are hurried from the still churchyard, the three graves, and the good priest, to a forced description of the attendant engraving; so that the beginning and conclusion have no connection with one another. We are, perhaps, old-fashioned, and too fond of Horace; but we are notwithstanding convinced that the servetur ad imum principle is equally applicable to characters and poems. "The Pilgrims of St. David's" must claim a high place. The following description of the "ancient pile" of St. David's, duskily seen through the misty evening, might have been written by a person who had not studied poetry at the feet of the writers of the Tracts for the Times :— "An evening mist which o'er it hung A deeper desolation flung, While 'neath its skirts were dimly seen, Black grazing herds in pastures rude, Signs of wild life, which wandering near Then wonder not in such a scene, "It seem'd the gathering of past years, A fragrance breathing o'er their tomb." (p. 193). The second error we shall notice in these poems is one that prevails to a great extent in this kind of religious poetry; we may define it a want of legitimate construction. It arises from the conceptions not being clear and distinct, and it is aided and abetted by the indiscriminate use of hyphens, which throw a veil over the most daring violations of her Majesty's English. In a word, these hyphens are becoming intolerable. They may be endured in passages where opposition is to be strongly marked, or in vivid enumerations; but when we are indulged with sixteen in six stanzas (pp. 10, 11), it becomes necessary seriously to espouse the cause of the colon family. This remark may not be altogether profitless, for we notice this system of linear punctuation has crept into modern prose-writing. What is the construction in the following hyphen-helped sentence?— "On all the ills which upon sin await Fain would I tend with thee-the silent cell Or in these luminous lines? "One twinkling star Look'd through the trees, silence was on the skies, Stillness kept watch, with nought soft nature's calm to mar.” (p. 46). Silence might well listen, as the sound of baying waters is an unusual treat. We do not admire such an ellipsis as is needed to explain these words: "The only panacea for all ill— The fabled stone transmuting all to gold, We forbear multiplying quotations, as they may be found very readily; in fact, questionable constructions and their concomitant hyphens are found in such abundance, that it would seem Mr. Williams had literally acted on the old principle of nulla dies sine lineâ. A third fault, similarly arising from loosely-arranged thoughts, is the confusion of metaphors. This is particularly the fault of young writers and highly imaginative persons, who commence with a metaphor derived from one source, and conclude the sentence with expressions entirely extracted from another. "The Baptistery" will supply us with instances: A seal is not usually "riven" on anything (p. 26); nor have we often heard "a low wind, that sighs before a storm," "yell" deeply (p. 70); as that accomplishment is principally confined to dogs. Passion seldom "wakes the expanse of a blue eye" with a "billow" (p. 133); "hues" are not "infused o'er a scene" (p. 153); rays grow dim, but not "old" (p. 156); hinds walk, run, skip, and jump, but never "by taking wings and soaring, leave the nets and dart behind them" (p. 176); nets are me ployed to catch fish, and not "to purify" the souls of mankind (p. 240); and though Gil Blas and his wife set the example, yet "a loose villager" would do anything rather than "weave a rustic saraband beneath the moon." (p. 278). A false use of epithets ought always to be noticed, such as sin-washed spirits (p. 11), which, if it mean anything, would mean the contrary to what Mr. Williams intends. "Eternal" is not the best epithet to a door (p. 43); "golden embassies" can mean nothing; a voice can hardly be "love-endearing" (p. 82); and a "molten looking-glass" (p. 131), would be a thing sufficiently strange to merit a place among "live and speaking furniture." (p. 158). Personification must be classed as a fourth fault; it closely resembles fire in being a good servant, but a most objectionable master. If a poet once begins to deal with capital letters, he must remember that they are not inserted to beautify a sentence, as av in the school-boy's Greek exercise; but that they mean an abstract idea has been introduced into a material world, and must be treated accordingly. If we assign vitality to such notions as hope, fear, contemplation, &c., we must be particularly careful that we maintain them in such an existence by the use of proper images and expressions, and that their return into the abstract state be distinctly noticed. Otherwise we find ourselves struggling in inextricable confusion, and exposed in every quarter to unpleasant ridicule. Mr. Williams delights in personification; this is, of course, natural, as his coadjutor Boetius fills his sketches with such rubbish: but still we think we have too many passages like the following: "All hail! dread Silence, Solitude, and Shade, And in the preceding stanza, we find— Looks from his western cell and gently dies away." (p. 59). Here is the confusion we have alluded to. If evening is to be represented as a pilgrim looking from a cell, it ought not in the same breath to "die away;" besides, this consorts but ill with two lines in the stanza but one before this : "When Twilight lets her dewy mantle fall, Thou goest forth in hallowed time of Even." (p. 58). We could fill pages with instances of this personification : Care, Penitence, Gaunt Ruin, Guilt, Remorse, Embryo Resolves, Warnings, Judgment, Desolation, Self-Slaughter, Abstinence, and Admiration are some of the strange Frankensteins that roam about "The Baptistery." The last peculiarity we shall notice in Mr. Williams's poetry is a fondness for antithesis; and as this is often found in the concluding line of a stanza, we cannot help thinking he has caught the habit from Phineas Fletcher, whose "Purple Island" literally teems with instances. It sometimes gives a certain quaintness to the line which is not unpleasing; but by constant repetition it becomes insufferably tedious: “A state which nothing hatli, yet all things doth possess." (p. 21). "Whose word is endless death-whose favour endless grace.” (p. 52). "Of life that never lives, of never-dying death." (p. 56). "The depth of love, our depth of woe, The deep of heaven above the deep of hell below." (p. 143). "Which prays to live, and lives to pray aright." (p. 243). A word on the rhymes in these poems. They are generally according to the principles of the best dictionaries on the subject; there are a few words, however, which seem fated always to introduce most barbarous sounds. One of these is the harmless dissyllable "even," which is forced into an antiphonetic intimacy with "driven" and "heaven," in the same stanza (p. 13); and again in p. 207: we meet them yet again in pages 45, 148, and 285. Another word is "dwell," which does not pleasantly respond to "tabernacle" (p. 132), to "unmoveable" (p. 139), to “unspeakable" (p. 138), to "unchangeable" (p. 184), to "untraceable" (p. 209), or to "syllable" (p. 292). "Tread" and "read" (present tense), "won" and "onson" (p. 154), are bad rhymes: "joined" and "mind" (p. ib.), abominable: "poor" and "store," "lone" and "upon" (p. 171), "clear" and "interpreter" (p. 173), may be classed in the same unmusical company. Such is "The Baptistery." Considered in its relation to rhyme and reason, we certainly wish it had more of both; but still it is as it is the best production of a bad school. All the other books of the same style, with the exception of "The Christian Year," are little foolish caricatures of one another, exceedingly tiresome and utterly unpoetic. With the sentiments therein we have here nothing to do. They profess to be poetry, and they are not even prose; while they ingeniously exhibit through this neutral tint all the shades of incoherence that we have had to notice in their choragus, Mr. Williams. We do here entreat the authors of these little books to exercise their ingenuity on ornithology, conchology, ecclesiology, or anything else they please, provided they will steadily adhere to the resolution of versifying only for the amusement of their friends. Prose is much more tractable; colons and semi-colons may be freely used, and the rules of grammar may even be complied with. They cannot tell how keenly they will enjoy these literary luxuries: sense and full-stops are not to be met with every day, so we do beg of them, for their own sake, to lose no time in acquiring a taste for such useful enjoyments. ART. VI.-History of France. By Mons. MICHELET, Principal of the Historic Section of the Archives of France. 2. History of the Germans. By KARL ADOLPH Menzel, Royal Consistorial and School Councillor of Prussia. 3. Theocratic Philosophy of English History. By the Rev. J. D. SCHOMBERG, B.A., C.C.C., Vicar of Polesworth, Warwickshire. THE study of history has ever been considered as the noblest employment of the human mind, and historians have always been regarded as benefactors to their country and to mankind. What are we without an accurate acquaintance with the history of those who have gone before us? What pretensions can we have to wisdom and knowledge, when we are ignorant of the sources of experience from whence they are to be derived? Unless we are versed in the annals of our race, our knowledge, derived from experience, will be limited within the circle, or society, with which we are brought into immediate contact. The understanding will be unstored with the treasures which have been accumulated by the past generations of men; the sympathies of the heart untouched with the joys and sorrows which have chequered the pathway of former travellers in the journey of life; the judgment will remain weak and impoverished, unable, from its ignorance of the past, to form a just decision on the progress and direction of the present; whilst the imagination, unpictured with the glowing representations of bygone days, will be deprived of its power to reflect its shadowy splendour on the pathway of existence. The soul will remain almost a blank, upon which nothing will be apparent, except the fleeting impressions of the present, rendered legible only in the misshapen characters of prejudice and selfishness. Such being the relative importance of historical knowledge, we find that mankind have ever laboured in the preservation of those materials from which such mighty advantages were to be secured. It is a kind of instinct in our race to hand down to posterity the memory of those actions in which they have been engaged, and to record even the thoughts by which they have been agi |