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thetic and bold, shall continue to link his shouting from the volcanic summit to name with that of his country. His ge- some huge being unknown, sitting, silent, nius was not only national, but provincial. It clung to Criffel, swam in Solway, and haunted the groves and scaurs of the Nith to the last. Dumfries-shire has reason to be proud of Allan Cunningham, and prouder because, in distance and absence, he never allowed his imagination, or his heart, to travel away from her well-beloved fields.

on the opposite peak-laying his lubber length on the dry, bald, burning rock, and snorting out from his deep chest terrific slumber; listening now and then to some snatch of melody from a distant vale, and controlling for awhile his wild step to its tone, or even dancing to its music; but relapsing as fitfully into his eccentric and incontrollable motion. So particularly in Cunningham's mind was essentially "Sir Marmaduke Maxwell" and "Michael lyrical; but the airy strings of his lyre Scott" does his genius run riot in conscious were set in a strong, rough, oaken frame. and glorying error. His wanderings have Masculine boldness, verging often on ex- about them this peculiarity-they are travagance, was his leading feature as a never those of the speculative intellect, writer. You saw the strong stonecutter moonstruck, and gathering mist as it dein all that he did. He hewed out his viates, but of the mere young fancy, burway through a subject as he was wont to dening itself with a profusion of harmless do through many a block of granite and flowers. He never returns, like some of marble. Yet is his execution hardly so your Germans and Germanised French, exact, and finished, and harmonious as laden with poisons, mandragora and hemyou might have expected from one whose lock, opium and night-shade, nux vomica trade brought him so closely in contact and henbane, which they have culled in with the proportions of things. It is the glooms of nature, and baptised in the often loose, disjointed, uneven; more like blaspheming bitterness of their own spirits. the work of a common mason, thought- His wanderings are those of hopeful and ful only of the position of separate stones, happy youth, not of fever, escaped from than of an architect solicitous of the ef- its keepers, arrowing the awestruck woods, fect and grand outline of the whole. The or ending its agonies in the embrace of Pagans represented their gods each with the "melancholy main." Health, indeed, a musical instrument in his hand, de- genial, robust health, was the moral elenoting thus the exquisite and eternal ment of Cunningham's being. You say, harmony which prevails throughout the as you read him, this is the handwriting universe. So should all great artists be of a happy man. Pleasure he has known; pictured, at once inspiring and controlling but he is not, manifestly, that degraded their conceptions, awakening and sooth- and most unblessed being who has said ing their fires to the measured modula- to pleasure, Thou art my God; and you tions of music. In this high sense Allan never find in his writings that stimulating Cunningham was not an artist at all. and well-nigh putrid flavour which indulHe never felt on his intellect the control gence bequeaths. His abiding feeling, of the "spirit of law," that serene omni- judging from his works, is a happiness presence which surrounds the steps of the compounded of "many simples," of a fine highest genius, wherever it goes, and in- bodily temperament-enthusiasm fresh, vests its own ideal of excellence with the but never fierce-wishes moderate and authority of conscience. His mind wan- subdued-speculative intellect quiescent ders untamed, like a giant of the infant-habits of thought and action well interworld, striding, with large uneven steps, mingled, and both well adjusted—a quiet, through the monstrous wildernesses of deep principle of common sense interthat early time-startling with careless mingling with imagination, and an enstep the coiled-up dragons of the desert acted consciousness of the fact, that the -dipping his fearless foot into the wet strong arm of man is the "sceptre of nest of the scorpion and the centiped-this planet;" and that he has a strong arm.

He was a poet, a novelist, a sketcher, | strongly enough of the brine, and which critics coincide in censuring as having rather the fade flavour of a cask of salt water carted inwards than that of the real ocean,

"Rolling the wild profound eternal bass In Nature's harmonies."

It can hardly be said, with all its occasional splendour and incessant energy, to have become a romance of even average popularity.

and a critic. As a poet he stood high in the second class. He never ventured the conception or execution of any piece of rhymed heroism-any massive structure, rising slowly with elaborate pomp, and far-seen stress, and far-heard panting of divine endeavour; or else rushing up, with startling haste, like an exhalation. His erections are small and scattered, though denoting a muscular power equal to greater things. How fine those ballads in 'Every man carries in him a madman." Cromek's collection, in their rude simpli- So is every author big with some mad procity, their touches of fearless pathos, their ject or other, which sooner or later blosoriginality, but slenderly disguised under soms into a deranged, or demi-deranged, the pretext of imitation-their quaint volume. Sometimes it is its author's turns of expression, and their frequent first, and then it either hurries him, beescapes into real daring and grandeur of fore a storm of laughter, into oblivion, conception and language! They remind or it gains him only so much ridicule us, at a great interval, of the ballads of as to rouse him, if he be a brave man, Schiller. They possess the abruptness, by the rebound of indignation, into after the direct dealing, the strong simplicity, excellence and immortal fame. Somethe enthusiasm, of those extraordinary times it is his last, and shelters under the compositions; but have none of their charitable presumption of dotage. Somedepth of thought, their width of philoso- times it is mistaken for a quiz; and somephic view, or the power and pressure, as times it is pardoned for the method, if on the very sense, of their individual meaning, and otherwise inexpressible descriptions. Cunningham brings us no confidence which, as in "Sartor Resartus," tidings from the "innermost main," where its fantastic structure faintly conceals. Schiller, a diver lean and strong," di- Under none of those pleas can Michael sports himself among the mighty shapes Scott" be defended. It is neither a sin and mightier shadows: the salamanders, of youth nor a drivel of age-neither snakes, dragons; hammerfish" darkening a quiz nor a splendid quaintness. It the dark of the sea;" and "terrible sharks, the hyenas of ocean;" giving to the depths of the sea a life more dreadful than utter death a motion more appalling than the uniformity of eternal silence. Yet Allan was a genuine lover of old ocean. Love to her, rather than that other feeling shadowed in Wordsworth's line, "of the old sea some reverential fear," in all her changing moods and Protean forms, was one of the ruling passions of his nature; and of him it might have been said, that

"His march was o'er the mountain wave, His home was on the deep."

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was written in sober earnest, and as a trial of strength; and yet, with all its wasted power and spilt splendour, can be likened to nothing in earth, sea, or air, but the caldron of a Canidia or a Hecate, with thick sparkles interpiercing a thick smoke, through which you see, or seem to see, amid a tremendous "bubble and squeak," a hell-broth in the act of cookery, which a Cerberus might with sputtering noise reject; and which you are thankful that no power in air, earth, or sea, can compel you to swallow.

How different the "Maid of Elvar," with its soft shine of imagery, its lapse Hence those foam-drops of song, such of Spenserian rhyme, its picturings of as "a wet sheet and a flowing sea," towered, and treed, and cottage-belted which are in everybody's mouth, and his scenery, its murmuring tone, as of a more elaborate romance of "Paul Jones," "noontide bee," and all the separate which nautical men blame as not smelling beauties which nestle so thickly among

its embowering branches! How different, ing the opinions of others, and in that too, that series of traditions, tales, and fine forge of imagery which stands persketches, which he wrote in the "London manently in his own mind. His book Magazine," and by which he turned up, on Painters is a gallery in itself. The with a share at once bold and tender, a English artists were precisely the theme tilth as yet rich and untried. Truly it for him. We question if he could have was a palmy periodical during its brief coped so worthily with the great Italians, reign, that same "London Magazine," in their knotty muscle, daring liberties, whence the elegant genius and lively ethereal combinations, or in that palpable style of John Scott had departed, early determination they evince to find their quenched, alas! and quenched in blood; sole religion in their art-a determinawhere Hazlitt's penetrating pen was tion so plain, that we could conceive them scratching as in scorn his rude immorta-breaking up the true cross for pencils, as lities; where De Quincey was transcrib- we know they crucified slaves for subjects. ing, with tremulous hand, the most su- Leaving them to the tingling brush of blime and terrific dreams which opium and Fuseli, Cunningham shows us in a fine genius had ever bred between them; where mellow light, Gainsborough seated silent Reynolds was edging in among graver on his stile; Morland among his pigs; matters his clever Cockneyisms; where Barry propounding his canons of austere Lamb was lisping his wise and witty criticism, and cooking the while his steak; small-talk; and where the idiomatic mind West arranging the tail of the of Allan Cunningham was adding a flavour of Scottish romance, as of mountain honey, to the fine medley.

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'Giant steed to be bestrode by Death, As told in the Apocalypse,"

As a critic, his character may be esti- with as much coolness as he would his mated from his pen-and-ink sketches in own cravat; Wilson with his hand tremthe "New Monthly," his Life of Burns, bling at his palette, half with enthusiasm, his critique on Thomson, and his "Lives half with brandy; dear enthusiastic Blake of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects painting Satan from the life — asking, of Great Britain." His leading quality "Jane Boucher, do you love me, lass? was constant healthiness of taste. He and there at once a beginning and an end had no profound insight into principles, of the courtship; or seeing the great vibut neither was he ever misled into one-sion pictured in the lines

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant depths or skies
Burnt the fervour of thine eyes?

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Did he that made the lamb make thee?"

sided judgments; he was not endowed with profound discrimination, nor do you ever find in him volcanic bursts of enthusiasm, the violence of which is proportioned to the depth of dreary depression from which they spring, and which remind you of the snatches which a miserable man takes of all the pleasures within his reach, eager, short, hurrying. His Opie lying all night awake with rapture, criticisms are sweet-toned, sensible, ge- after his successful debut as a lecturer, nerous; and as the building proceeds, the or retorting the frown Peter Pindar somechisel ever and anon tunes itself to sud-times cast at him from his enormous den impulse, moves quick as to some un-brows; Reynolds shifting his trumpet, or seen power, and you feel that the builder gazing with blandest look on his beauis a poet. He excels rather in critical teous "child-cherubs;" Flaxman cherishtalk than criticism. He seldom hazards ing his lofty ideals; Fuseli rising on tipa new opinion; never a paradox. He is toe, the bursting little man, towards the content to catch the cream of common creations of the giant Italians, or bristopinion into his own silver cup. His ling up against the Academy in such sort originality lies in the power of modify- as to teach them that an inspired prophet

a dome or a sonnet.

of Lilliput was worth a whole Brobdignag| very worst materials, he deduces the richof blockheads. Thus are Allan's figures not est laughter, or a sense of moral subliset still and stiff at their palettes, but live, mity which is more precious than pure move, breathe, battle, love, burn, and die. gold. And, not to speak of many others, We are thankful to Cunningham for we can challenge the world from the bethis book, not only because it is a monu- ginning to show a genius more unique, ment of his own powers, but because it more insulated in his craggy solitudedoes justice to the claims of British art; like a volcanic cliff shot up as by unseen -an art which, considering the disadvan- and unbounded catapult from the depth tages of climate and sky, and national of the sea-less prefigured by any precoldness of feeling, and taste, and bigoted ceding mind-less likely to be eclipsed religious prejudices, with which it has had by any other-more signally demonstrato contend, when compared with the Ita- tive in his single self of the truth, that lian school, is perhaps the greater wonder the human mind is sometimes a native of the two. We admit that we have had voice speaking immediately from the deep no prodigies like Michael Angelo and to the day-than the painter, the poet, Leonardo da Vinci-those kings of the the creator of the Deluge and Belshazzar's Beautiful, who ruled with sway so abso- Feast. lute over all its regions, and shot their We thank him, in fine, for this book, besouls with equal ease and energy into cause, like ourselves, he loves the painter. a tower and a tune, a picture or a statue, We know nothing of the technicalities of These were mon- the k serene and silent art:" we leave sters rather than men. We grant, too, these to the "artist and his ape; let that there has been but one Raphael-such describe the indescribable." But we who was a man and no monster-and dearly love our own ideal of the painter who of all men knew best the art of lift--as a graceful alias of the poet-as a ing man and woman quite out of earth genuine and bending worshipper of the "within the veil," and of showering on forms by which the Great Artist has retheir face, and form, and bosom, and deemed his creation from chaos, and of dress, beauty which is not of this cold the colours by which he has enchanted it clime lustre unborrowed of that dim into heaven-as himself, one of the finest king of earthly day-meanings travelling figures in the landscapes of earth, sitting out from eyes which seem set in eternity motionless under the rainbow; or dumb -motions of supernal grace and dignity as the pencil of the lightning is dashing -and who seemed made to supply the its fiery lines upon the black scroll of the Christian's most craving desire after a thunder-cloud; or copying in severe sympictured image of that face which was pathy from the cataract: or seated "knitmore marred than that of man-that ting" the mountain to the sky, on a crag form bent under the burden of a world's above the eagle's eyrie; or leaning over atonement in a bend more glorious than the rural bridge, over which, perchance, the bend of the rainbow-those arms in his reverie, he bedrops his pencil into which were instinct and vibrating with the still water; or mixing unnoticed in everlasting love those long curling locks the triumphal show, which, after living which seemed to twine lovingly round the its little hour on the troubled street-page, thorns which pierced his pale majestic shall live on his canvas for evermore; or brow. No Raphael have we: the world gazing like a spirit into the eye of genius has but one. Let Italy boast in him the or on the brow and blush of beauty; or Milton of painting, we have the Shak- in his still studio, sitting alone, chewing spere. Hogarth is ours-in his comic the cud of those sweet and bitter fancies lights and tragic shadows-in his humour, he is afterwards to embody in form; or force, variety, truth, absolute originality, looking, through hopeless yet happy tears, quaint but strong moral, and in that at the works of elder masters; or spreadmagic, all his own, by which, from the ing before him the large canvas which he

VOL. I.-Y

must cause to glow into a princely paint-given to an immortal work, and with no ing, or perish in the attempt; or even wish for any epitaph but this, "I also drooping over an abortive design; or dash- was a painter." "Somewhat too much ing his brush across it in the heat of his of this;" therefore, dear Allan Cunningspirit; or maddening in love to the fair ham, farewell! creation of his hands; or haunted by some terrible figure of his own drawing; or filling his asylum-cell with the chimeras of his soul; or dying with the last touch

"Perhaps in some far future land

We yet may meet-we yet may dwell; If not, from off this mortal strand, Immortal, fare-thee-well!"

JOHN KEATS.

A GREAT deal of nonsense has been writ- was far too fierce and restless a spirit to ten about the morale of men of genius. be indolent. Erasmus made a book while A nervous temperament has been ascribed on a journey. Shakspere wrote thirty to them, to which, as causes of unhappi- plays ere he was fifty. Milton felt himness, are added indolence, vanity, irrita- self ever in his "great Taskmaster's eye;" bility, insulation, and poverty. Disraeli, need we add that he laboured? Dryden in his "Calamities of Authors," has taken is one of the most voluminous of writers. up the doleful Jeremiad, and made a book Pope wrote much, and polished more. of it. He could have made just as large Daniel Defoe was one of the most aca book about the calamities of carters. tive men of his age. Goldsmith had too Our own experience of men of genius-and much writhing vanity to remain at rewe have known not a few-is, that they pose. Johnson and Thomson were, inare very much like their neighbours, indeed, indolent; but, in the former, it the qualities and circumstances referred sprang from disease, and it prevented to. Let us try the point by a brief in- neither from doing great things. Cowduction of facts, ere proceeding to the per was indolent only when the fit of deunfortunate child of genius whose name rangement was upon him. Alfieri might heads the sketch. And, first, as to indo-be called the galloping genius; and clearlence. Homer seems to have been as ac-ing thousands of miles, and writing trative as most ballad-singers; and, verily, gedies by the dozen, are no despicable their trade is no sinecure. Eschylus was affairs. Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and a tragedian, a leader of armies, and a Weber, were never done with their gracewriter of ninety plays. Demosthenes ful labours. Byron had all the activity talked perpetually; and to talk at his of a scalded fiend. Wordsworth has pitch for a lifetime was something. Pin- been called indolent. He has, however, dar added the activity of an Olympic written "The Recluse;" and it is long jockey to the fury of a Pythoness. Virgil since Jeffrey sought for a "powerful calpolished away all his life, and the labour culus" to compute its colossal magnitude. of the file is no trifle. On what subject Southey was the most regularly indushas Cicero not written? and an encyclo-trious man of the day. Coleridge was of an pædiast is not thought the most indolent indolent constitution; and yet, besides of animals. Horace, we admit, was indo- talking incessantly, he wrote a great deal. lent; not so Lucretius, who, besides other Shelley gave himself no rest till his eyes things, was at the pains of building up were shut and his heart hushed in death. an entire system of the universe, in a He had drank poison, and he slept no long and lofty poem. Michael Angelo, more. The names of Scott, Goethe, GodRaphael, and all the great painters of win, Schiller, Richter, Chalmers, &c. &c., Italy, worked without ceasing. Dante need only be mentioned. We might just

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