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But we had best pause at once, or we should be won to insert the whole. Buy the book itself, fair daughter of fashion, or borrow it from some accommodating neighbour, in order patiently to transcribe those eleven stanzas in the clearest of Italian hands, and learn, as you ponder their melancholy meanings, to look tenderly on your woe-worn sister, and reflect, that even for your own gentler sex, lifethe very spring-time of its years-has other scenes than the evening salon and the morning fête. Alas! these poor slaves of the toilet are the very Helots of haughty Fashion; the basis of its gorgeous structures are laid in these unseen, untold miseries; the bright consummate flower of the ballroom parterre has grown from this tear-bedewed root; not a fold in the crêpe lisse of that exquisite drapery -in the point lace of those irresistible flounces in the tulle illusion (most imaginative of textures !*) of those graceful skirts-in the golden blonde of that inimitable berthe-but has been the creation of weary vigils and fevered pulses. A Hamlet," considering it too curiously," might raise strange sermons on this topic.

The same lesson is pressed forcibly by our poet in another of these touching compositions, the "Lady's Dream.' In the dread midnight the vision of all the unmarked sorrows of the working

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"Onward, onward, with hasty feet,
They swarm-and westward still-
Masses born to drink and eat,
But starving amidst Whitechapel's meat,
And famishing down Cornhill!
Through the Poultry-but still unfed-
Christian charity, hang your head!
Hungry, passing the Street of Bread;
Thirsty, the Street of Milk-
Ragged, beside the Ludgate Mart,
So gorgeous, through mechanic art,
With cotton, and wool, and silk!

"At last, before that door
That bears so many a knock,

*The poetry of Parisian millinery has never yet obtained its due praises as one of the great departments of æsthetical science. How bold, for example, is the figure, when silks are described as "d'un veritable couleur de succés !" The fancy of a new Parisian bonnet was objected to by a fair purchaser: "Madame," was the reply of indignant genius, "parole d'honneur, il m'a couté trois nuits d'insomnie pour l'imaginer !" Still better was the solemn "not at home" of the porter of one of the greater artists—“Monsieur n'est pas visible, il compose !”

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A moral not unlike the bearing of these, is contained in the strange extravaganza of "Miss Kilmansegg," which occupies nearly half of the first of these volumes. The fiction is scarcely a happy one; but the execution is, in some parts, admirable, and there is a sort of droll pathos in the fate of the unfortunate heiress, scurvily treated by her magnificent count, and slain at last by the symbol and instrument of her own wealth. ode to Mr. Rae Wilson, full of witty retort, has the disadvantage of treading upon the most delicate and dangerous of all the fields of satire. Wilson had been pleased to comment somewhat severely upon an innocent expression of our Thomas the Rhymer, and the wit takes ample vengeance on the critic, and in him on-as he considers-all the exhibitors of osten

The

Mr.

tatious sanctity. "Man," declares

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Again, on Sir Andrew Agnew's Sabbath Bill, and other compulsory religious enactments, the poet's opinion is

Spontaneously to God should tend the
soul,

Like the magnetic needle to the Pole;
But what were that intrinsic virtue
worth,

Suppose some fellow, with more zeal
than knowledge,

Fresh from St. Andrew's College,

Should nail the conscious needle to the
north ?"

He declares that he abhors the partiality of schemes

"That frown upon St. Giles' sins, but
blink

The peccadilloes of all Piccadilly;"

as if

"the rich by easy trips
May go to heaven, whereas the poor
and lowly

Must work their passage as they do
in ships."

Neither is the angry bard needlessly complimentary to Mr. Wilson, in his character of Oriental Traveller :

"You have been to Palestine-alas !
Some minds improve by travel,
others, rather

Resemble copper wire, or brass,
Which gets the narrower by going
farther!"

The argument is capable of being dangerously and extravagantly misapplied; but no one can well deny the fact embodied in the following lines, and the legitimacy of the application as long as it is urged to the enforcement of individual humility and universal charity :

"Gifted with noble tendency to climb,
Yet weak at the same time,

Faith is a kind of parasitic plant,

That grasps the nearest stem with tendril-rings;
And as the climate and the soil may grant,

So is the sort of tree to which it clings.
Consider, then, before, like Hurlothrumbo,
You aim your club at any creed on earth,
That, by the simple accident of birth,

You might have been High Priest to Mumbo Jumbo.

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We pass on, however, without much delay from this branch of our task of criticism. The light-armed troops of wit and humour, powerful as they are at times to scatter the pompous columns of sanctimonious pretence, are seldom a perfectly safe auxiliary to the cause of sincere religion. They are Swiss, "who fight for any God or man." Wit has no time and no solicitude to make distinctions; and those who most enjoy its sallies are usually just as little inclined to do so. Hence it is constantly made to do a work its authors never intended; and Tartuffe and Hudibras are formed into standing arsenals of artillery against sincere profession no less than false. While the very connexion of ludicrous associations with even corruptions and spurious imitations of religion cannot be easily severed from religion in its purity and truth; the very language of hypocrisy and sincerity must, from the nature of the case, be the same; and the ridicule that is blended with that phraseology in its false, will adhere to it in its upright use. Men are unconsciously betrayed to pass the shifting barrier that divides them. The warfare against hypocrisy becomes thus too often a discipline for the warfare against sincere belief; the laughter which derides superstition saps the bulwarks that defend against infidelity. Like the dragon fight of the knight in Schiller, the assailants are trained upon the false to attack the true.

We are

not sorry to see our man of pun and poesy safe out of this dangerous region.

For Hood's gift as a poet of pure fancy-a dreamer in the visionary world of flowers and fairies, or in that ideal elder world of Greek mythological heroism near akin to it, the reader may be referred to those ethereal imaginings, "The Two Swans," "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "Lycus, the Centaur," " Hero and Leander" for Hood, too, has versified that immemorial tale. This brings us to his love verses, which have much of the delicate beauty of the early English school. The lines

"Lady, would'st thou heiress be

To winter's cold and cruel part?" &c. might be a veritable relic of George

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Thomas Hood was the son of a bookseller of the Mr. Hood whose name was usually entwined in bibliopolic matrimony with Verner-the firm of "Verner and Hood." He began as a probationer in the world of commerce, a clerk in a counting-house; and doubtless even then at times "penn'd a stanza when he should engross." His doom, however, was not to resemble that of his friend Charles Lamb in the continued drudgery of the desk; the young scribe's cheek began to pale, and his pulse to quicken; and he was sent for change of air to Scotland-to Dundee, where some relatives of his father's resided. At a later period, on his return to London, he was apprenticed to an engraver, where he learned the cunning of those droll etchings with which he was afterwards accustomed to adorn his publications. This too mechanic art did not long detain him from his early and abiding bent; and he became connected with the London Magazine, a periodical of high repute in those days through all the borders of Cockaigne. The public are familiar with his subsequent literary labours-his "Comic Annuals,” his "Whimsicalities," his "Up the Rhine" (that volume of irresistible humour), his "Tylney Hall," a fiction of the standard three-volume dimensions, and written with much power. The present volumes are, however,

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I never quaff'd of Hippocrene's stream,
Nor yet on Mount Parnassus did I dream
(Or, if I did, I really don't know it),
I've no pretensions, then, to be a poet.
The Muses' pallid fount I leave to those
Around whose busts the clinging ivy grows.
A rustic bard, I bring this stuff of mine,
And humbly lay it at Apollo's shrine.
Who has taught parrots to articulate?
Instructed magpies to converse and prate?
Say "How d'ye do?" and sev'ral other words,
(That quite astonish us when said by birds?)
That rigid master, teaching all the arts,
Who genius sharpens and who wit imparts-
An empty stomach !-for it makes them try
To speak those words which nature doth deny.
But should the hope of making money rise,
With all its dazzling pomp, before your eyes,
Chanted by rooks and magpies, you would fain
Believe you heard the true poetic strain!

C. E. T.

HUME'S LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE,*

SECOND ARTICLE,

THE life of Hume was one of much social enjoyment. When his pecuniary affairs had a little improved, he became a singularly happy man. "I was," says he, "ever more disposed to see the favourable than the unfavourable side of things—a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess than to be born to ten thousand a-year." In our March number, we mentioned that within two years of his being appointed keeper of the Advocates' Library, he published the first volume of his "History of the House of Stuart;" and in 1756, the second volume containing" The History of England, from the Death of Charles I. to the Revolution." We then endeavoured to show the origin of what we regard as some of the heresies in Hume's political creed, and we have little doubt, that had Hume commenced his studies with any earlier period of English history, he could not, with the same plausibility, have vindicated his notion of all power in the people being usurpations on the prerogative. The "History of the House of Stuart," was followed by that of "Tudor"-and the earlier part of the "History of England" was that which was last given to the public. It is in every respect the worst. The clamour against the "House of Tudor" was as great as that against his first volume. "The reign of Elizabeth," he says, "was particularly obnoxious." The volumes which relate the Anglo-Saxon story, and the fortunes of England, till the accession of Henry the Seventh, "met with tolerable, and but tolerable success." The last volume was published in 1761-six years from the publication of the first.

In the interval between the publication of the first and second volumes, appeared his "Natural History of Religion." The book was a failure

but Hume's disappointment was, he says, lessened by the gratifying circumstance that it was answered by Hurd.

In 1762, we find Hume speaking to his friends of the large sums given him for the copyright of the successive portions of his history; and he mentions the comfort of having set up a chaise. "I was become not only independent, but opulent. I retired to my native country, determined never to set foot out of it, and retaining the satisfaction of never having preferred a request to one great man, or even making advances of friendship to any of them." The plans of a literary man are as likely to be disturbed as those of any other, and Hume, though without solicitation on his part, was destined to be indebted to the great. In 1763, the Earl of Hertford, with whom Hume was not in the slightest degree acquainted, was sent as ambassador to Paris, and invited Hume to accompany him, holding out the expectation which was eventually realised, of Hume becoming secretary to the embassy. Hume declined the offer at first, but on its being repeated, suffered himself to be prevailed on. In 1765, Lord Hertford became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Hume, was left for some months" chargé d'affaires."

Hume's reception in Parisian society is mentioned by him with extravagant delight. His reputation had preceded him, and his entire freedom from affectation or pretence of any kind completed the charm. His works too were known by translations— were probably more read than in England-and certainly with greater sympathy. The admiration with which Hume had been regarded on the continent for some years, was, some short time before, pleasantly manifested to

The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, from the papers bequeathed by his nephew, Baron Hume, to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and other original By John Hill Burton, Fsquire, Advocate. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, 1846.

Sources.

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