Hurra! old blade, we ride apace We have cut them off with a shilling; now summon them all to surrender. "Gentlemen, you are taken prisoners, dismount and pile arms." (Tims would fain treat upon terms)"No-surrender at discretion, on pain of instant death !"-" That we will never do wile our orses can obble." Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit singula campum.-VIRGIL. At that moment the enemy's magazine blew up; the route became general; and being now somewhat thirsty with my oration, I beg leave to sit down, with the most perfect contempt for the Reverend Edward Irving, and admiration of Patrick Robertson. Mr Ambrose, a pot of porter-From the fresh tap, sir" swifter than meditation on the wings of love." THE GENERAL QUESTION, No. II., WILL BE PUBLISHED ON THE FIRST of NOVEMBER. BITS. BY THE DIRECTOR-GENERAL. PAINTERS seem to infest periodical literature at present, and the public is bored with long accounts of picturegalleries, which it may be very pleasant and delightful to visit, but rather a dry lounge to read about, especially to those who have never been there. Now, here are two children's books full of pictures, one entitled "Scenes in Africa," and the other "Scenes in England," by the Rev. Isaac Taylor. Let us see if the pictures in them will not describe just as well as those in the gallery at Petworth. No. 14. Druidical Rocking Stones. -A ghastly light, that seems to come neither from heaven, earth, nor hell, flickers over a pile of loose hanging rocks, that might have been flung into their present form in the battle of the Titans. The pile is crested by a grotesque and grim block of granite, in the shape of a cocked hat, but without a feather-for all is bare, blasted, and herbless. "Not even a vernal bee is heard to murmur there." Behind is the sullen sea-without a sail-not a flying fish skims its surface. There is a mortal deadness-a putrefaction in spite of salt-a depth beyond reach of plummet-" of the old sea a reverential fear" -a something profounder than the ocean of Byron or Barry Cornwall. Was there ever such a sea -such a sky-such an earth! Terrific union of the three kingdoms of the universe! A large flat stone is lying on the foreground-the stone of sacrifice-incarnadined and encrusted with the blood of victims, ghastly as a cloud in a stormy sunset-a gore-stone-a blood-petrifaction-a hebetated horror -a piece of the masonry of murder a chip of the old block on which Abel fell, "Beneath the spirit of the first-born Cain." What a knife! tempered in Tartarus He hafted in hell-steeped in Styxwhetted on the stony heart of despair. And there is the victim-cowed, convulsed, contracted into a shivering and shuddering lump of inanition. sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches nothing, yet all things-a death-in-life! a kneeling swoon! a conscious curse! a ghost at the hither end of the dark passage of eternity! a spectre that has swindled the swathing-sheet of its horror, and antedated the moment of its the grave more horrible than the botown doom, rendering the brink of tom, and shewing the triumph of the bloodless living carcase, in the struggle for mastery of hideousness over the worm-eaten bones and fleshless stink of a buried anatomy! There stands the Druid, with a beard like a comet-Saturn seems, in comparison, a smooth-chinned younker. Time flows down the "hoar antiquity," as if it were a river. What a cataract of old old hair! A silent Niagara, streaming for ever and ever from that broad, still, deep lake-his face! The Misletoe! -but it morning, noon, and night, "from go, go to the picture-gaze upon morn to dewy eve;" dream of it-ay, dream of it, if you dare; and then you will be as wise as I am-and that's "stark nought;" for the world is revolving on its own axis, and "They that creep and they that fly Just end where they began." No. 78. Skiddaw. The power of this picture cannot be fully felt under but never on a level-clouds, rack, mist! the only perpetual motion, the eternal turmoil, the commonwealth of chaos, where Ruin has himself been dethroned, and brought to the block by chimeras, his subjects; no prospect for the legitimates: here a restoration could not be. This is your true Unholy Alliance. Talk of divine right here, and a blast from the dreadful NOWHERE sends you howling. "Oh! 'tis a passionate work!" Yonder eagle is like a condor-a roc-for all is mighty, monstrous, vast, immeasurable, infinite, eternal. The ark might rest between the wings of the bird, safe as on Mount Ararat. As he sails on the roaring ocean of heaven, he makes the largest ship in the Bri PRIZE DISSERTATION ON WE are right simple people, and liable to be imposed upon, but we hope to get wiser as we grow older, and escape being quizzed during the closing years of life. If this humbug about Homer be intended seriously, and if the Royal Society of Literature did award to the author his Majesty's premium of one hundred guineas, then we just venture to hint, with all the humility in the world, that a set of more egregious idiots are not at present extant in the dominions of our gracious Sovereign George the King, than the highly respectable gentlemen whose names we some time ago read in the newspapers as forming the Council, and so forth, of the Society. The deplorable dunce of the Dissertation deserved to be set in a corner with a paper cap on his numskull, instead of tish navy contemptible as a cock-boat dredging for oysters. He is not a bird of prey-not he indeed-only a bird of flight. There he goes-sugh-sugh sugh-ventilating the universe, winnowing space, and driving on before his wings the current of time into the frozen sea of eternity. My friend Daw painted a picture, where an eagle was carrying off a child, and its mother scaling the cliff to storm his eyry. Why, this here eagle would, at "one fell swoop," brush down a regiment of cavalry, like nine-pins; nor so much as feel the standard of England among his talons. Ay, such a bird does indeed dignify ornithology. But were he shot by heaven's artillery-struck down by the thunder-stone-shivered by the forked lightning-where is the man to stuff him? where the glass-case big enough to hold him? and in what museum could the "secular bird of ages" be entombed? * Scenes in Africa.-No. 26. MumboJumbo. No. 59. Alligator swallowing a Buffalo. The History of African Superstition is-(We beg your pardon, Pygmalion-but we can stand this no longer.) THE AGE OF HOMER, &c.* being presented with a hundred gold guineas. Why, a hundred gold guineas will purchase him a house in Grub-Street, with all the old furniture, a wife, donkey-cart and donkey, and several complete suits of "old cloes." He is absolutely set up in life for all the rest of his days, and unless, in the pride of wayward genius, he launch out into all manner of extravagance, he will never be able to run through his fortune. How unequally are the good things in this world distributed! Here is one of the weakest and most unproductive of mankind suddenly raised to affluence by a single Essay; and yet we remember seeing a great agriculturist, at a public meeting, rewarda man and his wife with thirty shillings, for having respectably brought up, without parish assistance, eleven A Dissertation on the Age of Homer, his Writings and Genius; and on the State of Religion, Society, Learning, and the Arts, during that period. Being the Prize Question proposed by the Royal Society of Literature, for his Majesty's Premium of One Hundred Guineas, for the best Dissertation on the above Subject. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker. 1823. children. Why, a hundred guineas, in the hands of a man of judgment, would purchase a sufficient quantity of pickled pork to feed and fatten the families of a hundred paupers for a whole Anno Domini. A hundred guineas is as much as was ever paid for any one single article in Blackwood's Magazine. It is seldom that more than a reward of hundred guineas is offered for the apprehension of a murderer. Give us a hundred guineas, and we will publish the name of the writer of the Chaldee MS. The ninny in hand holds Homer and Moses to be one flesh. Part of his proof may be given. "One of the great beauties ascribed to the Homer by his critics and historians, is, the keeping, or classical exactness of his descriptions of the customs supposed to be in use at the epoch of the Trojan war. I would ask those critics or historians from whence could they judge of his being correct, unless they drew their knowledge of his correctness from the writings of Moses, there being no heathen author anterior to the Homer: and the earliest after him is Herodotus, of whom Wakefield says, We find from Herodotus, the first Greek historian, that no more was known of this Homer or Ho merus, nor so much in his day, which might be (2-3-4-500) years after the event, as in our own.' "I now select a passage from Rollin's Ancient History, which I think applicable to this subject. When Esdras was in power, as his chief view was to restore religion to its ancient purity, he disposed the books of Scripture into their proper order, revised them all very carefully, and collected the incidents relating to the people of God in ancient times, in order to compose out of them the two books of Chronicles, to which he added the history of his own times, which was finished by Nehemiah. It is their books which end the long history which Moses had begun, and which the writers who came after them continued in a direct series, till the repairing of Jerusalem. The rest of the sacred History is not written in that uninterrupted order. Whilst Esdras and Nehemiah were compiling the latter part of that great work, Herodotus, whom profane authors call the father of history, began to write. Thus, we find that the latest authors of the books of Scripture flourished about the same time with the first authors of the Grecian history; and when it began, that of God's people, to compute only from Abraham, included already fifteen centuries. Herodotus made no mention of the Jews in his history; for the Greeks desired to be informed of such nations only as were famous for their wars, their commerce, and grandeur, so that as Judea was then but just rising from its ruins, it did not excite the attention of that people.' infer that the Greeks could not at that "From this passage in Rollin, I would period relate anything new of the Jews, as they would well know that under their Odyssey, they possessed a most surpriown wonderful allegories, the Iliad and sing antitype of Jewish history and customs; in fact, they seem to have compiled a complete heathen Scripture (if I may be allowed the term) out of the sacred inspired writings; and the very silence of Herodotus upon the Jewish history confirms me in my opinion. "Now, as it is very evident the Greeks either could not or would not elucidate their poet and his works, how can a modern critic do it by referring to them? It is impossible! I therefore repeat again, there is no prototype for those Grecian poems but the sacred writings; and it will be most flattering to the Author of this Essay, if, at any subsequent period, the hypothesis advanced in it should be found worthy of further investigation." Many other circumstances, however, shew Homer to have been the Jewish lawgiver. Jacob's daughter, Dinah, was carried off while he was sojourning in Shalem in the land of Canaan ; and Helen was carried off by Theseus. Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brothers, were particularly active in the war against Hamor and Shechem, and Castor and Pollux rescued their sister from Theseus and his party, as is well known to most classical Cockneys. The next prominent event in the Iliad is the anger of Achilles, and his withdrawing himself from the Grecian army. In like manner, David withdrew from the army and the presence of Saul. "I shall not touch upon his justifiable provocation, that is not needful here; but I beg to observe, David had his followers, who are thus described :— "And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him, and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.' "I do not think, when it is considered of what David's followers were composed, that it derogates from their respectability to say they have a parody in the myrmi- "Achilles speeds from tent to tent, and warms Grim as voracious wolves that seek the springs, "I will instance another point of resemblance in the characters of David and Achilles. "It appears derogatory to the spirited high-wrought character of Achilles, that he should be found by the ambassadors of Agamemnon playing the harp; David played the harp-there is the coincidence; but what, in the inspired royal Psalmist, strikes as sublime, in the heathen general appears trivial and effeminate. "Paris touching the lyre, is classical, as being the Grecian instrument; but Achilles at the harp can only be account ed for as a copy of David. filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning, to work in all works of brass.' There also is the King of Tyre's letter to Solomon, wherein he particularizes that 'Hiram was skilful to work in gold and in silver, in brass, in iron,' &c. The molten sea is described to be round; the words are, 'round all about.' Farther, it stood upon twelve oxen, three looking towards the north, three towards the west, three towards the south, and three towards the east.' Achilles's shield is described round, supposed to represent the world; it is surmounted with twelve compartments, representing cities in different situations of civilization—some in peace, others in war. "The description of those twelve cities appear to me to bear strong resemblance to various situations the twelve tribes of Israel were in during their progress to the promised land. I will select such as appear most prominent. In the third compartment of the shield, mention is made of two judges, and two talents of gold; those two judges, or elders, I think may be taken for Moses and Aaron, and the two talents of gold is certainly applicable to the Israelites; as rating gold by talents was peculiar to them. The fourth and fifth compartments are very descriptive of the advance of the Israelites; more particularly the fifth, in which the account of the two spies bears strongly upon the description of the two spies sent out by Joshua, before the taking of Jericho. If we select the eighth compartment, we there We can afford, as Mr Jeffrey says, his reapers; and in the ninth, the vintage, find a perfect representation of Boaz and one other quotation. "The horses of the heroes of the Iliad are variously described: Achilles's, as being fleet as the winds; but Job's warhorse, which is the poetry of Moses, is certainly superior. Achilles's horse Xanthus spoke; Balaam's ass spoke, and no doubt was its prototype." "The second subject is the classing of the army and ships; in the Iliad it is quite in the style of the counting over the twelve tribes of Israel. And if I inquire no further than the song of Deborah, the words are Why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea-shore.' In this beautiful song of Deborah's, I also find allusion to a custom similar to that which caused the anger of Achilles: it is in those verses supposed to be uttered by the mother of Sisera, when she expects her son from the battle: Have they not divided the prey, to every one a damsel or two!' “The third and last subject I shall select for elucidation, is the shield of Achilles, the description of which has been the wonder of all commentators; and yet it assuredly has its prototype in the sacred writings. Where the account is given of the casting of Solomon's molten sea, we are told that King Solomon sent for Hiram out of Tyre, a worker of brass, a man VOL. XIV. which may be traced to the account of the Syrian vine, with its cluster, which was cut down by the men sent out by Moses to view the promised land. "It may be suggested that this shield could bear no resemblance to Solomon's molten sea, inasmuch, that the centre of the shield displayed earth, sea, and heaven. I do not advance it as a counterpart, but to take the account of the cunning workman, Hiram: he has much consequence given to him as an artist in the sacred books; and Vulcan being called forth by Thetis, for a work of wonder, appears an exact imitation of the Tyrian "I find in Josephus this superb piece of workmanship, the molten sea, described thus: And its figure that of an hemisphere.' Josephus remarks, that Solomon did not well in the ornaments he put on and about this sea, for there were figures not exactly agreeing with the law; a similitude of it would therefore be easily adapted by the Grecian rhapsodists." Thus far had we proceeded in getting up a slight flimsy article for Ebony, on a classical subject, when suddenly the scales fell from our eyes, and we saw into the very heart of a pound of butter at that moment lying before us on the breakfast-table. "The burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world," (see Wordsworth,) was lightened; we understood everything in a trice; difficulties were seen taking wing, and disappearing beyond the horizon; we found in our breeches-pocket a key to all the hieroglyphics of nature; the secrets of the universe were imparted to us in confidence; hoaxing, and humbugging, and trotting, stood displayed in their native colours; and we said to ourselves in a smile and a soliloquy, "WE HAVE BEEN BAM MED. 66 HEAVEN AND HELL. BY THE REVEREND EDWARD IRVING. WE laid before our readers ample extracts from Lord Byron's Heaven and Earth, Mr Southey's Vision of Judgment, and Mr Thomas Moore's Loves of the Angels, with suitable observations on their " and tenscope dency:" for we presume they have a scope and tendency," as well as the works of Lord Bacon, and that we understand them nearly as distinctly as Macvey Napier understands the Inductive Philosophy. "Heaven and Hell" is a taking title, and terrifically intellectual. Earth has a dull, cold, insipid sound, after that formidable monosyllable. Mr Irving does not call his work "Judgment to Come," a Poem, but an Argument, and, consequently, does not divide it into scenes, acts, cantos, titles, or even portions, but, simply, intó parts. An analysis, and a few extracts from Part VII., will enable our readers to compare the genius of the minister of the Caledonian Church, Hatton Garden, with that of the wayward Childe, the worthy Laureate, and the English Anacreon. The poet, or orator, (call him which you will,) is impressed with a due sense of the awful character of his theme, and pauses at the threshold, to take breath, and screw his courage to the sticking-place. Compare the following exordium, or invocation, with the commencement of Paradise Lost, should you not immediately recollect anything similar to it in Byron or Tommy Moore. "Ienter, therefore, into the unseen worlds which shall be built up for the habitations of the righteous and the wicked, in a cool reasonable spirit, invoking the help of God to guide my steps; and whosoever will accompany me, I pray to do the same, and not to resign himself to the guidance of my judgment, which is hardly able to guide myself. Upon the nature of these two several estates it is not easy to speak correctly; and a great deal of mischief has arisen from inconsiderate interpretations of the language of Scripture. Of how many light-witted men, unto this day, is the constant psalm-sinking of heaven a theme of scorn; the fire and brimstone of hell, a theme of derision! And on the other hand, by how many zealous but injudicious ministers of the Gospel are they the themes of rhapsodies, which end in nothing but the tedium and disgust of those who hear!" Put this into verse-and what better commencement could you have of an Excursion-thus: I enter, therefore, into the unseen worlds, hell! And, on the other hand, how are they made, |
