Moliere. Of Moliere's plays, The Impostor" is undoubtedly the best; "The Learned Ladies" may perhaps rank next. Under the name of Vadius in this comedy, the author meant to represent the character of Menage. Tartuff is a name borrowed from the German, signifying Devil.

Esop.

There is a book printed at Antwerp, 1578, in which the whole of Esop's Fables are translated into French Sonnets; some of which are extremely well paraphrased. The French are particularly partial to light detached pieces, and a great proportion of their literature affords sufficient testimony of it. The writer of these observations has in his possession a work, executed by the express command of Louis XIV., in which the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses are converted into Rondeaus!

Unwillingness of Men of Genius to be satisfied with their own productions.

It has been very justly observed that though men of ordinary talents may be

[Oct. 1,

highly satisfied with their own productions, men of true genius never are. Whatever be their subject they always scem to themselves to fall short of it, even when they appear to others most to excel; and for this reason, because they have a certain sublime sense of perfection which other men are strangers to, and which they themselves in their performances are not able to exemplify. Conrad Gessner.

The death of Conrad Gessner is said to have been similar to that of Petrarch, Capite libris innixo mortuus est inventus," (vita Petrarchæ.) He was found dead in his study with his head leaning on some books.-Most of his writings exhibit uncommon force of imagination, but very indifferently regulated, with much of that meretricious substitution of glittering words for ideas, so common to the German School of poetry.

Coincidence between Mallet and Shakes

peare.

The following passages from Shakespear appear to have furnished Mallet with an idea for his beautiful ballad "William and Margaret,"

"As the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
E'en so by love."
Two Gent. of Ver.

"She never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i'the bud
Feed on her damask cheek."

Twelfth Night.
"The rose was budding on her cheek
Just opening to the view.
But love had like the canker worm
Consumed her early prime;
The rose grew pale and left her cheek,
She died before her time."

William and Margaret.
Woman.

Carcinus, in Semele, says, "Oh Jupiter, what evil thing is it proper to call woman?" Reply. It will be sufficient if you merely say woman! Hamlet exclaims, "Frailty, thy name is woman,' and Shakespeare elsewhere says, "She is the devil." Otway's Castalio, like a blubbering school boy, who has been disappointed of his plaything, also bursts into the following splenetic recapitulation.

"I'd leave the world for him that hates a

woman!

1818.J

Who lost Mark Antony the world? a woman!

Who was the cause of a long ten years war, That laid at last old Troy in ashes?woman!

Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!
Woman to man first as a blessing given;
Happy awhile in paradise they lay,

But quickly woman longed to go astray; Some foolish new adventure needs must prove

And the first devil she saw she changed her

love!

To his temptations lewdly she inclined Her soul; and for an apple damned mankind."

How often does man, with a strange and almost unaccountable perversity, abuse that in which he most delights, and mar the blessings which his Creator has provided for him! As the gem will commonly sink in our estimation when possessed, so the amiable qualities of woman dwindle into comparative nothingness when ungrateful man becomes more habituated to them. Who will deny that

"The world was sad—the garden was a wild, And man the hermit mourned till woman smiled!"

Let us then believe, that

Campbell.

"All ill stories of the sex are false; That woman, lovely woman! nature made To temper man-we had been brutes without her.

Angels are painted fair to look like her; There's in her all that we conceive of heaven, Amazing brightness, purity and truth, Eternal joy and everlasting love!"

On Absence.

That absence sometimes increases love, and at other times destroys it, may happen from the circumstances of parting. When the separation is attended with no shocking reflection- when no illusage or infidelity has been the cause of it, absence certainly increases love; because the remembrance of past pleasure entertains the soul with nothing but sentiments of endearing tenderness; but if the separation proceeds from a want of merit, defect of love, &c., the mind employs itself in contemplating those ideas which seem most reasonable to restore its tranquillity, and thus gets the better of a passion which has had the misfortune to be placed on an unworthy object.

Epigram on Narcissus.

The following beautiful epigram is taken from a collection printed at Brest,

1605.

207

The following passage from Burton's highly ingenious and entertaining "Anatomy of Melancholy," appears to have suggested to Lord Byron that exquisite definition of solitude contained in the first Canto of Childe Harold.

"To walk amongst orchards, gardens, bowres, and artificial wildernesses green with thickets, arches, groves, rillet fountains and such like pleasant places; poolesbetwixt wood and water, in a fair meadow by a ruin side; to disport in some pleasant plaine, to run up a steep hill, or sit in a shadie seat, must needs be a delectable recreation. Whosoever he is therefore that is away with a pleasing melancholy, and overrunne with solitariness, or carried vaine conceites, I can prescribe him no better remedie than this."

Vol. 1, p. 224, ed. 1624. Lord Byron has infinitely improved the thought, and taken a much wider

range.

208

MR. EDITOR,

TO any one who reads the accounts of trials at the Old Bailey, and at the different Assizes throughout the kingdom, it is matter of painful reflection to consider the multitudes of human beings who are periodically consigned to the hands of the executioner. Such occurrences, I will say, demonstrate not merely the increasing corruption of the age, but what is in my mind worse, the indifference of the government to the lives of its subjects, and the coolness with which these scenes of blood are witnessed by many of the inhabitants of this country. Surely no abstract reasoning can justify a practice or a code of laws which consigns the murderer and the forger to the same gibbet. Our natural feelings, when not stifled or counteracted by custom and the corrupt maxims of the world, must rise in rebellion against such perversion of justice -against such a monstrous violation of every principle of humanity. For my own part I am not ashamed to confess, that I view the sanguinary system which prevails in this country with abhorrence; that I consider it as swelling the catalogue of national delinquency; and as being one of the foulest reproaches upon a nation calling itself Christian, that can be well imagined.-My heart sickens when I reflect upon the tragedies of horror that have been acted within this twelvemonth past. Men, women, boys, or some little more than boys, prematurely sent out of the world, not for murder or treason, or offences of like ⚫ atrocity, but for forgery. I need but refer your readers to the case of Vartie; of two men executed about a week since in London; and particularly to that of Gray, an unhappy youth about twenty years of age, executed last spring at Warwick; who, if the statement of the paper can be relied on, had been enticed by an old offender. A most pathetic letter was written to the Prince by his wife; but the law was inexorable. Many other instances might be mentioned. Enough has appeared to make every one, not entirely callous, start with horror at the legalized murder, for I can give it no milder appellation, which is repeatedly occurring. The nations on the continent regard our criminal code with astonishment, as more worthy of the age of Draco than of the 19th century. I am only surprised that its barbarity has not excited one loud and simultaneous cry throughout the country for its extinction. Happily some individuals

[Oct. 1,

have brought the matter before Parliament, and the names of Romilly and Mackintosh are nobly distinguished by their humane efforts to amend our criminal jurisprudence. Let them persevere in their virtuous exertions, till the feelings of the nation are excited on the subject, and the punishment of death is by a solemn enactment of the legislature at least restricted to the more atrocious offences. Humanity can scarce forbear to picture what useful members of society some of those unhappy victims might have made, had their lives been spared, and had they been transported to some remote region. Surely their youth, their temptations, might have pleaded in their behalf, and caused that mercy to be extended to them, which is not denied to the pick pocket and thief. I need not remind your learned readers that many enlightened men have condemned the practice of inflicting death for comparatively light offences; that they have recommended solitary confinement, hard labour, &c.; and that this alteration has been adopted with the most distinguished success, not only on the continent, as Holland, Switzerland, and, I believe, in Germany, but more recently in the United States of America. Even those uninfluenced by any other than selfish considerations may well doubt the expediency of the present sanguinary system, when they find the victims every day increasing, and the punishment of death appearing to have little influence in checking the progress of crime. Surely it is high time to revise a system so abhorrent to humanity, and, as experience demonstrates, so inefficient. It is time to beware of hardening the minds of the people by the frequent exhibition of public executions, and of leading them to confound offences; to suppose it a matter of indifference, whether a man employs his hand in forging the endorsement of a bill, or in drawing the trigger of a pistol against his neighbour's life. It is time to pay some deference to the feelings of others, and not withhold from the Prince Regent the prerogative of extending mercy when his own benevolence would prompt him to do so. To the advocates for capital punishment I would suggest the consideration, how solemn a thing it is to send a fellow creature for what we deem a great offence, into an eternal world. I would remind them how questionable is the right of society to punish capitally for any offences but those of murder, or what may be supposed to

1818.]'

lead to it, how desirable that punish ment, when inflicted, should be followed if possible by the amelioration of the offender, at least should operate as a caution and intimidation to the next. I am, &c. August 11, 1818.

C. L.

209

to the romance of "The Castle of Otranto," is considered. No person, however, who takes the trouble of reading the Tales of the Queen of Navarre, will have any doubt at all upon the matter; for the Mysterious Mother," is nothing more than a poetical version of that digusting story which in horror

+6

THER."

MR. EDITOR,

THE correspondent who has communicated to you an enigmatical epitaph as the origin of the tragedy of "The Mysterious Mother," (page 109) cannot have paid attention to the noble author's own account of its history, or compared it with some very common relations, which may be found in different books. Lord Orford says that his play is founded upon a fact, which occurred in the reign of King William, and he even goes so far as to vouch Archbishop Tillotson for the truth of it. In the supplemental volume to the Spectator, the same narrative is circumstantially given on the authority of William Perkins, who lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and in whose casuistical works the whole story is minutely detailed. Bishop Hall, in his Cases of Conscience, has an argument upon the subject, which he professes to have taken from Perkins, though he says the same circumstance is to be found in two German authors, who pretend that it happened at Prague. Bishop Jeremy Taylor, in his Ductor Dubitantium, relates this strange and rare case, as an event that took place at Venice, for the verity of which he refers to Comitolus, a learned Italian civilian.

After all I am not of opinion that Lord Orford took the story of his very deep tragedy from any of these books; since the whole fable, if it be one, is more dramatically told by Bandello, in one of his novels, entitled: "Un Gentiluomo Navarrese sposa una che era sue sorella e figluiola, non lo sapenda." The story exactly as related by Bandello may be also found in the "Heptameron, ou Sept Journées," better known by the title of the " Contes de la Reine Navarre," of which there have been several editions, and it is scarcely within possibility that such an inquisitive reader as Horace Walpole should have been unacquainted with these two collections of novels, but particularly the last. That he did not chuse to acknowledge the true source from whence he drew the outline of his plot, is not to be wondered, when his conduct, in regard

NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. 57.

Sept. 8, 1818.

C.W.

NOTICES ILLUSTRATIVE OF CAMBRIAN
HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES.
No. 1.

EDWARD THE FIRST.

THE memory of this monarch is still held in general detestation in Wales. His massacres in that country have indeed left a stain on his name which can never be obliterated.- Sir Davydd Trevor, the Rector of Llanallgo, in 1480, addressing the statue of Edward, over the grand entrance of Carnarvon Castle, thus expressed himself; "Where ! ye now astonish'd cry, "Where does mighty Edward lie? "He that gave these ramparts birth, "When prostrate Cambria lean'd on earth. "Here still his image, rais'd on high, "Attracts the thoughtful, curious eye; "But he, long humbled from a throne, "Lies far beneath a massy stone."

PLANTATIONS.

Since the denudation of the Cambrian cliffs by Edward the 1st, for the purpose of subjugation, the subsequent destruction in the war of Glyndwr, and the necessity there was of lessening even the remainder of the woods, from the shelter which they afforded to the "perturbed spirits" which the accession of Henry VII. and the consequent close of the wars of York and Lancaster, let loose upon the country, little has been done till within the last thirty years for the restoration of her forests. At present, however, a general emulation prevails, and immense numbers of thriving plantations decorate even the mountainous districts.

COLONEL CADOGAN,

It will be remembered, was amongst the heroes who fell gloriously in Spain. There is a singular coincidence in the name.-It is British, and is spelt Cadwgan, compounded of Cad, a battle, and Gwg, fierce, terrible!

FAIRIES.

In Wales, as in other pastoral districts, the Fairy Tales are not yet erased from the traditional tablet; and age neglects not to inform youth, that if, on retiring

* Ple mae Edwart plwm y dych, &c.
VOL. X.
2 E