Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William Lovett) vol.1 #13 (27 Mar 1847).
An Appeal for the Irish Peasantry; with Facts, of paramount advantage to the Iron-Masters, Manufacturers, and Agriculturists of Englund, respecting the value of Peat and Peat Charcoal, as a fuel and as a fertilizer. By Jasper W. Rogers, C.E. London: Effingham Wilson, 1847.
We strongly recommend this little volume to our readers, as opening up a very clear and certain way to the extinction of the evils of Ireland. It points out the natural wealth of Ireland as a source of profit to English capitalists; and especially its peat bogs, as one of the most certain sources of profitable speculation in the united kingdom. The value of this enormous storehouse of peat, which Ireland is, is made obvious by the plainest calculations; it is, moreover, shown that when this peat is removed, the ground is ready to produce the richest crops; and, lastly, that the Irish people, if employed for money wages, will work as hard as anybody can desire. Mr. Rogers shows that the poor peasantry have been paid, not in money, but by a patch of potato-ground, at a high nominal rent: and that thus the truck-system has been in constant operation throughout Ireland in its very worst shape. From personal knowledge of these facts, we can and do most earnestly recommend Mr. Rogers's work to general attention.
The Black-gown Papers. By L. Mariotti. 2 vols. Wiley and Putnam.
Signor Mariotti is no common writer—we speak of the subject-matter of his works; nor must we pass over his pure English, which is singularly correct, elegant, and often even eloquent. His volumes on "Italy, Past and Present," won for him a deservedly high reputation; nor will this, though not of as high a character, tend to decrease it.
Mariotti is one of that noble band of Italian refugees whose great intellect and energetic and useful lives amongst us have done more than anything else to turn the mind of the English public towards the sufferings and oppressions of Italy. It is with pleasure that we hear Mariotti say, in the dedication of these volumes to Lady Morgan, "For the last six years English hospitality, warm, free, unobtrusive, has encompassed me. The air of true freedom has nerved and strengthened me even to regeneration. My new home has been endeared to me, till it has Anglicised my very feeling and thought." The exile and suffering of these good and truly great men have not been in vain either for their own country, or for ours.
The one fault of the volumes now before us is their title, and the sort of little framework into which these sketches are set. Pass these, and the sketches themselves are of deep interest, and most of them full of great worth to humanity. We know not when we ever were more painfully rivetted over any pages than over those which give the history of the poor Italian organ-boy. It bears the stamp of truth in every word—except it be in the end, which we fear could not have been as happy and cheering as the kind-hearted author—we suspect in pity to the reader—chose to make it. Histories of this kind, in which the tyranny of man to man is chronicled with a stern and truthful pen, are benefits conferred on society, whose business it then becomes to see that an end is put to them. Had Signor Mariotti written only this one heart-rending story, he would have deserved our cordial thanks—and he has these for other good works also.
Works of George Sand. Translated by Miss Hays and others. Vol. III. Andre. Churton.
Miss Hays is a pure and high-minded woman, and we believe she is quite aware that she has undertaken a meritorious, but not the less a perilous labour, in making the English public acquainted with the writings of George Sand. As she is obliged to call in the assistance of other translators, we trust she will be careful to exercise the authority and judgment of an editor who is under a serious responsibility to the public. There are two ways of giving us George Sand. The one is to give us her better self—all that fine mass of pure and splendid writing which abounds in her, and which is the bulk. The other is, to give us the whole, good and bad. If she adopt the former course, she will render a great service to us; if the latter, we foresee the coming of storms, shoals, and quicksands. The Rubicon is not yet passed; the perils are behind; and if a very wise course be not pursued, there will arise such an outcry in the regions of critic-land as will too late be heard. If, therefore, our voice could have any weight with a work and a lady to whom we wish every success, we would say—take all the good, and leave all the bad. Leave that which even in France has not been tolerated without much offence. The question which concerns us is not that we have whatever Madame Dudevant has chosen to write, but whatever is worthy of her and of us. We shall then have a noble work, brilliant with genius, with acute, original, and independent thought: a mass of composition, warm with the truest human sympathies, and glorious with the hues of woman's finer intellect.
We have felt bound to make these remarks on reading this exquisite story of Andre. It is blotted by expressions, and one or two scenes, which by a little management it might have been freed from. There is a strong way, and a delicate way, even of expressing things, which a translator should regard, and we speak after no ordinary experience. In this translation the strong way has been adopted, and we regret it. This shows itself occasionally in the matter of mere phraseology. French usage is very different to English usage, and what is tolerable in one is often not admissible in the other.
Having made these remarks, however, in the best feeling, we shall freely praise or condemn as we find the work proceed. The present translation is from the hand of Miss Ashurst, whose abilities have long been known to us. As a whole, it does her the greatest credit, being much superior, in our judgment, to her translation of the Mosaic Workers. It is vigorous, life-like, and generally correct. It will, however, tax the highest powers of the translators of George Sand, be they who they may, to transfuse into our tongue the fervid eloquence of this extraordinary woman unimpaired. May they achieve that great object!
The Poetical Works of William Motherwell; with a Memoir. By James McConechy, Esq. Second Edition. Glasgow: David Robertson.
Mr. Robertson has rendered a good service to the lovers of genius by issuing this new and enlarged edition of the works of a true but short-lived poet; and enriching it with what was much wanted, a good memoir of him. The genius of Motherwell was for the old and legendary; and in particular for the heroic legends of the north. There are few such perfect and spirited specimens of the Danish legend and war-song as those of Motherwell. "The Battle Flag of Sigurd;" "The Wooing Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim;" and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Raudi;" might be free and fine translations from the ancient Scalds, instead of pure modern compositions, They will be remembered by many of our readers as published during Motherwell's life-time, and those to whom they are unknown will thank us for commending them to their acquaintance.
In almost all the other poems of Motherwell we find the same tendency to the past and the chivalric. Others again are quaint after the fashion of the religious writers of the time of the Commonwealth, as "The Solemn Song of a Righteous Hearte." His "Jeanie Morrison," the love of his boyhood, is full of true tenderness; and besides a number of sweet songs and miscellaneous pieces, never before published, there are many posthumous poems, some of them of singular beauty, as that of "Clerke Richard and Maid Margaret." Our space does not permit extract, but we must give one or two stanzas from a poem "I am not sad," because it is remarkably prophetic of his actual fate. Motherwell lies in the Necropolis of Glasgow, without a stone to mark the spot. We are glad to see that the editor speaks out almost as freely on this fact as Mr. Howitt did-in his "Homes and Haunts of the Poets." Surely this disgrace to Glasgow will now be removed.
I am not sad, though sadness seem
At times to cloud my brow;
I cherished once a foolish dream—
Thank heaven 'tis not so now.
Truth's sunshine broke,
And I awoke
To feel 'twas right to bow
To Fate's decree, and this my doom,
The darkness of a Nameless Tomb.
I grieve not, though a tear may fill
This glazed and vacant eye;
Old thoughts will rise do what we will,
But soon again they die;
An idle gush
And all is hush,
The fount is soon run dry;
And cheerly now I meet my doom,
The darkness of a Nameless Tomb.
The Life of the Rev. John Williams, Missionary to Polynesia. By Ebenezer Prout. Fourth Thousand. London: Snow, Paternoster-row. 1847.
Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa. By Robert Moffatt. Twenty-three years an agent of the London Missionary Society in that continent. Fourteenth Thousand. London: Snow, Paternoster-row.
These are cheap reprints of two deeply interesting works, containing the matter of many ordinary volumes, well printed, and containing also portraits of the chief actors in them, and wood-cuts. Independently of the vast importance of the subjects introduced, for those who are desirous only to occupy the time in some entertaining volume, we know of no books more attractive; and when we reflect what is now doing in the very scenes both in South Africa and Otaheite, where the British Missionaries have laboured so many years to establish peace and civilization, we feel it difficult to restrain our indignation. Especially lies a heavy debt against the English government for permitting the French to reduce to a hell of crime and horror that fair island, which, under the care of the lamented John Williams and other Christian labourers, bade fair to become a paradise.
The Novitiate; or the Jesuit in Training. A Personal Narrative. By Andrew Steinmetz. Second Edition. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1847.
The Jesuit in the Family. By Andrew Steinmetz. Smith, Elder, and Co. 1847.
Mr. Steinmetz in these curious volumes shows from his own personal experience that the Jesuits are already well-known; that the character and accounts of them and their system, which from time to time have been given to the world, are correct. That they are trained carefully to perfect obedience in the army of the popedom, are drilled as thoroughly as any other soldiers, and that the object is the same as that for which all other armies are employed, the usurpation of a false power over men; the destruction of liberty, physical and intellectual; and the obstruction of all that progress of the human race for which the best men and minds are everywhere labouring. He tells us that the Jesuits are everywhere, in all professions and disguises, and that nothing is able to turn them from their great enterprise, the restoration of England to the Romish faith. No doubt of it; but mass is not yet sung in Westminster Abbey; and if people will only read such works as these carefully, it never will. We earnestly recommend them; and have the utmost faith in the conscientious integrity of the writer. They have every impress of truth, and are fraught with the most solemn warnings.
Death's Soliloquy; a Poem. By Thomas Eagles. London: Whittaker & Co.
This is truly an Eagle's flight! It is the very thing for an ill-natured critic to get hold of. For ourselves, we do not know when we have had such a storm about our ears. We seem deafened with the roar of winds, and the hissing of serpents. We are blown, and tossed, and dinned, and dazed, with the terrors of a lugubrious landscape, filled with whirlwinds and snakes, and the most tremendous hail-storm of new words. The English language has no terms large enough for Mr. Eagles' ideas; he pours out upon us the most sesquipedalian terms of the Latin dictionary. If there be anywhere a nation lamenting its defective vocabulary, we advise it to send for Mr. Eagles, who would certainly manufacture a whole language to order any time. The new coinage of phraseology, which he flings out by shovelfuls, is fearfully astounding. We have squamous serpents, limous streams, noises strange and horrisonous, strong procillous blasts, bibulous marshes, mordacious blasts, siccific gales, phagedenous pests, mounts iguivomous, setaceous grass, glandiferous oaks, callous waves, and scrous clouds. These, any one may conceive, make a startling landscape enough; but when to these every monster and monstrosity that the imagination is capable of spawning is congregated in it, never was there such frightful chaos. Take, good reader, a specimen, and sustain it as you can.
The ignis fatuus was gambolling about in this congenial creation; taking "wide unsteady leaps," "bending the rotten reed-stems in its track," and it would,
Mongst scaturiginous uplands then descend
in one tremendous spring to valleys low
Where rotten swamps ferment; and leap, and bend,
And dance, and shoot above the lagging flow
Of muddy water o'er the lubric brow
Of mouldering rocks; and serpents venenose
Did glide and hiss as past the flame did go,
And gleamed their haunts within, tenebricose;
And scorpions, centipedes, did wake up from repose.
By mildew blight, the foliage on the moor,
And hurled were on before the bursting blast
Like pappous seed; the desert's scabrous floor
Emitted sound, as by the wind was cast,
As though a host of clouds had been outcast,—
Grandirous clouds, from th' concave's edifice,
And hurled their hail-load, wondering, man to gast,
In one huge mass, upon a sea of ice:
And hollow caverns loud did echo back the voice
Of god of storm with wild, continued roar:
And limous lakes, thick, stagnant, doubly foul,
Grew animose, and high their waves did pour;
And in the tempest stenches dreadful stole,
Which hovered round and did pervade the whole,
And crept through every crevice, cavern, dell;
And noise of loosened stones, as they did roll
From mountains scopulous, did harshly swell
Upon the wind so wild, it seemed the moan of hell.
Well, "belligerous thunders" burst through "caves soniferous," and
the tempest's scud
Trembles and boils within the phantom's track,
And spume arises round, thick, foul,—as Sandarack!
And if that be not enough for one exhibition, we do not know what is. It is true the poet afterwards subsides into sunshine and a sweet landscape, where
Luscious music gushes wild among
Puniceous blooms, which 'mid the rushes dance,
And querimonious birds wail on the sainfoin's lance.