It appears that the city of Sardis was not only built but sacked long before the time of Prometheus; it seems also that King Meris was father of Prometheus and Epimetheus. He sacked Sardis, when "He died on his return, and did confide His irfant twins to Amasis. Thou know'st The rest; the priests took them, and made him king, While he gave them the power thou see'st here." All this by way of poetry! " And what is he? Philosopher, they call him!" The name of philosopher did not exist until the time of Pythagoras, which was many ages after even the late period which Mr Reade assigns to his hero. "A spark will sometimes kindle into flame, When all the train is laid." "Ye arm, it is the sting which goads ye: Yet ye marvel when it proves its nature. Oh! the unalienate majesty of right. Confidence in the distrustful public eye." Here for the first time comes on the stage a new goddess "Though peace beside her walk'd, and 'blessing' stood, As of an unalienate liberty; Though by some storms shatter'd, or the woodman's hand, To their foundations, Egypt's heart shall answer thee." The heir-apparent says to King Amasis "Great king, they have searched hill and dale in vain." They might have in Egypt searched in vain for "hill and dale." He goes on"At midnight will I offer sacrifice To the high gods, and, while they reek to Heaven" Here we not only have philosophers, What! the gods reek to heaven ? but gunpowder ! "Hist! the prefect comes!" Do we not fancy we hear the boys out of bounds at Winchester? Prometheus says " I see one Among them of a different stamp, a man In all his inches." Strange expressions for Prometheus, when stumps and inches had not been invented. But what follows is not half so strange. "Look at him who stands Apart, pre-eminent above the rest In stature and in 'gait,' that give him height superior.” It would be wonderful if stature did not, and if gait did. Here is a piece of ill-temper for you! "Die, dog, on thy damn'd malice!" The risible muscles that can resist this, may safely read any tragedy our author has written, or will ever write. "On tyrants, caprices, age, and tribute." We are sincerely sorry if Mr Reade has lost a finger, or the faculty of counting upon his hands. Yet, unless he had, he never could have given us such measure as this. In what manner could he scan the verse? And what passages are these two together? Amasis himself is more in the way of reeking. "Hold; vengeance is wild justice." This is stolen, and worth stealing. "Who is this strange and fearful man?" The word fearful, for terrible, has often been strangely misapplied; never more strangely than here. It means precisely the contrary of fearful. "There doth not live on the wide earth a thing, However foul its nature, that hath not It has been said heretofore, that there is no human being who has not some particle of good in him. The more proper expression, we are afraid, would be, that has not had. We have seen statements of criminals in whom every spark of it seemed utterly extinguished. P. 55. He talks of "gilded spires." There never were any in Egypt. "Clad in white robes as a hierophant," is not a verse; the word is hierophant, not hierophant. "Enthusiasm even in heaven," &c. Neither is this a verse. "Then as the chosen priest of liberty." It never occurred to Mr Reade that allegory must not be thus violated. Such language would have suited Robespierre. enthusiastic admiration; and men do not so easily say what they feel, when they hate a man for his superiority. P. 74. "Thy name shall be a watchword to light others." Watchwords do not light; perhaps he meant watch-tower or beacon. P. 78. Superior, is made a quadrisyllable, genius a trisyllable, power a dissyllable, which is never done in verse. In p. 80, "Prometheus, now captive, is so foolish as to tell Amasis that he hates his own form, because it is like the king's, and is quite ready to die for that very reason.' P. 81. "Truths they responded. Dost so aspire." "First, their names Shall be struck out from the archives of Egypt." By way of verse. "The punishment of death accorded him who names them." By way of English. P. 82. "And these shall be the immortal appendages, To robe it with a glory of its own." A curious specimen both of verse and English. An appendage robes a thing; no doubt with somewhat belonging to the appendage-not at all; but the appendage is at hand to robe it" with a glory of its own." And welcome as a friend pale-faced despair.". Passion does not personify at this rate; and allegories were not yet among the (This, indeed, is superfluous; he plagues of Egypt, as they are among P. 96. " Toward his brethren, who won should have omitted through ye.') "Who part from him like waters: Closing again behind, with myriads round, He walks alone his solitary way." In the four verses here, are indeed two expletives; but nevertheless they are the best in this work, or in any other of Mr Reade's we have been induced to go through. P. 68. "Why would ye banish him? Too great, too good: he makes us feel we are Inferior in our natures: so we hate him." Now, in three or four minutes, there was hardly time for this change from those of modern poetry. No man, or hero, or demigod, ever welcomed pale-faced despair. She clung to some, but they would have got rid of her if they could. P. 90. "He will be impaled alive tomorrow's sun." Meaning he will be impaled alive tomorrow. To morrow's sun is neither English nor common sense; for the poet does not intend to say that tomorrow's sun will be impaled, which comes nearest the construction. P. 95. "The soul in its consciousness of freedom." This, too, is a Readean verse. his crown." P. 97. " And how at this dead hour? L. Dost thou ask? What hath inspired thee to come? L. P. 98. "Forth from my deeds, resem- P. 98. "I would change the 'impaled stake for that crown." The stake impales, but is not impaled. P. 180. "The watchwords that lead on He is very unlucky in his watchwords. The beauty and the glory of thy youth What a verse is that in italics! We Another proof among thousands that Mr Reade is inattentive to time, place, and character, is here. No Egyptian girl, from the beginning of the world, ever had golden hair or blue eyes. P. 109. "So basely, and our tyrants would blush." P. 111. "Thou shalt not speak the people." The last verse (or line intended for verse) is, P. 119. "Fools! look round ye. He Any schoolboy who had ever learned The reader will wonder what Prometheus could ever be doing in Egypt, The scholar and archeologist will doubt whether the Egypt of the Py.. ramids, to say nothing of the Pyramids themselves existed in the time of the Titans, of which brotherhood was Prometheus. "I beg your pardon," says Mr Reade, "my Prome theus was no more a Titan than you are: he was the son of Mæris, king of Egypt." With about the same propriety he might represent William the Conqueror as the son of William Pitt, or Joseph the steward of Pharaoh as the son of Joseph Hume.We are unwilling to cast on this gentleman more ridicule than has already been cast on him; but ridicule is the only chastisement of presumption; and was ever presumption equal to his telling us that "he receded from all further effort, as quietly confident of results, as if they had already happened." The results are, he continues to assure us, that his poetry will "live." That depends, in a great measure, on the quality of the paper. Turning it over, and manipulating it, we think it may. Something of its longevity, he tells Sir Robert Peel in his dedication, will be owing to the patronage of the right honourable gentlemen. Sir Robert Peel is not only a good scholar, but a good-tempered and courteous man; he would return a civil answer, with many thanks and courteous expressions, on receiving a book, although he would rather not have received it. He is the last person " to look a gift horse in the mouth," although a roarer or a brokenwinded one, as are Mr Reade's; not to mention that the best of them bear the fire-marks of Lord Byron, and are rather the leaner for the driver. He talks of his “tong-laboured Poem of Italy," but he forgets to tell us, what we happen to know without him, that this long-laboured Poem had several other labours beside his own confer red on it. A gentleman in Bath, besides a lady or two, corrected it in several hundred places, we mean the Rev. Mr M.; and Leigh Hunt operated on it with knife and caustic for several months, reducing its bulkiness, and giving it exteriorly a somewhat less sickly appearance. The author was discontented with both for their good offices, and avoided them ever afterwards, as if the correction had been personal. The patient was now discharged from the Infirmary, and began to swagger and challenge in all directions. Then came Catiline, more desperate still. Ben Jonson and Dr Croly had written tragedies on the same subject; but Mr Readé never takes a path of his own, he always follows close upon others, and treads down their heels; and he has so little judgment, that he always plays this prank with stronger men than him self. In Italy the waylays Byron and Rogers; and he catches at the skirts of Moore to mount among the angels, Italy, "the long-laboured Italy," went through as many hands to bring it to perfection, as a pin does, and was worth about as much when it came out of them. If those hands could polish, they could not point it; and, therefore, it is thrown aside aside and and swept off the carpet some years ago. Reade announced in the public papers, his tragedy of Cain as dedicated to Mr Macready. But as Mr Macready refused to bring it upon the stage, he transferred the signal honour of dedi. cation to Sir Edward Bulwer. This tragedy has already produced its effects, in the following couplet. Mr "The reign of justice is return'd again: Cain murder'd Abel, and Reade murders Cain." We willingly pass from Cain to Italy, and from Italy to the Pyramids, in little danger that by going further we may fare worse. There is no probability that we should have ever thought again about the author, if, in the Sun newspaper of May 9, we had not been attracted to him under the article of "Literature," and " A Record of the Pyramids." We should have thought the criticism a severe one, had we not been induced to peruse the poem, the preface, and the notes. We then acknowledged the leniency of the reviewer in making no quotations from the poetry. The author has made only his from the Latin: in one he has omitted the very word he wanted; in the other, he has substituted what destroys the metre. The story of Prometheus is known to every school boy and school girl of fourteen. The tragedy of Æschylus, founded on it, is familiar to the fifth form. Shelley has unbound the Titan; he never thought of delivering him from the vulture, only to have his sides nibbled at by the tom-tit. Mr Reade talks about his calmness and seclusion and indifference to notoriety; yet most of the critics in England (on good grounds we say it) have been solicited and importuned, from time to time, to pay attention to his poetry. Some have been won over by soft language to make soft replies; others have grown impatient, and have kicked at the sickling. A writer in Blackwood's Magazine showed up him and his letters to the public, and dismissed him with ridicule and scorn. But the unkindest cut of all was inflicted in the sly dexterity of a writer in the Quarterly Review, who placed various stanzas of Italy side by side with the originals in Childe Harold. Another, with less mischief in his head, and more calculation, offered a wager that the words shrine and enshrine terminate at least seventy verses in that poem, and that the interjection Lo! commences as many. reads only the preface to this Record of the Pyramids, will be ready to believe our declaration, that of all the authors, English or foreign, we have perused in the course of a long life, we never have met with one of so little modesty, so little sense of shame, so little self-knowledge, as Mr John Edmund Reade. Whoever MODERN GREECE. WHAT are the nuisances, special to Greece, which repel tourists from that country? They are three; - robbers, fleas, and dogs. It is remarkable that all are, in one sense, respectable nuisances-they are ancient, and of classical descent. The monuments still existing from pre-Christian ages, in memory of honest travellers assassinated by brigands or klephts, (Κλεπται,) show that the old respectable calling of freebooters by sea and land, which Thucydides, in a well-known passage, describes as so reputable an investment for capital during the times preceding his own, and, as to northern Greece, even during his own, had never entirely languished, as with us it has done, for two generations, on the heaths of Bagshot, Hounslow, or Finchley. Well situated as these grounds were for doing business, lying at such convenient distances from the metropolis, and studying the convenience of all parties, (since, if a man were destined to lose a burden on his road, surely it was pleasing to his feelings that he had not been suffered to act as porter over ninety or a hundred miles, in the service of one who would neither pay him nor thank him ;) yet, finally, what through banks and what through policemen, the concern has dwindled to nothing. In England, we believe, this concern was technically known, amongst men of business and "family men," as the " Low Toby." In Greece it was called ληστεια ; and, Homerically speaking, it was perhaps the only profession thoroughly respectable. A few other callings are mentioned in the Odyssey as furnishing regular bread to decent men, viz. the doctor's, the fortuneteller's or conjurer's, and the armourer's. Indeed it is clear, from the offer made to Ulysses of a job in the way of hedging and ditching, that sturdy big-boned beggars, or what used to be called "Abraham men" in southern England, were not held to have forfeited any heraldic dignity attached to the rank of pauper, (which was considerable,) by taking a far as mer's pay where mendicancy happened to "be looking downwards." Even honest labour was tolerated, though, of course, disgraceful. But the Corinthian order of society, to borrow Burke's image, was the bold sea-rover, the bucanier, or (if you will call him so) the robber in all his varieties. Titles were, at that time, not much in use-honorary titles, we mean; but had our prefix of" Right Honourable" existed, it would have been assigned to burglars, and by no means to privycouncillors; as, again, our English prefix of " Venerable" would have been settled, not on so sheepish a character as the archdeacon, but on the spirited appropriator of church plate. We were surprised lately to find, in a German work of some authority, so gross a misconception of Thucydides that of suppo supposing him to be in jest. Nothing of the sort. The question which he represents as once current, on speaking a ship in the Mediterranean, - " Pray, gentlemen, are you robbers?" actually occurs in Homer; and to Homer, no doubt, the historian alludes. It neither was, nor could be conceived, as other than complimentary; for the alternative supposition presumed him that mean and wellknown character-the merchant, who basely paid for what he took. It was plainly asking- Are you a knight grand-cross of some martial order, or a sort of costermonger? And we give it as no hasty or fanciful opinion, that the South Sea islands (which Bougainville held to be in a state of considerable civilization) had, in fact, reached the precise stage of Homeric Greece. The power of levying war, as yet not sequestered by the ruling power of each community, was a pri vate right inherent in every individual of any one state against all individuals of any other. Captain Cook's ship the Resolution, and her consort the Adventure, were as much independent states and objects of lawful war to the islanders, as Owyhee in the Sandwich group was to Tongataboo in the Friendly group. So that to have "Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands." By William Mure of Caldwell. In Two Volumes. 1842. |