Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/486

468 to be expected from the kind and hearty writer, more than once a loving mention made. In Justice Talfourd literature lost a critic of a generous sort none too rife; indeed, he might almost adopt the words of old Menenius Agrippa:the exemplary error (if error) of the critic being, to magnify merit, or even assume its existence, rather than to be niggard of applause, or scrupulous as to welcome. In these Supplementary Notes, among the complimentary allusions to contemporaries—lawyers, statesmen, priests, actors—we observe one to Lord Campbell, of whose legal arguments it is maintained that, "in comprehensive outline, exact logic, felicitous illustration, and harmonious structure," they excel all it ever fell to the critic's lot to hear;—another to Mr. Gladstone, whose faculty of truth-seeking, "applied to realities and inspired only by the desire to discover the truth, and to clothe it in language, assumes, in the minds of superficial observers, the air of casuistry from the nicety of its distinctions and the earnest desire of the speaker to present truth in its finest shades;"—another to Father Faber, whose society, enjoyed in 1844 in Wordsworth's company, impressed the author of "Ion" with "a delightful recollection of the Christian graces of his deportment and conversation;"—and, to quote an example of variety, another to Mr. Charles Kean, on his Sardanapalus, that "triumphant result of pictorial skill, and learning, and taste." Not that the Vacation Rambler is quite innocent of irony and sarcasm, however, when the occasion calls for it. He can say sharp things, for instance, of the external "make up" of Parisian artists, who "invite attention to the irregularities of nature by fantastic devices of art—cutting grizzled beards, red whiskers, and sandy moustaches into startling varieties of shape; bidding the scanty hair to fall over the shoulders in the greasiest of flakes, and affecting every strange combination of dirty and gaudy fashion. It would seem," adds the never ill-natured Rambler, "that personal vanity is so strong in each of these young men, that he thinks his particular deformity consecrated by being his own." With true-blue spirit, again, he records his estimate of a certain portrait at Versailles: "The recent naval achievements of France were irradiated by a portrait of the Prince Joinville, standing on the prow of a glittering ship, in our common sailor's neatest attire—tight bluejacket, open collar, loose black neckcloth, and snow-white trousers—the exact costume in which a very young lady dances the hornpipe in the Spoil'd Child—the type of dandified melodramatic seamanship." Lamartine is alluded to as the gentleman "who for a few days looked so glorious, and has since found that a nation cannot be governed by fine words." Mr. Holman, "the blind traveller," whom the Rambler met at Lyons, is none the more admired as a traveller for being blind, notwithstanding his own view of the subject. Of the Milanese Exhibition of the paintings of young Italy, he says: "It was intolerably radiant in colour, abounding in skies of deeper blue than Italy rejoices in, woods of the liveliest green, and ships and cities of amber; altogether a collection of gaudy