saying of genus et proavos,' the poet is here evidently becoming a chorus to his own scene, and explaining a fact which could by no means be inferred from the pageant that passes before the eyes of the king and prelate. The archbishop's observation on his appearance is free, however, from every objection of this kind.

'That prelate mark'd his march-On banners blazed

With battles won in many a distant land,

On eagle-standards and on arms he gazed;

"And hopest thou, then," he said, "thy power, shall stand? O thou hast builded on the shifting sand,

And thou hast temper'd it with slaughter's flood;

And know, fell scourge in the Almighty's hand!

Gore-moistened trees shall perish in the bud,

And, by a bloody death, shall die the man of blood!'

The miseries and crimes of the Guerrilla warfare are painted with horrible energy; and the landing of the British succours, and the portrait of the nations who compose them, are already, we believe, and deservedly in the memories or the newspapers of half the readers of the English tongue. What is so well known it is unnecessary to instance, and our limits warn us that it is time to proceed to the conclusion. Of this the first three stanzas are spirited, but somewhat forced; lullaby,' st. 1, is a word unfortunately at present too common in English poetry; but which we own we did not expect to meet with in its present situation. The picture of Lisbon's matrons summing the myriads of France and listening to the distant thunders of the drum is happily imagined; and the British soldier's sympathy with the victims of his enemy's lust and cruelty, is marked by the strongest features of truth and character.

The rudest centinel in Britain born,

With horror paused to view the havoc done,
Gave his poor crust to feed some wretch forlorn,

Wiped his stern eye, then fiercer grasp'd his gun.'

The praises which follow of Wellington, Cadogan, and Beresford (though to judge from the words of Mr. Scott himself, the second of these brave officers should seem to owe the minstrel's praise to an accidental meeting in the Hebrides,) are eloquent and powerful; and the merits of the last are finely discriminated in the praise accorded to him as the restorer of the military spirit of Portugal. The following stanzas, however, including the graceful and characteristic conclusion of the poem, excel the noisier and more general panegyrics of the commanders in Portugal, as much as the sweet and thrilling tones of the harp surpass an ordinary flourish of drums and trumpets.

VOL. VI. NO. XI.

30

XVI.

Nor be his praise o'erpast, who strove to hide
Beneath the warrior's vest affection's wound,
Whose wish, Heaven for his country's weal denied;
Danger and fate he sought, but glory found.
From clime to clime, where'er war's trumpets sound,
The wanderer went; yet, Caledonia! still
Thine was his thought in march and tented ground;
He dreamed mid Alpine cliffs of Athole's hill,
And heard in Ebro's roar his Lyndoch's lovely rill.
XVII.

'Obero of a race renowned of old,

Whose war-cry oft has waked the battle-swell,
Since first distinguished in the onset bold,

Wild sounding when the Roman rampart fell!
By Wallace' side it rung the Southron's knell,
Alderne, Kilsythe, and Tibber owned its fame,
Tummell's rude pass can of its terrors tell,

But ne'er from prouder field arose the name,

Than when wild Ronda learned the conquering shout of GRAME!
XVIII.

'But all too long, through seas unknown and dark,
(With Spenser's parable I close my tale)

By shoal and rock hath steered my venturous bark;
And land-ward now I drive before the gale,
And now the blue and distant shore I hail,
And nearer now I see the port expand,

And now I gladly furl my weary sail,

And, as the prow light touches on the strand,

I strike my red-cross flag, and bind my skiff to land.'

The lines are for the most part exceedingly harmonious, aud on the whole the rhythm of Spenser is far better preserved than by Mr. Campbell. There are, however, some careless rhymes which the latter would hardly have adopted; and there is in three, if not four instances,* an extension of the Alexandrine, which only occurs twice, we believe, in all the works of Dryden, and which Spenser has scarcely ever recourse to in the whole of his long poem. Was wrote,' in the fifteenth stanza, will hardly be allowed as grammar. But trifles such as these are scarcely worth the instancing, except that even the slightest faults of eminent men cannot be safely passed over; and on the whole, it may be said, that Mr. Scott has presented his country with a poem worthy of his former name, and the glorious theme it celebrates,-a theme exalted above all the

* One of these is indeed altogether anomalous.

Now, God and St. Jago strike for the good cause of Spain."

petty interests of temporary politics,-whose consequence will only cease to be felt when the importance of every earthly object shall expire.

It is right though we believe it is hardly necessary, to mention, that Mr. Scott has devoted the profits of his poem to the relief of the suffering inhabitants of Portugal.

ART. XIV. Notices sur l' Interieur de la France, écrites in 1806, par M. Faber. Tom. 1. St. Petersburgh, 1807. Re-imprimé à Londres. Chez Vogel & Schultz, Poland-street, 1810. Sketches of the Internal State of France. By M. Faber. Translated from the French. 8vo. pp. 300. London, Murray, Hatchdard; Edinburgh, Blackwood. 1811.

No

O man that ever lived has paid to the power of the press a more unequivocal homage than Buonaparte. He first courted it as an ally-he has since pursued it as an enemy; he now holds it as a captive. He treats it as Louis XIV. did the Masque de Fer,' with some outward show of respect, but with all the real jealousy of fear; and the vigilance at once active and mysterious with which it is watched, proves that the fortunes of the occupier of the throne of France might be endangered, if not overthrown, by its enlargement.

No instance, indeed, of his unexampled success,-not his battles, his consulate, his throne, nor his marriage,-appears to us so wonderful as his having been able to enslave the press to the extent that he has done; to destroy all the channels of intercourse and intelligence among men; to spread over his empire a cloud which no eye can pierce, and which covers those whom it involves from the world, and the world from them. We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the internal state of France; and in France they know of what passes in the rest of Europe just as much as it pleases Buonaparte to tell them. It would be not uninteresting to trace the steps, rapid and yet almost imperceptible, by which he has proceeded from a slight interference with the press, to the late decrees which have laid it prostrate at his feet; but that belongs not to us: we must content ourselves with seizing those occasions which may present themselves of counteracting his designs against literature and the free communication of public opinion, and of dispelling, whenever we find an opportunity and as far as we are able, that mist which he has spread around him. We cannot, indeed, expect that any external efforts will succeed in casting into France herself one ray of light; but we are still enabled to give to this country some glimpse of what is passing there; and whenever and to whatever extent we can lift the mysterious veil, we feel that we are performing a duty

most useful to the general interests of humanity, and to those particularly of this country, the depository of the liberties and hopes of mankind.

The work, the perusal of which has led to these observations, is one of the very few that have eluded the vigilance of the continental police, and effected an escape into this country. Hitherto we have had little more than the loose reports of an occasional traveller, and the narrow observations of a few prisoners or refugees, as to the internal state of the French empire; and these have been generally received with a degree of hesitation and suspicion, justified, we allow, not more by a consideration of the channels through which they were conveyed, than by the extraordinary and almost incredible statements which they contained. Here, however, we have the testimony of a witness announced to us as possessing more extensive means of information than any former writer, together with all the claims to credit and respect which can fairly be required.

But if this work is on general considerations thus interesting, and we will add, important, it becomes much more so by some peculiar circumstances connected with the history of the author and his publication: both have undergone some of the vicissitudes of revolutionary fortune; and both are examples as well as witnesses of the rigorous system which they describe. M. Faber is a German, or rather, we believe, a native of some German or Flemish province annexed to France; one of those who, in the earlier days of the revolution, captivated by the specious prospects of the hour, left his country to assist in the sacred work of French regeneration. We have no means of tracing him through the whole of his course; but it is stated that the love of liberty and the feelings of philanthropy, which made him at first the dupe of the revolution, preserved him from being afterwards a sharer in its atrocities. Doubting early, as it appears, of the justice of his first impressions, he became content to pursue a less brilliant but a more useful course than that which his youthful ambition had anticipated; and he seems to have dedicated himself to the duties of the magistracy. Here Buonaparte found him, and here he continued under the consul and the emperor. His disappointment, however, in his early Utopian fancies must have increased from hour to hour; and at last, (on what particular provocation we know not,) he resigned, in disgust, the office which he held, and retired, about the breaking out of the Prussian war, first to Berlin, and afterwards to St. Petersburgh. We have heard that a strong remorse at having been in any degree accessary to the revolution, and to the establishment of the tremendous despotism that has arisen out of the ruins of the monarchy and the republic, induced M. Faber to quit, and, on maturer deliberation, to re

nounce the country of his too hasty adoption. A motive, indeed, so generous is consistent rather with what we are told of his general character, than with the opinion which certain passages of his work would have induced us to form. Be, however, the motive what it may, M. Faber quitted France; and we find him about the time of the treaty of Tilsit employed in publishing, at St. Petersburgh, the work now under consideration. The conclusion of that treaty established the predominance of French influence in the Russian capital, and interrupted, as was to be expected, M. Faber's publication. The circulation of one volume, which had been already printed, was immediately prohibited, and the second then in progress, absolutely suppressed. One copy, however, of the former reached England, and from that the translation before us has been made.

Such is the account, loose and unsatisfactory it must be admitted, which we have collected of the author and his publication. The accordant testimony of different witnesses obliges us to admit that the work is genuine, and M. Faber no other than what he is stated to be; but we must confess that if we were to form our judgment on internal evidence alone, we should hesitate to come to the same conclusion. The work is beyond all doubt, that of a person generally acquainted with the state of France; and of the truth of the majority of the facts stated, there is ample corroboration in the extrinsic testimony of various official reports, addresses, and decrees, and in the concurrence of all those who have had any opportunity of observing the actual state of France: but we do not find in it so much of that minute detail, personal allusion, reference to obscure facts, appeal to names and dates, as we should have expected from one giving an account of what he himself had seen, and heard, and felt in situations of peculiar interest and importance. It is, however, fair to add, that M. Faber intimates that a regard for the safety of individuals induced him to deal in generals where he might have particularized; but it will be seen that he sometimes mentions names very indiscreetly, while he maintains a mysterious silence in matters where disclosure could do no harm.

M. Faber has divided his volume into ten chapters. 1. Les Français. 2. Administration. 3. Opinion Publique. 4. Le Thrône et L'Autel. 5. L'Ancien Temps et le Temps Nouveau. 6. Instruction Publique. 7. Justice. 8. Buonaparté en Tournee. 9. La Conscription. 10. La Garde Nationale. Our readers will at once perceive that this division is purely arbitrary. M. Faber, though a German, has little of German precision about him; and though, perhaps, accurate in his facts, is very far from being clear in his arrangements: many of his divisions contain anecdotes and reasonings which more properly belong to others; and in more than