proposed the health of Captain BThe company stood up, ladies and all, and it was drank with a tremendous hip-hip-hurrah,' in bumpers of whiskey!"-(Vol. III., pp. 124-127.)

This last incident of the "bumpers of whiskey," we will be bold to say exceeds the wildest flight of Mrs. Trollope's imagination—unless, indeed, Mr. N. P. Willis took his passage in the fore-cabin.

His interview with Professor Wilson is, perhaps, the best of his descriptions, and, but for his petulant and ill-judged attack upon Mr. Lockhart, the least unpleasing. Of Wilson

it may be said, as was said by Johnson of Burke, that nobody could stand with him under an archway, during a shower, without being convinced that he was a most extraordinary man. His conversation flows on without stop or stay; always new, always brilliant-his illustrations are highly poetical, and exact at the same time. "Like the waves of the summer, as one rolls away, another as bright and as shining "comes on." Wilson is the only celebrated writer we have met with, whose works do not raise higher ideas of his genius than are fulfilled by his conversation. The only thing which is new to us in Mr. N. P. Willis's account of him, is his obliviousness of breakfast, and his awkwardness at his own table.

66

We have said that Mr. Willis's attack on Mr. Lockhart was petulant and ill-judged; but at the same time, we do not hold that gentleman vindicated from the charges brought against him, by the defence offered in his behalf by Professor Wilson. The accusation—a very weighty one-namely, that he uses the influence of his talents and situation, as Editor of a leading Review, to nourish a feeling of hatred and exasperation between America and England-is advanced more seriously, in the preface. Against this narrow spirit of criticism we are anxious to enter our protest; but at the same time, we must not allow Mr. N. P. Willis to lay the flattering unction to his soul-that the severity of the Quarterly can arise from no other cause than the fact of an author being an American. It may arise quite as naturally from the fact of an author being weak or conceited; but, however this may be, how does Mr. N. P. Willis reconcile his statement that "it is to the Quarterly we owe every spark of ill-feeling

"that has been kept alive between England and America "for the last twenty years; and that the sneers and oppro"brious epithets of this bravo in literature have been re"ceived in a country, where the machinery of reviewing was "not understood, as the voice of the English people; and an "animosity for which there was no other reason, has been thus "periodically fed and exasperated?" How does he reconcile this with his declaration, in the body of his work, that the feeling against America is universal in England? If the Quarterly Review be the sole cause of enmity between the two countries, and yet that feeling in one of them is universal, we confess that we had greatly underrated the influence of the Quarterly Review.

We trust that we have shown in our brief career, that we are animated by no contracted spirit of nationality; but we cannot allow our desire to be liberal to overcome our determination to be just. We shall neither praise a work merely because it is written by a foreigner, from a feeling of pseudo-liberality, nor shall we captiously condemn it because it is not written by one of "ourselves." It is in this spirit we have offered these remarks, on what may be called the home portion of Mr. N. P. Willis's volumes. The extracts which we have made, have been of those passages only which contain descriptions of persons who may be called public property-of ladies and gentlemen whose acquaintance with title pages has made them accustomed to the sight of their own names in print. We do not follow Mr. N. P. Willis into the recesses of private life. We see no reason, because a man happens to be a Duke, that he should be at the same time made a show. Nor, indeed, in this country, is any great curiosity excited to know the colour of a nobleman's gaiters, or the cut of his shooting jacket. Neither is it our intention to tell our readers that Mr. N. P. Willis had been informed that one nobleman whom he met, and whom he names, had the reputation of being the coldest and proudest aris"tocrat of England;" or that he saw at a glance that the lady he sat next to, at dinner, was the most beautiful woman in Scotland. These things we pass over: and having expressed, we hope in no rancorous or unbecoming terms, what we consider the faults of this portion of his work, we have great pleasure in saying that the "pencillings" he has given us of other scenes and

countries are frequently interesting and amusing. There is nothing new, nothing deep, nothing in short upon which the memory will be inclined to dwell; but there is a liveliness in the style which carries the reader on, and keeps up his attention in spite of occasional inaccuracy and the meagreness of details. After a diligent perusal of the book, we confess we consider his prose, judging merely of it as composition, to be superior to his poetry. Mr. N. P. Willis is destroyed as a poet by his facility of versification. He seems satisfied with his first expressions, and has still to learn the art of blotting. But his prose is natural and easy, and at the same time has a degree of correctness which, under his circumstances, can only have been acquired by a careful study of good English authors.

ARTICLE VII.

I Monumenti dell' Egitto e della Nubia, disegnati della Spedizione scientifico-letteraria Toscana in Egitto. Distribuiti in ordine di Materie, interpretati ed illustrati dal Dottore Ippollito ROSELLINI, direttore della spedizione. Tom. I. II. Pisa, 1835, 8vo. With an

Atlas and Plates, large folio, in livraisons.

THIS is decidedly the greatest and most important work which has appeared on Egyptian antiquities, since the report of the French commission to Egypt, collected under the title of

66

Antiquités d'Egypte." A Tuscan commission of scientific inquiry, modelled on the foregoing, has given birth to the publication before us. Rosellini's work is unfinished; a portion only of the plates, which are however in considerable number, as well as of the volumes of text, explaining or commenting upon them, having reached this country. The author is an Italian of high scientific reputation, and was employed in his great undertaking of taking drawings from the tombs and temples which line both sides of the Nile, from the Delta to the southern extremity of old Thebes, when Champollion paid his last visit to Egypt, for the purpose of making similar

researches, the substance of which is to be found in his "Lettres écrites d'Egypte." In the mind of any one imbued with a knowledge of what has been done and said on the subject of Egyptian literature and antiquities, up to the present time, the work of Rosellini, or we should rather say the plates by which it is accompanied (for his commentaries are deteriorated by the same platitudes, iterations, and wordy and lengthy paradoxes, which have characterised all latter disquisition on the subject),-is calculated to arouse a series of exciting associations, if not to promote great and serious reflections. The work will constitute, we hesitate not to say, an epoch in the cycle of Egyptian discovery. Much has certainly been done since the commencement of that cycle; much light has been thrown on facts, which at first were scarcely visible through the twilight, or wrapt in the darkness of the early ages of the world's history; but much more remains to be done. What is chiefly now wanted is to realise our profits, and catalogue the acquisitions which have been made. Above all, it is requisite to separate what is true from what is false;―what is accurately ascertained, and rigidly demonstrated, from what is vague, speculative, or conjectural. In estimating what has been done, it is also necessary to consider what remains to be done. Neither must a secondary object be neglected, inasmuch as it constitutes a legitimate and effective medium, for bringing the truth before the public, and on the public mind when so introduced.-We mean novelty. On this account new and original views, provided they are not in collision with demonstrable truths, or with ascertained facts, are great desiderata; and here we must take leave to remark, that upon scarcely any subject within the compass of human inquiry has there been such fatiguing monotony—such nauseating repetition- such faithless or such uninquiring plagiarism, at the expense of predecessors or contemporaries— as on the subject of Egyptian antiquity and literature. Voltaire, had he lived now, might well have applied the sarcasm which he addressed to the literati of France in his time, to the writers of volume upon volume on exhausted themes

"We all fill our glasses in turn, from the bottles of our neighbours."

Even Rosellini is not more free than his predecessors, or his contemporaries, from the great sin of wearisome repetition. Although he deserves high credit for furnishing materials for new views or startling inferences, he can scarcely be rated above the rank of a laborious pioneer in opening the trenches for a more disciplined assault on the difficulties which rampart the subject. His courage, perseverance, and industry, deserve commendation, while forcing open the exhaustless galleries of the mine which he is pursuing; but he does not himself seem to be aware of the hidden treasures which its bowels conceal from view; nay, not even when his pencil or his graver reproduce strange and splendid samples of the interminable veins which branch from it in all directions, does he seem aware of the rich and inestimable inferences which analysis would be enabled to extract from them.

Nor in bringing forward this charge of abortive repetition, either specially or generally, do we make it, as may be sometimes fairly alleged against criticism, as a coup d'effet, for the purpose of flippant depreciation, or upon uncertain grounds.

Every mummy, for example, that is unrolled, is announced as little short of a miracle, by novices in the field of Egyptian inquiry, which (far beyond their limited ken) is almost infinite in the magnitude and variety of its associations. These things are imagined, or are proclaimed to be, novelties, when in fact every mummy that is unrolled, with some unimportant exceptions, resembles its brother or sister mummy; for nothing was more fatiguingly monotonous than all that was comprehended by the religious formulas and superstitions of Egypt. Again, one Egyptian traveller finds himself at the foot of Memnon's statue; he climbs the colossus, finds a hole in the head or breast, and descends with the air of an oracle announcing a new theory-that the celebrated sound of Memnon's lyre was produced by a concealed juggle of the priest, the same new theory having been at least one hundred times repeated. Another visits the great pyramid, and he also returns to the mouth of it with the same oracular visage, announcing a new theory. "All my prede"cessors," he tells us with mysterious dignity, "are wrong."