donius-finding their most resolute enemy in the Thebans-(three hundred of whose principal warriors fell in the field)—and now joined the Spartans at the Persian camp. The Athenians are said to have been better skilled in the art of siege than the Spartans; yet at that time their experience could scarcely have been greater. The Athenians were at all times, however, of a more impetuous temper; and the men who had 'run to the charge' at Marathon, were not to be baffled by the desperate remnant of their ancient foe. They scaled the walls--they effected a breach through which the Tegeans were the first to rush-the Greeks poured fast and fierce into the camp. Appalled, dismayed, stupified, by the suddenness and greatness of their loss, the Persians no longer sustained their fame-they dispersed themselves in all directions, falling, as they fled, with a prodigious slaughter, so that out of that mighty armament scarce three thousand effected an escape."

Our limits will admit of only one extract more, but it is on a different subject, and exhibits Mr. Bulwer's powers of criticism in the fields of poetry and romance, with which he has long been familiar:

disguise of any existent philosophy. How ever this be, it would certainly seem, that in this majestic picture of the dauntless enemy of Jupiter, punished only for his benefits to man, and attracting all our sympathies by his courage and his benevolence, is conveyed something of disbelief or defiance of the creed of the populace-a suspicion from which Æschylus was not free in the judgment of his contemporaries, and which is by no means inconsonant with the doctrines of Pythagoras."

Mr. Bulwer justifies this warm eulogium by some beautiful translations. We select his animated version of the exquisite passage so well known to scholars, where Clytemnestra describes to the chorus the progress of the watchfires which announced to expecting Greece the fall of Troy-a passage perhaps unrivalled in the classical authors in picturesque and vivid images, and which approaches more nearly, though it has surpassed in sublimity, Sir Walter Scott's description of the bale-fires which announced to the Lothians a warden inroad of the English forces :

"A gleam-a gleam-from Ida's height,
By the Fire-god sent, it came ;-
From watch to watch it leapt that light,
As a rider rode the Flame!

.

It shot through the startled sky,
And the torch of that blazing glory
Old Lemnos caught on high,

On its holy promontory.

And sent it on, the jocund sign,

To Athos, Mount of Jove divine.

Wildly the while, it rose from the isle,

So that the might of the journeying light
Skimmed over the back of the gleaming brine
Farther and faster speeds it on,

Till the watch that keep Macistus steep-
See it burst like a blazing sun!

Doth Macistus sleep

On his tower-clad steep?
No rapid and red doth the wild fire sweep;
It flashes afar, on the wayward stream
Of the wild Euripus, the rushing beam!
It rouses the light on Messapion's height,
And they feed its breath with the withered heath.
But it may not stay!

And away-away-
It bounds in its freshening might.

Silent and soon,

Like a broadened moon,

It passes in sheen, Asopus green,
And bursts on Citharon gray!

The warder wakes to the signal-rays,

And it swoops from the hill with a broader blaze, On-on the fiery glory rode

"Summoning before us the eternal character of the Athenian drama, the vast audience, the unroofed and enormous theatre, the actors themselves enlarged by art above the ordinary proportions of men, the solemn and sacred subjects from which its form and spirit were derived, we turn to Eschylus, and behold at once the fitting creator of its grand and ideal personifications. I have said that Homer was his original; but a more intellectual age than that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with Eschylus, philosophy passed into poetry. The dark doctrine of Fatality imparted its stern and awful interest to the narration of events-men were delineated, not as mere selfacting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents of a destiny inevitable and unseen-the gods themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, entering into the sphere of human action for petty motives, and for individual purposesdrawing their grandeur, not from the part they perform, but from the descriptions of the poet; -they appear now as the oracles or the agents of fate-they are visitors from another world, terrible and ominous from the warnings which they convey. Homer is the creator of the material poetry, Eschylus of the intellectual. The corporeal and animal sufferings of the Titan in the epic hell become exalted by tragedy into the portrait of moral fortitude defying physical anguish. The Prometheus of Eschylus is the spirit of a god disdainfully subjected to the misfortunes of a man. In reading this wonderful performance, which in pure and sustained sublimity is perhaps unrivalled in the literature of the world, we lose sight entirely of the cheerful Hellenic worship; and Stalk, in stern tumult, through the halls of Troy.” yet it is in vain that the learned attempt to We have now discharged the pleasing duty trace its vague and mysterious metaphysics to of quoting some of the gems, and pointing out any old symbolical religion of the east. More some of the merits of th s remarkable work. probably, whatever theological system it It remains with equal impartiality, and in no shadows forth, was rather the gigantic con- unfriendly spirit, to glance at some of its faults ception of the poet himself, than the imperfect-faults which, we fear, will permanently prerevival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical vent it from taking the place to which it is en

Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed--
'To Megara's mount it came;
They feed it again,

And it streams amain-
A giant beard of flame!
The headland cliffs that darkly down
O'er the Saronic waters frown,

Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride,
And the huge rock glares on the glaring tide,
With mightier march and fiercer power
It gained Arachne's neighbouring tower-
Thence on our Argive roof its rest it won,
Of Ida's fire the long-descended Son!

Bright harbinger of glory and of joy!
So first and last with equal honour crown'd,
In solemn feasts the race-torch circles round.-
And these my heralds !—this my SIGN OF PEACE;
Lo! while we breathe, the victor lords of Greece,

titled, from its brilliancy and research, in the archives of literature.

an.

Mr. Bulwer would be much the better of the habits of the bar, before he ventured into the arena of political conflict. It is not by his waspish notes that the vast influence of Mitford's Greece on public thought is to be obviated: their only effect is to diminish the force of his attempted and otherwise able refutation. The future historian, who is to demolish the influence of Colonel Napier's eloquent and able, but prejudiced and, in political affairs, partial history of the Peninsular war, will hardly once mention his name.

than an impropriety-there is a fault. By dis playing such extraordinary bitterness on the The first of these defects is the constant subject, Mr. Bulwer clearly shows that he feels effort which is made to justify the proceedings, the weight of the Mitford fire; the strokes deand extenuate the faults, and magnify the livered have been so heavy that they have merits of democratic societies; and the equally been felt. Nothing could be more impolitic uniform attempt to underrate the value of than this, even for the interests of the party aristocratic institutions, and blacken the pro- which he supports. It is not by perpetually ceedings of aristocratic states. This, as attacking an author on trifling points or minor Fouché would say, is worse than an offence- inaccuracies that you are to deaden or neutrait is a fault. Its unfairness and absurdity is lize the impression he has made on mankind: so obvious, that it neutralizes and obliterates it is by stating facts, and adducing arguments the effect which otherwise might be produced inconsistent with his opinions. The maxim, by the brilliant picture which Mr. Bulwer's "ars est eclare artem," nowhere applies more transcendent subject, as well as his own re- clearly than here: Lingard is the model of a markable powers of narrative and description, skilful controversialist, whose whole work, afford. By the common calculation of chances, sedulously devoted to the upholding of the it is impossible to suppose that the aristocra- Catholic cause through the whole history of cies are always in the wrong, and the demo- | England, hardly contains a single angry or encracies always in the right; that the former venomed passage against a protestant historiare for ever actuated by selfish, corrupt, and discreditable motives, and the latter everlastingly influenced by generous, ennobling, and upright feelings. We may predicate with perfect certainty of any author, be he aristocratic, monarchical, or republican, who indulges in such a strain of thought and expression, extravagant eulogiums from his own party in the outset, and possibly undeserved but certain neglect from posterity in the end. Mankind, in future times, when present objects and party excitement have ceased, will never read-or, at least, never attach faith to any works which place all the praise on the one side and all the blame to the other of any of the child-oblivion which it evinces of a superintending ren of Adam. Rely upon it, virtue and vice Providence, either in dealing out impartial are very equally divided in the world: praise retribution to public actions, whether by naand blame require to be very equally bestowed. tions or individuals in this world, or in deducDifferent institutions produce a widely different ing from the agency of human virtue or vice, effect upon society and the progress of human and the shock of conflicting passions, the affairs: but it is not because the one makes means of progressive improvement. We do all men good, the other all men bad; but be- not say that Mr. Bulwer is irreligious; far cause the one permits the bad or selfish quali- from it. From the brightness of his genius, ties of one class to exercise an unrestrained as well as many exquisite passages in his influence-the other, because it arrays against novels, we should infer the reverse, and we their excesses the bad or selfish qualities of hope yet to see his great powers exerted in the other classes. All theories of government the noblest of labours, that of tracing the wisfounded upon the virtue of mankind or the per-dom of Providence amidst the mighty maze fectability of human nature, will, to the end of of human events. We say only that he as the world, be disproved by the experience, and discarded by the common sense of mankind. Mother Eve has proved, and will prove, more than a match for the strongest of her descendants. Instability, selfishness, folly, ambition, rapacity, ever have and ever will characterize alike democratic and aristocratic societies and governors. The wisdom of government and political philosophy consists not in expecting or calculating on impossibilities from a corrupted being, but in so arranging society and political powers that the selfishness and rapacity of the opposite classes of which it is composed may counteract each other.

The second glaring defect is the asperity and bitterness with which the author speaks of those who differ from him in political opihion. He in an especial manner is unceasing 'n his attacks upon Mr. Mitford: the historian whose able researches have added so much to our correct information on the state of the Grecian commonwealth. Here, too, is more

The last and by far the most serious objection to Mr. Bulwer's work is the complete

.

If he

cribes no influence in human affairs to a su-
perintending agency. This is being behind
the age. It is lagging in arrear of his com-
peers. The vast changes consequent on the
French Revolution have blown the antiquated
oblivion of Providence in Raynal or Voltaire
out of the water. The convulsions they had
so large a share in creating have completely
set at rest their irreligious dogmas. Here,
too, Mr. Bulwer has fallen into an imprudence,
for his own sake, as much as an error.
will take the trouble to examine the works
which are rising into durable celebrity in this
country, those which are to form the ideas of
la jeune Angleterre, he will find them all, with-
out being fanatical, religious in their tendency
For obvious reasons we do not give the names
of living authors; but we admire Mr. Bulwer's
talents: we would fain, for the sake of the public,
see them enlisted in the Holy Alliance-for the
sake of himself, fall in more with the rising spi
rit of the age; and we give a word to the wise

As an example of the defect of which we complain, and to avoid the suspicion of injustice in the estimate we have formed of the tendency in this particular of his writings, we shall give an extract. Perhaps there is no event in the history of the world which has been so momentous in its consequences, so vital in its effects, as the repulse of the Persian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and none in which the superintending agency of an overruling Providence was so clearly evinced. Observe the reflections which Mr. Bulwer deduces from this memorable event.

"When the deluge of the Persian arms rolled back to its eastern bed, and the world was once more comparatively at rest, the continent of Greece rose visibly and majestically above the rest of the civilized earth. Afar in the Latian plains, the infant state of Rome was silently and obscurely struggling into strength against the neighbouring and petty states in which the old Etrurian civilization was rapidly passing to decay. The génius of Gaul and Germany, yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce known, save where colonized by Greeks, in the gloom of its woods and wastes. The pride of Carthage had been broken by a signal defeat in Sicily; and Gelo, the able and astute tyrant of Syracuse, maintained, in a Grecian colony, the splendour of the Grecian name.

"The ambition of Persia, still the great monarchy of the world, was permanently checked and crippled; the strength of generations had been wasted, and the immense extent of the empire only served yet more to sustain the general peace, from the exhaustion of its forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralyzed the East.

"Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and to direct to the arts of peace the novel and amazing energies which had been prompted by the dangers, and exalted by the victories, of war.

not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it is indeed the nature and prerogative of free states, to concentrate the popular will into something of the unity of despotism, by producing, one after another, a series of representatives of the wants and exigencies of The Hour-each leading his generation, but only while he sympathizes with its will;-and either baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in proportion as he excels or he is outshone in genius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the widest range of the legislative power, the most concentrated force of the executive; thus uniting the desires of the greatest number, under the administration of the narrowest possible control;-the constitution popular-the government absolute but responsible."

Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen a luminous specimen of the view taken of the most memorable events in history by the liberal writers. In his reflections on this heartstirring event, in his observations on the glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despotism by the infant efforts of European freedom, there is nothing said of the incalculable consequences dependent on the struggle-nothing on the evident protection afforded by a superintending Providence to the arms of an inconsiderable Republic-nothing on the marvellous adaptation of the character of Themistocles to the mighty duty with which he was charged, that of rolling back from the cradle of civilization, freedom and knowledge, the wave of barbaric conquests. It was FATE which raised him up! Against such a view of human affairs we enter our solemn protest. We allow nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another way of expressing the decrees of an overruling, all-seeing, and beneficent intelligence. We see in the defeat of the mighty armament by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore -in the character of its leaders-in the efforts "The Athenians, now returned to their city, which it made-in the triumphs which it saw before them the arduous task of rebuild- achieved, and the glories which it won-the ing its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands. clearest evidence of the agency of a superinThe vicissitudes of the war had produced many tending power, which elicited, from the collision silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes. of Asiatic ambition with European freedom, Many great fortunes had been broken; and the the wonders of Grecian civilization, and the ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just no inconsiderable shock in the power of new because we are fully alive to the important families; the fame of the base-born and demo- agency of the democratic element in this mecratic Themistocles-and the victories which morable conflict; because we see clearly what a whole people had participated-broke up inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it much of the prescriptive and venerable sanc- is capable of bestowing on mankind; because tity attached to ancestral names, and to parti- we trace in its energy in every succeeding cular families. This was salutary to the spirit age the expansive force which has driven the of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of blessings of civilization into the recesses of the great was excited to restore, by some active the earth, that we are the determined enemies means, their broken fortunes and decaying in- of those democratic concessions which entirefluence the energies of the humbler ranks, ly destroy the beneficent agency of this poweralready aroused by their new importance, were ful element, which permit the vital heat of stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or was the very crisis in which a new direction tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent might be given to the habits and the character masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of of a whole people; and to seize all the advan-early and cherished vegetation, leave only in tages of that crisis, FATE, in Themistocles, had its traces the blackness of desolation and the allotted to Athens, a man whose qualities were ruin of nature.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.*

THE French Revolution is a subject on which | on the other hand, allege that these severities, neither history nor public opinion have been however much to be deplored, were unavoidable as yet to pronounce an impartial verdict; nor is it perhaps possible that the opinions of mankind should ever be unanimous, upon the varied events which marked its course. The passions excited were so fierce, the dangers incurred so tremendous, the sacrifices made so great, that the judgment not only of contemporary but of future generations must be warped in forming an opinion concerning it; and as long as men are divided into liberal and conservative parties, so long will they be at variance in the views they entertain in regard to the great strife which they first maintained against each other.

inclined to rank it with the most faithful narratives of the events it records which have ssued from the press. Its general accuracy, we are enabled, from a pretty extensive comparison of the latest authorities, to confirm. We shall give some extracts, which, if we are not greatly mistaken, will justify the tone of commendation in which we have spoken of it. The period at which the work commences isǝthe opening of the Convention, immediately after the revolt on the 10th of August had overturned the throne, and when a legislature, elected by almost universal suffrage, in a state of unprecedented exasperation, was assembled to regenerate the state.

Robespierre and Marat, the Agamemnon and Ajax of the democracy, are thus ably sketched:

Roland and his wife, the beautiful victim of Jacobin vengeance, are thus portrayed:

"Roland was a man of ordinary capacity, but he obtained the reputation of genius by means of his wife, who thought, wrote, and spoke for him. She was a woman of a most superior mind; with as much virtue as pride, as much ambition as domestic virtue. Daughter of an engraver, she commenced her career by wishing to contend with a queen; and no sooner had Marie Antoinette fallen, than she seemed resolute to maintain the combat, no longer against a person of her own sex, but with the men who pretended to rival the reputation of her husband.

"Madame Roland had great talent, but she wanted tact and moderation. She belonged to that class in the middling ranks that scarcely knows what good breeding is; her manners were too brusque; she trusted implicitly to her good intentions, and was quite indifferent in regard to external appearances, which, after all, are almost every thing in this world. Like Marie Antoinette, she was master in her own family; the former was king, the latter was

Robespierre and Marat-enemies in secret, to external appearance friends-were early distinguished in the Convention; both dear to the mob, but with different shades of character. The latter paid his court to the lowest of the low, to the men of straw or in rags, who were then of so much weight in the political system. The needy, the thieves, the cut-throats-minister; her husband, whom she constantly in a word, the dregs of the people, the caput mortuum of the human race, to a man supported Marat.

put forward, as often disappeared in her presence, which gave rise to the bon mot of Con dorcet: When I wish to see the minister of Robespierre, albeit dependent on the same the interior, I never can see any thing but the class to which his rival was assimilated by his petticoat of his wife.' This was strictly true: ugliness, his filth, his vulgar manners, and persons on business uniformly applied to Madisgusting habits, was nevertheless allied to a dame Roland instead of the minister; and more elevated division of it: to the shopkeep- whatever she may have said in her memoirs, ers and scribes, small traders, and the inferior it is certain that unconsciously she opened the rank of lawyers. These admired in him the portfolio with her own hand. She was to the politesse bourgeoise; his well-combed and pow- last degree impatient under the attacks of the dered head, the richness of his waistcoats, the tribune, to which she had no means of reply, whiteness of his linen, the elegant cut of his and took her revenge by means of pamphlets coats, his breeches, silk stockings carefully and articles in the public journals. In these drawn on, bright knee and shoe buckles; every she kept up an incessant warfare, which Rothing, in short, bespoke the gentlemanly preten- land sanctioned with his name, but in which sions of Robespierre, in opposition to the sans-it was easy to discover the warm and brilliant culottism of Marat..

"The shopkeepers and the lower ranks of the legal profession never identify themselves with the populace, even during the fervour of a revolution. There is in them an innate spirit of feudality, which leads them to despise the canaille and envy the noblesse: they desire equality, but only with such as are above themselves, not such as would confound them with their workmen. The latter class is odious to them; they envy the great, but they have a perfect horror for those to whom they give employment; never perceiving that the democratic principle can admit of no such distinction. This is the reason which made the aristocratie bourgeoise prefer Robespierre; they thought they saw in his manners, his dress, his air, a certain pledge that he would never degrade them to the multitude; never associate them with those whose trade was carried on in the mud, like Marat's supporters. Amidst these divisions, one fixed idea alone united these opposite leaders; and that was, to give such a pledge to the Revolution, as would render it impossible to doubt their sincerity, and that pledge was to be the blood of Louis XVI"-Vol. i. p. 28.

style of his wife."-i. 38.

These observations exhibit a fair specimen of the author's manner. It is nervous, brief, and sententious, rather than eloquent or impressive. The work is calculated to dispel many illusions under which we, living at this distance, labour, in regard to the characters of the Revolution. They are here exhibited in their genuine colours, alike free from the dark shades in which they have been enveloped by one party, and the brilliant hues in which they are arrayed by the other. In the descriptions, we see the real springs of human conduct on this elevated stage; the same littlenesses, jealousies, and weaknesses which are every day conspicuous around us in private life.

The Girondists in particular are stripped of their magic halo by his caustic hand. He dis plays in a clear light the weakness as well as brilliant qualities of that celebrated party: their ambition, intrigues, mob adulation, when rising with the Revolution; their weakness, irresolution, timidity, when assailed by its fury. Their character is summed up in the following words, which are put into the mouth of Lanjuinais, one of the most intrepid and nobleminded of the moderate party.