in the 29th year of his age, in the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Lerici, from the upsetting of an open boat. The sea had been to him, as well as Lord Byron, ever the greatest delight, and as early as 1813, in the following lines, written at sixteen, he seems to have anticipated that it would prove his grave :—

"To-morrow comes:

Cloud upon cloud with dark and deep'ning mass
Roll o'er the blacken'd waters; the deep roar
Of distant thunder mutters awfully;
Tempest unfolds its pinions o'er the gloom
That shrouds the boiling surge; the pitiless fiend
With all his winds and lightnings tracks his prey;
The torn deep yawns,-the vessel finds a grave
Beneath its jagged jaws."

For fifteen days after the loss of the vessel his body was undiscovered; and when found, was not in a state to be removed. In order to comply with his wish of being buried at Rome, his corpse was directed to be burnt; and Lord Byron, faithful to his trust as an executor, and duty as a friend, superintended the ceremony which I have described. The remains of one who was destined to have little repose or happiness here, now sleep with those of his friend Keats, in the burial-ground near Caius Cestus's Pyramid ;-"a spot so beautiful," said he, "that it might almost make one in love with death."

66

Shelley," says the author of an able article in the National Magazine," "was most assuredly an amiable man: the spirit which pervades the whole of his writings, is that of a thoughtful and romantic humanity. We have little of the spirit of fashion or of the world. He possessed all the intensity of individual feeling which belongs to Byron, but none of the dark and desolating bitterness with which that haughty spirit overflowed. Like Wordsworth, he has bathed his heart in the beauty, and drunk of the spirit of the universe: he has all the lively conception of natural beauty, but none of the puerility and affectation occasionally to be met with in the works of that illustrious poet. Like him, too, he is one whose 'hourly neighbour' ever was

Beauty, a living presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms

That craft of delicate spirits hath composed
From earth's materials.

It has been said that Byron, even in his earlier and prouder days, before he was lost to himself, and worse than lost to the world, in the mean and degrading grossness of blackguardism,

Ere he fell flat, and shamed his worshippers,'

had little of creative energy in description, and was too much of a mere limner or copyist of nature. We find in the poetry of Shelley, a freer and purer development of what is best and noblest in ourselves: we are taught in it to love all living and lifeless things, with which, in the material and moral universe, we are surrounded,-we are taught to love the wisdom and goodness and majesty of the Almighty, for we are taught to love the universe, his symbol and visible exponent. God has given two books for the study and instruction of mankind: the book of revelation and the buok of nature. In one at least of these was Shelley

deeply versed, and in this one he has given admirable lessons to his fellow-men: throughout his writings, every thought and every feeling is subdued and chastened by a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. The poet meets us on the common ground of a disinterested humanity, and he teaches us to hold an earnest faith in the worth and the intrinsic godliness of the soul. He tells us he makes us feel-that there is nothing higher than human hope, nothing deeper than the human heart; he exhorts us to labour devotedly in the great and good work of the advancement of human virtue and happiness, and stimulates us

To love and bear-to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.""

The most extraordinary production from the pen of Shelley," our anonymous critic continues, "is the Revolt of Islam,' which contains some of his highest and purest poetry, and may be considered as the fullest collection of his intellectual strength. There is an air about it of mysticism and wildness,-the materials are disjointed,—it is in some parts enigmatical, discontinuous, and unsubstantial, like the shadowy records of an ill-remembered dream,—and yet, despite all this, its majestic expression, rich imagination, and splendid imagery, must rank it as one of the most remarkable of modern poems. The object of the author in undertaking this work, as we learn from his preface, was to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion,-all those elements, in short, which essentially compose a poem in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality, and with the view of kindling in the bosoms of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, nor the continual presence and pressure of evil, can ever totally extinguish among mankind. Against much of the philosophy of the Revolt of Islam,' however, we must except as false: it is more powerful in its thought than its conclusions. Its notions of human perfectibility are mere chimeras and golden dreams. The cold realities of the world were accompanied with too much bitterness for Shelley, he expected from it what it could and does give to no one: he vainly desired to raise the species in the scale of universal being, and to build himself a world,—like a brave poetical fiction. We smile at his vain enthusiasm, but we cannot condemn,-no, nor even scorn him for his simplicity; we leave that to those who see nothing in the world beyond their own dreary commonplaces, and hug themselves in the superiority of their knowledge, which is after all but the knowledge of evil, at all times a questionable advantage. We can imagine-we glory in imagining-the fond hopes that suggested themselves to a mind like Shelley's, imbued with an intense faith in the natural goodness of all things. We can pardon him for his unavailing belief in the power of man to be kinder and happier, though we think he would have been himself much wiser and more happy, had he sought contentment in busy action, and the strong natural excitement of strenuous honourable exertion. The plot of this poem, as we have already said, is artificial and fastidious,-and too filmy and obscure to enable us to give our readers a fair idea of it here. The poem throughout is, perhaps, too learned; he measures

every thing by the wide limits of his own understanding, and forgets that to speak to all men with success and power, he must bring himself down to their level, and make himself still more a man than they. He forgets the constitution of things, and follows blindly the light of his own mind, and the light of his own impulses, he regards every thing in its connexion with his imaginative world, and

'As if a man were author of himself,

And owned no other kin,'

he endeavours to suggest and illustrate, by noble passages and fine trains of thought, a certain system of philosophy and feeling, which belongs not to them, but rather to his own imagination. He 'hopeth against hope' recklessly on, and seeing that the world will not become what he so ardently thirsts for, he builds himself, in his vague abstraction, a world of nonentities and contingencies, and bids defiance there to the old security and sanctity of what he calls superstition and injustice. Such are the faults of the constitution of this singular poem; its beauties are above all praise. Grandeur of imagery, depth of sentiment, an intense feeling of nature, with an enthusiastic and buoyant hopefulness which might well teach us to mourn over the infinite longings and small acquirings of man."

The following remarks on Shelley's personal character are equally deserving of attention:-"The eccentricity of genius has, it appears, passed into a proverb-Shelley does not call into question the authority of the adage. His eccentricity, however, proceeded from enthusiasm; an ardent enthusiasm in all things, which cost him, as it usually does, many friends, and found him many foes. He could not, in any matter, leave his favourite region of sentiment and imagination for the sake of raising his worldly wealth or worldly greatness. With a vision deeper than that of most men he did not use it wisely: he refined too much on thought and feeling; he could not endure the necessary trials of human patience; he would have the world, as has been already said, a brave poetical fiction, and he turned dissatisfied from the harsh and dull reality. He was constantly during life regretting that he knew not the internal constitution of other men. 'I see,' he would say, 'that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when, misled by the appearance, I have thought to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill-fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have every where sought, and have found only repulse and disappointment.' And it was from this disappointment, this withering of his fond conjectures, that many of his faults arose. We have a high authority too, for stating that this unfortunate man of genius' was bitterly sensible, before his early death, of the error and the madness of that part of his career which drew upon him so much indignation and contumely. It is declared that he confessed with tears, that he knew well now he had been all in the wrong.' In his heart there was nothing depraved or unsound,-those who had opportunities of knowing him best. tell us that his life was spent in the con

templation of nature, in arduous study, or in acts of kindness and affection. A man of learning, who shared the poverty so often attached to it, enjoyed from him at one period a pension of a hundred a-year, and continued to enjoy it, till fortune rendered it superfluous. To another man of letters in similar circumstances, he presented fourteen hundred pounds; and many other acts like these are on record to his immortal honour. Himself a frugal and abstemious ascetic,-by saving and economizing he was able to assist the industrious poor,-and they had frequent cause to bless his name. In his youth he was of a melancholy and reserved disposition, and fond of abstruse study. Like the scholar described by old Chaucer, he was accustomed to keep continually

At his bed's head,

A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie.

He was, as his poetry attests, an elegant scholar and a profound metaphysician. We have frequently noticed his intense love of natural scenery, which grew with him from youth upwards. There is,' he

once finely said, an eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to dance in breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.' He made his study and reading room, we are told, of the shadowed copse, the stream, the lake and the waterfall. Prometheus Unbound,' a poem of singular vigour, one which strikes the mind like the naked and solitary grandeur of an old sculpture, and which breathes the true spirit of the finest fragments of antiquity, was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome. And when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the Witch of Atlas,' a strange and wild production, teeming with vivifying soul. Here also he wrote Adonais,' a fine tribute to the memory of his friend Keats, who died young, but whose infelicity had years too many.' His beautiful and stirring poem of Hellas,' was also written here. There is something strange and awful in the thought that he loved fervently, and always gloried in the presence of that sea, whose murderous jaws afterwards closed over his spirit for ever. 'In the wild but beautiful bay of Spezzia,' says one of his friends, the winds and waves which he loved became his playmates. His days were chiefly spent on the water; the management of his boat, its alterations and improvements, were his principal occupation. At night, when the unclouded moon shone on the calm sea, he often went alone in his little shallop to the rocky cliffs that bordered it, and sitting beneath their shelter, wrote the 'Triumph of Life,' the last of his productions.""

John Philip Kemble.

BORN A. D. 1757.—died A. D. 1823.

THIS unrivalled actor was born at Prescot, in Lancashire, on the 1st of February, 1757. His father was manager of a provincial company of comedians, with whom young Kemble occasionally acted while yet a boy. His education was, however, well conducted, and it was against the wishes of his father that he finally embraced the profession of an

actor.

He made his debût at Wolverhampton, on the 8th of January, 1776, in the character of Theodosius, in the Force of Love.' His success was not greatly flattering at first; but he gradually gained upon the estimation of the public, and established his reputation as a provincial actor under Tate Wilkinson, then with his company at York. In 1782 he went to Dublin, at a salary of £5 a-week. Here he made his first appearance in Hamlet. In September of the following year, he was engaged for Drury Lane, of which, in 1788, he became manager. In this office, which he held, with the intervention of a short period, until 1801, he amply justified the discernment that had placed him in it, by the many material improvements which he made in the general conduct of the preparatory business of the stage, in the regular decorum of representation, in the impartial appointment of performers to parts suited to their real abilities, and in giving to all characters their true and appropriate costume. Macbeth no longer sported an English general's uniform; men of centuries ago no longer figured in the stiff court dresses of our own time; and

'Cato's full wig, flowered gown, and lackered chair,'

gave way to the crop, the toga, and the couch. His groupings, his processions, &c. while they were in the highest degree conducive to theatrical effect, were yet so chaste and free from glare, that they appeared rather historical than dramatic, and might have been safely transferred by the artist to the canvass, almost without alteration. The departments of the painter and the machinist were likewise objects of his constant attention; and to his study and exertions the drama is indebted for the present propriety and magnificence of its scenery and decorations. During the time of Mr Kemble's management, he did not confine himself merely to the duties of his situation, but added very considerably to the stock of dramatic pieces, by translations of foreign, and revisions of obsolete plays. Released in 1801 from the fatigues of management, Mr Kemble devoted the year 1802 to the pleasures of travel. Having for his main object the improvement of the histrionic art, he visited the cities of Paris and Madrid, and studied the practice of his theatrical brethren in both those capitals. During his residence abroad, he received the most flattering marks of attention and respect from individuals and societies of literary character; and formed an acquaintance with Talma, which afterwards ripened into the closest intimacy. The following extract from a Parisian journal of that day will show the general interest he excited:-" Mr Kemble, the celebrated actor of