Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/287

Rh and now rushes in to spike the guns of that battery against the Bible, which the bold hands of sceptical speculators have planted upon the stars." Pollok's "description of the resurrection, though vivid and vigorous, is as coarse as though done by a resurrection-man." To be oratorical in praise when you stand before some masterpiece of genius, "were nearly as absurd as to cheer the thunder or encore the earthquake." Allan Cunningham's mind wanders untamed, "like a giant of the infant world, striding with large uneven steps …. laying his lubber length on the dry, bald, burning rock, and snorting out from his deep chest terrific slumber;"—and his "Michael Scott" "can be likened to nothing in earth, sea, or air, but the caldron of a Canidia or a Hecate, with which sparkles interpiercing a thick smoke, through which you see, or seem to see, amid a tremendous 'bubble and squeak,'—a hell-broth in the act of cookery, which a Cerberus might, with sputtering noise, reject." Ebenezer Elliott's "savage power has taught him to wield the hammer and the pen with little difference in degree of animal exertion and mental fury. We can never divest our minds as we read him of the image of a grim son of the furnace, black as Erebus, riving, tearing, and smiting at his reluctant words." Aird's vision of the high hills seen reeling in sympathy with the breaking waves of the burning lake, is "a circumstance reminding us of Hogarth's houses in Gin Alley. A sigh is bestowed on the unhappy "laureate who must sweat poetry out of every birth, baptism, burial, and battle." Poetry itself is "a splendid ulcer." Men have frequently but injudiciously classed Byron and Shelley together, as two dissolute and disorderly blackguards, because the two found themselves together one stormy night in the streets, having both been thrust out by the strong arm from their homes. "One had been kicking up a row and kissing the serving-maids; the other had been trying to reform the family, but in so awkward a fashion, that in his haste he had put out all the lustres, and nearly blown up the establishment." As to Mr. Macaulay's theology, it seams "we might ask with much more propriety at him the question which a reviewer asked at Carlyle, 'Can you tell us, quite in confidence, your private opinion as to the place where wicked people go?" Punsters are a feeble folk; for, "what poor creatures you meet continually, from whom puns come as easily as perspiration." (Talk about "odorous" comparisons!) "Carlyle's invective sometimes seems the foul spittle of some angry god. It is a wild, lashing rain from above, like Isaiah in his wrath" In reference to Byron's letters as illustrating his poems, it is interesting, says Mr. Gilfillan, "while these great cataracts are heaving on, to mark this attendant spray-sweat of their agony." (Prince Hal was not richer, surely, in the "most unsavory similes.") D., Croly's is a "galloping" style—at a generous, break-neck pace"—"it is no vulgar intoxication—it is a debauch of nectar; it is not a Newmarket, but a Nemean race." Certain religious littérateurs of the day are satirised as "hanging around the majestic form of Christianity a dirty finery. picked up from the cast-off clothes of second-rate poets, and sinking the mother-tongue of Heaven