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180 NOTICES OF BOOKS.
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3.—Becollections of the Last Days of She...
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4.—TJie National Magazine. January, Febr...
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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180 Notices Of Books.
180 NOTICES OF BOOKS .
3.—Becollections Of The Last Days Of She...
3 . —Becollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron . By E . J . Trelawny . Edward Moxon , London .
Never did the truth , of the adage " Save me from my friends " receive a more striking elucidation than in the volume before us .
Manifold as have been the attacks upon Lord Byron , exaggerated as were the on dits of the salons , it was reserved for his intimate and
personal friend to legitimatize , as it were , the spurious gossip so freelin circulationandby the abuse of private confidence and the
y , , privileges of intimacy , to fling the final stone at a man who , no one's enemy so much as his own , has never been more aptly
described than in that line of his which encircles a medallion portrait of the poet in the small library at Chatsworth , " The wandering
outlaw of his own dark mind . " The gross indelicacy of certain details connected with the burning
of Shelley ' s body , upon which Mr . Trelawny lingers , in utter disregard of the feelings of near relatives still livingthe heartless
, impression he conveys of Byron's conduct and words during the solemn ceremonyand the disgusting evidence he bears against
, himself in the sacrilegious inspection of Byron ' s corpse to satisfy his curiosity as to the carefully concealed cause of the poet ' s
lameness , cannot fail to inspire horror and disgust in the mind of every refined and honourable reader . Egotism and heartless indelicacy
characterize the book , which , for the honour of humanity , we can only wish had never been written .
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4.—Tjie National Magazine. January, Febr...
4 . —TJie National Magazine . January , February , and March numbers .
There is no lack of matter or of variety in the closely printed pages of the ' National Magazine . ' Headers of all descriptions can find in
each number some pages of pleasant reading ; and though the greater portion of the articles consists of stories or sketches , there is also
given each week a review or a notice connected with literature or art , which gives a more peculiarly present interest to the number .
Some of the stories are serials , and one , ' Ashburn Rectory , ' by the author of ' Gilbert Massinger , ' is especially worthy of the reader ' s
attention . 6 A Christmas Vagary , ' by the author of Paul Ferrol , is an attempt
at a Fairy Tale ; we say attempt advisedly , but ifc is no easy matter to write a good fairy tale ( has any one succeeded since Madame
d'Aulnoy ?) , and the remembrance of the clever first novel of this writer will , for some time to come , float her future works , just as it
has lately in a few days exhausted a first edition of a comparatively . inferior book . Some of the short poems are decidedly above the
average of magazine verses . One , entitled Mr . Smith of Maudlin , '
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), April 1, 1858, page 130, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01041858/page/58/
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