de Staël. His contributions to the Conciliatore were distinguished for the grace and elegance of their style, and at this period both the motive and the means of literary culture were fully enjoyed. The transition from such a sphere to a prison led him to reflect, with new zest, upon the discipline of life, the mysteries of the soul, and the truths of revelation. His latent religious sentiment was awakened. His heart, thrust back from the amenities of cultivated society and the delight of kindred, turned to God with a zeal and a singleness of purpose before unknown. He became devout, and experienced the solace and the elevation of Christian faith. There have been critics who pretend to see in this perfectly natural result only a proof of weakness, or an indication of despair. The candid utterance of pious feeling in his Prigioni was regarded, by the cynical, as evidence of a broken spirit and when he persevered in retirement and the offices of his faith, after emancipation, it was said that the wiles of Jesuitism had made him a victim and induced his political abdication. But no one can examine the writings of Pellico without feeling that he was evidently a man of sentiment. It was this quality, as contrasted with the severity of Alfieri, that first gained him popularity as a dramatic writer, that endeared him to family and friends, and that made him a patriot and a poet. Solitude, by the very laws of nature, where such a being is concerned, developed his religious sentiment; and to the predominance of this, united with physical disability, is to be ascribed his passive and hermit life. It should be a cause of praise, and not of reproach. He was true to himself; and in view alone of the sincerity and the consolation he obviously derived from religion, we are not disposed to quarrel with his Catholicism. The errors of that creed had no power over his generous and simple nature; it was hallowed to him by early association, and by parental sanctions; and there is no evidence that he accepted its ministrations with superstitious imbecility, but rather in a spirit above and beyond forms, and deeply cognizant of essential truth.

THE POPULAR POET.

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

WHEN Burns was on his death-bed, he said to a fellow-member of his military corps, "Don't let the awkward squad fire over me." There is an awkward squad in the ranks of all professions, and most earnestly is their service to be deprecated on any occasions calling for solemnity or tenderness. Then we demand what is graceful, harmonious, and efficient. Yet it is the constant fate of genius to be tried by other arbiters than its peers, to be profaned by idle curiosity and malignant gossip. The "awkward squad" in literature not only fire over the graves of poets, but are wont to discharge annoying batteries of squibs at them while living. The penny-a-liners scent a celebrity afar off, and hunt it with the pertinacity of hounds; they flock in at the death like a brood of vultures; and often, without the ability either to sympathize with or to respect the real claims they pretend to honor, show up the foibles, mutilate the sayings, and fabricate the doings, of those whose unostentatious private lives, to say nothing of the dignity of their public fame, should protect them from microscopic observation and vulgar comment.

No modern English poet has suffered more from this kind of notoriety than Campbell. Unlike his brother bards, he neither sought rural seclusion nor foreign exile, but continued to haunt cities to the last; and it is refreshing to turn from the hackneyed sketches of him in the magazines to his own letters and the history of his early career, and revive our best impressions of his character.

To do this we must discard what is irrelevant, and contemplate the essential. The only demand we have any moral right to make upon the bard who has enlisted our hearts by his song, is that there exist in his actions and tone of feeling a spirit consistent with the sentiments deliberately advocated in his verse. There is no reason whatever to expect in him immunity from error; we are irrational to look for a beauty of feature, a majesty of life, and an evenness of temper, corresponding with the ideal created by the finish and exaltation of his poetry; but if baseness deface the behavior and indifference chill the intercourse of him who has eloquently breathed into the ear of the world noble and glowing emotion, we are justified in feeling not only disappointment, but almost scepticism as to the reality of these divine sympathies. Such an anomaly we do not believe possible in the nature of things. In spite of what is so often asserted of the discrepancy between authorship and character, literary biography demonstrates that " as a man thinketh so is he."

Milton and Dante, Goldsmith and Petrarch, were essentially what their works proclaim them, although the former occasionally exhibited asceticism, which is the extreme of that genius whose characteristic is will, and the latter sometimes displayed the weakness which, in our human frailty, attaches to the genius whose main principle is love. A touch of pedantry and hardihood slightly deforms the images of those august spirits who explored the unseen world, as vanity and egotism mar the serene beauty of the gentler minstrels who sung of the tender passion and the charms of domestic life. Were it otherwise, they would eclipse instead of representing humanity. There is a process of metropolitan decadence to which literary celebrities are liable, especially in London, for which we, whose privilege it is to look upon them over the grand perspective of the sea, should make just allowance. The most absurd whim of modern society is that of making what are called lions of authors, and especially of poets. No class of men appear to less advantage in a conventional position; and no two principles can be more radically adverse than that of mutual agreeableness, conformity, and display, of which society technically considered is the arena, and the spirit of earnestness, nature, and freedom, characteristic of poets. Idolized as they usually

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are, and with good reason, in the domestic circle and among inti-. mate friends, the very qualities which are there elicited general society keeps in abeyance. Tact is the desideratum in the latter as truth is in the former; and though sometimes the natural dignity and manliness of genius successfully asserts itself in the face of pretence fortified by etiquette, as in the case of Burns at Edinburgh, the exception is too memorable not to have been rare. The consequence of this want of relation between the spirit of society and the poetic character is that a formal homage is paid its representatives on their first appearance, which, at length, becomes wearisome to both parties; and, if the time-honored guest has not the wisdom to anticipate his social decay and withdraw into honorable retirement, those upon whose memories the prestige of his original 'reputation does not rest are apt to fail in that recognition which habit has made almost necessary to his self-respect.

The admirers of dramatic and musical genius keenly regret the reäppearance of the favorites of their youth in public, only to awaken the unfeeling curiosity of a new generation; and somewhat of the same melancholy attaches to the prolonged, social exhibition of a man whose verse has rendered his name sacred to our associations and remembrance. That familiarity which breeds contempt denies the original glory of his presence. The name freely bandied at the feast comes to be repeated with less reverence at the fireside. The voice, whose lowest accent was once caught with breathless interest, is suffered to lose itself in the hum of commonplace table-talk; and the brow to which every eye used to turn with sympathetic wonder seems no longer to wear the mysterious halo with which love and fancy crown the priests of nature. And usually the victim of this gradual disenchantment is quite unconscious of the change, until suddenly aroused to its reality. Aware of no blight upon his tree of promise, inspired by the same feelings which warmed his youth, wedded to the same tastes, and loyal to the same sentiments, with a kind of childlike trustfulness he reposes upon his own identity, and is slow to believe in the precarious tenure upon which merely social distinction is held.

To a reverent and generous spectator this is one of those scenes

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in the drama of life, which is the more affecting because so few look upon it with interest. We sigh at the fragility of personal renown, and pity the enthusiasm that seems doomed to make idols and to find them clay." Then how enviable appear those who "are gathered to the kings of thought, far in the unapparent," the young poet who died in the freshness of his life, and the aged bard who seasonably retreated to the sequestered haunts of nature, and breathed his last far from the busy world where the echo of his fame yet lingered! We are chiefly pained, in the opposite case, at the difficulty of associating the author with his works, the written sentiment with the ordinary talk, the poet with the man, when we are thus brought into habitual contact with the social effigy of genius. We are also mortified at the inconsistency of feeling which leads men to guard and cherish an architectural fragment, and yet interpose no wise and charitable hand to preserve from sacrilege "creation's masterpiece, the poet soul;" which expends such hero-worship upon the distant and the dead, but holds up no shield between the greatness at their side and the indifferent or perhaps malicious gaze of the world. Modern philanthropy has furnished asylums for almost all the physical and moral ills to which flesh is heir; but the award of celebrity apparently cancels the obligations of society towards the gifted. If improvident, as is usually the case, poverty and neglect are often their lot in age; and if prosperous in circumstances, but bereft of near and genial ties, they are homeless, and consequently reckless.

Instances of private sensibility to claims like these, not only felt but realized with beautiful zeal, are indeed recorded to the honor of our common nature; and such benefactors as Mrs. Unwin, the friend of Cowper, and the Gilmans, at whose house Coleridge died, will live in honor when more ostentatious almoners are forgotten. Let us congratulate ourselves that we are seldom among the witnesses of the social decadence of our favorite English authors. Freshly to us yet beams their morning fame; we know them only through their works, and death has but canonized what love had endeared. There is no dreary interlude between the glorious overture and the solemn finale. Their garlands, to our vision, press unwithered brows. The music of their