Bella inter geminos plusquam civilia fratres, Quod fuit in votis, fratrem capit alter uterque ; Et victor victi transfuga castra petit. Quod genus hoc pugna est, ubi victus gaudet uterque ; Which has been very well translated by Dr. Peter Heylin : In points of faith some undetermin'd jars Both join'd in being conquer'd (strange to say), Whatever doubts Montaigne might throw out, he always professed himself to be of the Roman Catholic faith, and his resolution, that, as he had lived, so he would die in it. He expired during the performance of its last ceremonies, in his chamber, on the 13th September, 1592, aged fifty-nine years, six months, and eleven days, without the assistance of physic to which he cherished all his life an hereditary and invincible dislike, his father having lived seventy-four years, his grandfather sixty-nine, and his great-grandfather almost eighty years without having tasted any sort of medicine. Thus died Montaigne with a full blossoming reputation, after leading a life (with the exception of the disorder with which he was in his latter years afflicted) the most joyous, felicitous, and philosophical of the sons of men. We have no intention, and, if we had, we have no space to defend either his paradoxes or Pyrrhonism. We will, however, quote on this subject the opinion of an elegant writer and philosopher of the present day, who places Montaigne at the head of the French writers, who contributed, in the beginning of the 17th century, to turn the thoughts of their countrymen to sub VOL. II. PART II. jects connected with the philosophy of mind. He observes, that," in the mind of Montaigne, the same paradoxes may be easily traced to those deceitful appearances, which, in order to stimulate our faculties to their best exertions, nature seems purposely to have thrown in our way, as stumbling blocks in the pursuit of truth."* Leaving these things, however, we now come to the most serious charge against Montaigne—the great and foul blemish of his writings. We can forgive his vanity, and excuse his scepticism, but we cannot tolerate the indecencies which are profusely scattered, like "noisome weeds," about many of his Essays. There is one, and a long one too, under a mere colorable title, (for the titles of his Essays have, in general, little to do with the subject matter,) which is, from beginning to end, nothing else than a tissue of the grossest obscenities. He actually gloats on the subject, and dwells with ostentatious nauseousness on what the very instinct of nature teaches us to conceal. Had the Cardinal du Perron this in his mind, when he called our author's Essays "Le Breviare des honnêtes gens ?" "When he was young," he says, "he concealed his wanton passions; but, now that he was old, he must chase away melancholy by debauch," and tickle his mind with the remembrance of defunct desires. "Such rotten speeches are worst in withered age, when men run after that sin in their words, which flieth from them in the deed." He says, "it is not out of judgment that I have chosen this scandalous way of speaking; Nature has chosen it for me." It would have been better if, instead of justifying or excusing it, he had adopted his own maxim: "he, who says all that is to be said, gluts and disgusts us." 66 This is a part of the writings of Montaigne on which it is most painful to dwell, although we are not so outrageously virtuous as to despise or hate the sun which pours its radiance o'er a living and rejoicing world," because there are spots upon its surface. Passing over this, his talking discourses are inexpressibly taking and agreeable. With a singular power of selfinvestigation, and an acute observation of the actions of men, which he discriminated with "a learned spirit of human dealing," he combined great affluence of thought and excursiveness of fancy. He was, at once, profound and trifling--philosophical and inconclusive-bold in imagination and free in inquiryof an open and prepossessing demeanour, he was amiable and eminently attractive. An attempt was made in France to give the Spirit of his Works, which did not succeed. That to extract the spirit of Montaigne's Essays-to disentangle so much as is worth preserving, from that which we should be content to see perish, and, at the same time, preserve his character, would be difficult, is most true, but it is not impossible. It would require a nice hand, but we think, it might be done, and his Essays still remain a most fascinating book. "If the prophaneness may be severed from the wit, it is like a lamprey, take out the string in the back, it will make good meat." The style of Montaigne is bold, energetic, sententious, and abrupt; and, although provincial and unrefined, it is original, vivacious, simple, and debonair. La Harpe says of him: "Comme écrivain, il a imprimé à la langue une sorte d'energie familière qu'elle n'avoit pas avant lui, et qui ne s'est point usée, parce qu'elle tient à celle des sentiments et des pensées." We have adopted, for the purposes of this article, the translation of Charles Cotton, the poet, who was peculiarly fitted for the task. He has rendered the original (so far as it could be rendered into a foreign idiom) with fidelity and success, and has imitated the quaintness, liveliness, and simplicity, of the author's style, with great felicity and effect. ART. II. Clarastella; together with Poems occasional, Elegies, Epigrams, Satyrs. By Robert Heath, Esquire. London, Printed for Humph. Moseley, and are to be sold at his shop, at the signe of the Princes Arms, in St. Paul's Church Yard, 1650. At no period has the passion of love been celebrated so indefatigably as in the reign of Charles I. when a crowd of minor poets almost daily gave to the world the results of long and active speculation upon the infinite charms of their mistresses. Yet, at no other time has nature or genuine feeling had less to do with our poetry. The poet may ransack heaven and earth for terms, by which to express his admiration, his devotion, and his despair; but he succeeds in proving any thing rather than his love. We grant the fertility of his invention, but we deny the sincerity of his passion. In the numerous volumes devoted to the celebration of the Lucastas, the Castaras, the Clarastellas, of the polished court of Charles I. we look in vain for touching expressions of true passion, for the tender melancholy which occasionally seizes the mind of the true lover in moments of sickness, absence, hope, or joy; for evidences of that exalted love, which in dwelling on the object of its affection rises above it, and becomes mixed and identified with the eternal charms of nature, and the deep interests of man at large: in short, we look in vain for all marks, by which to know the true lover pouring forth his feelings in true poetry. In how different a strain did Shakspeare and the poets of the former age speak of love! How different the impassioned tone of old Middleton, who says The treasures of the deep are not so precious How differently Master Chapman; who asks, And didst thou know the comfort of two hearts As to joy one joy, and think both one thought; 6 But in the times, when the little work before us was published, it does not seem that he who wrote of love was required to feel it; poets,' as Cowley observes, in his preface to his Mistress,' 'were scarcely thought freemen of their company, without paying some duties, or obliging themselves to be true to love; in other words, first trying their pens in love-verses before they girded themselves up for more important undertakings. The truth of the matter is, it was the fashion for men of polite accomplishments to amuse themselves and their friends in this way. And whether they possessed, or fancied a mistress of undeniable charms, it was pretty nearly the same thing. The verses were not supposed to be the dictates of passion, but the amusements of an idle hour; not the tributes of deep affection, but the compliments of gallantry. And if, in the course of this exercise, the writer seldom reached either sublimity or pathos, yet practice gave him facility and sometimes elegance of composition. If he did not discover a hidden vein of genius in himself, and become a real poet, as Cowley and one or two others did, yet, he contented himself with the praise of an accomplished versifier. This is nearly all the merit which Robert Heath, the poet before us, has any right to claim, and that he has not been successful in maintaining with posterity. In truth, they who look into his volume with any other but a Retrospective' eye, will probably lay it down with feelings little short of contempt. But we are not accustomed thus to give way to despair. We have taken upon ourselves to read for those whose time is too valuable, or whose patience is too small to read, for themselves, and are not easily damped by page after page of frigid hyperbole, or perverse conceit. In the dullest writers, a spark of brighter intelligence is sometimes visible; and in the authors, whose chief fault or rather misfortune it is that they lived in an age when false principles and bad taste ruled the fashion, it is hard if the natural genius of the man does not now and then break out into strains worth recording. And in the worst case, when a rhymester has little to recommend him but long practice with his pen, we consider ourselves unfortunate indeed, if we do not find his verse run sometimes with ease, and occasionally mount to elegance. Such perhaps, if not greater, is the merit of the following stanzas, being the three first of the verses entitled, 'What is Love?' ""Tis a child of phansie's getting, Brought up between hope and fear, 'Tis a perpetual vestal fire Whose smoak like incense doth aspire, It is a soft magnetick stone, Attracting hearts by sympathie, Fixing thus two lovers' eies 'Tis the spheres' heavenly harmonie And every sound expressively Marries sweetly with the like: "Tis the world's everlasting chain And bid them like the fixed wain Unmov'd to bide." The following song, also, possesses similar merit, perhaps in a higher degree. "Invest my head with fragrant rose |