constantly encircled ;*-whose imaginations required but little fuel of fact, and whose tongues would not suffer a wonder to cool in circulating. The same peculiarities of temperament, which recommended females in the Pagan world, as the fittest sex to receive the inspirations of the tripod, made them valuable agents also in the imposing machinery of miracles. At the same time, it must be confessed, that they performed services of a much higher nature; and that to no cause whatever is Christianity more signally indebted for the impression it produced in those primitive ages, than to the pure piety, the fervid zeal, and heroic devotedness of the female converts. In the lives of these holy virgins and matrons,-in the humility of their belief and the courage of their sufferings, the Gospel fouud a far better illustration than in all the voluminous writings of the Fathers: there are some of them, indeed, whose adventures are sufficiently romantic, to suggest materials to the poet and the novelist ; and Ariosto himself has condescended to borrow from the Legends † his curious story of Isabella and the Moor,-to the no small horror of the pious Cardinal Baronius, who remarks with much asperity on the sacrilege of which that vulgar poet' has been guilty, in daring to introduce this sacred story among his fictions. To the little acquaintance these women could have formed with the various dogmas of ancient philosophy, and to the unincumbered state of their minds in consequence, may be attributed much of that warmth and clearness, with which the light of Christianity shone through them:whereas, in the learned heads of the Fathers, this illumination found a more dense and coloured medium, which turned its celestial beam astray, and tinged it with all sorts of gaudy imaginations. Even where these women indulged in theological reveries, as they did not embody their fancies into folios, posterity, at least, has been nothing the worse for them; nor should we have known the strange notions of Saint Macrina, about the Soul and the Resurrection, if her brother, Gregory of Nyssa, had not rather officiously informed us of them, in the Dialogue he professes to have held with her on these important subjects.”‡

* None of the Fathers, with the exception perhaps of St. Jerome, appears to have had such influence over the female mind as Origen. His correspondence with Barbara is still extant. She was shut up by her Pagan father in a tower with two windows, to which, in honour of the Trinity, we are told, she added a third. St. Jerome had to endure much scandal, in consequence of his two favorite pupils, Paula and Melania, of which he complains very bitterly in the epistle Si tibi putem,' &c. Upon the words "Numquid me vestes sericæ, nitentes gemmæ, pictas facies, aut auri rapuit ambitio? Nulla fuit alia Romæ matronarum, quæ meam possit edomare mentem, nisi lugens atque jejunans, fletu pene cæcata"-in this epistle, Moore wrote his beautiful song "Who is the Maid my Spirit seeks ?"

From the story of the Roman Virgin Euphrasia. See also the Life of Euphrosyna (in Bergomensis de Claris Mulieribus), which, with the difference of a father and lover, resembles the latter part of the Memoires de Comminges.

Opera, Tom. II. p. 177. Edit. Paris, 1638.

Upon the publication of this paper, Jeffrey wrote thus to Moore :

-

"My dear Sir,-The affairs of the Duke of Queensbury have kept our whole bar in such a state of hurry for these last ten days, that I have been obliged to neglect many things besides my thanks and acknowledgments to you. I was a little mortified at first when I found you had repented you of the verses, and would have written a letter of remonstrance and supplication if I had thought it would have been in time. Upon receiving the article, however, I was obliged to forgive you, both omissions and commissions. The candour, and learning, and sound sense of your observations are, if possible, more delightful than their point and vivacity, especially when so combined. Notwithstanding your pamphlet on the Popery laws, which I saw some years ago with the greatest surprise and atisfaction, I own I was far from suspecting your familiarity with these recondite subjects, and am still afraid that this article has cost you more trouble than we are any way entitled to put you to. It has been printed several days, and extends, I am sorry to say, only to about thirteen pages. It is no small distinction, however, in our journal to be the author of a paper which every reader must wish longer."

These are the only contributions to the Edinburgh from Moore's pen, to the year 1819, at which period the present issue of the Letters and Diary ends.

Amongst all the biographies, or autobiographies, we have ever read, there is not one more melancholy, or more suggestive in its grim moral than this now before us. Here we have a poet, brilliant and fashionable, a man of consummate and profound genius, confessed by all to rank amidst the highest spirits of his own, or of any age, and yet he was, to the day of his death-judged by his acknowledged merit-little removed from the condition of a beggar. We mean not that he was a mendicant; but there is a poverty which a man sees about him, which grows upon him year by year, and as children spring around, as daughters must be portioned, as sons must be sent to professions, or to College, that gnawing, anxious, hungry yearning of the heart, far more bitter than the hunger of the stomach, crushes hope, and weakens energy, and bows the victim to the earth, even whilst he may resolve to perish at his post of duty-to "die with harness on his back.'

This was the fate of Robert Southey-this would have been the fate of Thomas Moore, if that patronage which the Nation should have extended to him, had not been nobly risked by the Longmans. The Minister gave him a wretched Colonial

appointment-he could have secured a splendid one, had he been satisfied to desert old friends, and to prostitute the convictions of his soul for bread: when Moore's Deputy deceived him, he was hunted into exile by the Government, he refused help from his friends, by God's gift of genius, alone, would he free himself, and himself he did free.

Such, however, is the fate of literature in these kingdoms.So far as the state is concerned-Murray, and Longman, and Blackwood, are the Cabinet to which genius must apply itself, and for that support, which should spring from the Crown and from the revenue, the literary man turns to the booksellers and the reading public. If we look through that woful life of Southey, given to us under his own hand, we find him complaining that he must write for bread, that the Quarterly Review is his chief dependence, and that he fears he shall never have leisure to use the vast stores of knowledge he had accumulated for historic purposes. His wife became weak-minded through her anxiety to provide for her children from their limited fortunes; his own brain, overwrought, softened, and the terrible coma vigil, the demon of the scholar, clouded his last months of life-yet he had honestly, no man more so, served the Tory party. Sir Robert Peel, and for him, as a politician, as a Free Trader, we hold no love, was, judged by the spirit of our mechanical, cotton spinning, age, a greater patron of art and literature, than Leo X., valued by the spirit of his reign of genius and of intellect to Peel Southey owed the happiest period of his life. Peel, in the year 1835, offered him a baronetcy; this Southey refused, and let us hear, from himself, the causes of the refusal; let us recollect, too, that he was at this time sixty-one years of age, and had served the Tory party faithfully for a period of thirty-one years. He details his services-he states his reward he makes known his hopes-simple and humble enough, God knows :

"Keswick, Feb. 3, 1853.

"Dear Sir,-No communications have ever surprised me so much as those which I have this day the honour of receiving from you. I may truly say, also, that none have ever gratified me more, though they make me feel how difficult it is to serve any one who is out of the way of fortune. An unreserved statement of my condition will be the fittest and most respectful reply. I have a pension of £200 conferred upon me through the good offices of my old friend and benefactor, Charles W. Wynn, when Lord Grenville went out of office; and I have the Laureatship. The salary of the latter was

immediately appropriated, as far as it went, to a life insurance for £3000. This, with an earlier insurance for £1,000 is the whole provision that I have made for my family; and what remains of the pension after the annual payments are made, is the whole of my certain income. All beyond must be derived from my own industry. Writing for a livelihood, a livelihood is all that I have gained; for having also something better in view, and therefore never having courted popularity, nor written for the mere sake of gain, it has not been possible for me to lay by anything. Last year, for the first time in my life, I was provided with a year's expenditure beforehand. This exposition might suffice to show how utterly unbecoming and unwise it would be to accept the rank, which, so greatly to my honour, you have solicited for me, and which his Majesty would so graciously have conferred. But the tone of your letter encourages me to say more. My life insurances have increased in value. With these, the produce of my library, my papers, and a posthumous edition of my works, there will probably be £12,000 for my family at my decease. Good fortune, with great exertions on the part of my surviving friends, might possibly extend this to £15,000, beyond which I do not dream of any further possibility. I had bequeathed the whole to my wife, to be divided ultimately between our four children; and having thus provided for them, no man could have been more contented with his lot, nor more thankful to that Providence on whose especial blessing he knew that he was constantly, and as it were immediately, dependant for his daily bread. But the confidence which I used to feel in myself is now failing. I was young, in health and heart, on my last birth-day, when I completed my sixtieth year. Since then I have been shaken at the root. It has pleased God to visit me with the severest of all domestic afflictions, those alone excepted into which guilt enters. My wife, a true help-mate as ever man was blessed with, lost her senses a few months ago. She is now in a lunatic asylum; and broken sleep, and anxious thoughts, from which there is no escape in the night season, have made me feel how more than possible it is that a sudden stroke may deprive me of those faculties, by the exercise of which this poor family has hitherto been supported. Even in the event of my death, their condition would, by our recent calamity, be materially altered for the worse; but if I were rendered helpless, all our available means would procure only respite from actual distress. Under these circumstances, your letter, Sir, would in other times have encouraged me to ask for such an increase of pension as might relieve me from anxiety on this score. Now that lay sinecures are in fact abolished, there is no other way by which a man can be served, who has no profession wherein to be promoted, and whom any official situation would take from the only employment for which the studies and the habits of forty years have qualified him. This way, I am aware, is not now to be thought of, unless it were practicable as part of a plan for the encouragement of literature; but to such a plan perhaps these times might not be unfavourable. The length of this communication would require an apology, if its substance could have been compressed; but

on such an occasion it seemed a duty to say what I have said; nor, indeed, should I deserve the kindness which you have expressed, if I did not explicitly declare how thankful I should be to profit by it. I have the honour to remain,

With the sincerest respect,

Your most faithful and obliged servant, ROBERT SOUTHEY." 118

We have given this letter for the purpose of showing how little these kingdoms secure to the literary man, even to him who is a warm, able, and ready supporter of a great political party; and, in reading these two volumes before us, the weary, sickening, details of Moore's life to the year 1819, we feel they are relieved, and could be supported only by the spirit of a Poet, genuine in heart and soul.

Let us consider, for a moment, his condition. He bound himself to write the Melodies, after the sixth number had appeared, and when he was at the full measure of his fame, for Power, in consideration of £500 a year; and yet, he was at this same time, allowing his father one hundred pounds per annum, the interest at £5 per cent, on £2,000 of the purchase money of Lalla Rookh, which, for this purpose, he had left in the Longmans' hands, the principal being secured to him by bond. He was harassed by a pending prosecution for the defalcation of his Deputy; he was so poor, he thought it necessary to state to his mother, that £40 a year was a cheap rent to pay for Sloperton Cottage, furnished, and on the 18th of January, 1817, he writes to Power-"Could you, in the course of a week or ten days, muster me up a few pounds (five or six), as I am almost without a shilling ?" Thus he lived, and thus he died. A commission in a marching regiment, for his son, was no acknowledgment of the father's merit; a wretched pension, increased by unwilling dribblet doles, was no return for a Nation, or from a people like ours, to the man who had charmed and roused their spirits, glorified their language, and illustrated the literature of the land. In his sixtieth year he was in possession of £300 per annum; but, the glowing genius of early youth was passed; the hours when inspiration might have played around his pen were gone for ever-the twilight of fancy, like the evening of a summer day, is but dimness to those who have watched the meridian brightness; well might he have cried, with another great Irishman

* Life and Letters of Southey, vol. vi. Longman and Co. 1851.