The only potentates whose help I crave! His seat was filled by some no better clerk, For this their double-dealing.' Vol. II. pp. 189-191. We must make room for the closing scene, which needs neither explanation nor comment. "VAN RYK. 'Bring her away. Hark! hark! · PAGE. 'She will not stir. Either she does not hear me when I speak, 'VAN RYK. Leave her to me, Fly, if thou lov'st thy life, and make for Ghent. [Exit PAGE. Madam, arouse yourself; the French come fast: Enter Duke of Burgundy. 6 DUKE OF BURGUNDY. • What hideous cry was that? What are ye? Flemings? Who art thou, old sir? 6 VAN RYK. . What I am, Yourself have spoken. I am, as you said, 'DUKE OF BURGUNDY. • Well said, old man. VAN RYK. Sir, she is not a Fleming. Enter THE KING, THE DUKE OF BOURBON, THE EARL OF FLANDERS, SIR FLEUREANT OF HEURLEE, THE CONSTABLE, TRISTRAM OF LESTOVET, THE LORD OF COUCY, and many other Lords and Knights, with Guards and Attendants. 'What, say you so? What! this Van Artevelde? Oh me! how sad and terrible he looks! I would he might have lived, and taken service Vol. II. pp. 265-268. We need not tell those readers who can appreciate the poetry which is the analysis and interpretation of nature, that this is poetry of the most genuine quality; and he who does not feel it to be so, may assure himself that there is something in poetry which he does not understand. The thrilling exclamation of Elena, is a master touch; and many single lines and passages are marked by an unimprovable felicity which attest the hand of genius. The Author's versification is finely tuned to the old dramatic measure; and the snatches of songs introduced, as well as more particularly, the lyrical Interlude,' shew that he is free of the minstrel's craft. We cannot venture to predict that the present poem will ensure extensive popularity, but Mr. Taylor has achieved that which will not die. Should he succeed in obtaining and fixing the attention and applause of the capricious, volatile public, his will be an enviable and beneficial triumph. But what Wordsworth says of the Poet, is true also of the art and its productions: You must love it ere to you It will seem worthy of your love.' Some over-sagacious critics have discovered in this Romance a latent political moral, a covert satire on contemporary persons and things, a design deeper than the Author's philosophy. We cannot pretend to equal penetration. We take the moral as we find it on the surface, the genuine lesson of history. Artevelde is, perhaps, made to tower too far above his times; and yet he is below the full heroic stature. He is what the Poet designed to make him, -a character of mixed and earthly elements, acting upon events and circumstances which re-act upon the agent, modifying, darkening, tarnishing, the intellectual and moral nature, and leaving, at last, the man how altered from the youth! Who would be an Artevelde or a Cromwell? Who would say that, in these circumstances, he would act a better part? Happy is he who, by a wise choice of circumstances, and possessing the faith that alone can overcome them, can keep himself unspotted from the world." ART. VI. WORKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED. The Ministry of Reconciliation; a Discourse, delivered June 12, 1834, in Broadmead Meeting-House, Bristol, before the Bristol Education Society. By Edward Steane. 1s. Christ the Resurrection and the Life; a Sermon, preached on occasion of the Death of the Rev. William Vint, S.T.P., Idle, Yorkshire. By R. Winter Hamilton, Leeds. The Negro Jubilee. A Sermon, preached at the Independent Chapel, Wallingford, Berks, on the Evening of Friday, the 1st of August, 1834. By William Harris. 8vo. 1s. THE ECLECTIC REVIEW, FOR OCTOBER, 1834. Art. I.—1. Chants Chrétiens. 12mo. pp. viii, 368. Paris, 1834. 2. Choix de Cantiques. Troisiéme Edition. Paris, 1834. IN the " Archives du Christianisme," (June 28,) a religious journal well deserving of the patronage of British Christians, we find a notice of these publications, which we think our readers will thank us for placing entire before them in the form of translation, as it supplies some interesting general information. "There are reckoned to be in the German language, more than eighty thousand poems adapted for singing (cantiques): in France, there might, perhaps, be reckoned a hundred and fifty thousand. On both sides of the Rhine, the people sing; but on one shore, the popular poetry is eminently religious, while on the other, it is not at all so. This difference has its origin in several causes, which it may not be uninteresting to touch upon in a few words. 'Popular poetry, is the most faithful interpreter of the national character; and to that is more especially applicable the celebrated definition," Literature is the expression of society." Now the nations of the North are distinguished by a character habitually serious, contemplative, self-reflective, loving to live in the interior world of the soul, seeking after new ideas rather than new sensations, and finding the same attractions in the phenomena of conscience, that other nations do in the phenomena of nature. This character, or, to speak more properly, this instinct of the northern nations, could not fail to conduct them to the discovery of a species of poetry unknown to the Greeks and Romans, the inward poetry, (la poésie intime,) the poetry of the soul. All poetry of this description is serious, because man cannot enter within himself without reflection, without effort, VOL. XII.-N.S, H H nor, perhaps, without pain; and all serious poetry necessarily refers to religion, whether to glorify or to revile it. The poetry of Byron finds its explanation, as well as that of Klopstock, among a northern people. The character of the southern nations is completely different: the mind loves to occupy a position external to itself, delights in living with the physical world, suffers itself to be governed by sensations much more than by ideas, and lends itself to the service of every species of material delight. Thence must needs spring up, exhaust itself, and be reproduced, a poetry of art or of artificial character, melodious, richly decorated, laboured in expression, but deficient in invention, soothing the ear and the passions, but not even aiming at touching the conscience. In this kind of poetry, the forms of religion may indeed find place; but the doctrines of religion can obtain no admission, unless as it regards mythology, which is but sensation embodied under all its metamorphoses. We may already easily understand, why Germany should produce thousands of hymns, at the same time that France saw produced thousands of songs. Although France does not belong, in the whole extent of its territory, to the Southern regions of Europe, its literature has been deeply impressed, since the era of the Crusades, with the character of the nations of the South. The Troubadours of Provence were the progenitors of the Trouveurs of the northern provinces. In later times, under the Medici, and in the brightest years of the age of Louis XIV., the literature of Spain and that of Italy exerted over our great writers an incontestable influence, which extended itself to the end of the eighteenth century. It is only within our own time, that the poetry of the North has endeavoured to produce a reaction in France against the poetry of the South. Our dramatic writers no longer borrow their inspiration, like Corneille, from Lopez de Vega, or from Euripides, like Racine: they seek to derive it now from Shakespeare or from Goethe; and our own Lamartine studies Byron with as much assiduity as our Lafontaine studied Ariosto. "To return to the popular songs; Germany and France have presented, in this point of view, an aspect altogether different. The German Minnesingers were nurtured, as is admitted even at Weimar, under the genial rays of the poetry of the French Troubadours. The gentles of Suabia imitated those of Provence, in their devotion to beauty, in their pilgrimages from castle to castle, in the varied and learned forms of their poems. But the worship of love is more ideal, more inward, more pure, among the Minnesingers, than among the Troubadours. The poetry of the North can be considered as the daughter of the poetry of the South, only in its mechanical processes of composition and of outward form: it separates itself from its parent by |