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Addison, who had appeared with peculiar lustre in the Tatler, was to shine again in the Spectator with still brighter and more permanent glory. The great charm of his diction, which has delighted readers of every class, appears to me to be a certain natural sweetness, ease, and delicacy, which no affectation can attain. Truths of all kinds-the sublime and the familiar, the serious and the comic-are taught in that peculiar style which raises in the mind a placid and equable flow of emotions,— that placidness and equability which are in a particular manner adapted to give permanency to all our pleasurable feelings. A work which warms our passions, and hurries us on with the rapid vehemence of its style, may be read once or twice with pleasure; but it is the more tranquil style which is most frequently in unison with our minds, and which, therefore, on the tenth repetition, as Horace says, will afford fresh pleasure. Addison rejected that levity and medley of matter which often appeared disadvantageously in a single paper of the Tatler, and usually wrote regular treatises on the most important and most interesting subjects of taste and morality. Such subjects will never be out of date; but the strictures on the dresses and diversions of the times, whatever merit they possessed, could not have rendered the work immortal.

With respect to the Rambler, if I have prejudices concerning it, they are all in its favor. I read it at a very early age with delight, and, I hope, with improvement. Every thing laudable and useful in the conduct of life is recommended in it, often in a new manner, and always with energy, and with a dignity which commands attention. When I consider it with a view to its effects on the generality of the people, on those who stand most in need of this mode of instruction, it appears greatly inferior to the easy and natural Spectator. And, indeed, with all my prepossessions in favor of this writer, I cannot but agree with the opinion of the public which has condemned in his style an affected appearance of pomposity.

The Adventurer is an imitation of the Rambler. It is written with remarkable spirit, and with the benevolent design of promoting all that is good and amiable. The stories make a very conspicuous figure in this work, and tend to diffuse its influence among those readers who might probably have been deterred from reading it had it consisted only of didactic discourses written in a style approaching to the lexiphantic. Great, indeed, are its merits in every view; but I cannot discover in the diction the sweetness and the delicacy of Addison.

The World is written in a style different from all the preceding. There is a certain gayety and gentility diffused over it which gives it a peculiar grace when considered only as a book of amusement. That it inculcates morality with any peculiar force,

cannot be said. But it gives many valuable instructions without assuming the solemn air of a severe moralist.

The Connoisseur abounds in wit and a very pleasant species of humor. The book, however, is rather diverting than improving; yet, under the form of irony, many useful truths are conveyed with great success. There is no elevation of sentiment, and no sublime discourses on religion and morality; but there is a great deal of good sense expressed with good-humored drollery. The authors were by nature possessed of wit, and had acquired a very considerable knowledge of the classics.

Every one of these works is calculated to promote good sense and virtue; and, whatever may be the defects of each, the variety of their manners is well suited to the variety of dispositions and of tastes which occur in the mass of mankind.-Essays, No. XXVIII.

ON SIMPLICITY OF STYLE.

Food that gives the liveliest pleasure on the first taste frequently disgusts on repetition; and those things which please the palate without satiety are such as agitate but moderately, and perhaps originally caused a disagreeable sensation. Mental food is also found by experience to nourish most and delight the longest when it is not lusciously sweet. Profuse ornament and unnecessary graces, though they may transport the reader on a first perusal, commonly occasion a kind of intellectual surfeit, which prevents a second.

The Bible, the Iliad, and Shakspeare's works' are allowed to be the sublimest books that the world can exhibit. They are also truly simple; and the reader is the more affected by their indisputable sublimity, because his attention is not wearied by ineffectual attempts at it. He who is acquainted with Longinus will remember that the instances adduced by that great pattern of the excellence he describes, are not remarkable for a glaring or a pompous style, but derive their claim to sublimity from a noble energy of thought, modestly set off by a proper expression.

No author has been more universally approved than Xenophon. Yet his writings display no appearance of splendor or majesty; nothing elevated or adorned with figures; no affectation of superfluous ornament. His merit is an unaffected sweetness which no affectation can obtain. The graces seem to have conspired to form the becoming texture of his composition. And yet perhaps a common reader would neglect him, because the easy and natural air of his narrative rouses no violent emotion. More refined understandings peruse him with delight; and Cicero has

1 He should have added Milton, and placed him next to the Bible.

recorded that Scipio, when once he had opened the books of Xenophon, would with difficulty be prevailed with to close them. His style, says the same great orator and critic, is sweeter than honey, and the Muses themselves seem to have spoken from his mouth.

To write in a plain style appears easy in theory; but how few in comparison have avoided the fault of unnecessary and false ornament! The greater part seem to have mistaken unwieldy corpulence for robust vigor, and to have despised the temperate habit of sound health as meagreness. The taste for finery is more general than for symmetrical beauty and chaste elegance; and many, like Nero, would not be content till they should have spoiled, by gilding it, the statue of a Lysippus.-Essays, No. XV.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, called by a loving disciple "the inaugurator of our last and greatest era of English poetry," was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, August 4, 1792. In his early youth the sweep and intensity of his imagination were conspicuous, and he habitually withdrew himself from the rough plays of his fellows. When thirteen he was sent to Eton, where he developed the characteristic trait that moulded his whole future life,-invincible hatred of tyranny. That hateful system of "fagging," so prevalent in the English schools, was then in full force, and Shelley, for refusing to submit to its tyrannical dictation, was persecuted by every device of ingenious despotism. This he bore nobly; for the boy's nature, though shrinking and sensitive, was full of nervous vigor and manly self-reliance; so that he was not content with simply bearing all jeers and insults, but challenged and defied them; often defending the weak by the interposition of himself.

In 1810 Shelley was entered at University College, Oxford, where he studied and wrote incessantly, taking the greatest delight in disputation, and in combating received opinions, and, in his second year there, published a pamphlet questioning the arguments by which the existence of God was maintained. It was not so much an avowal of confirmed infidel opinions, as it was a challenge to discussion, and implied a desire to attain better reasoning on the side of the general belief of mankind, rather than a wish to overthrow the grounds of that belief. For this he was summoned before the master and two or three fellows of his college, and formally expelled. A more unwise course could hardly have been taken to meet the arguments of an earnest and inquiring mind by the mere authority of force. Had these men treated the youthful poet kindly, and set apart a day when the great questions he had started would be fully and freely discussed, they might have won him over to sound evangelical truth, and perhaps made him her eloquent champion through life. As it was, by their treatment and by the cruel course pursued by an unsympathetic father, who forbade him ever to revisit his home, he was driven still farther from religion, and made to consider the Christian system as a form of tyranny, and its professors as bigots and despots.

In 1811 Shelley made a runaway-match with a Miss Harriet Westbrooke, the daughter of a retired hotel-keeper. He was attracted to her by her personal charms; but neither her birth, education, nor character adapted her to any enduring sympathy with her husband's imaginative and intellectual nature; and after three years the mutual incompatibility of the ill-joined pair produced a separation. She returned to her father with her two children, and two years afterwards she destroyed herself; and, though it was from causes not connected immediately with him, so far as we can learn, this suicide cast a shadow over Shelley's subsequent life. He married, however, again, and this time more happily. Mary Wollstonecraft, the daughter of William Godwin, linked her fate with his, and thenceforward till his death he found refuge from his troubles and persecutions in his wife's warm love and genuine sympathy.

Shelley spent two or three years in travelling on the Continent, and in Italy formed intimate friendships with Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Lord Byron. His productions up to this time had been Queen Mab,1 a miniature poem published at the age of eighteen; Alastor; the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty; and the Hymn to Mont Blanc. In 1817, when Shelley had returned to England to claim his children, he hired a house at Marlow, and there wrote The Revolt of Islam, the longest of his poems. It contains many passages alluding to his sufferings from the Chancery decree which took his children from him, and much vehement declamation against the laws and their administration. While settled at Marlow, he was distinguished by the most active benevolence to the poor, and experienced an attack of ophthalmia, contracted while attending on them. In 1818 he left England for Italy, where he lived till his death in 1822, on intimate terms with the large circle of English scholars and poets there resident. During these years he wrote his other large poems, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Hellas, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, Julian and Maddalo, and Adonais, his most perfect poem, inspired by his sorrow for poor Keats's death.3 On the 8th of July, 1822, he started with an intimate friend in 1 It was on account of the atheistic senti- | lime as poetically beautiful. I could adduce ments and hostility to Christianity shown both in the text and notes of this poem perhaps the richest promise ever given at so early an age of poetic power-that Lord Chancellor Eldon, in 1817, decided against the claim of Shelley to his children by his first wife, on the ground that one holding such opinions was entirely unsuitable to their proper education. This decision embittered Shelley still more against state constituted authority,

and drove him further from the truths of Christianity. But let us hear one of his admirers: In one sense Shelley was an infidel; in another sense he was not an infidel. I could read you passages from Queen Mab which every right-minded man would indignantly condemn, and I could read you others breathing a spirit of benevolence and aspiration, and trust and purity, which are as sub

numbers of such passages: the poem is full of
them, steeped in a flood of earnest desire to
see this earth regenerated and purified, and
the spirit of man mingling with the Infinite
Spirit of Good.
All that Shelley knew
of Christianity was as a system of exclusion
and bitterness which was to drive him from
his country.
Yet there was a spirit in
poor Shelley's mind which might have assimi-
lated with the Spirit of his Redeemer,-nay,
which, I will dare to say, was kindred with
that Spirit, if only his Redeemer had been
differently imaged to him. Let who will de-
nounce Shelley, I will not. I will not brand
with atheism the name of one whose life was
one dream of enthusiastic, however imprac
ticable, philanthropy."-REV. F. W. ROBERTSON,
of whom see a notice in the Sixth Decade.

2Shelley styles his new poem Prometheus Unbound,
And 'tis like to remain so while time circles round;
For surely an age would be spent in the finding
A reader so weak as to pay for the binding."

8 In addition to his larger poems, Shelley wrote a multitude of minor poems,--some of which are of singular beauty,-tales, miscellanies in prose, and many translations from

THEODORE HOOK.

the German and the Greek. The latter are of high excellence, and drew forth warm praises from the Quarterly Review.

a sail-boat from Leghorn for his home on the Bay of Spezia. A violent storm arose, the boat was overset, and the two voyagers perished.

As a poet Shelley will always have a small circle of admirers; but to the great mass of mankind his poetry will be, as it were, a sealed book. It possesses but little human interest; his characters are abstractions; his scenes of felicity are Utopian. He deals not with the details of daily life, and is, therefore, apart from all ordinary sympathies. Even in his best efforts there always remain an obscurity and a dreaminess which will probably prevent his poems ever being extensively read. Yet no poet since Milton has shown a greater mastery over language, and certainly few, if any, in this century have exerted a greater influence over the minds that lead English literature."

THE RETURN OF SPRING.

Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows, reappear;

Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead seasons' bier.
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard and the golden snake,

Like unimprison'd flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood, and stream, and field, and hill, and ocean,
A quickening life from the earth's heart has burst,

As it has ever done, with change and motion,

From the great morning of the world! when first
God dawn'd on chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst,
Diffuse themselves, and spend in love's delight
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

1 I can no more understand Shelley than you can. His poetry is thin-sown with profit or delight."-CHARLES LAMB, Letter to Barton.

mystical speculations a search after truth; they are no such thing, and are as little worth the attention of reasoning and responsible Shelley was undoubtedly a man of genius, man as the heterogeneous reveries of nightof very high genius,-but of a peculiar and mare. They are a mere flaring up in the face unhealthy kind. It is needless to disguise the of all that Revelation has mercifully disclosed, fact, and it accounts for all: his mind was and all that sober Reason has confirmed. diseased; he never knew, even from boyhood, Shelley's faith was a pure psychological negawhat it was to breathe the atmosphere of tion, and cannot be confuted, simply because healthy life, to have the mens sana in corpore it asserts nothing; and, under the childish 8.2 His sensibilities were over-acute; his idea that all the crime, guilt, and misery of morality was thoroughly morbid; his meta- the world resulted from-what?-not the dephysical speculations illogical, incongruous, pravity of individuals, but from the very incomprehensible,—alike baseless and object-means, civil and ecclesiastical, by which these, less The suns and systems of his universe were mere nebula; his continents were a chaos of dead matter; his oceans a world of waters, and without a shore.' For the law of gravitaGen-that law which was to preserve the planets in their courses-he substituted some Edemonstrable dreamlike reflection of a dream, which he termed intellectual beauty. Life, according to him, was a phantasmagorial pictured vision, mere colors on the sunset elonds, and earth a globe hung on nothing,self-governing, yet, strange to say, without It is gratuitous absurdity to call his

laws

in all ages and nations, have been at least attempted to be controlled, he seemed to take an insane delight in selecting for poetical illustration subjects utterly loathsome and repulsive, and which religion and morality, the virtuous and the pure, the whole natural heart and spirit of upright man, either rises up in rebellion against, or shrinks back from instinctively and with horror."-MOIR's Poetcal Literature of the Nineteenth Century.

For a fine paper comparing and contrasting Byron and Shelley, see Miscellanies, by Rev. Charles Kingsley.

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