Unpublished Letters of Melancthon. 853 deliberations which are esteemed worthy to be maintained and preferred to the public tranquility. Methinks I look just now into the minds, and see the designs of all princes and learned men. I seem to foresee great contests. Strong love of strife, and much lack of learning, which are the worst of devils.' But I do not see what true union it is possible to attain, when the bitterness of animosities is greater among ourselves than that which is felt against the Popish faction. You will expect from me a history of that convention. French affairs, and the interests of the Emperor, I think, will be carried by some others even to it. And now I have no more topics than those which were in your letter. In regard to the Turks, the reports are both certain and sanguinary. Not far from Styria, the Turkish garrisons spread themselves abroad, and committed horrid cruelties. Some thousands of men having been recently drawn out of that country, the women were murdered and mangled with incredible ferocity. In Transylvania, John, with the help of the Turkish troops, has taken the very strongly fortified city Cassonia, and, as a Turkish garrison was placed in it, nearly all the citizens were slain. In the meantime, Christian princes strive and quarrel with one another as to whether it is lawful to eat flesh on Friday, and prepare intestine wars for the most contemptible causes. Is it not apparent, How great calamities these eclipses and comets threaten to the whole earth? It is affirmed that the Turks are preparing an expedition into Germany. It is certain that their advanced guards are widely wasting the German frontiers. Concerning all these affairs, I will write to you more certain information after the convention. Certainly I shall use my best endeavours to prevent my being dragged to that meeting, but fear I shall scarcely be able to keep myself out of it. I have received all your letters, and with them the gift from Blarerus. The delicate state of my health begins now to hinder even my studies of these raving sophists, who slander me in my absence. The veriest trifles have annoyed me, but they sometimes also afford amusement. Arcesilaus was an academician who preferred to put a restraint upon himself (x), rather than seem too harsh to some friends. dorf has been here, who, you know, is a dialectician. He began even to defend some of my propositions, and we could bring him over to our side if we had him among us. For your honourable spouse I send a present, and pray that this year may be, to you and to the country, prosperous and happy. I have no leisure at present to write more. My very dear friend, Farewell. May you enjoy the highest happiness.-20th of January 1537. PHILIP. I salute the Physician. [Nuremberg, Cod. of Strobelius, No. IV. fol. 53.] 13. To Justinus Goblerus. Ams I acknowledge your extreme candour in your suspecting nothing very bad from my silence, and I beg you will persevere in this constant friendship. And I on my part feel an affectionate and sincere regard for you, your genius, your learning, and your goodwill towards 3 K VOL. XVII.-NO. LXVI. me; and I love and highly esteem you. I assure you there was no other cause of my long silence except the want of an amanuensis, or unseasonable interruptions. For although a school has its name from oxon, leisure, yet I have precious little leisure for a letter. Of the convention I need not write, as its acts are published. We were beset by ambuscades, placed with sufficient skill, which God has dispersed; we have answered with moderation and yet with firmness. And truly those painted compromises (fucosa conciliationes), which some prepared with so much labour, could not heal the public discords. Let us, therefore, act as becometh saints, simply and plainly (simpliciter et plane); and as to the pontiffs, who according to the gospel are two-horned, let them see what they can effect by their wealth and power. They will never make faithful compacts with godly churches. Let us pray that God would reform the churches; and let every one in his own place help forward the work of true reformation. Farewell -7th December. PHILIP MELANTHON. [From the Hamburg Cod. Autograph Letters of Learned Men.] (From the German.) 28. To the Honourable, Learned, and distinguished Burgomaster, and the Councillors at Regensburg. My Gracious Masters,-The grace of God through his only begotten Son Jesus Christ our Saviour be with you. First, I beg your worships, as men of understanding, not to look unfavourably on my communications; for you know that I am bound to promote, to the best of my ability in this my calling, the studies of youth. I desire your worships, therefore, to know that the bearers of this letter, Nicolas Marius and Wolfgang Seitentaler, have by the grace of God prosecuted their studies well, and in a praiseworthy manner, according to the ability of their age; so that the hope may be entertained that they will be able to serve in their time the Christian government, especially if they continue and complete the course of study they have so well begun. I beg your worships, therefore, graciously to grant help for this end. Your worships, as men of understanding, and devoted to the furtherance of the divine glory, know that God has charged rulers with this duty of charity; so that the Christian religion may be spread abroad and maintained; and he will graciously reward them. For, your worships see what distress there is in France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland, where the Christian religion has for a long time been persecuted, and is yet terribly maligned. It is just, therefore, that we should thank God that he has so graciously spared Germany for the sake of his precious gospel; and we ought on that account to value it and truly to further it, that God may be rightly worshipped, and the Saviour Jesus Christ rightly honoured, and many people sanctified and saved. May God grant this! May your worships be pleased to grant ready help to the youth of your city in their studies; and look for your reward from God, who will indeed richly recompense this kind of generosity, although the work is not so great. May he at all times General Literature. 855 protect your church and city! Amen. Given at Wittemberg, 9th September 1544. Your worships' obedient servant, [From the Regensburg Archives.] 29. To the Same. (From the German.) PHILIP MELANTHON. The grace of God through his only begotten Son Jesus Christ our Saviour and true Helper, be with you! Honourable, learned, distinguished, gracious sirs, your worships know, as praiseworthy Christian governors, that our Saviour Jesus Christ has said: Suffer little children to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' The maintenance of Christian schools is, therefore, highly necessary, and the Son of God himself will give help to your worships in that, and protect your beloved youth, and grant his Holy Spirit, that your children may learn rightly to call upon God. For this reason I earnestly invoke and entreat him with you; since your worships have desired to obtain an active man for the management of your schools and the education of your youth, assisted by the counsel of the learned M. Joachim Camerarius and M. Nicolas Gallus, who was a preacher in your church, and is at present with us, and by others; I will send to your worships an active man at the next Leipsic fair; and I trust your worships will not take in ill part my short letter; for I must set off this hour for an assembly at which the Elector of Brandenburg will have certain communications made in the interests of religion. May .our Saviour Jesus Christ graciously direct and guard your worships, and his poor Christendom in all places! And I am your worships' willing servant.-Wittemberg, 16th December 1548. [From the Regensburg City Archives.] PHILIP MELANTHON. X. GENERAL LITERATURE. William Blake. A Critical Essay. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. London: John Camden Hotten. 1868. Let us frankly confess that we do not quite understand Blake, while there is much that we admire in his amiable character, and in his strange and beautiful work. Indeed, we are not sure that he ought to be wholly understood in a rational way. Mr Swinburne has assumed the office of interpreter, but his interpretation does not materially assist us on those very points where we are most at sea. Through defect of sympathy with the fundamentally Christian spirituality of his subject, he is also somewhat of a blind guide. We accept him as a highly qualified critic of Blake's weird powers of de signing, and especially of his exquisite lyrical faculty; but he is rot a partaker in his faith, and cannot even vaguely discern it as the spring of his action. Only imagine the wanton singer of "Laus Veneris" giving any intelligent assent to such sentiments as these: "I still and shall through eternity embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express image of God; but I have travelled through perils and darkness not unlike a champion. I have conquered, and shall go on conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God and in the abysses of the accuser. I must do my endeavour to live to the glory of our Lord and Saviour—if I myself omit any duty to my station as a soldier of Christ, it gives me the greatest of torments." And yet these passages are taken from those ten late recovered letters of Blake's, which his critic regards as the key to his whole life and work. They were written in his fortyfifth year, when his mind, we may presume, was moderately well made up, upon things both general and particular, and about the time he was composing those transcendental allegories, in which his critic finds chiefly a congenial paganism. It would certainly be difficult to infer, from this elaborate essay, that its subject was anyway concerned with Christianity, except as a mark to be shot at. The high favour into which the poor visionary artist is lately come -the posthumous fame now tardily overtaking him-is one of the signs of the times, to which we would do well to give heed. Until his biography, written by the late Mr Gilchrist, and edited, with selections from his works, by the brothers Rossetti, made its noticeable appearance, about five years ago, William Blake was either unknown or misapprehended, save by a discerning few. That book first brought us face to face with the strangely-endowed and child-hearted man, and enabled those living nigh forty years after his death to see him as he could not have been fully seen even by his contemporaries. As an artist, he was too original to be acceptable to the conventional taste, and too hopelessly egregious to follow meekly the Academician bell-wethers of his day, but he used to console himself by asserting, in his own eccentric way, that there were chambers in heaven filled with his pictures, and that archangels delighted to look upon them. Putting aside celestial fame for the nonce, there is no longer any question of the terrestrial, now that some of the most competent of our art critics have ranked his productions with those of Dürer and Buonarroti. Of his artistic performances, about the best known are the illustrations to Blair's poem of "The Grave," and about the grandest, the Inventions to the Book of Job; but he was more distinguished as a colourist than as an accurate delineator of form. He was eminently an inventive genius; and when he singled out for approbation some of the second or third-rate painters around him, it was because they possessed in degree the indispensable qualities of imagination and invention, without which the highest proficiency in construction or manipulation was nothing. His own greatest deficiencies, however, were just in the adequate expression of his lofty conceptions. Many of his suggestive ideas and splendid fancies may be adapted-we will not say adopted -by others more accomplished in the graces or technicalities of art, by those whose cultivated talent must serve them instead of genius. Swinburne's Essay on Blake. 857 But let that pass; in our opinion we shall have more to do with Blake's influence on modern thought, and his place in literature, before all is done. That influence, we believe, will be wholesome, so soon as his character shall have been asserted in its integrity. In reading this critical essay, we feel that he has fallen among thieves; and we fear that the priest and the Levite may pass him on either side, and certainly, it must be owned, he was no especial friend of their order. Much of his worth and excellence has already been declared by artistic experts, but his title has yet to be vindicated to the world as one of the children-it may be a somewhat wayward one-of the kingdom of heaven. As a poet, Blake lived in a clear musical atmosphere, far above the scanning versifiers of his dull generation, from which, indeed, he stands apart, as remote from all its thoughts and ways, as he is at once near to the models of our early poesy, and near to the spirit of our own age. His earlier pieces, however, are incomparably the best. Of these, Mr Rossetti remarks, with a rare perfection of critical sensibility, that "they afford many instances of that exquisite metrical gift and rightness in point of form which constitute Blake's special glory among his contemporaries, even more eminently perhaps than the grander command of mental resources, which is also his. Such qualities of pure perfection in writing verse, as he perpetually, without effort, displayed, are to be met with among those elder poets whom he loved, and such again are now looked upon as the peculiar trophies of a school which has arisen since his time; but he alone (let it be repeated and remembered) possessed them then, and possessed them in clear completeness. Colour and metre, these are the true patents of nobility in painting and poetry, taking precedence of all intellectual claims; and, it is by virtue of these, first of all, that Blake holds, in both arts, a rank which cannot be taken from him." This is fitly spoken of the manner and form, but what of the matter and the informing spirit? Is art a means or an end—a channel of high communion-a conduit of base emotion? or, in itself, whether well or ill employed, a chief good and final aim? Mr Swinburne, in the course of this essay, following Mr Robert Buchanan to his logical conclusion, eliminates morality from art, and the thing is easily done; but much as he dislikes the phrase, art may just as readily be made "the handmaid of religion" as the minister of sin. It is merely a question of use or abuse; and its discussion in connection with Blake, with a view to justify the perversion of art, is peculiarly unhappy. He was preeminently one who sought not his own, but the things of God, that he might render them in art. To have done otherwise would have implied that very Atheism which he often so impatiently denounced. Any of our readers at all familiar with the "most supersensuous of the sons of art," will hold this a superfluous vindication of his faith and works; but these have been impugned, and we only trust some approven champion will accept the challenge. Others, yet unacquainted with him, may perhaps judge somewhat both of his letter and spirit, and be excited to a fuller intimacy, from such examples of his poetry as we can here insert. From the" Songs of Innocence and Experience" we take a poem, entitled "The Little Black Boy," which |