school was no other than a wag who took this way of parodying a style which he wished to make ridiculous; but we are forced in sober sadness to avow the fact, that he writes this wholesale foolery in honest conviction of its merit, and what is still more curious, that he finds vehicles for retailing to the public, as the genuine juice of talent, this scum of his " seething brains." The shades of Shakspeare and Ariosto might well vanish in shame at the coming of this caricature, which has however been anticipated by a work of M, Lemercier, (the author of "Jane Shore," and better things) called "Le Charlequinade," or " La Panhypoirisiade," where, although satire is the dominant quality, every thing is to be found from the sublime to the burlesque. Should however our Viscount persist in offering this eighth wonder to the world, we beg to suggest a motto well worthy of his title-page, and selected from a work which we suspect he never has perused. "He looked, and saw a sable sorcerer rise, Till one wide conflagration swallows all." The DUNCIAD. Book III. With respect to the "Caroléide" we have but little to say. An epic in twelve books has small chance of inflicting any more serious injury than a fit of somnolency on the present generation. There is something too classical in the associations to make us tremble for their effect on the readers of romantic poetry. Works of such heavy calibre do but little execution at present. The tactics of poetry are quite new modelled; and instead of the movements of solid squares and columns of cantos, books, and dramas, we have voltigeurs, sharp-shooters, and riflemen, fragments, sketches, and scenes. Monsieur D'Arlincourt in verse is therefore a very harmless personage, whose friendship to romantic poetry, strange to say, carries no danger with it. He has put into requisition for the formation of his epic, Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Fenelon, wishing, no doubt, to prove the favourite axiom of French criticism, that "on peut créer en imitant." It would be an endless task to cite these imitative creations as far as phraseology is concerned, but in relation to facts we shall state a few. In one of Charlemagne's conflicts with his enemy Wortighin, he strikes him to the earth, and the prostrate ruffian acts over the treacherous part formerly played by Adrastus to Telemachus, and meets the same fate. Our author has however far exceeded the inflated descriptions of Fenelon, who contents himself with comparing his gentle hero upsetting the ferocious Adrastus, to "le cruel Aquilon" beating down "le tendre Moisson;" and we may remark here, that Fenelon in this very scene of his romance has, with a facility equal to D'Arlincourt's in stealing from him, borrowed from the Athalie of Racine the celebrated line, "Je crains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte. which he paraphrases as follows! "Celui qui ne craint point les Dieux craint la mort; au contraire celui qui les craint ne craint qu'eux.” and had it not been to remark this plagiarism of the Bishop, we should not have thought the Viscount's worthy of notice. But our author is also guilty of abduction, for he carries off by main force the heroine of Tasso, and wickedly instals her in the very heart of his epic. But the Leonore of the French poet is after all in some essentials a different person from the Armida of the Italian. All the precautions, the coquetry, and the false modesty of the latter, are despised by the former, who goes up to her object straightforward and unshrinkingly, makes love manfully, employs avowal and stratagem, and even condescends to the use of a man-trap, through which the unsuspecting monarch is made to descend into a dungeon. The monstrosities of the poem, in plan and style, are quite on a par with this incident. The favourite figure of the writer is bizarrerie out-bizarreried, and his best efforts at boldness of diction are in this vein: "Wortighin à son heure dernière Se déchirait les flanes et mordait la poussière." Had "D'Arlincourt" here stood for "Wortighin," we could have easily imagined the noble author se battant les flancs-a common process with writers of his tribe. In another place he makes reason perform an operation, ridiculous enough in itself, but which, had his poem been recited, would be infallibly pronounced by the majority of foreigners a plain case of felo de se. "La Raison m'ordonnait d'éviter votre vue Mais l'amour parle en maitre et la Raison s'est tue." Describing a combat, he avers that "De volantes forêts en sifflant fendent l'air, Un arsenal entier tombe en masse de fer." which idea has no parallel, that we know of, since the days of Blackmore. But in fact the whole poem of "La Caroléide" is a tissue of false taste, false feeling, and false French, "Nonsense precipitate like running lead, That slipt through cracks and zig-zags of the head; Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit." This combination is wound up to the highest pitch of absurdity, by the introduction of a certain priestess of Diana, one Ulnare, who is chosen in a council of northern deities as a fit and proper person to seduce and ruin Charlemagne, and who is no other than an imitation of monk Lewis's conception of Matilda. This priestess, however, herself falls into the snare, becoming violently enamoured of her intended dupe. She first meets him in a cavern, and makes him a very lively declaration. He begins to be moved, "Aux portes de son cœur elle frappe en ce jour La reconnoissance ouvre et fait entrer l'amour." The ghost of Ulnare's father carries her away in a clouda vapoury illustration of her well-merited punishment. Six days afterwards the lovers meet again in the same cavern. Ulnare takes Charlemagne this time for a god, and frankly proposes to him the following question, "Pourquoi n'aurais-je pas, sur ce roc isolé Charles is about to give a solution to this interrogatory, when the ghost reappears. The hero wishes the priestess good morning, "Sensible Ulnare adieu! Cet antre est dangereux." and he walks off; but losing his way, comes back once more to brave the perils of the cave, when Ulnare changing the whole process of her passion, gives him with great solemnity a magi→ cal sword, a sort of harlequin's wand, called joyeuse; and renewing her declarations, announces to him that in future he will find her partout et nulle part! In painting the passion inspired by this seductive priestess, the Viscount tells us "Le zephire de l'amour est l'ouragan du cœur.” a sentiment, by the way, conveying a certain force of thought which proves itself ridiculous only from the utter want of judgment in giving it expression. The fate of a poem is indeed hopeless whose only chance of redemption hangs on a line like this, and this is really the best we have discovered in it—always excepting the last. The work which began and ended our author's fame as a Romancier is "Le Solitaire." No one method natural or legitimate (if these nice distinctions are applicable to such progeny) was left untried to secure the reputation of this work. Multiplied editions, translations, parodies, melodrames, songs, caricatures, critiques-nothing was wanting to complete its success. As to the funds for furthering the business, their source was shrewdly suspected. But whatever was the cause the effect was all that the viscount could have wished. This first work had really a run; and its glaring violations of rationality were for a while overwhelmed in the extravagant oddity of its plot, and in the mixed curiosity and ignorance of the public as to what was or was not the romantic school. The extraordinary inconsistency of the French character is in no one respect more fully evident than in their talk of liberty and their submission to restraint-no matter whether the subject be politics or poetry, government or morals, men or things. They prattle about constitutions and sink under a despotism; they babble of green fields," and live and die in cities; declaim against the academy, and almost universally begin their literary career by a poem or an essay for one of its prizes, and the waking dream of the first half of their life is that they shall doze away the other in one of its forty Fauteuils. Thus while they loudly praise le romanticisme they submit to les regles, as they brawl for liberty, but bow down to power. Such is the chief reason at once of the retrograde movements of civil liberty-the tardy progress of the romantic style-and the momentary name of the Viscomte D'Arlincourt, this son of the "New Muses," who flutter their wings in the face of the hot blooded public, and flapdragon it, as the sea did the unhappy ship in "the Winter's tale." The sounding writings of Chateaubriand demolished the long accumulated prejudices of classical intolerance in France, and opened the view of the romance they had concealed, as the report of a pistol is sufficient to cause the fall of an avalanche whose mass had hidden the face of nature from our view. "Atala" had something in it seductive; mixed with the shadowy conceptions and vapoury sketches of the author, there were frequent touches of truth and reason, and the phantasmagoria of romance followed fast upon this opening scene. Monsieur D'Arlincourt appeared and the explosion of his absurdity did much mischief to the credit of the romantic school, and terrified the sensitive Parisians, just as the bursting of an overcharged pipe in the Palais Royal checked for awhile the progress of gas illumination, and determined the town to reject the brightness from dread of the vapour. "Le Solitaire," who turns out in the end to be the odious Charles the Bald, Duke of Burgundy, is one of those monsters generated not by any of the genial processes of pure imagination, but rather hatched by the heat of a feverish brain. This "Solitaire" is a melange of all that is criminal and virtuous, diabolical and divine; who, like the before-mentioned Ulnare of the Viscount's poem is partout et nulle parte, nulle part et partout-sees every thing, hears every thing, attempts every thing, accomplishes every thing, and meets in his whole career with but one accident (sudden death) to prevent his becoming as omnipotent as he was ubiquitary. This hero has more aliases than malefactors in general. He is sometimes l'homme, and sometimes l'aigle du mont sauvage; l'inconnu du desert; l'esprit de mystere; le hero de la bienfaisance; l'astre de la montagne; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And whom does he protect? La Vierge de la vallée; La Vierge d'Underlach; l'orpheline, la colombe du monastère. Sometimes he consoles the unfortunate, and then "s'avançant au sein de la tourmente, c'est le rayon de l'esperance à travers la nuit du malheur." Sometimes he fights, and then "Son front superbe s'eleve inebranlable, sa resplendissante epée semblable à la verge flamboyante de l'archange aux portes d'Eden, et sur son casque d'or un noir panache se balance, ainsi qu'une crêpe funeraire sur un monument triomphal." A detail of the tissue of absurdities, which for want of a better epithet we must call the plot of this rhapsody, will not be expected from us; nor is it necessary that we should crowd |