Winter Scenery: Waterfalls in Frost.

I wish I could find language sufficiently powerful to convey to you an idea of the sublime magnificence of the waterfalls in the frost, when the old, overhanging oaks are spangled with icicles; the rocks sheeted with frozen foam, formed by the flying spray; and the water that oozes from their sides congealed into innumerable pillars of crystal. Every season has its charms. The picturesque tourists-those birds of summer-see not half the beauties of nature. (From Letter written in Wales.)

Truth to Nature essential in Poetry. Miss Ilex. Few may perceive an inaccuracy, but to those who do, it causes a great diminution, if not a total destruction, of pleasure in perusal. Shakespeare never makes a flower blossom out of season! Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey are true to nature in this and in all other respects, even in their wildest imaginings.

The Rev. Dr Opimian. Yet here is a combination, by one of our greatest poets, of flowers that never blossom in the same season:

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine,

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,

To deck the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.' [MILTON'S Lycidas.] And at the same time he plucks the berries of the myrtle and the ivy.

Miss Ilex. Very beautiful, if not true to English seasons; but Milton might have thought himself justified in making this combination in Arcadia. Generally, he is strictly accurate, to a degree that is in itself a beauty. For instance, in his address to the nightin

gale:

'Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among,

I woo, to hear thy even song,

And missing thee, I walk unseen

On the dry smooth-shaven green.'

The song of the nightingale ceases about the time that the grass is mown.

The Rev. Dr Opimian. The old Greek poetry is always true to nature, and will bear any degree of critical analysis. I must say I take no pleasure in poetry that will not.

Mr Mac-Borrowdale. No poetry is truer to nature than Burns, and no one less so than Moore. His imagery is almost always false. Here is a highly applauded stanza, and very taking at first sight:

'The night-dew of heaven, though in silence it weeps, Shall brighten with verdure the sod where he sleeps ; And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.'

But it will not bear analysis. The dew is the cause of the verdure, but the tear is not the cause of the memory; the memory is the cause of the tear.

The Rev. Dr Opimian. There are inaccuracies more

offensive to me than even false imagery. Here is one in a song which I have often heard with displeasure. A young man goes up a mountain, and as he goes higher and higher he repeats Excelsior! but excelsior is only taller in the comparison of things on a common basis, not higher as a detached object in the air. Jack's bean-stalk was excelsior the higher it grew, but Jack himself was no more celsus at the top than he had been at the bottom.

Mr Mac-Borrowdale. I am afraid, doctor, if you look for profound knowledge in popular poetry, you will often be disappointed.

The Rev. Dr Opimian. I do not look for profound knowledge; but I do expect that poets should understand what they talk of. Burns was not a scholar, but he was always master of his subject. All the scholarship in the world would not have produced 'Tam o' Shanter,' but in the whole of that poem there is not a false image or a misused word. What do you suppose these lines represent ?—

'I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise,

One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled

A queen with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,
Brow-bound with burning gold.'

[TENNYSON'S Dream of Fair Women.]

Mr Mac-Borrowdale. I should take it to be a description of the Queen of Bambo.

The Rev. Dr Opimian. Yet thus one of our most popular poets describes Cleopatra, and one of our most popular artists has illustrated the description by a portrait of a hideous grinning Ethiop! Moore led the way to this perversion by demonstrating that the Egyptian women must have been beautitul because they were 'the countrywomen of Cleopatra.' Here we have a sort of counter-demonstration that Cleopatra must have been a fright because she was the countrywoman of the Egyptians. But Cleopatra was a Greek, the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes and a lady of Pontus. The Ptolemies were Greeks, and whoever will look at their genealogy, their coins, and their medals, will see how carefully they kept their pure blood uncontaminated by African intermixture. Think of this description and this picture applied to one who, Dio says-and all antiquity confirms him-was 'the most superlatively beautiful of women, splendid to see and delightful to hear.' For she was eminently accomplished; she spoke many languages with grace and facility. Her mind was as wonderful as her personal beauty. (From Gryll Grange.)

philosophers hold that the esse of things is percipi, so a gentleman's furniture exists to be looked at. Nevertheless, sir, there are some things more fit to be looked at than others; for instance, there is nothing more fit to be looked at than the outside of a book. It is, as I may say from repeated experience, a pure and unmixed pleasure to have a goodly volume lying before you, and to know that you may open it if you please, and need not open it unless you please. It is a resource against ennui, if ennui should come upon you. To have the resource and not to feel the ennui, to enjoy your bottle in the present, and your book in the indefinite future, is a delightful condition of human existence. There is no place, in which a man can move or sit, in which the outside of a book can be otherwise than an innocent and becoming spectacle. Touching this matter, there cannot, I think, be two opinions. But with respect to your Venuses there can be, and indeed there are, two very distinct opinions. Now, sir, that little figure in the centre of the mantelpiece—as a grave paterfamilias, Mr Crotchet, with a fair nubile daughter, whose eyes are like the fishpools of Heshbon-I would ask you if you hold that figure to be altogether delicate?

Mr Crotchet. The Sleeping Venus, sir? Nothing can be more delicate than the entire contour of the figure, the flow of the hair on the shoulders and neck, the form of the feet and fingers. It is altogether a most delicate morsel.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Why, in that sense, perhaps, it is as delicate as whitebait in July. But the attitude, sir, the attitude?

Mr Crotchet. Nothing can be more natural, sir.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. That is the very thing, sir. It is too natural: too natural, sir: it lies for all the world like- I make no doubt the pious cheesemonger, who recently broke its plaster fac-simile over the head of the itinerant vendor, was struck by a certain similitude to the position of his own sleeping beauty, and felt his noble wrath thereby justly aroused.

Mr Crotchet. Very likely, sir. In my opinion, the cheesemonger was a fool, and the justice who sided with him was a greater.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Fool, sir, is a harsh term: call not thy brother a fool!

Mr Crotchet. Sir, neither the cheesemonger nor the justice is a brother of mine.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Sir, we are all brethren.

Mr Crotchet. Yes, sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the squire of the poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client; the statesman of his colleague ; the bubble-blower of the bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro; as these are brethren, so am I and the worthies in question.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. To be sure, sir, in these instances, and in many others, the term brother must be taken in its utmost latitude of interpretation: we are all brothers, nevertheless. But to return to the point. Now, these two large figures: one with drapery on the lower half of the body, and the other with no drapery at all upon my word, sir, it matters not what godfathers and godmothers may have promised and vowed for the children of this world, touching the devil and other things to be renounced, if such figures as those are to be put before their eyes.

Mr Crotchet. Sir, the naked figure is the Pandemian Venus, and the half-draped figure is the Uranian Venus ;

and I say, sir, that figure realises the finest imaginings of Plato, and is the personification of the most refined and exalted feeling of which the human mind is susceptible: the love of pure, ideal, intellectual beauty.

The Rer. Dr Folliott. I am aware, sir, that Plato, in his Symposium, discourseth very eloquently touching the Uranian and Pandemian Venus; but you must remember that, in our Universities, Plato is held to be little better than a misleader of youth; and they have shown their contempt for him, not only by never reading him (a mode of contempt in which they deal very largely), but even by never printing a complete edition of him; although they have printed many ancient books which nobody suspects to have been ever read on the spot, except by a person attached to the press, who is therefore emphatically called 'the reader.'

Mr Crotchet. Well, sir?

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Why, sir, to 'the reader' aforesaid (supposing either of our Universities to have printed an edition of Plato), or to any one else who can be supposed to have read Plato, or indeed to be ever likely to do so, I would very willingly show these figures; because to such they would, I grant you, be the outward and visible signs of poetical and philosophical ideas; but to the multitude, the gross carnal multitude, they are but two beautiful women-one half-undressed, and the other quite so.

Mr Crotchet. Then, sir, let the multitude look upon them and learn modesty.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. I must say that, if I wished my footman to learn modesty, I should not dream of sending him to school to a naked Venus.

Mr Crotchet. Sir, ancient sculpture is the true school of modesty. But where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant. And, sir, to show my contempt for cant in all its shapes, I have adorned my house with the Greek Venus in all her shapes, and am ready to fight her battle against all the societies that were ever instituted for the suppression of truth and beauty.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. My dear sir, I am afraid you are growing warm. Pray be cool. Nothing contributes so much to good digestion as to be perfectly cool after dinner.

Mr Crotchet. Sir, the Lacedæmonian virgins wrestled naked with young men and they grew up, as the wise Lycurgus had foreseen, into the most modest of women, and the most exemplary of wives and mothers.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Very likely, sir; but the Athenian virgins did no such thing, and they grew up into wives who stayed at home-stayed at home, sir; and looked after the husband's dinner-his dinner, sir, you will please to observe.

Mr Crotchet. And what was the consequence of that, sir? that they were such very insipid persons that the husband would not go home to eat his dinner, but preferred the company of some Aspasia or Lais.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Two very different persons, sir, give me leave to remark.

Mr Crotchet. Very likely, sir; but both too good to be married in Athens.

The Rev. Dr Folliot!. Sir, Lais was a Corinthian.
Mr Crotchet. 'Od's vengeance, sir, some Aspasia and

any other Athenian name of the same sort of person you

like

The Rev. Dr Folliott. I do not like the sort of person at all the sort of person I like, as I have already implied, is a modest woman, who stays at home and looks after her husband's dinner.

Mr Crotchet. Well, sir, that was not the taste of the Athenians. They preferred the society of women who would not have made any scruple about sitting as models to Praxiteles; as you know, sir, very modest women in Italy did to Canova: one of whom, an Italian countess, being asked by an English lady, 'How she could bear it?' answered, 'Very well; there was a good fire in the room.'

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Sir, the English lady should have asked how the Italian lady's husband could bear it. The phials of my wrath would overflow if poor dear Mrs Folliott- Sir, in return for your story, I will tell you a story of my ancestor, Gilbert Folliott. The devil haunted him, as he did Saint Francis, in the likeness of a beautiful damsel; but all he could get from the exemplary Gilbert was an admonition to wear a stomacher and long petticoats.

Mr Crotchet. Sir, your story makes for my side of the question. It proves that the devil, in the likeness of a fair damsel, with short petticoats and no stomacher, was almost too much for Gilbert Folliott. The force of the spell was in the drapery.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Bless my soul, sir!
Mr Crotchet. Give me leave, sir. Diderot-
The Rev. Dr Folliott. Who was he, sir?

Mr Crotchet. Who was he, sir? The sublime philosopher, the father of the encyclopædia, of all the encyclopædias that have ever been printed.

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Bless me, sir, a terrible progeny! they belong to the tribe of Incubi.

Mr Crotchet. The great philosopher, Diderot

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Sir, Diderot is not a man after my heart. Keep to the Greeks, if you please; albeit this Sleeping Venus is not an antique.

Mr Crotchet. Well, sir, the Greeks: why do we call the Elgin marbles inestimable? Simply because they are true to nature. And why are they so superior in that point to all modern works, with all our greater knowledge of anatomy? Why, sir, but because the Greeks, having no cant, had better opportunities of studying models?

The Rev. Dr Folliott. Sir, I deny our greater knowledge of anatomy. But I shall take the liberty to employ, on this occasion, the argumentum ad hominem. Would you have allowed Miss Crotchet to sit for a model to Canova?

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), one of the most witty, popular, and influential writers of his age, was born at Woodford in Essex, 3rd June. He was one of the three sons of an eccentric and improvident gentleman, who out of the wreck of his fortune was able to give his family a good education. The opinion that men of genius more generally inherit their intellectual eminence from the mother than the father is illustrated by this remarkable family, for the mother, Maria Olier, the daughter of a French emigrant, was a woman of strong sense, energy of character, and constitutional vivacity or gaiety. The eldest son, Robert-best known by his Eton nickname of Bobus-was distinguished as a classical scholar, and adopted the profession of the law; Courtenay, the youngest, went to India,

resources.

and acquired great wealth and reputation as a judge and an Oriental scholar. After five years at Southampton, in 1782 Sydney was sent to Winchester, where he rose to be captain of the school, and whence, having first spent six months at Mont Villiers in Normandy, in 1789 he proceeded to New College, Oxford. There he gained a fellowship, but of only £100 per annum, and was cast upon his own He obtained in 1794 a curacy in a small village in the midst of Salisbury Plain. The squire of the parish, Mr Beach, four years afterwards engaged him as tutor to his eldest son, and it was arranged that tutor and pupil should proceed to Weimar. They set out; but 'before we could get there,' says Sydney Smith, Germany became the seat of war, and in stress of politics we put into Edinburgh, where I remained five years.' He preached occasionally at an Episcopal chapel there. After two years' residence in Edinburgh, he returned to England

to marry at Cheam a Miss Pybus, daughter of a deceased banker. The bride's brother, one of Pitt's Lords of the Admiralty, was highly incensed at the marriage of his sister with a decided Whig without fortune, and the prospects of the young pair were far from brilliant. But the wife had a small fortune of her own, and she realised £500 by the sale of a necklace her mother had given her. The Wiltshire squire added £750 for Sydney's care of his son, and thus the sordid ills of poverty were averted. Literature also furnished an addi

tional resource. The Edinburgh Review was started in 1802, and it was Sydney Smith who was the original projector.

'The principles of the French Revolution,' he says, 'were then fully afloat, and it is impossible to conceive a more violent and agitated state of society. Among the first persons with whom I became acquainted were Lord Jeffrey, Lord Murray-late Lord Advocate for Scotland-and Lord Brougham; all of them maintaining opinions upon political subjects a little too liberal for the dynasty of Dundas, then exercising supreme power over the northern division of the island. One day we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleuch Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a Review; this was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the Edinburgh Review. The motto I proposed for the Review was, Tenui musam meditamur avena-"We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal." But this was too near the truth to be admitted, and so we took our present grave motto from Publius Syrus, of whom none of us had, I am sure, ever read a single line; and so began what has since turned out to be a very important and able journal. When I left Edinburgh it fell into the stronger hands of Lord Jeffrey and Lord Brougham, and reached the highest point of popularity and success.'

A not unimportant feature in the scheme was that the writers were to receive for their contributions ten guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages. In 1804 Sydney Smith went to London, officiated for some time as preacher of the Foundling Hospital at £50 per annum, and obtained another preachership in Berkeley Square. His sermons were eminently popular; and a course of lectures on Moral Philosophy, delivered in 1804, 1805, and 1806 at the Royal Institution, and published after his death, raised his reputation. In Holland House and other select circles his extraordinary conversational powers had already made him famous; and his contributions to the Edinburgh Review brought him much éclat, though their liberal tone and spirit rendered him obnoxious to the party in power. During the short Whig administration in 1806–7, he obtained the living of Foston-le-Clay in Yorkshire, and here he wrote his most amusing and powerful Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, to

my Brother Abraham, who lives in the Country, by Peter Plymley (1807). The success of the Letters was immense-they ran through twentyone editions. Since the days of Swift, no such irresistible argument had been indited in such masterly political irony.

The Yorkshire clergyman, not content with his clerical work and his literary undertakings, became a farmer next. And having in his youth made some studies in medicine, he occasionally doctored his poorer parishioners. It was his aim to make the most of his situation in life, and no man with a tithe of his talents was ever a more contented practical philosopher. Patronage came slowly. About 1825 the Duke of Devonshire presented him with the living of Londesborough, to hold till the duke's nephew came of age; and in 1828 Lord Lyndhurst, disregarding party considerations, gave him a prebend at Bristol. 'Moralists tell you,' he said, 'of the evils of wealth and station, and the happiness of poverty. I have been very poor the greatest part of my life, and have borne it as well, I believe, as most people, but I can safely say that I have been happier every guinea I have gained.' Lord Lyndhurst conferred another favour: he enabled him in 1829 to exchange Foston for Combe Florey, near Taunton, and the rector and his family removed from Yorkshire to Somerset. In 1831 the advent of the Whigs to power procured for him a prebendal stall at St Paul's. The political agitation about the Reform Bill drew from his vigorous pen some letters intended for circulation amongst the poor, and several short but pronouncedly liberal speeches, in one of which, delivered at Taunton in 1831, the famous Mrs Partington was introduced.

Like Swift, Sydney Smith seems almost never to have taken up his pen from the mere love of composition, but to enforce practical views and opinions on which he felt strongly. Though he was a professed joker and convivial wit-'a dinerout of the first lustre,' as he himself described Canning-there is not one of his humorous or witty sallies that does not come in as naturally as if it had been struck out or remembered at the moment it was used. In his latter years Sydney Smith waged war with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in a series of Letters addressed to Archdeacon Singleton. He thought the Commission had been invested with too much power, and that the interests of the inferior clergy had not been sufficiently regarded; he took up the defence of the rights of Dean and Chapter with warmth and spirit, and his tone was at times none too friendly to his old Whig associates. The Letters contain some admirable portrait-painting, bordering on caricature, and a characteristic variety of rich illustration. In 1839 the death of his youngest brother, Courtenay, in India, put him in possession of £50,000: 'in my grand climacteric, I became unexpectedly a rich man.' This wealth enabled him to invest money in Pennsylvanian bonds; and

when Pennsylvania and other states sought to repudiate the debt due to England, the witty canon of St Paul's took the field, and by a petition and a series of letters roused all Europe against the repudiating states. His last work was a short treatise on the use of the Ballot at elections. A representative Englishman, manly, fearless, independent, practical, he strove in season and out of season to correct what he deemed abuses, to enforce religious toleration, to expose cant and hypocrisy, and to inculcate timely reformation. No politician was ever more disinterested or effective. He had some of the wit of Swift without his coarseness or cynicism; and if inferior to Swift in the high attribute of original inventive genius, he had a peculiar and inimitable breadth of humour and drollery of illustration that served as potent auxiliaries to his clear and logical argument. Shortly after his death was published A Fragment on the Irish Roman Catholic Church. Smith discharged with diligence his public and clerical duties, and was much annoyed when persons of a devouter temper assumed that he was indifferent to the creed he professed or was a scoffer at religion. Certainly his jests were hardly consistent with a reverent temper; his intimate friends were neither religious nor orthodox; and he himself was frankly and outspokenly hostile to mysticism and fanaticism, to evangelicalism and Methodism (he said Methodists and evangelicals were 'numerous and nasty vermin'), to Puseyism and transcendentalism.

Mrs Partington.

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but the attempt of the Lords to stop the progress of reform reminds me very forcibly of the great storm of Sidmouth, and of the conduct of the excellent Mrs Partington on that occasion. In the winter of 1824 there set in a great flood upon that town-the tide rose to an incredible height-the waves rushed in upon the houses—and everything was threatened with destruction. In the midst of this sublime storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, and squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs Partington's spirit was up; but I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest. (From a Speech at Taunton in 1831.)

From Peter Plymley's Letters. The pope has not landed—nor are there any curates sent out after him-nor has he been hid at St Albans by the Dowager Lady Spencer-nor dined privately at Holland House-nor been seen near Dropmore. If these fears exist-which I do not believe-they exist only in the mind of the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Spencer Perceval]; they emanate from his zeal for the Protestant interest; and though they reflect the highest honour upon the delicate irritability of his faith, must certainly be considered as more ambiguous proofs of the sanity and vigour of his understanding. By this

time, however, the best-informed clergy in the neighbourhood of the metropolis are convinced that the rumour is without foundation; and though the pope is probably hovering about our coast in a fishing-smack, it is most likely he will fall a prey to the vigilance of the cruisers; and it is certain he has not yet polluted the Protestantism of our soil. Exactly in the same manner the story of the wooden gods seized at Charing Cross, by an order from the Foreign Office, turns out to be without the shadow of a foundation: instead of the angels and archangels mentioned by the informer, nothing was discovered but a wooden image of Lord Mulgrave going down to Chatham as a head-piece for the Spanker gun-vessel; it was an exact resemblance of his lordship in his military uniform, and therefore as little like a god as can well be imagined.

From Wit and Humour.'

Surprise is so essential an ingredient of wit, that no wit will bear repetition ;—at least the original electrical feeling produced by any piece of wit can never be renewed. There is a sober sort of approbation succeeds at hearing it the second time, which is as different from its original rapid, pungent volatility as a bottle of champagne that has been opened three days is from one that has at that very instant emerged from the darkness of the cellar. To hear that the top of Mont Blanc is like an umbrella, though the relation be new to me, is not sufficient to excite surprise: the idea is so very obvious, it is so much within the reach of the most ordinary understandings, that I can derive no sort of pleasure from the comparison. The relation discovered must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind; it must not be a comparison of colour with colour, and figure with figure, or any comparison which, though individually new, is specifically stale, and to which the mind has been in the habit of making many similar; but it must be something removed from common apprehension, distant from the ordinary haunts of thought-things which are never brought together in the common events of life, and in which the mind has discovered relations by its own subtlety and quickness. . .

It is imagined that wit is a sort of inexplicable visitation, that it comes and goes with the rapidity of lightning, and that it is quite as unattainable as beauty or just proportion. I am so much of a contrary way of thinking, that I am convinced a man might sit down as systematically, and as successfully, to the study of wit as he might to the study of mathematics; and I would answer for it that, by giving up only six hours a day to being witty, he should come on prodigiously before midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know him again. For what is there to hinder the mind from gradually acquiring a habit of attending to the lighter relations of ideas in which wit consists? Punning grows upon everybody, and punning is the wit of words. I do not mean to say that it is so easy to acquire a habit of discovering new relations in ideas as in words, but the difficulty is not so much greater as to render it insuperable to habit. One man is unquestionably much better calculated for it by nature than another; but association, which gradually makes a bad speaker a good one, might give a man wit who had it not, if any man chose to be so absurd as to sit down to acquire it. I have mentioned puns. They are, I believe, what I