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clusive, exhibiting in general but a partial | Mackintosh, have been pretty closely scrutiview of any question, and upon which an nized by former critics: both poets, Beattie immoderate emphasis is laid. Truth lies and Gray. In Forbes's Life of Beattie we between the extremes of opposite theories. read this criticism: "Plato was one of the Thus, men are both self-lovers and benevo- first who introduced the fashion of giving us lent, selfishness and disinterestedness be- fine words instead of good sense; in this, as ing both of them original instincts. It is in his other faults, he has been successfully untrue to predicate of either of these prin- imitated by Lord Shaftesbury." Gray ciples, that they alone govern society. The writes with equal severity: "You say you dignity of human nature is to be cherished, cannot conceive how Lord Shaftesbury came while we must confess that imperfection is to be a philosopher in vogue. I will tell germain to the constitution of man. We you: first, he was a Lord; secondly, he was should endeavor to preserve what is good in as vain as any of his readers; thirdly, men human nature, endeavoring at the same are very prone to believe what they do not time to elevate and purify it. understand; fourthly, they will not believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads nowhere; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seemed always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons? An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead Lord ranks with commoners; vanity is no longer interested in the matter, for a new road has become an old one."

Extreme characters are unfair illustrations of any doctrine, as much so as any extravagant doctrine is of sound philosophy itself. A mere politician is no proper specimen of human nature, any more than a mere talking philanthropist.

In a letter of Archbishop Herring, (the only Archbishop we can at present remember, who was at the same time a pleasant and elegant prose writer,) to his friend Mrs. Duncombe, occurs the following admirable sentiment, and the justest criticism on the rational school of morality, i. e., that which based the foundations of morality on reason, and at the head of which stood Dr. Samuel Clarke: "The reasonableness of virtue is its true foundation, and the Creator has formed our minds to such a quick perception of it, that it is in almost every occurrence of human life self-evident; but then I am for taking in every possible help to strengthen and support virtue, beauty, moral sense, affection, and even interest; and it seems to me as if the Creator had adapted various arguments to secure the practice of it to the various tempers of men, and the different solicitations which they meet with. And virtue thus secured and guarded may perhaps not unfitly be compared to those buildings of a Gothic taste, which, though they have a good foundation, are furnished, nevertheless, (against all accidents,) with many outward supports or buttresses, but so contrived and adjusted by the architect, that they do not detract from, but even add to the beauty and grandeur of the building."

If after such men we may presume to add our opinion, it is perfectly in harmony with theirs. The works of Lord Shaftsbury appear to us a refectory of ethical topics, in which too many points and questions are comprehended under single heads, by no means sufficiently distinct and separate, full of commonplace, dressed up affectedly in stale metaphors and the cast-off imagery of the Platonists. He is absurdly verbose and magniloquent. His egotism is awkward, his circumlocutions clumsy, his pleasantry pompous. His style is in general heavy and languid, the style of a nobleman turned metaphysician. He is truly a philosophical petit maître, infected with the vilest pedantry and the French taste in criticism current in his day.

Gray's character of Aristotle appears to us even more just and better written than his portrait of Shaftesbury. As we have given Beattie's opinion of Plato, we may subjoin the following: "For my part, I read Aristotle, his poetics, politics, and morals, though I do not well know which is which. In the first place, he is the hardest author, by far, I The philosophical claims and literary char-ever meddled with. Then he has a dry conciseacter of Lord Shaftesbury, so impartially ness that makes one imagine one is perusing stated in the analytical review of Sir James a table of contents rather than a book; it

VOL. VIII. NO. I. NEW SERIES.

4

tastes for all the world like chopped hay, or rather like chopped logic; for he has a violent affection to that art, being in some sense his own invention; so that he often loses himself in little trifling distinctions and verbal niceties; and what is worse, leaves you to extricate him as well as you can. Thirdly, he has suffered vastly from the transcribers, as all authors of great brevity necessarily must. Fourthly, and lastly, he has abundance of fine uncommon things, which make him well worth the pains he gives one."

famous theories and systems, the authors of which avoid, as far as possible, any mention of Hobbes, unless to abuse him, so obnoxious is his name, and so much has his reputation suffered at the hands not of critics only, but of theological and political partisans. This tract was a favorite with Addison, and is highly praised by Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh; contains the very marrow of Hobbes' philosophy, as Hazlitt has clearly shown in his admirable Essay on the Writings of Hobbes. The life of Hobbes has been writWe know Aristotle wholly from transla- ten by the antiquarian Aubrey. The English tion, to be sure, and hence cannot judge of Aristotle was, at one time, secretary to Lord him as of an English author; but we believe Bacon, and the philosophical idol of Cowley, all of Gray's critique, save the last clause, who has penned a noble ode to his memory. which must overrate him. He is crabbed Locke owes an immense debt to him; but and unreadable to a wonderful degree, ana- so feeble is Fame, the latter philosopher is lytical to excess, harsh to austerity and bald- regarded as at the head of English metaness. As a mere writer, though he may be, physics, while the earlier, his master, and an at times, profoundly suggestive, yet the mat- original thinker, as well as a masterly writer, ter of his works may be far better studied in is classed with atheists, paradoxical sophists, modern authors, who are greater masters of and sensualist worldlings. Errors, and griev form. As a moralist and metaphysician, ous ones, are to be found in Hobbes, and of much of him may be in Hobbes and Locke, which we shall attempt no defense; still there yet they are far more able in developing the is much truth, penetration into human motives thought. In rhetoric and æsthetical criticism and characters, force of style, independence a score of writers, Greek, Roman, English, and manliness in his Treatise of Human Naand German, may be mentioned vastly supe-ture-a body of philosophy in itself. At prerior. In the philosophy of politics, France, sent we intend merely noting some remarkEngland, and the United States have produced disciples that have transcended their master's skill; and in natural history, France, Germany, England, and America, during the last fifty years have accumulated a mass of scientific information, probably far beyond all the resources of antiquity in the same department.

Speaking of the medium of translation, we offer the dictum of high authority on this subject-Dugald Stewart: "A very imperfect one, undoubtedly, where a judg ment is to be passed on compositions addressed to the powers of imagination and taste; yet fully sufficient to enable us to form an estimate of works which treat of science and philosophy. On such subjects it may be safely concluded, that whatever is unfit to stand the test of a literal version, is not worth the trouble of being studied in the original."

In a single tract of Hobbes, of some ninety duodecimo pages, occur some of the most suggestive passages in modern philosophical treatises. We find here the original of many

able coincidences of thought and expression between the elder writer and the others, generally his successors, though in some instances almost contemporaries.

"The consequences of our actions," says Hobbes, "are our counsellors by alternate succession in the mind."

In a noble, serious poem by Beaumont or Fletcher, the brother dramatists, we read:

"Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

The constant shadows that walk by us still."

"In dreams," Hobbes finely suggests, "our thoughts appear like the stars between the flying clouds." Locke, in Book II. Chap. X. of his Essay, has hit upon a similar illustration. Speaking of the facility with which in most minds ideas fade in the memory, he concludes: "In all these cases, ideas in the mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over fields of corn."

Hobbes has anticipated Gall and Spurzheim, where he writes, Chap. XI. of the

Treatise, "The Brain, the common organ of all the senses." Truly, the new thoughts come out of the old books, or as Dan Chaucer has declared:

"Out of the olde fieldes, as men saithe,

Cometh all this newe corne, fro yere to yere; And out of the olde bookes, in good faithe, Cometh all this newe science that men lere."

Rochefoucault's definition of Pity is almost identical with that given by Hobbes, who styles it, "Imagination, or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity."

After making, as we thought, quite a discovery, we found Hazlitt had, long before, pointed out the whole thing. So most of the new revelations of modern criticism are merely "new-found old inventions," according to Butler. Chap. II. is an Essay on Idealism, a Berkleian speculation. Now, Hobbes died in 1679, Berkeley was born in 1684, and it is fair to infer the later phi

losopher borrowed from his predecessor. The sum of the doctrine is contained in the tenth and last paragraph: "And from hence, also, it followeth, that whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seeming apparitions only; the things that are really in the world without us, are those motives by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense, which also is to be by sense corrected: for, as sense telleth me when I see directly, that the color seemeth to be in the object; so, also, sense telleth me when I see by reflection, that color is not in the object."

We will conclude this discursive paper by quoting a common saying, that has passed into a proverb: "The worth of a thing is what it'll bring," neatly framed into one of the most telling couplets of Hudibras. In Hobbes, we find it thus expressed: "So much worth is every thing, as a man will give for all it can do."

NILE NOTES OF A HOWAD JI.*

glish language. We are of honest Dogberry's opinion, that "comparisons are odorous," but must say, that of the books we have referred to, we think Eöthen stands at the head. Those happy combinations of a fascinating subject and a fascinating style, have rendered us more fastidious than formerly with all Eastern travellers who turn authors; and we are now as much disposed to apply a severe test of criticism to descriptions of Thebes and Cairo, and sentimental lucubrations beside the pyramids or under the palms, as to any scenes in Italy, or ramblings on the Continent. The charm of the East, since we have seen the subject so skilfully and admirably treated, is no longer sufficient to compensate for blemishes of

FROM the days of Herodotus to those of the Howadji, every thing that related to the East, the country that the latter terms peculiarly the property of the imagination, has been seized upon and read with eagerness and avidity. Such an interest has always attached to the subject itself, that we have felt disposed to be more lenient with books that purported to be a record of Oriental travel, than with the continental tours with which we have been inundated for many years. But several works upon the East have been published of late, by writers who, adhering to the good old catholic doctrine of Dr. Blair, "that all that can be required of language is to convey our ideas clearly to the minds of others, and at the same time in such a dress, as by pleasing and interest-taste or diction, in the notes of the traveller. ing them, shall most effectually strengthen the impressions we endeavor to make," wrote with gracefulness and ease, with manliness and vigor, disdained all affectations, and were above playing tricks with the En

We ventured upon the perusal of the book, whose title stands at the head of this article, with expectations founded upon the excessive laudations of it that we saw in many of the daily journals, and regret to state

* Nile Notes of a Howadji. New-York: Harper & Brothers.

that we have seldom closed a book, written | similar specimens, but deem the foregoing by a person of so much genius, against sufficient. We must, however, give the which we had charges to make of a more opening of the 21st chapter: "We deserious nature. We have marked for parted at dawn. Before a gentle gale the reprehension in our copy of "Nile Notes" Ibis fleetly flew in the star-light, serenaded many inelegancies of expression, passages by the Sallias;" and with this exquisite of false and twaddling sentiment, and viola-" morseau " we close our alliterated extracts. tions of the rules of syntax and of good All affectations in literature are offensive, taste; all faults of great magnitude, and and it is extremely painful to see an attempt which we shall notice more particularly made to revive practices in writing, that the hereafter. But to our mind, the cardinal fault purer taste of modern times has decided to of the book, and the one that disfigures it be unsuitable to a chaste and natural style; more than any, perhaps than all, of the and although the figure of words that conothers, and upon which we shall bestow the sists in the repetition of the same letter or most extended notice, is the affectation of letters at certain intervals, and is termed in alliterated sentences, with which almost rhetoric alliteration, was indulged in occaevery page is crowded; and after giving our sionally by some of the oldest and best readers a few specimens with which our au- writers-chiefly in poetry however—it is rethor has favored us, we propose to make a garded at the present day as a trivial and few observations on what we have always affected decoration of words, and an instance considered to be one of the most ridiculous of false refinement, and cannot be tolerated and puerile of literary follies that have been except in a work of a humorous or burlesque recorded, and which we think no power, cer- nature. When any folly is indulged in to tainly not that of the genius of the Howadji, a great extent, the very extravagances into can render again popular. But although which it runs is the cause of its total abanthe success of such an attempt would be as donment. Such was the fate of allitehopeless as deplorable, we do not, on that ration, which was carried to such lengths account, think the person making it less that its absurdity became apparent to deserving of censure. On one page alone all, and it went out of favor with the our author treats us with "two towels," public. Disraeli tells us of the "Ecloga "lickerous larder," 66 sharp stimulants," de Calois," by Hugbold the Monk, all the "most melancholy," "remote regions," "ill- words of which silly work began with a ness and inability," "landing at lonely," C; and also of a translation of the moral "provisions previously sent on shore for the proverbs of Christiana of Pisa, made by purpose at an admirable advance," "grown the Earl of Rivers, in the time of Edgrisly," "spectrally sliding," "story with ward IV., the greater part of which he sardonic smiles," "demoniac dragomen," contrived to conclude with the letter E; an "sang the slowest of slow songs." instance, he observes, of his lordship's hard We cull a few more of these flowers of application, and the bad taste of an age literature from some other pages. "Shines which Lord Oxford said had witticisms and not the Syrian sun suddenly," "dirt and whims to struggle with, as well as ignorance. direful deformity," ," "dumb secrets are but Now every such instance is the "reductio soft shadows and shining lights," "sitting ad absurdum" of such a practice. It is solemn saddening but successful," "trebly" from the purpose" of writing, and "though flies the Ibis while the sun sets,' ""dashed it make the unskilful laugh, yet it cannot with dying light," "cultivate chimney but make the judicious grieve." It is a corners and chuckle," "solid sin sticks method of courting notoriety that seems steadfastly," "sharp surges of sound swept," more ridiculous to us than that of the incen"music still swelled savagely in maddened monotony of measure," "make or maintain an otherwise monotonous mass of misery," "sedately sail for stranger scenery," "seems it too seriously symbolical," "swallow-like follow the summer, and shuffle off the coil of care at Cairo," &c. &c. We might fill our pages, as the Howadji has done, with

diary of Ephesus, and we shall always express our dislike at such attempts. Every thing that attracts attention from the matter to the style should be discountenanced. We should not think of tolerating a writer of modern times, who indulged in that figure of words termed Antanaclasis, which consists in the repetition of words the same in

sound, but not in sense. Instances of this, and was shoved back beyond glass." The as well as of alliteration, occur in the writ- incorrectness of the first part of this senings of Cicero, who stands pre-eminent tence is overshadowed by the inelegance of among elegant writers; but at the present the last part, that we have italicized. Sacday it is reckoned a defect, and not a beauty rifices of elegance are allowable, if thereby a in style. Yet in the time of Henry II., this greater force of expression is obtained; but childish and unmeaning folly prevailed to in this case the Howadji has gained nothing such an extent, that no poem or prose-writ- in vigor, and is singularly inelegant. He ing could be popular if it did not abound has attempted to be quaint, and is only in instances of it. clumsy.

Were it possible for such follies to be revived, we might expect to see verses again assume the grotesque shapes of pillars, bottles, lozenges, rhomboids, Cupids, hearts and altars, as in a former age. But we will not insult the public taste, by presuming for a moment such a thing possible.

Alliteration was conisdered to have a kind of natural connection with imitative harmony, and occurred most frequently where the sound was an echo to the sense; but our author, instead of attempting to revive it in its least objectionable shape, although in that sufficiently absurd, has plunged at once into extravagance, and forcibly brings in words without regard to their fitness, solely because the first letter or syllable is similar to that of the word that preceded or follows it. A puerile or senseless affectation, that cannot be animadverted upon with too much severity. We confess that we should have read his book with more pleasure, had he, after having selected a word that was appropriate, repeated it several times, or referred us in a note or otherwise to the letters in the Dictionary that the word commenced with for other words commencing with the same. Either of these two methods, we think, would have been superior to the one he has adopted, and with the latter we could have alliterated his sentences at our leisure, if we had any inclination to do so at all, without having it interfere with the perusal of his narrative.

On page 58 we have the following: "We were in the dream of the death of the deadest land."

On page 253: "Yet he will have a secreter sympathy with those forms than with any temple, how grand or graceful soever."

Whose grammar does the Howadji use? On page 66: "Over my head was the dreamy murmurousness of summer insects swarming in the warm air."

On page 134: "The sharp surges of sound swept around the room, dashing in regular measure against her movelessness."

On page 173: "It lingers on the verge of the vortex, then unpausing plunges in." On page 202: "Should we not have black balled the begirted Aristides?" And whose dictionary?

Such sentences as the following would be unpardonable in a school-boy's composition, and the youth who should be guilty of them would richly deserve to have the rules of syntax flogged into him :

Page 120: "And so frailtywas all boated up the Nile to Esne. Not quite, and even if it had been, Abbas Pacha, grandson of Mahommed Alee, and at the request of the old Pacha's daugher, has boated it all back again."

Page 156: "Nation of beggars effortless, effete, bucksheesh is its prominent point of contact with the Howadji, who revisiting the Nile in dreams hears far sounding and for ever, Alms, O shopkeeper !"

Page 173: "Confusion confounded, desolated desolation, never sublime yet always solemn, with a sense of fate in the swift rushing waters, that creates a somber interest not all inhuman, but akin to dramatic

We proceed now to notice some of the other faults that we alluded to in a former page, and to give a few of the most glaring instances. On the route to Boubek, see page 17, our author meets men with hog-skins slung over their backs full of water. This sight re-intensity." minds him of the remark in Scripture, "Neither do ye put new wine into old bottles," and carries him back to the time when glass bottles were an unknown luxury. To express this he says, "I remembered the land and the time of putting wine into old bottles,

Page 179: "Followed much monosyllabic discourse, also grave grunting and a little more salaaming among the belated sinners."

We confess to a prejudice in favor of the subjects and attributes of sentences being placed in the natural order of syntax.

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