he helped a great many little farmers to cultivate pieces of waste land? Or perhaps he has established large schools for the decent education of the brats of the wild Irish. No, he has done something much nobler: he has made, each year, a large volunteer subscription, towards defraying the expense of carrying on the war. Cunning Mr. Painter! always perform in this manner; and we shall not be tempted to the sin of reviling you for having taken us in.

Our readers have often heard of the late Dean Kirwan, long celebrated for his charity sermons; and if eloquence be rightly defined the art of persuading, it would appear that he must have been one of the greatest orators of modern times; for the sums collected after his sermons, amounted in all, as we are informed by Mr. Carr, to nearly sixty thousand pounds. For purposes of mischief we have often enough had occasion to see that a mere second-rate eloquence is sufficient to obtain immensely greater sums; and we have observed human nature too long to wonder at the fact; but that a sum like the one here specified should be granted to the pleadings of charity, does excite our wonder we own, and also our curiosity to know the exact nature of the eloquence which had so great an effect. Mr. Carr has given several pages of specimens, which he obtained with difficulty from a reverend admirer of the Dean, who had taken them down in short-hand. But whether it be, that the writer gave a cast of expression of his own to the sentences of the speaker, or whether there was a defect of taste in selecting them, or whether they were accompanied and enforced by unequal graces of delivery, or whether the great law of attraction exists in less force between money and its owners in Ireland than in other countries, or whatever other cause, of which we are not aware, contributed its influence, we acknowledge that we have some difficulty to comprehend, how a kind of oratory so very dissimilar to the noblest models of eloquence could produce the splendid result. These specimens too much remind us of the worst literary qualities of French oratory. The language has an artificial pomp, which is carried on, if we may so express it, at a certain uniform height above the thought, on all occasions; like the gaudy canopy of some effeminate oriental, which is still supported over him, with invariable and tiresome ceremony, whether he proceeds or stops, sleeps or wakes, rides or condescends to step on the ground. The images seem rather to be sought than to spring in the mind sponta

neously, and to be chosen rather for their splendour than their appropriateness. And the train of thinking appears to have little of that distinct succession of ideas, and that logical articulation, which are requisite to impress sound conviction on the understanding. We fear, however, that we begin to descry one capital cause of the Dean's success, in something else than the literary merits of his oratory: and our readers will hardly avoid the same surmise when they read the following passage. Expressing his reverence for the man, "however he may differ in speculative opinions," who relieves the wretched, &c. &c., he proceeds: "Should such a man be illfated, here or hereafter, may his fate be light! Should he transgress, may his transgressions be unrecorded! Or if the page of his great account be stained with the weakness of human nature, or the misfortune of error, may the tears of the widow and the orphan, the tears of the wretched he has relieved, efface the too rigid and unfriendly characters, and blot out the guilt and remembrance of them for ever!" Now if an admired preacher, after a pathetic address to the passions of a numerous and wealthy auditory, many of whom had never accurately studied the doctrines of Christianity, could have the courage to proceed forward, and declare to them, in the name of heaven, that their pecuniary liberality to the claims of distress in general, and especially to the case of distress immediately before them, would secure them, notwithstanding their past and future unrepented and unrelinquished sins, from all danger of divine condemnation; intimating, also, that, on the extreme and improbable supposition that they should be consigned to the region of punishment, it would prove so light an affair as to be rather a little misfortune than an awful calamity, he might certainly persuade them to an ample contribution. But that an enlightened minister of a protestant church could have the courage to declare or even insinuate the pernicious sentiment, awakens our utmost astonishment. We think there can be no doubt that a certain proportion of the money collected after the address, in which such a passage as this was seriously uttered, would be paid literally as the atonement for the past crimes, and as the price of an extended license to repeat them with impunity. If the whole of the oration was powerfully persuasive, we cannot fail to attribute a large share of the success to that particular part, so soothing to appre hension, and so flattering to ignorance and corruption.

In returning towards Dublin, our author made a visit to

the house of Mr. Grattan; and he might well feel himself flattered by the welcome, and the polite attention, which he experienced there, and gratified by the mental luxuries which, we may believe, scarcely another house could have supplied. We should have been glad to receive some more particular information about this distinguished orator, than the assurance merely of his being a polite and hospitable man, an elegant scholar, and respectable in domestic relations. We should have been glad to hear something of his studies, his personal habits, his style of talking, or the manner in which he appears to meet advancing age. Yet we acknowledge it is a difficult matter for a transient visitor, who is received on terms of formal politeness, to acquire much knowledge on some of these particulars, and a matter of some delicacy to publish what he might acquire. A number of pages are occupied with passages from Mr. Grattan's speeches; some of which extracts, we believe, were supplied to Mr. Carr from memory, and therefore are probably given imperfectly. On the whole, however, these passages tend to confirm the general idea entertained of Mr. Grattan's eloquence, as distinguished by fire, sublimity, and an immense reach of thought. A following chapter is chiefly composed of similar extracts from Mr. Curran's speeches; in most of which the conceptions are expressed with more lucidness and precision than in the passages from Grattan. These specimens did not surprise, though they delighted us. We have long considered this distinguished counsellor as possessed of a higher genius than any one in his profession within the British empire. The most obvious difference between these two great orators is, that Curran is more versatile, rising often to sublimity, and often descending to pleasantry, and even drollery; whereas Grattan is always grave and austere. They both possess that order of intellectual powers, of which the limits cannot be assigned. No conception could be so brilliant or original, that we should confidently pronounce that neither of these men could have uttered it. We regret to imagine how many admirable thoughts, which such men must have expressed in the lapse of many years, have been unrecorded, and are lost for ever. We think of these with the same feelings, with which we have often read of the beautiful or sublime occasional phenomena of nature, in past times, or remote regions, which amazed and delighted the beholders, but which we were destined never to see.

XVI.

EPIC POETRY.

The Fall of Cambria, a Poem. By JOSEPH COTTLE

OUR times are unfavourable, to the last degree, to the writers of that kind of poetry commonly called epic; a denomination about which there has been, among critics, a vast deal of superstition-a denomination as fairly applicable, for what any of them can show to the contrary, to any poetical narration of the great military transactions that have decided the destiny of a state, as to the Iliada denomination, therefore, which might with perfect propriety have appeared in the title-page of this work, had the author deemed it worth while to be tenacious of so trifling a point of rank. The present times, we observe, are unfavourable, because a great part of the impressive power of the heroic poem obviously depends on the contrast between such transactions as it narrates, and the ordinary course of human events. We have very naturally been accustomed to calculate the effect of this sort of poem, on an assumption that the fall of great states and monarchs, the extinction and creation of imperial dynasties, the exploits of great heroes, and such conflicts of armies as transfer whole nations to a new dominion, are things of so rare occurrence as to be of themselves adapted to take possession of the utmost faculty of attention and wonder, and therefore to need nothing but the eloquence of poetry to give them an overpowering magnificence. In their plainest mode of representation they must rise before our view, it is presumed, with somewhat of the aspect of sublime mountains; the effect of their appearing in poetry will be as when those mountains are seen in the state of volcanoes. But this high advantage of the epic poem-its having the province of celebrating a class of events which, in even the humblest style of recital, would be exceedingly striking to the imagination

is, along with so many other high and prescriptive things, totally abolished in the present age. The fall of monarchs, the end of a royal race, the catastrophe of empires-what solemn phrases these used to be in the lessons of moralists, and the declamations of orators! How many pensive and awful reflections were they expected to awaken! To what a remote, and lofty, and tragical order of ideas were we supposed to be aspiring when we uttered them! But the time is at length come for such ambitious phrases to express but the ordinary events taking place within our sight. We are now become accustomed to reckon with great confidence, at the beginning of the year, that if we live to the end of it, we shall outlive some one or other ancient kingdom that is coexisting with us on the first of January. We take not the smallest credit for any unusual foresight in the prognostication; and when the event accordingly takes place, it seems so much a matter of course that it should have happened, that it is not till after a considerable interval of reflection that the mind admits any very grave impression of its importance. The impression is not so much made by the event itself directly, as by our reflective wonder that it has impressed us so little. But both our direct and our reflective ideas of the magnitude of such an event are soon swept away by that incessant rapid progress of revolution, which is overturning another and still another throne; destroying the boundaries of states; either reducing those states to the condition of provinces of one vast rapacious empire, or supplanting their ancient institutions by new forms and names of government, and consigning the hereditary monarchs and their courts to obscurity and captivity, or driving them to the extremities and islands of Europe, or even to the other hemisphere. In this career of revolution, war has unfolded all its splendid and terrible forms, in such a crowded succession of enterprises and battles, with every imaginable circumstance of valour, skill, and destruction, that its grandest exhibitions are become familiar to us, almost to insipidity. We read or talk, over our wine or our coffee, of some great battle that has recently decided the fate of a kingdom, with an emotion nearly as transient as of an old bridge carried away in our neighbourhood by a flood, or a tree overthrown by the wind or struck with lightning. It is, even after every allowance for the natural effect of iteration and familiarity, perfectly aston