Of vision, multiplied through air or glass Again, Paradise Regained. So well I have disposed my airy microscope, Ibid. 'But Satan is one unbroken soliloquy, de omnibus negotiis.' So are most didactic poems; they are soliloquies, like Byron's Childe Harold, uttered by the mouth of another person, or like Cowper's Task, by the poet in person, de omnibus negotiis, connected with their theme. Cowper makes his universal, though a sofa that of Mr. Montgomery's Satan must be universal, since his theme is the world and the des tinies of man. Childe Harold is a personage in point. His sentiments are conveyed in a long soliloquy; the scene of action in Childe Harold is transferred from England to the continent; in Montgomery's Satan from the continent to England. Childe Harold, also, like Montgomery's Satan, is But enough of these trifles, Quorsum hæc tam putida tendunt ?' I say it without adulation, that my large experience of the press has brought me acquainted with multitudes of clever men, aye, in its minor departments too, who would produce as good articles of this description as the ordinary magazine run, 6 stantes pede in uno,' at £2: 2s. per sheet; nay, one every hour by Shrewsbury clock—all properly bebugled and bespangled with the false wit of rechauffee'd puns. There is no mind in such rattling nonsense' whatever; and, bought at the cheapest rate, such wares are too dear. 6 a fallen nature-morally degraded-a human devil -but deeply read in the internal mechanism of mind; and fervidly alive to all the beauties and sublimities of nature and art. The Literary Journalist's next objection (I continue to methodize for him) is to the sentiments, whether characteristic (or incident to the personage) or poetical (peculiar to the author). The reader will bear in mind that the true light by which the propriety of the characteristic sentiments must be tried, is, whether they are consistent with the sublime character of Mr. Montgomery's archangelic conception, not whether they are consistent with some gratuitous imagination, some saucer-eyed and long-tailed devil of the critic. 'Satan moralizes on man.' Why should he not, when no one is by to profit by his moralizing? The human devil,* Childe Harold, does so. If the Satan of Milton and of Montgomery admit truth, a fine moral is couched under the circumstance. Self-condemning truth is torturingly wrung from him. Though blasted, yet believing still,' he stands selfjudged out of his own mouth. The Satan of Paradise Regained is equally alive to intellectual refinements (see his Picture of Athens) as that of our author. Again, Montgomery's soliloquy of Satan warns England not to be so fond of money as she seems to be.' Milton's dialogue of Paradise Regained contains And soothe to say, he was a shameless wight.'-Childe Harold. 'For he through sin's long labyrinth had run.'—Ibid. the same censure as Mr. Montgomery's monologue of Satan. There the god of this world says, referring to an earthly prosperity They whom I favour thrive in wealth amain, While virtue, valour, wisdom, sit in want: and the God of the next world, rejecting the Roman throne, rebukes Rome, in his reply, for that idolatry of money which Juvenal denounces, and which, finally and justly, swept her and her twin pollutions of Mammon and Priapus from the surface of the earth*. Luxurious by their wealth and greedier still, What wise and virtuous man would seek to free * Should not Satan, approving the vice, tremble for the continuance of his empire? Montgomery makes Satan say, that money is made the only standard of right and wrong. A curious philological investigation which has the rare merit (for antiquarianism) of being brief, points out the modern erection and introduction of this amiable commercial standard of crime and virtue expressed of old by the ‘virtutem post nummos,' and 'quocunque modo rem' of Horace. In 1260, the Lord's Prayer has 'forgyf us ure sinnes;' in 960, it was gyltas, thence guilt; in 700, Scylda (German Schulde), sins; but in 1460, it was forgive to us our dettis—debts !' Again, Montgomery makes Satan perceive that half the thrice-aday Sunday church-goers are, in reality, Atheists, seeking a sanctimonious character on the Sunday, in order to cheat their neighbours with more effect on the Monday; or scarcely disavowed worshippers of the devil, Mammon, measuring virtue and morals by his metallic standard. Do not all these amiable persons already belong to the devil's eternal kingdom? and was it not important for Satan to detect so large an increase and so interesting a groupe of subjects beneath their worldly disguise? Was it not gratifying to him to detect the meditated extortion, or the half-conceived bubble, in the Pharisaical swindler's loud respouse and upturned eye? The following three passages are given by the Edinburgh Literary Journalist as objectionable, but no reasons but italics are assigned :: Is the earth Appall'd, or agonizing in the wrack Of elements? Oh, what a cloud on liberty was thrown, The shriek of violated maids, the curse And plunged amid devouring flame, were heard 2 I see no objection to them in sentiment or diction, but let the reader judge. The last image, 'dash of corpses torn from royal tombs amid devouring flame,' is picturesque. The composition's chiaro' is excitingly shadowed by that 'oscuro' association with terror, which is one great element of the sublime. Two other passages are adduced as exceptionable. The first, on account of a verbal error of the press, corrected in the second edition; the second, on account of Mr. Montgomery's use of the word 'glance' in the sense of survey; in which, to be candid, I agree with the critic, although there is authority for such use. Our Minutius Felix is welcome to the admission. Mr. Montgomery's fame as a great poet will not be affected even by the lucky minutiæ of Word-catchers who live on syllables. The following passage is criticised with a more than usual profusion of italics. To my view, it possesses the original vigour and searching deep-thoughtedness which characterise many of the finest metaphysical passages of Byron. The beauty and accuracy of the illustrations drawn from the phenomena of electricity and galvanism, and their mysterious connection with the mind through the excitation of the nerves, lighten through the whole passage, and flash a perspicuous ray on the little obscurity which results from its intense and energetic brevity. The atmosphere that circleth gifted minds The last objection of the critic is to the diction, or what he terms, false coinage of new words.' A few remarks are necessary here. All authorities allow a limited coinage to the poet : none a false. The only inquiry for the critic, therefore, is whether the coin is standard or debased. Neology*, though a licensed A volume might be collected of Buonaparte's neology, and augmented by the neology of the revolutionary Titans, his compeers. Even the polished anti-Buonapartist, Canning, was often kindled by the excitation of the revolutionary period into neology. |