CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKSPEARE'S GENIUS. MORE full of wisdom and ridicule and sagacity than all the moralists and satirists in existence, he is more wild, airy, and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world; and has all the elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason, nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Everything in him is in unmeasured abundance and unequalled perfection; but everything so balanced and kept in subordination as not to jostle or disturb, or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple, and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly, than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellencies, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets, but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share in their places the equal care of their Creator.Jeffrey.

Shakspeare was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it,--you feel it Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation : he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.-Dryden.

too.

OPINIONS ON THOMAS CARLYLE.

CARLYLE is like pickles; only a little of him can be tasted, with any relish, at a time.-Dr. Mackay.

The ingenious Tom Carlyle.—Jas. Hogg.

Mr. Carlyle formerly wrote for the Edinburgh Review; a man of talents, though absurdly overpraised by some of his admirers. I believe, though I do not know, that he ceased to write, because the oddities of his diction, and his new words, compounded à la Teutonique,

drew such strong remonstrances from Napier.-Macaulay to Leigh

Hunt.

Although Mr. Carlyle first propounded his views of hero-worship in a series of lectures, yet it is easy to discern from his studied-sometimes painfully studied-style of writing, that he is not well-adapted for an orator. We once heard him deliver a few sentiments at a public meeting; but he spoke, and that was all. The words that came uppermost did not please him, and he waited for others. Although he did what the best orators have been defined to do, though he "thought upon his legs," he did not think aloud; and the intervals between his silent thoughts and the expression of them were too long and too frequent for the patience of a mixed auditory. Yet the few sentences he did utter were aphorisms full of wisdom.-R. Chambers.

We shall regard it as one of the most melancholy evidences of the decline of all pure and healthful literature, if the writings of Mr. Carlyle continue to have an enduring hold upon the popular mind.— Church of England Quarterly Review.

A man who, though no systematic philosopher, has probably done more to spiritualize philosophy in England than any other modern writer.-F. R. Morell.

Thomas Carlyle I excuse; he is entitled to be crazy, being a man of genius.

North. And of virtue; as Cowper said of his brother, "a man of morals and of manners too."

Tickler. But oh, sir, the impudent stupidity of some of the subscribers to that Signet Seal!

North. Hopeless of achieving mediocrity in any of the humbler walks of their native literature, the creatures expect to acquire character by acquaintance with the drivel of German dotage; and going at once to the fountain head, gabble about Goethe, "the Master"! Yes, I beseech you, Hal, look at the flunkies !-Noctes Ambrosianæ. —Russell's Book of Authors.

66

HOGARTH AS A SATIRIST.

I INCLUDE the great name of Hogarth among our satirists, upon the strength of Charles Lamb's text, in his perfectly admirable essay upon that extraordinary artist :- "His graphic representations," Lamb says, are indeed books; they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at his prints we read." I would say, not so much-certainly not more-is Hogarth the artist, the penciller of the ludicrous, the incongruous, and the buffoonery in life's scene, as he is of the serious, the pathetic, and even the terrible. Lamb has, with fine critical tact, traced a parallel between the "Rake's Progress " and the "Timon of Athens" of Shakspeare. And if we read any of the painter's scenes of a life, we shall find as many incidents brought together, as many deep feelings expressed, and as many thoughts indicated and suggested, as in a first-rate drama or novel.

His by-plays, his asides, his subordinate points, display almost as much genius as the broad action of his leading characters. As, for instance, in the last scene of "The Harlot's Progress," amid the exhibition of shocking insensibility in the faces of the wretches assembled round the coffin of the poor dead outcast, that figure of the little boy, dressed in a mourning cloak and funeral weepers, who is to make one in the procession, calmly winding up his peg-top; as Lamb says, the only thing in that assembly not a hypocrite." Again, for a satirical incident, that one often noticed in the marriage scene of " The Rake's Progress" of the church poor-box, with a spider's web over the lid, and the commandments over the communion-table cracked across. In the settlement scene of the "Marriage à-la-Mode," the bride abstractedly drawing her handkerchief to and fro through her ring; it is evident from her manner that the mystic symbol of union may as well be there as on her finger or anywhere else. The morning after the masquerade; the candles in the ante-room, with long wicks swaled down to the sockets, and the footman yawning his head half off; and the steward going out shrugging his shoulders, with one receipt upon the file. These three great histories (with that of the "Idle and Industrious Apprentice"), for they are "great";-great in invention, great in design, great in execution, and great in detail, in wit, humour, satire, pathos, and horror; these elaborate series of so many lives,—are like pictorial telegraphs, biographies in hieroglyphic; whole years are suddenly condensed, like events in a dream, that would occupy hours to relate, but have passed over the mental retina in a few seconds. It may appear an extravagant confession, but I never recur to these high productions without coming to the conclusion that, after the great poets of our nation, I think I should wish to have been Hogarth; first, for his genius, and then for the profound moral lessons he has read to his fellow-men.-Charles Cowden Clarke.

CARLYLE ON KING DAVID.

ON the whole we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible, above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart"? David, the Hebrew king, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer, and ask, Is this your man according to God's own heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often baffled, never-ended struggle of it be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin-that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is dead; it is pure, as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in

those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: "a succession of falls"? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a life he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep abased; and ever with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable struggle: that is the question of questions.

SHAKSPEARIAN NOTES.

SIR THOMAS MORE, in his History of Richard III., written in 1513, gives an account of Jane Shore, the celebrated courtesan, in which, after relating some of her many acts of kindness and favour, not only towards people of her original rank in life, but towards disgraced courtiers, etc., he makes the following fine reflection :-" For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn, we write it in dust." These words of Sir Thomas More probably suggested to Shakspeare the proverbial observation in Henry VIII., Act iv., Sc. 2 :—

"Men's evil manners live in brass, their virtues

We write in water."

Shakspeare, in his play of Richard III., follows More's history of that reign, and therefore could not but see this passage.

The distich which Shakspeare has put into the mouth of his madman in King Lear, Act iii., Sc. 4—

"Mice and rats and such small deer,

Have been Tom's food for seven long year"

has excited the attention of the critics. Instead of deer one of them would substitute gear, and another, cheer. But the ancient reading is established by the old romance of Sir Bevis, which Shakspeare had doubtless often heard sung to the harp. This distich is part of a description there given of the hardships suffered by Bevis, when confined for seven years in a dungeon :

"Rattes and myse and such small dere
Was his meate that seven yeare."

Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry.

LITERARY MERITS OF THE BIBLE.

I HAVE carefully and regularly perused these Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume, independently of its Divine origin, contains more sublimity, purer morality, important history, and finer

strains of eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.—Sir Wm. Jones.

THE FOUR GREAT ENGLISH POETS.

THE four greatest names in English poetry are almost the four first we come to: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no others that can really be put in competition with these. The last two have had justice done them by the voice of common fame. Their names are blazoned in the very firmament of reputation; while the first two (though "the fault has been more in their stars than in themselves that they are underlings") either never emerged far above the horizon, or were too soon involved in the obscurity of time. In comparing these four writers together, it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser as the poet of romance; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton, as they ought to be. As poets, and as great poets, imagination, that is, the power of feigning things according to nature, was common to them all; but the principle, or moving power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit or inveterate prejudice; in Spenser, novelty and the love of the marvellous; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with every variety of possible circumstances; and in Milton combined only with the highest. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser remoteness; of Milton elevation; of Shakspeare everything. It has been said by some critic that Shakspeare was distinguished from the other dramatic writers of his day only by his wit; that they had all his other qualities but that; that one writer had as much sense, another as much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same depth of passion, and another as great power of language. This statement is not true; nor is the inference from it well-founded, even if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware that, upon his own showing, the great distinction of Shakspeare's genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not his differing from them in one accidental particular. The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds, so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought.-Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets.