scaffold with Russell and with Sydney? Had the sins of our fathers doomed us to be born in Italy, we often think what would have been our courage and our fate. Here, also, at least in imagination and in feeling, we range ourselves, side by side, with her virtuous citizens. Steadfast to the cause of good government and of truth, we follow the men, who, looking forwards to the independence of their country and to the happiness of future generations, dared boldly to put to hazard all on earth belonging to themselves. They failed! In the wanderings of their exile, in the living sepulchre of their dungeons, what can we do but feel as if we were reading our own story in the persons of better men? Instead of this beautiful world which God has given us—instead of useful duties, interchanged affections, an enlarging sphere of brightening prospects-all the love, the promise, and the poetry of life-to what a crisis have they been called! Every thing lost in one fatal moment. Were we to live a thousand years, we should enter a prison walls with very altered feelings from those of a mere spectator, since we have kept company with Pellico. We have mounted with him on his chair and table, to peer down from the lattice-bars on the dome of St Mark, the glittering cupolas, and the Lagune. We have clung with him to his grated windows for a glimpse of nature, and for something to look like the smile of God, while dawn was breaking over the Valley of Brunn upon his silent prayers. We have brooded with him through ten long years of a solitude so intense, that the step of the turnkey was a pleasure, the whisper of a neighbouring prisoner a blessing, and the sound of an Italian air from a distant dungeon an event. We have shared in all the fluctuations of his hopes and fears-in the spectral terrors of his nights, in the day-dreams of his family affections: we thrilled with him at his glimpse of Gioja, at his chance embrace of Oroboni, and, above all, at his overflowing testimony to the nobleness with which human nature, when cold and forsaken in the hearts of kings and sycophants, yet vindicated its rights, in a thousand other bosoms, to our confidence and love. Streams of moral lustre and heavenly charity broke in, and lightened the darkness most, where the monotony of selfishness, and the servile drudgery of a long acquaintance with, and ministry on the wretched, were most likely to have trodden out the germ of every tender feeling. The characters of the dumb boy, and of Maddalene at Milan, of Angiola at Venice, and of Schiller in Spielberg, belong to scenes, which, in honour of childhood, of woman, of the virtue which makes sentinels and turnkeys a thousand times nobler than the sovereigns whom they have the misfortune to represent, we pray never to forget. It is not wonderful that the courage, and patience, and faith of Pellico should occasionally have relapsed to our vulgar level; but it is wonderful that, with the prospect before him of a life far worse than a ten years' death-bed, he should so soon have taken up the true position; and have looked out with a firm trust and steady eye on the right support, whether for life or death, which rose up on him from between his prison-bars. At a time and place, when every thing else failed him, virtuous sympathy and religious hopes became his only consolation. He vowed, that in case he ever should return into the world, he would not be ashamed of bearing witness what was The Book which alone in his necessities breathed around him protection and repose. He proved the whole truth of St Augustin's declaration. In Cicero and Plato, and such other writers, I meet with many things wittily said, and things that have a manifest ten'dency to move the passions; but in none of them do I find these words, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' The author, in giving us this Journal, has not returned to life and liberty in vain. He has kept his vow. On the one hand, we do not fear that he will enslave himself to the merc pursuits of this world, where, as on a child's rocking-horse, we move to and fro, yet make no progress. His thoughts and feelings have been too long concentred on one overwhelming consideration, that he should now desire to write his name on water, or trifle in making there the brief and glittering circles which he well knows spread only on the surface, and widen into nothing. Religion, once brought to bear on the heart, raises our intellectual and moral being. It gives to man the style and character of a creature who has been living with a nobler race. On the other hand, restored to the world, he must remember that he has to live in it and for it. He must resume the generous interests and the varied motives to active usefulness, so long necessarily suspended. He must pick up and connect again the threads of life, which have been broken for a time by a terrible misfortune. We rejoice to see, in three recent Tragedies, the first fruits of his liberated muse, that he has re-entered on his honourable career. They are dedicated, in the highest sense of the word, to his parents. They are, perhaps, not the less calculated to answer the moral purpose in which they are conceived, that the touches of beauty in them are more remarkable than strokes of strength; and that the creative spirit of his imagination (is that the effect of all that he has gone through?) appears to be merged in the sensibility of his heart. Sorrow is an ancient and universal school. If Job is the most sublime, Pellico is among the most touching of its disciples. There might easily be what the world would call a cleverer book than this, which we have so earnestly recommended. There can be none more beautiful, none more useful. It is a cup of water for the weary who are fainting by the wayside. It is the gentle voice of peace and charity, which, here and hereafter, is of better worth than all the warring words of our contentious wisdom. The uses of resentment, so well explained by Butler and by Chalmers, find, at the same time, in its pages a guide and guarantee for the rectitude of our indignant feelings. How its reader must hate oppression! how he must despise himself for the thoughts which he has been wasting on his own petty troubles, and still more frivolous enjoyments! how must his spirit wander round the walls of Spielberg, and sigh that he cannot, like Richard's Minstrel, convey to its noble victims the consolation at least of sympathy, if not yet the gladsome tidings of a speedier deliverer than death! A cloud, from which more than infamy must, sooner or later burst, has gathered over those fatal dungeons. In the meanwhile, it is some relief to know, that the mind is its own palace; that, chained down where sunbeam never reaches, he who has light in his clear bosom, 'may sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day,'-a day which emperors cannot shut out from the cells of even Moravia or Venice! Thanks be to God! the prison of patriotism and virtue can be made but half a prison. An angel descends into its depths of misery, and walks through the fiery furnace with spirits sainted by affliction. An exemplification, like the present, of the means by which religion transmutes the greatest sorrow into the greatest joy, has the glory of co-operating with God's highest and most secret purposes. It teaches us how out of evil He brings forth good;-good to the sufferer himself, good to all, who take duly to their own hearts the sufferings of others. But woe to those through whom the evil cometh! No thanks to them that there are minds which, in suffering all things, not only have suffered nothing, but can answer, it is good for us to have been here;'-in whom the crushing step of tyranny brings out the strength and sweetness, not the bitterness of their nature; and who are blessed enough to find that there is a fountain of surpassing comfort, which, alas! human weakness seldom reaches, but by passing through the vale of tears. ART. XII.-Chansons Nouvelles et Dernières, de P. J. DE BERANGER. Dédiées à M. LUCIEN BUONAPARTE. Paris: 1833. WHEN we last introduced Beranger to the notice of our readers, his fame, though little known beyond his own country, had reached its height in France. Ardent and enthusiastic, sad and gay by turns, witty and yet natural,—with all their simplicity of expression, dignified and forcible, his songs had become familiar as household words in the hearts and mouths of his countrymen. Prosecution and fine had increased, if that were possible, his popularity; and had endeared still more to the public the poet who appeared to them to have been a sufferer in their cause. On the mind of the poet himself they had produced their natural impression. What terrors indeed could a fine of three hundred franes and a year's imprisonmentcheered, as it was, by constant visits and expressions of sympathy from distinguished men of all parties-have for one to whom the gloomy apartments of La Force could hardly appear more desolate than the tailor's garret where he had passed his youth? They had none. The solitude of his prison seemed only to render his fancy more active ;-his penance to give additional point, force, and boldness to his political allusions. The poet of the people-the title to which his claim was now universally recognised-even from his prison continued to launch forth those epigrammatic traits of irresistible satire which linger in the popular memory, and silently prepare the fall of dynasties, by exposing them to that which in France is omnipotent, contempt. A change not unnatural or unpleasing has come over his mind since those days of young enthusiasm, of suffering and triumph. We have here the last volume of his songs-not, indeed, as he tells us in his preface, the last he may write, but the last he intends to publish. Helas! helas! j'ai cinquante ans,' might have been the appropriate title of more than one of the songs it contains. Gaiety is not, indeed, excluded from its pages, but it is more tempered than of old, and recurs more seldom; and often some sad recollection suddenly arising from the heart, comes over his spirit like a cloud, and converts the smile unawares into a tear. One change, we are sure, no one who is interested in Beranger's fame can regret. It was unworthy of his great and varied powers to be, as he too often was, the poet of licentiousness; it was an insult to that people, whose poetical high-priest he aspired to be, to hold out to the world that these were the compositions which they delighted to honour. His best friend will not deny that he has written many lines which, when dying, he would wish to blot. We are sure he feels and regrets this himself; of which the best proof is, that in the present volume, the product of his riper experience, and juster appreciation of what is due to himself and to public morals, his purer taste has discarded these blemishes, and banished the Margots, Lises, and Roses to that obscurity from which a poet's hand should never have withdrawn them. A sly allusion, a hint sufficiently vocal to the 'intelligent,' no doubt occasionally occurs even in these his purer lays. We see plainly enough that they are the work of one who, like Shallow, has heard the chimes at midnight' a little too often, and who in his youthful days had been no enemy to ' cakes and ale.' But there is nothing offensive in these sallies; and the future editor of a Family Beranger, while he more than decimates his former volumes, will probably content himself with erasing a few stanzas from the present. To the graver views which advancing years naturally produce in any mind, has been added, in Beranger's case, the seriousness which political convulsions, and a somewhat clouded and menacing future, necessarily awaken in minds which, like his, find their happiness beyond the narrow sphere of self; and whose sympathies and interests are bound up with the well-being of society around them. Beranger has, in fact, been placed, since the Revolution of 1830, in a very painful and embarrassing position. He has seen the desire of his soul, but he is not satisfied. The elder branch of the Bourbons, the victims against whom he aimed his incessant fire of 'paper pellets of the brain,' has been expelled. No Marchangys and Bellarts now exist to check the free current of his fancy by Dix mille francs d'amende.' The Jesuits, another of the objects of his persevering satire, arewho can tell where? The friends with whom he laboured, for whom he wrote, whom he looked up to as the future saviours of France, were in power; but Beranger is discontented, The millennium which he expected from the Revolution, has not been realized; those airy visions of republican liberty, and national happiness and glory, which had, strangely enough, alternated in his mind with an enthusiastic admiration of Buonaparte, seem to him as far as ever from assuming substance and form: as it was in the days of Louis XVIII. and Charles X, so it is, in most of these respects, in those of Louis Philippe. So, at least, thinks Beranger. 'Je croyais qu'on allait faire |