him. Yet Steele, gifted at all times with the susceptibility of genius, was exercising the finest feelings of the heart: the same generosity of temper which deluded his judgment, and invigorated his passions, rendered him a tender and pathetic dramatist; a most fertile essayist; a patriot without private views; an énemy whose resentment died away in raillery, and a friend, who could warmly press the band that chastised him. Whether in Administration, or expelled the House whether affluent, or flying from his creditors-in the fulness of his heart be perhaps secured his own happi ness, and lived on, like some wits, extempore. But such men, with all their virtues and all their genius, live only for themselves; they are not links in the golden chain of society. Steele, in the waste of his splendid talents, had raised sudden enmities and transient friendships; the world uses such men as Eastern travellers do fountains; they drink their waters, and when their thirst is appeased-turn their backs on them! Steele lived to be forgotten. He opened his career with folly; he hurried through it in a tumult of existence; and he closed it by an involuntary exile, amidst the wrecks of his fortune and his mind! If Steele had the honour of the invention " rary Disappointments disordering the Intellect,' is beautifully traced" in the fate of Leland and Collins;" of whom, "The one exhausted the finer faculties of his mind in the grandest views, and sunk under gigantic tasks; the other enthusiast sacrificed his reason and his happiness, to his imagination.-Leland, the father of our Antiquaries, was an accomplished scholar; and his ample Greece and Rome; those of his own age; mind had embraced the languages of and the antient ones of bis own country: thus he held all human learning by its three vast chains. He travelled abroad, and he cultivated poetry with the ardour he could even feel for the acquisition of words. On his return home, among other royal favours, he was appointed by Henry VIII. the King's Antiquary; a title honourably created for Leland, for with him it became extinct. By this office he was empowered to search after English Antiquities; to review the libraries of all the religious institutions, and to bring the records of antiquity out of deadly darkness into lively light.' This extensive power fed a passion al ready formed by the study of our old rude Historians, while his elegant taste perceived that they wanted those graces which he could lend them; and as he proceeded in his inquiries, they inspired the most arduous enterprize. Six years were occupied by uninterrupted travel and study to survey our National Antiquities; to note down every thing observable for the history of the country, The "awful Calamity" of "Lite- and the honour of the nation. What a of those periodical papers, devoted to elegant literature and popular instruction, which enlightened and amended the national genius in his own times, this man of volition himself may instruct posterity of the influence of the moral, over the literary character*. required, for Lady Steele was usually left whole days in solitude, and frequently in want of a guinea, when Steele could not raise one. He, however, sometimes remonstrates with her very feelingly. The following note is an instance : DEAR WIFE, I have been in great pain of body and mind since I came out. You are extremely cruel to a generous nature, which has a tenderness for you that renders your least dishumour insupportably afflicting. After short starts of passion, not to be inclined to reconciliation, is what is against all rules of Christianity and justice. When I come home, I beg to be kindly received; or this will have as ill an effect upon my fortune, as on my mind and body'. * "Steele, in one of his numerous periodical works, has, in the twelfth number of the Theatre, drawn an exquisite contrast between himself and his friend Addison it will finely harmonize with the present Calamity. It is a cabinet picture. Steele's careful pieces, when warm with his subject, had a higher spirit, a richer Aavour, than the equable softness of Addison, who is only beautiful! There never was a more strict friendship than between these gentlemen; nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing: the one, with patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed the torrent, while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it. Thus these two men lived for some years last past, shunning each other, but still preserving the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. But when they met, they were as unreserved as boys, and talked of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other'." magnificent magnificent view has he sketched of this learned journey! In search of knowledge, Leland wandered on the sea-coasts, and in the midland; surveyed towns and cities and rivers; castles, cathedrals, and monasteries; tumuli, coins, and inscriptions; collected authors, transcribed MSS. If antiquarianism pored, genius too meditated, in this sublime industry Another six years were devoted to shape and to polish the immense collections he had amassed. All this untired labour and continued study were rewarded by Henry VIII. It is delightful, from its rarity, to record the gratitude of a Patron: Henry was worthy of Leland; and the genius of the author was magnificent as that of the monarch who had created it. Nor was the gratitude of Leland silent: be seems to have been in the habit of perpetuating his spontaneous emotions in elegant Latin verse. Our author has fancifully expressed his gratitude to the King: Sooner,' he says, ' shall the seas float without their silent inhabitants; the thorny hedges cease to hide the birdsthe oak to spread its boughs, and Flora to paint the meadows with flowers; 'Quàm, Rex dive, tuum labatur pectore nostro Nomen, quod studiis portus et aura meis.' 'Than thou, great King, my bosom cease to hail, [ing gale.' Who o'er my studies breath'st a favour"Leland was, indeed, alive to the kindness of his royal patron; and among his numerous literary projects was one of writing a history of all the palaces of Henry, in imitation of Procopius, who described those of the Emperor Justinian. He had already delighted the royal ear in a beautiful effusion of fancy and antiquarianism, in his Cygnea Cantio, the Song of the Swans. The swan of Leland melodiously floating down the Thames, from Oxford to Greenwich, chants, as she passes along, the antient names and honours of the towns, the castles, and the villages. Leland presented his Strena, or a New Year's Gift,' to the King. It consists of an account of his studies; and sketches, with a fervid and vast imagination, his magnificent labour, which he had already inscribed with the title De Antiquitate Britannica, to be divided into as many books as there were shires. All parts of this address of the King's Antiquary to the King, bear the stamp of his imagination and his taste. He opens bis intention of improving, by the classical graces of composition, the rude labours of our ancestors; for, 'Except Truth be delicately clothed GENT. MAG. July, 1812. in purpure, her written verytees can scant find a reader.' "Our old writers, he tells his sovereign, had, indeed, From time to time preserved the acts of your predecessors, and the forand no less faith; would to God with tunes of your realm, with great diligence, like eloquence!' "An exclamation of fine taste, when taste was yet a stranger in the country. And when he alludes to the knowledge of British affairs seattered among the Roman, as well as our own writers, his fervid fancy breaks forth with an image at once simple and sublime: I trust,' says Leland, so to open. the window, that the light shall be seen, so long, that is to say, by the space of a whole thousand years stopped up, and the old glory of your Britain to re-flourish through the world*.' "And he pathetically concludes, that are already begun, I trust that your 'Should I live to perform those things realm shall so well be known, once painted with its native colours, that it shall give place to the glory of no other region.' "The grandeur of this design was a constituent part of the genius of Leland, but not less that presaging melancholy which even here betrays itself, and frequently in his verses. Every thing about Leland was marked by his own greatness; his country and his countrymen were ever present; and, by the excitement of his feelings, even his humbler pursuits were elevated into patriotism. Henry died the year after he received The New Year's Gift.' From that moment, in losing the greatest patron for the greatest work, Leland appears to have felt the staff which he had used to turn at pleasure for his stay, break in his hands. He had new patrons to court, while engaged in labours for which a single life had been too short. The melancholy that cherishes genius, may also destroy it. Leland, brooding over his name; Grecce, greatly eloquent, and full of fame, Sighs for the want of many a perish'd [mourns And Rome o'er her illustrious children Their fame departing with their mould'ring urns. How can I hope, by such examples shewn, More than a transient day, a passing sun? Enough for me to win the present age, And please a brother with a brother's page.' "By other verses addressed to Cranmer, it would appear that Leland was experiencing anxieties to which he had not been accustomed-and one may suspect, by the opening image of his Supellex, that his pension was irregular, and that he began, as authors do in these hard cases, to value the furniture' of his mind above that of his house. 'AD THOMAM CRANMERUM, The furnitures that fill my house, All noble, and the store is gold; "But, conscious of the greatness of his labours, he would obtain the favour of the Archbishop, by promising a share of his own fame: pretium sequetur amplum- But take the ample glorious meed, His "Thus was Leland, like the melancholic, withdrawn entirely into the world of his own ideas; his imagination delighting in reveries, while his industry was exhausting itself in labour. manners were not free from haughtiness - his meagre and expressive physiognomy indicates the melancholy and the majesty of his mind; not old age, but the premature wrinkles of those nightly labours he has himself recorded. All these characteristics are so strongly marked in the bust of Leland, that Lavater had triumphed had he studied it *. "Labour had long been felt as volup tuousness by Leland; and this is among the Calamities of Literature, and all those studies which deeply busy the intellect and the fancy. There is a poignant delight in study, often subversive of human happiness. Men of genius, from their ideal state, drop into the cold formalities of society, to encounter its evils, its disappointments, its neglect, and perhaps its persecutions. When such minds discover the world will only become a friend on its own terms, then has the cup of their wrath overflowed; the learned grow morose, and the witty sarcastic; but more indelible emotions in a highly excited imagination often produce those delusions, which Darwin calls Hallucinations, and sometimes terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself; but seems a constituent part of the mind itself when that is completely covered with its cloud. "Leland did not reach even the maturity of life, the period at which his stupendous works were to be executed. He was seized by phrenzy. The causes of his insanity were never known. The Papists declared he was mad because he had embraced the new religion; his malicious rival Polydore Vergil, because he had promised what he could not perform; duller prosaïsts, because his poetical turn had made him conceited. The grief and melancholy of a fine genius, and perhaps an irregular pension, his enemies have not noticed. "The ruins of Leland's mind were viewed in his library; volumes, on volumes stupendously heaped together, and masses of notes scattered here and there; all the vestiges of his genius, and its distraction. His collections were seized on by honest and dishonest hands; many were treasured, but some were stolen. Hea.ne zealously arranged a series of volumes from the fragments; but the Britannia of Camden, the London of Stowe, and the Chronicles of Holinshed, are only a few whose waters silently welled from the pure spring of Leland's genius and that nothing might be wanting to preserve some relick of that fine imagination which was always working in his poetic soul, his own description of his learned journey over the kingdom was a spark, which, falling into the inflammable mind of a Poet, produced the singular and patriotic poem of the Polyolbion of Drayton. Thus the genius of Leland has come to us diffused through a variety of other men's; and what he intended to produce, it has required many to perform. "A singular inscription appeared on his monument, in which Leland speaks of himself, in the style he was accustomed to use. And as Weever tells us it was affixed to his monument, as he had heard by tradition, it was probably a relick snatched from his general wreck -for it could not with propriety have been composed after his death*. 11. Retrospection; a Poem in familiar Verse. By Richard Cumberland. Printed for the Author, 1811; 4to. pp. 71. G. and W. Nicol. THIS publication may literally be called the last Words of its ingenious Author; and, in 1340 lines of "familiar Verse, or measured Prose," contains a Retrospect" of that long and chequered Life, which we have in our Volume for the last year very fully epitomised. In a work evidently written currentissimo calamo,superior excellence cannot reasonably be expected; yet in these retrospective lines there are some which are worthy of the Author's best days. His attachment to Tunbridge and his brave Compatriots in Arms is extremely pleasing; and the following appropriate compliment is elegant: "Now to the modest and melodious I know thou dost, and pitiest the hand height cere, Of argument so solemn, so sublime. Still, O my Friend, believe my verse sin[shalt live Which tells thee in my 'Memory' thou As long as that sweet pleasure' shall endure; Which thy propitious fancy hath adorn'd With every charm that Poem can display." Another Friend is thus addressed: "G, in thy society thou know'st I am not old, for thou canst make me young. [the world, Speak for me then, kind Friend, and tell That as I never strove to wrest from man One hour that gave him innocent delight, No man should take my harmless pen from me, And strip me of my last,my sole resource." And the Poem thus concludes: "Time, who can stay thee? Who can call thee back? Pass on then, thou despoiler of our joys, Our strength, our talents! What thou hast of mine [verish me; Won't make thee rich, nor much impoFor I have some affections, some delights, Lodg'd where thy pilfering fingers cannot reach. me, safes to add No, I defy thee to impair my love For my dear child, my widow'd Marianne: Me thon may'st take away, but her from [take. Till Death divide us, thou shalt never Each day, each hour, that Heav'n vouch[more To a fond father's life, will more and Endear, and draw her closer to my heart. Now, if these embers of an aged Muse, Fann'd by the breath of candour, still [extinct : Some glimm'rings of a flame not quite 'Tis thou, my child, and others like to thee, [me still, Whose kindness cheers me, and retains Though not unmindful of the illustrious dead, can show Prophecies;" the other containing "Various Proofs of Jesus Christ." The Editor observes that "If we may judge from appearances in the present day, a diligent perusal of the following pages may be no less profitable to the Free-thinking Gentile than to the Jew. With an earnest hope, therefore, that the information they contain may have all the effect which it is so well calculated to produce in the minds of both, the Editor submits it to their candid and serious consideration." 13. A Classical List of the most fashionable Furniture: and Considerations necessary for the interior Elegance, Comfort, and Safety of a House, from the Plain and Neat to the most Elegant and Superb, alphabetically arranged, with Examples of its Utility in Practice. By Joseph Gregson, Interior Surveyor. 12mo. pp. 44. Ackerman. "Mr. Gregson having spared no expence in cultivating the knowledge of the Arts and Sciences appertaining to the Upholstery Department, and necessary to promote the interior elegance, comfort, and safety of a house, he has now the honour of acting as an Interior Surveyor, in the practice of which profession superintending the entire Fittingsup and Furniture of Houses, he has ar ranged the following List, which he presumes will be found of as great utility to those who are going to Furnish as to the general Upholder.” Mr. Gregson states some curious Questions on the Dry Rot; but his Answers, we think, would have been more satisfactory. His two Plans for a Supply of Water in cases of emergency" are new and ingenious: 65 "One of them by the means of Cisterns with internal and external communications aided by Buckets prepared and managed upon simple and easy principles, which will give an almost instantaneous supply; and the other mode by an establishment of Water Carts, likewise managed upon cheap and simple principles, which, with moderate exertion will convey water to any place with a velocity equal to the rate of two-hundred feet and upwards per minute, a swiftness which cannot be equalled by the powers of any Steam Engine, however great those powers may be." *** The Conclusion of the Bibliomania shall be given next month. YKS says, ROGER Ascham (see last volume, page 417) was born not at Kirbyweik, but at Kirkby-wiske, in the wapentake of Gilling East, co. York. SELECT |