1857.] be remedied by a worse. Once More. Titian's Entombment," the 'Belle Jardinière,' the charming Girl and Children,' the best Rubens of the collection, will follow the fate of the Paul Veronese and the Correggios, and be toned down to the level of Poussin, and Murillo, and Jouvenet, And although care has clearly been taken, many pictures, and amongst these a few of the choicest, the Tintoret and little Rubens, for example, are hung at a height inaccessible to study or to satisfaction. They serve only to fill space; they are so much other upholstery. Things are thus 589 managed in France. Attendants on ONCE MORE. ONCE MORE! Word of high hearts, of all who bear Them worthily through Life's great enterprise. The immoralities of dull despair, Burdened-betrayed-giddied with wrong and care, Fight the more sternly if some dread surprise A loftier Future. Failures do but teach To such their strength, their call to glorious strife, The aims, the deep requirements of life; And till they front the far time-closing shore, Their hope is staunch, their watchword still-Once More. MR. WARREN'S MISCELLANIES.* WE was, he would have enjoyed an absolute ovation. The work was translated into almost every living tongue; Mr. Warren, with pardonable pride, mentions the Bohemian as the latest he has heard of. Having turned to literary account his knowledge of his first profession, that of medicine, Mr. Warren next made his present one, the law, stand him in like stead. Ten Thousand a- Year, which likewise appeared in Blackwood, is all about law; which is made considerably more inte resting there than we ever found it anywhere else. The increasing avocations of the rising barrister diminished his time for contributing to general literature: but Now and Then did not lessen his popularity as a writer. Then The Lily and the Bee came out, really looking as if Mr. Warren wished to be laughed at; and the volumes now under our consideration, which were published some months ago, contain his stray contributions to Blackwood's Magazine during a considerable period, ending in 1854. Mr. Warren, now a Queen's Counsel and a Member of Parliament, has, we presume, washed his hands of light literature, and is looking to the emoluments and honours of his own profession. We shall rejoice when Mr. Justice Warren takes his seat upon the Bench; for we are far misled by his writings if he be not a man of high principle and honour, of great kindness of heart and amiability of nature, of a powerful though unchastened imagination, and of a real enthusiasm for the law and all its belongings. And if we can trace in him such failings as a disposition to hang on to the skirts of great men ; a good deal of snobbishness and flunkeyism; a tendency to clap-trap and horrors; much indulgence in philosophy of the old-woman mark; great lack of taste, and occasionally of sense; a strong bias towards moral and religious reflections which remind us of the very washiest lessons of the pulpit;-why, no man is wholly without faults; and his * Miscellanies, Critical, Imaginative, and Juridical: contributed to Blackwood's Magazine. By Samuel Warren, D.C.L., F.R. S., of the Inner Temple, one of her Majesty's Counsel. Two volumes. William Blackwood and Sons. 1855. 1857.] Mr. Warren's Liking for the Horrible. real merits, acknowledged by none more cheerfully than by ourselves, may well outweigh much greater faults than those of Mr. Samuel Warren. These volumes, Mr. Warren tells us, contain 'such of his contributions to Blackwood's Magazine as appeared to deal with subjects of general, intrinsic, and permanent interest and importance. Most of them,' we are informed, 'were originally written with a view to subsequent separate publication; and some of them have cost the author great pains, alike in the writing and revision.' It is very candid and good in Mr. Warren to tell us how much trouble his papers cost him; but we must say that, if we had not his own authority for the fact, we should not have guessed it from anything in the papers themselves. We have seldom met with worse English; the style is clumsy and inelegant to a degree which is extraordinary in the case of an author who has written so much. Then Mr. Warren is no master of logic; his reasoning is almost always extremely disjointed and inconclusive; and in the general treatment of his subjects there is a confusion of thought, a cumbrous huddling-up of circumstances, an utter want of symmetry and arrangement, which (but for the author's assurance) we could have accounted for only on the supposition that the articles were written in extreme haste. Let not Mr. Warren complain that we are dealing in general assertions and accusations: we mean to quote chapter and verse in support of what we have stated. To use the advocate's phraseology, we have opened no charge against Mr. Warren which we are not fully prepared to prove. As for his tendency to clap-trap, and his habit of using very coarse means to excite interest, we need go no further for proof than the titles of most of the papers which make up these volumes. The writers for the penny press of Holywell-street could hardly invent anything more likely to catch the 591 eye of the unwashed, than WHO IS THE MURDERER?' 'PEGSWORTH, A PRESS-ROOM SKETCH:** 'THE MYSTERY OF MURDER, AND ITS DEFENCE: HIGH TREASON AND MURDER, AND MORAL INSANITY;' 'THE MURDERED GLASGOW COTTONSPINNER; THE ROMANCE OF FORGERY;' DUELLING, AND WHAT'S IN A NAME?' After these, even THE PARADISE IN THE PACIFIC,' and 'SPECULATORS AMONG THE STARS,' sound tame and unexciting. The 'Press-room Sketch' gives us an extremely minute account of an execution. Mr. Warren witnessed all the preliminaries, walked in the procession to the scaffold, and saw the poor wretch turned off: then, having noted his dying struggles, he walked back and had breakfast in Newgate during the hour the man was hanging; and after breakfast he saw the body cut down! We dislike marks of exclamation as much as Mr. Warren seems to approve them, but we really cannot but use one at the close of such a narration. Again we find our author in the front seat of the gallery of the chapel of Newgate, ' to hear the condemned sermon preached to Benjamin Courvoisier, and witness the demeanour of one who was to be publicly strangled on the ensuing morning, and in the ensuing evening buried within the precincts of the prison.' Mr. Warren's taste for the horrible is such, that he cannot even mention that he went to hear the condemned sermon, without recounting and chuckling over the miserable particulars of the wretched being's doom. Having taken his 'front seat,' Mr. Warren looks forward to the criminal's entrance with cheerful anticipation: With what feelings would one enter, -the death-doomed,- for whom, and for whom alone, was reserved that solitary, central, ominous black bench? Who was so terribly far advanced in his passage from a human tribunal to that of the dread Eternal! On whose brow already faintly glistened the dread twilight between Here and Hereafter, -the black night of time, breaking before the dawn of an eternal day! *The Press-room, we may mention for the information of our fair readers, who are less familiar with such matters than Mr. Warren, is the room where a criminal's limbs are tied before he is taken out to be hung. Such are the places in which Mr. Warren loves to disport himself. Yes, there he sat, where we had also seen sitting his blood-stained predecessor, Greenacre; and, moreover, Fauntleroy, the forger; also a young banker's clerk, a widowed mother's sole support, for forging a trifling check. Alas, alas! how he wept during the whole service! but how calmly he behaved the next morning on the gallows! The Press-room and Newgate Chapel having palled on Mr. Warren's taste by familiarity, we find him seeking a new sensation at Bedlam. Here he enjoyed an interview with Oxford, who fired at the Queen; and with McNaughten, who shot Mr. Drummond by mistake for Sir Robert Peel. The first-named contemptible little wretch made one sensible remark to Mr. Warrennamely, that what he needed when he fired at her Majesty was a sound horse-whipping. Mr. Warren had previously seen him in the chapel at Newgate; and we are favoured with a description of his dress and appearance, after a fashion which reminds us of the unpleasantly minute particulars of Tittlebat Titmouse's toilet at the beginning of Ten Thousand a-Year He He seemed a silly, vulgar little dandy, who had put on his best clothes for the occasion. His hair was full and curly, displayed in a most affected style. wore a sort of secondhand blue surtout with a velvet collar, a black satin stock, a light figured waistcoat, and light slate-coloured trousers, the latter a trifle too short, and strained down by a pair of elongated straps, so as to reach as nearly as possible to the brightly-polished boots. Beside him was a hat, of which he seemed very careful, and smoothed it round delicately once or twice with his hand. Several times during the service his fingers passed jauntily through his hair, as if to dispose it effectively about his temples. He frequently pulled off and put on his gloves, and arranged different portions of his dress, as though he feared they did not sit upon him sufficiently becomingly. So much for Mr. Warren's use of clap-trap titles and subjects, and of coarse expedients for exciting interest. For the value, originality, and judgment of his reflections, let the following piece of Balaam certify: Can an observer of human nature have a richer field laid before him than a court of criminal justice? Amongst mankind there is nothing so solemn and affecting as-startling adumbration of hereafter-man sitting in judgment upon his fellow-man. There, at the bar, all eyes anxiously settled upon him, stands, in terrified or sullen silence, an individual whose conduct in a particular transaction is the subject of inquiry. He stands cold and benumbed within the panoply of legal protection. His heart, nevertheless, suddenly shrinks the blood deserts for a moment his flushed cheeks, as his guilty soul feels that his pursuers are pressing, though in the dark, closer and closer upon the truth of the transaction! And there is his judge, the occasional glance of whose practised eye, which he feels upon him, shoots a thrill of terror into his soul, for he knows that he has found him out, and that a few words of his will presently clear away the previous doubt and uncertainty that may be felt by the jury, who, charged with the issues of life and death, may soon utter the fearful word That summons him to heaven or to hell! For bombastic weakness and folly, such a picture might very suitably have stood in a sermon by Mr. Spurgeon. And what could be more washy and old-womanish than Mr. Warren's reflections on the first day of Term after Sir William Follett's death? Very weak indeed must the preacher be who would address an educated audience in the following terms: Where, alas! was Sir William Follett? His eloquent lips were stilled in death; his remains were mouldering in the tomb -yes, almost within the very walls of that sacred structure, hallowed with the recollections and associations of centuries, in which his surviving brethren were assembled for worship on Sunday, the 2nd day of November, 1845-the commencement of the legal year-at that period of it where his was, erewhile, ever the most conspicuous and shining figure. Yes, there were assembled his brethren, who, with saddened faces and beating hearts, had attended his solemn obsequies in that very temple where was committed 'his body to the ground, earth to earth, 1857.] Mr. Thackeray's Opinion of Mr. Warren. ashes to ashes, dust to dust;' where all, including the greatest and noblest in the land, acknowledged, humbly and mournfully, at the mouth of his grave, that man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them! Surely these are solemnizing and instructive reflections; and many a heart will acknowledge them to be such, amidst all the din and glare and bustle of worldly affairs, in the awful presence of Him who turneth man to destruction, and sayeth, Come again, ye children of men! A more striking instance than this we have seldom seen of the weak and twaddling in sentiment, and the hopelessly rigmarole in thought and expression. Our humorous contemporary, Punch, lately quoted from an Edinburgh publication the startling and original sentiment, All must die.' Whenever he wants more sentiments and reflections of that mark, we can recommend him to turn to Mr. Warren's Miscellanies. Again, Mr. Warren tells us that the man who toils to make money merely for money's sake is in a bad way he may be 'justly despised, and characterized as being of the earth, earthy; incapable of high and generous sentiments and aspirations, -sordid, grovelling, and utterly despicable!' Perhaps Mr. Warren, as a man skilled in drawing distinctions, will tell us what is the difference between a man who may be justly despised,' and another man who is utterly despicable.' We shall quote no more of our author's reflections, of which there is a vast quantity in the book. We assure our readers that those we have given are a fair sample of the whole. Would that Mr. Thackeray saw them! He might get some hints for yet further intensifying the characteristics of the meaningless, fluent platitudes of Mr. Charles Honeyman. The bombastic and flunkeyish description of the Duke of Wellington's funeral which Mr. Warren gives us at pp. 297-8 of vol. 1., ends with a passage which will be most gratifying to the author of the Book of Snobs :— The Queen has lost, indeed, a prince and a great man from among her people; 593 and her royal heart is perhaps at this moment throbbing, as her consort tells her, in faltering tones, of the sublime spectacle which he has been witnessing, and of the tears which he let fall as the chief royal mourner by the grave of Arthur Duke of Wellington. Mr. Thackeray tells us, taking as his evidence a certain passage in Ten Thousand a-Year, that Mr. Warren is perhaps one of the greatest snobs of the present age. We regret to say that there are many proofs in these volumes that Mr. Thackeray is right. Loyalty is an excellent thing, when it is the unaffected fealty of a manly spirit towards a Queen amiable and virtuous as is our own: but Mr. Warren's loyalty is worthy of the pages which declared Gorgias IV. to be the noblest and worthiest of monarchs: it is the servility of a poodle dog; it is the crawling abnegation of the dignity of a rational being. The introductory pages of a paper entitled, The Paradise in the Pacific, which in plain English is a description of Pitcairn's Island, Bounty, is impregnated with the the resort of the mutineers of the very essence of snobbishness. The chaplain of Pitcairn, one Mr. Nobbs, has actually conversed with The Royal Person. Warren's capitals.) (We give Mr. Both Queen aud Prince have seen and spoken with him. since travelled from the royal presence, But he has exhilarated with its cheering brightness, ten thousand miles and more! So there is a cheering brightness' in the presence of royalty, which leaves an 'exhilarating effect. Mr. Warren's words remind us of the scribes the notions of Dr. Burney, manner in which Mr. Macaulay dewhen he was transported at getting to Queen Charlotte :his daughter made a waiting woman Dr. Burney seems to have thought that going to court was like going to heaven; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by royal persons was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious efflux or reflection to all who were suffered to stand at their toilettes, or to bear their trains.* Even so would Mr. Warren ex Macaulay's Essays, vol. iii. p. 319. |