We cannot condescend to enumerate them. Before we quit this part of our subject, we must add, that Scotland boasts but one original newspaper, the Scotsman, and that newspaper but one subject—Political Economy.—The Editor, however, may be said to be king of it!

Of the Magazines, which are a sort of cater-cousins to ourselves, we would wish to speak with tenderness and respect. There is the Gentleman’s Magazine, at one extremity of the series, and Mr. Blackwood’s at the other—and between these there is the European, which is all abroad,—and the Lady’s, which is all at home,—and the London, and the Monthly, and the New Monthly—nay, hold; for if all their names were to be written down, one Article or one Number would hardly contain them—so many of them are there, and such antipathy do they hold to each other! For the Gentleman’s Magazine we profess an affection. We like the name, we like the title of the Editor, (Mr. Sylvanus Urban—what a rustic civility is there in it!)—we like the frontispiece of St. John’s Gate—a well-preserved piece of useless antiquity, an emblem of the work—we like the table of contents, which promises no more than it performs. There we are sure of finding the last lingering remains of a former age, with the embryo production of the new—some nine days wonder, some forlorn Hic jacet—all that is forgotten, or soon to be so—an alligator stuffed, a mermaid, an Egyptian mummy—South-sea inventions, or the last improvement on the spinning-jenny—an epitaph in Pancras Church-yard, the head of Memnon, Lord Byron’s Farewell, a Charade by a Young Lady, and Dr. Johnson’s dispute with Osborn the bookseller! Oh! happy mixture of indolence and study, of order and disorder! Who, with the Gentleman’s Magazine held carelessly in his hand, has not passed minutes, hours, days, in lackadaisical triumph over ennui! Who has not taken it up on parlour window-seats? Who has not ran it slightly through in reading-rooms? If it has its faults, they are those of an agreeable old age; and we could almost wish some ill to those who can say any harm of it.

The Monthly Magazine was originally an improvement on the Gentleman’s, and the model on which succeeding ones have been formed. It was a literary Miscellany, variously and ably supported—a sort of repository for the leading topics of conversation of the day; but it has of late degenerated into a register of patents, and an account of the proprietor’s philosophy of the universe, in answer to Sir Isaac Newton! Other publications have succeeded to it, and prevailed. Which of these is the best, the London or the New Monthly? We are not the Œdipus to solve this riddle; and indeed it might be difficult, for we believe many of the writers are the same in each. But both contain articles, we will be bold to say, in the form of Essays, Theatrical Criticism, Jeux-d’esprit, which may be considered as the flower and cream of periodical literature. To those who judge of books in the lump, by the cubic contents, the binding, or the letters on the back, and who think that all that is conveyed between blue or yellow or orange-tawny covers, must be vain and light as the leaves that flutter round it, we would remark, that many of these fugitive, unowned productions, have been collected, and met with no unfavourable reception, in solid octavo or compact duodecimo. Are there not the quaint and grave subtleties of Elia, the extreme paradoxes of the author of Table Talk, the Confessions of an Opium-eater, the copious tales of Traditional Literature, all from one Magazine? We believe, the agreeable lucubrations of Mr. Geoffrey Crayon also first ventured to meet the public eye in an obscure publication of the same sort—

To say truth, some such ordeal seems almost necessary as a passport to literary reputation. The public like to taste works in the sample, before they swallow them whole. If in the two leading Magazines just alluded to, we do not meet with any great fund of anecdote, with much dramatic display of character, with the same number of successful experiments in the world of letters as at an earlier period of our history, yet the reader may perhaps think the want of these in a great measure compensated by a better sustained tone of general reflection, of mild sentiment, and liberal taste; which we hold, in spite of some strong exceptions, to be the true characteristics of the age. The fault of the London Magazine is, that it wants a sufficient unity of direction and purpose. There is no particular bias or governing spirit,—which neutralizes the interest. The articles seem thrown into the letter-box, and to come up like blanks or prizes in the lottery—all is in a confused, unconcocted state, like the materials of a rich plum-pudding before it has been well boiled. On the contrary, there may be said to be too much tampering with the management of the New Monthly, till the taste and spirit evaporate. A thing, by being overdone, stands a chance of being insipid—the fastidious may end in languor—the agreeable may cloy by repetition. The Editor, we are afraid, pets it too much,—and it is accordingly more remarkable for delicacy than robustness of constitution, and, by being faultless, loses some of its effect.

Over-refinement, however, cannot be charged as the failing of most of our periodical publications. Some are full of polemical orthodoxy—some of methodistical deliration—some inculcate servility, and others preach up sedition—some creep along in a series of dull truisms and stale moralities—while others, more ‘lively, audible, and full of vent,’ subsist on the great staple of falsehood and personality, and enjoy all the advantages that result from an entire contempt for the restraints of decency, consistency, or candour. There is no pretence, indeed, or concealment of the principles on which such works are conducted: and the reader feels almost as if he were admitted to look in on a club of thorough-going hack authors, in their moments of freedom and exaltation. There is plenty of slang-wit going, and some shrewd remark. The pipes and tobacco are laid on the table, with a set-out of oysters and whisky, and bludgeons and sword-sticks in the corner! A profane parody is recited, or a libel on an absent member—and songs are sung in mockery of their former friends and employers. From foul words they get to blows and broken heads; till, drunk with ribaldry, and stunned with noise, they proceed to throw open the windows and abuse the passengers in the street, for their want of religion, morals, and decorum! This is a modern and an enormous abuse, and requires to be corrected.

The illiberality of the Periodical Press is ‘the sin that most easily besets it.’ We have already accounted for this from the rank and importance it has assumed, which have made it a necessary engine in the hands of party. The abuse, however, has grown to a height that renders it desirable that it should be crushed, if it cannot be corrected; for it threatens to overlay, not only criticism and letters, but to root out all common honesty and common sense from works of the greatest excellence, upon large classes of society. All character, all decency, the plainest matters of fact, or deductions of reason, are made the sport of a nickname, an inuendo, or a bold and direct falsehood. The continuance of this nuisance rests not with the writers, but with the public; it is they that pamper it into the monster it is; and, in order to put an end to the traffic, the best way is to let them see a little what sort of thing it is which they encourage. Both of the extreme parties in the State, the Ultra-Whigs as well as the Ultra-Royalists, have occasionally trespassed on the borders of this enormity: But it is only the worst part of the Ministerial Press that has had the temptation, the hardihood, or the cowardice to make literature the mere tool and creature of party-spirit; and, in the sacredness of the cause in which it was embarked, to disregard entirely the profligacy of the means. It was pious and loyal to substitute abuse for argument, and private scandal for general argument. He who calumniated his neighbour was a friend to his country. If you could not reply to your opponent’s objections, you might caricature his person; if you were foiled by his wit or learning, you might recover your advantage by stabbing his character. The cry of ‘No Popery,’ or ‘the Constitution is in danger,’ was an answer to all cavils or scruples. Who would hesitate about the weapons he used to repel an attack on all that was dear and valuable in civil institutions? He who drew off the public attention from a popular statement, by alluding to a slip in the private history of an individual, did well; he who embodied a flying rumour as an undoubted fact, for the same laudable end, did better; and he who invented a palpable falsehood, did best of all. He discovered most invention, most zeal, and most boldness; and received the highest reward for the sacrifice of his time, character, and principle. If the jest took, it was gravely supported; if it was found out, it was well intended: To belie a Whig, a Jacobin, a Republican, or a Dissenter, was doing God and the king good service; at any rate, whether true or false, detected or not, the imputation left a stain behind it, and would be ever after coupled with the name of the individual, so as to disable him, and deter others from doing farther mischief. Knowledge, writing, the press was found to be the great engine that governed public opinion; and the scheme therefore was, to make it recoil upon itself, and act in a retrograde direction to its natural one. Prejudice and power had a provocation to this extreme and desperate mode of defence, in their instinctive jealousy of any opposition to their sentiments or will. They felt that reason was against them—and therefore it was necessary that they should be against reason,—they felt, too, that they could extend impunity to their agents and accomplices, whom they could easily screen from reprisals. Conscious that they were no match for modern philosophers and reformers in abstract reasoning, they paid off their dread of their talents and principles by a proportionable contempt for their persons, for which no epithets could be too mean or hateful. These were therefore poured out in profusion by their satellites. The nicknames, the cant phrases, too, were all in favour of existing institutions and opinions, and were easily devised in a contest where victory, not truth, was the object. The warfare was therefore turned into this channel from the first; and what passion dictated, a cunning and mercenary policy has continued. The Anti-Jacobin was one of the first that gave the alarm, that set up the war-whoop of reckless slander and vulgar abuse. Here is a specimen.

‘Mr. Coleridge having been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, has, since that time, left his native country; commenced citizen of the world; left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex hoc disce omnes—his friend Southey and others.’

This is the way in which a man of the most exemplary habits and strict morals was included in the same sentence of reprobation with one of greater genius, though perhaps of more irregular conduct; while the imputations in both cases were impudent falsehoods—probably known to be so, or else founded on some idle report, eagerly caught up and maliciously exaggerated. What has been the effect? Why, that these very persons have, in the end, joined that very pack of hunting-tigers that strove to harass them to death, and now halloo longest and loudest in the chase of blood. Nor was the result, after all, so unnatural as it might at first appear. They saw that there was but one royal road to reputation. The new Temple of Fame was built as an outwork to the rotten boroughs, and the warders were busy on the top of it, pouring down scalding lead and horrible filth on all those who approached, and demanded entrance, without well-attested political credentials. ‘The manna’ of court favour ‘was falling’; and our pilgrims to the land of promise, slowly, reluctantly, but perhaps wisely, got out of the way of it. Who, indeed, was likely to stand, for any length of time, ‘the pelting of this pitiless storm’—the precipitation of nicknames from such a height, the thundering down of huge volumes of dirt and rubbish, the ugly blows at character, the flickering jests on personal defects—with the complacent smiles of the great, and the angry shouts of the mob, to say nothing of the Attorney-General’s informations, filed ex officio, and the well-paid depositions of spies and informers? It was a hard battle to fight. The enemy were well entrenched on the heights of place and power, and skulked behind their ramparts—those whom they assailed were exposed, and on the pavé. It was the forlorn hope of genius and independence struggling for fame and bread; and it is no wonder that many of the candidates turned tail, and fled from such fearful odds.

The beauty of it is, that there is generally no reparation or means of redress. From the nature of the imputations, it is frequently impossible distinctly to refute them, or to gain a hearing to the refutation. But if the calumniators are detected and exposed, they plead authority and the King’s privilege! They assume a natural superiority over you, as if, being of a different party, you were of an inferior species, and justly liable to be tortured, worried, and hunted to death, like any other vermin. They have a right to say what they please of you, to invent or propagate any falsehood or misrepresentation that suits their turn. The greater falsehood, the more merit; the more barefaced the imposture, the more pious the fraud. You are a Whig, a reformer—does not that of itself imply all other crimes and misdemeanours? That being once granted, they have a clear right to heap every other outrage, every other indignity, upon you as a matter of course; and you cannot complain of that which is no more than a commutation of punishment. You are an enthusiast in the cause of liberty: does it not follow that you must be a bad poet? You are against Ministers; is it to be supposed that you can write a line of prose without repeated offences against sense and grammar? If it be once admitted that you are an opposition writer of some weight and celebrity, it follows, of course, that the government scribbler should get a carte blanche to fill up your character and pretensions, life, parentage, and education. Your mind and morals are, in justice, deodands to the Crown, and should be handed over to the court critic to be dissected without mercy, like the body of a condemned malefactor. The disproportion between the fact and the allegation only points the moral the more strongly against you; for the odiousness of your conduct, in differing with men in office and their sycophants, is such, that no colours can be black enough to paint it; and if you are not really guilty of all the petty vices and absurdities imputed to you, it is plain that you ought to be so, to answer to their theory, and as a fiction in loyalty, for the credit of church and state. You are a bad subject, they pretend: that you are a bad writer and bad man, is a self-evident consequence that will be at once admitted by all the respectable and well-disposed part of the community. You are entitled, in short, neither to justice nor mercy: and he who volunteers to deprive you of a livelihood or your good name by any means, however atrocious or dastardly, is entitled to the thanks of his own country.

One of their most common expedients is, to strew their victim over and over with epithets of abuse, and to trust to the habitual association between words and things for the effect of their application. There was an instance of this, some little time ago, in a well-known paper, with which we shall exemplify our doctrine. It was in reference to the assault made on Sir Hudson Lowe by young Las Casas.

‘A French lad, of the name of Las Casas, the son of one of Buonaparte’s Counts, waylaid Sir Hudson Lowe in the street on Tuesday, and struck him, because Sir Hudson did his duty properly, as an English Governor, at St. Helena, and as keeper of the miscreant of whom he had the charge. The Chronicle put forth yesterday a letter without an address, said to be from the boy himself, signed Baron ——, something. In this he confesses the assault, which, in default of other witnesses, will substantiate the fact, and consign him, as soon as the thief-takers can catch him, no doubt to the pleasing recreation of the tread-mill for a given time.’

We pass over the terms ‘miscreant,’—‘fellow,’ &c.; but there is a refinement, in one part of this paragraph, worth notice. It is said, as if casually, that the ‘thief-takers were after him.’ What! had he been accused of picking pockets, of shop-lifting, or petty larceny? No; but though the fact was known to be quite different, the feeling, it was thought, would be the same. His offence would be transferred, by the operation of this choice expression, to the class of misdemeanors which thief-takers are employed to look after; and thus young Las Casas, for resenting the unworthy treatment of his father and old master, has an indirect imputation fastened on him, by which he is confounded in the imagination with felons and housebreakers, and other persons for whom the ‘tread-mill’ is a suitable punishment! Such is the force of words—the power of prejudice—and the means of poisoning public opinion.

Take another illustration in a native instance. A man of classical taste and attainments appears to be editor of an Opposition Journal. He publishes (it is the fault of his stars) an elegant and pathetic poem. The first announcement of the work, in a Ministerial publication, sets out with a statement, that the author has lately been relieved from Newgate—which gives a felon-like air to the production, and makes it necessary for the fashionable reader to perform a sort of quarantine against it, as if it had the gaol-infection. It is declared by another critic, in the same pay, to be unreadable from its insipidity, and afterwards, by the same critic, to be highly pernicious and inflammatory—a slight contradiction, but no matter! This, and fifty other inconsistencies, would all go down, provided they were equally malignant and unblushing. The writer may contradict himself as often as he pleases: if he only speaks against the work, his criticism is sound and orthodox. Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintance, or those whom they casually notice, that come under this sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear stage. The friends of Cæsar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes forward: an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the Examiner, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides his fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter. He should have thrown back his bounty in the face of the donor, and come with his manuscript in his hand, to have poetical justice dealt out to him by the unbiassed author of the Baviad and Mæviad! His tenderness and beauties would then have been exalted with faint praise, instead of being mangled and torn to pieces with ruthless, unfeeling rage; his faults would have been gently hinted at, and attributed to youth and inexperience; and his profession, instead of being made the subject of loud ribald jests by vile buffoons, would have been introduced to enhance the merit of his poetry. But a different fate awaited poor Keats! His fine fancy and powerful invention were too obvious to be treated with mere neglect; and as he had not been ushered into the world with the court-stamp upon him, he was to be crushed as a warning to genius how it keeps company with honesty, and as a sure means of inoculating the ingenuous spirit and talent of the country with timely and systematic servility! We sometimes think that writers are alarmed at the praises that even we bestow upon them, lest it should preclude them from the approbation of the authorized sources of fame!

This system thus pursued is intended to amount, and in fact does amount, to a prohibition to authors to write, and to the public to read any works that have not the Government mark upon them. The professed object is to gag the one, and hoodwink the others, and to persuade the world that all talent, taste, elegance, science, liberality and virtue, are confined to a few hack-writers and their employers. One would think the public would resent this gross attempt to impose on their understandings, and encroach on their liberty of private judgment. When a gentleman is reading a new work, of which he is beginning to form a favourable opinion, is it to be borne that he should have it snatched out of his hands, and tossed into the dirt by a retainer of the literary police? Can he be supposed to pick it up afterwards, either to read himself, or to lend it to a friend, sullied and disfigured as it is? But the truth we fear is, that the public, besides their participation in the same prejudices, are timid, indolent, and easily influenced by a little swaggering and an air of authority. They like to amuse their leisure with reading a new work; and if they have more leisure, have no objection to fill it up with listening to an abuse of the writer. If they approve of candour and equity in the abstract, they do not disapprove of a little scandal and tittle-tattle by the by. They take in a disgusting publication, because it is ‘amusing and clever’—that is, full of incredible assertions which make them stare, and of opprobrious epithets applied to high characters, which, by their smartness and incongruity, operate as a lively stimulus to their ordinary state of ennui. This happens on the Sunday morning; and the rest of the week passes in unravelling the imposture, and expressing a very edifying mixture of wonder and indignation at it. Such a paper was detected, not long ago, in the fabrication of a low falsehood against a most respectable gentleman, who was said to have proposed a dinner and rump and dozen, in triumph over the death of Lord Castlereagh. This was said to have taken place in a public room, so that the exposure of the falsehood was immediate and complete. Not long before, it put a leading question to a popular member for the city, as if some ill-conduct of his had caused his father’s death: it was shown that this gentleman’s father had died before he was born! Is it to be supposed that the writer knew the facts? We should rather think not. He probably neither knew nor cared any thing about them. It was his vocation to hazard the dark insinuation, and to trust to chance and the malice of mankind for its success. The blow was well meant, though it failed. But was it not a blow to the paper itself? Alas, no; it still blunders on; and the public gape after it, half in fear half in indignation. It slanders a virtuous lady; it insults the misfortunes of a Noble House; it rakes up the infirmities of the dead; it taints (for whatever it touches it contaminates) the unborn. No matter. They or their family had sinned in being Whigs—and there are still men in England, it would appear, who think that this is the way by which differences of opinion should be revenged or prevented.

It used to be the boast of English gentlemen, that their political contentions were conducted in a spirit, not merely of perfect fairness, but of mutual courtesy and urbanity; and that, even among the lower orders, quarrels were governed by a law of honour and chivalry, which proscribed all base advantages, and united all the spectators against him by whom a foul blow was given or attempted. We trust that this spirit is not yet extinguished among us; and that it will speedily assert itself, by trampling under foot that base system of mean and malignant defamation, by which our Periodical Press has recently been polluted and disgraced. We would avoid naming works that desire nothing so much as notoriety; but it is but too well known, that the work of intimidation and deceit, of cruel personality and audacious fabrication, has been carried on, for several years, in various periodical publications, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly,—that it has been urged with unrelenting eagerness in the metropolis, in spite of the public discountenance of the leaders of the party which it disgraces by its pretended support; and then propagated into various parts of the country, for purposes of local annoyance. It is equally well known and understood too, that this savage system of bullying and assassination is no longer pursued from the impulse of angry passions or furious prejudices, but on a cold-blooded mercenary calculation of the profits which idle curiosity, and the vulgar appetite for slander, may enable its authors to derive from it. Where this is to stop, we do not presume to conjecture,—unless the excess leads to the remedy, and the distempered appetite of the public be surfeited, and so die. This is by no means an unlikely, and, we hope, may be a speedy consummation. In the mean time, the extent and extravagance of the abuse has already had the effect, not only of making individual attacks less painful or alarming, but even, in many cases, of pointing out to the judicious the proper objects of their gratitude and respect. For ourselves, at least, we do not hesitate to acknowledge, that, when we find an author savagely and perseveringly attacked by this gang of literary retainers, we immediately feel assured, not only that he is a good writer, but an honest man; and if a statesman is once selected as the butt of outrageous abuse in the same quarter, we consider it as a satisfactory proof that he has lately rendered some signal service to his country, or aimed a deadly blow at corruption.

We have put ourselves out of breath with this long lecture on the great opprobrium of our periodical literature,—and dare not now go on to the ticklish chapter of Reviews. We do not, however, by any means renounce the design; and hope one day to be enabled to resume it, and to astonish our readers with a full and ingenuous account of our own merits and demerits, and those of our rivals.

This work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of invective—but it is spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum. Mr. Landor’s mind is far from barren in feeling or in resources; but over the natural, and (what might be) the useful growth of these, there every where springs up a luxuriant crop of caprice, dogmatism, extravagance, intolerance, quaintness, and most ludicrous arrogance,—like the red and blue flowers in corn, that, however they may dazzle the passenger’s eye, choke up the harvest, and mock the hopes of the husbandman. We are not ignorant of the school to which our author belongs; and could name other writers who, in the course of a laborious life, and in productions numerous and multiform—some recent and suited to the times, some long and luckily forgotten,—in odes, inscriptions, madrigals, epics,—in essays, histories and reviews,—have run into as many absurdities, and as many extremes: But never did we see, bound up in the same volume, close-packed, and pointed with all the significance of style, the same number of contradictions, staring one another in the face, and quarrelling for the precedence. Mr. Landor’s book is a perfect ‘institute and digest’ of inconsistency: it is made up of mere antipathies in nature and in reasoning. It is a chef-d’œuvre of self-opinion and self-will, strangling whatever is otherwise sound and excellent in principle, defacing whatever is beautiful in style and matter.

If it be true (as has been said) that

we know few writers that have higher or more unequivocal pretensions in this way than the author of the ‘Imaginary Conversations.’ Would it be believed, that, trampling manfully on all history and tradition, he speaks of Tiberius as a man of sentiment, who retired to Capri merely to indulge a tender melancholy on the death of a beloved wife: and will have it that Nero was a most humane, amiable, and deservedly popular character—not arguing the points as doubtful or susceptible of question, but assuming them, en passant, as most absolute and peremptory conclusions—as if whatever was contrary to common sense and common feeling carried conviction on the face of it? In the same page he assures us, with the same oracular tranquillity, that the conflagration of Rome, and the great fire of London, were both wise and voluntary measures, arising from the necessity of purifying the cities after sickness, and leaving no narrow streets in their centres! and on turning the leaf, it is revealed to us, that ‘there is nothing in Rome, or in the world, equal to—the circus in Bath!’ He spells the words foreign and sovereign, ‘foren’ and ‘sovran,’ and would go to the stake, or send others there, to prove the genuineness of these orthographies, which he adopts on the authority of Milton; and yet he abuses Buonaparte for being the ape of Antiquity, and talking about Miltiades. He cries up Mr. Locke as ‘the most elegant of English prose writers,’ for no other reason (as we apprehend) than that he has often been considered as the least so; and compares Dr. Johnson’s style to ‘that article of dress which the French have lately made peace with’ (a pair of pantaloons), ‘divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind.’ He pronounces sentence upon the lost works of two ancient writers, Democritus and Menander, that the former would be worth all the philosophical remains of antiquity, and the latter not be worth having,—precisely because he can know nothing about the matter; the will to decide superseding the necessity of any positive ground of opinion, and the spirit of contradiction standing him in lieu of all other conviction. Boileau, according to our critic, had not a particle of sense, wit, or taste: Pope, to be sure, was of a different opinion—and we take it to be just possible that Boileau would have thought himself indemnified by the homage of the one for the scorn of the other! He speaks of Pitt as a poor creature, who did not see an inch before him, and of Fox as a charlatan; and says modestly in reference to some history he is writing, that he trusts ‘Posterity will not confound him with the Coxes and the Foxes of the age.’ It would be rather too much in his own manner perhaps to say, that no one who could write this sentence, will ever write a history—but we hazard the conjecture notwithstanding—and leave it to time to decide. He announces that Alfieri was the greatest man in Europe, though his greatness has not yet been generally acknowledged. This, however, is exactly the reason that Mr. Landor vouches for it, because whether he was so or not, rests solely on his ipse dixit. It is a fine thing to be one of the oracles of Fame! With equal modesty and candour he declares literary men to be as much superior to lords and kings as these last are to the meanest of their vassals. In a dialogue between Prince Maurocordato and General Colocotroni, he wishes the Greeks to substitute the bow for the use of fire-arms; and to this experimental crotchet, we suspect, he would sacrifice the Greek cause,—or any other. He has a hit at Lord Byron, and another at Mr. Thomas Moore, and a compliment to Lady Morgan. It is hard to say which he hates most—the English Government or the French people—Buonaparte or the Bourbons. He considers Buonaparte as a miracle, only because no man with so little talent ever gained such an ascendancy; and certainly with the qualifications our author allows him, he must have dealt with the Devil to do what he did; and, as if determined to conciliate no party and have all the world against him, he takes care to inform the reader at the same time, that in the most remarkable English victory in the last fifty years, ‘the prudence and skill of the commander (Wellington) were altogether wanting.’ He brings it as a proof of Buonaparte’s stupidity, that ‘he knew nothing of judicial astrology, which hath certain laws assigned to it, and fancied he could unite it with atheism, as easily as the iron crown with the lilies.’ He tells us, that ‘he did his utmost in pursuing this tyrant to death, recommending and insisting on nothing less:’ but that now he is dead, ‘he is sorry for it.’ So hot, indeed, is he on this scent, that he is for bringing Louis XIV. to life, in order to have him ‘carted to condign punishment in the Place de Grêve, or at Tyburn.’ We cannot understand this coincidence in the proposed fate of two persons so different; nor how Mr. Landor should call ‘the battle of Waterloo the most glorious to the victors since that of Leuctra,’ while he recommends a resort to tyrannicide, and points out its objects, to get rid of the legitimate consequences of that battle; nor why he should strike ‘his marble table with his palm,’ or call his country names—‘degenerate Albion,’—‘recreant slave,’ &c. &c. for not aiding ‘in the cause of freedom in Greece,’ when she has his thanks and praise for putting down the principle, at one blow, all over the world! Kings and nations, however, do not change like whiffling politicians. The one are governed by their prejudices, the other by their interests;—Mr. Landor and his friends by the opinion of the moment, by a fit of the spleen, by the first object that stirs their vanity or their resentment.

The work before us is an edifying example of the spirit of Literary Jacobinism,—flying at all game, running a-muck at all opinions, and at continual cross-purposes with its own. To avoid misconstruction, however, we should add, that we mean by this term, that despotism of the mind, which only emancipates itself from authority and prejudice, to grow impatient of every thing like an appearance of opposition, and to domineer over and dictate its sudden, crude, violent, and varying opinions, to the rest of the world. This spirit admits neither of equal nor superior, follower nor precursor: ‘it travels in a road so narrow where but one goes abreast.’ It claims a monopoly of sense, wit, and wisdom. To agree with it is an impertinence: to differ from it a crime. It tramples on old prejudices: it is jealous of new pretensions. It seizes with avidity on all that is startling or obnoxious in opinions, and when they are countenanced by any one else, discards them as no longer fit for its use. Thus persons of this temper affect atheism by way of distinction; and if they can succeed in bringing it into fashion, become orthodox again, in order not to be with the vulgar. Their creed is at the mercy of every one who assents to, or who contradicts it. All their ambition, all their endeavour is, to seem wiser than the whole world besides. If they are forced to adopt a common-place, they exaggerate it into a paradox, by their manner of stating it. So, in the ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ we learn, that ‘for every honest Italian, there are,’ not ten, or a hundred, but ‘a hundred thousand honest Englishmen.’ They hate whatever falls short of, whatever goes beyond, their favourite theories. In the one case they hurry on before to get the start of you; in the other, they suddenly turn back, to hinder you, and defeat themselves. It is not the love of truth, or of mankind, that urges them on—but the love of distinction; and they run into every extreme, and every folly, in order to indulge their overweening self-complacency and affected singularity.

An inordinate, restless, incorrigible self-love, is the key to all their actions and opinions, extravagancies, and meannesses, servility and arrogance. Whatever sooths and pampers this they applaud; whatever wounds or interferes with it they utterly and vindictively abhor. If an author is read and admired, they decry him; and if he is obscure or forgotten, or unintelligible, they extol him to the skies. But if they should succeed in bringing him into notice, and fixing him in the firmament of fame, they soon find out that there are spots in the sun, and draw the cloud of envy over his merits. A general is with them a hero, if he is unsuccessful or a traitor; if he is a conqueror in the cause of liberty, or a martyr to it, he is a poltroon. Whatever is doubtful, remote, visionary in philosophy, or wild and dangerous in politics, they fasten upon eagerly, ‘recommending and insisting on nothing less;’—reduce the one to demonstration, the other to practice, and they turn their backs upon their own most darling schemes, and leave them in the lurch immediately. With them everything is in posse, nothing in esse. The reason is, that they would have others take all their opinions implicitly from their infallibility: if a thing has grounds or evidence of its own to rest upon, so that they are no longer called in like prophets, to vouch for its truth, this is a sufficient excuse for them to discard it, and to look out for new terræ incognitæ to exercise their quackery and second-sight upon. So they cry up a protegé of their own, that nobody has ever heard of, as a prodigious genius, while he does nothing to justify the character they give of him, and exists only through the breath of their nostrils;—let him come forward in his own person, encouraged by their applause, and convince the world that he has something in him, and they immediately set to work to prove that he has borrowed all his ideas from them,—and is besides a person of bad moral character! They are of the church-militant; they pull down, but they will not build up, nor let any one else do it. They devote themselves to a cause, to a principle while it is in doubt or struggling for existence;—let it succeed, and they become jealous of it, and revile and hate the man by whom it has risen, or by whom it stands, like a triumphal arch over the ruins of barbaric thrones! For any one to do more for a cause than they have done, to be more talked of than they are, is a piece of presumption not hastily to be forgiven.

We consider the spirit which we have here attempted to analyze, as maintained in a state of higher concentration in this work than in any other we have for some time seen. Some of Mr. Southey’s lucubrations contain pretty good samples of it; but in him it is ‘dashed and brewed’ with other elements. He has been to court, is one of a firm, and mixes something of the cant of methodism with his effusions. But Mr. Landor keeps a private still of his own, where the unrectified spirit remains in its original vigour and purity,—cold indeed, and without the frothy effervescence of its first running, but unabated in activity, strength and virulence. We have pointed out what we regard as the ‘damning sin’ of this work; and having thus entered our protest, and guarded the reader against its mischievous tendency, we hold ourselves at liberty to extract what amusement or instruction we can from it. We are far from wishing to represent our author as ‘to every good word and work reprobate.’ On the contrary, we think he is naturally prone to what is right, but diverted from it by the infirmity we speak of. He has often much strength of thought, and vigour and variety of style; and we should be mortified, indeed, and deserving of mortification, if the petty provocation he has attempted to give us, could deter us from doing him that justice. He is excellent, whenever excellence is compatible with singularity. It is the fault of the school to which he belongs, not that they are blind to truth, or indifferent to good—but truth to be welcome must be a rare discovery of their own; they only woo her as a youthful bride; and are too soon satiated with the possession of what they desire, out of fickleness, or as the gloss of novelty wears off—or sue out a divorce from jealousy, and a dread of rivals in the favour of their former mistress!

This was the reason, whatever might be the pretext, why the same set of persons raised such an outcry against Buonaparte, and alone insisted on his assassination. They had no great objection to what he was doing—but they could not bear to think that he had done more than they had ever dreamt of. While they were building castles in the air, he gave law to Europe. He carved out with the sword, what they had only traced with the pen. ‘Never,’ says Mr. Landor, ‘had been such good laws so well administered over a considerable portion of Europe. The services he rendered to society were great, manifold, and extensive.’ But these services were hateful in their eyes—because he aggrandized himself in performing them. The power he wielded, the situation he occupied, excited their envy, much more than the stand he made against the common enemy, their gratitude. They were ready enough at all times to pull down kings, but they hated him worse who trampled, by his own might, on their necks—as more rivals to themselves, as running in the same race, and going farther in it. Any service, in short, any triumph is odious in their eyes, be it over whom, or in favour of what it will. Their great idol now is Washington; but this is because he acted upon comparatively a narrow theatre, and belongs to a people whose greatness is rather prospective than present; and also, because there is something in his mechanical habits and cold formality that appeases their irritable spleen.

The Dialogues are thirty-six in number, and on a great variety of curious and interesting topics. The style of the period is sometimes well imitated, without being mimicked; and a good deal of character, and sometimes of humour, is thrown into the tone of the different speakers. We give the following, between Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Gray, as one of the most pleasing, and as a relief to the severity and harshness of our introductory speculation.

‘Ascham. Thou art going, my dear young lady, into a most awful state: thou art passing into matrimony and great wealth. God hath willed it so: submitt^[15] in thankfulness. Thy affections are rightly placed and well distributed. Love is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least. He who is inspired by it in a great degree, is inspired by honour in a greater: it never reaches its plenitude of growth and perfection, but in the most exalted minds.... Alas! alas!

‘Jane. What aileth my virtuous Ascham? what is amiss? why do I tremble?

‘Ascham. I see perils on perils which thou dost not see, although thou art wiser than thy poor old master. And it is not because Love hath blinded thee, for that surpasseth his supposed omnipotence, but it is because thy tender heart having always leaned affectionately upon good, hath felt and known nothing of evil. I once persuaded thee to reflect much; let me now persuade thee to avoid the habitude of reflection, to lay aside books, and to gaze carefully and steadfastly on what is under and before thee.

‘Jane. I have well bethought me of all my duties: O how extensive they are! what a goodly and fair inheritance! But tell me, wouldst thou command me never more to read Cicero and Epictetus and Polybius? the others I do resign unto thee: they are good for the arbour and for the gravel walk: but leave unto me, I beseech thee, my friend and father, leave unto me, for my fire-side and for my pillow, truth, eloquence, courage, constancy.

‘Ascham. Read them on thy marriage-bed, on thy childbed, on thy death-bed! Thou spotless, undrooping lily, they have fenced thee right well! These are the men for men: these are to fashion the bright and blessed creatures, O Jane, whom God one day shall smile upon in thy chaste bosom.... Mind thou thy husband.

‘Jane. I sincerely love the youth who hath espoused me; I love him with the fondest, the most solicitous affection. I pray to the Almighty for his goodness and happiness, and do forget, at times, unworthy supplicant! the prayers I should have offered for myself. O never fear that I will disparage my kind religious teacher, by disobedience to my husband in the most trying duties.

‘Ascham. Gentle is he, gentle and virtuous; but time will harden him: time must harden even thee, sweet Jane! Do thou, complacently and indirectly, lead him from ambition.

‘Jane. He is contented with me and with home.

‘Ascham. Ah, Jane, Jane! men of high estate grow tired of contentedness.

‘Jane. He told me he never liked books unless I read them to him. I will read them to him every evening: I will open new worlds to him, richer than those discovered by the Spaniard: I will conduct him to treasures.... O what treasures!... On which he may sleep in innocence and peace.

‘Ascham. Rather do thou walk with him, ride with him, play with him, be his faery, his page, his every thing that love and poetry have invented; but watch him well, sport with his fancies; turn them about like the ringlets round his cheeks; and if ever he meditate on power, go, toss up thy baby to his brow, and bring back his thoughts into his heart by the music of thy discourse. Teach him to live unto God and unto thee: and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.’ II. 54.

We must say we think this Dialogue is written con amore. It is imbued with the very spirit of some of those old writers, where ‘all is conscience and tender heart.’ Mr. Landor’s over-anxious mind reposes on the innocence of youth and beauty, on the simplicity of his subject, on the reverence due and willingly paid, because silently exacted, to age and antiquity! Even the quaintness, the abruptness, the wanderings and the puerility, are delightful, and happily characteristic. While we are in good humour with our author, we will extract another conversation of the same period, and distinguished by the same vein of felicitous imitation, in the sentiment of which we also go along with him heart and hand,—that between Elizabeth and Burleigh, on the trite subject of Spenser’s pension.

‘Elizabeth. I advise thee again, Churlish Cecil, how that our Edmund Spenser, whom thou calledst most uncourteously a whining whelp, hath good and solid reason for his complaint. God’s blood! shall the lady that tieth my garter and shuffleth the smock over my head, or the lord that steddieth my chair’s back while I eat, or the other that looketh to my buck-hounds lest they be mangy, be holden by me in higher esteem and estate than he who hath placed me among the bravest of past times, and will as safely and surely set me down among the loveliest in the future?

‘Cecil. Your highness must remember he carouseth fully for such deserts.... A hundred pounds a year of unclipt monies, and a butt of canary wine.^[16]

‘Elizabeth. The monies are not enow to sustain a pair of grooms and a pair of palfreys, and more wine hath been drunken in my presence at a feast. The monies are given to such men, that they may not incline nor be obligated to any vile or lowly occupation; and the canary, that they may entertain such promising Wits as court their company and converse; and that in such manner there may be alway in our land a succession of these heirs of Fame. He hath written, not indeed with his wonted fancifulness, nor in learned and majestical language, but in homely and rustic wise, some verses which have moved me; and haply the more so, inasmuch as they demonstrate to me that his genius hath been dampened by his adversities. Read them.