sations. It may be fairly objected-what work of surpassing merit has given the proof?-Certainly, none. Yet still there are ominous facts, sufficient, I fear, to afford a certain prophecy of its reception, if such were produced. NOTES ON CHALMERS'S LIFE OF SAMUEL DANIEL. The justice of these remarks can not be disputed, though some of them are too figurative for sober criticism. MOST genuine! a figurative remark! If this strange writer had any meaning, it must be :-Headly's criticism is just throughout, but conveyed in a style too figurative for prose composition. Chalmers's own remarks are wholly mistaken; too silly for any criticism, drunk or sober, and in language too flat for any thing In Daniel's Sonnets there is scarcely one good line; while his Hymen's Triumph, of which Chalmers says not one word, exhibits a continued series of first-rate beauties in thought, passion, and imagery, and in language and metre is so faultless, that the style of that poem may without extravagance be declared to be imperishable English. 1820. BISHOP CORBET. I ALMOST Wonder that the inimitable, humor and the rich sound and propulsive movement of the verse, have not rendered Corbet a popular poet. I am convinced that a reprint of his poems, with illustrative and chit-chat biographical notes, and cuts by Cruikshank, would take with the public uncommonly well. September, 1823. NOTES ON SELDEN'S TABLE TALK.* THERE is more weighty bullion sense in this book, than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer. OPINION. Opinion and affection extremely differ. I may affect a woman best, but it does not follow I must think her the handsomest woman in the world. * These remarks on Selden were communicated by Mr. Cary.-Ed. * * Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reason why all the world should think as I think. Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself. Good! This is the true difference betwixt the beautiful and the agreeable, which Knight and the rest of that лños sov have so beneficially confounded, meretricibus scilicet et Plutoni. O what an insight the whole of this article gives into a wise man's heart, who has been compelled to act with the many, as one of the many! It explains Sir Thomas More's zealous Romanism, &c. PARLIAMENT. Excellent! O! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making every accident an outlet and a vehicle of wisdom! POETRY. The old poets had no other reason but this, their verse was sung to music: otherwise it had been a senseless thing to have fettered up themselves. No man can know all things: even Selden here talks ignorantly. Verse is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry, as contra-distinguished from science, and distinguished from history civil or natural. To Pope's Essay on Man,-in short, to whatever is mere metrical good sense and wit, the remark applies. Ib. Verse proves nothing but the quantity of syllables; they are not meant for logic. True; they, that is, verses, are not logic; but they are, or ought to be, the envoys and representatives of that vital passion, which is the practical cement of logic; and without which logic must remain inert. NOTES ON TOM JONES.* MANNERS change from generation to generation, and with manners morals appear to change,—actually change with some, but appear to change with all but the abandoned. A young man * Communicated by Mr. Gillman.—Ed. of the present day who should act as Tom Jones is supposed to act at Upton, with Lady Bellaston, &c. would not be a Tom Jones; and a Tom Jones of the present day, without perhaps being in the ground a better man, would have perished rather than submit to be kept by a harridan of fortune. Therefore this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. But, notwithstanding all this, I do loathe the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of tinct. lytta, while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women;-but a young man whose heart or feelings can be injured, or even his passions excited, by aught in this novel, is already thoroughly corrupt. There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson. Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones (and it must be remembered that he is in every one taken by surprise—his inward principles remaining firm-) is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that the reader's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on the criminal indulgence itself. In short, let the requisite allowance be made for the increased refinement of our manners,-and then I dare believe that no young man who consulted his heart and conscience only, without adverting to what the world would say-could rise from the perusal of Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Amelia, without feeling himself a better man ;—at least, without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act. If I want a servant or mechanic, I wish to know what he does--but of a friend, I must know what he is. And in no writer is this momentous distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what Blifil does ;-the deed, as separate from the agent, may be good or ill; but Blifil is a villain;—and we feel him to be so from the very moment he, the boy Blifil, restores Sophia's poor captive bird to its native and rightful liberty. Book xiv. ch. 8. Notwithstanding the sentiment of the Roman satirist, which denies the divinity of fortune; and the opinion of Seneca to the same purpose; Cicero, who was, I believe, a wiser man than either of them, expressly holds the contrary; and certain it is there are some incidents in life so very strange and unaccountable, that it seems to require more than human skill and foresight in producing them. Surely Juvenal, Seneca, and Cicero, all meant the same thing, namely, that there was no chance, but instead of it providence, either human or divine. Book xv. ch. 9. The rupture with Lady Bellaston. Even in the most questionable part of Tom Jones, I can not but think, after frequent reflection, that an additional paragraph, more fully and forcibly unfolding Tom Jones's sense of self-degradation on the discovery of the true character of the relation in which he had stood to Lady Bellaston, and his awakened feeling of the dignity of manly chastity, would have removed in great measure any just objections,—at all events relatively to Fielding himself, and with regard to the state of manners in his time. Book xvi. ch. 5. That refined degree of Platonic affection which is absolutely detached from the flesh, and is indeed entirely and purely spiritual, is a gift confined to the female part of the creation; many of whom I have heard declare (and doubtless with great truth) that they would, with the utmost readiness, resign a lover to a rival, when such resignation was proved to be necessary for the temporal interest of such lover. I firmly believe that there are men capable of such a sacrifice, and this, without pretending to, or even admiring or seeing any virtue in, this absolute detachment from the flesh. ANOTHER SET OF NOTES ON TOM JONES. Book i. ch. 4. "Beyond this the country gradually rose into a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds." As this is laid in Somersetshire, the clouds must have been unusually low. One would be more apt to think of Skiddaw or Ben Nevis, than of Quantock or Mendip Hills. Book xi. ch. 1. "Nor can the Devil receive a guest more worthy of him, nor possibly more welcome to him than a slanderer." 66 The very word Devil, Diabolus, means a slandercr. 'And here we will make a concession, which would not perhaps have been expected from us; That no limited form of government is capable of rising to the same degree of perfection, or of producing the same benefits to society with this. Mankind has never been so happy, as when the greatest part of the then known world was under the dominion of a single master; and this state of their felicity continued under the reign of five successive Princes." Strange that such a lover of political liberty as Fielding should have forgotten that the glaring infamy of the Roman morals and manners immediately on the ascent of Commodus prove, that even five excellent despots in succession were but a mere temporary palliative of the evils inherent in despotism and its causes. Think you that all the sub-despots were Trajans and Antonines ? No! Rome was left as it was found by them, incapable of freedom. Book xviii. ch. 4. Plato himself concludes his Phædon with declaring, that his best argument amounts only to raise a probability; and Cicero himself seems rather to profess an inclination to believe, than any actual belief, in the doctrines of immortality. No! Plato does not say so, but speaks as a philosophic Christian would do of the best arguments of the scientific intellect. The assurance is derived from a higher principle. If this be Methodism Plato and Socrates were arrant Methodists and New Light men; but I would ask Fielding what ratiocinations do more than raise a high degree of probability. But assuredly an historic belief is far different from Christian faith. No greater proof can be conceived of the strength of the instinctive anticipation of a future state than that it was believed at all by the Greek Philosophers, with their vague and (Plato excepted) Pantheistic conception of the First Cause. JONATHAN WILD.* JONATHAN WILD is assuredly the best of all the fictions in which a villain is throughout the prominent character. But how impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained * Communicated by Mr. Gillman.-Ed. |