John and I looked equally dismal, unshorn pose that they were three youths of title, and weary as we were; an old blue travel-fortune or fashion, making a tour of the conling cloak and cap, which had seen better tinent with their tutor-not at all;-these days, with a book in my hand, were unpro- three young men were engaged in trade: mising symptoms; the baggage was, to use the carriage, servants, and courier formed a French expression, leger comme un a joint concern, and a stock purse procured compliment" (as light as a compliment); them: the handicups also, enabled them to the winter of years which sat on my fore- treat (or maltreat) a poor reduced gentlehead bespoke caution and experience, sad man of their acquaintance, whose knowledge enemies to the hotel-keeper's trade; my of the world and of French might have been book announced my being a reading man, most useful to them, if they had felt inclined who was likely to take but a pint of ordinary to follow either his example or his advice; wine at dinner, and to study away the after- but as some men buy books without the idea noon; besides it might be written on of reading them, so did these gay ones pay finance, and I might be a cold calculating for a companion without profiting by his fellow; my domestic was neither " a hand- company; the brotherly dress of these some man" nor yet (I hope), “ a gay deceiver;" the post-chaise might have been hired, nay, even if sold, it would scarcely pay for one extravagant dinner in this splendid hotel, such as a party of bons vivans could sit down to. The thing would not do at all, and I received my congé with a smile, for I understood it perfectly; Mr. Meurice, the landlord, who does not like to lose his Latin, (the phrase I allow is French), and who gives nothing for nothing (a fair exchange), but calculates the price of each bow and civility, finally, Mr. Meurice, Qui miscuit utile dulci," brother-quills was a whim or fancy of the party, and their coming to Paris for a fortnight produced no advantage to themselves, and less to their country, unless its misrepresentation be deemed as such. What droves of these biped cattle, in the shape of pseudo elegants, frequent the French capital, and add their examples to the many which bring the old English character and gentleman into disrepute; customers like these, however, are welcome inmates at such an hotel as Meurice's; not an order from them but what produces a long article in the day-book; not an oath but is followed by a bill; not a ring of the bell which does not announce more to pay ! A poor nobleman, or a calm observer of the world, will sit whole hours without noise, expence, or refreshment, but the bells of all sorts are put in motion by such "n'entends pas” gentry as these. "Don't look at the bill, old one," cried one of them to the poor gentleman one morning at breakfast, "only tell us the amount, damn the expence, one don't come abroad to save."-Glorious!—But it is time to dismiss these subjects; and even to part with the gentle landlord; we now shall return to the cracking of the postillion's whips. very properly, whilst he pays attention to the travellers, keeps a steady eye upon the baggage, and judges that heavy packages may contain plate and other valuables, whilst carriages and horses may be very conveniently exchanged for made dishes, sparkling champagne, expensive apartments, and a view of the finest part of Paris; such are his views and I believe it would be difficult to make him change them; he will change your notes for you as often as you please, but his own never; and, indeed, the worthy citizen has now got to a very high note and a very high tone, take him down who will. Nothing injured by odious comparisons, I retreated to my lodgings, drank The thundering cracks produced by the an ocean of tea, changed my dress, got my dexterous hands of French postillions are vehicle housed, and myself brushed up, and, not merely for awakening the inn-keepers, after a few turns in the Tuilleries and a or for advertising the post-house that the look at Galignani's library, I joined the pro- relay must turn out; this manœuvre is miscuous circle at the 'foresaid Mr. Meu-practised through every village, and in every rice's table d'hôte; but the three would-be situation where notoriety may be courted exquisites and their humble companion and won; it tells the plebeians that some were not content with such fare, they order- one of consequence is on the road; it orders ed a magnificent dinner at seven o'clock, the common travellers to clear the way; it and drank and broke about a dozen bottles announcest he respectability of the voyageur, of the most expensive wine-Vivent les Ang- and evinces, at the same time, the masterly lais!-At the same time one of the sculli- hand of the driver; and, moreover, it is a ons was singing one of the many caricatures stimulus to the horses driven; it attracts composed and set to music against the Eng- the pretty girls to the door, amongst whom, lish. Goddem, qu'il fait bon à Paris; the perchance, is also the post-boy's chére amie, bill of the play must have been set to some with a smile on her countenance, and, tune also. sometimes, with the petit verre (the dram) My reader may now wish to hear some-in her hand again, you may judge how the thing of the milords Anglais, and may sup- travellers pay by the spirited or languid : crack of the whip; in short, it is a little his-sentially that of Fancy; the poetry of Byron tory of itself. In war, the trumpet and the that of Passion. If there is passion in the drum, the din of arms and the ringing of effusions of the one, the fancy by which it is harness are all powerful auxiliaries; even expressed predominates over it: if fancy is at courts and in processions, pursuivants, called to the aid of the other, it is still subheralds, the bustle of precursors and the servient to the passion. Lord Byron's jests buzz of greatness set off the parties concern-are downright earnest; Mr. Moore, when he ed wonderfully, and produce a powerful effect upon the passions. The national character of French is la gloire et l'amour, and in each it requires something qui s'annonce to carry the object in view: love has his heralds, war its imposing externals; why therefore should the travelling gentleman, or the debonnaire postillion, be denied his share of pomp and publicity on the main road of life? How refreshing to the weary traveller to behold windows flying open, women and children running to their doors, nay even to contemplate the envious curs (and there are many in life's journey), barking at the whirling wheel! how delightful to the French driver to exhibit at once his figure and his excellence in the way of galloping and cracking his whip, having always in view love and wine at each stage! It would be unjust to condemn this innocent sport, or to discontinue this useful habit; for whilst in all countries men are occasionally their own trumpeters, why should not the light and airy Gaul be his own announcer, and tell of self in any legitimate way possible? who will gainsay it? CONTRAST BETWEEN BYRON AND MOORE. [Ext. from Edin. Rev. 1823] The is most serious, seems half in jest. The latter Like moonlight on a troubled sea, We conceive, though these two celebrated writers in some measure divide the Poetical Public between them, that it is not the same Public whose favour they severally enjoy in the highest degree. They are both read and admired, no doubt, in the same extended circle of taste and fashion; but each is the favourite of a totally different set of readers. Thus a lover may pay the same outward attention to two different women; but he only means to flirt with the one, while We do not believe Mr. Moore ever writes the other is the mistress of his heart. gay, the fair, the witty, the happy, idolize a line, that in itself would not pass for poetMr. Moore's delightful Muse, on her pedes tal of airy smiles or transient tears. Lord Byron's severer verse is enshrined in the breasts of those whose gaiety has been turned to gall, whose fair exterior has a canker within, whose mirth has received a rebuke as if it were folly, from whom happiness has fled like a dream! If we compute the odds upon the known chances of human life, his Lordship will bid fair to have as numerous a class of votaries as his more agreeable rival. We are not going to give a preference, but we beg leave to make a distinction on the present occasion. The poetry of Moore is es ry, that is not at least a vivid or harmonious FATALISM. An There is a tide in the affairs of men. Taken at the summit, it leads on to fortune; but wo be to him who is caught in the strength of its ebbing current! In vain he struggles with the destiny that hurries him on. accident, next to a miracle, may save him from utter and final destruction; he may not be engulfed at the moment when he gives up all for lost, and resigns himself to the unutterable agonies of despair; in his deathgrasp he may catch some reed of momentary safety, and hope, which had fled, may return; but the illusion is fleeting and unreal; his doom is written, his destiny is sealed, his cup is mingled-and he must drain it to the dregs. nacle of military glory; like him, he tasted him, also, he fell a victim to the inextinguishthe bitterness of disaster and defeat; like able hatred of an enemy, who, though victorious, trembled at the terrors of his name. That master-spirit, which so long held the obeyed his destiny, and future ages will find world in awe, is now quenched; but he that he has not lived in vain. THE GERMAN DRAMA. The reader of the modern dramas, will have remarked with surprise, that they were most of them built upon moral paradox. He will remember to have heard from those same venerable men, who stood in the relation to him of parent, whether of the person or the Call it by what name you will, there is a mind, that all VICE had a contagious influpresiding influence which all men,in all their ence; that any single enormity, long indulg actions, and even in all their thoughts, obey. ed, from the natural operation of our selfUnconscious of its existence in individual ac- love, begot a specious sanction that satisfied tions or volitions, we discover it plainly and the conscience; and by the extension of siundeniably in the general result; just as we milar palliation to kindred crimes, the whole determine the progress of the index of the mind became irrecoverably tainted, and the chronometer, or of the shadow on the dialBEING obnoxious and to be avoided. The plate. Every thing tends to confirm this German secret of interest tended to view of human actions, and, by consequence, strengthen the self-delusion in actual life; it of human affairs. Things apparently the paid the flattering unction to the soul,' that most anomalous, observe a general law; the any one vice might maintain its power in proportion between the numbers of the sex- the most amiable minds; and exhibited the es, for example. Is the mind of man an ex-robber, and the murderer, as the most generception to a rule to which no other excep- ous of the species. tion has yet been discovered? If it be material, as some would have us believe, then it must acknowledge the laws to which matter is subjected; if it be immaterial, which is negative, or spiritual, which, by the received usage of language, gives us an idea of something different from matter, then it must be under the influence of the laws peculiar to that something to which it belongs. But whatever acts according to a general rule or law, acts necessarily; in other words, its actions are so many effects of causes, which, whether known or unknown, must have an existence. Admit that we cannot determine the nature of those causes: what then? We cannot define in what gravitation consists, but who doubts its existence? We are in utter ignorance of the power which affects the magnet, as we are of the affinity which subsists between that power and electricity, galvanism, and light; but the affinity itself is matter of observation. It THE wildest meanderings of the imaginais just so with human actions and human af- tion, far from appearing extravagant, are fairs. There is only one course which they here in their proper place, and spread a can take, and that course they pursue. Look sort of indescribable charm over its varied to the career of Napoleon: examine the cir- measures; and the moment that the sober cumstances which contributed to his rise, garb of reason is seen, the charm is broken, and those which brought about and accele- the strain of inspiration is no more. Indeed, rated his fall. Being what he was, could a single glance at the lyric compositions of he have acted otherwise than he did, or ex- any age may suffice to convince us on that perienced a different fate?-he could not. head. And when we consider, on the other Like Hannibal, he reached the highest pin- hand, that the language of reason is the came popular, from the passion it set in mo- Thus sympathy THE ESSAYIST. ON LYRIC POETRY. [Continued.] same in every tongue, and in every nation, the spell-like religious devotion which bound how widely distant soever they may be, them at another. alike intelligible to all; and that oftentimes stanzas of the modern Greeks, we see a In the spirit-stirring it happens, that, from our ignorance of the people, roused to the recollection of the manners and allusions of a nation, the beau- deeds of their sires, claiming freedom as their ty of their lyric poetry is entirely lost to us, just inheritance, and throwing off the shack-we cannot for a moment hesitate in the les of ruthless despotism. conclusion, that the Ode is truly the fruit of the imagination and of the passions. "Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er, Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." There is something, too, by which the beauty of this species of poetry is doubly enhanced; I mean by the accompaniment of music. None but a native can tellnone but a native can feel, the effect of a wild plaintive Ode, sung to the music of his country. Necessity may compel a man to quit his home; habits, and associations, and connexions, the voice of interest, the calls of ambition, a galled spirit, or a broken heart, may bind him to a foreign shore; "Or pining Love, Or Jealousy with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart; And Sorrow's piercing dart !" But there are moments when even these passions, mighty as they are, disappear, and are for a while blotted out from the book of recollection. If, in such a moment as this an Ode of his country should be poured on his ear, sung to its own wild native melody, his spirit will melt at the sound. His habits and manners may be changed his thoughts his feelings, his ideas, may have become foreign, his mind may be callous from ambition, or hardened from crime, or jaundiced from the bitter pang of treacherous friendship or unrequited love; yet his heart, seared though it may be, will still, at the sound of that thrilling melody, yearn after the land of his sires. Innumerable examples, such as these, might be produced, and all would tend to convince us, that the prevailing spirit of a people, modified as it is by law, by liberty, to give a peculiar turn to its odes. In the or by oppression, is sure to break forth, and songs of the Scandinavians, for instance, we read the ferocity of their character; we see the thirsty savage revelling over the carcass of his fallen foe, draining the bloody draught from the skulls of the slain. In those of the Troubadours we can trace their wild romantic spirit of chivalry; we can mark the almost devotional respect with which their knights bent to the decrees of their fantastic courts of love, and the undaunted soul which upheld them in the mortal career for the fame of their "bright ladye love." In the soft canzonets of Petrarca, in the dulcet melody of his polished strain, we are let incharacter. to the melancholy sweetness of the Italian tic measuses, all thrilling as the wild-notes And Gongora, with his majesof his native guitar, shows us at once the noble, romantic, and impassioned Spaniard. In and examine with attention the songs of Were we to look a little further, Scotland, we should find a strong confirmation indeed of what has been advanced. In one or two of these short and simple songs, we should learn more of the character of the Scottish nation than a hundred cold pages of history could teach us. them are to be found the peculiar feelings and manners of the country, its prejudices, its habits, its superstitions, and, above all, If an historian be aware generally of the peculiarly characterizes our native land. that determined soul of patriotism which so pursuits and habits of a nation, there is no- The Spaniard may surpass them in a granthing which can give him truer information deur and a cultivation to which they preconcerning its particular spirit and charac- tend not,-the Persian in luxuriance of fanter at the different stages of its existence, cy,-the Troubadour in romantic sentiment, than a perusal of its lyric poems. From the Italian in measured melody; yet, the songs of a nation may be gathered, nevertheless, in them there is much to envy, with unvarying propriety, the exact pitch much to admire. There is the undaunted of refinement which it has reached. Nay spirit that spurns at slavery, that quails not when any extraordinary revolution has at the thought of death,-the gay, light taken place, when a nation of slaves has carol, that speaks a mind pure, chainless, become freemen, or a nation of freemen and free,-the quenchless tenderness of slaves, the same revolution also takes place love, in life and in death the same,-and in the Odes of that nation, which are but an the soft, wild note of melancholy, that robs echo of the spirit of the times. We can us of a tear. thus trace, in the diminished vigour and tameness of their Odes, the era when the freedom of the Spaniards was broken by the yoke of Austria. In the Odes of early France, we can mark the chivalrous knighterrantry which prevailed at one time, and these songs as worthy of a place in the an- has consigned to the vilest of the rabble losophers have believed man solicited for these sacred monuments of old times. It ever by a good and evil genius, spirits which was held by the ancients as the surest sign of they have personified under the names of a conquered nation, as the lowest pitch of Oromazes and Arimanes, betwixt whom degradation to which a country could fall, they imagined eternal war; the contest of when it abandoned the language and the the soul with the senses, of the spirit with literature of its forefathers, to adopt those of the flesh, of the irascible with the intellecanother people. And so is it now with Cal-tual principle, that contradiction which St. edonia; her manners and her customs are Paul laboured under, when he said in his no more; her language has become a by- Epistle to the Romans, that his members word and a reproach among her children: were in open war with his reason. These and her songs, replete with the feelings, and phenomena, which suggest the conception glowing with the genius of those that have of a two-fold being (Homo duplex, Buffon,) long since gone by, are spurned under the are nothing but a necessary strife betwixt feet of her degenerate offspring. There are the determinations of instinct and the debut few now left whose hearts still kindle in- terminations of reason; between the oftento rapture at the sounds of Scottish melody. times imperious wants of the organic nature, [To be continued.] and the judgment which keeps them under, or deliberates on the means of satisfying them, without offending received ideas of fitness, of duty, of religion, &c. ARTS AND SCIENCES. PHYSIOLOGY. A being, absolutely destitute of sensitive organs, would possess only existence of REASON and instinct unite and blend to- vegetation: if one sense were added, he gether, to produce the intellectual system, would not yetpossess understanding, because, and the various determinations of mental as Condillac has shown, the impressions action. But the part that each bears in produced on this only sense, would not admit the generation of ideas, is very different in of comparison; it would all end in an inanimals, whose grosser external senses al- ward feeling, a perception of existence, and low instinct to predominate; and in man, he would believe the things which affected in whom the perfection of these senses, and him to be a part of his being. The fundathe art of signs, which perpetuate the tran- mental truth, so completely made out by sient thought, augment the power of reason, modern metaphysicians, is found distinctly while they enfeeble instinct. It is easy stated in the writings of Aristotle:* and to conceive, that the brain, assailed by a there is room for surprise that that facrowd of impressions from without, will re- ther of philosophy should have merely regard less attentively, and therefore suffer cognised it, without conforming to its docto escape, the greater part of those that re-trine: but still more that it should have been sult from internal excitation. Instinct is for so many ages disregarded by his succesmore vigorous in savage man, and its rela-sors. So absolutely is sensation the source tive perfection is his compensation for the advantages which superior reason brings to man in civilization. The moral and intellectual system of the individual, considered at different periods of life, owes more to internal sensation the less it is advanced; for, instinct declines as reason is strengthened and enlarged. of all our knowledge, that even the measure of understanding is according to the number and perfection of the organs of sense; and that by successively depriving them of the intelligent being, we should lower, at each step, his intellectual nature; whilst the addition of a new sense to those we now possess, might lead us to a multitude of unknown sensations and ideas, would disclose to us in the beings we are concerned with, a vast variety of new relations, and would greatly enlarge the sphere of our intelligence. It is only, after laying down between the sources of our knowledge a very exact line of demarcation; after scrupulously distinguishing the rational from the instinctive determinations; acknowledging that age, sex, temperament, health, disease, climate, The impressions, produced on any organ, and habit, which modify our physical organ- by the action of an outward body, does not ization, must by a secondary effect, modify constitute sensation; it is further requisite, these last; that we can possibly understand that the impression be transmitted to the the diversity of humours, of opinions, of brain, that it be there perceived, that is, felt characters, and of genius. He who has by that organ; the sensation then becomes well appreciated the effect, on the judgment perception, and this first modification suppoand reason, of the sensations that spring from ses, as is apparent, a central organ, to the habitual state of the internal organs, sees which the impressions on the organs may be easily the origin of those everlasting dis- carried. The cerebral fibres are more or putes on the distinction between the sensi tive and the rational soul; why some phi *Nil est in intellectu, quod non priusfuerit in sensu, |