sionally most competent to undertake the cure. So long as we could affect to be ignorant of the evils that environ us, it was deemed unnecessary to send for either; but from the day of the publication of the evidence before us, this excuse, like a poisonous weed plucked from the ground, has been gradually withering. Even if the amount of mischief by which we are surrounded were a fixed quantity, it surely ought to create among us very serious alarm; but, on the contrary, every day it is becoming more and more formidable. The sea-beaten shores of Great Britain remain unaltered-but the population within them is already increasing at the rate of 230,000 persons per annum. In the year, therefore, that has just closed, people enough to fill a whole county of the size of Worcestershire, or of the North riding of Yorkshire, have been poured upon us; and every progressive year the measure of increase will become larger. What is to be the result of such an increasing addition to our population it is awful enough, under any circumstances, to contemplate; but if every living individual de mortuis nil nisi bonum-be allowed to continue to pollute the air-our commonwealth—as much as he pleases; if pollution be allowed to continue to engender disease-disease, demoralization-and demoralization, mutiny and rebellion by a young mob-the punishment of our apathy and negligence, sooner than we expect it, may become, like that of Cain, greater than we can bear. We cannot take leave of Mr. Chadwick without expressing our high sense of the energy with which he has conducted this allimportant investigation, the benevolent feeling towards the poor and the suffering which has evidently animated and sustained him in his long labours, and the sagacity which distinguishes all his leading suggestions. ART. VIII.-Lays of Ancient Rome. By Thomas Babington Macaulay. 8vo. pp. 191. 191. London. 1842. THIS HIS was a bold undertaking, even for Mr. Macaulay: the success is beyond our expectation. Mr. Macaulay's fine youthful ballads on our Civil Wars and on the French League-the Cavalier and Roundhead and the Battle of Ivry-were still fresh upon our memory: yet we could not be without some apprehension lest he should emperil his reputation in the attempt to throw back into its old poetic form that which has been familiar to us from our boyhood as Roman history. The task not merely required the power of writing ballad-verse with unflagging spirit, with rapid and picturesque brevity, with the bold distinctness as to character character and incident which is essential to that kind of poetry, but likewise a full, yet unobtrusive scholarship, which should keep it true to the people and to the times. Schiller's beautiful ballads on some of the incidents of Grecian mythology and history, though perhaps correct in all their allusions, have still something of the reflective tone of modern poetry; but Schiller did not give them as remains of Grecian song. In Mr. Macaulay's case the self-denial was harder: he had absolutely to reject everything which might not have struck the popular eye, have cloven to the popular ear, or stirred the popular heart in the earliest days of Rome. Nor is this task to be achieved by pedantic faithfulness of costume: witness in this respect the difference between Walter Scott and his imitators, the latter far more sedulously correct in their antiquarianism, but, by that very elaborate correctness, constantly betraying that their knowledge is got up for the occasion. This truthfulness must flow from copiousness of knowledge, long before worked into the mind, and ready to suggest itself spontaneously when wanted-not to be sought out, or transferred from a commonplace-book, with a dull and servile appeal to authority. In these Lays we are now and then disturbed by too close a reminiscence of some of the familiar turns of our own ballad or Border poetry, the tone and cadence of which it was perhaps impossible to avoid; but the metre-if metre it may be called-of the Saturnian verses of the old minstrels of Rome, seems really to have had a strong similarity and relationship with our own, and with almost all other rude poetry. What we least approve under this head are one or two spirited and effective, but direct, imitations of a very peculiar march of Marmion-that hurried tempestuous reduplication, so characteristic that it was more than any other feature aimed at in James Smith's capital parody. Mr. Macaulay, as may be anticipated, adopts to its utmost extent the hypothesis that the early Roman history grew out of the popular poetry. Niebuhr assigns to Perizonius* the first bint of this theory, which his own authority has gone far to establish as the general opinion among almost all recent writers of Roman * Has Mr. Macaulay, who is said to forget nothing, quite forgotten one Butler, unquestionably the earliest modern who alludes to Roman Lays? history. Mr. Macaulay's remarkably lucid and forcible statement of the theory is likely to gain some proselytes, who may have been perplexed, rather than convinced, by the somewhat abstruse reasonings of Niebuhr, or hardened into disbelief by the dictatorial tone which he, in the full conviction of his own superior acquaintance with the subject, and of its irrefragable truth, thought that he might justly assume. The illustrations from the English and Spanish chroniclers of the manner in which poetry passes into history appear to us extremely happy, and will tempt us hereafter to present them to our readers. This question of the poetic origin of the early Roman history, we would remind our readers, is very different from that of its utter uncertainty, as shown by Beaufort, Levesque de Pouilly, and other writers. The theory is conservative rather than destructive. It tends at least to invest these old stories in the dignity of some kind of truth, rather than to leave them in the neglected rubbish of mere fable. The philosophic historian of the present day will not venture to disdain even mythic history, the more imaginative form of the poetic annals of nations. But there is a great difference between mythic and heroic legend: Niebuhr himself has pointed this out with his usual sound discrimination. The inventive faculty has a very different office in the religious allegory or mythological legend of the priest and the epic song of the popular bard. Only a small portion of the early Roman history is absolutely mythicthe birth of Romulus and Remus, the apotheosis of Romulus, the intercourse of Numa with the nymph Egeria. We should reluctantly yield up the real personality either of the founder or the lawgiver. In this border-ground between the mythic and the historic, it is the sunset of the religious legend which sheds its glowing colouring over the reality of life, rather than the thin and incorporeal impersonations of the myth which harden into actual and sensible existence. Almost all the rest, however, of the unhistoric period of Roman tradition is that popular poetry which has its groundwork in truth. This poetry is not purely inventive: it selects, embellishes, aggrandizes incidents and characters: it surrenders itself in the first place to that insuperable tendency to depart from sober truth incident to all poets-the insatiate desire of seizing and making the most of the poetic element, the sublime, the striking, the picturesque, the pathetic; of discarding the mean, the trivial, the ineffective; of dwelling solely and exclusively upon that which would arrest the eager ear and maintain the mute attention of an enthralled audience. Besides this, appealing to, living on popular passion, such poetry would be instinct itself with passion: it would be a flatterer, perhaps an honest flatterer, of family pride or of faction: it would be patrician or plebeian, according as it found its audience in the halls of the great or the streets of the commons: above all, it would be national-Roman. It would dwell on exploits of valour, and magnify them to the utmost height of patriotic credulity: if it ever touched on the sad string of defeat and shame, it would dignify public disaster by individual feats of self-devotion and glory. So long as the poets were the sole chroniclers, such would be the history; and history grounded -if not entirely, yet to a great extent-on such authorities, would preserve this peculiar character. Where, as in the case of our own poetic historian, Shakspeare (the historian from whom most of us take our earliest and almost indelible impression of many of the reigns of our kings), the poetry is drawn from the chronicle, it is far more free and impartial: it is when it alludes to the poet's own times, to Elizabeth or James, that it condescends to flattery. But popular poetry, we conceive, would never be absolutely creative it would never celebrate the feats of an imaginary warrior, or plunge its heroes into an ideal warfare. Reckoning, as he has full right to do, on a very large amount of credulity in his readers on an almost insatiable inclination to believe all which is within the bounds of probability-the popular poet would swell numbers, always loosely calculated in early stages of society, magnify exploits, centre on one the feats of many, be careless of dates, and even be guilty of anachronisms; where the scenes are remote, be regardless of fidelity of local description. The production, however, would still be history, though in a poetic form, and wanting the indispensable requisites of trustworthy annals. The facts might be so disguised as almost to cease to be facts-the personages so out of proportion to the space which they actually filled as to give the most erroneous impressions of the times. Truth and fiction in these legends are indeed so subtilely interwoven, so incorporated with each other, that the most acute discrimination will hardly separate the one from the other. Now and then the poetic dress may be so loosely thrown over the transaction, that it will almost fall off of itself. Here and there fine philosophical discernment may discover where the reality ceases and the licence of the poet begins. But in general we must rest content with the axiom, an axiom which we think is almost invariable, that the ballad-poet takes his subject from real life-that there is some groundwork of truth in all his fictions: he will be a witness, therefore, whom History will by no means disdainfully reject, but whose testimony will be received according to rules of evidence altogether peculiar, and variable with the undefinable circumstances of the case. Upon this principle the domain of early Roman history, from a region of utter darkness and confusion, in which it seemed almost condemned to lie, emerges into a region, not indeed of clear and distinct daylight, but peopled with real forins, though seen through a kind of rich and glowing haze, which disturbs their proportions, and brightens or darkens their real lineaments. Before, however, it is either rescued from or surrendered to this intermediate state, the two questions naturally occur-what evidence have we that this poetry, which thus assumes a right to take the place of history, ever existed in Rome; and if it existed-so copious, so various, so dear to all popular associations, as it must have beenhow came it to perish so absolutely and so entirely as not to leave a trace, at least a distinct and undeniable trace, behind it? On the first point, Mr. Macaulay urges, of course, the universal prevalence of this poetic history-the actual or fairly presumed existence of this popular ballad poetry in all nations at a certain stage of civilisation. Even Mr. Macaulay's memory has not exhausted the illustrations which might be adduced of this almost unerring law of our intellectual development. But if from the steppes of Tartary to the shores of Peru-if in various degrees of excellence from the inimitable epics of Homer to the wild ditties of the South Sea islanders-scarcely any nation or tribe is without its popular songs, is it likely that Rome alone should have been barren, unimaginative, unmusical, without its sacred bards, or-if its bards were not invested in religious sanctity-without its popular minstrels; Rome, with so much to kindle the imagination and stir the heart; Rome, peopled by a race necessarily involved in adventurous warfare, and instinct with nationality, and with the rivalry of contending orders? In Rome everything seems to conspire which in all other countries, in all other races, has kindled the song of the bard. When, therefore, we find the history as it is handed down to us, though obviously having passed through the chill and unimaginative older chronicle, still nevertheless instinct with infelt poetry, can we doubt where it had its origin? The early history of Rome,' observes Mr. Macaulay, 'is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions |