racter and position, or from the neglect and I an abstract view of the subject, just as it is misery which such an estimate involves, are powerful-Mr. Jerrold expresses his ideas of Mr. Jerrold's views respecting national pros- military pomp and action: perity and national glory. The hollowness which, in his estimation, destroys or renders This dazzling heathenism that makes a pomp positively pernicious the ideal of life in the of wickedness-seizes and distracts us at the very individual, has exactly the same effect as rethreshold of life. Swords and drums are our gards the nation. Hence his almost republi- playthings; the types of violence and destruction can idea of every thing which constitutes mere and, as we grow older, the outward magnificence are made the pretty playthings of our childhood; external pomp, or which exists for purposes of the ogre, Glory-his trappings and his trumpets, of parade. Hence also his denunciations of his privileges and the songs that are shouted in war and his scorn of martial glory. Long ere his praise, enslave the bigger baby to the sacrifice. the Peace Society was constituted, years But for craft operating on ignorance, who, in the before the principles on which it was founded name of outraged Heaven, would become the had met with any thing like the acceptation sergeant works on the block ploughman, and at hireling of the sword? Day by day the they now receive directly or indirectly, Mr. last carves out a true, handsome soldier of the Jerrold employed his genius in the condem- line. What knew Hodge of the responsibility of nation of war-in ridiculing as well as deplor- man? What dreams had he of the self-accounting its results, and in satirizing all manifesta- ability of the human spirit? The musket-stock tions of the martial spirit. He did so not on which for many an hour he hugs-hugs in weariprinciples of economy, but from unmistakableness was no more a party to its present use than motives of humanity. It is "the folly of the heroism of the soul; war tests the magnanimity was Hodge. But war brings forth the sword," to borrow the title of one of his most of man. Sweet is the humanity that spares a vigorous essays, which awakens his scorn, and fallen foe; gracious the compassion that tends the irresponsibility of those in whose hands his wounds, that brings even a cup of water to it is generally placed, which he pities and his burning lips. Granted. But is there no deplores. A firm believer alike in the inef- heroism of a grander mould? The heroism of ficacy and barbarity of capital punishments, to strike, a nobler virtue than the late-born pity forbearance? Is not the humanity that refuses he regards life and death as things so solemn of violence? Pretty it is to see the victor with and so awful, that he views a devotion of the salve and lint kneeling at his bloody trophy—a one to a false and delusive idea of glory, and maimed and agonized fellow-man; but surely it the association of the other with the horrors had been better to have withheld the blow, than of the battle-field, as inimical to all the hu- to have been first mischievous to be afterwards manizing and elevating influences of Chris- humane.—pp. 146–7. tianity. It is but just to add, however, that in urging these opinions, Mr. Jerrold seldom if ever descends to the use of such language as is often employed in the condemnation of war. His intelligence, not less than his good taste and generous feeling, restrain him from the fulmination of coarse invectives or sweeping charges against those who have been the agents of what he conceives to be a false idea. Yet, on this as on other subjects which provoke his sarcasm, Mr. Jerrold may very fairly be regarded as taking up a position from which he might be easily driven by weapons of his own forging. He manifests a disposition to take what might be considered too direct a view of an evil; to look at it too much in the abstract, and without a due consideration of extenuating or justifying circumstances. There is no deduction made for the necessity which constitutes war a punishment as well as "a pastime for despots;" nothing allowed for the glory, martial though it be, of saving a nation's liberty, even at the expense of its blood and treasure. In such language as the following-language powerful, and, in We have thus endeavored briefly to point out some of the more prominent characteristics of Mr. Jerrold's literary character, giving illustrations of what we conceive to be the chief element of it-viz., a serious and earnest nature working with the materials, so to speak, of a comic and satirical writer. It now only remains for us to go over some of his works; and, while exhibiting certain features of his style, endeavor to do so by such quotations as our limits allow. Although we are disposed to regard Mr. Jerrold as in some respects the most practical of our modern novelists-as giving us, upon the whole, the most ordinary pictures of human life in those aspects in which he looks at it-it would be a great mistake to suppose that his writings are destitute of those expressions of feeling which are, in the strictest sense of the word, poetical. While it must be admitted that there is occasionally a tendency towards the use of language and metaphors which are the very reverse of tasteful or elegant, for the most part his style is clear and terse-singularly so for a writer of such strong feelings, and yet necessarily so, we should be disposed to think, for the effect of his satire. So pregnant and complete are some of his sentences, that it would seem as if in a few words he had struck out a meaning which could not have been better conveyed in a page. This is especially the case in metaphorical passages. Thus, in one of his stories, speaking of the fertility of Australia, he says: "Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe, and she laughs with harvest." Again, in the same tale, he thus describes a matter-of-fact man: "Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask the number of the steps." Characterization could scarcely go farther than this. We have the disposition of the man dashed off in a single line. A shaft of sarcasm, too, is often completed, even to its barbed point, in no more words than we have just quoted. Here is an instance of it: "At that hour when sparrows look down reproachfully from their eaves at the flushed man trying the street-door." There are few of our modern writers from whose works so many pregnant sentences could be culled as from the volumes before us. They have an epigrammatic clearness and force, an intensity of expression, which renders them in a great measure peculiar. We shall quote a few of these; but in doing so, it is necessary to remind the reader that they lose not a little of their strength by being thus detached. In the opening page of St. Giles and St. James," there is a finely reflective description of a winter night in a great city, which closes with the following lines: "It was a time when, in the cellars and garrets of the poor, are acted scenes which make the noblest heroism of life; a time when in want and anguish, in throes of mortal agony, some seed is sown that bears a flower in heaven." The tale from which this sentence is taken abounds with many of its author's finest and most touching thoughts. Here are some of them, full of the finest feeling: It was a beautiful spring evening-last of the spring, yet fresh with all its green. The peace of heaven seemed upon earth. An hour and scene when the heart is softened and subdued by the spirit of beauty. One of the happy hours that, sweet in the present, are yet delicious in the past; treasured as they are, as somewhat akin to those hours of the world's spring when earth was trod by angels. p. 103. There seemed a Sabbath peace on all things. The drudged horse stood meek and passive in the field, patiently eyeing the passer-by, as though it felt secure of one day's holiday; the cows, with their large kind eyes, lay unmoved upon the grass; all things seemed taking rest beneath the brooding wings of heaven. We have climbed the hill-have gained the churchyard; the dust of the living dust of generations. The bell is distant hamlets we see men, women, and children swinging still; and turning on every side, from -age with its staff, and babyhood warm at the breast-all coming upward-upward to the church. Still they climb, and still from twenty opposite paths they come, to strength and rejoice their souls in one common centre-a foreshadowing of that tremendous Sabbath of the Universe when all men from all paths shall meet in Paradise. . . A beautiful sight, doubtless, to behold, in that same village temple, men of all conditions gathered together to confess their common infirmities, to supplicate for common blessings, to appear for a time as in the vestibule of eternity in common adoration of the Eternal.-p. 210. How few the incidents of life, how multitudinous its emotions! How flat and monotonous may be the circumstances of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape, broken into hill and dale, with trees of varied hue and form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet fields. How beautiful, for how varied! Cast your eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate-barren as barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then with nearer gaze contemplate the wondrous forms and colors of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the hum of busy life sounding at every root of forest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness, audibly as when the corn grows and the grape is ripening? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor, with the most active and with apparently the most inert ?-pp. 333, 334. His The love of nature, and of all things beautiful, as evinced in such passages, marks, in a greater or less degree, almost every one of Mr. Jerrold's works, except such as are broadly and exclusively comic. He turns aside, as if for relief and refreshment, from the city scenes of misery and the haunts of profligacy, to the quiet of the sunny lanes and the breezy downs of England. landscapes are all unmistakably English. He cannot think of the country and its peaceful influences, but his mind seems to revert to the wide and open fields, with "the lark, a trembling and fluttering speck of song, above them." He brings this love of nature into the dust and din of city streets and murky alleys, too, presenting us, as in the following passage, with quaint reflections on its influence there: Pugwash was fond of what he called nature, though in his dim, close shop he would give her but a stifling welcome. Nevertheless, he had the earliest primroses on his counter; "they threw," he said, "such a nice light about the place." A sly, knavish customer, presented him with a pot of polyanthuses, and, won by the flowery gift, Pugwash gave the donor ruinous credit. The man with the wallflowers regularly stopped at the shop, and for sixpence, Pugwash would tell his wife that he had made the place a Paradise. "If we can't go to nature, Sally, isn't it a pleasant thing to be able to bring nature to us?" Whereupon, Mrs. Pugwash would declare that a man with at least three children to provide for had no need to talk of nature. Nevertheless, the flowerman made his weekly call. Though at many a house the penny could not every week be spared to buy a hint, a look of nature for the darkened dwellers about him, Isaac, despite of Mrs. Pug wash, always purchased. It is a common thing, an old familiar cry, to see the poor man's florist, and hear his loud-voiced invitation to take his nosegays, his penny roots; and yet it is a call, a conjuration of the heart to a man over-labored and desponding, walled in by the gloom of a town, divorced from the fields and their sweet, healthful influences, almost shut out from the sky,--it is a call that tells him there are things of the earth besides food and covering to live for; and that God, in his great bounty, hath made them for all men. Adown dark lanes and miry alleys he takes sweet remembrances, touching records of the loveliness of earth, that with their bright looks and balmy odors cheer and uplift the dumpish heart of man; that make his soul stir within him, and acknowledge the beautiful. Amidst the violence, the coarseness, and the suffering that may surround and defile the wretched, there must be moments when the heart escapes, when the soul makes for itself even of a flower a comfort and a refuge. pp. 97, 98. In these extracts, we have given illustrations almost exclusively of Mr. Jerrold's serious and reflective manner; we have done so from the conviction that the comic and satirical phases of his literary character have been allowed, in some measure, to hide the poetry and pathos with which his works abound. Let us endeavor now to give one or two specimens of his wit and humor. We have already said that Mr. Jerrold is not often witty without being satirical. Humor is less susceptible of an alliance with sarcasm, however, than wit is, and it will therefore be found that, where he lays aside the weapons of the satirist, he is simply humorous. And there is often a richness of fancy and a breadth about his humor which few of his contemporaries have surpassed. This is evinced more fully in the "Chronicles of Clovernook," perhaps, than in any of his other works. There is a geniality about it, and on the whole an absence of the author's more extreme opinions, which has always led us to regard it as among his most successful | comic writings. Witness the following description of the Hermit of Clovernook, alias the Hermit of Bellifull: none. hard and active. His face was big and round, Altogether he was a massive lump of a man, with a rich larder look about it. His wide red living. The hermit had no nose; none, ladies, cheeks were here and there jewelled with good There was a little knob of flesh like a small mushroom dipt in wine, which made its unobtrusive way between the good man's cheeks, and through which he had been known to sneeze; The hermit's mouth had all the capacity of large but impudence itself could not call that a nose. benevolence, large and wide, like an old pocket. There seemed a heavy unctuousness about the lower lip; a weight and drooping from very mellowness, like a rich peach cracking in the sun. His teeth--but that he had lost one, as we afterwards learned, in active service on a Strasburg ham-were regular as a line of infantry, and no less dangerous. .. The hermit's voice was deep and clear; and he had a sweet, heart-warming chuckle, which came like wine gurgling from a flask. p. 9. The ironical enters so largely into every thing of a comic character which Mr. Jerrold has written, that it would be impossible, even did our limits permit, to quote a passage of any length in which it does not occupy a marked prominence. Nor is his irony at all of the delicate or obscure kind. There is no mistaking it in such a passage as this,—we quote from the essay entitled "The Order of Poverty:" There was one order-Teutonic, if we mistake sincerity in the very title of it. The philosophy not-the Order of Fools. There was a quaint stitution of such a chapter admitted knights was out-speaking; and, more than all, the conagainst whose worthiness, whose peculiar right to wear the badge, no envious demagogue could say his bitter saying. . . From the mere abstract love of justice, we should be right glad to have the Order of Fools revived in the fullest splendor of folly. Such an order would so beneficently provide for many unrewarded public idlers, ay, and public workers also.-p. 321. Here is another specimen equally trenchant: You will hear a good lowly creature sing the praises of pure water-call it the wine of Adam when he walked in Paradise-when, somehow, fate has bestowed upon the eulogist the finest Burgundy. He declares himself contented with a crust, although a beneficent fairy has hung a fat haunch or two in his larder. Yes, it is their tongues to the honor of dry bread and water, delightful to see these humble folks, who tune compelled by the force of fortune to chew venison and swallow claret.--p. 36. It is manifest, we think, from the volumes before us, that Mr. Jerrold has made great progress since the earliest of his works was published; it is certainly not too much to expect that he will yet attain to a much higher position than the one he now occupies. As it is, his writings are worthy of more attention than they receive from the large class to whom his qualities, both of mind and heart, are little known. We trust it has been shown that he is no mere wit; not simply a satirist of social follies, but a man of strong convictions and keen sensibilities, equally alive to what is grave and serious, to the lu dicrous and the mirthful. His errors-and they arise as often from the strength of his feelings as from his repugnance to all that is formal and hollow-are not those of a man who lacks charity, but are frequently the result of a too ready acquiescence of the judgment in the dictates of a beart easily and strongly moved. He has contributed much that is healthful and invigorating to the literature of the day, and we think his faults may be lightly passed over in consideration of his sympathy with so much that is true and elevating. From the Scottish Review. SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER.* THE attention of the Scottish public has of, late been strongly attracted to Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, through his visit to Edinburgh, and the elegant and scholarly addresses he delivered there. We propose taking the opportunity so lawfully and gracefully furnished by his recent appearances among us, to analyze at some length, and in a critical yet kindly spirit, the leading elements of his literary character and genius. genius, variety of intellectual experience, and the brilliant popularity which has followed him in all his diversified career, he reminds us rather of Goethe or Voltaire than of any living author. Like them he has worshipped the god Proteus, and so devoutly and diversely worshipped him that he might almost, at times, be confounded with the object of his adoration. We think decidedly, however, that this Bulwer has been now twenty-seven years boundless fertility and elasticity have tended before the public, and has during that period to lessen the general idea of Bulwer's powers, filled almost every phase of authorship and and to cast an air of tentative experiment and of life. He has been a critic, an editor, a rash adventure over many of his works. Had dramatist, an historian, a politican, a specu- he concentrated himself upon some grand lator in metaphysics, a poet, a novelist, a topic, his fame had now been equally wide, member of parliament, a roué, a husband, a not less brilliant, and much more solid than divorcée, a winebibber, a subject of the cold-it is; had he taken some one lofty Acropolis water cure, a sceptic, a Christian, a philo- by storm, and shown the flag of his genius sophical radical, and a moderate conservative. floating on its summit, instead of investing a In his youth he worshipped Hazlitt and hundred at once, he had been-and been Shelley; in his middle age he vibrated be- | counted--a greater general. We would willtween Brougham and Coleridge; and in his ingly have accepted two or three superb waning manhood he associates with Alison novels, one large conclusive history, along and Aytoun. He has poured out books in with a single work of systematic and profound all manners, on all subjects, and in all styles; criticism, in exchange for all that motley and and his profusion might have seemed that of unequal, although most varied and imposing a spendthrift, if it had not been for the stores mass of fiction, history, plays, poems, and in the distance which even his scatterings by politics, which forms the collected works of the wayside revealed. For versatility of Sir E. Lytton Bulwer. * The Novels and Romances of Sir E. B. Lytton, Bart. London: Chapman & Hall. Some of Sir Edward's admirers have ventured to compare him to Shakspere and to Scott. Such comparisons are not just. Than Shakspere he owes a great deal less to nature, and a great deal more to culture, as well as to that indomitable perseverance to which he has lately ascribed so much of his success, so that we may indeed call the one the least, and the other the most cultivated of great authors; and to Scott he is vastly inferior in that simple power, directness of aim, natural dignity, manly spirit, fire and health, which rank him immediately below Homer. We may here remark, that, notwithstanding all that has been said and sung about the genius of Scott, we are convinced that justice has never been done to one feature of his novels-we mean their excellence as specimens of English style. Except in Burke and De Quincey, whose mode of thinking is so very different, we know of no passages in English prose which approach the better parts of the Waverley series in the union of elegance and strength, in manly force, natural grace, and noble rhythmical cadence. Would that any word of ours could recall the numerous admirers of the morbid magnificence and barbarous dissonance of Carlyle's style; of the curt, affected jargon which mars the poetic beauty of Emerson's; of the loose, fantastic verbiage in which Dickens chooses to indite most of his serious passages; and of the labored antithesis, uneasy brilliance, and assumed carelessness of Macaulay; and induce them to take up again the neglected pages of the Titan Burke, with all the wondrous treasures of wisdom, knowledge, imagery, and language they contain, and to read night and day Scott's novels-not for their story, or their pictures of national manners-but for the sake of the wells of English undefiled; the specimens of picturesque, simple, rich, and powerful writing, which they so abundantly contain. Bulwer, too, although even in his most favored hours he cannot write like Scott, is distinguished by the merit of his style. It has more point, if not so much simplicity; if possessing less strength, it has far more brilliance; and it has, moreover, a certain classical charm -a certain Attic elegance-a certain tinge of the antique-which few writers of the age can rival. If D'Israeli's mode of writing remind you of the gorgeous dress of Jewish females with their tiaras shining on the brow, their diamond necklaces gleaming above the breast, the vivid yellow or deep red of their garments, their broidered hair, and pearls, and costly array; Bulwer's, in his happier vein, reminds you of the attire of the Grecian women, shod with sandals, clothed with the simple, yet elegant tunic, and bearing each on her head a light and tremulous urn. Passing from his style, we have some remarks to make on the following points connected with him: the alleged non-poetical nature of his mind; his originality; the impersonal faculty he possesses to such a degree; his remarkable width of mind; his dramatic power; the fact that, with all his frequent flippancy, levity, and excess of point, he is equal to all the great crises of his narrative; and finally to that power or principle of growth which has been so conspicuous in his literary history. First. Not a few have maintained that Bulwer, with all his brilliant effect and eloquence, is not, properly speaking, a poet. An eloquent detractor of his bas said: "The author is an orator, and has tried to be a poet. Dickens' John the Carrier was perpetually on the verge of a joke, but never made one; Bulwer's relation to poetry is of the same provoking kind. The lips twitch; the face glows; the eyes light; but the joke is not there. An exquisite savoir faire has led him within sight of the intuitions of poetic instinct. Laborious calculation has almost stood for sight, but his maps and charts are not the earth and the heavens. His vision is not a dream, but a nightmare; you have Parnassus before you, but the light that never was on sea or shore is wanting. The whole reminds you of a lunar landscape, rocks and caves to spare, but no atmosphere. It is fairy-land travelled by dark. How you sigh even for the chaos, the discordia semina of genius, while toiling through the impotent waste of this sterile maturity!" This is vivid and vigorous, but hardly just. We need meet it only by pronouncing one magic word—“Zanoni." Who that ever read that glorious romance, with its pictures of love and life and death, and the mysteries of the unseen world; the fine dance of the human, and the preternatural elements which are in it, and keep time so admirably to the music of the genius which has created both, and the melting sublimity of its close, will deny the author the name of poet? Or who that has ever read those allegories and little tales which are sprinkled through "The Student," and the " Pilgrims of the Rhine," can fail to see in them the creative element? Or, take the end of his Harold, the death of Rienzi, the Hell scene in "Night and Morning," and the closing chapters of the "Last Days of Pompeii"-the terms "oratory" or "art" will not measure these: they are instinct with power; their words are the mighty rushing wings of a supernal tempest; and to us, at least, they always, even at the twentieth perusal, give that deep delightful shiver, that thrill of aw |