Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

motion, but in plants more real power. A horse is certainly far stronger than a vine; yet a small vine can not only support, but can raise, a column of fluid five times higher than a horse can. [The comparison here is between the sap of plants and the blood of animals.] Indeed, the power which a plant exercises of holding a leaf erect during an entire day without pause and without fatigue is an effort of astonishing vigour, and is one among many proofs that a principle of compensation is at work, so that the same energy which in the animal world is weakened by being directed to many objects, is in the vegetable world strengthened by being concentrated on a few." These are specimens which "will illustrate the grasp of Hunter's mind," and are thought by Mr Buckle "to contain a large amount of important though neglected truth." It is a pity that the grasp is of shadows. Had Newton made such a grasp, it is probable that he would have considered it his duty to ascertain whether the vine did, or did not, raise and support the column of fluid; and on finding that there was no such column in the vine, his conjectural comparison with the blood of the horse would have been suffered to vanish into the limbo of disproved hypotheses. Any botanist will assure Mr Buckle that although the phrase "circulation of the sap" is in current use, it does not imply a process similar to that of the blood-circulation. There is no column of sap ascending from roots to buds, and descending again. The sap is contained in a series of closed chambers (cells),

through the walls of which it oozes, by the law of osmosis, and is thus conveyed from one cell to another wherever two cells are in contact, and not in an ascending column. Further, we may remark that the power of the plant to hold a leaf erect without pause and without "fatigue," is less astonishing than the power of pillars to support the roof of a temple without "fatigue" during several centuries, and has about the same relation to muscular effort.

We have by no means exhausted the objections to be made against Mr Buckle's numerous remarks on Method; but we hope to have vindicated our assertion that it is a subject on which his views are confused. In concluding our notice of his scientific errors, it is but common honesty to say that we have mentioned all the errors we have observed. This statement becomes the more demanded, because of a vicious practice which many critics follow, when, instead of candidly saying "these are all, or nearly all, the blunders we have detected," they name all they detect, and present them as "samples which might easily be multiplied "-thereby doing the author great injustice, and implying in themselves an immense superiority. Such critics would be rightly punished if they were publicly forced to make good their boast, and produce the blunders they pretend to leave unmentioned. For ourselves, we have spoken of Mr Buckle's errors without reticence; but we have to add that were they more numerous they would not prevent our admiration of his abilities nor our respect for his learning.

SIR CRESSWELL CRESSWELL.

Of all the COURTS throughout the land,
Dispensing with impartial hand

The justice we delight to read of,
But hope we ne'er may stand in need of,
The strangest, if I'm fit to guess well,

Is that where sits Sir CRESSWELL CRESSWELL.

What cases has he to determine,

The Man who there displays his ermine?
What weighty themes his judgment claim?
What is their nature and their name?
Come, Muse, endeavour to express well
The duties of Sir CRESSWELL CRESSWELL.

DEATH is his first great Cause of causes:
He proves all Wills, with all their clauses.
Is there a Will, or is there not?

Is it well made, or but a blot?

Or has some knave contrived to dress well
A forgery to cheat Sir CRESSWELL?

But the main fact that brings him Cases,
We scarce can tell to modest faces;
Though Scripture language is not shy
To name what wrongs the Marriage-tie.
This matter, if you read the Press well,
You'll find much occupies Sir CRESSWELL.

I've heard inquiring females ask—
The answer was no easy task-
"Who would be Judge, if some fine day
Sir CRESSWELL'S self should go astray?"
I know no method to repress well
A faux pas by or with Sir CRESSWELL. *

But then how good Sir CRESSWELL is!
Sense, temper, firmness, all are his.
If I on earth were made Dictator,

His powers, now great, should still be greater.
There's many a wrong we could redress well
If aided by Sir CRESSWELL CRESSWELL.

O! what a World of peace and pleasure
Would spring up from that healing measure!
When, mended every luckless blunder,
All ill-matched things were put asunder.
The golden days of Good Queen BESs well
Might yield to those of Great Sir CRESSWELL.

This very case, or rather its parallel, was put by the late Duchess of Gordon to Sir William Scott, who said he could not then answer the question, as the idea had not suggested itself till he had the honour of knowing her Grace.

The (once so-called) UNITED STATES,
Now quarrelling worse than angry Mates,
Might find a course at least as good

As shedding one another's blood.

'Twould end their discord and distress well, To be divorced by old Sir CRESSWELL.

VENETIA, if her lord and master

By kindness cannot fix her faster,
Will some day soon the band dissever,
Whose galling grasp can't last for ever.
'Twould get them both out of that mess well,
To leave it to the wise Sir CRESSWELL.

But there's a thing some people want,
I'm sure Sir CRESSWELL would not grant.
He never would divorce SARDINIA,

As if 'twere Venice or Virginia.

Our French Friend plays his game of chess well, But could not soon checkmate Sir CRESSWELL.

THE STAGE OF WEIMAR.

A LETTER.

MY DEAR IRENEUS,-If all the world's a stage, the world of Weimar and the stage of Weimar are the same; and the subject of this letter is only a continuation of that of last April, but written, alas! under circumstances how different! The curtain of that pretty little world, or stage, as you may please to call it, has dropped for me-I hope not, but I almost fear-for ever. Under these circumstances,

"I feel like one

Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed ;"

but with this difference, that I have departed and left the lights (the footlights), and the garlands thrown to histrionic success, behind. The charm of the bird-like accents of our Prima Donna warbling a translated "Last Rose of Summer" in the opera of Martha, still rings in my ears, and I dream of dramatic, social, pictorial, poetical, and evergreen Weimar, among all the whirling life of this highly self-satisfied and well

to-do Jewish paradise on the bank of the Maine. The view of the Taunus Mountains, with Cromberg and Königstein nestling in them like the robber strongholds of Italy, cannot avail to make the change agreeable; nor even centrality of position, with all its superior conveniences. There is a charm about the free, fine, bracing air of the Thuringian Forest which recalls the oxygen of Scandinavia, whether it blows over the fatal slope to the west of Jena, the wild primeval pine forests of Ilmenau and Elgersburg, or plays among the Arcadian beechwoods and labyrinthine glens of Eisenach. But unhappily this very enjoyable air has been the motive of our forced migration. So we have returned from the town where Goethe died to that in which he was born, a town altered not for the better by wealth and commerce. The Römerberg is still there, with its hall of Kaisers; the old gutted houses in the middle town still tell of the picturesque eye of the architects of the middle ages; the cathedral, which, "the likeness of a kingly

crown has on," still stands everlastingly asking for a spire; but the old German Hanseatic character of the place is gone, and it is only a depraved and Cockney taste which would not now vastly prefer Bamberg, or Augsburg, or Nuremberg. Though the ramparts have been changed into pleasant enough gardens, where the citizens recreate themselves, showing off the Eschenheimer Thor, the model of an old gate-tower, to great perfection, through a row of planes; yet the town is completely enclosed in pretentious suburbs, devoid of all national or local character, made of vast villas, compared by Indians to the great houses in Calcutta; and the new main street, which is mainly inhabited by millionaires-so it is said-is a model of architectural formality and ugliness only to be surpassed by the much-bepraised Rue de Rivoli in Paris, where the houses are like rows of soldiers, with all individuality drilled out of them, and figuring the military despotism under which France is destined to groan.

But woe be to good taste and good feeling in any community where the people are the governors! Is not this, barring its perpetual state of siege by Austrian, Prussian, and Bavarian regiments, in all municipal matters at least, the free city of Frankfort-on-the-Maine? Quite

consistently with this freedom of the city, foreigners are charged twenty-four florins a-year and some odd kreutzers for permission to reside here; and the ancient guilds still remain a standing nuisance in these modern times, subdividing butchers into beef, mutton, pork, and veal butchers, and making penal the employment of unprivileged artisans in any kind of work. Under the circumstances, added to the fact of its being the Jewish metropolis of Christendom, I very much wonder how the poor pork-butchers are able to exist at all. Alas for poor freedom in this nineteenth century! "Of old sat Freedom on the heights,"

and has, I fear, been sitting there so long, that she has come to that time of life when French ladies say a moral "crise" comes on from the long ennui of virtue, which tempts them to do something a little wicked. In her pet Disunited States, she is endeavouring as far as she can to justify the ex-king of Naples, enacting inconsistencies which make the angels (including Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe) weep, preaching abolition to the South, and refusing to let her own free negroes wear her uniform. I only know one state in the world where freedom, as poets imagine her, is realised, and that is in the dominions of the Grand - Duke Karl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar. But what of England? you indignantly ask. Well, I suppose England must be considered as a free country. She has had a long education in freedom, and it is her own fault if she does not know how to be free by this time; but no country can be free where there are not wholesome checks on the tyranny of individuals. Is it no deduction from freedom that strikes among workmen are allowed to exist, in which honest deserving fellows are bullied out of their bread by a faction of lazy drones? Is it, again, no deduction from freedom that railway companies are allowed to murder and mutilate her Majesty's subjects wholesale, and yet every director escapes unhanged?

There is a neighbouring Thuringian potentate who, conceiving that he has a mission to emancipate, has been endeavouring to give his subjects a larger measure of liberty than that accorded by his princely fellows. The Duke of Coburg-Gotha has placed himself in the van of the German national party, has placed his army under the command of Prussia, and his local power in the hands of his people. He is evidently a fine open chivalrous character, and animated by the best intentions. But he has in part discovered his error when too late, and has been

600

forced to write a plaintive letter,*
complaining of how his subjects
misunderstand his intentions, and
wish, because he has given them
his cloak, to take from him his coat
also. So did Mæandrius in Hero-
dotus, wishing to be "the justest
of men," let the people of Samos
loose;
and they instantly accused
him of peculation. The Duke is a
mighty hunter—that is, a sports-
man, since hunting proper does not
exist in his country. He wishes
to be a plain country gentleman,
but, like other country gentlemen,
to keep to himself the right of
shooting over his own preserves.
Of his anxiety in the preservation
of his manorial rights the following
notice, put up by his foresters at
the inn at Oberhof, on the crest of
the mountain pass, is a specimen :-
"Visitors to this wood are desired
not to allow dogs, which they may
happen to have with them, to track
and hunt game in the wood, since
the body of keepers [Jagtaufsichts-
personal-formidable compound in
German !] have orders to shoot dead
all dogs who shall be caught hunt-
ing. At the same time, the same
persons are to take notice that
shooting in the wood is not allowed."
The author of the notice should
have added "for them," else how
were the stray dogs to be shot?

Well, this natural and healthy desire to preserve his highness's game, instinctive to all real sportsmen, who know that without preservation game would cease to exist, is actually made the object of much grumbling by the discontented radicals in Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The Grand-Duke of Weimar practises with the radicals somewhat more

reserve.

He allows them to fraternise to any extent, and even to sing patriotic songs under his windows when they are drunk; but he preserves a dignified silence as to their aspirations, and does not seem disposed to abate a jot of his own rights and privileges, probably because it has never been proved to him that

such concessions would be for his
subjects' good. The constitution of
his states remains where it was in
1848, of the events of which year a
Weimarian gentleman remarked to
me that the only good result was
that smoking was now allowed in
the Home Park. If it had not been
for the counter-revolution, it would
probably have come to allowing it
in the Court theatre, so it is well
that matters stopped when they did.
I may well say that the world and
stage of Weimar is one, as the stage
is the soul-the oversoul, as Mr Em-
erson would say-of the Weimarian
world. Weimar, without its present
artistic character and literary tradi-
tions, would not be a place of any
It appears
from the
great interest.
railway station like a place which
had sunk into its position from its
weight, producing the effect, on a
large scale, of a geological specimen
being put on a feather-bed, for one
does not see from thence the other
sides of the hills that surround
it. Undulating is the proper epithet
for the country. It might be com-
pared to the modified swell in a
landlocked bay, having the same
relation to the rugged highlands
of Thuringia that such a swell has
to the breakers outside, which I
have observed to be often the case
with the neighbourhoods of moun-
tain-chains. Yet it is a country
lovely in the spring, when the Park
is scented with blossoming trees,
and the woods ring with singing-
birds; lovely in the summer, when
the sward is enamelled with wild-
flowers when the nightingales,
very properly protected by law, carol
at their ease and the flying glow-
worms carry their steady lamps
about, not like the fitful flickering
fire-flies of the Tiber in the shades of
evening; lovely in the autumn, when
the beechwoods unfold their glories
of yellow, russet, and brown; and not
least lovely in the crisp winter, when
the air is vocal with sledge-bells, and
or great flooded
the "swan-lake"
meadow is alive with skaters, with

-

* See the pamphlet entitled Der Herzog von Gotha und sein Volk.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »