Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850

On the 5th a pilot-boat brought into Cowes the master of the Lincoln, sailing from Boston for California. He had reached the latitude of 4° N. and longitude 25° W., and when at 10.30 p.m. of March 2, during a heavy shower of rain, and without any menacing appearance in the air, the ship was Struck with Lightning, which shivered the mainmast, and darted into the hold. On opening the scuttle, volumes of smoke were emitted, and finding it impossible to extinguish the fire, the crew endeavored to stifle it by closing every aperture. In this state they remained for nearly four days, with the fire burning in the hold, when they were relieved from their perilous situation by the providential appearance of the Maria Christina, and taken on board. Previous to leaving the ill-fated brig, the hatches were opened, when the flames burst forth, and in thirty minutes afterward the mainmast fell over the side. The unfortunate crew were most kindly treated by Captain Voss, the master of the Maria Christina, who did every thing in his power for their relief.

A Miss Downie met, on the 4th, with an Extraordinary Death at Traquair-on-the-Tweed. She had suffered, since childhood, from severe pains in the head and deafness; her health had been gradually declining for the last three years, and in August last she was seized with most painful inflammation in the left ear, accompanied by occasional bleedings also from the ear. On the 20th of March an ordinary-sized metallic pin was extracted from the left ear, which was enveloped in a firm substance with numerous fibres attached to it; several hard bodies, in shape resembling the grains of buckwheat, but of various colors, were also taken out of the right ear. The poor girl endured the most intense pain, which she bore with Christian fortitude till death terminated her sufferings. It is believed the pin must have lodged in the head for nearly twenty years, as she never recollected of having put one in her ear, but she had a distinct remembrance of having, when a child, had a pin in her mouth, which she thought she had swallowed.

The Poet Bowles. – The canon's absence of mind was very great, and when his coachman drove him into Bath he had to practice all kinds of cautions to keep him to time and place. The poet once left our office in company with a well-known antiquary of our neighborhood, since deceased, and who was as absent as Mr. Bowles himself. The servant of the latter came to our establishment to look for him, and, on learning that he had gone away with the gentleman to whom we have referred, the man exclaimed, in a tone of ludicrous distress, "What! those two wandered away together? then they'll never be found any more!" The act of composition was a slow and laborious operation with him. He altered and re-wrote his MS. until, sometimes, hardly anything remained of the original, excepting the general conception. When we add that his handwriting was one of the worst that ever man wrote – insomuch that frequently he could not read that which he had written the day before – we need not say that his printers had very tough work in getting his works into type. At the time when we printed for Mr. Bowles we had one compositor in our office (his death is recorded in our paper of to-day), who had a sort of knack in making out the poet's hieroglyphics, and he was once actually sent for by Mr Bowles into Wiltshire to copy some MS. written a year or two before, which the poet had himself vainly endeavored to decipher. —Bath Chronicle.

ARCHIBALD ALISON

Mr. Archibald Alison, author of the "History of Europe," is son of the author of the well-known "Essay on Taste." He holds the office of sheriff of Lanarkshire, and is much respected in the city of Glasgow, where his official duties compel him to reside. Though educated for the profession of the law, and daily administering justice as the principal local judge of a populous district, Mr. Alison's tastes are entirely literary. Besides the "History of Europe," in 20 volumes – a work which, we believe, originated in the pages of a "Scottish Annual Register," long since discontinued – Mr. Alison has written a "Life of Marlborough" and various economic and political pamphlets. He is also a frequent contributor to Blackwood's Magazine. It is, however, upon his "History of Europe" that his fame principally rests. If Mr. Alison be not the most successful of modern historians, we know not to whom, in preference to him, the palm can be conceded. His work is to be found in every library, and bids fair to rank hereafter as the most valuable production of the age in which he lived. This success is due, not only to the importance and interest of his theme, but to the skillful, eloquent, and generally correct manner in which he has treated it. He has, doubtless, been guilty of some errors of omission as well as of commission, as we have heard of a literary amateur, whose chief amusement for some years past, has been to make out a list of his mistakes; but, after all deductions of this kind, enough of merit remains in the work to entitle its author to a place in the highest rank of contemporary authors.

The bust of Mr. Alison, of which we present an engraving, was executed in the year 1846, and presented in marble to Mr. Alison by a body of his private friends in Glasgow, as a testimonial of their friendship to him as an individual; of their esteem and respect for him in his public capacity, as one of their local judges; and of their admiration of his writings. It is considered a very excellent likeness.

THE CORN-LAW RHYMER

Ebenezer Elliott not only possessed poetical spirit, or the apparent faculty of producing poetry, but he produced poems beautiful in description, touching in incident and feeling, and kindly in sentiment, when he was kept away from that bugbear of his imagination a landed gentleman. A man of acres, or any upholder of the corn-laws, was to him what brimstone and blue flames are to a certain species of devotee, or the giant oppressor of enchanted innocence to a mad knight-errant. In a squire or a farmer he could see no humanity; the agriculturist was an incarnate devil, bent upon raising the price of bread, reducing wages, checking trade, keeping the poor wretched and dirty, and rejoicing when fever followed famine, to sweep them off by thousands to an untimely grave. According to his creed, there was no folly, no fault, no idleness, no improvidence in the poor. Their very crimes were brought upon them by the gentry class. The squires, assisted a little by kings, ministers, and farmers, were the true origin of evil in this world of England, whatever might be the cause of it elsewhere.

This rabid feeling was opposed to high poetical excellence. Temper and personal passion are fatal to art: "in the very torrent, tempest, and (I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you should acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." It is also fatal to more than art: where a person looks with the vulgar eyes that Ebenezer Elliott used on many occasions, there can be neither truth nor justice. Even the satirist must observe a partial truth and a measure in expressing it, or he sinks down to the virulent lampooner.

Part of this violence must be placed to the natural disposition of the man, but part of it was owing to his narrow education; by which we mean, not so much book-learning or reading, of which he had probably enough, but provincial and possibly low associates. Something, perhaps, should be ascribed to a self-sufficiency rather morbid than proud; for we think Elliott had a liking to be "head of the company," and that he resented any want of public notice as an affront, even when the parties could not know that he was entitled to notice.

These defects of character operated very mischievously upon his works. The temper marred his political poems; though the people, their condition, vices, and virtues, is a theme that, properly sung, might stir the Anglo-Saxon race throughout the world and give immortality to a poet. The provincial mind affected the mass of Elliott's poems even where the subject was removed from his prejudices; for he had no habitual elevation or refinement of taste: it required a favorable theme or a happy moment to triumph over the deficiencies of nature and education. His self-sufficiency coupled with his provincialism seems to have prevented him from closely criticising his productions; so that he often published things that were prosaic as well as faulty in other respects.

The posthumous volumes before us naturally abound in the author's peculiarities; for the feelings of survivors are prone to err on the side of fullness, and the friends of the lately dead too often print indiscriminately. The consequence is, that the publication has an air of gatherings, and contains a variety of things that a critical stranger would wish away. It was proper, perhaps, to have given prose as a specimen of the author; and the review of his works by Southey, said to have been rejected by the Quarterly, is curious for its total disregard of the reviewer's own canons, since very little description is given of the poems, and not much of the characteristics of the poet. Much of the poetry in these volumes would have been better unpublished. Here and there we find a touching little piece, or a bit of power; but the greater part is not only unpoetical but trivial, or merely personal in the expression of feeling. There is, moreover, a savageness of tone toward the agricultural interest, even after the corn-laws were abolished, that looks as like malignity as honest anger. —London Spectator.

Madame Grandin, the widow of M. Victor Grandin, representative of the Seine Inférieure, who died about seven or eight months since, met with a melancholy end on the 6th, at her residence at Elbœuf. She was confined to her bed from illness, and the woman, who had been watching by her during the night, had left her but a short time, when the most piercing shrieks were heard to proceed from her room. Her brother ran in alarm to her assistance, but, unfortunately, he was too late, the poor lady had expired, having been burned in her bed. It is supposed that in reaching to take something from the table, her night-dress came in contact with the lamp, and thus communicated to the bed.

T. BABINGTON MACAULAY

Mr. Macaulay, though ambitious at one time, and perhaps still, of a reputation for poetry though an acute critic and a brilliant essayist, and though a showy and effective orator, who could command at all times the attention of an assembly that rather dislikes studied eloquence seems at present inclined to build up his fame upon his historical writings. Most of his admirers consider that, in this respect, he has judged wisely. As a poet – however pleasing his "Lays of Ancient Rome" and some of his other ballads maybe – he could never have succeeded in retaining the affection of the public. Depth of feeling, earnest and far-seeing thought, fancy, imagination, a musical ear, a brilliancy of expression, and an absolute mastery of words, are all equally essential to him who, in this or any other time, would climb the topmost heights of Parnassus. Mr. Macaulay has fancy but not imagination; and though his ear is good, and his command of language unsurpassed by any living writer, he lacks the earnestness and the deep philosophy of all the mighty masters of song. As a critic he is, perhaps, the first of his age; but criticism, even in its highest developments, is but a secondary thing to the art upon which it thrives. Mr. Macaulay has in him the stuff of which artists and originators are made, and we are of the number of those who rejoice that, in the vigor of his days; he has formed a proper estimate of his own powers, and that he has abandoned the poetical studies, in the prosecution of which he never could have attained the first rank; and those critical corruscations which, however beautiful, must always have been placed in a lower scale of merit than the compositions upon which they were founded; and that he has devoted his life to the production of an original work in the very highest department of literature.

There was, at one time, a prospect before Mr. Macaulay of being one of the men who make, instead of those who write history; but his recent retirement from parliament and from public life has, for a while at least, closed up that avenue. In cultivating at leisure the literary pursuits that he loves, we trust that he, as well as the world, will be the gainer, and that his "History of England," when completed, will be worthy of so high a title. As yet the field is clear before him. The histories that have hitherto appeared are mostly bad or indifferent. Some are good, but not sufficiently good to satisfy the wants of the reader, or to render unnecessary the task of more enlightened, more impartial, more painstaking, and more elegant writers. There never was a work of art, whether in painting, sculpture, music, or literature, in which lynx-eyed criticism could not detect a flaw, or something deficient, which the lynx-eyed critic, and he alone, could have supplied. Mr. Macaulay's history has not escaped the ordeal, neither was it desirable that it should; but the real public opinion of the country has pronounced itself in his favor, and longs for the worthy completion of a task which has been worthily begun.

The bust of Mr. Macaulay was executed shortly after that of Mr. Alison, and is, we believe, in Mr. Macaulay's own possession. It is a very admirable likeness.

MOSCOW AFTER THE CONFLAGRATION

It was both a strange and a horrible spectacle. Some houses appeared to have been razed; of others, fragments of smoke-blackened walls remained; ruins of all kinds encumbered the streets; every where was a horrible smell of burning. Here and there a cottage, a church, a palace, stood erect amid the general destruction. The churches especially, by their many-colored domes, by the richness and variety of their construction, recalled the former opulence of Moscow. In them had taken refuge most of the inhabitants, driven by our soldiers from the houses the fire had spared. The unhappy wretches, clothed in rags, and wandering like ghosts amid the ruins, had recourse to the saddest expedients to prolong their miserable existence. They sought and devoured the scanty vegetables remaining in the gardens; they tore the flesh from the animals that lay dead in the streets; some even plunged into the river for corn the Russians had thrown there, and which was now in a state of fermentation… It was with the greatest difficulty we procured black bread and beer; meat began to be very scarce. We had to send strong detachments to seize oxen in the woods where the peasants had taken refuge, and often the detachments returned empty-handed. Such was the pretended abundance procured us by the pillage of the city. We had liquors, sugar, sweetmeats, and we wanted for meat and bread. We covered ourselves with furs, but were almost without clothes and shoes. With great store of diamonds, jewels, and every possible object of luxury, we were on the eve of dying of hunger. A large number of Russian soldiers wandered in the streets of Moscow. I had fifty of them seized; and a general, to whom I reported the capture, told me I might have had them shot, and that on all future occasions he authorized me to do so. I did not abuse the authorization. It will be easily understood how many mishaps, how much disorder, characterized our stay in Moscow. Not an officer, not a soldier, but could tell strange anecdotes on this head. One of the most striking is that of a Russian whom a French officer found concealed in the ruins of a house; by signs he assured him of protection, and the Russian accompanied him. Soon, being obliged to carry an order, and seeing another officer pass at the head of a detachment, he transferred the individual to his charge, saying hastily – "I recommend this gentleman to you." The second officer, misunderstanding the intention of the words, and the tone in which they were pronounced, took the unfortunate Russian for an incendiary, and had him shot. —Fezensac's Journal.

Truth. – Truth is a subject which men will not suffer to grow old. Each age has to fight with its own falsehoods: each man with his love of saying to himself and those around him pleasant things and things serviceable for to-day, rather than things which are. Yet a child appreciates at once the divine necessity for truth; never asks, "What harm is there in saying the thing there is not?" and an old man finds in his growing experience wider and wider applications of the great doctrine and discipline of truth. —Friends in Council.

A provincial paper mentions the discovery of the Original Portrait of Charles the First, by Vandyck, lost in the time of the Commonwealth, and which has been found at Barnstaple in Devonshire. It had been for many years in the possession of a furniture-broker in that town, from whom it was lately purchased by a gentleman of the name of Taylor, for two shillings. Mr. Taylor, the account adds, has since required £2000 for it.

WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT

William H. Prescott, the American historian, is a native of Salem, Massachusetts, where he was born on the 4th of May 1796. He is a son of the late eminent lawyer William Prescott, LL.D., of Boston, and a grandson of Colonel William Prescott, who commanded the forces in the redoubt on Breed's Hill in the memorable battle fought there on the 17th of June 1775. Mr. Prescott entered Harvard college in 1811, where his chief delight consisted in the study of the works of ancient authors. He left Harvard in 1814, and resolved to devote a year to a course of historical study, before commencing that of the law, his chosen profession. His reading was suddenly checked by a rheumatic inflammation of his eyes, which for a long time, deprived him wholly of sight. He had already lost the use of one eye by an accidental blow while at college; doubtless the burden of study being laid upon the other overtaxed it, and produced disease. In the autumn of 1815 he went to Europe, where he remained two years, a greater portion of the time utterly unable to enjoy the pleasures of reading and study. He returned to Boston in 1817, and in the course of a few years married a grand-daughter of Captain Linzee who commanded one of the British vessels at the battle of Bunker Hill. His vision gradually strengthened with advancing age, and he began to use his eye sparingly in reading. The languages of continental Europe now attracted his attention, and he soon became proficient in their use. These acquirements, and his early taste for, and intimate acquaintance with, the best ancient writers, prepared him for those labors as a historian in which he has since been engaged.

As early as 1819, Mr. Prescott conceived the idea of producing an historical work of a superior character. For this purpose, he allowed ten years for preliminary study, and ten for the investigation and preparation of the work. He chose for his theme the history of the life and times of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; and at the end of nearly twenty years, pursuant to his original plan, that great work was completed. He had resolved not to allow it to be published during his lifetime, but the remark of his father, that "The man who writes a book which he is afraid to publish, is a coward" decided him, and it went forth to the world in 1838. It was quickly republished in London; every where it was pronounced a master-piece, and his fame was firmly established. But little did those who read his delightful pages know of the vast toil, and patient, persevering industry, in the midst of a great privation, which the historian had employed in his task. His rare volumes from Spain and other sources were consulted through the medium of a reader; the copious notes were written by a secretary; much of the work in its final shape was written by himself with a writing machine for the blind, and in the whole preparation of this and subsequent works, he relied far more upon his ear than his eye for aid.

The "Conquest of Mexico" next followed, and his publishers sold seven thousand copies the next year. It was published at the same time in London, and translated in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, and Mexico. His "Conquest of Peru" followed soon afterward, and was received at home and abroad with equal favor. The "Conquest of Mexico" has had three separate translations into the Castilian, and the "Peru," two. They have been reprinted in English in London and Paris, and have gone through repeated editions in this country. Whether we shall soon have another work from Mr. Prescott's pen, is a matter of doubt, as it is understood that he proposes to employ the last ten years of his historic life in preparing a History of the Reign of Philip the Second of Spain. His eyes have somewhat failed in strength, and he is now able to use them for reading less than an hour each day; "But," he says in a letter to a friend, "I am not, and never expect to be, in the category of the blind men."

Our allotted space will not permit us to take an analytical view of the character and writings of Mr. Prescott. We can only say that great industry, sound judgment, comprehensive views, purity of diction, and fine, flowing style in description and narrative, all governed by a genius eminently philosophical, place him in the first rank of modern historians. Americans love him as a cherished member of their household – throughout the Republic of Letters he is admired as one of its brightest ornaments.

THE ENCHANTED BATHS

These warm springs are natural phenomena, which perhaps have not their equal in the whole world. I am, therefore, quite inconsolable at the thought of having made the long and difficult journey from Bona, and having been five whole days here in Guelma, within the distance of five-and-twenty miles from those wonderful springs, yet unable to see them. At the distance of a mile or two from Hammam Meskutine, thick clouds of vapor are seen rising from these warm springs. The water is highly impregnated with calcareous properties, whose accumulated deposits have formed conical heaps, some of which are upwards of thirty feet high. From amidst these cones the springs jet forth lofty columns of water, which descend in splendid cascades, flowing over the ancient masonry, and covering it with a white calcareous stratum.

The mass produced by the crystalization of the particles escaping from the seething waters, has been, after a long lapse of years, transformed into beautiful rose-colored marble. F – brought me a piece of this substance from the springs. It is precisely similar to that used in building the church at Guelma, which is obtained from a neighboring quarry. From the remains of an ancient tower and a fort, situated near Hammam Meskutine, it is evident that these springs were known to the Romans. An old Arab legend records that, owing to the extreme wickedness of the inhabitants of these districts, God visited them with a punishment similar to that of Lot's wife, by transforming them into the conical heaps of chalk I have mentioned above. To this day, the mass of the people firmly believe that the larger cones represent the parents, and the smaller ones, the children.

Owing to the high temperature, the surrounding vegetation is clothed in the most brilliant green; and the water of a tepid brook, which flows at the foot of the cascades, though in itself as clear as a mirror, appears to be of a beautiful emerald color. F – told me that he was not a little surprised to see in this warm rivulet a multitude of little fishes sporting about, as lively as though they had been in the coolest water. This curious natural phenomenon is explainable by the fact, that in this rivulet, which is of considerable depth, the under-currents are sufficiently cool to enable the fish to live and be healthy, though the upper current of water is so warm, that it is scarcely possible to hold the hand in it any longer than a few seconds. The hilly environs of Hammam Meskutine are exceedingly beautiful, and around the waters perpetual spring prevails. —Travels in Barbary.

LITERARY NOTICES

Letters of A Traveler; or, Notes of Things seen in Europe and America. By William Cullen Bryant. 12mo, pp. 442. New York: G.P. Putnam.

Every one will welcome a volume of descriptive sketches from the eminent American poet. The author has made a collection of letters, written at wide intervals from each other, during different journeys both in Europe and in this country, rightly judging that they possess sufficient elements of interest to claim a less ephemeral form than that in which most of them have been already presented to the public. They consist of the reminiscences of travel in France, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Cuba, and the most interesting portions of the United States. Arranged in the order of time, without reference to subject or place, the transition from continent to continent is often abrupt, and sometimes introduces us without warning into scenes of the utmost incongruity with those where we had been lingering under the spell of enchantment which the author's pen throws around congenial objects. Thus we are transported at once from the delicious scenery and climate of Tuscany, and the dreamy glories of Venice, to the horse thieves and prairie rattlesnakes of Illinois, making a break in the associations of the reader which is any thing but agreeable. The method of grouping by countries would be more natural, and would leave more lively impressions both on the imagination and the memory.