he shows that his spirit of amity and conciliation is not diminished. 'I went to England again on a short visit in 1829. An interval of but four years had elapsed; yet I was amazed at the increase of London. The Regent's Park, which, when I first knew the west-end of the town, disclosed nothing but lawns and fields, was now a city. You saw long rows of lofty buildings, in their outward aspect magnificent. On this whole space was set down a population of probably not less than fifty or sixty thousand souls. Another city, hardly smaller, seemed to have sprung up in the neighbourhood of St. Pancras Church and the London University. Belgrave Square, in an opposite region, broke upon me with like surprise. The road from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich exhibited for several miles compact ranges of new houses. Finchley Common, desolate in 1819, was covered with neat cottages, and indeed villages. In whatever direction I went, indications were similar. I saw nothing of Carlton Terrace, for Carlton House was gone, or of the street, of two miles, from that point to Park Crescent, surpassing any other in London, or any that I saw in Europe. To make room for this new and spacious street, old ones had been pulled down, of which no vestige remained. I could scarcely, but for the evidence of the senses, have believed it all. The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remarks, that the description, composed in the Theodosian age, of the many stately mansions in Rome might almost excuse the exaggeration of the poet; that Rome contained a multitude of palaces, and that each palace was equal to a city. Is the British metropolis advancing to that destiny? Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and other provincial towns that I visited, appeared, on their smaller scales, to have increased as much. In the midst of it all, nearly every newspaper that I opened rang the changes upon the distress and poverty of England. Mr. Peel's bill, banishing bank-notes under five pounds from circulation, had recently passed. There was great clamour-there is always clamour at something among this people. Prices had fallen-trade was said to be irrecoverably ruined, through the over-production of goods. Į have since seen the state of things at that epoch better described, perhaps, as the result of an under-production of money. Workmen in many places were out of employ; there were said to be 14,000 of this description in Manchester. I saw portions of them walking along the streets. Most of this body had struck for wages. I asked how they subsisted when doing nothing. It was answered, that they had laid up funds by joint contributions among themselves whilst engaged in work. In no part of Liverpool or its extensive environs did I see * We think it is Goldsmith who shrewdly observes, that no man can hope to be popular with the English people who will not tell them that they are in a state of the greatest poverty and distress; and one of the causes of the overthrow of the Duke of Wellington's ministry was an assertion in the king's speech, in the beginning of 1830, that distress, though partially severe, was not general.' It was, and always has been, John Bull's pleasure to be miserable, pauperism; pauperism; the paupers for that entire district being kept within the limits of its poor-house; in which receptacle I was informed there were 1500. I passed through the vale of Cheshire; I saw in that fertile district, in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, appearances of wide-spread prosperity, in the lands, houses, canals, roads, public works, domestic animals, people-in everything that the eye of the merely transient traveller took in.'-pp. xi.—xiii. We earnestly recommend to the attention of thinking men this description by a republican, by an impartial and not unintelligent observer, of that state of a country which his Majesty's present ministers and their drivers, the mob, (followers, they have none) thought so deplorable as to render urgent and inevitable the 'perilous experiment' of parliamentary reform-and all the other changes in every branch-legal, financial, clerical, commercial— of our national policy, by which this once happy and, by all mankind, admired and envied country is now menaced. ART. III.-Bibliotheca Græca, curantibus Fr. Jacobs et THE elegy and the ode of the Greeks flowed out of the Homeric poetry like two streams from a common fountainhead. They both preserved, throughout, some touch of the quality of the parent waters, whilst they mingled with it, in vary ing proportions, and not by the same process, the new elements which each took up in its particular course. The chief and most characteristic of those new elements was a distinct expression of the personal feelings of the individual. Poetry, thenceforth, ceased to be a sound of many voices, kept in tune by common subjects and an all-pervading spirit, and became, instead, the out-pouring of the poet's own heart, the record of his hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows, the escape of his patriotism or his love, the vehicle of his flattery, or the instrument of his revenge. The fragments of Callinus and Tyrtæus seem to show that the elegy was in its inception deeply imbued with the warlike spirit of the old heroic poetry; but it was not long before the unerring instinct of the Greek taste restricted the use of the couplet to the expression of feelings connected with the natural incidents or pru 2 B 2 dential dential ethics of private life, to the complainings of disappointed love, or the lamentations of bereaved affection.* But whatever the immediate theme or occasion might happen to be, so far as we can judge from the remains of Mimnermus, Theognis, and Simonides, there breathed in every elegiac poem a characteristic spirit of melancholy-that gentle melancholy, in which the transient flashes of a reckless gaiety are as natural and sweet as the intermittent twinklings of the lesser fire-fly in the silent darkness of a tropical night. How true to human nature-how true, more especially, of those whose minds and bodies are of the subtlest fabric-that temper is, which produced such a strain of poetry, many of our readers can, by personal experience or observation, abundantly testify. It exists in us, as men, now as of old; but Christianity, whether we have faith in it or not, has, by necessity, much altered in any of us the genuine character of the Greek melancholy;-for how can the true believer ever be without hope, or how can the infidel, say what he may, be entirely without apprehension? Whereas, in the paganism of antique Greece, there was neither promise nor threat by revelation, and the spirit which then moved in the minds of men-with reverence be it spokenwas a spirit that knew not the living God. But there is another mood of feeling, as truly natural, and more common to men in social life, which requires, and works out for itself, a freer issue, and a more splendid vehicle of poetic expression. Moreover, there are many subjects and occasions which are calculated to excite the passions so vehemently as to suspend all sense of melancholy, and which demand an utterance too rapid, too figurative, and peremptory, to be compatible with the character or capacity of the elegy. In thankfulness for national deliverance, in exultation at national victory, the ode had its first rise; and it is in the state of feeling, called into energy by such and similar emergencies-in anger, desire, admiration, joy-in danger and difficulties, in conflict and success-that it has ever since found its spring and its aliment. Ages before that marvellous instrument of music, the Greek language, was ready for the touch of a Sappho or a Pindar, the venerable Hebrew of the patriarchs had been wrought up to the very highest pitch of human sublimity in the triumphant songs of Moses and Deborah.+ In these, *The reader may find this subject more fully treated in a late article in this Journal on Greek Elegy. + Exodus xv. Judges v. Perhaps there does not exist a more perfect instance of the pure lyric impetus-of the transition with a link, than in vv. 9, 10, 11, 12, of the fifteenth chapter of Exodus. Conceive them arranged to music, or sung by Miriam and all the women, in this manner: Semi-chorus (rapidly)- The enemy said, "I will pursue, I will overtake, I will these, the total being, the very soul and body, as it were, of the poet become vocal; and images of national delivery, of conquest, and revenge, are glanced forth, like sparks of fire, from the solemn, because intense, enthusiasm of the leader out of Egypt, and the victorious mother in Israel. Although every thought, every word, in these effusions be very Hebrew of the Hebrews, how easy to distinguish the diverse operation of personal feeling in the more dignified and devout rejoicing of the meekest of men, and in the fierce thanksgiving, the bitter imprecation, the blessing of Jael, and the picturing of Sisera's mother, which perhaps could only have come from the heart of a flushed and exultant woman! But admirable as these poems are, under all the disadvantages of translation-if indeed they do suffer much disadvantage in the nervous diction and fine rhythm of our English Bible-they by no means present the only models of lyric expression, even amongst the people of Israel. Besides the second song of Moses *-his departing hymn-we need not point out the many noble and affecting, but less impetuous, effusions of praise and thanksgiving, with which we are all so familiar in the book of Psalms, in the authorised translation of which, strange to say, there is, if not less genius, certainly less accuracy than in any other part of our version. The force and the colouring, indeed, may vary according to the age, and circumstances, and temper of a Moses, a Deborah, and a David; but, in every age, and under all circumstances-so long as Israel was truly Israel-the Hebrew Muse was uniformly simple and sublime—in her birth and development always essentially lyric-bursting forth with a boldness of imagery, a ruggedness of address, a dogmatism of passion, a divinity of enthusiasm, which might have failed in producing a result of moral harmony, had not her feet been planted on the Rock of ages, and her lips touched with fire from the altar of the Lord! The character of the Greek lyric muse was as different as might be expected from the very different circumstances under which she first sprang forth into form, and continued to flourish. In her power of moving and concentrating passion, of embodying national or personal enthusiasm, she was, perhaps, not inferior to her elder sister; but with that deepness of tone, that awfulness of import-yea, sometimes that terror and weakness-which distin divide the spoil; my lust' shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them!"' Semi-chorus (slowly)-Thou didst blow with thy wind-the sea covered themthey sank as lead in the mighty waters.' Chorus (quicker, but in solemn time)- Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like unto thee,-glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders? Thou stretchedst out thy right hand-the earth swallowed them, * Deut. xxxii. - guish the songs and singers of Israel, she had little sympathy or correspondence. The national separation, the miraculous history, the typical ritual, the worship of a God against whose direct government idolatry was treason these mysteries, or such as these, which overshadow the face of the Hebrew poetry, did not affect the imagination of the Greek poet, excepting, perhaps, in his connexion with the earlier tragic drama. With that single exception, all the elder poetry of Greece breathes a spirit of undoubting obedience to the popular or Olympian polytheism-a scheme of gods compounded, partly of the canonized heroes of the ante-historical times, and partly of the personified forms, functions, and powers of the material world, in conjunction with, but generally as agents superior to, some of the passions and moral qualities of man, also personified. That something, too, of the popular religion and worship was borrowed from Egypt and Phoenicia few can doubt; but whatever was so borrowed was re-cast, or at least re-coloured, by fancy and art; and, let the deity or the rite come from what region soever it might, there soon fell upon it and around it, the same sunshiny hue, the same elegance of form and rhythm of motion, which the spirit of Beauty-the aboriginal genius of Greece-continually poured forth upon the games, the sacrifices, and the funerals, the Statues, and temples, and memorial tombs,' of that renowned land. To this spirit, as to an imperial sovereign, the whole poetry of Greece was subject; to its rules and requisitions, all peculiarities of theme, all shapings of the individual imagination, were uniformly reduced. It was a veritable presence -a power of light, and life, and harmony, prevailing with a gentle but strong coercion over all thought, and passion, and purposeraising the low, illumining the obscure, repressing the extravagant, and infusing throughout a unity of its own creation. It is the energy of this living principle that, in our judgment, strikingly distinguishes the Greek from the Hebrew poetry-giving that symmetry of form and ordonnance* of composition to the first, which are the characteristic deficiencies of the last. A Greek poem is obviously, to the critical eye, a work of art, the end of which is to produce pleasure, consistently with perfect beauty in the instrument of production; the Hebrew song was an outbreak of the heart, the only law and object of which were a significant expression of strong emotion. In the one, the workmanship is sometimes more valuable than the materials; in the other, the *We venture to suggest the naturalization of this expressive word, as being, in its formation, in accordance with the genius of our language-and itself without a synonyme-the two pre-requisite conditions, in our judgment, to the use of a foreign term in pure style. materials |