1854. T to Mr. Warwick Beechwood has writ ten a good-sized book, admirably printed, and on most unexceptionable paper. The principal composition is called "The Friends,' * written in un. rhymed decasyllabic measure, sometimes, as on the present occasion, very We appropriately called blank verse. had not the privilege of being present at the process of composition; but we should suppose it to have been conducted after a receipt somewhat like the following: "Take your subject; turn it over in your mind; make a tale of it; write it out in prose, using a reasonable quantity of large words: you may add some old phrases- the older the better, provided they are sweet; pepper it with a little passion; sweeten it with a little love; stiffen it with a little philosophy. Stir up the whole, till you mix the composition well together, and invert the order of the words; then tell it off into lines of five feet, two syllables to the foot; you can count the feet with your left hand, while you score them with your right; leave it to dry; read it over; polish it off, and then it is fit for use." We have certainly failed to discover in "The Friends" any of those qualities which are ordinarily supposed to be indispensable to a poem. There is no fine thinking, no elevation of sentiment, no felicitous imagery, no high colouring-nothing that touches the feelings, that holds the heart, that clings to the memory. It is simply a prose tale; and, had it been undis guisedly written in prose lines, the whole length of the page, we should have said -had we indeed been disposed to say anything at all about it that it was a narrative of two very commonplace lives, told in extremely good language, but, after all, not worth the trouble of telling. The Ladye Adeline, the se cond piece, stands somewhat higher in the scale of constructive excellence, for it is rhymed. It is a tale of a horrible old baron, who killed his wife with a sword-cut in the head, and then threw her into a dungeon, instead of giving her Christian burial. The natural consequences ensue. The lady's ghost walks the castle o' nights, and at length appears to her own daughter, the Ladye Adeline, whom she leads to "The Friends, and Other Poems." By Warwick Beechwood. Longman and Co. "Ladye, I pray thee, go not near That horrid pit of woe and fear!" But Adeline has a dash of good Queen Bess in her, and so she swears a lusty oath that she'll have her own way -404 "Nay, bring the key,' the ladye said; Down they go; and, sure enough, they found a heap of whitened bones on the floor of the dungeon. "No withered flesh did they display, A groan is heard; the friar cries out, Jesu, Maria !" and calls on his stouter companion to stand to him "Assist me, lady, or I faint.” They put the bones in the coffin, and the tomb closes with a clap that shook the castle. Three towers fell crashing to the ground, thunder and lightning follow, and "Voices were heard in merry peal, Making the human blood congeal; and the Ladye Adeline is saluted by the ghostly gambollers once more with "nine times nine." But the worst is to come. Old Sir Lionel, who had taken to his bed, is nowhere to be found; all that could be discovered "Were the few blackened ashes strewed over his bed, All that rested to show old Sir Lionel dead!" The lady weeps, and asks the friar— "If the portals of mercy were shut on the man ?" In reply whereto, the latter "thus "Oh, woe! that thy spirit should be snatched from the world, "Heart Histories" is a collection of poems, and prose tales, and essays. With the latter we shall not at present concern ourselves; the former are "Heart Histories." By Marion Paul Aird. London and Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter. 1854. "Most of these pieces were written long ago. I am quite aware that it is no reasonable plea to state that they were written very rapidly; but I venture to mention the fact, as it is a kind of excuse. The second, third, fourth, and fifth poems were written in about a dozen nights; and some of the others, of considerable length, at a single sitting each. Several are unfinished, almost all unpolished, and some much mutilated also. "I am conscious that I ought to endeavour to amend much of what I now commit to the press, and not to shoot' these clearings of my desk there; but I do not think it worth while to expend any pains upon such materials. I fear it would be in vain to try to make these compositions worth much: the foundations are too sandy."" There is abundant evidence of haste throughout these poems- indeed, a great portion of them are quite incom • "Morbida; or, Passion Past, and other Poems." London: Saunders and Otley. 1854. prehensible to us. And this is the more "That liquid lustre is the light of youth, That thou, more precious, art in aught less Than one entire and perfect chrysolite !'" "It is the Holy Land that looms along the dawning light; And, far from where his fathers fought, from where his fathers lie, To cast him down, with casque and crown, the Throned in heaven adoring. He comes to seek the Throned who came to tread the field of blood, We could wish the author would take more time, think more respectfully of the public, and do himself more justice, and then we shall have better things from the author of "Morbida. " We have many volumes still before us, but for the present we must lay them aside. When autumn is past, and the nights are lengthening at the approach of winter, we shall hope to find in them companions for our own fireside, and taking from them what is good and profitable what is lovely and pleasant-send them forth to make an hour pass pleasantly away at the firesides of our readers. ** THE SPASMODIC DRAMA. MR. T. PERCY JONES is a homeopathic poet. While that true "spasmodic tragedy," the cholera, stalks dread o'er the scene, he stimulates the drooping energies of the town with a counterirritant, of a congenial nature, almost, but not quite so terriby in earnest. Some "gripes of compassion (as Isaac Barrow says) seem good to divert the thoughts from convulsions, which take a more selfish hold upon the feelings; and the globules here administered by Doctor Jones act upon the midriff in a manner highly conducive (if King John be an authority) to the circulation; for they set the blood "Tickling up and down the veins, Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes." Our author has no respect for schools (nor, as it afterwards appears, for schoolmasters), and holds it particularly senseless to talk about "Schools of Poetry." He is a scholar of nature, that nature which is spasmodic, but yet uncramped by rules; the same nature, he flatters himself, which produced Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, and to which you, gentle reader, are indebted for "Firmilian," and for all those to whom you may give the honour of the poetic name. For in Mr. Jones's firm opinion, "all high poetry is, and must be, spasmodic." Yet he has no call to "the devil." No; he distinctly renounces that agent and his black art, scorning the "buffooneries " of Goethe, and scarcely forbearing to sneer at Shakspeare's Witches, and the Ghost in Hamlet. By the spasmodic energy of his genius he can dispense with supernatural agencies, and pile the agony to any height ever attained by mortal inspiration. The result of his efforts is before us, and all he asks of the critic is to notice it. He is not greedy of indiscriminate praise, nor "at all deterred by hostile criticism." On the contrary, he thanks those gentlemen, who, however censorious, have "brought him forward." His own opinion, however, he frankly avows to be, that "the utter extravagance which some writers affect to have discovered in his play is traceable only to their own defects in high imaginative development;" and he concludes his preface with this modest challenge : "I am not arrogant enough to assert that this is the finest poem which the age has produced; but I shall feel very much obliged to any gentleman who can make me acquainted with a better. "T. PERCY JONES. And now for the matter of this spasmodic tragedy. "Firmilian; a Student of Badajoz," a "great youth baptised to song," is urged by the voice of universal Pan to rise up in his might, be great in guilt, and making his song a tempest, shake the earth to its foundation. Accordingly, he sits down to write a tragedy upon "the first murder;" but finding, for want of experience, that he can but feebly "Paint the mental spasms that tortur'd Cain," he concludes that the best way to master his subject will be to kill two or three particular friends, and thereby obtain the right sensation. "What do I know as yet of homicide? Nothing. Fool! fool! to lose thy precious time In dreaming of what may be, when an act, Thus Michael Angelo is apocryphally reported to have nailed his "model" to a cross, that he might catch a grace beyond the reach of art, in finishing off his great work of The Crucifixion. In this case, however, a difficulty presents itself, like that which puzzled Tom Sheridan when advised by his father to take a wife. "With all my heart, father; but whose wife shall I take?" Firmilian knows so many who are dear to him, that he cannot choose all in a "Firmilian; or, the Student of Badajoz." A Spasmodic Tragedy. By T. Percy Jones. Blackwood and Sons. |