opinion whatever of the poem to which it refers. "Give a dog a bad name," &c. Whenever a book is abused, people take it for granted that it is I who have been abusing it.

Latterly I have read "Saul," and agree with But surely Mr. Ward (who, although he did the epigrammatist, that it "will do"-whoever write "De Vere," is by no means a fool) could attempts to wade through it. It will do, also, never have put to paper, in his sober senses, anyfor trunk-paper. The author is right in calling thing so absurd as the paragraph quoted above, it "A Mystery :”—for a most unfathomable mys- without stopping at every third word to hold his tery it is. When I got to the end of it I found sides, or thrust his pocket-handkerchief into his it more mysterious than ever-and it was really mouth. If the serious intention be insisted upon, a mystery how I ever did get to the end-which however, I have to remark that the opinion is I half fancied that somebody had cut off, in a fit the mere opinion of a writer remarkable for no of ill-will to the critics. I have heard not a syl- other good trait than his facility at putting his lable about the "Mystery," of late days. "The readers to sleep according to rules Addisonian People," seem to have forgotten it; and Mr. and with the least possible loss of labor and Coxe's friends should advertise it under the head time. But as the mere opinion of even a Jefof "Mysterious Disappearance"-that is to say, frey or a Macaulay, I have an inalienable right the disappearance of a Mystery. to meet it with another.

As a novelist, then, Bulwer is far more than respectable; although generally inferior to Scott, The pure Imagination chooses, from either Godwin, D'Israeli, Miss Burney, Sue, Dumas, Beauty or Deformity, only the most combinable Dickens, the author of "Ellen Wareham," the things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as author of "Jane Eyre," and several others. a general rule, partaking, in character, of beauty, From the list of foreign novels I could select a or sublimity, in the ratio of the respective beauty hundred which he could neither have written or sublimity of the things combined-which are nor conceived. As a dramatist, he deserves themselves still to be considered as atomic-that more credit, although he receives less. His is to say, as previous combinations. But, as "Richelieu," "Money" and "Lady of Lyons”, often analogously happens in physical chemistry, have done much in the way of opening the pub80 not unfrequently does it occur in this chemis- lic eyes to the true value of what is supercilitry of the intellect, that the admixture of two ously termed "stage-effect" in the hands of one elements results in a something that has nothing able to manage it. But if commendable at this of the qualities of one of them, or even nothing point, his dramas fail egregiously in points more of the qualities of either... Thus, the range of important; so that, upon the whole, he can be Imagination is unlimited. Its materials extend said to have written a good play, only when we throughout the universe. Even out of deformi- think of him in connexion with the still more ties it fabricates that Beauty which is at once its contemptible “old-dramatist" imitators who are sole object and its inevitable test. But, in gen- his contemporaries and friends. As historian, eral, the richness or force of the matters com- he is sufficiently dignified, sufficiently ornate, bined; the facility of discovering combinable and more than sufficiently self-sufficient. His novelties worth combining; and, especially the "Athens" would have received an Etonian prize, absolute "chemical combination" of the com- and has all the happy air of an Etonian prizepleted mass—are the particulars to be regarded in essay re-vamped. His political pamphlets are our estimate of Imagination. It is this thorough very good as political pamphlets and very disharmony of an imaginative work which so reputable as anything else. His essays leave often causes it to be undervalued by the thought- no doubt upon any body's mind that, with the less, through the character of obviousness which writer, they have been essays indeed. His is superinduced. We are apt to find ourselves asking why it is that these combinations have mever been imagined before.

"He (Bulwer) is the most accomplished writer of the most ccomplished era of English Letters; practising all styles and lasses of composition, and eminent in all-novelist, dramaEst, poet, historian, moral philosopher, essayist, critic, potical pamphleteer;-in each superior to all others, and nly rivalled in each by himself."

Ward-author of "Tremaine."

criticism is really beneath contempt. His moral philosophy is the most ridiculous of all the moral philosophies that ever have been imagined upon earth.

"The men of sense," says Helvetius, "those idols of the unthinking, are very far inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, can alone impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts.”

When the Swiss philosopher here speaks of

"inferiority," he refers to inferiority in worldly success:—by "men of sense" he intends indo- LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE II. lent men of genius. And Bulwer is, emphatically, one of the "men of passions" contemplated in the apopthegm. His passions, with opportunities, have made him what he is. Urged by a rabid ambition to do much, in doing nothing he would merely have proved himself an idiot. Something he has done. In aiming at Crichton, he has hit the target an inch or two above Harrison Ainsworth. Not to such intellects belong the honors of universality. His works bear about them the unmistakeable indications of mere talent—talent, I grant, of an unusual order and nurtured to its extreme of development with a very tender and elaborate care.

Nevertheless,

This remarkable book was written more than a century ago. The author's son, the third Earl of Bristol, became possessed of the manuscript, and gave strict injunctions in his will that no publication should be made of it until the decease of his Majesty George III." Certain causes, principally the fact that persons still lived whose immediate ancestors were pourtrayed with either too much truth, or too much malevolence, (perhaps with too much of both,) occasioned a still greater delay in the publication. In the

Hailes

meantime the existence of the Memoirs, anit is talent still. Genius it is not. And the proof nounced by Horace Walpole in his catalogue of is, that while we often fancy ourselves about to Royal and noble authors, has been a matter of be enkindled beneath its influence, fairly enkin-interest to men of letters; some of whom, Lord dled we never are. That Bulwer is no poet, folamongst them, have looked to the evenlows as a corollary from what has been already tual publication as a means of explaining some said :—for to speak of a poet without genius, is mysteries as to which historians were at fault. The work has at last been published, and we merely to put forth a flat contradiction in terms. propose to give a somewhat extended notice of it. Perhaps we should have done this some months ago; but Delay seems to have been the Fate of the book, and it has touched even us. We have, however, the certainty, from the character of the Memoirs, that we shall not be raking after a dead book, or going on the track of an ephemeral production the value and interest of which have ceased to be considered. Indeed we are pretty sure that those of our usual readers who have become familiar with the Memoirs, will be the most willing to go over again with us some of the remarkable portraits and some of

Quaintness, within reasonable limits, is not only not to be regarded as affectation, but has its proper uses, in aiding a fantastic effect. Miss Barret will afford me two examples. In some lines to a Dog, she says:

Leap! thy broad tail waves a light.
Leap thy slender feet are bright,
Canopied in fringes.

Leap! those tasselled ears of thine
Flicker strangely fair and fine

Down their golden inches.

And again—in the “Song of a Tree-Spirit." the spicy trifles with which they abound.

The Divine impulsion cleaves
In dim movements to the leaves
Dropt and lifted-dropt and lifted—
In the sun-light greenly sifted-
In the sun-light and the moon-light
Greenly sifted through the trees.
Ever wave the Eden trees

In the night-light and the moon-light,
With a ruffling of green branches

Shaded off to resonances

Never stirred by rain or breeze.

66

John, Lord Hervey belonged to a family whose peculiarities of mind and character are much noticed by contemporary writers. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu "divided the human species into men, women, and Herveys." Carr, Lord Hervey, our author's elder brother, who died at an early age, was a man of every irregularity of conduct, but of rare endowments; Horace Walpole says that he was reckoned to have had The thoughts here belong to a high order of parts superior to those of his more celebrated poetry, but could not have been wrought into brother;" Pope speaks of him as one "whose effective expression, without the aid of those early death deprived the family of the Herveys repetitions—those unusual phrases-those quaintnesses, in a word, which it has been too long the in any branch of it." He was celebrated for his "feminine style of beauty, for winning manners, fashion to censure, indiscriminately, under the one general head of "affectation." No poet for an original wit, and for the licentious practiwill fail to be pleased with the two extracts Ices which brought his rash and brilliant life to an have here given; but no doubt there are some untimely end." Horace Walpole, as marked a who will find it hard to reconcile the psychal impossibility of refraining from admiration, with the too-hastily attained mental conviction that, critically, there is nothing to admire.

of as much wit and honor as he left behind him

* MEMOIRS OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE II., &c. From his Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline. By Jola Lord Hervey. Edited by the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard.

man as most in the list of English authors, was] The means which Lord Hervey possessed of probably another of these Herveys; Lady Loui- knowing those matters of which he writes were sa Stuart declares that he was notoriously the abundant. He was vice chamberlain to Queen son of Carr, Lord Hervey. Whether he was or Caroline, her confidante, the friend whom Sir was not, the reader of these Memoirs will doubt- Robert Walpole kept for fourteen years of his less come to the conclusion that Sir Robert Wal-ministry "squat at Eve's ear," a master of court pole was just the man, incredulous of virtue, and festivals, a getter up of tableaux and games for below, (he would have said above,) the common the amusement of the princesses Emily and Carsensibilities of wronged husbands, to think on oline, the king's occasional antagonist at whist the one hand the illegitimacy of his wife's son or ombre or even put, for the royal taste in gamquite probable, and on the other hand to care bling was not over-nice, in a word a fixture of nothing at all about such a tride. the court with abundant opportunities to know Lord Hervey, our author, was as peculiar as its secrets and the characters of all who belongany of his peculiar family. He was distinguish-ed to it. In addition he was long a member of ed by a mordicant and bitter wit, utter want of the House of Commons, and came eventually heart, a penetrating intellect, the feminine beauty into the House of Lords, and of course was fully which we have noticed in his brother, and by many graces and accomplishments personal and intellectual. He was an orator of considerable pretension, if not of considerable force. His style as a writer is clear, sharply edged and telling; perhaps he carries antithesis to extremes. Pope has given us a malicious, exaggerated portrait of him, which would yet destroy him to posterity if he had been a much better man than he was. He is the Sporus of the prologue to the satires, (epistle to Arbuthnot)—

P. Let Sporus tremble

A. What! that thing of silk?
Sporos! that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense alas! can Sporos feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings!
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys;
Yet wit ne'er tastes and beauty ne'er enjoys;
As well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he speaks

And as the prompter breathes the puppet squeaks;
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad!

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,

Ia pun or politics, or tales or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.
His wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis.
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling bead or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord,
Ere's tempter thus the rabbins have expressed

A cherub's face-a reptile all the rest!
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust."
There is no escape from the effect of such a
closing, as that, of the venomous teeth; Pope
was a bitter, malignant little wretch, who made
his brilliant genius and exquisite skill in his art
the instruments of injustice and hatred, but nev-
ertheless Sporus is demolished.

VOL. XV-38

cognizant of the politics and public temper of his times. With such opportunities afforded by his position Lord Hervey seems to have dealt in the spirit of a Boswell; no saying, or occurrence, or trait of character, if there was point in it, seems to have been so minute as to escape him.

The court of George II., as we find it presented in these volumes was pretty much a combiuation of Dutch grossness and French licentiousness. The king was a pragmatical little man, fond of chariots and fat mistresses; he insulted every one about him habitually, and played the by no means conflicting parts of coward to his people and tyrant to his household; he seems to have been utterly unable to perceive the least meaning in such words as sentiment and generosity; he hated his eldest son and heir apparent, Frederick, so genuinely, that the death of "poor Fritz" gave him a pleasure too intense for concealment; he snubbed his daughters so incessantly that with quite a similarity of disposition these estimable princesses were accustomed to call him a brute at his back, and to sulk in his august presence; he wronged, scolded, worried, his shrewd and submissive queen, who yet, by flattery and caresses, and by a cunning interpolation of her ideas with his own until all seemed his own alike, led him by a fine hook in the nose; he was altogether as worrying, as ill-tempered, as vain-glorious, as intensely selfish, as fussy, as strutting, as utterly disagreeable a little beast as ever wore the royal lion's skin. One evil thing he was not-he was not a tyrant to his people; but then it must be considered that he was dreadfully afraid of them, that the House of Hanover has only ruled by popular permission, that a very small matter would have fired the petard and hoisted him out of his British dominions; besides it was quite in his power to indulge his despotic disposition in a petty but constant way against wife, children, mistresses, courtiers, grooms and other servants-and his ebullitions found this safer escape. The only act at all tinctured with

generosity, which Lord Hervey has recorded of accustomed to sneer at his heroic ardors as afhis majesty, was a gift of some Flemish horses fectations. And to confirm their judgment on which he made to the queen; a gift, says our au- this head we have some circumstances attending thor, which operated a convenience to the do- one of the returns from Hanover. On the eve nor, not to the receiver, for his majesty had the of the king's embarkation at Helvoetsluys the use of the horses whilst the queen paid out of weather threatened so stormily that Sir Charles her separate income for keeping them. To what Wager, admiral, refused to put to sea. His majuses his majesty put the animals of his stud we esty urged the vehis Cæsarem until his trembling are enabled to form a lively idea. Those seem pages were full of admiration; and Sir Charles to have been awful days to Lord Hervey, when sulking and swearing attempted the voyage. In the king made him a party in the drivings and three days the king's yacht crept back to Helcounterdrivings, with which, fancying that to voetsluys as much damaged as the royal courage move rapidly was to be energetic and usefully was-which is saying a great deal. It was with busy, he so often afflicted his household. The considerable difficulty that his majesty could be got queen, sick, forlorn, with inflamed eyes, a cold on board again, to re-attempt the passage, even afin the head, a weary spine, groaning helas! to ter a long delay, and the apparent return of safe her vice-chamberlain who clings desperately to fair weather. But sea-sickness may be too much a mettlesome, galloping cob at her chariot win- for even a hero-who may have a "doughty dow, and chokes with dust, and meditates, as well stomach" under all other trials. Altogether it is as the thumping bounds of his horse permit, upon impossible to know whether his majesty would the beauties of regicide, this is a picture to have distinguished himself in battles had be which our author no doubt often reverted to fought them, or enacted the hero had occasion quicken his ferocity against his royal master. offered. Sir Robert Walpole, a sensible people, Whilst on this subject of the royal charioteering, and his own Dutch economy, made his reign pawe must request the reader to give particular no-cific, and the caged Lion could only show his tice to an anecdote in the Memoirs, very charac- martial ardors by roaring.

teristic, and showing the relative values which But one thing, at least, George II. did very the king attached to the lives of grooms and car-well; he wrote letters to women in a most graceriage horses. ful and charming style. Whilst in Hanover,

It is possible that his majesty possessed along where he spent so much of his time, he wrote with his brutality, selfishness, and habitual inso-to his wife at about the rate of forty pages weeklence, the capability of being thrilled by the nar-ly. These letters were often shown to Sir Robration of heroic deeds. But as the possession of ert Walpole and Lord Hervey, and the former such a capability generally infers something of was accustomed to say "if the king was to write the heroic temper itself in the possessor, we are to women, and never to strut and to talk to them, hardly clear upon the point. We were struck he would get the better of all the men in the with the manner in which his majesty is made, in world with them." The forty pages weekly were the Memoirs, to speak of the character and fate chronicles of his amours; this singular little husof a brave Frenchman, Count Plelo, who fell at band made his wife a confidante in such matters. Dantzic. This Count Plelo, a man bred in Her indulgence to his irregularities of this kind camps, but who had become ambassador of was indeed a principal means of swaying him. France at the court of Denmark, volunteered to re-lead a repulsed body of the French to the breach at Dantzic. In a civilian's dress and with only a gentleman's rapier in his hand, this highspirited man marched to the breach shouting avancez-avancez ! He was slain by a shot from some officer behind him-of his own partywhose cowardice the fine gallantry of the count rebuked. Lord Hervey tells us that "when the king of England related this history of Count Plelo to his courtiers at Richmond, he said with tears in his eyes—'It was a brave action; he was a fine fellow. I think a prince is too happy who has such subjects.'"

It must be a nature in some respects fine that can shed genuine tears over an action of high daring and a gallant death. But his majesty's family, who doubtless knew him very well, were

*The king's visits to Hanover made the subject of a great many pasquinades, caricatures, &c., amongst his English subjects. "An old, lean, lame, blind horse was turned into the streets with a broken saddle on his back, and a pillion behind it, and on the horse's forehead this inseription was fixed: Let nobody stop me; I am the King's Hanover equipage, going to fetch his majesty and his to England.'

At the Royal Exchange, a paper with these words was stuck up:

visit his British dominions for three months in the spring." 'It is reported that his Hanoverian majesty designs to On St. James's gate this advertisement was posted:

'Lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has left a wife and six children on the parish, whoever will give any tidings of him to the churchwarden of St. James's Parish. sixpence reward. N. B. This reward will not be increasso as he may be got again, shall receive four shillings and ed, nobody judging him to deserve a crown.

[Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 150.

From his answer to one of her letters advising | ter, or parry sharp assaults, in quite an elegant him to bring his mistress, Madame Walmoden, and glittering manner. Sir Robert Walpole the heroine of the singular ladder-story recount- called her on one occasion "a fat b-h;" but ed in the Memoirs, home with him, we have a her conversations are often sparkling and pretty; few sentences extracted which show in a small her fidelity to the king and her approved friends, compass the extreme grace and elegance of his seems to have been unalterable; and even where majesty's style. most implacable to her enemies she is often so piquant, transfixes so beautifully, that, caring noth"Mais vous voyez mes passions ma chère Car-ing at this distant day for her victims, we are deoline! Vous connaisez mes foiblesses, il n'y a lighted. Such a woman, in spite of her embonpoint, rien de caché dans mon cœur pour vous, et plût is scarcely the human animal which Sir Robà Dieu que vous pourriez me corregier avec la ert's silhouette dash of description would make même facilité que vous m'approfondissez! Plut à Dieu que je pourrais vous imiter autant que je of her. Lord Hervey lived on terms of great sais vous admirer, et que je pourrais apprendre intimacy with the queen; he was her poor my de vous toutes les vertus que vous me faites voir, Lord Hervey,' her opinionàtre devil,' &c.; she sentir, et aimer !" seems to have treated him at all times with affectionate freedom, whilst he speaks as well of How the king possessed the Gallic genius for her as it was in his nature to speak of any one. this sort of graceful writing, in conjunction with We have many a sly and detractive observation his Hanoverian atrocities and bestialities, is won-upon his patroness, and her last sickness is dederful enough. In one of his letters is the most tailed with a bestial indecency, and a clear want extraordinary proposition ever made by husband of feeling, worthy of that devoted character, Sir to wife. If it were not so characteristic of his Mungo Malagrowther, who was so fond of visitmajesty, we should certainly hesitate to quote it, ing his friends in their affliction. although the fastidious English editor, who has expurgated the Memoirs, has permitted the passage to appear. His majesty desires the queen to contrive if she can that Francis d'Esté, Prince of Modena, who is expected to visit England, shall bring with him his wife, the beautiful but not virtuous Charlotte Aglai, daughter of the Regent Duke of Orleans; and gives as a reason that he had heard that her Highness is no better contempts, sufficiently to quell not only "poor than she should be, and that he has the greatest inclination to pay his addresses to a daughter of France-"un plaisir que je suis sûr, ma chère Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite."

We conclude our notice of the king with a specimen of his manner to his dying wife. The poor queen lies on her bed with eyes fixed on vacancy: his majesty remonstrates-Mon Dieu, madame! why do you fix your eyes so? What do you regard there? Your eyes resemble the popped eyes of a calf when they go to cut his throat."

So much for his majesty George II., of whom our much is the merest possible trifle compared with the atrocities recounted of him in the book we review.

The queen abhorred her eldest son, Frederick Prince of Wales, as much as the king did; and her animosity was the most effective of the two, for whilst his majesty only cheated him out of his revenue, and "damned him daily for a liar, a scoundrel, a fool, a beast, a disgusting puppy," &c., &c., the maternal tongue rained sarcasms, clinging nicknames, calumnies, pointed

Fritz," but every forlorn courtier that, speculating on a post obit, clung to his skirts, from Carteretdown to Bubb Dodington. The mother could however, condescend at times to abuse as bluntly as the father. On one occasion-"My dear Lord Hervey," quoth the queen, "I will give it you under my hand, if you are in fear of my relapsing, that my dear first born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it.” The reader will find much both to amuse and to sicken him in the quarrels of the households of the king and prince. The whole story of the scamperings, mysteries, and dangers attending the birth of the Prince's daughter, afterwards Duchess of Brunswick, whom Lord Hervey saw in her infancy, and describes as “a little rat of a girl about the bigness of a large tooth-pick case," is quite as droll as any thing we have recently met with.

Queen Caroline, as Lord Hervey pourtrays her, was on the one hand a jolly, fun-loving, vivacious matron, somewhat addicted to the "spite and smut" in which Sporus seems to have been a proficient; but this honest and fruitful matron As the king, like master Rodolph, the steward with her broad humor, and flowing spirits, was of the Prince of Little Lilliput, was fond of havsingularly sagacious, capable of long continued ing very short persons about him, so his middledissimulation, and could, when occasion offered, aged queen was fond of having for foils a parwield her tongue like a rapier, and slay charac-cel of elderly dowdyish ladies. Alas! for the