reflection, that the prodigious change they now survey, with eyes that age and sorrow can make dim no more-of knowledge become power-virtue sharing in the dominion-superstition trampled under foot-tyranny driven from the world are the fruits, precious, though costly, and though late reaped, yet long enduring, of all the hardships and all the hazards they encountered here below.'

Though persons of acknowleged talents and influence have questioned the expediency of making the laborious classes able to examine and judge for themselves upon moral and religious questions, yet, setting aside all particular tenets, and taking the subject of the proposition on the broad grounds which our learned orator has done, we are inclined to consider that but very few who have themselves been enabled, by tasting, to appreciate the benefits of education, would be found to dissent from the principles and tendency of the discourse here noticed: for, on those advocating the contrary doctrine, it would be incumbent to shew, that moral good is the result of ignorance; and that to stint knowlege is the way to make a people prosperous, powerful, and magnanimous.

As none of the opinions of Longinus have been introduced into this discourse on rhetoric, it may be presumed that he is less a favorite with Mr. B. than Quintilian, who seems to have been freely consulted. The Greek critic, in specifying those endowments necessary for constituting his perfect orator, has spoken to the following effect: "The first qualification that we are to look for in a great orator is, that he must not have a sordid spirit, since it is impossible that a man whose sentiments and inclinations are mean and grovelling should ever express any thing noble and worthy to be regarded by posterity. It is probable that they only who entertain great and liberal conceptions are capable of making elevated discourses; and it is peculiarly the part of great men to say surprising and extraordinary things." (Treatise on the Sublime, chap. vii.)

Now whether experience leads Mr. B. to differ with this celebrated master concerning the first essential qualification in a public speaker he has failed to tell us; and we cannot but look upon it as rather strange that, in a didactic lecture, delivered on so memorable and conspicuous an occasion, a writer of the highest repute upon the subject treated of should have been wholly omitted to be mentioned in the discourse of the Lord Rector.

ART.

ART. X. Revelations of the Dead Alive. 12mo. pp. 376. 10s. 6d. Boards. London. Simpkin and Marshall. 1824.

THERE

HERE are a great many good things, several things not positively bad, and much that is absolutely absurd, here strung together. The cadre is ridiculously extravagant. It is taken from an exaggerated case related by Dr. Cheyne of a man, who was endued with a singular volition of dying when he pleased. The author to improve upon this, acquires such extraordinary skill in the art of dying, and during the period of his death, of identifying himself with futurity, that he contrives to remain dead one hundred and ninetyeight days and a quarter; and in the course of each day a year of futurity is conceived to be seen; so that he remarks, When I came to life again I had observed what was and is to be in the lapse of one hundred and ninety-eight years and a quarter; a year for each day.' The knowlege thus acquired forms the substance of our modern Quevedo's lucubrations. The humor, if from visions of this nature humor could emanate, must necessarily consist in such imaginary changes of manner, sentiment, science, taste, and literature, and in such revolutions in the social system, as might be conceived to take place during the cycle of generations included in the trance: but it is in humor that this dead gentleman falls most short. His efforts at facetiousness for the most part remind us of his inanimate condition; and shew that death does not very much improve the faculty for wit.

He takes his place on the outside of a stage-coach, at what period, he does not tell us, but, as we conjecture, about the beginning of the 21st century, and proceeds to relate the fancied metamorphoses he meets with between Fulham and London, with certain changes in particular houses and streets, at which, on reaching the metropolis, he seems to have been greatly astonished.

Every body would guess that, in such a lapse of time, Apsley-House might be in ruins; that Mr. Murray's shop might be a pork-shop; and that the White-Horse in Piccadilly might possibly have changed its sign to that of the Cat and Fiddle: but who can be amused with such ideal doings? Occurrences so common-place and insignificant were hardly worth dying for; indeed, had he been actually alive, the author could scarcely have been more dull and prosing. There is, however, every now and then, a stroke of good sense and of well-placed satire, which half redeems the monotony and tediousness of his whims. We heartily agree with his remarks upon the new buildings at the west end of

the town, which like the ruins in Mr. Sterling's garden will speedily cost more than they are worth to keep in repair.

Passing through Hanover-Square, of which three sides were taken up with shops, I got into Regent-Street. Alas! that theatrical chain of lath and plaister splendour was in utter ruins. Scarcely any of the original houses remained, and these in rags and patchwork; wind and rain, sun and frost, had done their natural work upon them. I was no longer disagreeably startled with the inconsistency of a crispin or a stay-maker, hammering or stitching under a Grecian portico. The ostentatious, misplaced, and, as I could afterwards learn, never-inhabited quadrant, had vanished. Sensible looking-houses, with plain, tradesman-like, brick faces, predominated, and even these were venerable: here and there was a shed. I must remark, in general application to the change that had come over the whole physiognomy of future London, that noblemen's houses, retail shops, agents' offices, and the dwellings of petty gentry, individually bore some resemblance to their real character. You would scarcely confound one with another. They seemed in outside pretension as distinct as they were in name, nature, and purpose. The only trait of my old Regent-Street, that I thought I could now recognize, and even that smote my soul with something of the horror experienced by Voltaire, at a sight of his old mistress after half a century of separation, was the romantic steeple of the new church I had left unfinished, at the upper end, towards Portland-Place. I wellremembered its pristine assumption of form, agreeably resembling a thick, clumsy, antique candlestick, with an extinguisher placed over a snuff at the top; but the meagre remains of its former comeliness and symmetry now made me sigh instead of laugh.'

The whole of our author's observations upon dress, of which we submit a few, are judicious; and the endless vicissitudes of fashion are well exemplified by feigning an apartment in the British Museum, on the walls of which are supposed to be suspended original specimens of the garments of English men and women since we first became a nation.

But to take one lounge through the gallery. On the first peg, at the north-west side, hung, in lieu of a specimen of costume which it was impossible to procure, inasmuch as it never had had existence, the preserved, painted, and tattooed skin of an aboriginal Briton, such as he was found at the first visit of the Romans. I saw some exquisites of 2023 regard this with a complacency that shewed how proud they were of their honest, primitive ancestor. On the next peg dangled a scant piece of wolfskin, the first simple encroachment on the unconsciousness I have just described. Next was a clumsy imitation of the classic costume of the conquerors; and next the heavy incumbrance of the Lombards. Passing many intervening pegs, I shall particularly

notice the silken and embroidered foppery of Henry the Second's era, when the short mantle appeared, and with it, for the first time, all the gingerbread pomp of coronation-robes, and robes of state. But about this age an old chronicler describes, better than I can hope to do, and while he also mentions several statutes passed to clip its extravagance, the dandy costume of his day.

"The commons," he says, "were besotted in excess of ap parel, in wide surcoats reaching to their loins, some in a garment reaching to their heels, close before, and strutting out on the sides, so that on the back they made men seem women, and this they call by a ridiculous name, gown. They have another weed of silk that they call paltock; their hose are of two colours, or pied, which with latchets, which they call herlots, they tie to their paltocks, without any breeches. Their girdles are of gold and silver, some worth twenty marks; their shoes and their pattens are snouted and piked more than a finger long, crooked upwards, which they call crackowes, resembling the devil's claws."'—

On separate pegs hung Elizabeth's ruff, and the first pair of silk stockings she ever wore, or which ever had been worn in England; and in the same compartment, the odd kind of things like Gothic niches, windows, or arches, in which the ladies of her day most unaccountably disguised their heads. Next I admired the easy, flowing, and, at the same time, scanty drapery that afforded to Kneller and Lely such good opportunities for the almost unreserved study of the female figure; next the cylinder waists, balloon gowns, and branching caps, of Anne's time, together with the blowzed periwigs, and niggard skirts of the men; and at the very next step, all this useless hair, still, however, too precions to be put out of sight, was shut up in a bag; while the caps simultaneously dwindled, and the petticoat, now ribbed and substantially stiffened with bone, stood, independent of peg or any other aid, firmly on the floor, not unlike a huge cathedral bell, mouth downwards; the short male-skirt, growing to the ankle, by its side.

This I thought a little more rational; but, lo! on the very succeeding peg was a man's coat with diminished skirts again, and a hoop of inconceivable magnitude! And what on the very next?

A gown without hoop of any kind, and so short, and with such a dip about the bosom as I shall not dwell upon; but its consort-coat furnished with skirts that swept the floor! Here also was a lady's wig, made to lie flat to the top of the head, and supplied with hanging ringlets that must sometimes have tripped up her heels; and a reduced gentleman's bag; and I had entirely forgot a little China saucer, laid on a shelf, half filled with discarded patches, round, square, angular, and hyperbolical; all the worse for the wear. And then, such quaint or monstrous contrarieties of female and male hats, shoes, and boots, the jarring products of one little era! Hats like pent-houses, and hats that could not ward off a drop of rain from the nose; hats cocked into a point little less than ferocious, and hats like a round flat cymbal ; shoes with soles, even and thin as a pancake, and shoes with stilts under the heels, of half a foot high.'

The

The dead gentleman becomes acquainted with an author of the 21st century, Mr. Drudge, who introduces him to Mrs. Drudge, and invites him to dinner. The knives and forks are laid by mechanism; and commence, of their own accord, to cut the contents of every plate, while, once in the quarter of a minute, the knife reposed for a time, and the fork found its way to the mouth, laden with a proper proportion of food. This is too childish even for children. Mrs. Drudge is a profound woman; and the Dead Alive contrives, in a conversation after dinner, to obtain the opinions of this literary couple on our present school of poetry.

"We have lost some of Lord Byron's works, which I am led to suspect I need not, as a virtuous lady, be sorry for," continued Mrs. Drudge," and we read and like him most in his earliest effusions."

"His college-volume, Madam?" I asked.

"No," answered Mr. Drudge, "that we have never seen, though it is sometimes good humoredly spoken of. Mrs. Drudge means the Giaour, the Corsair, and their family, and some of Childe Harold. We preserve, indeed, his tragedies, too; but, though they are fine things, regard them almost as the works of another man. There were, in fact, two or three Byrons, according as the first poet of that name became an admirer of different models and styles; for I suspect a good portion of his Lordship's genius lay in happy adaptations of the essence of other poets; and even here, you see, I do not withhold the term genius, for, with Voltaire, I allow judicious imitation to be one of its best attributes. That apart, and leaving the college-effusions as quite original, Byron wrote his Eastern Tales, because the Lady of the Lake had been written before them; Childe Harold was generated by a luxurious indulgence in Spenser; and Manfred was born after Faust, and while the first impression of that wonderful production irritated and fired his Lordship's mind."

"Crabbe," said I, "is

*

"What a contemporary essayist has stamped him," interrupted Mr. Drudge, "sometimes the Salvator and sometimes the Teniers of poetry. So let us leave him as he is; a volume, or ten hours' talk, could not define him better.

"The next of your list of names I shall take up is Moore." "You delight me," said I, " for while some people grumbled at the popularity of Moore, I always thought no contemporary poet had a sweeter fancy, or a purer feeling, while few equalled him in numbers and metre."

"We fully agree with you, recollecting, meantime, that these same perfections often ran into their own extremes, redundancy, prettiness, and sound," said Mr. Drudge.

* Mr. Charles Butler.'

"No