14. At Mains, Linlithgow, in the 75th year of his age, Mr William Glen, distiller. -At her house, Frederick Street, Glasgow, Mrs Janet Fleming, widow of George Lothian, Esq. of Kirklands, merchant in Glasgow. 15. At Berwick, Alice, wife of Mr William Cunningham, merchant. In Argyll Street, London, Miss Georgiana Harriet Colebrooke, younger daughter of the deceased George Colebrooke, Esq. of CrawfordDouglas. 16. At Wallingford, in the 65th year of his age, the Reverend Edward Barry, D.D. rector of St Mary's and St Leonard's, in that town. At Gorgie Mill, Mrs Cox, relict of Mr John Cox, Bell's Mills. At Edinburgh, George Cooper, Esq. St Croix. Miss Catherine Mercer, daughter of the late Col. Wm. Mercer of Aldie. At London, Captain Thomas Robertson, of 99, George Street, Edinburgh. 17. At his Grace's mansion, in StJames's Square, London, her Grace the Duchess of St Albans. - At Whitehall Place, Elizabeth Penelope, the eldest child of Lord and Lady James Stuart. 18. At Maryfield, John, youngest son of Mr Richard Alexander, merchant, Edinburgh. At his house in Prince's Street, Mr David Findlay, in the 80th year of his age. 19. At London, Charles Knyvett, Esq. aged 70. He was long and highly respected in the musical world. At Banff, Sarah, eldest daughter of the late David Young, Esq. of Craighead, merchant in Glasgow, and grand-daughter of the deceased Reverend John Carse, D.D. minister of St Mary's Church in that city. 20. At Edinburgh, Miss Agnes -Lowis. At his house, No. 4, Greenside Street, Andrew Johnston, farrier, aged 35. 21. At Fountainbridge, Charles Durie of Craig luscar, Esq. aged 84. 22. At Cambeltown, in the 73d year of his age, Duncan Campbell, Esq. sheriff-substitute of Kintyre, who held that situation for the last thirtyfive years of his life. 23. Mrs Janet Brodie, wife of Mr James Tait, bookseller, No. 4, Nicolson's Street. 24. At Edinburgh, Agnes Donaldson, wife of Dr Colin Lauder. 25. At Edinburgh, K. W. Burnett, Esq. of Monboddo. 26. At Paris, William Leod M'Leod, the infant son of Alexander Norman M'Leod, Esq. of Harris., At her house, Young Street, Charlotte Square, Mrs Grace Waugh, relict of Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert Waugh. 27. At Edinburgh, Mrs Pitcairn of Pitcairn. At Warriston Crescent, Mrs Hamilton Dundas, sen. of Duddingstone. At Edinburgh, Janet, eldest daughter of Mr Bogle, secretary of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Mr Alexander Gillies, writer in Edinburgh. -At Edinburgh, Mrs Margaret Wishart, daughter of the late Reverend Dr George Wishart, sometime minister of the Tron Church, Edinburgh, and one of the Deans of the Chapel Royal. 30. At Clermiston, Mr Andrew Hay Robinson, youngest son of George Robinson of Clermiston, Esq. writer to the signet. Lately.-At Sir John Hay's House, Pitt Street, Miss Arthur Whethem Hay, third daughter of the late Colonel Hay, of the Engineers. At her house, 41, Hanover Street, Mrs Wren, in the 91st year of her age. At Beaufort, South Caroline, Mr Andrew Drysdale, late farmer in Middleton, Mid-Lothian, At Tewkesbury, in the 96th year of his age, Mr John Dick, formerly a respectable linendraper of that borough. Mr Dick was a native of Scotland, and perfectly recollected seeing the march of the rebel army to the fatal plains of Prestonpans, in 1745, while he was pursuing the more peaceful occupation of following the plough. Printed by James Ballantyne & Co. Edinburgh. THE author of this poem has been from the commencement of his career the enfant gaté of the critics. It was by slow degrees that the professional dispensers of literary honour consented to do full justice to the merits of Scott and Byron; and up to this hour, Wordsworth, a poet of genius quite equal to either of these, has never been able to obtain any thing like justice at their hands. Coleridge and Southey have been infinitely more quizzed than applaudedand are likely to be so in future, notwithstanding the contempt which men of real knowledge and feeling have expressed for the manner in which they have been treated. But Mr Milman has been, from the beginning and all along, lauded to the skies in journals of the most opposite sentiments; and, in short, he is almost the only literary man now living, who has never had the slightest reason to complain of any one of his literary contemporaries. We have many doubts whether this universal kindness has been favourable to the true interests of this gentleman, or will in the end be found to have promoted his true poetical fame. There was a great deal in his first efforts to please every body, and there was nothing to displease any one. His language spoke him a scholar, his tone * of feeling was uniformly that of a gentleman, and nobody could read his verses without being persuaded that they were written by a man of virtuous principles. And withal, there was diffused over the whole surface of his composition a something of opulent and luxurious and stately, which was well calculated to inspire lofty hopes, and to lend even to visible defects the appearance of so many pledges of future excellence. The critics, propitiated by all this, were willing to trust that time and reflection would do for him the work of reprehension, and so they passed over all his faults with a leniency not very customary in these days. After a time, he himself became one of the Quarterly Reviewers; and since then he has enjoyed all the support which that journal's extensive acceptance and merited authority could give him. There may be some minds so constituted as to thrive better under this sort of general favour than under any other treatment; but we think the event has shewn that it is not so in the case of Mr Milman. His Oxford Prize poem and his Fazio-performances in all respects juvenile― are still the best things he has done : and, if we are to judge of the progress of his intellect from the last poem he * The Martyr of Antioch: A Dramatic Poem. By the Rev. H. H. Milman, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. 8vo. London. Murray, 1822. VOL. XI. 2 L has published, we must be compelled to say, not only that he has acquired no additional strength of imagination, but that even in the minor arts of language and versification he has absolutely retrograded. And these are the things which convince us that he has really been a spoiled child; for, in spite of defects more serious than we choose at this moment to dwell upon, there is that about Mr Milman which leaves us no doubt that, had he given himself fair play, he might have been by this time a very different sort of person from what he now is. We shall for the present say nothing about what we think Mr Milman might have been, nor about what we think he may perhaps yet be; but shall speak our mind very plainly, and that in a spirit of great kindness, as to what we think he has done and is doing. He has written four octavos, containing more verses than many poets of the greatest eminence have written in the whole course of their lives. In these volumes he has exhibited no ordinary command over the resources of the poetical language of England, -they contain many passages of rich description-many more of vigorous declamation, and some of much lyrical beauty; and taken altogether, they cannot fail to leave the impression that their author is a very elegant and accomplished man. But with the four volumes lying on our table before us, we cannot but ask ourselves, our readers, and Mr Milman himself, this simple question-What have these four volumes added to the literature of England? Would our literature have been a whit less complete than it is had Mr Milman never published one line of all he has written? We are afraid there is but one answer which any candid man can make to this trying question. Mr Milman has opened no new sources of poetical interest; he has delineated no new working of human passion; he has sounded no unexplored depth in the moral or intellectual nature of man; he has neither adorned nor embalmed any faded or forgotten portion of our national recollections; he has touched no unvibrating silent chord of sympathy; he has removed the dust from no noble monument; no youthful imagination has been kindled by his torch; no solitary unconscious poet has been roused by his appeal; there is not one passage in all his books which has passed from lip to lip, and from heart to heart; there is no one line of his that any man quotes; there is no phrase, no epithet of his that has become common property. Heis very probably surrounded, when he delivers his lectures on the poetical art at Oxford, by a troop of young gentlemen, who consider him as the very Magnus Apollo of the time, who reecho his opinions, or rather the opinions which he himself echoes, and with whom the auros ea of Mr Milman is enough. In like manner his books are beautifully printed by Mr Davison, and bountifully puffed by Mr Murray, and they find a place for several weeks on the table of every fa shionable drawing-room in town. But here the matter stops. Take the nation at large, and who knows or remembers any thing now about Samor, Lord of the Bright City, or The Fall of Jerusalem? Take the nation at large this day six months, and by that time the Martyr of Antioch will, we are sorry to say, be quite as much forgotten as the Newspaper or Magazine in which it has been extolled on the morning of its publication. The fact is, that Mr Milman appears to have entirely neglected those habits of sincere self-examination, by means of which alone the power of intellect can be built up higher and higher. He has listened to flattery, and been enervated by it-not stimulated. He has gone on writing, but not studying,-describing, but not searching, elaborating declamations, but not opening his heart to the inspirations of individual feeling. His works, therefore, appear one after another, without conveying any notion of their being poured out from the fulness of a strengthening mind. They are not progressive, but successive exertions. When one reads a new poem, however imperfect and defective, from the pen of Lord Byron, one never fails to meet every now and then some noble thought, some beautiful expression, which takes its place immediately in the memory, and never passes away again: and if any one thinks of comparing the Lord Byron of this day with "George Gordon Lord Byron, a Minor," every single thought and expression of this sort is a new mark of the immense stride that intellect has taken. In the same way, when the author of Waverley sends out a new novel, it is very likely that we all say to ourselves, this is very inferior to Waverley, this is inferior to Rob Roy, this is nothing like Ivanhoe; but who ever lays down the most careless and hasty of his volumes without being sensible that he has made a certain number of substantial acquisitions while reading it? Will any body ever forget the beautiful struggles between the half-estranged sisters in The Pirate, or the beautiful moral lesson their behaviour and its consequences teach? or doubt the immense superiority of these things over any thing "The great Magician" could have done when he wrote the Lay of the Last Minstrel ? Will any body ever forget those terrible words in Sardanapalus' description of his vision of Semiramis, eyed And bloody-handed ?" But we put it to the good faith of any intelligent reader who has followed us thus far, to say, where is the conception or the expression in all Mr Milman's volumes, which one is likely to remember in this fashion.-There is nothing like the "cunctantem thalamo" of Virgil, or thé anλa μɛ vos de xolos, &c. of Homer. But this is trying by severe standards; and without pushing the matter farther, we shall just conclude with asking, Who has ever, in this borrowing and lending age, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed any thing from Mr Milman? The truth and substance of the whole matter is, that Mr Milman has never yet produced any thing stamped with the strong unquestionable impress of originality; and the best things he has done, elegant as they are, have been but so many exemplifications of the sagacity of the old adage, facile est inventis addere. Mr Milman has many defects; we wish he had more, but of another kind; for his sins are, almost without exception, sins of omission, not of commission: and these are, we think, the worst a young author can make himself remarkable for. We should have had, undoubtedly, much greater hopes as to Mr Milman's future career, had we found him running into fifty palpable errors of a bold and thoughtless nature, for every one fault of the negative order, which the most skilful eye can detect in him. An infelix fucilitas" of language has kept Mr Milman stationary in one great department of his art, wherein his early efforts gave much room for hope of the greatest excellence. A facility of swallowing compliments still more unfortunate, has prevented him from perceiving the necessity of intellectual labour; and thus going round and round in the same circle of words and images, Mr Milman has suffered several of his finest years to pass over his head without producing any thing which he might not have produced with equal ease when he was writing Fazio-without adding one leaf to the wreath which he had won for his temples ere he ceased to be a stripling. The Martyr of Antioch is in every respect an inferior performance to the Fall of Jerusalem; and we are of this opinion much more decidedly at the close of a second perusal, than we were at the close of a first. The best passages in it are lyrical; but there is no lyric in the whole of it in the least to be compared even with those of the second order in the former poem; and the most successful effort it contains is but an echo of the conclusion of the Fall of Jerusalem. The story also is much more meagre, and we think there is by no means the same indication of dramatic tact in the management of the dialogue. Nevertheless, this is a poem on which, even had it appeared anonymously, some share of attention must have been fixed, and we shall not hesitate to examine its structure and materials with some little accuracy, although, unless the author exerts himself more vigorously than he has been doing, we shall probably not bestow the same compliment on the next of his volumes. The story is that of a young girl dedicated to the service of Apollo at Antioch, converted to the Christian faith, and sacrificed to the unrelenting spirit of offended heathenism, in the reign of the Emperor Probus. The author, in his preface, blames the old martyrologists for " describing, with almost anatomical precision, the various methods of torture," while they have, as he says, "rarely and briefly noticed the internal and mental agonies to which the same circumstances inevitably exposed the converts. In such a situation," he says, "it has been my object to represent the mind of a young and tender female; and I have opposed to Christianity the most beautiful and the most natural of heathen superstitions,-the worship of the Sun." From all this it must be sufficiently evident, that Mr Milman owes the general idea of his new poem to the romance of Valerius, and that in most of his leading conceptions, he follows the author of that on the whole splendid, although very unequal composition. The ideas of following the female martyr into the struggles of the domestic affections, wounded and disturbed by the influence of the new religion, and of contrasting the simple faith of the Bible with the gorgeous superstition of the God of Delos, are common to both performances. The ancient Christian priest Fabius of the poem, is the same being with the Aurelius Felix of the novel, and speaks in a great measure the same language; but indeed how could he speak any other? The Margarita of the poem is the shadow of the Athanasia of the romance; her conversion is discovered almost in the same manner, and her conversations with her friends while in confinement and expectation of death, are all conceived in precisely the same spirit. The Amphitheatre, with the laughing and cruel multitude of spectators, is a copy, but a faint one it is true, of the magnificent picture of the Coliseum in Valerius, a picture to which our prose literature possesses few things equal. The behaviour of the different martyrs is in like manner taken almost entirely from the same source. If Mr Milman's performance goes beyond Valerius, it must therefore be in the management of its plot, and in the more judicious use which the poet may have made of the materials furnished ready to his hand by the learning or the invention of the novelist; and in many particulars we are of opinion, that such is the case. And, first of all, we think Mr Milman has exhibited great judgment in giving to the story of his heroine a termination altogether tragic. The Athanasia of Valerius ought to have died; and her preservation is a foolish compliment to the prevailing taste of the young ladies, and other habitual novel-readers. Secondly, Mr Milman, in consequence of this his tragic catastrophe, gains another great advantage, which is, that his performance concludes with the highest interest of his story; whereas in Valerius, the interest is not sustained on the same key with the description of the bloody scenes in the Roman Amphitheatre, at the close of the first volume. Thraso and Athanasia should have died together, and at the end of the book. Thirdly, Mr Milman's plan has the merit of concentrating the interest on the proper personages, much more than that of his predecessor. The father of his Christian maiden is, in regard to the conception at least, much better than Athanasia's numerous tribe of relatives. And, in like manner, it is far better that Margarita should be the priestess of Apollo herself, instead of occupying such an inferior place in his temple as Athanasia does. Fourthly, The idea of representing the Christian heroine as being beloved by the Roman Prefect, whose business it is to judge and condemn the disciples of the persecuted religion, is a happy one, and of this Mr Milman might have made great use; but here we think he has failed very miserably, and done no sort of justice to the interesting dramatic situations his idea brought within his reach. This Olybius, who tempts Margarita to abandon her religion by shewing her his long suite of apartments and magnificent furniture, and promising her that she shall be seated close by his side on the throne of the Amphitheatre, &c. is a very vulgar personage, and quite unworthy of Mr Milman's imagination. There is nothing Roman in such a character; nor does his hasty abdication, on hearing of Margarita's death, at all elevate him in our eyes. The style in which he argues with Margarita can sanction no comparison with the scene between the senator Palma and Athanasia in Valerius ; and this is the more astonishing, when one considers the superiority of the relative situation in which the poet's interlocutors are placed. Trajan and Palma in the novel are beings whom we understand; they speak like high-bred, enlightened, and compassionate men; but the Olybius of the poem is a person whom it is difficult to imagine either a man reverencing, or a woman loving. He is vain, presumptuous, boastful, the one moment; the next, nothing but weak and silly; and as for his threatening and scolding the wo |