return to France on condition of his signing a certain declaration. But he regarded this as dishonourable, and therefore preferred dying in exile.

About the year 1780, our French artists painted as the Abbé Delille wrote, that is, in a ridiculously affected style. David taught our young students to copy the antique. Most of the figures in his pictures are undressed, and are remarkable for fineness of drawing. David was certainly one of the most distinguished men that France has produced during the 18th century. His famous picture of Napoleon at Mount St. Bernard was sold on the 18th

instant.

The celebrated improvisatore, Sgricci lately exhibited his talent with great éclat at a party given by Baron Gerard, now the first of our French painters. Madame Pasta sung the favourite air from Gluck's Orfeo, to which she imparts such exquisite expression. At the conclusion of the song, the company requested M. Sgricci to improvise the fifth act of a tragedy on the subject of Orpheus, a task which he performed with extraordinary ability.

Some of our leading fashionables are just now engaged in getting up a coneert for the Lenefit of the Greeks. M. Sosthene de la Rochefoucault has, it is said, prohibited Rossini from presiding at this concert.

THE SUNBEAM.

THOU art no lingerer in monarchs' hall;
A joy thou art, and a wealth to all-
A bearer of hope unto land and sea;

Sunbeam! what gift has the world like thee?

Thou art walking the billows, and Ocean smiles-
Thou hast touch'd with glory his thousand isles!
Thou hast lit up the ships and the feathery foam,
And gladden'd the sailor, like words from home.

To the solemn depths of the forest shades,
Thou art streaming on through their green arcades,
And the quivering leaves that have caught thy glow,
Like fire-flies glance to the pools below.

I look'd on the mountains-a vapour lay,
Folding their heights in its dark array;
Thou brokest forth-and the mist became
A crown and a mantle of living flame.
I look'd on the peasant's lowly cot-
Something of sadness had wrapt the spot;
But a gleam of thee on its casement fell,
And it laugh'd into beauty at that bright spell.
To the earth's wild places a guest thou art,
Flushing the waste like the rose's heart;
And thou scornest not, from thy pomp, to shed
A tender light on the ruin's head.

Thou tak'st through the dim church-aisle thy way,
And its pillars from twilight flash forth to day,
And its high, pale tombs, with their trophies old,
Are bathed in a flood as of burning gold.

And thou turnest not from the humblest grave,
Where a flower to the sighing winds may wave;
Thou scatter'st its gloom like the dreams of rest,
Thou sleepest in love on its grassy breast.
Sunbeam of summer! oh! what is like thee?
Hope of the wilderness, joy of the sea!
-One thing is like thee, to mortals given,

The Faith, touch ing all things with hues of Heaven.

F. H.

POPULAR FALLACIES.

That great wit is allied to madness.-So far from this being true, the greatest wits will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

-did Nature to him frame,

As all things but his judgment overcame;

His judgment, like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mightysea below."

The ground of the fallacy is, that men, finding in the raptures of the
higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel
in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in
dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet.
But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his
subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks
familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and
is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins
his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night."
Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind un-
tuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind
(a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this
misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,-never letting the reins of reason
wholly go,
while most he seems to do so, he has his better genius still
whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner
counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier
resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be
found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he sum-
mon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consis-
tency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even
when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes
submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as
that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he
clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder
at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European
vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own
nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth.
Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the lat-
ter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they
lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless;
their visions night-mares. They do not create, which implies
shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active-
for to be active is to call something into act and form-but
passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something
super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly
non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucina-
tions were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature,
or trascending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if
it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even in the describing of real

and every-day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature-show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy,-than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels,-as they existed some twenty or thirty years back,-those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms,-whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue-where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street-a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive :--we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By what subtile art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosopher enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream-that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy,-is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his widest seeming-aberrations.

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort-but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.

ELIA.

LECTURES ON POETRY, BY T. CAMPBELL.

LECTURE XI.

A SHORT notice of Sophocles, in Suidas's Lexicon*; a life of him, prefixed to his works, by an anonymous Greek scholiast; and some passages in which he is cursorily mentioned by classic authors, contain all the scanty information respecting this great poet, that has come down from antiquity. Among modern scholars, Petitus, Gyraldus, Meursius, Fabricius, and the re-editors of the Greek Library, have collected those traditionary testimonies; and Lessing has collated them with peculiar sagacity, though he unhappily left his work unfinished. The materials for a clear and connected history of the poet's life, certainly cannot be said to exist: and in biography, as in architecture, there is no skill that can atone for the want of materials. It is not surprising, therefore, that there should be no satisfactory life of Sophocles in English, any more than in any other language. But still a few interesting traditions respecting the poet actually remain to us; and it is surprising with what meagreness and frigidity two successive English translators of his works have contrived to string them together.

According to the Arundel Marbles (which, with deference to Lessing and Fabricius, I prefer to any other authority,) Sophocles was born in the third year of the 70th Olympiad (B. C. 498 years), and was eight and twenty when he gained his first victory in the theatre. The latter circumstance Lessing thinks irreconcileable with Plutarch's assertion, that the poet was then a young man; for nobody (as the learned German alleges) is thought young at eight and twenty. But, alas! is there not a time when we begin to think that period of life enviably youthful? His rival Eschylus, when he was beat by Sophocles at the age of fifty-six, may have possibly been of that opinion.

The free people of Athens were divided into tribes or phylas, and subdivided into demoi or parishes. Sophocles's tribe is supposed to have been that of Hippothoon, and his parish was Colonos, a place (signifying a hill) near Athens, which was doubly honoured in being the place of his birth, and the scene of one of his most beautiful tragedies.

*Suidas's account is short, nor does he deign to quote an authority. The anonymous scholiast quotes Aristoxenus, (of Tarentum it may be supposed,) who wrote a treatise on music still extant, and Ister, a pupil of Callimachus, and is more circumstantial than Suidas, but is by no means a satisfactory biographer. More than a dozen ancient authors give us something about Sophocles, among whom Athenæus, Plutarch, the author of the " Arundel Marbles," and the anonymous writer of the Records of the Olympiads, deserve to be mentioned.

+ Suidas's date of his birth in the seventy-third Olympiad is evidently erroneous, if Sophocles danced and sang in public around the trophy erected for the battle of Salamis. At sixteen years of age such an appointment is credible; but Suidas's reckoning would make him only six-an age when those who took him to a solemn festival, instead of putting a hymn of victory into his mouth, were more likely to have given him figs to hold his tongue.

There was another Colonus within Athens itself. In our poet's second tragedy on the fate of Edipus, the Athenian, who meets the royal exile, calls the place where the scene of the drama is laid Tov inπoτηy Koλwvov. (line 60.) On this account I prefer giving it the name Colonus, to calling it Coloné, or Colona, with the - French and English translators. Cicero mentions it, lib. 5 de Finibus, with the words "Coloneus ille locus," according to the common editions; but Meursius, in his Reliqua Attica, corrects the reading to Colonus. 2 M

June 1826-VOL. XVI. NO. LXVI.

In spite of all the obscurity that involves so many points of his personal history, it seems to be clear that he was a happy-tempered and fortunate man; that he was devotedly attached to his native soil, and that nothing could tempt him to leave it, though he was pressingly invited to foreign courts. As little can it be doubted that local fondness induced him to lay the scene of his second Edipus, not only in his native country, but in the hamlet of his birth-place.* At the time of composing that tragedy, he was extremely old; but it has no token of his fervid genius having been damped by years. How pleasing it is to imagine his venerable aspect, as he walked abroad in that Attic landscape and meditated his final work. Athens, with all her temples and monuments, so many of which had sprung up in his long life-time, was before him-the theatre where he had been fifty times crowned, and the land which, great as it was, he had elevated in glory.+ Beside him were the walks of his childhood, and he was to make them heroic ground in his old age, by the poetical presence of an Edipus or Theseus, and an Antigone-thus hallowing to the world's remembrance the spot of earth that was dearest to his own.

It is undetermined, says his English translator, Dr. Francklin, with regard to him as with regard to Demosthenes, whether his father was a Vulcan or a Cyclop, the master of a forge or a common smith. The reverend Doctor ought to have known, in the first place, that there can be no doubt as to the father of Demosthenes having been a wealthy manufacturer, and in the next place, that Pliny the elder assigns a noble descent to Sophocles. The question whether our poet was the son of a mechanic, a manufacturer, or a landed proprietor, has certainly not a particle of interest, in as far as our veneration for him is concerned; for what is genealogy to genius? But, as he rose to a high public station in Athens, it would gratify curiosity to know whether he attained it by the popularity of his genius alone, or by the collateral influence of his birth and fortune.

I agree with Lessing, as to the extreme improbability of his having been either of humble, or middling birth. Aristoxenus says that his father was an operative smith or joiner; and Ister makes him a swordcutler. To the credibility of this tradition, or rather of two traditions clashing with each other, the anonymous scholiast biographer justly objects, first, that Sophocles shared a command in the Athenian army with Pericles and Thucydides, both men of high birth; and secondly, that none of the comic poets ever ridiculed the lowness of his descent. This is certainly a token that they had nothing to say against it. Euripides was rallied with his mother's herb-stall, Isocrates with his father being a flute-maker, and Themistocles, in spite of all his services, with the poverty of his house. Aristophanes, though not certainly so inimical to our poet as to Euripides, yet spared not Sophocles himself entirely, but accused him of avarice in his old age; and if his father had been a mechanic, we should have probably heard as much about his saws and hammers as about the mother of Euripides having sold greens.

કે

* σε χαριζόμενος ἐ μόνον τῇ πατρίδι άλλα τῷ ἑαυτο δημῳ," says the Scholiast.

+ The power of Athens was on its decline in the last years of Sophocles, and as a patriot he must have felt this misfortune. But still, amidst public calamity and domestic ingratitude, what a solace to his old age must the composition of such a tragedy have been! and let us hope too, that he had a daughter such as he paints Antigone or Ismene.