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And so when death gives gold of good,
From his dear bed away,

More hearts than those around that stood,
Feel light from death's new day."

As before observed, I have cited only from the more spontaneous poems, springing directly from the native genius and mother wit, leaving aside the longer compositions whose materials were quarried by laborious studies, such as the "Hahnemann," "Fourier," "Tegnér," "Dalton," "Swedenborg," though these likewise contain many noteworthy things I have gone upon the principle well expressed by Blake (whether correct or not in his application of it) in his "Descriptive Catalogue": "The Greek Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions."

And now, in conclusion, I may confess that pondering once more how much that is pure and wise and beautiful is contained in this almost unknown book, notwithstanding all the wilful disadvantages under which it was written, I half repent me of the severity of certain of the strictures I have passed upon portions of it; though the sharpest of these strictures were but the very same which Wilkinson had previously passed upon a genius as great, a visionary as genuine as his own over-idolised master; upon one who had nobler fire in his spirit, a more genial heart in his breast, than the ever-placid dogmatic Swede; upon one who soared in lyric raptures of which the other was as unsusceptible as a stone; upon one who was free from that dreary, monstrous, methodic madness which kept piecing and

patching away, year after year, for a whole generation all the shreds and tatters of Hebrew old clo's, in the desperate delusion of thus making a sufficient and everlasting garment for the illimitable Universe of Life. And, moreover, can we help being angry, do we not well to be angry when, our poor race pining for illumination, some of the most fulgent spirits obstinately refuse to be effulgent; will not let their light shine forth before men, but carefully hide it under a bushel? The supreme warmth and light of genius and intellect are so rare, so sorely needed, yet so unaccountably wasted! I mean not in such instances as those of Swedenborg and Comte, where the long chronic monomania of the decadence followed an acute attack of mental disease in the prime; I think of a Maurice scourging himself with those "forty stripes save one," the Thirty-nine Articles, and burying his genius in the deathly vaults of the mouldering English Church; of a Newman dismembering himself of intellect and will, and perishing in the labyrinths of the Roman Catacombs; of a Wilkinson immolating his splendid powers on the altar built of dead men's bones, of a demented dogmatism more implacable than the old heathen altars of merely bodily human sacrifice. When I first read in the great preface to the "Human Body" (1851), that he hoped never again to come forth with the pen, a mournful verse from a place of most mournful frustrate life arose in my memory, and recurs now as I ponder these lives, so frustrate of their full development and happiness in usefulness, a verse of Matthew Arnold's stanzas from that sepulchre of Death-in-life, the Grande Chartreuse :—

66

Achilles ponders in his tent,

The kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they are though not content;

They wait to see the future come : They have the griefs men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more."

JOHN WILSON AND THE NOCTES

AMBROSIANÆ*

I

THE Noctes Ambrosiana appeared in Blackwood between 1822 and 1835, arousing an excitement and taking by storm a popularity almost unique in their kinds. Many causes beyond the intrinsic merits and vigour of the dialogues contributed to these results. When the series began, the capital of Scotland was a real literary capital, with the Great Unknown for its half-veiled monarch. Party spirit was high and fierce. The Whigs with the Edinburgh Review, started in the second year of the century, carried all before them in periodical literature; until, fifteen years later, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, came into the field. (The Quarterly, commenced in 1809, being of the modern Babylon, had but slight influence on the modern Athens.) The Review, which had been fractious and turbulent enough in its infancy, had now arrived at years of some discretion, and become comparatively decorous.

* "The Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ," by Christopher North. Selected and arranged by John Skelton, advocate (author of "The Impeachment of Mary Stuart," &c.). William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1876.

The young Magazine rushed into the battle ramping and raging, bellowing and roaring, full of tropical ardour and savagery, neither taking nor giving quarter; and in the dust and confusion of the fray, and the bewilderment of manifold mystifications, unscrupulous impersonations, fantastic disguises, interchanges of armour and arms, it was impossible for the spectators clearly and surely to discern who was the captain of the host and who were the warriors. If their own defiant proclamation could be trusted,* there were some strange wild beasts in this deluge of anthropophagi suddenly let loose upon Whigs, Radicals, Benthamites, Joe-Humists, Cockneys, Heretics, haverers, haverils, gouks, sumphs, e tutti quanti; for this rampageous Apocalyptic menagerie had constituted themselves the heraldic supporters of the Nobility, the bodyguard of the Throne, the watch-dogs of the quiet sanctities of the Altar-around which they yelped and barked day and night. In the "Ancient Chaldee Manuscript" are specified some of the principal champions of "the man in plain apparel, which had his camp in the place of Princes, whose name was as it had been the colour of ebony, and whose number was the number of a maiden, when the days of the years of her virginity have expired" (Blackwood, 17 Princes Street). "And the first which came was after the likeness of a beautiful leopard, from the valley of the palm-trees, whose going forth was comely

* "Translation from an ancient Chaldee Manuscript," Blackwood, October 1817; quickly suppressed, so that few sets contain it; but republished as appendix to the "Noctes," in vol. iv. of the twelve-volume edition of the Works of Professor Wilson, edited by his son-in-law, the late Professor J. F. Ferrier. (Blackwood, 1855.)

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