BOOKS.

MRS. JAMESON'S COMMONPLACE BOOK OF rii013631Ts, MEMORIES, AND FANCIES..

LIKE many authors and some musicians, Mrs. Jameson is in the habit of writing down at the moment what Handel called " de taut." The essays on "Shakspere's Female Characters," "Sacred and Legendary Art," with other productions, originated from these memoranda ; the writer's mind, we take it, being frequently oc- cupied with the theme, and thus producing ideas akin to it, for isolated thoughts coming at haphazard would never make a con- tinuous work. The volume before no is a selection from those thoughts which could not be used up in a book, with choice ex- tracts from Mrs. Jameson's reading, sometimes standing alone, more frequently serving as a text for annotations. The subjects themselves are divided into two parts, one division relating to " Ethics and Character," the other to 4' Literature and Art." These terms, however, must be interpreted very broadly to logically include all that appears in the respective divisions. Miscella- neous thoughts on morals, manners, society, religion, individual character, art in very many of its branches, literature, criticism, and anecdotes, for the most part of well-known persons, consti- tute the topics of Mrs. Jameson's Commonplace Book.

The characteristics which we last week noticed as appertaining to real conversations belong to the book. It is brief, various, and sometimes pithy. If it has not the weight which attaches to the talk or thoughts of some eminent men, it has great elegance and refinement, without conventional timidity in handling certain questions. There is, moreover, a feminine nicety of appreciation and a justness of judgment on matters that fall fairly within a woman's ken. Praise, however, must be confined to the brief detached reflections, anecdotes, and comments. There are some longer pieces that rather smack of bookmaking. such are the brief reports of sermons the author has heard delivered by various

preachers, well enough, but which it was notaecessary-to publish.

The long autobiographical reminiscences of the writer's childhood, in connexion with certain views on education, are but so-so, in

spite of their general elegance and particular passages of interest.

A kind of chapter on sculpture, sculptors, and what our ancestors, when it was the fashion to draw a character adapted to art, would have called " advice to sculptors," are also elegant, but somewhat flimsy. Extracts from Hazlites Liter Amoris, and other books, are articles without the text, where the broader parts are out away, and nothing is left but some remarks on the quotations. Pruned of these inferior parts, the bookwould form a very plea- sant Tamesoniana, not only agreeable but 'instructive. " HoW can we reason but from what we know r"—how can we think unless we have matter to think about ? The brevity of what are called " thoughts" makes them a favourite with young literary aspirants; but their productions are generally nothing more than a collection of pompous truisms or commonplaces. Mrs. Jameson has suffered and seen others suffer ; she has mixed, in various degrees of inti- macy, with numbers of persons, often remarkable ; she has dwelt upon questions which occupy the minds and affect the happiness of society, not at first to write about, but to arrive at the truth

concerning them ; she has investigated the principles -which regu- late criticism and taste. Results of this lifelong study will be found in her pages ; and the thoughts that spring from a mind stored with the accumulations of observation and experience are the thoughts of value. It follows from these premises, that Mrs. Jameson is frequently touching upon those moot questions which either in discussion VT

actual experiment occupy society in every age, till the subject is settled, or worn out, to be renewed again in some future stage.of social progress. Here is her contribution on cheap productions.

"It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price Of a good article, or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief Net only do they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be anxious about the education of the lower classes, they undo with one hand what they do with the other; they encourage the mere me- chanic and the production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom education has done much more and whose educa- tion has cost much more.

"Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can threw into it no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the Inman being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman ; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any kind."

Seemingly wide as the poles asunder, but perhaps not so far apart as they seem, are these remarks on poetical justice in real life, illustrated by a startling character, yet of common cocain:awe.

"I was reading today in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson, that 4it is a theory which every one-knows to be false in iact, that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.' I should say that ail my experience teaches me that the position is not false but true; that virtue does produce happiness, and vice does produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By happiness, we do not necessarily mean a State of worldly prosperity. By virtue, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded, and if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevo- lent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy.fulfils my action of virtue.

• A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies,Chi/ring and'Se•

lected. By 'Mrs. Jameson. With Illustrations and Facbings. Pubed' byaour man and Co. Strength is essential to it ; weakness incompatible with it. Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant ; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse of blue sky above our head ; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God. "And vice is necessarily misery : for that fluctuation of principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs false- hood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities, these constitute misery as a state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had 12,0007. a year ; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends ; very little conscience— not enough, one would have thought, to vex with any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly in- creasing. The perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable exi- gence with regard to things, without any high standard with regard to per- sons,—these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.

"I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that be confounded happiness with pleasure, with self-indulgence. Ile set aside with a towering scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called : he styled this philosophy of happiness 'the philosophy of the frying-pan.' But Ibis was like the reason- ing of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of Tugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes, something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to in- flict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure—is as sub- lime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it ; and under this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them."

The following thought is profoundly true. It explains the fail- ures of men of reflection in a regular course or life of action; the great type of whom is Hamlet the Dane.

"Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly, is more sure of himself; and more direct in his dealings with circumstances and with others, than a man whose manysided capacity embraces an immense extent of ob- jects and objections,—.just as, they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less 'likely to shy."

These two anecdotes are equally good in their way. The one is not, as Mrs. Jameson intimates, better than the other ; only the speaker in the one ease was a lover, in the other a diplomatist : per- haps a dash of satire lurked in the mot of Talleyrand—as who should say, "Madame de Steel can do everything."

" We all remember the famous bon mot of Talleyrand. When seated be- tween Madame de Steel and Madame Recamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Steel suddenly asked him if she and Madame Recamier fell into the river, which of the two he would save first ? ' Madame,' replied Talleyrand, ' je crois que vous pouvez nager !' Now we will match this pretty bon mot with one far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for whom, vaurien as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, be began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to him, 'If your mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save first?' My mother,' he instantly replied ; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, ' To save you first would be as if I were to save myself first.' "

Something complimentary to crowned heads among extracts from Chateaubriand.

" Madame de Coeslin, (whom he describes as en impersonation of aristo- tocratic morgue and all the pretension and prejudices of the ancien regime,) ' lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rom, elle eta Fes lunettes et dit en se mouchant, " II y a done one epizootic sur yes betas d coul.onne.'" ' " I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely person- ages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust and offices of dignity. In relaying to her experience she never either moralized or gene- ralized; but her scorn of ' ces bates a couronne ' was habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as that of Madame de Coeslin."

A nice bit of criticism from the section on Art; and useful, as showing, in the first anecdote especially, how a keen observer can turn the most common action to account.

" Lavater told Goethe, that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly difthrent and individually characteristic.

" What, then, shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and women, not from individual mature, but from a model hand—his own very often ? And every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyok's portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in very .few instances harmonize with the personalite ; that the position is often affected, and as if intended for display,—the display of what is in it- self a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of comparative physiology would have saved him.

, ' There are hands of various character : the hand to catch, and the hand to hold ; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp ; the hand that has worked or could work, and the band that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's picture. " Let any one look at the hands in Titian's portrait of old Paul IV. : though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could belong to no other."

We will close our extracts with a lesson on the necessity of in- cessant care even to maintain excellence, and another proof of the wonderful riches of Shakspere.

" I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred to play ? She replied, after a moment's consideration, and in her rich delibe- rate emphatic tones., ' Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied.' She afterwards said that ebe had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part and gene- rally the whole play in the morning ; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it ; ' something,' she oaid, 4 which had net struckme so much -as it ought-to have struck me: "