On this page

• Departments (1)
  • 
• Text (5)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    %x\u atim.

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    %X\U Atim.

    % x \ u atim .

    Untitled Article

    In resuming our notice of the Periodicals , interrupted last week by exigencies of space , we first direct the reader ' s attention to the Prospective Review , a work always remarkable , and this number particularly so for its paper on Sir Wilmam Hamilton , and for an essay on Shakspeare . Two more unpromising subjects than the great Metaphysician and Shakspeare (» nd keiu Ende !) could scarcely be proposed to an " Able Editor ; " yet these writers have contrived to write valuable papers on the character of Sir William ' s Philosophy , and on the character of the man Shakspeare . The first is partly historical and partly expository ; no one interested in metaphysics should allow it to pass unread , its subtlety and eloquence betraying the authorship unmistakably . Fromi the paper on Shakspeare we are tempted to make an extract or two ; for example , this enforcement of an idea we are repeatedly iterating : ——

    " The reason why so few good books are written , is that so few people that can write know anything . In general an author has always lived in a room , has read books , has cultivated science , is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors , but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears . He has nothing to hear and nothing to see . His life is a vacuum . The mental habits of Robert Southey , which about a year ago were so extensively praised in the public journals , is the type of literary existence , just as the praise bestowed on it shows the admiration excited by it among literary people . He wrote poetry ( as if anybody could ) before breakfast ; he read during breakfast . lie wrote history until dinner ; he corrected proof sheets between dinner and tea ; he wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards ; and after supper , by way of relaxation , composed the

    Doctor , a lengthy and elaborate jest . Now , what can any one think of such a life—except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information , formed with the best care , and dajly regulated by the best motives , are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate . Southey had no events , no experiences . His wife kept house , and allowed him pocket-money , just as if he had been a German professor devoted to accents , tobacco , and the dates of Horace ' s amours . And it is pitiable to think that so meritorious a life was only made endurable by a painful delusion . He thought that day by day , and hour by hour , he was accumulating stores for the instruction and entertainment of a , long posterity . His epics were to be in the hands of all men , and his History of Brazil , the ' Herodotus of the South American Republic . ' As if his epics were not already dead , and as if the people who now cheat at Valparaiso care a real who it was that cheated those before them . Yet it was only

    by a conviction like this that an industrious and caligraphic man ( for such was Robert Southey ) , who might have earned money as a clerk , worked all his days for half a clerk ' s wages , at occupation much duller and more laborious . The critic in the Vicar of Wakefield lays down that you should always say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains ; but in the case of the practised literary man , you should often enough say that the writings would have been much better , if the writer had taken less pains . He says he has devoted his life to the subject—the reply is , Then you have taken the best way to prevent yonr making anything of it . ' Instead of reading studiously what Burgendiciug and iEneecidemus said men were , you should have gone out yourself , and seen ( if you can see ) something for yourself . Lord Bacon tells us that some one in his time boasted in Latin , 'Decent annos conswnpsi in legendo Cicerone , ' and echo answered in Greek , ' tve , You ass / "

    Again , this description of Falstaff , with Hazlitt incidentally touched off : — " We mean that the animal spirits of Falstaff give him an easy , vague , diffusive sagacity , which is peculiar to him . A moroso man , Iago , for example , may know anything , and is apt to know a good deal , but what he knows is generally all in corners . He knows number 1 , number 2 , number 3 , and so on ; but there is not anything continuous , or smooth , or fluent in his knowled ge . Persons conversant with the works of Hazlitt will know in a minute what we mean . Everything which he observed he scorned to observe from a certain soreness of mind ; he looked at people because they offended him ; he had the same vivid notion of them that a man has of objects which g rate on a wound in his body . But there is nothing at

    all of this in I'alstafi ; on the contrary , everything pleases him , and everything i » food for a joke . Cheerfulness and prosperity give an easy abounding sagacity of mind which nothing elso doos give . Prosperous people bound easily over all the surface of things which their lives present to them ; very likely they keep to the surfaco ; there airo things beneath or abovo to which they may not penetrate or attain , but what is on any part of the surface , that , they know well . ' Lift not tho Painted veil which those who live call life / and they do not lift it . What in sublime or awful above , what i . s ' sightless and drear' beneath , —these they may not dream of . Nor is any one piece or corner of life so well impressed on them as on minds

    less happily constituted . It is only people who have had a tooth out that renlly know the dentist ' s waiting-room . Yet such people , for tho time ab least , know nothing but that and their tooth . The ensy and ( sympathizing friend who accompanies them knows everything ; hintsjjently at the contents of tho Times , and would cheer you with Lord Pnhnorston s replies . So , on a greater scale , tho man of painful experience knows but too well what has hurt him , and where and why , but the happy havo a vnguo and rounded view of tho round world , and such , it in certain , wan tho knowledge of . Falstafl * , and , with a limitation , to bo shown presently , oi" Shalcipspearo also . "

    There are some happy turns of thought and caprices of expression in this paper . Thus it is remarked , and is indeed remarkable , that Siiaknpieark , our glory nnd delight , is biographically unknown to us , but , nevertheless , there ' is one fact decisively known , — " The reverential nature of tho English mind has carefully preserved what they thought the great excellence of their poet—that he made n fortune I " A foreigner would imagine we were a very classical people , judging from

    the copiousness of quotation in Parliament and m newspapers , together with the frequency of articles in Magazines and Reviews on classical writers . Horace is treated of in this number of the British Quarterly , Aristophanes in Tait , Plato in Hogg ' s Instructor and in the Scottish E $ u ~ cational Journal : and treated , moreover , by men knowing what thev are about . The article on Aristophanes opens with a glance at a curious

    and oft-qubted fact , for which many explanations have been unsuccessfull y suggested , namely , that comedy is fugitive and temporal , tragedy is eternal : — ' < The mere remoteness of ancient times places us afc a disadvantage in speculating upon their elements of comic delineation . As no age appears poetical to itself , so none appears humorous to another . The distance which lends the enchantments of imagination to the view , robs it of those minutely personal features in which the comic lurks . Great objects loom grander through the mists of antiquity , while smaller are altogether lost in its haze . "

    We quote this to protest against it . The reason why we do not understand ancient fun ( when we do not understand it ) is simply because laughter , being the result of a perception of incongruity , whenever the standard of the congruous is wanting , whenever we are unable to detect the incongruity , the comic element vanishes . Athenian wit is frequentl y no wit to us , just for the same reason that London wit is frequentl y unintelligible in the provinces . Othello with a strong Scotch accent would be ludicrous to us , but in Germany or France the incongruity would not be perceptible . The rule then , is this : whenever the incongruity lies in a direction where from universal experience it is perceptible , the fun is universal and eternal . Thus , comedy of manners is fleeting , comedy of character eternal . It all depends on whether we have a standard of congruity whereby to test the incongruity .

    The article Plato in Hogg ' s Instructor , now a monthly magazine of high character , is the first of a series on the " Men of the Past , " and is really a good study , although , as we think , exaggerated in its estimate of Plato ; but it has for centuries been the fashion to exaggerate in that direction . In the same magazine there is a good paper on Edgar Poe , a ^ nd the second part of Gjlfillan ' s paper on Burke—but where is De Quincey and his essay on the English Language ? The Two Platos , in the Scottish Educational Journal , in a pleasant , gossipy notice of Plato , the comic dramatist , in contrast with Plato , the dramatic dialectician . The writer quotes a passage from the dramatist which would fall in perfectly with the sentiments of those numerous mild husbands , now daily brought before magistrates , for undue exercise of the marital syllogism , —

    yvvq yap , tjv fiev avrrjv aei KoXa ^ rjs , eo'Ti irawrcop KTrjfiaTcov KpaTiorov , which may be rendered , " For a wife , if eternally you beat her , is the greatest of all treasures "—a sentiment , by the way , which stands in piquant contrast with " Platonic love !" Bentley and the British Journal , this month , are made up of the usual light magazine papers , calling for no special notice from us ; and a word of " reminder" will suffice for the English Cyclopaedia , the third part of which is now issued , rich in woodcuts and valuable articles .

    Untitled Article

    THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS OF THE " VESTIGES . " Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation . Tenth Edition . With extensivo Additions and Emendations , and Illustrated , by numerous Engravings oa Wood . J . Churchill . Tenth edition ! In spite of vituperative syllogisms from men of science , and of contemptuous epithets tacked on to off-hand " refutations , " from men of no science—in spite of confident assertion , and adroit insinuation , all pointing at the " atheism" and " superficiality" of this work , we find that in nine years ten editions havo been called for by a bullied public ,

    these editions being for tho most part necessarily large , by reason of their cheapness ; and we do not find that tho " proibunder" works , written by these moro " accurate" and orthodox refuters , are received with anything like that degree of favour . Tho Vestiges , we are cons tantly assured , " leads to atheism , " is very inaccurate and shallow , and is the offspring of a " cold and cheerless materialism ; " but wo cannot detect its atheism ; we are by no means sensible of its shallowness ; and as to tho " cold and cheerless" ism , to which its parentage is ascribed , until wo have more satisfactory accounts both of it and of its antagonist ( " hot and hilarious spiritualism" F ) we must bo content to raugo ourselves on tho side of the public—an extensive one—calling for ton editions in nine

    years . , Tho fact is significant of one of these two things : cither tho British public has an eager preference for books declared to bo inaccurate , shallow , false , dangerous , and in all respects contemptible ; or tlioro is an uneasy unrest in the minds of men , a painful suspicion of tho validity of what acknowledged Teachers choose to avow . Choose your horn ! The fact is significant also of tho steadily growing conviction that lift , and Life in its most complox form , Socioty , are aa amenable to rigorous of tho henomena

    Law as any p of tho inorganic world . A conviction that tho Whole is the manifestation , of one infinite Life , tho incarnate activity of God , not in alien indifference , not in OBtranged subjection ; a conviction that ; tho progress of Humanity is but anothor phase in tho univorsal procession of Life , and that its history is but one chapter in tho groat history of tho universe . Becauso tho Vestiges presonts the broad outlines of such a History , its success has boon onormous ; and not because it is superficial , and has " great charms of style , " an wo aro bo frequently informed . There lias boon great exaggeration respecting the style of this work ; perhaps not wholly unintentional exaggeration , as a woman's beauty is BomotwnoB praiBoa at tho cxponso of lior intollect . Compared with

    Untitled Article

    Critics are not the legislators , but the judges andpolice of literature . _ They do not make laws—they interpret and try to ^ n ^ £ atc&t"h . Bra . —BdinburghMev \ eui .

    Untitled Article

    784 THE ^ ADBR , PfalTOPAi ,

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 13, 1853, page 784, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1999/page/16/