← catalogue

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

by Various · English · Gutenberg #25633 · 559,343 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

Author: Various


        
Release date: May 29, 2008 [eBook #25633]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25633

Credits: Produced by Brendan OConnor, Paul Dring, Jonathan Ingram
        and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
        generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
        Journals.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE - VOLUME 62, NO. 384, OCTOBER 1847 ***




Produced by Brendan OConnor, Paul Dring, Jonathan Ingram
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
Journals.)





  Transcribers note:
  The letter o appears in this text with a macron and
  a breve above it. They have been rendered as [=o]
  and [)o] respectively.




                    BLACKWOOD'S
                EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

       *       *       *       *       *

  No. CCCLXXXIV.     OCTOBER, 1847.     VOL. LXII.

       *       *       *       *       *




  CONTENTS


  HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
    The Emperors New Clothes
  THE VISION OF CAGLIOSTRO
    Tiberius
    Agrippa
    Milton
    Mirabeau
    Beethoven
  MAGA IN AMERICA
  THE TIMES OF GEORGE II
  ART IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN AGES
  THE PORTRAIT
    Chapter I
    Chapter II
  HOUNDS AND HORSES AT ROME
    English Kennel
    The Steeple-chase
    Roman Dogs
  SONG
  MY FRIEND THE DUTCHMAN




WORKS OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.[1]


If our readers have perchance stumbled upon a novel called "The
Improvisatore" by one HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, a Dane by birth, they
have probably regarded it in the light merely of a foreign importation
to assist in supplying the enormous annual consumption of our
circulating libraries, which devour books as fast as our mills do raw
cotton;--with some difference, perhaps, in the result, for the material
can rarely be said to be worked up into any thing like substantial
raiment for body or mind, but seems to disappear altogether in the
process. As the demand, here, exceeds all ordinary means of supply, they
may have been glad to see that our trade with the North is likely to be
beneficial to us, in this our intellectual need. Its books may not be so
durable as its timber, nor so substantial as its oxen, but then they are
articles of faster growth, and of easier transportation. To free-trade
in these productions of the literary soil, not the most jealous
protectionist will object; and they have, perhaps, been amused to
observe how the mere circumstance of a foreign origin has given a cheap
repute, and the essential charm of novelty, to materials which in
themselves were neither good nor rare. The popular prejudice deals very
differently with foreign oxen and foreign books; for, whereas an
Englishman has great difficulty in believing that good beef can possibly
be produced from any pastures but his own, and the outlandish beast is
always looked upon with more or less suspicion, he has, on the contrary,
a highly liberal prejudice in favour of the book from foreign parts; and
nonsense of many kinds, and the most tasteless extravagancies, are
allowed to pass unchallenged and unreproved, by the aid of a German, or
French, or Danish title-page.

Nay, the eye is sometimes tasked to discover extraordinary beauty, where
there is nothing but extraordinary blemish. Where the shrewd translator
had veiled some absurdity or rashness of his author, the more profound
reader has been known to detect a meaning and a charm, which "the
English language had failed adequately to convey;" and he has, perhaps,
shown a sovereign contempt for "the bungling translator," at the very
time when that discreet workman had most displayed his skill and
judgment. The idea has sometimes occurred to us--Suppose one of these
foreign books were suddenly proved to be of genuine home
production--suppose the German, or the Dane, or the Frenchman, were
discovered to be a fictitious personage, and all the genius, or all the
rant, to have really emanated from the English gentleman, or lady, who
had merely professed to translate--presto! how the book would instantly
change colours! What a reverse of judgment would there be! What secret
_misgivings_ would now be detected and proclaimed! What sudden
outpourings of epithets by no means complimentary! How the boldness of
many a metaphor would be transformed into sheer impudence! How the
profundities would clear up, leaving only darkness behind! They were so
mysterious--and now, throw all the light of heaven upon them, and there
is nothing there but a blunder or a blot.

If our readers, we say, have fallen upon this, and other novels of
Andersen, they have probably passed them by as things belonging to the
literary _season_: they have been struck with some passages of vivid
description, with touches of genuine feeling, with traits of character
which, though imperfectly delineated, bore the impress of truth; but
they have pronounced them, on the whole, to be unfashioned things, but
half made up, constructed with no skill, informed by no clear spirit of
thought, and betraying a most undisciplined taste. Such, at least, was
the impression their first perusal left upon our mind. Notwithstanding
the glimpses of natural feeling and of truthful portraiture which caught
our eye, they were so evidently deficient in some of the higher
qualities which ought to distinguish a writer, and so defaced by
abortive attempts at fine writing, that they hardly appeared deserving
of a very critical examination, or a very careful study. But now there
has lately come into our hands the autobiography of Hans Christian
Andersen, "The True Story of my Life," and this has revealed to us so
curious an instance of intellectual cultivation, or rather of genius
exerting itself without any cultivation at all, and has reflected back
so strong a light, so vivid and so explanatory, on all his works, that
what we formerly read with a very mitigated admiration, with more of
censure than of praise, has been invested with quite a novel and
peculiar interest. Moreover, certain tales for children have also fallen
into our hands, some of which are admirable. We prophesy them an
immortality in the nursery--which is not the worst immortality a man can
Win--and doubt not but that they have already been read by children, or
told to children, in every language of Europe. Altogether Andersen, his
character and his works, have thus appeared to us a subject worthy of
some attention.

We insist upon coupling them together. We must be allowed to abate
somewhat of the austerity of criticism by a reference to the life of the
author. We cannot implicitly follow the unconditioned admiration of Mrs
Howitt for "the beautiful thoughts of Andersen," which she tells us in
her preface to the Autobiography, "it is the most delightful of her
literary labours to translate." We must be excused if we think that the
mixture of praise and of puff, which the lady lavishes so
indiscriminately upon the author whose works she translates, is more
likely to display her own skill and dexterity in author-craft, than
permanently to enhance the fame of Andersen. In the works which Mrs
Howitt has translated, (with the exception of the Autobiography,) there
is a great proportion of most unquestionable trash, which, we should
imagine, it must be a great affliction to render into English.

It is curious, and perhaps necessary, to watch this new relationship
which has sprung up in the world of letters, between the original author
and his translator. A reciprocity of services is always amiable, and one
is glad to see society enriched by another bond of mutual amity. The
translator finds a profitable commodity in the genius of his author; the
author, a stanch champion in his foreign ally, who, notwithstanding his
community of interest, can still praise without blushing. Many good
results doubtless arise from this alliance, but an increased chance of
impartial criticism is not likely to be one of them.

When Andersen writes _for_ childhood or _of_ childhood, he is singularly
felicitous--fanciful, tender, and true to nature. This alone were
sufficient to separate him from the crowd of common writers. For the
rest of his works, if you will look at them kindly, and with a friendly
scrutiny, you will find many a natural sentiment vividly reflected. But
traces of the higher operations of the intellect, of deep or subtle
thought, of analytic power, of ratiocination of any kind, there is
absolutely none. If, therefore, his injudicious admirers should insist,
without any reference to his origin or culture, on extolling his
writings as works submitted, without apology or excuse, to the mature
judgment and formed taste--they can only peril the reputation they seek
to magnify. They will expose to ridicule and contempt one who, if you
allow him a place apart by himself, becomes a subject of kindly and
curious regard. If they insist upon his introduction, unprotected by the
peculiar circumstances which environ him--we do not say amongst the
literary magnates of his time, but even in the broad host of highly
cultivated minds, we lose sight of him, or we follow him with something
very much like a smile of derision.

We remember being told of a dexterous stratagem, by which a lady cured
her son of what she deemed an unworthy passion for a rustic beauty. We
tell the story--for it may not only afford us an illustration, but a
hint also to other perplexed mammas, who may find themselves in the like
predicament. She had argued, and of course in vain, against his
high-flown admiration of the village belle. She was a goddess! She would
become a throne! Apparently acquiescing in his matrimonial project, she
now professed her willingness to receive his bride-elect. Accordingly,
she sent her own milliner--mantua-maker--what you will,--to array her in
the complete toilette of a lady of fashion. The blushing damsel appeared
in the most elegant attire, and took her place in the maternal
drawing-room, amongst the sisters of the enraptured lover. Alas!
enraptured no more! The rustic beauty, where could it have flown? The
belle of the village was transformed into a very awkward young lady.
Goddess!--She was a simpleton. Become a throne!--She could not sit upon
a chair. The charm was broken. The application we need hardly make.
There may be certain uncultivated men of genius on whom it is possible
to practise a like malicious kindness.

We would rather preface our notice of the life and works of Andersen, by
a motto taken from our own countryman Blake, artist and poet, and a man
of somewhat kindred nature:--[2]

  "Piping down the valleys wild,
    Piping songs of pleasant glee,
  On a cloud I saw a child,
    And he laughing said to me--

  'Pipe a song about a lamb;'
    So I piped with merry cheer.
  'Piper, pipe that song again!--'
    So I piped--he wept to hear.

  'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,
    Sing thy songs of happy cheer--'
  So I sang the same again,
    While he wept with joy to hear.

  'Piper, sit thee down and _write_,
    In a book that all may read.'
  Then he vanished from my sight;
    And I plucked a hollow reed,

  And I made a rural pen,
    And I stained the water clear,
  And I wrote my happy songs,
    Every child may joy to hear."

Such was the form under which the muse may be said to have visited and
inspired Andersen. He ought to have been exclusively the poet of
children and of childhood. He ought never to have seen, or dreamed, of
an Apollo six feet high, looking sublime, and sending forth dreadful
arrows from the far-resounding bow; he should have looked only to that
"child upon the cloud," or rather, he should have seen his little muse
as she walks upon the earth--we have her in Gainsborough's picture--with
her tattered petticoat, and her bare feet, and her broken pitcher, but
looking withal with such a sweet sad contentedness upon the world, that
surely, one thinks, she must have filled that pitcher and drawn the
water which she carries--without, however, knowing any thing of the
matter--from the very well where Truth lies hidden.

We should like to quote at once, before proceeding further, one of
Andersen's tales for children. We _will_ venture upon an extract. It
will at all events be new to our readers, and will be more likely to
interest them in the history of its author than any quotation we could
make from his more ambitious works. Besides, the story we select will
somewhat foreshadow the real history which follows.

A highly respectable matronly duck introduces into the poultry-yard a
brood which she has just hatched. She has had a deal of trouble with one
egg, much larger than the rest, and which after all produced a very
"ugly duck," who gives the name, and is the hero of the story.

     "'So, we are to have this tribe, too!' said the other ducks, 'as if
     there were not enough of us already! And only look how ugly one is!
     we won't suffer that one here.' And immediately a duck flew at it,
     and bit it in the neck.

     "'Let it alone,' said the mother; 'it does no one any harm.'

     "'Yes, but it is so large and strange looking, and therefore it
     must be teased.'

     "'These are fine children that the mother has!' said an old duck,
     who belonged to the noblesse, and wore a red rag round its leg.
     'All handsome, except one; it has not turned out well. I wish she
     could change it.'

     "'That can't be done, your grace,' said the mother; 'besides, if it
     is not exactly pretty, it is a sweet child, and swims as well as
     the others, even a little better. I think in growing it will
     improve. It was long in the egg, and that's the reason it is a
     little awkward.'

     "'The others are nice little things,' said the old duck: 'now make
     yourself quite at home here.'

     "And so they did. But the poor young duck that had come last out of
     the shell, and looked so ugly, was bitten, and pecked, and teased
     by ducks and fowls. 'It's so large!' said they all; and the
     turkey-cock, that had spurs on when he came into the world, and
     therefore fancied himself an emperor, strutted about like a ship
     under full sail, went straight up to it, gobbled, and got quite
     red. The poor little duck hardly knew where to go, or where to
     stand, it was so sorrowful because it was so ugly, and the ridicule
     of the whole poultry-yard.

     "Thus passed the first day, and afterwards it grew worse and worse.
     The poor duck was hunted about by every one; its brothers and
     sisters were cross to it, and always said, 'I wish the cat would
     get you, you frightful creature!' and even its mother said, 'Would
     you were far from here!' And the ducks bit it, and the hens pecked
     at it, and the girl that fed the poultry kicked it with her foot.
     So it ran and flew over the hedge.

     "On it ran. At last it came to a great moor where wild-ducks lived;
     here it lay the whole night, and was so tired and melancholy. In
     the morning up flew the wild-ducks, and saw their new comrade; 'Who
     are you?' asked they; and our little duck turned on every side, and
     bowed as well as it could. 'But you are tremendously ugly!' said
     the wild-ducks. 'However, that is of no consequence to us, if you
     don't marry into our family.' The poor thing! It certainly never
     thought of marrying; it only wanted permission to lie among the
     reeds, and to drink the water of the marsh.

     "'Bang! bang!' was heard at this moment, and several wild-ducks lay
     dead amongst the reeds, and the water was as red as blood. There
     was a great shooting excursion. The sportsmen lay all round the
     moor; and the blue smoke floated like a cloud through the dark
     trees, and sank down to the very water; and the dogs spattered
     about in the marsh--splash! splash! reeds and rushes were waving on
     all sides; it was a terrible fright for the poor duck.

     "At last all was quiet; but the poor little thing did not yet dare
     to lift up its head; it waited many hours before it looked round,
     and then hastened away from the moor as quickly as possible. It ran
     over the fields and meadows, and there was such a wind that it
     could hardly get along.

     "Towards evening, the duck reached a little hut. Here dwelt an old
     woman with her tom-cat and her hen; and the cat could put up its
     back and purr, and the hen could lay eggs, and the old woman loved
     them both as her very children. For certain reasons of her own, she
     let the duck in to live with them.

     "Now the tom-cat was master in the house, and the hen was mistress;
     and they always said, 'We and the world.' That the duck should
     have any opinion of its own, they never would allow.

     "'Can you lay eggs?' asked the hen.

     "'No!'

     "'Well, then, hold your tongue.'

     "Can you put up your back and purr?' said the tom-cat.

     "'No.'

     "'Well, then, you ought to have no opinion of your own, where
     sensible people are speaking.'

     "And the duck sat in the corner, and was very sad; when suddenly it
     took it into its head to think of the fresh air and the sunshine;
     and it had such an inordinate longing to swim on the water, that it
     could not help telling the hen of it.

     "'What next, I wonder!' said the hen, 'you have nothing to do, and
     so you sit brooding over such fancies. Lay eggs, or purr, and
     you'll forget them.'

     "'But it is so delightful to swim on the water!' said the duck--'so
     delightful when it dashes over one's head, and one dives down to
     the very bottom.'

     "'Well, that must be a fine pleasure!' said the hen. 'You are
     crazy, I think. Ask the cat, who is the cleverest man I know, if he
     would like to swim on the water, or perhaps to dive, to say nothing
     of myself. Ask our mistress, the old lady, and there is no one in
     the world cleverer than she is; do you think that she would much
     like to swim on the water, and for the water to dash over her
     head?'

     "'You don't understand me,' said the duck.

     "'Understand, indeed! If we don't understand you, who should? I
     suppose you won't pretend to be cleverer than the tom-cat, or our
     mistress, to say nothing of myself? Don't behave in that way,
     child; but be thankful for all the kindness that has been shown
     you. Have you not got into a warm room, and have you not the
     society of persons from whom something is to be learnt? But you are
     a blockhead, and it is tiresome to have to do with you. You may
     believe what I say; I am well disposed towards you; I tell you what
     is disagreeable, and it is by that one recognises one's true
     friends.'

     "'I think I shall go into the wide world,' said the duckling.

     "'Well then, go!' answered the hen.

     "And so the duck went. It swam on the water, it dived down; but was
     disregarded by every animal on account of its ugliness.

     "One evening--the sun was setting most magnificently--there came a
     whole flock of large beautiful birds out of the bushes; never had
     the duck seen any thing so beautiful. They were of a brilliant
     white, with long slender necks: they were swans. They uttered a
     strange note, spread their superb long wings, and flew away from
     the cold countries (for the winter was setting in) to warmer lands
     and unfrozen lakes. They mounted so high, so very high! The little
     ugly duck felt indescribably--it turned round in the water like a
     mill-wheel, stretched out its neck towards them, and uttered a cry
     so loud and strange that it was afraid even of itself. Oh, the
     beautiful birds! the happy birds! it could not forget them; and
     when it could see them no longer, it dived down to the very bottom
     of the water; and when it came up again it was quite beside itself.

     "And now it became so cold! But it would be too sad to relate all
     the suffering and misery which the duckling had to endure through
     the hard winter. It lay on the moor in the rushes. But when the sun
     began to shine again more warmly, when the larks sang, and the
     lovely spring was come, then, all at once it spread out its wings,
     and rose in the air. They made a rushing noise louder than
     formerly, and bore it onwards more vigorously; and before it was
     well aware of it, it found itself in a garden, where the
     apple-trees were in blossom, and where the syringas sent forth
     their fragrance, and their long green branches hung down in the
     clear stream. Just then three beautiful white swans came out of the
     thicket. They rustled their feathers, and swam on the water so
     lightly--oh! so very lightly! The duckling knew the superb
     creatures, and was seized with a strange feeling of sadness.

     "'To them will I fly!' said it, 'to the royal birds. Though they
     kill me, I must fly to them!' And it flew into the water, and swam
     to the magnificent birds, that looked at, and with rustling plumes,
     sailed towards it.

     "'Kill me!' said the poor creature, and bowed down its head to the
     water, and awaited death. But what did it see in the water? It saw
     beneath it its own likeness; but no longer that of an awkward
     grayish bird, ugly and displeasing--it was the figure of a swan.

     "It is of no consequence being born in a farm-yard, if only it is
     in a swan's egg.

     "The large swans swam beside it, and stroked it with their bills.
     There were little children running about in the garden; they threw
     bread into the water, and the youngest cried out, 'There is a new
     one!' And the other children shouted too; 'Yes, a new one is
     come!'--and they clapped their hands and danced, and ran to tell
     their father and mother. And they threw bread and cake into the
     water; and every one said, 'The new one is the best! so young, and
     so beautiful!'

     "Then the young one felt quite ashamed, and hid its head under its
     wing; it knew not what to do: it was too happy, but yet not
     proud--for a good heart is never proud. It remembered how it had
     been persecuted and derided, and now it heard all say it was the
     most beautiful of birds. And the syringas bent down their branches
     to it in the water, and the sun shone so lovely and so warm. Then
     it shook its plumes, the slender neck was lifted up, and, from its
     very heart, it cried rejoicingly--'Never dreamed I of such
     happiness when I was the little ugly duck!'"

It is not only in writing for children that our author succeeds; but
whenever childhood crosses his path, it calls up a true pathos, and the
playful tenderness of his nature. The commencement of his serious
novels, where he treats of the infancy and boyhood of his heroes, is
always interesting. Amongst the translated works of Andersen is one
entitled "A Picture-Book without Pictures." The author describes himself
as inhabiting a solitary garret in a large town, where no one knew him,
and no friendly face greeted him. One evening, however, he stands at the
open casement, and suddenly beholds "the face of an old friend--a round,
kind face, looking down on him. It was the moon--the dear old moon! with
the same unaltered gleam, just as she appeared when, through the
branches of the willows, she used to shine upon him as he sat on the
mossy bank beside the river." The moon becomes very sociable, and breaks
that long silence which poets have so often celebrated--breaks it, we
must confess, to very little purpose. "Sketch what I relate to you,"
says the moon, "and you will have a pretty picture-book." And
accordingly, every visit, she tells him "of one thing or another that
she has seen during the past night." One would think that such a
sketch-book, or album, as we have here, might easily have been put
together without calling in the aid of so sublime a personage. But
amongst the pictures that are presented to us, two or three, where the
moon has had her eye upon children in their sports or their distresses,
took hold of our fancy. Here Andersen is immediately at home. We give
one short extract.

     "It was but yesternight (said the moon) that I peeped into a small
     court-yard, enclosed by houses: there was a hen with eleven
     chickens. A pretty little girl was skipping about. The hen chicked,
     and, affrighted, spread out her wings over her little ones. Then
     came the maiden's father, and chid the child; and I passed on,
     without thinking more of it at the moment.

     "This evening--but a few minutes ago--I again peeped into the same
     yard. All was silent; but soon the little maiden came. She crept
     cautiously to the hen-house, lifted the latch, and stole gently up
     to the hen and the chickens. The hen chicked aloud, and they all
     ran fluttering about: the little girl ran after them. I saw it
     plainly, for I peeped in through a chink in the wall. I was vexed
     with the naughty child, and was glad that the father came and
     scolded her still more than yesterday, and seized her by the arm.
     She bent her head back; big tears stood in her blue eyes. She wept.
     'I wanted to go in and kiss the hen, and beg her to forgive me for
     yesterday. But I could not tell it you.' And the father kissed the
     brow of the innocent child; and I kissed her eyes and her lips."

Our poet--we call him such, though we know nothing of his verses, for
whatever there is of merit in his writings is of the nature of
poetry--our poet of childhood and of poverty, was born at Odense, a town
of Funen, one of the green, beech-covered islands of Denmark. It bears
the name of the Scandinavian hero, or demigod, Odin; Tradition says he
lived there. The parents of Andersen were so poor that when they married
they had not wherewithal to purchase a bedstead, or at least thought it
advisable to make shift by constructing one out of the wooden tressels
which, a little time before, had supported the coffin of some
neighbouring count as he lay in state. It still retained a part of the
black cloth, and some of the funeral ornaments attached to it, when in
the year 1805 there lay upon it, not in any peculiar state, the solitary
fruit of their marriage--the little Hans Christian Andersen. He was a
crying infant, and when carried to the baptismal font, sorely vexed the
parson with his outcries. "Your young one screams like a cat!" said the
reverend official. The mother was hurt at this reflection upon her
offspring; but a prophetic god-papa, who stood by, consoled her by
saying, "that the louder he cried when a child, all the more beautifully
would he sing when he grew older."

Those who are disposed to trace a hereditary descent in mental
qualifications, will find an instance to their purpose in the case of
Andersen. His mother, we are told, was utterly ignorant of books and of
the world, "but possessed a heart full of love!" From her he may be said
to have derived a singular frankness and amiability of disposition--a
fond, open, affectionate temper. For the more intellectual qualities, by
which this temper, through the medium of authorship, was to become
patent to the world, he must have been indebted to his father. This poor
and hapless shoemaker (such was his trade) seems to have been a singular
person. To use a favourite phrase of Napoleon, "he had missed his
destiny." His parents had been country people of some substance, but
misfortune falling upon misfortune had reduced them to poverty. Finally,
the father had become insane; the mother had been glad to obtain a
menial situation in the very asylum where her husband was confined; and
there was nothing better to be done for the son than to apprentice him
to a shoemaker. Some talk there was amongst the neighbours of raising a
subscription to send him to the grammar-school, and thus give him a
start in life; but it never went beyond talk. A shoemaker he became. But
to the leather and the last he never took kindly. He would read what
books he could get--Holberg's plays and the Bible--and ponder over them.
At first he would make his wife a sharer in his reflections, but as she,
good woman, never understood a word of what he said, he learned to
meditate in silence. On Sundays he would go out into the woods
accompanied only by his child; then he would sit down, sunk in
abstraction and solitary thought, while young Hans gathered flowers or
wild strawberries. "I recollect," says the son, in his Autobiography,
"that once, as a child, I saw tears in his eyes; and it was when a youth
from the grammar-school came to our house to be measured for a new pair
of boots, and showed us his books, and told us what he learned, 'That
was the path on which I ought to have gone!' said my father; he kissed
me passionately, and was silent the whole evening."

There surely went out of the world something still undeveloped in that
poor shoemaker. At a subsequent period of the history we find him fairly
abandoning his unchosen trade. The name of Napoleon resounded even in
Odense--even in Odense could find a heart that is disquieted. He would
follow the banner of him who had "opened a career to all the talents."
But the regiment in which he enlisted got no further than Holstein.
Peace was concluded; he had to return to his native place, and fall back
as well as he could into the old routine. His march to Holstein had,
however, shaken his health, and he died shortly after his return.

"I was," says our author, "the only child, and was extremely spoilt; but
I continually heard my mother say how very much happier I was than she
had been, and that I was brought up like a nobleman's child." No
nobleman's child could, at all events, be brought up with less
restraint, or more completely left to his own fancies. Poor as were his
parents, he never felt want; he had no care; he was fed and clothed
without any thought on his part; he lived his own dreamy life, nourished
by scraps of plays, songs, and all manner of traditionary stories. There
was a theatre at Odense, and young Andersen was now and then taken to it
by his parents. He himself constructed a puppet-show, and the dressing
and drilling of his dolls was for a long time the chief occupation of
his life. As he could rarely go to the theatre, he made friends with the
man who sold the play-bills, who was charitable enough to give him one.
With this upon his knee, he would sit apart and construct a play for
himself; putting the _dramatis personae_ into movement as well as he
could, and at all events despatching them all at the close; for he had
no idea, he tells us, of a tragedy "that had not plenty of dying."

Of what is commonly called education he had little enough. He was sent
to a charity-school, where, by a somewhat startling error of the press,
Mrs Howitt is made to say "he learned only _religion_, writing, and
arithmetic." Of the _reading_, writing, and arithmetic there taught, he
seemed to have gained little; certainly the writing, and the arithmetic
went on very slowly. To make amends, he used to present his master on
his birth-day with a poem and a garland. Both the wreath and the verses
seemed to have been but churlishly received, and the last time they were
offered, he got scolded for his pains.

It would be difficult, however, to conceive of a life more suitable to
the fostering of the imagination than that which little Hans was
leading. Besides the play-house, and the scraps of dramas read to him by
his father, himself a strange and dreamy man, we catch sight of an old
grandmother, she who resided in the lunatic asylum where her husband was
confined. Young Hans was occasionally permitted to visit her; and here
he was a great favourite with certain old crones, who told him many a
marvellous and terrible story. These stories, and the insane figures
which he caught sight of around him, operated, he tells us, so
powerfully upon his imagination that when it grew dark he scarcely dared
to go out of the house. His own mother was extremely superstitious. When
her husband was dying, she sent her son, not to the doctor, but to a
wise-woman, who, after measuring the boy's arm with a woollen thread,
and performing some other ceremonies, bade him go home by the river
side, "and if he did not see the ghost of his father, he was to be sure
that he would not die this time." He did _not_ see the ghost of his
father--which, considering all things, was rather surprising; but his
father died nevertheless.

After the death of her husband, the mother of Andersen found another
object for her affections, for that "heart so full of love." She married
again. But the stepfather was "a grave young man, who would have nothing
to do with Hans Christian's education;" refused, we presume, all
responsibility on so delicate a business. He was still left to himself.
He had now grown a tall lad, with long yellow hair, which the sun
probably had assisted to dye, as he was accustomed to go bare-headed. He
continued to amuse himself with dressing his theatrical puppets. His
mother reconciled herself to the occupation, as it formed, she thought,
no bad introduction to the trade of a tailor, to which she now destined
him. On the other hand, Hans partly reconciled himself to the idea of
being a tailor, because he should then have plenty of cloth, of all
colours, for his puppets. Meanwhile it was to a very different trade or
destiny that these puppets were conducting him.

About this time, not for the money, said the warm-hearted mother, but
that the lad, like the rest of the world, might be doing something, Hans
was sent, for a short interval, to a cloth factory. But it was fated
that he should never work. He had a beautiful voice, and could sing. The
people at the factory asked him to sing. "He began, and all the looms
stood still." He had to sing again and again, whilst the other boys had
his work given them to do. He was not long, however, at the factory. The
coarse jests and behaviour of its inmates drove out the shy and solitary
boy.

And now came the crisis. He would go forth into the world. He would be
famous. All his early aspirations for distinction and celebrity had
become, as might be expected, associated with the theatre. But as yet he
had not the least idea in what department he was to excel--whether as
actor or poet, dancer or singer--or rather he seems to have thought
himself capable of success in them all. The passion for fame, or rather
for distinction, had been awakened before the passion for any particular
art. All he knew was, that he was to be a celebrated man; by what sort
of labour, what kind of performance, he had no conception. Indeed, the
remarkable performance, the work to be done, was not the most essential
thing in his calculation. "People suffer a deal of adversity, and then
they become famous." It was thus he explained the matter to himself. He
was on the right road, at all events, for the adversity.

We must relate his going forth in his own words. Never, surely, on the
part of all the actors in it, was there a scene of such singular
simplicity.

     "My mother said that I must be confirmed, in order that I might be
     apprenticed to the tailor trade, and thus do something rational.
     She loved me with her whole heart, but she did not understand my
     impulses and my endeavours, nor, indeed, at that time did I myself.
     The people about her always spoke against my odd ways, and turned
     me into ridicule. (They only saw the ugly duckling in the young
     swan.)

     "We belonged to the parish of St Knud, and the candidates for
     confirmation could either enter their names with the provost or
     with the chaplain. The children of the so-called superior families,
     and the scholars of the grammar-school, went to the first, and the
     children of the poor to the second. I, however, announced myself as
     a candidate to the provost, who was obliged to receive me, although
     he discovered vanity in my placing myself among his catechists,
     where, although taking the lowest place, I was still above those
     who were under the care of the chaplain. I would, however, hope
     that it was not alone vanity that impelled me. I had a sort of fear
     of the poor boys, who had laughed at me, and I always felt as it
     were an inward drawing towards the scholars of the grammar-school,
     whom I regarded as far better than other boys. When I saw them
     Playing in the churchyard, I would stand outside the railings, and
     wish that I were but among the fortunate ones--not for the sake of
     the play, but for the many books they had, and for what they might
     be able to become in the world.

     "An old female tailor altered my deceased father's greatcoat into a
     confirmation suit for me; never before had I worn so good a coat. I
     had also, for the first time in my life, a pair of boots. My
     delight was extremely great; my only fear was that every body would
     not see them, and therefore I drew them up over my trousers, and
     thus marched through the church. The boots creaked, and that
     inwardly pleased me, for thus the congregation would hear that they
     were new. My whole devotion was disturbed. I was aware of it, and
     it caused me a horrible pang of conscience that my thoughts should
     be as much with my new boots as with God. I prayed him earnestly
     from my heart to forgive me, and then again I thought upon my new
     boots.

     "During the last year I had saved together a little sum of money.
     When I counted it over, I found it to be thirteen rix-dollars banco
     (about thirty shillings.) I was quite overjoyed at the possession
     of so much wealth; and as my mother now most resolutely required
     that I should be apprenticed to a tailor, I prayed and besought her
     that I might make a journey to Copenhagen, that I might see the
     greatest city in the world.

     "'What wilt thou do there?' asked my mother.

     "'I will become famous,' returned I; and I then told her all that I
     had read about extraordinary men. 'People have,' said I, 'at first
     an immense deal of adversity to go through, and then they will be
     famous.'

     "It was a wholly unintelligible impulse that guided me. I wept and
     prayed, and at last my mother consented, after having first sent
     for a so-called wise-woman out of the hospital, that she might read
     my future fortune by the coffee-grounds and cards.

     "'Your son will become a great man!' said the old woman; 'and in
     honour of him all Odense will one day be illuminated.'

     "My mother wept when she heard that, and I obtained permission to
     travel."--(p. 27.)

So, at the age of fourteen, with thirty shillings in his pocket, and his
idea of becoming famous by going through a deal of adversity, he comes
to Copenhagen--the Paris, the more than the Paris of Denmark, for, in
respect to all that a great town collects or fosters, Copenhagen is
literally Denmark. There never was a stranger history than this of young
Andersen's. It is more like a dream than a life; it is like one of his
own tales for children, where the rigid laws of probability are
dispensed with in favour of a quite free and rapid invention. The
theatre is his point of attraction: but he was by no means determined in
what department, or under what form, his universal genius shall make its
appearance. He will first try dancing. He had heard of a celebrated
_danseuse_, a Madame Schall. To her he goes with a letter of
introduction, which he had coaxed out of an old printer in Odense, who,
though he protested he did not know the lady, was still prevailed upon
to write the letter. Dressed in his confirmation suit, a broad hat upon
his head, his boots, we may be sure, not forgotten, which were worn,
however, this time under the trousers, he finds out the residence of
Madame Schall, rings at the bell, and is admitted. "She looked at me
with great amazement," writes our author, "and then heard what I had to
say. She had not the slightest knowledge of him from whom the letter
came, and my whole appearance and behaviour seemed very strange to her.
I confessed to her my heartfelt inclination for the theatre; and upon
her asking me what character I thought I could represent, I replied
Cinderella. This piece had been performed in Odense by the royal
company, and the principal character had so taken my fancy, that I could
play the part perfectly from memory. In the mean time I asked her
permission to take off my boots, otherwise I was not light enough for
this character; and then, taking up my broad hat for a tambourine, I
began to dance and sing--

  'Here below nor rank nor riches
  Are exempt from pain and wo.'

My strange gestures and my great activity caused the lady to think me
out of my mind, and she lost no time in getting rid of me."

We should think so. Only imagine some wild colt of a boy, one of those
young Savoyards, for instance, who are in the habit of dancing round the
organ they are grinding, apparently to convince the world how sprightly
the tune is--imagine a genius of this natural description introducing
himself into the drawing-room of a Taglioni or an Elssler, and
commencing forthwith, "with great activity," to give a specimen of his
talent! Just such as this must have been the part which young Andersen
performed in the saloon of Madame Schall.

As the dancing does not succeed, he next offers himself as an
actor--proceeding, quite as a matter of course, to the manager of a
theatre to ask for an engagement. The manager was facetious--said he was
"too thin for the theatre." Hans would be facetious too. "Oh," he
replied, "if you will but engage me at one hundred rix-dollars banco
salary, I shall soon get fat." Then the manager looked grave, and bade
him go his way, adding, that he engaged only people of education.

But he had many strings to his bow--he could sing. It was at the opera
evidently that he was destined to become famous. Here he met with what,
for a moment, looked like success. A voice he certainly possessed,
though uncultivated, and Seboni, the director of the Academy of Music,
promised to procure instruction for him. But a short time afterwards he
lost his voice, through insufficient clothing, as he thinks, and bad
shoe leather. (Those boots could not be new always--doubtless got sadly
worn tramping through the streets of Copenhagen.) Seboni dropped his
_protege_, counselled him to go back to Odense, and learn a trade.

As well learn a trade in Copenhagen, if it was to come to that. He still
stayed in the capital, and still lingered round the theatre, sometimes
getting a lesson in recitation, sometimes one in dancing, and overjoyed
if only as one of a crowd of masked people he could stand before the
scenes. There never surely was so irrepressible a vanity combined with
so sensitive a temperament; never so strong an impulse for distinction
accompanied with such vague notions of the means to attain it. At this
period of his life his utter childishness, his affectionate simplicity,
his superstition, his unconquerable vanity, present a picture quite
unexampled in all biographies we have ever read. He has to make a
bargain with an old woman (no better than she should be) for his board
and lodging. She had left the room for a short time; there was in it a
portrait of her deceased husband. "I was so much a child," he says,
"that, as the tears rolled down my own cheeks, I wetted the eyes of the
portrait with my tears, in order that the dead man might feel how
troubled I was, and influence the heart of his wife."

Great as his susceptibility to ridicule, his vanity is always greater,
can surmount it, and find a gratification where a sterner nature would
have felt only mortification. In a scene of an opera where a crowd is to
be represented, he edges himself upon the stage. He is very conscious of
the ill condition of his attire: the confirmation coat did but just hold
together; and he did not dare to hold himself upright lest he should
exhibit the more plainly the shortness of the waistcoat which he had
outgrown. He had the feeling very plainly that people would be making
themselves merry with him; yet at this moment, he says, "he felt nothing
but the happiness of stepping for the first time before the footlamps."

Of his superstition he records the following amusing instance. "I had
the notion that as it went with me on New Year's Day, so would it go
with me through the whole year; and my highest wishes were to obtain a
part in a play. It was now New Year's Day. The theatre was closed, and
only a half-blind porter sat at the entrance to the stage, on which
there was not a soul. I stole past him with a beating heart, got between
the moveable scenes and the curtain, and advanced to the open part of
the stage. Here I fell down upon my knees, but not a single verse for
declamation could I recall to my memory. I then said aloud the Lord's
Prayer. I went out with the persuasion that, because I had spoken from
the stage on New Year's Day, I should, in the course of the year,
succeed in speaking still more, as well as in having a part assigned to
me."--(p. 50.)

We must quote the paragraph that immediately follows this extract,
because it shows that, after all, there was something better stirring at
his heart than this vague theatrical ambition, this empty vanity. There
was the love of nature there. "During the two years of my residence in
Copenhagen, I had never been out into the open country. Once only had I
been in the park, and there I had been deeply engrossed by studying the
diversions of the people and their gay tumult. In the spring of the
third year, I went out for the first time amid the verdure of a spring
morning. I stood still suddenly under the first large budding
beech-tree. The sun made the leaves transparent--there was a fragrance,
a freshness--the birds sang. I was overcome by it--I shouted aloud for
joy, threw my arms around the tree, and kissed it. 'Is he mad?' said a
man close behind me."

His good fortune provided him at length with a sincere and serviceable
friend in the person of Collins--conference-councillor, as his title
runs, and one of the most influential men at that time in Denmark.
Through his means a grant was obtained from the royal purse, and access
procured to something like regular education in the grammar-school at
Slagelse. His place in the school was in the lowest class amongst little
boys. He knew indeed nothing at all--nothing of what is taught by the
pedagogue. At the age of eighteen, after having written a tragedy, which
had been submitted to the theatre at Copenhagen, and we know not what
poems besides,--after having versified a dance, and recited a song, he
begins at the very beginning, and seats himself down in the lowest form
of a grammar-school.

It is not our intention to pursue the biography of Andersen beyond what
is necessary for understanding the singular circumstances in which his
mind grew up; we shall not, therefore, detain our readers much longer on
this part of our subject. His scholastic progress appears to have been
at first slow and painful; the rector of the grammar-school behaved
neither kindly nor generously towards him; and on him he afterwards took
his revenge in the character of Habbas Dahdah, in "The Improvisatore."
But he was docile, he was persevering, and passed through the school,
and afterwards the college, not discreditably. In 1829, he was launched
again into the world, a member of the educated class of society.

After supporting himself some time by his pen, he received from his
government a stipend for travelling, which, it appears, in Denmark is
bestowed on young poets as well as artists. And now he started on his
travels--evidently the best school of education for a mind like his. For
whatever use books may have been of to Andersen, in teaching him to
_write_, they have had nothing to do with teaching him to _think_. No
one portion of his writings of any value can be traced to his
acquaintance with books. What knowledge he got from this source he could
never rightly use. What his eye saw, what his heart felt--that alone he
could work with. The slowly won reflection, the linked thought--any
thing like a train of reasoning, seems to have been an utter stranger
to his mind. Throughout his life, he is an observant child. From books
he can gather nothing: severe analytic thinking he knows nothing of; he
must see the world, must hear people talk, must remember how his own
heart beat, and thus only can he find something for utterance.

What a change now in his destiny! The poor shoemaker's child, that
wandered wild in the woods of Odense, and afterwards wandered almost as
wild and as solitary in the streets of Copenhagen--who was next
imprisoned in a school with dictionary and grammar--is now free
again--may wander with wider range of vision--is a traveller--and in
Italy! But the sensitive temper of Andersen, we are afraid, hardly
permitted him to enjoy, as he might have done, his full cup of
happiness. Vanity is an unquiet companion; he should have left it behind
him at home; then the little piece of malice which he records of one of
his friends would not have disturbed him as it appears to have done.

"During my journey to Paris, and the whole month that I spent there, I
heard not a single word from home. Could it be that my friends had
nothing agreeable to tell me? At length, however, a letter arrived; a
large letter, which cost a large sum in postage. My heart beat with joy,
and yearning impatience; it was indeed my first letter. I opened it, but
I discovered not a single written word--nothing but a Copenhagen
newspaper, _containing a lampoon upon me_, and that was sent to me all
that distance with postage unpaid, probably by the anonymous writer
himself. This abominable malice wounded me deeply. I have never
discovered who the author was; perhaps he was one of those who
afterwards called me friend, and pressed my hand. Some men have base
thoughts; I also have mine."

Poor Andersen has all his life long been sorely plagued by his critics.
Those who peruse his Autobiography to the close, and every part of it is
worth reading, will find him in violent ill humour with the theatrical
public, whom he describes as taking a malicious and diabolical pleasure
in damning plays. To hiss down a piece, he declares, is one of the chief
amusements that fill the house. "Five minutes is the usual time, and the
whistles resound, and the lovely women smile and felicitate themselves
like the Spanish ladies at their bloody bull-fights." His second journey
into Italy seems to have been in part occasioned by some quarrel with
the theatre. "If I would represent this portion of my life more clearly
and reflectively, it would require me to penetrate into the mysteries of
the theatre, to analyse our aesthetic cliques, and to drag into
conspicuous notice many individuals who do not belong to publicity; many
persons in my place would, like me, have fallen ill, or would have
resented it vehemently. Perhaps the latter would have been the most
sensible."

Oh, no! Hans Christian--by no means the most sensible. Better even to
have fallen ill. An author by his quarrel with the public, whether the
reading or theatrical public, can gain nothing for himself but added
torment. The more vehemently he contests and resents, the louder is the
laugh against him. Whether the right is upon his side, time alone can
show; time alone can redress his wrongs. When the poet has written his
best, he has done all his part. If he cannot feel perfectly tranquil as
to the result, let him at least affect tranquillity--let him be silent,
and silence will soon bring that peace it typifies.

Henceforward, however, upon the whole, the career of Andersen is
prosperous, and his life genial. We find him in friendly intercourse
with the best spirits of the age. The lad who walked about Odense with
long yellow locks, bare-headed, and bare-footed, and who was half
reconciled to being a tailor's apprentice, because he should get plenty
of remnants to dress his puppets with--is seen spending the evening with
the royal family of Denmark, or dining with the King of Prussia, who
decorates him with his order of the Red Eagle! He has exemplified his
text--"people have a deal of adversity to go through, and then they
become famous."

Those who have read "The Improvisatore," the most ambitious of the
works of Andersen, and by far the most meritorious of his novels, will
now directly recognise the materials of which it has been constructed.
His own early career, and his travels into Italy, have been woven
together in the story of Antonio. So far from censuring him--as some of
his Copenhagen critics appear to have done--for describing himself and
the scenes he beheld, we are only surprised when we read "The True Story
of his Life," that he has not been able to employ in a still more
striking manner, the experience of his singular career. But, as we have
already observed, he betrays no habit or power of mental analysis; he
has not that introspection which, in the phrase of our poet Daniel,
"raises a man above himself;" so that Andersen could contemplate
Andersen, and combine the impartial scrutiny of a spectator with the
thorough knowledge which self can only have of self. So far from
censuring him for the frequent use he makes of the materials which his
own life and travels afforded him, we could wish that he had never
attempted to employ any other. Throughout his novels, whenever he
departs from these, he is either commonplace or extravagant,--or both
together, which, in our days, is very possible. If he imitates other
writers, it is always their worst manner that he contrives to seize; if
he adopts the worn-out resources of preceding novelists, it is always
(and in this he may be doing good service) to render them still more
palpably absurd and ridiculous than they were before. He has dreams in
plenty--his heroes are always dreaming; he has fevered descriptions of
the over-excited imagination--a very favourite resource of modern
novelists; he has his moral enigmas; and of course he has a witch
(Fulvia) who tells fortunes and reads futurity, and reads it correctly,
let philosophy or common sense say what it will. His Fulvia affords his
readers one gratification; they find her fairly hanged at the end of the
book.

We are far enough from attempting to give an outline of the story of
this or any other novel--such skeletons are not attractive; but the
extracts, and the observations we have to make, will best be understood
by entering a few steps into the narrative.

Antonio, the Improvisatore, is born in Rome of poor parents. He is
introduced to us as a child, living with his fond mother, his only
surviving parent, in a room, or rather a loft, in the roof of a house.
She is accidentally run over and killed by a nobleman's carriage. A
certain uncle Peppo, a cripple and a beggar, claims guardianship of the
orphan. Of this Peppo we have a most unamiable portrait. His withered
legs are fastened to a board, and he shuffles himself along with his
hands, which were armed with a pair of wooden hand clogs. He used to sit
upon the steps of the Piazza de Spagna. "Once I was witness," says the
Improvisatore, who tells his own story, "of a scene which awoke in me
fear of him, and also exhibited his own disposition. Upon one of the
lowest flights of stairs sat an old blind beggar, and rattled with his
little leaden box that people might drop a _bajocco_ therein. Many
people passed by my uncle without noticing his crafty smile and the
waivings of his hat; the blind man gained more by his silence--they gave
to him. Three had gone by, and now came the fourth, and threw him a
small coin. Peppo could no longer contain himself: I saw how he crept
down like a snake, and struck the blind man in his face, so that he lost
both money and stick. 'Thou thief!' cried my uncle, 'wilt thou steal
money from me--thou who art not even a regular cripple--cannot see--that
is all! And so he will take my bread from my mouth.'"

On great occasions Peppo could quit his board and straddle upon an ass.
And now he came upon his ass, set Antonio before him, and carried him
off to his home or den. The boy was put into a small recess contiguous
to the apartment which his uncle occupied with some of his guests. He
overheard this conversation: "Can the boy do any thing?" asked one; "Has
he any sort of hurt?"

"No; the Madonna has not been so kind to him," said Peppo; "he is
slender and well formed, like a nobleman's child."

"That is a great misfortune," said they all; and some suggestions were
added, that he could have some little hurt to help him to get his
earthly bread until the Madonna gave him the heavenly. Conversation such
as this filled him with alarm; he crept through the aperture which
served for window to his dormitory; slid down the wall, and made his
escape. He ran as fast as he could, and found himself at length in the
Coliseum.

Antonio, at this time, is a poor boy about nine or ten years old; we
have seen from what sort of guardian the terrified lad was making his
escape. Now, observe the exquisite appropriateness, taste, and judgment
of what follows. It is precisely here that the author makes parade of
the knowledge he has lately gained in the grammar-school of
Slagelse--precisely here that he throws his Antonio into a classical
dream or vision!

     "Behind one of the many wooden altars which stand not far apart
     within the ruins, and indicate the resting-points of the Saviour's
     progress to the cross,[3] I seated myself upon a fallen capital,
     which lay in the grass. The stone was as cold as ice, my head
     burned, there was fever in my blood; I could not sleep, and there
     occurred to my mind all that people had related to me of this old
     building; of the captive Jews who had been made to raise these huge
     blocks of stone for the mighty Roman Caesar; of the wild beasts
     which, within this space, had fought with each other, nay, even
     with men also, while the people sat upon stone benches, which
     ascended step-like from the ground to the loftiest colonnade.

     "There was a rustling in the bushes above me; I looked up, and
     fancied that I saw something moving. Oh, yes! my imagination showed
     to me pale dark shapes, which hewed and builded around me; I heard
     distinctly every stroke that fell, saw the meagre black-bearded
     Jews tear away grass and shrubs to pile stone upon stone, till the
     whole monstrous building stood there newly erected; and now all was
     one throng of human beings, head above head, and the whole seemed
     one infinitely vast living giant body.

     "I saw the vestals in their long white garments; the magnificent
     court of the Caesar; the naked bleeding gladiators; then I heard how
     there was a roaring and a howling round about, in the lowest
     colonnades; from various sides sprang in whole herds of tigers and
     hyaenas; they sped close past the spot where I lay; I felt their
     burning breath; saw their red fiery glances, and held myself fast
     upon the stone upon which I was seated, whilst I prayed the Madonna
     to save me. But wilder still grew the tumult around me; yet I could
     see in the midst of all the holy cross as it still stands, and
     which, whenever I had passed it, I had piously kissed. I exerted
     all my strength, and perceived distinctly that I had thrown my arms
     around it; but every thing that surrounded me trembled violently
     together,--walls, men, beasts. Consciousness had left me,--I
     perceived nothing more. When I again opened my eyes, my fever was
     over."

Sadder trash than this it were almost impossible to write. It is
necessary to make some quotations to justify the terms of censure, as
well as of praise, which we have bestowed upon Andersen; but our readers
will willingly excuse the infliction of many such quotations; they might
be made abundantly enough, we can assure them.

On awaking from this vision, Antonio finds himself in the presence of
some worthy monks. They take charge of him, and ultimately give him over
to the protection of an old woman, a relative, Dominica, who is living
the most solitary life imaginable, in one of the tombs of the Campagna.
Here there is a striking picture presented to the imagination--of the
old woman and the little boy, shut up in the ruined tomb, in the almost
tropical heat, or the heavy rains, that visit the Campagna. He who
erewhile had visions of vestals and captive Jews, Caesar and the
gladiators, is more naturally represented as amusing himself by floating
sticks and reeds upon the little canal dug to carry the water from their
dwelling;--"they were his boats which were to sail to Rome."

One day a young nobleman, pursued by an enraged buffalo, takes refuge in
this tomb, and thus becomes acquainted with Antonio. He is a member of
the Borghese family, and proves to be the very nobleman whose carriage
had accidentally occasioned the death of his mother. Antonio becomes the
protege of the Borghese, returns to Rome, receives an education, and is
raised into the high and cultivated ranks of society. He is put under
the learned discipline of Habbas Dahdah--an excellent name, we confess,
for a fool--in whose person, we presume, he takes a sly revenge upon his
late rector of Slagelse. But he has not been fortunate in the invention
of parallel absurdities in his Italian pedagogue to those which he may
have remembered of some German prototype. He describes him as animated
with a sort of insane aversion to the poet Dante, whom he decries on
every occasion in order to exalt Petrarch. A Habbas Dahdah would be much
more more likely to feign an excessive admiration for the idol and glory
of Italy. However, his pupil stealthily procures a Dante; reads him, of
course _dreams_ of him; in short, there is an intolerable farago about
the great poet.

But the time now comes when the great business of all novels--love--is
brought upon the scene. And here we have an observation to make which we
think may be deserving of attention.

Antonio, the Improvisatore, is made, in the novel, to love in the
strangest fashion imaginable. He loves and he does not love; he never
knows himself, nor the reader either, whether, or with whom, to
pronounce him in love. Annunciata, the first object of this uncertain
passion, behaves herself, it must be confessed, in a very extraordinary
manner. We suppose the exigencies of the novel must excuse her; it was
necessary that her lover should be plunged in despair, and therefore she
could not be permitted to behave as any other woman would have done in
the same circumstances. She has a real affection for Antonio; yet at the
critical moment--the last moment he will be able to learn the truth, the
last time he will see her unless her response be favourable--she behaves
in such a manner as to lead him inevitably to the conclusion that his
rival is preferred to him. This Annunciata, the most celebrated singer
of her day, loses her voice, loses her beauty,--a fever deprives her of
both;--and not till her death does Antonio learn that he, and not
another, was the person really beloved. Meanwhile, in his travels,
Antonio meets with a blind girl, whom he does or does not love, on whom
at least he poetises, and whose forehead, _because she was blind_, he
had kissed. He is afterwards introduced, at Venice, to a young lady,
(Maria) who bears a striking resemblance to this blind girl. She is, in
fact, the same person, restored to sight, though he is not aware of it.
Maria loves the Improvisatore; he says, he believes that his affection
is _not_ love. He quits Venice--he returns--he is ill. Then follows one
of those miserable scenes which novelists will inflict upon us--of
dream, or delirium--what you will,--and, in this state, he fancies Maria
is dead; he finds then that he really loved; and, in his sleep or
trance, he expresses aloud his affection. His declaration is overheard
by Maria and her sister, who are watching over his couch. He wakes, and
Maria is there, alive before him. In his sleep he has become aware of
the true condition of his own heart; nay, he has leapt the Rubicon,--he
has declared it. He becomes a married man.

Now, in the confused and contradictory account of Antonio's passion, we
see a truth which the author drew from his own nature and experience,--a
truth which, if he had fully appreciated, or had manfully adhered to,
would have enabled him to draw a striking, consistent, and original
portrait. In such natures as Andersen's, there is often found a modesty
more than a woman's, combined with a vivid feeling of beauty, and a
yearning for affection. Modesty is no exclusive property of the female
sex, and there may be so much of it in a youth as to be the impediment,
perhaps the unconscious impediment, to all the natural outpouring of his
heart. The coyness of the virgin, the suitor, by his prayers and wooing,
does all he can to overcome; but here the coyness is in the suitor
himself. He has to overcome it by himself, and he cannot. He hardly
knows the sort of enemy he has to conquer. Every woman seems to him
enclosed in a bell-glass, fine as gossamer, but he cannot break it. He
feels himself drawn, but he cannot approach. His heart is yearning; yet
he says to himself, no, I do not love. A looker-on calls him inconstant,
uncertain, capricious. He is not so; he is bound by viewless fetters,
nor does he know where to strike the chain that is coiled around him.

Such was the truth, we apprehend, such the character, that Andersen had
indistinctly in view. He drew from himself, but he had not previously
analysed that self. It is, therefore, not so much a false as a confused
and imperfect representation that he has given, which the reader, if he
thinks it worth his while, must explain and complete for himself.
Perhaps, too, a fear of the ridicule which an exhibition of modesty in
man might draw down from certain slender witlings, from the young
gentlemen, or even the young ladies, of Copenhagen, may have, in part,
deterred him from a faithful portraiture. To people of reflection, who
have learned to estimate at its true value the laugh of coxcombs, and
the wisdom of the so-called man of the world--the shallowest bird of
passage that we know of--such a portrait would have been attractive for
the genuine truth it contains. It would require, indeed, a master's hand
to deal both well and honestly with it.

The descriptions of Italy which "The Improvisatore" contains are
sufficiently striking and faithful to recall the scenes to those who
have visited them; which is all, we believe, the best descriptions can
effect. What is absolutely new to a reader cannot be described to him.
If all the poets and romancers of England were to unite together in a
committee of taste, they could not frame a description which would give
the effect of mountainous scenery to one who had never seen a mountain.
The utmost the describer call do, in all such cases, is to liken the
scene to something already familiar to the reader's imagination. Though
generally faithful, we cannot say that our author never sacrifices
accuracy of detail to the demands of the novelist, never sacrifices the
actual to the ideal. For instance, his account of the _Miserere_ in the
Sistine Chapel, is rather what one is willing to anticipate it might be,
than what a traveller really finds it. To be sure, he has a right to
place his hero of the novel where he pleases in the chapel, relieve him
from the crowd, and give him all the advantages of position: still his
perfect enjoyment of all that both the arts of painting and music can
afford, and that overpowering _sentiment_ which he finds in the great
picture of the Last Judgment by Michel Angelo, (a picture which
addresses itself far more to the artist than the poet,) strikes us as a
description more from imagination than experience.

A little satire upon the travelling English seems, by the way, to be as
agreeable at Copenhagen as at Paris. Our Danish friends are quite
welcome to it; we only wish for their sakes that, in the present
instance, it had been a little more lively and pungent. Our Hans
Andersen is too weak in the wrist, has not arm strong enough "to crack
the satyric thong." Mere exaggeration maybe mere nonsense, and very dull
nonsense. The scene is at the hotel at Terracina, so well known by all
travellers.

     "The cracking of whips re-echoed from the wall of rocks; a carriage
     with four horses rolled up to the hotel. Armed servants sat on the
     seat at the back of the carriage; a pale thin gentleman, wrapped in
     a large bright-coloured dressing-gown, stretched himself within it.
     The postilion dismounted and cracked his long whip several times,
     whilst fresh horses were put to. The stranger wished to proceed,
     but as he desired to have an escort over the mountains where Fra
     Diavolo and Cesari had bold descendants, he was obliged to wait a
     quarter of an hour, and now scolded, half in English and half in
     Italian, at the people's laziness, and at the torments and
     sufferings which travellers had to endure; and at length knotted up
     his pocket-handkerchief into a night-cap, which he drew on his
     head, and then, throwing himself into a corner of the carriage,
     closed his eyes, and seemed to resign himself to his fate.

     "I perceived that it was all Englishman, who already, in ten days,
     had travelled through the north and the middle of Italy, and in
     that time had made himself acquainted with this country; had seen
     Rome in one day, and was now going to Naples to ascend Vesuvius,
     and then by the steam-vessel to Marseilles, to gain a knowledge
     also of the south of France, which he hoped to do in a still
     shorter time. At length eight well-armed horsemen arrived, the
     postilion cracked his whip, and the carriage and the out-riders
     vanished through the gate between the tall yellow rocks."--(Vol.
     ii. p. 6.)

"_Only a Fiddler_" proceeds, in part, on the same plan as "The
Improvisatore." Here, too, the author has drawn from his own early
experience; here, too, we have a poor lad of genius, who will "go
through an immense deal of adversity and then become famous;" here too
we have the little ugly duck, who, however, was born in a swan's egg.
The commencement of the novel is pretty, where it treats of the
childhood of the hero; but Christian (such is his name) does not win
upon our sympathy, and still less upon our respect. We are led to
suspect that Christian Andersen himself, is naturally deficient in
certain elements of character, or he would have better upheld the
dignity of his namesake, whom he has certainly no desire to lower in our
esteem. With an egregious passion for distinction, a great vanity, in
short, we are afraid that he himself (judging from some passages in his
Autobiography) hardly possesses a proper degree of pride, or the due
feeling of self-respect. The Christian in the novel is the butt and
laughing-stock of a proud, wilful young beauty of the name of Naomi; yet
does he forsake the love of a sweet girl Lucie, to be the beaten spaniel
of this Naomi. He has so little spirit as to take her money and her
contempt at the same time.

This self-willed and beautiful Naomi is a well-imagined character, but
imperfectly developed. Indeed the whole novel may be described as a
jumble of ill-connected scenes, and of half-drawn characters. We have
some sad imitations of the worst models of our current literature. Here
is a Norwegian godfather, the blurred likeness of some Parisian
murderer. Here are dreams and visions, and plenty of delirium. He has
caught the trick, perhaps, from some of our English novelists, of
infusing into the persons of his drama all sorts of distorted
imaginations, by way of describing the situation he has placed them in.
We will quote a passage of this nature: it is just possible that some of
our countrymen, when they see their own style reflected back to them
from a foreign page, may be able to appreciate its exquisite truth to
nature. Christian, still a boy, is at play with his companions; he hides
from them in the belfry of a church. It was the custom to ring the bells
at sunset. He had ensconced himself between the wall and the great bell,
and "when this rose, and showed to him the whole opening of its mouth,"
he found he was within a hair's breadth of contact with it. Retreat was
impossible, and the least movement exposed his head to be shattered. The
conception is terrible enough, but by no means a novel one, as all
readers conversant with the pages of this Magazine will readily allow,
by reference to the story of "The Man in the Bell," in our tenth
volume,[4] one of the late Dr Maginn's most powerful and graphic
sketches. But the natural horror of the situation by no means satisfies
this novelist; he therefore engrafts the following imaginations
thereupon, as being such as were most likely to occur to the lad,
frightened out of his senses, stunned by the roar of the bell, winking
hard, and pressing himself closer and closer to the wall to escape the
threatened blow.

     "Overpowered to his very inmost soul by the most fearful anguish,
     the bell appeared to him the jaws of some immense serpent; the
     clapper was the poisonous tongue, which it extended towards him.
     Confused imaginations pressed upon him; feelings similar to the
     anguish which he felt when the godfather had dived with him beneath
     the water, took possession of him; but here it roared far stronger
     in his ears, and the changing colours before his eyes formed
     themselves into gray figures. The old pictures in the castle
     floated before him, but with threatening mien and gestures, and
     ever-changing forms; now long and angular, again jelly-like, clear
     and trembling; they clashed cymbals and beat drums, and then
     suddenly passed away into that fiery glow in which every thing had
     appeared to him, when, with Naomi, he looked through the red
     window-panes. It burned, that he felt plainly. He swam through a
     burning sea, and ever did the serpent exhibit to him its fearful
     jaws. An irresistible desire seized him to take hold on the clapper
     with both hands, when suddenly it became calm around him, but it
     still raged within his brain. He felt that all his clothes clung
     to him, and that his hands seemed fastened to the wall. Before him
     hung the serpent's head, dead and bowed; the bell was silent. He
     closed his eyes and felt that he fell asleep. He had
     fainted."--(Vol. i. p. 59.)

Are these some of the "beautiful thoughts" which Mrs Howitt finds it the
greatest delight of her literary life to translate? One is a little
curious to know how far this beauty has been increased or diminished by
their admiring translator; but unfortunately we can boast no
Scandinavian scholarship. This novel, however, is not without some
striking passages, whether of description of natural scenery, or of
human life. Of these, the little episode of the fate of Steffen-Margaret
recurs most vividly to our recollection. Mrs Howitt, in her translation
of "The True Story of my Life," draws our attention, in a note, to this
character of Steffen-Margaret, informing us that it is the reproduction
of a personage whom Andersen becomes slightly acquainted with in the
early part of his career. She thus points out a striking passage in the
novel; but the translator of the Autobiography and of "Only a Fiddler,"
might have found more natural opportunities for illustrating the
connexion between the novel and the life of the author. There is no
resemblance whatever between the two characters alluded to, except that
they both belong to the same unfortunate class of society. Of the young
girl mentioned in the life, nothing indeed is said, except that she
received once a week a visit from her papa, who came to drink tea with
her, dressed always in a shabby blue coat; and the point of the story
is, that in after times, when Andersen rose into a far different rank of
society, he encountered in some fashionable saloon the papa of the
shabby blue coat in a bland old gentleman glittering with orders.

Christian, the hero of the novel, a lad utterly ignorant of life, has
come for the first time to Copenhagen. Whilst the ship in which he has
arrived is at anchor in the port, it is visited by some _ladies_, one of
whom particularly fascinates him. She must be a princess, or something
of that kind, if not a species of angel. The next day he finds out her
residence, sees her, tells her all his history, all his inspirations,
all his hopes; he is sure that he has found a kind and powerful
patroness. The lady smiles at him, and dismisses him with some cakes and
sweetmeats, and kindly taps upon the head. This is just what Andersen at
the same age would have done himself, and just in this manner would he
have been dismissed and comforted. There is a scene in the Autobiography
very similar. He explains to some kind old dames, whom he encounters at
the theatre, his thwarted aspirations after art; they give him
cakes;--he tells them again of his impulses, and that he is dying to be
famous; they give him more cakes;--he eats and is pacified.

The ship, however, had not been long in the harbour before his princess
visited it again. It was evening--Christian was alone in the cabin.

     "He was most strangely affected as he heard at this moment a voice
     on the cabin steps, which was just like hers. She, perhaps, would
     already present herself as a powerful fairy to conduct him to
     happiness. He would have rushed towards her, but she came not
     alone; a sailor accompanied her, and inquired aloud, on entering,
     if there were any one there. But a strange feeling of distress
     fettered Christian's tongue, and he remained silent.

     "'What have you got to say to me?' asked the sailor.

     "'Save me!' was the first word, which Christian heard from her lips
     in the cabin; she whom he had regarded as a rich and noble lady. 'I
     am sunk in shame!' said she. 'No one esteems me; I no longer esteem
     myself. Oh, save me, Soeren! I have honestly divided my money with
     you; I yet am possessed of forty dollars. Marry me, and take me
     away out of this wo, and out of this misery! Take me to a place
     where nobody will know me, where you may not be ashamed of me. I
     will work for you like a slave, till the blood comes out at my
     finger-ends. Oh, take me away with you! In a year's time it may be
     too late.'

     "'Should I take you to my old father and mother?' said the sailor.

     "'I will kiss the dust from their feet they may beat me, and I will
     bear it without a murmur--will patiently bear every blow. I am
     already old, that I know. I shall soon be eight-and-twenty; but it
     is an act of mercy, which I beseech of you. If you will not do it,
     nobody else will; and I think I must drink--drink till my brain
     reels--and I forget what I have made myself!'

     "'Is that the very important thing that you have got to tell me?'
     remarked the sailor, with a cold indifference.

     "Her tears, her sighs, her words of despair, sank deep into
     Christian's heart. A visionary image had vanished, and with its
     vanishing he saw the dark side of a naked reality.

     "He found himself again alone.

     "A few days after this, the ice had to be hewed away from the
     channel. Christian and the sailor struck their axes deeply into the
     firm ice, so that it broke into great pieces. Something white hung
     fast to the ice in the opening; the sailor enlarged the opening,
     and then a female corpse presented itself, dressed in white as for
     a ball. She had amber leads round her neck, gold earrings, and she
     held her hands closely folded against her breast as if for prayer.
     It was Steffen-Margaret."

"O.T." commences in a more lively style than either of the preceding
novels, but soon becomes in fact the dullest and most wearisome of the
three. During a portion of this novel he seems to have taken for his
model of narrative the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe; but the calm
domestic manner which is tolerable in the clear-sighted man, who we know
can rise nobly from it when he pleases, accords ill enough with the
bewildered, most displeasing, and half intelligible story which Andersen
has here to relate.

We have occupied ourselves quite sufficiently with these novels, and
shall pass over "O.T." without further comment. Neither shall we bestow
any of our space upon "The Poet's Bazaar," which seems to be nothing
else than the Journal which the author may be supposed to have kept
during his second visit to Italy, when he also extended his travels into
Greece and Constantinople.

We take refuge in the nursery--we will listen to these tales for
children--we throw away the rigid pen of criticism--we will have a
story.

What precisely are the laws, what the critical rules, on which tales for
children should be written, we will by no means undertake to define. Are
they to contain nothing, in language or significance, beyond the
apprehension of the inmates of the nursery? It is a question which we
will not pretend to answer. Aristotle lays down nothing on the subject
in his "Poetici;" nor Mr Dunlop in his "History of Fiction." If this be
the law, if every thing must be level to the understanding of the
frock-and-trousers population, then these, and many other Tales for
Children, transgress against the first rule of their construction. How
often does the story turn, like the novels for elder people, upon a
marriage! Some king's son in disguise marries the beautiful princess.
What idea has a child of marriage?--unless the sugared plum-cake
distributed on such occasions comes in aid of his imagination. Marriage,
to the infantine intelligence, must mean fine dresses, and infinite
sweetmeats--a sort of juvenile party that is never to break up. Well,
and the notion serves to carry on the tale withal. The imagination
throws this temporary bridge over the gap, till time and experience
supply other architecture. Amongst this collection, is a story in which
vast importance is attached to a kiss. What can a curly-headed urchin,
who is kissing, or being kissed, all day long, know of the value that
may be given to what some versifier calls,

     "The humid seal of soft affections!"

To our apprehension, it has always appeared that the best books for
children were those not written expressly for them, but which,
interesting to all readers, happened to fasten peculiarly upon the
youthful imagination,--such as "Robinson Crusoe," the "Arabian Nights,"
"Pilgrim's Progress," &c. It is quite true that in all these there is
much the child does not understand, but where there is something vividly
apprehended, there is an additional pleasure procured, and an admirable
stimulant, in the endeavour to penetrate the rest. There is all the
charm of a riddle combined with all the fascination of a story. Besides,
do we not throughout our boyhood and our youth, read with intense
interest, and to our great improvement, books which we but partly
understand? How much was lost to us of our Milton and our Shakspeare at
an age when nevertheless we read them with intense interest and
excitement, and therefore, we may be sure, with great profit. Throughout
the whole season of our intellectual progress, we are necessarily
reading works of which a great part is obscure to us; we get half at
one time, and half at another.

Not, by any means, that we intend to say a word against writing books
for children; if they are good books we shall read them too. A clever
man talking to his child, in the presence of his adult friends,--has it
never been remarked, how infinitely amusing he may be, and what an
advantage he has from this two-fold audience? He lets loose all his
fancy, under pretence that he is talking to a child, and he couples this
wildness with all his wit, and point, and shrewdness, because he knows
his friend is listening. The child is not a whit the less pleased,
because there is something above its comprehension, nor the friend at
all the less entertained, because he laughs at what was not intended for
his capacity. A writer of children's tales--(If they are any thing
better than what every nursery-maid can invent for herself)--is
precisely in this position: he will, he _must_ have in view the adult
listener. While speaking to the child, he will endeavour to interest the
parent who is overhearing him; and thus there may result a very amusing
and agreeable composition.

We have met with some children's tales which, we thought, were so
plainly levelled at the parent, that they seemed little more than
lectures to grown-up people in the disguise of stories to their
children. Some of the very clever stories of Miss Edgeworth appear to be
more evidently designed for the adult listener, than to the little
people to whom they are immediately addressed. And they may perhaps
render good service in this way. Perhaps some mature matron, far above
counsel, may take a hint which she thinks was not _intended_--may accept
that piece of good advice which she fancies her own shrewdness has
discovered, and which the subtle, Miss Edgeworth had laid, like a trap,
in her path.

We are happy, we repeat, that we do not feel it incumbent upon us to
settle the rules, the critical canon, of this nursery literature. We
have no objection, however, to peep into it now and then, and we shall
venture to give our readers another of Andersen's little stories, and so
take our leave of him. We omit a sentence, here and there, where we can
without injury to the tale; yet we have no fear that our gravest readers
will think the extract too long. Our quotation is from the volume called
"Tales from Denmark." There is another collection called, "The Shoes of
Fortune;" these are higher in pretension, and inferior in merit.


THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES.

     "One day a couple of swindlers, who called themselves first-rate
     weavers, made their appearance in the imperial town of----. They
     pretended that they were able to weave the richest stuffs, in which
     not only the colours and the pattern were extremely beautiful, but
     that the clothes made of such stuffs possessed the wonderful
     property of remaining invisible to him who was unfit for the office
     he held, or was extremely silly.

     "'What capital clothes they must be!' thought the Emperor. 'If I
     had but such a suit, I could directly find out what people in my
     empire were not equal to their office; and besides, I should be
     able to distinguish the clever from the stupid. By Jove, I must
     have some of this stuff made directly for me!' And so he ordered
     large sums of money to be given to the two swindlers, that they
     might set to work immediately.

     "The men erected two looms, and did as if they worked very
     diligently; but in reality they had got nothing on the loom. They
     boldly demanded the finest silk, and gold thread, put it all in
     their own pockets, and worked away at the empty loom till quite
     late at night.

     "'I should like to know how the two weavers are getting on with my
     stuff,' said the Emperor one day to himself; 'but he was rather
     embarrassed when he remembered that a silly fellow, or one unfitted
     for his office, would not be able to see the stuff. 'Tis true, he
     thought, as far as regarded himself, there was no risk whatever;
     but yet he preferred sending some one else, to bring him
     intelligence of the two weavers, and how they were getting on,
     before he went himself; for every body in the whole town had heard
     of the wonderful property that this stuff was said to possess.

     "'I will send my worthy old minister,' said the Emperor at last,
     after much consideration; 'he will be able to say how the stuff
     looks better than anybody.'

     "So the worthy old minister went to the room where the two
     swindlers were' working away with all their might and main. 'Lord
     help me!' thought the old man, opening his eyes as wide as
     possible--'Why, I can't see the least thing whatever on the loom.'
     But he took care not to say so.

     "The swindlers, pointing to the empty frame, asked him most
     politely if the colours were not of great beauty. And the poor old
     minister looked and looked, and could see nothing whatever. 'Bless
     me!' thought he to himself, 'Am I, then, really a simpleton? Well,
     I never thought so. Nobody knows it. I not fit for office! No,
     nothing on earth shall make me say that I have not seen the stuff!'

     "'Well, sir,' said one of the swindlers, still working busily at
     the empty loom, 'you don't say if the stuff pleases you or not.'

     "'Oh beautiful! beautiful! the work is admirable!' said the old
     minister looking hard through his spectacles. 'This pattern, and
     these colours! Well, well, I shall not fail to tell the Emperor
     that they are most beautiful!'

     "The swindlers then asked for more money, and silk, and gold
     thread; but they put as before all that was given them into their
     own pocket, and still continued to work with apparent diligence at
     the empty loom.

     "Some time after, the Emperor sent another officer to see how the
     work was getting on. But he fared like the other; he stared at the
     loom from every side; but as there was nothing there, of course he
     could see nothing. 'Does the stuff not please you as much as it did
     the minister?' asked the men, making the same gestures as before,
     and talking of splendid colours and patterns, which did not exist.

     "'Stupid I certainly am not!' thought the new commissioner; 'then
     it must be that I am not fitted for my lucrative office--that were
     a good joke! However, no one dare even suspect such a thing.' And
     so he began praising the stuff that he could not see, and told the
     two swindlers how pleased he was to behold such beautiful colours,
     and such charming patterns. 'Indeed, your majesty,' said he to the
     Emperor on his return, 'the stuff which the weavers are making, is
     extraordinarily fine.'

     "It was the talk of the whole town.

     "The Emperor could no longer restrain his curiosity to see this
     costly stuff; so, accompanied by a chosen train of courtiers, among
     whom were the two trusty men who had so admired the work, off he
     went to the two cunning cheats. As soon as they heard of the
     Emperor's approach they began working with all diligence, although
     there was still not a single thread on the loom.

     "'Is it not magnificent?' said the two officers of the crown, who
     had been there before. 'Will your majesty only look? What a
     charming pattern! What beautiful colours!' said they, pointing to
     the empty frames, for they thought the others really could see the
     stuff.

     "'What's the meaning of this?' said the Emperor to himself, 'I see
     nothing! Am _I_ a simpleton! I not fit to be Emperor? Oh,' he cried
     aloud, 'charming! The stuff is really charming! I approve of it
     highly;' and he smiled graciously, and examined the empty looms
     minutely. And the whole suite strained their eyes and cried
     'Beautiful!' and counselled his Majesty to have new robes made out
     of this magnificent stuff for the grand procession that was about
     to take place. And so it was ordered.

     "The day on which the procession was to take place, the two men
     brought the Emperor's new suit to the palace; they held up their
     arms as though they had something in their hands, and said, 'Here
     are your Majesty's knee-breeches; here is the coat, and here the
     mantle. The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; and when one is
     dressed, one would almost fancy one had nothing on: but that is
     just the beauty of this stuff!'

     "'Of course!' said all the courtiers, although not a single one of
     them could see any thing of the clothes.

     "'Will your imperial Majesty most graciously be pleased to undress?
     We will then try on the new things before the glass.'

     "The Emperor allowed himself to be undressed, and then the two
     cheats did exactly as if each one helped him on with an article of
     dress, while his Majesty turned himself round on all sides before
     the mirror.

     "'The canopy which is to be borne above your Majesty in the
     procession, is in readiness without,' announced the chief master of
     the ceremonies.

     "'I am quite ready,' replied the Emperor, turning round once more
     before the looking-glass.

     "So the Emperor walked on, under the high canopy, through the
     streets of the metropolis, and all the people in the streets and at
     the windows cried out, 'Oh, how beautiful the Emperor's new dress
     is!' In short there was nobody but wished to cheat himself into the
     belief that he saw the Emperor's new clothes.

     "'But he has nothing on!' said a little child.'

     "And then all the people cried out, 'He has nothing on!'

     "But the Emperor and the courtiers--they retained their seeming
     faith, and walked on with great dignity to the close of the
     procession."


FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Improvisatore; or, Life in Italy_, from the Danish of HANS
CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Translated by MARY HOWITT.

_Only a Fiddler!_ and _O.T. or, Life in Denmark_, by the Author of _The
Improvisatore_. Translated by MARY HOWITT.

_A True Story of my Life_, by HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Translated by
MARY HOWITT.

_Tales from Denmark_. Translated by CHARLES BONAR.

_A Picture-Book without Pictures_. Translated by META TAYLOR.

_The Shoes of Fortune, and other Tales_.

_A Poet's Bazaar_. Translated by CHARLES BECKWITH, Esq.

[2] See Allan Cunningham's _Lives of the Painters and Sculptors_, vol.
ii. p. 150.

[3] Not very clearly expressed by the translator. One would think that
our Saviour, in his progress to the cross, had passed through the area
of the Coliseum, and not that each of the pictures on these altars
represented one of the resting-points, &c. Mrs Howitt is sometimes hasty
and careless in her writing. And why does she employ such expressions as
these:--"many white buttons," "beside of it," "beside of us?" We have
read _a many_ English books, but never met them in anyone beside of
this.

[4] Vol. x, Nov. 1821, p. 373.




THE VISION OF CAGLIOSTRO.

     "In the horror of a vision by night, when deep sleep is wont to
     hold men, fear seized upon me, and trembling, and all my bones were
     affrighted; and when a spirit passed before me, the hair of my
     flesh stood up."--_The Book of Job._


The last, and perhaps the most renowned of the Rosicrucians, was,
according to a historical insinuation, implicated in that notorious
juggle of the Diamond Necklace, which tended so much to increase the
popular hatred towards the evil-doomed and beautiful Marie Antoinette.
Whether this imputation were correct, or whether the Cardinal Duc de
Rohan was the only distinguished person deluded by the artifices of the
Countess de la Motte, it is certain that Joseph Balsamo, commonly called
Alexandre, Count de Cagliostro, was capable of any knavery, however
infamous. Guile was his element; audacity was his breastplate; delusion
was his profession; immorality was his creed; debauchery was his
consolation; his own genius--the genius of cunning--was the god of his
idolatry. Had Cagliostro been sustained by the principles of rectitude,
he must have become the idol as well as the wonder of his
contemporaries; his accomplishments must have dazzled them into
admiration, for he possessed all the attributes of a Crichton. Beautiful
in aspect, symmetrical in proportions, graceful in carriage, capacious
in intellect, erudite as a Benedictine, agile as an Acrobat, daring as
Scaevola, persuasive as Alcibiades, skilled in all manly pastimes,
familiar with the philosophies of the scholar and the worldling, an
orator, a musician, a courtier, a linguist,--such was the celebrated
Cagliostro. In his abilities, he was as capricious as Leonardo, and as
subtle as Macchiavelli; but he was without the magnanimity of the one,
or the crafty prudence of the other. Lucretius so darkened the glories
of nature by the glooms of his blasphemous imagination, that he might
have described this earth as a golden globe animated by a demon.
Fashioned in a mould as marvellous as that golden orb, and animated in
like manner by a devilish and wily spirit, was Balsamo the Rosicrucian.

Between the period of his birth in 1743, and that of his dissolution in
1795, when incarcerated in a dungeon of San Leo, at Rome, Cagliostro,
rendered himself in a manner illustrious by practising upon the
credulity of his fellow-creatures. Holstein had witnessed his pretended
successes in alchemy. Strasburg had received him with admiration, as the
evangelist of a mystic religion. Paris had resounded with the marvels
revealed by his performances in Egyptian free-masonry. Molten gold was
said to stream at pleasure over the rim of his crucibles; divination by
astrology was as familiar to him as it had been of yore to Zoroaster or
Nostradamus; graves yawned at the beck of his potent finger; their
ghostly habitants, appeared at his preternatural bidding. The
necromantic achievements of Doctor Dee and William Lilly dwindled into
insignificance before those attributed to a man who, although apparently
in the bloom of manhood, was believed to have survived a thousand
winters.

Accident had supplied Cagliostro with an accomplice of suitable
depravity. In the course of his eccentric peregrinations among the
continental cities, he had formed the acquaintance of a female,
remarkable for her consummate loveliness and her boundless sensuality.
Married to this Circe, the adventurer began to thrive beyond his most
sanguine anticipations. It must be remembered, however, that in his
nefarious proceedings, Balsamo was aided by a faculty of invention
almost miraculous in its fruitfulness, and occasionally almost sublime
in its audacity. By these means, he ultimately became the most
astonishing impostor the world had ever beheld, with the solitary
exception of Mohammed.

As a forerunner of a disastrous revolution, the appearance of this
fantastic personage in the capital of civilisation was at once dismal
and prophetic. Unconsciously, he was the prophet of disaster.
Unconsciously, he was the prelude--half-solemn, half-grotesque--of a
bloody and diabolical saturnalia. History, both profane and inspired,
tells us that when the Euphrates forsook its natural channel, and the
hostile legions trampled under its gates at nightfall; when the
revellers of Belshazzar, drunk with prolonged orgies and haggard with
the shadow of an impending doom, staggered through the marble vestibules
and out upon the marble causeways, rending their purple vestures in the
moonlight, there was weeping among the lords of Chaldea,--"Wo! wo! wo!"
was walled in the streets of Babylon. A similar destiny awaited Paris,
but as yet a different spectacle was visible; as yet the carousals of
the metropolis were at their zenith; as yet the current flowed in its
ancient channel; as yet the woes of the empire were not written on the
wall of the palace. Festivities were never conducted with more
magnificence than immediately before the downfall of the monarchy and
the general desolation of the kingdom. The pomps of the religion, the
pageantries of the court, and the munificence of the nobility, were
never before characterised by so much grandeur and profusion. The
church, the sovereign, and the oligarchy, were crowning themselves for
the sacrifice.

       *       *       *       *       *

Opposite the Rue de Luxembourg, and parallel with the Rue de Caumartin,
there stood, in the year 1782, a little villa-cottage or rustic
pavilion. It was separated from the Boulevard de la Madeleine by a green
paddock, and was concealed in a nest of laurustinus and clematis.
Autumn, that generous season, which seems in its bounty to impart a
smell of ripeness to the very leaves, had already scattered dyes of gold
and vermilion over the verdure of this shrubbery. A night-breeze,
impregnated with vegetable perfumes, and wafting before it one of these
leaves, stole between the branches--over the fragrant mould--across a
grass-plot--through an open window of the cottage. The leaf tinkled. It
had fallen upon the pages of a volume from which a man was reading by a
lamp. At that moment the clock of the Capuchins tolled out a doleful
TWO; it was answered by the numerous bells of Paris. Solemn, querulous,
sepulchral, quavering, silvery, close at hand, or modulated into a dim
echo by the distance, the voice of the inexorable hours vibrated over
the capital, and then ceased.

Alas, for the heart of Cagliostro!

The solitary watcher shuddered as the metallic sounds floated in from
the belfries. Although startled by the dropping of the leaf, he closed
the volume, leisurely placing it between the pages as a marker--_it_, so
brittle! so yellow! so typical of decay and mortality! The book
comprised the writings of Sir Cornelius Agrippa. Having tossed the old
alchemist from him with an air of overwhelming dejection, the student
abandoned himself to the most sorrowful reflections.

He had but recently returned from a masked ball, and a domino of
salmon-coloured satin still hung loosely over his shoulders. As the
feeble light of the lamp glimmered upon the jet-bugles and
steel-spangles of his costume, there was visible the perpetual contrast
of his destiny,--a mingling of the most abstruse researches and the most
extravagant frivolities. Jewels sparkled upon his hands and bosom; the
varicose veins on his temples throbbed with a feverish precision; the
fumes of the wine-cup flushed his cheek and disordered his imagination.

"Death," thought the Rosicrucian, "fills me with abhorrence; and yet
life is totally devoid of happiness. Happiness! O delusive phantom of
humanity, how art thou attainable? Through Fame? Fame is mine, and I am
wretched. Over the realms of civilisation my name is noised abroad; in
the populous cities the glory of my art resounds; when my barge glided
among the palaces of Venice, the blue Adriatic was purpled with blossoms
in my honour.--Fame? Fame brings not happiness to Cagliostro. Wealth?
Not so. Ducats, pistoles, louis-d'or, have brought no panacea to the
sorrows of Balsamo. Beauty? Nay; for, in the profligate experience of
capitals, the sage is saddened with the knowledge that comeliness, at
best, is but an exquisite hypocrisy. I have striven also, vainly, for
contentment in the luxuries of voluptuous living. The talisman of
Epicurus has evaded my grasp--the glittering bauble![5] The ravishing
ideal JOY, has been to me not as the statue to Pygmalion: I have
grovelled down in adoration at its feet, and have found it the same
immobile, relentless, unresponsive image. Youth is yet mine, but it is a
youth hoary in desolation. Centuries of anguish have flooded through my
bosom, even in the heyday of existence. The tangible and the intangible,
the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, have
been at deadly strife in my conjectures. The present has been to me an
evasion, the future an enigma; the earth a delusion, the heavens a
doubt. Even the pomp of those inexplicable stars is a new agony of
indecision to my recoiling fancy[6]--so impassive in their
unchangeableness, so awful in the quiescence of their eternal grandeur.
Supreme, too, in my bewilderment, remains the problem of their
revolutions--the cause of their impulsion[7] as well as of their
creation. Baffled in my scrutiny of the sublime puzzle which is _domed_
over the globe at nightfall, dizzy with the contemplation of such
abysses of mystery, my thoughts have reverted to this earth, in which
pleasure sparkles but to evaporate. No solace in the investigation of
those infinitudes, which are only fathomable by a system revolting to my
judgment--the system of a theocratic philosophy; no consolation in the
dreamings evoked by the lore of the stupendous skies: my heart throbs
still for the detection and the possession of happiness. Nature has
endowed me with senses--five delicate and susceptible instruments--for
the realisation of bodily delight. Sights of unutterable loveliness,
tones of surpassing melody, perfumes of delicious fragrance, marvellous
sensibilities of touch and palate, afford me so many channels for
enjoyment. Still the insufficiency of the palpable and appreciable is
paramount; still the everlasting dolor interposes: the appetite is
satiated, the aroma palls upon the nostrils, the nerves are affected by
irritability, the harmony merges into dissonance; even the beautiful
becomes so far an abomination that man is 'mad for the sight of his eyes
that he did see.' Such is the sterile and repulsive penalty of the
searcher after happiness. Happiness! O delusive phantom of humanity, how
art thou attainable?"

A thrill pervaded the frame of the visionary as he paused in his
meditations. Subtle as the birth of an emotion--solemn as the presage of
a disaster--terrible as the throes of dissolution, was the pang that
agonised the Rosicrucian. His flesh crept upon his bones at the
consciousness of a preternatural but invisible presence--the presence of
an unseen visitant in the dead of the midnight! His heart quaked as it
drank in, like Eliphaz, "_the veins of_ ITS _whisper_."[8] There was no
sound or reverberation, and yet the language streamed upon the knowledge
of the listener with a distinctness beyond that of human articulation.
The stillness of his solitude was only broken by the rustling of the
night-breeze among the laurustines, and yet in the ears of Cagliostro
there was the utterance as of unsubstantial lips--the sense as of a
divine symphony--"the thunder, and the music, and the pomp" of an
unearthly Voice.[9]

"Balsamo!" it cried, "thy thoughts are blasphemy; thy lamentations are
foolishness; thy mind is darkened by the glooms of a most barren
dejection. Away! vain Sceptic, with the syllogisms of infidelity. The
glory of the immortal WILL evades thy comprehension in the depths of
infinitude. When in its natural brightness, the spiritual being of man
reflects that glory as in a mirror. _Thine_ is blurred by sensuality.
Tranquillity is denied thee, because of the concupiscence of thy
ambition. A profligate and venal career has troubled thy soul with
misgivings. Thou hast scorned even the five senses--those golden portals
of humanity! Know, O dreamer, that in them alone consists the enjoyment
of a finite existence: know that _through the virtuous use of those five
senses, earthly happiness is attainable_! Dost thou still tremble in thy
unbelief? Arise, Balsamo, and behold the teachings of eternity!"

As the last sentence resounded in the heart of Cagliostro, up into the
air floated the Rosicrucian and the Voice.


TIBERIUS.

Time and distance seemed to be conquered in that mysterious ascension,
and an impenetrable darkness enveloped the impostor as he felt himself
carried swiftly through the atmosphere. When he had somewhat recovered,
however, from his astonishment, the motion ceased, and the light of an
Italian evening beamed upon him from the heavens. A scene then revealed
itself around Cagliostro, the like of which his eyes had never before
beheld, or his imagination, in its wildest mood, conceived.

He was standing in a secluded grove in the island of Capreae. Fountains
sparkled under the branches; blossoms of the gaudiest colours flaunted
on the brambles, or enamelled the turf; laughter and music filled the
air with a confusion of sweet sounds; and among the intricacies of the
trees, bands of revellers flitted to and fro, clad in the antique
costumes of Rome. Under the shadow of a gigantic orange-bush, upon a
couch of luxurious softness and embroidered in gorgeous arabesques,
there reclined the figure of an old man. His countenance was hideous
with age and debauchery. Sin glimmered in the evil light of his
eyes--those enormous and bloodshot eyes with which (_praegrandibus
oculis_) the historian tells us he could see even in the night-time.[10]
Habitual intemperance had inflamed his complexion, and disfigured his
skin with disgusting eruptions; while his body, naturally robust in its
proportions, had become bloated with the indolence of confirmed
gluttony. A garment (the _toga virilis_) of virgin whiteness covered his
limbs; along the edge of the garment was the broad hem of Tyrian purple
indicative of the imperial dignity; and around the hoary brow of the
epicurean, was woven a chaplet of roses and aloe-leaves.

Cagliostro recoiled in abhorrence before a spectacle at once so austere
and lascivious. His spirit quailed at the sight of a visage in which
appeared to be concentrated the infamy of many centuries. His soul
revolted at the sinister and ferocious expression pervading every
lineament, and lurking in every wrinkle. As he gazed, however, a blithe
sound startled him from the umbrage of the boughs. Quick, lively,
jocund, to the clashing of her cymbals, there bounded forth an Italian
maiden in the garb of a Bacchante. Her feet agile as the roe's, her eyes
lustrous and defiant, her hair dishevelled, her bosom heaving, her arms
symmetrical as sculpture, but glowing with the roseate warmth of youth,
the virgin still rejoiced, as it were, in the tumult of the dance.
Grapes of a golden-green relieved by the ruddy-brown of their foliage,
clustered in a garland about her temples, and leaped in unison with her
movements. Around! with her raven tresses streaming abroad in
ringlets--around! with her sandals clinking on the gravel to the
capricious beat of her cymbals--around! with her light robes flowing
back from a jewelled brooch above the knee--singing, sparkling,
undulating, circling, rustling, the Bacchante entranced the heart of the
Rosicrucian. She gleamed before him like the embodiment of enthusiasm.
She was the genius of motion, the divinity of the dance; she was
Terpsichore in the grace of her movements, Euterpe in the ravishing
sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper
tint even the abhorred cheek of the voluptuary.

By an almost imperceptible degree, the damsel abated the ardour of her
gyrations, her cymbals clashed less frequently, the song faded from her
lip, the flutter of her garments ceased, the vine-fruit drooped upon her
forehead. She stood before the couch palpitating with emotion, and
radiant with a divine beauty. In another instant, she had prostrated
herself upon the earth, for in the decrepit monster of Capreae, she
recognised the lord of the whole world--Tiberius.

"Arise, maiden of Apulia," he said, with an immediate sense that he
beheld another of those innocent damsels, who were stolen from their
pastoral homes on the Peninsula to become the victims of his depravity.
"Arise, and slake my thirst from yonder goblet. The tongue of Tiberius
is dry with the avidity of his passion."

An indescribable loathing entered into the imagination of the Bacchante
even as she lay upon the grass; yet she rose with precipitation and
filled a chalice to the brim with Falernian. Tiberius grasped it with an
eager hand, and his mouth pressed the lip of the cup as if to drain its
ruby vintage to the bottom. Suddenly, however, the eyes of the old man
blazed with a raging light; the scowl of lust was forgotten; the
vindictiveness of a fiend shone in his dilated eyeballs, and, with a
yell of fury, he cast the goblet into the air, crying out that the wine
_boiled like the bowl of Pluto_. He was writhing in one of those
paroxysms of rage, which justified posterity in regarding him as a
madman. The howling of Tiberius resounded among the verdure, as the
rattle of a snake might do when it raises its deadly crest from its lair
among the flowers. Quick as thought at the first sound of those
inexorable accents, the grove was thronged with the revellers. They
jostled each other in their solicitude to minister to the cruelty of the
despot; and that cruelty was as ruthless, and as hell-born, as it was
ingenious and appalling.

Obedient to a gesture of Tiberius, the Bacchante was placed upon a
pedestal. For a moment, she stood before them an exquisite statue Of
despair--exquisite even in the excess of her bewilderment. For a moment,
she stood there stunned by the suddenness of the commotion, and frantic
with the consciousness of her peril. For a moment she gazed about her
for aid, wildly but, alas! vainly. No pity beamed upon her in that more
horrible Gomorrah. The marble trembled under her feet--a sulphurous
stench shot through its crevices--the virgin shrieked and fell forwards,
scorched and blackened to a cinder. She was blasted, as if by a
thunderbolt.[11] Cagliostro looked with horror upon the ashes of the
Bacchante. He had seen youth stricken down by age; he had seen virtue
annihilated, so to speak, at the mandate of vice; he had seen--and even
_his_ callous heart exulted at the thought--he had seen innocence
snatched from pollution, when upon the very threshold of an earthly
hell. While rejoicing in this reflection, he was aroused by the
stertorous breathing of the emperor. The crowned demon of the island was
being borne away to his palace upon the shoulders of his attendants.
Although maddened by an insatiable thirst, and by a gloom that was
becoming habitual, the monster lay upon his cushions as impotent as a
child, in the midst of his diseases and iniquities.[12]

At the feet of the Rosicrucian were huddled the bones of the virgin of
Apulia; and the babbling of the fountains was alone audible in the
solitude.

"Such," said the mournful Voice, as Cagliostro again felt himself
carried through the darkness--"such, Balsamo, are the miseries of a
debauched appetite."


AGRIPPA.

In another instant, the impostor was standing upon the floor of a
gigantic amphitheatre in Palestine. The whole air was refulgent with the
light of a summer morning, and through the loopholes of the structure,
the eye caught the blue shimmer of the Mediterranean. Banners,
emblazoned with the ciphers of Rome, fluttered from the walls of the
amphitheatre. Its internal circumference was thronged with a vast
concourse of citizens; and, immediately about the Rosicrucian, groups of
foreign traders, habited as if for some unusual ceremony, were scattered
over the arena. Expectation was evinced in every movement of the
assemblage, in every murmur that floated round the benches. The
worshippers were there, it seemed, and were awaiting the high-priest.
That high-priest was approaching, and more than a high-priest; for Herod
Agrippa, the tetrarch of Judea had descended from Jerusalem to Caesarea,
for the celebration of warlike games in honour of the Emperor Claudius,
and, on the completion of those festivities, the deputed sovereign had
consented, at the intercession of Blastus, to receive a deputation of
certain Phenician ambassadors who were solicitous for an assurance of
his clemency. Those envoys--the merchant princes of Tyre and Sidon--were
tarrying in the public theatre of the city for the promised interview in
the presence of the people of Samaria.

Cagliostro marvelled, as he scanned the scene before him, whether it
were all a reality or a delusion of his fancy; but the lapping of the
surge upon the adjacent beach, and the perfume of Oriental spices which
impregnated the breezes from the Levant, and even the motes that swarmed
about him like phosphoric atoms, proved that it was no juggle of a
distempered imagination.

Suddenly the air was rent with acclamations; the crowd rose as if by a
single impulse; trumpets sounded in the seven porches of the
amphitheatre; again the plaudits shook the air like the concussion of
enthusiasm, and the deputation in the arena prostrated themselves in the
dust. Balsamo saw, at once, the reason of this rejoicing; he saw the
tetrarch of Judea seated upon a throne of ivory. The crown of Agrippa
glittered upon his forehead with an unnatural brightness--it was of the
purest gold, radiating from the brow in spikes, and flecked with pearls
of an uncommon size. Silent--erect--inflated with pride at his own
grandeur, and the adulation of the rabble, sate the King of Palestine.
Silent--awe-stricken--uncovered before the majesty of the representative
of Claudius, stood the people of Samaria and Phenicia. Extreme beauty of
an elevated and heroic character shone upon the features of Herod,
although his beard was grizzled with the passage of fifty-four winters.
In the midst of the silence of the populace, the morning sun rose,
almost abruptly, above the topmost arches of the edifice, and darted his
beams full upon the glorious garments of Agrippa. It played in sparkles
of intense lustre upon the jewels of his diadem; and upon the outer
robe, which was of silver tissue woven with consummate skill and
powdered with diamonds, the refraction of the sunlight produced an
intolerable splendour.[13] The Samaritans shielded their eyes from its
magnificence; they were dazzled; they were blinded; they thrilled with
admiration and astonishment.

Agrippa spoke.

At the first sound of his accents, there was a whisper of awe among the
multitude--it increased--it grew louder--it arose to the heavens in one
prolonged and jubilant shout of adoration.

"It is a God!" they cried--"it is a God that speaketh, not a man!"

As the language of that impious homage saluted the ears of Herod, his
mouth curled with a smile of satisfaction, his soul expanded with an
inexpressible tumult of emotions, he drank in the blasphemous flatteries
of the rabble, and assumed to himself the power and the dignity of the
Most High God. Yet in the very ecstasy of those sensations, his
countenance became ghastly, his lips writhed, his eyes beheld with
unutterable dismay the omen of his dissolution--the visible phantom of
an avenging Nemesis.[14] He staggered from his throne, crying aloud in
the extremity of his anguish; a sudden corruption had seized upon his
body--he was being devoured by worms.

The heart of Cagliostro quailed within him at the lamentations of the
people of Samaria, as they beheld their idol smitten down by death in
the midst of his surpassing pomp. Even the Jewish hagiographer tells us,
with pathetic simplicity, that King Agrippa himself wept at the wailings
of the adoring mob.

Again the Alchemist found himself enveloped in darkness, again the
unearthly Voice stole into his brain.

"Lo!" it said, "how the frame rots in the ermine: how the body and soul
are polluted by vicious passions! Such, Balsamo, are the penalties of
the lusts of the flesh."


MILTON.

Another scene then revealed itself to the Rosicrucian, but one
altogether different from those he had already witnessed. Instead of
being in an Oriental amphitheatre, he was standing in a rural lane;
instead of tumult he found tranquillity; instead of regal pageantries an
almost primitive simplicity. He inhaled the sweet smells of clover and
newly-turned mould with a zest hitherto unexperienced. The gurgling of a
brook by the wayside saluted his ears, as it struggled through the
rushes and tinkled over the pebbles, with a sound more agreeable than he
ever remembered to have heard from the instruments of court musicians.
For the first time nature seemed to disclose her real loveliness to his
comprehension. Every where she appeared to abound with beauties: in the
bee that lit upon the nettle and sucked the honey out of its blossom; in
the nettle that nodded under the weight of the bee; in the dew that
dropped like a diamond from the alder-bough when the thrush alighted on
its stem; in the thrush that warbled till the speckled feathers on its
throat throbbed as if its heart were in its song; in the slug that
trailed a silver track upon the dust; in the very dust itself that
twirled in threads and circles on the ground as the wind swerved round
the corner of the hedgerow. Cagliostro was entranced with the most novel
and pleasurable emotions, as he strolled on towards the building he had
already observed. From the elevation of the ground which he was
traversing, his glance roved with admiration over a wide and diversified
extent of country; over a prospect richly wooded and teeming with
vegetation; over orchards laden with fruit and knee-deep in grass; over
fields of barley bristling with golden ripeness; over distant mills,
churning the water into foam, and driving gusts of meal out through the
open doorway; over meadows where the sheep cropped the cool herbage, and
the cattle lay in the sunshine sleeping; over village steeples, over
homesteads brown with age, or hid amongst the verdure. The worldling
scanned the profusion of the panorama with an amazement that was
exquisite from its newness. He marvelled at the charms that strewed the
earth in such abundance, at the almost unnumbered forms and colours of
her vitality, at the wonderful harmony that subsisted amidst all those
various hues and shapes. Never had the joys derivable from the sense of
vision appeared of so much value as now that he gazed into the deep and
delicious magnificence of nature. His sight, with a sort of luxurious
abandonment, strayed over the contrasts, and penetrated into the
distances of the landscape; his bosom swelled with the consciousness of
a sympathy with that creation of which he felt himself to be but a
kindred unit, or, at best, a sentient atom.

It was while absorbed in these sensations, that Cagliostro paused before
the rustic dwelling-house towards which his steps had been involuntarily
directed. The building was situated at a few paces from the pathway.
There was nothing about it to arrest the attention of a passer-by,
except, perhaps, all appearance of extreme but picturesque humility. The
walls were riveted together with iron-bands in crossbars and zig-zags;
the brickwork was decayed and crumbling away in blotches; the roof was
low and thatched. Yet, in spite of these evidences of poverty, the
scholar regarded the structure with a reverential aspect, with such an
aspect as he might have presented had he contemplated the hut of Baucis
and Philemon.

The threshold of this obscure edifice formed of itself a bower of
greenery, thickly covered with the blooms of the honey-suckle. Under the
porch was seated a man of a most venerable countenance. He was muffled
in a gray coat of the coarsest texture, and his legs being crossed, a
worsted stocking and a slipper of untanned leather betrayed the meanness
of his under garments. His hair, brilliant with a whiteness like that of
milk, was parted in the centre of the forehead, and fell over his
shoulders in those negligent curls called _oreilles de chien_, which
became fashionable long afterwards, during the days of the French
Directory. Had the Alchemist remained profoundly ignorant as to the
identity of the old man, he must still have observed with interest,
features which were equally characterised by the pensiveness of the
student and the paleness of the valetudinarian. He knew, however,
instinctively, as he had done upon the two preceding occasions, that he
beheld a personage of illustrious memory. And he knew rightly, for it
was Milton. While the great plague was desolating the metropolis, he had
escaped from his residence in the Artillery Walk, and sought security
from the contagion by a temporary sojourn in Buckinghamshire.

Opposite the immortal sage stood a person of about the same years, but
of a very different deportment--it was the dearest of his few friends,
and the most ardent of his many worshippers, Richardson. The latter was
leaning against the trunk of a great maple-tree that grew close to the
parlour-lattice, stretching forth its enormous branches in all
directions, and mingling its foliage with the smoke that issued from the
chimney. Richardson had been reading aloud but a moment before, from a
volume of Boccaccio; he had placed the book, however, upon the
window-sill, in obedience to a movement from his companion, and
continued, with his arms folded and his eyelids closed, a silent and
almost inanimate portion of the domestic group. The quietude which
ensued was so contagious that Cagliostro remarked with a feeling of
listlessness, the details and accessories of the spectacle--the silk
curtains of rusty green festooned before the open window, the
tobacco-pipe lying among the manuscripts upon the table, even the
slouched-hat hanging from the back of an arm-chair. The rambling
meditations of Balsamo were soon concentrated upon a loftier theme, by
the voice of Milton singing in a subdued tone the antistrophe of a
favourite ode of Pindar. As the noble words of the Greek lyrist rolled
with an indescribable gusto from the lips of Milton, it seemed to the
Rosicrucian that he had never before comprehended the true euphony of
the language. And the visage of the old bard responded to the strain of
Pindar; it was illumined with a certain majesty of expression that
imparted additional dignity to a countenance at all times beaming with
wisdom. In appreciating the Pagan poet, the poet of Christianity
appeared to glow with enthusiasm like that which entranced his whole
soul in the moments of his own superb inspiration.[15] Nor was the
grandeur of the head diminished in any manner by the unpoetical
proportions of the body, for, to the acknowledgment of his most partial
biographer, Richardson, the stature of Milton was so much below the
ordinary height, and so much beyond the ordinary bulk, that he might
almost be described as "short and thick." Yet, notwithstanding these
peculiarities of the frame, an august radiance seemed to envelope the
brow--a brow, hoary alike from years and from misfortunes--and to invest
with a sublime air the figure of that old man huddled in that old gray
coat. Cagliostro gazed with profound interest upon Milton as the rolling
melody of Pindar streamed into his ears, when suddenly the song ceased,
and the face of the singer was raised to the resplendent light of the
heavens. Alas! those eyes turned vacantly in their sockets--those eyes
which had once looked so sorrowfully on the sightless Galileo--those
eyes which had mourned over the ashes of _Lycidas_, and rained upon them
tears transmuted by poetry into a shower of precious stones! The misery
of his blindness recurred to Milton himself at that same instant. A
cloud of grief descended upon his countenance. He experienced one of
those poignant feelings of regret which, in our own day, occasionally
oppress the heart of Augustin Thierry--for with the sensibility of a
poet he _knew_ that the hour was beautiful. Never had Cagliostro seen
human face express such exquisite but patient suffering; it seemed to be
_listening_ to the loveliness of the earth; it seemed to be _inhaling_
the glories of nature, as it were, through those channels which were not
obliterated. The stirring of the leaves, the scent of the woodbine, the
pattering of the winged seeds of the maple upon the pages of Boccaccio,
the fitful twittering of the birds--all ascended as offerings of
recompense to the blind man, but they only tended to enhance the sense
of his affliction. He caught but the skirts of the goddess of that
creation whose glories he had chanted in his celestial epic; and yet no
murmur escaped from the dejected lip of Milton!

Again darkness surrounded the Rosicrucian--again the awful voice
resounded in his imagination.

"Behold!" it said, "the sorrows of the great and virtuous when the light
is quenched: behold the divine prerogative of those who see! And know,
Balsamo, that such are the boons thou hast contemned--such are the
faculties thou hast polluted."


MIRABEAU.

After a scarcely perceptible pause, the Voice resumed: "The miseries of
those who have abused or lost the powers of seeing, of tasting, or of
feeling, have been revealed to thee, O sceptic! Thine eyes have
penetrated into the dim retrospections of the past. Look onwards,
Balsamo, and thou shalt discern the things that are germinating in the
womb of the future."

Cagliostro had scarcely heard this assurance when the curtain hitherto
impenetrable to mortal, was raised--the dread shadows of the future were
dispelled. He found himself in the upper apartment of one of the most
distinguished mansions in Paris. The chamber, which was lofty and
spacious, was enriched with the most costly furniture, and the most
gorgeous decorations. Pilasters, incrusted with marble, and enamelled
with lapis-lazuli, broke the monotony of the walls and supported the
ceiling with their capitals. Between these pilasters were pedestals
surmounted with statuary and busts; and these, again, were reflected in
the mirrors hung about the room in profusion. An almost oriental luxury
characterised the Turkish carpets, as soft as the greensward, and the
draperies of velvet which concealed the windows, and fell in graceful
folds about a bed at the opposite end of the apartment. An antique
candelabrum stood upon the mantelpiece and shed a rosy and voluptuous
light over this domestic pomp, while some odorous gums crackled in a
chafing-dish upon the hearth and loaded the air with their fragrance.

Familiar as the Rosicrucian was with splendour, his glance roved over
these appurtenances with delight, for he had never before seen the
evidences of wealth so enhanced by the evidences of refinement. He
thought that the possession of such a dwelling would be something
towards the realisation of happiness. In the very conception of that
ignoble thought, however, he received a solemn and effectual admonition.
Before him, in the silent chamber, on either side of it groups of
attendants and men robed in the costumes of the court and the barracks,
was a deathbed. It was the deathbed of an extraordinary being, the owner
of all this grandeur. It was the deathbed of Honore-Gabriel de Mirabeau.

The patrician demagogue reposed upon the pillows in the final stage of
dissolution, and his broad forehead was already damp with the sweat of
his last agony. Cagliostro surveyed the dying tribune with emotion, for
in the very hideousness of his countenance there was a subtle and
indefinable fascination. The gigantic stature which had so often awed
the tumults of the National Assembly was prostrate. The voice, whose
brazen tones had sounded like a trumpet over the land, was hushed--that
voice which had exclaimed with such sublime significance to the
Marseillais,--"When the last of the Gracchi expired, he flung dust
towards heaven, and from this dust sprang Marius!"--that voice which had
conquered the aversion of Mademoiselle de Marignan with its seductive
melody--that voice which had been at once the oracle of the king and the
law of the rabble. Mirabeau lay before the Rosicrucian, with his natural
ugliness rendered yet more repulsive by the tokens of a terrible malady.
The touch of death imparted additional horror to the massive deformity
of his skull, to the coarseness of his pockmarked features, to his
sunken eyeballs, to his cheeks scared by disease, to his hair bristling
and dishevelled like that of a gorgon. Still, through all these
unsightly and almost loathsome peculiarities, there was perceptible a
sort of masculine susceptibility. It was that susceptibility which gave
zest to his debaucheries, and occasionally subdued into pathos the
storms of his dazzling and sonorous eloquence.

Never was a solitary life prized by so many millions, as that which was
then ebbing from the breast of Mirabeau. He seemed to be the only
guarantee for the solid adjustment of the Revolution. With his
disappearance, all hope of tranquillity and good government was prepared
to vanish. His was the intellect in which the extremes of that momentous
epoch were united. He was the antithesis of public opinion. Noble by
birth and plebeian by accident, a democrat in principle and a dictator
in ambition, the shield of the monarch and the sword of the people, he
was placed exactly between the contending powers of the age. He was the
arbiter between royalty and revolt: on the one side he acquired the
obedience of the sovereign through his fears, and on the other he
obtained the allegiance of the multitude through their aspirations. His
supremacy occupied at the same moment the palace, the legislative
chamber, and the marketplace; for all recognised _in_ him the omen of
their good fortune, and _through_ him, the realisation of their wishes.
Flattered by the minions of the monarchy, applauded by the members of
the National Assembly, and idolised by the mob, his influence rested, as
it were, upon a triple foundation. And yet, by a contradiction as
remarkable as the anomalies of his own character, all parties were
disposed to rejoice at the probability of his departure. The King was
gratified at the thought of his removal, forasmuch as Mirabeau was the
impersonation of a formidable sedition; the political adventurers
exulted in the prospect of his decease, because he monopolised
popularity, and rendered them insignificant by the contrast of his
colossal genius; the people, in like manner, were, not altogether
displeased at the notion of his extinction, because he appeared to them
the only obstacle between themselves, and the supreme authority. All
valued him as their present preserver, and all hated him as their future
impediment. Such were the conflicting sentiments entertained towards
Mirabeau, during the last incidents of his eccentric and volatile
career. And in the midst of so many antagonistic interests, he alone
remained unshaken and unappalled, his oratory rendering him still the
mouth-piece of the Revolution, his duplicity its diplomatist, and his
intellectual contrivance its statesman. Nor was he satisfied with these
successes; he sought others, and was equally fortunate. Profligacy and
legislation equally divided his enthusiasm between them, and proved him
to be not only the most daring politician, but the most debauched
citizen in France. His power and popularity had now, however, reached
their apogee, and Honore-Gabriel Riquetti Comte de Mirabeau was
stretched upon his deathbed.

Cagliostro approached the couch and listened, for the great demagogue
was speaking. His voice was harsh even in a murmur, though it still
retained, according to Lemercier, "a slight meridional accent." The rosy
light of the candelabrum beamed upon his cadaverous lips.

"Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that thus I may enter
upon eternal sleep."

Memorable words--the last words of Gabriel de Mirabeau. They embody the
spirit of his sterile philosophy, and are in unison with the
evanescence of his genius.[16] As Cagliostro observed the limbs
convulsed and the eyes glazed with a simultaneous pang, he was caught up
again into the darkness, and again his soul hearkened to the whispers of
the Holy Voice.

"Thus," it said, "are those recompensed with disease and satiety, who
are the slaves of their meanest, as of their noblest appetites; thus is
their talisman shattered in the hour of its attainment."


BEETHOVEN.

When the reproachful accents ceased, Balsamo felt his feet once more
pressing the earth, and the breezes rustling against his domino. He was
wandering in the garden of what is termed the Schwarzpanier House,
situated on a slope or glacis in the outskirts of Wahring. The evening
was so far advanced, that candles already twinkled from the upper
windows of the building, while the fires of the kitchens checkered the
shrubs and gravel with patches of glaring light. Through the flowerbeds,
and along the intricate paths of the shrubbery, the Alchemist strolled
at a languid pace, musing upon the things he had already witnessed, when
his vigilant ears caught the tones of a musical instrument. Although it
was scarcely audible from the distance, Cagliostro was struck by the
extreme beauty and _espieglerie_ of the performance. He hurried forward
in the direction from which the sounds proceeded, and at each step they
became more distinguishable and bewitching. After a momentary feeling of
indecision when he reached the walls of the Schwarzpanier, the Alchemist
ascended a flight of steps, and passed through the open casement of a
French-window into a modest sitting-room. The musician whose skill had
attracted him, was seated in the gray twilight at a piano. Cagliostro
scarcely noticed that he was a man of short stature but of muscular
proportions; he scarcely remarked, indeed, either the apartment or its
occupant; his whole consciousness was absorbed in the melody that
streamed from the instrument.

At first, the fingers of the player seemed to frolic over the keys, as
though they toyed with the vibrations of the strings. The sounds were
sportive and jocund; they rippled like laughter; they were capricious as
the merriment of a coquette. Then they merged into a sweet and warbling
cadence--a cadence of inimitable tenderness, the very suavity of which
was rendered more piquant by its lavish variations. The measure changed,
with an abrupt fling of the treble-hand: it gushed into an air quaint
and sprightly as the dance of Puck--comic--odd--sparkling on the ear
like zig-zags: it threw out a shower of notes; it was the voice of
agility and merriment; it was grotesque and fitful, droll in its absurd
confusion, and yet nimble, in its amazing ingenuity. Gradually, however,
the humorous movement resolved itself into a strain of preternatural
wildness--a strain that made the blood curdle, and the flesh creep, and
the nerves shudder. It abounded with dark and goblin passages; it was
the whirlwind blowing among the crags of the Jungfrau, and swarming with
the forms and cries of the witches of the Walpurgis; it was Eurydice,
traversing the corridors of hell; it was midnight over the wilderness,
with the clouds drifting before the moon; it was a hurricane on the deep
sea; it was every thing horrible, wierdlike, and tumultuous. And through
the very fury of these passages there would start tones of ravishing and
gentle beauty--the incense of an adoring heart wafted to the black
heavens through the lightnings and lamentations of Nineveh. Again the
musician changed the purpose of his improvisation; it was no longer
dismal and appalling, it was pathetic. The instrument became, as it
were, the organ of sadness, it became eloquent with an inarticulate wo;
it was a breast bursting with affliction, a voice broken with sorrow, a
soul dissolving with emotions. Then the variable harmonies rose from
pensiveness into frenzy, from frenzy into the noise and the shocks of a
great battle; they swelled to the din of contending armies, to the storm
and vicissitudes of warlike deeds, and soared at last into a paean such
as that of victorious legions when--

  "Gaily to glory they come,
      Like a king in his pomp,
      To the blast of the tromp,
  And the roar of the mighty drum!"

As the triumphant tones of the instrument rolled up from its recesses,
and filled the apartment with a torrent of majestic sounds, as the
musician swayed to and fro in the enthusiasm of his sublime
inspirations, and enhanced the divine symphony by the crash of many
thrilling and abrupt discords, the Rosicrucian gazed with awe upon the
responsive grandeur of his countenance. The impetus of his superb
imagination imparted an inconceivable dignity to every lineament, to his
capacious forehead, to his broad and distended nostrils, to the fierce
protrusion of his under-lip, to the mobile and generous expression of
his mouth, to the tawny yellow of his complexion, to the brown depths of
his noble and dilated eyes. There was something in unison with the
glorious sounds that reverberated through the chamber, even in the
enormous contour of his head and the gray disorder of his hair. He
seemed to exult in the torrent of melody as it gushed from the piano and
streamed out upon the dusk of the evening. While Cagliostro was
listening in an ecstasy of admiration, he was startled by a sudden
clangour among the bass-notes--the music seemed to be jumbled into
confusion, and the ear was stunned by a painful and intolerable
dissonance. On looking more intently, he perceived that the composer had
let one hand fall abstractedly upon the key-board, while the other
executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and
involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the
musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: Beethoven was
cursed with the loss of his most precious faculty. Those who appreciate
the full splendour of his gigantic genius, those who conceive, with a
distinguished composer now living, that "Beethoven began where Haydn and
Mozart left off;" those who coincide with an eminent critic, in saying
that "the discords of Beethoven are better than the harmonies of all
other musicians;" those, in fine, who worship his memory with the
devotion inspired by his compositions, can sympathise in that terrible
deprivation of the powers of hearing, by which his art was rendered a
blank, and the latter years of his life were imbittered. They will
remember with gratitude the joys they have derived from the effusions of
his fruitful intellect; they will call to their recollection the joyous
chorus of the prisoners in _Fidelio_,--the sublime and adoring hymn of
the "Alleluia" in _The Mount of Olives_,--the matchless pomp of the
_Sinfonia Eroica_,--the passionate beauty of the sentiment of
_Adelaida_,--the aerial grace of his quartets and waltzes,--the
thrilling and almost awful pathos of the dirge written for six
trombones,--but, above all, they will recall to mind the noblest work
ever conceived and perfected by composer, one of the greatest
achievements of the human mind, _the Mass in D_. And, bearing these
wonders in their memory, their hearts will ache for the doom of Ludwig
Von Beethoven. None of these things, however, being known to the
Rosicrucian, his sympathies were aroused solely by what he himself had
heard and witnessed. Still that was more than enough to fill his whole
soul with commiseration, especially as the sounds again burst in
bewitching concert from the instrument, and a new inspiration lit up the
visage of the musician. Cagliostro found himself, with profound sorrow,
returning into the silent darkness, and the solemn Voice stealing, for
the last time, into his brain.

"Behold, Balsamo," it said, "the pleasures that may vanish with the loss
of hearing. Behold, and shudder at the remembrance of thy blasphemies.
Recognise the goodness of Omnipotence in thy five senses--value them
beyond either rank, or wealth, or dignity, or fame, or power,--value
them as the five mysterious talismans of human life; and, in their
virtuous employment, know that earthly happiness _is_ attainable!"

While these words were resounding in his mind, the Rosicrucian felt
himself carried, with inconceivable swiftness, through the atmosphere.
Immediately they ceased he became motionless, though he was still
enveloped in the shadows of night. All that had recently occurred to
him,--all the strange and moving circumstances of which he had been a
spectator, then thronged upon his recollection, and stirred his heart
with astonishment. His imagination responded to his amazement. He
revisited again, in thought, the blooming grove of Capreae, the
pageantries of Cesarea, the green lanes of Buckingham, the luxurious
_salon_ of Paris, and the twilight of the garden of Wahring. Italian
beauty lived again in his remembrance, but a beauty marred by
licentiousness and cruelty. He seemed to behold once more the multitudes
of Palestine, the landscapes of England, the dainty splendours of
France, and the tranquil homes of Germany. Gradually, however, his
reflections became less incoherent, and the meaning of the vision
appeared to evolve itself before him, in inductions fraught at once with
reproach and consolation. Coupling together the truths enunciated by the
Voice of his unseen visitant, and the spectacles revealed to him in
succession through its agency, the Alchemist bethought himself whether
his original impressions, as to the condition of humanity, might not, in
a great measure, have been erroneous. What he had just witnessed assured
him, in an unanswerable manner, that overt crimes or overt virtues were
merely the good or evil employment of one or other of the five senses;
that they were the bright and black spots upon the spiritual nature of
man, the _faculae_ and the _maculae_, as it were, on the disc of his
conscience. Satisfied, therefore, that the purity or depravity of every
mortal was merely the consequence of the different purpose to which
their senses had been directed, the Rosicrucian perceived the intimate
relationship subsisting between the immaterial being and the physical
organs. He perceived especially that those organs were the channels
through which that immaterial portion of humanity was brought into
communication with a material existence, was compelled to endure its
miseries, or was enabled to appreciate its enjoyments. In this he
recognised the veracity of that solemn assurance, that happiness is
accessible, even on this earth, to all who use their senses with a
virtuous discrimination. Nor had this consolatory truth been enforced
merely by a barren asseveration. Balsamo had been taught the inestimable
value of those senses, and the penalties of such as abused them by their
vices. Five incidents, most touching, or most appalling, had reminded
him of the exquisite pleasures derivable from created things, through
the eyes, through the nostrils, through the ears, through the palate,
and through the nerves. He had seen the anguish, moreover, of those who
suffered from the deprivation of either sense, or of those who were
tortured by the result of their own heinous misapplication. He had seen
this in the insanity of Tiberius, in the torments of Agrippa, in the
sadness of Milton, in the desolation of Mirabeau, and even in the
philosophic sorrows of Beethoven. The emperor, the tetrarch, the poet,
the demagogue, and the musician, crowded upon his memory, and appealed
to his judgment with the same melancholy distinctness. Still the
villainous predilections of the Rosicrucian contended for the mastery,
although his intellect recognised the wisdom of the Vision. A fierce
strife arose between his passions and his reason.

Suddenly his eyes opened to the splendour of an autumn morning; and as
the sunlight poured along the _Boulevard de la Madeleine_, as it gilded
every blade of grass in the paddock, and streamed in golden pencils
through the open window of the cottage, it glittered upon his cheek like
raindrops.

Cagliostro was weeping.


FOOTNOTES:

[5] Beranger has already conveyed this truth through the melody of his
delicious verse:--

  "Le vois-tu bien, la-bas, la-bas,
  La-bas, la-bas? dit l'Esperance;
  Bourgeois, manants, rois et prelats
  Lui font de loin la reverence.
  C'est le Bonheur, dit l'Esperance.
  Courons, courons; doublons le pas,
  Pour le trouver la-bas, la-bas,
  La-bas, la-bas."

[6] "I did not dare to breathe aloud the unhallowed anguish of my mind
to the majesty of the unsympathising stars."--See _Falkland_.

[7] "Motus autem siderum," such is the reverent and sententious remark
of Grotius, "qui eccentrici, quique epicyclici dicuntur, manifeste
ostendunt _non vim materiae, sed liberi agentis ordinationem_."--See _De
Veritate Rel. Christ. Lib._ i. Sec. 7.

[8] "Now, there was a word spoken to me in private, and my ears, by
stealth as it were, received the veins of its whisper."--_Job_, chap.
iv. verse 12.

[9]

  "There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
  When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
  Among immortals when a god gives sign
  With hushing finger, how he means to load
  His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
  With thunder, and with music, and with pomp."

Such are the majestic syllables which preface the speech of Saturn in
_Hyperion_. Keats was ridding himself of the puerilities of Cockaigne
when he wrote that fragment of an epic--a fragment which is unsurpassed
by any modern attempt at heroic composition. In reading it, the very
earth seems shaking with the footsteps of fallen divinities. Even Byron,
who, like ourselves, had no great predilection for the school in which
the poetic genius of John Keats was germinated, has emphatically said of
_Hyperion_ that "it seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as
sublime as AEschylus."--See _Byron's Works_, vol. xv., p. 92.

[10] Thus writes Suetonius--"praegrandibus oculis, qui, quod mirum esset,
noctu etiam et in tenebris, viderent, sed ad breve, et quum primum a
somno patuissent; deinde rursum hebescebant."--_Tib._ cap. lxviii.

[11] Those who are familiar with the classic historians, will see in
this description no exaggeration whatever. Instruments for the
destruction of life yet more awful and mysterious, were employed by many
of the predecessors, and many of the successors of Tiberius, as well as
by Tiberius himself: and modern science has shown that these devices,
instead of being, as was originally conjectured, the result of
black-magic, were, in reality, the effect of hydraulic, pneumatic, and
mechanical contrivances. Even the most marvellous feats of the Egyptian
sorcerers have been latterly explained by the revelations of natural
philosophy, and a multitude of these explanations may be found by the
reader in the learned work "Des Sciences Occultes," &c. written by M.
Eusebe Salverte, and published in Paris as recently as 1843. In that
remarkable volume, M. Salverte proves that natural phenomena are more
startling than necromantic tricks, and that, in the words of Roger
Bacon, "_non igitur oportet nos magicis illusionibus uti, cum potestas
philosophica doceat operari quod sufficit._" That Tiberius was capable
of atrocities yet more terrific, and that murders of the most inhuman
kind were the consequence of almost every one of his diabolical whims,
those acquainted with the picturesque narrative of Suetonius already
know. They will remember not only how he caused his nephew Germanicus to
be poisoned by the governor of Syria, but how he ordered a fisherman to
be torn in pieces by the claws of a crab, simply because he met him, in
one of his suspicious moods, when strolling in a sequestered garden of
Capreae.--_Sue. Tib._ c. lx.

[12] Suetonius assures us (cap. lxviii.), that the muscular strength of
Tiberius Claudius Nero was, in the prime of his manhood, almost as
supernatural as his crimes; that he could with his outstretched finger
bore a hole through a sound apple (_integrum malum digito terebraret_),
and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (_caput
pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret._) His excesses must,
however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation.

[13] His garb, writes Josephus, "was so resplendent as to spread a
horror over those that looked intently upon Him."--_Lib._ xix. c. 8.

[14] "An owl," says Josephus (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," angelos
Kyriou, say the scriptures, (Acts. xii. 23,)--in either case a spectral
illusion.

[15] It is impossible for anyone devoted to the study of "Paradise
Lost," of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il
Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away
at times by the _oestrum_, or _divine afflatus_, although Dr Johnson
discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these
transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of
invention."--See _Lives of the Poets_, vol. i. p. 188.

[16] Even M. Alphonse de Lamartine acknowledges of Mirabeau, that
"neither his character, his deeds, nor his thoughts, have the brand of
immortality."--_Hist. Giron._ Liv. i. chap. 3.

[17] This incident was suggested by a touching sentence in Schindler's
biography of Beethoven. After observing that the outward sense no longer
co-operated with the inward mind of the great composer, and that,
consequently, "the outpourings of his fancy became scarcely
intelligible," Schindler continues:--_"Sometimes he would lay his left
hand flat upon the key-board, and thus drown, in discordant noise, the
music to which his right was feelingly giving utterance._"--See _Life of
Beethoven, Edited by Ignace Moschelles_, ii. 175.




MAGA IN AMERICA.


                                        _New York, August_ 1847.

My Dear Godfrey--You will laugh when you hear into what a practical
blunder I was led, by a desire to gratify your curiosity concerning
Maga's Icon in America. I wondered you should ask me for a description,
when it was so easy to have ordered out the thing itself; and so
resolved to save myself the trouble of writing a long story, by duly
exporting a specimen of the American Ebony, from which you might form
your own conclusions as to its counterfeit merits, and its supposed
relations to the great question of international copyright. _Segnius
irritant_--you know! What disciple of old Plunkett's will ever forget
the difference between the _demissa per aurem_, and

  ----"quae sunt _oculis_ subjecta fidelibus!"

I have always maintained that his illustration of this great principle
gave Dickens the hint of his Dotheboy's Hall. You remember, doubtless,
poor Harry Farmar's false quantity, and how Plunkett made him peel
onions till he cried his eyes out; asserting his confidence in Horace's
maxim, and that he had found the usual box on the ear quite incapable of
any exciting effect on Harry's mind. Who would have said that the same
Harry, surviving the operation, would have lived to hunt bisons on the
prairies of Western America, after riding on elephants in India, and
bestriding a camel's hump through the waste places of Edom! Harry's
wandering mind has developed as vagabond a habit of life as ever his
prophetic instructor ventured to predict; but he vows himself cured at
last, and that, if he ever sets foot again on England's _terra firma_,
he will at once become one of the manly hearts that guard the fair, and
settle down in contented conjugation. He it was, then, who offered to be
the bearer to yourself at C---- of any despatches, or parcels, I might
choose to send; but he affected to think me so thoroughly Americanised,
that he entered a caveat against my loading him with a consignment of
bowie knives or cotton-bales. A nicely packthreaded parcel was
accordingly put up, and duly adorned with your most Saxon name and
address, in the delusive expectation that none but your own hands would
presume

  "----to set the imprison'd wranglers free,
  And give them voice and utterance once again."

I was doomed to be quickly undeceived; and as I doubt not Harry will be
giving you his own version of the affair, over a glass of wine, some
three weeks hence, at the Hall, you shall know beforehand how much to
allow, in this matter, for his habitual unveracity, or rather love of
romance.

I waited on him yesterday and presented the packet; but you should have
seen him start, when I happened to mention its contents. Not the captors
of Guido Fawkes bounced with more consternation, when that eminent
pyrotechnist proposed to touch off his gunpowder for their especial
gratification and amusement. "What!" exclaimed our mutual friend--"Have
you lived so long in America, as to have forgotten the laws of a
civilised and Christian land! Would you have me seized as a smuggler;
posted in every newspaper as an importer of contraband goods; brutally
insulted by the officers of her Majesty's Customs; and perhaps actually
brought before a justice, and locked up where the only prospect would
be a distant view of New South Wales!" It was in vain that I
remonstrated with his eloquent horrors, at the thought of renewing his
travels at government cost: he insisted that my proposal might actually
have ensured the catastrophe; and from this appeal to my feelings,
passed to a bold invective against literary piracy, and concluded by a
generous compromise in favour of the cotton-bales, if I would pardon the
warm expressions with which he found himself compelled to decline my
extraordinary commission. You should have seen him, Godfrey! If he ever
takes that seat in Parliament which he threatens to make the sequel of
matrimony, I predict wo to the whole race of Humes, Brights, and
Cobdens, should they ever start him on a subject capable of
transatlantic illustration.

I could not but laugh, though, when I saw the true state of the case, at
the comical scene that might have ensued, had he taken my parcel without
explanations. Think of Harry's air of fearless innocence before the
inspectors of imports, till from the depths of an enormous trunk comes
forth a parcel, which those faithful officials at once lay bare, with
the professional dexterity of a private tearing his cartridge. The
officer stares, and Harry looks still more astounded, at the sight of a
familiar visage, peering forth from under the wrapper, and giving mute
but significant expressions of pain and displeasure. It is the head of
Geordy Buchanan! It is Blackwood, imported from New York! The confounded
servant of her Majesty's Customs begins to whisper contraband, and
expresses a wish for the undoubted original, which you, just stepping up
to welcome your friend, are enabled to supply. The fresh number from
your coat-skirts, and the suspicious importation from America, are set
together like the two Dromios before the duke. "Look on this picture,
and on that!" Behold the two Buchanans!

     "One of these men is genius to the other
     ----Which is the natural man,
     And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?"

Harry, to prevent the coming crisis, volunteers a confession, but
invites you to a comparison of the heads. With his outrageous Tory
hatred of the Yankees, he, of course, declares there's no comparison;
ridicules the fac-simile, and hastily seizing what he mistakes for the
counterfeit, confounds the company by a quotation from the Latin of
"Terence"--that very small fragment of the Eunuchus which Plunkett
forced into his head through the opposite pole of his person--

     "Ne comparandus hic quidem ad illum est, ille erat
     Honesta facie, et liberali!"

And finally, disgusted to find that he has ascribed the more gentlemanly
bearing to the American, he tosses the whole parcel into the docks, with
the tardy announcement that it was my friendly consignment to yourself,
as well as the very curiosity of literature which you so much desire to
see. You remember, doubtless, what I did not recollect, that there is no
port of entry in her Majesty's empire for the Icons of British copyright
property. They come with a Frenchified air from the press of Galignani;
they arrive in vulgarised costume from the cheap manufactories of New
England; but the scent of the vermin is familiar to the nose of a
collector of customs, and no rat-catching terrier, says my informant,
ever pounces upon his Norwegian with half the gusto with which such an
official snubs such an intruder. A health, I say, to the fury of this
sort of Iconoclasts!

Our friend's unusual caution has saved you the excitement of the scene I
have imagined, but it puts me to the necessity of substituting a hurried
description for the ocular satisfaction I had proposed to send you. Who
would have supposed, thirty years since, that one Maga would not be
enough for the world, and that New York would be the seat of its
flourishing double! Yet it is now twelve years since its twin started up
on this side the water, and has been battening and fattening on the
rewards of successful illegitimacy. Nay--for a portion of that period,
Maga has been "three gentlemen at once." The very pirates were pirated,
and undersold; and two reprints of Maga, both professing to be
fac-similes, were at one time supported in America, in addition to
countless republications of particular articles; such, for instance, as
the tales of "Ten Thousand a-Year," and "Caleb Stukeley"! I think I hear
you exclaim at such wholesale grand-larceny; but though not inclined to
take up the cudgels for Reprint and Co., it is but justice to tell you
what they would say in self-defence. The truth is, they would not have
known what you meant, had you told them, when their republication was
established, that there was any question as to the ethics of such a
business. The laws not only permitted, but even encouraged the
enterprise; and they do so still. The most respectable booksellers were
engaged in a similar seizure of every new novel of Bulwer's, and every
new work whatever, that had stood the experiment of success in England.
Original copies of the Magazine were rarely imported, as the importer's
charges and duties nearly doubled the first cost of each number; and
besides, it was already virtually republished, its leading articles
being constantly appropriated, in different ways, by editors of literary
periodicals, and often by the daily newspapers. Then, it must be
remembered, that England was nearly twice as far from America before the
era of steamers; and that the matter of copyright was only just
beginning to excite the attention of Parliament. As yet Lord Mahon had
not stirred up the ministry to move foreign countries to international
justice, and England was not, as now, prepared to invest their authors
with all the rights she concedes to her own. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Reprint and Co. commenced operations without any
compunctions of conscience, and were even praised for their enterprise
by honourable men. Hundreds, who could hardly forego the reading of
Maga, were unable to pay for it twice what it costs in England; and I
grant you, that when the first number was laid on my table at one-fourth
the price of an importation, I myself was not the man to throw a pebble
at the pirates, but wished them good luck and gave them my name as a
subscriber. I verily believe I did so with a virtuous delight in what
then struck me as a compliment to my favourite magazine; for somebody,
at about the same time, had started a similar republication of other
English Monthlies, and I desired to see them fairly run off the course.
You will certainly concede to the Americans some credit for a discerning
taste, when I add that Maga's competitors have long since been withdrawn
for want of backers; and she so easily walks the field, that it begins
to be a fair question whether Messrs Reprint and Co. are honestly
entitled to the purse.

I have marvelled a little, I confess, that a magazine of such
unmitigated Toryism, and of so uncomplimentary a tone towards America,
should nevertheless gain so universal a popularity in this country. I
must stand to it, Godfrey--there's a touch of the magnanimous in the
affection which exists among Americans for Christopher North, and all
his high Tory fraternity. Seldom approving, they always enjoy his
old-fashioned prejudices; and defend in Maga what, in a book of
Alison's, they would relish very little. Much is said for the kind of
affectionate regard with which they welcome to their firesides its
monthly returns, in the fact that it is the only foreign work which
American republishers have felt themselves forced, by popular feeling,
to furnish in the form of a fac-simile. It is proof of the individual
interest which it possesses, and of the rich associations which it has
imparted even to the simplicity of its outside. Every one wants old
Ebony in its own gentlemanly wear: but much as is implied in the livery
of the _Edinburgh Review_, and many as are its admirers among the
literary freethinkers of the eastern states, it is curious that no one
cares twopence to see it in any other than a semi-newspaper shape, and
that Reprint and Co. have never thought of reproducing it in all the
splendour of its popinjay surtout. In fact, I doubt whether it will long
continue in any shape at all. Its crack article is always reprinted in
another form; and oracular as its pages are deemed by the clannish
provincials of Boston, its general contents seldom go down with the
public. The truth is, no one honestly prefers porridge to roast-beef;
and in spite of a natural leaning to buff and blue, Jonathan will not be
diverted from his luxurious repasts in Maga, by anything less "hot in
the mouth."

I remember that, in one of those Ambrosial Noctes, some one remarked in
auld-lang-syne, that Maga is a ubiquity. The Shepherd assented, for he
had seen the head of Geordy alike in the hut and the hall; beaming the
same by the mirrored fire-light of the manorial villa, and "by the
peat-lowe frae the ingle o' the auld clay biggin." But think, my dear
Godfrey, what a flow of the _decalect_ would have gushed from that child
of the Yarrow, had he beheld, with me, the pirated Maga scattered
through the length and breadth of this immense republic, and devoured
with equal delight by the self-congratulating native of Massachusetts
Bay, and the home-sick immigrant of Oregon. Here, too, Maga is
ubiquitous. If you make your summer tour through the States of New
England, and stop to visit its priggish little colleges, and biggish
little schools, you shall find it on many a sophister's table, and in
many a schoolboy's hands; or, ten to one, as you pass the windows of the
barracks where they keep their terms, you will chance to hear some
full-voiced youth adding a nasal rhetoric to Maga's pages, as he retails
them, through clouds of cigar-smoke, to his assembled companions. To
your surprise, you will find Maga in every library and reading-room from
the Independent Union Lyceum of Jeffersonville, in New Hampshire, to the
Congressional lobbies at Washington. And I assure you, they not only
take it in, but they read it out and out. Often, when I have wanted but
a glimpse at its leader, I have found it, like _The Times_ at a country
inn, in the grasp of some sturdy monopolist, exploring it inch by inch,
and only pausing at intervals, to wipe his glasses, and renew his pinch
of snuff. Along the shores of the Hudson, in those snug little villas
that peep forth from the thick trees and copsewood, Maga is quite as
universal, but is found in more palmy estate. There--whether your
retreat from the city be to the banks of Westchester, to the glens of
the Highlands, or to the table-lands that underlie the Kaatskills--your
welcome you value none the less that you see volumes of old numbers in
the book-case, and the number of the month already laid on the table in
the hall; and you think of the hot noons they will help to wile away,
after the morning's sport, and before the evening drive. In homes like
these, I have usually found _Blackwood_ a favourite with the fairer
portion of American society. You shall find it lurking amongst worsteds
and flower-patterns, and very often preferred to the pretty work that
tasks a far prettier eye: or, stepping into the verandah to see a
steamer go by, you shall pick it up from a tabouret, where it lies with
a pearl-knife in its uncut pages, and the breezes playing with its
parted leaves--evidently the immediate relic of some startled and
disappearing fair one. Going south or west, you meet it on railways, and
in steamers. It is usually the companion of such travellers as are
accustomed to decline the repeated attempts of fellow-passengers to
engage them in conversation or political debate, and seems to afford
peculiar refreshment to those who have effected a retreat from the
philanthropic assaults of travelling temperance agents, and of other
affectionate inquirers as to the condition of their bodies and souls.
When you reach the Carolinas, where, in default of taverns, you may
always venture to make yourself the guest of a planter, and will be
thanked for your visit--if you would bait at noon, and turn from the
road to a hospitable-looking mansion among the pines, I'll wager that a
basking Negro, without a shirt, will start up, and take charge of your
horse, while the master of a thousand slaves gives you one open hand,
but holds in the other the ubiquitous pages, which he has been reading
in the cool of his piazza. I say then, had the Shepherd been blest with
such universal experiences as mine, with what a flow of metaphor and
illustrative wit would he have enlarged upon the proposition--Maga is an
ubiquity. Beginning with a broadside at the literary corsairs of New
York, I can fancy him bursting with indignant virtue into luxurious
comparisons between the rape of the Sabines, and that of the inimitable
Noctes--and then between Maga bodily, and her who in the field of Enna
gathering flowers, experienced a fate most gloomy; and so on till his
exuberant good-humour expands at last into an apology, as he expatiates
on the tempting character of the booty, and declares, that like apples
of gold to frolicsome schoolboys, so beautiful Maga, to covetous
Yankees, is a thing too full of relish and of beauty to be other than
pardonable plunder! Maga, like Italy, ought to be less bewitching, or
better defended. What would not some of Maga's cotemporaries give,
nevertheless, for the compliment of being perpetually ravished by the
Goths and Vandals of Letters--the merciless anti-copyright booksellers
of America? Nay--they will pout at the insinuation, and stand upon the
virtue which no one believes they possess. But assure them, dear
Godfrey, that they are in no conceivable danger. Maga shall growl, and
they shall fawn; but the republicans will not be repulsed by the honest
frankness of the one nor propitiated by the hypocritical blandishments
of the others. If they doubt it, just tell them what happened with me
the other day, and what I vouch for as fairly exhibiting the feeling of
the most intelligent Americans. I could add many other anecdotes of the
same colour and character; but I tell this as creditable to them, and
illustrative of Maga's footing among them:--

I was at the reading-rooms of "The Athenaeum"--a literary club-house in
this city, which has grown out of a small society of scholars that
existed here before the Revolution--and which, I am happy to say, is
always supplied with the genuine imported Magazine. A young man, whom I
had often met at the rooms, and who had the Magazine in his hand, called
my attention to a palpable error in an article, that reflected pretty
merrily on his countrymen. "Ha!" said I, "just like old Ebony! Why don't
you banish the rabid old Tory from these most democratic tables?"

"Banish Maga!" was the reply--"what would be left fit to read?"

"You surprise me! Edinburgh, Westminster--any thing that thinks better
of Congress, and legislative eloquence--as you do, of course!"

"Why so? Mayn't a man be a republican, without recognising a _jure
divino_ majesty in a Congressman?"

"But Maga would make out some of your Solons prodigiously long in the
ears."

"Nay--rather intolerably long in the wind, which is just the intolerable
truth. Thanks to Maga for giving them the echo of their palaver! and may
the first reformed Congress vote her a gold medal for the good she has
done to the country!"

"She sometimes makes free with the nation itself, and some of the little
peculiarities of your countrymen."

"Well, well--we are not drawn more out of proportion than the Iron
Duke's nose is in _Punch_! Why should we not laugh like heroes, who are
said to grow hale of good-humour kept up by caricatures?"

"You must allow that Maga is not always good-natured, as some of her
rivals invariably are."

"There's no comparison, sir, between the sometimes irritable merriment
of King Christopher, and the professional tinkling of a jester's
cap-and-bells. I can't argue it,--only I like _Blackwood_ for all its
Toryism; and when Kit North is testy, I reflect that he's long had the
gout! Banish Geordie Buchanan's venerable old pow--did you say? Never,
Sir, never!"

Of course, I allowed the good sense of these replies, and at once
explained to myself the philosophy which gave rise to them. The truth
is, there is in human nature a deep sense of "the eternal fitness of
things," which usually gives tone to the opinions of man, where undue
prejudices do not exercise an overruling control. You know, my dear
Godfrey, how unlikely it is that an American would ever care to pay you
a second visit at the Hall, should he signalise his first by
depreciating the character of Washington, or undervaluing the many
advantages which his country really enjoys. On the same principle which
would certainly betray you into marks of cool aversion towards such a
guest from this side the Atlantic, the intelligent American despises in
his heart the Briton, whose spirit is alien to the time-honoured
institutions of his ancestors, and whose life is one long blasphemy of
all that has contributed most to the glory and greatness of an empire,
whose worst symptom of decay is the fungous existence of a race of such
blasphemers, at once the morbid fruit of a free constitution, and its
fatal and cancerous disease. Whiggery is, therefore, at a discount in
the republic; and I have been surprised to hear the confession from
American democrats, that if they were Englishmen, they would be far from
any sympathy with those who call themselves reformers. This, perhaps,
will account for it, that with all the influence of the Edinburgh
Reviewers, they have never gained, in this country, any hold of the
heart, even where they have controlled the head; whilst Maga, on the
contrary, without bending the republican opinions of Americans, has
secured no small degree of their affections, and become enshrined in
their genuine regard. You may see one proof of this in the fact, that if
you contract with Reprint & Co. for their republications, and will take
_Blackwood_ and _The Quarterly_, you can have _The Edinburgh_ and _The
Westminster_ almost thrown into the bargain; like the lying little
_Mercury_ of AEsop's statuary, which was a mere gratuity to those who
would buy a _Phoebus_, and _Pallas-Athene_. In truth, if my observation
has been correct, intelligent Americans like to be republicans
themselves, because such were the fathers of their country; but an
Englishman in blue and yellow, they regard much as they do an Indian in
shoes and stockings. He is despised, as no specimen of the noble race
from which he has degenerated and dwindled into a Whig.

To return to the republished Magazine; it is not only a republication,
but, as I have said, it professes to be a fac-simile. You will ask, if
it is cleverly done. I must answer--not very, considered as a whole; and
yet, to give the mannikin its due, the face of the thing is about as
accurate as counterfeits usually are. The colour is not often right,
however, and I suspect Reprint & Co. are ignorant that the colour is of
any consequence. The thistle-framed portrait, nevertheless, is tolerably
well copied; enough so, to deserve the greatest proportion of credit
belonging to the whole, as an imitation. You look for the familiar
imprint in vain. One would never know from the publisher's part of the
title-page that the house of Blackwood & Sons was still in existence.
Instead of the usual mark, we have that of the republishers, with an
intimation that they are assisted in the sale by booksellers in Boston,
Philadelphia, Charlestown, Baltimore, Savannah, New Orleans, and PARIS!
Why they should print Paris in capitals, rather than Boston and
Philadelphia, I am at a loss to conceive; but such an announcement does
indeed demand some note of admiration at the vastness of the enterprise
of REPRINT & Co., who, to give Mr Blackwood more time to attend to the
getting up of each successive number of his work, thus undertake to
relieve him of any share in seeing to the supply of the Continent of
Europe. In this benevolent effort to take the burthen from the
proprietors of the genuine Ebony, it is fair that the French coadjutor
should have his share of the honour. His name is given as HECTOR
BOSSANGE; and his shop, if I rightly remember, adorns the Quai Voltaire.
And, now I think of it, I advise you, dear Godfrey, to skip across the
Channel this summer, and alight on the capital, (where very likely they
will just be getting up an _emeute_ in honour of the Three Days), and
there, in Monsieur Bossange's establishment, you will be permitted to
try the merits of my description and Maga's Icon at the same time, and
with no danger from officials of the Customs. So much then for the
front, which is good, except the colour. _Nimium ne crede colori_, says
Mr Reprint; and _fronti nulla fides_, say I.

The reverse cover has, of course, an outer and inner surface, with only
the thickness of the paper between the letter-press adorning the twain.
What say you, then, to the fact, that whilst the outer half is devoted
to an advertisement of Mr Reprint's imitative publications, the _better
half_ contains a bold and faithful warning against such piracy! You
stare, but I repeat it; whilst the one side of the leaf announces Mr
Reprint's arrangements for circulating throughout the States his
imitations of Blackwood, the other indignantly announces that there are
"now in circulation in the United States, SPURIOUS and HIGHLY
PERNICIOUS IMITATIONS." Alas for the difference between those who
_instruct_ the head, and those who only _dress_ it! The imitations that
are shamelessly commended are only those of _Blackwood's Magazine_;
while those which Messrs Reprint feel called upon to hold up as shocking
to every sense of virtue,--to head with IMPORTANT INFORMATION, and to
stamp with triple marks of wonder, as FRAUDULENT COUNTERFEITS--are
imitations of Rowland's Macassar Oil! Think of that, Godfrey! I learn
from this announcement of Reprint's, that there are now in the United
States men base enough to rob the immortal Rowland of his patent right,
men who have doubtless established agencies in "Boston, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Savannah, New Orleans and PARIS," but who, as the imitation
Blackwood is circulated in just those places, will find it, by just
retribution, always in their way. _A bon chat, bon rat!_ Well, it was
wise in the agents of Rowland to employ one ubiquitous imitation to stop
another; but since the trade is much the same, it ought to be suggested
to Reprint & Co., that they do ill to expose a fellow-craftsman.
Suppose, now, the enterprising apothecaries, who do for Mr Rowland what
Reprint & Co. are doing for Mr Blackwood, should print a label for every
bottle of their "incomparable oil," warning the public that spurious
imitations of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine are now in circulation
throughout the States, which they are compelled to stamp as FRAUDULENT
COUNTERFEITS! Would not this be quite as IMPORTANT INFORMATION as the
other? Are not the public as much concerned in having the genuine
article for their brain, as in having the unadulterated article for
their hair? Yet, how would Reprint like to see such a _Rowland_ for his
Oliver?

Strange that the same leaf that thus brands a counterfeit,--which
Reprint repudiates, hinting that respectable perfumers "sell only the
genuine article,"--should within one two-hundredth part of an inch,
contain the exposure of his own counterfeit, by his own pen, ink, and
types: and that with the announcement of a "Travelling Agent, recently
appointed to procure Subscribers in the Western States, Iowa and
Wisconsin, _who will prove his identity by a certificate from the Mayor
of Cincinnati_!" Now, it strikes me, would not a certificate from his
lordship, proving _the identity of the Magazine_, be much more to the
purpose? It is called _Blackwood's_ Magazine; and if so, the Travelling
Agent would be better certified by a commission from Mr Blackwood to be
selling his property, and that would be more to the purpose still! But
think, dear Godfrey, where this certified bagman goes! Iowa and
Wisconsin are a thousand miles inland, where even so lately as when this
reprint was begun, the Indian trail was the only post-road, and the
aborigines almost the only inhabitants, and where, even at this day, the
reader of Maga, holding the cream of civilisation and refinement in one
hand, must keep the other in close contact with his rifle, and the rifle
well loaded and cocked; for should his magazine interest him more than
his safety, he might expect at any moment the pressing salutations of a
cougar, or the warm embrace of a grisly bear. Or think, I pray you, of a
circumstance still less improbable, which will illustrate what it is to
be a bagman in Iowa. Where this "Travelling Agent" goes, he often
carries his merchandise through an Indian village, and often, I'll
venture to say, has Buchanan been seen in his hand, as centre to a
circle of fierce-visaged Red-skins, with tomahawks in their girdles, and
any thing but brotherly love in their gestures. Ah, then, the
contrabandist is afraid. Among savages he first learns to wish himself
engaged in any thing but an anti-copyright expedition; and produces in
vain the proof of his identity, signed by the Mayor of Cincinnati.

I observe that there are similar agencies in the Southern and
South-western States; so that Reprint & Co. are the monopolists of Maga,
from the mouth of the St Lawrence, to the deltas of the Mississippi, and
before long will doubtless have their travelling agents pushing its
sale in the "halls of the Montezumas," or exchanging it for peltry at
the head-waters of the Colombia. It is said in one of the newspapers of
this city, that for every copy issued in Edinburgh, two copies of the
reprint are published here; and though the estimate strikes me as, at
least, unlikely, it is far from being incredible. I can pardon Mr
Blackwood should his temper be a little ruffled, when he compares his
trouble and responsibility, and limited sale, with the _sans souci_ and
universal market of Reprint & Co.; but surely, old Christopher North
should smile with inward satisfaction when, not by cannon, or carnage,
but as the result of a greatness thrust upon him, he finds his empire,
like her Majesty's, the girdle of the earth, and his sovereignty
recognised, in the world of letters, where hers can claim no subjects,
and demand no homage. That crutch is now the sceptre of bookdom. Its
shadow stretcheth over all lands, whether the dawn project it athwart
the broad Atlantic, or the Boreal light send it overland to farthest
India. Who reads not Maga? You shall find the smutched lieutenant
turning over its pages by the camp-fire, after a terrible scratch with
the Sikhs; and within the same twenty-four hours you may fairly surmise
that some green mountain volunteer, on the wrong side of the Rio Grande,
has lighted a pine-knot, and is reading one of the Marlborough articles
to his mess, with extemporary paralellisms in favour of General Taylor,
which the shade of the great Churchill must not venture to overhear.
Swinging in his hammock, the midshipman holds Blackwood to the smoky
lamp of the orlop, as he plunges and pitches around Cape Horn. Lounging
in his state-room, and bound for Hong Kong, the sea-sick passenger
corrects his nausea with the same spicy page, and bewitched with the
flavour, forgets to sigh for Madeira, which he has passed, or to look
out for St Helena, which is somewhere on his lee. It keeps the old
Admiral from the deck as his keel scrapes the coral-reefs of the South
Pacific; and a stale back number, from the bottom of a seaman's chest,
is purchased as a prize, by him who cruises among seals, icebergs, and
spermaceti whales.

          "Quis jam locus, inquit, Achate,
     Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris!"

Yes--who reads not Maga? The flayed Radical of Parliament--the rasped
Balaamite of Congress--the spanked Cockney of an author--the jaundiced
Editor of some new no-go periodical--even these must cut the leaves of
each new number, if they die for it, or if their only reward be to find
their own sweet selves hung up in its pages, like sham Socrates in his
basket, but not looking on like live Socrates with philosophic
composure. And if they whimper, who will sympathise? Like the Shepherd
at Awmrose's, the testy public may now and then rebel, and rail for a
season at "the cawm, cauld, clear, glitterin' cruelty in the expression
of his een,"--but who can keep up a quarrel with North? Again, like the
Shepherd, they relax into a broad good humour, and, before they know it,
are drinking with all the honours, "Long live King Christopher!" So
then, in spite of Cockneys, chartists, coxcombs, rebels, radicals, and
rascally reformers, yea, and the whole alphabetical list of what is
whiggish, vulgar, and vexatious,--

          "Maga still sitteth on Edina's crags,
     And from her throne of beauty rules the world!"

Ah! my dear Godfrey of Godfrey Hall, in the county of Kent, Esquire,--I
know what you are thinking of. You were certainly meant for trade, and
'twas a loss to the Bank of England, that you ever wore a
shooting-jacket. There was ever a commercial crotchet in your head, and I
am sure it now suggests the rejoinder--that to rule the world is nothing,
so long as one can't rule the market. But I respectfully ask, do you go
for absolute monarchy? Would you have Maga more potent than her Majesty?
I grant there should be something coming to Mr Blackwood for the
thousands that profit by his labours in America--but if it can't be so,
let the glory suffice him, and let _Sic vos non vobis_ be his song of
patient resignation. The parallel between his case and that of the
Virgilian sufferers, is perfect. Who concentrates more pungency, or
collects more sweets than the busy bee? Who keeps more musical throats in
time than the motherly bird? Who lends the agricultural interest greater
assistance than the labouring ox; or who suffers more by the
manufacturers than the fleeced lamb? Undoubtedly, the answer is,--Mr.
Blackwood! Well then, I say, he must comfort himself by philosophy and
_Sic vos non vobis_. He may, indeed, utter one word of remonstrance
against literary and commercial piracy, like that first great sufferer by
anti-copyright,--Mr. Virgilius Maro, of Mantua--

     "Hos ego versiculos _emi_, tulit alter honores."

Or, in other words, I pay for every line and letter of Maga, and lo! Mr
Bathyllus Reprint, of New York, carries off the sesterces! Think,
Godfrey, what a charm of a life this Bathyllus must make of it! His are
all the honey, and the bird's nests, the corn-bags, and the fleeces of
the Ebony estates; and yet he has no trouble to see his banks furnished
with bees, or to preserve game in the brake; no care to drive away
crows, or to stifle the blatter of sheep. For him--to descend from the
firmament of metaphor, to the plain prose of George Street and
Paternoster Row--for him, Mr North inspects boxes of Balaam, with the
patience of a proofreader, and deciphers pages of wit and pathos with
the perseverance of a Champollion. For him, with each new moon, and
punctual to the day, comes forth the Maga of the month, the fruit of
incredible diligence, and the flower of admirable skill. For him the
foreign purveyor of all he lives by pays down the golden _honorarium_,
fifty guineas for the sheet, that he may have the whole for less than
fifty pence. For him--the same benevolent provider takes pains to
silence, by the same metallic spell, ten thousand other claims and
clamours, contingent to each lunation of Maga. All things work for him!
For him the steamer ploughs Atlantic surges; and for him, when she gains
her port, two hundred miles of wire are put into galvanic tremor,
bidding him prepare his covers, and rally his compositors. It is there
that Reprint, with a grateful sense (perhaps) of all that has been done
for him, and a still more gratifying sense of the very little that
remains for him to do, finds himself called to bestir from a fortnight's
nap, and proceed to do that little. With railway speed, and thunder
step, the Express of Harnden brings to his hand almost the only emigrant
original of _Blackwood_ that ever touches these occidental shores. No
prosy correspondence--no botheration manuscript--no rejectable
contribution--but the choicest literary matter that the genius of the
British empire can furnish, all picked, packed, and laid at his feet, in
fair white printed copy, without pains and without cost! Another's all
the toil--his, all the profits! In a turn or two of his hand the
American market is supplied. Sure sale--no risk--all clear gains, and
quick returns! I am sure Mr Bathyllus Reprint must be the happiest of
men, and the most amiable of publishers; and I can conceive that few of
the more legitimate craft would be able to stand upon dignity, or refuse
his kind invitation to meet a little company at his board--

     "At the close of the day, when the market is still,
     And mortals the sweets of comestibles prove."

But hold! When is the market still. For a fortnight after he has set it
astir with a new number, his announcements confront you as you open your
"folio of four pages." His placards smite the eye at the crossings of
the streets; they return your glance at the shop-window, and confound
your senses at every turn. "Old Ebony for the month,"--"Kit North again
in the field,"--"A racy new number of _Blackwood_,"--such are the
headings of newspaper puffs, and the bawlings of hawkers on the steps of
Astor House. They pursue you to the Boston railway-station, or to the
Hudson-river steamer; they follow you on the road to Niagara; meet you
afresh at Detroit and Chicago, and hardly provoke any additional
surprise when the bagman accosts you with the same syllables, through
the nose, as you arrive in the buffalo-season on the debateable grounds
of Oregon! To quote once more the oracular words of the Ettrick orator
and poet, "Ane gets tired o' that eternal soun'--_Blackwood's
Magazeen,--Blackwood's Magazeen_--dinnin' in ane's lugs, day and nicht!"
So vast and so varied I suppose to be the commercial relations of
Reprint & Co., and such, beyond a doubt, is Maga's empire in America.

No more by this steamer. Let me see; in ten days, perhaps, Harry will be
with you at breakfast, discussing my letter, and lamenting my lot, to
live so far from the world. For me, however, a contented disposition,
the steamers twice a-month, and _Blackwood_ monthly, do wonders. I see
as much of the world as a good man need wish to see; and at any time,
you know, it's not a fortnight's work, by God's blessing, to rejoin the
old friends and true friends, that so often go fishing under your
patronage, and tell improbable stories around your table. Wait till I
get into my own chair beside you, and I will tell stories of my sojourn
in America that will put Harry's Indian romances to the blush. He now
goes out with a stock of prairie-adventures, that out-Sinbad Sinbad, and
yet he tells them with an air of honesty that would gull Gulliver. Wait
till I rejoin you, and you shall see how a plain tale will put him down.

                                                  Yours, &c.




THE TIMES OF GEORGE II.[18]


Female authorship is beginning to flourish in England. To this
employment no rational objection can be raised. The want of occupation
for female life in the higher classes has long been a subject of
complaint, and any honest change which removes it will be a change for
the better. The quantity of time and thread which has been wasted on
chainstitch, and roundstitch, and all the other mysteries of the needle,
in the last three centuries, is beyond all calculation. If the fair
artists had been workers at the loom, they might have clothed half the
living population in "fine linen," if not in purple. If they had been
equally diligent in brickmaking, they might have built ten Babels; or if
they had devoted similar energies, on Iago's hint, "to suckle fools, and
chronicle small beer," they might have tripled the population, or
anticipated the colossal vats of Messrs Truman & Co. What myriads of
young faces have grown old over worsted parrots and linsey-wolsey maps
of the terrestrial globe! What exquisite fingers have been thinned to
the bone, in creating carnations to be sat upon, and cowslip beds for
the repose of favourite poodles! What bright eyes have been reduced to
spectacles, in the remorseless fabrication of patchwork, quilts and
flowery footstools for the feet of gouty gentlemen! Nay, what thousands
and tens of thousands have been flung into the arms of their only
bridegroom, Consumption, leaving nothing to record their existence but
an accumulation of trifles, which cost them only their health, their
tempers, their time, their charms, and their usefulness!

But the age of knitting and tambour passed away. The spinning-jenny was
its mortal enemy. The most inveterate of fringemakers, the most
painstaking devotee of patchwork, when she found that Arkwright could
make in a minute more than with all her diligence she could make in a
month, and that old Robert Peel could pour out figured muslins, by a
twist of a screw, sufficient to give gowns to the whole petticoat
population of England, had only to give in; the spinsterhood were forced
to feel that their "occupation was o'er."

Even then, however, the female fingers were not suffered to "forget
their cunning;" and the age of purse-making began. The land was
inundated with purses of every shape, size, and substance. Then
followed another change. The Berlin manufacturers had contrived to bring
back the age of worsted wonders, though, by a happy art, they saved the
fair artists all the trouble of drawing and design. We are still under a
Gothic invasion of trimmings and tapestry, of needlework nondescripts,
moonlight minstrels in canvass, playing under cross-bar balconies; and
all the signs of the zodiac brought down to the level of the ivory
fingers of womankind.

To this, we must acknowledge, that the incipient taste of the ladies for
historical publications, for diving into the trunks of family memorials,
and giving us those private correspondences which are to be found only
by the desperate determination to find something and every thing, is a
fortunate turn of the wheel.

It is true, that England boasts of many distinguished female writers;
that the works of Mrs Radcliffe opened a new vein of rich description
and solemn mystery; that the comedies of Inchbald netted her innocent
and persevering spirit some thousand pounds; and that Joanna Baillie's
tragedies entitle her to an enduring fame. We also acknowledge, with
equal sincerity and gratification, the merits of many of our female
novelists in the past half century; their keen insight into character,
their close anatomy of the general impulses of the human heart, and the
mingled delicacy and force with which they seize on personal
peculiarities, belong to woman alone. But their day, too, has gone down.
They were first rivalled by the "high-life novel," the most vulgar of
all earthly caricatures. They are now extinguished by the low-life
novel; the most intolerable of all earthly realities. The true novel,
true in its fidelity to nature, polished without affectation, and
vigorous without rudeness, now sleeps in the grave, and must sleep,
until posterity shall, with one voice, demand its revival.

Yet, until another race of genius shall arise, and the laurel of
Fielding or of Shakspeare shall descend on our female authors, we must
be grateful for their gentle labours in the rather rugged field of
history.

It must be owned, that gallantry has a good deal to do in giving these
works the name of history. They want all the vigour, all the philosophy,
and all the eloquence of history. Of course, no human being will ever
apply to them as authorities. Still, they have the merit of giving
general statements to general readers, of supplying facts in their
regular order, and probably, of inducing the multitude, who would shrink
from the formalities of Hume or Gibbon in solemn quartos and ponderous
octavos, to dip into pages having all the look and nearly all the
slightness of the modern novel. At all events, if they do nothing else,
they employ the time of pens, which might be much worse occupied; and
that pens are often much worse occupied, we have evidence from hour to
hour.

The French novels are making rapid way into our circulating libraries.
Yet nothing can be more unfortunate, for nothing can be more corrupting
than a French novel of the nineteenth century. France, always a
profligate country, always had profligate writers. But they were
generally confined to "Memoirs," "Court anecdotes," and the ridicule of
the world of Versailles; their criminality was at least partially
concealed by their good breeding, and their vice was not altogether
lowered to the grossness of the crowd.

The Revolution created a new school. All there was hatred to duty,
faith, and honour. The deepest profligacy was pictured as scarcely less
than the natural right of man; and all the abominations of the human
heart were excited, encouraged, and propagated by daring pens, sometimes
subtle, sometimes eloquent, and in all instances appealing to the most
tempting abominations of man.

But the Revolution fell, and with the ascendant of Napoleon another
school followed. War, public business, the general objects of the active
faculties, and strong ambition of a people with Europe at its feet,
partially superseded alike the frivolous taste of the monarchy, and the
rabid ferocities of revolutionary authorship. The Bulletins of the
"Grande Armee" told a daily tale of romance, to which the brains of a
Parisian scribbler could find no rival, and men with the sound of
falling thrones echoing in their ears, forgot the whispers of low
intrigue and commonplace corruption.

The "Three Glorious Days" of July 1830, have now produced another
change; and peace has given leisure to think of something else than
conquest and the conscription. The power of the national pen has turned
again to fiction, and the natural wit, habitual dexterity, and dashing
verbiage of France have all been thrown into the novel. Even the French
drama, once the pride of the nation, has perished under this sudden
pressure. A French modern tragedy is now only a rhymed melodrama. Even
French history attracts popular applause only as it approaches to a
three volume romance. Every man of name in French modern authorship has
attained it only by the rapid production of novels. But no language can
be too contemptuous, or too condemnatory, for the spirit of those works
in general. Every tie of society is violated in the progress of their
pages; and violated with the full approval of every body. Seduction is
the habitual office of the hero. Adultery is the regular office of the
heroine. I

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/25633