Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

The Shoes of Fortune, and other Tales.

A Poet's Bazaar. Translated by Charles Beckwith, Esq.

2

See Allan Cunningham's Lives of the Painters and Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 150.

3

Not very clearly expressed by the translator. One would think that our Saviour, in his progress to the cross, had passed through the area of the Coliseum, and not that each of the pictures on these altars represented one of the resting-points, &c. Mrs Howitt is sometimes hasty and careless in her writing. And why does she employ such expressions as these:—"many white buttons," "beside of it," "beside of us?" We have read a many English books, but never met them in anyone beside of this.

4

Vol. x, Nov. 1821, p. 373.

5

Béranger has already conveyed this truth through the melody of his delicious verse:—

"Le vois-tu bien, là-bas, là-bas,

Là-bas, là-bas? dit l'Espérance;

Bourgeois, manants, rois et prelats

Lui font de loin la révérence.

C'est le Bonheur, dit l'Espérance.

Courons, courons; doublons le pas,

Pour le trouver là-bas, là-bas,

Là-bas, là-bas."

6

"I did not dare to breathe aloud the unhallowed anguish of my mind to the majesty of the unsympathising stars."—See Falkland.

7

"Motus autem siderum," such is the reverent and sententious remark of Grotius, "qui eccentrici, quique epicyclici dicuntur, manifeste ostendunt non vim materiæ, sed liberi agentis ordinationem."—See De Veritate Rel. Christ. Lib. i. § 7.

8

"Now, there was a word spoken to me in private, and my ears, by stealth as it were, received the veins of its whisper."—Job, chap. iv. verse 12.

9

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a god gives sign
With hushing finger, how he means to load
His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought,
With thunder, and with music, and with pomp."

Such are the majestic syllables which preface the speech of Saturn in Hyperion. Keats was ridding himself of the puerilities of Cockaigne when he wrote that fragment of an epic—a fragment which is unsurpassed by any modern attempt at heroic composition. In reading it, the very earth seems shaking with the footsteps of fallen divinities. Even Byron, who, like ourselves, had no great predilection for the school in which the poetic genius of John Keats was germinated, has emphatically said of Hyperion that "it seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus."—See Byron's Works, vol. xv., p. 92.

10

Thus writes Suetonius—"prægrandibus oculis, qui, quod mirum esset, noctu etiam et in tenebris, viderent, sed ad breve, et quum primum a somno patuissent; deinde rursum hebescebant."—Tib. cap. lxviii.

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Those who are familiar with the classic historians, will see in this description no exaggeration whatever. Instruments for the destruction of life yet more awful and mysterious, were employed by many of the predecessors, and many of the successors of Tiberius, as well as by Tiberius himself: and modern science has shown that these devices, instead of being, as was originally conjectured, the result of black-magic, were, in reality, the effect of hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical contrivances. Even the most marvellous feats of the Egyptian sorcerers have been latterly explained by the revelations of natural philosophy, and a multitude of these explanations may be found by the reader in the learned work "Des Sciences Occultes," &c. written by M. Eusebe Salverte, and published in Paris as recently as 1843. In that remarkable volume, M. Salverte proves that natural phenomena are more startling than necromantic tricks, and that, in the words of Roger Bacon, "non igitur oportet nos magicis illusionibus uti, cum potestas philosophica doceat operari quod sufficit." That Tiberius was capable of atrocities yet more terrific, and that murders of the most inhuman kind were the consequence of almost every one of his diabolical whims, those acquainted with the picturesque narrative of Suetonius already know. They will remember not only how he caused his nephew Germanicus to be poisoned by the governor of Syria, but how he ordered a fisherman to be torn in pieces by the claws of a crab, simply because he met him, in one of his suspicious moods, when strolling in a sequestered garden of Capreæ.—Sue. Tib. c. lx.

12

Suetonius assures us (cap. lxviii.), that the muscular strength of Tiberius Claudius Nero was, in the prime of his manhood, almost as supernatural as his crimes; that he could with his outstretched finger bore a hole through a sound apple (integrum malum digito terebraret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (caput pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.) His excesses must, however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation.

13

His garb, writes Josephus, "was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon Him."—Lib. xix. c. 8.

14

"An owl," says Josephus (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," αγγελος Κυριου, say the scriptures, (Acts. xii. 23,)—in either case a spectral illusion.

15

It is impossible for anyone devoted to the study of "Paradise Lost," of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away at times by the œstrum, or divine afflatus, although Dr Johnson discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention."—See Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 188.

16

Even M. Alphonse de Lamartine acknowledges of Mirabeau, that "neither his character, his deeds, nor his thoughts, have the brand of immortality."—Hist. Giron. Liv. i. chap. 3.

17

This incident was suggested by a touching sentence in Schindler's biography of Beethoven. After observing that the outward sense no longer co-operated with the inward mind of the great composer, and that, consequently, "the outpourings of his fancy became scarcely intelligible," Schindler continues:—"Sometimes he would lay his left hand flat upon the key-board, and thus drown, in discordant noise, the music to which his right was feelingly giving utterance."—See Life of Beethoven, Edited by Ignace Moschelles, ii. 175.

18

Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon. By Mrs Thompson. 2 Vols. Colburn.

19

Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Christlichen Völkern. Von Gottfried Kinkel.

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