when they are not called for; who wishes to sting, and aims at point, and scatters censure heedlessly: he is no vulgar satirist, no hasty judge. If ever mortal mind enjoyed a freedom from the common hurries and confusions which attend human opinion, it was his if ever man was truly great as a thinker, calm, considerate, imperturbable, sublimely dispassionate, it was he. And the sermon on the Great Rebellion, to which we are referring, exemplifies this temper. He does not take there the simple popular view of Puritanism: he enters esoterically into its character, comes into real solid mental contact with it, and turns it over as a form of religion, in his thoughts, before he speaks of its public acts. Moreover, he was not likely, as a man of general information, to be ignorant of its history: certainly the most unlikely man that ever lived, to be ignorant of it, if he wrote about it. He thus does justice and allows full weight to the religious professions of the Puritan leaders: he thinks them religious men in a sense. And upon a review of history, conducted in harmony with his own deep contemplative knowledge of the operations of man's mind and will, he decides, that their religion was in its nature hypocritical, and their zeal an immoral one. Begging therefore to confront Mr. Carlyle with Butler, we feel ourselves under the authority of so great a religious and philosophical name, simply performing an act of judicial morality, in applying to Cromwell the name of hypocrite.

The character of Cromwell is a vast and wonderful, but an uninteresting, unlovely one. He appeared first before us, in this sketch, as the regicide, the one man at whose door the murder of Charles lay. The eye, as it analyzed events, and disengaged realities from their cumbrous foreground, saw Charles and Cromwell standing alone in that scene. A mercurial subtlety then accompanied an audacious self-will; and Cromwell to the historical eye is one soluble whole; spreading everywhere like water in the political world, coming up every where; insinuating himself into all interests, all parties. With a perpetual flux and reflux he flows from, he absorbs into his own centre. He is the genius, the anima mundi of the Great Rebellion; he pervades its movements, shapes its course; he inhabits it: he is its god; and the ubiquity of a deep mind occupies and sways the vast tumultuous world of matter and will. But Cromwell exhibits this character without those fine additions and sets-off, which, though not redeeming it, (a thing impossible,) have sometimes thrown a pictorial and refining light upon it, in the case of other men. Subtlety and blood have not seldom contrived to be fascinating; and the great, though guilty mind, has won a tragic interest, and raised a morbid sympathy. Cromwell's does not.

He had subtlety without refinement: he was a coarse man. The inbred grace of humanity, which a mysterious providence sometimes allows in this mixed world, to adorn evil, was not granted to him. We see not the form divine, of either body or mind: that noble, outward cast of feeling, and shape of soul, which sometimes cover the evil man, are wanting. He does not attract, or tempt, or win us. He appeals to no forbidden human sympathies, which will often move and stir within us, even when we feel we should suppress them. We do not see our nature even externally represented in him: he does not look like man divine; he raises no regret that he was not what he was; or recall us to any fancied original, over whose stains and pollutions we are ready to weep. We have no weak sighs, no longings, no supposings over him. The powerful movements, the cavernous involutions of his vast mind, seem almost like the operations of some mighty bestial intellect, which appears upon earth to domineer over weaker humanity, and master a higher nature than its own. We see the huge, ponderous strength, as if of some prodigious and unearthly animal. We see a coarse, and not a high strength. We do not bow to it. The dragon of old romance is great in his way, but his scales repel us: we look in wonder at him, but we do not touch: he is mighty, but he is unseemly; he is tremendous, but he is vile. Human nature stands disarmed and weak before him; but still feels that after all she is lofty, and he is low; she is human, and he bestial. The intellectual developments of fallen manhood do not always raise it. Natural subtlety is often animal-like. Coarse intellect is akin to matter. Brute genius appeared very early in the world, and received its sentence;- on thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.' It has deceived and triumphed over man at times from the beginning, and will do so to the end. But it is essentially low, notwithstanding its successes; its mysterious powers do not exalt it; and it preserves its family relationship to the dust of the earth, and to the beasts of the field. True, high, and consoling thought it is, not strange, however elevating, but the familiar philosophy of every religious mind; that the weakest, most helpless, most ignorant goodness has by the most absolute right of simple essence, by the mere fact that it is itself, a superiority royal, and fixed as fate over such greatness; that it looks down from the height ineffable of another nature, from the heaven, and the heaven of heavens upon it that innocence, if really such, is the imperial quality, and must enjoy an ultimate dominion; that strength and majesty, eternal height, tranquillity, belong by nature to it; and that to it the prophecy is spoken, Upon the lion and adder shalt thou the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.'

go;

316

ART. II.-1. The Poetical Works of HENRY ALFORD. London: Burns.

2. Poems by THOMAS HOOD. London: Moxon.

3. Bells and Pomegranates. By ROBERT BROWNING, Author of "Paracelsus.' London: Moxon.

4. The Baron's Yule Feast. By THOMAS COOPER, the Chartist. London: How.

5. Ballad Romance. By R. H. HORNE. Ollier.

EVERY one knows what is meant when a poet or composer is said to be popular. And yet the arts of popularity are proverbially special and varying; and its theory has less of adınitted and settled principle than even the higher and more elementary doctrines of metaphysics. A poem does not live upon men's lips and mingle with their life because they approve of its principles; or, else Young's Night Thoughts' and Hayley's Triumphs of Temper,' might attain a predominance unknown to them. Nor is uniform and sustained excellence a guarantee for popularity. Grant that a poet is popular, and we rather thank him for falling, every now and then, below himself. Such intervals give us time to understand, and strength to follow him. Mere appeals again to our temporary and casual feelings can produce no more than a transient and fitful popularity. Partisanship gets cool before we know that its fuel is beginning to waste; and its fire and eagerness go in search of some other object of interest; leaving it, may be around its former idol, a kind of languid reminiscence of feeling. The work is still idolized, but by fewer votaries than before. Lastly, to write for a select few' is no unfailing warrant that our purpose will be answered. It is not safe to write truth down to the capacities of a prepared and willing sympathy. There remains but one conclusion. Beauty alone can be the power which stirs all hearts, without addressing itself to any medium of particular interest. Beauty, then, in its most refined and abstract generality, (and not mere pleasurableness,) is the most far reaching of all claims to the approval and sympathy of our kind.

A few instances may serve to show that this distinction is acknowledged, even by the very authors who would cry out against it as transcendental,' if it were nakedly put before them. A cheap bread' song, then, is not accounted beautiful, because it stirs all the pulses of a crowded city. Nor need the words of Rule Britannia' be so esteemed by a critical taste, on the ground that our English hearts have, one and all, a seaward aspect, like the seats in the Pnyx of old. A yet wider and more universal chord is struck by such poetry as the patriotic parts of

Mr. Macauley's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' Yet the peculiar stirring pleasure which they afford us, is surely distinguishable from a sense of beauty. The flashing light of their indignant patriotism is not the useful brightness' which lights our hearths. For the interest begins and ends with the strong remedial feelings which are there set down so forcibly. But true poetry, on the other hand, must have more of ourselves in it, than even the most perennial of our outward relations. A last instance shall serve to generalize all those which have gone before. Though we had assurance then that all the human race should admire a certain page of Shakspere or Shelley, yet this would not assure us of its beauty, if we likewise knew that they approved it because of some outward and accidental circumstance purposely made common to them all. Therefore the interest, whatever it is, must be merely human: founded that is upon no circumstances, no relations, no accidents of our own, but inward, elementary, and constitutive. We may love a thing for the good that it will do us; and this a love of expediency. Or for its good qualities which we see and appreciate, but goodness is not convertible with beauty. Our sense of beauty begins when our knowledge of things is completed, or at its point of failure; and it is a sense indeed, as direct and unreasoning as the skill of Aholiab. And if we have succeeded in disengaging its object from all association of interest, as well as from all notions of combined and ordered qualities, we shall be prepared to receive the truth, that our knowledge of it must be derived, not from examination of its crystalline fragments dispersed throughout the universe, but from contemplation of the unity, simplicity, and goodness of the Divine nature.

This, then, is familiar as well as solemn truth; and, like all such truths, the oruλo Tochpes of our life and being here, it gains in manifold fertility of application from the very abstract character which would seem to make it unpractical. Nay, does not the very failure of empirical methods invite us to derive our rules for the production of beauty from the universal laws of mind? Who ever could work upon a large scale in any of the fine arts, by means of the fragmentary axioms which Burke lays down? Who can found any principle upon the multifarious physical, moral, and intellectual antecedents and associations which he ranges, side by side, with no sign of pre-eminence in any? The absence of angles and cross lights, smoothness and softness, proportion, unity, intermittence, colour, surprise, association, &c. &c., come one after another, and in an easy and uninterrupted flow; agreeing only in this, that they are held to be, more or less, beautiful. By such theorizing as this, the next step is clearly laid down beforehand for a system of speculation

more legitimate and consistent indeed, but quite as unlikely to guide us to the truth. Either the beautiful in all these various instances is resolved into a limited number of associations, each possessing its own independent interest; or else the word beautiful' is set down in the philosophical vocabulary as one of the many which have drifted over and over again from their moorings, retaining somewhat of each separate meaning which they have, from time to time, possessed. In either case we lose much of the perpetual stay to reason which imagination is ordained to furnish. If it be untrue that

'irrespective of all names of kind

Is heavenly Beauty-spread along the earth

In all created things one and the same,'-Alford, ii. p. 29;

then vainly and untruly is moral goodness represented to us by the name, and through the attribute of loveliness. A notion so fleeting and illusive can have little to do with genuine wisdom or true philosophy.

Taking warning by the failure of such speculations as these, we will keep to the course already proposed. We have confessed our utter ignorance of all the causes of beauty, and will seek for nothing but the precepts which must, of necessity, be common to all art. Beauty, if seen by the very eyes of men, would make strange stirrings in all their hearts. But she sits alone in heaven; and will not unveil herself to be openly understood by us. And outward nature, as we have seen, can give no answer proportioned to our wants. Shut out then from heaven and earth alike, we must turn to ourselves and to our reason.

That man, then, is popular, who can make his truth and beauty familiar to many men. Now, if this general appreciation were a gift and nothing more, we should have nothing to do but to frame our thoughts by discipline, and then wait till the sunshine from heaven should come upon them, softening their roughness like the mountain tops at sunset. This, however, is not the whole of the truth, though its most important part. For popularity is likewise a duty, and must be achieved. As a duty, it must fall under the common laws of our nature; admitting that is of systematic pursuit, and containing an intellectual element. In other words, however subtle and intangible the very reality of beauty may be, it is yet most certain that it is found in inseparable connexion with certain types of intellect; and these admit of analysis, and may form the basis of a system. That which is beyond our view and inexpressible will find measure and register in its seen and expressed conditions, and may be dimly viewed in their light. Indeed, unless these conditions were, in some sense, within the scope of our knowledge and power, we