not taken his place contentedly, where nature had assigned it, as one of the ornamental performers of the time! His station was with the lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin. He should have thrown himself upon the admiring sympathies of the world as the most dazzling of rhetorical artists, rather than have challenged their angry passions in a vulgar scuffle for power. In that case he would have been alive at this hour-he would have had a perpetuity of that admiration which to him was as the breath of his nostrils; and would not, by forcing the character of rhetorician into an incongruous alliance with that of trading politician, have run the risk of making both ridiculous. In thus running over the modern history of rhetoric, we have confined ourselves to the literature of England: the rhetoric of the continent would demand a separate notice, and chiefly on account of the French pulpit órators. For, laying them aside, we are not aware of any distinct body of rhetoric-properly so called-in modern literature. Four continental languages may be said to have a literature regularly mounted in all departments, viz. the French, Italian, Spanish, and German; but each of these have stood under separate disadvantages for the cultivation of an ornamented rhetoric. In France, whatever rhetoric they have, (for Montaigne, though lively, is too gossiping for a rhetorician,) arose in the age of Louis XIV.; since which time, the very same development of science and public business, operated there and in England, to stifle the rhetorical impulses, and all those analogous tendencies in arts and in manners which support it. Generally it may be assumed that rhetoric will not survive the age of the ceremonious in manners, and the gorgeous in costume. An unconscious sympathy binds together the various forms of the elaborate and the fanciful, under every manifestation. Hence it is that the national convulsions by which modern France has been shaken, produced orators, Mirabeau, Isnard, the Abbé Maury, but no rhetoricians. Florian, Chateaubriand, and others, who have written the most florid prose that the modern taste can bear, are elegant sentimentalists, sometimes maudlin and semipoetic, sometimes even eloquent, but never rhetorical. There is no eddying about their own thoughts; no motion of fancy self-sustained from its own activities; no flux and reflux of thought, half meditative, half capricious; but strains of feeling, genuine or not, supported at every step from the excitement of independent external objects. With respect to the German literature, the case is very peculiar. A chapter upon German rhetoric would be in the same ludicrous predicament as Van Troil's chapter on the snakes of Iceland, which delivers its business in one summary sentence, announcing, that snakes in Iceland-there are none. Rhetoric, in fact, or any form of ornamented prose, could not possibly arise in a literature, in which prose itself had no proper existence till within these seventy years. Lessing was the first German who wrote prose with elegance; and even at this day, a decent prose style is the rarest of accomplishments in Germany. We doubt, in deed, whether any German has written prose with grace, unless he had lived abroad, (like Jacobi, who composed indifferently in French and German,) or had at least cultivated a very long acquaintance with English and French models. Frederick Schlegel has been led, by his comprehensive knowledge of other literatures, to observe this singular defect in that of his own country. Even he, however, must have fixed his standard very low, when he could praise, as elsewhere he does, the style of Kant. Certainly in any literature, where good models of prose existed, Kant would be deemed a monster of vicious diction, so far as regards the construction of his sentences. He does not, it is true, write in the hybrid dialect, which prevailed up to the time of our George the First, when every other word was Latin, with a German inflexion; but he has in perfection that obtuseness which renders a German taste insensible to all beauty in the balancing and structure of periods, and to the art by which a succession of periods modify each other. Every German regards a sentence in the light of a package, and a package not for the mail-coach, but for the waggon, into which his privilege is to crowd as much as he possibly can. Having framed a sentence, therefore, he next proceeds to pack it, which is ef fected partly by unwieldy tails and codicils, but chiefly by enormous parenthetic involutions. All qualifications, limitations, exceptions, illustrations, are stuffed and violently rammed into the bowels of the principal proposition. That all this equipage of accessaries is not so arranged as to assist its own orderly development, no more occurs to a German as any fault, than that in a package of shawls or of carpets, the colours and patterns are not fully displayed. To him it is sufficient that they are there. And Mr. Kant, when he has succeeded in packing up a sentence which covers three close-printed octavo pages, stops to draw his breath with the air of one who looks back upon some brilliant and meritorious performance. Under these disadvantages, it may be presumed that German rhetoric is a nonentity; but these disadvantages would not have arisen, had there been a German bar or a German senate, with any public existence. In the absence of all forensic and senatorial eloquence, no standard of good prose style-nay, which is more important, no example of ambition directed to such an object-has been at any time held up to the public mind in Germany; and the pulpit style has been always either rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry. These disadvantages with regard to public models of civil eloquence, have in part affected the Italians; the few good prose writers of Italy have been historians; and it is observable that no writers exist in the department of what are called moral Essayists; a class which, with us and the French, were the last depositaries of the rhetorical faculty, when depressed to its lowest key. Two other circumstances may be noticed as unfavourable to an Italian rhetoric; one, to which we have adverted before, in the language itself-which is too loitering for the agile motion, and the To dispo of rhetoric; and the other in the constitution of the national mind, which is not reflective, nor remarkably fanciful-the two qualities most indispensable to rhetoric. As a proof of the little turn for reflection which there is in the Italian mind, we may remind the reader that they have no meditative or philosophic poetry, such as that of our Young, Cowper, &c.; a class of poetry which existed very early indeed in the English literature (e. g. Sir T. Davies, Lord Brooke, Henry More, &c.); and which, in some shape, has arisen at some stage of almost every European literature. Of the Spanish rhetoric, à priori, we should have augured well: but the rhetoric of their pulpit in past times, which is all that we know of it, is vicious and unnatural; whilst, on the other hand, for eloquence profound and heartfelt, measuring it by those many admirable proclamations issued in all quarters of Spain during 1808-9, the national capacity must be presumed to be of the very highest order. We are thus thrown back upon the French pulpit orators as the only considerable body of modern rhetoricians out of our own language. No writers are more uniformly praised; none are more entirely neglected. This is one of those numerous hypocrisies so common in matters of taste, where the critic is always ready with his good word, as the readiest way of getting rid of the subject. To blame might be hazardous; for blame demands reasons; but praise enjoys a ready dispensation from all reasons and from all discrimination. Superstition, however, as it is, under which the French rhetoricians hold their reputation, we have no thought of attempting any disturbance to it in so slight and incidental a notice as this. Let critics by all means continue to invest them with every kind of imaginary splendour. Meantime let us suggest, as a judicious caution, that French rhetoric should be praised with a reference only to its own narrow standard: for it would be a most unfortunate trial of its pretensions, to bring so meagre a style of composition into a close comparison with the gorgeous opulence of the English rhetoric of the same century. Under such a comparison, two capital points of weakness would force themselves upon the least observant of critics first, the defect of striking imagery; and, secondly, the slenderness of the thoughts. The rhetorical manner is supported in the French writers chiefly by an abundance of ohs and als -by interrogatories-apostrophes-and startling exclamations: all which are mere mechanical devices for raising the style: but in the substance of the composition, apart from its dress, there is nothing properly thetorical. The leading thoughts in all pulpit eloquence being derived from religion, and, in fact, the common inheritance of human nature,-if they cannot be novel, for that very reason cannot be undignified: but, for the same reason, they are apt to become unaffecting and trite, unless varied and individualized by new infusions of thought and feeling. The smooth monotony of the leading religious topics, as managed by the French orators, under the treatment of Jeremy Taylor, receives at each turn of the sentence a new flexure-or what may be called a separate articulation:* old thoughts are sur * We may take the opportunity of noticing | veyed from novel stations and under various angles: and a field absolutely exhausted throws up eternally fresh verdure under the fructifying lava of burning imagery. Human life, for example, is short-human happiness is frail: how trite, how obvious a thesis! Yet, in the beginning of the Holy Dying, upon that simplest of themes how magnificent a descant! Variations the most original upon a ground the most universal, and a sense of novelty dif fused over truths coeval with human life! Finally, it may be remarked of the imagery in the French rhetoric, that it is thinly sown, common-place, deficient in splendour, and, above all, merely ornamental; that is to say, it does no more than echo and repeat what is already said in the thought which it is brought to illustrate; whereas, in Jeremy Taylor, and in Burke, it will be found usually to extend and amplify the thought, or to fortify it by some indirect argument of its truth. Thus, for instance, in the passage above quoted, from J. Taylor, upon the insensibility of man to the continual mercies of God, at first view the mind is staggered by the apparent impossibility that so infinite a reality, and of so continual a recurrence, should escape our notice; but the illustrative image, drawn from the case of a man standing at the bottom of the ocean, and yet insensible to that world of waters above him, from the uniformity and equality of its pressure, flashes upon us with a sense of something equally marvellous, in a case which we know to be a physical fact. We are thus reconciled to the proposition, by the same image which illustrates it. In a single mechanical quality of good writing, that is, in the structure of their sentences, the French rhetoricians, in common with French writers generally of that age, are superior to ours. This is what in common parlance is expressed (though inaccurately) by the word style, and is the subject of the third part of the work before us. Dr. Whately, however, somewhat disappoints us by his mode of treating it. He alleges, indeed, with some what it is that constitutes the peculiar and characterizing circumstance in Burke's manner of composition. It is this, that under his treatment every truth, be it what it may, every thesis of a sentence, grows in the very act of unfolding it. Take any sentence you please from Dr. Johnson, suppose, and it will be found to contain a thought-good or bad-fully preconceived. Whereas, in Burke, whatever may have been the preconception, it receives a new determination or inflexion at every clause of the sentence. Some collateral adjunct of the main proposition, some temperament or restraint, some oblique glance at its remote affinities, will invariably be found to attend the progress of his sentences-like the spray from a waterfall, or the scintillations from the iron under the blacksmith's hammer. Hence, whilst a writer of Dr. Johnson's class seems only to look back upon his thoughts, Burke looks forward-and does in fact advance and change his own station concurrently with the advance of the sentences. This peculiarity is no doubt in some degree due to the habit of extempore speaking, but not to that only. there is not one celebrated author of this day We recollect a little biographic sketch of Dr. Johnson, published immediately after his death, in which, amongst other instances of desperate tautology, the author quotes the well-known lines from the imitation of Juvenal plausibility, that his subject bound him to con- Hence an anomaly, not found perhaps in any literature but ours, that the most eminent English writers do not write their mother tongue without continual violations of propriety. With the single exception of Mr. Wordsworth, who has paid an honourable attention to the purity and accuracy of his English, we believe that "Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru;" and contends, with some reason, that this is saying in effect,-Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively." Certainly Dr. Johnson was the most faulty writer in this kind of inanity that ever has played tricks with language. On the other hand, Burke was the least so; and we are petrified to find him described by Dr. Whately as a writer" qui variare cupit rem prodigialiter unam," and as on that account offensive to good taste. The understanding of Burke was even morbidly impatient of tautology: progress and motion-everlasting motion-was a mere necessity of his intellect. We will venture to offer a king's ransom for one unequivocal case of tautology from the whole circle of Burke's writings. The principium indiscernibilium, upon which Leibnitz affirmed the impossibility The following illustration, however, from Dr. J.'s critique on Prior's Solomon, is far from a happy one: "He had infused into it much knowledge and much thought; had often polished it to elegance, dignified it with splendour, and sometimes heightened it to sublimity; he perceived in it many excellencies, and did not perceive that it wanted that, without which all others are of small avail,-the power of engaging attention, and alluring curiosity." The parts marked in italics are those to which Dr. W. would object as tautologic. Yet this objection can hardly be sustained: the ideas are all sufficiently discriminated: the fault is, that they are applied to no real corresponding differences in Prior. of finding any two leaves of a tree that should be mere duplicates of each other, may be applied to Burke as safely as to nature; no two propositions, we are satisfied, can be found in him, which do not contain a larger variety than is requisite to their justification. Speaking of the advantages for energy and effect in the license of arrangement open to the ancient languages, especially to the Latin, Dr. Whately cites the following sentence from the opening of the 4th Book of Q. Curtius:Darius tanti modo exercitus rex, qui, triumphantis majis quam dimicantis more, curru sublimis inierat prælium,-per loca, quæ prope immensis agminibus compleverat, jam inania, et ingenti solitudine vasta fugiebat. "The effect," says he, " of the concluding verb, placed where it is, is most striking."* The sentence is far enough from a good one: but, confining ourselves to the sort of merit for which it is here cited, as a merit peculiar to the Latin, we must say that the very same position of the verb, with a finer effect, is attainable, and, in fact, often attained in English sentences: see, for instance, the passage in the Duke of Gloucester's soliloquy-Now is the winter of our discontent-and ending, In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. See also another at the beginning of Hooker's Eccles. Polity on the thanklessness of the labour employed upon the foundations of truth, which, says he, like those of buildings," are in the bosom of the earth concealed." The fact is, that the common cases of inversion, such as the suspension of the verb to the end, and the anticipation of the objective case at the beginning, are not sufficient illustrations of the Latin structure. All this can be done as well by the English. It is not mere power of inversion, but of self-intrication, and of selfdislocation, which mark the extremity of the artificial structure; that power by which a sequence of words, that naturally is directly consecutive, commences, intermits, and reappears at a remote part of the sentence, like what is called drake-stone on the surface of a river. In this power the Greek is almost as much below the Latin as all modern languages; and in this, added to its elliptic brevity of connexion and transition, and to its wealth in abstractions "the long-tailed words is ositg and ation," lie the peculiar capacities of the Latin for rhetoric. Dr. W. lays it down as a maxim in rhetoric, that "elaborate stateliness is always to be regarded as a worst fault than the slovenliness and languor which accompany a very loose style." But surely this is a rash position:stateliness the most elaborate, in an absolute sense, is no fault at all; though it may happen to be so in relation to a given subject, or to any subject under given circumstances. "Belshazzar the king made a great feast for a thousand of his lords." Reading these words, who would not be justly offended in point of taste, had his feast been characterized by elegant simplicity? Again, at a coronation, what can be more displeasing to a philosophic taste than * We wish, that in so critical a notice of an effect derived from the fortunate position of a single word, Dr. W. had not shocked our ears by this hideous collision of a double " is." a pretended chastity of ornament, at war with the very purposes of a solemnity essentially magnificent? An imbecile friend of ours, in 1825, brought us a sovereign of a new coinage, "which" (said he) "I admire, because it is so elegantly simple." This, he flattered himself, was thinking like a man of taste. But mark how we sent him to the right about; "and that, weak-minded friend, is exactly the thing which a coin ought not to be: the duty of a golden coin is to be as florid as it can, rich with Corinthian ornaments, and as gorgeous as a peacock's tail." So of rhetoric, imagine that you read these words of introduction, "And on a set day, Tullius Cicero returned thanks to Cæsar on behalf of Marcus Marcellus," what sort of a speech is reasonably to be expected? The whole purpose being a festal and ceremonial one, thanksgiving its sole burden first and last, what else than the most "elaborate stateliness?" If it were not stately, and to the very verge of the pompous, Mr. Wolf would have had one argument more than he had, and a better than any he has produced, for suspecting the authenticity of that thrice famous oration. In the course of his dissertation on style, Dr. W., very needlessly, enters upon the thorny question of the quiddity or characteristic dif ference, of poetry as distinguished from prose.* We could much have wished that he had forborne to meddle with a quæstio vexata of this nature, both because, in so incidental and cursory a discussion, it could not receive a proper investigation; and because Dr. Whately is apparently not familiar with much of what has been written on that subject. On a matter so slightly discussed, we shall not trouble ourselves to enter farther, than to express our astonishment that a logician like Dr. Whately should have allowed himself to deliver so nugatory an argument as this which follows: Any composition in verse, (and none that is not,) is always called whether good or bad, a poem, by all who have no favourite hypothesis to maintain." And the inference manifestly is, that it is rightly so called. Now, if a man has taken up any fixed opinion on the subject, no matter whether wrong or right, and has reasons to give for his opinion, this man comes under the description of those who have a fa * As distinguished from prose. Here is one of the many instances in which a false answer is prepared beforehand, by falsely shaping the question. The accessary circumstance, as distinguished from prose," already prepares a false answer by the very terms of the problem. Poetry cannot be distinguished from prose without presupposing the whole question at issue. Those who deny that metre is the characteristic distinction of poetry, deny, by implication, that prose can be truly opposed to prose. Some have imagined, that the proper opposition was between poetry and science; but suppose that this is an imperfect opposition, and suppose even that there is no adequate opposition, or counterpole, this is no more than happens in many other cases. One of two poles is often without a name, even where the idea is fully assignable in analysis. But at all events the expression, as "distinguished from prose," is a subtle instance of a petitio principii. those countries in which these scenes had place hear strange and wonderful stories, whose truth so much resembles fiction, that, while interested in the narration, we never give implicit credence to the narrator. Of this kind is a tale I heard at Naples. The fortunes of war perhaps did not influence its actors; yet it appears improbable that any circumstances so out of the usual routine could have had place under the garish daylight that peace sheds upon the world. vourite hypothesis to maintain. It follows, names of Europe's conquerors are becoming therefore, that the only class of people whom antiquated to the ears of our children. Those Dr. Whately will allow as unbiassed judges on were more romantic days than these; for the this question-a question not of fact, but of revulsions occasioned by revolution or invaopinion are those who have, and who professsion were full of romance; and travellers in to have, no opinion at all upon the subject; or, having one, have no reasons for it. But, apart from this contradiction, how is it possible that Dr. Whately should, in any case, plead a popular usage of speech, as of any weight in a philosophic argument? Still more, how is it possible in this case, where the accuracy of the popular usage is the very thing in debate, so that -if pleaded at all-it must be pleaded as its own justification? Alms-giving-and nothing but alms-giving-is universally called charity, and mistaken for the charity of the Scriptures, by all who have no favourite hypothesis to maintain-i. e. by all the inconsiderate. But Dr. Whately will hardly draw any argument from this usage in defence of that popular notion. When Murat, then called Gioacchino, king of Naples, raised his Italian regiments, several young nobles, who had before been scarcely more than vine-dressers on the soil, were inspired with a love of arms, and presented themselves as candidates for military honours. Among these was the young Count Eboli. The father of this youthful noble had followed Ferdinand to Sicily; but his estates lay principally near Salerno, and he was naturally desirous of preserving them; while the hopes that the French government held out of glory and prosperity to his country made him often regret that he had followed his legitimate but imbecile king to exile. When he died, therefore, he recommended his son to return to Naples, to present himself to his old and tried friend, the Marchese Spina, who held a high office in Murat's government, and through his means to reconcile himself to the new king. All this was easily achieved. The young and gallant Count was permitted to possess his patrimony; and, as a further pledge of good fortune, he was betrothed to the only child of the Marchese Spina. The nuptials were deferred till the end of the ensuing campaign. In speaking thus freely of particular passages in Dr. Whately's book, we are so far from meaning any disrespect to him, that, on the contrary, if we had not been impressed with the very highest respect for his talents, by the acuteness and originality which illuminate every part of his book, we could not have allowed ourselves to spend as much time upon the whole, as we have, in fact, spent upon single paragraphs. In reality, there is not a section of his work which has not furnished us with occasion for some profitable speculations; and we are, in consequence, most anxious to see his Logic, which treats a subject so much more important than rhetoric, and so obstinately misrepresented, that it would delight us much to anticipate a radical exposure of the errors on this subject, taken up from the days of Lord Bacon. It has not fallen in our way to quote much from Dr. Whately totidem verbis; our apology for which will be found in the broken and discontinuous method of treatment by short sections and paragraphs, which a subject of this nature has necessarily imposed upon him. Had it coincided with our purpose to go more into detail, we could have delighted our readers with some brilliant examples of philosophical penetration, applied to questions interesting from their importance or difficulty, with the happiest effect. As it is, we shall content ourselves with saying, that, in any elementary work, it has not been our fortune to witness a rarer combination of analytical acuteness, with severity of judgment; and when we add that these qualities are recommended by a scholar-like elegance of manner, we suppose it hardly necessary to add, that Dr. Whately's is incomparably the best book of its class, since the days of Campbell'slections he was to bear with him, to inspire Philosophy of Rhetoric. From the Keepsake. FERDINANDO EBOLI-A TALE. BY THE AUTHOR OF FRANKENSTEIN. DURING this quiet time of peace, we are fast forgetting the excitements and astonishing events of the last war; and the very Meanwhile the army was put in motion, and Count Eboli only obtained such short leave of absence as permitted him to visit for a few hours the villa of his future father-in-law, there to take leave of him and his affianced bride. The villa was situated on one of the Apennines to the north of Salerno, and looked down over the plain of Calabria, in which Pæstum is situated, on to the blue Mediterranean. A precipice on one side, a brawling mountain torrent, and a thick grove of ilex, added beauty to the sublimity of its site. Count Eboli ascended the mountain path in all the joy of youth and hope. His stay was brief. An exhortation and a blessing from the Marchese, a tender farewell, graced by gentle tears, from the fair Adalinda, were the recol him with courage and hope in danger and absence. The sun had just sunk behind the distant isle of Istria, when, kissing his lady's hand, he said a last " Addio," and with slower steps, and more melancholy mien, rode down the mountain on his road to Naples. That same night Adalinda retired early to her apartment, dismissing her attendants; and then, restless from mingled fear and hope, she threw open the glass door that led to a balcony looking over the edge of the hill upon the torrent, whose loud rushing often lulled her to |