as to those who will pay to-morrow the sufferings of their fellow creatures.

SECTION III.

POETRY OF VENGEANCE AND OF POPULAR WRATH IN EUROPE.

Such a position should find a poetic expression.

The first in date, the chief of these poets is Crabbe. Before him the Saxon and domestic tendencies were revealed, but with less violence and harshness. It is easy to go back from Crabbe and Burns to Goldsmith, whose "Deserted Village" is a popular and social elegy, or to Gray's "Elegy in a country Church-yard." This popular view is ancient; long interrupted by Puritanism or by Italian and French influence, it is to be found even in the middle ages, and appears in the Vision of Pierce Plowman, the roturier and Saxon reclamation of a peasant against the abuse of Norman Sovereignty.

In America, the poetry of vengeance could not arise. The primitive liberty of nature, the great struggle of the Puritans with the elements, the waves, the soil, the wind, did not permit the domestic muse to take this fearful and bitter flight, nor to become hateful and violent. The earliest of American literateurs, Franklin, Audubon, Cooper, are amiable and human writers, that is popular in the true sense of the word. They write for all the world like Shakspeare, Montague, Cervantes. But in England, in the midst of an old and refined society, is produced another falsely-popular literature, vindicative and furious, destined exclusively for

workmen, peasants, and men without property or civil rights. Strange, that while democratic America fostered a literature graceful and elegant, full of fine and delicate shading, aristocratic and natural, old, weary Europe gave birth to a brood of tragic poets, dithyrambic and academic in the dress of the penniless; false men of the people who speak loudly and boldly, and roughly, and lyingly.

Hierarchic, feudal England gave the first impulse. Crabbe is the primary instigator. Robert Burns, a peasant, followed him closely. Robert Bloomfield, and Southey, in his youth, trod the same path.

Among these prose and poet-workmen, some have really issued from the inferior classes. Two are men of genius, Robert Burns, and the Sheffield Blacksmith. The latter, Ebenezer Elliot, Saxon and Puritan by his Christian name, has been powerfully reviewed by Carlyle.*

As an artist, Elliot is far from being perfect. Epic without knowing it, he tries to be lyric, and does not always succeed. His poetry is Crabbe, Wordsworth, Cowper, exaggerated. His energy would be more valuable if he contained it more; if his flame were not mingled with whirlpools of smoke, such as float over the furnaces of Birmingham. He throws out his poetry in ardent puffs, somewhat like Savage, the cotemporary of Johnson; and the incoherence of his words, mingled with his perpetual cry of fury, pain and hunger, produces a painful sensation. Yet sometimes he forgets his political mission, ceases to speak against taxes, the dearness of bread and proprietors, seeks the shadows of the wood,

Here Mr. Chasles gives the review of the Corn Law Rhymes by Carlyle, too well known here to be reprinted in this volume.

climbs the mountains, and then his accents penetrate, born as they are of religious sentiment and the view of Nature.

verse;

Yet he might have expressed in prose what he has said in the lesson would not have been less striking. One can live in prose. The Koran, half the works of Goethe, the Emile of Rousseau, and the novels of Scott, are in prose. Perhaps even, the thought of Elliot would have been more vigorously developed, if he had not wished to be a versifier ; if he had not mounted that often restive, often lame steed, which the ancients called Pegasus, and we Rhyme.

Thomas Cooper has written a savage poem, called the Purgatory of Suicides; the idea of which is as follows: Society, down to our day, has been a hell which noble souls hasten to flee from. By destroying the frame of government, and crushing religion and existing institutions, human force will regain its normal development; the triumph of our race over material force, already more than half conquered, will pursue its inevitable course, and assure an universal well-being.

To these must be added in their measure, "Ernest, or Social Regeneration," "Nights of a Workingman," edited by Dickens, "Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-loom Weaver," by Thom; and Leonard Addison's "Tenant of Creation." Then there are autobiographies in the same taste: Thom's, Mary Ann Wellington's, Mary Catchpole's, and others.

Now, America, the latest in the road to civilization, has no taste for these memoirs of penniless people and working men. But she delights in the recital of adventures, violent narratives, strange odysseys, full of sudden changes of fortune, of motion, and of novelty. Sometimes, after the English fashion, they are apocryphal confessions. The heroes, therefore, if they have no great moral valor, have at least a piquant singularity.

For instance, there is now at Charleston a poor negro, who

has a little mercer-shop, and attends the Methodist Church with great assiduity. He gets along well with his wife, also an African, and the little establishment is much esteemed in the neighborhood. How can a noisy glory attach itself to so humble, so retired a household. By what literary alchemy change this poor man into a hero, and his life into a romance? We will see.

One night, a Protestant minister, no doubt in search of a call, enters and sits down by the counter of Zamba. As he listens to his half-African jargon, confused ideas of speculation, philanthropy and literature arise in the mind of the visitor. The negro, freed by the kindness of his master, recounts his adventures, which are those of all his race; he he says that he was a king in his own land; king like those petty chiefs who, on the shores of African rivers, adorned with old small-clothes, remnant of European frippery, and an ancient uniform coat, bought from a sailor, rule over two hundred poor people, annually decimate their people and so provide for the slave trade. The story of Zamba, his lion hunts, the burning of a neighboring village, the voyage on board an American ship, and the peculiar position of a king who, in trying to sell his subjects, gets sold himself, interest the visitor. He thinks that Zamba's narrative may be worked up; and as the American market is not very favorable to these writings, he prints at London, "The Life and Adventures of Zamba, a Negro King, and Recollections of his Captivity in South Carolina; written by himself." This work had some run; and occupies even a prominent place in the literature of fraudulent confessions and false individuality. In the two hundred and fifty pages which form the volume, the author has imitated Paul and Virginia, borrowed from Raynal, copied the negrophilists, and used the worn-out literature of Europe. You find here, the eternal recriminations in favor of human

liberty and fraternity; a thousand hunting stories and adventures copied from travel-books; and at last, the picture already over-painted by Mrs. Trolloppe, Miss Martineau, and twenty others, of the tyranny exercised by the Southern planters. In this individual confession all that is lacking is an individuality; out of the recital of Zamba, but one thing is left-Zamba.

There is far more interest and talent in certain American Autobiographies, among others the "Memoirs of Jonathan Sharp." The "Sojourn of two Americans at Noukahiva," and the "Return of the American Sailor to the United States." The "Sojourn, etc.," was much read and sold well, because of the singularity of the hero's adventures; the author then found it natural to plough in the furrow which had procured so good a crop; and thus he did it.

The hero was taken captive by the inhabitants of the Isles of Marquesas, and recounts how his savage hosts carried off, one fine day, the sailor who served him for domestic-he even lets you see how much he fears that this fidus Achates had been eaten by the savages with great pomp. In a more recent autobiography this Sancho Panza revives; he was not eaten, but came very near it. From cataract to abyss; from promontory to valley; from wigwam to wigwam, he got at last to New York; where he published his Odyssey, the most gasconading and amusing of the fictions of which I speak. Here at least there is warmth, action, noise, and when analysed, much interest in the narrative in which the author seems quietly to make fun of the public. I love his effrontery when I compare it with the Puritan pretensions of Zamba, etc. Since quackery there is to be, give me that which marches hand on hip, like Callot's footmen, and not that which plays the hypocrite, adopts a sanctified air, and affects an ingenuous coarseness.