedlessly, if not heartlessly, render the poor man or woman's lot more miserable than it really is go to, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the terrible significance of Hood's appeal. If you have laughed with him-if you have enjoyed the flash of his wit and the piquancy of his humour, it equally behoves you to respond to the serious outpourings of his heart. In the "Bridge of Sighs," the "Song of the Shirt," the "Lady's Dream," and the "Workhouse Clock," he "points a moral" applicable to us all

But evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart!

How many of us may exclaim, with the Lady in the Dream

Alas! I have walk'd through life,

Too heedless where I trod,
Nay, helping to trample my fellow-worm,
And fill the burial sod;

And still bedew'd it with a various stain; Lastly came Ariel, shooting from a star, Who bears all fairy embassies afar.

The appeals of the Fays to Father Time, especially those of Music, Flowers, and Love are delicious beyond comparison. There is such a dainty sweetness about their language that we almost fancy ourselves in the midst of their court, listening to their tiny voices. What can be more tenderly sweet than this verse, in which the fairy is supposed to preside over the sleep of an infant ?

And we are near the mother, when she sits
Beside her infant in its wicker bed;
And we are in the fairy scene that flits
Across its tender brain; sweet dreams we
shed,

And whilst the tender little soul is fled Away, to sport with our young elves, the while

We touch the dimpled cheek with roses red, And tickle the soft lips until they smile, So that their careful parents they beguile.

After several fruitless appeals to the stern judgment of Time, the elfin shapes are about to become the victims of the latter's rude scythe when

the shade of Shakspere appears, before whom time is powerless, and rescues the fairy band. The allegory is delicately conceived, and worked out with considerable beauty. Most of his minor poems, with some sonnets, are characterised by much graceful fancy. Hood developes as great an originality of genius in his serious poems as in his comic ones. That he was a man of tender heart, of refined taste, and singular poetic fancy, must be admitted on all sides. In some places he has the warmth and vigour of Burns; in others, the tenderness and fancy of Keats; here he is denouncing the "countless wrongs" of man against man, there he is beguiling you with visions of faëry land; now he is recounting, in burning sentences, the miseries of the poor sempstress; anon he is conducting you, with delicate conceits, into the presence of Titania and Oberon. In anticipation of the melancholy events we are about to record, the following eminently beautiful lines must form our last extract. From the date (April, 1845) they would appear to be among the last, if not the last, effusion of his gifted mind :

Farewell, Life! my senses swim,
And the world is growing dim;
Thronging shadows cloud the light,
Like the advent of the night:
Colder, colder, colder still,
Upward steals a vapour chill;
Strong the earthly odour grows,-
I smell the mould above the rose !

Welcome, Life! the spirit strives;
Strength returns and hope revives;
Cloudy fears and shapes forlorn
Fly like shadows at the morn;
O'er the earth there comes a bloom,
Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapour cold,
I smell the rose above the mould!

Strange as it may appear, no man suffered more, for several years, from physical debility, than Hood. In the midst of all, it is scarcely necessary to observe, he was cheerful and resigned. However shattered the frame, the mind was predominant over all. "His sportive humour," says a writer in the Literary Gazette, "like the rays from a crackling fire in a dilapidated building, had long played among the fractures of a ruined constitution, and flashed upon the world through the flaws and rents of a shattered wreck." The patience and even cheerfulness he manifested during his long and wasting

illness forms one of the most amiable traits in his character. One circumstance which gave him much consolation, and which was effected through the kindness of that great and good man, the late Sir Robert Peel, was the grant of a pension of £100 a-year to his wife. This reconciled him to the close of that poignant suffering which he so long and calmly awaited. On Saturday, the 3d of May, 1845, death relieved him of all his earthy pains, and, as is our fervent hope, transported his spirit to that "sunny light" for which it so deeply yearned.

On the 10th of May he was followed to his grave, in Kensal-green Cemetery, by a large number of literary friends and admirers. His widow and two children were left in straitened and precarious circumstances; but, through the efforts of a committee, among whom were the Earl of Ellesmere, the Marquis of Northampton, and Sir Bulwer Lytton, a sum has been raised upon their behalf.

We have already entered at such length into the various characteristics of Hood's genius, that any further comments would be superfluous. The best summary of Hood's life and character is to be found in his works. In them, like every other true poet, he lived, moved, and had his being; and by them he must be judged.

Of his manners in private society we quote a few sentences from the pen of Mr. S. C. Hall. "I remember the first time I met him was at one of the pleasant soirees of the painter, Martin; for a moment I turned away, as many have done, disappointed-for the countenance in repose was of melancholy rather than of mirth; there was something calm, even to solemnity, in the upper portion of the face, which, in public, was seldom relieved by the eloquent play of the mouth, or the occasional sparkle of the observant eye; and it was a general remark among his acquaintances, that he was too quiet for the world.' There are many wit-watchers to be found in society who think there is nothing in a man, unless, like a sounding-board, he make a great noise at a small touch; who consider themselves aggrieved unless an author' open at once like a book, and speak as he writes. This vulgar notion, like others of the same stamp, creeps into good society, or what is so

considered; and I have seen both Hook and Hood, 'set,' as a pointer sets a partridge, by persons who glitter in evanescent lights, simply by repeating what such men have said. Mr. Hook perhaps liked this celebritythis setting and staring-this lionhunt-so different to the heart-worship paid to veritable greatness. Mr. Hood did not he was too sensitive, too refined, to endure it. The dislike to being pointed out as 'the man who was funny,' kept him out of a crowd, where there were always numbers who really honoured his genius, and loved him for his gentle and domestic virtues. It was only among his friends that his playful fancy flourished, or that he yielded to its influence; although, strictly speaking, 'social' in all his feelings, he never sought to stimulate his wit by the false poison of draughts of wine; nor was he ever more cheerful than when, at his own fireside, he enjoyed the companionship of his dear and devoted wife."

must close.

Never having had the fortune of seeing the poet, we are unable to give any description of his personal appearance. The quiet and somewhat methodical cast of his features has been the subject of general comment among those who knew him. The best description, however, we have met is that by himself, in his remarks on his own portrait. With this extract we "The figure opposite," he says, "has certainly the look of one of those practical jokes whereof the original is oftener suspected than really culpable. He might pass for the sign of the Grave Maurice.' The author of Elia' has declared that he once sat as substitute for a whole series of British admirals, and a physiognomist might reasonably suspect that, in wantonness or weariness, instead of giving my head, I had procured myself to be painted by proxy. For who, that calls himself stranger, could ever suppose that such a pale, pensive, peaking, sentimental, sonneteering countenancewith a wry mouth, as if it always laughed on the wrong side-belonged bona-fide to the editor of the "Comic,' a professor of the Pantagrulian philosophy, hinted at in the preface of the present work? What unknown, who reckons himself decidedly serious, would recognise the head and front of my "offending," in a visage not at all

6

too hilarious for a frontispiece to the Evangelical Magazine?' In point of fact, the owner has been taken sundry times, ere now, for a Methodist minister, and a pious turn has been attributed to his hair-lucus a non lucendo-from its having no turn in it at all. In like manner my literary contemporaries, who have cared to remark on me personally, have agreed in ascribing to me a melancholy bias; thus an authority in the New Monthly Magazine' has described me as a grave, anti-punlike-looking person;' whilst another, in the Book of Gems,' declares that 'my countenance is more grave than merry,' and insists, therefore, that I am of a pensive habit, and 'have never laughed heartily in company, or in rhyme.' Against such an inference, however, I solemnly protest; and, if it be the fault of my features, I do not mind telling my face to its face that it insinuates a False-Hood, and grossly misrepresents a person notorious amongst friends for laughing at strange times and odd places, and particularly when he has the worst of a rubber."

J. E.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI. AMONG the many questions in philosophy and literature which biographical studies suggest, that of hereditary genius is one of the most interesting. All through nature we see the transmission from parent to offspring of those qualities, ethical and physical, by which the first was characterised; and yet, in spite of this law, observed as frequently in man as in the lower creatures, great men are in nothing more remarkable than in being the progenitors of fools. Not that the subject under consideration makes any addition to the category; but that, as an exception to the general fact, it suggests the curious nature of the fact itself. It may be said that great genius is like a great tree, which overshadows all the lesser plants that stand in its vicinity; and admitting that there is something fatal in the shadow and the drip, as regards the tree, there is nothing parallel to it in the case of mental growths; for, although ordinary talent may appear stunted and weak beside the overpowering grandeur of a great genius, genius itself cannot be frowned down, and only shines out

more fully in its individuality when brought into contrast with others equal to itself. For this reason the plea that genius-keeping to the metaphor of the tree-uses up all the soil, and absorbs all the glory of the sunlight, leaving no room for a successor, is untrue, and the conclusion forced upon us is, that great men are not, as a rule, succeeded by great sons; the fact being so far otherwise, that the sons of great men are, in the majority of cases, but few removes from positive imbecility. There is something physically as well as morally suggestive in this; and as this is not the place to discuss a question so recondite, we content ourselves with having called attention to it, and pass to this exception in the case of Disraeli, as a fit subject at the present moment for the biographer.

Beginning with the father, who was a man of great genius and greater learning, we are led back to the year 1776 as that in which he was born, of Jewish parents, and heir to an extensive property. His ancestors were of the number of trading Jews which in the fourteenth century haunted the European bazaars as speculative traders; alternately assuming the character of unscrupulous usurers and pleaders for their wealth and lives. The persecutions instituted against them at the close of the fifteenth century, drove the ancestors of our Chancellor from their home in Spain; and, flying to Venice, they there settled and assumed the name of Disraeli. The father of Isaac came to this country in 1748, under the inducements offered by the firm esblishment of the Hanoverian dynasty, and the efforts then making by Mr. Pelham for the emancipation of the Jews. This Disraeli had made a fortune before the breaking out of the French Revolution, and he came here to settle down and enjoy it; a wise determination, which he carried out successfully in the neighbourhood of Enfield.

Isaac Disraeli was born in 1776, and, like Scott, Liebig, and others of equal note, was a dunce at school. He was the only son, which, of course, means that he was a spoiled child, and a source of continual anxiety and trouble to his parents. Moody, taciturn, and passionate by turns, he at length completed the climax of his father's sorrow by writing a poem. Terrified

by this act of extravagance in his son, the father lost no time in shipping him off to Amsterdam, where, under the chilling frown of a phlegmatic Dutch tutor, it was hoped his vagrant nature would be withered in the bud. This scheme failed, for he became more literary than ever; and, on his father hinting that he should send him to Bordeaux to study trade in a counting-house, the son produced another poem, which, written at the age of eighteen, was of course Utopian and golden-age-ical; and in this the son vindicated his love of letters and hatred of worldly things, in an attempt to show that commerce was the prime source of the world's sorrows. This poem he took, with trembling hands, to the house of Dr. Johnson, in Bolt-court, Fleet-street, in the hope of obtaining the critical opinion of the great lexicographer upon its merits. He was too late; the doctor was then too ill to read anything, and, a few weeks after, the dropsy closed the great man's career.

A commercial life, however, was not Isaac's fate, for a literary acquaintance prevailed upon the stern father to let the lad's passion have room to grow, and forthwith he was sent to travel through France, to visit libraries, make literary acquaintances, and prepare himself for the duties and responsibilities of the litterateur. Whether the difficulties of his early career gave him the stimulus which afterwards worked out its will in the illustration of the fortunes of the literary class, it is perhaps not possible to say; but certain it is, he devoted himself to the vindication of the literary character with a degree of zeal and learning which constitutes his labours as epochal in English literature. He soon made acquaintance with Samuel Rogers and John Murray, and published a series of works on literature and literary men, which brought him both profit and reputation. "Curiosities of Literature,' ""Calamities of Authors," "The Literary Character," "Amenities of Literature," and several romances and historical works, followed each other in rapid succession, the last written after blindness had fallen on him. In 1848 his life terminated, at the age of eighty-two, after having been spent in the midst of the luxuries, marred by none of the heart-burnings, of learning and literature.

Benjamin, eldest son of Isaac Disraeli, was born in London in December, 1805. His mother was Miss Bassevi, of the well-known Jewish family of that name. In youth he was noted for his quickness of apprehension and readiness in the acquisition of his tasks; and his father, who knew the ways of an enthusiastic boy when checked in the pursuit of a growing passion for literature, neglected nothing which might conduce to the growth of his mind, and furnished him with every stimulus to intellectual exertion. It is interesting to know, that when he was sent to school in Islington, he had Mr. Milner Gibson, the present Right Hon. Gibson, for his school-fellow.

At the age of twelve, Benjamin was sent to Brighton on account of the delicate state of his health; and about this period the Disraelis became Christians. Completing his education at Winchester school, where he betrayed many traces of eccentricity, he was afterwards sent, at the age of eighteen, to travel in Germany, concluding his tour before he was twenty-one, when the first part of his first work, "Vivian Grey," appeared. He took a position at once, and though it could not be said that a great book had been written, there was at least a sensation made, which even the ephemeral nature of the book itself could not easily or speedily subdue. It was a book full of impudence, scandal, and sharp satire; witty without being coarse, and dashing without too great a mixture of the bombastical. It was, moreover, a book formed after a new fashion. It was a novel in which the scenes and incidents were built up from the doings of the hour, and marks the peculiar mental traits of its author, who is a man living for to-day, and having few sympathies with the past or hopes for the future. The personages, moreover, were types of the time, and on its appearance the town was involved in a vortex of conflicting conjectures as to who was Mr. So and So, and my lord this and my lord that; the veil thrown over the characters being plainly perceptible, though of too close materials to be pierced with ordinary eyes. Equal curiosity existed to discover its authorship, and every man of note was in turn pounced upon and saddled for a few weeks or months with the sins of the book. As to the hero, it is not speaking too boldly to say that he and the

author are one. True, he has disclaimed this himself, and between the ignominious Vivian and the ambitious author, there is a discrepancy marked and definite. Nevertheless, the man's soul goes Vivian's way, and if he uses not the same sneering tone of speech, nor the same serpent crawling and wriggling, there are too many points wherein they are akin to suffer them evermore to part company.

Vivian Grey is the fast young man in upper life-young England developing his first coat of chin-down under the shadow of court rolls and coronets. He is brilliant, ambitious, fashionable, sarcastic, mean, and, in more ways than one, paltry and contemptible. skims through fashionable society like a scented butterfly, and comes into contact with the greatest men of the time, all of whom he dwarfs into littleness by the frivolous vanity of his own mind.

He

The idea of the book is the struggle for power; and in this we have a counterpart of the inside of our present Chancellor of the Exchequer. Vivian is determined to achieve fame, no matter by what means; and so he clings to the skirts of an old twaddler whom he hates and despises-because, forsooth, this same old twaddler is an aristocrat, and has political influence. By stratagem and falsehood together, Vivian at last ingratiates himself in the favour of the imbecile aristocrat, the Marquis de Carabas; and after a discourse on punch, in which he favours his lordship with a receipt for making "tomahawk punch," Vivian, with great finesse, leads his lordship into a conversation about power; and, in a powerful battery of argument and eloquence, rouses up the old lord's slumbering ambition. In this passage of the work, Disraeli speaks, according to the household maxim, two words for himself and one for his hero, and breaks out into a most true confession of his own faith:

"Is power a thing so easily to be despised, young man?" asked the Marquis.

"Oh, no, my lord, you de mistake me," eagerly bursts forth Vivian: "I am no coldblooded philosopher that would despise that for which, in my opinion, men-real men -should alone exist. Power! oh, what sleepless nights; what days of hot anxiety; what exertions of mind and body; travel; what hatred; what fierce encounters; what dangers of all possible kinds would Í not endure, with a joyous spirit, to gain it!"

what