Village' " and Captain Rock-the one shadowed forth in a pair of interlacing trees, a couple of rooks and a church spire, the other in a heap of "specimens" overgrown by a fir-tree:-Alma Mater, a venerable woman, clad in august but parsimonious fashion, and with shining hands, holding to her breast a pair of gowned and trencher-capped babes, while other four climb round her knee :-Galileo, to whose snail-shell head a pair of telescopes are feelers; and (in the second number of Hood's Own') that terrible piece of satire, in which a masked and coronetted lady of rank, with pen for fishing-rod, weighted by a scull, stoops smilingly to the side of a grave, and says to the rough man delving therein, "Short of bait, give me a worm!"—and Edwin Landseer.... but our readers shall see Landseer-and the "animals after him."

We have been here seduced into confounding author and designer, but it is impossible wholly to separate them, for the one has everywhere helped the other with so impalpable a legerdemain, that it is next to impossible to define where their several labours begin and end. This brings us to our "Lastly," though, -to follow the metaphor,-how are we, on the final close of our homily, to examine, still less "to improve," the five hundred woodcut imaginings which illustrate Hood's works?

Shall we show him where he is political, as in the following design :

or as in the "Pauper in high relief" a blind Falstaff, whose "fair round belly" gives such ample testimony to the cuisine of the old Poor Law, or as in the familiar newspaper question which he illustrates by Britannia, with trident and shield, clinging to the fragments of a suspension bridge, and exclaiming, "What will the Piers do next?" Or shall we show him when he is more generally satirical, as in his sketch of " Civil War," where an artillery-man sends compliments with chain shot, and a private, with sword to his antagonist's throat, says "Don't rise!" while a cavalry soldier chases his victim with a polite "After you, Sir;"-or when he illustrates Temperance by a tipsy man tottering to a pump, with his maudlin "We hav'nt met this age"-or displays "Fancy Fairings" by a sesquipedalian Guardsman with a penny trumpet in his hand, and a penny cock-horse at his heels,—or when in his picture of a "Bog Plant," he exhibits an innocent lover of science deluded into the midst of a quagmire, while "studying botany and grass!" Once again, shall we accompany him in his most whimsical mood-as when he dreamed of the weary River God, with stooped urn and hoary beard, gravely asking "Can I have a bed here?" to the thorough discomfiture of the tidy little Mrs Partington, who stands by, warming-pan in hand (a combination, by the way, as far-fetched and as irresistible as that of the university pun whereon Elia descants, in which the young gownsman, overtaking a porter carrying game, perplexed him by the question"Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or is it a wig?") or as

when choosing to illustrate "Away with Meloncholy ” — he sketched, with the rich fancy of a Rubens, the group of merry Cupids-shouting with laughter, while they tug out of sight the enormous solemn pumpkin, whose presence has obviously imposed a restraint on their antics? Or shall we follow him through the English Poets, when he chooses to wrest the first line of Shenstone's pretty pastoral from its honest meaning, by exhibiting the smirking man of trade, who stands, with his hands in his pockets, and exclaims-" My banks they are furnished," or when he throws "a browner horror" over one of Moore's most insinuating Irish melodies, by representing Death shoving off in a coffin-boat, beckoning and singing "Come o'er the Sea!" It is fruitless to attempt such a course of enumeration: and we can but indicate a few among its many diverging paths, generally expressing, as our judgment on these designs, that though their anatomy do not stand firm, and there be not always "the principle of the pyramid" in their composition, there is more in them of the genius which should set every artist's hand to work, than in the productions of nine-tenths of the gentlemen who, on the strength of two magic letters appended to their name, show forth great and gaudy marvels year by year upon the walls of our Royal Academy exhibition.

We have now done with Hood's works; but while drawing out our brief catalogue raisonnée of the various merits which are assembled in them, their author has been so often and so pleasantly with us, that a paragraph,―ere we part from the reader, counselling him not only to buy but also to ponder,-may be devoted not impertinently to personal remembrance. We began by stating our conviction that few writers were so imperfectly understood as he of the 'Comic Annual' is: few, we may add, have been more sparingly known in the world of society. Hood has never sought the tinsel honours of Lionship. A shape of slight figure, with pale and pensive countenance, may, indeed, have flitted through society occasionally, without causing any remark; none of the Lady Worrymores or Capel Loffts, who make themselves ridiculous, and their literary protegés disrespectable, by their senseless ecstacies-even dreaming that that slight figure was moving to and fro, to gather simples of humour and folly and absurdity, but not in the spirit of a Sycorax-that the rarest conceit could twinkle through the spectacles which give a decent gravity to those eyes, or that the most luxuriant whimsies, and the most irresistible repartees could drop-rich as oil, if not always sweet as honey,-from the corners of that impassive-looking mouth. But we know better; and as the sea divides him

from us, may say as much without any fear of our friend interposing to prevent us. We have sat by his side through the "small hours," listening to tales of ghosts, remembered, improved, or improvised-such as night-watchers in the nineteenth century are rarely permitted to enjoy. We have heard him-apart from the listening circle-accompany the long-winded tale of a traveller with such a running fire of notes and comments aside, as the brethren of the Row would give gold to gather and print. We have watched him so provoke the component members of a sociable rubber in that moment of intense interest, when the game hung on a card,-that odd tricks have been forgotten, trumps wasted, and all four hands thrown down, in an universal paroxysm. We have seen his Yorick spirit sending forth its sparkling bubbles, in despite of trial and vicissitude;-for may we not allude to these, when in his preface to his last new undertaking, our friend has himself pointed thereat? His education as an engraver has given him an eye of singular keenness-his genius, a fancy ever ready, and a wit rarely blunt, rarely indebted to others for its weapon, and these are as much manifested in his daily intercourse with his friends as in his more ceremonious commerce with the public. There is not a page in all his works more thoroughly humorous than the account we once heard him deliver, of a hurried labour at the Comic Annual,' when at the eleventh hour, like Mozart over the overture to Don Giovanni, he fell asleep, and continued (he declares) to dictate, for some good ten minutes, ere his amanuensis, who had been plying the pen for half an hour, herself scarcely less somnolent, discerned the least change in his diction,-the least abatement of his fluency. There is no dilemma recounted by Mrs Twigg, or Mrs Jones, half so diverting as those with details of which his familiar letters from the Continent are filled. But with these the world will perhaps one day be edified, and it would be unfair, by attempting them in our feebler phrase, to forestal the new Pilgrim of the Rhine.' Here then we leave him-author and man-well pleased if the foregoing pages have supplied any hints to the right understanding and appreciation of his affluent and original genius.

6

C. H.

VOL. XXXI. No. I.

L

146

ART. VI.-Biografia di Fra Paolo Sarpi. Par A. Bianchi Giovini. 2 vols. Zürich. Orell, Füssli, et Cie. 1836.

THIS book fills up a blank often regretted, but which few have seriously thought of supplying, and, in a meritorious manner, puts an end to a silence which ought long ago to have been broken. Engrossed by the turmoil of things belonging to the present or the future, we are neglectful of the great men whose labours and perils prepared the way for us, and made us what we are; they lie sealed up in their narrow tomb as though we had bidden them an eternal farewell. This ought not to be. Not that in so busy a world, and in an age when thinking men have so many calls upon their active faculties, researches of cold erudition or of mere curiosity respecting dates or petty incidents of the lives of eminent men are a-wanting; we have quite enough of that. But the mind, the soul, the purposes, the visions of the future, of the great men of the past; the influence which they exercised on their own age, and through that on ours, and the influence their age had on them; in a word, their allotted work, their position in the history of mankind—it is more than ever important for us to know.

This book, devoted to reviving the remembrance of one of Italy's great men, suggests painful thoughts of the neglect which leaves in the shade, to this day, the imposing forms of the most strong-headed Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. What do we know, generally speaking, of Telesio, of Giordano Bruno, of Tommaso Campanella, and that whole series of thinkers up to Savonarola, to whom may be traced so much of the present philosophy of Germany, and of the attempts at a new social philosophy in France? Where are their works? Who reprints them? How many of them-how many of the writings even of the man of whom we are about to speak, mildew unpublished? How ungrateful are the Italians! we might saycould anything of the kind be attempted in Italy. The Life of Sarpi is published at Zürich, and its author resides in the Swiss Canton of Ticino.

6

The name of Fra Paolo is here, as everywhere else, well known-his life, very little. His authority has been often cited, for and against, by our theologians, in the controversies about the Reformation. The tolerably close translation of the History of the Council of Trent,' by his friend Nathaniel Brent, published here in 1629, and reprinted in 1640, made the historian appreciated. We possess also, in English, his Historical Discourse on the Inquisition.' A Latin translation of the history, the last