From the New Monthly Magazine.

TALFOURD'S LAST POETRY* AND PROSE.†

soon broken, that charm soon spent. Giron,, the mountain heights "with step airy and a rival of Padilla, secures the person of the true," amid crumbling fragments that broke queen, usurps the command of the insurgents, to dust beneath each footstep, till he trod and involves them, and their cause, in utter The glassy summit, never touch'd till then confusion. The Regent triumphs, seizes many Save by the bolt that splinter'd it, serene a noble prisoner, one of them Padilla's only As if a wing, too fine for mortal sight, Upbore him, while slant sunbeams graced his brow With diadem of light.

son, and issues an offer

Of pardon at the will of him who gives
Padilla to the axe-

the "

Plied by appeals to take up the cause of the people, and startled by strange revelations of popular suffering and courtly tyranny, Pathus expresses the emotions within which constrain him to compliance with the summons without:

and of this offer the father takes advantage
to disguise himself, promise the betrayal of
arch-rebel," procure the enfranchise-dilla
ment of his boy and the forgiveness of Tole-
do, and then doff the monkish wrappings and
stand forth to die, strong in integrity of pur-
pose and assurance of faith. The same mel-
low even-tide light suffuses the catastrophe
as does that of "Ion"-of a calm beauty too
refined and " dainty sweet" not to tell in
every line of poetical license-but with a
softening influence and divine melancholy
peculiar to itself.

There is nearly the same liberal presence of florid diction, and picturesque description, and glittering imagery, in this as in Talfourd's earlier tragedies. Take an example or two. Of Padilla's trusty old steward, seen in the garden at sunset, an approaching visitor

says

What! vegetating still with ruddy cheek
As twenty summers since-like yonder dial
O'ergrown by the huge sycamore, that, touched
No longer by the sunbeam, shows no trace
Of coursing time?

The conceit is pretty of its kind, but it is
hardly the sort of fancy that would occur to
the visitor; it is rather the simile of the poet
in his study, with the garden, dial, setting
sun, trusty steward, and well-spoken visitor
all duly arranged in his mind's eye. The
same speaker finely says, with a view to en-
list Padilla in the leadership of the impatient
Commons, as the only man in whom the con-
ditions of such leadership are to be found,
He who would direct
A people in its rising, must be calm
As death is, yet respond to every pulse
Of passion'd millions,-as yon slender moon,
That scarce commends the modest light it sheds
Through sunset's glory to the gazer's sense,
In all its changes, in eclipse, in storm,
Enthroned in azure, or enriching clouds
That, in their wildest hurry, catch its softness,
Will sway the impulsive ocean, he must rules
By strength allied to weakness, yet supreme,
Man's heaving soul, and bid it ebb and flow
In sorrow, passion, glory, as he mourns,
Struggles or triumphs.

t

A new world of strange oppressions startles me, as shapes of dim humanity, that clustering hung Struck Spain's great Admiral* with awe of natures Along the dusky ridges of the West, From Time's beginning passion'd with desires He had no line to fathom.

*This is not the only allusion to Columbus in "The Castilian." Queen Joanna dreamily recalls the glorious time when he and his achievements were the theme of every circle:

"Last in vivid speech Told of august Columbus and the birds of dazzling colors that he brought from realms Far westward, till her fancy seem'd to ache With its own splendor, and, worn out, she slept The gentle sleep of childhood, whence, alas! She woke still more estranged."--Act IV. Sc. 1. The veteran Mondeiar, again, speaks of the "agefreighted hours" in which he shared

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Columbus' watch upon the dismal sea,
While the low murmurs of despair were hush'd
To dull submission by the solemn light
of the great Captain's eye, as from the helm
Dawn'd in its flashes ere the headland broke
It beamed composure, till the world they sought
The gloom to common vision."-Act II. Sc. 1.
enlivening his subject with other historical allusions,
Nor has the dramatist neglected the opportunity of
appropriate to its spirit, and in harmony with the
unities of time and place and action. Isabella the
Catholic is glowingly portrayed :

"Whom each Castilian holds
Sacred above all living womanhood;-
Her from whose veins Joanna's life was drawn:
Who, o'er the rage of battles and the toils
Of empire, bent an aspect more imbued
With serious beauty earth partakes with heaven,
Than cloister nurtured in the loveliest saint
It shrined from human cares."-Act III. Sc. 2.
Add the following spirited passage in honor of the
great Cardinal, Ximenes:

"Who from a cell,
Savagely framed for cruel penance, steppd
To the majestic use of courtly arts,
Which luxury makes facile, while he wore
The purple o'er the sackcloth that inflamed

Padilla fondly pictures his noble boy scaling His flesh to torture, with a grace as free

When Padilla's popular favor is at its zenith,
his rival consoles himself and friends with the
assurance that its waning hour must, in the
nature of things, be nigh:

Believe me, comrade, when the incense floats
Most thickly round the idol's shrine, its fire
Begins to smoulder.

And Padilla, accordingly, soon finds himself deserted by his men, troop after troop, till "left as bare as a thick grove in winter, sadly deck'd by some few desperate friends that, like dink leaves, which, in their fluttering yellow, cleave through rain and frost to mossclad boughs,' will not forsake him. At length, indeed, he "stands apart," in the words of his wife, "in his own majesty, a tower of refuge which beams from Heaven illumine,”—-or, in the figure he prefers, " upon the arid sands a desolate mark for the next lightning." The tragedy of his fall makes both figures true: the lightning strikes the tower, but illumines and glorifies while it scathes, and is rather hailed than dreaded, as coming from Heaven, and charged with fleet errand of no merely penal fire.

In

existence, rather than to be niggard of ap-
plause, or scrupulous as to welcome.
these Supplementary Notes, among the com-
plimentary allusions to contemporaries—-law-
yers, statesmen, priests, actors-we observe
one to Lord Campbell, of whose legal argu-
ments it is maintained that, "in comprehen-
sive outline, exact logic, felicitous illustration,
and harmonious structure," they excel all it
ever fell to the critic's lot to hear ;-another
to Mr. Gladstone, whose faculty of truth-
seeking, "applied to realities and inspired
only by the desire to discover the truth, and
to clothe it in language, assumes, in the minds
of superficial observers, the air of casuistry
from the nicety of its distinctions and the
earnest desire of the speaker to present truth
in its finest shades ;" another to Father
Faber, whose society, enjoyed in 1844 in
Wordsworth's company, impressed the au-
thor of " Ion" with "a delightful recollection
of the Christian graces of his deportment and
conversation ;"-and, to quote an example of
variety, another to Mr. Charles Kean, on his
Sardanapalus, that "tumphant result of
pictorial skill, and learning, and taste." Not
that the Vacation Rambler is quite innocent
of irony and sarcasm, however, when the oc-
casion calls for it. He can say sharp things;
for instance, of the external "make up" of
Parisian artists, who "invite attention to the
irregularities of nature by fantastic devices of

The Supplement to "Vacation Rambles" consists of Recollections of a Tour through France, via Paris, Dijon, Lyons, Avignon, and Marseilles, to Italy,-where the Rambler visited and gossips about Genoa and Naples, Capua and Antium, Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Milan,--returning homeward by Swit-art-cutting grizzled beards, red whiskers, zerland; the "home" at which we leave him being at Lausanne, with Charles Dickens, in the long vacation of 1846. Of Dickens and other beloved or admired contemporaries, there is, as was to be expected from the kind and hearty writer, more than once a loving mention made. In Justice Talfourd literature lost a critic of a generous sort none too rife; indeed, he might almost adopt the words of old Menius Agrippa:

For I have verified my friends

.with all the size that verity
Would without lapsing suffer; nay, sometimes,
Like to a bowl upon a subtle ground,
I have tumbled past the throw:

the exemplary error (if error) of the critic
being, to magnify merit, or even assume its

As when it floats o'er worshipp'd womanhood
Or princely youth; he who had learn'd in vigils
Of lonely night, such wisdom for command
Of the world's issues, as if spirits breathed
The long experiences of wisest statesmen
Into a single breast; who from a soul
Which men imagined withering like his frame
In painful age, pour'd, as from living urn,
Exhaustless courage into soldiers' hearts,
And made them heroes."-Act III. Sc. 2.

and sandy moustaches into startling varieties of shape; bidding the scanty hair to fall over the shoulders in the greasiest of flakes, and affecting every strange combination of dirty and gaudy fashion. It would seem," adds the never ill-natured Rambler, "that personal vanity is so strong in each of these young men, that he thinks his particular deformity consecrated by being his own." With true-blue spirit, again, he records his estimate of a certain portrait at Versailles: "The recent naval achievements of France were irradiated by a portrait of the Prince Joinville, standing on the prow of a glittering ship, in our common sailor's neatest attire-tight blue jacket, open collar, loose black neckcloth, and snow-white trousers-the exact costume in which a very young lady dances the hornpipe in the Spoiled Child-the type of dandified melodramatic seamanship." Lamartine is alluded to as the gentleman "who for a few days looked so glorious, and has since found that a nation cannot be governed by fine words." Mr. Holman, " the blind traveller," whom the Rambler met at Lyons, is none the more admired as a traveller for being blind,

notwithstanding his own view of the subject. | of the entry; may not the pulpit poet have Of the Milanese Exhibition of the paintings drawn his impression of a present God from of Young Italy, he says: "It was intolerably the feelings, not the thoughts, inspired by radiant in color, abounding in skies of deeper the sublimities around him-from the senblue than Italy rejoices in, woods of the live-timents of awe, the mysterious emotions of liest green, and ships and cities of amber; adoring wonder, the yearnings of religious altogether a collection of gaudy impossibili- worship, excited by such a scene, and by no ties, few of which would be admitted at Bir- means from a cold adjustment of logical memingham." Of Naples he says: "How it chanics, worked out by harmonious junction is possible for English men and women to of Paley, Whately, and pocket microscope? pass months in such a place, and bless their Coleridge was not thinking of logic when he stars and call it luxury,' even if the satiated wrote (or translated, or adapted,-what you mosquitoes give them leave to sleep, is a will) his Hymn before Sunrise, in the vale mystery which has doubtless a solution of Chamouni; and we can suppose the small which I sought in vain." As he lingers, at poet (saving his Reverence) who wrote such evening, in St. Peter's at Rome, he sees three a big hand, and whose theism seemed to his priests kiss the foot of the statue of Jupiter- censor so out of place (of all places in the Cephas, and kneel down before it, as if to world) at the Montanvert, to have really pray; but next, "to our surprise, not with- meant very much the same as S. T. C., when standing our experience of continental habits, he exclaimed, each began zealously spitting on the beautiful pavement, as if it was a portion of his duty-I fear illustrating the habits which a priesthood, possessed of unlimited power, encourages by its example." This is not the Judge's only paper pellet at Romanism in the present itinerary.

tumns.

To these illustrations of his mild indulgence in sarcasm and rebuke, let us add one more, referring to the hotel-book at the Montanvert, in which travellers inscribe their names, and some "perpetuate their folly for a few auAmong these fugitive memorials, was one ambitious scrawl of a popular and eloquent divine, whereby, in letters almost an inch long, and in words which I cannot precisely remember, he recorded his sense of the triumphant refutation given to Atheism by the Mer de Glace, intimating his conviction that, wherever else doubts of the being of Deity might be cherished, they must yield to the grandeur of this spot; and attesting the logic by his name in equally magnificent characters.' The Rambler appends his opinion that this poetical theist had wholly misapprehended the Great First Cause, and supposes him to imagine, that in proportion as the marks of order and design are withdrawn, the vestiges of Deity become manifest; as if the smallest insect that the microscope ever expanded for human wonder did not exhibit more conclusive indications of the active wisdom and goodness of a God than a magnificent chaos of elemental confusion." It is not for us to assume what the popular and eloquent divine may actually have meant; but at least we can suppose the Rambler to have misapprehended him, especially as he is oblivious of the wording

VOL. XXXIII.-NO. II.

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow
Adown enormous ravines slope amain-
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
WHO made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon?

GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!

No

The same honest avowal of indifference or distaste, wherever indifference or distaste was felt, which characterized Sir Thomas Talfourd's former "Rambles," is patent here also. It is refreshing to note his candid acknowledgments in every such case. man was more ready, more eager even, to express in the most cordial way his satisfaction wherever it was felt; but he was above the trick of affecting an enthusiasm he did not feel. He found Versailles " tiresome," and he says so; the "huge morning" he spent there seemed "dragged out into eternity;" and its only consolation was the zest its tediousness imparted to a subsequent resort to claret and champagne. In the Bay of Naples he owns that he has "been more deeply charmed by smaller and less famous bays." At Herculaneum he was "grievously disappointed," and was almost as glad to emerge from its "cold and dark passages that led to nothing," as from a railway tunnel. The dome of St. Peter's, when he first caught sight of it, on the road from Antium, "looked like a haycook," he says, "but soon afterwards assumed the improved aspect of a cow on the top of a malt-house." Entering Rome, he found the "famed Italian sky as filthy as a London fog;" he bewails the only too decisive contrast between the Capitol unvisited and the Capitol explored;

15

and is indignant, for Coriolanus' sake, with that impostor and receptacle for vegetable refuse, the Tarpeian Hill. In Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" he could see "no presiding majesty; no balance of parts; nothing that stamps even the reality of a moment on the conception; nothing in this great handwriting on the wall to make mad the guilty and appal the free."" The "Laocoon" he looked on with any thing but a Winkelman's gaze. And in short, to leave Rome "was to escape," he confesses, "from a region of enchantment into the fresh air of humanity and nature; and, humiliating as the truth may be, I quitted it for ever with out a sigh."

thing that some one might eat, or for a battered pewter-pot, or even a rim of liquorstain on a bench or table, to indicate that once upon a time something had been drunk there." Gratefully he recalls the fare on board the steamer to Genoa; the sumptuous breakfast at ten; "then, four dishes of exquisite French cookery, with a bottle of clear, amber colored, dry Italian wine for each person, followed by a dessert of fresh grapes and melons or peaches, and rich dried fruits, with coffee and liqueurs," &c.; while "at five in the afternoon, dinner was served with similar taste, but with greater variety and profusion." At Genoa, he says, "To secure a dinner-the first object of sensible man's selfish purpose-by obtaining the reversion of seats at a table-d'hôte, we toiled as good men do after the rewards of virtue." At the same place, the "terrible brilliancy of the sunlight" scared him from the fatigues of sight seeing, and "unnerved" him "for any thing but dinner. That was welcome, though coarsely conceived and executed," &c. At the ancient capital of the Volsci, the fatal asylum of Coriolanus,-"although black stale bread and shapeless masses of rough-hewn mutton and beef boiled to the consistency of leather, flanked by bottles of the smallest infrà acid wine, constituted our fare, we breakfasted with the enjoyment of the Homeric rage, and were deaf to wise. suggestions that we should be obliged to dine in Rome." In a rude inn at Montefiascone,

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For ever! A new and touching emphasis is imparted to the phrase by the stroke which so suddenly laid the kind writer low. With the so recent memory of that stroke, it may seem frivolous, or worse, if we mention as another noticeable point in the "Rambles" his ever freely recorded appreciation of good cheer. But how take account of the "Ram bles" at all, and not refer to this feature in the Rambler's individuality? - not, be it observed, that he was a " gastronome," but that he was healthily void of reserve in jotting down his interest in gastronomics. It had been unpardonable in Boswell to omit Dr. Johnson's creed and practice in this line of things. "Some people," quoth the sage, "have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind any thing else." So averred a Rambler of last century; a Plain Speaker on this as on most other topics. Now the Rambler with whom we have to do was guiltless of this "foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind." If, at Dieppe, he had to put up with a "coarse breakfast of black-skinny fowl swimming in yellowish butter, ish bread, cold boiled mutton, and straw-colored coffee," he thought it a thing to be put down-in his book. He confesses how a due sense of "the eternal fitness of things" enforced on him the duty of drinking the best Burgundy he could procure in Dijon, "in gay defiance to the fever which so strangely but surely lurks beneath the 'sunset glow of that insidious liquor;" how he "enjoyed some coffee and cutlets" at Lyons; how "dinner came to his inexpressible relief" at Avignon; how wistfully he looked about in the dreary kitchen of a quasi-inn, but all in vain, 'for a flitch of bacon, or a rope of onions, or a mouldy cheese, to hint of some

we satisfied the rage of hunger with coarse and plentiful repast of fish, beef boiled to leather, and greasy beans, accompanied by a pale white wine of an acidity more pungent than ever elsewhere gave man an unmerited heartburn." In an old palatial inn at Radicofani, "we enjoyed a breakfast of hard black bread, a large platter of eggs, some boiled beef of the usual consistency, and a great

with the true relish of hunger." Further illustrations are not wanting; and not wanted.

Something like a qualm of conscience we feel, at leaving this book, without affording means of neutralizing the impression producible by such shreds of literal table-talk, by a set-off of examples of the writer's grave and reflective mood, such as, the reader is cautioned, are fairly interspersed in the course of the Rambles. Half a dozen at the least we had marked for citation, but now is space exhausted, and we can only therefore refer to the Rambler's meditations on the career of Sir William Follett, on Philo-Romanism, and other occasional musings sug