SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE,

The Works of Walter Savage Landor. In two volumes Moron. Memoirs Official and Personal, with Sketches of Travels among the Northern and Southern Indians; embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes along the Western Borders. By Thomas L. Id`Kenney, late Chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Author of " The History of the Indian Tribes of North America." On the Origin, History, Character, and the Wrongs and Rights of the Indians. With a Plan for the Preservation and Happiness of that persecuted Race. By Thomas L. M'Kenney. The two volumes in one Paine and Burgess, New Fork.

NATURAL HISTORY,

Observations in Natural History ; with an Introduction on Habits of Observing, as connected with the Study of that Science. Also, a Calendar of Periodic Phteno- meua in Natural History ; with Remarks on the Importance of such Registers. By the Rev. Leonard Jenyns, M.A., F.L.S., &a., Vicar of SwaffhamBalbeck, Cam- bridgeshire Van worst.

HISTORY,

The History of British India, from 1805 to 1835. By Horace Hayman Wilson, M.A.,

F.R.S.,&e., &c. Vol. II Madden and Malcolm.

THE WORKS OP WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR ARE as deserving of preservation in a collected form as those of any of his contemporaries. A vein of originality runs through all of them; and yet, perhaps, the general tone of thought is more peculiar than original. Mr. Landor belongs to a class, albeit for a good part of his life he has kept much aloof from that class. Ile is a deer that has left the herd. An Eng- lish gentleman of property and old family, trained in the favourite studies of our collegiate schools and universities, Mr. Landor has retained through life the sentiments and modes of thought developed in English society and under English teachers. He has lived much in Italy, knows the Italian character thoroughly, and judges it with a degree of fairness that to the superficially-informed mass of Englishmen is impossible ; but still he judges it by the conventional English standard of morality. With France and Germany he is not from personal acquaintance so familiar, and his judgments of society in those countries are those of a true John Bull. Mr. Landor is an accomplished classical scholar, after the old Ox- ford fashion, a master of Latin composition, and sensitively alive to the beauties of the Greek and Latin poets ; but very imperfectly if at all ac- quainted with the more philosophical views in philology and ancient his- tory, which have resulted from the labours of Continental literati, and are now beginning to strike root in England. Mr. Landor's politics are those of the Auglo-classical school : he has political antipathies and sympathies rather than political principles.

We have attempted, however imperfectly, to sketch the mould in which Mr. Landor's mind has been cast. Comparatively isolated as he appears to have lived from English society for a considerable time, he has cherished in his seclusion the impressions of early life. From them his opinions are derived; and the opinions of Mr. Landor, though frequently sound and striking, are not the most valuable things to be found in his writings. The instinctive faculty of imagination, by which be can assume the character of another, think with another's thoughts, and' speak his words, enables him at times to present historical characters" with more of truth than would be possible by the most subtile mental analysis. All his writings are imbued with a deep voluptuous sense of the beautiful in passion and in external forms. He is a natural artist, with an instinctive sense of the harmonious disposition of parts, and the limits of creative art—the point at which the true artist will atop short in his attempt to represent, and leave the rest to the associations awakened in the minds of those who read or contemplate his works. Above all, there is a healthy unsophisticated appretiation of character about Lander. The education of the class to which he belongs had at least this advan- tage that it left the mind free from philosophical sectarianism and meta- physical systems. The Anglo-classical school did not breed good rea- goners, but it left the minds of its pupils unbiassed, and open to the impressions of realities. They saw men as they were, not through the medium'of analyses of the human mind. Landor's strong passions often lead him to exaggerated expressions of his judgments of individual cha- racters, but at bottom the judgments will generally be found to be just.

The volumes into which his collected works have been gathered con- tain the " Imaginary Conversations," with numerous additions ; the " Ci- tation and Examination of William Shakspere" ; "The Pentameron " ; the "Pericles and Aspasia " ; " Geber " ; "Acts and Scenes " ; "Hel- lenies "and minor prose pieces and miscellaneous poems. The collection is complete, with the exception of Mr. Landor's Latin poems, which we grieve to miss. Modern Latin poetry may be elegant trifling, but in the hands of such a master as Landor it is very elegant. From a necessity of its nature it has the finish and fulness of epigram without its pertness. The restraint imposed upon the writer by the limited range of expressions in a foreign and dead language imposes a salutary restraint on minds in which the sense of beauty is apt to tempt them to diffuseness, while the exquisite finish of the received phrases supply vases worthy to hold the most beautiful and fragrant thoughts.

The poetry of Landor is scarcely equal to his prose. He is deficient in power. In his Latin versification this is not felt : we unconsciously make allowance for the restraint imposed upon one using a foreign idiom,— forgetting that the stiff dress which checks the free muscular play of the strong man may prop up a feebler frame. But in his English poems we feel amid much of beauty and elegance and truthful remark, a want of that impassioned imagination from which proceed vivid pictures and condensed impressive expression. This deficiency is most obvious in " Geber " and other earlier poems ; there is a dreamy vagueness about them. It is less felt in the "Acts and Scenes " ; which are in a great measure Imagi- nary Conversations versified ; but even in them, though the subjects are handled with the force and precision of a manly full-grown intellect, the absence of the true poetic trays is undeniable.

It is upon his prose writings, and among them on his " Imaginary Con- versations," that Landor's fame will rest. Indeed, his beautiful "Aspasia," his deep-felt "Citation and Examination of William Shakspere," and his subtile " Pentameron," may be called expanded, as his " Acts and Scenes"

have been called versified Imaginary Conversations. Landor is one of the very few who have rightly comprehended the nature of dialogue. All his characters have a distinct individuality : they are not the same person alternately taking opposite sides of an argument under a differ- ent name. His conversations are not a mere exchange of repartee, or logical parries and thrusts. They are discursive as real conversations. Arguments are taken up, carried a certain length, interrupted and diverted into another channel by some casual association of ideas : yet under this external appearance of want of purpose, the thought, the opinion sought to be presented under all its phases, is made to recur, as is often the case in conversation, until that object is attained. The author always contrives, without obtruding the peculiarities of his personages or the full elucidation of his thoughts, to present both exhaustively before the dialogue closes.

He is most felicitous when he takes his themes and characters from classical or old English history and literature, or from Italian literature and modern Italian society. In these subjects he is perfectly at home ; is widely read, or has been an extensive and careful observer. There is something in the sensuous imaginative character of the old Greeks or modern Italians akin to his constitutional impulses ; as there is in Roman stoicism, and the elegant Puritanism of those characters in English his- tiny with whom the intellect of Landor, like that of Southey, most sym- pathizes, accordant to the impressions left by his early moral training.

Landor's young Shakspere and his old Boccaccio are fine conceptions. It is not easy to decide between their comparative merits; but there is, perhaps, more of the fulness of experience and the soothing influence of ripe mellowed sentiment in the latter. This, by the way, is the prevail- ing characteristic of all the additions to the Imaginary Conversations. There was often an acerbity; a repulsive harshness, about those formerly published. This is characteristic of all strong constitutions, physical and mental : they shoot into angular strength ; time is required to superin- duce that grace and repose which constitute true beauty. In the later writings of Landor we meet with little or nothing of the asperities which abound in his earlier productions. Southey's beautiful verses on the Holly Tree are typical of Landor's career in this respect.

, Among the Imaginary Conversations, those which struck us as at once the finest and the most characteristic of Mr. Landor's varied excellencies are " Marcus Tullius and Quinctus Cicero," " Dante and Beatrice," " Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth," " Steele and Addison," " The Cardinal Legate Albani and Picture-dealers," " Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth," "Publius Scipio .IEmilianus, Polybius, and Pancetius," "Lucian and Timotheus," " Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa," " Landor, English Visiter, and Florentine Visiter." It is impossible to rise from the perusal of thnie pieces without a deep impression of the exquisite delicacy with which the author can catch the most transient play and refined niceties of character, of his power to elevate himself to the highest tone of imaginative moral speculation' of his exuberant play of rich humour, and of the subdued but far from callous vein of practical seepticism which maintains the balance of his mind amid the disturbing operation of such strong and varied impulses.

Mr. Moron, by his handsome and not expensive edition, has placed within general reach the writings of an author who will be more read by the next than he has been by the past generation, and whose works will be found full of that least equivocal indication of true genius, suggestive- ness. The writings of Landor influence the mind as wholes, not by detached passages. They give no electric shocks : they descend like a soft shower, which leaves the air cooler and vegetation more vigorous when it has passed. The subjoined extracts are taken pretty much at rafidom.

WHAT MAKES MARRIAGES UNHAPPY.

Let it be remembered that marriage is the metempsychosis of women; that it turns them into different creatures from what they were before. Liveliness in the girl may have been mistaken for good temper: the little pervicacity which at first is attractively provoking, at last provokes without its attractiveness: negligence of order and propriety, of duties and civilities, long endured, often deprecated, ceases to be tolerable, ,e when children grow up and are in danger of following the example. It often happens that, if a man unhappy in the married state were to disclose the manifold causes of his uneasiness, they would be found, by those who were beyond their influence, to be of such a nature as rather to excite derision than sympathy. The waters of bitterness do not fall on his head in a cataract, but through a colander; one, however, like the vases of the Danaides, perforated only for replenishment. We know scarcely the vestibule of a house of which we fancy we have penetrated into all the corners. We know not how grievously a man may have suffered, long before the calumnies of the world befell him as he reluctantly left his house-door. There are women from whom incessant tears of anger swell forth at imaginary wrongs; but of contrition for their own delin- quencies, not one.

POLITICIANS.

Scarcely ever has there been a politician, in any free state, without much false- hood and duplicity. I have named the most illustrious exceptions. Slender and irregular lines of a darker colour run along the bright blade that decides the fate of nations, and may indeed be necessary to the perfection of its temper. The great warrior has usually his darker lines of character, necessary (it may be) to constitute his greatness. No two men possess the same quantity of the same virtues, if they have many or much. We want some which do not far outstep us, and which we may follow with the hope of reaching; we want others to elevate, and others to defend ns. The order of things would be less beautiful without this variety. Without the ebb and flow of our passions, but guided and moderated by a beneficent light above, the ocean of life would stagnate; and zeal, devotion, elo- quence, would become dead carcasses, collapsing and wasting on unprofitable sands. The vices of some men cause the virtues of others, as corruption is the parent of fertility.

PETERBOROUGH AND LUDLOW E.7 WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

I was struck by the manly, calm, unassuming, military air, of a robust and fresb-coloured man, about seventy years of age, who stood before Inc with his eyes fixed downward on one spot. Being neither very shy, nor more disposed to balk my curiosity than my other propensities, I bowed to him respectfully, and ex- pressed my persuasion that whoever was interred there, merited the sympathies of the nation.

" Young gentleman," answered he mildly, " you do not know, apparently, whose bones have lain here?

" Certainly not, sir," I replied; " but probably many men's in many ages: for, whatever may be the respect which, in this place above others, is paid to the de- enied, it will not insure to their tones an undisturbed and permanent station." " If it could," replied he, " surely those of the most prudent, humane, intelli- gent commander that ever led Englishmen to victory, would not have been dii- mterred."

" The felonious Stuarts and their insatiable jackalls," cried I " prowled after rotten carcasses, and had more stomach to lap congealed blood than to fight for fresher. And there are sycophants yet among us who would excite our com- miseration for their chastisement. The same fellows, next week, will be jest as loyal and religious in extolling the powers that be." He seemed neither to notice my expressions nor to partake in my emotion; bat, laying his hand gently on my shoulder, said, gravely and tenderly, " Even generous enthusiasm leaves men sometimes ungenerous. We have removed the evil; let us pardon and forget it. Let us imitate, as far as we can, him whom we ought rather to think on than on the Stuarts. We are treading the ground that covered Blake; the man of men."

Roused to higher enthusiasm by his calmness than I could have been by his eloquence, if he had any, I seized him by thehand, and swore by God the eulogy was merited and true.

Penn. And God will forgive thee; for though thou didst (as many wise men will tell thee) take his name in vain, never was it taken in adjuration less in vain than then. Some Admirals have maintained the glory of England; some have in- creased It: he found it lower than that of Holland, of Spain, or even of France, and raised it by his genius and valour far above them all. The hope is more rea- sonable that we may never want such men again than that we shall ever see them. Peterborough. Hold l friend William I With your leave, I will entertain both hopes alike; little as is the probability that, if any Admiral shall equal him in the union of nautical skill and moral bravery, the same person will be equally grave, disinterested, dispassionate, humble, and tender-hearted. I agree with you that no fighting man was ever at once so great and so good a man as Blake: and since History does not inform us that there has been, Reason does not encourage us to believe that there will be at any time hereafter: but Hope may whisper when these are silent. In all ages, party and self are the prime movers of human action, and never were they more busy. than in the whole of his lifetime. Firm as he was in the minciplesof Republicanism, he belonged to no party, and was as far removed from selfishness as from faction. He declined the honours of the state, he avoided the acclaim of popularity, he won battles against calculation, he took treasures above it, he lived frugally, he died poor. Ludlow was moved by the earnestness of my language and demeanour, and said gracefully, " Sir, I perceive you are a military man: so was I, while I had any existence as an Englishman.

" How ! Sir!" exclaimed I.

" They under these stones," continued he, " inherit their place of rest: I coma i

to seek it; and if rumours are to be trusted, I may fail to find it. Again I bead' my beloved country in the enjoyment of peace and freedom. Much of my propatT, most of my days, all of my thoughts, designs, and labours, have been devoted to the consummation of this one event. How gladly have I bestowed them! how gladly shall I bestow the remainder I To see the country :I have served by my life and writings, is an ample recompense for any service I could render her, and almost comforts me under the privation of friends, associates, and comrades, swept away by the storm that split our island and convulsed all Europe." An old beadle at this moment twitched me by the skirt of my coat, and drew me aside. " Have a care," said he, in a tremulous voice; " that is old Ludlow. The Tories would pink him, and the Whigs poison him."

" Faith! honest friend," said I, " you describe the two parties better than any

one in the land." Then, turning to the General, I told him he had a right to re- prove my forwardness; and in order that be might know. on what person the re- proof should fall, I gave him my name. He said many kind things, and addbd some compliments. I regretted that he was not received in the country with pub- lic honours, as having been commander-in-chief, and against a family then ex- cluded by a majority of the nation, and now expelled by the whole. My indig- nation burst out against that wrangler and robber Seymour, whoa few days after- ward drove him from the country, lest his virtues should be acknowledged, his sufferings pitied, his losses compensated, and his estates restored. •

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON AND MR ROBERT INGLDI.

Inglis. God has, from the beginning, set his face against idolatry. Duke. I don't wonder. I am persuaded you are correct in your statement, Sir Robert Inglis. Inglis. He reproved it, in his wrath, as one among the most crying sins of the Jews.

Duke. They have a good many of that description: but they must have been fine soldiers formerly. Do you think, Sir Robert Inglis, they are likely, at last, to get into the Houses of Parliament?

Inglis. God forbid!

Duke. For my own part, I have no voice on the occasion. Other rich folks, quite as crying, and craving, and importunate, lawyers more especially, Crowd both yours and ours. But I think a sprinkling of Jews might help you pro. digiously just at present; for, by what I hear about them, there are nowhere such stiff sticklers against idolatry, at the present day, as those gentlemen. • • • * sticklers • * I tell you from my own knowledge, that Ellenborough is only a coxcomb. Respect him, for he is the greatest in the world; and the head of every profession should be respected. What would you have? whom would you have? You are an aristocrat; you have your title, and, no doubt, your landed estate. Would you send to govern India, as was done formerly, such men as Clive and Hastings? They could conquer and govern empires: what then?—could they keep Ministers and the friends of Ministers in their places? No such thing. Therefore, my good worthy Sir Robert Inglis, do not let us talk any more nonsensee together. Our time is valuable; we have not too much left. Inglis. Whatever, by God's Providence, we may still look forward to, let us de- vote to his service, repressing to the utmost of our power all attempts to aid or comfort a false and most impure religion. Duke. A bargain ! we will; that is, you and L Let us enter into a compact, this very hour, never to worship the Lingam in word or deed. We will neither bow down to it nor worship it, nor do anything in word or deed which may point to such a conclusion. I promise, furthermore, to use all my interest with her Ma- jesty's Ministers, that they will immediately send a despatch to Lord Ellenborough, ordering him not to set up the gates again in a temple which has ceased to exist for many centuries; but that, as the gates have been carried about a thousand miles, and as we have lost about as many men (to say nothing of field-pieces). in conveying them back, his Excellency do issue another proclamation, empowering six of the Generals and six of the Supreme Council, to leave India forthwith, bear- ing with them, to show the devotion both of M.thometans and Hindoos to her Ma- Mjesty, a tooth-pick-case and twelve tooth-picks, made therefrom, for the use of her Majesty and her successors. • • • Inglis. I would only beg of your Grace that you prevail on Ministers to hesitate before— Duke. I never tell any man to hesitate. Right or wrong, to hesitate is im- becility. How the deuce can a man fall while he is going on? If Peel stops suddenly, the Whigs will ran in and cut his brush off. Inglis. God forbid! Duke. They don't mind what God forbids, not they. A man is never quag- mired till he stops; and the rider who looks back has never a firm seat. We must cast our eyes not at all behind nor too much before, but steadily just where we are. Politicians are neither lovers nor penitents. I see, Sir Robert Inglis, you are in haste. I lay before Peel, and the rest of them, all your sug- gestions. In the mean time, be a little patient; Juggemauth is not coming down St. James's Street.