den, and Française dwelt apart, still not venturing to assume her rank. The Lubomirski family made vigorous efforts to procure justice for her on this point, and even appealed to Maria Theresa in her behalf. The Prince at last relented, and wrote her a letter of tender entreaty to join him at Dresden. She obeyed, but found neither happiness nor the respect due to her rank. Deprived of the revenue she should have received if acknowledged as one of the royal family, she endured great privations, and was reduced almost to poverty; Maria Theresa, pitying her sufferings, presented her with the estate of Langkorona, near Cracow; but this benefit, bestowed by the hands of a stranger, noway satisfied her ambition, and she finally sunk under an illness brought on by her mental sufferings. She held a very lively correspondence with her sister, and all the members of her family who remained in Poland. Before her departure for Dresden she thus writes : I must depart without seeing you again, which you may guess is a source of much unhappiness to me, my dear sister; but I cannot longer defer going to my husband, who has fixed the day when I must arrive. In his letter he commands that I fail not to be with him by the 5th of January. I must, therefore, write my adieux, instead of pronouncing them, as I should have preferred, in your arms. I return you with all my soul the tender affection you have ever evinced for me. Be assured that wherever I may be, and under whatever circumstances I may be placed, you are, and ever will be, the tenderest object of my affection and gratitude. I go to where I hope to find a little repose-not happiness, for I have been fearfully awakened from the dream that happiness can ever more exist for me. The Elector will neither grant me the title of Princess, nor recognise me as the Prince's wife. He orders that I am to preserve the strictest incognita while in his States. The Prince Royal is truly afflicted; and in the midst of my grief nothing more sensibly afflicts me than that he should suffer from anything connected with me. His health visibly declines. Should we receive any augmentation of pension, I shall pray him to leave Dresden, and establish me in another state near Saxony, where I may communicate easily with him," &c. &c. In 1776 the Polish Diet assigned considerable pensions to the heirs of Augustus III., and half that of Prince Charles was to revert to his wife, F. Krasinska. During her stay at Dresden she gave birth to a daughter, the Princess Mary, to whose education she devoted all her time and energies; but she did not live to see the result of her care. The sorrows of her mind worked its evil effects on her frame, and she died the 30th of April, 1796, aged 53 years. Madame Moszynska, who had been the friend of Française during her prosperity, and remained faithfully attached to her amid all her reverses of fortune, thus announces her death to Madame Angelica_Gzymanowska, the niece to whom Française and the Prince Royal were sponsors in the Cathedral of Warsaw in 1760 : Dresden, 8th of June, 1796: I comply with your request, madame, and hasten to give you some particulars of what has been to me the greatest sorrow of my whole life— the death of the Princess your aunt. She began to feel symptoms of her malady two years since, and experienced then a pain, which, beginning faintly, became violent in her breast. Some physicians declared it to be cancer, while others made light of it as a mere glandular affection. An incision was made, the effect of which was, that she appeared better for a time, but the relief was only temporary, as an external swelling became visible, and she suffered agonies in describable in her breast, and along the whole length of her arm. She bore all with exemplary patience. She consulted many physicians, all of whom declared her malady hopeless unless she consented to undergo a most painful operation, the result of which must still be uncertain. For the space of 12 weeks she saw no persons but those in immediate attendance on her, and the physicians, who pronounced her sometimes amending, and sometimes worse. At the end of that time fever supervened, which totally exhausted her strength, and symptoms of rapid consumption were developed, under which she sank, and expired with great resignation, and in a heavenly state of mind, on the 30th of April. On examination, after death, the physicians found that she had been suffering from a complication of diseases; and I, who attended her through all her suf Poetry is at all times a venture there is an uncertainty attending the putting forward of the best specimen of it in the best of times; and no author, nor publisher, no! nor critic either can speculate on the reception it will meet with when it appears, farther than that it will be cried down by many. There are two things against it; one is that there is always something in poetic sublimity, which, in the minds of the unpoetic public, verges on the ridiculous, and may be confounded with it by a little judicious management; besides on the part of the poet, there is some violence ever done to the natural inclination (unless vanity be very strong) in exposing the feelings in public at all, just as it requires some fortitude and strength of nerve to act or sing before a mixed audience, both one and the other requiring a display of something of passion and excitement which is distasteful to the mind just in proportion as these feelings have force from nature, or delicacy from cultivation, in the breast of the exhibitor. Another disadvantage against which the poet has almost invariably to struggle; and this to some may appear a singular opinion, though our whole literary experience and observation tends to confirm us in it, is, that the public taste in this country, is, and has been, aye, and ever will be, against poetry, however great the merits of the author and his work may be. This is humiliating, no doubt; it is an opinion that many will repudiate with indignation, and many pass by with contempt; but nevertheless it is too true that the nation of shopkeepers are constitution ally averse to rhyme, and look ashamed if their customers catch them with an epic under their ledger. At the present time, to be sure, there is an outery raised against it, a sort of anti-poetic agitation, and the tide of temporary feeling unites with the strong national current, bearing off the mind at ten knots from the shores of song; but that current sets as constantly in one direction as the waters of the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar. The fact is the current remaining the same, the tide had flowed a little the other way for a short period during the last generation, and quiet men were betrayed into a sort of unwilling emotion at tropes, figures, images and metaphors, sublimities, and sentimentalisms. Now, however, their eyes are open again; they blush at their by-gone enthusiasm, and with all the stubborn resolution by which the nation is characterised, determine that it must be something monstrously sublime indeed which shall avail to draw a tear from their eye, or a shilling from their pockets, in the cause or in the purchase of "poetry." This being the lamentable condition of things as regards the unfortunate maker of rhymes, cau we wonder when we see poet after poet torture his nerves into an agony in his closet, during years of brain-compelling toil, then trembling put forth the cherished offsping of his mental life for the notice and approbation of the public, hoping, fondly hoping that it may at least avail to support itself, and perhaps its worn and wasted parent in the decline of his years, and then after all see him forced to receive home the adventurer, buffetted, ridiculed, defamed, to hang a dead The Retired Lieutenant, and the Battle of Loncarty-Poems by John Lake, author of "The Golden Grove," &c. &c. 2 vols, 8vo. London. 1836. weight upon his heart and hands to the "I've marked the youth with talents cursed, To find his genius scorned." And as often as we have witnessed The poet, whoever he may be, On the other hand, we may as well confess it, our powers for good are now-a-days extremely limited. Whereas, at one time a reviewer had only to direct the public to commend, to ensure success to an author, all he can do now is humbly to produce his specimens, and leave it to his sturdy, selfjudging readers to turn the thumb up or down, according as they doom death, or accord life to the gymnast before them. This is perhaps all as it should be, if this same public could only be found fair and impartial in its decisions. But with heads stiffly set against all claimants, ears deaf to the to. most cunning charmer, souls averse to music that in old times would have moved stones, mankind, in these days of useful knowledge, steam, and railroads, would do well to take a little advice in matters of taste from those who have leisure to cultivate it, and not condemn what they will not listen We do not pretend to say, that the arts will not fall back among antique absurdities by and bye; indeed they have begun to do so already. It is discovered that Nature can be her own artist, as far as form and colour are concerned, and the Royal Academy could scarcely do better than anticipate the fate that awaits it, and like Sardanapalus, collect its treasures in a heap, and commit an act of magnanimous suicide at once, ut pictura poesis. This, in the course of things, will extend to the sister arts, and in time, we shall have epics thrown off by a versifying machine, at the rate of so many rhapsodies an hour, while poor poets stand by, like bewildered post-horses at railway staold system lasts, and individual labour tion-houses. But while the imperfect sweeps along the painful stages of poetry, in the name of justice let respect be paid to the noblest form in which the mental faculty can exercise itself, that form in which the oldest Scriptures, and the sublimest works of human genius have developed themselves; and let the bard, superannuated and blind though he be, be still accommodated with a loose box, and a well-filled rack, by those he has so long and so nobly served. Now, Mr. Lake, though neither superannuated nor blind, is, in our mind, a poet, and as such we lead him out before our readers, with a view of making a fair experiment in his person, how far we have any authority left among them. We allow he is poor, unfriended, and to a certain degree uneducated. He has not the excuse of youth to offer for his faults, nor the hopes of youth to encourage future efforts. He is already past middle age. His poems are the labours-rather, we should say, to his enthusiastic temperament, the recreation-the fruit of his best years. Such as they are, they are what he must stand or fall by; he need never, now, expect to mend his hand. His lot is similar, while his merits are, in our eyes, vastly superior, to Nathaniel Bloomfield's. Moving in humble life, and now peaceably settled many a mile from his native hills, these poems were conceived, and partially executed during the excitement and adventure of an unusually chequered and adventurous life, and they may claim one merit, perhaps, even superior to Falconer's admirable production, that while they enter into the tone and spirit of the scenes they describe, and the characters they illustrate with surprising concentration and energy of thought; the scenes and characters, instead of being suggested by the realities of the occasion on which they were written, were conceived in spite of surrounding interests and associations, and were the creatures almost wholly of imagination and reflection, animated by constant and fervent application to books. Considering the concentration of tone and feeling displayed in the poems before us, we do conceive this to be a merit. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, quam oculis subjecta fidelibus, and that imagination must be strong indeed, which can think itself out of active life into fiction, so as to maintain poetic keeping, for any length of time together. Mr. Lake's life has been one of much adventure, and we have been permitted the perusal of a MS. account of some years of it, by his own hand, which we sincerely hope may not eventually be withheld from the public, so strange are the scenes and situations described, and so simple and strong the mode of describing them. The volumes before us contain two poems, which differ as widely as the poles asunder. This difference extends to the style, metre, tone, and character, as well as the name and subject. One is simple and domestic, marked by a Crabbe-like simplicity-the other, romantic, chivalrous, heroic, modelled on Scott's feudal poetry; and both, as we hope to show, managed with much power and feeling in their several styles. "The Retired Lieutenant" is a simple narrative of the little incidents which marked the close of the life of a gallant veteran, resting all its interest on the fidelity of its touches to nature, and the pure and affecting moral to be drawn from the whole piece. Halbert Guise had scraped together enough of money, after all his services, to purchase a cottage near an English village, and there he determined to take up his quarters for the rest of his earthly campaign. "With its appendages, the place; Might occupy an acre's space; She answered his purpose, it seems, completely, "And truth it was, she every way So selvag'd out her master's pay, And with such luck her thrift was crown'd, That at his board the veteran found No stint nor stoppage all the year." Such a settler was sure to attract notice in the village. Amongst the neighbours, Farmer Goss solicited his friendship, nor was it difficult to obtain it-a few kind offices sufficed: and we find the veteran on a summer's day proceeding on his way to partake of the farmer's rustic hospitality. The description of the homestead, as he ap proached, will, we think, be pronounced masterly:- "Warm in a vale with culture gay Enamell'd, rose, and scarcely rose, By the farmer our hero was introduced to another neighbour, Mr. Drew and well-wishers. In every reflection and every sentiment throughout this poem, be it observed in passing, there is a manly and wholesome morality, clothed in homely and plain language, so as to give to the whole piece a species of simple dignity which is not easily conveyed through the medium of disjointed pageantry. The veteran in his turn was in the habit of enter taining his new friends, with histories of many a hard-fought campaign. He possessed trophies in the shape of rusty swords, &c. over his chimneypiece, and of course a story was sheathed in every scabbard, though probably by no means so difficult to draw out as the blade that suggested it. He kept the anniversaries of the victories he had helped to win, and even exhibited the hacks upon the trusty steel : "The movements of the glorious day, The point at which the feat was done, The parson was next added to his list of acquaintances "In their conditions clearly stood Не ing hard by. He is, greatly to his surprize, invited to dine at the castle, and finds the whole company anxious to shew him attention and kindness. passes the day in the midst of luxuries and refined conversation, he himself taking an animated part in the discourse, and departs at last, having been presented by this noble host with the liberty of sporting over his manors, to him a most acceptable privilege, and assured besides of the very high consideration with which he was regarded by the whole family. Poor Guise was rather overwhelmed with all this; he had been ambitious, but had schooled his mind down to contentment, by long and rigid discipline, and there was to him something painful and oppressive in experiencing these late marks of favour, which seemed to aim at breaking through the barriers he had so long successfully opposed to his own aspirings. There is much knowledge of nature in this;—once the mind has made a conquest over itself, it is distressing ever to be brought to feel that the struggle was uncalled for, and the self-subdued philosopher would almost prefer resigning the choicest gifts of fortune, to an inch of that hard-fought ground gained in the mortal conflict with himself. "But more, in scenes secure to please, Brought him again his wonted ease; With home and humble fare content, As wont he in his garden spent Those seasons when the ether bland Opens the earth to culture's'hand." And Guise was once more master of himself. With every page our interest in this philosophic veteran grows warmer. In each office and and duty of life, he is guided by the most upright and manly principle, and a dignified simplicity ever attends him, and hallows his very presence. In him the world had done with its heart-burnings and vexations. A calm serenity seemed to spread towards the horizon where The minister, like the soldier, was his sun was destined to set. We see above repining at his lot. the spirit having effected its subjugation of the will now reigning benignly over the passions it had reduced from rebels to subjects. "No priestly fopperies had he, At last the retired and retiring lieutenant meets with some unexpected civilities from the Baron and his lady, At last, a packet arrives one evening, directed to Lieutenant Halbert Guise, "reinstatement on active service," "promotion," "a summons to London: "The veteran's heart advanced and fled people of wealth and influence resid- By turns, as he the letter read ;" |