CRITIQUE ON "A FROG HE WOULD A-WOOING GO." as he listens to the bewitching tones of the seductive Mustella. But mark the sequel :— "Ruin from Man is most concealed when near, And sends the dreadful tidings in the blow.” * 31 joyed in his native marshes, might cross his mind at this moment; away, therefore, he flies, but with unsteady footsteps, and a brain heated by the effects of his midnight orgies; In the midst of their revelry the hand-writing he arrives at the brink of a stream, and appears on the wall! "As they were thus a merry-making, A Cat and her Kittens came tumbling in." Oh, fatal irruption! oh, dire event! but oh, just visitation! See how the wicked are discomforted! Behold what a picture of confusion and dismay! "The cat she seized the rat by the crown." Without pause or stay, like the demon-statue embracing the reprobate and infidel Don Juan, the chief delinquent is seized and hurled to perdition; the female accomplice is speedily involved in the same fate. The myrmidons of justice rush on with destroying rage: "The kittens they pulled the little mouse down!" How quaintly the poet describes the condition of his hero: "This put Mr. Frog in a terrible fright!" But the ruling passion is strong, even in his extremity. Already has fashionable life imparted the cold chill of selfishness to his character; in the midst of this wild disorder, he forgets the misfortunes of his quondam friends, and remembers only the loss he should sustain, were he to leave behind him the chief ornament of his person : "So he took up his hat, and,-" unable to repel a faint touch of bacchanalian humour, -he wished them good night!" laughing in his sleeve at his escape, and rejoicing in the dispensation which rendered him obnoxious, as food, to either cat or kitten. Perhaps, too, a thought of the security he en * Young. plunges in the wave, to cool his feverish limbs, and recover from his debauch. But the climax of events is at hand. "As he was crossing over a brook." We pause as we read, in momentary expectation of some scene of horror! the blood curdles by anticipation! a new actor appears before us. "A lily-white duck" comes sailing, like some huge kraken, or snow wreath, the catastrophe is at hand! "Audivere, Dii, audivere, Lyce!" The vengeance of the gods is at length arrived! "A lily-white duck came and gobbled him up." The curtain falls upon the scene; "He dies, and makes no sign." How feeling is the moral couched in the concluding stanza :— "So here's an end of one, two, and three, The rat, the mouse, and the little froggy." The uncertainty of life; the empty joys of the world; the overwhelming punishment which awaits the guilty: how clearly are they all conveyed in these two simple lines. As we peruse them, we sigh over the frailties of our nature, and drop a tear to the memory of the departed! "If they were guilty their lives paid for wrong; And as we muse upon their fate, "striking our pensive bosoms," we assent to the pathetic exclamation of the recording bard, "Heighho says Anthony Rowley." MAX. WHY speaks such grief that little word, It tells of parting from the lov'd, ADIEU.* Even hardened hearts can scarce suppress The heart, as mem'ry flings its dream, Adieu! Alas, how sad that word "Tis sorrow's darkest hour, When all the loving and the lov'd Must feel its mournful power. By a young lady not yet twelve years old. ON rejoining my friends, I found them still in brooding discussion of the phenomenon of the present age, novel writing. "Persons," said Evelyn, "who have no judgment which is properly their own, and whose perceptions, even, are merely the echoes of common opinion (and such persons form nine-tenths of mankind), have no idea that, in this walk of art, we are living in an era as extraordinary and memorable as hat which elsewhere, and in another line, produced the works of Correggio and Raphael; an age which probably will never return, while its productions will be imperishable. Still less are they aware that, for the last twenty years and upwards, prose works of imagination have been really assuming a power, as agents in the great work of moral improvement, in the gradual re-modelling of the human character and sensibilities, compared with which, all direct moral instruction, or what is so called, is becoming trifling and contemptible. And they who can only see the workings of Providence in those narrow and conventional tracks, in which they have been taught to recognise it, or to fancy it, would not even understand you, if you were to tell them that your main hopes, in this age of accumulating problem as to the prospects of mankind, are built upon the extraordinary and almost miraculous character of moral instrumentality, which has been stamped upon the major part of this important section of public instruction; while the tendency of almost every other influential agency of modern times has been at least equivocal, if not pernicious." "I suspect," said Falkland, "that they would even question the soundness of your morality if you were to attempt to open their eyes." "With some persons," rejoined Evelyn, "all morality consists in abstaining from the seven deadly sins. They forget that crimes are, comparatively, the remote incidents of human life; and that its main material is composed of propensities, of habits, of sensibilities, of perceptions, and of delicate and complicated duties, relations, and dependencies; while its main value consists in the model upon which all these are formed and executed, and its accurate adjustment to the circumstances and position of the individual. Mere didactic instruction is too general to apply itself to these, while it fails to realise the actual incidents and scenes upon which character is to be enacted; and hence, as the vulgar phrase is, it goes in at one ear and out at the other.' "But I was directing my attention rather to the wondrous mystery of art, which the higher order of these works exhibit; for it has been a favourite hobby of mine to attempt to analyse and discover the secret of their formation, as a painter would pore into the mysteries of a first-rate Titian or Salvator Rosa. The highest productions of art, however, are always inscrutable to the bystander; and it is only when we come down to second-rate genius, that its mode of working can be detected, or that you can discover the secret of the handling. And here, I think I could give a beginner some hints. "The first essential is to get your mind, imagination, and memory, thoroughly imbued with the particular element of life in which your scene is to be laid; and if this be one foreign to your own experience, or of a past time, you can only do that by extensively reading, and concentrating your mind upon the historical or illustrative literature of the place or period. In this operation, a person of very extensive reading can track most of our first novelists; and it is sometimes amusing to observe from what very trivial, as well as recondite sources a clever writer will draw materials. In the third volume, for instance, of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, you may track its talented author throughout the whole of Jeannie Deans's journey to London, in the Appendix of Local Proverbs, &c. to Grose's Provincial Glossary. But see the richness of effect, which such a mind as his gave to these common-place vulgarities. "I should add, that to the successful effect of some of our modern novel writing, much more depends than most people are aware of, upon what may be called the intonation, or the key, in which the writer pitches his narrative. Writers are, in this respect, like church organs: each has some key, in which he harmonises best. The peculiar sentiment of each man's soul has an answering tone in style; and unless he happen to hit this, the full effect is not given. A major key will not express the sentiment which is conceived in a minor one, nor will a sharp key always do the work of a flat one. There is a time, too, in style, and a disposal and arrangement of the rests, upon which much of the success of effect depends." "Can you give any strong illustration of your particular meaning?" enquired Falkland. "I know not that I could do better than refer to the Lights and Shades of Scottish Life.' Nearly the whole effectiveness of that writer's productions-genius being given -may be stated as dependent upon the peculiar pitch or key in which he has set his compositions, and its precise adaptation to the tone of his sentiment. Although this tone is not strictly true to the verity of life, yet aided by its perfect correspondency to his style it produces great effect, and is admirably adapted to a combination of sweetness and pathos. But nerve or raciness is quite out of the question; and the sweetness is of a nature that palls after a time. "I think if any one will take the trouble to impregnate his mind and his ear with the particular pitch of this writer, and will sit down under that state of impregnation, he will find it not very difficult to produce something of his effect by that aid only, without having any resort to Covenanters or Cameronians; and I have the tone so strongly upon my ear at this moment, that if you will trouble yourself to hold the pen, (which you wield so rapidly,) for ten minutes, I think I could myself exemplify it by an off-hand specimen." Amused at the idea, Falkland caught up an album from the table at which they were sitting, and rapidly took down the following sentences: "The attachment of Malcolm and Ellen Graham was of a more intense and romantic order than ordinarily characterises the affection of first cousins. Perhaps, the familiar intercourse, from youth upwards, which persons in so near relationship commonly enjoy, and the homely knowledge of each other which that intercourse affords, causes the mantle of love to descend upon them rather in the sober mood which blesses the friendship and intimacy of married life, than in that idolatrous allegiance and subjection of the heart, in which the existence of these two individuals was wrapped up and enveloped. "The attachment of Malcolm Graham to Ellen, I should perhaps have said; for though the devotedness and fidelity of Ellen Graham to him with whom she had-exchanged vows was such, that had anything befallen Malcolm she would undoubtedly have sunk into a state of stricken heartedness, from which the world and life would never have wholly recalled her; yet there was a moral altitude, and an unearthly tone in the spirit of Ellen Graham, which, while it rendered still more idolatrous and reverential the love of her betrothed cousin, perhaps excluded much of the dominion of passion from her own emotions towards him. "Ellen Graham was not a methodist. Her piety represented God, perhaps, more as an object of undefinable love and aspiration, whose constant presence was at once a certain protection from harm, and an invincible obstacle to wrong doing, than as a being with the terrors of whose wrath, or the sunshine of whose grace, she was familiarised in all the terms of the dictionary. But it cannot be denied that her pure and uplifted thoughts were directed towards that heaven, which she contemplated as the certain and actual abode of two loved parental images, (one of pure idea, and the other of long-known and treasured experience,) quite as often as to any of the scenes of actual existence which were passing around her, and in which she bore her part. "The attachment of Malcolm and Ellen Graham was recognised and approved by all their kindred; but so long a succession of casual obstacles had occurred to prevent their nuptials, that they had both been brought in some measure to regard each other as though they were all that they would ever be to one another, rather than as persons about to commence a career of joy and union, to which all their thoughts were tumultuously carried. The tremors of expectation had been so often and so long deferred, that their minds had settled into a sort of fixedness with regard to each other, which found its food and its life in a species of religious contemplationI am afraid I must say adorement, of the abstraction which mingled itself with all the thoughts of each. "Ellen Graham indeed was not, at any time, one of those persons, whose recognised connexion with a young man of her own age and sphere of life would have filled with those ideas, which occupy the private thoughts of most young females about to be married. She never pictured herself hanging in graceful whiteness upon a husband's arm, along the walks of a watering place, and amid the gaze of whispering promenaders. Still less did her thoughts dwell on opening house, and hiring servants, and purchasing costly furniture, and all the other prerogatives of a newly married woman. It was quite certain that she had never discussed "the wedding order," and that none of her female friends had ever detected her in raising enquiries upon occult points of housekeeping. Let not Ellen Graham be misunderstood. To the duties, the requirements, and the enjoyments which her situation would have occasioned, she would have been found ready and susceptible; but she had contemplated the married life rather as the unavoidable and natural result of that affection and congeniality which made separatedness an infliction, and as a career of mutually inspiring virtue and energy, than as a source of novel advantages, or increased import ance. "In the breast of Malcolm Graham-and in what man about to be married to the object of his affections is it otherwise?—the thoughts of the approaching "mystery of joy and union" had been much more complicated and had even rioted in detail. The last images of the night's wanderings, and the first of the morning's wakings, had been of that ecstatic period in the life of man, when all the tumults and anxieties of courtship passed and obliterated for ever, he beholds himself the loved and recognised possessor, guardian, and companion of the angel spirit, and the tender form which he has sought and won. The boundless confidence, the entire repose, the solid, fearless joy, the glowing consciousness; all had been the deep and treasured contemplations of his secret hours; and in the power of thought, solitude had been to him a joy and a virtue. But these energies of the heart had been as it were exhausted in the lapse of years of remediless delay; and the streams of affection, thus cheated of their fulfilment, had taken a tone more superstitious; and the heart had found its solace in abstractions not less intense, but perhaps less true to the actual realities of human life. "While these years of hope deferred' had been passing over the heads of Malcolm and Ellen Graham, trial and heart-breaking had fallen sudden and heavily upon the family, in which Ellen had found her home from the hour of her widowed father's departure. To these, his best-loved kindred, she had been consigned by him, not as a burthen, but as a gift; of which he had known the value too well to deem that others could ever prize it less. Much as the worth of Ellen Graham had been felt in the days of prosperity and enjoyment, it was now that sorrow and perturbation had come upon them, that the strength and power of her character was really perceived, and that she was found to be the rock to which they clung in the shipwreck which surrounded them. “Mr. Jervis, of Jervis Wood, was a man, the natural structure of whose mind disposed him rather to borrow a tone from some higher pitched spirit, than to strike out his own course, and evidence his own stability of character amid the contending influences and commotions of life; and his present wife, although a woman of greater native strength, had broken down in a manner almost unexampled since the last calamity that had befallen them, the loss of her only child, and Mr. Jervis's only son, a midshipman in the Navy, who, after three years of much promise in the service, had sunk under a Mediterranean fever in his way home from the Dardanelles. After the first paroxysms of maternal agony were over, Mrs. Jervis had evinced a collectedness of manner, and had borne a calm, though tearful eye, which convinced every one that she would endure the blow with that fortitude of which her known character raised the expectation; but whether it was that nature had been over-strained in the effort, or from whatever other cause, within a month after the arrival of the fatal news, an unlookedfor change was manifest in Mrs. Jervis ; and her family observed with surprise, that her energy and determinateness of character had sunk into a sort of inactive listlessness, from which she was with difficulty roused. And now that the period had arrived, when the vigour of a strong and supporting spirit was more than ever needed in the household at Jervis Wood, that mind which had hitherto been instant and energetic in every passing interest of her family, was secretly wandering in those ocean depths where the shrouded relics of her sailor-boy lay alone-alone-amid the waves. “Mr. Jervis beheld this change with the alarm of a man, who knew the human heart too well not to be aware that it boded far more of permanent and irretrievable brokenheartedness, than the more violent and tumultuous forms of grief; and he wisely determined to adopt that which he believed to be the only available of human means for stemming this collapse of the feelings,—the introduction of a succession of new images and incidents. For this change of scene he unfortunately wanted no pretext. "His sister, Mrs. Fraser, had since the death of her husband, who was a small heritor of the Island of Kaasay, not over-burdened with wealth, been placed by an awful dispensation of Providence, in a position of anxiety and affliction, which had already called on Mr. Jervis to make a hurried visitation to her residence on that island. An only daughter, a girl of fervid feelings, and romantic in the secrecies of her heart as the hills and shores among which she had lived, had fallen in the way of the master of an Hebridian trader, whose vocation brought him occasionally to Kaasay, and his manly figure and bold spirit had obtained a mastery over the mind of Annipple Fraser, which he was too much of the rover and the sailor of fortune to refuse to improve. The timely observations and cautions of a neighbour, who knew the doubtful character of the man, enabled Mrs. Fraser to throw her maternal protection between Annipple and the invader of her peace: and though high spirited and intense, her daughter was yet too much under the habitual and natural influence of a mother, to resist her injunctions to hold converse with this man no more. In order to break off the connexion, she was induced also to make a summer visit to the house of a relation at Anoch, a village in Glenwollison, on the main land. But in this instance, the measure anxiously taken by Mrs. Fraser for her daughter's safety, defeated its own object; for the sloop, George, having a quantity of rum to send on shore at Glenely, and its master having business to transact with the inn-keeper at that place, who acted as agent for the neighbouring proprietors, came to an anchor there, and was detained upwards of a week by a northwestern wind from proceeding in working up the narrows. During this unlucky period, Captain Duncan Macrae, who had roamed up the country to Glensheals, the valley inhabited by the clan whose name he bore, met with Annipple Fraser upon the banks of the loch which stretches up from Glensheals towards Glen wollison, and where she had probably wandered to indulge those strange sensations of her heart, which the late events of her life had given birth to. The meeting was prolonged, was repeated; and in a few days Mrs. Fraser received a messenger from the alarmed and anxious family at Anoch, to acquaint her that her daughter, after having been absent an unusual length of time for two successive days, had wholly disappeared on the third, and that no tidings whatever could be obtained of her in the surrounding neighbourhood. "Perhaps, of all meetings of interdicted love, none are more dangerous or more seductive than those of wholly unexpected casualty. Remote from the domestic and habitual associations of home; a strange country; a society to whom we have no rivets, and in whom our interest is merely that of the day; a heart void and vacant from absence of nature's accustomed kindlings: all these circumstances conspire to give a mastery to the power of the affections, and to make a lover the whole world, and the forgetfulness of the whole world, to an ardent female who is fated to meet him at such a a time. Poor Annipple Fraser, then only in her twentieth year, and whose strength lay rather in her affections than in her prudence, had, alas! learnt this lesson of the human heart too experimentally. "Do you yet catch my intonation," said Evelyn, pausing to allow Falkland to rest upon his oars. "Excellently well," said Falkland; "there is an entire correspondence between the air in the orchestra, and the scene on the stage; between your characters and your style: and I plainly see that one word of burlesque or the broad familiar, still more one touch of low reality, anything about the dog's-meat, man, or even the twopenny-postman, would spoil all. It is a prose epic sui generis, the skill of which consists in the selection of certain points only of life and character, and colouring them highly, but tenderly; while everything else—all the mechanism, all the work-day material of life-is studiously kept out of sight: and yet, what is produced is veritable of its kind. It is not mere poetry. The style, if I understand it rightly, consists in an excess of the plaintive and the tender, kept down by the absence of everything ambitious and dashing in composition; and it partakes therefore of what persons, who make a demand for those articles, would call the namby-pamby." "Nothing can be more exact than your analysis. Those who have a touch of the sentimental, and those who have real and delicate feeling, admire this kind of tone vastly; but those who have neither, treat it with contempt, as puling, sickly, out-of-life, and imbecile-as the cockney school of North Britain; and like that of the Southron, only fitted for 'maids whose very souls peep out at their bosoms, as it were, and who love the moonlight stillness of the Calton Hill.' It is capable, however, of some scenic force, without departing from its characteristic tone. This may be heightened by a certain dexterity in the management of pauses; a mechanism which the dreaminess of the style well admits of.” After meditating a few minutes, he resumed: |