MAGAZINES FOR JANUARY.
Frascr's Magazine begins the year with a well-furnished number, in which there arc two articles of unusual interest. These are, the second part of Mr. Peacock's "Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley," and Major Noel's "Conversations with Prince Metternich." The most striking and un- expected feature of Mr. Peacock's paper is its contradiction of Lady Shelley respecting the facts of Shelley's separation from his first wife. He denies that it took place by mutual consent, or that "estrangements which had been slowly growing came to a crisis towards the close of 1813," as alleged in the Shelley Nemorials; and he substantiates his de- nial by proofs positive and negative. Shelley's Scotch marriage took place in 1811, and the Parish Register of St. George's, Hanover Square, shows that in March, 1814, he married Harriet a second time. From this fact, Mr. Peacock argues that there could have been no such es- trangement as Lady Shelley speaks of, for had they existed divorce would have been better for both parties, and the dissolution of the first marriage could have been easily obtained in Scotland.
"There was no estrangement, no shadow of a thought of separation, till Shelley became acquainted, not long after the second marriage, with the lady who was subsequently his second wife. The separation did not take place by mutual consent. I cannot think that Shelley ever so represented it. He never did so to me : and the account which Harriet herself gave me of the entire proceeding was decidedly contradictory of any such supposi- tion. He might well have said, after first seeing Mary Wollstonecraft God-
win, vidi ! ut peril!' Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrol- lable passion, that that under which I found him labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in London. Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whotn he was not then separated, and Ins new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind 'suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.' His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, 'I never part from this.' He added : 'I am always repeating to myself your lines from Sophocles Man's happiest lot is not to be :
And when we tread life's thorny steep, Most blest are they, who earliest free. Descend to death's eternal sleep."'
Again, he said more calmly, Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one wto can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither.' I said, It always appeared to me that you were very fond of Harriet.' Without affirming or denying this, he answered, 'But you did not know how I hated her sister.' The term 'noble animal' he applied to his wife, in conversa- tion with another friend now living, intimating that the nobleness which he thus ascribed to her would induce her to acquiesce in the inevitable transfer of his affections to their new shrine. She did not so acquiesce, and he cut the Gordian knot of the difficulty by leaving England with Miss Godwin on the 28th of July, 1814."
Phrenology was the leading topic of conversation between Prince Met- ternich and Major Noel, their common interest in Gall's system having occasioned the Prince to intimate in the winter of 1834 his wish to see the Major at the Princess's soirees. The Prince had been one of the first to ap- preciate Gall's discoveries and to encourage him to pursue his investigations, the value of which he was the better able to understand, having himself studied every branch of science necessary to qualify him to become a medical man. From phrenology the conversations branched off into many other topics, the discussion of which, noted down night by night by the guest, afforded a considerable range of insight into the nature and habits of the host's mind. Politics were occasionally touched on, and once Major Noel ventured to express his surprise that in Vienna, with its numerous churches, its archbishop and large body of clergy, things should be as bad as the Prince admitted them to be.
"His Highness smiled at this remark, and gave me to understand that he thought poor human nature so very bad that, but for the priests and police arrangements, nothing but anarchy would prevail. Every virtuous and enlightened man, he further said, was obliged to draw up laws for himself, according to which he squared his conduct. Every thinking being soon found out that what is called liberty is in reality the indulgence of our pro- pensities, which leads in the end to misery and ruin. It was only the vicious, or dolts and fools, who objected to wise laws and social arrangements for the guidance and control of the mass, who were led away by empty words and sounds, and exercised their lungs by crying out for liberty. "I had never before heard the Prince speak with so much earnestness as on the foregoing topics. There was a degree of bitterness, and scorn too,
in his expression and in the tone of his voice when speaking of reformers and the mass of humanity, which showed me too plainly his low estimate of his fellow-creatures, and the hopelessness of any efforts on my part to modify his political principles. I may here mention, however, that on this and other occasions, he allowed me to dissent from his views, and that his man- ners were invariably kind and free from dogmatical pretension. I came to the conclusion that his self-love and consciousness of power over his fellow- creatures on the one hand, and his education under a regime of bigotry and absolutism, together with his experience of the vices and venality of men on the other, had caused him to under-estimate the capacity of man to make progress in virtue and civilization. I became also gradually convinced that Fnne.e Metternich acted upon principles which he believed to be sound, and that there was nothing in his character at all allied to that of a hypocrite or cruel dot. He was fond of using analogies in his arguments, which I did not think always to the point ; and altogether his intellect seemed to me more remarkable for the power to master details, and for acuteness in dealing with them, than for originality oryrofundity of judgment. One key to his power was evidently to be found in his great self-respect and self- control, and in the absence of those passions which so often detract from the influence of genius." What Major Noel describes from his own observation possesses strong claims upon the confidence of his readers. It is only when he speaks upon the authority of others that we find him tripping. Speaking of the year 1848, he says— "I cannot here refrain from mentioning a circumstance which would seem to show that at this period of his life the Prince's political vision had become somewhat obscured. It had long been his custom to hold a levee on each New Year's Day, when he received the dignitaries of State, and such of the Austrian diplomatists as happened to be in Vieima, and on these occasions he in a speech surveyed itillineitory of the past year and cast the horoscope of the coming one. The Prince had never been 'known to !Peak so cheerfully of the immediate future as on New Year's Day, 1848. He could not see, he said, a single cloud to obscure the political horizon. I have this front the best authcalty. Before two months had passed over, as is well known, he had to fly for his life. Lesser men in Austria had long felt the ground burning under their feet." " Soiled Metternich !" says a writer in the Globe, quoting in support of his assertion the following extract from the Politische .Briefe of the Prussian diplomatist, Von L sedom- " I was, as you know, at Vienna in the autumn of 1847, on account of a particular incident in the affairs of Italy. . . . The Prince would express no positive opinion as to the future. r am,' he said, no prophet, and I do not know wb a will come to pass, but I am an old physician, and can dis- tinguish between transient and mortal maladies. We are now labouring under the latter. We stand fast here as long as we can, but I despair of the issue.'
"It is within our own knowledge," oureontemporary adds, "that Prince Mettersich, when in England in 1848, expressed his persuasion that the Austrian Government would be again absolute within a twelvemonth. Neither before therefore, nor after the sudden explosion which cast him on our shores' did the veteran statesman betray the want of foresight supposed of him by Major Noel." Rumour attributes to Sir Bulwer Lytton a poem, called "St. Stephen's," the first part of which appears in this month's Blackwood. Its subject is Parliamentary oratory from its origin to our own times, avhich will be illustrated by succinct sketches of the men most distin- guished in that line, the list beginning with Eliot, and closing with the late Sir Robert Peel. The portrait of Swift will serve as an example of the style and metre.
"Note, through the levee with a careless stride,
Parting the throng as some tough keel the tide, With soldier bearing, yet in priestly guise, With black brows knitted over azure eyes With lips that kindle from the gravest there, The boisterous laughter which they scorn to share, The stern, sad man who made the world so gay, Swift comes—half-Rousseau and half-Rabelais. Half-Rousseau ?—yes ' • for while we gaze on both, Hating we pity, and admiring loathe ; With varying fever-fits now glow, now freeze, And shuddering ask, Which genius, which disease ? ' Half-Rabelais ?—yes ; on crozier and on crown Hanging wild fool-bells, jingling reverence down ; Profaning, levelling, yet illumining earth, Vile and sublime the demagogue of mirth ; Power, wisdom, sublime, trampled, smeared, and spurned : What rests to admire ?—the strength that overturned ! Genius permits no mortal to debase
By his own height the stature of his race ; The crowds beneath if he with scorn surveys, He dwarfs them not ; he does but lift their gaze."
Throug,hout the poem, as in this passage' the structure of the verse and the distribution of the pauses are after Pope's model. Mr. Ruskin's works in general are very roughly handled in an article apropos of his "Elements of Drawing," and he is rated with especial severity for a passage "intended to awaken in the minds of his hearers a recollection of the charges once so rife against Nelson, and stow so fully proved to be groundless with regard to the execution of Caracciolo." May we suggest that the writer of this statement should devote a special paper to the establishment of a fact which all Englishmen would so gladly be- lieve if they could. He goes on to say that "since Sir Harris Nicholas's publication of the Nelson Despatches, we should have supposed it to be impossible for any one honestly to repeat those slanders." He is wrong in that supposition ; the " slanders " are still regarded by many as in- disputable truths, among others by the editor of Bose's Diaries and Cor- respondence. We are indebted no doubt to that wicked wit, the author of Firtailian, for "The Last French Hero "—an exquisite carioature of the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Fils, over which we have laughed im- moderately. Reminding our readers of what we said last week, in our review of The Arctic Voyage of the Fox, on the dilemma in which Sir Charles Wood and his colleagues at the Imiralty placed themselves by their award of the Parliamentary grant of 10,000/. to Dr. Rae, we commend to their notice the following lines from Blackwood's review of Captain M'Cliatock's book : "The Sovereign, whose Navy Captain Welintock adorns, has gracefully added to his laurels, by granting him sea-time forevery day he commanded the Fox, as if it bad been one of her own war-ships—an act of grace and courtesy/ only conceded on rare and extraordinary occasions; and the Lords Comnus- sioners of the Admiralty, in the official letter informing the gallant offioer of this Royal set of approbation, gracefully add, that it was in 4 considera- tion of the important services performed by you, in bringing home the only authentic intelligence of the death of Sir John Franklin, and of the fate of the crews of the Erebus and Terror '—an official acknowledgment which we have reason to know gives the Captain and officers of the Fox a legal claim upon a very handsome Parliamentary reward of 10,0001."
That is to say, the present Board of Admiralty has virtually declared that its predecessors acted illegally in awarding the 10,000/. to Dr. Rae. Have they any moral claim to an Act of Indemnity ?
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