traveller, with a false beard, so as to render it almost impossible to recognize him, and set out to beg alms at several houses adjacent to that of his beloved. As he approached the latter, the lady of the mansion herself made her appearance, half wild and distracted at the situation of her loveliest daughter. Informed of the occasion of her grief, the wily pilgrim, availing himself of the circumstance, bade her not despair, as the power of the Lord was in finite, and his goodness equal to his power. Moreover, with his aid, he had himself become skilled in all the virtues of almost all the plants under the sun, and had devoted his knowledge of herbs and juices to the relief of his unhappy fellow-creatures, besides possessing secrets adapted to every species of disease. The poor credulous old lady raised her hands to heaven in gratitude upon hearing such consolatory words, vowed that he had been peculiarly sent by Providence, and insisted that he should be instantly introduced to her unhappy girl. It was now that the latter attempted to console and encourage her, declaring it would be his only pride to fulfil her wishes in the minutest point; but here his voice failing him, through his fast-coming tears and sobs, he laid his aching head down by the side of his beloved's, and there remaining for a short time, as he breathed forth a soul-distracting adieu; he raised it again painfully, passed his hand over his eyes, and looking his last look, left the apartment. He then joined her weeping mother, and so far from holding out any hope, he said that pity for the sad and dying state in which he had found the poor patient had drawn scalding tears from his eyes. And he had not long been gone, before the gentle spirit of his love, as if unable to continue longer without him, prepared to take wing, and in a few hours actually fled, as if to prepare in some happier scene a mansion of rest for their divided loves. For the wretched Ippolito, though able to bear up long enough to behold the beloved one consigned to earth, had no sooner witnessed all the virtues and charms he had so fondly esteemed and loved for ever entombed in the vault of the Salimbeni, than just as the ceremony was about to close, he fell dead at the foot of her marble monument. So strange and sudden an event threw the surrounding company, by whom it was regarded as little less than a miracle, into the utmost surprise and confusion, all of them believing that Ippolito Saracini was then on his way to the shrine of San Giacomo of Galicia. His unhappy parents hearing of this his untimely end, hastened to join their tears with those of the mother of the beauteous Gangenova, by whose side the faithful Ippolito was The moment Ippolito beheld her he perceived that the tidings he had received were indeed too true. So much was he shocked, that he could with difficulty support his character; more particularly when he saw, from the brightening features of his beloved, that she instantly recognized him. Taking, then, the hand of the suffering girl within his own, as if to feel how fast her life-blood ebbed, he begged her attendants to stand apart, while he proceeded to try his secret prayers and charms in his own way. Ippolito was thus enabled to learn the real source of her illness from her own lips. Beholding him with a mixture of tenderness and pity, that added momentary lustre to her dying charms, she attempted, inlaid. those low soft tones he so much loved, to infuse balm into his wounded spirit. Painfully sensible of the extent of his loss, Ippolito from very grief was unable to utter a word, much less to ask the needful questions of his beloved. Wildly pressing his hand, she besought him never to forget the tender love he had borne her, and which she had seldom been happy enough to tell him how warmly and deeply she returned. "For joyful, oh, very joyful, my Ippolito," she continued, "would my departure have been to me before now, had not solicitude for your fate detained me. As it is, I die content, nay grateful, for two unexpected benefits: the one to have seen you thus, to hear you, and to feel your hand in mine; and the other, to know that I lived, and that I died, beloved by my most noble and faithful-hearted Ippolito!" CHANGE. Youth's fairy-land recedes, and year by year The early past appears, and all between That thus we change, just e'er death close the scene. LAMENT FOR THE DECLINE OF CHIVALRY. [Thomas Hood, born in London, 1798; died 3d May, 1845. Humourist and novelist. He began the business of life as clerk in a counting-house; then proceeded to learn the art of engraving under his uncle, Robert Sands; and finally he adopted the profession of letters. Frequent ill-health marred his prospects, although his works rapidly obtained the popularity which they still A pension of £100 a year was offered to him possess. by government when too late to be of service to him personally; but at his request it was continued to his wife. He was sometime editor of the London Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and for one year of the Gem, an annual in which first appeared The Dream of Eugene Aram. To Punch, amongst other valuable contributions, he gave The Song of the Shirt. His chief works are: Odes and Addresses to Great People; Whims and Oddities, Hood's Own; Hood's Comic Miscellany; Up the Rhine: Tylney Hall, a novel; Our Family, a novel, not completed, &c. "Hood's verse, whether serious or comic, was ever pregnant with materials for thought. Well may we say, in the words of Tennyson, 'Would he could have stayed with us!' for never could it be more truly recorded of any one that, he was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.'"-D. M. Moir.] Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, Is ended now and past! That iron age-which some have thought Ay-where are those heroic knights Of old-those armadillo wights Who wore the plated vest,Great Charlemagne and all his peers Are cold-enjoying with their spears An everlasting rest! The bold king Arthur sleepeth sound, Oh, Time has pluck'd the plumy brow! But those that go to law! Grim John o' Gaunt is quite gone by, Bold Sidney, and his kidney-nay, No Percy branch now perseveres Surgeons, alone, by any chance, Alas for Lion-Hearted Dick! Of his old mace in Greece! The famed Rinaldo lies a-cold, But only grow the small! Our Cressys too have dwindled since And measles took him off! Where are those old and feudal clans, A battle was a battle then, The curtal-axe is out of date! Of death, upon the shaft! The spear-the gallant tilter's pride, The rusty spear, is laid aside, Oh, spits now domineer! The coat of mail is left alone,And where is all chain armour gone? Go ask at Brighton Pier. We fight in ropes, and not in lists, Methinks I see the bounding barb, For warding steel's appliance! Methinks I hear the trumpet stir! 'Tis but the guard to Exeter, That bugles the "Defiance." In cavils when will cavaliers Set ringing helmets by the ears, And scatter plumes about? Or blood-if they are in the vein? That tap will never run again Alas, the Casque is out! No iron crackling now is scored To find a vital place- To labour through his case! Farewell, then, ancient men of might! Crusader, errant-squire, and knight! Our coats and custom soften,To rise would only make you weepSleep on, in rusty-iron sleep, As in a safety-coffin! ORATORY. [Henry, Lord Brougham, born at Edinburgh, 19th September, 1778; died at Cannes, 7th May, 1868. He was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review (1802); be distinguished himself at the bar-notably as the advocate of Queen Caroline; he won high repute in parliament; he became lord-chancellor in 1830; and he rendered important service to the cause of education by his share in the organization of mechanics' institutes, and in establishing the Society for the Diffusion of Usefal Knowledge. He wrote upon almost every subject, and wrote well. His Works, Critical, Historical, Philosical, Scientifle, and Rhetorical, have been published in ten volumes; and his Contributions to the Edinburgh Ri have been issued in three volumes by Griffin & Co. The following extract is from his review of the works of Demosthenes, of which the French critic M. Villemain declared him to be "the best of modern interpreters." Brougham also wrote a novel, Arthur Lunel, which was not published until five years after his death.1] We must be permitted to dwell yet a little upon a topic, in itself truly inexhaustible the prodigious merit of the immortal original (works of Demosthenes). And we pursue this course the rather in these times, when a corrupt or a careless eloquence so greatly abounds, that there are but few public speakers who give any attention to their art, excepting those who debase it by the ornaments of a most vicious taste. Not, indeed, that the two defects are often kept apart; for some men appear to bestow but little pains upon the preparation of the vilest composition that ever offended a classical ear, although it displays an endless variety of far-fetched thoughts, forced metaphors, unnatural expressions, and violent perversions of ordinary language:-in a word, it 1 A feeble denial of the authorship was raised in some quarters; but there appears to be little doubt that Brougham wrote the novel, although he kept it in manuscript whilst he lived. is worthless without the poor merit of being elaborate; and affords a new instance how wide a departure may be made from nature with very little care, and how apt easy writing is to prove hard reading. Among the sources of this corruption may clearly be distinguished as the most fruitful, the habit of extempore speaking, acquired rapidly by persons who frequent popular assemblies, and, beginning at the wrong end, attempt to speak before they have studied the art of oratory, or even duly stored their minds with the treasures of thought and of language, which can only be drawn from assiduous intercourse with the ancient and modern classics. The truth is, that a certain proficiency in public speaking may be attained with nearly infallible certainty by any person who chooses to give himself the trouble of frequently trying it, and can harden himself against the pain of frequent failures. Complete self-possession and perfect fluency are thus acquired, almost mechanically, and with little or no reference to the talents of him who becomes possessed of them. If he is a man of no capacity, his speeches will of course be very bad; but though he be a man of genius, they will not be eloquent. A sensible remark or a fine image may frequently occur; but the loose and slovenly and poor diction, the want of art in combining and disposing his ideas, the inability to bring out many of his thoughts, and the utter incompetency to present any of them in the best and most efficient form, will deprive such a speaker of all claims to the character of an orator, and reduce him to the level of an ordinary talker. The same man, had he the same powers of convincing or expounding, never spoken in public, would have possessed provided he were only called upon to exert them in conversation with one or two persons. Perhaps the habit of speaking may have taught him something of arrangement, and a few of the simplest methods of producing an impression; but beyond these first steps he cannot possibly proceed by this empirical process; and his diction is sure to be much worse than if he had never made the attempt-clumsy, redundant, incorrect, unlimited in quantity, but of no value. Such a speaker is never in want of a word, and hardly ever has one that is worth having. It is a very common error to call this natural eloquence; it is the reverse; it is neither natural nor eloquence. A person under the influence of strong passions or feelings, and pouring forth all that fills his mind, produces a powerful effect on his hearers, and frequently attains, without any art, the highest beauties of rhetoric. The language of the passions flow easily; but it is concise and simple, and the opposite of that wordiness which we have been describing. The untaught speaker, who is also unpractised, and utters according to the dictates of his feelings, now and then succeeds perfectly; but, in those instances, he would not be the less successful for having studied the art; while that study would enable him to succeed equally in all that he delivers, and give him the same control over the feelings of others, whatever might be the state of his own. Herein, indeed, consists the value of the study; it enables a man to do at all times what nature only teaches upon rare occasions. Now, we cannot imagine any better corrective to the faults of which we are complaining in the eloquence of modern times, than the habitual contemplation of those exquisite models which the ancients have left us; and especially the more chaste beauties of Greek composition. Its perfect success, both in moving the audience to whom it was addressed, and the readers in all ages who studied it, cannot be denied; its superiority to all that has ever been produced in other countries is confessed. There may be some use, therefore, in observing how certainly it was the result of intense labour-labour previously bestowed to acquire the power, and the utmost care used in almost every exercise of that power. Without somewhat both of this discipline and this sedulous attention, it would be as vain to think of emulating those divine originals, by dint of a habit of fluent speech attained through much careless practice, as to attempt painting like Raphael without having learned to draw, and by the help of some mechanical contrivance. The extreme pains which the most illustrious of the Greeks bestowed upon their compositions, are evinced by all the accounts transmitted to us of the course of education deemed requisite to form an orator, and by the wellknown anecdotes of the steps by which both Demosthenes, and, after his example, Cicero and some of his contemporaries, trained them selves to rhetorical habits. . . . But let us come to Demosthenes himself. His extreme care in composing his orations is as well known as the sedulous discipline which he underwent to learn the art; and, notwithstanding the facility which he must have acquired, both by this preparation and by long and constant practice, he was averse, in an extraordinary degree, to extempore speaking. Plutarch relates this of him; and, notwithstanding the great excellence which is ascribed to his unpremeditated harangues in the same passage, there may be some suspicion that his reluctance to "trust his success to fortune," affected his execution upon certain occasions— perhaps in the memorable debate with Philip, of which the orator's illustrious rival has left us so lively and so cutting a description. His anxiety in preparing may, however, be further estimated by the circumstance of his having left a collection of exordia, or introductions, almost resembling that "volumen proamiorum," which we know Cicero to have kept ready by him, from the pleasant mistake that he committed in sending one to Atticus as the beginning of his treatise De Gloriâ, when he had before used it for the Third Book of the Academic Questions. It may justly be conceived that Demosthenes was not likely to have a book of introductions, so unconnected with any particular subject as to be applicable to any speech. This rather befitted Sallust, or Cicero himself, than the close reasoning, business-like Athenian. Yet in whatever way we account for it, and though we suppose that most of the exordia in question were written in the prospect of making some particular speech, when time was wanting to compose the whole, the fact of fifty-six of these pieces remaining, only two or three of which exist in their connection with any of his known orations, seems to prove, incontestably, the laborious nature of the process by which he reached and kept his vast pre-eminence in eloquence. From the detailed examination into which we have entered of these repetitions, two conclusions may be drawn, both highly illustrative of the degree in which oratory among the Greeks was considered as an art demanding the utmost care, and calculated to exhibit the mere display of skill, as well as to attain more important objects. In the first place, we find that the greatest of all orators never regarded the composition of any sentence worthy of him to deliver, as a thing of easy execution. Praetised, as he was, and able surely, if any man ever was, by his mastery over language, to pour out his ideas with facility, he elaborated every passage with almost equal care. the same ideas to express, he did not, like our easy and fluent moderns, clothe them in different language for the sake of variety; but reflecting that he had, upon the fullest deliberation, adopted one form of expression as the best, and because every other must needs be Having He tells him, as soon as he discovers the mistake, to cancel the exordium, and prefix another, which he sends, taken from the same collection.-Ep. ad Att. xvi. 6. worse, he used it again without any change, unless further labour and more trials had enabled him in any particular to improve the workmanship. They who speak or write with little or no labour to themselves, and proportionably small satisfaction to others, would, in similar circumstances, find it far easier to compose anew, than to recollect or go back to what they had finished on a former occasion. Not so the mighty Athenian, whom we find never disdaining even to make use of half a sentence which he had once happily wrought, and treasured up as complete; nay, to draw part of a sentence from one quarter and part from another, applying them by some slight change to the new occasion, and perhaps adding some new member-thus presenting the whole, in its last form, made of portions fabricated at three different periods, several years asunder. Nothing can more strikingly demonstrate how difficult, in the eyes of the first of all orators and writers, that composition was, which so many speakers and authors, in all after ages, have thought the easiest part of their task. But another inference may be drawn from the comparisons into which we have entered. If they prove the extreme pains taken by the orator, they illustrate as strikingly the delicate sense of rhetorical excellence in the Athenian audience; and seem even to show that they enjoyed a speech as modern assemblies do a theatrical exhibition, a fine drama or piece of music, which, far from losing by repetition, can only produce its full effect after a first, or even a second representation has made it thoroughly understood. It seems hardly possible, on any other supposition, to account for many of the repetitions in Demosthenes. A single sentence, or even a passage of some length, if it contained nothing very striking, might be given twice to a court or a popular assembly in modern times after no great interval of time; but who could now venture upon making a speech, about two-thirds of which had been spoken at different times, and nearly half of it upon one occasion the very year before? This would be impossible, how little soever there might be of bold figures, and other passages of striking effect. But we find Demosthenes repeating, almost word for word, some of his most striking passages-those which must have been universally known, and the recurrence of which might have been foreseen by the context. It seems to modern readers hardly possible to conceive that the functions of the critic thus performed by the Athenians should not have interfered with the capacity of actors or judges, in which it was certainly the orator's business chiefly to address them; and that the warmth of feeling, arising from a sense of the reality of all they were hearing, should not sometimes have been cooled by the recollection of the very artificial display they were witnessing. Yet no fact in history is more unquestionable than the union of the two capacities in the Athenian audience-their exquisite discrimination and high relish of rhetorical beauties, with their susceptibility of the strongest emotions which the orator could desire to excite. The powers of the artist become, no doubt, all the more wonderful on this account; and no one can deny that he was an artist, and trusted as little to inspiration as Clairon and the other actors, of whose unconcern during the delivery of passages which were convulsing the audience so many striking anecdotes are preserved. In the whole range of criticism there is not, perhaps, a more sound remark than that of Quintilian, which has sometimes been deemed paradoxical, only because it is profound, in his celebrated comparison of the Greek and Roman masters-Curæ plus in illo, in hoc naturæ. PROGRESS. BY WILLIAM ALLINGHAM. "Give back my youth!" the poets cry, And leave the true thing on the shelf. |