is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth. How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly. The Papal church has had three phases, -anti-Cæsarean, extra-national, anti-Chris tian. April 20. 1833. ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY. THE Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure. April 24. 1833. WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS. TENNYSON'S POEMS. EXCEPT in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-women. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare! The I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson, indeed without it he can never be a poet in act, is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or - the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan his verses. May 1. 1833. I THINK with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.* Glorious spirits! glorious spirits! "Hos utinam inter Heroas natum me!" "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an un They were born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding. - ED. usual intensity of the modifying power, which, detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness, — yea, divided from it namely, the by an impassable mountain, activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit." May 4. 1833. COLONIZATION.-MACHINERY.-CAPITAL. COLONIZATION is not only a manifest expedient, but an imperative duty on Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of Hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and |