rendering ordinary matters the vehicle of subtle thought, or subjecting them to rhetorical definition. We see the spectacle of a man of great powers taking a perverse pleasure in winding to his purposes the docility of common apprehensions. He is a giant stooping to lift a feather. As to his ingenuity, we may apply to it language which we dare say will be recognized. Hazlitt, Sir! is one of a set of men who account for every thing systematically; for instance, it has been a fashion to wear scarlet breeches; these men would tell you, that, according to causes and effects, no other wear could at that time have been chosen." It is to the existence of such writers as these, however, joined with the indescribable action of political events in moulding human thought, that we are to look for the main causes which, in this country, have given a more ambitious and decided turn to our critical system, and a more vigorous and elevated tone to our periodical literature, than that which justified the admiration of our immediate predecessors for the wit and philosophy of the golden age of Queen Anne.

The writers in the Round Table appear to have read the Italian poets, especially Dante,* with such care, as to be able to refer to them very effectually, on occasions for which the beaten range of hackneyed quotation could not possibly lend equal power to their illustrations, or force to the meaning they wish to convey. Indeed, the Examiner has been remarkable for its numerous and apt quotations from Italian literature. It was with some indignation, therefore, that we saw it stated in a contemporary work, that Mr Hunt's knowledge in that department "is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the inedium of Mr Hoole." This could only be the statement of one who has had no personal or direct

*There is a set of authors more admired than read. Dante is almost the chief of these. We believe it was Voltaire who said wittily and truly, that Dante owed his fame to his obscurity. It shews a laudable curiosity in a modern critic, when he reads such an author, and extends his fame by imparting a relish of him to his own readers.

opportunity of estimating the literary pretensions of Mr Hunt and Mr Hazlitt. Except through the hearsay of very second-hand persons, he can know nothing of the habits or acquirements of these gentlemen. And, if the freedom of their political sentiments, and their truly English strain of independence, had not made ene◄ mies to them in many quarters, whence enmity could not have proceeded from sound judgment, or right principle, we should have been surprised, as well as offended, at such an instance of want of common discretion, joined with an utter disregard of common candour, or critical fairness. The impudent harshness, and rude vulgarity, of the whole paper, of which this averment was a part, are, in fact, so excessive, so obtrusive, and transparent, that they of themselves sufficiently indicate a source to which no information of the personal habits of Mr Leigh Hunt or Mr Hazlitt could possibly have reached, except at third or fourth hand. The Messrs Hunts were educated at Christ's Hospital, and were early initiated into more of the best of ancient literature than is at all common among the rawheaded young men who fret their little hour in the lowest ranks of those professions to which, in this provincial town, the epithet learned is applied with a most ludicrous exclusiveness and impropriety.

**

In the tirade to which we at present

Far be it from us to attach any importance to those school acquirements which one fool may have, and another want, just strength in these studies, must stand or fall as the chance is. But they who put their by their proficiency in them. The Blue Coat School, and other foundations for learning in England, comparing them with the schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, will be found to produce, number for number, at least as many well-grounded scholars,-more men of open and independent character,—and certainly not fewer of

sound and serviceable attainments. Now, it would be strange if any man, not a better scholar than those, (allowing him, for the sake of argument, to be as good,) should say that they knew Homer only through a translation, when they quoted him in Greek! It is equally strange, and not a whit more honest, for a man who knows absolutely nothing of the private studies of these writers, to say, that they cannot read Italian, because they quote Dante in his native tongue !!

yet we will never cease nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with

our own; when France called her children to partake her equal blessings beneath her laughing skies; when the stranger was met in all her villages with dance and festive songs, in celebration of a new and golden era; and when to the retired and contemplative student the prospects of human happiness and glory were seen ascending, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, in bright and never-ending succession. The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recal, but has left behind it traces which are not to be effaced by birth-day and thanksgiving odes, or the chaunting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe-hatred and scorn as lasting !"

As a primary event, influencing by its peculiar features and connections strongly and immediately the tone and progress of society in the European Continent, and, more remotely, some of the less indifferent feelings and speculations of the whole range of civilized man, the French Revolution, that word of still mighty import has been used, we imagine, with reference to varying phenomena in the moral, and very different classes of events in the political, world, both by its friends and enemies, with marvellously little strictness of application or clearness of idea. By one set of thinkers it has been execrated as the direful parent of all, and even more than all, the evils attributed by others to the selfishness and unteachableness of kings and courts. By a recluse, and scanty, and scattered race of speculative men, it has been more simply regarded as a grand revenge on the crimes of successful tyranny, and the insults of de ceiving priestcraft, wherever committed. We do not wish to enter into this painful topic, or to express, even by inference, any opinion of our own upon it; but, in these days of political mystification and shameless tergiversation, there is something kindly in the air of that man who can trust himself with the buoyancy and warmth of his youthful impressions ;-more

so, if he can speak of that event without any perverse inclination to cut into the angry feelings about it which yet remain on either side.

As to Mr Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare, they appear to us the most animated, intelligent, and prepossessed criticism on the " great heir of fame." Their admiration is only too systematic. There is a constant effort to point out beauties, along with a profound reason for them, and to discern fitnesses at which Shakespeare himself would be astonished, were any of the happy spirits in Elysium to mention the progressive speculations about him with which earth teems. The following passage from these criticisms, which is full of truth and error, is a proper specimen of how deeply Mr Hazlitt goes into the most ticklish speculations, even when he' is discussing the scenery of a play, or the merits of a scenic hero.

"The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to usurped authority, or even the natural resistance to it, has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination: it is the assumption of a right to insult or oppress others that carries an air of superiority with it. Wrong, dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance, has more attraction than the fickleness of the people; yet, the inabstract right. Coriolanus complains of stant he cannot gratify his pride and obstinacy at their expence, he turns his arms against his country. If his country was not worth defending, why build his pride on its defence? He is a conqueror and a hero; he conquers other countries, and makes this a plea for enslaving his own; and, when he is prevented from doing so, he leagues with its enemies to destroy his country. He rates the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their infirmity.' He scoffs at one of their franchises. Mark you his absolute shall;" tribunes for maintaining their rights and not marking his own absolute will to take every thing from them,-his impatience of the slightest opposition to his own pretensions being in proportion to their arrogance and absurdity. If the great and powerful had the beneficence and wisdom of gods, then all this would have been well: if, with a greater knowledge of what is good for the people, they had as great a selves, if they were seated above the world, care for their interest as they have themsympathizing with the welfare, but not feeling the passions of men, receiving neither good nor hurt from them, but bestowing their benefits as free gifts on them, they might then rule over them like an

case.

other Providence. But this is not the Coriolanus is unwilling that the senate should shew their cares' for the people, lest their cares' should be construed into fears,' to the subversion of all due authority; and he is no sooner disappointed in his schemes to deprive the people, not only of the cares of the state, but of all power to redress themselves, than Volumnia is made madly to exclaim,

Now the red pestilence strike all trades in Rome,

And occupations perish.'

This is but natural: it is but natural for a mother to have more regard for her son than for a whole city; but then the city should be left to take some care of itself. The care of the state cannot, we here see, be safely entrusted to maternal affection, or to the domestic charities of high life. The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must courtesy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct, if necessary, opposition to them; their power is at the expence of our weakness; their riches of our poverty; their pride of our degradation; their splendour of our wretchedness; their tyranny of our servitude. If they had the superior knowledge ascribed to them, (which they have not,) it would only render them so much more formidable; and from gods would convert them into devils. The whole dramatic moral of CORIOLANUS is, that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor, therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves, therefore they ought to be beaten. They work hard, therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burthen. They are ignorant, therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the logic of the imagination and the passions; which seeks to aggrandize what excites admiration, and to heap contempt on misery; to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetical justice; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havock in the chace, though they do not share in the spoil. We may depend upon it, that what men de

:

light to read in books, they will put in practice in reality."

This is extremely animated and erroneous, and, in point of ingenuity, is far above the pitch of dramatic criticism. What follows is less painful in its subject, as well as more just and lively.

"Shakespeare's comedy is, in essence, the same with that of Cervantes, and also very frequently of Moliere, though he was more systematic in his extravagance than Shakespeare. Shakespeare's comedy is of a pastoral and poetical cast. Folly is indigenous to the soil, and shoots out with a native, happy, unchecked luxuriance. Absurdity has every encouragement afforded it, and nonsense has room to flourish in. Nothing is stunted by the churlish icy hand of indifference or severity. The poet runs riot in a conceit, and idolizes a quib→ ble. His whole object is to turn the meanest or rudest objects to a pleasurable account. The relish which he has of a pun, or of the quaint humour of a low character, does not interfere with the delight with which he describes a beautiful image, or the most refined love. The clown's forced jests do not spoil the sweetness of the character of Viola; the same house is big enough to hold Malvolio, the Countess, Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew AgueCheek. For instance, nothing can fall much lower than this last character in intellect or morals: yet how are his weaknesses nursed and dandled by Sir Toby into something high fantastical,' when, on Sir Andrew's commendation of himself for dancing and fencing, Sir Toby answers, 'Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before them?" &c. How Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and the Clown, afterwards chirp over their cups! How they rouse the night out in a catch, able to draw three souls out of one weaver!' What can be better than Sir Toby's unanswerable answer to Malvolio, Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' In a word, the best turn is given to every thing, instead of the worst. There is a constant infusion of the romantic and enthusiastic, in proportion as the characters are natural and sincere; whereas, in the more artificial style of comedy, every thing gives way to ridicule and indifference, there being nothing left but affectation on one side, and incredulity on the other. Much as we like Shakespeare's comedies, we cannot agree with Dr Johnson, that they are better than his tragedies; nor do we like them half so well. If his inclination to comedy sometimes led him to trifle with the seriousness of tragedy, the poetical and impassioned passages are the best parts of his comedies."

6

Mr Hazlitt, in descanting on Shakespeare's beauties, and on the variety of his genius, which grasps, as it were by anticipation, so many excrescent lights of thought, and gratuitous corruscations of fancy, has omitted to note, with its proper tone, one striking passage. In the first scene, second act, of "As You Like It," we think Shakespeare has completely anticipated the Lake Poets. He "translates the stubbornness of fortune into so quiet and so sweet a style," as to "Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing." All that precedes, about the seclusion and simplicity of their style of life in the Forest of Arden;-all that follows of the "poor sequestered stag that from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt;"where Jacques is left "weeping and commenting upon the sobbing deer," and the Duke is made to say, "I love to cope him in those sullen fits, for then he is full of matter." All these parts are in a style which Mr Wordsworth has not surpassed, either for natural plainness, or force of effect. Nothing can, indeed, be more effective, except in such cases as where, by an instantaneous hit, Shakespeare reaches the very climax of good fellowship. It is Sir John Falstaff who says, Aye, Master Shallow, we have heard the chimes at midnight !!"

Six Weeks in Paris, or a Cure for the Gallomania; said to be extracted from the Portfolio of a Nobleman. 3 volumes 8vo. London, J. Johnston.

FROM the title of this book, we suspected that it would be a libel against the French; and, as we have an abhorrence of all libels, whether directed against nations or individuals, we were predisposed to severity against the author. On reading it, however, all our wrath subsided, and our feelings sunk into those of the most sovereign contempt. The desire to calumniate is, no doubt, strongly shown in every page; but, fortunately, the malignity of the author is diluted with such a profuse mixture of vulgarity and stupidity, that he, and, perhaps, his unfortunate publisher, are the only persons in danger of suffering from the effusion. The resemblance

VOL. I.

of Paris, or of Parisian manners, is so little to be discovered, in the coarse, vulgar, and disgusting daubings of the author, that we have no hesitation in saying, that he has never been in Paris himself. We are persuaded that he has only heard some gossiping fool give a distorted description of some few objects in that city which attract the attention of strangers,— has thereupon procured a Guide de Paris, for farther information,-and from these materials has produced the three volumes now given to the public. In short, there is neither reality nor caricature ;-neither humour, wit, nor fancy, to be found in the book ;and, as for taste or fine writing, an Irish labourer, dictating an epistle which he cannot write, would exhibit specimens of both superior to those displayed by the author in this wretched performance.

We

We have to apologize, therefore, for noticing the work at all; but we do so to have an opportunity of expressing our decided disapprobation of all attempts to libel the character and manners of foreign nations, to gratify the senseless conceit of the ignorant and malignant part of our own. We were much distressed, when in France, to meet with amiable and intelligent individuals of that nation filled with all sorts of prejudices against this country, many of them so foolish as to excite our astonishment at their being for a moment entertained. But these prejudices owed their origin to misrepresentations, lies, and slanders, industriously circulated in France by wits of the same paltry description as are found too easily here. really did not know whether to smile or to frown at being gravely told, that, in Britain, the gentlemen regularly get drunk after the ladies have retired to the drawing-room ;-that genteel people in England box each other on the slightest quarrel;-that we eat beaf-steaks, half raw and half broiled, to breakfast, dinner, and supper;that our whole soul is wrapt up, night and day, in the desire of gain ;—that we are strangers to refined amusement and social pleasure ;-that we shoot, drown, and hang ourselves on the occasion of every disappointment; with an endless list of similar absurdities. Such ridiculous prejudices may appear deserving of contempt alone; and, if no evil consequences arose

3 A