ESSAYS CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS.'
Tuns volume has '.t threefold division. It contains a defence of modern French literature against the Quarterly Review, with no- tices of a few French authors ; soino short essays on various sub- jects ; and a number of fragmentary extracts front a tour, seemingly extending up the Rhine to Vienna, and thence to Trieste and the Northern parts of Italy and France.
The first production of this author, published a few years since, was distinguished by a freshness of manner, an independence in the choice and treatment of his subjects, and a peculiarity of character, that gave a promise which the presmt volume inns not fulfilled. So far than having improved upon the limner, it has retrograded : the subjects are not so large, the thoughts and sentiments not so full or so racy. It looks like a field whose first crop had exhausted the soil, and whose second, though of the saline nature, is light, thin, and stunted.
We do not predicate from this a fidling- off in the writer's abilities, but in his book (though we see no traces of an expanding or en- riched mind in his pages); and it was scarcely to be expected that it should be otherwise. The second part, cootaining the short essays, only coosists o: extracts tl'onn his papers of thoughts on such commonplace subjects as " elniumey-pots," " the start and the finish," " pleasure," &c.; and though a few have a higher interest, they are treated superficially, without reflection and without study. The "Extracts from a Tourist's Journal" are equally common- place—small 'bets, or individual impressions, too general to have character or use. Of the notice's of the French authors, the only one entitled to remark is a review of DF. 13ALzAc's Pena de Chagrin, and event this is superficial. The story is described or abridged with some felicity ; but the criticism is slight, and the critic does not seem to perceive the moral of the tale the author has worked out, whatever might be his purpose in writiag the work. Of the few thoughts of novelty or reflection in the volume, the following ma) be taken as a sample of the best.
EFFECTS OF ILL HEALTH.
It is a mistake too flattering to our amour propre not to be extensively popular, to suppose that bad health will necessarily soften down the snore sen- sual and grosser parts of the sharacter, and blend the hitherto jarring elements into a philosophical composuW. In a strictly regulated mind this may indeed be the result ; the fruits of low, self-government and unselfish action may re- ceive their crowning perfection from the inroads of physical decay; but how rare is such a case compared to those in which the decline of health only in- duces a deeper and more heartfelt regret for past and irrevocable pleasure. Nor must we wonder at this.: in active life our energies are distributed over a variety of objects; schemes or ambition, aspirations after the ideal, retro- qset of the stirring events of the past, anticipations of the untried future : all these (accompaniments of youth and health) share our attention along with the pursuit of pleasure. But when physical debility cramps the powers of mind and body, then, when these complicated interests of the world are &d- in from our eyes, the thoughts are forced back on one subject—the pleasures that are past ; we look back upon them with an energy of regret that is quite appalling. Thus the debility of bad health is far more of an enervating than composing character. The young mourn over their career prematurely closed; the old think that they also could have done better. Qt-, all states of mind, this maudlin regret for past pleasure is the weakest and most deplorable. Satiety has its grandeur of impassibility; remorse, its con- vulsive energy ; but there is an intrinsic littleness in the ceaseless refvrence to what is gone, not as a good thing past, but an enjoyment lost, (each year haunted by the ghost of its predecessor,) which has no redeeming accompani- ment.
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