ing to bachelors; showing that, however they may seek in single blessedness to avoid the cares and anxieties of married life, they cannot escape the common lot. Mr. Barker, the Bachelor of the Albany, in avoiding the nuisance of sons and daughters (as he deems them), falls into the greater evil of nephews and nieces; is carried into parliament against his inclination; and, after enduring a variety of annoyances, is obliged to seek a relief in marrying a clever smart young lady. Amidst much clever observation and sarcastic sketching of character, there is occasionally a touch of farce and absurdity; as where Mr. Barker is gravely said to have called for a return of the number of lines quoted from Virgil from the Revolution of 1688 downwards. This is not satire, but folly. The pantomime joke, too, of a youth dressing himself as a jackass, and alarming a whole company, is carried to an absurd extreme, an imitation of Smollett, without his humour. The writer of this novel, in his "Falcon Family," was to our notion greatly overrated we do not deny him considerable talents, and all necessary acquirements; but he is literal to prosaicness, and views things from so superior a height, that he casts a kind of shadow of contempt on his own creations.

"A Warning to Wives" is by a very different kind of person to the foregoing writer; very inferior in knowledge, power, and observation, but yet, though absurdly extravagant on the whole, more pleasing and more sociable. In the Warning to Wives" we have nothing like the pellucid language of the "Bachelor of the Albany;" but there is an earnest impulsiveness, however frequently wrong in its direction, that has its merit. The characters are overcharged with the grossest exaggeration ; the incidents are brought about without skill or art; the villains are darkened so as to lose their resemblance to modern men and women; and the satire is of that coarse nature which merely consists in attaching the vilest motives to certain professions and occupations, and so bringing into disrepute a class of employments rather than a species of character. All this is very bad and very distressing to have to read; but there is in it a heedless dashing kind of spirit, with a knowledge and genuine admiration of what is good and right, that, in some measure, make amends for its egregious artistic blunders. The writer (a lady) evidently has taken Mrs. Gore as her model, and manifests the same defiance of critical opinion; the same strong but coarse delineation of character; and the same reckless disregard of the means of producing an effective result.

"Jane Eyre, an Autobiography," is superior to either of the two previous novels, and contains so much that is fresh and good, and so evidently reveals the experiences of a thoughtful and reflective mind, that we almost wish to omit it from a notice, preluded by such a general condemnation of this species of literature. In the autobiography rests the chief merit of the work; and we are inclined to think much of it veritable biography. It is evidently the work of a young author, though not of a very young person; and we all know

that the first works of writers of fiction embrace not only much of their experiences, but also much of their adventures. It has that strong and powerful interest which arises from truth clearly developed, and from that strong delineation of characteristics evidently derived immediately from individuals, and not the result of looking at human nature through "the spectacles of books." It has also the faults of young authorship. To create emotion in the reader is too much the aim, especially in the latter portion of the heroine's career, where the stern face of tragedy is thrown into the extravagant contortions of melodrama. It is, however, a work of considerable merit, and if one-tenth of the works of fiction contained the power of writing that this does, we should not have thought it necessary to preface our remarks by such a decided condemnation of this kind of literature, when considered as a class.

THE LIFE OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. By Thomas Medwin. 2 vols. post 8vo. T. C. Newby.

"TWENTY-FOUR years have elapsed since Shelley was withdrawn from the world, and no record of him remains save fugitive notices scattered about in periodicals." Such is the opening sentence of Mr. Medwin's book, and surprising it seems, for of no one has there been more conti nual talk, nor is there any one fresher in the memory, than the noble subject of this memoir. Mr. Medwin also states that he concludes Mrs. Shelley "has abandoned, if she ever formed, the intention of executing this labour of love." With these excuses, Mr. Medwin goes on to state his own qualifications for the task; and certainly, if long and intimate acquaintance and friendship, extending from schoolfellowship to the latest hour of Shelley's young life, can form a qualification, he has it. Other qualifications, however, are necessary to fully unrol the actual existence of a man so gifted and so characterised as Shelley. The life of a poet is ever a perilous undertaking, except with those gentlemen who imagine, because there is little to narrate of outward adventure, that there is nothing to tell. Mr. Medwin does not belong to this dull and exploded class of biographers; he feels and knows, that the life of so exalted a genius as Shelley has a spiritual story that far exceeds in importance any mere physical adventures.

We have certainly not had for two hundred years an author, who, in so short a life, and with so comparatively few works, produced such great mental revolutions. We perfectly remember the first effect of his daring writings, the glow it communicated to the generous and unsophisticated hearts of the young, and the terror and consternation it spread on those who exist mentally, as well as in manners, only conventionally and superstitiously. In his own remarkably worldly family his enunciations must have been like the shock of an earthquake and it is only wonderful that, in their consternation, they did not proceed to even harsher courses with him.

We are thankful to the author of this biography for renewing our consideration of this noble author, who has not yet had full justice done to him, either as a man or a poet. A peculiar school of literature, impregnated with the logical dogmas of the last age, at the best, but damn with faint praise, and mingle their poor laudations with lamentations of what they term the vagueness and dreaminess of his conceptions, and the want of completeness in his poems. Those less scholastic in their ideas, and more impressionable in their nature, acknowledge him fully and fervently as a true poet; perhaps, with the exception of Wordsworth, the only one of his contemporaries truly inspired with the faculty divine. He is, to us, the only writer of modern times who has reproduced, in its strength as well as its melody, the rhythm of the Shakspearean era. His numbers are

sweeter, fuller, and more various in their excellence than any we know of on this side the Restoration. He was equal in power to that age, and a kindred genius; no imitative, no second-hand reproducer of their ideas, forms of speech, or sounds, but, formed by Nature of the same materials, he gave breath and being to equally magnificent conceptions.

But he was also great as a man,-indomitable in his expression of his own truth; susceptible in the highest degree of all the emotions of our species; benevolent, and sympathetic, and bountiful as Nature herself. Whatever may be the conventional forms and doctrines he attacked; however he may have uttered and given shape to the doubts and fears which have darkened alike the minds of saints and philosophers, Luther and Voltaire, St. Augustine and La Place, he was at heart truly religious, worshipping virtue and beauty as inseparable, and bending every thought to the exaltation and amelioration of mankind.

The present volumes were not needed to clear the fame and display the brightness of this gifted man; but they are pleasant as memorials of one it is delightful to be minutely acquainted with. As a critic, we do not think Mr. Medwin very profound or acute; nor does he quite penetrate to the grandeur and greatness of his friend's views. The most astonishing proof of Shelley's genius and goodness was his effect on the wilful, powerful, but selfish Byron. His acquirements were great, and he cultivated his genius in every manner, training his moral and spiritual nature rigidly and even severely. The following is the account of his pursuits at Oxford :—

"Shelley was an indefatigable student, frequently devoting to his books ten or twelve hours of the day, and part of the night. The absorption of his ideas by reading, was become in him a curious phenomenon. He took in seven or eight lines at a glance, and his mind seized the sense with a velocity equal to the twinkling of an eye. Often would a single word enable him at once to comprehend the meaning of the sentence. His memory was prodigious. He with the same fidelity assimilated, to use a medical term for digestion, the ideas acquired by reading and those which he derived from reflection or conversation. In short, he possessed the memory of places,

words, things, and figures. Not only did he call up objects at will, but he revived them in the mind, in the same situations, and with the lights and colours in which they had appeared to him at particular moments. He collected not only the gist of the thoughts in the book wherefrom they were taken, but even the disposition of his soul at the time. Thus, by an unheard-of faculty and privilege, he could retrace the progress and the whole course of his imagination from the most anciently sketched idea, down to its last development. His brain, habituated from earliest youth to the complicated mechanism of human forces, drew from its rich structure a crowd of admirable images, full of reality and freshness, with which it was continually nurtured. He could throw a veil over his eyes, and find himself in a camera obscura, where all the features of a scene were reproduced in a form more pure and perfect than they had been originally presented to his external senses."

We are glad of this biography, as it will tend to turn attention to the noblest of our later poets; creating a higher ideal than the practical tendency of the time engenders; and opening a store-house of suggestions, thoughts, and utterances, whence may be wrought a new array of intellectual arms, to be turned against the conventionalities, untruths, and outrageous wrongs with which modern society is oppressed.

THE SHAKSPEARE SOCIETY'S PAPERS. Vol. 3. London: The Shakspeare Society.

THIS third volume that the Society has printed of Miscellaneous papers is, we think, the most entertaining; and the publication of such a miscellany will prove more attractive to many of the readers of Shakspeare and admirers of the old drama than the more elaborate reprints issued by the Society. In this volume there are twenty-three different articles, all of them illustrating either old habits, customs, or poetry. Some of them are valuable as confirming, by documents, the old usages customary to the theatre, and which have hitherto escaped the vigilance of our most industrious antiquaries. The most important of these is a patent, issued by the Crown, giving very extraordinary, and, indeed, unconstitutional powers, to Tylney, the Master of the Revels, to enlist, as it were, any persons, singers, or others, that he might think advantageous for the performance of theatrical exhibitions before the Court. There is also given, by the same contributor, "The original patent for the nursery of actors and actresses in Charles the Second's time." Several of the papers illustrate passages in Shakspeare and the other old plays of the period,-and other events in the little known lives of our old poets. The most interesting of these is a paper by Mr. Cunningham, bringing to light several events in the life of Nash, the prose satirist and poet. Nor is it without critical articles, amongst which we may particularise Miss Zornlin's papers on Jack Cade, and a still more interesting one on Hamlet's conduct to Ophelia.

The reprint of "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus," attributed-as the writer of the paper thinks-falsely to Francis Beaumont, is a valuable contribution. It is a beautiful poem, and it was desirable that it should be accessible to the reader in a correct and readable form. This poem alone would render the volume valuable.

The most interesting of the prose articles is by Mr. Payne Collier, "On the earliest Quarto editions of the Plays of Shakspeare." He very justly says that a great many inferences are to be drawn from the observation of the original editions, and more especially as regards their title-pages. In the present paper he has reprinted, in their original state, as regards the size and disposition of the type, the old quarto title pages; and has remarked on each in a very ingenious manner, with no over-nice speculation, but with a shrewdness that always keeps within the bounds of fair and plain deduction. Several curious circumstances are thus weighed up: First and foremost, the strange but incontrovertible fact, that only seventeen out of thirty-six of his plays were ever seen in print by this most wonderful writerhe leaving nineteen to the hazardous casualties of manuscript. What can be thought, after this, of the numerous gentlemen who now rush into print without a chance of being performed, or a chance of ever deserving to be so. Amongst other remarkable circumstances connected with the publication of his plays in his lifetime, are the haphazard selection that is made, and the strange periods they were published in. It seems to us so curious, that we give the following

summary :

In the year 1597, the earliest date yet discovered, Shakspeare being then thirty-three years old, were published three, viz.: Romeo and Juliet; Richard the Second; Richard the Third.

In 1598, two, viz.: Henry the Fourth, Part I.; Love's Labour Lost.

In 1600, six, viz.: Much Ado about Nothing; Midsummer Night's Dream; Merchant of Venice; Henry the Fourth, Part II.; Henry the Fifth; Titus Andronicus.

In 1602, The Merry Wives of Windsor.

In 1603, Hamlet.

In 1608, King Lear.

In 1609, Troilus and Cressida; Pericles.

Why these should have been published, some from good and some from most wretched copies-why there should be six in one year, and five years without any, cannot now be ascertained. For although the folio editors say that they were all unauthorised, we yet find that several of the quarto plays have a larger quantity of matter and better readings than the folio. It is also a curious fact, that whilst several plays were printed falsely, with Shakspeare's name ostentatiously set forth, that in the quarto Romeo and Juliet in the three editions no name appears. There is very little more faith, however, to be placed in these title-pages, than in the play-bills of our minor theatres and saloons, where all the