than the hill of Sisyphus, and more crossed with agitation than the face of Kilmarnock, or the valleys of the Death's Head. To discharge our obligations, there is a task to draw the sorrows of age upon the early locks of the fair and spiritual Maga. Then the budding of new genius in regions yet to be consigned to immortality-to watch the first shoot, to cherish it as it expands, to strengthen its roots, and note its full burst of perfect beauty, is not a less onerous obligation than to expose mendacious pretension wherever it appears. But peculiar claims have women to our pages-especial and distinct, and above all other periodicals from John O'Groat's house to the Land's End, from Carrickfergus to Cape Clear, "from Indus to the Pole!" Compose thy golden tresses, exquisite Muse, and fix thy subdued eyes, in which the light lies like an "imprisoned sunbeam," upon that gorgeous procession of the Ariadnes, the Sapphos, the Stellas, the Lesbias, the Altheas of our Isles! In this proud train which we have invoked, and which has arisen, one by one, in our gallery, behold the multiform shapes which love takes in its devotions; the young and trustful heart expressed through cleft lips, on which words of confidence and hope appear to cluster-the saddened spirit casting its shadows over the marble brow, and blanching the early roses in the cheek—the accomplished vow, confirmed in the smile of surety and repose-the betrothed, with a flutter in the eyes that betrays her secret—and the young wife, looking onward with a radiant ecstasy of face that hath a marvellous criticism in its beauty. Throughout this galaxy of charms have we not manifested to the scoffers of rank, the poor and ribald creatures who cannot look beyond the mean level of their own caste for the ennobling graces of life, that the Aristocracy of England are not a nobility of stars and ribands, but that they bear upon their foreheads the stamp and impress of Nature's greatness? In what quarter of the world, in what class of society, in what choice paradise of "nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles," can such lofty expression of soul, such innate purity of heart, such high culture and intelligence be found as are testified to the life in those distinguished portraits which we have derived indiscriminately from the Ladies of our Peerage? It is not that here and there a fine head, and chiseled features, as full of beauty as if Phidias had designed them in search of ideal perfection, starts upon us to fascinate us with its enchantment-but that they present a succession of splendid visions, varied in their tone and power, and holding us in admiration as much by their number as their singular loveliness. Let it not be said that these courtly embellishments of our page are without their value as agents of refinement, and promoters of a worthier appreciation of exalted rank. If the middle classes enjoy the advantages of the strong voice in the state, of sturdy convictions, and, if you will, of inflexible integrity in what they believe to be right, to the hereditary class, the descendants of the barons of old, some of whom trace their blood to the imperial line of Charlemagne, belongs that cultivated ascendancy of the intellect which subdues the ruder elements of our nature, and asserts its dignified and calm authority over the weaknesses, the errors, and the impetuosity of imperfect knowledge. The sphere of their experience is wide; their responsibility to their country is heavy; they are educated for their duties, and their lives are dedicated to employments that embrace a larger field of human interests than can enter into the contemplations of their grovelling calumniators. We do not utter this with a political bias; we throw aside the contentions of party; we speak of the nobility of England as of the fountain of its honour, of its historical glories, its chivalry, and of all its refining influences. If we search in these groups of portraits for traits to sustain our faith, we find them in profusion, blended with the tenderest and most poetical expression. Love, not as a sentiment or perfumed vapour, but as an active representative of all that is intellectual and devotional in our feelings, hallows these counterparts of the Noble and Beautiful, and consecrates them to enduring fame! And what is this Love, this tremulous disturber of our rest, about which so much has been said, written, sung, and fought: for which Hammond died, Essex fell, and Tasso lay in captivity ?-concerning which the more explanations we obtain, the more we are in the dark ?—which never affects two persons alike, and which, nevertheless, affects every body in common?—which is to-day as gay as primroses in the lap of spring, and to-morrow as dismal as the icicled flower in winter?-which Lady Blessington describes to be of a restless and inconstant and treacherous nature; and Mr. D'Israeli, the younger, describes to be passionate, and enthusiastic, permanent and persevering?—which Crashaw, the priest, dissolved in kisses, and Waller, the courtier, banished in hymns ?—which converted Henry VIII. to Protestantism, and raised John Ernest Bisen from servitude to a throne?—which lost the world to Mare Antony, and made Spenser a poet? which is the burthen of every ballad, play, and romance, in every language, and which subsisted in infinite varieties throughout all ages of the world, in all climates, and under all forms of government, free and despotic, nomadic and monarchical, republican and oligarchical, elective and hereditary, flourishing with unabated luxuriance in spite of all decrees, ukases, firmans, manifestoes, pains, penalties, and bulls to the contrary? Sterne tells us in the Sentimental Journey, that he was constantly falling in love, that whenever he happened to fall out of it he never was satisfied with himself or the world, and that all the good and amiable actions of his life were committed when he was under its influence. Hazlitt, who always imagined himself in love, and who struggled to keep himself constantly in the exaltation of its beatitude, gives us a very different account of the matter. He tells us that love in women is vanity, or interest, or fancy; that it is merely selfishness ; that it has no foundation in friendship, esteem, or even pity; that it is a blind, head-strong impulse, and that it is never to be secured by talents or by virtue. The only instance he allows of the possibility of a woman loving a man for the sake of his mental endowments, is in the clerical character. In this, perhaps, he was right. Lord Chesterfield-who was well informed upon the worst side of the sex-said that he would rather be rivalled in the good graces of a lady by a captain than a curate. The privileges that attach to clergymen in society, throw people off their guard. They are never observed or suspected; and their approaches are, therefore, covert and insidious. They make love under false pretences; they steal the human affections under the mask of a divine mission; they fling a sanctity round the language of passion, and absolve the sin they provoke. Then women are flattered by the thought of transferring the contemplations of the minister from heavenly things to themselves, and when they capture the reverend lover, they believe that they have achieved a triumph over faith itself. But Hazlitt was out of humour with love when he wrote so bitterly against a sex to which he always looked for the only springs of happiness which his unsettled life discovered. He was once sadly disappointed, and that soured him, until, like Rousseau, he fell in love again, and was again deceived. But the estimate of women which his experience enabled him to form, must be taken only for so much as it is worth-and that is very little. All he required was the excitement of an imaginary passion. The object itself was a pure accident. He did not love a woman because she possessed qualities to command and sustain respect, but because it was necessary to him to believe that he loved something. She might, or might not be worthy; and being thus adopted upon impulse, the chances were against her. The consuming energies of his own spirit supplied all the attributes that were requisite to transform her into an idol prepared to receive his worship: he idealized her and loved her: he surrounded her with a halo that he might lose himself in its beams, and when they vanished before his returning sense, and he saw her in her common-place reality, he recoiled, and took arms against the sex for another interval of heresy. One of Coleridge's biographers, speaking of that remarkable man, observes that there was a yearning tone of feeling about him, which betrayed the uneasiness of one who lacked sympathy, and who, in the midst of his fame, seemed to pine for some being upon whom he might expend the suppressed affections of his heart. It is so with all finely organised minds, and sensitive temperaments. Like the half-creatures of Plato, they are imperfect until they find a kindred nature. This is a condition in the existence of superior intellect, which cannot subsist upon popular flattery, and the ordinary rewards of public success. Men do not toil of their own volition for mere abstract objects; and when they devote themselves to pursuits apart from the associations of Love, it is either to escape from the misery of some bitter miscalculation of that kind, or because they have already exhausted their treasury of " deep longings." Even when they have been most abused in their hopes, they have sometimes surrendered themselves to an ideal enjoyment of that serene delight which it was beyond their reach to realise. Addison is an example of this. His Xantippe had trampled out all pleasure in his home; but he found a resource notwithstanding. Look into the Spectator for those beautiful and pathetic episodes upon the passion, which unveil to us at once the way in which he tried to solace himself for the want of the living truth. The description of the rejected lover ruminating by the brook, and deploring the unkindness of his mistress, is one of the most natural and affecting pictures in the language. In the present day, too, we have similar instances of distinguished authors who, having missed, in ill-assorted unions, the happiness for which they were formed, console themselves in fertile images-a vent into which they throw all their capacity for love. But these illustrations are not yet old enough to be cited. Assuredly Love has compelled many people into strange courses, which, could they but have seen them in others, would have surprised them sometimes into smiles, and sometimes into tears. It is related of a member of the family of Brown, in the county of Mayo, a connection of the Marquis of Sligo, that his grief for the death of his wife was so overwhelming that he shut himself up for a year, during which time he suffered his beard to grow, and never admitted any body to his presence. Lord Lansdowne, as all the world knows, contented his sorrow with a monody, although it is said that his mourning was deep and permanent. Petrarch worked up his imagination to such a state of excitement that he at last came to identify the laurel tree with the lady of his love, and used to pay it, wherever he fell in with it, as much adoration as if it were the veritable Laura herself. His biographers tell us that on one occasion happening to see a laurel at a distance, he ran towards it for the purpose, as usual, of prostrating himself before the trunk, and, in his impetuosity, not perceiving a running brook that traversed the path before him, his feet tripped, and he was precipitated into the water, to the great amusement of the spectators! A dream-like legend is related of Milton that he was once lying asleep upon a bank under the shadow of some trees, and that a lady chancing to pass fell in love with him, leaving a couplet behind her to the effect that if he were so fascinating with his eyes closed, he would be irresistible when they were open. When the poet awoke, and found this compliment lying on the grass beside him he was fired with curiosity, and according to the tradition, resolved to devote himself to the task of discovering the fair wit who had thus stolen upon his slumbers. In pursuance of this determination he journeyed throughout England, and the whole continent of Europe, but was unable to trace the fugitive inspirer; and, inconsolable for his disappointment, vented his anguish in the composition of Paradise Lost! It is a pity that this story is not true; it is precisely the sort of story that one would like to be able to believe, only that it would require too great a stretch of fancy to suppose that Milton's poetical despair could have lasted through so elaborate an epic! The Wyatt, whose good fortune it was to escape decapitation at a time when it was difficult for political men who had enemies to keep their heads on their shoulders, was suspected of being the favourite of Anna Boleyn, and was even publicly charged with being her accepted lover; but, however that may be, it is certain that the unfortunate lady occupied her last hours in prison over his sweet but artificial sonnets, which engrossed her almost up to the moment when she was led to execution. celebrated Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, as all readers of the histories of the Rhenish chivalry are aware, when he discovered that his mistress in his absence, believing him to be dead, had taken the veil in the island of Nonnesworth, built for himself a tower on the summit of a rock overlooking the river, where he dwelt to his life's end for the sake of gazing down into the little wood, in the midst of which stood the sad building that enclosed his betrothed. The ruins of that tower are yet to be seen, but few of the gay crowds that visit the Rhine trouble themselves about the old story, unless somebody-a travelling artist, perchance, or a young versifier-happen, in their enthusiasm, to direct their attention to the cliff, and relate the ancient tale breathlessly as the rapid boat darts past the base of Rolandsec. Of the gallant and unhappy Surrey we learn, amongst other things that are equally consistent with his knightly and romantic character, that, being at one time at the court of the Emperor, where he had thrown down defiance to "Christian, Turk, Jew, Saracen, or Cannibal," to dispute in arms the peerless charms of his mistress whom he had celebrated in his exquisite love verses, he consulted the celebrated Cornelius Agrippa, the professor of natural magic, for the purpose of ascertaining what Geraldine was engaged in at that moment; and, as the narrative runs, the sorcerer showed him in a mirror the image of the beloved one reclining ill upon a couch, and reading, by the twinkling light of a taper, one of his most impassioned sonnets. This fact, if it be one, is not so well authenticated as the devotion of Anna Boleyn to the sonnets of Wyatt; and a late critical biographer of Surrey, who was a hunter of dates, and a sedulous explorer of all the evidence he could find to prove the weakness of the poetical creed in relation to such matters, has almost established, beyond a doubt, that such a circumstance could not very well have occurred, since Surrey, agreeably to his discoveries, had never been abroad in his life. We wish such commentators would not meddle with poets. It is a part of the pleasure one derives from their works to mingle them credulously with incidents that would be difficult, or impossible, of belief in reference to other men; for, after all, their clay is so essentially different from that of the vulgar, clock-regulated, day-plodding world, so much more subtle, and at the same time frail, that we can easily credit wonderful things of a poet which no effort over the will could induce us to attach to the common herd of mankind. Pope's Rape of the Lock (sarcasm set to music,) and his Essay on Woman (a bitter confession of faith), would lose half their charms if we did not know that he made a declaration of love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and that, upon his own admission, she was so surprised, astonished, and thrown off her guard by a declaration from so dwarfed and fragile a creature, that she laughed outright in his face! Pope, who was trained in the school of Balzac and Voiture, never forgave the proud and triumphing beauty; but, from that hour forth, sacrificed her to his wit and his searing revenge in his implacable and immortal satires. It is necessary to have some faith in improbabilities, and some occasion to exercise it, if we would truly, and with proper intensity, enter into the depths of the spirit of poetry. But Lady Mary, despite her brilliant talents, was not a loveable person in the end. Before marriage, she calculated the consequences so accurately, that it might easily be seen she did not look to her new state for any of those fairy dreams of the heart which more trustful, and generous, and womanly natures are so prompt to conjure up. Her coach, and her townhouse, and her circle of wits, Prior and Congreve, bandying repartee with her, and Pope shrinking into a corner to smother his spite and vexation, were carefully drawn in her mind before she married; and it would almost appear that she took a husband to give a sanction to her boldness, rather than to create her own happiness, or to acquire an excuse for creating his. And Wortley was not the man to appreciate her tenderness, if she had any. Cold, formal, and regular, he could neither value her affections, which appear to have been very limited; nor her wit, which was to the full as salient, and as licentious as the age admitted. They were thoroughly assimilated in these points, on which it would have been well for their felicity they had been contrasted; and, unfortunately, widely opposed on other points, on which they ought to have sympathized. The result was exactly what such circumstances would lead any discerning person to anticipate. Expatriation for her ladyship during long years of complete seclusion from society, a dull and monotonous existence in the country for her husband, a daughter petted by the mother and alienated from the father, and a son alienated from both. Courtly marriages are not conducted now as they used to be. There is more nature and a truer sense of domestic life in them. Even so late as the time of Queen Elizabeth, it was the custom amongst the families of the nobility to strengthen their alliances and interests by contracting their children to each other at an early age. The object of this practice was to consolidate the higher classes against the inroads and encroachments of the lower. The times were unsettled, and the aristocracy felt the necessity of cementing their order into a compact body by intermarriages. Thus, the unhappy Earl of Surrey was betrothed at the age of sixteen, to Lady Frances Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford; and Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the natural, and, it is recorded, favourite child of Henry VIII., was betrothed to his sister. Both pledges terminated in sorrow. Fitzroy died at the early age of seventeen, before he had reached his prime, or fulfilled his troth; and Howard-the brave, the devoted chevalier and minstrel, was married at nineteen years of age, and beheaded at thirty-one! Had Surrey lived in the succeeding reign, he would have been caressed at Court, and faction would have been abashed in the glory of his presence; but the savage temper of Henry, who asked no higher pretext for hunting him to the death, than the flimsy accusation that he had worn the arms of Edward the Confessor, which all his family, with the licence of heraldry, had done before him, was inflamed by his reputation, his honourable qualities, his impatience of restraint, his contempt for hypocrisy, and his out-spoken worship of purity. When Sydney, during the revolution of Poland, was proposed as a candidate for the throne of that disturbed realm, Queen Elizabeth at once discountenanced the proposal. She refused to sanction it, says history, lest she should lose the jewel of her times! How she would have nurtured Surrey !—perhaps, endeavoured to corrupt him! But where have we wandered from our text?-or had we a text to wander from? Bright-eyed May! it is thy dawn that bursts upon the green hills, and reveals the cheerful world just emancipated from the last breath of Spring, and brightening into summer; if, indeed, Spring or Summer are ever to come again into these ocean-girt lands. "Tis nature, full of spirits, waked and springing: They tell us that Love and Time, when they were both young and unskilled in their vocations, were once playing in a glade together-such a glade as Boccaccio would have dropped his company of gallants into, for a long summer's day of song and legend; and that in a frolic they exchanged toys, Time taking the bow and quiver, and Love snatching the hour-glass. But the experiment had a strange effect. Time shot the arrows so slowly that, it is said, the process of the passion became so full of weariness, that all the lovers fell asleep in the very height of the enchant ment; while Love, spilling out the sands with his usual precipitation, hurried people out of the world, at about the same rate of velocity that he is wont to hurry them into a frenzy. The apologue is in point. The seasons appear to have exchanged offices, and there has Winter, for seven or eight long months, been doing duty for himself as well as for the gay, laughing Spring, who, we suppose, has all this time been disporting herself in the Elysian fields, or in some other vagrant quarter of the universe, instead of attending to her proper business, for the due performance of which she enjoys a proportionate amount of privileges in the sweep of the Zodiac. Perhaps she has some factious design upon the year, and entertains a hope that she may be permitted to enjoy a sinecure; but she can hardly have been apprised of the measures that have of late been taken to abolish all idle offices, pensions, and hangers-on. If she do not bestir herself, the supplies will be stopped, and there will be an end at once to her functions→→→ for the time being. But May will come in to the relief, as she has often done, and disturbing the primroses from their trance, suddenly call them up into the startling sunlight. Shame upon Southwell for casting a reproach upon this month, with her sweet forehead braided with flowers, and her breath aromatic with honeysuckle. May never was the month of love, Had not Southwell been a Jesuit, and, therefore, incompetent to form any opinion in the matter, and a martyr to his faith withal, we should take rare pleasure in affixing to this madrigal such a criticism as, good saints protect us! would make him repeat the seven penitential psalms in his coffin. Old Ben's Invocation to a Dream may be better applied to May, and will act as an antidote to Southwell's quotation Yet let it like an odour rise, To all the senses here; And fall like beauty on their eyes, Or music in their ear! We have strained an image, or, more properly, banished Sleep that Beauty might take its place, in order to adapt the stanza; but this alteration, to suit a purpose, like all such forcible wresting of the elder poets to immediate uses, spoils the exquisite dance of the measure, and the still more |