try, be more generally cultivated, it will be strange, indeed, if we do not form more intelligent estimates of other nations, and more modest estimates of our own; if, emancipating ourselves from the servitude of local and arbitrary opinions, we do not acquire a profounder sympathy with universal man, and a truer reverence for those commanding truths which are the common property of our race.'

The mischievous influence of such politics as are commonly talked by our country gentlemen and barroom babblers, is deeply to be deplored. Instead of being a patient and sober inquiry after truth, with a single-hearted wish to judge justly what is right and what wrong; what is for the country's good, and what tends to its hurt;-'talking politics' is commonly nothing more than a senseless wrangle, between partisans whose only thought is to confound each other, even though it be by noise and sophistry: a mere trial of lungs and flippancy, without a care for truth or patriotAnd political aspirants!-how utter, often, is their profligacy! how reckless their abandonment of principle! how servile their obedience to party!—Does not Mr. Goddard offer a remedy-at least a mitigantwell worth trying, for this terrible endemic?

ism.

with the contentions of the day, men are proscribed, because they may be content to doubt where others choose to dogmatize; or, because they may dare to differ when the multitude have determined that all shall agree. If this species of tyranny be not sternly resisted, it will banish from the walks of public and of private life all independence of thought and action; all calm discussion of controverted questions; all intrepid defence of unpopular truths.

In the subjoined paragraph, Mr. Goddard well probes, and prescribes for, another disease rife in this Union:

If the influence of politics, direct and indirect, be thus injurious, it surely demands counteraction. I am not so visionary as to believe that the wider diffusion of a taste for liberal studies would prove more than a partial corrective of evils, which, deeply rooted in the very nature of our government, may, to a certain extent, be deemed inevitable. I cannot doubt, however, that it would banish from political controversy much of its would render politics a less absorbing game; that it acrimony, and lead to more intelligent views of the true interests of the people. The spirit of literature is essentially conservative. It forms a graceful alliance with whatever is elevated in thought or in action; it abhors violence; it is not rampant for change. It protects the sacred inheritance of individual freedom; the free thought of the free soul.' It is congenial to the more retired graces of character; to elegance, to dignity, to repose. Surely, in times like these, when a mighty controversy is maintained with the varied forms of evil; when factious violence every where prevails; when 'The value of liberal studies, in counteracting the radicalism threatens to tear up the base of all social influence of politics upon the individual and social cha- order, we need to calm our troubled spirits, and to reracter of our countrymen, deserves next to be consider-cruit our overtasked energies, amid "the still air of ed. You surely do not require to be told that politics delightful studies."' is with us becoming a distinct, though not very reputable trade; that the strife for power is hardly less eager than the strife for gain; that a new code of political ethics has been established, for the accommodation of pliant consciences; and that, almost without an exception, the public men of both parties, and of all parties, tired of waiting for popularity to run after them, are now eager to run after popularity. Who now so intrepid as to dare to take his stand, upon grave and well defined principles? In these days of meek condescension to the will of the people, and of affected reverence for their good sense, how few care to lead public opinion aright! how many pusillanimously follow it, when they know it to be wrong! How few, alas! will forego the vulgar trappings of office for the sustaining consciousness, that by no sacrifice of principle or of dignity, did they ever seek to win them! I would fain believe that the days of the republic are not numbered; but I am not without sad forebodings of her fate, when aspirants for popular favor are such utter strangers to the grace of an erect and manly spirit as to be solicitous rather to appropriate to themselves, at any cost, some transient distinction, than to await, with unfaltering rectitude and unforfeited self-respect, the judgments of coming times; when the man of wealth, and talent, and social consideration, | outstrips the radical, in zeal for pestilent doctrines and mischievous projects; in fine, when it is incorporated into the creed of the politician, that the people are always in the right; in other words, that public opinion is not only the standard of taste, but the keeper of conscience!

"To most active spirits, the contentions of party are far from being repulsive; and elevated station seldom fails to captivate the ambitious. Thus multitudes, forsaking the round of common occupation, are seen to dash amid the tumults of the people. Thus, too, many of our most gifted men, relinquishing the pursuits of literature, or the sure rewards and the permanent fame of professional eminence, peril their independence, perchance their honor, in a doubtful controversy for some fascinating political distinction.

'Nor is this all. The agitations of politics communicate to the public mind impulses so despotic that it becomes, on all questions, intolerant of dissent. Hence it often happens, that, in matters entirely unconnected

'In such studies may also be found an antagonist to the spirit of ultraism. This spirit, at the present day, seems to pervade all lands, where thought and feeling are free. Our own country has not escaped the epidemic phrenzy. We have ultras in fashion, who deem every one a barbarian who will not adopt their conventional standard of propriety and their elaborate style of enjoyment; who will not sacrifice health, and happiness and virtue upon the shrine of their senseless idolatries. We have ultras in politics, who either propagate wild notions, or infer, from sound principles, dangerous conclusions; who revel amid agitations, and who owe all their consequence to their skill in working mischief. We have ultras in philanthropy, who, in the impetuosity of their zeal, sacrifice to an abstraction the substantial welfare of their fellow men; who make rash applications of admitted truth, and who seem to forget that, in carrying out one principle, however sacred, we must never trample upon other priniples which are no less obligatory upon the conscience. And, last of all, we have ultras in religion, who, forgetting the weightier matters of the law, lose themselves in the labyrinths of systematic divinity; and who, impatient of a chastised, evangelical fervor, resort to equivocal expedients to generate an effervescent zeal. The spirit of ultraism I cannot pause fully to characterize. It dwarfs the intellect, and it exasperates the passions. It is ferocious in denunciation; it is enamored of vexed questions; it is recruited by gladiatorial strife. I do not claim for liberal studies the power to operate, directly, as a corrective of this diseased state of the public mind. Some efficacy, however, may be anticipated from their reflex operation. By stimulating the intellect to an exercise of its various powers upon themes of commanding dignity and attractive elegance, they would allay the violence of the passions, and rebuke that unphilosophical spirit which limits itself to a partial reception of speculative truths, and to a partial view of men and manners. They would, moreover, establish among the intellectual faculties that harmony of adjustment and operation,

which is essential to their just procedure, both in mat- | much which it is not the business of masters in mediters of speculation and of conduct. They would, in cal science to teach? And, think you, should we hear fine, impart to all classes of people, not those feverish such repeated complaints of the drowsiness and the impulses which impair intellectual vigor and foster an aridity of the pulpit, if preachers, less ambitious of eccentric zeal; but those healthful interests which are soaring to the Alpine heights of theology, spoke more congenial to moderation, to simplicity and to truth.' frequently the language of cultivated tastes, sympathies and affections; if, full of the momentous verities of the gospel, they were capable of imitating, however inadequately, the varied song of David, the majestic eloquence of Paul, the seraphic fervor of Isaiah?"`

After some reflections on utilitarianism-reflections which we dissent from because we like utilitarianism; and which therefore we shall not copy-Mr. G. has the following just and beautiful passage:

And let merchants of all sorts, mechanics, and farm

'How pervading is the sense of the beautiful, anders, pay heedful attention to the following:

how full of beautiful forms is this earth on which we are

appointed to dwell! Who can look upon nature in her serene aspects and wonderful transformations, and not own it a glorious privilege to comprehend other than philosophical relations, and to enjoy something beside the demonstrations of exact science? At this season of pathetic loveliness, who can look upon the memorials of the dying year, without confessing the power of imagery to wake to an eloquent response the chords of human feeling?

'This peculiar tendency of American society, which I have cursorily considered, would be exempt from the danger of excess, if liberal studies were permitted to exert their full power of counteraction. Without rendering us impatient of dull realities, they sometimes lift us above them; they quicken within us the sensibilities of taste; they transport us into the region of hopes and fears; of the profound and the indefinite; they invite us to the contemplation of whatsoever is lovely in the sympathies of our common nature; splendid in the conquests of intellect, or heroic in the trials of virtue.'

Lawyers, physicians, clergymen,-ought to read and ponder well this paragraph:

'Professional men, sometimes ready to sink under the pressure of unvaried mental effort, find that occasional excursions into the field of elegant literature impart renewed vigor to their exhausted powers. They do not so much require complete exemption from toil, as counter excitement; and to men of refined tastes, this species of excitement is abundantly supplied by those treasures of wisdom and of wit, and those captivating forms of expression, which lie without the boundaries of exclusively professional study. Again, from the peculiar nature of their pursuits, and from the almost incessant attention which they demand, such men are liable to become somewhat narrow and perverse in their judgments. They cultivate few of the graceful sensibilities of their nature; they estrange themselves from the regions of taste; they regale their imaginations with no images of beauty. There is perhaps nothing," says one of the most original thinkers of the age, "which more enlarges or enriches the mind, than to lay it genially open to impressions of pleasure from the exercise of every species of talent." In this disposition, with rare exceptions, professional men are wanting; and it is this disposition which liberal studies are specially fitted to create. What a reproach attaches to the lawyer who feels admiration for no science but his own? What physician is thoroughly prepared for the practice of his profession, who has not learned

'Autumn.-[Ed. Mess.

The precepts and the exemple of the celebrated James Otis deserve to be commended to the attention of every young man who aspires to distinction at the Bar. We are told, by his biographer, that, after leaving College, he devoted eighteen months to the pursuit of various branches of Literature, previously to entering on the study of Jurisprudence. In a letter to his father, he says, "I shall always lament that I did not take a year or two further for more general inquiries in the Arts and Sciences, before I sat down to the laborious study of the laws of my coun. try." He inculcated on his pupils as a maxim, "that a lawyer ought never to be without a volume of natural or public law, or

moral philosophy, on his table, or in his pocket."

'But it is to those who are familiarly styled men of business, that liberal studies should be more particularly commended. Parents often withhold, from such of their sons as are intended for active life, an accomplished education, because they believe that success in active life is rather hindered than promoted by the liberal cultivation of the intellect. In accordance with this belief, it is often said that merchants, manufacturers, and mechanics acquire no additional skill for the conduct of their business, by an acquaintance with general literature. And what if they do not? Were they born to be merchants, and manufacturers, and mechanics, and nothing more? Are they not endowed, like other men, with the higher faculties of their being, and should not these faculties be exercised upon their proper objects? They are not, it is true, candidates for literary distinction; but in whatever sphere they may chance to move they are human beings, and why should they not be rational well informed, refined human beings? If their ordinary occupations be somewhat alien from the pursuits of literature, this, of itself, is a cogent reason why a taste for such pursuits should be the more carefully fostered. To the imperfect education of this large and valuable class in every community, may be ascribed the otherwise inexplicable mistakes of men who stand strong in the consciousness of rare practical sagacity. What disastrous errors would such men avoid, if they gave more repose to their passions; and if, by employing their minds upon a larger variety of objects, they sharpened their accuracy, and enlarged their comprehension!'

The concluding paragraph is pregnant with truth and power:

'Well might I be deemed an unfaithful advocate of liberal studies, if, in estimating their value, I yielded no tribute of applause to the solid provision which they make for independent individual happiness; for that happiness which is enjoyed, not so much amid the hum and shock of men, as amid the solitude of nature and of thought. Living in a land where "men act in multitudes, think in multitudes, and are free in multitudes," we are constantly tempted to forget the mysterious individuality of our being; to go out of ourselves for materials of enjoyment; to fritter away our sensibilities, and to debilitate our understandings, amid the false and hollow gaieties of the crowd. I contend for no severe estrangement from the joys of a chaste and elegant conviviality; for no exclusive intercourse with forms of inanimate beauty; for no fearful communion with the mysteries of the inner spirit. But I deprecate habits and tastes which are impatient of seclusion; which destroy all true and simple relish for nature; which scorn all quiet pleasures; which abhor alike the composure and the scrutiny of meditation. As means of reforming tastes and habits thus uncongenial to virtue and to happiness, I can hardly exaggerate the importance of liberal studies. I ascribe to them, however, no power to teach rooted sorrow the lesson of submission; to succor virtue amid mighty temptations; These are the victories of christian faith; the grand, to dispel the awful sadness of the inevitable hour. and peculiar, and imperishable evidences of its power.

The victim of a mother's wanton boast,
Beheld the rugged crags that reared their wild
And threatening heads above the stormy coast;
And as she gazed upon the sea before,

In mockery through her bosom stole a host
Of pleasant memories, while with angry roar
The death-denouncing waves broke on the rocky shore.

The ample treasure of her raven locks

In darksome beauty streaming on the wind, Upon a pedestal of blackened rocks

Like Parian statue stood the maid, confined

By chains which marred the tender wrists they bound:
The thoughts of home came thronging on her mind,...
Her bosom heaved, her eyes in tears were drowned,
And grief burst from her lips in sorrow's plaintive sound.

She thought of early childhood's summer hours,
Of sportive glee beneath the myrtle shade,
Of garlands wreathed for youthful friends in bowers

Selection from Blackwood's Magazine for 1819.

ON THE POETRY OF

SCOTT, BYRON, AND WORDSWORTH.

The three great master-spirits of our day, in the poetical world, are Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron. But there never were minds more unlike to each other than theirs are, either in original conformation or in the course of life. It is great and enduring glory to this age, to have produced three poets,-of perfectly origi nal genius,-unallied to each other, drinking inspira tion from fountains far apart,-who have built up superb structures of the imagination, of distinct orders of architecture,--and who may indeed be said to rule, each by a legitimate sovereignty, over separate and powerful provinces in the kingdom of Mind.

Though greatly inferior in many things to his illastrious brethren, Scott is perhaps, after all, the most unequivocally original. We do not know of any model after which the form of his principal poems has been moulded. They bear no resemblance, and, we must allow, are far inferior to the heroic poems of Greece;

Of myrrhine sweets, through which her feet had strayed... nor do they, though he has been called the Ariosto of

Thought of her father's halls---the dance---the lay

Of minstrel, and the mellow lute of maid.....
Then of her doom; and saw with dread dismay
The monster of the deep roll on, prepared to slay.

One piercing shriek of anguish wildly rose
Above the moaning ocean---fear represt
The hapless cry of agony, and froze

The fount of life within her virgin breast;
While from each starting orb, the tear-drops, o'er
Her snowy bosom showering pearls, confessed
Her lorn despair, as rushing towards the shore
The ravenous monster seemed her beauty to explore.

She trembled like an aspen; and the blood

Was curdling in her veins, as mute she gazed
Upon his bulk, now stretched upon the flood,
Now rolled in spires, as o'er the waves he raised
His towering crest, high gleaming in the air;

And marked his eyes, which like two meteors blazed
Upon his burnished front, with their red glare
Portending darksome death, destruction and despair.

Still onward rolled the portent, till his breath
Came warm upon her, and his nostrils shed
The dewy brine; and armed with pointed death
Appeared the jagged teeth within his dread
And terrible jaws, expanded to devour;

When from the upper air flashed on her head

A sudden light, and, in that fearful hour,

An unseen arm was raised that broke the monster's power.

E'en as his giant body smote the sand,

Swift rushing from the foam-engirdled tide, With nostrils spread but breathless on the sand He lay immense, ---with jaws expanded wide... And sinews bent--but rigid as the pile

Of endless crags, that, reared on either side With everlasting adamant did tile

The rocky ramparts of the sea-defying isle.

the North, seem to us to resemble, in any way what ever, any of the great poems of modern Italy. He has given a most intensely real representation of the living spirit of the chivalrous age of his country. He has not shrouded the figures or the characters of his heroes in high poetical lustre, so as to dazzle us by resplendent fictitious beings, shining through the scenes and events of a half-imaginary world. They are as much real men in his poetry, as the "mighty earls" of old are in our histories and annals. The incidents, too, and events, are all wonderfully like those of real life; and when we add to this, that all the most interesting and impressive superstitions and fancies of the times are in his poetry incorporated and intertwined with the ordinary tissue of mere human existence, we feel ourselves hurried from this our civilized age, back into the troubled bosom of semibarbarous life, and made keen partakers in all its impassioned and poetical credulities. His poems are historical narrations, true in all things to the spirit of history, but everywhere overspread with those bright and breathing colors which only genius can bestow on reality; and when it is recollected, that the times in which his scenes are laid and his heroes act were distinguished by many of the most energetic virtues that can grace or dignify the character of a free people, and marked by the operation of great passions and important events, every one must feel that the poetry of Walter Scott is, in the noblest sense of the word, national; that it breathes upon us the bold and heroic spirit of perturbed but magnificent ages, and connects us, in the midst of philosophy, science, and refinement, with our turbulent but high-minded ancestors, of whom we have no cause to be ashamed, whether looked on in the fields of war or in the halls of peace. He is a true knight in all things,-free, courteous, and brave. War, as he describes it, is a noble game, a kingly pastime. He is the greatest of all war-poets. His poetry might make a very coward

LORD BYRON'S FAULTS.

fearless. In Marmion, the battle of Flodden agitates experience, gives to all his poetry, a very peculiar, a us with all the terror of a fatal overthrow. In the Lord very endearing, and, at the same time, a very lofty of the Isles, we read of the field of Bannockburn with character. His poetry is little colored by the artificial clenched hands and fiery spirits, as if the English were distinctions of society. In his delineations of passion still our enemies, and we were victorious over their or character, he is not so much guided by the varieties invading king. There is not much of all this in any produced by customs, institutions, professions, or modes modern poetry but his own; and therefore it is, that, of life, as by those great elementary laws of our nature independently of all his other manifold excellences, which are unchangeable and the same; and therefore we glory in him as the great modern National Poet of the pathos and the truth of his most felicitous poetry Scotland, in whom old times revive,-whose poetry are more profound than of any other, not unlike the prevents history from becoming that which, in times of most touching and beautiful passages in the sacred excessive refinement, it is often too apt to become a page. The same spirit of love, and benignity, and dead letter,-and keeps the animating and heroic spec- etherial purity, which breathes over all his pictures of tacles of the past moving brightly across our every-day the virtues and the happiness of man, pervades those world, and flashing out from them a kindling power too of external nature. Indeed, all the poets of the over the actions and characters of our own age. age, and none can dispute that they must likewise be Byron is in all respects the very opposite of Scott. the best critics,-have given up to him the palm in that He never dreams of wholly giving up his mind to the poetry which commerces with the forms, and hues, and influence of the actions of men, or the events of his- odors, and sounds, of the material world. He has tory. He lets the world roll on, and eyes its wide-brightened the earth we inhabit to our eyes; he has weltering and tumultuous waves-even the calamitous made it more musical to our ears; he has rendered it shipwrecks that strew its darkness-with a stern and more creative to our imaginations. sometimes even a pitiless misanthrophy. He cannot sympathise with the ordinary joys or sorrows of humanity, even though intense and overpowering. They must live and work in intellect and by intellect, before they seem worthy of the sympathy of his impenetrable soul. His idea of man, in the abstract, is boundless and magnificent; but of men, as individuals, he thinks with derision and contempt. Hence he is in one stanza a sublime moralist, elevated and transported by the dignity of human nature; in the next a paltry satirist, sneering at its meanness. Hence he is unwilling to yield love or reverence to any thing that has yet life; for life seems to sink the little that is noble into the degradation of the much that is vile. The dead, and the dead only, are the objects of his reverence or his love; for death separates the dead from all connexion, all intimacy with the living; and the memories of the great or good alone live in the past, which is a world of ashes. Byron looks back to the tombs of those great "that stand in assured rest;" and gazing, as it were, on the bones of a more gigantic race, his imagination then teems with corresponding births, and he holds converse with the mighty in language worthy to be heard by the spirits of the mighty. It is in this contrast between his august conceptions of man, and his contemptuous opinion of men, that much of the almost incomprehensible charm, and power, and enchantment of his poetry exists. We feel ourselves alternately sunk and elevated, as if the hand of an invisible being had command over us. At one time we are a little lower than the angels; in another, but little higher We feel that our elevation and our disgrace are alike the lot of our nature; and hence the poetry of Byron, as we before remarked, is read as a dark, but still a divine revelation.

men

than the worms.

[The merits of Lord Byron have been sufficiently trumpeted. No penner of choice verses in a lady's album, but has the oft-quoted beauties of Childe Harold, The Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos, at his fingers' ends. No literary dandy, who draws his morality and his prettinesses of speech from Bulwer, but lisps with equal fondness and familiarity though less knowledge, the euphonious name of 'Byron.' It is now time to hear the other side. That our readers may in part do so, we cull from our old Blackwood the following severe letter addressed to his Lordship, by a stern moralist, whose castigation is the more just and effectual, as he evidently holds the powers of the noble poet in the highest esteem.-Ed. Mess.]

TO THE AUTHOR OF BEPPO.

My Lord,-It has for many years been almost impossible that any thing should increase my contempt for the professional critics of this country; otherwise the manner in which these persons have conducted themselves towards your Lordship, would, most certainly, have produced that effect. The hyperboles of their sneaking adulation, in spite of the far-off disdain with which you seem to regard them, have probably reached, long ago, the vanity of the poet, and touched, with If Byron be altogether unlike Scott, Wordsworth is a chilling poison, some of the better feelings of the yet more unlike Byron. With all the great and essen- man. I have formed, however, a very mistaken opitial faculties of the poet, he possesses the calm and nion of your character, if, conscious as you still are of self-commanding powers of the philosopher. He looks the full vigor of youthful genius, you can allow yourover human life with a steady and serene eye; he lis-self to be permanently satisfied, either with the subjects tens with a fine ear "to the still sad music of humani- or the sources of the commendation which has been ty." His faith is unshaken in the prevalence of virtue poured upon you. If you feel not within yourself a over vice, and of happiness over misery; and in the strong and tormenting conviction, that as yet you have existence of a heavenly law operating on earth, and, done little more than exhibit to the world, the melanin spite of transitory defeats, always visibly triumphant choly spectacle of a great spirit, self-embittered, selfin the grand field of human warfare. Hence he looks wasted, and self-degraded,-if, in your solitary moover the world of life, and man, with a sublime benig-ments, there shoot not sometimes across your giddy nity; and hence, delighting in all the gracious dispen-brain, the lightnings of a self-abhorrent and unhyposations of God, his great mind can wholly deliver itself critical remorse, the progress of the mental paralysis up to the love of a flower budding in the field, or of a child asleep in its cradle; nor, in doing so, feels that poetry can be said to stoop or to descend, much less to be degraded, when she imbodies, in words of music, the purest and most delightful fancies and affections of the human heart. This love of the nature to which he belongs, and which is in him the fruit of wisdom and

has been more deadly than I had been willing to believe ;--but even then, a friend of charity and of virtue may expect a ready pardon for having hoped too much, and for having spoken to you in vain.

To few men, either in ancient or in modern times, has been afforded an opening destiny more fortunate than yours. Sprung from a long line of generous ca