hold the mirror up to Nature in this wise? When our mirror is no mirror, but only as it were a nursery saucepan, and that long since grown rusty?

We might add, were it of any moment in this case, that we reckon Dr. Müllner's tragic knack altogether insufficient for a still more comprehensive reason; simply for the reason that it is a knack, a recipe, or secret of the craft, which, could it be never so excellent, must by repeated use degenerate into a mannerism, and therefore into a nuisance. But herein lies the difference between creation and manufacture; the latter has its manipulations, its secret processes, which can be learned by apprenticeship; the former has not. For in poetry we have heard of no secret possess ing the smallest effectual virtue, except this one general secret: that the poet be a man of a purer, higher, richer nature than other men; which higher nature shall itself, after earnest inquiry, have taught him the proper form for imbodying its inspirations, as indeed the imperishable beauty of these will shine, with more or less distinctness, through any form whatever.

one.

Had Dr. Müllner any visible pretension to this last great secret, it might be a duty to dwell longer and more gravely on his minor ones, however false and poor. As he has no such pretension, it appears to us that for the present we may take our leave. To give any further analysis of his individual dramas would be an easy task, but a stupid and thankless A Harrison's watch, though this too is but an earthly machine, may be taken asunder with some prospect of scientific advantage; but who would spend time in screwing and unscrewing the mechanism of ten peppermills? Neither shall we offer any extract, as a specimen of the diction and sentiment that reigns in these dramas. We have said already that it is fair, well-ordered stage-sentiment this of his; that the diction too is good, wellscanned, grammatical diction; no fault to be found with either, except that they pretend to be poetry, and are throughout the most unadulterated prose. To exhibit this fact in extracts would be a vain undertaking. Not the few sprigs of heath, but the thousand acres of it, characterize the wilderness. Let any one who covets a trim heath-nosegay, clutch at random into Müllner's seven volumes; for ourselves, we would not deal further in that article.

lampoon: the German Joe Millers also seem familiar to him, and his skill in the riddle is respectable; so that altogether, as we said, he makes a superior figure in this line, which indeed is but despicably managed in Germany, and his Mitternacht-Blatt is, by several degrees, the most readable paper of its kind we meet with in that country. Not that we, in the abstract, much admire Dr. Müllner's newspaper procedure; his style is merely the common-tavernstyle, familiar enough in our own periodical literature; riotous, blustering, with some tincture of blackguardism; a half-dishonest style, and smells considerably of tobacco and spirituous liquor. Neither do we find that there is the smallest fraction of valuable knowledge or opinion communicated in the Midnight Paper; indeed, except it be the knowledge and opinion that Dr. Müllner is a great dramatist, and that all who presume to think otherwise are insufficient members of society, we cannot charge our memory with having gathered any knowledge from it whatever. It may be, too, that Dr. Müllner is not perfectly original in his journalistic manner: we have sometimes felt as if his light were, to a certain extent, a borrowed one; a rushlight kindled at the great pitch link of our own Blackwood's Magazine. But on this point we cannot take upon us to decide.

One of Müllner's regular journalistic articles is the Kriegszeitung, or War-intelligence, of all, the paper-battles, feuds, defiances, and private assassinations, chiefly dramatic, which occur in the more distracted portion of the German Literary Republic. This Kriegszeitung Dr. Müllner evidently writes with great gusto, in a lively braggadocia manner, especially when touching on his own exploits; yet to us, it is far the most melancholy part of the MitternachtBlatt. Alas! this is not what we search for in a German newspaper; how "Herr Sapphir, or Herr Carbuncle, or so many other Herren Dousterswivel, are all busily molesting one another! We ourselves are pacific men; make a point "to shun discrepant circles rather than seek them" and how sad is it to hear of so many illustrious-obscure persons living in foreign parts, and hear only, what was well known without hearing, that they also are instinct. with the spirit of Satan!. For what is the bone that these Journalists, in Berlin and elsewere, are worrying over; what is the ultimate purpose of all this barking and snarling? Sheer love of fight, you would say; simply to make one another's life a little bitterer, as if Besides his dramatic labours, Dr. Müllner is Fate had not been cross enough to the hapknown to the public as a journalist. For some piest of them. Were there any perceptible considerable time, he has edited a literary news-subject of dispute, any doctrine to advocate, paper of his own originating, the Mitternacht- even a false one, it would be something; but Blatt (Midnight Paper); stray leaves of which we occasionally look into. In this last capacity, we are happy to observe, he shows to much more advantage; indeed, the journalistic office seems quite natural to him; and would he take any advice from us, which he will not, here were the arena in which, and not in the Fatedrama, he would exclusively continue to fence, for his bread or glory. He is not without a vein of small wit; a certain degree of drollery there is, and grinning half-risible, half-impudent; he has a fair hand at the feebler sort of

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so far as we can discover, whether from Sapphire and Company, or the "Nabob of Weissenfels," (our own worthy Doctor,) there is none. And is this their appointed function? Are Editors scattered over the country, and supplied with victuals and fuel, purely to bite one another? Certainly not. But these Journalists, we think, are like the Academician's colony of spiders. This French virtuoso had found that cobwebs were worth something, could even be woven into silk stockings: whereupon, he exhibits a very handsome pair

of cobweb hose to the Academy, is encouraged | upper air. Not in despite towards the German to proceed with the manufacture, and so col-nation, which we love honestly, have we spolects some half-bushel of spiders, and puts ken thus of these its Playwrights and Jourthem down in a spacious loft, with every con- nalists. Alas! when we look around us at venience for making silk. But will the vicious | home, we feel too well that the Germans might creatures spin a thread? In place of it, they take to fighting with their whole vigour, in contempt of the poor Academician's utmost exertions to part them: and end not, till there is simply one spider left living, and not a shred of cobweb woven, or thenceforth to be expected! Could the weavers of paragraphs, like these of the cobweb, fairly exterminate and silence one another, it would perhaps be a little more supportable. But an Editor is made of sterner stuff. In general cases, indeed, when the brains are out, the man will die: but it is a well known fact in Journalistics, that a man may not only live, but support wife and children by his labours, in this line, years after the brain (if there ever was any) has been completely abstracted, or reduced, by time and hard usage, into a state of dry powder. What then is to be done? Is there no end to this brawling; and will the unprofitable noise endure for ever? By way of palliative, we have sometimes imagined that a Congress of all German Editors might be appointed, by proclamation, in some central spot, say the Nürnberg Market-place, if it would hold them all: here we would humbly suggest that the whole Journalistik might assemble on a given day, and under the eye of proper marshals, sufficiently and satisfactorily horsewhip one another simultaneously, each his neighbour, till the very toughest had enough both of whipping and of being whipped. In this way, it seems probable, little or no injustice would be done: and each Journalist, cleared of gall, for several months, might return home in a more composed frame of mind, and betake himself with new alacrity to the real duties of his office.

say to us,-Neighbour, sweep thy own floor! Neither is it with any hope of bettering the existence of these three individual Poetasters, still less with the smallest shadow of wish to make it more miserable, that we have spoken. After all, there must be Playwrights, as we have said: and these are among the best of the class. So long as it pleases them to manufacture in this line, and any body of German Thebans to pay them, in groschen or plaudits, for their ware, let both parties persist in so doing, and fair befall them! But the duty of Foreign Reviewers is of a two-fold sort. For not only are we stationed on the coast of the country, as watchers and spials, to report whatsoever remarkable thing becomes visible in the distance; but we stand there also as a sort of Tide-waiters and Preventive-servicemen, to contend, with our utmost vigour, that no improper article be landed. These offices, it would seem, as in the material world, so also in the literary and spiritual, usually fall to the lot of aged, invalided, impoverished, or otherwise decayed persons; but this is little to the matter. As true British subjects, with ready will, though it may be, with our last strength, we are here to discharge that double duty. Movements, we observe, are making along the beach, and signals out sea-wards, as if these Klingemanns and Müllners were to be landed on our soil: but through the strength of heaven this shall not be done, till the "most thinking people" know what it is that is landing. For the rest, if any one wishes to import that sort of produce, and finds it nourishing for his inward man, let him do so, and welcome. Only let him understand that it is not German Literature he is swallowing, But, enough! enough! The humour of but the froth and scum of German Literature; these men may be infectious; it is not good which scum, if he will only wait, we can furfor us to be here. Wandering over the Ely- ther promise him that he may, ere long, enjoy sian fields of German Literature, not watch-in the new, and perhaps cheaper, form of sediing the gloomy discords of its Tartarus, is ment. And so let every one be active for himwhat we wish to be employed in. Let the self. iron gate again close, and shut in the pallid kingdoms from view; we gladly revisit the

Noch ist es Tag, da rühre sich der Mann,
Die Nacht tritt ein, wo niemand wirken kann.

VOLTAIRE.

[FOREIGN REVIEW, 1829.]

COULD ambition always choose its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters. Certainly, if we examine that love of power, which enters so largely into most practical calculations, nay, which our Utilitarian friends have recognised as the sole end and origin, both motive and reward, of all earthly enterprises, animating alike the philanthropist, the conqueror, the money-changer, and the missionary, we shall find that all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited, and ineffectual. For dull, unreflective, merely instinctive as the ordinary man may seem, he has nevertheless, as a quite indispensable | appendage, a head that in some degree considers and computes; a lamp or rushlight of understanding has been given him, which, through whatever dim, besmoked, and strangely diffractive media it may shine, is the ultimate guiding light of his whole path and here, as well as there, now as at all times in man's history, Opinion rules the world.

**

Is it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills, increase the current of some world'sriver? Or is it to be itself a Rhine or Danaw, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its flood an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself, the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents? We know not only in either case, we know its path is to the great ocean: its waters, were they but a handful, are here, and cannot be annihilated or permanently held back.

As little can we prognosticate, with any certainty, the future influences from the present aspects of an individual. How many Demagogues, Croesuses, Conquerors fill their own age with joy or terror, with a tumult that promises to be perennial; and in the next age die away into insignificance and oblivion ! These are the forests of gourds, that overtop the infant cedars and albe-trees, but, like the Prophet's gourd, wither on the third day. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt, in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herdsman? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war, are buried deep in the wrecks of time; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilized nations. Or figure Mahomet, in his youthful years, “travelling to the horse-fairs of Syria!" Nay, to take an infinitely higher instance, who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero? To us it is the most earnest, sad, and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing: Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quæsitissimis pœnis affecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus CHRISTIANOS appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus CHRISTUS, qui, Tiberio imperitante, per Procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. Repressaque in præsens exitiabilis superstitio rursus erumpebat, non modo per Judæum originem ejus muli, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt, celebranturque. “So, for the quieting of this rumour,* Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate. * Mémoires sur Voltaire, et sur ses Ouvrages, par Long-The baneful superstition, thereby repressed champ et Wagnière, ses Secrétaires; suivis de divers for the time, again broke out, not only over Ecrits inédits de la Marquise du Châtelet, du Président Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but Henault, &c., tous relatifs à Voltaire. (Memoirs con

Curious it is, moreover, to consider, in this respect, how different appearance is from reality, and under what singular shape and circumstances the truly most important man of any given period might be found. Could some Asmodeus, by simply waiving his arm, open asunder the meaning of the Present, even so far as the Future will disclose it, how much more marvellous à sight should we have, than that mere bodily one through the roofs of Madrid! For we know not what we are, any more than what we shall be. It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end! What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working Universe, and will also work there, for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. But the life of every man is as the well-spring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighbouring rivulets, as a tributary; or receive them as their sovereign?

cerning Voltaire and his Works, by Longchamp and in the City also, where from every side al! Vagnière, his Secretaries; with various unpublished pieces by the Marquise du Châtelet, &c., all relating to Voltaire.) 2 Tomes. Paris, 1826.

* Of his having set fire to Rome.

heaps of straw!" For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the Fable, the mild shining of the sun shall silently accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, nọ tramp of squadrons, or immeasurable tumult of baggage-wagons, attends its movements: in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating, which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for Kings and Emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule not over, but in all heads, and with these its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas bend the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself will be better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less momentous than the opening of the first Mechanics' Institute.

atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish."* Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper, has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind. Nor is it only to those primitive ages, when religions took their rise, and a man of pure and high mind appeared not merely as a teacher and philosopher, but as a priest and prophet, that our observation applies. The same uncertainty, in estimating present things and men, holds more or less in all times; for in all times, even in those which seem most trivial, and open to research, human society rests on inscrutably deep foundations; which he is of all others the most mistaken, who fancies he has explored to the bottom. Neither is that sequence, which we love to speak of as a chain of causes," properly to be figured as a “chain,” or line, but rather as a tissue, or superficies of innumerable lines, extending in breadth as well as in length, and with a complexity, which will foil and utterly bewilder the most assiduous computation. In We have been led into such rather rite refact, the wisest of us must, for by far the most flections, by these volumes of Memoirs on Volpart, judge like the simplest; estimate im-taire; a man in whose history the relative importance by mere magnitude, and expect that portance of intellectual and physical power is what strongly affects our own generation, will again curiously evinced. This also was a strongly affect those that are to follow. In this private person, by birth nowise an elevated way it is that conquerors and political revo-one; yet so far as present knowledge will enalutionists come to figure as so mighty in their ble us to judge, it may be said, that to abstract influences; whereas truly there is no class of Voltaire and his activity from the eighteenth persons, creating such an uproar in the world, century, were to produce a greater difference who in the long run produce so very slight an in the existing figure of things, than the want impression on its affairs. When Tamerlane of any other individual, up to this day, could had finished building his pyramid of seventy have occasioned. Nay, with the single excepthousand human skulls, and was seen "stand-tion of Luther, there is, perhaps, in these ing at the gate Damascus, glittering, in steel, with his battle-axe on his shoulder," till his fierce hosts filed out to new victories and new carnage, the pale onlooker might have fancied that Nature was in her death-throes; for havoc and despair had taken possession of the earth, the sun of manhood seemed setting in seas of blood. Yet, it might be, on that very gala-day of Tamerlane, a little boy was playing ninepins on the streets of Mentz, whose history was more important to men than that of twenty Tamerlanes. The Tartar Khan, with his shaggy demons of the wilderness, "passed away like a whirlwind" to be forgotten for ever; and that German artisan has wrought a benefit, which is yet immeasurably expanding itself, and will continue to expand itself through all countries and through all times. What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Bonaparte, compared with these "movable types" of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying thing for your Conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal which he hammers with such violence: how the kind earth will soon shroud up his bloody footprints; and all that he achieved and skilfully piled together will be but like his own canvas city" of a camp,this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, "a few earth-pits and

*Tacit. Annal. xv. 44.

modern ages, no other man of a merely intellectual character, whose influence and reputation have become so entirely European as that of Voltaire. Indeed, like the great German Reformer's, his doctrines too, almost from the first, have affected not only the belief of the thinking world, silently propagating themselves from mind to mind; but in a high degree also, the conduct of the active and political world; entering as a distinct element into some of the most fearful civil convulsions which European history has on record.

Doubtless, to his own contemporaries, to such of them at least as had any insight into the actual state of men's minds, Voltaire already appeared as a note-worthy and decidedly historical personage: yet, perhaps, not the wildest of his admirers ventured to assign him such a magnitude as he now figures in, even with his adversaries and detractors. He has grown in apparent importance, as we receded from him, as the nature of his endeavours became more and more visible in their results. For, unlike many great men, but like all great agitators, Voltaire everywhere shows himself emphatically as the man of his century: uniting in his own person whatever spiritual accomplishments were most valued by that age; at the same time, with no depth to discern its ulterior tendencies, still less with any magnanimity to attempt withstanding these, his greatness and his littleness alike fitted him to produce an immediate effect; for he leads whither the multi.

With the "Age of the Press," and such mani

tude was of itself dimly minded to run, and | lish Life of Voltaire;* nay, we remember to keeps the van not less by skill in commanding, have seen portions of his writings cited, in terthan by cunning in obeying. Besides, now rorum, and with criticisms, in some pamphlet, that we look on the matter from some distance, by a country gentleman," either on the Eduthe efforts of a thousand coadjutors and disci- cation of the People, or else on the question of ples, nay, a series of mighty political vicissi- Preserving the Game. tudes, in the production of which these efforts had but a subsidiary share, have all come, na-festations of it on this subject, we are far from turally in such a case, to appear as if exclusively his work; so that he rises before us as the paragon and epitome of a whole spiritual period, now almost passed away, yet remarkable in itself, and more than ever interesting to us, who seem to stand, as it were, on the confines of a new and better one.

quarrelling. We have read great part of these thousand-and-first "Memoirs on Voltaire," by Longchamp and Wagnière, not without satisfaction; and can cheerfully look forward to still other "Memoirs" following in their train. Nothing can be more in the course of nature than the wish to satisfy one's self with knowNay, had we forgotten that ours is the "Age ledge of all sorts about any distinguished perof the Press," when he who runs may not only son, especially of our own era; the true study read, but furnish us with reading; and simply of his character, his spiritual individuality, counted the books, and scattered leaves, thick and peculiar manner of existence, is full of as the autumnal in Vallombrosa, that have been instruction for all mankind: even that of his written and printed concerning this man, we looks, sayings, habitudes, and. indifferent acmight almost fancy him the most important tions, were not the records of them generally person, not of the eighteenth century, but of all lies, is rather to be commended; nay, are not the centuries from Noah's flood downwards. such lies themselves, when they keep within We have Lives of Voltaire by friend and by foe: bounds, and the subject of them has been dead Condorcet, Duvernet, Lepan, have each given for some time, equal to snipe-shooting, or Colus a whole; portions, documents, and all manner burn-Novels, at least little inferior in the great of authentic or spurious contributions have art of getting done with life, or, as it is techbeen supplied by innumerable hands; of whichnically called, killing time? For our own we mention only the labours of his various part, we say, would that every Johnson in secretaries: Collini's, published some twenty the world had his veridical Boswell, or leash years ago, and now these two massive octavos of Boswells! We could then tolerate his from Longchamp and Wagnière. To say no- Hawkins also, though not veridical. With thing of the Baron de Grimm's Collections, regard to Voltaire, in particular, it seems to unparalleled in more than one respect; or of us not only innocent but profitable, that the the six-and-thirty volumes of scurrilous eaves- whole truth regarding him should be well undropping, long since printed under the title of derstood. Surely, the biography of such a Mémoires de Bachaumont; or of the daily and man, who, to say no more of him, spent his hourly attacks and defences that appeared best efforts, and as many still think, successseparately in his lifetime, and all the judicial fully, in assaulting the Christian religion, must pieces, whether in the style of apotheosis or be a matter of considerable import; what he of excommurication, that have seen the light did, and what he could not do; how he did it, since then; a mass of fugitive writings, the or attempted it, that is, with what degree of very diamond edition of which might fill whole strength, clearness, especially with what moral libraries. The peculiar talent of the French intents, what theories and feelings on man and in all narrative, at least in all anecdotic, de- man's life, are questions that will bear some partments, rendering most of these works ex-discussing. To Voltaire, individually, for the tremely readable, still further favoured their last fifty-one years, the discussion has been circulation, both at home and abroad: so that indifferent enough; and to us it is a discussion now, in most countries, Voltaire has been read not on one remarkable person only, and chiefly of and talked of, till his name and life have for the curious or studious, but involving congrown familiar like those of a village acquaint-siderations of highest moment to all men, and ance. In England, at least, where for almost a century the study of foreign literature has, we may say, confined itself to that of the French, Here, accordingly, we are about to offer with a slight intermixture from the elder Ita- some further observations on this questio lians, Voltaire's writings and such writings as vexala; not without hope that the reader may treated of him, were little likely to want readers. accept them in good part. Doubtless, when We suppose, there is no literary era, not even we look at the whole bearings of the matter, any domestic one, concerning which English- there seems little prospect of any unanimity men in general have such information, at least respecting it, either now, or within a calculahave gathered so many anecdotes and opinions, ble period: it is probable that many will conas concerning this of Voltaire. Nor have native tinue, for a long time, to speak of this "uniadditions to the stock been wanting, and these of a due variety in purport and kind: maledic-work, which we can recommend only to such as feel *"By Frank Hall Standish, Esq." (London, 1821): a tions, expostulations, and dreadful death-scenes, themselves in extreme want of information on this subpainted like Spanish Sanbenitos, by weak well-ject, and, except in their own language, unable to acquire meaning persons of the hostile class; eulogies, generally of the gayer sort, by open or secret friends all this has been long and extensively carried on among us. There is even an Eng

inquiries which the utmost compass of our philosophy will be unable to embrace.

and not without considerable indications of talent; to all appearance, by a minor, many of whose statements and opinions (for he seems an inquiring, honest-hearted, rather decisive character) must have begun to astonish even himself, several years ago.

any. It is written very badly, though with sincerity,