2 O'er soll'd with filth, deform'd with sores unkind: Roll vast along, in many a length’ning fold; And feeds the scraggy monsters from her dugs; Speeds on, and in her own corruption reels.!!" In the sixth part, the author is pathetic on the miseries of those who are so unwise as to marry the fortune-hunting misses, who go to India on matrimonial speculations. He then, not unnaturally, slides to bilious disorders, and next gives a loathsome account of the selfishness of military officers in India, who, if he may be credited, watch for the deaths of their comrades with as much eagerness as a vulture does for carcasses. In conclusion he assures us, that not one in fifty persons escapes from Jodia; and that the one who does escape to England, far from being happy there, lingers out the short remnant of his days in solitude and misery. 2 "Years spent in exile, all he finds at home, A wretched end, a miserable tomb." 66 ? The remainder of the first volume consists of minor poems, one of the largest of which is " a brief sketch of the island of Madeira." From this we gather that the author does not like Madeira; that he considers mountains as abrupt excres cences ;" and that he is very angry with the people of the island, for being over-run with vermin, and being malignant and superstitious; and also for wearing few clothes, and paying more attention to the vines, than they do to shrubs and flowers. It would not, perhaps, be difficult to urge something in extenuation of the last two crimes, and especially of the last of the two; but we do not wish to involve ourselves in a controversy with so formidable an antagonist as the author of The Cadet. He nght take it into his head to write on the subject, and wc might be compelled to read. It is this dislike of a contest, which prevents us likewise from questioning, and perhaps directly contradicting his doctrine, that "Memory is one of the sublimest among the intellectual faculties." "Farther on and fare worse.' We have at last reached the second volume, and a delectable prospect is spread before us, Egbert and Amelia" is a tale, of between three and four thousand lines, and, to make the matter absolutely unbearable, it is in blank verse. While we drawled along before, in the old jolting waggon, though the road was rough, and the country unpicturesque, we had the tinkling of the bells to amuse or to lull us; but now, though neither the conveyance, nor the com try, nor the road, is mended, we have lost the music, such as it was, and must plod on in silence. If we must have bad verse, we confess that we would rather have it in rhyme, because, when taken in that form, it excites less nausea. "that 54 In his preface, for this volume too bas a preface, the author, after descanting on the more virulent shaft of criticism," being “held in readiness to be hurled" on him, pleads that his tale was written at sea, "within the compass of three weeks;” and he shrewdly observes that "little can be expected from what engrossed so short a period in the composition." Certainly, when a man keeps scribbling, without ever looking backward or for ward for three weeks, at the rate of nearly two hundred lines a day, we have no reason to be disappointed, if we find that his production is an utterly worthless one. That we do not unjustly accuse the author of having scribbled on, without any plan, he himself will bear witness; as he honestly owns, he followed, throughout the narrative, whatever the inclination of his mind led him to write, without any adherence to strictness of rule;" and this he urges in apology for " the long episode, giving the brief history of Edmund," which episode he confesses to have little or no business in the tale. Whether he wrote under the influence of sea sickness we know not, but we know that he has sickened us completely. His friends, he says, advised him to publish. What dangerous animals some friends are! There is sound good sense in the Spanish proverb, which declares, "Heaven defend me from my friends, and I will defend my self from my enemies." Through this almost interminable tale we have looked in vain for a single good line. It is as intellectually barren as the deserts of Arabia are physically. Of misery it has an abundance, but not a particle of pathos. The author kills all his characters, and we cannot do otherwise than smile at the motive which he gravely assigns for so doing. He deemed it" more charitable, and much more consistent with humanity, to put an end to those who remained in affliction, than suffer them to pass the residue of an advanced, or even a non-advanced, life in misery ;" and, "the hours allotted to man for existence being short, he esteemed it better suited to the character of the tale, to follow every individual introduced therein to the termination thereof, than to suffer the reader to leave off unsatisfied with the idea that any remained to combat against excess of sorrow." This is an admirable thought, and we hope that our writers of tra gedy gedy will avail themselves of it. Let the next piece that is written, end with a philanthropic general massacre, in order to spare the spectators the pain of thinking after they get home, that, perhaps, at that moment, Don Felix is sitting under a willow, lamenting the loss of Donna Violante, and Donna Clara is going mad," in white satin," through the perfidy of Don Rodrigo. In comedy, too, as a hanging bout would not be quite suitable to its character, it would be well if a com plete gaol delivery were to take place, a miraculous conversion of the rogues to be effected, and sufficient annuities for life settled on them, that no awkward fears might remain as to their future destiny. Though we have but scanty room left for extracts, we can. not forbear quoting the following ludicrous image, which we believe to be original "But who shall bustle thro' the war of strife, Among the fair sex the author will have few partisans; for he has said a thing, which cannot fail to offend all the ladies who are in, and even beyond, their teens. Speaking of a certain time, he with infinite gallantry, informs us, that "Amelia then Would just attain her two and twentieth year, He does not inform us at what age ladies become fully wise? but, if they do not begin to learn till they are two and twenty we imagine that he will be disposed to fix at a very distant date the period of their mature wisdom. We wish, while he was on this subject, that he had given us his idea of the time at which men grow sage; as it would have enabled us to judge, whether he is likely to commit again the juvenile indiscretion of publishing wretched verses. Of the remaining poems in the volume, some of which are tolerably long, and in blank, the blankest, verse, much need not be said. There is nothing in them, except their sentiments, which we can praise, consistently with a regard to truth. We must lament that the author has lain violent hands on the beautiful story of Cupid and Psyche, and has mangled it in a barbarous manner. Psyche he treats worse than even the malignant Venus did "Still seem'd she destin'd-Why? Fate sole could tell, Nothing can equal this in elegance, except, perhaps, the picture of Mr. Vegetation, in his Sunday clothes "Here Vegetation wore his best attire, And forc'd the eyes to wonder and admire." His latter passage has, however, a formidable rival in that which describes the nuptial feast, where, we are told, Apollo play'd, and comic Momus pranc'd, Grave Juno smil'd, and airy Venus danc'd." But enough! We must not surfeit our readers with sweets and we will, therefore, forbear to cull any of the equally blooming flowers from the copious store of them which still remains behind. ART. III. A Literary History of the Middle Ages, comprehending an Account of the State of Learnng from the Close of the Reign of Augustus, &c. &c. (Concluded from P. 304.) THE fixth book opens with too short an account of the tempestuous life of Dante; and it is closely followed by rather too long an one of that of Petrarca. "Dante degli Alighieri was now advancing to the zenith of his literary glory. He was born at Florence in the year 1265; where he studied, as well as in other cities of Italy, collecting from all quarters, and even, it is said, from the universities of Paris and Oxford, whatever was deemed most excellent in philosophy, theology, and the liberal arts. On his return to his own city, he was employed in many honourable offices. The cultivation of the Italian tongue, which was yet rude and inharmonious-but which the muses were now about to adopt as their own-had deeply engaged his attention. Thus was Dante occupied; when in 1302, in one of those civil commotions, to which the free cities of Italy were, at this time, daily exposed, the party, which he had espoused, was vanquished by its antagonists, and he was himself forced into exile. To Florence he never returned; but the cities of Italy continued to afford him an asylum; the regrets of banishment which he felt with the keenest severity, did not however suspend his literary ardour. He died at Ravenna in 1321." P. 413. VOL. IV. OCT. 1815. Bb This This is all; and, indeed, upon the life of many other men we should have been satisfied even with less; and, perhaps, we might have been inclined to forgive Mr. Berington for thus hardly introducing to our acquaintance Dante himself, if, in this account, our author had not left out even those circumstances which we know to have given a bias to his writings. We feel, however, very much obliged to Mr. Berington for thus properly telling us the year when Dante was boin, and when he died; and should we ever be tempted to write a book on chronology, we shall most undoubtedly quote the History of the Middle Ages, upon the birth and death of Durante degli Alighieri. But, on the present occasion, we should have expected a specimen of biography rather than a mere statement of dates; and we cannot help lamenting that Mr. Berington has, in this respect, disappointed our most sanguine hopes. We have always understood that the greatest and most difficult merit of a biographer, is to record those events which shew the man and paint the writer, without entering into absurd and endless details; but, in the lives both of Dante and Petrarca, Mr. Berington, we know not for what reason, has adopted a peculiar plan of his own. Wonderfully short on Dante, he employs not less than fourteen pages on the life of Petrarca, and six pages at least out of these fourteen would have hardly suited a huge quarto volume of modern travels. But if the prejudice which every scholar feels in favour of Petrarca, and the veneration which we bear to his memory for having so much espoused the cause of learning, may prompt us to forgive the details of the places in which he dined and in which he slept, the very same reason compels us to condemn the biographer who hardly tells us that there lived such a man as Dante. Immediately after the paragraph we have just quoted, Mr. Berington passes on to analyse the works of this first rate poet of modern Europe, and particularly to acquaint the reader with the Divina Commedia. "The works of Dante, on various subjects, in prose and verse, some of which were composed in Italian, and others in Latin, may be considered as almost absorbed in the renown of that to which his admiring countrymen have affixed the lofty title of the Divina Commedia. They, indeed, can be the only judges of its merit. A what period of the poet's life, or where it was written, or begun to be written, is uncertain; and the cities of Italy contend as ear gerly for the honour of each canto, as those of Greece once did for that of Homer's nativity. The poem, as every scholar knows, contains the description of a vision, in which, with Virgil, sometimes, for his guide, the poet is conducted through hell, and purgatory, and |