fatal. There is a constant struggle to blend the picturesque simplicity of the Chronicler or Romancer, with what the French talk of as the polished stateliness of the French tragedy; and the result is disagreeable. In one paragraph we have Haute et puissante dame,' and in the next Quoi, Madame?' Royal spectres begin their speeches with an Eh bien,' and when the ghost of the chosen hero Montmorenci himself heads the French army, and decides the fate of the empire at Bovines, we are told that

Germains, Hongrois, Teutons, reculent effrayés,
Tremblants, saisis d'horreur, et presque foudroyés;

La force en vain combat, l'épouvante est plus forte; Mort ou vivant, fantôme ou chevalier, N'IMPORTE.' Again, one of the principal preux of the cycle of Philippe Auguste, conceiving an unfortunate passion for the wife of the eldest son of his king and his own most particular friend, is, as is proper, by that lady rejected and rebuked; falls, of course, into a state of the most profound and heroic melancholy, and thus describes his situation

'Le bonheur est fécond, le malheur est aride,
Rien d'un cœur isolé ne peut remplir le vide.
Cependant, quelquefois, dans mes fougueux élans
Je veux me réveiller à la gloire, aux-TALENS!'

But the best example is behind. The main knot in the fable of M. Parseval is this: Philippe Auguste, being persuaded that his dearly beloved queen, Isembure, is an adultress, dismisses her and takes Agnes de Meranie in her stead. The pope, disapproving of this proceeding, lays an interdict on the kingdom of France, the consequences of which are fearful in the extreme; more particularly the interruption to marriages, thus tenderly, classically, and ecclesiastically alluded to by our poet→→

O vierges, qui d'amour languissez dès l'aurore,
Le soir en soupirant vous languirez encore;
N'espérez plus d'Hymen: l'Eglise en son courroux
Sur sa porte a fixé d'inflexibles verroux-'

In the meantime Agnes herself becomes convinced of her predecessor's purity-for no other reason in the world but that the said predecessor, with whom she meets one fine morning by the merest accident in the world in a church, assures her she is pure. The Queen de facto engages Montmorenci to prove the fact thus ascertained, by a duel, and the result is the re-establishment of the Queen de jure, the removal of the interdict, and the final triumph of Philippe Auguste over all his enemies. Now it seems pretty

clear that the return of Isembure to her husband's arms under such circumstances is an incident of high importance in the plot

of this epic: the situation is in itself, no one can deny, a very noble and affecting one. The following is the use made of it by M.

Parseval.

'Les ordres du monarque assemblent son conseil.
Isembure, au milieu d'un pompeux appareil,
Sort du cloître, et bientôt des grands environnée,
Par les mains d'un époux resplendit couronnée.
Le Héros LUI SOURIT, lui fait UN DOUX ACCUEIL:
Toute SA COUR L'IMITE, et, sortant d'un long deuil,

Au rang qu'elle a perdu la REINE EST REPLACÉE'! ! !

Les dénombrements,' says M. Parseval, qui font une partie nécessaire de l'épopée, ont peu d'attraits pour les lecteurs: et c'est là surtout que le poëte doit épuiser toutes les ressources de l'art d'écrire, pour obtenir leur attention.'

The above is part of the note upon the passage, in which M. Parseval describes the army of King John at the battle of Bovines; to wit:

Les uns viennent du nord de la riche Angleterre
Qui sous Plantagenet baisse un front tributaire;
C'est le vaillant Sussex, le noble Vestmorland,
Somerset et Pembrock, Carlisle et Cumberland:
Tous veulent d'Albion venger les grands désastres:
Je ne t'oublierai pas, famille des Lancastres,
Qu'attendent les combats, les succès, les revers,
Et dont la renommée remplira l'univers.

Et vous, nobles guerriers d'Hertford et de Cambridge,
Audacieux Norfolk, arrogant Fauconbridge,
Suffolk, et Middlesex, étalez à nos yeux
Votre pauvreté noble, et vos noms glorieux,
Tandis que des Anglais l'éblouissante élite
Salsbéry, Rochester son ardent prosélyte,
Et Stafford, et d'Essex étincellent sous l'or

Que leur ont prodigué les beautés de Windsor.'

Not satisfied with surpassing Homer and Virgil in this splendid manner, M. Parseval takes various opportunities of coming to close quarters with the most celebrated poets of modern days. We request particular attention to the following passage from Chant VII. in which he enters the lists with Milton and transports us to the Empyrean.

‹ Thibaut dans un air pur

La suit, et voit Marie en un palais d'azur
Où la myrrhe, exhalant une divine essence,
Fume et vole en parfums de joie et d'innocence.
La Princesse à Thibaut, dans la céleste cour,
Fait remarquer alors la source de l'amour,

Qui du sein du Très-Haut en flots brillants s'écoule,
En cascades s'épanche, en nappes se déroule,

Et

Et dont les ruisseaux d'or, de nacre, et de saphir,
Surpassent en éclat tous les trésors d'Ophir.
Pareilles, sur sa rive, à de blanches statues,
De leur seule pudeur les saintes revêtues,
Se plongeoient à l'envi dans son brillant canal,
Dont les eaux trahissoient leur éclat virginal.
Thibaut voit ces torrens balancer dans leur onde
Clotilde, Rosalie, Ursule, Radegonde,

Qui nagent, s'inondant de ces flots précieux,
Brillante effusion du Souverain des cieux.'

Recommending these flots précieux,' flots brillants,'' brillants canals' and brillantes effusions' to the leisurely consideration of our readers, we request them to pass with us for a moment to Chant XI. where Philippe-Auguste is gratified with a survey of the apparitions of all his royal predecessors on the throne of France, and among the rest those of Childeric and his paramour Bazine.

'Cette ombre que tu vois, lui dit la plus jeune ombre,
Est Childéric, et moi, je suis Bazine. Un jour
Banni de ses états, il parut dans ma cour
En réclamant par lui l'hospitalité sainte.

Mon époux l'accueillit. Oh! de quel trouble atteinte
Je vis sa beauté fière et sa noble candeur!
Mais, soumis au devoir d'une austère pudeur,
Je craignois peu l'Amour et son charme angélique;
Instruite à respecter le culte évangélique,

Je méditois ses lois, quand, m'abordant un soir,
Celui
que vous voyez à mes pieds vint s'asseoir:
Une Bible en ses mains offroit ce beau cantique
Où le Roi Salomon, sous l'arbre aromatique,
A la beauté qu'il aime exprime son amour.
Les ombres de la nuit luttaient contre le jour.
Nous étions seuls; l'écrit dont la sainte lecture
D'une mystique ardeur nous offroit la peinture
Sembloit nous révéler les voluptés des cieux;
Vers ses yeux adorés j'osai tourner mes yeux.
Je n'en pus soutenir l'ardeur étincellante;
Une tremblante main pressoit ma main tremblante,
Et sembloit implorer ou la vie ou la mort;
Quand je lus ce verset qui décida mon sort;

Que les baisers sont doux quand c'est toi qui les cueilles,
Et lorsque sur mon lit la rose ouvrant ses feuilles,
La Rose, dont l'odeur m'encense nuit et jour,
Avec toi m'enveloppe en des parfums d'amour.
Celui que j'aime alors, dans l'ardeur qui l'enivre,
Il étoit à mes pieds....j'oubliai le saint livre,
Et, durant tout le jour, de mon amant épris,
Mes yeux ne virent plus les célestes écrits.

CC 3

The

The poet says, with perfect good faith, in his Note on this

passage

cette apparition de Bazine et de Childéric m'a été INSPIRÉE par l'admirable Episode de Françoise de Rimini dans l'Enfer du Dante.

Inspiration, indeed! We certainly thought that a living genius of our own country had succeeded in degrading the story of Francesca of Rimini as far as the powers of human bathos could plunge, but we must admit that this new master of the Epopée Chrétienne,' as he continually calls it, has achieved a still baser degree of profanation. A great authority says;

6

In poetry the height we know ;

'Tis only infinite below :

For instance-when we rashly think
No rhymer can like Welsted sink,
Concanen, more aspiring bard,

Soars downwards deeper by a yard.'

The introduction of Solomon for Launcelot, and the muddy murder of quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante' in the three last lines we have quoted from M. Parseval, are, however, we must still hope, specimens of the absolute ne plus infra.

In an earlier part of this epic poem the scene between Hubert and Arthur, in Shakspeare's King John, inspires Monsieur Parseval with a passage quite as abominable, and so much longer, that we cannot think of transcribing it. But indeed our readers may, probably, be of our own opinion: namely, that we have already given too much space to a performance in which, after all, there is at least as much to provoke pity as merriment. The chief faults revealed by his grand jour de l'impression' are, he may depend upon it, never once alluded to in the voluminous notes of this laureate of the Tabatière.

ART. V.-1. The Subaltern. 8vo. Edinburgh. 1825. 2. The Adventures of a Young Rifleman in the French and English Armies during the War in Spain and Portugal, from 1806 to 1816. Written by himself. London. 1826.

Written

3. Adventures of a French Serjeant, during his Campaigns in Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, &c. from 1805 to 1823. by himself. London. 1826.

WHEN we consider of what materials the British army

is

composed; that its officers are, for the most part, and have long been, gentlemen, and men of at least some education; we cannot help experiencing both regret and surprize at the total absence of literary ambition which appears generally to affect them. There is perhaps no species of composition which the

reading

reading public is disposed to treat with greater lenity, certainly none better calculated to interest and amuse, than a Military Memoir. The soldier necessarily meets, in the course of his active career, with so many wild adventures; he sees human nature under modifications so multifarious and so grotesque;-the horrible and the ludicrous, the savage and the pathetic, fall in his way so frequently, and in such picturesque combinations and juxtapositions, that if he have but the good taste to shun affectation, and to tell his tale in plain intelligible language, it appears to us to be the next thing to impossible, that he should not tell it pleasantly;-yet it cannot be denied that our own literature is extremely poor in books of this class.

We must go back to the days of native good faith-when such men as Munro described almost without suspecting that there was any art in description—ere we can catch even a glimpse of the realities of warfare, set forth at first hand by any professed author fairly and honestly, as we find them in the Recollections of the Peninsula,' and in the still abler volume which we have named at the head of our paper, The Subaltern.' The traits of this kind that enliven our more recent works of history have been painfully accumulated from the conversation or private letters of individuals, who never dreamt of authorship. Defoe made happy use of such materials in his Cavalier, and Swift in his Memoir of Captain Crichton; but what would we not give to have the great civil war of England, or even the contests in which Crichton had a part, painted by an eye-witness, with that expansion and picturesque truth of detail, which this Subaltern has bestowed upon one little fragment of the peninsular campaigns of the Duke of Wellington! Captain Carleton's account of his Spanish campaigns in the time of Peterborough is a valuable and an interesting work, and deserves the compliment that Dr. Johnson paid to it; yet considering what Carleton's materials were, his performance must be pronounced jejune in the extreme, when compared with the volume now before us.

The author (now known to be Mr. Gleig) served during but a short period of the late war in Spain, and his rank was such, that he could see but little of what was actually done by the army while he belonged to it. Under these circumstances, he has had nevertheless the good sense to describe nothing but what he did witness; and he does this so well, that we know no other book from which the civilian reader is likely to derive so distinct a notion of the actual employments and feelings of an individual British regimental officer during a hard fought campaign.

It has, perhaps, been of advantage to the book, that the writer