season arrives, she will be forth-coming. Mr. Shelley says of himself and her, in a simile picturesque in itself, but laughable in its application, ' thou and I, Sweet friend, can look from our tranquillity, Like lamps, into the world's tempestuous night- Which wrap them from the foundering seaman's sight, That burn from year to year with unextinguished light.'-p. xxxii. Neither will the reader be much at a loss to discover what sapient personage is dimly shadowed out in Archimago; but a clue is afforded even to the uninitiate by a note in the preface, in which we are told that Mr. Malthus by his last edition has reduced the Essay on Population to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of Political Justice. With such instruments doubtless the glorious task will be speedily accomplished-and what will be the issue? this indeed is a serious question; but, as in most schemes of reform, it is easier to say what is to be removed, and destroyed, than what is to be put in its place. Mr. Shelley would abrogate our laws-this would put an end to felonies and misdemeanours at a blow; he would abolish the rights of property, of course there could thenceforward be no violations of them, no heart-burnings between the poor and the rich, no disputed wills, no litigated inheritances, no food in short for sophistical judges, or hireling lawyers; he would overthrow the constitution, and then we should have no expensive court, no pensions or sinecures, no silken lords or corrupt commoners, no slavish and enslaving army or navy; he would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our biblesthen we should pay no tithes, be enslaved by no superstitions, abused by no priestly artifices: marriage he cannot endure, and there would at once be a stop put to the lamented increase of adulterous connections amongst us, whilst by repealing the canon of heaven against incest, he would add to the purity, and heighten the ardour of those feelings with which brother and sister now regard each other; finally, as the basis of the whole scheme, he would have us renounce our belief in our religion, extinguish, if we can, the light of conscience within us, which embitters our joys here, and drown in oblivion the hopes and fears that hang over our hereafter. This is at least intelligible; but it is not so easy to describe the structure, which Mr. Shelley would build upon this vast heap of ruins. Love,' he says, 'is to be the sole law which shall govern the moral world;' but Love is a wide word with many significations, and we are at a loss as to which of them he would have it now bear. We are loath to understand it in its lowest sense, though we believe that as to the issue this would be the correctest mode of interpreting it; but this at least is clear, that Mr. Shelley does not mean it in its highest sense : he does not mean that love, which is the fulfilling of the law, and which walks after the commandments, for he would erase the Decalogue, and every other code of laws; not the love which is said to be of God, and which is beautifully coupled with joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance,' for he pre-eminently abhors that religion, which is built on that love and inculcates it as the essence of all duties, and its own fulfilment. It is time to draw to an end.-We have examined Mr. Shelley's system slightly, but, we hope, dispassionately; there will be those, who will say that we have done so coldly. He has indeed, to the best of his ability, wounded us in the tenderest part.-As far as in 3. him lay, he has loosened the hold of our protecting laws, and sapped the principles of our venerable polity; he has invaded the purity and chilled the unsuspecting ardour of our fireside intimacies; he has slandered, ridiculed and blasphemed our holy religion; yet these are all too sacred objects to be defended bitterly or unfairly. We have learned too, though not in Mr. Shelley's school, to discriminate between a man and his opinions, and while we shew no mercy to the sin, we can regard the sinner with allowance and pity. It is in this spirit, that we conclude with a few lines, which may serve for a warning to others, and for reproof, admonition, and even if he so pleases of encouragement to himself. We have already said what we think of his powers as a poet, and doubtless, with those powers, he might have risen to respectability in any honourable path, which he had chosen to pursue, if to his talents he had added industry, subordination, and good principles. But of Mr. Shelley much may be said with truth, which we not long since said of his friend and leader Mr. Hunt: he has not, indeed, all that is odious and contemptible in the character of that person; so far as we have seen he has never exhibited the bustling vulgarity, the ludicrous affectation, the factious flippancy, or the selfish heartlessness, which it is hard for our feelings to treat with the mere contempt they merit. Like him, however, Mr. Shelley is a very vain man; and like most very vain men, he is but half instructed in knowledge, and less than half-disciplined in his reasoning powers; his vanity, wanting the controul of the faith which he derides, has been his ruin; it has made him too impatient of applause and distinction to earn them in the fair course of labour; like a speculator in trade, he would be rich without capital and without delay, and, as might have been anticipated, his speculations have ended only in disappointments. They both began, his speculations and his disappointments, in early childhood, and even from that period he has carried about with GG 4 him ? him a soured and discontented spirit-unteachable in boyhood, unamiable in youth, querulous and unmanly in manhood,―singularly unhappy in all three. He speaks of his school as a world of woes,' of his masters as tyrants,' of his school-fellows as enemies,'alas! what is this, but to bear evidence against himself? every one who knows what a public school ordinarily must be, will only trace in these lines the language of an insubordinate, a vain, a mortified spirit. We would venture to hope that the past may suffice for the speculations in which Mr. Shelley has hitherto engaged; they have brought him neither honour abroad nor peace at home, and after so fair a trial it seems but common prudence to change them for some new venture. He is still a young man, and though his account be assuredly black and heavy, he may yet hope to redeem his time, and wipe it out. He may and he should retain all the love for his fellow-creatures, all the zeal for their improvement in virtue and happiness which he now professes, but let that zeal be armed with knowledge and regulated by judgment. Let him not be offended at our freedom, but he is really too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced, and too vicious to undertake the task of reforming any world, but the little world within his own breast; that task will be a good preparation for the difficulties which he is more anxious at once to encounter. There is a book which will help him to this paration, which has more poetry in it than Lucretius, more interest than Godwin, and far more philosophy than both. But it is a sealed book to a proud spirit; if he would read it with effect, he must be humble where he is now vain, he must examine and doubt himself where now he boldly condemns others, and instead of relying on his own powers, he must feel and acknowledge his weakness, and pray for strength from above. pre We had closed our remarks on Laon and Cythna, when Rosalind and Helen' was put into our hands: after having devoted so much more space to the former than its own importance merited, a single sentence will suffice for the latter. Though not without some marks of the same ability, which is occasionally manifested in Mr. Shelley's earlier production, the present poem is very inferior to it in positive merit, and far more abundant in faults: it is less interesting, less vigorous and chaste in language, less harmonious in versification, and less pure in thought; more rambling and diffuse, more palpably and consciously sophistical, more offensive and vulgar, more unintelligible. So it ever is and must be in the downward course of infidelity and immorality;- -we can no more blot out the noblest objects of contemplation, and the most heart-stirring sources of gratitude from the creation without injury to our intellectual and moral nature, than we can refuse to walk by the light of of the sun without impairing our ocular vision. Scarcely any man ever set himself in array against the cause of social order and religion, but from a proud and rebel mind, or a corrupt and undisciplined heart: where these are, true knowledge cannot grow. In the enthusiasm of youth, indeed, a man like Mr. Shelley may cheat himself with the imagined loftiness and independence of his theory, and it is easy to invent a thousand sophisms, to reconcile his conscience to the impurity of his practice: but this lasts only long enough to lead him on beyond the power of return; he ceases to be the dupe, but with desperate malignity he becomes the deceiver of others. Like the Egyptian of old, the wheels of his chariot are broken, the path of mighty waters' closes in upon him behind, and a still deepening ocean is before him :—for a short time, are seen his impotent struggles against a resistless power, his blas*phemous execrations are heard, his despair but poorly assumes the tone of triumph and defiance, and he calls ineffectually on others to follow him to the same ruin-finally, he sinks like lead' to the bottom, and is forgotten. So it is now in part, so shortly will it be entirely with Mr. Shelley:-if we might withdraw the veil of private life, and tell what we now know about him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit, but it would be an unanswerable comment on our text; it is not easy for those who read only, to conceive how much low pride, how much cold selfishness, how much unmanly cruelty are consistent with the laws of this 'universal' and 'lawless love.' But we must only use our knowledge to check the groundless hopes which we were once prone to entertain of him. ART. VIII.-Maurice and Berghetta; or the Priest of Rahery. A Tale. 12mo. London. 1819. THE title-page of this simple production is anonymous, but the advertisements (which have been scattered with somewhat of aristocratical profusion) inform us that the author is Mr. William Parnell, Knight of the Shire for Wicklow in Ireland; and the preface intimates that, in the following tale, the author's intention was not to write a novel, but to place such observations on the manners of the Irish peasantry as had occurred to him in a less formal shape than that of a regular dissertation.' (p. xliii.) It is somewhat unfortunate for the honourable member that, not intending to write a novel, he should have accomplished, by a most perverse fate, the very thing that he had determined not to do; while, as we shall see, he makes but a lame business of that which was his main design. As he has chosen to publish the unhappy misconception into which he had been inadvertently betrayed, it becomes our duty to give our readers some account of it: in the first place, as a tale; and secondly, as a dissertation on the Irish character. As a tale, we were at first inclined to think somewhat better of it than Mr. Parnell himself appears to do; but when we had made a little progress in the work those hopes vanished, and we were forced to acknowledge the impartiality and justice with which our Hibernian Brutus has condemned his own offspring. Father O'Brian, the popish priest of Rahery, a barren little rock on the north coast of Ireland, narrates to his parishioners with becoming humility, that after a tolerably long ministry he discovered that he had no religion in his heart, but that' (about the period when the novel begins) he began to change his vain, worldly, selfish, hard and proud temper into a tender and pious one; and that the first proof of this Christian change was resolving to take care of two orphans' (p. 25.) of one David O'Neal, a labourer in the parish who had died about a year before, leaving his children in the filth, poverty and desolation of the lowest order of the Irish peasantry but the tardiness of this good priest's charity did no harm. -The orphans, a boy rejoicing in the mellifluous name of Muircheartach (anglicè, Maurice, we are told) and his sister Una (hibernicè, Owna) aged about eleven and twelve, had already shown a vigour of character and good sense which would have appeared unnatural in children anywhere but in Ireland; the boy had already turned out of doors, bag and baggage, his surviving relations and friends who had disgusted, by their superstitions and vulgarity, this non non sine dis animosus infans: and he and his sister,—though only day-labourers, the one earning thirteen and the other twopence per diem,-had discovered by the mere light of their own talents and taste, and had effected, upon the strength of the aforesaid fifteen-pence, such a pure system of religion and morals, such improvements in agriculture and domestic economy, that the priest had really nothing to teach them, and, when he heard all their wonderful works, could only exclaim, with patriarchal pathos-' God love you, children-I never heard the like before!'-p. 30. In this Ultonian Utopia of Mr. Parnell every thing which use could require or taste wish for, was provided, down even to a fashionable accent. Mr. Parnell is well aware that a hero or heroine, with an Irish brogue, would be a monstrous solecism, and he accordingly represents his orphans as so very nice in the article of accent, that they are always mistaken for English! Besides polishing his own and his sister's pronunciation, learning Greek and Latin from Father O'Brian, and all the mysteries of scientific horsemanship, terre à terre, passades, courbettes, caprioles sur les voltes,' (p. 113.) from an old French book on the manège, |