tributor of stamps, which office he resigned in favour of his son, upon his own appointment to the Laureateship."-Pp. 28, 29. Accustomed to live secluded from the world-coddled up by a few old and withered spinsters-the poetical mind of this fine writer has become narrowed, till it has lost most of that vigorous and embracing universality, and scorn of conventionalism, which made him in his inspired moments utter "We must be free or die, Who speak the language Shakspeare spoke-the faith Setting aside the manifest wrong done the poet in misquoting the lines,— "Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue Which Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold setting aside, we say, the question whether a critic has a right not only to alter lines and words, but also to italicise words for no apparent reason—even admitting the truth of what is here said respecting the man who stands at the head of our living poets, both by rank and age, (he being now fourscore years old,)—we must regret the necessity which could impel any man to write these sentences. There are two sorts of necessities-one arising from without, the other from within. In this case we can conceive of no pressure from without which could urge a writer, animated by the sympathy for men of letters which inspired Carlyle, in the extract given above, and, indeed, throughout his eloquent biography of Schiller-to write so flippantly of a great poet's declining years. And yet this writer bears no malice in his heart against the poet, of whom and whose family circle he speaks so very freely and decidedly. On the contrary, he professes to venerate him exceedingly ; and in another place, where he gives another description of him, in the more picturesque style, actually leaves it to be inferred that he has written a sonnet upon the poet's portrait : "Seated on the sofa, with one leg crossed over the other, and with his hand buried in his bosom, sits an old man, with a few straggling gray hairs on his forehead, dressed in tolerably well-worn black, his deep-set eye, gray and abstracted, as though in some speculation lost! he rises, his figure is tall, broad, and gaunt, his deep guttural voice seems to come from the depths of his heart, and the impressive tone he speaks in gives an emphasis even to the commonest of commonplace; he is reciting a passage from Milton; he has got the first edition in his hand, and is demonstrating to an attentive listener that the blind old man' intended an emphasis to be laid on every word beginning with a capital, excepting at the commencement of each line; he slightly stoops, but it is a trifle for so old a man, and his venerable face seems to light up at the sound of Milton's verse, and to bring back with them all the dreams of his youth, when, wandering with Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb, they held high converse with the mighty dead. "We have only seen one portrait of the fine old poet that at all gives any idea of him; a friend of his was so pleased with it that he sent the artist a sonnet, which we must find space to quote :— "We die, and pass away; our very name Goes into silence, as the eloquent air Scatters our voices, while the wear ed frame, Shrouded in darkness, pays the grave's stern claim, Then living music flows from buried lips, And the dead form throws off the grave's eclipse! O! blest magician, that can fix for aye The fleeting image; here I seem to gaze On Wordsworth's honour'd face, for in the cells Of those gray eyes, Thought, like a prophet, dwells, And round those drooping lips Song like a murmur strays."-Pp. 240, 241. We can reconcile these contradictions only by supposing a simple want of perception in the writer, of that respect with which individuals, bred in gentle society, instinctively regard the feelings of others, and especially of those who are exalted by age, genius, and character. The paragraph upon Rogers is another example of similar wilful or unconscious departure from the manners of that class of society for whom poets write: "It was told me by a friend of the bard, the beau, the banker, that the poet's uncle adopted him and his brother, and took them into his bankinghouse. After some time he detected the elder one in writing verses: the horror-struck merchant, when he died, allowed the detected verse-maker a certain annuity, leaving the business and the bulk of his fortune to Samuel, with the remark that he would never be a poet. We are entirely of the uncle's opinion, and boldly avow our belief that no spiteful nature can, by any process of sublimation, be raised into the poet; Mr. Rogers, therefore, must be content to stand or fall by his own nature-he has the reputation of being a great wit, and of having made some of the severest of modern jokes." -P. 34. The want of perception above mentioned is here so marked, as to leave an impression upon the reader precisely opposite to what was apparently intended. Again we have Dickens thus "summed up :" "To sum up his capabilities in a few words: as a man, he is good-tempered, vain, fickle, which makes him at times appear to be insincere; on the other hand, it must in justice be stated, that he forgets with kindly facility an offence; but the impression on the minds of those who have known him longest is, that he is deficient in all those striking qualities of the heart which sanctify the memory of man."-P. 177. And yet there is no consciousness of impropriety manifest in the sketch; a simple attempt at impartial analysis, that is all. We take another instance from the writer's attempt to sketch Talfourd :— "The learned sergeant is jovial and hospitable, and has the reputation of having been the liberal friend of many necessitous men of genius. We give this as we heard it from his own family, but we regret to add that we have been informed by others, that the author of Ion has the peculiarity of forgetting his friends when they are in poor circumstances. We may mention as an instance, the case of the author of Rimini. He has, however, many excuses, he has felt himself the privations of poverty-has a large family-lives expensively, and is fond of luxurious dinners. He gives excellent parties, and at his table we have spent some pleasant hours, and met many illustrious men of letters." This is Mr. Powell's way of requiting people who allow him the opportunity of meeting "illustrious men," and "spending pleasant hours" at their houses. There are many more quite as striking instances as these in the volume-one which is too mean to be quoted. We feel confident that we have given enough to justify a decision against the work on account of its character-its want of manners-want of that which is want of sense. And we further wish to render it clear to our readers, why we have deemed it necessary to write at all respecting a work of which we are forced to judge so unfavourably. Since its publication, Mr. Dickens, either provoked by Mr. Powell's account of himself, or, as his non-admirers in this country understand it, glad of an opportunity for a sneer at the American press, has thought it necessary, through a friend here, (Mr. Clark, of the Knickerbocker Magazine,) to caution our public against the author of this volume, in language by no means equivocal. Whether he was right in so doing, or whether the terms of his letter might not have been more dignified, we need not now decide; but we confess that his severity of language does not surprise us much, after reading Mr. Powell's volume. Now this is a free country, open to all comers, and where all writers have equal rights. But is it a place to which London writers, between whom and one of the first of their own class, hitherto deemed respectable, there would appear to be still open a serious question of veracity, can come and raise themselves, per saltum, to the same rank they might occupy in our esteem if no such question existed? and that by the publication of books which must be condemned on their own merits, and for the spirit in which they are written? We apprehend, most decidedly, not. Charity begins at home. There are plenty of writers among us of more power to interest readers, and gentle readers, than the author of this volume, and who are known to our best writers, not from having written flippantly of them, but for the resolution with which they have always, through the lowest employments of literature, and against the heart-sickness of hope deferred, endeavoured to preserve their own self-respect and the esteem of others. It seems to us very plain that, at least, there is no discriminating charity in taking by the hand and encouraging to success in letters those whose performances give no high promise, while so many such as these are hardly able to earn their daily bread. The true charity would lead us to a precisely opposite course, and it may not only justify, but require severe impartial criticism, and terms of condemnation as decided as those we have here used. Had the work not proceeded from one of the most respectable publishing houses in the country, and were it not likely, from its very title, and the nature of its topics, to be widely circulated, it would not have been necessary to notice it. As it is, it has been treated leniently in this article. ART. IX.-EGYPT AND ITS MONUMENTS. The Monuments of Egypt: or, Egypt a Witness for the Bible. By FRANCIS L. HAWKS, A BOOK on ancient Egypt is eminently needed, as well by the scien- But the convenience chiefly requisite is of a different, an intellectual nature. Materials so copious, so various, so peculiar, call for arrangement, for co-ordination upon some self-consistent and intelligible principles. We do not mean that old theories, whether philosophical or Biblical, should be recklessly reiterated, or new ones devised without preparation. The preparatory process known in natural science as a catalogue descriptive and comparative would suffice for the present. This would perhaps properly confine itself to collecting and collating the facts, the monuments of all descriptions, together with the most authoritative opinions respecting their appropriate characters, destinations, and developments. The whole would be interspersed advantageously, if only for popular use, with a running commentary or criticism, suggesting the various analogies between the successive specimens of the same art, between contemporaneous forms of the different arts, and, in fine, between the several artistic and industrial phases, the monuments and the manners, of Egyptian life. We may illustrate by an example. Compare the two most conspicuous of these arts, namely, Writing and Architecture, in their primary stages,-the former of Picture-writing, the latter of the Pyramids. The Picture-writing, which denotes the object by its simple image, is manifestly the rudest, the most material mode of representation. So the pyramid is the most obvious in shape, and the most merely masonic in style, of all the species of structure, not only Egyptian, but imaginable. The erections of children are always pyramidal. Now this comparative observation would of itself, apart from historical evidence, tend to show that the two forms must have emanated from one and the same condition of the national mind. It would do much more and better than this. In the first place, it would demonstrate that this mental state was one of extreme and imbecile infancy. And, in the next place, it would furnish, in these three correlative starting-points, at once the cause of the progression which the facts exhibit in all the monuments, and the key to its interpretation in the two descriptions in question. Having established these fundamental standards, such a synopsis as we have in view would easily indicate the historical order of the respective series. Meanwhile, it would expose and exclude a thousand puerile controversies still agitated by even the latest writers: such, for instance, as whether the symbolical was not anterior to the picture form of Hieroglyphics. That is, whether the human mind does not proceed from the abstract to the concrete, instead of the well-known reverse. Indeed, this preposterous error was carried still further. Even the Enchorial or alphabetic form was supposed to be the earliest, until the error was dispelled by the discoveries of Champollion, who, remarkable to say, at first inclined to this opinion himself. But the error, though nearly routed in regard to the art of writing, remains rampant in respect to most |