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Leader (1850-1860), 30th April 1859, Edition 2 of 2, Page 11, LITERARY CILRONICLE OF THE WEEK.

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      Hb.4?^Ab «It 3q. 1859. -|- The Plpm 555

      Hb . 4 ?^ AB « it 3 Q . 1859 . - | - THE plPm 555

      Literature, Science, Art, &C.

      LITERATURE , SCIENCE , ART , & c .

      Literary Cilronicle Of The Week.

      LITERARY CILRONICLE OF THE WEEK .

      -•¦ After Niuch Rumouring And Paragraphi...

      - •¦ After niuch rumouring and paragraphing , whisperings in literary coteries , and jangling in law-courts , ' . the . new periodical ^ " All the Year Eound , " makes its appearance . And now that it has come , what can be said of it , but that it is " Household "Words" with a new name ? In shape , manner , and matter it is essentially the same ; so that if you were to cut the title off a number of the old publication , and stick it upon the new , no . one could possibly tell the difference . The opening of Mr . Dickehs ' s new-tale promises a story of about the Bleak House" level—quaintness and oddity bein"' more aimed at than humour—and we fancy the hand elsewhere in the

      rumours of wars , Stock Exchange bankruptcies , and electioneering amenities ? When the waters of strife are come , prudent men put by their valuables , and intelligence waits the return of reason . .

      we can detect same number . Public report , as well as internal evidence , attributes the " Piece of China , " a passing sketch of Chinese travel , to the circumnavigatory hermit of Egyptian Hall , Piccadilly . As ° for the oid publication , " Household Words , " Messrs . Bradbury and Evans seem determined not to let the grass grow under their feet . On Thursday , they applied to the Master of the Rolls to have the proceedings hastened , and the property offered for sale without delay , and were successful . Mr . Dickens offered no opposition . The consequence is , that this property- — which is but a . name—will be competed for about the end of May , and we shall be surprised if there be more than two competitors in the field .

      Next Thursday and . Friday an interesting but affecting ceremony will draw many a literary pilgrim to ^ Grasiiiere . The . 'death-of Mrs . Wordsworth renders it necessary that the goods and chattels in Eydal Mount should be dispersed , and , on the days we have named , the hammer of the auctioneer will echo in those honoured walls . Mere carpets , chairs and tables , my lords , and haply a book or two , and some odd nic-nacs , ¦— mere odds and more ends , Cheap tmrg-nihs from book stalls , cheap keepsakes from friends .

      But William Wordsworth has used those chairs ; Coleridge lias prosed over those fire-irons ; Southey has turned over the leaves of that book ; and more distinguished men and women than we can find space or leisure to indicate by name here , have pressed that worn old carpet witli their feet . Surely we will have a stick or a shred , if money will buy it—aye , though the Bank discount be 3 £ per cent . There has been a mistake about the

      Haliburtons . We suspected some confusion when the new knight was continually called Sir Brenton Haliburton . The name of " Sam Slick " was , as we well know , Thomas Chandler Haliburton . How , then , , came Sir Brenton ? The answer is plain and simple—Sir Brenton is quite another " guess sort" personage from the Clockmaker , and is now Chief Justice of Nova Scotia , on , account of which office he has been knighted . Thomas Chandler Haliburton , still plain Miv ( as we ai e glad to hear ) , is one of the candidates for representing the borough of JLaunceston , an honour to which ho aspires , not on account of his own merits and his liberal principles , but through the favour of the Duke of Northumberland , and upon high Tory professions—whioh wo are not by any means glad to hear . , The Critio says : —

      " We hear that only a few days before her death Lady Morgan was engaged in superintending through tliq press a talo of Indian life , entitled ' Imxima , the ¦ Prophetess , ' which sho had taken great pains to romodol from hoi * first production , Tho Missionary , ' published upwards of forty years ago . Sinco then a generation lias passed away , and tho story of LuxUna' will consequently como forth as if it wore now to tho groat mass of roadova of romance Mr Wosterton has announced it for immediate publication , ae well n . B * a now novel from tho pon of Mrs . Ohallico , the wife of Dr . Challioo , tho eminent physician , and deputy-coroner for Middlosox , This lady is ftu-oauy known by hor ' Sistor of Charity , ' and other Scanty notes this week I But what would you wheni evovy one . is shouting out wara and

      Chadwick's Life Of De Foe. The Life And ...

      CHADWICK ' S LIFE OF DE FOE . The Life and Times ofDanielDe Foe ; with Bemarks Diqressive and Discursive . By William Chadwick , London . John Russell Smith . A good and sufficiently ample life of De Foe is a desideratum in English literature . And the want of a standard work on the subject is all the more felt , that one or two sketches of the life of the author of " Robinson Crusoe" the " True Born

      Englishman , " have acted as whets to our appetite . The incomplete draughts of Hazlitt , Walter Wilson , Chalmers , and Sir ' Walter Scott—all of them defective in respect of magnitude and fulness , and such as Scott ' s avowedly looking at the subject only in one aspect-r-have by their very partial excellencies excited the greater expectancy for the advent of a literary student , assiduous enough in the research requisite for a full handling of the theme , and expert enough in his vocation to do it

      artistic justice . Nor has this feeling been decreased by the comparatively recent appearance in the Edinburgh Review , of Mr . Forster ' s cabinet picture , and , of the slowly progressing history of Lord Macaulay , in which , as might have been expected , the well-trusted adviser of the limner ' s hero , has his fah- share of promine u ce and laudation . Animated by this feeling , we opened the volume before us with considerably more than usual curiosity and interest . Whatever the genius and the industry , here at least was a large canvas—nearly five hundred pages octavo . On shutting the book , and after wading through its every sentence , we can express only unmitigated disappointment . A siiln ' p . nt of e-reat diimitv , of important historic

      relations , and deeply interesting in its national bearinos , is handled with the flippancy of a panaplSeteer . Sfcentorous declamation is spread over pages which ought to have been dedicated to the adduction of rival testimony , the portraiture of public character , the estimate of public occurrences , the inquiry into hidden motives , the . tracing of ultimate results . When the . reader has a right to expect some explanation of the relation in which De Foe stood to the influential Dissenters of the City of London a hundred and flfty years ago , the reader is treated by Mr . Ohadwick to a tirade ag ainst dissenting , deacons and parsons in these

      our own days , who beg money for soup kitchens and missionary societies . And Svhen some such sweeping assertion is made as that a hundred and so many odd members of such and such a Parliament of Queen A nne were in the pay of Louis XIV ., the turning of a leaf leads you ,. not to what ought to follow—some corroboration of the avcrment—but to an attack against the Privy Council Education Grants , a magniloquent oiler of 5001 . as the nucleus of a subscription for a statue in Hyde Park to Oliver Cromwell , or sapient strictures of the 1 ¦ ! 1

      on our growing habit letting upper lip remain unshaven . A slight modification of the wellknown saying of Sehelling to the aspiring young author whom he asked to tea , is thoroughly applicable to Mr . Chadwiok ' s book : " What is novel in it is perfectly irrelevant ; what is good in it is not his own . " it is indeed only those parts of it which are not his own which have ^ sustained us through its perusal . Ho makes , every now and thoi ) , quotations from JDo _ Foe ' s political pamphlets and poems , vary ing in length from one to a dozen pages ; and within the inverted commas is to bo found all in tho book that is ¦ ' 1 1

      worth reading . Our judgment w severe , and both tho author and our readers have a right to some oorroborativo illustrations of tho faults wo nljoge . But lot us first summarily state those . Imprimis : tho " remarks digressive and dieoursivo " have no business in tho book . II'Mr . Chadwick wishas to write down tho Privy Council grunts , or anything else , lot him write a book on tho subject , and thon hid purchaser will know what ho is buying and bargains for . Secondly : by tho

      author ' s own confession , as . we shall show , he is . guilty of a want of proper diligence in the collection of his materials . Thirdly : if he be defective in the carting to the spot the bricks he is going to build with , he . is ten times more inefficient in the rearing , and cementing ^ and proportioning his fabric . De Foe was not only abreast of the most forward and far-seeing of his contemporaries , but was also a contemned and ridiculed harbinger of much that is now enacted , to our practical advantage , in this country ; He is closely tied to what is present to us , as well as intimately mixed up ¦ with all the public history of his own times . To > - write the " Life and Times " of such a man must

      be one of the most arduous of literary tasks . To it are requisite the most delicate sense of historic perspective and proportion ; a niind emancipated , from hereditary party politics ; a sympathy with the subject , tempered by impartiality of historic judgment ; a power of grouping characters , of condensing narrative , of making a sentence or a saying typify the meaning or intent of a life or of a party . It would be hard to pass on Mr . Chadwick decisive discredit , if he only did not stand the application of this high criterion . We have av ri ght : to do so when we believe that . he evinces onlv the absence of every one of these qualities .

      Queen Anne reigned- ' by a parliamentary title , although a Stuart , 'just , as much so as her predecessor William , or her successor , George . The great leverage used by Mrs . Masham , Iiarley , and the Tories , all through her reign , against the Duchess of Marlborougli and Godolphin -influence , was the reiterated elevation of the jure divino right of sovereigns ciy , and its corollary , passive obedience . De Foe , of course , was one of the most assiduous maintainers of " the people ; the source of all power" view of the question . Mr . Chadwick supports his author with a ludicrous zeal ^ which would be most appropriate if the Bill of Rights were now

      endangered , or the Pretender were at Preston . But witlftliat we find no serious fault . And here we may allow that the only pleasing feature of Mr . Chadwick ' s performance , js the hearty , pugilistic style in wliich he goes in for his hero and his own dogmas against all comers . This characteristic would have been an excellent centre round which other / merits would have harmoniously clustered . As it stands , jt goes for nothing ; for it only plunges our author into rhapsodies of eulogy he takes no pains itimate casions and

      to substantiate by their leg oc ; into , torrents of invective which leave their objiects undepreciated , for he forgets to g ive the evidence of their culpability . Mr . Chadwick digresses from a reference to the anti-Dissenter bills of Queen Anne ' s reign , and the jure divino fi gment on which they were based , into a long recapitulation of the epochs in English history , when the doctrine of elective monarchy was virtually asserted , as at the accessions of Edward III . and Henry VII . Even on this and such digressions we do not found our

      blamo-taking ; although , certainly , they are mappropriate in a book on one man and one age , whatever they might have been in a continuous constitutional history of England . But even from this digression our author digresses . Having loft tho highway for a side lane , ho still must wander into a more devious and intricato by-path . Ho Hies off' to prescribe Annual Parliaments as the remedy for corrupt executives . And after nil , Pegasus , who has cantered over several centuries with tho bit between his teeth , lonjw abruptly back into tho highway , amongst J \ 'ii > o and the Presbyterians of rumors' Hall Meoting-housc , clearing in his last bound a still" foneo , which we take tho liberty of putting before M « wrs . Berkeley , Whitohurst , and their coadjutors ol tho ballot and socioty . ' , "Ikanothop part of this book I have proposed , a <* a punishment for bribery and intlin dation tor moa in high place in this world ' s smiles , stripping m Palaco-yard , Westminster , and lying to a cart-tail and flogging down tho Strand to Tomplo-bar . J ? his is a bettor protootjoh to tho voter than tho ballotbox ; tho ballot-box you might forgo , but thoro would bo no forging undor tho lush of two drummene from tho Foot Guards . Thoro is a way of protection to tho votor ; and that way must bo adopted \ and without tho ballot , too . "—Pago 170 .

  • Citation
    • Leader (1850-1860), April 30, 1859, page 11, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_30041859/page/11/