ments too, and had been accustomed to them; but, excepting her music, all the rest were retrenched; nor was she ever suffered to play at cards, which she loved. While she was dressing, she was told the king liked some particular manner of dress. She said, 'Let him dress himself; I shall dress as I please.' They told her he liked early hours; she replied, she did not, and Qu'elle ne voulait pas se coucher avec les poules.' A few weeks taught her how little power she had acquired with a crown. The affection she conceived for the king softened the rigour of her captivity. Yet now and then a sigh stole out, and now and then she attempted, though in vain, to enlarge her restraint. What must have penetrated deeper, was that policy did not seem to be the sole motive of the mortifications she endured. At times there entered a little wantonness of power into the princess's treatment of her. The king made her frequent presents of magnificent jewels; and as if diamonds were empire, she was never allowed to appear in public without them. The first time she received the sacrament she begged not to wear them, one pious command of her mother having been not to use jewels at her first communion. The king indulged her; but Lady Augusta carrying this tale to her mother, the princess obliged the king to insist on the jewels, and the poor young queen's tears and terrors could not dispense with her obedience."

The frequent notices of Pitt are among the most valuable things in the book. Walpole metes out niggardly praise to the great minister: but nevertheless, despite of himself, is often compelled to do homage to his genius and the deep sincerity of his every purpose. Here is a picture of Pitt, risen from a sick bed, to deliver himself on the preliminaries of a peace with France and Spain. Parties were hanging in suspense when

“The doors opened, and at the head of a large acclaiming concourse was seen Mr. Pitt, borne in the arms of his servants, who, setting him down within the bar, he crawled by the help of a crutch, and with the assistance of some few friends, to his seat; not without the sneers of some of Fox's party. In truth, there was a mixture of the very solemn and the theatric in this apparition. The moment was so well timed, the importance of the man and his services, the languor of his emaciated countenance, and the study bestowed on his dress, were circumstances that struck solemnity into a patriot mind, and did a little furnish ridicule to the hardened and insensible. He was dressed in black velvet, his legs and thighs wrapped in flannel, his feet covered with buskins of black cloth, and his hands with thick gloves. He said a few words in support of the motion for sending the preliminaries to a committee; not in order to give time for raising animosities, but as it was for the dignity of the king and the country to weigh them maturely. Parts of the treaty, he confessed, were, beyond his expectation, good; but his mind was wounded by what regarded our trade and our allies. He wished for a committee, that he might call merchants to the bar, to state the importance of what we were to keep, of what we were to give away. He would be convinced we were doing right, or he would inflexibly arraign.”

Pitt's reply :

"His speech it would be difficult to detail; it lasted three hours and twenty-five minutes, and was uttered in so low and faint a voice that it was

almost impossible to hear him. At intervals he obtained the permission of the house to speak sitting, a permission he did not abuse, supporting himself with cordials, and having the appearance of a man determined to die in that cause and at that hour. This faintness and the prolixity with which he dwelt on the article of the fisheries, gave a handle to the courtiers to represent his speech as unmeasurably dull, tedious, and uninteresting. But it contained considerable matter, much reason, and some parts of great beauty; but thunder was wanting to blast such a treaty, and this was not a day on which his genius thundered! His health or his choice had led him to present himself as a subject of affliction to his country, and his ungrateful country was not afflicted."

After all, it would seem, Young England is a poor, coxcombical imitator. He is not even original in his eccentricity; for behold the picture of a Young Englander, of 1764 :

"While men were taken up with the politics of the age, there was a minister so smitten with the exploded usages of barbarous times, that he thought of nothing less than reviving the feudal system. This was the Earl of Egmont, who had actually drawn up a plan for establishing that absurd kind of government in the island of St. John. He printed several copies of his scheme, and sent them about to his brother peers. And so little were they masters of the subject, and so great was the inattention of the ministry to the outlying parts of our empire, that his lordship, in the following year, had prevailed with the council to suffer him to make the experiment, if General Conway had not chanced to arrive at council and expose the folly of such an undertaking, which occasioned its being laid aside. Lord Egmont was such a passionate admirer of those noble tenures and customs, that he rebuilt his house at Enmere, in Somersetshire, in the guise of a castle, moated it round, and prepared it to defend itself with cross-bows and arrows, against the time in which the fabric and use of gunpowder shall be forgotten."

We have selected the above few extracts, as a fair example of the interest and value of the work. What stirring matters are told in it! We have Wilkes in all his reckless democracy, with a full account of the explosion of that bomb-shell, number 45; and worse than all, we have innumerable instances of the baseness and flagrant dishonesty of public men; from which iniquity we at least arrive at the satisfactory conviction that, in spite of those who avow the world to be still the same, with all their faults, with all their imbecility and tergiversation, public men dare not be the like flagitious knaves that graced the early part of the reign of George the Third.

In the book before us, we see men in place who ought rather to have been in the pillory. Where is now the genus Colonel Barré,-a sort of legislative Captain Gibbet? Why, such a swaggering ruffian would not, politically, enjoy six months' life. Let those sceptics who doubt our advancement in political virtue, consult this, in many instances, terrible record of state-craft, state-hypocrisy, state-villany. In much that degrades and debases man, its records of the doings of a court might be confidently compared with parts of the Newgate Calendar.

ESSAYS: Second Series. By R. W. EMERSON.-J. Chapman.

THE duty of the critic (as the noticer of works is somewhat presumptuously termed) is at all events twofold, and may be interpretative as well as judicial. The former exercise of the duty is the one to be pursued towards minds of the quality of Emerson's; and we are the more anxious to attempt the task, as a medium is required between the utterers of abstract truth and the unreflecting multitude. We shall not attempt an analysis of the new philosophy,-new at all events to the mass of men who speak the English language, whether born American or British. There shall be nothing transcendental in our attempted interpretation, for space will not allow us to speculate on principles, but only to speak of impressions.

The

The writings of Emerson in America, are silently and surely making as great an inroad on the style and thoughts of superficial and secondrate writers, as Carlyle is in England. With this, novelty may have something to do, but the freshness of philosophy much more. world of readers, wearied with the monotonous cadences and glittering antitheses of a worn-out school, have, at length, from abusing the innovators, turned their admirers; and welcomed that as inspiriting and suggestive, which they at first termed impertinence and insanity.

It is ever thus that the weaker intelligence at first rebels and subsequently worships the stronger. From being the object of the most scurrilous and contemptuous (and contemptible) abuse, from one end of the United States to the other, Emerson, the gentle and retiring thinker, has become the pride of American literature, a fashionable lecturer, and a quoted authority. We all know that Carlyle's course has been nearly similar in England. He, however, has had to deal with a more phlegmatic race, unmixed with the blood of German and French, which gives a more facile, if a more ferocious, tinge to American humanity.

But let us record our impressions and opinions of the little but important volume. On a first perusal, there was much that seemed dark and fragmentary. The illustrations are brilliant and glowing images ; but their logical applicability seemed only asserted and not shown. And herein, perhaps, may consist the want of the element of popularity. The uninformed can most readily, and, indeed, they themselves are apt to think can only, receive knowledge by a gradation of reasonings. Not so think and know those superior intelligences, whose more fiery and spirituel intellects receive or have inherent in them the power of penetrating and perceiving the absolute relations of things, uninfluenced by the conventional slime that thickens over and renders dull the mental perceptions of common men. This power of seeing things as they are, belongs to the order of minds termed philosophic and poetic; and is one and the same order of mind turned either to investigation or enunciation; and it is this intellect modified either by a different range of sympathies and organic capacities, that forms either

the philosopher or the poet. To our, perhaps, limited knowledge, the full conjunction of powers has as yet been only visibly portrayed in one man. Need the name of Shakspeare be repeated to those who have made his works their manual of nature, human and inanimate ?

The philosopher and the poet are so nearly allied, as to be scarcely distinguishable; for the philosopher who is not also the poet, can scarcely be known as the philosopher. If he cannot utter his perceptions, and does not derive impressions from them, he must lack the power of utterance to manifest himself; and if he can utter them, the very expression would be the music of nature, and to the human heart and ear, poetry. The imperfect, fragmentary, and factitious intelligences, often claiming to be, and received as, poets and philosophers, are in no way concerned in this statement.

That Emerson is, in a high degree, possessed of the faculty and vision of the seer, none can doubt who will earnestly and with a kind and reverential spirit peruse these nine essays. He deals only with the true and the eternal. His piercing gaze at once shoots swiftly, surely through the outward and the superficial, to the inmost causes and workings. Any one can tell the time who looks on the face of the clock, but he loves to lay bare the machinery and show its moving principle. His words and his thoughts are a fresh spring, that invigorates the soul that is steeped therein. His mind is ever dealing with the eternal; and those who only live to exercise their lower intellectual faculties, and desire only new facts and new images; and those who have not a feeling or an interest in the great questions of mind and matter, eternity and nature, will disregard him as unintelligible and uninteresting, as they do Bacon and Plato, and, indeed, philosophy itself.

Objection has been taken, by writers even of distinction, to the style of these philosophers. But though faults of style may be discovered both in the English and American (though much seldomer in the latter), this is not in the main a just charge. The expression of profound and novel truths must, to a certain point, be obscure. It is not possible to state long processes of thought in brilliant repartees, nor to express sensations and intuitions scarcely at all in words. To a totally ignorant mind, it would be impossible to give an idea of the higher processes and reasonings of abstruse mathematics, and in a brief sentence make him comprehend the doctrine of fluxions; nor to a man who had never known the sense of vision, to explain the sensations it is capable of producing. Emerson and other philosophers do not write to save thinking, but to suggest it. They write to stimulate the active powers of the soul, and do not intend to trot round the intellect they seek to instruct, in a ready-made ring of ideas. They have solved certain problems, and they show the results; they give enough help to enable the reader to gather the data of the theorem, but they do not work it for him. To those who are merely recipient of facts, they say go to those who deal in them. If you want principles, work them out yourself.

Of the nine Essays, the most powerful seem to be those on "The Poet" and "Nature." They abound in profound thought, revealing "innate universal laws," and with Shakspearean illustrations. To give specimens in these instances, is indeed to offer a brick as a sample of the Palace. But we make a few extracts as lures, for surely those who can value them, and know there are mines of such, will not be slow to cultivate the soil that yields so richly.

"The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it is with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune." "The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world always seems waiting for its poet."

"What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! these stony moments are still sparkling and animated !"

"Every one has some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter we know not."

"Talent may frolic and juggle: genius realises and adds."

"It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word."

"As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession."

"The poet is the namer, or language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name, and not another's, and thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary."

*

"The poets made all the words. * For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolised the world to the first speaker and the first hearer."

"The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men." "The difference between the Poet and the Mystic is, that the Mystic nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional: all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good as ferries and horses are for conveyance, and not as

farms and houses are for homesteads."

"Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one."

These extracts can in no way convey the powerful eloquence of the whole essay, nor give even a glimpse of the harmonious ray that penetrates melodiously the whole dissertation. It is almost a wrong to pluck it in this manner, instinct as it is with the brightest life.

We cannot, however, refrain from concluding with a few more random selections of wise apothegms and felicitous expressions. "Dearest Nature, strong and kind.”

"The taciturnity of Time."

66 #

*Unrepenting Nature."

"The rounded world is fair to see

Nine times folded in mystery.