notwithstanding his own view of the subject. | of the entry; may not the pulpit poet have Of the Milanese Exhibition of the paintings drawn his impression of a present God from of Young Italy, he says: "It was intolerably the feelings, not the thoughts, inspired by radiant in color, abounding in skies of deeper the sublimities around him-from the senblue than Italy rejoices in, woods of the live-timents of awe, the mysterious emotions of liest green, and ships and cities of amber; adoring wonder, the yearnings of religious altogether a collection of gaudy impossibili- worship, excited by such a scene, and by no ties, few of which would be admitted at Bir- means from a cold adjustment of logical memingham." Of Naples he says: Of Naples he says: "How it chanics, worked out by harmonious junction is possible for English men and women to of Paley, Whately, and pocket microscope? pass months in such a place, and bless their Coleridge was not thinking of logic when he stars and call it luxury,' even if the satiated wrote (or translated, or adapted,-what you mosquitoes give them leave to sleep, is a will) his Hymn before Sunrise, in the vale mystery which has doubtless a solution of Chamouni; and we can suppose the small which I sought in vain." As he lingers, at poet (saving his Reverence) who wrote such evening, in St. Peter's at Rome, he sees three a big hand, and whose theism seemed to his priests kiss the foot of the statue of Jupiter- censor so out of place (of all places in the Cephas, and kneel down before it, as if to world) at the Montanvert, to have really pray; but next, "to our surprise, notwith- meant very much the same as S. T. C., when standing our experience of continent I habits, he exclaimed, each began zealously spitting on the beautiful pavement, as if it was a portion of his duty-I fear illustrating the habits which a priesthood, possessed of unlimited power, encourages by its example." This is not the Judge's only paper pellet at Romanism in the present itinerary. To these illustrations of his mild indulgence in sarcasm and rebuke, let us add one more, referring to the hotel book at the Montanvert, in which travellers inscribe their names, and some "perpetuate their folly for a few autumns. Among these fugitive memorials, was one ambitious scrawl of a popular and eloquent divine, whereby, in letters almost an inch long, and in words which I cannot precisely remember, he recorded his sense of the triumphant refutation given to Atheism by the Mer de Glace, intimating his conviction that, wherever else doubts of the being of Deity might be cherished, they must yield to the grandeur of this spot; and attesting the logic by his name in equally magnificent characters.' The Rambler appends his opinion that this poetical theist had wholly misapprehended the Great First Cause, and supposes him to imagine, that in proportion as the marks of order and design are withdrawn, the vestiges of Deity become manifest;"as if the smallest insect that the microscope ever expanded for human wonder did not exhibit more conclusive indications of the active wisdom and goodness of a God than a magnificent chaos of elemental confusion." It is not for us to assume what the popular and eloquent divine may actually have meant; but at least we can suppose the Rambler to have misapprehended him, especially as he is oblivious of the wording VOL. XXXIII-NO. II. Ye ice-talls! ye that from the mountain's brow Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! WHO made you glorious as the gates of Heaven GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, The same honest avowal of indifference or distaste, wherever indifference or distaste was felt, which characterized Sir Thomas Talfourd's former "Rambles," is patent here also. It is refreshing to note his candid acknowledgments in every such case. No man was more ready, more eager even, to express in the most cordial way his satisfaction wherever it was felt; but he was above the trick of affecting an enthusiasm he did not feel. He found Versailles "tiresome," and he says so; the "huge morning" he spent there seemed "dragged out into eternity;" and its only consolation was the zest its tediousness imparted to a subsequent resort to claret and champagne. In the Bay of Naples he owns that he has been more deeply charmed by smaller and less famous bays." At Herculaneum he was "grievously disappointed," and was almost as glad to emerge from its "cold and dark passages that led to nothing," as from a railway tunnel. The dome of St. Peter's, when he first caught sight of it, on the road from Antium, "looked like a haycock," he says, 'but soon afterwards assumed the improved aspect of a cow on the top of a malt-house." Entering Rome, he found the "famed Italian sky as filthy as a London fog;" he bewails the only too decisive contrast between the Capitol unvisited and the Capitol explored; 15 86 thing that some one might eat, or for a battered pewter-pot, or even a rim of liquorstain on a bench or table, to indicate that once upon a time something had been drunk there." Gratefully he recalls the fare on board the steamer to Genoa; the sumptuous breakfast at ten; "then, four dishes of exquisite French cookery, with a bottle of clear, and is indignant, for Coriolanus' sake, with that impostor and receptacle for vegetable refuse, the Tarpeian Hill. In Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" he could see "no presiding majesty; no balance of parts; nothing that stamps even the reality of a moment on the conception; nothing in this great handwriting on the wall to make mad the guilty and appal the free."" The "Lao-amber - colored, dry Italian wine for each coon" he looked on with any thing but a Winkelman's gaze. And in short, to leave Rome "was to escape," he confesses, "from a region of enchantment into the fresh air of humanity and nature; and, humiliating as the truth may be, I quitted it for ever with out a sigh." person, followed by a dessert of fresh grapes and melons or peaches, and rich dried fruits, with coffee and liqueurs," &c.; while "at five in the afternoon, dinner was served with similar taste, but with greater variety and profusion." At Genoa, he says, "To secure a dinner-the first object of sensible man's selfish purpose-by obtaining the reversion of seats at a table-d'hôte, we toiled as good men do after the rewards of virtue." At the same place, the "terrible brilliancy of the sunlight" scared him from the fatigues of sight-seeing, and "unnerved" him "for any thing but dinner. That was welcome, though coarsely conceived and executed," &c. At the ancient capital of the Volsci, the fatal asylum of Coriolanus,--"although black stale bread and shapeless masses of rough-hewn mutton and beef boiled to the consistency of leather, flanked by bottles of the smallest infrà - acid wine, constituted our fare, we breakfasted with the enjoyment of the Homeric rage, and were deaf to wise suggestions that we should be obliged to dine in Rome." In a rude inn at Montefiascone, 66 For ever! A new and touching emphasis is imparted to the phrase by the stroke which so suddenly laid the kind writer low. With the so recent memory of that stroke, it may seem frivolous, or worse, if we mention as another noticeable point in the "Rambles" his ever freely recorded appreciation of good cheer. But how take account of the "Ram bles" at all, and not refer to this feature in the Rambler's individuality? — not, be it observed, that he was a "gastronome," but that he was healthily void of reserve in jotting down his interest in gastronomics. It had been unpardonable in Boswell to omit Dr. Johnson's creed and practice in this line of things. "Some people," quoth the sage, "have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind any thing else." So averred a Rambler of last century; a Plain Speaker on this as on most other topics. Now the Rambler with whom we have to do was guiltless of this "foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind." If, at Dieppe, he had to put up with a "coarse breakfast of blackish bread, cold boiled mutton, and straw-colored coffee," he thought it a thing to be put down-in his book. He confesses how Something like a qualm of conscience we a due sense of "the eternal fitness of things" feel, at leaving this book, without affording enforced on him the duty of drinking the means of neutralizing the impression produbest Burgundy he could procure in Dijon, cible by such shreds of literal table-talk, by "in gay defiance to the fever which so a set-off of examples of the writer's grave strangely but surely lurks beneath the sun- and reflective mood, such as, the reader is set glow of that insidious liquor;" how he cautioned, are fairly interspersed in the "enjoyed some coffee and cutlets" at Lyons; course of the Rambles. Half a dozen at the how "dinner came to his inexpressible relief" least we had marked for citation, but now is at Avignon; how wistfully he looked about space exhausted, and we can only therefore in the dreary kitchen of a quasi-inn, but all refer to the Rambler's meditations on the in vain, "for a flitch of bacon, or a rope of career of Sir William Follett, on Philo-Roonions, or a mouldy cheese, to hint of some-manism, and other occasional musings sug we satisfied the rage of hunger with coarse and plentiful repast of fish, beef boiled to leather, and greasy beans, accompanied by a pale white wine of an acidity more pungent than ever elsewhere gave man an unmerited heartburn." In an old palatial inn at Radicofani, "we enjoyed a breakfast of hard black bread, a large platter of eggs, some boiled beef of the usual consistency, and a great skinny fowl swimming in yellowish butter, with the true relish of hunger." Further illustrations are not wanting; and not wanted. gested by sights and sounds in foreign travel. And another huge omission must crave the pardon it deserves not; that of the descriptive sketches of scenery and men and man ners, often pencilled with a grace and animation that make the omission more unpardonable still. From the Eclectic Review. MRS. OPIE.* THE name of Mrs. Opie is connected with and breathing thing, and the reader of our earliest recollections of literature, or at fashionable fiction held companionship with least that description of it which has of late the men and women of the middle ages. years set in upon us like a flood-namely, Then there came a reaction from this. The fiction. Her stories, we can remember, were heroes and heroines of the novelist were no always excepted, when a disposition to prefer longer knights of the tilt-yard, the greena novel above every other kind of book pro- wood, and the battle-field, or ladies for whose voked a warning against the perusal of such love they broke a lance and buckled their things, or a general statement of their per- armor on. They emerged, at the call of nicious tendencies. Her "Illustrations of Charles Dickens, from the "slums;" they Lying," for example, was regarded as a book were of the Alsatian type, and talked slang, which was not to be classed among mere or belonged to the common order of everystory books, but a highly useful and edifying day humanity. And working in the same production. And such we might be disposed field with Dickens, though in a totally differto call it now, although to our boyish imagi- ent way, came the other semi-satirical novelnations, filled with the wonders of the "Cas-ists, the writers who chose politicians for tle of Otranto," and that tremendous melo- | their heroes, and those who made the intedramatic affair, the "Romance of the Fo- rest of their books depend upon the developrest," it appeared tedious and tame. The ment of character subjectively rather than authoress, whose works, then popular upon striking and stirring incidents. enough, were thus placed in our hands, always rose up before us as a sedate, if not demure, lady about middle age, whose delight it was to write books solely for the purpose of putting out our old romantic favorites. The time came when Mrs. Opie's tales were no longer popular. There are fashions in regard to books, which change just as the shape of dress and the style of ornaments do, and accordingly the stories of our authoress went out along with those of Hannah More, Miss Burney, Mrs. Inchbald, and others. Scott came, with his magic mirror, in which the characters and events of the past were reflected with a vividness that called public sympathy away from the things of the present, and centred it upon historic scenes and heroes. The romantic, in his hands, ceased to be the thing made up of old armor in gloomy castles, such as Mrs. Radcliff had given us. It was a living Memorials of the life of Amelia Opie; selected and arranged from her Letters, Diaries, and other Manuscripts. By Cecilia Lucy Brightwell. London: Longman & Co. Amid these changes the world had wellnigh forgotten Mrs. Amelia Opie, and when the announcement of her death appeared in the public journals about a year ago, no doubt many were surprised to hear that she had lived till then. She seemed so much an old-world personage a character of the past generation-that comparatively few knew of her existence. There were, no doubt, some peculiar circumstances in the life of Mrs. Opie to account for her almost total disappearance from public view for many years before her death, and these are the things which give the volume before us its chief interest. Otherwise it is not very remarkable. As a literary production, it is creditable for the truthful representation which it gives us of the lady with whose life it makes us acquainted. That life was unusually prolonged, and even although it had been much less eventful than it was, it would have been fitted to suggest some very interesting reflections. Begun before the French Revolution shook the world, and extending over an important period of European history, it pre sents a number of interesting circumstances. | place while Miss Alderson was moving in the Mrs. Opie, in the days of her celebrity, literary and political, or at least semi-political mixed in the society of remarkable men and circles of London, and to one who had imwomen. She corresponded with not a few bibed strong opinions, these were, of course, of them, and her circle of friends embraced matters of no ordinary importance. Her persons of all ranks and of every variety of sketches of the scenes she then witnessed at character-royal dukes, statesmen, bishops, the Old Bailey were given in letters to her players, Quakers, poets, and painters. She father, who, deeming them somewhat danentered upon the world as a prodigy; and gerous, destroyed them as they were rebeing an only child, and motherless at the ceived, after reading the contents to one or age of fifteen, she was thus early called upon two confidential friends. The fragmentary to superintend the household of her father, references to the subject which occur Dr. Alderson, a physician of some note in the volume before us, are not of much inteNorwich. The family of our authoress was rest, and contain nothing really new. one of considerable repute. The present Baron Alderson is her cousin, and several other relatives, near or distant, have distinguished themselves in society. Mrs. Opie's father appears to have been a man of genial disposition and an active mind. He held what were then considered extreme liberal or radical opinions, and doubtless influenced to some extent the mind of his daughter. Early development contributed with other circumstances to render Amelia's tastes somewhat peculiar. When a mere girl, she took especial delight in visiting lunatic asylums, and in attending the assizes held in her native town. She was brought into association with the Gurneys, and other celebrated "Friends," too, and their peculiarities and benevolence served in some measure to gratify her love of sentiment and her rather romantic tastes. In curious inconsistency with friendships such as these was Miss Alderson's early acquaintance with John Philip Kemble, and other members of the celebrated histrionic family. This friendship seems to have resulted from her love of the drama, which manifested itself so strongly, when she was little more than eighteen, that she wrote a tragedy, which the biographer informs us is still extant. She seems to have attempted song-writing, too, but not with much success. It was not until she had fully reached the years of womanhood that any work of real value was produced. She visited London when in her twenty-fifth year, and some time before she was known as an authoress. Her tastes and early associations, however, led her into the literary society of the metropolis, and her diaries furnish us with sketches of some of the celebrated men of the time. These are graphic enough in one or two instances, but the persons to whom they refer have almost all been portrayed in a more felicitous and characteristic manner by others. The trials of Horne Tooke, Hardy, and Holcroft, took In her twenty-ninth year Miss Alderson was united in marriage to Opie, the painter, who had been struck with her appearance at an evening party, in a blue robe, and bonnet with three white feathers. It does not appear that the lady herself was very deeply smitten, but the marriage was by no means one of mere convenience. It was mainly instrumental in bringing her before the world as a novelist, for it would appear that the circumstances of Mr. Opie were not so prosperous as to obviate the necessity for exertion on his wife's part. Mrs. Opie's first literary efforts were not very successful. She tried the theatre, but even her connection with stage magnates did not suffice to promote her plans. Her first acknowledged work, her biographer tells us, was the "Father and Daughter," and we are disposed to consider it her best work. There is a vividness and power of expression, a depth and delicacy of feeling, as well as dramatic force in that book, which makes it no matter of marvel even now that it procured for its authoress a great deal of attention. We are scarcely disposed to regard her other productions as worthy of the promise thus held ont. An incident in one of her girlish visits to an asylum for the insane supplied her with material for one of the most touching parts of the story. It was scarcely an incident, in fact, but rather the mere look of a poor lunatic, who, probably perceiving in her face some resemblance which recalled the past, fixed upon her "eyes so full of woe,' that they haunted her memory for many subsequent years. The record of Mrs. Opie's married life does not present us with any thing very notable, and in perusing it we have been more than once surprised and disappointed that it does not. Considering her own position and that of her husband, and seeing, moreover, that she was generally the gayest of the gay in society, we had been led to expect much more of the piquant in her descriptions of fashionable life, and some additions to our knowledge of remarkable men. There is very little of this. Her letters contain a good deal of lively gossip, and here and there we light upon an epistle from some of her more distinguished correspondents which is really pleasant, but, as a whole, her diaries have disappointed us. Let us, however, go on to trace the leading features of her life. About four years after their union, Mr. and Mrs. Opie visited Paris, and met Charles James Fox, whom they both idolized, on his way home from the Netherlands. They dined with him at his hotel in Paris, and then sallied forth to get a glimpse of Bonaparte, then First Consul. This, Mrs. Opie seems to have considered one of the most exciting incidents of her visit to the French capital, and she wrote a long account of the schemes adopted to obtain a good sight of the great Corsican. He was about to review the troops in the Place du Carrousel, and the English visitors stationed themselves at a convenient distance on the ground-floor of the Tuileries. "Just before the review began," wrote Mrs. Opie, we saw several officers in gorgeous uniforms ascend the stairs, one of whom, whose helmet seemed entirely of gold, was, as I was told, Eugène Beauharnais. A few minutes afterwards, there was a rush of officers down the stairs, and amongst them I saw a short, pale man, with his hat in his hand, who, as I thought, resembled Lord Erskine in profile; but though my friend said in a whisper, "C'est lui," I did not comprehend that I beheld Bonaparte till I saw him stand alone at the gate. In another moment he was on his horse, and rode slowly past the window, while I, with every nerve trembling with strong emotion, gazed on him intently, endeavoring to commit each expressive feature to memory, contrasting, also, with admiring observation, his small, simple hat, adorned with nothing but a little tri-colored cockade, and his blue coat, guiltless of gold embroidery, with the splendid head adornings and dresses of the officers who followed him. . . . . At length the review ended, too soon for me. The Consul sprang from his horse, we threw open our door again, and as he slowly reäscended the stairs we saw him very near us, and in full face again, while his bright, restless, expressive, and, as we fancied, dark blue eyes, beaming from under long black eyelashes, glanced over us with a scrutinizing but complacent look; and thus ended and was completed the pleasure of the spectacle.”—p. 108. This is one of the best descriptions in the whole book, and we could have wished that Mrs. Opie had exercised her powers of observation with as much success on other occasions. Mr. Opie, who had been appointed Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy, had not long completed the delivery of his first course of lectures, when he was taken away by death. He was interred with becoming honor by the side of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in St. Paul's Cathedral; and after a comparatively short married life, Mrs. Opie returned to Norwich, and again took up her residence with her father. Her husband's lectures were published shortly after his decease, and she wrote a memoir of him, which we have seen, and which is worthy of preservation, for the delicacy and feeling pervading it. For the first three years of her widowhood, Mrs. Opie seems to have remained in strict retirement. Two letters of that period are given; one from the Countess of Charleville, and another from Mrs. Inchbald, but neither of them is remarkable. It was not in the nature of the lively lady who is the subject of these memoirs to remain long out of the busy world, or at least to isolate herself from the society to which she had been accustomed during her wedded life. Accordingly, we find that, in 1810, she paid another visit to London, and was soon in the midst of its gayeties. Nor was it from any want of feeling, or from giddy thoughtlessness, that she thus sought once more the pleasures of intercourse with congenial spirits. Sydney Smith well remarked, that tenderness was her forte and carelessness her fault, and this opinion may be applied in a wider significance than was intended. Amelia Opie's heart was easily touched and highly sensitive, yet she had a free and joyous nature, and was ever attracted by what her Quaker frends were not slow to call "the vain shows of the world." Her stay in London, on the occasion of the visit we have referred to, was rendered very agreeable, it would appear, by the distinguished society in which she mingled. We find her frequently meeting such people as Sheridan, Lyttleton, Dudley, Mackintosh, and Romilly; in short, the most celebrated men and women of the time. She had her opinions about them all, too, and upon the topics-political or otherwise-discussed in such society. These we find recorded in her letters to her father, whom she kept fully informed of all her doings. She held levees herself on Sundays, and more than once seems to congratulate herself on the splendor of these, and the number of persons who came to them in carriages. And so the gay widow managed to pass the time very |