Wood, Rev. William. Architecture, Aquatinta We could have wished to have been able to distinguish, in each case in the above List, whether various Articles, appertaining to the Science or Subject mentioned, or only the particular Article bearing the Name of the Science or Subject, are the production of the Individual mentioned; this, however, we are unable to do. Besides the above names, the Covers above mentioned, announced, that the assistance of C. R. Aikin, John Clennel, E. Coleman, Astley Cooper, Rev. W. Crowe, John Leslie, Dr. Richard Pearson, W. Symonds, and William Thomas, were engaged; but whether all, or any of these Gentlemen furnished any Articles, we are uninformed. We have been sorry to observe, the Date 1819 affixed to the Title-page of each of the 39 Volumes, instead of that particular Year, in which each Volume was finished; because of the great number of discoveries and improvements in the useful Arts and the Sciences, which have been, for the first time, submitted to the Public, or at least in so methodized a form, in the Volumes of this Work, by the many able, practical, and scientific Individuals, who have written Articles in them; the want of these Dates to the Volumes, can scarcely fail to be the source of much literary injustice, and of high regret by the future historians of Scientific Improvement. We trust therefore, that our Readers will approve our giving here, a List containing the Dates of Publication, of each of the 85 Parts of this extensive Work; and to which we have affixed the name of the last Article in each year. To have expected that a Work so extensive as the present, and so long in course of publication, could have been of equal Merit throughout all its parts and departments, or without several Faults, would perhaps be deemed unreasonable: suffice it to say, that its merits are conspicuous, and well understood, as its very extensive sale and patronage, have already evinced. The printing has been executed by Andrew Strahan, in an elegant style, but whose omission of pages has been complained of by great numbers, as precluding reference to particular passages in the long Articles. ART. II. The Jacobite Relics of Scotland, being the Songs, Airs, and Legends, of the Adherents to the House of Stuart. Collected and illustrated by JAMES HOGG, Author of the Queen's Wake, &c. &c. 8vo. pp. 444. Edinburgh, 1819. WE gather, from some remarks in the Introduction to this volume, that the undertaking was suggested at a meeting of the Highland Society of London, to which it is dedicated. Nothing can be more praiseworthy than the purpose of rescuing from the oblivion, to which they were hurrying swiftly, the monuments raised by the poetical genius of our countrymen who had devoted themselves to the exiled family; and he must either be a squeamish politician, or a cold admirer of song, who can suffer the pernicious and absurd principles consecrated in those effusions of the Jacobite muse, to interfere with the wish common to every good Scotchman, that the literary merits of his country, in all ages, should meet with their full share of praise. At the same time, it cannot be denied, that the language held upon this subject by many persons among us in the present times, is peculiarly reprehensible. The controversy between the two families and their partisans is wholly laid at rest, by the course of nature, indeed, as well as of political events; and long ago it ceased to be at all a practical question. Yet do we find a strange sort of spirit lately sprung up-a sort of speculative Jacobitism, not wholly romantic, neither, we are afraid, but connected with the events of the times, and a sort of twin brother to the newfangled doctrine of legitimacy. The praises of the Cavaliers are lavishly chanted; the devotion of the Stuart partisans is consecrated as something more than human; the exiled house is represented in the most false and favourable lights; and the Whigs are vilified in an equal proportion, and with no kind of discrimination. Now the men who show their zeal in this truly preposterous manner, run no risk, much less do they make the smallest sacrifice; yet they seem to exult in the disinterested gallantry and constancy of the old and real Jacobites, as if they belonged themselves to the caste. In a sound skin, they publish what, even half a century ago, would have cost them either ear; and they would fain persuade themselves that they have a right to glory in the romantic purity of their honest zeal for a beaten cause. Now all this is not mere folly and affectation; nor is it all enthusiasm. The persons who indulge in this lofty strain have some things in common with that party whose personal attachment, gallantry and contempt of danger, they have no pretension to share. Like them, they hate the cause of popular principles; they dislike a free and rational government; they had rather see a king unfettered by a parliament; a judge unchecked by a jury; and a press free to praise only the stronger side, and restrained from palliating all abuses save those of power. To promulgate such doctrines openly, even at this time of day, and large as the strides are which have been made within a few years, might not be altogether safe; and accordingly their advocates are eager in seizing every opportunity of crying up those who were the victims of such principles in a former age, and of stamping with every mark of opprobrium and ridicule the great men to whom we owe the whole blessings of the English constitution. Mr. Scott's avowed writings are not entirely free from this imputation; and those still more popular works which are so generally ascribed to him, abound with instances of the spirit of which we are speaking. But not only are such things far less reprehensible in works of pure fiction; Mr. Scott is an artist of far greater delicacy than his imitators; and a sly hint, or a joke, or an incidental remark, may be allowed to pass unnoticed, while we turn with disgust from the clumsy matter-of-fact statements of Jacobite doctrine which others have not scrupled to put forth. Of these we know none more deserving of censure than the compiler of the volume before us, and, before touching upon its literary merits, we must be suffered to prefix a word or two upon its politics. If Mr. Hogg had confined himself to the praises which the poe tical merit of the Jacobite poetry so often calls forth with justice; if he had only extolled that side of the question as beyond comparison the most smit with the love of sacred song;' or if he had contented himself with giving the misguided adherents of the cause their due applause for disinterested valour, no one could have blamed him, even if, like a truly able and successful defender of those bad principles, David Hume, he had contrived to make the worse appear the better reason by dexterity of statements and skilful narrative. But his is not that judicious abstinence, which gains what greediness never can reach, that delicate hand which feels its way, and gains admittance where brute force knocks in vain. See the plain undisguised manner in which he lays down the most offensive propositions, until he scares those who, by more lenient methods, might have been favourably disposed to him. They (the 'songs) are the unmasked effusions of a bold and primitive race, 'who hated and despised the overturning innovations that prevail'ed in Church and State, and held the abetters of these as dogs, or 'something worse-drudges in the lowest and foulest paths of perdition-beings too base to be spoken of with any degree of pa'tience and forbearance.' (p. viii.) Nor can this writer shelter himself under the pretext that he meant here only to describe the light in which the illustrious founders of English liberty were viewed by their adversaries. Throughout the whole book he identifies himself with them; and, in the Introduction, he even brings forward his principles under a sanction which would excite no little surprise, were there the smallest reason to doubt that he has himself been most grossly deceived. 'Had it not,' he says, 'been ren'dered necessary for our kings of the House of Brunswick to main'tain the sovereignty to which they were called by the prevailing ' voice of the nation, they seem never to have regarded those the 'law denominated rebels otherwise than with respect.' The absurdity of this passage is sufficiently glaring. George I. and George II., it seems, would have respected the Balmerinos and the Lovats, had they not been the very persons against whom those worthies rebelled ;-but as it was, they testified their respect by the hands of the hangman! But he proceeds to give what he calls proofs of the position, that the princes of the House of Brunswick are at heart Jacobites. 6 The first is, that Frederick, Prince of Wales, rebuked his wife for throwing some blame upon the lady who harboured the Pretender when he flung himself upon her protection in the extremity of peril.' 'I hope in God,' said his Royal Highness, 'you 'would have done so in the same circumstances.' Now, to what does this amount, but that even Frederick, perhaps the least magnanimous of all the Brunswick princes, yet felt what every human being must feel on such an occasion, without entering in the least into the merits of the question out of which it arose? We know that the law calls it treason to shelter a traitor; but the man who most abhors the crime, would feel himself almost as unable to resist the sympathy which overwhelmed him, when he suddenly found a fellow creature's life in his hands, as to perform the last office of the law upon him. This is all that Frederick meant; and we rather marvel that the partialities of his august spouse, for a nobleman of known jacobite tendencies, were not rather cited as evidence that the late king took his jacobitism by descent. However, the author goes on to prove his late Majesty also an adherent of the Stuart family, in preference to the Hanoverian. Not only did he restore the forfeited estates, and afford relief in money to the distresses of the exiled house, (why was the restoration of the national dress also omitted?) but Mr. Hogg adds, that since his Majesty is 'now secluded from his government and people, and we may consider him as a deceased monarch,' he will relate a trait which 'marked his sentiments of those who stood for the cause of his un'fortunate relative.' We proceed to give this notable trait in the author's own words-premising, that we verily believe neither he nor any man living would have ventured to publish such a thing, had not the late king been, as he says, in the state of a deceased 'monarch.' His Majesty having been told of a gentleman of fa'mily and fortune in Perthshire, who had not only refused to take 'the oath of allegiance to him, but had never permitted him (the king) to be named as king in his presence. "Carry my compli'ments to him," said the king, "but-what-stop-no;-he may 'perhaps not receive my compliments as King of England-give him the Elector of Hanover's compliments, and tell him that he ' respects the steadiness of his principles." Now, we will at once take upon us to affirm, from internal evidence, that every one word of this is a pure fabrication, probably of some one who wished to impose on Mr. Hogg's credulity. The late King was no more the man to utter such affected stuff, than Mr. Pitt was the man to die with "Oh my country!"a in his mouth, even if he had been at the moment in a state of mind to speak coherently. His Majesty was a plain, rational person, utterly incapable of such nonsense. The folly of it was as much beneath his good sense, as its conceit was beyond his ingenuity. If any person could have ventured to tell him the anecdote on which the tale is founded, it must have been in order to laugh in broad grins at the Highlander to whom it related. If the monarch had taken it at all seriously, he would have begun by showing his displeasure at the rash narrator. That he should send his compliments, or, in Mr. Hogg's a We presume the reader is aware, that all Mr. Pitt's friends deny this tale, which some one palmed upon Mr. Rose. Indeed it refutes itself. |