Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

"'What was there in the paper you gave me for the Crown-prince?' he said. 'It may ruin me for life. The Crown-prince looked excited as he read it – ay, angry; and when he saw me there, he ordered me off without one gracious word.'

"I could not help laughing. The music-master grew more and more anxious, and I more and more delighted. I rejoiced already in my imprisonment; and I thought how I could carry on my philosophic speculations in my solitude. Once only I saw the Crown-prince at the theatre. He gave me a friendly nod. Very good. For eight days I had not seen Stadion; but, on the 10th of April, I got certain information that he had gone off by night. I was very sorry to think I had seen him for the last time; and it struck me, with strange significance, that he read his last mass on Good-Friday. At last my long repressed and dissembled feelings burst forth in tears. It is in solitude one knows his own wishes and his helplessness. I found no place of repose for my struggling heart; and, tired with weeping, I at length fell asleep. Have you ever fallen asleep worn out with weeping? But men do not weep. You have never wept so that the sobs shook your breast even in your sleep? Sobbing in my dreams, I heard my name. It was dark. By the faint glimmer of the street lamps, I perceive a man near me, in a foreign military uniform, sabre, sabretash – dark hair. I should have thought it was Black Fred, (Stadion's name among his intimates.)

"No – it is no mistake; it is indeed Black Fred, come to take his leave.

"'My carriage is at the door – I am going – as a soldier – to the Austrian army; and with regard to your Tyrolese friends, you shall have nothing to reproach me with, or you never see me more; for I give you my word of honour I will not consent to their being betrayed. I have this moment been with the Crown-prince. He drank with me the health of the Tyrolese, and a 'pereat' to Napoleon. He took me by the hand, and said – 'Remember that, in the year nine, in April, during the Tyrolese rebellion, the Crown-prince of Bavaria opposes Napoleon.' And so saying, he clanged his glass on mine so, that he broke the foot of it off.'

"I said to Stadion – 'Now then I am all alone, and have no friend left.'

"He smiled, and said – 'You write to Goethe. Write him from me that the Catholic priest will gather laurels on the Tyrolese battle-field.'

"I said – 'I shall not soon hear a mass again.'

"'And I shall not soon read one,' he answered.

"He then took up his weapons, and reached me his hand to say good-by. I am sure I shall never see him again.

"Scarcely was he gone, when a knock came to the door, and old Bopp came in. It was still dark in the room, but I knew by his voice he was in good-humour. He held out a broken glass to me; with great solemnity, and said – 'The Crown-prince sends you this, and bids me tell you that he drank the health of those you take under your protection out of it; and here he sends you his cockade, as a pledge of honour that he will keep his word to you, and prevent all cruelty and injustice.'"

The fate of Hofer comes unfortunately to our memory to mar the pleasantness of this little dramatic incident; but the whole story gives a favourable impression of the Crown-prince, who is now the poetical Louis of Bavaria – the dullest and stupidest of whose works (we may observe in a parenthesis) makes a poor figure in its Greek dress, and had better be retranslated as quickly as possible into its original Teutsch.

It is curious to see the sort of society that Bettina moves in – crown-princes, and prince-bishops, and ambassadors-extraordinary – and all treating her with the greatest regard. There must have been something very taking in the bright black eyes and rosy lips of the correspondent of Goethe, and friend, apparently, of all the German magnificoes; for she uses them with very little ceremony, and holds her head as high among them as if she knew there was more in it than was contained under all their crowns and mitres. But it was not with the magnates of the land alone that she was on such terms. The literary potentates were equally pleased with her attention. If a rising artist wants encouragement, he applies to Bettina. Sculptors, painters, musicians, all lay their claims before her; and we find her constantly using her influence on their behalf with the literary dictator of Weimar. If a scholar or philosopher is sick, she sits at his bedside; and in the midst of all the playfulness, wildness, eccentricity, (and perhaps affectation,) we meet with in the letters, we see enough of right spirit and good heart to counterbalance them all; and such a malicious little minx! and such a despiser of prudery, and contemner of humbug in all its branches! It is delightful to reflect on the torment she must have been to all the silly stiff-backed old maids within reach of tongue and eye. And therefore – and for many reasons besides – we maintain that Bettina, from fifteen to seventeen, is an exquisite creature, fiery and impassioned as Juliet, and witty as Beatrix. We will also maintain till our dying day, that neither her Romeo nor Benedict was near sixty years old.

The information given by the Frau Rath about her son has already been incorporated in the thousand and one memoirs and recollections supplied by the love and admiration of his friends; – we will therefore not follow Bettina in her record of his boyish days, as gathered from his mother and reported to himself, further than to remark, that vanity seems from the very first to have been his prevailing characteristic – even to so low a pitch as the "sumptuousness of apparel." Think of a little snob in the Lawnmarket – son of a baillie – dressing himself two or three times a-day – once plainly – once half-and-half – and finally in hat and feather – silks and satins – a caricature of a courtier of Louis XIV.; and all this at the age of eight or nine!

We have said that our love for Bettina only extends to the three years of her life from 1807 to 1810. At that period it dies a natural death. She assumed at fourteen the feelings of a love-inspired, heart-devoted "character" – as fictitious, we are persuaded, as any created by dramatist or poet; and it was pleasant to see with what art and eloquence she acted up to it. It seemed a wonderful effort of histrionic skill, and superior, in an infinite degree, to the mere representation on the stage of an Ophelia or Miranda. But when years passed on, and she still continued the same "character," she strikes us with the same feelings that would be excited by some actress who should grow so enamoured of her favourite part, as to go on Opheliaizing or Desdemonaing off the stage – singing snatches of unchristian ballads, with the hair dishevelled, during prayers in church; or perpetually smothering herself with pillows on the drawing-room sofa. It is as if General Tom Thumb were to grow to a decent size, and still go on imitating Napoleon, and insisting on people paying a shilling to see his smallness. Bettina should have stopped before she grew womanly; for though we have not the least suspicion of her having had any meaning in what she did – further than to show her cleverness – still, the attitudes that are graceful and becoming in a children's dance, take a very different expression in an Indian nautch. And therefore we return to our belief at the commencement of this paper, that the "child" of Goethe's correspondence died, and was buried in a garden of roses, in the year 1810 —De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

No. VIII

Supplement to MacFlecnoe and the Dunciad

Well, then, we have once more – to wit a month ago – wheeled round and encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set out – John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar character, that of Avengers – to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mud-engendered monster, burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.

Dryden and Pope! Father and son – master and scholar – founder and improver. Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers? – the free composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or some special gift of the universal Mother – or the perfected art of Pope? Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.

Dryden is all power – and he knows it. He soars at ease – he sails at ease – he swoops at ease – and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable —

"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"

and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (in blanks, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet – alone of those who have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look after the rhyme – these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the clumsy clowns to glorious John: – sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile, stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth – or sitting his horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt. His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance —

"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes —
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."

But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism, however excellent, in a Supplement – and therefore gladden you all with a specimen – without note or comment – from the second part of Absalom and Achitophel.

"Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad:
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satyr,
For still there goes some thinking to ill nature:
He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made,
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.
For almonds he'll cry whore to his own mother:
And call young Absalom king David's brother.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hang'd who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key:
Let him rail on, let his invective Muse
Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence,
In fire-works give him leave to vent his spight,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show,
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year.

"Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
For here's a tun of midnight-work to come,
Og from a treason-tavern rowling home,
Round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue: