doubly so by the contrast with the white | gracefully growing, and on the ground, dresses of the ladies near her. In the disposition of the figures the artist has exhibited a judicious taste. Thus the Marchioness de Latour-Maubourg, a lady with noble Italian cast of features, and dark hair and eyes, is seen leaning over and talking to the fair English blonde- -the contrast between the different styles of beauty being at once striking and pleasing. The dresses of the ladies, chiefly white, are pleasantly relieved by the colored ribbons, coquettishly displayed in various parts of their costume, and by the flowers with which some of them are carelessly playing. The details of the picture are lovely; as, for instance, the vase round which vines are the rich roses that the ladies have amused themselves in gathering. Indeed, these flowers are worthy of a more than passing notice; they are certainly as near perfection as a floral representation on canvas can possibly be. There will, about a group of this kind, always be a certain stiffness an appearance of sitting for a portrait which is almost impossible to avoid. In the present picture this stiffness of position is not as obvious as in most paintings of the kind, but still it is there to a small degree. Exception might also be taken to the unpleasant, dark sky, seen occasionlly behind the foliage. THE EMIGRANT ON THE SEA-SHORE. OLD Ocean, wondrous ocean-as of yore, With the same well-known voice and mobile features, As when in childhood, from thy varied store, Thou brought'st deep lessons by unrecked-of teachers! Young were my griefs, and blithesome was my heart, When I first met thy glance, O glorious Ocean! With mind unripe for thought, yet tears could start To trace Divine Pulsation in the motion. To see the stamp of a Creator's Hand In the frail seaweeds and the wondrous corals; Or strive, with earnest faith, to understand Old Nature's fables and their soul-deep morals. Oh! 'tis a wondrous thing, and bright as strange, That He who made us gave us earth in blessing; Who framed the dew-drop, made the Ocean's range, And gave us both-to praise him in possessing. Now, on a distant and unfriendly shore, I ask thee of the past. I bid thee tell, By those soft waves the pink-hued sand caressing, How in my native bay the waters swell— How their low murmurings chime with bygone blessing? Once on that far-off strand a thoughtless child I traced my name in rudely-printed letters; Then stood and watched, while billows harsh and wild Washed out the lines and bound with sandy fetters. Reckless I mocked at what the tide had done, Old Ocean! as in childhood did thy wave, So has cold Time, in harsh and bitter measure, Retaken all the loved ones that he gave, Washed out their names and robbed me of my treasure. I am alone-a gray-haired man-and thou Art young and strong as in the years long vanished; We meet again who have not met for ages; at my hour of birth, so even now, And yet wilt be the same when I am banished. From the Eclectic Review. BRITISH NOVELISTS AND THEIR STYLES.* places these books see, into what strange Ir is computed that there has been novels go that fly before us in such inter"produced in these islands, since the pub-minable procession? To rest and sleep. lication of Waverley," in all about three like every one of us. What strange thousand novels, counting about seven thousand volumes. A goodly result of human industry. Novel-writing is at this moment a flourishing trade, and it would seem to be likewise profitable. Huge is the demand; still more huge the supply. The number of novels produced in this country is something enormous. Weekly come forth the Athenæum and the Literary Gazette, their advertising pages covered with announcements. There is no scarcity of bread for those who are ahungered. The manufacture is even now going on. Think of it, at this moment in England some hundred or more pens are gayly careering over foolscap sheets, pursuing the fortunes of imaginary characters. How many heroines are weeping at this hour! How many heroes are cursing their hard fate! In a few months each of these young people will be married happily at the close of the third volume; and the chronicles of their misfortunes and adventures will have been printed, published, advertised, reviewed, read, forgotten; and the hundred pens will be careering over foolscap sheets as gayly as ever, pursuing the fortunes of another set of characters, who will in their turn be married; the book containing an account of the same will be printed, published, etc., etc. The wielders of these hundred pens consume bread and beer even as ordinary men and women. They employ tailors and bootmakers, and it is charitably hoped duly-the pot-boy round the corner. pay the same. To keep the wolf from the door there is but the deft flourish of a gray goose quill. The cash received for bundles of stained foolscap, delivered yearly or half-yearly, being what keeps house over head, shoes upon feet, nay, which pays poor-rates and double income tax. Wonderful! Verily, man has sought out many inventions! Where do all these British Novelists and their Styles. By DAVID MASSON. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. Misfor tunes accumulate upon it. Its margins, once so pure and unsullied, are scribbled over with insolent comments; it loses leaves, it gets detached from its boards, and finally in the dust-bin, like poor human mortals in their graves, it has rest from all its sorrows. "The king is dead: long live the king." The race of novels is never extinct. Authorship, in a rich and luxurious Community, in which half the men are idle, and more women, becomes a trade, and the deft workman_inherits the pud-| gallant way, faces the curled waves braveding and the praise. In such communi- ly, going through them when he can not ties books are manufactured for daily use, mount them; and when he arrives at port, even as muffins are. Idle men and wo- from his deep hold we are sure he will men must be amused, excited, and he who unlade rich stuffs. You may object to his peppers the highest is sure to please." speed; you can not with a pure conscience Much skill is brought to bear on the object to his cargo. Professor Masson preparations of these intellectual comfits. enters his protest against fun. He is Others, too, than readers exist upon plainly of opinion that there should be no books. The publishing season sets in more cakes and ale. He detests "comic upon the world like the herring shoals literature," and expresses his belief that upon the Hebrides. Onward comes glit- could he wish "in this age of abounding tering the annual army, the shark, por- wits and humorists for that which, from poise, and dog-flesh feeding upon its its very rarity, would do us most good, it edges, while the gull and cormorant has- would be for the appearance among us of ten to the feast from afar. a great soul that could not, or would not, laugh at all; whose every tone and syllable should be serious, and whose face should front the world with something of that sublimity of look which our own Milton wore, when his eyes rolled in darkness in quest of suns and systems, or of that pitiful and scornful melancholy which art has fixed, for the reprehension of frivolity forever, on the white mask of the Italian Dante." In his first lecture, Professor Masson enters into a variety of ingenious specu lations concerning the relations existing between the epic and the novel, and discusses the question which is the better fitted for purposes of narration, prose or verse. The fact that at present novels are produced at the rate of two per week is worthy of being taken notice of, and may suggest meditation not altogether unedifying. Of this fact Professor Masson essayed to take sufficient notice in four lectures delivered last winter before the audience which is wont to assemble itself in the Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh, and he now, the lectures meantime having been corrected and extended, and gathered up into a handsome volume, commends his thinkings thereupon to the readers of the entire country. Having duly perused the Professor's book, we are constrained to give it our cordial approval. It is honestly done work; full of good thinking, and not without a sufficiency of It may be said that, as the medium of bravura passages, exhibiting a literary impassioned thought, the powers and cadexterity and an eloquence far from com- pabilities of prose have never yet been mon. He brings to his task large know- fully developed. Supreme verse has been ledge, and his verdicts on the great writers in our literature written much more fre of the present and of bygone times are in quently than supreme prose. Perhaps, on the main to be approved. As a book, it the whole, supreme prose writing is the is singularly free from extravagance. Its more difficult task. And, remembering tone is eminently sober and judicial. Per- great passages in the writings of Jeremy haps if one might hint a fault, the writing Taylor, Wilson, Carlyle, De Quincy, one is too uniformly serious and solemn. A is inclined to ask what want they in little more ease and gayety might be de- thought, or in imagination, or in music, sired. When he does break a butterfly it that verse could possibly possess. Still, is upon a wheel altogether out of propor- even admitting that prose is superior to tion to the task. Fashionable novels, verse in so far as it holds a wider region, even, he will not "laugh into Hades;" he and can achieve a greater variety of trigoes at them fiercely, like the early Icono- umphs; that in the hands of a master it clasts at the gilded shrines and niched is quite equal to verse as a vehicle of passaints and apostles in a Popish cathedral. sionate or imaginative utterance, we can Seriousness evidently is the habit of his not anticipate the time when " verse, mind. He is not a pleasure yacht, the sacred and aboriginal verse," will be driv wind sitting in its great sheet of canvas, en by its rival to the "remotest fastnesses skimming the foam like a seabird. He is of the mountains." Drive verse to the rather a lugger, with bows like a Dutch-mountain top, and, behold! she appears man, deep in the water from a supera- on the plain. Nay, is the fact not really bundance of ballast, and, if slow, he makes so? During the years that prose, in the lower platform of prose. To ask which, verse or prose, is the better vehicle of thought, is an inquiry somewhat useless; both are perfect in their proper place, and in such a discussion reference must always be had to the mind of the writer -- what moral does he wish to inculcate, and through what medium, passionate or satirical, does he wish that moral to be made visible? Perhaps on the whole it is better to let great writers alone, and not trouble them with impertinent questionings or theories. Had the Idylls of the King been written in prose, they might have reminded one of Mr. G. P. R. James; had the Newcomes been written in verse it would be difficult to say of what it would have reminded us. In the second lecture Professor Masson treats of Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, in a manner singularly appreciative and manly. Of the third lecture we need only say that its subject is Scott, and that it was delivered in Edinburgh. The great man is celebrated; but there is perhaps more than sufficient celebration of the beauty of the city by night and by day; more than sufficient celebration of the men who have followed Scott in the "gray metropolis of the North," with an amazing prophecy ventured as to the great men-their name is to be legion-who in that city are yet to appear and make their times glorious. It is not without reason that Professor Masson, in his preface, hints that "with respect to one of the lectures - the third hands of Burke, and Wilson, and De Quincey, and Carlyle, produced its most brilliant effects, verse, in the person of Robert Burns, made the grotesquest satire her own, in the Deil and Doctor Hornbook; Cowper sang the Sofa; the muse of Wordsworth celebrated Idiot Boys, and wandered over the country with wagoners and peddlers. Byron made a successful inroad into the domain of prose in Don Juan, and one of the noblest poems of our own day, Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh, is a veritable novel in verse, in which many of the most prosaic elements of modern social life are represented-literary soirées and the bald chit-chat of the Blues." And what means the cry so often raised in critical journals, that poets do not consider the subject matter of their song sufficiently nowadays, that they concern themselves with themes very far removed from the heroic; but that if prose has entered and taken possession somewhat of the realm that from time immemorial belonged to verse, verse has returned the compliment by transplanting her airy hosts and pitching her tents on the acknowledged territory of prose? The question proposed by Professor Masson, "What can verse do in narrative fiction, that prose can not; and, on the other hand, are there any compensating respects in which, in the same business, prose has the advantage of verse?" is not one likely to be discussed by a writer filled with the inspiration of his subject. Whether the writer chooses prose or verse depends in the first instance on the constitutional bent or proclivity of his mind; and in the second, on what he purposes to achieve. Tennyson chose verse to set forth the monotonous sorrow of In Memoriam; Goethe verse in Faust; but with a wider field before him, with a far deeper moral to inculcate, and with more stubborn and alien elements to reduce to obedience and order, in Wilhelm Meister he chooses, and rightly so, prose for his vehicle. Whatever passionately possesses the imagination of a writer, and which does not "Perhaps there is a certain ungraciousness require for its fit setting forth the admix-in our thus always comparing and contrasting ture of prosaic elements, will not move happily in a less elevated region than that of verse. Whatever has to work out its moral from the "thick and miscellany of things," from the humors, prejudices, the unloveliness and ordinariness of human life, must perforce betake itself to the it might even be obliging if the reader were to remember specially that it was prepared for an Edinburgh audience." The fourth lecture is the most interesting of the series, in so far as it deals with contemporary fiction, and with writers who are at present alive. It is full of allusions to Bulwer, the Brontés, but is mainly occupied with a comparison of the merits of the two great rivals, Dickens and Thackeray. Here is a glimpse of both on Douglas Jerrold's funeral day : the two writers. We ought to be but too glad that we have such a pair of contemporaries, yet living and in their prime, to cheer on against each other. I felt this strongly once when I saw the two men together. The occasion was historic. It was in June, 1857; the place was Norwood Cemetery. A multitude had gathered there to bury a man known to both of them, within the leaden coffin which entered the and who had known both of them well-a man | is constantly tempted into extravagance whom we have had incidentally to name as and rhapsody. He has little command holding a place, in some respects peculiar, in over his own creations, and they use him the class of writers to which they belong, though as they please. He is constantly wanderhis most effective place was in a kindred department of literature; a man, too, of whom I ing on the confines of existence, where will say that, let the judgment on his remaining the man melts into the shade. Most of writings be permanently what it may, and let his characters commit suicide, so far as tongues have spoken of him this or that awry, the faith of the reader is concerned. They there breathed not, to my knowledge, within either crumble away into nothing before the unwholesome bounds of what is specially the book is closed, or change into someLondon, any one in whose actual person there thing else. Mr. Pecksniff is not the same was more of the pith of energy at its tensest, Pecksniff all through. We wonder his of that which in a given myriad any where, distinguishes the one. How like a little Nelson he daughters did not express astonishment stood, dashing back his hair, and quivering for at the aspect of their changed papa. the verbal combat! The flash of his wit, in Thackeray plants himself more firmly on which one quality the island had not his match, the reality of character, he holds his subwas but the manifestation easiest to be ob- ject more in hand; and although his proserved of a mind compact of sense and informacess is comparatively slow, his work, when tion, and of a soul generous and on fire. And now all that remained of Jerrold was inclosed finished, looks like a thing that will endure. There is nothing lyrical about cemetery gates. As it passed, one saw Dickens Thackeray, he never loses his self-possesHis tone is among the bearers of the pall, his uncovered sion through enthusiasm. head of genius stooped, and the wind blowing sober, and he seems to have made up his his hair. Close behind came Thackeray; and, mind on every subject he touches, and on as the slow procession wound up the hill to the many subjects besides which he prefers chapel, the crowd falling into it in twos and to say nothing about. He has a quick threes and increasing its length, his head was and merciless eye for the little meannesses to be seen by the later ranks, towering far in the front above all the others, like that of a and vilenesses of human nature. He has He marching Saul. And so up to the little chapel the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw. they moved; and after the service for the dead, does not care about grand passions and down again to another slope of the hill, where, tragic crimes. He does not believe in by the side of one of the walks, and opposite to them. A grocer sanding his sugar he the tombstone of Blanchard, Jerrold's grave rolls like a sweet morsel under his tongue; was open. There the last words were read; he can not away with Othello in his jealthe coffin was lowered; and the two, among hundreds of others, looked down their farewell. ous rage smothering a pure Desdemona And so, dead at the age of fifty-four, Jerrold with a bolster. Reading his books is like was left in his solitary place, where the rains sitting in a police-court; there is always were to fall, and the nights were to roll over- something going on, and respectable parhead, and but now and then, on a summer's ties in the witness-box are continually letday, a chance stroller would linger in curiosity; ting out the shabbiest secrets about themand back into the roar of London dispersed the selves, and the judge or bench is never funeral crowd. Among those remitted to the living were the two of whom we speak, aged astonished at the amount of that kind of the one forty-five, the other forty-six. Why thing which transpires; he seems to exnot be thankful that the great city had two such pect it, and to consider it the most ordimen still known to its streets; why too curi-nary thing in the world. It would take ously institute comparisons between them ?" a good deal to shock him. Dickens is the more pleasing writer, and he really In his estimate of the two writers Pro-awakens the most benevolent sensations fessor Masson does not in the least run counter to popular feeling. He admits that Dickens is the more productive, versatile, and essentially rich mind; that Thackeray is the more cynical, melancholy, weighty, and cultured. Dickens possesses gayer spirits and more exuberant natural genius; Thackeray has the more meditative eye, and is by far the profounder artist. Dickens from his lyrical turn, and in the excitement of work, in the reader. After reading one of his books you wish every day in the year Christmas, and every man, woman, and child in the world nothing to do but to sit down to a table groaning with roast meat, with a huge plum-pudding to follow. Mr. Dickens empties his pockets of their loose silver to the first beggar he meets shivering ankle-deep in the snow; Mr. Thackeray growls tramp" from beneath his warm comforter, and buttons them more 66 |