the grief of the virtuous for the virtuous, and the extinction of those bright and lofty hopes, for which the best and wisest of every age contended? Where is the man, worthy of the name, who would be less affected at the lamentation of one mother for her son, slain in defending his country, than at the extermination of some six or seven usurpers, commanding or attempting its invasion? National safety legitimates every mean employed upon it. Criminals have been punished differently in different countries: but all enlightened, all honest, all civilised men, must agree who are criminals. The Athenians were perhaps as well-informed and intelligent as the people on lake Ladoga: they knew nothing of the knout, I confess; and no family amongst them boasted a succession of assassins, in wives, sons, fathers, and husbands: but he who endangered or injured his country was condemned to the draught of hemlock! They could punish the offence in another manner: if any nation cannot, shall that nation therefore leave it unpunished? And shall the guiltiest of men enjoy impunity, from a consideration of modes and means? Justice is not to be neglected, because what is preferable is unattainable. A house-breaker is condemned to die, a citybreaker is celebrated by an inscription over the gate. The murder of thousands, soon perpetrated and past, is not the greatest mischief he does it is followed by the baseness of millions, deepening for ages. Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too powerful, and provide that it be duly executed. It is just, and it is necessary, that those who pertinaciously insist on so unnatural a state of society, should suffer by the shock things make in recovering their equipoise.' 11. 269.

We have given this tirade, not with any view to comment on the sentiments it conveys, but to justify what we have said of the outrageous spirit that so frequently breaks out in the present work, and that might reasonably condemn the author to the draught of hellebore.' We believe the attempt to revive the exploded doctrine of tyrannicide is peculiar to the reformed Jacobins. We remember a long and welltimed article in the FRIEND, Some years ago, on this subject; nor do the strong allusions to the same remedy, in a celebrated journal, form an exception to this remark, at a time when a renegado from the same school directed its attacks upon the Corsican hero. These modern monks and literary jesuits, who would fain set up their own fanatic notions against law and reason, and dictate equally to legitimate kings and revolutionary usurpers, find fault with Napoleon for having thrown his sword into the scale of opinion; and now, finding the want of it, sooner than be baulked of their fancy, would (as far as

we can understand their meaning) substitute the dagger. We cannot applaud their expedients; nor sympathize with that final hope' which seems 'flat despair.' If these pragmatical persons could have every thing their own way-if they could confer power and take away the abuse of it-if they could put down tyrants with the sword, and give the law to conquerors with the pen-we should not despair of seeing some good result from this new theocracy. The worst we could fear would be from their fickleness, rashness, and inconsiderate thirst for novelty; but they would not, by their illtimed servility and gratuitous phrensy, help to bring down the iron hand of power upon us, or enclose us in the dungeons of prejudice and superstition! As it is, they have contrived to throw open the flood-gates of despotism-to shut exceeds their power:' they have got rid of one tyrant, to establish the principle in perpetuity, and to root out the very name of Freedom. Those of them who are sincere, who are not bribed to silence by places and pensions obtained by their momentary complaisance and seeming inconsistency, speak out, and are sorry for the part they have taken, now that it is too late. They strike the marble table with their palm'-they call their country recreant and base-they invoke the shade of Leonidas they apostrophize the spirit of Bolivar-they polish their style like a steel breastplate-they point their sentences like daggers against the bloated apathy of legitimacy-they publish satires on the constitution, and print libels on departed ministers in asterisks-they invent new modes of warfare, and recommend new modes of extermination against despots; and, in return for all this, the Holy Allies laugh at them, their credulity, their rage, their helplessness, and disappointThere was one man whom they did not laugh at, but whom they feared and hated; and they persuaded Mr. Landor and others that what they feared and hated above all other things, was out of love to Liberty and Humanity!

ment.

Mr. Landor has interspersed some pieces of poetry through these volumes. His muse still retains her implicit and inextricable style. The author, some five-and-twenty years ago, published a poem under the title of GEBIR, in Latin and English, and equally unintelligible in both, but of which we have heard two lines quoted by his admirers.

Pleas'd they remember their august abodes,

And murmur as the ocean murmurs there.'

This relates to the sound which sea-shells make if placed close to the ear, and is beautiful and mystic, like something composed in a dream. His tragedy of Count Julian we have not seen.

VOL. XL.]

SHELLEY'S POSTHUMOUS POEMS

[July 1824. MR. SHELLEY'S style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science -a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilites, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry— out of nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): But, in him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination—and was not sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We thank him-but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley's mind was of too fiery a quality' to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true-it soared beyond the visible diurnal sphere,' to the strange, the improbable, and the impossible. He mistook the nature of the poet's calling, which should be guided by involuntary, not by voluntary impulses. He shook off, as an heroic and praiseworthy act, the trammels of sense, custom, and sympathy, and became the creature of his own will. He was all air,' disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould. He ransacked his brain for incongruities, and believed in whatever was incredible. Almost all is effort, almost all is extravagant, almost all is quaint, incomprehensible, and abortive, from aiming to be more than it is. Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fireworks in the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor discriminate form. Yet Mr. Shelley, with all his faults,

was a man of genius; and we lament that uncontrollable violence of temperament which gave it a forced and false direction. He has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and, in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most. If some casual

and interesting idea touched his feelings or struck his fancy, he expressed it in pleasing and unaffected verse: but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system. The fumes of vanity rolled volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy tabernacle of his thought. The success of his writings is therefore in general in the inverse ratio of the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon, and outstripped his powers of execution.

Mr. Shelley was a remarkable man. His person was a type and shadow of his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light, and his spirit within him -'so divinely wrought,

That you might almost say his body thought.'

He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid's fables. His form, graceful and slender, drooped like a flower in the breeze. But he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy! He mistook the nature of his own faculties and feelings-the lowly children of the valley, by which the skylark makes its bed, and the bee murmurs, for the proud cedar or the mountain-pine, in which the eagle builts its eyry, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.' -He wished to make of idle verse and idler prose the frame-work of the universe, and to bind all possible existence in the visionary chain of intellectual beauty

'More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched dew, do not in th' air more lightly flee.'

Perhaps some lurking sense of his own deficiencies in the lofty walk which he attempted, irritated his impatience and his desires; and urged him on, with winged hopes, to atone for past failures by more arduous efforts, and more unavailing struggles.

With all his faults, Mr. Shelley was an honest man. His unbelief and his presumption were parts of a disease, which was not combined in him either with indifference to human happiness, or contempt for human infirmities. There was neither selfishness nor malice at the

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bottom of his illusions. He was sincere in all his professions; and he practised what he preached to his own sufficient cost. He followed up the letter and the spirit of his theoretical principles in his own person, and was ready to share both the benefit and the penalty with others. He thought and acted logically, and was what he professed to be, a sincere lover of truth, of nature, and of human kind. To all the rage of paradox, he united an unaccountable candour and severity of reasoning: in spite of an aristocratic education, he retained in his manners the simplicity of a primitive apostle. An Epicurean in his sentiments, he lived with the frugality and abstemiousness of an ascetick. His fault was, that he had no deference for the opinions of others, too little sympathy with their feelings (which he thought he had a right to sacrifice, as well as his own, to a grand ethical experiment)—and trusted too implicitly to the light of his own mind, and to the warmth of his own impulses. He was indeed the most striking example we remember of the two extremes described by Lord Bacon as the great impediments to human improvement, the love of Novelty, and the love of Antiquity. The first of these (impediments) is an extreme affection of two extremities, the one Antiquity, the other Novelty; wherein it seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while Antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and Novelty cannot be content to add, but it must deface. Surely the advice of the Prophet is the true direction in this matter: Stand upon the old ways, and see which is the right and good way, and walk therein. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression. And to speak truly, Antiquitas seculi Juventus mundi. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we count ancient, ordine retrogrado, by a computation backwards from ourselves.' (ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, Book I. p. 46.)—Such is the text and Mr. Shelley's writings are a splendid commentary on one half of it. Considered in this point of view, his career may not be uninstructive even to those whom it most offended; and might be held up as a beacon and warning no less to the bigot than the sciolist. We wish to speak of the errors of a man of genius with tenderness. His nature was kind, and his sentiments noble; but in him the rage of free inquiry and private judgment amounted to a species of madness. Whatever was new, untried, unheard of, unauthorized, exerted a kind of fascination over his mind. The examples of the world, the opinion of others, instead of acting as a check upon him, served but