THE SUBSIDING OF AN EFFERVESCENCE RAISED BY TFIE YORK FESTIVAL.

A DISTINCTIVE appellation derived from the county or city in which it is celebrated hardly does justice to a grandeur of scene, a vastness of assemblage, and a concentration of musical genius, which give to the Yorkshire Festival a character absolutely na- tional. For my own part, on drawing near the crumbling walls of the old city, I could have imagined myself, nwie the blasts of th broken-winded mail-coach horn, to be some Pagondas 119w1-7;;; repairing to the banks of the Alpheus—to the rendezvous of a po-

lite people assembling for the purpose of intellectual (if not also of athletic) exercise. The festivals of Derby, Manchester, Bir- mingham, Hereford, Sce., however nearly they may be on a level with that of York in the estimation of the scientific, are yet but local meetings when compared with it, in respect of the interest they severally create in the nation, and of the effect of the tout ensemble on the senses. This superiority is mainly to be ascribed to the advantage of possessing in the Minster so incomparable a theatre for the celebration of a musical triumph. After standing, in its strength and its grandeur, ever since the Reformation at least, to no other earthly end than to he admired by a chance stranger, or trod listlessly by a saunterhag townsman, the vacant part of the Cathedral—which is also by much the most august— seems at length to have suggested to mens minds its supreme ap- propriateness as a temple for the performance of compositions of a sublimity corresponding with its own.

Nobody that has ever inhabited an episcopal city, and more es- pecially the archiepiscopal city of York, can have paced the vast and solitary aisles of the Cathedral without some time or other reflecting sadly on the uselessness—for any use we can be said to make of it, of that noble monument of Catholic genius and Mag- nificence. Those high-soaring pillars—stupendous yet gracefully light—receding, one behind another, in remote perspective, and supporting that carved and vaulted roof, which the upturned head almost aches to contemplate,—those vast, arched windows, whose massive stanchions look like filagree-work to ilia spectator below, and through whose rich storied panes the sun's rays stream in purple and gold on pavement and pillar, arch and capital, pedes- tal and tomb—were they reared for no better purpose than that I, and one or two idlers more, might lose ourselves in romantic reveries ; and, as the distant swell of choral voices broke on the ear, might feed our Gothic imaginations with visions of mailed knights, and hooded monks, and veiled nuns—of processions, crucifixes, incense, music, and all the overwhelming pageantry of the old religion, whose actors—priest and nun, mitred bishop and mailed baron—crumbled in the dust below our feet ? "We," might the Catholic have said, "we, who raised this vast edifice to worship in, were able also to fill it with worshipers. Those aisles, in which you now wander lost in undisputed solitudes, were not too spacious for our devotion. They, in whose vast concep- tions this great work had its origin, and whose munificent spirit and persevering piety gave it completion, used to celebrate in it rites not unworthy of the pile they had Teared—rites which sug- gested no ideas of incongruity, but, in point of magnificence, were in perfect harmony with the grandeur of the temple in which they were performed. August and sublime as it is, in OUT hands it was not more than a meet emblem of the worship to whose use it was dedicated. What is it in your hands ? A meet type of the wor- ship you celebrate ? Observe that dignitary, who over his great- coat has just donned his priest's robe, following that single mace- bearer—the creature of tithes, but without hospitality—graced with church endowments, but endowed with no graces. Look along those dark stalls, where you detect rather than see some dozen of old men and antiquated maidens, come to wear away half an hour of the long, long day, in a meritorious stagnation of thought and vacuity of mind. Listen to the voice of that croaking reader, which sounds as impressively on the ear as the scratching of a rat behind the wainscot of a noble apartment. Cast your eye over that vast unoccupied space, on which the sun-beams play in perfect soli- tude, and which, once worn by the knees of a multitude bending in adoration of the great Architect of all, is now never trod hut by idlers like yourself; and say whether the building is in character with your worship, or whether its immensity is emblematic of the extent of your devotion ? Filled as your devotion fills it—wor- shiped in as your vacant saunterers warship—the Cathedral looks rather like a monument to the memory of a religion defunct, than a place used for celebrating the rites of a living one."

* Les rues etaient oriles de tapis; des voiles de diverses couleurs, tendus d'un toit t l'entre, intercept:tient, volume flux jetix du cirque, l'eclet et la cheieur du jour ; 1' pavt 4taitjenclie et dos partuni brideient on abundance. I.'evi.eitie de

Itheitus marchaient en habits cior6s farouclie Sic:nu:ire 1111.91 appelait son his spirituel : "Purina," lot disait celui-ei enterveilb: de tent de punipe, " west ee pas Lace routturrie d ed us Li; ,A4 prom:is de an euni.11:ir e 1" Tilierry, tom i. livre I. What are we to answer to this ? Is the genius of our times and our religion so grovelling that we can but walk and wonder among the works of other days ; marvelling what manner of men they might be, and what the reach of their minds, who could con- ceive, and conceiving could execute, a design like that of the stu- pendous temple arising in colossal magnitude, yet beautiful pro- portions, above and around us ? Are we so far below those great spirits, that we cannot even imagine an adequate use for what they reared and we have inherited ? Must it, in our bands, be as the gem which a thief has stolen, and which he is ashamed or afraid to wear ?—The genius of the nineteenth century has relieved us from the obloquy of having usurped a noble edifice without having mind or imagination to fill it with scenes of aught like cor- responding sublimity. " True," we may say, " our simpler worship which leaves its votaries to the devotion of their own hearts, and interposes no priestly pomp to bear up their thoughts and aspirations—earthly else and grovelling—to the Throne of Mercy, needs not for its cele- bration the wide space which the impure magnificence of your church required. That comparatively small chapel is capable of containing our whole population, collected as it is in a dense mass about the officiating priest, whom, though a sinner like the rest, your superstition permitted to keep himself aloof, as something intermediate between God and his creatures. As for week-day worship—true, the congregation is thin ; but our hard-living Poor serve God by digging and delving for an honest subsistence, instead of wearing the pavements of churches with their knees, as in the mendicant days of Catholic hospitality. And as for that exterior space with whose utter vacancy you reproach us—that vast, that noble, that stupendous over-arched hall is once every three years filled with a conflux 8f the young and the old, the noble and the simple, the beautiful and the talented, all that have ears to hear and souls to feel, from all quarters and corners of the realm. There, as in a temple, all the native talent of our country, and all the talent that wealth—the produce of our country's in- dustry—can import from abroad, are congregated ; and rehearse the immortalworks of departed genius, in a style which leaves the rapt auditor no other feeling than a wish, that the canonized bones' of the mighty composers might burst their cerements' to hear their own sublime conceptions for once completely realized. There at least, Hundets Messiah' yet reigns. There the wonders of Creation' are sung in strains such as those with which the angels celebrated the birtli-day of the heavens and the earth. There the exalted imagination sees, with closed eyes, the angels of God ascending and descending, as in Jacob's dream of old ; or hears the voice that proclaimed peace and good-will' on the moon-lit sides of the pastoral mountains. There the maids of Britain sym- pathize with him who bravely died ;' or are wafted in thought, through the skies' with the soul of Jephthah's daughter. There gentle airs,' drawn by an exquisite enchanter from inanimate matter, suspend the vast assemblage, breathless, on a strain of music so finely spun as takes captive the breath, till the over- charged heart relieves itself in a sigh of ecstacy. You, with all your pageantry—your banners on high, and crowns and crosses below— splendours that made barbarian Clovis ask, was that the kingdom of heaven which the priests had promised him;' did you ever impress on the minds of your votaries the realms of peace and love' as, on that morning, they rose to the eye of imagination, conjured up by the single voice of a woman ? Or, with all your fabled woes of saints and martyrs, did you ever subdue the heart of man like him whose voice, divine in ruins, sang the child doomed by a father ;' or like her whose liquid accents wailed forth so touchingly and heart-break-

iugly, 'Ii abbraccia piange ...' that the closest and most obdurate bosoms were unlocked and set wide open ? When did ever your priestly hurlers of God's own thunder paint on the minds of a trembling devotee the tremendous Last Day with the force of that appalling chorus, which so presented the concourse of the un- numbered dead, breaking from their tombs, and hurrying all of every age and nation' to the great tribunal, that if Orpheus had not been a fable and Amphion a lie, the very prelates and abbots who have slept for centuries below, would have roused them at the sound and prepared for their final doom ?' " Something like this might be our reply to him who should object to us our deserted aisles, and remind us how his superstition once peopled them with a kneeling multitude whose loud amens pealed through the vast space, till the vaulted roof itself rang with their unanimous bursts of supplication and assent. And what if among ourselves there be any insensate or misjudging souls that talk of profanity ?—of desecrating a holy edifice with the exhibition of human vanities ?—of confounding earthly festivities with the joys of heaven ?—of indulging worldly tastes under the pretext of charity and devotion ? To such I would answer, if any such there be, the merest man of clay, at one moment or other during these unrivalled performances, felt an emotion—a rapture that had more of heaven in it, than the best of your over-righteous people ever experienced in a whole life of chapel-going and psalm-singing. What profane to own the influence of harmony ? Do not the Scriptures draw the angelic host hymning the praise of God morning-tide and even ? Do not yourselves attempt often to join on a Sunday's crowded evening in a jarring chorus of harsh

rebellious voices ? Is Glory to God in the highest' acceptable when LITERARY SPECTATOR.

murdered by the croaking voice of a clerk, and profane when chanted in the strains of MOZART, half realizing all that has been sung or said of heaven? To feel the sordid passions of the heart THE ANGLO-IRISH. for way at the summons of a celestial air—to rid the bosom but

for a moment of the devils that tenant it, and to have it swept

by which it is cumbered and

a heaven, and the divine soul imprisoned in flesh, half bursts its

Great and exalted of the land ! with you it rests to render this I trust, when we shall be able to enjoy ourselves without the aid of your high names and noble patronage to invite us to the banquet ; hm —when we, the plebeian mass, who really support the mass of the expense, and without wo you could no more celebrate such a f(!te than WELLINGTON and his staffcould have won W aterloo with hu ffl th e amplitude of your own luxurious mansions. Let the accumu- charity sanctifies and religion smiles on our enjoyments. cumstances, but invariably stamped with the characters of reality.

emotions before unknown ; they expand the contracted soul, and line of the story, that he may know in what classes and under what suspend the anxieties of a world of care ; they contribute to the circumstances he is to expect whatever revelations of character it wider diffusion of wealth, and give new impetus to industry ; they afflirds. The hero—of Irish and patrician descent—is one of that reward living talent, and they celebrate the genius of the mighty unhappy class, who never confess their origin without an apology ; dead, bringing their memory back to earth by their own harmonious and if not bold enough to give themselves out, like Lady Clonburny strains ; they confound high and low, young and old, in one holy, —" Henglish born in Hoxfordshire," disavow as much as can be soft, or triumphant feeling—a feeling purely of the soul, without taken off from the crime of their lineage, by subjoining, " English- one particle of earth. The fair who reveals her opening charms Irish," or, "born in Ireland, but bred in England," or, " Irish only for the first time to the public gaze, will look back, through many by birth," or some such sneaking, anti-national disclaimers ; for a year of household cares and troubles, to that day, when rapt above which they richly deserve all that they earn of hatred from the one sublunary dreams she thought neither of the effect of her own people and contempt from the other. It were well if every per- beauty nor saw the surpassing splendours around her. And that son so disclaiming the land of his nativity, were responded to in most of earth-earthy personage—even the tender of cattle and the words of Gunning—the Crabtree or cynic of the present work tiller of the ground—will sometimes interrupt his talk of crops and —to Mr. Blount, the English-Irish hero :

' bestial ' hereafter, to reflect on that moment when he was surprised "English-Irish, or Anglo-Irish—why you make yourselves out nothing by the discovery within him of a something of which he had never at all ; one does not know where to have you I wonder you never

previously dreamt, thought of having heard said, between two stools,' and so forth "— "1 never knew till now, why it was that, whenever such of your half- me English are not a musical peopIe,"—so say our neigh- Irish as I have seen, came to visit us in England, they appeared to be hours, and so say our own kind compatriots who believe themselves oter-eolite orer-conciliating, self-doubtirtg, inferior kind if men. But now exceptions to the general rule. Be it so—we have not that con- I know it. They are tyrants at home under us, and they must be inferiors formation of the organs which produces the strains that ravish, front home, in our presence,—they can't help it." vol. iii. p. 3. but we have the souls that enjoy those strains to rapture : and This English-Irish scion of nobility is in his nonage, when he there is not in all Europe a hand that draws a liner note, or a voice is first discovered at a breakfast party at Lord CASTLEREAGH'S ; that warbles more exquisitely than common, but it is soon enticed whence we follow him to Westminster school, and afterwards to from its native soil and planted in an English erchestra. What Cambridge. Returned to town and entered into public life, he be- foreigner that stood in that vast theatre, heard those soul-subduing conies the secretary of the Minister ; is present at a skirmish of airs and triumphant choruses, and stretched his eye over that broad oratory in the House of Commons on the Catholic question ; as- and splendid gallery—which, under the agitation subsequent to a sists at a dinner at Mr. Secretary CROKER'S ; whence he adjourns finer cadence or grander burst than ordinary, looked like a rich to a route of lady patronesses and lady secretaries of Irish refor- parterre of flowers, stirred by the breeze and brightening in the sun mation societies and schools ; and when you believe him fixed for —but must have acknowledged that the women of these islands life in a routine of official dinners, levees, and so forth, he tumbles are fair and the men thereof magnificent ; and that they were agreat into an intrigue, kills his man, (who, however, is alive and well, people, who had the wealth to create so splendid a scene, anti the vol. iii. p. 301,) ; and flies for it to ruminate in Pare la Chaise. On

soul to expend it on so liberal and exalted an enjoyment? his passage home he is wrecked and thrown on the Irish coast; where 0 people of England ! these be the trophies of peace and the he meets with adventures, and whence—thrown from the coach, and triumphs of civilization ;—how better far than the uproarious was- breaking his arm by the way—he is conveyed to Dublin; is present at &Wings and illuminations for battles won and cities taken, what a meeting of the Catholic Board, and subsequently makes one at an

time you pranced abroad on your great war hobby-horse— English-Irish dinner at Stephen's Green, where his host presides, To feed the crows and fatten foreign ground I