of poesy, flowing under ground, is in both betrayed by now and then a solitary word. And the reason is, that, to both, facts are real existences: they do not lie leaning upon the cold page; they stand upright, and, through the golden haze which covers the eye of the seer, look ideal. The facts, too, though simple, are select, and suitable for imaginative treatment. There is a youthful freshness of imagination about Macaulay, which is most delightful to see. Shallow criticasters say of him, in rebuke and derision, that he writes like a school-boy, paying him, unintentionally, one of the highest compliments they could bestow upon a full-grown and thoroughly-furnished man. The secret, as it seems to us, of perfect composition, is manly wisdom, uttered in youthful language. Coleridge calls genius "the power of producing the feelings and freshness of youth into the powers and passions of manhood;" so Macaulay, to this hour, talks of the deepest speculations of policy and poesy with all the enthusiasm of an Eton boy. One "childish thing," however, it were well for him to put away; we mean a certain mannerism of style, which adheres to all his articles. He is the most easily detected of writers, except, perhaps, Christopher North. You cannot read two sentences without being aware of his identity. All his prominent qualities, his muscular nerve, his balanced antithesis, his sharp short form of sentence, his thoroughly English spirit, his enthusiasm breaking out at intervals, his elaborate pictures set at distances, his decisive tone, his unbounded command of illustration, his keen and crushing contempt, his intimate knowledge of floating personal history, all these lie upon the surface, and are perpetually reproduced, in every one of his compositions. He is not the most profound, or poetical, or ingenious, but he is the most rhetorical of critics. Byron was often blamed for snatching the sentiments of the Lakers out of their mouths, and uttering them in prouder and more impassioned accents. Macaulay seizes the paradoxes of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and presents them in more imposing and commanding forms, and bedecks them from the exuberant riches of his own learning; and announces them in a tone of more perfect assurance. And, as Byron was the interpreter between the Lakers, as poets, and the public, so is Macaulay between them and the public, as critics. Men receive from him dicta, which were caviare to them from less popular authorities. And an eloquent Aaron he is! Who looks not back to the first perusal of his Milton with delight? The picture of the Puritans "looking down upon the rich and the eloquent, upon nobles and upon priests, with contempt, esteeming themselves rich in a more enduring treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language-nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand "-was magnificent. And with a like power has he since depicted Dryden and

Machiavelli, Byron and Johnson, Bunyan and Bacon, Frederick the Great and Warren Hastings. Some poet says, that after reading Dante he could never write from sheer despair of emulating his excellence. So to a critic, reading Macaulay is the worst possible preparative for composition. He can only wonder and shrink into insignificance.

But far better than even these celebrated articles are his "Lays of Ancient Rome." He goes down the battle like a scythed chariot. What homely grandeur stamps their every line! How completely does he reproduce those early Roman days! Standing on the old Tarpeian rock, he blows his magic horn, and History gives up the dead which are in it, and the "foster babes" of the old she-wolf-"the men of iron-" rise an exceeding great army, and range around him, and, hark, he shouts, and they echo the thrilling cry:

Hail to the great Asylum;

Hail to the hill-tops seven;

Hail to the fire which burns for aye,

And the shield which fell from heaven.

Since Homer, or since Hardyknute, we have had nothing like those ballads except Lockhart's, and his own brilliant fragment, "The Armada."

And yet there are those who talk as if Macaulay had come to the dregs and lees of his mind-had, forsooth, exhausted himself. So is the sky exhausted at the close of a long day of rain. But the clouds, after the rain, return; and so, if he has exhausted one vein, there are hundreds-thousands ampler and deeper still, which it is in his power to open and to empty. We wish him Godspeed; especially in the devoirs which, if report speaks correctly, he is paying to the Muse of History. Let Hallam, and Alison, in this case, look to their luarels. Dear, and deservedly dear, are they to Clio; but dearer still is our illustrious author, any one of whose articles is worth a hundred of the ordinary works which are dignified by the proud name of history.

Note.-The reader is referred for a fuller and more matured estimate of Macaulay, to the "Second Gallery."

THOMAS AIRD.

"BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE" has unquestionably collected around it one of the most distinguished of the many clusters into which the literary men of the present day have gravitated. Its roll of names is a brilliant one, including " that great Scotsman with the

* Can the reader guess where the "Lays" were written? In the War Office-a most appropriate place.

meteor-pen," as the Corn-Law Rhymer calls him, Wilson; Lockhart, the sharp, and caustic, and manly spirit; Hogg, the " poetlaureate to the Faery Queen;" Galt, the De Foe of Scotland, the only writer we know completely up to Sawney in all his wily ways; Delta, the tender and beautiful poet; MacGinn, the wild wag; De Quincey, the lawful inheritor of Coleridge's mystic throne and appetite for the poppy; Doubleday, the elegant dramatist; Warren, the vigorous weaver of melo-dramatic tale; Croly, the impetuous and eloquent; Simmons, that fine scion of the Byronic school of poetry; Moir, the accomplished critic; Ferrier, the rising metaphysician; Aytoun, the pleasing, nor yet uninspired versifier; and last, not least, Thomas Aird, author of "Religious Characteristics," "Othuriel," &c., whom we propose, as he is comparatively little known, more particularly to introduce to our readers, and who certainly, in point of original genius, is surpassed by few of the names we have just cited.

Thomas Aird is, we say, a man of original genius. He sees all things, from a constellation to a daisy, in a certain severe and searching light. His mind is stiffened by nature's hand, into one sublime position. His stream of thought is not broad, nor winding, but narrow, deep, moving right onward, and lurid in its lustre, as though a thunder-cloud were "bowed" over it, throughout its entire course. His original sympathies are obviously with the dark, the stern, and the terrible. He delights, or rather is irresistibly led, to paint the fiercer passions of the human soul, the drearier aspects of nature, the gloomy side of the future world. While his heart is full of the milk of human kindness, his genius has a raven wing, and an almost Dantesque dreadfulness of tone. All his works are studies from Scripture, but breathe more of the element of Sinai than of Calvary. He has evidently spent his youth in meditative solitude, with more thoughts than books; Bunyan and the Bible all his library, but these deeply pondered have pressed down a load of influence upon his genius, and account at once for its monotony and its power. He "curdles up" meaning into his words, oftentimes to an oppressive degree. In his desire to do justice to the fulness of the view presented him of a scene or a subject, in manly aversion to the gingerbread, the lackadaisical, the merely pretty, he is apt to become harsh, elliptic, abrupt, obscure, at once to stuff too much thought into his words, and to pack it too closely together. His great power lies in descriptionknotty, minute, comprehensive, and piercing portraiture. He has hardly the constructive faculty, is perhaps unable to produce a whole; but what a strange, unearthly light he casts on the jagged edges and angles of things! Inevitably does he leave the impression upon you, as you read, whether it be to blame or to praise, this is no echo, but a native voice, sounding from the inner penetralia of nature's own temple. "His mind," says Wilson, "dwells

in a lofty sphere." He breathes freely an air which it is difficult for inferior men to respire. He is drawn by a native attraction to the snowy summits of high and holy thought. There, as the "moon glazes the savage pines" around, as the wind lifts the unresisting snow at his feet, as the melancholy song of the Aurora sounds past him like the pant of spirits, he meditates strangely, and with folded arms, upon life and death-"Erebus and old Nox," Chaos and Demogorgon-wild shapes, meanwhile, sweeping by, in the wan moonlight; demoniacs from Galilee, who seem already to "dwell mid horned flames and blasphemy in the red range of hell;" gibbering ghosts, with "fire-curled cinder-crusted tongues;" a Father's form, dilating wrathfully as it comes; sooty negroes, with black enormous trumpets at their lips; Nebuchadnezzar, with insane, eyes, lightening through his feathery hairs; and bringing up the rear, the " Grizzly terror" himself, the fiend-dreamer on Mount Aksbeck, "like fiery arrow shot aloft from some unmeasured bow." This sphere is certainly lofty, but remote from human sympathies; as solitary as it is sublime, a " dread circle," carved by the magician, like a scalp on a snowy and savage hill, and across which few, save congenial spirits, can ever break. Aird's genius, indeed, is not, like that of Milton, one, to the appreciation of which men must and will grow. It is rather, in its intense peculiarity, like that of Coleridge or Shelley, which, if you hate, you hate at once and for ever; which, if you love, you love at first sight, and " even to the end." Hopeless of his works ever becoming popular in any sense, we do no despair of seeing them take up, in the hearts of a select few, the place due to their originality, their power, their daring, and their religious spirit. His faults are obscurity, mannerism, a want of flow and fluency of verse, a style often cumbered and perplexed, and an air-it is no more-of elaborate search after peculiarities of thought and expression. Such are, however, we believe, nothing but excrescences upon the robust oak of his essential originality. It is the struggle of a native mind to convey itself in a vehicle so imperfect as words, which has begot all those minute strangenesses of style, which are but the wild veerings of a strong-winged bird, beating up against a contrary wind. Nature has given Aird genius in high measure, but art has not added the calm and completeness of an equal empire over words. His power over them is great; but it is a convulsive despotism, rather than a mild, steady, and legitimate sway. His language is picturesque and powerful; but comes from far, and comes as a captive. His obscurity, the grievous fault of his earlier productions, has been manfully sifted out of his later writings. His mannerism he has not been able altogether to remove. It adheres to him, and will, as the burr did to the voice of Coleridge, equally natural, and equally cureless.

T

Such is the short portraiture of a unique, who, had his ambition been equal to his powers, might have taken, long ere now, a much higher place; one who is strong and rounded in his originality as in a castle, but who has laid down all the peculiarities of that genius, and all the keys of that castle, meekly and gently at the foot of the Cross; who has never, we believe, sung one strain which did not mount, ere its close, as if by instinct, to heaven. He is, in the true sense, a religious poet; not merely making an occasional irruption into the consecrated region with some; not singing with others certain sickly strains of loathsome sweetness and affected unction; not, with a third class, "breaking into blank the gospel of St Luke, and boldy pilfering from the Pentateuch," but viewing the Cross through the medium of his own genius. His soul dwells in the haunted climes of Palestine, "tosses its golden head afar on the snowy mountains cold" of Mount Lebanon, reclines on the banks of the Lake of Galilee, mounts Tabor hill, and sees, with kindling rapture, the eclipsed light of heaven bursting forth from every pore of the Saviour's transfigured frame -his form, long bent under a weight of wo, erecting itself like a palm-tree from pressure; his eye shining out like a sun from the skirts of a departed cloud; his brow expanding into its true dimensions, its wrinkles fleeing away, its sweat-drops of climbing toil changed by that sudden radiance into bright bubbles of glory, when

Light o'erflow'd him like a sea, and raised his shining brow,

And the voice came forth that bade all worlds the Son of God avow.

In another and a darker mood, he follows the demoniac amid the tombs, or traces him along the crackling margin of the Dead Sea, or pursues Nebuchadnezzar into the wilderness, or catches the skirts of Ezekiel, advancing under the very ring of the wheels, so high that they were dreadful; or reverently, tenderly, and from afar off, follows the footsteps of the awful sufferer into the gloom of Gethsemane, or up the ascent of Calvary's quaking hill. He has caught much of the spirit of the olden Hebrew prophet bards; their abruptness, austere imagination, and shadowy sanctities. He has drunk out his inspiration from those deep springs, which at the rod of prophecy sprang out of the Syrian wilderness. His genius, as it is said of Bunyan, has not been dipped in dews of Castalie, but baptised with the Holy Ghost and with fire.

His first work (beyond a volume of juvenile poems, inclusive of "Murtzoufle," a tragedy, discovering no dramatic, though much poetic power), is entitled "Religious Characteristics." It attracted at the time considerable notice, and is still fresh in the memories and much in the hands of those who allowed their generous penetration to pierce past the rough rind of its style, into the rare power and beauty which its core contained. Among these, we