felt as an instinctive impulse; and similar writers, among whom the author of Reginald Dalton is evidently ambitious to be classed, labour hard to write down the tone of popular feeling to a right loyal and legitimate standard of insipidity. In every page of the work in question, we perceive the author's conviction, that exaltation of character is jacobinical, and high feeling dangerous to the state. In the estimation of this gentleman and of the school to which he belongs, the staple virtues of social life are-eating and drinking. To listen to their élans on this subject, we might fancy them of that creed, of which Margutto declares the dogmas in the Morgante Maggiore

Their faith is in "capons and cups of sack ;" and provided the heroes of their romances go drunk to bed every night, they seem very little solicitous that they set an example of any other virtue. In Reginald Dalton, no opportunity is lost of recommending intemperance; and that the reader may judge of this fact for himself, we subjoin one passage of very many in the work illustrative of the point:

"There is nothing in which the young sinners of a debauch have so decidedly the better of the old ones, as in the facility with which their unshattered constitutions enable them to shake off the painful part of its immediate consequences. I say the painful part-because really when the sickness and the head-ache are gone, the feverish fervour which remains about the brain, is with them neither a pain nor a punishment. A sort of giddy, reckless delirium lies there, ready to be revived and rekindled by the mere winds of heaven; and in fact, when such excitements as air and exercise are abundantly supplied, a sort of legacy of luxury is bequeathed to them even by their departed carousal; and it is in this point of view, I apprehend, that any charitable person will ever interpret old Tom Brown's glorious chaunt of

Wine, wine in the morning
Makes us frolic and gay,

That like eagles we soar

In the pride of the day."-Vol. 2. p. 10.

To what good purpose, it will be asked, can these fascinating portraitures of debauchery be directed? What benefit can be sought by informing youth that the first steps in vice are less painful and less dangerous than the last? or by encouraging boys to enter upon a train of riot and excess, which, when once it has become habitual, can seldom be thrown off? Can these scribes be really afraid that a sober and diligent youth leads to a maturity of radicalism and resistance? or that, to ensure the triumphs of legitimacy, it is necessary that man should be not only ignorant, but brutish, sensual, and besotted ? There is something so odious in this eternal recommendation of the pleasures of the table, this chaunting of the delights of locked diningrooms and "no daylight," this fulsome eulogy of sound principles and sound corks, of the good old loyalty and good old port of other times, -coupled too as it is with hypocritical pretensions to superior virtue and sanctity, of the same class of writers, upon other occasions,-that we cannot but mark it with a strong expression of disgust. Let the reader observe also, that one of the coarsest debauchees in which Reginald is made to participate (and he is never insensible to the claims

of a bottle of Champaigne) is supposed to occur after he has ruined his father, shot his friend in a duel, been expelled from college, and is on the point of sailing for India without a hope of again seeing the object of his devoted attachment! If this new school of philosophy should take root, we shall have the rising generation staggering through our streets at noon-day; and as the German youth turned banditti after the example of Schiller's robbers, and the English lads knocked down watchmen in humble admiration of the exploits of Tom and Jerrry, -so we shall see a jovial band of stripling Tories riot through the land, obedient to the canons of good fellowship laid down in the Reginald Daltons, the Peter's Letters, and the other productions of the clique, putting down Whiggery and water-drinking by club law, and forming in every village associations for the propagation of passive obedience to rulers and toast-masters.

But to return to the story. Reginald Dalton, a common-place sort of youth, educated in the seclusion of a north country parsonage, is the son of a clergyman, the cadet of an ancient family, from which he has estranged himself in consequence of a very silly disappointment in love. Left to the solitude of his parsonage-house, the victim at once of ennui and pique, the worthy divine marries a farmer's daughter, who, Dieu sçait pourquoi, is represented as a Catholic. This fair transubstantialist has a sister, who runs off with a seducer, and is privately married according to the succinct forms admitted by the Scottish law. The seducer, after the most approved usages "in that case provided," endeavours to hush up the transaction, and marries again. Of this transient union a daughter is the fruit. The mother dies, and the orphan is quartered on a Catholic priest, who takes her abroad.

The gay deceiver, the cause of all this mischief, is the half-brother of the elder Dalton's cousin and first love; who, to comfort her in her afflictions, instead of looking for another husband, turns Methodist : and her brother, to conciliate her affections and become the legatee of her property, adopts, or rather affects to adopt, her religious predilections also. At the opening of the novel, Reginald's father renews his intimacy with his family, and the problem to be solved in the progress of the work is, whether his old flame shall suffer the family estate to follow the legal course of descent, or will it out of the family to her Methodist brother. En attendant, Reginald goes to Oxford; and the larger and the most amusing part of these volumes is occupied with details of college life, wine-parties, hunting, fights with the townfolks, debts, duns, and drunkenness. On his road to the university, Reginald meets in the coach with an odd sort of Scotch attorney, who, "for the better carrying on of the plot," goes at once out of his way and his character to introduce the young man to a Catholic priest, resident in Oxford; who is, of course, the protector of Reginald's neglected and disowned cousin. Love, in the usual routine, follows; which thrives the better for the mutual poverty of the parties (Malthus on Population at this time probably not forming part of a college course). Meantime the hero's dissipation plunges him in difficulties, and he utterly exhausts his father's slender finances. Notwithstanding a very edifying repentance, he becomes involved in a duel, is expelled from college, and has a new life to seek. Just at this time the dignus vindice nodus of the piece is solved, by the death of the virgin heiress;

who leaves the estate,-not to her canting brother, but to his daughter by the second marriage, a lady one degree more cunning and ass duous than her father. Forthwith the honest attorney ci-dessus nommé, who was "particeps criminis" of the clandestine marriage, determines to turn his knowledge of that transaction to account, by forcing the father of the rich legatee to give her and her estate to his own son. His power to effect this purpose is increased by an error in the wording of the will, which, giving the property to his friend's eldest daughter, of course, if her claim were made public, would assign it to the little Catholic perdue. The negociation to keep this secret, very happily commenced, is abruptly broken off by the supposed heiress choosing for herself and running off with a third party. The attorney, thus foiled, embarks in a new speculation to produce the "true Simon Pure," and marry his son to her. Upon the point as he imagines of carrying this design into successful execution, he is again thwarted by the old Methodist father, who, seeing no other means of avoiding the snare, and touched moreover in his conscience, brings to light a forgotten entail which nullifies the will, and settles the property on Reginald, who, as in duty bound, marries his cousin, and the curtain falls.

Such are the very flimsy materials out of which the author of Reginald Dalton has contrived to spin three very closely printed volumes, by dint of descriptions and details à la Walter Scott, (if W. Scott be the "great unknown")-descriptions and details, which, though of the most ordinary and trifling incidents and situations, are still, by force of writing, endowed with considerable interest to the reader. It is this circumstance, indeed, which alone renders the work worth five lines of criticism. It is this faculty of engaging an half-alive sort of attention, and pinning the mind down to details which tend to enfeeble the intellectual powers of the reader, which aim at affording amusement without rousing thought or interesting the nobler passions, and which familiarize the imagination with selfish and narrow notions and motives, that we would deprecate as debasing literature and degrading the national tone of feeling. Whatever openings the story affords for energy and dignity of character in the better personages of the tale, are utterly lost by the author. Reginald and his father are both more amiable than otherwise, but both are nearly ruined; the one by his thoughtless extravagance, and the other by want of paternal vigilance, or rather of common prudence. Both are weak, and accident alone prevents them from being miserable. There is, indeed, an attempt at the portraiture of an old lady of sense and goodness, but nothing is made of the character, either in the story or as a character. The moral interest which might spring out of the religious peculiarities of the personages, is left wholly aside, and no use whatever is made of the circumstance.

The most interesting and amusing part of the book is occupied with a very vivid description of a night brawl in Oxford, which, though a mere parody of the prentices' row in the Fortunes of Nigel, is executed with considerable force.

M.

THE RELEASE OF TASSO.

THERE came a Bard to Rome: he brought a lyre,
Of sounds to peal through Rome's triumphal sky,
To mourn a hero on his funeral pyre,

Or greet a conqueror with its war-notes high;
For on each chord had fall'n the gift of fire,
The living breath of Power and Victory!
-Yet he, its lord, the sovereign city's guest,
Sigh'd but to flee away, and be at rest.

He brought a spirit, whose ethereal birth
Was of the loftiest, and whose haunts had been
Amidst the marvels and the pomps of earth,
Wild fairy-bowers, and groves of deathless green,
And fields, where mail-clad bosoms prove their worth,
When flashing swords light up the stormy scene.
-He brought a weary heart, a wasted frame,
The Child of Visions from a dungeon came.

On the blue waters, as in joy they sweep,
With starlight floating o'er their swells and falls,
On the blue waters of the Adrian deep,

His numbers had been sung: and in the halls,
Where, through rich foliage if a sunbeam peep,
It seems Heaven's wakening to the sculptured walls,
Had princes listen'd to those lofty strains,
While the high soul they burst from, pined in chains.

And in the summer-gardens, where the spray
Of founts, far-glancing from their marble bed,
Rains on the flowering myrtles in its play,

And the sweet limes, and glossy leaves that spread
Round the deep-golden citrons; o'er his lay
Dark eyes, dark, soft, Italian eyes had shed

Warm tears, fast-glittering in that sun, whose light
Was a forbidden glory to his sight.

Oh! if it be that wizard sign and spell
And talisman had power of old to bind,
In the dark chambers of some cavern-cell,
Or knotted oak, the Spirits of the Wind,
Things of the lightning-pinion, wont to dwell
High o'er the reach of eagles, and to find
Joy in the rush of storms;-even such a doom
Was that high Minstrel's in his dungeon-gloom.

But he was free at last!—the glorious land
Of the white Alps and pine-crown'd Apennines,
Along whose shore the sapphire seas expand,
And the wastes teem with myrtle, and the shrines
Of long-forgotten gods from Nature's hand
Receive bright offerings still; with all its vines,
And rocks, and ruins, clear before him lay-
-The seal was taken from the founts of day.

The winds came o'er his cheek; the soft winds, blending
All summer-sounds and odours in their sigh;
The orange-groves waved round; the hills were sending
Their bright streams down; the free birds darting by,

And the blue festal Heavens above him bending,

As if to fold a world where none could die !

And who was he that look'd upon these things?

-If but of earth, yet one whose thoughts were wings

To bear him o'er creation! and whose mind
Was as an air-harp, wakening to the sway
Of sunny Nature's breathings unconfined,
With all the mystic harmonies that lay

Far in the slumber of its chords enshrined,
Till the light breeze went thrilling on its way.

-There was no sound that wander'd through the sky,
But told him secrets in its melody.

Was the deep forest lonely unto him

With all its whispering leaves?-Each dell and glade
Teem'd with such forms as on the moss-clad brim
Of fountains in their sparry grottoes play'd,

Seen by the Greek of yore through twilight dim,
Or misty noontide in the laurel-shade.

-There is no solitude on earth so deep

As that where man decrees that man should weep!

But oh the life in Nature's green domains,
The breathing sense of joy! where flowers are springing
By starry thousands, on the slopes and plains,

And the grey rocks!—and all the arch'd woods ringing,
And the young branches trembling to the strains
Of wild-born creatures, through the sunshine winging
Their fearless flight!—and sylvan echoes round,
Mingling all tones to one Eolian sound!-

And the glad voice, the laughing voice of streams,
And the low cadence of the silvery sea,

And reed-notes from the mountains, and the beams
Of the warm sun-all these are for the Free!

And they were his once more, the Bard, whose dreams
Their spirit still had haunted!--Could it be

That he had borne the chain?-Oh! who shall dare
To say how much man's heart uncrush'd may bear?

So deep a root hath hope!-But woe for this,
Our frail mortality! that aught so bright,
So almost burden'd with excess of bliss,
As the rich hour which back to summer's light
Calls the worn captive, with the gentle kiss
Of winds, and gush of waters, and the sight
Of the green earth, must so be bought with years
Of the heart's fever, parching up its tears!

And feeding a slow fire on all its powers,
Until the boon for which we gasp in vain,
If hardly won at length, too late made ours,
When the soul's wing is broken, comes like rain
Withheld till evening, on the stately flowers
Which wither'd in the noontide, ne'er again
To lift their heads in glory!-So doth Earth
Breathe on her gifts, and melt away their worth!

The sailor dies in sight of that green shore,
Whose fields, in slumbering beauty, seem'd to lie
On the deep's foam, amidst its hollow roar
Call'd up to sunlight by his fantasy!—