REVIEW.

Auckland Examiner, Volume 1, Issue 41, 24 September 1857, Page 3

REVIEW.

The Month: a literary and critical Journal, Edited by Frank Fowler. Sydney : J. R. Clarke, 205, George Street. London : IV. Kent & Co. Paternoster Row. Dr. Johnson thought so ill of reviewers that, in very bitterness of splenetic feeling, he would have the reader approve all they censure and censure all they approve. Having long been the mark at which critics aimed their shafts, he was often out of humor with them, and we dare affirm that he was not in sweetest of moods when he bore so hard upon them. The great moralist, as at school we were taught to consider him, displayed many weaknesses, and the weakest of the.-.e we take to have been his impatience of criticism. Not that reviewers are always j ust, or always quite so wise as they fancy themselves, and we should be sorry to affirm that they’ arc. But, with every respect due to the mere dictum of Dr. Johnson, we dissent from his wholesale condemnation of them. Some of England’s ablest writers and profoundest thinkers are, or have been, Reviewers. It would be difficult to name men mentally superior to Sydney 1 Smith, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Babington Macauley,Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin D’lsraeli, and John Wilson Croker. In their several spheres they shone with brightness unsurpassed. Germany, France, and other parts of Europe swarm with Reviewers, whose critiques are sometimes far more valuable than the books which called them forth. Our own Reviews

have but slight pretensions to be called Re- j views at all, for they are necessarily meagre, and amount to little more than brief notices of works with an occasional spiee of their quality in shape of quotations. While readng the ‘ Month’ we were li ( erally bewildered by the multitude of topics it suggests and the ample material for thinking it affords. This is the second number, and the first we have not seen ; but from this number may be gathered valuable information in the most pleasing form that information can assume. Mental Discipline, Ait Education in Australia, Quartz and Gold, Wine and Walnuts, Sydney and its Suburbs, New Music, are the titles cf some of the articles contained in the number before us. A part (the concluding one) of Mr. Frank Fowler’s Lecture on Coleridge is so admirable that we were tempted to appropriate some passages which appear to us full of fun, beauty, and rare intelligence. Here are a few of them “ How Coleridge ev:r managed to mount his horse I am at a loss to tell. He must have christened him Pegasus before he attempted it, and then have got into the stirrups with difficulty. I have good ground, mind, for these strictures on his equestrianism. There is a well authenticated story of the poet cutting so queer a figure in the saddle, that a countryman, on seeing him pass one day could not refrain from cracking a joke with him. It is a rather dangerous thing, however, for your countryman to pit himself against a poet in matters of humor. I think our practibalfricnds will concede that much at all events. ‘ Hollo, zur, did yer zee a tailor thing a-riding down’t road ?’ shouts Giles as Coleridgepasses. Now, the point of that joke—which is rather obscure—seems to be wrapped up in the fact, that tailors, from their constant sitting on the floor, make but fantastie cavaliers. Coleridge drew up his horse on hearing the question, and looking benignantly at the man, begged him to repeat it. Countryman jumps at this. Of all things this repetition is what he desires. That was the one solitary joke of his life, and it seems as if Providence calls on him to renew it. 'Did yer zee a tailor thing a-riding down the road ?’ he says, and thrusting his hands to the bottom of his pocfccls, stands, with open mouth, grinning at Coleridge. 'See a tailor! Why-yes,’says the rider, ‘ I did, and he told me as I came up here I should meet his goose V Poor Giles !” “His talk was grand: brilliant, sinuous, and deep in contrast as a snaki coiling round a rod .• as magical and cunning as if that rod were Prospero’s wand. His ordinary conversation was full of Hymettus-likc richness and deep classic flavour. Rushing around like light, and pressing all learning into its service,, it darted into every nook and cranny of a subject, and convexed its hidden recesses into sharp- : edged relief. I know, those dull dogs who never try simile without wofully failing, have objected to Coleridge’s occasional gorgeousness of diction ; but I could never see any reason why the hilt of a sword should not be jewelled, providing the jewels are good, and the point and temper, of the blade are not affected. There are two kinds of ornament: the-one-as fresh, natural, and heightening in effect as the dew-drop-on the ros” ; the other as outre and outof place as carmine on a bust. To the former order belongs all Coleridge’s arabesques—to the latter all Mr. Gilfillan’s buttons. I may add, too, that we generally find this latter order of ornament in tlie impudent criticisms of those who find fault with the first.” “But time advances, and forces me to generalise. Coleridge’s life, then, was a magnificent fragment. To quote fr-onn himself, his 'giant limbs were like lifeless tools.’ In Germany, at Malta, at Rome, or in England, he was a self-alienated wanderer. He was rudderless in every storm of passion that beset him. Comparatively early in life he had contracted, as you all know, a propensity for opium-eating, and this so grew upon him that for a long dreary time—an eternity of ’ determination , weakness, and remorse—ho was a complete slave to the passion. He has left on record how great was his anguish, how deep-set. his desire to cast it off. De Quincey believes he never entirely succeeded; but this is a remark, I think, springing from certain personal grounds, and Coleridge’s own testimony is opposed to it. Still, he did not relinquish the vice until it had' made a wreck of him. He was defective in the firmer ingredients of character from the beginning. Touchingly does Hazlitt, in his Wiuterslow Essays, describe the poet’s circumgyration of gait—the undecided walk, corresponding so closely with his purposelessness o&»aim.—and this defect seems to have been countenanced and nourished by the vice which so persistantly beset him. Pleasure, business, ho i:e, wife, friends,- became distasteful to him. He weakened, and toppled, and fell to ruins,” “ Ills influence upon the thought andliteraure of the age can be scarcely overrated. His was one of those minds which.fall upon society as a stone in a stream. The effect is accuniumulative rather than instantaneous ; the circle cf agitation grows wider and. wider until the perturbation is complete and the whole surface disturbed. In art, metaphysics, and the more sequestered walks of theology, the Presence of Coleridgt is felt—if not always seen—at this day He opened up so large a realm of thought that it is scarcely possible to push an enquiry far without entrenching on his domain. In all he did, too, he moved as a master-spirit, and, as a consequence, became at one and the same time the pioneer and the potentate. On , whatever new ground he discovered he planted his flag; and many a day shall elapse, and many a voyager in the same seas shall founder, before the sign of his soverignty is plucked down. And while mourning his shortcomings —while deploring the uusanitariness- of that most regal mind—let us remember his life of buffet and orphanhood, his noble struggles, his harrowing remorse, his wonderful, thou h . fragmentary achievements, and, above all, lot

us keep in view bis sweet graces, steady affections, and child-like simplicities.” We cannot dismiss ‘The Month’ without strongly recommending it to all of every class who read for some purpose less larrcn than that of killing time. A friend in Sydney, who forwarded the number before us, says, that of the first number no fewer than 4,000 copies were sold. Success so extraordinary cannot fail to encourage Mr Frank Fowler and those who may be associated with him in his effort to create a literature where most a literature 'is needed. Years m’jst roll away before Auckland will have a ‘ Month’ of her own ; but to the youth of Auckland we say— Nil desperandum, which freely translated means — There’s a good time coming boys.