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< This poison is so quick in its operation, that it immediately flies to the heart, and causes instant death. Raja Palacca, one of the most powerful kings in Celebes, once gave a remarkable proof of this by just drawing blood with a poisoned kris in the fleshy part of the thumb of two condemned malefactors, and immediately after amputating their arms: the toes of two others were punctured, and the corresponding legs removed. These four men died in a very short time; and in order to shew that their death was occasioned solely by the subtle operation of the poison, he allowed the bodies to be opened, when the hearts of all four were found poisoned.'

If to this account we add that given by Rumphius of the ipo of Macassar, which he calls arbor toxicaria, whose red resin was a deadly poison, the drops from whose leaves blistered those on whom they fell, and whose exhalations were so baneful that birds approaching on the wing fell lifeless to the ground-we shall, in fact, be in possession of the whole story attributed to Foersch, with the exception of the little machinery of Mahomet and the old Malay priest, and the misplaced allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah. It required but little ingenuity for an adept in forgery to substitute, for the thumbs and toes of four malefactors, the bare bosoms of thirteen beautiful but faithless concubines. Every other circumstance is to be found in the narratives of Valentyn and Rumphius.

It is worthy of remark, that Valentyn's, account of the operation of the poison on the heart, perfectly agrees with the result of Mr. Brodie's experiments. The fact, we have no doubt, is so, for it is mentioned by Tavernier and others. Raja Palacca, from a betelbox bearer to the King of Macassar, was raised by the Dutch to the sovereignty of that district, and the bodies were opened by Dutch surgeons. Mr. Leschinault is of opinion that the ipo or toxicaria of Rumphius, is the same tree as that which produces the antiar in Java.

The natural history of Java presents a wide and unexplored field. Much has been done by Valentyn and Thunberg, by Wormbe, and other contributors to the six volumes of the Transactions of the Batavian Society; and recently by Messrs. Deschamps and Leschinault, but more remains to be done. No country in the old world, lying under the same parallels of latitude, has yet been explored-an additional incitement to those who may hereafter prosecute their researches in the interior of this island.

ART. XI. Memoirs of the latter Years of the Right Honourable
Charles James Fox, with a Postscript. By John Bernard
Trotter, Esq. Private Secretary to Mr. Fox. 8vo.
London. Phillips. 1811.

WE

pp. 552.

E have seldom, if ever, met with any work, which it would be so difficult to characterize by a short and intelligible description, and which, on the other hand, it was a task of so much delicacy to discuss and examine in detail; as the volume now before us.

To write Memoirs of any conspicuous individual, whose name is connected with every public question that has agitated the country for the last thirty years, and with events of which the causes are yet in dispute, and the consequences yet in operation, is an undertaking which to execute happily, would require not only consummate dexterity, but consummate candour and self-control. And even a writer who should possess those qualities in the most eminent degree, and exercise them with the most scrupulous sincerity, though secure against any bias in his own mind, would not be exempted from the hazard of giving offence to half his readers.

The review of such a work necessarily partakes of the difficulties attending its composition: difficulties arising in a great degree out of the very nature of the subject; but liable to be either lightened or aggravated to the reviewer, by the manner in which the author may have treated it. If Mr. Trotter's object had been to aggravate these difficulties to the greatest possible amount, in the hope of thereby setting criticism at defiance, he might congratulate himself upon very signal success. The rare infelicities of a style at once mean and inflated; assertions brought forward sometimes without any evidence at all, sometimes against received and established opinions, and not seldom against notorious and indisputable facts; adulation in one instance, and invective in others, equally beyond all bounds of modesty, taste, and feeling; a professed contempt of all authority except that of the one individual whom he adores, and a misuse of that authority (sometimes direct, and sometimes by implication) to purposes which that individual would not have sanctioned or tolerated; violence the more offensive as it is uttered with the accents of mourning; egotism continually breaking forth from under the disguise of an affected humility:such are the principal faults of a work, upon which we do nevertheless hesitate to pronounce a sweeping judgment and condemnation. With all these faults and with more than we shall have occasion to prove against it, we yet think the work not wholly with

out value. We have yet derived both pleasure and information from the perusal of it.

Before it is taken for granted that, in absolving or giving quarter to such a culprit, we condemn ourselves, we would intreat a patient consideration of the following circumstances, which weigh with us to suspend and to mitigate his sentence. It is, in the first place, incontrovertible, that Mr. Trotter was not only honoured by the regard and affection, but also by the esteem and confidence of Mr. Fox; and the approbation of such a man, evinced as it is in every line of his private letters, (which form an appendix to the volume,) affords a strong presumption in favour of the person on whom that approbation is bestowed. Those letters from internal evidence must be authentic; they afford many pleasing specimens of Mr. Fox's exquisite taste in literature, and are distinguished by that frank and simple benevolence which we believe to have been justly ascribed to him: and those letters, it must be admitted, breathe an almost parental tenderness for the young pupil whose studies he condescended to encourage and direct. On the other hand it is not possible to peruse Mr. Trotter's book without yielding to the conviction that his admiration of Mr. Fox was as sincere as it was enthusiastic; and that his affection for such a friend and benefactor, though expressed in language often extravagant and sometimes absurd, was proved beyond suspicion by a long course of those soothing attentions which real gratitude alone can inspire and sustain.

In the next place it may be presumed that Mr. Trotter, from his situation, had the best opportunities of learning the opinions of Mr. Fox, on topics connected with public affairs, as well as on points of literature and criticism: which opinions, it is clear, Mr. Trotter's feelings led him to adopt as his own. It follows from this, not that we are to receive every assertion of Mr. Trotter's as sanctioned by Mr. Fox: but simply that unless we suppose Mr. Trotter to have altogether thrown away the advantage of opportunities so valuable, it may be worth our while to endeavour to sift and separate what he may have remembered, from what he may have imagined or invented, rather than to reject his work at once upon a summary charge of pertness, malignity and falsehood.

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Mr. Fox has observed, in one of his letters, that Mr. Trotter, like many of his countrymen, is generally too figurative in his language for the English taste.' We have hinted already that his meaning is often obscured by the omission of the facts from which his reasoning is deduced. It is, moreover, perfectly evident that he has composed and published in a state of mind not the most favourable to a calm recollection of circumstances with which he may heretofore have been accurately acquainted; and in a temper

which must have prevented him from comparing his own impres sions with those of others, who might have had the same or nearly the same means of information. And to all these considerations is to be added that of the strange inaccuracy of which he has been convicted in his late controversy with Mr. Fox's physicians; which is of itself sufficient to shew how unsafe it would be to rely implicitly upon him in any case where his judgment could be supposed to have been warped by preconceived notions of his own, or to have been disturbed by the disorder of his feelings or of his imagination. Here are, it must be confessed, abundant grounds of caution. But we are not therefore willing to consider as utterly unworthy of credit, or as intentionally and perversely misre presented, whatever he may have imperfectly explained, or rashly conjectured, or injudiciously exaggerated. We are still willing to believe such assertions of fact, though standing upon his testimony alone, as we find upon examination and inquiry to be fortified either by internal evidence, or by circumstances bearing collaterally upon them and even when the opinions delivered by Mr. Trotter appear to us to deserve not refutation only but severe reprehension, we shall still think it an act of justice before we pour out the full vials of our wrath upon him, to endeavour to ascertain what portion of the colouring by which the truth has been disfigured, is the natural tinge of party politics, and what portion has been superadded by himself.

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It is not, however, from justice and candour only that we are induced to direct our remarks upon this book, rather to the pose of reformation than of punishment: we have another reason for doing so. One may venture to treat with little ceremony a disagreeable companion who is to be dropped at the end of a journey, and probably never to be heard of more: but this is only a first meeting with Mr. Trotter; and is intended by him as merely introductory to a much more extended and confidential intercourse.

Between the preface and the table of contents we find the following advertisement, carefully secured against the possible chance of being overlooked, even by the most hasty reader, by being consigned to the table of Errata, to which, after the perusal of a very few pages, every one will find it necessary to refer.

Should this work meet with the favourable reception which the partiality of friends has led the author to expect, he meditates the plan of a work on THE ENTIRE PUBLIC LIFE OF MR. Fox; and with that view invites the communication of facts and original materials to the care of Sir Richard Phillips, No. 5, Buckingham-gate, London.'

We do not dissemble the alarm which has been excited in us by this notification. Having already had to deal with a Political

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Life,'* of three dense volumes Quarto, (which our fondness for the subject, our prepossessions in favour of the intentions of the author, and our concurrence in his attachments, enabled us happily to get through ;) we cannot look forward without dismay to that rival publication which Mr. Trotter thus formidably meditates;' and which, if the copiousness of his narrative is to be proportioned to his estimate of the comparative merits of his hero, the largest press that Sir Richard Phillips can erect and the smallest letter that he can cast, will not enable him to confine within any assignable number of Folios. We contemplate the impending volumes with the sensation of a traveller in the vallies of the Alps, who sees an avalanche in the act of detaching itself from a mountain over his head,

In discussing with Mr. Trotter the merits of the work before us, we shall have occasion to address ourselves less to his facts than to his opinions. That facts are not his favourite province, is apparent as well from the small number of new facts which constitute the 'Private Memoirs' of Mr. Fox, in the present volume, as from his consigning to his publisher the task of collecting them for his intended Folios. By far the greater portion of this book is occupied with the opinions of Mr. Trotter. It is plain, indeed, that those opinions contain the essence of his projected history; and that they are, in truth, the very inferences which he means to deduce in a more regular and authentic manner from the facts and original materials' to be hereafter communicated to Sir Richard Phillips.

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We proceed therefore,-First, to give an analysis of the contents of the work; Secondly, to examine some of the more prominent of those opinions, political and moral, which occupy so considerable a part of its 500 pages.

The Memoirs' are divided into two parts: the first containing Mr. Trotter's account of the commencement of his acquaintance with Mr. Fox, and of their tour through Holland and Flanders, to Paris, in 1802;-the second comprising the period from Mr. Fox's acceptance of the seals of the foreign office to his death.

Mr. Trotter paid his first visit to St. Anne's Hill, in 1798, at a season when the summer was yet young, and all the freshness of nature was upon that beautiful spot.' He describes, with rapture, the charming prospect which lay before him ;-the rich expanse of cultivated country;-the meadows, corn, woods and villages, 'till the eye caught the distant smoke of London :' and this picture of serenity and rural happiness,' surrounding the British metropolis at a moment when so many other countries were suffering under the

*See Quarterly Review, No. 7. Art. 13.

VOL. VI. NO. XII.

67

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