Bestowing, on the gifted few, Of genius, opening to the view The greater mind has greater cares; And when before the judgment-seat The question will no longer be, I will not for your future heir Nor wish it like its mother fair, To use the talent given, As light by which it may discern THE FORSAKEN. FARE thee well—we part in peace; There, no cold heart shall mock the pain Of the believing and betrayed; No cruel eye view with disdain Thou found'st me in the bloom of spring, Gay as the morning song of May; Thou leav'st me a forsaken thing, To sigh my hours away. But secretly my woes I'll weep ;— And if thy heart its silence keep, In silence mine shall break. Love, wealth, ambition, still to thee Their varied pleasures will impart ; And what through life remains for me Till from the joys I cannot share, From scenes whose every voice of mirth, But mocks the bosom of despair Hide me, my mother Earth. J. F. T. J. M. DR. PARR ON THE IDENTITY OF JUNIUS. We have been favoured with copies of several extracts from the correspondence of the late Dr. Parr; from which it would seem that he either had, or fancied he had, very strong grounds for ascribing the authorship of the letters of Junius to Charles Lloyd, private secretary to George Grenville, and his deputy Teller of the Exchequer. Lloyd was known, says the doctor, to have been the author of the letters signed Atticus and Lucius, and that the same person wrote Junius appears to have been pretty generally admitted. The editor of Woodfall's edition, in reviewing the claims of the various individuals to whom these powerful, but malignant libels have been ascribed, founds his refutation of Mr. Lloyd's pretensions upon the fact, that Junius wrote a note to Woodfall on the 19th of January, and Lloyd died on the 22d, supposing it to be impossible for a man to write a few lines, which required no mental exertion, so short a time before his decease. Were the claims of the party in question stronger than they really appear to be, such an objection would be entitled to little or no consideration. The eighteenth letter of Junius disclaims, it will be remembered, all knowledge of Mr. Grenville. Now as Lloyd was intimately connected with Mr. G. it consequently follows that, if he can be supposed to be Junius, he must have been guilty of gratuitous and useless falsehood. Junius has not shewn himself so remarkably scrupulous in his adherence to truth as to warrant a rejection of the hypothesis upon this circumstance alone. On the contrary, in his eighth letter to Woodfall, alluding to the one previously published, he says, I wish it could be recalled. Suppose you were to say, we have some reason for suspecting that the last letter of Junius in this paper was not written by the real Junius, though this observation escaped us at the time.' In his letter dated 16th October, 1771, signed Anti-Fox, we find: I know nothing of Junius, but I see that he has designedly spared Lord Holland and his family.' Dr. Parr mentioned to General Cockburne, in 1820, the names of several eminent men of the present day, who coincided with him upon the subject; and also stated his and their conviction that the late king was aware that Lloyd was Junius. In a letter to the general in the course of the same year the doctor observes: 'In regard to Junius, I broke the seal of secrecy two months ago, and having no restraints of delicacy about it, I communicated the opinion unreservedly to Mr. Denman. The impression produced by a well written pamphlet, and an elaborate critique on it in the Edinburgh Review, still direct the national faith towards Sir Philip Francis. He was too proud to tell a lie, and he disclaimed the work. He was too vain to refuse celebrity which he was conscious of deserving. He was too intrepid to shrink when danger had nearly passed by. He was too irascible to keep the secret, by the publication of which he at this time of day could injure no party with which he is connected, nor any individual for whom he cared. Beside, dear sir, we have many books of his writings upon many subjects, and all of them stamped with the same character of mind. Their general Lexis, as we say in Greek, has no resemblance to the Lexis of Junius; and the resemblance in particulars can have far less weight than the resemblance of which there is no vestige. Francis uniformly writes English. There is Gallicism in Junius. Francis is furious, but not malevolent. Francis is never cool, and Junius is seldom ardent. Do not suppose that I have forgotten the fact, upon which you very properly lay great stress. I have little or no hesitation in supposing that, under all the circumstances of the case, and from motives of personal regard to George Grenville himself, his friend and his secretary would venture upon falsehood; and Woodfall, knowing the importance of such disavowal, would record, although he disbelieved, it. Woodfall stated a fact, and left his readers to their own conclusion; and it was the wish, if not the duty, of Woodfall to keep us in the dark. I retain my old faith; and in the true spirit of orthodoxy, I retain it the more firmly, in consequence of what I think unsuccessful attacks. You are at liberty to couple my name with the name of Mr. Walsh, as fixing upon Mr. Lloyd for the writer. In another letter he says: I smiled at the scepticism of our sagacious friend, Lord Hutchinson, as to Lloyd. We must all grant that a strong case has been made out for Francis; but I could set up very stout objections to those claims. It was not in his nature to keep a secret. He would have told it from vanity, or from his courage, or from his patriotism. His bitterness, his vivacity, his acuteness, are stamped in characters very peculiar upon many publications that bear his name; and very faint indeed is their resemblance to the spirit, and, in an extended sense of the word, to the style of Junius. Burke is altogether out of the question; when he writes coolly, as in his book upon the sublime and beautiful, and in his imitation of Lord Bolingbroke, the style is very dissimilar. But in his political publications, there is what logicians call a specific identity. Even in the calmest of them (his thoughts upon the popular discontents), we see the mind of Burke; and yet this is the only political work in which there are few or no vestiges of a public speaker. Again, there is a very marked character in his invectives; they have not even the very faintest resemblance to the invectives of Junius; they have not the coolness and the poignancy of Junius. We have none of Burke's amplification, none of his high-wrought eloquence, none of his aristocratical propensities. No two witnesses can be more dissimilar: you and I, and Mr. Walsh, shall adhere firmly to our old creed. I do not blame you for telling the tale to Lord Hutchinson; with the exception of Mr. Fox only, I think Lord Hutchinson's judgment upon politics and common life, the very soundest I ever met with; and he has another noble property-he has no artifice, he has no ostentation, and he is a faithful speaker of truth." It is, undoubtedly, remarkable, that, from the time of Lloyd's death Junius ceased to write. All the other supposed authors lived many years after. We are, however, free to confess, that we are not a little sceptical as to the propriety of attributing the letters of Junius to Lloyd. THE LADIES ALBUM. To define an Album, were like analysing the Alchaest of the old philosophers; which contains every thing, and destroys every thing. It implies in the original language, white or felicitous; but it has no association in its adopted form in English with aught that implies white and felicitous. It has neither a white day nor a white garment, nor a white stone; it is too coquettish and variable to have much to do with white faith. If it resemble any thing definable, it is Locke's human soul, which he compares to a sheet of white paper, on which you may scribble what you please. The only etymology which hits off its true description, is the French Blanc, signifying white and vacant at the same time. An Album, is in short, a lottery, in which there are no prizes, and only a capital blank. Although a book of white, it contains as much red and black ink, and flourishes expended on the blanks, as if they were all prizes. An Album is a micro-chaos, where all manner of humours contend for mastery; light armed, or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift, or slow. It is a Noah's ark, in which odd fish, and strange animals are jumbled together by sixes and sevens, and not arranged by twos. The verse is what is called fugitive; that is to say, not worth catching. One line is like a kangaroo, and limps on four unequal feet; and the next like a centipede, 'crawls with his hundred feet an inch per day.' First you have an extract from that sweet new poem the Triton of the Minnows,' by a Blue, with a criticism, by 'a Poetical Lecturer.' Then follows a bouquet of peonies and tulips, which almost blind you with the fierce glare of red and yellow. Motley is the only wear,' and nature, to please some fancies, must be dressed in fools' colours. Next you have a sketch of Swiss lake scenery from Clarens; in looking at the details of which, you are bound to do credit to Rousseau's téte exaltée for being in its highest state of exaltation. Of course the Ranz des vaches, and Swiss longing to get home become truly miraculous; as for the trees they usually resemble large onions and cabbages, rather than such as have their foliage on lake Leman's shore. It is ten to one if the next rarity be not Locke's Panegyric on Dancing. Trifles come next in the bill of fare-Lady H. on staining tulips, You turn over the page and behold a lion!' Videlicet, part of an unpublished tragedy by Lord Star, dash, star. However from a sight of these disjecta membra poetæ, you escape with precipitation, and find yourself floundering in the midst of an epigram on Rousseau in bad French; a recipe for Circassian wash of roses, in bad English; the diagram of a new quadrille; a false perspective of the church of St. Peter at Rome; and directions for making ladies' shoes with cork and packthread. To draw harmony from an Album, would puzzle the skill of a Hannibal, who made it his chief boast that he was able to reduce to order the multitude of heterogeneous elements that composed his army An eastern army is followed by another army nearly as large, of suttlers, beggars, Jews, and plunderers; but in an Album, the 'humour of the thing,' consists in the plunderers composing the main body, and miserable usually is the plunder when obtained. Verse on stilts, and prose run mad; elegant extracts without elegance; apothegms without instruction; epigrams without point; and repartees without meaning, form the corps d'elite, the argyraspidas, or white shields of the army. The light corps or velites are Joe Millers, hashed up for the hundredth time and spoiled in the hashing; conundrums, rebuses, charades, acrostics, riddles, and Bouts rimés, in which it would puzzle Edipus, ay-and the Sphinx to boot, to discover a glimpse of meaning, wit or humour, after the inventors have been so condescending as to put themselves to the torture of trying to explain them. THE AVENGER. A SPANISH BALLAD. I. WITHIN a hall, in proud Castile, which now is still and lone, She leaned her head upon her hand, her cheek was wan with woe, When her brother entered there, and said, 'Why, sister, weep you so?' II. 'You were wont to be the gayest, but now you droop and sigh, What sorrow weighs upon your heart that your tears descend like rain ?* III. 'You know that Don Fernando Rey had made his vow to me; That he'd sworn to love no other, and that I his bride should be ; But his words were like the wind, for he his plighted faith hath broken, IV. And more than this, has dared to breathe against my virgin fame V. 'No-no-go not, Diego!' but, alas! she spoke too late, VI. "Twere vain to guess the stirring thoughts o'er her burning brain that rushed, And the deep and dark forebodings that o'er her spirit gushed, As hurriedly she paced the room, as fast she trode the floor, And ever turned her tearful eye upon the opening door. VII. Diego soon returned again, and came in calmest mood, But Perilla looked upon his hands, and saw them red with blood, She spoke no word-she made no sign-but shrieked, and swooned away, And the day that saw her lover's death, was her own dying day. H. H. |