Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847

These pictures of Belisarius and his times are not very favourable. A governor-general sitting in council, with his wife on the sofa directing the despatch of business, and a commander-in-chief holding a council at which one of his generals of division rushes at him with a drawn sword, do not give us an exalted idea of the order maintained in society during the brilliant conquests of Justinian's reign. Reasoning from analogy, it may appear natural enough that such a governor-general and commander-in-chief should end his career by having his eyes put out and by begging his bread.

There was another circumstance which very much increased the probability of Belisarius dying a beggar. We do not wish to deprive the tale of the smallest portion of the just sympathy of the latest posterity. The fact is, Belisarius grew enormously rich during his successful campaigns against Gelimer and Witiges, and even contrived to accumulate treasures during his unsuccessful wars with Chosroes and Totila.[30 - Procopius would lead us to believe that a fine of 300 lbs. of gold (upwards of £140,000 in specie, and twice that sum in value) extorted from Belisarius in 543, was the produce of his profits during the Asiatic campaigns of 541 and 542. But it is difficult to know what confidence ought to be placed in the details of the Secret History.—C. 4, p. 32, l. 1, ed. Bonn. Clinton's Fasti Romani, p. 780.] Like his friend Bessas and his enemy Konstantinos, as the truth must be spoken, he did not neglect the golden opportunities he enjoyed of gaining golden spoils from all sorts of men. Now, from the days of Sylla, to those of Justinian, not to say a good deal earlier and later, it was the avowed system of the financiers of Rome to increase the budget by confiscations. The Ottoman empire, heir to most of the vices and some of the grandeur of Imperial Constantinople, cherished the system as a part of its strength, until it adopted the more pitiful vices of Western Europe. Anastasius—not the ecclesiastical historian of the earlier Popes, but the hero of the "Memoirs of a Greek," by Mr Thomas Hope—in his ratiocination on the principles of Ottoman finance, gives us a compendious abstract of those of Imperial Rome during eleven centuries, from Augustus to Constantine Dragoses:—

"Regarding each officer of the state only in the light of one of the smaller and more numerous reservoirs, distributed on distant points to collect the first produce of dews, and drip, and rills, ere the collective mass be poured into the single greater central basin of the Sultan's treasury, you give yourself no trouble to check the dishonesty of your agent, or to prevent his peculations. You rather for a while connive at, and favour and lend your own authority to his exactions, which will enable you, when afterwards you squeeze him out, to combine greater profit with a more signal show of justice. In permitting a temporary defalcation from your treasury, you consider yourselves as only lending out your capital at more usurious interest. Nine long years, while your work is done for you gratuitously, you feign to sleep, and the tenth you wake from your deceitful slumber; like the roused lion, you look round where grazes the fattest prey, stretch your ample claw, crush your devoted victim, and make every drop of his blood, so long withheld from your appetite, at last flow into the capacious bowels of your insatiable hazné"—(treasury).[31 - Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Greek, by Thomas Hope, vol. ii. 393., first edition. The writer of these pages remembers reading Anastasius with singular pleasure, at the time of its publication. Now, after four-and-twenty years' intimate acquaintance with the East, and with the representatives of most of the classes of men depicted in the novel, he finds that its correctness of description and truth of character give it all the inexhaustible freshness of actual life.]

Belisarius was certainly a fatted prey, and it is no wonder that his inordinate wealth excited the cravings of the minister of finance of the lavish Justinian and the luxurious Theodora. After his return from the conquest of Italy, he lived at Constantinople in a degree of magnificence unrivalled by the proudest modern sovereign. His household consisted, as we have already seen, of a small army; and as he was fond of parade, he rarely appeared in public without a splendid staff of mounted officers. His liberality and his military renown ensured him the applause of the people whenever he presented himself among them. Such wealth, such a train of guards, and such popularity, not unnaturally excited both envy and alarm. Accordingly, when the unsuccessful issue of the campaigns against the Persians under Chosroes, in 541 and 542, had diminished the popularity of Belisarius, the Emperor seized the occasion of rendering him less an object of fear by depriving him of a considerable number of his guards and great part of his treasures.[32 - Historia Arcana, c. 4. Tom. iii. p. 34, ed. Bonn.] The picture Procopius has drawn of Belisarius in his disgrace, is by no means flattering to the general; it represents him as a mean-spirited and uxorious courtier. "It was a strange spectacle, and incredible, had we not been eye-witnesses of the fact, to behold Belisarius, deprived of all his official rank, walking in the streets of Constantinople almost alone, dejected, melancholy, and fearing for his life."[33 - Ibid, Tom. iii. p. 31.]

Shortly after, Belisarius was partially reinstated in favour and sent to command in Italy against Totila. In 548, he quitted that country for the second time, after struggling unsuccessfully against the Gothic monarch. The jealousy of Justinian had prevented his receiving the supplies necessary for carrying on the war with vigour; and the want of success is not to be considered as any stain on the military reputation of Belisarius. Though he returned ingloriously to Constantinople, still, even amidst the misfortunes of the Roman arms in Italy, he had not neglected to save or accumulate wealth, and he was enabled to pass the rest of his life in great if not in regal splendour.[34 - De Bello Gotthico, iii. 35.]

He enjoyed the glory of his earlier exploits, and the popularity secured by his equable temperament, undisturbed for eleven years. In the year 559, an incursion of the Huns was pushed forward to the very walls of Constantinople. The weakness of Justinian, the avarice of his ministers, and the rapacity of his courtiers, had introduced such abuses in the military establishments of the capital, that in this unexpected danger the city appeared almost without a regular garrison. In this difficulty, all ranks, from Justinian to the populace, turned to Belisarius as the champion of the empire. The aged hero, finding the imperial guards useless as a military corps, since it had been converted into a body of pensioners, appointed by the favour of ministers and courtiers, and its ranks filled up with shopkeepers and valets—assembled such of the provincial troops and of his old guards as were living in the capital.[35 - Agathias, lib. v. c. 6, p. 159, ed. Paris.—The conversion of royal guards into cheesemongers is by no means a very uncommon corruption. The dreaded janissaries degenerated into a corporation of hucksters and green-grocers. The Hellenic kingdom, founded as an incorporation of the spirit of anarchy and despotism, by the grace of the foreign secretaries of the three great powers of >Europe, possesses a more singular body of military than even the defunct Ottoman corps of green-grocers. It consists of officers without troops. Its inventor, Armansperg, the quintessence of Bavarian corruption in Greece, called it the Phalanx.] With a small body of experienced veterans, and an army in which fear at least ensured obedience to his orders, he took the field against the Huns. Victory attended his standard. He not only drove back the barbarians, but overtook and destroyed the greater part of their army.

There was nothing of romance in this last campaign of Belisarius. He could no longer lead his gallant guards to display his own, and their valour, in some rash enterprise. His war-horse, Balan, was in its grave, and his own strength no longer served him to act the colonel of cuirassiers. But he was, perhaps, all the better general for the change; and his manœuvres effected a more complete destruction of the Huns, than would have resulted from the defeat of their army by the bold sallies of his youthful tactics.

The glory of the aged hero, and the proofs it afforded of his great popularity and extensive authority over the military classes throughout the empire, again revived the jealousy of the court. The ministers of Justinian perhaps dreaded that the affection of the emperor for his former favourite might recall Belisarius into public life, and effect a change in the cabinet. To prevent this, they calumniated him to the feeble prince, and worked so far on his timidity as to induce the emperor to withhold those testimonials for great public services which, it was customary to bestow. The fact that he was persecuted by the court, endeared Belisarius to the people and augmented the aversion of the emperor.[36 - Agathias, v. ii. p. 161, ed. Paris.]

Belisarius was now an object of suspicion to the government. And at this interesting period of his life, all cotemporary history suddenly fails us. The events of his latter days are recorded by writers who lived more than two hundred years after his death.[37 - The authentic history of the last events of the life of Belisarius must be gathered from Theophanes, p. 201, John Malalas, p. 239, and Cedrenus, p. 387. Though, perhaps, Cedrenus may be objected to as living too long after these events. Theophanes died in 817 at the age of 60. His chronography ends with the year 813. John Malalas lived in the ninth century. The chronicle of Cedrenus ends with the year 1057.]

In the year 562, a plot against the life of Justinian was discovered, and Belisarius was accused by some of the conspirators as privy to it. The accusation was sure to please the party in power. Several of his dependents, on being put to the torture, gave evidence against him. He was suspected by the government; but his conduct during a long life rendered the charge improbable, and the Roman law never placed any great reliance on evidence extracted by torture.[38 - Pandects, xlvii. tit. 18. 1, s. 23.—Quæstioni fidem non semper, nec tamen nunquam habendum, constitutionibus declaratur; etenim res est fragilis, et periculosa, et quæ veritatem fallat.—Every one conversant with the social condition of the people of the East, (and probably it is the case under all despotic governments,) knows the extreme difficulty of obtaining judicial evidence that can be relied on, and the temptation judges incur to sanction torture. Hence the common assertion of public functionaries, that torture is absolutely necessary to secure the administration of justice; and of course people who require torture to persuade them to speak the truth, are unfit for self-government and constitutional liberty. Thus falsehood and oppression are perpetuated, and truth kept perpetually at bay.] In this bitter hour, it must be confessed that Justinian treated Belisarius with more justice than he had treated the Pope Silverius. A privy council was convoked, at which the principal nobles, the patriarch, and some of the officers of the imperial household, were present with the emperor in person. Belisarius was summoned, and the cause of the conspirators was heard. Justinian was induced for a moment to believe in his guilt. The order was given to place him under arrest. He was deprived of the guards that still attended him, his fortune was sequestered, and he was confined a prisoner in his palace. Six days after the first examination, the business of the conspiracy was again investigated, and Justinian did not retract his previous suspicions. Belisarius was kept under arrest in his own palace without any further proceedings being directed against him. These examinations took place on the 5th and 11th of December; and the text of Malalas must be received as convincing evidence that Justinian took no stronger measures against Belisarius before the commencement of the year 563.[39 - Joannis Antiocheni cognomenti Malalæ Historia Chronica. Pars altera, p. 84, ed. Venet.]

On the 19th of July of that year Belisarius was restored by Justinian to all his honours. Some months of cool reflection had convinced the emperor, that the extorted evidence of a few dependents against an opposition leader, ought not not to outweigh the testimony of a long life of unstained loyalty. The remainder of that life was passed in tranquillity; and in the month of March of the year 565, the patrician Belisarius terminated his glorious career, and his fortune reverted to the imperial treasury. Such is the brief account which we possess of the last days of the conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths—the restorer of the spoils of Jerusalem—the deposer of a Pope—the destroyer of the tomb of Hadrian—and the last of the Romans who triumphed, leading kings captive in his train.[40 - Theophanis Chronographia, p. 201, ed. Paris. The accounts of Theophanes and Malalas must be compared together, as the comparison establishes the fact that they were both drawn from official sources. See also p. 202, 203, and note.] Antonina survived her husband, and lived in retirement with Vigilantia, the sister of Justinian, but in the enjoyment of wealth. Before her death she reconstructed the church of St Procopius, which had been destroyed by fire; and it received, from her affection for Justinian's sister, the name of Vigilantia.[41 - Georgius Codinus de Originibus Constantinopolitanis, p. 54.]

We must now notice the accounts of the modern Byzantine writers. George Cedrenus was a monk of the eleventh century, who has left us a history of the world to the year 1057. It contains many popular stories, but often transcribes or abridges official documents as well as ancient historians. In this work we might expect to find any fable, generally accredited, concerning Belisarius; but the account of his latter days is in exact conformity with those of Theophanes and Malalas.[42 - Georgii Cedreni Compendium Historiarum, p. 387.]

John Zonaras had been Grand Drungary, or First Lord of the Admiralty at Constantinople, before he retired to end his days in a monastery on Mount Athos. His Chronicle extends from the Creation to the year 1118, and contains much information not found elsewhere. He is considered as among the most valuable of the Byzantine historians. He mentions that Belisarius was compromised in the plot against the life of Justinian; that he was deprived of his guards and kept prisoner in his house; and that, when he died, his fortune was taken by the imperial treasury.[43 - Joannis Zonaræ Annales, tom. ii. p. 69. ed. Paris.] Consequently Belisarius was in possession of his fortune at the time of his death, and it is possible that Justinian may have been his legal heir.[44 - This may have resulted from the marriage of Joanna, the daughter of Belisarius, with Anastasius, the grandson of Theodora.—Procopii Arcana, c. 4, p. 34.]

The chronicle published under the name of Leo Grammaticus, which dates from the twelfth century, states that Belisarius, having been accused of plotting against the Emperor Justinian, died of grief.[45 - Leonis Grammatici Chronographia, p. 132. Bonnæ: 1842. 8vo.]

Such are the historical accounts which the annals of the Byzantine empire furnish concerning the fate of Belisarius. But, attached to the collection of Justinian's laws, there is a rescript, which would alone afford conclusive evidence of the restoration of Belisarius to all his honours, if we could place implicit reliance on the date it bears. Unfortunately, however, for our purpose, the authority on which Cujacius published it, is not sufficiently established to give satisfactory authenticity to its date. This date is 565, and in the month of March of this year Belisarius died; and in the month of November Justinian also followed him. The rescript speaks of Belisarius incidentally as "our most glorious patrician;" an expression incompatible with his having suffered any great indignity, or remained in permanent disgrace.[46 - Corpus Juris Civilis. Aliæ aliquot Constitutiones. Tom. ii. p. 511, ed. ster. 4to. Privilegium pro Titionibus ex Cujac. Obss. lib. x. c. 12. In a new edition of the Corpus there is the following note:—Hoc privilegium editum est in Cujac. Obss., sed ex quo fonte desumptum sit, non indicatur, nisi quod Cujacius a P. Galesio Hispano se id decepisse dicat. Non sine ratione addidit Beck. qui in App. Corp. Juris Civ. hanc constitutionem recepit, an genuina sit, dubio non carere.]

We must now turn from examining public history, to consider popular feeling. Belisarius, as we have already observed, was the hero of the Roman world; but another society existed in the very heart of that world, which hated every thing Roman. This society was Greek; it had its own feelings, its own literature, and its own church. Of its literature, Procopius has left us a curious specimen in his Secret History, where the facts of his public Roman history are presented to the discontented Greeks, richly spiced with calumny and libels on the Roman administration. Peculiar circumstances gave the reign of Justinian a prominent position in the history of the world, as the last great era of Roman history, and its memory was long cherished with a feeling of wonder and awe.[47 - Greece under the Romans, p. 229.—If the writer of this article may presume to refer to his own authority.] We must, however, remark, that from the death of Justinian to the accession of Leo III. the Isaurian, the government of the Eastern empire was strictly Roman. From the reign of Leo III. to that of Basil I. the Macedonian (867) if not quite Roman, it was very far from Greek.

Three centuries after the death of Belisarius and Justinian, new feelings arose. The Greeks then looked back on the authentic history of Belisarius as they did on that of Scipio and Sylla,—as a history unconnected with their own national glory, but marking the last conquests which illustrated the annals of the Roman empire, and affording one of those mighty names admirably adapted

"To point a moral, or adorn a tale."

We must now endeavour to prove that its use for this purpose, in the manner transmitted to us, was subsequent to the accession of Basil the Macedonian.

We believe that the blindness and beggary of Belisarius, as recorded in the Greek romance, of which the memory has become a part of the tradition of Western Europe, was suggested to the novelist by the fate of Symbat, an Armenian noble in the Byzantine service, who married the daughter of the Cæsar Bardas, the uncle of the Emperor Michael III. The catastrophe of the romance is mentioned by two writers of the twelfth century. One is the anonymous author of a description of Constantinople, who was a cotemporary of Zonaras. The other is John Tzetzes, who wrote a rambling work consisting of mythological and historical notices in Greek political, civil, or profane verse, as it may be called, (versus politici)—the epic poetry of modern Greece; correctly compared by Lord Byron to the heroic strain of

"A captain bold of Halifax who lived in country quarters."

This poet flourished at the end of the twelfth century.

The anonymous Guide-Book, relates that Justinian, envying the glory of Belisarius, put out his eyes, and ordered him to be placed in the Lauron with a bowl of earthenware in his hand, that the charitable might bestow on him an obolus.[48 - Imperium Orientale: studio A. Banduri. Tom. i. pars tertia. Antiquitatum Constantinopolitanarum, p. 7. ed. Paris.] Tzetzes repeats the same story in his learned doggrel, only he gives Belisarius a wooden dish in his hand, and stations him to beg in the Milion or Stadium of Constantinople. But Tzetzes, who piqued himself on his historical knowledge, candidly tells his readers, that other chronicles say that Belisarius was restored to all his former honours.[49 - Joannis Tzetzæ Historiarum Variarum Chiliades, p. 94, ed. Kiesslingii, Lipsiæ, 1826, 8vo.]

The notices of a Greek guide-book, and the tales of a popular versifier, concerning a Roman general, ought certainly to be received with great caution, when they are found to be at variance with all historical evidence. In this case, tradition cannot be admitted to have had any existence for many centuries after the death of Belisarius. The supposed tradition is Greek,—the authentic history is Roman. But historical evidence exists to show that all the details concerning the blindness and beggary of Belisarius have been copied by the author of the romance, from circumstances which occurred at Constantinople in the year 866.

In that year, the Armenian, Symbat, after assisting his wife's cousin the Emperor Michael III. (who rejoiced in the jolly epithet of the Drunkard,) and the future emperor Basil the Macedonian, (who subsequently murdered his patron the Drunkard,) to assassinate his own father-in-law Cæsar Bardas, rebelled against his connexion the Drunkard.[50 - Basil the Macedonian was originally a groom, and owed his first step in the imperial favour of the Drunkard to his powers as a whisperer. He broke an ungovernable horse belonging to the emperor, by the exercise of this singular quality, and rendered it, to the amazement of the whole court, as tame as a sheep. Leo Grammaticus says, Τη μεν μια χειρι τον χαλινον κρατησαϛ, τη δε 'ετιρα του ωτοϛ δραξαμενος εις εμ*ροτ*τα προβατου μεταβαλον. —P. 230, ed. Bonn.] He engaged Peganes, the general of the theme of Opsikion, or the provinces on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont, in his rebellion. Peganes was soon taken prisoner by the imperial troops, and the Drunkard ordered his eyes to be put out and his nose to be cut off, and he then sent him to stand in the Milion for three days successively, with a bowl in his hand, to solicit alms. A month after, the news that Symbat was captured was brought to the emperor, while he was feasting in the palace of St Mamas. He ordered Peganes to be led out to meet the new prisoner, that Symbat might be conducted into Constantinople with every possible indignity. The blind and mutilated Peganes was compelled to walk before his friend, with a bowl of earthenware in the form of a censer, filled with sulphur, as if burning incense to perfume him. The right eye of Symbat was put out, and his right hand cut off, and in this state he was placed in the Lauron, like a beggar, with a bowl hung before his breast to receive charity. Three days after, the two rebels were allowed to return to their houses, where they were kept prisoners. Symbat regained possession of his sequestered fortune when Basil the Macedonian became emperor.

Now, even if we admit the possibility of the politic Justinian having treated Belisarius as Michael the Drunkard treated the unprincipled Symbat, still it is impossible to compare the words in which the Guide-book and Tzetzes commemorate the misfortunes of the hero with the narratives of the punishment of Peganes and Symbat, without feeling that the former are transcribed from the latter.

To prove this, if necessary, we could quote the words of our authorities. The earliest account of the punishment of Peganes and Symbat is given by George the Monk, a Byzantine writer whose chronicle ends with the year 920. The chronicle of Simeon Metaphrastes, which also belongs to the tenth century, and that of Leo Grammaticus, give the same account, almost in the same words. There can be no doubt that they are all copied from official documents; the style is a rich specimen of the monastic state-paper abridgment.[51 - Georgius Monachus, p. 540. Simeon Metaph. p. 449. Scriptores post Theophanem, ed. Paris. Leo Gramm., p. 469, ed. Paris, p. 247, ed. Bonn.]

The state-paper style was retained in the romance from which the Guide-book was copied, to impress the feeling of reality on the minds of the people; while the mention of the obolus, an ancient coin, marked the antique dignity with which the tale was invested. The obolus had been, for centuries, unknown in the coinage of Constantinople; and the word was no longer in use in the public markets of Greece. But besides this, if the Guide-book is to be admitted as an authority for a historical fact, it very soon destroys the value of its own testimony concerning the blindness and beggary of Belisarius; for, only a few lines after recording his disgrace, it mentions a gilt statue of the hero as standing near the palace of Chalce.

Such is fame. The real Belisarius, the hero of the history and the libels of Procopius, being a Roman general, owes his universal reputation to the creation of an imaginary Belisarius by some unknown Greek romance-writer or ballad-singer. The interest of mankind in the conquests and records of Byzantine Rome has become torpid; but the feelings of humanity, in favour of the victims of courtly ingratitude, are immortal. The unextinguishable aversion of the Hellenic race to tyranny and oppression, has given a degree of fame to the name of Belisarius which his own deeds, great as they were, would never have conferred. This is but one proof of the singular influence exercised by the Hellenic mind over the rest of the world during the middle ages. It may be continually traced in the literature both of the east and the west. Whenever the sympathies are awakened by general sentiments of philanthropy among the emirs of the east, or the barons of the west, there is reason to suspect that the origin of the tale must be sought in Greece. Europe has been guided by the mind of Hellas in every age, from the days of Homer to those of Tzetzes; and its power has been maintained by addressing the feelings common to the whole human race—feelings long cherished in Greece after they had been banished from western society by Goths, Franks, and Normans.[52 - Things have not changed in our day. Capodistrias lighted his pipe with Canning's treaties and King Leopold's renunciation; and Colettis makes game of the feeble acts and strong expressions of Viscount Palmerston.]

There is yet one important reflection which, if the study of the age of Belisarius and Justinian does not suggest, we have failed to comprehend its true spirit. In spite of its glory—of its legislative, its legal, its military, its administrative, its architectural, and its ecclesiastical greatness, it was destitute of that spiritual power which rules and guides the souls of men. It was an age entirely material and selfish. Religion was a mere formula: Christianity slept victorious amidst the ruins of extinguished paganism. Belisarius could depose one Pope, and sell the chair and the keys of St Peter to another, without rousing the indignation of the Christian world. Liberty was an incomprehensible term. That energy of individual independence and physical force which excited the barbarians of the north to conquer the western empire, and enabled the Romans of Byzantium to save the eastern, was sinking into lethargy. Patriotism was an unknown feeling. Indeed, what idea of nationality or love of country could be formed by the privileged classes of Constantinople? Their successors the Turks may be taken as interpreters of the sentiments of the Byzantine Romans on this subject, who, while vegetating in Stamboul, gravely tell you that Mecca is their country.

In short, the spirit of liberty and religion was torpid in the empire of Justinian, and perhaps in the soul of Belisarius. These two remarkable men were both governed by the material impulses of military discipline and systematic administration. Verily, the mission of Mahomet was necessary to awaken mankind, and rouse the Christian world from its lethargy to the great mental struggle which, from the hour of the unfolding of the banner of Islam, has left the minds of men no repose; and will henceforth compel them to unite the spirit of religion with all their restless endeavours to realise each successive dream of social improvement that the human soul shall dare to conceive.

Athens, March 20, 1847.

ANCIENT AND MODERN BALLAD POETRY.[53 - The Minstrelsy of the English Border; being a collection of Ballads, ancient, remodelled, and original, founded on well-known Border Legends. With illustrative notes by Frederick Sheldon. London: 1847.A Book of Roxburghe Ballads. Edited by John Payne Collier, Esq. London: 1847.A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood. Edited by John Mathew Gutch, F.S.A. 2 vols. London: 1847.Poems and Songs of Allan Cunningham. London: 1847.The Poetical Works of William Motherwell, Second Edition, Enlarged. Glasgow: 1847.]

The first day of April is a festival too prominent in the Kalendar of Momus to be passed over without due commemoration. The son of Nox, who, according to that prince of heralds, Hesiod, presides especially over the destinies of reviewers, demands a sacrifice at our hands; and as, in the present state of the provision market, we cannot afford to squander a steer, we shall sally forth into the regions of rhyme and attempt to capture a versifier.

The time has been when such a task was, to say the least of it, very simple. Each successive spring, at the season when "a livelier iris glows upon the burnished dove," Parnassus sent forth its leaves, and the voices of many cuckoos were heard throughout the land. Small difficulty then, either to flush or to bag sufficient game. But, somehow or other, of late years there has been a sort of panic among the poets. The gentler sort have either been scared by the improvisatore warblings of Mr Wakley, or terrified into silence by undue and undeserved apprehensions of the Knout. Seldom now are they heard to chirrup except under cover of the leaves of a sheltering magazine; and although we do occasionally detect a thin and ricketty octavo taking flight from the counter of some publisher, it is of so meek and inoffensive a kind that we should as soon think of making prize of a thrush in a bed of strawberries. We are much afraid that the tendency of the present age towards the facetious has contributed not a little to the dearth of sonnets and the extermination of the elegiac stanza. So long as friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh has the privilege of frequenting the house of Mrs Perkins and other haunts of fashionable and literary celebrity, Poseidon Hicks will relapse into gloomy silence, and Miss Bunion refrain from chanting her Lays of the Shattered Heart-strings. It a hard thing that a poet may not protrude his gentle sorrows for our commiseration, mourn over his blighted hopes, or rejoice the bosom of some budding virgin by celebrating her, in his Tennysonian measure, as the light-tressed Ianthe or sleek-haired Claribel of his soul, without being immediately greeted by a burst of impertinent guffaws, and either wantonly parodied or profanely ridiculed to his face. So firm is our belief in the humanising influence of poetry that we would rather, by a thousand times, that all the reviews should perish, and all the satirists be consigned to Orcus, than behold the total cessation of song throughout the British Islands. And if we, upon any former occasion, have spoken irreverently of the Nincompoops, we now beg leave to tender to that injured body our heartfelt contrition for the same; and invite them to join with us in a pastoral pilgrimage to Arcadia, where they shall have the run of the meadows, with a fair allowance of pipes and all things needful—where they may rouse a satyr from every bush, scamper over the hills in pursuit of an Oread, or take a sly vizzy at a water-nymph arranging her tresses in the limpid fountains of the Alpheus. What say you, our masters and mistresses, to this proposal for a summer ramble?

Hitherto we have spoken merely of the gentler section of the bards. But there is another division of that august body by no means quite so diffident. Since our venerated Father Christopher paid, some four years ago, a merited tribute to the genius of Mr Macaulay, commenting upon the thews and sinews of his verse, and the manly vigour of his Lays of Ancient Rome—ballad poetry in all its forms and ramifications has become inconceivably rampant. The Scottish poetry also, which from time to time has appeared in Maga, seems to have excited, in certain quarters, a spirit of larcenous admiration; and not long ago it was our good fortune to behold in the Quarterly Review a laudation of certain lines which are neither more nor less than a weak dilution of a ballad composed by one of our contributors. It would be well, however, had we nothing more to complain of than this. But the ballad fever has got to such a height that it may be necessary to make an example. Our young English poets are now emulating in absurdity those German students, who dress after the costume of the middle ages as depicted by Cornelius, and terrify the peaceful Cockney on the Rhine by apparitions of Goetz of Berlichingen. They are no longer Minnesingers, but warriors of sanguineous complexion. They are all for glory, blood, chivalry, and the deeds of their ancestors. They cut, thrust, and foin as fiercely as fifty Francalanzas, and are continually shouting on Saint George. Dim ideas of the revival of the Maltese Order seem to float before their excited imaginations; and, were there the slightest spark of genuine feeling in their enthusiasm, either Abd-el-Kader or Marshal Bugeaud would have had by this time some creditable recruits. But the fact is, that the whole system is a sham. Our young friends care about as much for Saint George as they do for Saint Thomas Aquinas; they would think twice before they permitted themselves to be poked at with an unbuttoned foil; and as for the deeds of their ancestors, a good many of them would have considerable difficulty in establishing their descent even from a creditable slop-seller—"the founder of our family"—in the reign of George the Third. It is therefore a mystery to us why they should persevere in their delusion. What—in the name of the Bend Sinister—have they to do with the earlier Harrys or Edwards, or the charge of the Templars at Ascalon, or the days of the Saxon Heptarchy? Are they called upon by some irrepressible impulse to ransack the pages of English history for a "situation," or to crib from the Chronicles of Froissart? Cannot they let the old warriors rest in peace, without summoning them, like the Cid, from their honoured graves, again to put on harness and to engage in feckless combat? For oh!—weak and most washy are the battles which our esteemed young friends describe! Their war-horses have for the most part a general resemblance to the hacks hired out at seven-and-sixpence for the Sunday exhibition in the Park. Their armour is of that kind more especially in vogue at Astley's, in the composition of which tinfoil is a principal ingredient, and pasteboard by no means awanting. Their heroes fight, after preliminary parley which would do credit to the chivalry of the Hippodrome; and their lances invariably splinter as frush as the texture of the bullrush. Their dying chiefs all imitate Bayard, as we once saw Widdecomb do it, when struck down by the infuriated Gomersal; and the poem generally concludes with a devout petition to "Our Ladye," not only to vouchsafe her grace to the defunct champion, but to grant that the living minstrel may experience the same end—a prayer which, for the sake of several respectable young members of society, we hope may be utterly disregarded.

The truth is, that instead of being the easiest, the ballad is incomparably the most difficult kind of all poetical composition. Many men, who were not poets in the highest sense of the word, because they wanted the inventive faculty, have nevertheless, by dint of perseverance, great accomplishment, and dexterous use of those materials which are ready to the hand of every artificer, gained a respectable name in the roll of British literature—but never, in any single instance, by attempting the construction of a ballad. That is the Shibboleth, by which you can at once distinguish the true minstrel from mere impostor or pretender. It is the simplest, and at the same time the sublimest form of poetry, nor can it be written except under the influence of that strong and absorbing emotion, which bears the poet away far from the present time, makes him an actor and a participator in the vivid scenes which he describes, and which is, in fact, inspiration of the very loftiest kind. The few who enjoy the glorious privilege, not often felt, nor long conferred, of surrendering themselves to the magic of that spell, cease for the time to be artists; they take no thought of ornament, or of any rhetorical artifice, but throw themselves headlong into their subject, trusting to nature for that language which is at once the shortest and the most appropriate to the occasion; spurning all far-fetched metaphors aside, and ringing out their verse as the iron rings upon the anvil! It was in this way that Homer, the great old ballad-maker of Greece, wrote—or rather chanted, for in his day pens were scarce, wire-wove unknown, and the pride of Moseley undeveloped. God had deprived the blind old man of sight; but in his heart still burned the fury of the fight of Troy; and trow ye not, that to him the silent hills of Crete many a time became resonant with the clang of arms, and the shouts of challenging heroes, when not a breath of wind was stirring, and the ibex stood motionless on its crag? What a difference between Homer and Virgil! Mœonides goes straight to work, like a marshal calling out his men. He moves through the encampment of the ships, knowing every man by headmark, and estimating his capabilities to a buffet. No metaphor or nonsense in the combats that rage around the sepulchre of Ilus—good hard fighting all of it, as befits barbarians, in whose veins the blood of the danger-seeking demigods is seething: fierce as wild beasts they meet together, smite, hew, and roll over in the dust. Jove may mourn for Sarpedon, or Andromache tear her hair above the body of her slaughtered Hector; but not one whit on that account abstain their comrades from the banquet, and on the morrow, under other leaders, they will renew the battle—for man is but as the leaves of the forest, whilst glory abideth for ever.

Virgil, on the contrary, had but little of the ballad-maker in his composition. He was always thinking of himself, and of his art, and the effect which his Æneid would produce,—nay, we are even inclined to suspect that at times he was apt to deviate into a calculation of the number of sestertia which he might reasonably reckon to receive from the bounty of the Emperor. The Æneid is upon the whole a sneaking sort of a poem. The identity of Æneas with Augustus, and the studied personification of every leading character, is too apparent to be denied. It is therefore less an epic than an allegory; and—without questioning the truth of Hazlitt's profound apothegm, that allegories do not bite—we confess that, in general, we have but small liking to that species of composition. For in the first place, the author of an allegory strips himself of the power of believing it. He can have no faith in the previous existence of heroes whom he is purposely portraying as shadows, and he must constantly be put to shifts, in order to adapt his story, during its progress, to the circumstances which he attempts to typify. And, in the second place, he commits the error, equally palpable, of disenchanting the eyes of his reader. For the very essence of that pleasure which we all derive from fiction, lies in our overcoming to a certain extent the idea of its actual falsity, and in our erecting within ourselves a sort of secondary belief, to which, accordingly, our sympathies are submitted. Every thing, therefore, which interferes with this fair and legitimate credulity is directly noxious to the effect of the poem; it puts us back one stage further from the point of absolute faith, and materially diminishes the interest which we take in the progress of the piece. Spenser's Faerie Queen is a notable example of this. Could we but think that Una was intended, though only by the poet's fancy, to be the portraiture of a mortal virgin, unfriended and alone amidst the snares and enchantments of the world, would we not tremble for her sweet sake, knowing that some as innocent and as fair as she have fallen victims to jealousy less dark than Duessa's, and wiles less skilfully prepared than those of the hoary Archimage? But Una never for one moment appears to us as a woman. From the first we feel that she is there, not exposed to temptation, but as a pure and holy spirit, in whose presence hypocrisy is unmasked, and all sin and iniquity unveiled. Nor fear we for the Red-Cross Knight, even when he seems to go astray, and turns from the side of her whom he had sworn to protect and guard; for he bears a talisman upon his shield and his bosom, expressive of his origin, and able to resist for ever the fiery darts of the wicked. Never rode knight and lady through earthly wilderness as these two journey together. For them we have no human interest—not even such tears as we might shed for the lapse of an erring angel. They have not put on mortality, nor do they meet or combat with mortal foes. Truth will do much for us, even in poetry where the mortal interest is most largely intermingled with the supernatural. Some belief we have even in the wildest flights of Ariosto. Astolfo does not cease to be one of ourselves when traversing the regions of air on his hippogriff, or conversing on the mount of terrestial Paradise with the beloved Apostle John. But which of us even in fancy can ride with the Red-Cross warrior, penetrate with Guyon into the cave of Mammon, or realise the dreary pageant that issued from the House of Pride?

Spenser's is the purer allegory—Virgil's but a secondary one. The Æneid is a hybrid poem, wherein the real and the ideal mingle. There is sufficient of the first to preserve for us some epic interest, and enough of the latter at times to stagger our belief. But apart from this, how inferior is the Æneid in interest to the masterpiece of Homer! It consists, epically speaking, of three divisions—the landing at Carthage, the Sicilian visit to Acestes, and the final campaign of Italy—and the two first of these have no bearing at all upon the third, and even that third is incomplete. Whatever homage we may be compelled to pay to the sweetness of Virgil's muse, and his marvellous power of melody, this at least is undeniable, that in inventive genius he falls immeasurably short of the Greek, and that his scenes of action are at once both tinselled and tame. One magnificent exception, it is true, we are bound to make from such a censure. The second book of the Æneid stands out in strong and vivid contrast from the rest; and few poets, whether ancient or modern, have written aught like the conflagration of Troy. Nor shall we, with the severer critics, darkly hint of works which had gone before, but of which the substance long ago has perished—of the Cyclic poem of Arctinus, said to have been of all others the nearest in point of energy to the Iliad, or of the songs of Lesches and Euphorion. Rather let us be thankful for this one episode, without which the great tale of Ilium would have been incomplete, and the lays of Demodocus in the Odyssey remained mere hints of the woful catastrophe of Priam. But if you wish to see how Homer could handle a ballad, turn up the eighth book of your Odyssey until you come to the Minstrel's son—or if haply you are somewhat rusted in your Greek, and yearn for the aid of Donnegan, listen to the noble version of Maginn, who alone of all late translators has caught the true fire and spirit of Mœonides.

"The Minstrel began as the Godhead inspired:
He sang how their leaguer the Argives had fired,
And over the sea in trim barks bent their course,
While their chiefs with Odysseus were closed in the horse,
Mid the Trojans who had that fell engine of wood
Dragged on, till in Troy's inmost turret it stood;
There long did they ponder in anxious debate
What to do with the steed as around it they sate.

Then before them three several counsels were laid:
Into pieces to hew it by the edge of the blade;
Or to draw it forth thence to the brow of the rock,
And downward to fling it with shivering shock;
Or, shrined in the tower, let it there make abode
As an offering to ward off the anger of God.
The last counsel prevail'd; for the moment of doom,
When the town held the horse, upon Ilium had come.

The Argives in ambush awaited the hour
When slaughter and death on their foes they should shower.
When it came, from their hollow retreat rushing down
The sons of th' Achivi smote sorely the town.