Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/281

Rh and other blossoms, but will put into the same bouquet the dandelion, the flaunting poppy, and even the nightshade and stramony." In fact, Mr. Gilfillan’s diction may not inaptly be described in words of his own, originally applied to a fellow-countryman and oratorical divine, as a "strange, amorphous, Babylonish dialect, imitative, yet original, rank with a prodigious growth of intertangled beauties and blemishes, enclosing amid vast tracts of jungle little bits of clearest loveliness, and throwing out sudden volcanic bursts of real fire amid jets of mere smoke and hot water.” From our adoption of the "saving clauses" and "redeeming points" in this description, it will be seen that we do not tax our author with the exclusive production of sheer bombast.

Some of his reviewers do. They can see in his florid complexion nothing but morbid ill-bloodedness. Whereas we are happy to descry and to acknowledge in his flourishes, a not unfrequent felicity, however spoilt in the setting. He gives you his truth, it has been said, precisely as he gets it;—"it comes before you as pearls, which have succession, but which have been strung together yon scarcely know how." That he has some degree of imaginative power, and an over-teeming fancy, must be evident to all bis readers; nor are we inclined to deny him "views not destitute of vigor, and certainly replete with point and vivacity, so that, for the moment, of some happy paragraph we could almost say, "Ubi bene, nemo melius." But, on the other hand, he is radically deficient in logical calmness, in steadiness of intellectual vision, in comprehension of view, in tact and taste, and in self-knowledge and self-restraint. The reputation of both Robert Hall and John Foster was singularly advanced by the esprit de corps of "denominational" and party influence; and, in like manner, the exalted honours to which Mr. George Gilfillan is, in some quarters, presumed to have attained, are due to a cognate cause, Indiscriminate and unconditional eulogists he has—tant pis pour lui; but they consist either of authorlings, criticasters, and poetastera, who have been praised by him in print, and who gratefully act up to their light of conscience on the "Caw me caw thee" principle; or of Caledonian noncons, proud of such a high-flying theologian, such a rhetorical critic, and such a "splendid" writer. Thus—one "Alastor," who has done deeds of dreadful note in prose and verse, affirms that the two "Galleries of Literary Portaits” (whose painter, by-the-way, had patted "Alastor" benignantly on the back) form a "waving forest of grand imagery;" and goes on to say, "no praise of mine could touch the pale of that awful Sinai, whose grand imagery hangs over and folds around it, even as that dread mountain when it shook with the thunder and lightnings of the immediate Godhead; I allude to those grand outpourings of a majestic soul to the eternal, whose crystal floods are gathered within his last great work, 'The Bards of the Bible'"—which magnum opus, we are subsequently assured, "is an altar raised to the great I, piled with golden thoughts and flame-like utterances …. and over all gradually spreads the night-like majesty of Bible-wisdom, till its religious firmament is sanded with the brilliant stars of revelation, to which Gilfillan's soul is as the