Madame de Staël's boudoir, and mused in Mr. Rogers's comfortable study; but the darling room of the poet of nature (which we must suppose to be endued with sensibility, or he would not have addressed it) would not be flattered with such common-place comparisons ; no, no, but it is something to have it said that there is no such room in the ruins of the Drachenfels, in the vineyard of Oberwinter, or even in the rapids of the Rhene, under the Lurleyberg. We have ourselves visited all these celebrated spots, and can testify, in corroboration of Mr. Tennyson, that we did not see in any of them anything like this little room so exquisITE. The second of the lighter pieces, and the last with which we shall delight our readers, is a severe retaliation on the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine, who, it seems, had not treated the first volume of Mr. Tennyson with the same respect that we have, we trust, evinced for the second. 6 TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH. You did late review my lays, You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher. When I learnt from whom it came I forgave you all the blame, I could not forgive the praise, Was there ever anything so genteelly turned-so terse-so sharp and the point so stinging and so true? 'I could not forgive the praise, This leads us to observe on a phenomenon which we have frequently seen, but never been able to explain. It has been occasionally our painful lot to excite the displeasure of authors whom we have reviewed, and who have vented their dissatisfaction, some in prose, some in verse, and some in what we could not distinctly say whether it was verse or prose; but we have invariably found that the common formula of retort was that adopted by Mr. Tennyson against his northern critic, namely, that the author would always Now this seems very surprising. It has sometimes, though we regret to say rarely, happened, that, as in the present instance, we have been able to deal out unqualified praise, but we never found that the dose in this case disagreed with the most squeamish stomach; on the contrary, the patient has always seemed exceedingly com fortable 6 fortable after he had swallowed it. He has been known to take the Review' home and keep his wife from a ball, and his children from bed, till he could administer it to them, by reading the article aloud. He has even been heard to recommend the Review' to his acquaintance at the clubs, as the best number which has yet appeared, and one, who happened to be an M.P. as well as an author, gave a conditional order, that in case his last work should be favourably noticed, a dozen copies should be sent down by the mail to the borough of. But, on the other hand, when it has happened that the general course of our criticism has been unfavourable, if by accident we happened to introduce the smallest spice of praise, the patient immediately fell into paroxysms-declaring that the part which we foolishly thought might offend him had, on the contrary, given him pleasure-positive pleasure, but that which he could not possibly either forget or forgive, was the grain of praise, be it ever so small, which we had dropped in, and for which, and not for our censure, he felt constrained, in honour and conscience, to visit us with his extreme indignation. Can any reader or writer inform us how it is that praise in the wholesale is so very agreeable to the very same stomach that rejects it with disgust and loathing, when it is scantily administered; and above all, can they tell us why it is, that the indignation and nausea should be in the exact inverse ratio to the quantity of the ingredient? These effects, of which we could quote several cases much more violent than Mr. Tennyson's, puzzle us exceedingly; but a learned friend, whom we have consulted, has, though he could not account for the phenomenon, pointed out what he thought an analogous case. It is related of Mr. Alderman Faulkener, of convivial memory, that one night when he expected his guests to sit late and try the strength of his claret and his head, he took the precaution of placing in his wine-glass a strawberry, which his doctor, he said, had recommended to him on account of its cooling qualities: on the faith of this specific, he drank even more deeply, and, as might be expected, was carried away at an earlier period and in rather a worse state, than was usual with him. When some of his friends condoled with him next day, and attributed his misfortune to six bottles of claret which he had imbibed, the Alderman was extremely indignant- the claret,' he said, " was sound, and never could do any man any harm― his discomfiture was altogether caused by that damned single strawberry' which he had kept all night at the bottom of his glass. ᎪᎡᎢ . ART. V.-Memoirs of Dr. Burney, arranged from his own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Recollections. By his daughter, Madame d'Arblay. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1832. WE E would willingly have declined the task of reviewing this book. As a literary work we have not a word to say in its favour; and having no hope of improving the style of an author whose most popular production was published nearly sixty years ago, and feeling a great reluctance to give gratuitous pain to a person so respectable as Madame d'Arblay, we wish we could have evaded the subject altogether; but the duty which we owe our readers, our regard for the memory of Dr. Burney, and even our personal estimation of Madame d'Arblay herself, all concur in obliging us to offer some account of these volumes. Dr. Burney had, as Madame d'Arblay sets out with informing us, not merely intended, but directed that the Memoirs of his life should be published; and his family and friends'-very naturally-expected them to pass through her hands' (p. v.); but we regret to say, that Madame d'Arblay appears to have disobeyed the directions' and disappointed the expectations' which she thus professes to fulfil. Dr. Burney left behind, it seems, sundry manuscript volumes, containing the history of his life from his cradle almost to his grave:'-those were the Memoirs which the Doctor directed' to be published, and of which his family and friends expected' Madame d'Arblay to be the editor; but from these voluminous papers Madame d'Arblay has made very scanty extracts, and has become the writer of a work essentially her own, and not the editor of her father's recollections of his life. Her motives for this course of proceeding are not distinctly stated; but it is hinted that she considered what her father had thus left as unfit for the public eye. He began this task, it seems, in 1782, but wrote at that time only a few pages, giving an account of his parentage and birth, and neither continued nor resumed it, save by occasional memorandums, till 1807, when he had reached the age of eighty-one, and was under the dejecting apprehension of a paralytic seizure; from that time, nevertheless, he completed the history of his life from his cradle almost to his grave;-out of the minute amplitude of which vast mass of matter his daughter thought it her duty to collect' (select?) ' all that seemed of interest to the general reader, and to publish nothing that she supposed the author himself would, at an earlier period, or in a better state of health and spirits, have wished to withhold.' (Introduction, p. xvi.) Madame d'Arblay may have exercised a sound discretion in not giving to the public this mass of materials, in extenso; but VOL. XLIX. NO. XCVII. H we we do very much doubt whether what she has suppressed could have been more feeble, anile, incoherent, or sentant plus l'apoplexie, than that which she has substituted for it. In fact, almost the only passages in these volumes, which exhibit common sense, good taste, or intelligible language, are the few sentences which are given in Dr. Burney's own words, and which, though occasionally somewhat inflated, appear simple and natural in the midst of the strange galimatias of pompous verbosity in which his daughter has enshrined them. For instance, could Dr, Burney's own recollections of Mrs. Cibber have been more absurdly expressed than Madame d'Arblay's version of them? Mrs. Cibber herself he considered as a pattern of perfection in the tragic art, from her magnetizing powers of harrowing and winning at once every feeling of the mind, by the eloquent sensibility with which she pourtrayed, or, rather, personified, Tenderness, Grief, Horror, or Distraction.-vol. i. p. 17, Or could his exposition of the fascinations of gambling be more verbose and obscure than the following: Gaming, with that poignant stimulus, self-conceit, which, where calculation tries to battle with chance, goads on, with resistless force, our designs, by our presumption, soon left wholly in the background every attempt at rivalry by any other species of recreation.'-p. 44. Or can anything be in worse taste than this sketch of the Doctor and his wife at their first meeting, which is so managed as to look like a description of what they were, till the last word of the sentence informs us, that it is in fact an account of what they were nat Critical was the first instant of meeting between two young persons thus similarly self-modelled, and thus singularly demonstrating that Education, with all her rules, her skill, her experienced knowledge, and her warning wisdom, may so be supplied, be superseded, by Genius, when allied to Industry, as to raise beings who merit to be pointed out as examples even to those who have not a difficulty to combat, who are spurred by encouragement, and instructed by able teachers; to all which advantages young Burney and Esther-though as far removed from distress as from affluence were equally strangers! P. 67. Or the following elucidation of the reflections which a visit to a public library excited in the Doctor's mind: To wander amidst those stores, that commit talents to posterity as indubitably as the Herald's Register transmits names and titles; to develop as accurately the systems of nations, the conditions of communities, the progress of knowledge, and the turn of men's minds, two or three thousand years ago, as in this our living minute; to visit, in fact, the brains of our fellow-creatures, not alone with the harrowing knife to dissect physical conformation, but, with the piercing eye of penetration tration to dive into the recesses of human intelligence, the sources of imagination, and the springs of genius; and there, in those sacred receptacles of mental remains, to survey, in clear, indestructible evidence, all of the soul that man is able to bequeath to man. Views such as these of the powers of his gifted, though gone fellowcreatures, seen thus abstractedly through their intellectual attributes; purified equally from the frailties and selfishness of active life, and the sickly humours and baleful infirmities of age; seen through the medium of learned, useful, or fanciful productions; and beheld in so insulated a moment of vacuity of any positive plan of life, instinctively roused the dormant faculties of the subject of these memoirs, by setting before him a comprehensive chart of human capabilities, which involuntarily cited a conscious inquiry: what, peradventure, might be his own share, if sought for, in such heavenly gifts?-pp. 157, 158. These specimens will, we think, satisfy our readers that so far as style is concerned, Dr. Burney's original Memoir cannot have been much worse than that of his daughter; and that a judicious selection from the autograph manuscript would probably give a fuller and certainly a more intelligible account of this amiable man, than can be gathered from the over-anxious piety and too elaborate care of his affectionate, but injudicious, biographer. There is another motive, no doubt, which may have influenced Madame d'Arblay in substituting a work of her own for her father's; but before we allude more particularly to that, we think it right to notice the principal events which she records of Dr. Burney's life. Dr. Charles Burney (whose grandfather's name was Macburney, which his father contracted into Burney) was born in Shrewsbury, in April, 1726. He was educated at the Free School of Chester, from whence, showing a taste for music, he was removed to the care and tuition of an elder half-brother, who was then, and for more than half a century afterwards, organist of St. Margaret's, Shrewsbury. Dr. Arne, in returning from Ireland, fell in with young Burney, and thought so well of his talents that he took him as a pupil, and carried him to London, where he became of course known to Arne's celebrated sister, Mrs. Cibber, and, through her, to Garrick and several other wits and poets of the day. Mr. Fulke Greville, an eccentric man of family and fashion, himself a writer, and husband of the author of the well known Ode to Indifference,' took a fancy to Burney, and buying up his indentures from Arne, domesticated him in his own family, and introduced him into the higher society in which he himself moved. This connexion, which no doubt polished the manners, and probably cultivated the intellect of Burney, lasted till he made a match-the imprudence of which all the romantic verbiage of Madame D'Arblay does not veil-with Miss Esther Sleepe, a young person of French and humble ex H 2 traction, |