pro tonished and trembling Jews, gazing in the streets at the digies that appear in the skies, manifests great command of the secrets of the poetic art. We have now specified, or quoted, a great variety of excellence; passages in which every different power of moral and natural description, of animated soliloquy or pathetic dialogue, is called out, and happily exercised. We wish that our limits would allow a more liberal quotation of such parts: but an ampler detail of the story we expressly avoid, lest we should deaden that curiosity which it is our object to rouse. Let us now make our readers acquainted with the lyrical merits of Mr. Milman; and here, although we find much to admire, in all the efforts but the last we discover also much to censure. In the hymn to our Saviour, which breathes a spirit of unaffected and most pleasing piety, the gentleness and the simplicity of the appearance of the Redeemer are beautifully pointed out, first in the state of destitution in which he was born; secondly, in the single star that led the Eastern Sages to his cradle; again, in the announcement to the shepherds; and, lastly, in the merciful address to the penitent thief. When, however, misled by the spirit of generalization, and the desire of multiplying his allusions, the author endeavours to extenuate the supernatural terrors that accompanied the crucifixion, we think that he has taken not only a narrow but an incorrect view of that great event. He endeavours to fix the attention on the transient nature of the earthquake and the darkness, as if it were necessary for a miracle to be prolonged to give it full effect! This is neither poetical nor judicious; and what does he mean by saying that, after the resurrection, our Saviour did haste to meet' his mother's coming feet? What tradition, or imagination, may we take this to be? The sacred song, beginning King of Kings, and Lord of Lords,' has much spirit: but it is certainly lengthened out to ill effect; and the last stanza, in our opinion, is the weakest and the worst. We hasten to the final hymn. The Temple has fallen; and great, and gloriously described, has been its fall, when the poet thus proceeds: 'Javan. Fall down, My brethren, on the dust, and worship here * The well-known passage in Shakspeare will occur to every reader. Even 1 Even so shall perish, In its own ashes, a more glorious Temple, Yea, God's own architecture, this vast world, The same destruction Earth, Earth, Earth, behold! 'HYMN. Even thus amid thy pride and luxury, When that Great Husbandman shall wave his fan, Shalt thou thy wonted dissolute course maintain. And marriage feasts begin their jocund strain: Till Earth, a drunkard, reeling to and fro, And Heaven his presence own, all red with furnace heat. The Towers and Temples, nam'd of men The gilded summer Palaces, The courtly bowers of love and ease, Where still the Bird of pleasure sings; Go gaze on fallen Jerusalem! Yea, mightier names are in the fatal roll, 'Gainst earth and heaven God's standard is unfurl❜d, The skies are shrivell'd like a burning scroll, And the vast common doom ensepulchres the world. < Oh! who shall then survive? Oh! who shall stand and live? When for the round earth hung in air, With all its constellations fair In the sky's azure canopy; When for the breathing Earth, and sparkling Sea, Heaving along the abyss profound and dark, A fiery deluge, and without an Ark. Lord of all power, when thou art there alone That in its high meridian noon Needs not the perish'd sun nor moon: When When thou art there in thy presiding state, Wide-sceptred Monarch o'er the realm of doom: And when the tribes of wickedness are strewn After this sublime burst of poetry, we really must decline the ungracious task of transcribing the errors of expression which we have noted in this volume, and leave an author who is so capable of excellence to correct his own faults. We heartily wish him "good luck with his laurels," and earnestly exhort his still increasing care to avoid all quaintness and antiquarianism of phraseology. Let us be allowed to assure him that, with all the varied and unrivalled poetry which adorned his favourite æra of English literature, much pedantry also was mixed both of mind and manner, to cloud and to disfigure the highest efforts of genius. MONTHLY CATALOGUE, FOR AUGUST, 1820. POLITICS. Art. 10. A few plain Facts and Observations relative to the Situation of the Country at the Commencement of the Year 1820, in regard to its Finances, Morals, and Religion; with a Plan for their gradual Improvement. 8vo. pp. 45. Whitmore and Fenn. After a general, or, mort correctly speaking, a particular abuse, in unmeasured language, of almost every class in society, the land-holder, the fund-holder, the banker, and the lawyer, not forgetting the clergyman, this author indulges us with his plan for the improvement of the nation. We are to have an immediate reduction of one-fourth of the national debt for a commencement; for, as we have long been insolvent, we should, like honest tradesmen, offer our creditors a composition. We are next to have a property-tax of five shillings in the pound, till it is redeemed by a transfer of stock producing an equal annual sum; sum; then, a reform in Parliament; and the clergy are to be compelled to strict residence. We are to have no pluralities; and the post-obit system,' which now prevails in the church, of renewing leases of twenty-one years, or three lives, on fines, and continuing the old reserved rents, is to be for ever abolished.-Let us recommend a little more civility of language to this gentleman if he ever writes again. Art. 11. My Opinions since the Peace. By Sir Rowland Oldacre, Bart. 8vo. pp. 39. Longman and Co. 1820. This worthy Baronet looks out from the loop-holes of his antient castle, the venerable seat of his ancestors, and is no unobservant spectator of the passing events of the political world. He expresses, without any affectation of sensibility, his concern at the sufferings of his country, endeavours to trace back their origin and progress, reasons on them with much good sense, and offers the suggestions of his mind in a tone of perfect moderation, yet with a becoming confidence. At the period of the peace, British industry was in full activity : the price of agricultural produce being high, the farmer could pay his rent punctually, employ numerous labourers, and encou rage trade and manufactures by an extensive purchase of goods in the home-market. Under the comparative disadvantages of great wages and heavy taxation, still, by the superiority of our machinery, the abundance of our capital and consequent credit, we were enabled to keep our looms at work, because we could export our manufactures to every quarter of the globe: but "the centre of this circle of prosperity was the thriving state of the home-market." The different branches of industry and internal trade supported each other; though in opposition, it is admitted, to certain general principles of political economy. A statesman had his option of two courses to pursue; first, to maintain high prices by a heavy duty on foreign corn, and to preserve a full circulation of currency, which alone could render the thriving state of the domestic market compatible with a large annual amount of taxes. Sir Rowland Oldacre,-first cousin, we presume, to Sir John Barleycorn, seems to have foreseen, what the event has proved, that the exhausted state of foreign nations must disable them from giving us a compensation for the falling off of our domestic market by a liberal purchase of our exports. The prices at which our manufactures have been sold in foreign markets are ruinous, and we have lost the substance in grasping at the shadow. condly, the other course was more consonant with the views of the economist; namely, to reduce the price of English corn to a level with that which was grown in the rest of Europe, by throwing open the ports; and not to encourage a waste of capital by feeding people at a greater expence than they would cost if the same money were employed in manufactures to be exchanged against foreign corn. A statesman, with this purpose in view, would consider the nominal price of our commodities as arising from an excessive paper-currency not convertible into specie; and he would in course revert to cash-payments, and thus raise the value Se of of our own currency to a level with that of other states. The price of our own commodities being thus reduced to the average level of the rest of Europe, he would, in consistency, remove all commercial prohibitions and restrictions, and proclaim a general freedom of trade. The low price of our commodities, however, would render it impossible for us to pay a high nominal amount of taxes, imposed to discharge the interest of money borrowed when prices were high. He must, therefore, by means of retrenchment, reduce the amount of taxes on industry: the baronet adds, and by means of a property-tax but we say that a propertytax is that very tax on industry which he deprecates, because those whose incomes are diminished by a decrease of their property have no longer resources to employ the same number of workmen at the same price which they gave before: industry, therefore, must be worse paid, that is to say, taxed. The severest retrenchment, however, accompanied even by an equitable property-tax, would be very insufficient, while a sum equal to double the whole rental of the kingdom is drawn from the diminished profits of land and labour, to pay the interest of more than a thousand millions sterling of public debt. The statesman, therefore, who adopts the latter course, must by some means or other diminish the amount of the public debt, to such limits as will bring the payment of the interest within the power of a people who have been reduced, by the system which has been preferred, to a comparatively low rent for land and remuneration. for labour. Now, our worthy baronet complains that neither of these systems has had fair play, or has been carried on consistently and allowed its full operation on the contrary, opposite as the two plans are in their principles and effects, they have been put together and mixed, so as to produce, as it were from black and white, a pie-bald or a grey colour. For example,' says he, that the rules of political economy have been acted upon, so as to lower prices and deprive land and labour of the means of contributing largely to the exigencies of the state; but that they have been neglected so as to leave the demands of the state upon that land and labour as great as they were before.' He therefore attributes much of our present distresses to the inconsistency of the measures which have been pursued; to the timidity which deterred our statesmen from acting resolutely on the one or the other system; and to the childishness of pursuing a middle course, and expecting to reap advantage from the combination of principles hostile to each other. If we have taken a serpentine rather than a straight line, we must fall back till we can get into the track of one of the two systems, either of which would extricate us from the perplexity and embarrassment which now distract us: - but, alas! here is the difficulty, for here must be the acknowlegement of error: "Sed revocare gradum REV. AUG. 1820. Ff Art. |