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    ¦ '¦ ¦ v ¦' . . ' ¦ LITERATURE, SCIENCE, ART, &c.

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    Untitled Article

    Aftbb much rumouring and paragraphing , whisperings in literary coteries , and jangling in law courts , the new periodical , " All the Year Round , " makes its appearance . And now that it has come , what can be said of it , but that it is " Household Words" with a new name ? In shape , manner , and matter it is essentially the same ; so that if you were to cut the title offa number of the old publication , and stick it upon the new , no one could possibly tell the difference . The opening of Mr . Dickens ' s new tale promises a story of about the Bleak House" level—quaintness and oddity bpin ^' more aimed at than humour—and we fancy the hand elsewhere in the

    we can detect same number . Public report , as well as internal evidence , attributes the " Piece of China , " a passing sketch of Chinese travel , to the circumnavTgatory hermit of Egyptian Hall , Piccadilly . As for the old publication , " Household Words , " Messrs ; Bradbury and Evans seem determined not to let the-grass grow under their feet . On Thursday , they applied to the Master of the Rolls' to have the proceedings hastened , and the property offered for sale without delay , and were successful . Mr . Dickens offered no opposition . The consequence is , that this pix ^ ertywhich is but a name—will be competed for about the end of May , and we shall be surprised if there be liiore than two competitors in the field .

    Next Thursday and v riday an interesting but affecting ceremony will draw many a literary pilgrim to Grasmere ; The death of Mrs . Wordsworth renders it necessary that the goods and chattels in Rydal Mount should be dispersed , and , on the days , we have named , the hammer of the aixctioneer will echo in those honoured walls . Mere carpets , chairs and tables , my lords , arid hajily a book or two , and some odd nic-nacs , . incrc odds and mere cncls , Cheap bargains from book stalls , cheap keepsakes from friends .

    But William Wordsworth has used those chairs ; Coleridge has prosed over those fire-irons ; Southey has turned over the leaves of that book ; and more distinguished mem and women than wo can find space or leisure to indicate by name here , have pressed that worn-old carpet with their feet . Surely we will have a stick or a shred , if money will buy it—aye , though the Bank discount be 3 £ per cent . There has been a mistake about the Haliburtons . We suspected some confusion when the new kni was continually called Sir Brcnton Ilaliburton . The name of . " Sam Slick ' ¦ was , as wo well knew , Thomas Chandler Haliburton . How ,

    then , came Sir Brenton ? The answer is plain and simple—Sir Brenton is quite another " guess sort" of personage from the Cloekmaker , and is now Chief Justice of Nova Scotia , on account of which office he has been knighted . Thomns Chandler Haliburton , still plain Mr . ( as we are glad to . hear ) , ia one of the candidates for representing the borough of Launceston , an honour to which he aspires , not on account of his own merits and his liberal principles , but through the favour of the Duke of Northumberland , and upon high Tory professions—which wo are not by any means glad to hoar . ., ' The Critic says : —

    "We hoar that only a few days before hor death Lady Morgan was engaged in superintending through tho press a tale of Indian lifts , ontitlod ' Lu-xima , tho Prophetess , ' which she had taken great pains to rqmodel from her first prodiictipn , The Missionary ^' published upwards of forty years ago . Since then a generation" has passed away , and tho story of Luxlma' will consequently come forth ns if it woro now to tho groat mass of roadors of romanoo . Mr WoBtorton has announced it for immediate publication , as well as a new novel from tho pen of Mrs . Ohallloo , thewJfe of Dr . OhalUoo , tho omfnont physician and doputy-qoronoi' for Middlesex . This lady is already known by hor ' Sister of Charity , ' and othor works . " Scanty notes this wook ! ' But what would you —when ; evory ono is shouting out wars and

    rumours of wars , Stock Exchange bankruptcies , and electioneering amenities ? When the waters of strife are come , prudent nlen put by their valuables , and intelligence waits the return of reason .

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    CHADWICK'S LITE OF DE FOE . The Life and Times of Daniel De Foe ; with Remarks Digressive and Discursive . By William Chadwick , London . John Russell Smith . A good and sufficiently ample life of De Foe is a desideratum in English literature . And the want of a standard work on the subject is all the more felt , that one or two sketches of the life of the author of " Robinson Crusoe" the " True Born Englishman , " have acted as whets to our appetite . The incomplete draughts ofHazlitt , Walter Wilson , Chalmers , and Sir Walter Scott—all of them defective in respect of magnitude and fulness , and

    such as Scott ' avowedly looking at the subject only in one aspect—have by their very partial excellencies excited the greater expectancy for the advent of a literary student , assiduous enough in the research requisite for a ftill handling of the theme , and expert enough in his vocation to do it artistic justice . Nor has this feeling been decreased by the comparatively recent appearance in the Edinburgh Review , of Mr . Forster ' s cabinet picture , and of the slowly progressing history of Lord Macaulay , in which , as might have been expected , the well-trusted adviser of the limner ' s hero , has his fair share of prominence and laudation . Animated

    by this feeling , we opened the volume before us with considerably more than usual curiosity and interest . Whatever the genius arid the industry , here . at least was a large canvas—nearly five hundred pages octavo . Oil shutting the book , and after wading through its every sentence , we can express only unmitigated disappointment . A subject of great dignity , of important historic relations , and deeply interesting in its national bearings , is handled with the flippancy of a pamphleteer . Stentorous declamation is spread over pages which ought to have been dedicated to the adduction of rival testimony , the portraiture

    of public character , the estimate of public occurrences , the inquiry into bidden motives , the tracing of ultimate results . When the reader has a right to expect some explanation of the relation in which De Foe stood to the influential . Dissenters of the City of London a . hundred and fifty yeai'S ago , the reader is treated by Mr . Chadwick to a tirade against dissenting deacons and parsons in these our own days , who beg money for soup kitchens and missionary societies . And when some such swot t ing assertion is made as that a hundred and so many odd members of such and such a Parliament of Queen Anne were in tho . pay of Louis

    XIV ., the turning of a leaf leads you , not to what ought to follow—spme corroboration of the averment—but to an attack against the Privy Council Kducation Grants , a magniloquent oiler of 500 / . as the nucleus of a subscriptio n for a statue in Hyde Park to Oliver-Cromwell , or sapient ¦ strictures oil our growing habit of letting the upper lip remain unshaven . A slight modification of the- wellknown saying of Schelling to tho aspiring young author whom he asked to tea , id thoroughly applicable to . Mr . Chadwick ' s book : '' What is novel in it is perfectly irrelevant ; what is good in it la not his own . " it is indeed only those parts of it which are not hw own which have sustained

    us through its perusal . He makes , every now and then , quotation * ' i ' voin Do Fou ' s political pamphlets and poems , varying in longtn from one to u dozen pages ; and within the inverted commas is to bo found all in tho book thufc is worth reading . Our judgment id severe , and both the author and our roadera have a right to some corroborative illustrations of the faults wo allege . But let us first summarily state these . Imprimis : , tho " remarks digressive and discursive " have no business in tho book . If Mr .

    Chadwiok wishes to write down the Privy Council grants , or anything else , lot him write a book on tho subject , and then his purchaser will know what ho ig buying and bargains for . Secondly : by the

    author ' s own confession , as we shall show , he isguilty of a want of proper diligence in the collection of his materials . Thirdly : if he be defective in the carting to the spot the bricks he is going to build with , he is ten times more inefficient . in the rearing , and cementing , and proportioning hia fabrie . De Foe was not onl y abreast of the most forward and far-seeing of his contemporaries , but was also a contemned and ridiculed harbinger of much that is now enacted , to our practical advantage , in this country . He is closely tied to what is present to us , as well as intimately mixed up with all the public history of his own times . To write the " Life and Times " of such a man must

    be one of the most arduous of literary tasks . \ To it are requisite the most delicate sense of historic perspective and proportion ; a mind emancipated from hereditary party politics ; a sympathy with , the subject , tempered by impartiality of historic judgment ; a power of grouping characters-, of condensing narrative , of making , a sentence or a . saying typ ify the meaning or intent of a life or of a party . It would be hard to pass on Mr . Chadwick decisive discredit , if he only did not stand 'the application of this high criterion . We have a right to do so when we believe that he evinces only the absence of every one of these qualities . title

    Queen Anne reigned by a parliamentaiy , although a Stuart , just as much so as her predecessor William , or her successor , George . The great leverage used by Mrs . Masham , Ilarley , and the Tories , all through her . reign ^ against the Duchess of Marlborough and Godolphin influence , was the reiterated elevation of the jure divino right of sovereigns cry , and its corollary , passive obedience . De Foe , of course , was one of the most assiduous maintainers . of " the . people ; the source of all power " view of the question . Mr . Chadwick supports his author with a ludicrous zeal , which would be most appropriate if the Bill of Rights were now endangered , or the Pretender were at Preston . But , witlrthat we find no serious fault . And here we

    mayallow that the only pleasing feature of Mr . Chadwick ' s performance is the hearty , pugilistic style in . which he goes in for his hero and his own dogmas against all comers . This characteristic would have been an excellent centre round which other merits would have harmoniously clustered . As it stands , it goes for nothing ; for it only plunges pur author into rhapsodies of eulogy he takes no pains to substantiate by their legitimate occasions ; _ and into torrents of invective which leave then- objects undepreciated , for he forgets to give the evidence of their culpability . Mr . Chadwick digresses from a reference to the anti-Dissenter bills of Queen Anne ' s reign , and the jzire divino figment . on which , they were based , into a long recapitulation of the epochs in Ensrlish history , when the doctrine of

    elective monarchy was virtually asserted , as at the accessions of Eidward III . and Henry VII . Even on this and such digressions we do not found our blame-taking ; although , certainly , they are inappropriate in a book on one man and one age , wluitevor they might have been in a continuous constitutional history of England . But oven from this digression our author digresses . Having left tho highway tor a side lane , he still must wander into a more devious and intrirato by-path . He ilies on" to prescribe Annual Parliaments as tho a'cmedy for corrupt executives . And after all , Pegasus , who has cantered over several centuries with the bit between his teeth , Iimijis abruptly bnck into the highway , mnony . st l > c / oo and tue . Presbyterians of Pinners' Hall Meeting-house , clearing in his lust bound a stii-l * il-iico , which we take the liberty of putting belore Morfars . Uaricoloy , Wiiitohtirbt , and their coadjutors ol tho ballot and

    society . n "Ar another pnrt of this book I haivo proposed , as a punishment for bribery and intimidation for inon in hiirh place in this world ' s sinilun , stripping in Palace-yard , Westminster , and tying to u cart-tail and Uomrlng down tho Strand to lumnlo-bar . Thiss a bettor protection to tho voter than tho ballotbox ; tho ballot-bo ? you might forgo , hut thoro would bo no forging under tho lash , of two drummers from ! tlioJtoot Guards . Thoro is a way of protection ta tho voter s and that way must bo adopted \ ami vltliout tho ballot , too . "—Page 17 / 5 ,

    ¦ '¦ ¦ V ¦' . . ' ¦ Literature, Science, Art, &C.

    ¦ '¦ ¦ v ¦ ' . . ' ¦ LITERATURE , SCIENCE , ART , &c .

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    ^^ . 30 . 1859 . 1 THE LEADER . 555

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    ———^ LITERAR ? CHRONICLE OF THE WEEK .

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), April 30, 1859, page 555, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2292/page/11/