once more a sweet Singer wearing the likeness of a Man. In humble guise, it is true, and of stature more or less marred in its development; yet not without a genial robustness, strength and valour, built on honesty and love; on the whole, a genuine man, with somewhat of the eye and speech and bearing that beseems a man. To whom all other genuine men, how different soever in subordinate particulars, can gladly hold out the right hand of fellowship. Error involves you in the square-root of a ne- | brings, and as he brings it? Let us be thankgative quantity; try to extract it, or any earthly | ful, were it only for the day of small things. substance or sustenance from it, if you will! Something it is that we have lived to welcome The honourable Member can discover that "there is a reaction," and believe it, and wearisomely reason on it, in spite of all men, while he so pleases, for still his wine and his oil will not fail him but the sooty Brazier, who discovered that brass was green-cheese, has to act on his discovery; finds, therefore, that, singular as it may seem, brass cannot be masticated for dinner, green-cheese will not beat into fireproof dishes that such discovery, therefore, has no legs to stand on, and must even be let fall. Now, take this principle of difference through the entire lives of two men, and calculate what it will amount to! Necessity, moreover, which we here see as the mother of Accuracy, is well known as the mother of Invention. He who wants every thing, must know many things, do many things, to procure even a few: different enough with him, whose indispensable knowledge is this only, that a finger will pull the bell. So that, for all men who live, we may conclude, this Life of Man is a school, wherein the naturally foolish will continue foolish though you bray him in a mortar, but the naturally wise will gather wisdom under every disadvantage. What, meanwhile, must be the condition of an Era, when the highest advantages there become perverted into drawbacks; when, if you take two men of genius, and put the one between the handies of a plough, and mount the other between the painted coronets of a coach-and-four, and bid them both move along, the former shall arrive a Burns, the latter a Byron: two men of talent, and put the one into a Printer's chapel, full of lampblack, tyrannous usage, hard toil, and the other into Oxford universities, with lexicons and libraries, and hired expositors and sumptuous endowments, the former shall come out a Dr. Franklin, the latter a Dr. Parr! However, we are not here to write an Essay on Education, or sing misereres over a "world in its dotage" but simply to say that our CornLaw Rhymer, educated or uneducated as Nature and Art have made him, asks not the smallest patronage or compassion for his rhymes, professes not the smallest contrition for them. Nowise in such attitude does he present himself; not supplicatory, deprecatory, but sturdy, defiant, almost menacing. Wherefore, indeed, should he supplicate or deprecate? It is out of the abundance of the heart that he has spoken; praise or blame cannot make it truer or falser than it already is. By the grace of God this man is sufficient for himself; by his skill in metallurgy, can beat out a toilsome but a manful living, go how it may; has arrived too at that singular audacity of believing what he knows, and acting on it, or writing on it, or thinking on it, without leave asked of any one: there shall he stand, and work, with head and with hand, for himself and the world; blown about by no wind of doctrine; frightened at no Reviewer's shadow; having, in his time, looked substances enough in the face, and remained unfrightened. What is left, therefore, but to take what he The great excellence of our Rhymer, be it understood then, we take to consist even in this, often hinted at already, that he is genuine. Here is an earnest, truth-speaking man; no theorizer, sentimentalizer, but a practical man of work and endeavour, man of sufferance and endurance. The thing that he speaks is not a hearsay, but a thing which he has himself known, and by experience become assured of. He has used his eyes for seeing; uses his tongue for declaring what he has seen. His voice, therefore, among the many noises of our Planet, will deserve its place better than the most; will be well worth some attention. Whom else should we attend to but such! The man who speaks with some half shadow of a Belief, and supposes, and inclines to think; and considers not with undivided soul, what is true, but only what is plausible, and will find audience and recompense; do we not meet him at every street-turning, on all highways and byways; is he not stale, unprofit able, ineffectual, wholly grown a weariness of the flesh? So rare is his opposite in any rank of Literature, or of Life, so very rare, that even in the lowest he is precious. The au thentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement, how small soever: palabra, again, were it a supreme pontiff's, is wind merely, and nothing, or less than nothing. To a considerable degree, this man, we say, has worked himself loose from cant, and conjectural halfness, idle pretences and hallucinations, into a condition of Sincerity. Wherein, perhaps, as above argued, his hard social environment, and fortune to be "a workman born," which brought so many other retardations with it, may have forwarded and accelerated him. That a man, Workman, or Idleman, encompassed, as in these days, with persons in a state of willing or unwilling Insincerity, and necessitated, as man is to learn whatever he does traditionally learn by imitating these, should nevertheless shake off Insincerity, and struggle out from that dim pestiferous marshatmosphere, into a clearer and purer height, betokens in him a certain originality; in which rare gift Force of all kinds is presupposed. To our Rhymer, accordingly, as hinted more than once, vision and determination have not been denied: a rugged, homegrown understanding is in him; whereby, in his own way, he has mastered this and that, and looked into various things, in general honesty and to purpose. 369 sometimes deeply, piercingly, and with a must do, into Politics; is a Reformer, at least Seer's eye. Strong thoughts are not wanting, a stern Complainer, Radical to the heart: his beautiful thoughts; strong and beautiful ex-poetic melody takes an elegiaco-tragical chapressions of thought. As traceable for instance in this new illustration of an old argument, the mischief of Commercial Restrictions: Will not God smite thee black, thou whited wall? Or Nature is a dream unnatural: Look on the clouds, the streams, the earth, the sky; Where is the gorgeous pomp which, yester morn, To feed the all-feeding sea! the molten gold Is flowing pale in Loxley's waters cold, And wake to verdant life hill, vale, and plain. Nature and the doings of men have not passed by this man unheeded, like the endless cloudrack in dull weather; or lightly heeded, like a theatric phantasmagoria; but earnestly inquired into, like a thing of reality; reverently loved and worshipped, as a thing with divine significance in its reality, glimpses of which divineness he has caught and laid to heart. For his vision, as was said, partakes of the genuinely Poetical: he is not a Rhymer and Speaker only, but, in some genuine sense, something of a Poet. Farther we must admit him, what indeed is already herein admitted, to be, if clear-sighted, also brave-hearted. A troublous element is his; a Life of painfulness, toil, insecurity, scarcity, yet he fronts it like a man; yields not to it, tames into some subjection, some order; its wild fearful dinning and tumult, as of a devouring Chaos, becomes a sort of wild war-music for him; wherein too are passages of beauty, of melodious melting softness, of lightness and briskness, even of joy. The stout heart is also a warm and kind one; Affection dwells with Danger, all the holier and the lovelier for such stern environment. A working man is this; yet, as we said, a man: in his sort, a courageous, much loving, faithfully enduring and endeavouring man. What such a one, so gifted and so placed, shall say to a Time like ours; how he will fashion himself into peace, or war, or armed neutrality, with the world and his fellow men, and work out his course in joy and grief, in victory and defeat, is a question worth asking: which in these three little Volumes partly receives answer. He has turned, as all thinkers up to a very high and rare order in these days! 47 racter: much of him is converted into Hostility, and grim, hardly-suppressed Indignation, such as Right long denied, Hope long deferred, may awaken in the kindliest heart. Not yet as a rebel against any thing does he stand; but as a free man, and the spokesman of free men, not far from rebelling against much; with sorrowful, appealing dew, yet also with incipient lightning, in his eyes; whom it were not desirable to provoke into rebellion. He says in Vulcanic dialect, his feelings have been hammered till they are cold-short; so they will no longer bend; "they snap, and fly off,"-in the face of the hammerer. Not unnatural, though lamentable! Nevertheless, under all disguises of the Radical, the Poet is still recognisable: a certain music breathes through all dissonances, as the prophecy and ground-tone of returning harmony; the man, as we said, is of a poetical nature. The To his Political Philosophy there is perhaps no great importance attachable. He feels, as all men that live must do, the disorganization, and hard-grinding, unequal pressure of the Social Affairs; but sees into it only a very little farther than far inferior men do. frightful condition of a Time, when public and private Principle, as the word was once understood, having gone out of sight, and Self-inscramble, as it could and would, Difficulties terest being left to plot, and struggle, and had accumulated till they were no longer to be borne, and the spirit that should have fronted and conquered them seemed to have forsaken the world;—when the Rich, as the utmost they could resolve on, had ceased to govern, and the Poor, in their fast-accumulating numbers, and ever-widening complexities, had ceased to be able to do without governing; and now the plan of " Competition" and "Laissez-faire" was, on every side, approaching its consummation; wants and perils, stood grimly distrustful of and each bound up in the circle of his own his neighbour, and the distracted Commonweal was a Common-wo, and to all men it became apparent that the end was drawing nigh :-all this black aspect of Ruin and Decay, visible enough, experimentally known to our Sheffield friend, he calls by the name of "CornLaw," and expects to be in good part delivered from, were the accursed Bread-tax repealed. here so emphatically set forth, there is not In this system of political Doctrine, even as much of novelty. Radicals we have many; loud enough on this and other grievances; the removal of which is to be the one thing needful. The deep, wide flood of Bitterness, and Hope becoming hopeless, lies acrid, corrosive through any orifice Accident may open: through in every bosom; and flows fiercely enough Law Reform, Legislative Reform, Poor Laws, want of Poor Laws, Tithes, Game Laws, or, as we see here, Corn Laws. Whereby indeed only this becomes clear, that a deep, wide flood of evil does exist and corrode; from which, in all ways, blindly and seeingly, men seek deliverance, and cannot rest till they find it; least of all till they know what part and proportion of it is to be found. But with us foolish sons | black colours of Life, even as here painted, and of Adam this is ever the way; some evil that lies nearest us, be it a chronic sickness, or but a smoky chimney, is ever the acme and sumtotal of all evil: the black hydra that shuts us out from a Promised Land: and so, in poor Mr. Shandy's fashion, must we "shift from trouble to trouble, and from side to side; button up one cause of vexation, and unbutton another." brooded over, do not hide from him that a God is the Author and sustainer thereof; that God's world, if made a House of Imprisonment, can also be a House of Prayer; wherein for the weary and heavy-laden, Pity and Hope are not altogether cut away. It is chiefly in virtue of this inward temper of heart, with the clear disposition and adThus for our keen-hearted singer, and suf- justment which for all else results therefrom, ferer, has "the Bread-tax," in itself a consider- that our Radical attains to be Poetical; that the able but no immeasurable smoke-pillar, swoln harsh groanings, contentions, upbraidings, of out to be a world embracing Darkness, that one who unhappily has felt constrained to darkens and suffocates the whole Earth, and has adopt such mode of utterance, become ennobled blotted out the heavenly stars. Into the merit into something of music. If a land of bondof the Corn Laws, which has often been dis- age, this is still his Father's land, and the cussed, in fit season, by competent hands, we bondage endures not for ever. As worshipper do not enter here; least of all in the way of and believer, the captive can look with seeing argument, in the way of blame, towards one eye: the aspect of the Infinite Universe still who, if he read such merit with some emphasis fills him with an infinite feeling; his chains, "on the scantier trenchers of his children," were it but for moments, fall away; he soars may well be pardoned. That the "Bread-tax," free aloft, and the sunny regions of Poesy and with various other taxes, may ere long be Freedom gleam golden afar on the widened altered and abrogated, and the Corn Trade be- horizon. Gleamings we say, prophetic dawncome as free as the poorest "bread-taxedings, from those far regions, spring up for him ; drudge" could wish "it, or the richest satrap nay, beams of actual radiance. In his ruggedbread-tax-fed" could fear it, seems no extrava-ness, and dim contractedness, (rather of place gant hypothesis: would that the mad Time could, by such simple hellebore-dose, be healed! Alas, for the diseases of a "world lying in wickedness," in heart-sickness and atrophy, quite another alcahest is needed;-a long, painful course of medicine and regimen, surgery and physic, not yet specified or indicated in the Royal-College Books! But if there is little novelty in our friend's Political Philosophy, there is some in his political Feeling and Poetry. The peculiarity of this Radical is, that with all his stormful destructiveness, he combines a decided loyalty and faith. If he despise and trample under foot on the one hand, he exalts and reverences on the other: the "landed pauper in his coachand-four" rolls all the more glaringly, contrasted with the "Rockinghams and Savilles" of the past, with the "Lansdowns and Fitzwilliams," many a " Wentworth's lord," still "a blessing" to the present. This man, indeed, has in him the root of all reverence,-a principle of Religion. He believes in a Godhead, not with the lips only, but apparently with the heart; who, as has been written, and often felt, " reveals Himself in Parents, in all true Teachers, and Rulers,"-as in false Teachers and Rulers quite Another may be revealed! Our Rhymer, it would seem, is no Methodist: far enough from it. He makes "the Ranter," in his hotheaded way, exclaim over "The hundred Popes of England's Jesuitry;" and add., by way of note, in his own person, some still stronger sayings: How "this baneful corporation," "dismal as its Reign of Terror is, and long armed its Holy Inquisition, must condescend to learn and teach what is useful, or go where all nuisances go." As little perhaps is he a Churchman; the "Cadi-Dervish" being nowise to his mind. Scarcely, however, if at all, does he show aversion to the Church as Church; or, among his many griefs, touch upon Tithes as one. But, in any case, the than of organ,) he is not without touches of a feeling and vision, which, even in the strictest sense, is to be named poetical. One deeply poetical idea, above all others, seems to have taken hold of him: the idea of TIME. As was natural to a poetic soul, with few objects of Art in its environment, and driven inward, rather than invited outward, for occupation. This deep mystery of ever-flowing Time; "bringing forth," and as the Ancients wisely fabled, “devouring” what it has brought forth; rushing on, in us, yet above us, all uncontrollable by us; and under it, dimly visible athwart it, the bottomless Eternal;-this is, indeed, what we may call the Primary idea of Poetry: the first that introduces itself into the poetic mind. As here: "The bee shall seek to settle on his hand, Who numbers worlds and writes their names in light, And not the first idea only, but the greatest, properly the parent of all others. For if it can rise in the remotest ages, in the rudest states of culture, wherever an "inspired thinker" happens to exist, it connects itself still with all great things; with the highest results of new Philosophy, as of primeval Theology: and for the Poet, in particular, is as the life-element wherein alone his concep tions can take poetic form, and the whole world make even Corn-Laws rhyme, we require of become miraculous and magical. "We are such stuff As Dreams are made of: and our little life Figure that, believe that, O Reader; then say whether the Arabian Tales seem wonderful! "Rounded with a sleep, (mit Schlaf umgeben)!" says Jean Paul: "these three words created whole volumes in me." Tc turn now on our worthy Rhymer, who has brougni us so much, and stingily insist on his errors and shortcomings, were no honest procedure. We had the whole poetical encyclopædia to draw upon, and say commodiously, Such and such an item is not here; of which encyclopædia the highest genius can fill but a portion. With much merit, far from common in his time, he is not without something of the faults of his time. We praised him for originality; yet is there a certain remainder of imitation in him; a tang of the Circulating Libraries, as in Sancho's wine, with its key and thong, there was a tang of iron and leather. To be reminded of Crabbe, with his truthful severity of style, in such a place, we cannot object; but what if there were a slight bravura dash of the fair tuneful Hemans? Still more, what have we to do with Byron, and his fierce vociferous mouthings, whether "passionate," or not passionate and only theatrical? King Cambyses' vein is, after all, but a worthless one; no vein for a wise man. Strength, if that be the thing aimed at, does not manifest itself in spasms, but in stout bearing of burdens. Our Author says, "It is too bad to exalt into a hero the coxcomb who would have gone into hysterics if a tailor had laughed at him." Walk not in his footsteps, then, we say, whether as hero or as singer; repent a little, for example, over somewhat in that fuliginous, blue-flaming, pitch-and-sulphur "Dream of Enoch Wray," and write the next otherwise. We mean no imitation in a bad palpable sense; only that there is a tone of such occasionally audible; which ought to be removed; -of which, in any case, we make not much. Imitation is a leaning on something foreign; incompleteness of individual development, defect of free utterance. From the same source, spring most of our Author's faults; in particular, his worst, which after all is intrinsically a defect of manner. He has little or no Humour. Without Humour of character he cannot well be; but it has not yet got to utterance. Thus, where he has mean things to deal with, he knows not how to deal with them; oftenest deals with them more or less meanly. In his vituperative prose Notes, he seems embarrassed; and but ill hides his embarrassment, under an air of predetermined sarcasm, of knowing briskness, almost of vulgar pertness. He says, he cannot help it; he is poor, hardworked, and" soot is soot." True, indeed; yet there is no connection between Poverty and Discourtesy; which latter originates in Dullness alone. Courtesy is the due of Man to Man; not of suit of clothes to suit of clothes. He who could master so many things, and him this further thing,-a bearing worthy of himself, and of the order he belongs to,-the highest and most ancient of all orders, that of Manhood. A pert snappishness is no manner for a brave man ; and then the manner so soon influences the matter; a far worse result. Let him speak wise things, and speak them wisely; which latter may be done in many dialects, grave and gay, only in the snappish seldom or never. The truth is, as might have been expected, there is still much lying in him to be developed; the hope of which development it were rather sad to abandon. Why, for example, should not his view of the world, his knowledge of what is and has been in the world, indefinitely extend itself? Were he merely the "uneducated Poet," we should say, he had read largely; as he is not such, we say, Read still more, much more largely. Books enough there are in England, and of quite another weight and worth than that circulating-library sort; may be procured too, may be read, even by a hard-worked man; for what man (either in God's service or the Devil's, as himself chooses it) is not hard-worked? But here again, where there is a will there is a way. True, our friend is no longer in his teens; yet still, as would seem, in the vigour of his years: we hope too that his mind is not finally shut in, but of the improvable and enlargeable sort. If Alfieri (also kept busy enough, with horsebreaking and what not) learned Greek after he was fifty, why is the Corn-Law Rhymer too old to learn? However, be in the future what there may, our Rhymer has already done what was much more difficult, and better than reading printed books;-looked into the great prophetic-manuscript Book of Existence, and read little passages there. Here, for example, is a sentence tolerably spelled: "Where toils the Mill by ancient woods embraced, "Whose trade is Poaching! Honest Jem works not 4 With him they feel the majesty of might, It is rustic, rude existence; barren moors, with the smoke of Forges rising over the waste expanse. Alas, no Arcadia; but the actual dwelling-place of actual toil-grimed sons of Tubal-cain: yet are there blossoms and the wild natural fragrance of gorse and broom; yet has the Craftsman pauses in his toil; the Craftsman to has an inheritance in Earth; and even in Heaven. "Light! All is not corrupt, for thou art pure, A guide no more, I seem to want a guide, And when thou com'st, less silent are the fields, tic-Tragical. It is said, "the good actor soon makes us forget the bad theatre, were it but a barn; while, again, nothing renders so apparent the badness of the bad actor as a theatre of peculiar excellence." How much more in a theatre and drama such as these of Life itself! One other item, however, we must note in that ill-decorated Sheffield theatre: the back-scene and bottom-decoration of it all; which is no other than a Workhouse. Alas, the Workhouse is the bourne whither all these actors and workers are bound; whence none that has once passed it returns! A bodeful sound, like the rustle of approaching world-devouring tornadoes, quivers through their whole exist ence; and the voice of it is, Pauperism! The thanksgiving they offer up to Heaven is, that they are not yet Paupers; the earnest cry of their prayer is, that "God would shield them from the bitterness of Parish Pay." Mournful enough, that a white European Man must pray wistfully for what the horse he drives is sure of,-That the strain of his whole faculties may not fail to earn him food and lodging. Mournful that a gallant manly spirit, with an eye to discern the world, a heart to reverence it, a hand cunning and willing to labour in it, must be haunted with such a fear. The grim end of it all, Beggary! A soul loathing, what true souls ever loathe, Dependence, help from the unworthy to help; yet sucked into the world-whirlpool,-able to do no other: the highest in man's heart struggling vainly against the lowest in man's destiny! In good truth, if many a sickly and sulky Byron, or Byronlet, glooming over the woes of exist ence, and how unworthy God's Universe is to have so distinguished a resident, could transport himself into the patched coat and sooty apron of a Sheffield Blacksmith, made with as strange faculties and feelings as he, made by God Almighty all one as he was,-it would throw a light on much for him. Meanwhile, is it not frightful as well as mournful to consider how the wide-spread evil is spreading wider and wider? Most persons, who have had eyes to look with, may have verified, in their own circle, the statement of Through whose sweet paths the toil-freed townsman this Sheffield Eye-witness, and "from their steals, To him the very air a banquet yields. His little Boys are with him, seeking flowers, own knowledge and observation fearlessly declare that the little master-manufacturer," that the working man generally, "is in a much worse condition than he was in twenty-five years ago." Unhappily, the fact is too plain; the reason and scientific necessity of it is too plain. In this state of things, every new man is a new misfortune; every new market a new complexity; the chapter of chances grows ever more incalculable; the hungry gamesters (whose stake is their life) are ever increasing in numbers; the world-movement rolls on: by what method shall the weak and help-needing, who has none to help him, withstand it? Alas, how many brave hearts, ground to pieces in that unequal battle, have already sunk; in every sinking heart, a Tragedy, less famous than that of the Sons of Atreus; wherein, however, if no "kingly house," yet a manly house went to the dust, and a whole manly "lineage was swept away." Must it grow worse and worse till the last brave heart is |