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1822.]

PROSE FICTION.

151

Editor. I think the good novels, which are published, come in place of new dramas. Besides, they are better fitted for the present state of public taste. The public are merely capable of strong sensations, but of nothing which requires knowledge, taste, or judgment. A certain ideal dignity of style, and regularity of arrangement, must be required for a drama, before it can deserve the name of a composition. But what sense have the common herd of barbarians of composition, or order, or any thing else of that kind?

Odoherty. But there is also the more loose and popular drama, which is only a novel without the narrative parts.

Editor. Yes, the acting is the chief difference. But I think the novel has the advantage in being without the acting, for its power over the feelings is more undisturbed and entire, and the imagination of the reader blends the whole into a harmony which is not found on the stage. I think those who read novels need not go to the theatre, for they are in general beforehand with the whole progress of the story.

Odoherty. This is true to a certain extent. But novels can never carry away from the theatre those things which are peculiarly its own; that is to say, the powers of expression in the acting, the eloquence of declamation, music, buffoonery, the splendor of painted decorations, &c.

Editor. You are perfectly right. Novels may carry away sympathy, plot, invention, distress, catastrophe, and everything-(Vide Blair.) Odoherty. Do you mean Dr. Blair, or Adam Blair?

Editor. The latter. I say the novels may carry away all these things, but the theatre must still be strong in its power of affecting the senses. This is its peculiar dominion. Yet our populace do not much seek after what strikes and pleases the senses; for the elegances of sight and hearing require a sort of abstract taste which they do not seem to have. Any thing which is not an appeal through sympathy to some of their vulgar personal feelings, appears to them uninteresting and unmeaning.

Odoherty. They think it has no reference to meum and tuum.

Editor. It probably would not be easy to find a people more lamentably deficient in all those liberal and general feelings which partake of the quality of taste.

Odoherty. You sink me into despair. I think I must betake myself to my old and favorite study of theological controversy, and furnish a reply to Coplestone. I perceive that Lord Byron, in his Mystery of Cain, tends very much to go off into the same disputes.

Editor. A skeptically disputatious turn of mind, appears a good deal here and there in his poetry.

Odoherty. I suppose you think Sardanapalus the best Tragedy he has written.*

* One scene in Sardanapalus is worth nearly all, (from its intensity of regretful tenderness,

Editor. Yes. The Foscari is interesting to read, but rather painful and disagreeable in the subject. Besides, the dialogue is too much in the short and pointed manner of Alfieri. When a play is not meant to be acted, there is no necessity for its having that hurry in the action and speeches, which excludes wandering strains of poetical beauty, or reflection and thought, nor should it want the advantages of rhyme. The Faustus of Goethe seems to be the best specimen of the kind of plan fit for a poem of this kind not meant to be acted.

Odoherty. Pindarum quisquis.

Editor. Byron's Manfred is certainly but an Icarian flutter in comparison; his Sardanapalus is better composed, and more original. Odoherty. How do you like Nimrod and Semiramis?

Editor. That dream is a very frightful one, and I admire the conception of Nimrod.*

Odoherty. You know that I am not subject to nocturnal terrors, even after the heaviest supper; but I acknowledge that the ancestors of Sardanapalus almost made my hair stand on end; and I have some intention of introducing the ghost of Fingal in my "Black Revenge." The superstitious vein has not lately been waked with much success. I slight the conception of Norna in relation to fear. The scorpion lash, which Mr. David Lindsay applied to the tyrant Firaoun, is not at all formidable to the reader, but there is solemnity and sentiment in the conception of the people being called away one by one from the festival, till he is left alone. That same piece of the Deluge would be very good, if it were not sometimes like music, which aims rather at loudness than harmony or expression. most elegant and well composed piece in Lindsay's book is the Destiny of Cain.

Editor. How do you like the Nereid's love?

The

Odoherty. It is vastly pretty, but too profuse in images drawn from mythology. However, there are many fables of the ancients on which poems might be successfully made even in modern times, and according to modern feeling, if the meaning of the fables were deeply enough studied. It does not necessarily follow that all mythological poems should be written in imitation of the manner of the ancients, and much less in the pretty style of Ovid, and those moderns who have adopted the same taste.

Odoherty. You do not think Mr. Lindsay's Nereid French?

Editor. By no means. It is free from any fault of that kind. In

"the late remorse of love,") that modern playwrights have written. This is the hero's parting with his "gentle, wronged Zarina.”—M.

The description of Nimrod is a picture:

"The features were a giant's, and the eye

Was still, yet lighted; his long locks curl'd down
On his vast bust, whence a huge quiver rose,
With shaft-heads feather'd from the eagle's wing,
That peep'd up bristling thro' his serpent hair.-M.

1819.]

66

THE IRISHMAN!"

153

some of Wordsworth's later poems, there appears something like a reviving imagination for those fine old conceptions, which have been and always will be.

An age hath been, when earth was proud,

Of lustre too intense

To be sustain'd: and mortals bow'd
The front in self-defence.

Who, then, if Dian's crescent gleam'd,
Or Cupid's sparkling arrow stream'd,
While on the wing the urchin play'd,
Could fearlessly approach the shade?
Enough for one soft vernal day,
If I, a bard of ebbing time,
And nurtur'd in a fickle clime,
May haunt this horned bay;
Whose am'rous water multiplies
The flitting halcyon's vivid dyes,

And smooths its liquid breast to show

These swan-like specks of mountain snow,

White, as the pair that slid along the plains

Of heaven, while Venus held the reins.

Odoherty. Beautifully recited; and now touch the bell again, for we're getting prosy.

Editor. Positively Ensign, we must rise.

Odoherty. Having now relinquished the army, I rise by sitting still, and applying either to study, or—will you ring?

Editor. Tis time to be going, I believe. I see the daylight peeping down the chimney. But sing one good song more, Odoherty, and so wind up the evening.

Odoherty. (Sings.)

ARIA-With boisterous expression.

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His face was no ways beautiful,

For with small-pox 'twas scarr'd across ;
And the shoulders of the ugly dog

Were almost doubled a yard across.

O, the lump of an Irishman,

The whisky-devouring Irishman

The great he-rogue, with his wonderful brogue, the fighting, rioting, Irishman.

3.

One of his eyes was bottle-green,

And the other eye was out, my dear;

And the calves of his wicked-looking legs

Where more than two feet about, my dear,

O, the great big Irishman,

The rattling, battling Irishman

The stamping, ramping, swaggering, staggering, leathering swash of an Irishman.

4.

He took so much of Lundy-Foot,

That he used to snort and snuffle-0;
And in shape and size, the fellow's neck,
Was as bad as the neck of a buffalo.
O, the horrible Irishman,

The thundering, blundering Irishman

The slashing, dashing, smashing, lashing, thrashing, hashing Irishman.

5.

His name was a terrible name, indeed,

Being Timothy Thady Mulligan;

And whenever he emptied his tumbler of punch,

He'd not rest till he filled it full again.

The boozing, bruising Irishman,

The 'toxicated Irishman

The whisky, frisky, rummy, gummy, brandy, no dandy Irishman.

6.

This was the lad the lady loved,

Like all the girls of quality;

And he broke the skulls of the men of Leith,

Just by the way of jollity.

O, the leathering Irishman,

The barbarous, savage Irishman—

The hearts of the maids, and the gentlemen's heads, were bother'd,

I'm sure, by this Irishman.*

I think I hear the rattles, Christopher. By Saint Patrick, there's a row in the street! Come along, old one! Up with your crutch!

* This song was written by Dr. Maginn.-M.

(Exeunt AMBO.)

NO. II. APRIL, 1822.

SCENE.—The little wainscotted room behind—a good fire-a table covered with books and papers, decanters and glasses. TIME-Nine o'clock in the evening :—a high wind without.

:

Present-Mr. CHRISTOPHER NORTH, and Mr. BULLER of Brasennose (seated in arm-chairs at the opposite sides of the fire-place.)

Mr. North. So-Mr. Buller, you've been reading Henry Mackenzie's Life of John Home.* What say you to the book? I am sure your chief objection is, that it is too short by half.

Mr. Buller. It is; for, to tell you the truth, I know very little about the characters with whom Mr. Mackenzie seems to take it for granted that every body is as familiar as himself. Do you remember John Home?

North. Perfectly. I remember going out to his farm-house, in East Lothian, and spending two delightful days with him there, so far back as the year seventy-seven. I was then a very stripling, but I can recall a great deal of what he said quite distinctly. After he came to live in Edinburgh, I was not much in Scotland; but I once called upon him, and drank tea with him here, I think about 1807 or 1808-very shortly before his death. He was, indeed, a fine highlyfinished gentleman-and bright to the last.

Buller. What sort of looking man was he?

North. A fine, thinking face-extremely handsome he had been in his youth-a dark-gray eye, full of thought, and, at the same time, full of fire his hair highly curled and powdered-a rich robe-dechambre-pale green, if I recollect, like one John Kemble used to wear-a scarlet waistcoat-a very striking figure, I assure you.

Buller. He had been a clergyman in his early life!

North. Yes, and, you know, left the kirk in consequence of a foolish outcry they were making about his Douglas. I remember him sitting in their General Assembly, however, as an elder-and once dressed in scarlet; for he had a commission in a fencible regiment.

* In 1822, when his Life of John Home was published, Henry Mackenzie was seventy-five years old. But his reminiscences of the illustrious men whom he had long survived, were vivid to the last, and extremely graphic. When he died, in 1831, he was eighty-five years old.-M.

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