Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox. Edited by LORD JOHN RUSSELL.
Vols. I. and II. Bentley. London, 1853.

IF any very considerable portion of the British
nation were to read all the "Mémoires pour
servir" which have been published during the
last few years, the name of Charles James Fox
would become only a family possession, and
his memory would be worshipped by about
half a
score pure Whigs. The Bedford,
Chatham, Walpole, Grenville, and Fox Papers
have not only stripped every deed of its decent
drapery, but they have made the actors appear
worse than they really were. We see the
bickerings, the resentments, the intrigues; but
we see nothing else. We are like men ad-
mitted behind the scenes of a theatre: all the
vulgar expedients by which effects are produced
lie open to us, but we lose the poetry of the
drama.

The life of Charles James Fox has still to be written. Nothing has gone before which has the least title to be called a biography: the volumes now produced profess no more than to be materials. Society, idleness, and public business, have combined to leave the great idol of Holland House without an historian. Lord Holland diligently resolved to write a life of Fox, and he ever and anon opened the chest in which the papers lay, and passed hours in docketting, annotating, and arranging. But as Lord Holland liked conversation much better than solitude, and as good biographies are not to be written by fits and starts, year after year passed, and the virtues of Charles James remained unsaid. Lord Holland died, leaving the papers partly arranged and annotated, "to furnish some future biographer with the materials for a more comprehensive work." Allen, whom Sidney Smith used to call Lady Holland's atheist, then took up the task. Now Allen was a physician, who had migrated from Edinburgh with the "Edinburgh Review" clique, and who lived in clover for all after years in Holland House. It was the fashion of the Whigs of that time to think Allen a wonderful man, and it is a tradition of the present day that he was so. He wrote one excessively absurd book, and he committed the "Edinburgh Review to a considerable quantity of very shallow nonsense about our Constitutional History. Beyond this he did nothing. He appears to have been one of those might-could-would-or-should sort of men, who have the knack of twaddling to a clique, and who succeed in impressing their intimates with an awful idea of what they could do, if they would only try. But they never do try. Allen went over what Lord Holland had done, made a few memoranda, and supplied the date

and locality of the statesman's birth; but the "Life" was still unwritten. Then Allen died, and Lady Holland died, and the papers, and the duty of writing the Life, devolved upon Lord John Russell.

But Lord John Russell is involved in public affairs, and certainly has no time-probably has no inclination-to tempt a very doubtful field of fame. Fox's "Fragment of the History of James the Second" is confessedly a failure. It is not always those who can make history well who can write it well. Lord John Russell has made a very good little heap of history to himself, and he does wisely to stick to it, and to let other people's heaps alone. He is sure to get into a scrape with some wild Irishman, or to provoke the memory of some calculating boy, if he should take to write history in the interval between the adjournment of the House and bed-time.

These memorials are divided into eight books. First, Documents relating to the birth, family, connexions, and education of Mr. Fox

topics in which the Memorials are not very rich, and which occupy only forty-seven pages.

Second, Correspondence relating to his private or public life, from his election for Midhurst in 1768 to his separation from Lord North in 1774.

Third, From 1774, when Mr. Fox went into opposition, to 1782, when Lord North's administration fell. This book is prefaced by a succinct, but very admirable sketch, by Lord John Russell, of the state of Europe at the time Fox commenced his parliamentary career. It is terminated by a review, from the same hand, of the memorable events that marked the early periods of Mr. Fox's political life.

Fourth: This book is divided, by the present editor, into three parts: the first comprising the history of the first Rockingham administration-that great Hejira in Whig traditions; the second and third comprising the years 1782, 1783, and 1784, including the Shelburn and the Coalition administrations.

Fifth: This commences the history of the Pitt administration; and in the accounts of the Indian debates we have an insight into the views of Lord John Russell upon the policy that should guide us in dealing with that mighty population. Here only does Lord John prove faithless to his Whig traditions. He is, perhaps, almost the only man in the kingdom who would now deny that the impeachment of Hastings was a harsh and factious measure; yet, while noticing the arguments by which Mr. Fox shewed that the double government

THE CILICIAN POTSHERDS.

That every writer in a Quarterly Review is "an anonymous scribbler" we at once admit; but as it is a phrase that any smarting smatterer may throw at Brougham, Macaulay, or Hallam, just as well as at our humble selves, we may perhaps be excused from feeling any great humiliation at this confession. Upon every other point of Mr. Barker's charges against us we at once join issue.

It would be affectation to pretend, that when we reviewed this book we were unacquainted with the general opinion of all Orientalists as to the acquirements of Mr. Barker in Eastern literature; but we distinctly deny, that in any word we wrote we travelled for a moment out of the book that lay before us for judgment. If we threw doubt upon Mr. Barker's claims to scholarship, it was because we found in the pages of that book instances of glaring ignorance, which no real scholar could possibly have afforded to the world. How does Mr. Barker attempt to dissipate those doubts? He does not refute-he does not even dare to question a single one of the many instances we adduced. From the misnomer of the Ephesian watch-dog to the utterly disgraceful mistake (oftentimes repeated) in the name of the reigning Sultan-in all the decisive exposures of his erroneous spelling of proper names-in the instanced plagiarisms from D'Herbelot-Mr. Barker finds nothing that he can dispute. From his book, and not from any thing we have either heard or seen of the author, we judged him. Our judgment was not that Mr. Barker cannot quote Arabic, for we admitted, without reservation, his fluency in the vulgar Arabic of the present day; but that, "beyond this, he has no more claim to the name of an Orientalist, than a courier who can jabber Romaic has to edit a Greek play." We are afraid that we must retain this opinion so long as Mr. Barker produces such books as "Lares and Penates ;" and we unhesitatingly appeal to every Oriental scholar in Europe to justify us in that opinion. As to the quotation from the Kurán, we shall not persist, in the face of Mr. Barker's distinct assertion, in any expression of our belief: we shall only remark, that although a resident in the East may well have committed to memory many pages of the sacred writings of the Arabs, there is nothing in the publications of Mr. Barker to shew that

he could write Arabic without a fault in orthography."

In parting with this gentleman, we would beg to assure him, so far as we know and believe, there is no one connected with the "New Quarterly Review," or with the article to which he takes exception, who has any feeling whatever against him, or who would not willingly and warmly have acknowledged any merit they could have discovered in his work. We should be exceedingly sorry to occasion him the least injury. We doubt not his capability to prepare boys for Haileybury, and we believe he would be a very efficient teacher of the vernacular Arabic. Seeing that the medium of diplomatic communication with Eastern nations is for the most part the French language, we do not feel called upon to discuss his capacity to translate faithfully Arabic, Persian, and Turkish documents. We have very unwillingly performed a very painful duty. Mr. Barker has published a volume replete with mis-statements on Oriential matters, which cannot be accounted for as the results of carelessness. Had we not already sufficiently proved how little Mr. Barker has profited by having "continually studied the best Arabic authors," we have in our note-book many other errors which are quite at Mr. Barker's service. He has, moreover, displayed the most lamentable ignorance of classical antiquities, and has crowned the whole by an unjustifiable, or, at least, unjustified, assumption of profound learning. To return to our former comparison, we would willingly admit the merit of a man intimately acquainted with the Modern Greek pro tanto; but if he were to write a book in which nations and dynasties were confounded, and the names of Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander, and even Otho, were curiously mis-spelt, we might surely be justified in not placing him in the same rank with Thirlwall, Grote, and Muir-ne sutor ultra crepidam. We should ill discharge the functions of our office had we allowed such a volume as the "Lares and Penates" to pass without full exposure.

Poems. By ALEXANDER SMITH. London: David Bogue, Fleet Street.

WHEN Some time since it was communicated to us, that a POET had been born in these latter days, we must confess that a feeling of doubt mingled in our minds with the delight of anticipation. Although there has been as yet but little of what is really excellent in poetry to invite admiration in this latter half of the nineteenth century, yet the appreciation of what is false and bad has been so various and so enthusiastic, that we can own to but little faith, when the shout of Eureka has been raised here or there rather as the war-cry of a clique, than the genuine note of exultation, in which a true connoisseur may indulge when he has found a vein of gold. When Alexander Smith was borne aloft and followed with Io Pæan cries, instead of joining the procession we rather determined to handle the idol ourselves; to be its loudest trumpeters if it should feel like a live god of Olympus-to shake the sawdust out of it if it should prove to be a stuffed puppet.

It is a fashion with some critics and cliques to "take up" a poet, and whether the poet of the moment turn out to be an ales imitator of the Tennysonian genus, or an original songster of less pretension, we are immediately summoned to believe in him by the whole coterie in chorus. These people regard matters of poetry and authorship as mere articles of vertu, and would fain earn a reputation for cleverness by the eccentricity of their taste. They are for the most part mystery-mongers of literature, who wish to spare their own opinions too searching an analysis, and delight in dealing with subjects transcending sense. The new pet of this class of persons is Mr. Alexander Smith; and they are busy in destroying any germs of genius within him by their indiscriminate praise. They are encouraging his faults, urging him to fresh outrages on sense, taste, grammar, and poetry; and they will, in all probability, cause him to write more and worse, until he will be in danger of becoming a burlesque on Bailey, who wrote Festus, and a travesty on Tennyson. A man of genius like Byron can rise superior to the censure of false critics; but he must indeed be great who shall triumph over flattery exhibited in such large doses at an age so young.

Some of the peculiar characteristics of the author before us are bathos, a sort of luminous obscurity and imitative mannerism. A truly great genius, in painting as well as poetry, generally creates a school, and out of that school it is not by any means impossible that a pupil shall surpass the master. But a conventional genius, while perhaps his disciples numerically equal those of the truly original masters, such as Michael Angelo or Shakspeare, Raffaelle or Milton, Landseer or Macaulay, is seldom or never the occasion of any thing save sorry imi

tation. Thus, what are the copiers of Guido worth, or the followers of Waller, or the disciples of Shenstone? What then must we say of the parody on Locksley Hall, page 28 of the "Life Drama," or the other Tennysonian parodies which abound. Is there any hope, moral or metaphysical, chemical or mathematical, esoteric, æsthetical, or comical, that, by continually parodying a parody, a man may simplify himself to sense, and stumble on the sublime? Does Lord Bateman, or Lord Lovel lead back to the "Childe of Elle;" and may one find beauties in "Bon Gualtier" that are denied to his originals? If so, there is still some hope in this reproduction of the faults and blemishes of the most successful poets of this age.

But we must give a taste of the poet's quality. In the street, the tide of being, how it surges, how it rolls!

God! what base, ignoble faces! God! what bodies wanting souls,

Mid this stream of human being, banked by houses tall and grim,

Pale I stand this shining morrow with a pant for woodlands dim.

The second line is a somewhat irreverent expression of a dyspeptic physiognomist--but "a pant for woodlands!" Does the gentleman mean the American diminutive for the inexpressibles of a satyr?

Again, p. 29, for we need not stray wide from our starting-point in this book, wherever that may be, in order to pick up curiosities

Once I saw a blissful harvest-moon, but not through forest leaves;

'Twas not whitening o'er a country, costly with the piled sheaves;

Rose not o'er the am'rous ocean, trembling round his happy isles;

(What rose? Oh! we beg pardon, It.)

It came circling large and queenly o'er yon roof of smoky tiles;

that is, the moon came circling. No doubt the moon does turn round, but that is not quite the image it presents, even to the poetic eye.

And I saw it with such feeling, joy in blood, in heart, in brain

I would give, to call the affluence of that moment back

again,

Europe, with her cities, rivers, hills of prey (Qy.), sheep-sprinkled downs,

Ay, an hundred sheaves of sceptres! Ay, a planet's gather'd crowns!

This would be hyperbole, were it not utter nonsense! But perhaps it is a proof of poetic genius to be moon-struck.

"Such delicious thoughts as these They are fit to line portmanteaus;" "Nay," she whis per'd, "Memories."

We agree with the gentleman.

Here is a choice specimen of the admiration of modern critics

Soul, alas! is unregarded; Brothers it is closely shut,

Thus Walter proceeds in his strain of egotistical raving to describe the strivings and wrestlings of a soul above buttons, discontented with its lot, and wishing to be everybody. But, during all this time, we are given to understand that the poet, who is somewhat in a dilemma between spiritual delirium and most sensuous passion, has drained the cup of licentious pleasure down to the bitter lees. Suddenly we find our hero a little humanized by the not very novel expedient of falling in love again, this time more happily. The young lady to whom he has told his story, and who rejoices in the name of Violet, "understands" him, and soothes him. Whether matrimony be the result or not is a question we should like to have resolved, since there is a passage ending in a manner which is at once suggestive of impropriety, and yet innocent by its comicality. Walter and Violet, after having been making love like a metaphysical Romeo and Juliet, yet with very tender and philoprogenitive approaches (Scene IX-A lawn-Sunset) the curtain of eve and our author's fancy falls thus: