but as the whole world; and they will so, as the world advances in knowledge and influence. Now poetry is the breath of beauty, flowing around the spiritual world as the winds that wake up the flowers do about the material; and in proportion as statesmen have a regard for poetry, and for what the highest poetry loves, they "look abroad," as Bacon phrases it, "into universality," and the universe partakes of the benefit.

It is a very curious and agreeable fact, that scarcely any name of eminence can be mentioned in the political world, from Solon and Lycurgus down to the present moment, that has not, at one period of the man's life or another, been connected with some tribute to the spirit of grace and fancy in the shape of verse. Perhaps there is not a single statesman in the annals of Great Britain that will not be found to have written something in verse-some lines to his mistress, compliment to his patron, jest on his opponent, or elegy or epithalamium on a Court occasion. Even Burleigh, in his youth, wrote verses in French and Latin: Bacon versified psalms: and Clarendon, when he was Mr. Hide, and one of the "wits about town," wrote complimentary verses to his friends the poets.

Wyatt, Essex, Sackville, Raleigh, Falkland, Marvell, Temple, Somers, Bolingbroke, Pulteney, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Canning, all wrote verses; many of them late in life. Pope's Lord Oxford wrote some, and very bad they were.

Lord Chatham wrote Latin verses at college. Pitt, his son, wrote English ones in his youth, and assisted his brothers and sisters in composing a play. Even that caricature of an intriguing and servile statesman, Bubb Dodington, had a poetical vein of tender and serious grace.

Our first statesman whose verses are worth quoting, is Sir Thomas Wyatt, a diplomatist of exquisite address in the service of Henry the Eighth. He was rather a great man than a great poet, and his most important pieces in verse are imitations from other languages. But he was very fond of the art, and was accounted a rival in his day of his illustrious friend, the Earl of Surrey. The following Description of such a one as he would love" is in the highest moral taste, and reminds us of some of the sweet quiet faces in the Italian masters:

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A face that should content me wondrous well,
Should not be fair, but lovely to behold;
With gladsome chere, all grief for to expell;
With sober looks so would I that it should
Speak without words, such words as none can tell;
The tress also should be of crisped gold.

With wit, and these, might chance I might be tied,
And knit again the knot that should not slide.

Our next poetical statesman is Queen Elizabeth's Earl of Essex; and of a truly poetical nature was he. He was more of a lover of poets, it is true, than a poet; but he himself was a poem and a romance. The man who could even think that he could wish to "hold in his heart the sorrows of all his friends" (for such is a beautiful passage in one of his letters) must have had a noble capability in his nature, that makes us bleed for his bleeding, and wish that he had partaken less of the stormier passions. He died on the scaffold for madly attempting to dictate to his Sovereign by force of arms; and Elizabeth, as fierce as he, and fuller of resentment, is thought by some to have broken her heart for the sentence. Here follow some most curious verses, which show the simplicity and love of gentleness in one of the corners of the man's mind. They were the close of a despatch he sent to Elizabeth when he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland! Imagine such a winding up of a state paper now!

Happy is he could finish forth his fate
In some unhaunted desert most obscure,
From all society, from love and hate,
Of worldly folk; then should he sleep secure,
Then wake again, and yield God ever praise,

Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry,—

In contemplation passing out his days,

And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Who when he dies, his tomb may be a bush

Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

Sackville, Lord Dorset (in the time of Elizabeth), who wrote the fine Induction to the "Mirror of Magistrates," as well as the tragedy of "Gorboduc," has been gathered into collections of British poetry. So ought Sir Walter Raleigh, whose poems have been lately republished. Raleigh was a genuine poet, spoilt by what has spoilt so many men otherwise great-his rival Essex included-the ascendency of his will. His will thrust itself before his understanding-the

imperious part of his energy before the rational or the loving; and hence the failure, even in his worldly views, of one of the most accomplished of men. The best production of this lawless and wilful genius is the fine sonnet on the "Fairy Queen" of his friend Spenser; which, not content with admiring as its greatness deserved, he violently places. at the head of all poems, ancient and modern, sweeping Petrarch into oblivion, and making Homer himself tremble. It is one of the noblest sonnets in the language.

But we now come to the great wit and partisan, Andrew Marvell, whose honesty baffled the arts of the Stuarts, and whose pamphlets and verses had no mean hand in helping to put an end to their dynasty. Marvell unites wit with carnestness and depth of sentiment, beyond any miscellaneous writer in the language. His firm partisanship did not hinder him being of the party of all mankind, and doing justice to what was good in the most opposite characters. In a panegyric on Cromwell he has taken high gentlemanly occasion to record the dignity of the end of Charles the First:

thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
While round the armed bands
Did clap their bloody hands.

HE nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

The emphatic cadence of this couplet,

Bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

is in the best taste of his friend Milton.

Sir William Temple wrote verses with a spirit beyond the fashion of his time. Even miserly Pulteney was a verseman; to say nothing of flighty Hanbury Williams and crawling Dodington.

Ꭰ Ꭰ

BOOK BINDING AND "HELIODORUS."

(The Monthly Repository, December 1837.)

GLORY be to the memory of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary and Bohemia, son of the great Huniades, and binder of books in vellum and gold. He placed fifty thousand volumes, says Warton, "in a tower which he had erected in the metropolis of Buda; and in this library he established thirty amanuenses, skilled in painting, illuminating, and writing, who under the conduct of Felix Ragusinus, a Dalmatian, consummately learned in the Greek, Chaldaic, and Arabic languages, and an elegant designer and painter of ornaments on vellum, attended incessantly to the business of transcription and decoration."

Methinks we see this tower-doubtless in a garden— the windows overlooking it, together with the vineyards which produced the Tokay that his Majesty drank while reading.

What a fellow! Think of being king of the realms of Tokay, and having a library of fifty thousand volumes in vellum and gold, with thirty people constantly beneath you, copying, painting, and illuminating, and every day sending you up a fresh one to look at !

Dr. Dibdin should have existed in those days, and been his Majesty's chaplain, or his confessor. The doctor would have continually absolved the king from the sin of thinking of his next box of books during sermon-time, or looking at the pictures in his missal instead of reading it; and the king would have been always bestowing benefices on the doctor, till the latter began to think he needed absolution himself.

Not being a king of Hungary, nor rich, nor having a confessor to absolve us from sins of expenditure, how lucky is it that we can take delight in books whose outsides are of the homeliest description! How willing are we to waive the grandeur of outlay! how contented to pay for some precious volume a shilling instead of two pounds ten! Bind we would, if we could: there is no doubt of that. We should have liked to challenge the Majesty of Hungary to a 'bout at bookbinding, and seen which would have ordered

the most intense and ravishing legatura; something at which De Seuil, or Grollier himself, should have

Sighed, and looked, and sighed again;

something which would have made him own that there was nothing between it and an angel's wing. Meantime, nothing comes amiss to us but dirt, or tatters, or cold, plain, calf, school binding-a thing which we hate for its insipidity and formality, and for its attempting to do the business as cheaply and usefully as possible, with no regard to the liberality and picturesqueness befitting the cultivators of the generous infant mind.

Keep from our sight all "Selectæ e Profanis," and "Enfield's Speakers," bound in this manner; and especially all Ovids, and all "Excerpta " from the Greek. We would as lief see Ovid come to life in the dress of a Quaker, or Theocritus serving in a stationer's shop. (See the horrid, impossible dreams which such incoherences excite!) Arithmetical books are not so bad in it; and it does very well for the "Gauger's Vade Mecum," or tall thin copies of "Logarithms;" but for anything poetical, or of a handsome universality like the grass or the skies, we would as soon see a flower whitewashed, or an arbour fit for an angel converted into a pew.

But to come to the book before us. See what an advantage the poor reader of modern times possesses over the royal collector of those ages, who doubtless got his manuscript of Heliodorus's romance at a cost and trouble proportionate to the splendour he bestowed on its binding. An "argosie" brought it him from Greece or Italy, at a price rated by some Jew of Malta; or else his father got it with battle and murder out of some Greek ransom of a Turk; whereas we bought our copy at a bookstall in Little Chelsea for tenpence! To be sure it is not in the original language; nor did we ever read it in that language; neither is the translation, for the most part, a good one; and it is execrably printed. It is "done," half by a "person of quality," and half by Nahum Tate. There are symptoms of its being translated from an Italian version; and perhaps the good bits come out of an older English one, mentioned by Warton.

The "Ethiopics" or "Ethiopian History" of Heliodorus,