about the Divine Decrees, which we wholly disapprove. Against Calvin's own sentiments, except on the subject of Reprobation, we have not much to object, beyond an unguardedness of statement which has laid him open to misrepresentation. But there are writers who have been aptly designated as Calvino Calviniores, whose peremptory assertions on these subjects we deprecate as warmly as our Author would. Mr. Vaughan is the latest of these shallow and pernicious speculators; and he has ventured much further than we could have supposed a pious man, however deluded by his own false reasonings, would have done. Between the two assertions, that God's purpose founded on his foreknowledge, and, that his foreknowledge is founded on his purpose, or, as Calvin states it, Ideò præscivit, quia decreto suo sic ordinarat,we see little to choose: both appear to us alike unmeaning and unphilosophical. Calvin had in view, to oppose the Romish doctrine of a Predestination caused by foreseen good works in man; a doctrine which Luther not less warmly combated. But the opposite of error is not always truth. Both propositions undertake to assign a cause for the Divine proceeding, which they entirely fail to supply. The Because lies neither in the attribute of prescience, nor in the act of predetermination; since neither can the attribute supply the reason of the act, nor the act be the reason of the existence of the attribute. And when a specific exercise of the Divine attribute, and an act of the Divine will in reference to the same objects, are spoken of, the attempt to distinguish between them in the order of time, is utterly fallacious and absurd. Again, to assign a reason or motive for the determination of the Creator, exterior to himself, involves a contradiction. On these inscrutable subjects, truth itself sounds like impropriety. But the only reason that can be given for the Divine decrees, is, that, out of all possible worlds or systems of creation, the one which exists, as the fruit of the Divine predetermination, is the best. As to the rest, the resolution of Augustine is the wisest, Alii disputent, ego mirabor. Art. II. 1. Cain, a Mystery. By Lord Byron. 12mo. London. 1822. 2. The Vision of Judgement: a Poem. By Robert Southey, Esq. LL. D. Poet Laureate, &c. 4to. London. 1821. OUR UR reluctance to occupy our pages with publications of this description, has led us hitherto to content ourselves with a mere passing reference to the still-born hexameters of Mr. Southey, and the abortive tragedies of his noble rival. Nor should we have departed from our original intention to pass them over, had not one of these publications acquired an unfortunate notoriety, having found its way, in a cheap form, into an extended circulation, owing less to its literary merit, than to its moral demerits as a choice importation of daring impiety for the lowest of the vulgarly profane to batten on. It is on the character and tendency of both publications, in a moral view, that we wish to offer a few remarks. To impute motives to any writer, is seldom justifiable; and yet, it is impossible that the motives of the Author of Cain, in sending forth that publication, could be good. To charge him with a deliberate love of mischief for its own sake, with a Satanic desire to proselyte to infidelity, is, we think, going further than is warranted by either propriety or probability. But we cannot help suspecting that his Lordship was disposed to put the liberty of the press in this country, in reference to irreligious works, to a fair trial; that seeing how Hone tortured Lord Ellenborough, and how Carlile, by his besotted obstinacy, is giving a moment's consequence to the Bridge street jobbers, he wished to put to the test the efficiency of the law, and the validity of the principles on which some recent prosecutions have been conducted. For this purpose, he seems here to have thrown down the gauntlet to Mr. Attorney General, and we can easily imagine that he laughs in his sleeve at the silent consternation produced by his challenge; that he secretly enjoyed the solemn perplexity of the Lord Chancellor, when the application for an injunction against the pirated edition came before the Court, and when Cain was gravely paralleled with Paradise Lost; and that, most of all, he laughs at the awkward situation in which he has placed the Poet Laureat, as at once his rebuker and his fellow culprit. A malignant pleasure of this kind, whether it entered into his Lordship's motives or not, we think very consonant with what he has been pleased to let us know of his character; and if it can repay him for the irretrievable infamy which, as the Author of Don Juan and Cain, he has purchased, who would envy him the utmost gratification he can derive from his diabolical joke? "Cain" is not, however, a profane poem: the "Vision of Judgement" is. This assertion will stagger those only who do not consider what is the import of the word. Profaneness is an irreverent use of sacred names and things. Now a religious drama or mystery, founded on the Scripture narrative, is, in itself, no profanation of any thing sacred. Paradise Lost, The Messiah, The World before the Flood, Racine's tragedies of Esther and Athaliah, are all precedents so far in point. Of this, Lord Byron was fully aware; and here, in a Court of Law, would rest his defence. He pleads, that he has not even taken the same liberties with his subject that were common formerly, as may be seen,' he says, by any reader. curious enough to refer to those very profane productions, (the "Mysteries or Moralities") whether in English, French, Italian, or Spanish.' But a burlesque of things sacred, whether intentional or not, is profaneness. To apply the language of Scripture in a ludicrous connexion, is to profane it.. The mimicry of prayer on the Stage, though in a serious play, is a gross profanation of sacred things. And all acts which come under the taking of God's name in vain, are acts of profaneness. According to this definition of the word, the Vision of Judgement is a poem grossly and unpardonably profane. Mr. Southey's intention was, we are well persuaded, very far from being irreligious; and indeed, the profaneness of the poem partly arises from the ludicrous effect produced by the bad taste and imbecility of the performance, for which his intentions are clearly not answerable. Still, the Author cannot be exonerated. Whatever liberties a poet may claim to take, in representations purely allegorical, with the invisible realities of the world to come, the ignis fatuus of political zeal has in this poem carried Mr. Southey far beyond any assignable bounds of poetical license. It would have been enough to celebrate the apotheosis of the monarch; but, when he proceeds to travestie the final judgement, and to convert the awful tribunal of Heaven into a drawing room levee, where he, the Poet Laureate, takes upon himself to play the part of a lord in waiting, presenting one Georgian worthy after another, to kiss hands on promotion,-what should be grave is, indeed, turned to farce. The It is possible, since Lord Byron's Cain has been mentioned along with Paradise Lost, that Robert Southey might plead the precedent of Dante, who, in his Divina Commedia, has been very free in distributing eternal rewards and punishments to his countrymen and contemporaries, according to his private feelings and political partialities. Between. Southey and Dante, the intellectual distance is not so great as the moral distance between Milton and Lord Byron. parallel in either case is about as close. The time at which Dante wrote, not less than the character and spirit of his poem, rescues it, at least to our feelings, from the charge of profaneness; since, in his wildest fictions, he did but tread in the steps of the monkish fabulists, and in many instances he only adopted the current superstitions of the popular creed. Yet, no one will contend for the abstract propriety of Dante's machinery, or vindicate the use which in every instance he has made of it. The incongruities, the barbarous taste, the occasional imbetilities which disfigure his great poem, would have been fatal to a production of less transcendent merit. And what, in a Roman Catholic of the thirteenth century is imputable to the barbarism of superstition, would, in a Protestant of the nineteenth century, be sheer profaneness and gross impropriety. Besides, as irreverence essentially enters into the idea of profaneness, the apparent purpose of the writer must be considered as greatly mitigating or otherwise aggravating his offence. When sacred names or things are introduced into a work of fiction, the design of which is noble or meritorious, the argument lofty, and the general tendency good, one is ready to overlook the misapplication; in some instances, to admire its beauty. But when the object is low and unworthy, and the tendency exceptionable, one feels as if the offence were greater. Profaneness is certainly more intolerable, if not more criminal, in proportion to its vulgarity. Now there is much in the Vision of Judgement that is positively vulgar-vulgar in the conception, vulgar in the political feeling which inspired it, vulgar in the bungling machinery, the stage clouds and canvas heavens of the performance, vulgar in the Laureate's hired and fulsome loyalty. And it is this which makes the profaneness of his hexameters more offensive than that which pervades his Kehama, and disfigures his Roderick. Profaneness is a crime, unhappily, not confined to persons destitute of religion. The profane jeur de mots and the illicit use of Scripture phraseology in which the ministers of religion are too apt to indulge, will at once occur to our readers in verification of this remark. In Mr. Southey, we are disposed to impute it to his being, from the peculiar habits of his mind, unsusceptible of the feeling of moral propriety or impropriety in relation to the objects of religious reverence. It is not a little remarkable, that a writer so exemplarily free from all that borders on impurity of thought or expression, who discovers so much delicacy as well as amiableness of sentiment, and so nice a sense of practical propriety in all matters of costume or personification, should have so perpetually and grossly sinned against religious taste. His accommodations of Scripture language in the Kehama, e. g. the speech of Ereenia to Kailyal, 'Be of good heart, beloved. It is 1 are utterly inconsistent with a proper reverence for Divine truth. We readily believe that Mr. Southey does not mean to be profane, because we believe that he does not know when he is profane. His religious sense has, we suspect, become blunted by the prostitution of his heart to the idols of his fancy. He has, in his poems, played the part of a devout believer in every faith but that of Judaism; has invocated in turn Mahommed, the Virgin, and the monsters of the Hindoo pantheon, with well-feigned zeal and fervour; and it is hardly to be expected that he should have come out of all these transmigrations without retaining in his character some traces of his pre-existent conditions. As the Biographer of the Cid, of Lord Nelson, and of Wesley, he has undergone scarcely less strange mutations; for the religion of his heroes differed almost as widely as that of Thalaba does from that of Ladurlad or of Roderick. The result of all this, it is easy to conceive, must be the deadening of the religious sensibilities. Punch,' said Johnson to Garrick, Punch, David, does not feel.' If actors felt, they could not be actors. Now Mr. Southey, in the poems alluded to, acts so well the Mahommedan, the Heathen, and the Papist, that we are constrained to believe that religion is a subject on which he does not feel. And this deficiency of feeling betrays him unwittingly into profaneness. Sacred things are so strangely jumbled in his mind with the figments of imagination, the lumber of learning, the legends of former ages, the politics of the day, things real and unreal, clean and unclean, a heterogeneous omniana, that nothing is less surprising than that they should get shuffled, as it were, so as to produce a sort of cross readings, in which Scripture is grafted on the Vedas, poetry runs into politics, loyalty into profaneness, and heaven is let down into Carlton palace. That Mr. Southey is not conscious of the gross profaneness with which, in his hapless Vision, he is so pre-eminently chargeable, is manifest from the high and indignant tone which he assumes as a moralist, in applying the branding iron (as he facetiously terms the art of nicknaming) to Lord Byron, and in calling down the vengeance of the Civil Power on what he designates as the Satanic school. But really, while we would not place his Lordship and Mr. Southey on a par in respect to intention, we do not see upon what principle the one can be subjected to pains and penalties, and the other escape. If profaneness is indictable, the Vision of Judgement is an offence which would deserve not less than Cain itself, to be sent to a jury; and the absence of bad intention could be pleaded only in mitigation. If Lord Byron is not, strictly speaking, guilty of profaneness in his poem, it does not, assuredly, proceed from any reverence of sacred subjects. But profaneness would not comport with the character of the poem: it would have been in bad taste, would not have suited his purpose. Lord Byron is a man of exquisite taste, of cool science; and in this respect he has an immense advantage over his opponent, even when they fairly strip to abuse one another. In Don Juan he is most atrociously |