other novels of modern date; and it was not a bad puff for any novel to be read habitually to such circles as crowded the halls of Abbotsford during months of every year, by the author of Waverley.”—Literary Gazette, Aug. 10, 1833. This statement does not meet the charge-on the contrary, it gives more force to it. The remark was, that Sir W. Scott had noticed with applause many secondary contemporary novelists, but never mentioned the claims of Miss Austen's works. The defence is, that he did justice to their merits in an anonymous review. Acknowledgment of their excellence, proceeding openly from his authority, would have had incomparably more effect with the public; and it is strange, that, rating the genius of Miss Austen as the critic in the Quarterly must have done, he took no other opportunity of paying public tribute to it. How happened it that he contented himself with the anonymous notice? In one of his latter publications, he runs through the claims and characteristics of the more distinguished novelists of the age, those he would represent as the more distinguished,—and Miss Austen's name is not to be found in the number. Feeling her merit as the Quarterly critic did, it is, we repeat, strange that he should have suppressed the acknowledgment of it when the suitable occasion presented. As for Sir Walter's frequent perusal of the novels of Miss Austen, it is evidence of his taste; but the evidence of another quality is necessary to the defence attempted by the Literary Gazette: "It was no bad puff," says that experienced Journal, " for any novel to be read habitually to such circles as crowded the halls of Abbotsford, during months of every year." This is not to be disputed with the Literary Gazette, which must be allowed a competent judgment in puffs; but something better than a puff would be rendered to the genius of Miss Austen, by most of those who knew how to value it Before we learnt that Scott was the author of the review in the Quarterly, which showed a critical perception of the beauties of Miss Austen, we were inclined to attribute his neglect of her to the same cause that must have made him rate that matchless satire, the Jonathan Wild of Fielding, merely as the history of a scoundrel. The aim of the book must altogether have escaped him. POLITICAL CRIMINALS. Ir is the capricious liberality of English society to extend the largest toleration to the greatest political criminals. A man who has cut a throat for pelf, is justly accounted infamous; but one who has poured out blood like water, for ends not a whit less selfish or less sordid, is received as a favoured guest, and gaped at as a curiosity. One man commits a murder for a purse, and another commits five thousand murders for power, which would command thousands of purses. The first, failing to escape detection, is requited with the gallows; the second failing of a success which would have permitted none to question the crime, is greeted with the hospitality of the most moral people in the world, and finds himself even raised into an authority upon the very circumstances he must have egregiously miscalculated when he made his desperate and criminal attempt against the liberties of his country. The Baron D'Hausser, one of the guilty Ministers of Charles the Tenth, treats his reception in England in a way which may serve better than any moral lesson to rebuke the vicious indulgence upon which we have observed. The criminal himself is the first to despise those who have treated his criminality as celebrity. He says "That varnish of condemnation which I carry along with me has not been unserviceable to me. The curiosity which in England attaches to whatever is out of the common course, to men as well as things; the vanity which causes those who have played a conspicuous part to be sought after, filled up all the voids left, especially at first, by the various elements composing my existence. They have bound them together in such a manner as to give them an elevated situation in society, and to make of me, in spite, nay, perhaps on account of the events which have been my downfall, a personage who, by common consent, is sought after, questioned, consulted; for whom the first place is everywhere reserved; and who, notwithstanding his previous habits, is regarded as a sort of political authority." This reminds us of a story in Walpole's Correspondence. A certain china jar was advertised to be sold for ten guineas. London was shaken by an earthquake. The jar was cracked, and it was advertised to be sold for twenty guineas, being the only jar in existence cracked by an earthquake. The Baron D'Hausser is a jar cracked by an earthquake. Hence his enhancement with us curiosity-mongers. Let us hear no cant of respect for fallen greatness. If a man fall in attempting to throw down all that is dear and valuable to millions, we have no pity for his fall. He has well earned it. He has been unfortunate a word lachrymose as an onion--true : had he been fortunate, the liberties of his country would have had an end, and the scaffold would have reeked with the blood of patriots, for whom there is no mercy. The reverses of unmerited greatness, which are not brought down by great crimes, we can commiserate; but we have no sympathy with the calamities which have been but the just recoil of mischief the most malignant to mankind. It is grace enough to leave them undisturbed in their retreats, and unvisited with scorn. COBBETT ON EDUCATION. Mr. COBBETT's opinions respecting education are curiously inconsistent, both in theory and in practice. For years he has been addressing himself with all earnestness to the agricultural labourers; and yet if his advice prevailed, they would be unable to read what he wrote for their instruction. He must think there is some use in laying before their minds the statements and arguments in the Register; and yet he talks like an Attorney-General, as if a knowledge of letters was an unmixed mischief, having a direct tendency to crime. All this would be intelligible, if he would frankly say, that he alone, of all mankind, was competent to guide the understandings of the labouring classes, and claim an exclusive patent for that end. He lately said "Education was the knowledge necessary for a man for the situation of life in which he was placed. Take two men, for instance,-suppose one of them to be able to plough, and the other able to plough and make hurdles, and be a good shepherd. If the first man knew how to read as well as to plough, and the other man did not know how to read, even then he should say that the latter was the better man. Let Honourable Members go into the agricultural districts and take father and son, what would they find? Why, that in almost every instance the father was the better man he was the better labourer-he knew better how to do his work; and he was more able and more willing to do it. The reports that were from time to time laid on the table of that House, said that men became more and more immoral every year: those reports must be taken to be true. Then what became of the benefits of education? for education had been more and more spread: but what did it all tend to? nothing but increasing the number of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses— that new race of idlers. Crime, too, went on increasing." The exercise of the mind in one direction sharpens it for use in others; and there is probably no mechanical operation so humble, that it is not facilitated or improved by the application of intelligence. Well says eggs. the old proverb, that there is reason in the roasting of The man who can plough and read, but not make hurdles, is not incapacitated for making hurdles by his reading; on the contrary, the probability is, that when he, with more exercised faculties, sets himself to learn making hurdles, he will see his way through the art in half the time of the unlettered man. Mr. Cobbett's statement, that fathers are better labourers than sons, wants (as they say of news) confirmation. He himself is of the father class; which, from the time of Homer to the present hour, has been complaining of the degeneracy of the sons, and extolling the men of more barbarous ages. In employments requiring experience, the father must have advantages; but what age or ages has Mr. Cobbett in view when he makes the reference. The terms are vague; fathers range from twenty to four score, and sons from infancy to half a hundred. Going out of the walks of labour, the superiority of sons over fathers becomes indisputable. The House of Lords is a House of Fathers. The assertion that education tends to the increase of misconduct and crime, was so well answered by Mr. Murray, that we cannot do better than quote his words: "He denied, in the most distinct manner, the statements made by the Honourable Member for Oldham, as to the increase of crime being, as that Honourable Member had represented it, the consequence of the increase of education. That opinion had once been entertained in Edinburgh; but there the experiment had been fairly tried, and that opinion no longer existed. (Hear, hear.) In Edinburgh lists had been kept of the workmen, and columns marked so as to give a full account of their conduct during the year; and all the masters had found that those men who had received the benefits of education, and employed themselves as often as they could, in reading and writing, were the most sober, the most industrious, the most regular at their work, and the best conducted in their families. (Hear, hear!) So that the obstinate and the prejudiced masters-he did not, of course, mean to say that the Honourable Member for Oldham was prejudiced (in a laugh, and from Mr. Cobbett, 'Oh !')— had been obliged to confess that the result was decidedly in favour of education. He agreed that the man who could plough and make hurdles, and was a good shep. herd, was a more useful man than he who could only plough; but the fallacy was in assuming, that if the man was taught to read and write, he would be taught nothing else." Our own inquiries (and we never lose an opportunity of making them) confirm this representation. When we have heard manufacturers complaining of the turbulence of their men, we have asked them, which they found the most difficult to deal with, the men who read, or the men who don't read? The answer has uniformly been, Both are troublesome, but the ignorant are the most dangerous. "The reading men are always agitating, but we know what the end of their agitation is likely to be; we know the lengths they will go, and how they will go, and where they will stop; but the ignorant, when once set in motion, are like infuriated animals; there is no reckoning on their actions, or on any considerations that may check them." After the answer of Mr. Murray, which we have quoted, Mr. Cobbett said he was not an enemy to education, but to forcing it on the people. Not an enemy to education! What! Does Mr. Cobbett mean to say that he is not an enemy to that which he alleges to be a cause of crime? Until Mr. Cobbett's ideas on this subject are a little more settled-until he has determined in his own mind whether education be a cause of crime, and, as such, an evil to be abated, or whether it be innocuous or positively beneficial, and as such to be promoted,-it would be well if he would hold his peace upon the subject, and spare his reputation the stain of these flagrant inconsistencies. THE WISHING-CAP. No. VI. Spenser recommended to more general perusal.-Spenser a favourite Poet with Poets. Remarks on the supposed obsoleteness of his language, on his diffuseness, and his caprices of spelling. Reason why, beyond any other great English Poet, he takes people out of their cares. Ir is much to be wished, (and we hereby wish it accordingly, and hope to see results from our good will,) that readers who love poetry, and yet happen to be unacquainted with Spenser, should hasten to make themselves amends by getting the Faerie Queene. If their love is of the right sort, they will rejoice in the new region thrown open to them, and wonder how they could have missed it so long. An admiration of Spenser is a test of poetical taste. Other poets may be preferred, and some few (such as Dante and Shakspeare) were greater men and profounder originals; but not to like Spenser, is not to like poetry for its own sake, not to relish the beautiful and the luxurious, without the aid of other stimulants. All the poets have liked him. There has not been a more genuine favourite among them, a writer beloved more as a matter of course, or more imitated; and what is remarkable, he has been beloved by poets of all sorts, natural and artificial. To be poetical at all, is to have a sympathy with him. There is a sonnet attributed of Shakspeare, in which the great dramatist says that Spenser is " dear” to him. It is of doubtful authenticity; but nobody doubts that Shakspeare must have relished him to the full. Milton avowedly regarded him as his master. Cowley was led to write verses by a copy of the Faerie Queene, which used to lie in his mother's window. All the wits and poets of his own, day, the Raleighs, Sydneys, Ben Jonsons, &c., reverenced him; and so did those of Charles the First and of Charles the Second,-Dryden, in particular, who sometimes copied from him. Pope said he read him in advanced life, with as much pleasure as in youth; and Thomson eulogised him in the Seasons, and imitated him in his beautiful poem, the Castle of Indolence. It would be easy to add to this list, both great names and small. The most poetical poets of the last and present generation have all passionately admired him; and no stanza has been so popular as the magnificent one of his invention. Even Lord Byron wrote in it,-the only poet on record who professed to have no regard for him, and whose regard was, in all probability, really less than he would have been willing to have it, at times when he spoke less under the influence of his humour. But this was the misfortune of the prose part of his life, and not the natural feeling of his poetry. The notion that Spenser's language is unintelligibly obsolete, vanishes on the slightest acquaintance. Ben Jonson said, that "in affecting the ancients, he wrote no language." Possibly the actual language of the Faerie Queene, taken altogether, was never spoken. And the same may be said of Milton's. The English language itself, as now spoken, is a mixture of many others; and the languages of our more scholarly poets have been usually a sort of quintescence of this mixture: but they are not on that account the less intelligible; at all events not to educated readers. Spenser's was a kind of new architecture, of Gothic mould; and shedding a grace, on that very account, upon the peculiarity and remote VOL. III.—NO, XVIII. 3 C ness of his fairy region. It is not that of passion, like Shakspeare's and Chaucer's; nor of wit and manners, like Pope's; nor of anything else which renders a common parlance essentially requisite. It is that of a fine, lazy, luxurious, far-off, majestic dream; and therefore may take all the licence of a dream, compatible with beauty and dignity. To an educated reader, Spenser very seldom, indeed, requires a glossary; there is one, however, always printed with him: it need not be often in request with any readers at all accustomed to books, or whose perceptions are of an order fit to read poetry. In fact, generally speaking, he is as easy to be comprehended, and puts his meaning as plainly on the surface, as in the first stanzas of his introduction: "Lo! I the man whose Muse whilom did maske, For trumpets stern to change mine oaten reeds, Me, all too mean, the sacred muse areeds Here is one word of Chaucer's (whilom) which was disused in the graver poetry of Spenser's days. Hundreds of his stanzas have no such old word; and if they had, who would require a better or newer style for a Gothic Romance? The word "moralize" was his own invention, and has been repeated by Pope "He stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song." The worst difficulties, in the way of a relish of Spenser, are his spelling and his diffuseness. With the rights of orthography, he certainly does take manifold and marvellous liberties; spelling, in fact, just as he pleases, with all the non-chalance of the ladies of his day; and even delighting to force his rhymes into visible harmony, where the audible harmony was sufficient; as in writing the word sed for said, in order to make it look severely of a cast with red; and lam for lamb, to rhyme with dam; carving out the very sound, at it were, with a pen-knife, to make it fit and tally in the nicest possible manner, and out of the sheer indulgence of his will and pleasure. And herein, we doubt not, lay the secret. Spenser pampered his imagination till it could bear no obstacles that by any possibility could be set aside. He sometimes goes so far as to coin new inflections, and consequently new words, on purpose to accommodate his rhyme, as in an instance which we shall notice presently. The stanza invented by the poet for his long work is a remarkable and magnificent instance of this enjoyment of his will, and contempt of obstacles. It compelled him to repeat the rhyme upon one word three times, and upon another four. This, in English, is very difficult, and has led him, says Warton, " into many absurdities, the most striking and obvious of which are the following: "I. It obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant, with trifling and tedious circumlocution'; viz. F. Q. ii. ii. 44. "Now hath fair Phoebe, with her silver face, Thrice seen the shadows of this neather world, In which her roiall presence is enroll'd." That is, it is three months since I left her palace. "II. It necessitated him, when matter failed towards the close of a stanza, to run into a ridiculous redundancy of words; as in F Q. ii. ix, 33, |