readers. That our English minstrels at any
time united all the talents of the profession,
and were at once poets, and reciters, and
musicians, is extremely doubtful; but that
they excited and directed the efforts of their
contemporary poets to a particular species
of composition, is as evident as that a body
of actors must influence the exertions of the-
atrical writers. They were, at a time when
reading and writing were rare accomplish-
ments, the principal medium of communica-
tion between authors and the public; and
their memory in some measure supplied the
deficiency of manuscripts, and probably pre-
served much of our early literature till the
invention of printing." We may thus learn,
that, although the number of those was
very few whose minds could be elevated by
reading, the compositions of learned and
accomplished men might yet be familiar to
the people through the agency of a numer-
ous body of singers and reciters. There has
been a good deal of controversy about the
exact definition of the minstrel character-
whether the minstrels were themselves poets
and romance-writers,
and romance-writers, or the depositaries of
the writings of others, and of the traditional
literature of past generations. Ritson, a
writer upon this subject, says: "that there
were individuals formerly who made it their
business to wander up and down the coun-
try chanting romances, and singing songs
and ballads to the harp, fiddle, or more hum-

lived John Lydgate, a monk of Bury, who | was a very popular poet, and possessed great versatility of talent. Warton says: "He moves with equal ease in every mode of composition. His hymns and his ballads have the same degree of merit: and whether his subject be the life of a hermit or a hero, of St. Austin or Guy Earl of Warwick, ludicrous or legendary, religious or romantic, a history or an allegory, he writes with facility. . . . . He was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the company of goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty at Eltham, a May game for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a mumming before the lord-mayor, a procession of pageants from the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for a coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry." A fine illuminated drawing in one of Lydgate's manuscripts, now in the British Museum, represents him presenting a book to the Earl of Salisbury. Such a presentation may be regarded as a first publication of a new work before the date of printing. The royal or noble person at whose command it was written bestowed some rich gift upon the author, which would be his sole pecuniary recompense, unless he received some advantage from the transcribers, for the copies which they multiplied-which in most cases is unlikely. Doubtful as the rewards of authorship may be in an age when the multiplicable and less artificial instruments, cannot be tion of copies by the press enables the reader to contribute a small acknowledgment of the benefit which he receives, the literary condition must have been far worse when the poet, humbly kneeling before some mighty man, as Lydgate does in the picture, might have been dismissed with contumely, or have had his present received with a low appreciation of the labour and the knowledge required to produce it.

The fame, however, of a popular writer was of a kind far more direct and flattering than belongs to the literary honours of modern days. There is little doubt that the narrative poems of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, were familiar to the people through the recitations of the minstrels. Mr. George Ellis, in his agreeable work on the Rise and Progress of English Poetry, observes: Chaucer, in his address to his Trolius and Cressida, tells us it was intended to be read, 'or elles sung,' which must relate to the chanting of the minstrels; and a considerable part of our old poetry is simply addressed to an audience, without any mention of

doubted." They were a very numerous body a century before Chaucer; and most indefatigable in the prosecution of their vocation. They even appear to have become at length something of a nuisance, like the barrelorgans and hurdy-gurdies that now infest the quieter portions of our towns. There is a writ or declaration of Edward II., which complains of the evil of idle persons, under colour of minstrelsy, being received into other men's houses to meat and drink; and it then goes on to direct, that to the houses of great people, no more than three or four minstrels of honour should come at most in a day; "and to the houses of meaner men, that none come unless he be desired; and such as shall come, to hold themselves contented with meat and drink, and with such courtesy as the master of the house will show unto them of his own good-will, without their asking of anything." Nothing can more clearly exhibit the general demand for the services of this body of men; for the very regulation as to the nature of their reward, shows plainly that they were accus

eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."*

tomed to require a liberal payment, and it was only when their demands began to approach towards extortion, that the state found it needful to interfere with them. After this enactment, they struggled on, in a sort of vagabondish manner, sometimes prosperous and sometimes depressed, according to the condition of the country, till the invention of printing came to make popular literature always present in a man's house. The book of ballads or romances which was then to be bought, could be constantly retained without the incurring of any charges for "meat and drink;" for, in the words of Richard de Bury, whom we quoted in the beginning, books "are the masters who instruct us without rods, without hard words or anger, without clothes and money. If you approach them, they are not asleep if, investigating, you interrogate them, they conceal nothing; if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you.' To this truthful and judicious eulogy, let us append Milton's more modern and more eloquent laudation:"Books," says he, "are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a phial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth: and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And. . . . unless wariness be used, as good kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature-God's image; but he who Areopagitica: a Speech for the Liberty of Undestroys a good book, kills reason itself-licensed Printing. 1644. kills the image of God, as it were, in the

The inestimable advantage of good books, printing has secured to us as an inalienable possession. Whosoever will, may at a trifling cost procure them. These few particulars, relating to the condition and commercial circumstances of literature prior to the use of printing, may nevertheless be interesting to some of the readers of this Journal. Taken in contrast with the present state of knowledge, and the means existing for its dissemination, they may serve at least to show the great advances that have been made since William Caxton first set up his printing-press at Westminster. To appreciate all the advantages of the present, it is sometimes advisable to look into the past, and to contemplate from that position the higher ground of benefit and convenience to which we have attained. Without the mechanical contrivance of printing, the thoughts of ennobling imaginations of genius could never have become possessions to any but the affluent and favoured few; but by means of that imperishable invention, they can now be made available to the uses of all who have learned the simple art of reading; and a man's poverty, unless it be extremely desperate, need no longer hinder him from sharing in the wealth of mind and fancy which was meant for the common inheritance of mankind.

THE EMPEROR LOUIS NAPOLEON AND THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE.-Mr. Henry Scott Riddell, of Teviothead, the well-known author of "Scotland Yet," and many other esteemed and popular national songs, was recently, on the recommendation of a clergyman of the Established Church, employed to translate the Gospel of Matthew into the Lowland Scotch. Mr. Riddell finished his!

task a few weeks ago, and he has now been informed that his employer is no other than the Emperor of the French. The Emperor, he has been given to understand, takes a curious interest in language, and it would appear is especially interested in the older language of Caledonia, the country of the progenitors of his Empress.

From Blackwood's Magazine.]

MODERN NOVELISTS-GREAT AND SMALL.

And there is no sphere in which it is so necessary to exercise this toleration as among the great army of novelists who minister to our pleasures. In no other department of literature is the field so crowded; in few others do success and failure depend so entirely upon the gifts of the artist. A biography, however indifferently executed, must always have something real in it. History may be intolerably heavy-may be partial, or disingenuous, or flippant, but still it is impossible to remove fact and significance altogether from its pages. Fiction, on the other hand, has no such foundation to build upon, and it depends entirely on the individual powers of its professors, whether it is merely a lying legend of impossible people, or a broad and noble picture of real things and real men. To balance this, it is also true that few people are without their bit of insight, of whatever kind it may be, and that the greater portion of those who have the power of speech, the trick of composition, have really seen or known something which their neighbors would be the better for hearing. So far as it professes to represent this great crowded world, and the broad lights and shadows of universal life, with all its depths and heights, its wonders and mysteries, there are but few successful artists in fiction, and these few are of universal fame; but there remains many a byway and corner, many a nook of secret seclusion, and homes of kindly charity, which genius which is not the highest, and minds of a lower range and scantier experience, may well be content to embellish and illustrate. Nor does it seldom happen that a story-teller of this second rank finds a straight road and a speedy entrance to the natural heart which has but admired and wondered at the master minstrel's loftier tale.

GREATNESS is always comparative: there | individual of them to be great "in his are few things so hard to adjust as the slid- way." ing scale of fame. We remember once looking over a book of autographs, which impressed us with an acute perception of this principle. As we turned over the fair and precious leaves, we lighted upon name after name unknown to us as to a savage. What were these? They were famous namesscraps of notes and boarded signatures from the great Professor this, and the great Mr. that, gentlemen who wrote F. R. S., and a score of other initial letters against their names, and were ranked among the remarkable people of their generation. Yet we-we say it with humiliation-knew them not, and we flatter ourselves that we were not inferior in this particular to the mass of the literatureloving public. They were great, but only in their own sphere. How many spheres are there entertaining each its own company of magnets? How few who attain the universal recognition, and are great in the sight of all men! There is not a parish or a county in the three kingdoms without its eminent person-not an art or a science but has its established oligarchy; and the great philosopher, who maps the sky like any familiar ocean, is not more emphatically distinguished among his fellows than is some individual workman in the manufactory from which came his great telescope-so true is it, in spite of the infinite diversity of individual constitution, that we have but a series of endless repetitions in the social economy of human nature. Nor is it much easier to define greatness than to limit the number of those for whom it is claimed. In the genera tion which has just passed, are there not two or three grand names of unquestionable magnitude and influence, the secret of whose power we cannot discover in anything they have left behind them? In fact, all that we can do when we descend from that highest platform whose occupants are visible to the whole world, and universally acknowledged, is to reconcile the claims of the lesser and narrower eminences, by permitting every

Place aux dames! How does it happen that the cowardice of womankind is a fact so clearly established, and that so little notice is ever taken of the desperate temerity of

1855.]

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this half of the creation? It is in vain that regular sentences?-the dialogue which
we call to the Amazon, as the lookers on at chimes in exactly the same measure, whether
that famous tourney at Ashby-de-la-Zouch the speakers speak in a club, or in the dowa-
called to the disinherited knight, "Strike ger duchess's sombre and pious boudoir ?
the hospitaller's shield-he is weak in his Mammon is a good representation of her aver-
saddle." While we are speaking, the femi-age productions; and so is Transmutation, an
nine knight-errant rushes past us to thunder
upon the buckler of Bois Guilbert, the
champion of champions. Where philosophic
magnets fear to tread, and bodies of divinity
approach with trembling, the fair novelist
flies at a gallop. Her warfare, it is true, is
after the manner of woman: there is a rush,
a flash, a shriek, and the combatant comes
forth from the melée trembling with delight
and terror; but the sudden daring of her
attack puts bravery to shame. This, which
is the age of so many things-of enlighten-
ment, of science, of progress-is quite as
distinctly the age of female novelists; and
women, who rarely or never find their way
to the loftiest class, have a natural right and
claim to rank foremost in the second. The
vexed questions of social morality, the grand
problems of human experience, are seldom
so summarily discussed and settled as in the
novels of this day, which are written by
women; and, though we have little reason to
complain of the first group of experienced
novelists who lead our lists, we tremble to
encounter the sweeping judgments and
wonderful theories of the very strange world
revealed to us in the books of many of the
younger sisterhood.

No; Mrs. Gore with her shining, chilly sketches-Mrs. Trollope with her rough wit and intense cleverness-Mrs. Marsh with her exemplary and most didactic narratives-are orthodox and proper beyond criticism. To have remained so long in possession of the popular ear is no small tribute to their powers; and we must join, to these long established and well known names, the name of a writer more genial and kindly than any of them, and one who has wisely rested long upon her modest laurels, without entering into competition with the young and restless powers of to-day-Mrs. S. C. Hall. The Irish Sketches of this lady resemble considerably Miss Mitford's beautiful English sketches in Our Village; but they are more vigorous and picturesque, and bright with an animated and warm nationality, apologetic and defensive, which Miss Mitford, writing of one class of English to another, had no occasion to use.

The novel of conventional and artificial life belongs to no one so much as to Mrs. Gore. Who does not know the ring of her

anonymous novel recently published, in which,
if it is not Mrs. Gore's, we are wonderfully de-
ceived. Even in works of the highest genius
it is seldom difficult to trace a family resem-
blance between the different creations of the
same hand; and it is impossible to imagine
that any mortal fancy could retain originality
through the long period which this lady has
spent in the composition of novels; so it is
not wonderful that we need to pay especial
attention to the names; to make ourselves
quite sure that it is a new and not an old
novel of Mrs. Gore's which we have in our
hand. There is the same country house-
the same meek lady and morose gentleman--
the same "nice young man" for hero-and
the same young ladies, good and naughty,
in the same white muslin and blue ribbons.
There is the same chorus kept up through
the book, of conversations at clubs upon
other people's business, which the parties in-
terested either overhear or do not overhear,
And so the tale
as is best for the story.
glides on smoothly and easily, its sorrows
disturbing our placidity as little as its joys,
and everybody concerned having the most
composed and tranquil certainty as to how
it is to end. Nevertheless, Mrs. Gore's novels
have a host of readers, and Mrs. Gore's
readers are interested. People will be inter-
ested, we suspect, till the end of the world,
in the old, old story, how Edwin and Ange-
lina fell in love with each other; how they
were separated, persecuted, and tempted;
and how their virtue and constancy triumph-
ed over all their misfortunes. And there is
much vivacity and liveliness, and a good
deal of shrewd observation in these books.
They are amusing, pleasant beguilers of a
stray hour; and, after all our grand preten-
sions, how valuable a property is this in the
genus novel, which proclaims itself an ephe-
meron in its very name!

Mrs. Trollope is a different person. It pleases this lady to put her fortune to the touch, whether she will delight or disgust us, and according to her auditors is her success. The bold, buxom, daring, yet very foolish Mrs. Barnaby, seems to have been a work entirely after this author's heart, and at which she labored con amore; but we cannot profess to have the smallest scrap of admiration for Mrs. Barnaby, though there is no

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