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Mr. Taylor-the author of "Essays written in the Intervals of Business."* In that writer, the happiness of parti. cular words strikes us more often than in Henry Taylor; but we are far from sure that this, while it increases the momentary effect, is a merit. Is it fanciful in us to think that in these occasional felicities of language which separate, as it were, a word from those around it-a paragraph from its context-we see the imagination playing with its subject, rather than the whole mind engaged?

"I marked

That mi! the chequer-work of light and shade, With curious choice he plu ked no other flowers But those on which the moonlight fell."

Still, to criticise in this spirit works which have given us great delight, disputing or dispelling beauty after beauty, will not do; and we must remember that an author who thus seems to play with his subject, may, in fact, be but seeking to communicate truths which would otherwise have little chance of access to his hearer's mind, in a less obtrusive character than that of a teacher of indisputable proportions. Whatever is original in speculation, must be presented as if it were doubtful, or an author will seem to claim the right of an instructor, instead of appearing to be one engaged on an inquiry in common with the hearer whom he seeks to interest. We are, however, straying from our subject, and are dwelling on points which concern the essayist rather than the dra. matist, for, as faults or as merits, they can scarce exist, except in passages where the author speaks in his own person, and not in that of an imaginary character.

We are told by our author that he feels the scenes in mo lern fiction to be often painfully harrowing. In many of these cases it can be plainly shown

that the limits of Art are transcended. In the ancient tragedy, there was always reason for the suffering. It was not pain for the sake of excitement, or exhibited for the sake of showing the skill of the poet or the actor, but it was the measure of divine wrath, or of superhuman endurance. It was the suffering of a god or a demigod. The scene was cast in the heroic ages. There is a story told by Herodotus, and commented on by Schlegel, which is calculated to illustrate the view which the Greeks took of such things. Miletus had been destroyed by the Persians. In Herodotus's account of its destruc. tion, we are given the language of the oracle concerning it :

Καὶ τότε δὴ Μίλητε, κακῶν ἐπίμήχαν ἔργων, Πολλοῖσι δεῖπνόν τε καὶ αγλαὰ δωρα για

νήσει

Σαὶ δ' άλοχοι πολλοῖσι πόδας νίψουσι κομηταις· Νηοῦ δ ̓ ἡμετερου Δίδυμοις ἄλλοισι μελήσει.†

The words of the oracle were fulfilled. The men were slain by the "long-haired" Persians-the women were treated as slaves. As to the tem. ple and the shrine at Didymi, it ceased to be tended by the Milesians, which perhaps satisfies the meaning of the words of the oracle; but so far from beng tended by others, it was burnt and pillaged. The poet Phrynicus composed a drama upon "the capture of Miletus. When it was acted at Athens, the whole theatre burst into tears; but the poet was fined a thousand drachmæ for renewing the memory of their domestic misfortunes, and orders were given that no one should thenceforward act that drama."

The example of the ancients, then, so far from supporting the writers who seek to produce effect by excitement, is, when examined, entirely in the other way. To calm the perturbation of the passions seems, in any interpretation we

We have reviewed, in former volumes, this writer's "Claims of Labour," see DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE, Vol. XXV., and his "Henry II." DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE, Vol. XXIII. We take shame to ourselves for not having before now called our readers' attention to the essays on slavery in the second volume of his "Friends in Council," and to the illustrations of that most important and most perplexing chapter on the history of the human race given in his "Conquerors of the New World." Of these books-the last, most probably, in connection with the American historian Prescott-we must soon find or make an opportunity of communicating with our readers.

"And thou Miletus, contrived of wicked deeds,

Though shalt become a banquet and rich spoils to many;
Thy wives shall wash the feet of many long-haired,
And others shall have the care of our temple at Didymi."

can give to the language of the most subtle of the ancient critics, to have been, if not the absolute purpose of the dramatic poet, yet the presupposed condition on which alone it was possible for the mind to receive the lessons of wisdom which it was the business of the drama to give. This, however, we must leave for the present undiscussed.

Among the volumes which we had thought of bringing before our readers' notice is one of exceeding beauty. "Annesley and other Poems"-by Anua Harriet Drury. "Annesley" was sent to us on its first publication, but by some accident the volume was mislaid, and has almost by accident again met our eye, when we were looking at the books which we have been just speaking of. We have room but for the opening of the poem, but even in the passages we have selected from Tennyson and Henry Taylor there is nothing more touchingly beautiful:

"He was the favoured friend of early days;
My generous rival for scholastic praise;
My pure example in the paths of right,
In all superior-save in boyish might.
Pale, weak of frame, a slight and studious youth,
His eye all intellect, his lip all truth,
Marked for his genius, for his learning crowned,
He shunned the sports for which we were renowned.

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"It ceased at last: the passion, and the strife:
And I retreated from my Eastern life.
Laden with wealth, and scared before my time,
Returned repining to my native elime.
My end of being gained, my labour o'er,
I had no more to gain, yet sighed for more.
The world was mine, with all the world can be;
I tried it all, and found it, vanity!
Restiess from spot to spot I wandered on,
Seeking for peace on earth, and finding none,
Till to the village were my footsteps sent.
Where the brief manhood of my friend was spent:
There, like a wellspring to its ancient track,
Came the checked tide of old affection back.
I reached his Church: I paced the silent aisle,
Till fancy heard his voice, and caught his smile:
Till mixing things that are with things that scem,
Our separation but appeared a dream,
And when again I sought the open air,
I almost started not to find him there."

Annesley's story is told to his old friend by a venerable man whom he meets in the churchyard. It is a romance of domestic life, which it would not be fair to tell in any but the author's words, and for this we have not space.

We have seldom been more pleased than with the poem of " Annesley."

A.

ANDREW CARSON'S MONEY;

THE night of a bitter winter day had come; frost, and hail, and snow carried a sense of new desolation to the cold hearths of the moneyless, whilst the wealthy only drew the closer to their bright fires, and experienced stronger feelings of comfort.

In a small back apartment of a mean house, in one of the poorest quarters of Edinburgh, a young man sat with a pen in his fingers, endeavouring to write, though the blue tint of his nails shewed that the blood was almost frozen in his hands. There was no fire in the room; the old iron grate was rusty and damp, as if a fire had not blazed in it for years; the hail dashed against the fractured panes of the window; the young man was poorly and scantily dressed, and he was very thin, and bilious to all appearance; his sallow yellow face and hollow eyes told of disease, misery, and the absence of hope.

His hand shook with cold, as, by the light of the meanest and cheapest of candles, he slowly traced line after line, with the vain thought of making money by his writings. In his boyish days he had entered the ranks of literature, with the hopes of fame to lead him on, but disappointment after disappointment, and miserable circumstances of poverty and suffering had been his fate: now the vision of fame had become dim in his sick soul-he was writing with the hope of gaining money, any trifle, by his pen.

Of all the ways of acquiring money to which the millions bend their best energies, that of literature is the most forlorn. The artificers of necessaries and luxuries, for the animal existence, have the world as their customers; but those who labour for the mind have but a limited few, and therefore the supply of mental work is infinitely greater than the demand, and thousands of the unknown and struggling, even though possessed of much genius, must sink before the famous few who monopolise the literary market, and so the young writer is overlooked. He may be starving, but his manuscripts will be returned to him; the emoluments of

A STORY OF GOLD.

literature are all flowing in other channels; he is one added to the thousands too many in the writing world; his efforts may bring him misery and madness, but not money.

The door of the room opened, and a woman entered; and advancing near the little table on which the young man was writing, she fixed her eyes on him with a look in which anger, and the extreme wretchedness which merges on insanity, were mingled. She seemed nearly fifty; her features had some remaining traces of former regularity and beauty, but her whole countenance now was a volume filled with the most squalid suffering and evil passions; her cheeks and eyes were hollow, as if she had reached the extreme of old age; she was emaciated to a woeful degree; her dress was poor, dirty, and tattered, and worn without any attempt at proper arrangement.

Writing! writing! writing! Thank God, Andrew Carson, the pen will soon drop from your fingers with starvation."

The woman said this in a half-screaming, but weak and broken-down voice.

"Mother, let me have some peace," said the young writer, turning his face away, so that he might not see her red glaring eyes fixed on him.

"Ay, Andrew Carson, I say thank God that the force of hunger will soon now make you drop that cursed writing. Thank God, if there is the God that my father used to talk about in the long nights in the bonnie highland glen, where it's like a dream of lang that I ever lived."

syne

She pressed her hands on her breast, as if some recollections of an overpowering nature were in her soul.

"The last rag in your trunk has gone to the pawn; you have neither shirt, nor coat, nor covering now, except what you've on. Write-writeif you can, without eating; to-morrow you'll have neither meat nor drink here, nor aught now to get money on."

"Mother, I am in daily expectation of receiving something for my writing now; the post this evening may bring me some good news."

He said this with hesitation, and there was little of hope in the expression of his face.

"Good news! good news about your writing! that's the good news 'ill never come; never, you good-for-nothing scribbler!"

She screamed forth the last words in a voice of frenzy. Her tone was a mixture of Scotch and Irish accents. She had resided for some years of her earlier life in Ireland.

As the young writer looked at her and listened to her, the pen shook in his hand.

"Go out, and work, and make money. Ay, the working people can live on the best, whilst you, with that pen in your fingers, are starving yourself and me.'

Mother, I am not strong enough for labour, and my tastes are strongly, very strongly, for literature."

"Not strong enough! you're twenty past. It's twenty long years since the cursed night I brought you into the world."

The young writer gazed keenly on his mother, for he was afraid she was under the influence of intoxication, as was too often the case; but he did not know how she could have obtained money, as he knew there was not a farthing in the house. The woman seemed to divine the meaning of his looks

"I'm not drunk, don't think it," she cried; "its the hunger and the sorrow that's in my head.'

"Well, mother, perhaps this evening's post may have some good intelligence."

"What did the morning's post bring? There, there-don't I see it-them's the bonnie hopes of yours."

She pointed to the table, where lay a couple of returned manuscripts. Andrew glanced towards the parcel, and made a strong effort to suppress the deep sigh which heaved his breast.

"Ay, there it is-there's a bundle of that stuff ye spend your nights and days writing; taking the flesh off your bones, and making that face of yours so black and yellow; it's your father's face, too-ay-well it's like him now, indeed the ruffian. I wish I had never seen him, nor you, nor this world.”

"My father," said Andrew, and a feeling of interest overspread his bloodless face. "You have told me little of him. Why do you speak of him so harshly?"

"Go and work, and make money, I say. I tell you I must get money; right or wrong, I must get it; there's no living longer, and enduring what I've endured. I dream of being rich; I waken every morning from visions where my hands are filled with money; that wakening turns my head, when I know and see there is not a halfpenny in the house, and when I see you, my son, sitting there, working like a fool with pen and brain, but without the power to earn a penny for me. Go out and work with your hands, I say again, and let me get money-do any thing, if it brings money. There is the old woman over the way, who has a working son; his mother may bless God that he is a shoemaker and not a poet; she is the happy woman, so cozily covered with warm flannel and stuff this weary weather, and her mutton, and her tea, and her money jingling in her pocket for ever; that's what a working son can do a shoemaker can do that."

At this some noise in the kitchen called Mrs. Carson away, to the great relief of Andrew. He rose, and closed the door gently after her. He seated himself again, and took up his pen, but his head fell listlessly on his hand; he felt as if his mother's words were yet echoing in his ears. From his earliest infancy he had regarded her with fear and wonder, more than love.

As

Mrs. Carson was the daughter of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, who was suspected by his brethren in the ministry of entertaining peculiar views of religion on some points, and also of being at intervals rather unsound in his mind. He bestowed, however, a superior education on his only daughter, and instructed her carefully himself until his death, which occurred when she was not more than fourteen. her father left her little if any support, she was under the necessity of going to reside with relations in Ireland, who moved in a rather humble rank. Of her subsequent history little was known to Andrew; she always maintained silence regarding his father, and seemed angry when he ventured to question her. Andrew was born in Ireland, and resided there until about his eighth year, when his mother returned to Scotland.

It was from his mother Andrew had gained all the little education that had been bestowed on him. That education was most capriciously imparted, and in its extent only went the length

of teaching him to read partially; for whatever further advances he had made, he was indebted to his own self-culture. At times his mother would make some efforts to impress on him the advantages of education: she would talk of poetry, and repeat specimens of the poets which her memory had retained from the period of her girlhood in her father's house; but oftenest the language of bitterness, violence, and execration was on her lips. With the never-ceasing complaints of want-want of position, want of friends, but, most of all, want of money-sounding in his ears, Andrew grew up a poet. The unsettled and aimless mind of his mother, shadowed as it was with perpetual blackness, prevented her from calmnly and wisely striving to place her son in some position by which he could have aided in supporting himself and her. As a child, Andrew was shy and solitary, caring little for the society of children of his own years, and taking refuge from the never-ceasing violence of his mother's temper in the privacy of his own pcor bed-room, with some old book which he had contrived to borrow, or with his pen, for he was a writer of verses from an early age.

With a

Andrew was small-sized, sickly, emaciated, and feeble in frame; his mind had much of the hereditary weakness visible in his mother; his imagination and his passions were strong, and easily excited to such a pitch as to overwhelm for the moment his reason. little-exercised and somewhat defective judgment; with no knowledge of the world; with few books; with a want of that tact possessed by some intellects, of knowing and turning to account the tendencies of the age in literature, it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet, though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in the way of realising either fame or emolument. Now, as he sat with his eyes fixed on the two returned manuscripts on his table, his torturing memory passed in review before him the many times his hopes had been equally lost. He was only twenty years of age, yet he had endured so many disappointments! He shook and trembled with a convulsive agony as he recalled poem after poem,

odes, sonnets, epics, dramas-he had tried everything; he had built so many glorious expectations on each as, night after night, shivering with cold and faint with sickness, he had persisted in gathering from his mind, and arranging laboriously, the brightest and most powerful of his poetical fancies, and hoped, and was often almost sure, they would spread broadly, and be felt. deeply in the world. But there they had all returned to him-there they lay, unknown, unheard of-they were only so much waste paper.

As each manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world's success would hardly have made him happy; he had no internal strength to cope with disappointment -no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was overwhelmed with present failures. One moment he doubted sorely the power of his own genius; and the thought was like death to him, for without fame-without raising himself a name and a position above the common masses-he felt he could not live. Again, he would lay the whole blame on the undiscerning publishers to whom his poetry had been sent; he would anathematise them all with the fierce bitterness of a soul which was, alas! unsubdued in many respects by the softening and humbling influences of the religion of Christ. He had not the calm reflection which might have told him that, young, uneducated, utterly unlearned in the world and in books as he was, his writings must of necessity have a kind of inferiority to the works of those possessed of more advantages. He had no deep, sober principles or thoughts; his thoughts were feelings which bore him on their whirlwind course to the depths of agony, and to the brink of the grave, for his health was evidently seriously impaired by the indulgence of long-continued emotions of misery.

He took up one of the rejected manuscripts in his hand: it was a legendary poem, modelled something after the style of Byron, though the young author would have violently denied the resemblance. He thought of the pains he had bestowed on it of the amount

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