Various

“ While foreign writers sketch us as the most matter-of-fact and pudding-eating of peoples—while we pique ourselves on sturdy John Bullism, and cheerfully accept the portrait of an absurd old gentleman in a black coat, and a broad-brimmed hat and gaiters, with his hands in his well-filled breeches pockets, as a just impersonation of the genius of the nation, it is an obvious fact that a poet never had such a certainty of being appreciated in England as now. Fit audience is no longer few. ”

“ Miss Annie is about in the room once more, giving dainty touches to its somewhat defective arrangement—throwing down a book here, and there altering an ornament. Patience, Menie Laurie! many another one before you has sat in resolute outward calm, with a heart all a-throb and trembling, even as yours is. Patience; though it is hard to bear the rustling of Miss Annie’s dress—the faint discords of July’s music. ”

“ No one who reads your book will believe that you would abstain from the use of any weapon which you could wield against Mr Disraeli— (how should he, when you glide before us as a masked assassin?) —but he will be at no loss to divine the reason why you decline an encounter of wit. We are perfectly sincere when we say that your intense dulness ought in some measure to be accepted as an extenuation for your malevolence, for you have not art enough to disguise or conceal the hatred which is rankling in your breast. ”

“ Randall, we are far apart already. I have a little world you do not choose to share: you are entering a greater world, where I can never have any place. God speed you, and God go with you, Randall Home. You will be a great man: you will prosper and increase; and what would you do with poor Southland Menie, who cannot help you in your race? Randall, we will be good friends: we will part now, and say farewell. ”

“ On the one hand, it is a pity, without an effort, to allow a likely lad to be flyblown and spoiled by the buzzing blue-bottles of literature; on the other, it is impossible to avoid seeing that the mischief has been so far done, that any remedy likely to be effectual must cause serious pain. To tie up a Guffaw to the stake, and to inflict upon him condign punishment—a resolution which we intend to carry into effect some fine morning—would be far less painful to us than the task or duty of wounding the sensitiveness of a youth who may possibly be destined to be a poet. ”

“ Oh, Menie, is it our Randall?—is it his blame?”
July is so near crying that she must be answered. “Nobody is to blame; there is no harm,” said Menie, quickly, leading her back to her seat—quickly with an imperative hush and haste, which throws July back into timid silence, and sets all her faculties astir to listen, too. But there comes no sound into this quiet room—not even the footsteps which have passed out of hearing upon the garden path, nor so much as an echo of the voices which Menie knows to be engaged in converse which must decide her fate. ”

“ Let half-a-dozen of ploughman lads be associated in a bothy, and however tidy and snug and commodious the apartments, yet when their age and circumstances are remembered—when it is considered that they are without a head, to control, counsel, and direct them, that each is his own master—we confess that to us it seems chimerical to expect that any desirable measure of decency, or sobriety, or order, will prevail within the walls of the bothy. It is in vain to tell a well-disposed lad that he can escape the pollution of a wicked associate in the bothy, by retiring to his own apartment. ”

“ But Menie’s nature, more truthful than her will, fails in the effort. The time goes on, the lingering moments swell into an hour. Music is in her ears, and smiling faces glide before her and about her, till she feels this dreadful pressure at her heart no longer tolerable, and bursts away in a sudden passion, craving to be alone. ”

“ While she stands arrested, looking at them as they draw near—growing aware of their full amity and union—a shiver of great emotion comes upon Menie—then, or ever she is conscious, a burst of tears. In another moment all her sudden enlightenment is gone, quenched out of her eyes, out of her heart—and Menie puts the tears away with a faltering hand, and stands still to meet them in a quiet tremor of joy, the same loving Menie as of old. ”

“ Living without pride amongst his people, going from house to house, knowing well the trials of every household, a patient listener to the homely annals of the poor, catechising the young, exhorting the unruly, helping the aged to trim their lamps and gird up their loins, we can understand how well and how quietly this worthy clergyman discharges the duties of the pastorate, reaping a nobler guerdon in the love of those amongst whom he lives and labours than ever the noisy trump of fame blew into ambition’s greedy ear. ”

“ Since the time of Peter the Great, the whole body of the Russian clergy, from the highest to the lowest, have lain grovelling in the dust at the feet of every tyrant with the title of Czar or Czarina; and no other corporation in the world that we have any knowledge of, lay or clerical, equals it in hopeless servitude. Taught from their infancy to regard the Czar as the sole dispenser of good and evil, and firmly believing that every people on the earth trembles at his name, they scarcely make any distinction between him and the Deity ”

“ I should not willingly have revived, in the quiet times in which we are so happy as to live, the memory of those fierce contentions in which so many years of my public life were passed. Many expressions which, when society was convulsed by political dissension, and when the foundations of government were shaking, were heard by an excited audience with sympathy and applause, may, now that the passions of all parties have subsided, be thought intemperate and acrimonious. ”

“ No, poor Jenny, little of sentiment or grace embellishes your melancholy—yet it is hard to find any poem so full of pathos as a desolate heart, even such a one as beats in your homely breast to-night.
Softly—the room is not vacant now, as it was when you last entered here. Some one stands by the window, stooping forward to look at the stars; and while you linger by the door, a low cry, half a sigh, half a moan, breaks the silence faintly—not the same voice which just now bore its part so well below;—not the same, for that voice came from the lips only—this is out of the heart. ”

“ It is the abode of Franz Müller, the musician, Edith his wife, and Spiegel their friend. Franz and Spiegel had been brought up together, and had passed the flower of their youth in poverty, working and hoping. Franz studied music, Spiegel was passionately fond of painting; art and friendship scared discouragement from their doors. For the space of three years they wandered on foot, knapsack on shoulder and staff in hand, through Germany and the Tyrol, stopping wherever the beauty of the country tempted them, and purveying, each in his own manner, for the wants of the community. ”

“ The oppression of a Christian people by a misbelieving despotism is sufficient, of itself, to enlist the sympathies of a civilised and tolerant nation; and the fact of that oppression being practised by a small minority over a multitude composing three-fourths of the population of the Ottoman empire in Europe, is denounced as a monstrous anomaly; and the public indignation has been roused at the idea of scarcely three millions and a half of Turks grinding to the dust more than ten millions of Christians. We execrate religious oppression as much as any one can do ”

“ Here is Randall, looking for once out of himself, with a real will and anxiety to soften, by every means in his power, the misfortunes of Menie’s mother, and rousing himself withal to the joy of carrying Menie home—to the sterner necessity of doing a man’s work to provide for her, and for the new household; and all the wonder you can summon—no small portion in those days—flutters about the same subject, little July Home; and you think in your heart if you but could, what marvellous things you would do for Menie Laurie, and Menie Laurie’s mother ”

“ The yawning gulf betwixt the high and the low of the land is the most ominous evil of these times, and should be bridged over by sympathetic communication whilst it can. The wintry neglect of his superiors is worse to be borne by the labourer than the cold of his miserable cottage. Let us listen to Mr Stuart on an evil which seems to have entered like iron into his kindly soul. ”

“ But it is not with inspired ploughmen that our country gentlemen and tenant-farmers are called upon to deal, but with men of common clay—with the brawny peasants who till their fields and tend their herds, and whose toil has turned the sterile North into a garden of Ceres. Have our agricultural labourers been neglected—have their physical wellbeing and their moral and educational training been overlooked and left uncared for, while the classes above them and around them have had their comforts and privileges, moral and social, infinitely multiplied? ”

“ When they witness the extraordinary respect and honour which encompass a supreme pontiff, their admiration and wonder are so excited, that they look upon the chief of the Church as a second sovereign, whose dignity is equal, or even superior, to that of the monarch himself; and they are disposed to attach to the ecclesiastical rank a character of power superior to the other. Now, as it is incontestable that the common people indulge in such reflections, what, we ask, would be the case if the unjust disputes of an arbitrary clergy were added to light up a conflagration? ”

“ It shows that we are still alive to our dignity as a people, to our duty as the enemies of outrage and aggression—that we have heart enough and will enough, at any sacrifice, to maintain our high position—and that the love of Mammon has not so occupied our souls as to render us insensible to the part which we are bound to take, as the freest state and most advanced community in Europe. ”

“ But you were a Tory, and you became a Whig, and you are now a placeman; and you would hold that place of yours as readily under Mr Cobden as under Lord Aberdeen. You were once a Peelite, but you had not even the decency to wait for the fortunes of your chiefs. You lusted after office, and took the bribe the instant it was tendered by the Whigs; and in consequence you are universally looked upon and distrusted as the most venal, selfish, and unprincipled young man of your generation. It would indeed be absurd in you to entertain any “dread of the partisan’s malice.” ”

“ Mrs Laurie says nothing more as she draws her daughter close to her, and puts her lips softly to Menie’s brow. It is the seal of the new bond. The mother and the son have been brought together; the past is gone for ever like a dream of the night; and into the blessed daylight, full of the peaceful rays God sends us out of heaven, we open our eyes as to another life. Peace and sweet harmony to Menie Laurie’s heart! ”

“ It is, therefore, most gross impertinence in Mr Randal Leslie to challenge what Parliament has not challenged. Mr Disraeli’s present position, as the leader of the largest independent, and most influential section of the House of Commons, is the best answer to the insinuations of this contemptible little snake, who, we apprehend, will not receive, from his political superiors, the meed of gratitude which he expected for his present unfortunate attempt. It is the misfortune of your Randal Leslies, that they never can, even by blundering, stumble on the right path. ”

“ Distress and dismay—it is not hard to see them both in Menie Laurie’s face, so pale and full of thought, as she leans upon the wall here among the wet leaves, looking out. Yes, she is looking out, fixedly and long, but not upon the misty far-away London, not upon the pleasant slope of green, the retired and quiet houses, the whispering neighbour trees. Something has brought the dreamy distant future, the unknown country, bright and far away—brought it close upon her, laid it at her feet. ”

“ The young student, with his head and imagination full of Sophocles and classical theories, even though he may push the latter beyond the verge of extravagance, is always an interesting object to the more experienced man of letters. Enthusiasm is never to be despised. It is the sign of a high and ardent spirit, and ought not to be met with the drenching operation of the bucket. But Mr M. Arnold is now considerably past his teens. He is before the public for the third time, and he still parades these Greek imitations, as if he were confident of their worth and power as English poems. ”

“ Let him sound as high a note as he can for the life of him, he will yet find echoes enough to constitute fame. There are homes in England almost as common as hothouses, where fine criticism is nightly conversation—where appreciators, as true as any who review in newspapers, hail a good and great writer as a personal friend. Here may be found all the elements necessary for the recognition of merit and the detection of imposture. Sturdy good sense refuses to believe in gaudy pretension; keen logic exposes emptiness; enthusiastic youth glows at the high thought, the splendid image ”

“ We are afraid, though we have not descended to verbal criticism, but have only indicated essential faults, that Alexander will think we have treated his book in an irreverent spirit; but, nevertheless, it is a truly paternal one. Even in such mood did we deal, of late, with our own beloved first-born, heir of his mother’s charms and his father’s virtues—a fine, clever fellow, in whom his parents take immense pride, though we judiciously conceal it for fear of increasing the conceit which is already somewhat conspicuous in his bearing. ”

“ In Un Héritage, the character of Franz Müller is at once pleasing and natural. He is not represented as perfect—he has his failings and weaknesses like any other mortal, and they are exhibited in the book, although we have not, in the outline we have traced of it, had occasion to give them prominence. But his heart is sound to the last. Wealth may momentarily bewilder, but it does not pervert him. He is true to his affections, and has the sense and courage to accept honourable toil as preferable to a fortune embittered by anxiety and dissension. ”