Burns's Address to the Del Illustrated with Wood Engrav- ings,
after THOMAS LANDSEER.
A very beautiful reprint of this favourite humorous poem of BURNS, and elaborately embellished with the finest wood engravings. Mr. LANDSEER, however, has not either comic or serious humour; he la- bours to be funny, and is successfully extravagant ; but his horrors, like his humour, are as substantial as his figures and faces are animal. He zoologizes mankind, and makes the Devil a wild scaramouch-fiend. So far, indeed, as the latter personage is concerned, he hits off the charac- ter of Bunas's "Dell ;" but, as some Irish reporter said of Mr. BROUGHAM'S speeches, "he wants pathos." The frontispiece, repre- senting, the infernal kitchen, with one of the fiend-cooks basting a law- yer on the spit, and cramming another sinner into a seething-pot, while the blaze of the flames forms the only light in the pitchy plate, is exceedingly clever, effective, and original. The other cuts are more ad- mirable for pictorial effect, and spirited wood engraving, than for merit as designs': the Will o' the Wisp is the best amongst them' where "the wight that late and drunk is" is decoyed into a slough. Job, with his portentous beard, rather resembles Old Time than the man of LIZ. The Notes are anything but "explanatory," being equally laboured and superfluous; and they bear much the same proportion to the text as those of the SHAKSPEARE commentators. It is treating BURNS scur- vily to make his stanzas pegs whereon to hang impertinent commenta- ries; and Mr. LANDSEER'S elaborate designs ought to want no other interpreter than the reader. They should not be so obscure as to need a farthing candle to throw a light on the humour or the expression Of the personages : but they are in some instances deficient in making out. Had less pains been bestowed in the getting up of this little work, more spirit might have been infused into it. It is overdone ; and that is a fault which spoils the effect of many a clever trifle.
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