The Age of Clay. By William Boyd-Mushet, M.B. (Wyman and
Sons.) —The "Age of Clay" is our own, successor, it would seem, to the age of iron, which the satirists of old supposed to have exhausted all evils,—and worse than it. Mr. Mushet satirises its morals and its religion. He lays on the lash with the heartiest good-will; but his strokes are not effective. The instrument is neither well constructed nor well directed. Even those who sympathise with his aims must smile to see him seek to compress a sort of universal history into twenty pages of the blankest possible verse. Here is a specimen of it :—
Antigonus At Ipsns, with his son Demetrius, Engages Ptolemy, Lysireachus,
Seleucus, and Cassauder. Death o'ertakes
Antigonus. Lysimachas is slain Fighting Soleness. Pyrrhus against Rome
Assists Tarentum. Greeks despatch the Gauls At Delphi."
And here is the conclusion :— " With reluctant grace
Russia accepts, (to be defortified) The port of Batoum ; but from her ally Roumania, wrests the Bessarabian plains. Travers'd, outwitted, mortified, chagrin'd By England's Premier, Lord Beaconsfield, And Sal'abury, our truly noble Earls, The Muscov signs the Treaty of Berlin."
" Sal'sbnry," as Mr. Mushet, metri gratia, conscientiously spells the name, is a truly noble marquis. But this, perhaps, is trifling ; as is, it may be, the suggestion that the a of the feminine nominative in Latin is short, and that consequently the line, " Contenta paucis, absque timore mall" is not after the usual model of the pentameter.
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