kissed her the poor little child that she had rescued from ignorance, vice, and poverty, and in their stead had planted education, virtue, and religion, who now stood there, a great and rich heiress, to thank and bless her for those jewels which the wealth of nations cannot buv.

Katty Kennedy was transported for seven years; and Mick, convicted also of theft from the Worrells, was sentenced to one year's imprisonment.

Mr. Fortescue would not hear of any division, as Captain Barton proposed.

"No," said he, "I have £2,000 a year without this property; but as you wish to do something, I will not, my dear fellow, cast away your kindness; forgive me the back rents for the last ten years, since your father died, and I am content."

So Peter got a nice house; and little Katty and Peter were taken up to the Abbey. Grace went to call at Fairport in her own carriage-the poor little girl off the bog.

William

blubbered out when he saw her; and she put her arms round his neck, and kissed him; and ran down to see Margaret and Catherine.

"I always said so," sobbed the cook, as she hugged her. "Sure, I knew she couldn't take it."

Poor and Mary Lizzie; were they to leave the dear home where they were born, and the rabbits, and pigeons, and little gardens? Grace saw them sorrowful, and found out the

cause.

"No," she said, "you shall stay and live with me-I'll not take anything of yours, and then you'll teach me my lessons instead of Jane." And the papas consented, and the two families lived on together. And Miss Fortescue said "Good bye;" and some body, I believe it was, said, "Joy be with her, she's no great loss."

So the three cousins grew up together, all like sisters-three sweet Graces instead of one. And Mary

and Lizzie learned from Grace that the sure way of being loved was first to love; and were taught by Grace, thinking of her early days in misery, to do unto others even as they would wish others to do to them. The story commenced in the cold, dreary bog, continued at happy Fairport, is finished at the Abbey.

LET us take them, good, bad, excellent, and indifferent, in the order in which they come to our hand. And first we take up "The Angel World, and other Poems, by Philip James Bailey, author of Festus.'

If we consider Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Lord Francis Egerton, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Douglas Jerrold, Ebenezer Elliot, James Montgomery, J. W. Marston, George Gilfillan, Mrs. S. C. Hall, and Mrs. Mary Howitt, or any of them, competent to pronounce on what is good poetry, we must accept Mr. Bailey's "Festus" as the great poem of the age; for there is not one of these eminent persons who has not testified to its merits in terms of praise such as, applied to Homer, to Dante, or to Milton, might seem extravagant. We shall, therefore, avoid an inconvenient conflict of opinion by saying nothing more of "Festus" on this occasion, than that, if it be the poem these amiable critics declare, it can hardly have proceeded from the same faculties which have created the " Angel World." The "Angel World" is, in truth, as ambitious, weak, and unintelligible a performance as any that the mystical school has produced in our time. Milton wrote of the angelical state with helps from revelation and the science of divinity. Whatever he feigned of Michael, Ithuriel, or the other actors in his celestial drama, he had grave sanction for, either in the declarations of Holy Writ, or in the formulas or traditions of the Church. He has, besides, the charm of classical allusion and of historic learning in almost every line. His work is all linked with humanity, and is a cyclopædia of learning in man's past progress on the earth which he inhabits. But for these helps, even Milton would have found it impossible to support himself in the rare medium of preter

natural speculation. As it is, his wing occasionally flags on the inane, till uplifted again by the strong rebuff of some encountering matter of dogmatic faith, or human sentiment or passion, or historic, or geographic, or scientific fact, or learned allusive adaptation. So also of Dante; so of Homer; so of every great uninspired poet_dealing with God or with the gods. But Mr. Bailey seemingly aims at imagining a state of being utterly detached from humanity, and independent equally of revealed and human helps. Of course

he fails in realising that impossible project. His " Festus" had exhausted the storehouse of pretentious inanities, and imposing no-meanings. He has been left to construct his "Angel World" of inanities which make no pretence to substance, and of no-meanings destitute of any cloak of imposingness. It is not until he has recourse to the sufficiently objective device of a Perseus and Andromeda, that he is able to place any tangible idea before the mind of his readers. Before this incident the "Angel World" consists of a congregation of good angels employed in "meditative converse"→ about what we are not told-and of bad ones occupied in dancing and making illuminations. The result of their "choir-mazes astroeidal," and " esoteric rites," is the advent of a "hugeous monster" of the hydra species

"Dragon like,

In lengthened volumes stretched his further part,

Incalculably coiled; but in the front,
On one wide neck, a hundred heads he reared,
Which spake with every mouth a hundred
tongues,

Through teeth of serried daggers black with

blood.

The breath he drew in day, he breathed out night."

This polyglott, black-mouthed dra

2 P

VOL. XXXVI.-NO. CCXV.

gon of Wantley, having received the obeisances of the Terpsichorean corps of angels, demands their queen, whether as bride or bonne-bouche, Mr. Bailey does not inform us. The narrator, who afterwards turns out to be too exalted a being to be named in connexion with this absurd adventure, resolves to rescue her :--

"Sudden seized and bound, and carried off To a lone sea-crag, circled by the sea, And for the monster's evening victim left.

"Then vowed I to deliver her from her foes,

And for the rescue armed. The lightning steed,

Which pastures on the air, and is the sign Of the Divine destruction of all worldsThe sparkles of whose hoofs in falling stars,

Struck from the adamantine course of space,

Stream o'er the skies, in swift and solemn joy

Came trembling at my call. A lance of light,

A sunbeam tempered in eternal fire,

I in mine hand assumed, and forth we faced."

That is to say, our hero mounts upon a flash of lightning, and goes out to kill the dragon with a solidified, red-hot sun-beam. Of course the dragon has no chance against a Moore of Moorehall, so mounted and so armed:

"The lance of light I couched; and straight my steed,

Who knew instinctive all his dread devoir, Drove on like an inevitable storm;

The weight behind propelled the point before

Through the whole monstrous mass, till in the heart

Quivering it stood triumphant. Down then dropped

The soulless corse.

The beauteous captive's bonds I instant burst, and wrapt her sacred limbs

In the same robe I wore-of golden web And azure wove; for forth I sped at first, Of conquest confident, mine armour dight With trophies rich, beseeming such event."

These puerilities expunged, the remainder of the " Angel World" is an unintelligible tissue of " arduousest emprises," "arcanest heavens "-into the arcana of which we are not ad

mitted-"wisest parley"-but about what, non constat—of

"Lamb, lion, eagle, ox, dove, serpent, goat, And snow-white hart, each sacred animal Cleansed from all evil quality, sin-instilled,

Speaking one common tongue-"

"premortal music," which "faith hears in the still of time;" "breast-laws of starry orbs" naming blest days, "wherein Eternity entwines with Time its golden strands," and other such inconceivable and incommensurable emptinesses. Deluded into the belief that these excursions above reason are his forte, Mr. Bailey has lost the care or the capacity to express comprehensible ideas in distinct language. When he descends from ante-mundane periods in time, and ultra-mundane limits in space, to express a simple image or state a simple fact, all these fine verbal phantasmagorias, which to the eye of ignorant wonder seemed pregnant with meanings so mighty and mysterious, eventuate in prosaic feebleness and confusion. Let us take, for example, his lines

"TO THE TRENT. "Of all the rivers in the land,

Thee most I love, fair Trent; For in thy stream and on thy banks My happiest hours I've spent. "Twas there, hard-by, I first drew breath, There hope to end my days, And everywhere I'll tell till death My native river's praise."

"There!" where? Was Mr. Bailey born in the river Trent?

"Oh! Shannon hath a wilder shore,

And Thames a richer freight,
And silver-linked Forth is banked
By more baronial state;
But neither hath a purer wave,

Nor deeper, stiller stream;
'Tis quiet as a grassy grave,

Or a saint's dying dream."

"Neither," in the ordinary use of the English tongue, is applicable to one of two, not to one of three objects. What idea does the "wilder" shore of the Shannon convey? Is it the idea of solitariness, or sternness, or desolateness? and, in any of those meanings, is wildness of shore an excellence in river scenery? Truth to tell, Mr. Bailey neither knows nor cares, beyond this, that "wilder" is an eligible dissyllable

of settled quantity and indefinite signification which the reader may help to a meaning as his fancy moves him, the writer not having anything distinct in his mind about the Shannon with which to fill up the rythm, and meet the exigencies of the comparison. "Thames a richer freight." Freight is, by an allowable figure of speech, accounted the burthen of the vessel, the vessel the burthen of the river. "Thames a richer cargo"-" Thames a richer ballast," would be equally proper: but "richer freight" has the merit of expressing, for once, a definite and tan. gible idea-more traffic, more bills of lading, larger customs duties. Very good. "Silver-linked Forth is banked by more baronial state"-by more of baronial state, or by state of a more baronial character? We suppose the former. The Trent has some baronial state on its banks; the Forth has more; nevertheless the Forth has not a deeper or stiller stream than the Trent so be it. Mr. Bailey is quite at liberty to prefer the Trent to the Forth on that account. ""Tis quiet as a grassy grave"-a weedy river probably; or a saint's dying dream

the dream dying or the saint? We apprehend the latter; but these ambiguities are not conducive to edification:

"Let me, in sunshine or in storm, Still linger by her side;

I'll always look on her with love

And speak of her with pride. By rock and mead, and grove and is le, She goes from deep to deep; I love her in her dawning smile, And in her sunset sleep."

Having declared early in the stanza that he will always look on the Trent with love, Mr. Bailey narrows instead of expanding the sentiment when he -repeats at the close, where the strength of the stanza ought to lie, that he loves the Trent in its dawning smile, that is, in its smile at dawn, and in its sunset sleep. Expressio unius alterius est exclusio. The legitimate inference is, that Mr. Bailey is indifferent, perhaps ill-disposed, towards our river in its mid-day and midnight conditions. But then the Trent has another phase, when our poet loves it more than ever. Here at last he does speak a little like a poet, yet more obstetrically than poetically:

May such a calm, triumphant course
To sacred souls be given,
That, river-like, though born on earth,
They image only heaven:
And tending ever towards the light,
In this their earthly race,
Meet, mixing with Eternity,

In joy, their Maker's face."

"Sacred souls" do not need the aspiration; they are already set apart for bliss. Rivers also image the clouds of the sky, as well as the blue depths, which poets are privileged to call heaven; besides, rivers do not tend "ever towards the light." Trees and plants which grow upward might be said "to tend towards the light;" but the waters go prone downward into the darkest pits that their channels contain, and flow onward and downward, by night as well as by day, and northward or southward, according to the inclination of the ground, quite regardless Neither do of the position of the sun.

rivers run a race. A mill-race, even, runs only a course. They are horsemen, footmen, charioteers, who run races. Neither do rivers mix with Eternity, although the stream of Time, from time immemorial, has been made, in literary and oratorical exercises, to mix with the ocean of that name. "Meet their Maker's face," if not a flying in the face of the Maker, is not a happy mode of expressing the soul's coming into the presence of the Deity. We suppose the ocean is here considerBut ed to be the Maker of the river. which was first-thirst or drinking, ocean or river? However, this becomes We can assure Mr. hypercritical.

Bailey we would never have thought of criticising him so closely, if he had had the modesty to retain in his desk, instead of parading in an appendix to his little foolish volume, such ill-advised and absurd testimonia as these :—

"If Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Shelley had not existed, we should esteem such writing as this a miracle.'-J. A. Heraud."

"It contains poetry enough to set up fifty poets.'-Ebenezer Elliot."

A truly wonderful poem.'-Douglas Jerrold."

"I can scarcely trust myself to say how much I admire it, for fear of falling into extravagance.'-Alfred Tennyson."

"There is matter enough in it to float a hundred volumes of the usual prosy poetry. It contains some of the most wonderful things I ever read [omne ignotum pro magnifico].' -Mrs. S. C. Hall."

"There is a universe in its entirety. It abounds in thoughts so beautiful, and sentiments so exquisite in their simple truth, that we should not only excuse the occasional extravagancies, but they might almost be felt [but we might almost feel them?] as a relief from what would otherwise be overpowering in its beauty.-J. W. Marston."

666 'Apart from its theological pretensions, the Poem of the Age's Hope. We want words to express the wonder which grew upon us as each page opened like a new star, and we felt that the riches of thought, and imagery, and language scattered through the poem were absolutely "fineless," and that the poet's mind was as vast as his theme.' [The fervour of laudation increasing in the inverse ratio of the critic's authority.] -George Gilfillan.”

Praises so exorbitant-we omit the milder commendations of Lord Francis Egerton, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, James Montgomery, and Mary Howitt -excited by a performance so unsatisfactory as "Festus," speak badly for the state of literary taste in England at the present day.

But the error has corrected itself. Drawn into the preposterous belief that obsurity is grandeur-that poetic daring is evinced in studied improprieties of thought and diction-that the Deity and his attributes are materials of sublimity, ready to the hand of any one daring enough to snatch at such topics-and that to rise above the rules of the poetic art, it needs only that the

London: Pickering. 1850.

poet should get beyond reason—Mr. Bailey has employed his faculties in the production of a volume which pulls "Festus" down to its own level of ambitious mediocrity. The cause of good criticism has, however, been benefited. All the tricks of transcendentalism lie exposed in the most artless manner. Vagueness of conception, obscurity of expression, and argumentative paradox, are the staples of the useless product. Mr. Tennyson and his friends ought to blush for having given a conventional value to matter so worthless.

"Poems, Original and Translated, including the First Iliad of Homer, by W. G. T. Barter, Esq." We were not aware of the existence of a second Iliad. One work of that kind may suffice even for Homer.

"The wrath, O goddess, sing, of Peleus' son, Destructive, whence to Greeks woes countless grew,

Which many mighty souls of heroes down
To Hades hurl'd untimely; themselves threw
To dogs a prey, and all the winged crew.
So was the will of Jove accomplished,
From the time that asunder first they drew
Those chiefs, in angry strife contending then,
Achilles, godlike, and Atrides, king of men.
Who, then, of the gods, set them con-ten-
ding

In angry strife? Jove's and Latonas's son;
For he all sorely angered with the king,
Roused through the host a grievous plague
anon,

Whose weight fell the per-ish-ing folk upon-❞

Oh! Barter, Barter, in the circle of the currency the coin exists not minute enough to represent your value in exchange.

Another venture. Ay-here, indeed, is something worth stretching out the hand for, and that not empty"Egeria; or, the Spirit of Nature, and other Poems, by Charles Mackay, Author of Voices from the Crowd,' &c."+ An admirable lesson does "Egeria" read to the whole tribe of mystics whom we have just dealt with in the person of Mr. Bailey :

"Why this longing, clay-clad spirit? Why this fluttering of thy wings? Why this striving to discover Hidden and transcendent things?

London: David Bogue. 1850.