most important part of a great poem, it is deficient. But the conception of the " Night Thoughts," for a didactic poem, is unutterably grand. An aged and bereaved mourner stands alone with the dead-the grave his scene-the night his canopy-and time, death, eternity-the darkest, the loftiest objects of human hope and human intellect, supply his only themes. Here, at this spot, and at this hour, commencing his strain with a majesty worthy of its aims and end, he calls upon

"Silence and Darkness, solemn sisters, twins

From ancient Night, who nurse the tender thought

To Reason, and on reason build resolve,

That column of true majesty in man!

Assist me: I will thank you in the grave—

The grave, your kingdom

Following the course of the sombre inspiration that he adjures, he then passes in a vast review before him, in the presence of the Stars, and above the slumbers of the dead, the pomps and glories of the world-the veiled and shadowy forms of Hope-the dim hosts of Memory

"The Spirit walks of each departed Hour,

And smiles an angel, or a fury frowns-"

Standing upon the grave-the creations of two worlds are round him, and the grey hairs of the mourner become touched with the halo of the prophet. It is the time and spot he has chosen wherein to teach us, that dignify and consecrate the lesson: it is not the mere human and earthly moral that gathers on his tongue. The conception hallows the work, and sustains its own majesty in every change and wandering of the verse. And there is this greatness in his themedark, terrible, severe-hope never deserts it! It is a deep and gloomy wave, but the stars are glassed upon its bosom. The more sternly he questions the world, the more solemnly he refers its answer to Heaven. Our bane and antidote are both before him; and he only arraigns the things of Time before the tribunal of Eternity. It is this, which to men whom grief or approaching death can divest of the love and hankerings of the world, leaves the great monitor his majesty, but deprives him of his gloom. Convinced with him of the vanities of life, it is not an ungracious or unsoothing melancholy which confirms us in our conviction, and points with a steady. hand to the divine SOMETHING that awaits us beyond;

"The darkness aiding intellectual light,

And sacred silence whispering truths divine,
And truths divine converting pain to peace."

I know not whether I should say too much of this great poem if I should call it a fit Appendix to "Paradise Lost." It is the Consolation to that Complaint. Imagine the ages to have rolled by since our first parents gave earth to their offspring, who sealed the gift with blood, and bequeathed it to us with toil :-imagine, after all that experience can teach-after the hoarded wisdom and the increasing pomp of countless generations-an old man, one of that exiled and fallen race, standing among the tombs of his ancestors, telling us their whole history, in his appeals to the living heart, and holding out to

us, with trembling hands, the only comfort which Earth has yet discovered for its cares and sores-the anticipation of Heaven! To me, that picture completes all that Milton began. It sums up the Human History, whose first great chapter he had chronicled; it preacheth the great issues of the Fall; it shows that the burning light then breathed into the soul, lives there still, and consummates the mysterious record of our mortal sadness and our everlasting hope. But if the conception of the "Night Thoughts" be great, it is also uniform and sustained. The vast wings of the Inspiration never slacken or grow fatigued. Even the humours and conceits are of a piece. with the solemnity of the poem-like the grotesque masks carved on the walls of a Cathedral, which defy the strict laws of taste, and almost inexplicably harmonize with the whole. The sorrow, too, of the poet is not egotistical, or weak in its repining. It is the Great One Sorrow common to all human nature-the deep and wise regret that springs from an intimate knowledge of our being and the scene in which it has been cast. That same knowledge, operating on various minds, produces various results. In Voltaire, it sparkled intowit; in Goethe, it deepened into a humour that belongs to the sublime; in Young, it generated the same high and profound melancholy as that, which produced the inspirations of the Son of Sirach, and the soundest portion of the philosophy of Plato. It is, then, the conception of the poem, and its sustained flight, which entitle it to so high a ránk in our literature. Turn from it to any other didactic poem, and you are struck at once by the contrast-you are amazed at once by its greatness. "The Seasons" shrink into a mere pastoral; "The Essay on Man" becomes French and artificial; even the "Excursion" of Wordsworth has, I know not what, of childish and garrulous, the moment they are forced into a comparison with the solemn and stern majesty of the "Night Thoughts."

There is another merit in the "Night Thoughts;" apart from its one great lesson, it abounds in a thousand minor ones. Forget its conception-open it at random, and its reflections, its thoughts, its worldly wisdom alone may instruct the most worldly. It is strange, indeed, to find united in one page the sublimity of Milton and the point of La Bruyere. I know of no poem, except the Odyssey, which in this excels the one before us. Of isolated beauties, what rich redundance! The similes and the graces of expression with which the poem is sown are full of all the lesser wealth of invention. How beautiful, in mere diction, is that address to the flowers:—

"Queen lilies, and ye painted populace,

Who dwell in fields and lead ambrosial lives."

So, too, how expressive the short simile,

like our shadows,

Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.”

What-but here I must pause abruptly, or I should go on for ever; for the poet is one who strikes the superficial even more on opening a single page at random than in reviewing the whole in order. Only one word, then, upon the Author himself. Ambition he certainly possessed; and, in spite of all things, it continued with him to the last. His love of ambition, perhaps deepened, in his wiser moments, his con

tempt of the world: for we are generally disappointed before we despise. But the purer source of his inspiration seems to have been solemnly and fervently felt throughout life. At college, he was distinguished for his successful zeal in opposing the unbelief of Tindal. In litera ture, some of his earliest offerings were laid upon the altar of God. In the pulpit, where he was usually a powerful and victorious preacher, he is recorded once to have burst into tears on seeing that he could not breathe his own intense emotion into the hearts of a worldly audience. Naturally vain, he renounced the drama, in which he had gained so great a reputation, when he entered the church; and though called covetous, he afterwards gave-when his play of "The Brothers" several years afterwards was acted, not the real proceeds of the play, (for it was not successful,) but what he had imagined might be the proceeds a thousand pounds, to the propagation of the Gospel abroad. A religious vein distinguished his private conversation in health and manhood, no less than his reflections in sorrow, and his thoughts at the approach of death. May we hope with him that the cravings of his heart were the proof of a hereafter

"That grief is but our grandeur in disguise,

And discontent is immortality."

While we admire his genius, let us benefit from its object; while we bow in homage before the spirit that "stole the music from the spheres to soothe their goddess;" while we behold aghast the dread portrait he has drawn of Death, noting from his grim and secret stand the follies of a wild and revelling horde of bacchanals; while we shudder with him when he conjures up the arch-fiend from his lair; while we stand awed and breathless beneath his adjuration to Night, "Nature's great ancestor, Day's elder born, And fated to survive the transient sun;"

let us always come back at last to his serene and holy consolation: "Through many a field of moral and divine

The muse has strayed, and much of sorrow seen
In human ways, and much of false and vain,
Which none who travel this bad road can miss;
O'er friends deceased full heartily she wept,
Of love divine the wonders she displayed;
Proved man immortal; showed the source of joy;
The grand tribunal raised; assigned the bounds
Of human grief. In few, to close the whole,

The moral muse has shadowed out a sketch
Of most our weakness needs believe, or do,
In this our land of travail and of hope,

For peace on earth, or prospect of the skies."'

I have given the substance-and, as far as I could remember, the words of my friend's remarks-the last conversation I ever held with him on his favourite poet-or indeed upon any matters merely critical. And although the reader, attached to more worldly literature, may not agree with L as to the high and settled rank in which the poem thus criticised should be placed-I do not think he will be displeased to have had his attention drawn for a few moments towards one, at least, among the highest, but not most popular, of his

country's poets. At this solemn time, too, of the year-the graver and the holier thoughts of life-can scarcely be considered strangers altogether uninvited and unwelcome. And as for the rest-it is not perhaps amiss to refresh ever and anon our critical susceptibilities to genius-its defects and its beauties, by recurring to those departed writers, who being past the reach of our petty jealousies-may keep us, as it were, in the custom to praise without envy and blame without injustice. And I must confess, moreover-that it appears to me a sort of duty we owe to the illustrious dead-to turn at times from the busier and more urgent pursuits of the world—and to water from a liberal urn the flowers or the laurels which former gratitude planted above their tombs.*

A WORD FOR THE CONSTITUTION.

WHAT is the British Constitution? In what records is it contained? On what parchments is it written? At what period, and at whose creative fiat did the elements of its beauty and perfection rise out of chaos? If it be the work of a day, what is the date of that day? If years and centuries, what years and what centuries? When did its light first begin to struggle with the darkness, and on what day or year had it reached the high noon of its splendonr? Who can put his finger on the page of English history, and say, " At this period our glorious Constitution was formed;" or, "Here its formation commenced, and there it was completed?" To whose wisdom are we indebted for it? By whose sagacity was it constructed? When did it exist in all its perfection and vigour, sending political health through the whole frame of society, satisfying all reasonable men, and defying the nice eye of captious criticism to discern a flaw in it? And before it existed, what was Great Britain? Did it gain no victories, enjoy no peace, boast of no prosperity? If we be called on to thank our ancestors for the blessings which they have transmitted to us, which of our ancestors are we to thank? What generation, or what part of any generation? What is the Constitution, is it changeable or unchangeable? If unchangeable, how long has it existed unchanged; and if changeable, of what changes is it susceptible on this side of destruction or deterioration? Is a Whig or a Tory Ministry essential to it? Is the House of Commons part of the Constitution, and is it essential to the Constitution that Old Sarum should send two Members, and Manchester none? If Old Sarum can be disfranchised, and Manchester enfranchised, without injury to the Constitution, how far can disfranchisement of the depopulated, or enfranchisement of peopled districts proceed, without destroying the Constitution? Have we, then, no Constitution? Yes; we have a glorious Constitution, that is as old as the hills, free as the streams. Our Constitution is the air we breathe, the restless blood that circulates in our veins, the food that we eat, the soil that nourishes us, the waves that beat upon our shores, the beauty of our women, the strength of our men, the skill of our artisans, the science of our philosophers, the adventurousness of our merchants, the busy activity and civil ambition that keeps us in a constant state of effervescence, progressing in the arts and advancing in the comforts of civilized life. Our Constitution is imperishable and indestructible, save by a convulsion of nature, or a change which neither mobs nor monarchs can ever make. The constitution of every country under heaven is nothing more nor less than the national characteristics modified by the times. Constitutions are not made of paper, nor are they to be destroyed by paper. S.

*To be concluded in our next.

TALLEYRAND.

THERE is a propensity often found among eminent persons which, abstractedly from the gratification they derived from the performance of great actions, has given them pleasure in acting the part, as it were, belonging to the situation in which their talents placed them. This passion for acting, if we may so call it, has made many assume divers varieties of character-some hardly correspondent with their genius; some out of keeping with their position. Alexander, and Julius Cæsar, in particular, possessed it in an extraordinary degree; so that the one of those great men, even on board the pirate's vessel, wrote poems and orations, and rehearsed them, as Plutarch tells us. Bolingbroke, an able statesman, and with the elegant accomplishments of a man of letters, acted the melo-dramatic union of the debauchee and the philosopher. We have ventured, in a former Number, to say, that the most distinguished orator of our own time and country possesses this theatrical disposition-this feeling for stage effect; while few, we should think, have seen M. de Chateaubriand at Rome, in the Chamber of Peers, in the Institute-have read his travels, or his "Génie du Christianisme," or have even cast their eye on the Letter to M. Beranger, and the pamphlet on the banishment of Charles the Tenth and his family, (with which it is published,) without perceiving that the passion and disposition of an actor are as strong in the Noble Viscount, as they even could be in Garrick, in Talma, or in Kean.

If we could suppose this passion to be the ruling one of the distinguished person of whom we are about to make mention, few people certainly could ever have enjoyed a life in more accordance with, or better suited to, the developement of, their peculiar taste. Let us look back to the Past-let us suppose that a year has rolled away since the destruction of the Bastille; and on the spot consecrated by the sighs of so many victims, "ICI L'ON DANSE," proclaims, with a characteristic grace and gaiety, the triumph of the Revolution. It is the 14th of July-the celebrated day of the Federation-an immense and magnificent amphitheatre is erected in the Champ de Mars; there the descendant of St. Louis, and the President of the National Assembly-the representatives of Old and Young France, are seated on two equal thrones, resplendent with those arms which the Nation has taken from its ancient kings-and there is the infant hope of that nation and those kings-and there that Queen, "decorating and cheering the sphere she moves in, glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy;" -and on each side of those thrones are ranged the members of that Assembly, which has displayed such talent, such energy, and such perseverance in creating a Constitution, which is, unfortunately, doomed to be too like the spectacle they are assisting at-the mere pageant of a day;—and in yonder balcony is the most graceful and splendid court (for such, even at that time, it was,) that ever existed-and the surrounding galleries are filled with the gayest people in the world, at all times easily enchanted, and at this moment in the presence of every thing that can captivate the eye and exalt the imagination;-in the open space, those confederated bands, collected from every part, and representing every feeling and interest in