on the discovery that there may be less creditable methods of recruiting one's finances than even those which are recorded with reprobation in the columns of the Newgate Calendar.

Our opinion of the literary merits of Tieck generally is, as Robert Owen would "a secret which has hithersay, to remained hidden from mankind." Be it then, on the 1st of March, 1837, made notorious to all whom it may concern, and also to all whom it may gladden, that for our German friend we cherish the highest imaginable veneration. As a critic we hold him perfect, as a raconteur pluperfect, as a philologist preterpluperfect. That is, he shines, we conceive, in syntax, in story-building, and in the art of twaddling on the belles-lettres. We confess we are proud, proud as a peacock, of being able to bear testimony in his favor thus far. Nothing could give us greater pleasure than the privilege of smoking the pipe of peace with him on all occasions whensoever; unless he would allow us to advance one step further and join him in grinning away his hypochondriacism, of which last article, or rather substantive, his inglorious constitution appears to have laid in a stock by no means as easily transferable as stock in general is.

But Omnia vincit veritatis amor, as Ferdinand Mendez Pinto observes in his Quarto; and candor compels us to repeat that our esteemed friend is, as a poet, an egregious quack. For two hours we have been tugging at these two volumes for two consecutive stanzas that might convey to our mind some shadow of a notion of what it was that the writer fancied himself about, and we are now commencing hour the third in a vain search after the same phantom. We scan the page and blink like an owl over it, our countenance preserving the while that steady expression of stupifiedness which the plodding through Cimmerian poetry is so apt to communicate to the august lineaments of the human face divine. Certes, either he is mysterious beyond the capacity of the children of men, or we are Impenetrability personified.

All that we can gather is that he is delectably miserable. He maintains almost from first to last one monotonous wail, as mournful and nearly as unvarying as the night-lament of the Whip-Poor-Will in the forests of South America. He simpers and whimpers; and yet, one cannot tell whether he would fain be thought glad

or sad. He plays the poetical coquette between Fortune and Misfortune, and might adopt for his devise the plaint of Uberto, in Pergolesi's Opera, La Serva Padrona:

O un certo che nel core,
Che dir per me non so
Se è odio o s'è amore;

Io sto fra il si e il nò,

Fra il voglio e fra il non voglio,

E sempre più m'imbroglio.

Trifles and things of nothing also exercise prodigious power over him. It is easy to see that, if tempted to "make his quietus," it will be with nothing savager than "a bare bodkin,” and that a yard of packthread will be quite sufficient to aid his efforts at exhibiting a case of suspended animation in his own person. Hotspur complains of being "pestered by a popinjay," but Tieck's patience, like that of Tristram Shandy's uncle, is put to the test by a blue-bottle fly. He is knocked down by a bulrush every half-minute in the day, and reverently kisses the face of his fatherland fourteen hundred and forty times in twelve hours. A dead leaf throws him into convulsions, and at the twittering of a swallow the heart of the poor man batters his ribs with such galvanic violence of percussion that at three yards' distance you suspect the existence of hypertrophy, and are half-disposed to summon a surgeon. Like Gulliver in the hands of the Lilliputians, he is the victim of a million of tiny tormentors, who slay him piecemeal, the ten-thousandth part of an inch at a time. The minuter his calamity, too, the more he suffers. He may exclaim, with the lover in Dryden's play, "My wound is great, because it is so small!" The colossal evils of life he passes over sous silence, as unworthy the notice of a sentimentalist. Like the bronze figure of Atlas, he can stand immovable with a World of Woes upon his shoulders; but a single disaster, particularly if it be very slight, is too tremendous for his equanimity. The last feather, it is said, breaks the horse's back; but Tieck's back is broken by one feather. He is ready to oppose, as our friend Fergusson would say, an "ironbound front," to the overwhelming allurements of an entire parterre, while a simple bouquet brings on an attack of delirium tremens. He can lounge through a flower-garden half-a-mile long, his hands in his pockets, a Peripatetic in appearance and a Stoic at heart; but dies of one rose in aromatic pain."

Under such circumstances one should

suppose that he was much to pity. The case is the contrary. His sufferings are the sole source of his pleasures. Reversing the saying of the frogs in the fable, what seems death to you is sport to him. Every emotion that tenants his heart must pay a rackrent, or the income of his happiness is so far deficient. Like Sindbad in the Valley of Diamonds, the lower the gulf he descends into, the wealthier he becomes. If he be found in tears, it is a proof that he is lost in extacy. He not only agrees with the author of Hudibras, that "Pain is the foil of pleasure and delight, and sets them off to a more noble height," but goes further, and, like Zeno, makes pain and pleasure identical. To help him to an annoyance or two, therefore, is to confer a favour on him that awakens his most lugubrious gratitude. He is like Brother Jack in the Tale of a Tub, whose felicity consisted in planting himself at the corners of streets, and beseeching the passengers, for the love of Heaven, to give him a hearty drubbing. Or he reminds us of Zobeide's porter in the Arabian Nights, who, as each successive load was laid upon his aching shoulders, burst forth with the exclamation: "O fortunate day! O, day of good luck!" But why waste our ink in these vain illustrations? There is no saying what he resembles, or what he is or what he does, except that he doubts and groans, and allows his latitudinarianism in the one volume to carry on the war so soporifically against his valetudinarianism in the other, that not Mercury himself, if he took either in hand, could avoid catching the lethargic infection, and dropping dead asleep over the page.

The apex of Tieck's cranium must, we should think, display a mountainous development of the organ of Selfesteem. It is quite manifest that whatever he chooses to pen becomes in his own conceit inerasable and inestimable. A piece of bizarre barbarian

ism that Rabelais would have blotted out on a first reading is reckoned as the production of Ludwig Tieck, worthy of being enshrined in gold and amber. With submission, nevertheless, to our esteemed, he here reckons without his host; that is, without his host of readers, and also without us, his knouter, who are a host in ourself. The world, we would beg to assure him, gains nothing but dead losses by snch acquisitions to the staple stock of litera ture. Where a man's genius, indeed, is very prononcé, where "his soul is like a star and dwells apart," people

have an excuse for attaching importance to his extravagances. But Tieck, if a star at all-and he is rather a starling than a star-is but one of a family constellation, whose number may hereafter, when Time shall have brushed away the dust from our moral telescopes, appear as augmented as their glory will appear diminished. If we hold up all we have got from him between our eyes and the light, we shall be rather at a loss to discover in what it is that he has transcended his neighbours. The grotesque make of an article, he ought to recollect, is but a soso set-off against its inutility. Common sense judges of all things by their intrinsic worth. A pedlar scarcely guarantees the admiration of a sensible purchaser by shewing him a pair of bamboo sandals from the shores of the Bhurrampooter, or a necklace of cherrystones strung together by a child born without arms or legs. We want not that which is unique and singular, but that which is of paramount and permanent interest. The Roman Emperor who rewarded with a bushel of milletseed the man whose highest ambition it was to cast a grain of that seed through the eye of a needle, set an example of contempt for mountebankism which we are at length beginning to copy. We do not now-a-days, like our ancestors, barter an estate for a Dutch tulip. Not exactly, Ludwig! Your thoughts, Ludwig, are not one gooseberry the more valuable to the public on the score that they are your thoughts exclusively. "I cannot be expected," says Goldsmith's Chinese, "to pick a pebble off the street, and call it a relic, because the king has walked over it in a procession." If the Useful should take precedence of the Ornamental, how far into the rear should it not hustle the Fantastic? Poets generally reflect less to the purpose than other men, or they would have long ago found out that the world is weary of their impertinences, and that nothing satisfies in the long run but what was of sterling respectability from the beginning. A publican can think of nothing better for luring the thirsty crowd into his pot-house than a Hog in Armour, and a poet must clap some parallel monstrosity over the door of his own sanctum sanctorum, or he fears that he will not be left in a situation to

quarrel with his company. But Nature, after all, does not often back the appeals of the Bedlamite. "The common growth of Mother Earthher humblest tears, her humblest

mirth," suffice for the generality. Few people catch mermaids in these times and still fewer are caught by them. A phoenix is a nine days' wonder—a sight to be stared at and talked of during a season; but our affections are given to the goose, and she is honored from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. Let Tieck but bring us geese into the market and we shall be satisfied. We will not even object to go to the length of puffing off all his geese as swans. The sole stipulation we make with him is, that he shall close the gates of his Phoenix-Park.

Tieck is our particular friend. We have called him a quack. Our freedom of speech is a proof of our friendship. For the world we have little but hypocritic smiles and silver lies. Tieck deserves better, and we have favored him with a gentle trouncing. He must not droop, therefore, but contrariwise rejoice. He must pluck up heart. There is pith and stamina with in him. We depend on him for yet giving us something rather less remarkable for platitude than his Bluebeard is. The Titian of The Pictures, the Prometheus of The Old Man of the Mountain-above all, the concoctor of The Love-charm can never be des titute of the means of retrieving his poetical reputation. But the task is one that will exact the sacrifice of his entire cistern of tears. If he undertake it, it must be with nerves of iron and a brow of brass. It was not, he should remember, by enacting Jackpudding under the mask of a Howling Dervish, that Milton or Goethe grew to be an intellectual Colossus. Annual self-exhibitions at Leipsic Fair may be all very well for nondescripts and nobodies-the awkward squad of the literary army-the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the bookmaking multitude, who are glad to pocket sixpence by hook or crook, and will bawl and bray the whole day long for half a dollar, but Tieck ought to be above those degrading shifts and antics. His mode of procedure is obvious and simple. He aspires to the title of a poet. Very good let him give us conceptions we may make something out of; and sentiments that our flesh and blood hearts will respond with a

The weariful day was past,
The mind, overstrained,
Was fain to succumb at last.
In dungeons of drowsiness,
As when dull dreams oppress,
My spirit lay passionless,

thrill to. He need neither overleap the pale of the world, nor yet grovel in the low and swampy places of the world. Enough of work, we warrant him, will he find to do in the right spot. He can build himself a magnificent mansion, with "ample room and verge enough" in it to entertain the whole circle of his acquaintance, "yea, the great globe itself," if his architecture be not of the clumsiest. Embrace, O, Tieck, the Beautiful and True! Abandon the Factitious and the False! The bowers of Poetry, bestrewn with roses, and overarched with evershining laurel, shall no man visit but with Nature's passport! You cannot assimilate Kant and Shakspeare. Metaphysics and Poetry are by no manner of means nitrogen and oxygen. They dwell best asunder. Each should be kept at a distance from the other, as brandy should be kept at a distance from water. The tertium quid produced by the attempted amalgamation of both is a nauseous humbug. If any doubt of the truth of our assertion overcast your mind, peruse your own poems and doubt no longer.

One of the least unintelligible of Tieck's vagaries is a small composition entitled Ball-music. It is a tableau of the feelings of an imaginative but morbid mind, under the influence of the artificial excitement which such a scene as a ball-room presents, is calculated to engender. The lights and shades are too strongly contrasted, but the general idea is good, though not as well sustained as in more dextrous hands it might have been. It is altogether a sort of loose-jointed and rhapsodical commentary on that text of Holy Writ: In the midst of Life we are in Death. We shall hazard the selection of a few passages from this peem, which, indeed, affords about the best evidence we have been able to collect of its author's ability to put into the form of rhyme something that may escape the chance of being condemned as utterly insane. The poet begins by representing himself buried in a brown study, in the solitude of his parlour, out of which he is aroused by sounds that seem to proceed from a hundred orchestras.

And chilled and chained

When the Devil of Riot arose, Who so metamorphoses mortals, And thundered against the portals With many and clangorous blows.