We will choose the occasion where Merope opens the door of the house and sees Epytus, whom she has mistaken for the murderer of her son; asleep on a couch, she exclaims :

"He sleeps sleeps calm. O ye all-seeing Gods!

Thus peacefully as ye let sinners sleep,
While troubled innocents toss, and lie awake!
What sweeter sleep than this could I desire
For thee, my child, if thou wert yet alive?

How often have I dreamed of thee, like this!

Merope then compares the figure before her with her supposed murdered son, and exclaims:

"Ah miserable!

And thou, thou fair-skinn'd serpent! thou art laid

In a rich chamber on a happy bed,

In a king's house, thy victim's heritage ;

And drink'st untroubled slumber, to sleep off
The toils of thy foul service, till thou wake
Refresh'd, and claim thy master's thanks and gold.
Wake up in hell from thine unhallow'd sleep,
Thou smiling fiend, and claim thy guerdon there!
Wake amid gloom, and howling, and the noise
Of sinners pinioned on the torturing wheel,
And the stanch Furies' never silent scourge.
And bid the chief tormentors there provide
For a grand culprit shortly coming down.

Go thou the first, and usher in thy lord!

A more just stroke than that thou gav'st my son,
Take

Merope goes towards the sleeping Æpytus, with axe uplifted; Arcas returns and prevents the blow.

We regret our inability to give further extracts. Here, in "Merope,” is a positive and dignified rebuke to the poets of our day, who have lost all love for the simple and classical, and have precipitated themselves into the regions of metaphor, till we are at a loss to catch the natural tints and sounds about us.

Last year, Mr. Arnold was elected to the chair of Poetry, at the University of Oxford. We believe he was the first Professor who gave his inaugural lecture in English. We trust his influence will be lasting in that home of the Classics. But Mr. Arnold has another, if not a higher profession. Few men have such excellent opportunities of judging of the influence of our current literature as he, moving continually, as he does, amongst those whose time is devoted to the extension of popular education; and no man is more likely to give birth to a healthy feeling amongst the educators of the country.

J. H. B.

Thomas Plowman.

WE, some time back, ventured on an estimate of the genius and writings of Chatterton; and we wish there had been adequate means of forming a judgment on another of Bristol's "marvellous " ones,-him, whose name is at the head of this article. It is presumed that many of our readers are acquainted with a little tract-like book, entitled "Tommy Plowman: a Brief Memoir of a Remarkable Child, who died August 3rd, 1842, aged eight years;" but there may be others who are yet to be informed that, on the 26th of October, 1834, Mrs. Plowman, the wife of the first mate of a ship trading between Bristol and Naples, gave birth to Thomas William Plowman. As an infant he appears to have been eminently beautiful; as a boy, very handsome; and so spiritually intelligent, that an artist, after engaging to "do his best" in making a portrait of him, having observed one of the child's meteor-like expressions, added, "but nobody can paint that !" At ten months he uttered words; at eleven months he was found busy in hammering nails into the arms of his chair; at fifteen months he was master of his alphabet, the two first words he chose to spell without book being "Nebuchadnezzar” and "Constantinople." At twenty-six months old he recited the twentyfour verses of "St. Agatha's Eve;" at four years of age he was to be found in his study surrounded by books on Geology, Chemistry, Mechanics, &c.; the Bible however being his Book of books. His only difficulty seems to have rested in the clear pronunciation of the letters 1, v, and w; but he had the impatience natural to quick minds, and when his mother would have interpreted for him to his auditors, he exclaimed, "Mother, mother! why will you, mother? I can make the ladies understand myself." In his fifth year he attended a series of scientific lectures at the Bristol Institution; and his mother, under his dictation, wrote a report of them, which tallied with the account detailed in the public prints. After this we are not to wonder at his lecturing his seniors on "argillaceous" and "malleable" matter; on the action of the moon in occasioning the tide ; on the question "whether the monkey is a ceropithecus, or one of the quadrumana ?" on the bubbles caused by nitrous acid poured into a puddle; and on the principle of the pneumatic railway,―suggested at once to his mind by merely asking him "if he knew what an exhausted receiver and a cylinder were?" Coupling bis

knowledge of these with the allusion to the railway, he exclaimed, "I have it! I have it! There's an exhausted cylinder; the train is in it; they let in the air, and away it goes as fast as the wind that drives it!" His objection to travel in an omnibus was thus expressed, "Oh, Sir, it's like being at the end of a blow-pipe of hydrogen and oxygen gas!"

But the child appears to have been not a wonder only, for his engaging charm lay in the perfect preservation of his infant nature. We learn from Mrs. Marcet, on the occasion of her first seeing him, "he seemed more inclined to play than to talk, and had a good game of romps." Mr. Romily, too, mentions how the boy "came bounding into the room;" and refers to the " rosy freshness on his cheek and the air of health and enjoyment in his appearance, so unusual in precocious children." It is also said that "he disliked being petted, and thoroughly enjoyed a game of play with those of his own age," when there was no opportunity for graver application.

Allusion has been made to his impatience, not as a moral defect, but as a part of his quickly anticipative intellect. As in the case of the pneumatic railway, he would often leap to correct conclusions, with his "I see! I see it!" and, to people who could not readily see, he appears to have been disinclined: for he would say, his liking to be with Mr. Stockwell was occasioned by "the latter's understanding him, which others did not." His impatience, however, fretted his good mother, and an interesting anecdote is told of her having requested Mr. C. to make some general remarks on this fault before the boy. This was done. Little Plowman listened with attention till the close of the observations, which of course expressed no direct allusion to himself; and then said "I suppose Mr. C. you mean to say 'Thou art the man!'" The child's knowledge of the Scriptures was, doubtless, as the book asserts, wonderful; but we can scarcely believe, what seems to be signified, that by his own intuition he had discovered the promise of the Saviour in the words of Gen. iii. 15. If it was a mere act of memory informed by the annotator, it deserves no especial notice. Indeed, his knowledge of Bible exposition was little more than what many other children, of not much more advanced years, but accustomed to hear with attention and read with memory, might exhibit. His frequent repetition of the verse in the 27th Psalm,

"The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear," &c., might be expected; but the reason for his especial admiration of the 29th Psalm is not so apparent. Neither do we think his prayer, composed at Hertford, is beyond his years at the time; since apart from its piety it is childish and pointless. Again, we regret the report of his having said

during his last illness, that he felt himself " a very great sinner." This, we think, smacks more of conventional tuition than of innate conviction, -a mode of speech scarcely to have been expected from a boy so devoted to strict Truth as Thomas Plowman ever had been; and who, in the simplicity of his nature, with all its piety, pure affection, obedience, innocent cheerfulness, and unconsciousness of any inarked wrong, should, in honesty, have limited his self-accusation to the faults of which he was truly aware; and which, if they really justified the expression quoted, render the "memoir" that has been written in his praise, a work to be lamented, as shewing that its distinguished hero was, essentially, no better than "a naughty little boy." Though less heinous than the idea of "continuing in sin that grace may abound," the insincere declaration of “ very great sinfulness" must be offensive to that power, which is not to be bribed by the plea of " guilty to award grace in more abundance; and as the poor boy had declared in his prayer, "I have never yet told a a story, knowing it," so he might have said to Mr. L. "I do not know that I have been a very great sinner." Apart from the child's alleged impatience, we do not learn that he ever came within reach of reproof, except on one occasion at school, when it was discovered that not he, but his nurse, was the blameable party. There is in fact, thoughout his brief history, such a severe simplicity connected with buoyant play fulness, as inclines us to think, that either there is some mistake in this report, or that Master Tom had been worked upon, by not the most judicious of teachers. "It cannot be expected," says Jeremy Taylor, "that in a child's age should be the vice of a man: that were monstrous, as if he wore a beard in his cradle;" and, at all events, it were monstrous to think that such a practical exemplar of goodness and truth, as young Plowman, could, under the instigation of his own free thought, have "felt himself to be a very great sinner."

His mother's conduct appears to have been that of a most excellent and sensible woman, though it was not perhaps shown in her making him promise never to allow his head to be examined by a phrenologist. To the permission of this, no persuasion could enforce him; and when money was offered, he rejected it with scorn; though, if the report be correct, in language rather more "hoity-toity" that we could have wished ;-“ And do you think, Sir, I could be bribed with morey to do what is wrong? ? My mother told me not to have my head examined, and I promised her I would not."

Now, there may not be wanting cynics, who, putting this and that together (i. e. this indignant outburst of insulted honour, with the hum

ble avowal of sinfulness before alluded to), might be inclined to question the worth of the resultant total: but there is enough in the memoir to show, that Thomas Plowman must have been, in every sense, an admirable child, religiously, morally, and scientifically; for it is evident that the great bent of his little giant mind, so far as its earthly occupations were concerned, was "in the direct forthright," as (Shakspeare so powerfully states it) towards natural science in general, and mechanics in particular. We read of his architectural studies: so that it is "probable to thinking" he would have become an engineer to make Mr. Brunel second best by long odds. He might have turned out the very Leviathan of engineers, or the designer of works not less remarkable for their artistic, than for their constructive perfections; and, but that his early end may have been predestined, we should deeply lament the absence of circumstances more favourable to the education of such a wondrous lad, than those which offered themselves. To us, it seems strange that such a boy should have been sent to the Infant School at Hertford, or indeed to any school of the ordinary class, except in connexion with private tutorage; because his talents, as distinguished from those of Chatterton, were of such eminently practical quality, that it might well have been expected he would prove as greatly useful to his country as creditable to old Bristol. This was the more to be looked for, from the fact of his being not merely mechanical and scientific, but gifted with that pervading amenity, which gave him a singularly taking address and refinement of expression. Too frequently do coarseness and awkwardness accompany the mechanical genius to the detriment of its universal welcome; but Mrs. Marcet gives us a description of his person and manners, which, ushering his genius into courtly presence, leave us little doubt that he would, in time, have become Sir Thomas William Plowman, P.R.S., &c., &c., &c., lecturing princes and nobles in the theatre of Albemarle-street.

We are not reviewing, but making use of the little book, which, so far as we are aware, is the only existing record of this extraordinary child; but we may say, in passing, that it is well written as it is unpretending, and includes several letters of much interest. The respected persons mentioned in the course of the narrative, are the Revs. Messrs. H. Forsyth and F. Cunningham, Mr. Grinfield, Mr. Stockwell, Rev. Mr. Woodward, Mr. Creeney, Mr. and Mrs. E. Romilly, Mrs. Marcet, Messrs. Miller and Visger, Dr. Carpenter, Miss G., Mrs. L., and his nurse at Hertford, who has the unenviable distinction of having been the one unkind person, whose misrepresentation had nearly subjected him to undeserved punishment. We could earnestly desire that any or all of