fatal tendency of the project we have discussed. We have undertaken to propose for consideration several reforms, to which, in their broad outline, we can scarcely imagine any well-grounded and disinterested objection; nor have we any doubt that they will commend themselves to the clergy and laity generally. In bringing these observations to a close, we emphatically protest against any party in the Church or State attempting to steal a march upon the Protestants of Ireland on a question so momentous. Measures devised in the secrecy of a conclave, by timid friends, have more than once proved baleful; and we entertain a profound conviction that the Church can suffer at the present time only from the injudicious intervention of the weak and wavering among her own body. We are strengthened in this conviction by the opinion of those most capable of judging of the principles, designs, and strength in combination of political parties. The Protestant clergy and people of Ireland have seen their Church pass through real dangers and come forth from them purified and invigorated; but at that time they were united, and our only real weakness now arises from the prevalence of party feeling and intolerance of each other's differences. We owe it to these sources of weakness that English clergymen are not only appointed bishops, but placed over the bishops of Ireland, to the exclusion of her own able and excellent ministers, and without any reciprocity. When these high appointments are to be made, the feeling runs so strongly against the distinguished men of each party in the Church, that the Government find it easy and even popular to exclude them all. But weak as we are, in these respects, let no party in the Church or the State presume to concoct and negotiate measures so grave and vital as those we have canvassed, behind the backs of the people and their pastors. This is really not a clergy question. We are too much in the habit of defending the Irish Church as if it were a clerical corporation. The present bishops and clergy have their life tenure secured from which no change will dislodge them. If the institution is valuable and worth preserving, it is so in the interest of the Protestant people of Ireland and not of the present ecclesiastical incumbents; though the clergy are entitled to all respect, inasmuch as though under no effective supervision, and ill-treated by Governments, they have not weakened the religion of the country by infidel or Romeward tendencies, and have acquitted themselves with faith, courage, and constancy, under many trials. The institution is deeply rooted in our affections, and we do not mean to surrender it to false friend or open foe. Its position was well and eloquently described by Sir Robert Peel, last year, in closing the speech we have already quoted :— "In dealing with the Established Church of Ireland you are not dealing with a mere excrescence or a growth of yesterday, but with an institution which has existed for ages in that country. It was founded by the piety of our ancestors, it has been sanctioned by Parliament, and by the coronation oath of the sovereign, and above all, it has been confirmed by the attachment and veneration of many generations." This Irish Church includes everything great and good in the two races -Saxon and Celtic-of which it is composed. The question is of an incidence more comprehensive, and of accompaniments more serious, than the possession of emoluments by any body of men. It bears vitally upon all settlements, and bequests, upon property, loyalty, liberty, order, and peace. We have made manifest that as the Churches of England and Ireland are one, liable to the same assaults, open to the same objections, exposed to the same dangers, established upon the same principle, conferring the same benefits and blessings, and of the same importance to the empire and to civilization-they must stand or fall together. LYRISTS. HERRICK-BEN JONSON-CAREW. THE merit of Ben Jonson-who, gifted with little imagination, was possessed of strong powers of observation and exquisite fancy (but, unfortunately, of more learning than either) consists of having introduced greater regularity of design into his pieces than was displayed by any of his contemporaries except Shakespeare, who, however, excelled him and all others in the art of dramatic perspective. Nothing can be more laboured than the Jonsonic plays, in which a spontaneous touch of true nature is hardly to be found. His comedies, in which he photographs manners, are as hard as his tragedy is stilted and pretentious. In the former, whose elaboration is so manifest on the surface, and in which there is a strange dryness in the humour, and in the humours which the chief characters embody, it is evident that he had Plautus continually in view; and even his most comic delineation-Captain Bobadil-is in its ideal but a more tasteful, moderate, and inventive transcript of the outrageously extravagant Miles Gloriosus of the old Latin writer. In his tragedies, impregnated as they are with classic learning, how utterly he has failed to reflect the antique spirit may be seen by contrasting "Sejanus" and "Catiline" with the "Cæsar" or "Coriolanus" of Shakespeare. Perhaps "Cynthia's Revels" is his best, as it is the most spontaneous of the larger efforts of his erudite genius; and it is to be regretted that he did not devote himself more to compositions of purely fanciful structure than those based on current life or history. Wherever he can indulge in the exercise of pure fancy he is admirable, as in the characters of Volpone the Magnifico, in "The Fox," and Sir Epicure Mammon, in "The Alchemist"-in both of which, while finding an outlet for his most spontaneous gift, he has possibly reflected something of his own nature. But even in his famous passages, such as those in which Mammon revels in contemplation of the miracles of vo luptuousness with which he will surround himself by means of his magic elixir, it is curious to observe how his fancy has eclecticised its images and accumulated the details of the picture of luxuries from ancient writers; and even the material of the witches' charm song, in another of his plays, is similarly derived. It is, indeed, in the lyrics scattered through his plays and masks that the genius of rare Ben appears under its most natural poetic aspect. The Elizabethan dramatists and lyrists fortunately wrote their songs before the public taste exhibited an advance so retrogressive as to prefer music to poetry the opera to the theatre. They looked merely for beautiful ideas, and let the thoughts or fancies evolve themselves with rhythmical naturalness; unlike many of the moderns, who, without either imagination, fire, or sense of beauty, seek merely for sentiments likely to be popular; and, taking their cue and inspiration from the music composer, appear to address themselves exclusively to the extensive but low strata of the public, who appreciate sound more than sense, fire, fancy, image, or poetic emotion. Many of the lyrics of Beaumont, Herrick, Jonson, and of several of the occasional writers of the age of Elizabeth and James, combine the excellency of being at once poetic and popular -such as the song to Celia, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and those interspersed throughout "Cynthia's Revels"-The Song of Echo, Slow, slow, fresh fount: keep time with my salt tears;" "Oh, that joy so soon should waste;" 66 Thou more than most, sweet glow;" the Song of Hesperus to the Moon, "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," in the same drama; and several, though inferior, in the masks or entertainments. As an instance of a lyric in which picture, sentiment, and tone combine and are evolved in natural musical utterance, take the following song, in which Echo laments the death of Narcissus : "Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears, Yet, slower, yet; Oh faintly gentle springs; List to the heavy part the music bears, best of them, are of an amatory cast, several containing brilliant fancies on the limited range of themes which formed the materials of the bards who tinkled on the little golden-stringed Woe weeps out her division, when she lyre of Cupid, about ladies' lips and sings. Droop, herbs and flowers, Fall grief in showers, Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, Since nature's pride is now a withered daffodil." In this song, which evinces a fine musical ear, the art of Jonson is apparent, while the lyrics of Shakespeare, whose instinct, as in all other cases, acquainted him with the requirements of this sort of composition, are more natural. What can breathe more of the sea-beach or be more simply spiritual than the song "Come unto these yellow sands, And there take hands: Court'sied when you have, and kissed(The wild waves whist,)" &c. Where can we find a little ditty which so pleasingly unites the melancholy of reflection with airy gaiety, as in the "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," &c. Several of the other snatches introduced throughout his dramas are possibly not from his pen, which, however, is clearly seen in the "Take, oh take these lips away," the winter song at the end of the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and the drinking round in Antony and Cleopatra. It is unnecessary to allude to Beaumont's lines to Melancholy eyes, smiles, sighs, moles, roses, lilies, &c., and the fluctuating phases of the divine passion. Such fancies Carew generally elaborates to the close, consistently with their ideal, in nettete; and though not a few are very a symmetrical manner -- with sparkling, many more are mere concetti, imitated from the Italians, the spirit of whose poetry was so largely infused into the literature of England in the days of Elizabeth and James. His lines on the contest between Celia's lips and eyes, as to which are the most beautiful, are very pretty; also the prayer to the wind to waft one of his sighs to his inamorata; the songs, 66 Give me more love or more disdain," and "He that loves a rosy cheek." The "Elegy on the fly which flew into his mistress's eye," however, is a still better specimen of his complimentary, witty, fanciful manner :-"When this fly lived she used to play In the sunshine all the day; Till coming near my Celia's sight She found a new and unknown light, So full of glory as it made The noonday sun a gloomy shade. Then this amorous fly became My rival, and did court my flame. She did from hand to bosom skip, And from her breath, her cheek, her lip Sucked all the incense, all the spice, And grew a bird of paradise. At last into her eye she flew, Then scorched in flames and drowned in dew, Like Phaeton from the sun's sphere, A GLANCE AT HERRICK'S HESPERIDES. "Lo! this immensive cup To that terse muse of thine," sings Herrick, in one of his merrymaking songs; but though he was well acquainted with, and in the selection of subjects has followed in his wake, his genius bears much less resemblance to that of the Roman poet, of "Give me but what this ribbon bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round." The Hesperides commence with a cluster of invocations to the muses, and addresses to his book,-in the number of which he surpasses Martial himself. Then come amatory and Anacreontic odes and verses, epithalamiums, pastoral, and descriptive pieces, poems relating to Fairy Land, to charms and ceremonies, moral and pathetic verses, and aphorisms. Of these the best are the poems celebrative of love and wine, and those relating to fairy superstitions. His idyllic verses show that he had no eye for the picturesque in scenery, and he was of too gay and versatile a temperament to produce much impression in the pathetic and moral orders of poesie. He merely paints externals, and seldom shows a sense of beauty below the surface. His is not the bright and spacious genius in whose shrine, as Marlowe says, whose intense feeling and passion he a couplet, by the way, much inferior was incapable, than to Anacreon. to Waller's on a similar subject:Herrick's book, entitled "Hesperides,' is the most charming collection of lyric trifles in English literature, a little tome of fancies on all sort of subjects, thrown off with the careless spontaneity of the old bard of Tios,to whose verses, however, with a few exceptions they are inferior. They resemble each other in their simplicity and sparkle, but those of the English child of song lack the symmetrical grace which characterizes all the poetry of Greece, when its intellect and language were still in their creative phase. If, however, there are no poems in the Hesperides of equal length, so perfect as Anacreon's Pigeon, his address to Venus, to the artist who was to paint Bathyllus, or to the Lesbian odes of Catullus, there are here and there little strings of verses running to six or eight lines, and single lines in many places, which are complete perfections of music and colour, and which evince the unmistakable presence of imagination a quality seldom seen in writers of occasional verses. Some of the best occur in his lines to his pretty housekeeper, Julia--a mistress for whom the reverend amorist and bacchanalian entertained a platonic passion, which never went beyond the fanciful admiration of those numerous beauties which his muse delighted to reflect in painted lines "Black and rolling is her eye, Of which latter image he was so fond Again he sings of her in her chamber, where she was singing "Melting melodious words to lutes of amber" of her eyes, her hair, her ribbon girdle, &c. "As shows the air when with a rainbow graced So smiles that ribbon 'bout my Julia's waist Or like-nay 'tis the zonulet of love, Wherein all pleasures of the world are wove;" "Beauty, mother of the muses sits And comments volumes with her ivory pen;" but rather resembles a little bower of blossoms through which by day the butterfly flits,-through which at night the firefly sparkles. He delights to shape fragmentary graceful fancies about eyeballs and dimples, kisses, wine-bubbles,-girdles, and other articles of female attire; the sight of a willow wreath gives birth to a pathetic fancy, and he can write a woeful ballad of a few verses on his mistress' eyebrow. All sorts of little objects of beauty, which he catches at a glance, elicit playful, pretty, and bright fancies, a drop of dew on a cherry, the bag of a bee, a fly in amber: "About the sweet bag of a bee And for their boldness stript them, Some little verses as those on a fly in amber and such like, are embellished with fancies minute and delicate as the tracery on trinkets; but, though he has written several times on the above subject, none of his verses equal Martial's on a bee similarly entombed in a drop of transparent electrum : “ Et latet, et lucet Phaetontide condita gutta, Ut videatur apis nectare clausa suo; Dignum tantorum pretum tulit illa labo rum, Credibile est ipsum sie voluisse mori." He delights in the beauty and associative fancies connected with all pretty articles of attire "Rara labefactes numere vestes, Aut pelluciduli deliciis lapillis." Never were verses more charming composed than those entitled "Delight in Disorder"'—a theme which, albeit, naturally suited to mere fancy, has been, in this case, treated with the finest and truest imagination, picturesque and sensitive. "A sweet disorder in the dress, A happy kind of carelessness; An erring lace, that here and there Do more bewitch me than where art Herrick has written two epithalamiums, one to Sir Thomas Southwell and his lady, the second to Sir Clipsely Crew and his lady. In the first of these compositions, both of which are among his longest efforts, he has throughout closely imitated Catullus's nuptial song to Manlius Torquatus and Julia, both in its arrangement and in the freedom of its pagan spirit. Several of the verses are little more than a paraphrase of those of the Veronian; but in none has he equalled the beauty of imagery which flows here and there through the antique marriage song. The second epithalamium, though less carefully written as far as metre is concerned, is much finer, more spontaneous, and original, and everywhere indicates the fine abandon of the imagination, both in its spirit and expression. Perhaps Tennyson, in the exquisite nuptial song introduced into the "In Memoriam," had the latter part of this poem in view; and the idea in the last verse of the old poem has been introduced in a nobler spirit in the modern. زر It would be too long to enumerate through the "Hesperides," among the the pretty songs and verses scattered best of which are the well-known lines, "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,' "The Kiss a dialogue," "To a Primrose filled with dew." Nowhere, however, has he shown more descriptive fancy than in his fairy poems, viz., "Oberon's Chapel,' ""Oberon's Feast,' and "Palace." With the exception of Shakespeare, in the Midsummer Night's Dream," no poet of that age or any succeeding has excelled Herrick in the imagination of appropriate fairy imagery, or in delightful pictorial diction, in illustration of which take "Oberon's Feast." "OBERON'S FEAST. After short prayer they set on bread- Of which he eats, and tastes a little With the red-capp'd worm, that's shut Brown as his tooth: a little moth |