'If, when two candles are placed at the distance of eight or ten feet from the eye, and about a foot from each other, we view the one directly, and the other indirectly; the indirect image will swell, as we have already mentioned, and will be succeeded with a bright ring of yellow light, while the bright light within the ring will have a paleblue colour. If the candles are viewed through a prism, the red and green light of the indirect image will vanish; and there will be left only a large mass of yellow, terminated with a portion of blue light. In making this experiment, and looking steadily and directly at one of the prismatic images of the candles, I was surprised to find that the red and green rings began to disappear, leaving only yellow and a small portion of blue; and when the eye was kept immovably fixed on the same point of the image, the yellow light became almost pure white; so that the prismatic image was converted into an elongated image of white light'-(Treatise on Optics, p. 296, 297.) Professor Moser regards this experiment as inexplicable by the ordinary theory of accidental colours; and ascribes the phenomena to a peculiar vital action not yet understood. In the middle of this physiological difficulty, our exhausted limits compel us to stop. But we cannot allow ourselves to conclude this article without some reflections, which the preceding details must have excited in the minds of our readers, as well as in ours. Two great inventions, the produce of two of the greatest and most intellectual nations in the world, have illustrated the age in which we live. With a generous heart and open hand, France has purchased the secret of the Daguerreotype; and while she has liberally rewarded the genius which created it, she has freely offered it as a gift to all nations-a boon to universal science -a donation to the arts-a source of amusement and instruction to every class of society. All the nations of Europe-save one—and the whole hemisphere of the New World, have welcomed the generous gift. They have received the free use of it for all their subjects; they have improved its processes; they have applied it to the arts; they have sent forth travellers to distant climes to employ it in delineating their beauties and their wonders. In England alone, the land of free-trade--the enemy of monopoly -has the gift of her neighbour been received with contumely and dishonour. It has been treated as contraband-not at the Custom-house, | but_at_the_Patent-office. Much as we admire the principle of our Patent laws, as the only reward of mechanical genius under governments without feeling and without wisdom, we would rather see them utterly abrogated, than made, as they have in this case been made, an instrument of injustice. While every nation in the world has a staff of pilgrim philosophers, gathering on foreign shores the fragments of science and practical knowledge for the benefit of their country, England marshals only a coastguard of patent agents, not to levy duties, but to extinguish lights; not to seize smugglers, but to search philosophers; not to transmit their captures to the national treasury, but to retain them as fees and profits to interested individuals. Nor does the fate of the Calotype redeem the treatment of her sister art. The Royal Society-the philosophical organ of the nationhas refused to publish its processes in their Transactions. No Arago-no Gay Lussac, drew to it the notice of the Premier or his Government. No representatives of the People or the Peers unanimously recommended a national reward. No enterprizing artists started for our colonies to portray their scenery, or repaired to our insular rocks and glens, to delineate their beauty and their grandeur. The inventor was left to find the reward of his labours in the doubtful privileges of a patent; - and thus have these two beauti ful and prolific arts been arrested on English ground, and doomed to fourteen years' imprisonment in the labyrinths of Chancery Lane! Lays of Ancient Rome, by the Right Honourable THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. Lon don. 1842. (FROM FRAZER'S MAGAZINE.) THE Conductors of the public business in Eng- | hot strife of the political arena is brought into land are honourably distinguished by three things from those of other nations devoted to the same pursuit. Their personal honour and honesty always stand unsullied; no suspicion of any pecuniary baseness can attach to any English minister, whether Whig or Tory. They take no bribes-they appropriate to themselves no public money. They have never even been accused of using the information they receive in their official capacity for the purpose of affecting the money-market and winning fortunes for themselves. It is not so with their political contemporaries in foreign parts. The second thing which distinguishes them from Continental statesmen is, that no rancorous feeling from the VOL. I. the intercourse of private life. The most violent party-men on opposite sides may be the warmest allies in some intellectual pursuit, and meet as cordial friends over the social board. A third distinction is that English politicians, with scarcely an exception, retire gracefully into private life, while their political occupation is in abey ance, or when actually gone, and seek in some other honourable and lofty pursuit employment for minds too active by nature, education, and habit, to endure idleness. They make not themselves ridiculous by vain repinings after lost power-they make themselves not contemptible by paltry intrigue for their own personal restoration to office. All this is, for the most part, 19* different with the men abroad. Our leading politicians are sure to be men of taste and learning; and it is delightful to see them, whether released or exiled from the burthen of public affairs, recurring in the decline of life to the beautiful studies of their youth, or, in maturer manhood, seeking to extend their renown by labours in another career, and plying the pen of the commentator, the historian, or the poet. William Pitt in his retirement betook himself once more to hold converse with the illustrious Greek, whose matchless oratory roused the admiration, and lent wings to the ambition, of his boyhood. The venerable Eldon, and his brother, "the enlightened magistrate of nations," loved in their retirement to revive the classic lore on which the youthful powers of their great minds were exercised, and which first enabled them to plant a firm footstep on the road to worldly prosperity and undying fame. Fox and Burke, at every interval of political leisure, turned the mighty floods of their oratory into the channels of literature. In an earlier day Bolingbroke did the like; and in that day, abounding with the greatest names England can boast of, we have the example of Sir John Davis, of Bacon, and of Raleigh, amongst a host of others. Perhaps the case of the august captive, who could make his spirit travel free through all antecedent time, to compensate for his body's thraldom, and devise an adequate employment for his mind-the only one that could suit its grandeur-in writing the history of the world, is the most touching in that world's long story to him who thinks nicely and has a due appreciation of intellect and will. Impressed with these feelings, it is with unfeigned pleasure we observe that the two most intellectual and capable members of the late ministry have lost no time in presenting themselves to their fellowcountrymen in their literary capacity,-that capacity, decidedly, in which they are most calculated to shine. They probably feel that, as public servants, the doom upon them is not simply a long exile, but the awful "never to return!" That it should be so is certainly better for the British empire, and, we sincerely believe, for themselves here and their posthumous renown hereafter. Lord John Russell, although his abilities are not in any particular great, possesses most commendable industry and zeal, and a true faculty of application, which is in itself as high as it is a rare power, alike physically and mentally; and he has access to stores of documents which would enable him to make valuable contributions to the modern history of our native country at some of its most interesting periods. Our business, however, is not at present with him or his recent publication. Mr. Babington Macaulay claims our attention; but before we give ourselves up to him, we would fain remark that there is one other retired minister (we mean Lord Palmerston) whose faculties and learning, and the proof of whose early performances--sportive, but strong of flight -in conjunction with Frere, and Croker, and Canning, and whose later efforts on adequate occasions, regarded as pieces of argumentation, and outpourings of a full mind in answering oratory, shew that few men are more capable of producing a work which should confer honour on himself, and bring advantage to his country. In one branch of modern historical knowledge Lord Palmerston stands confessedly without a rival, and it is that which records the relations of Great Britain with foreign powers. If he would only turn that to the account of which it is capable, he might win a name which his countrymen would not easily let pass away. We now address ourselves to Mr. Macaulay. The announcement of a new book, from the vast multitude of our modern authors, rarely excites any other feeling in us excepting one of nausea, dreading lest we might be compelled in duty to review it. A genuine emotion, how ever, passed through our frame as we read of the promised Lays of Ancient Rome. Mr. Macaulay is the author of two admirable ballads, the Armada and the War of the League. Great is their vigour of expression-beautifully pic turesque the scenes they conjure up. They are evidently the effusions of a brilliant fancy and of a male mind. The second, which relates to the Battle of Ivry, is little known. A few verses will shew that it is not inferior to the Armada, and superior to any thing, in its way, which could be produced by any of our living poets who still continue to write: "Now glory to the Lord of Hosts, from whom all glories are, And glory to our sovereign liege, King Henry of Na He looked upon his people and a tear was in his eye, And if my standard-bearer fall, as fall full well he may, Hurra! the foe is moving, hark to the mingled din culverin; The fiery duke is pricking fast across St. André's plain, France, Charge, for the golden lilies now, upon them with the lance! prose: we speak of it generally. It is well known A thousand spurs are striking deep, a thousand spears ments, and the cogency of his arguments-what in rest, A thousand knights are riding hard behind the snowwhite crest; And in they burst, and on they rush, whilst, like a guiding star, Amidst the thickest conflict blazed the helmet of Navarre! Now God be praised the day is ours, Mayenne hath turned his rein, D'Aumale hath cried for quarter, the Flemish count is slain. Their ranks are breaking like thin clouds before a Biscay gale, ever may be your conclusion as to whether he has, or has not, proved his case-it invariably, we say, leaves you with a respectful impression of the natural abilities, the wide-spread reading, and lofty ambition of the writer, who hesitates not to grapple with subjects the highest and most difficult upon which the moral and political philosopher can be engaged. At the same time, however, you cannot fail to perceive that, although he marshals his facts with ability, that he possesses not the high reasoning power; that though his order be specious-though it wear the show of clearness-it is not the real lucidus ordo; The field is strewed with wounded steeds, with flags that he is not master of the science of method; And glory to our sovereign liege, King Henry of Navarre!" We have given the whole of this right Protestant ballad; we felt that in curtailing it we should have been breaking a gem. We considered, too, that in presenting to our readers in its entirety this ballad, which was originally thrown away upon some sickly annual or obscure periodical, we were laying before them an excellent exemplar of the peculiar style and powers of the writer. But there is prose as well as verse in this volume of Macaulay's now before us. A word, in the first instance, about his that to him leading thoughts are not revealed as he studies books, or the characters of men; that the subtle, cementing, subterraneous power, which Coleridge styles the INITIATION of method, has not been vouchsafed to him. You see, too, that the reading in its depth_bears no just proportion to its width, that where the flood brawls loudest in its impetuous career it is oftentimes the most shallow; that his learning is rather a thing of memory, embodying the statements and conclusions of others, than a precious collection of results-of formula, to borrow the language of mathematics, worked out by the operations of reason from the masses of facts first subjected to the understanding-a precious collection lying at ease in the small cells of the brain, but always ready to be evoked, and capable of expansion throughout the universe. It is plain, too, that in the generous ambition which inspires Macaulay, "Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,” there is an over-due admixture of personal feeling, such as that which weighs down to the mere "earth, earthy," a portion of the Divina Comedia. His prejudices as an individual and as a partyman are vehemently strong, and often distort, and always embitter, what he says and writes. Such, at least, is the general conviction; and this it was which gave such tremendous effect in the House to a rejoinder made on the instant by Sir Robert Peel, to a vocalised pamphlet of our author's, by way of reply to an old speech of Peel's, when he accused Macaulay at the very outset with then creeping forward to vent upon him the sweltering venom of a three months' preparation. This venom, we believe, is entirely political. There is a freemasonry in | “There was a time, so ancient records tell,' And broad highway to power, that ever then Whilst all its instruments from first to last, Doubtless a seat in the cabinet, and Mr. Macaulay's personal success in life, must have operated powerfully towards reconciling him to the present state of things; but we are pretty Icertain that the aspiration of his earlier days was to be a popular leader. But this may not be; his strength lies not in his voice but in his pen. After this little introduction, we will proceed to the despatch of business. We now turn calmly to his volume. When we first saw it, we opened it with no ordinary emotion; here, at the outset, we must candidly confess it has not fulfilled our expectations. Not, however, that it is ill executed-not that it does not contain many very fine poetical passages-not that it is not written with much vigour and fire-not that it is not entitled to very high praise. The feeling, however strong within us, is that we might have reasonably anticipated that the author of the Armada and the War of the League would have done better than he has done. In other words, the Right Hon. Thomas Babington Macaulay is, by no means, so successful a "metre ballad-monger" as plain Mr. Macaulay. This will appear by and by, when we shall come to quote. The number of lays is four. They are ushered in by a long introduction, in which there is something of a parade of reading, and something of an affectation of modesty. Mr. Macaulay labours at great length to shew that Rome, in its early days, had ballad poetry. He cites the authority of Ennius, and Cato the censor, and Varro, and Dionysius, and Cicero, and Valerius Maximus, and Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Servius the commentator, Aulus Gellius, and Lord only knows whom besides, to support his theory about the existence of those ballads. But who, nowadays that Niebuhr and Arnold have written, disputes the fact? No doubt there were ballads in ancient Rome, and some of them were metrical legends of gods and demigods, and mythical heroes, and some of real men; and fragments of these have glided down the stream of Time, and were seized upon by History as waifs and strays floated away from the wreck of an earlier world. But though this be the case, it is yet to be seen whether we can go quite so far as Mr. Macaulay would lead us, and by the particular paths it has pleased him to pursue. The proposition that Rome had ballad poetry has been already established, aud his purpose might have been answered by quoting Arnold, instead of evoking such a host of ancients. We believe the truth is, that there never was the nation or tribe yet, which had not, soon after it became possessed of a capable language, some species of ballad poetry. Mr. Macaulay after having, under the auspices of his classical authorities, applied this general proposition to the particular of old Rome, proceeds to say: "The proposition, then, that Rome had ballad poetry, is not merely in itself highly probable, but is fully proved by direct evidence of the greatest weight. This proposition being established, it becomes easy to understand why the early history of the city is like almost every thing else in Latin literature-native where almost every thing else is borrowed, imaginative where almost every thing else is prosaic. We can scarcely hesitate to pronounce that the magnificent, pathetic, and truly national legends, which present so striking contrast to all that surrounds them, are broken and defaced fragments of that early poetry which, even in the age of Cato the censor, had become antiquated, and of which Tully had never heard a line. That this poetry should have been suffered to perish will not appear strange, when we consider how complete was the triumph of the Greek genius over the public mind of Italy. It is probable that, at an early period, Homer, Archilochus, and Herodotus, furnished some hints to the Latin minstrels; but it was not till after the war with Pyrrhus that the poetry of Rome began to put of its old Ausonian character. The transformation was soon consummated. The conquered, says Horace, led captive the conquerors. It was precisely at the time at which the Roman people rose to unrivalled political ascendancy that they stooped to pass under the intellectual yoke. It was precisely at the time at which the sceptre departed from Greece that the empire of her language and her arts became universal and despotic. The revolution indeed, was not effected without a struggle. Nævius seems to have been the last of the ancient line of poets. Ennius was the founder of a new dynasty. Nævius celebrated the first Punic War in Saturnian verse, the old national verse of Italy. Ennius sang the second Punic War in numbers borrowed from the Iliad. The elder poet, in the epitaph which he wrote for himself, and which is a fine specimen of the early Roman diction and versification, plaintively boasted that the Latin language had died with him. Thus what to Horace appeared to be the first faint dawn of Roman literature appeared to Nævius to be its hopeless setting. In truth, one language was set ting, another dawning. The victory of the foreign taste was decisive: and, indeed, we can hardly blame the Romans for turning away with contempt from the rude lays which had delighted their fathers, and giving their whole admiration to the great productions of Greece. The national romances, neglected by the great and the refined, whose education had been finished at Rhodes or Athens, continued, it may be supposed during some generations, to delight the vulgar. While Virgil, in hexameters of exquisite modulation, described the sports of rustics, those rustics were still singing their wild Saturnian ballads. It is not improbable that, at the time when Cicero lamented the irreparable loss of the poems mentioned by Cato, a search among the nooks of the Appennines, as active as the search which Sir Walter Scott made among the descendants of the moss-troopers of Liddesdale, might have brought to light many fine remains of ancient minstrelsy. No such search was made-the Latin ballads perished for ever. Yet discerning critics have thought that they could still perceive in the early history of Rome numerous fragments of this lost poetry; as the traveller on classic grounds sometimes finds, built into the heavy wall of a fort or convent, a pillar rich with acanthus leaves, or a frieze where the Amazons and Bacchanals seem to live. The theatres and temples of the Greek and Roman were degraded into the quarries of the Turk and the Goth: even so did the old Saturnian poetry become the quarry in which a crowd of orators and annalists found the materials for their prose. It is not difficult to trace the process by which the old songs were transmuted into the form which they now wear. Funeral panegyric and chronicle appear to have been the intermediate links which connected the lost ballads with the histories now extant. From a very early period it was the usage that an oration should be pronounced over the remains of a noble Roman; the orator, as we learn from Polybius, was expected on such an occasion to recapitulate all the services which the ancestors of the deceased had, from the earliest time, rendered to the commonwealth. There can be little doubt that the speaker on whom this duty was imposed would make use of all the stories suited to his purpose which were to be found in the popular lays. There can be as little doubt that the family of an eminent man Would preserve the copy of a speech which had been pronounced over his corpse. The compilers of the early chronicles would have recourse to these speeches; and the great historians of a later period would have recourse to the chronicles." Running over many pages whose object is to shew that actually in modern nations ballads had been made the foundation of chronicles, and these, in their turn, of history, we find him arrived at the following conclusion. "Such, or nearly such, appears to have been the process by which the lost ballad-poetry of Rome was transformed into history. To recover that process, to transform some portions of early history back into the poetry out of which they were made, is the object of this work." He then informs us that, in the poems to follow, he speaks not in his own person, but in that of an ancient Roman citizen. There are only four lays, "Horatius;" the "Battle of the Lake Regillus:",,Virginia;" and the "Prophecy of Capys." All, except "Virginia," "Who spake the words of doom- The mother to the tomb.'" Red with blood-in the livery of their father 'In the hall-gate sat Capys, Capys, the sightless seer; And up stood stiff his thin white hair, But thou-what dost thou here In the old man's peaceful hall? Our corn fills many a garner, Our vines clasp many a tree, For thee no treasure ripens In the Tartessian mine; Thru shalt not rest on down; Leave gold, and myrrh, and jewels, To them who of man's seed are born, Thou wast not made for lucre, For pleasure, nor for rest, From sunrise until sunset, All earth shall hear thy fame; And name it by thy name. |