How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain, What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, LONGFELLOW: Divina Commedia. *Parvis and portal, vestibule and doorway. + Gargoyle, a projecting eaves-trough made of stone, and often grotesquely carved. SIGHT-SEEING WITH UNCLE TOM MACAULAY. GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN (b. 1838). 66 He was never so happy as when he could spend an afternoon in taking his nieces and nephews a round of London sights, until, to use his favorite expression, they could not drag one leg after the other." If he had been able to have his own way the treat would have recurred at least twice a week. On these occasions we drove into London in time for a sumptuous midday meal, at which everything that we liked best was accompanied by oysters, caviare,* and olives; some of which delicacies he invariably provided with the sole object of seeing us reject them with contemptuous disgust. Then off we set under his escort;-in summer, to the bears and lions; in winter, to the panorama of Waterloo, to the Coliseum in Regent's Park, or to the enjoyment of the delicious terror inspired by Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. † When the more attractive exhibitions had been exhausted by too frequent visits, he would enliven with his irrepressible fun the dreary propriety of the Polytechnic, or would lead us through the lofty corridors of the British Museum, making the statues live and the busts speak by the spirit and color of his innumerable anecdotes paraphrased off-hand from the pages of Plutarch and Suetonius. One of these expeditions is described in a letter to my mother in January 1845:-" Fanny brought George and Margaret, with Charley Cropper, to the Albany at one yesterday. I gave them some dinner: fowl, ham, marrow-bones, tart, ice, olives, and champagne. I found it difficult to think of any sight for the children; however, I took them to the National Gallery, and was excessively amused with the airs of connoisseurship which Charley and Margaret gave themselves, and with Georgy's honestly avowed weariness: 'Let us go. There is nothing here that I care for at all.' When I put him into the carriage he said, half-sulkily, 'I do not call this seeing sights. I have seen no sight to-day.' Many a man who has laid out thirty thousand pounds on paintings would, if he spoke the truth, own that he cared as little for the art as poor Georgy." * Variously pronounced ca-veer' and kav-yar (corruption of Italian caviale), a preparation of the roe of the sturgeon. The famous wax-work exhibition in London. Lord Macaulay's nephew and biographer, Mr. Trevelyan. Regularly every Easter, when the closing of the public offices drove my father from the Treasury for a brief holiday, Macaulay took our family on a tour among the cathedral towns, varied by an occasional visit to the universities. We started on the Thursday; spent Good Friday in one city, and Easter Sunday in another, and went back to town on the Monday. This year it was Worcester and Gloucester; the next, York and Lincoln; then Lichfield and Chester, Norwich and Peterborough, Ely and Cambridge, Salisbury and Winchester. Now and then the routine was interrupted by a trip to Paris or to the great churches on the Loire; but in the course of twenty years we had inspected at least once all the cathedrals of England, or indeed of England and Wales, for we carried our researches after ecclesiastical architecture as far down in the list as Bangor. "Our party just filled a railway carriage," says Lady Trevelyan; "and the journey found his flow of spirits unfailing. It was a return of old times: a running fire of jokes, rhymes, puns, never ceasing. It was a peculiarity of his that he never got tired on a journey. As the day wore on he did not feel the desire to lie back and be quiet, and he liked to find his companions ready to be entertained to the last." Any one who reads the account of Norwich and Bristol in the third chapter, or the account of Magdalen College in the eighth chapter of the "History," may form an idea of Macaulay's merits as a cicerone* in an old English provincial capital. To walk with him round the walls of York, or through the rows of Chester; to look up at the towers of Lichfield from the spot where Lord Brooke † received his death-wound, or down upon Durham from the brow of the hill behind Neville's Cross; to hear him discourse on Monmouth and Bishop Ken beneath the roof of Longleat‡ Hall; or give the rein to all the fancies and reminiscences, political, personal, and historical, which were conjured up by a drive past Old Sarum to Stonehenge ;—were privileges which a child could appreciate, but which the most learned of scholars might have envied. When we returned to our inn in the evening it was only an exchange of pleasures. Sometimes he would translate to us choice morsels from Greek, Latin, Italian, or Spanish writers, with a vigor of language and vivacity of manner which communicated to his impromptu version not a little of the air and the charm of the original. Sometimes he would read from the works of Sterne, or Smollett, or Fielding those scenes to which ladies might listen, but which they could not well venture to pick out for themselves. And when we had heard enough of the siege of Carthagena in Roderick Random, or of Lieutenant Le Fevre's death in Tristram Shandy, we would fall to capping verses, or stringing rhymes, or amusing ourselves with some game devised for the occasion, which often made a considerable demand upon the memory or invention of the players. * Pron. che-cher-o-nay, guide. A sad misapplication of “Cicero,” the name of the illustrious Roman orator. + Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, author of theological and political treatises, joined the Parliamentary army, and was killed in the battle of Lichfield, 1643. Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, on the edge of Wiltshire, a magnificent example of the Elizabethan mansion. SHELLEY'S "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND" (1819). JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP, LL.D., Principal of the United College, St. Andrews (b. 1819). [The old Greek legend related how Prometheus made man of clay, and to endow his creation with life stole fire from heaven. Thereupon Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, and a vulture preyed upon his vitals by day, the wounds filling and healing over by night. From this ceaseless anguish Hercules released him, unchaining the victim and shooting the vulture. The brother of Prometheus ("forethought") was Epimetheus ("afterthought "). This legend has exerted a strong fascination on the poets of all ages. It became in the hands of Eschylus the subject of that grandest among Greek tragedies, the Prometheus Bound, of which Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning has given us a magnificent English version (1833). Longfellow wrote in 1807 Prometheus; or, The Poet's Forethought, and a companion poem, Epimetheus; or, The Poet's Afterthought. Mrs. Shelley, taking a suggestion from Byron, wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus forms one of Lowell's earlier poems (1843). The following eloquent analysis of Shelley's conception and treatment is extracted from Principal Shairp's lectures delivered (1877-1881) from the Chair of Poetry in Oxford University.] That drama is from beginning to end a great lyrical poem, or I should rather say a congeries of lyrics, in which perhaps more than anywhere else Shelley's lyrical power has highest soared. The whole poem is exalted by a grand pervading idea, one which in its truest and deepest form is the grandest we can conceive— the idea of the ultimate renovation of man and of the world. And although the powers, and processes, and personified abstractions which Shelley invoked to effect this end are ludicrously inadequate, as irrational as it would be to try to build a solid house out of shadows and moonbeams, yet the high ideal imparts to the poem something of its own elevation. Prometheus, the representative of suffering and struggling humanity, is to be redeemed, and perfected by union with Asia, who is the ideal of beauty, the light of life, the spirit of love. To this spirit Shelley looked to rid the world of all that is evil, and to bring in the diviner day. The lyric poetry, which is exquisite throughout, perhaps culminates in the song in which Panthea, one of the nymphs, hails her sister Asia as "Life of life! thy lips enkindle With thy love the breath between them; Faints, entangled in their mazes. "Child of light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them; |