MR. T. PERCY JONES is a homœopathic poet. While that true "spasmodic tragedy," the cholera, stalks dread o'er the scene, he stimulates the drooping energies of the town with a counterirritant, of a congenial nature, almost, but not quite so terriby in earnest. Some "gripes of compassion (as Isaac Barrow says) seem good to divert the thoughts from convulsions, which take a more selfish hold upon the feelings; and the globules here administered by Doctor Jones act upon the midriff in a manner highly conducive (if King John be an authority) to the circulation; for they set the blood

"Tickling up and down the veins, Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes."

Our author has no respect for schools (nor, as it afterwards appears, for schoolmasters), and holds it particularly senseless to talk about "Schools of Poetry." He is a scholar of nature, that nature which is spasmodic, but yet uncramped by rules; the same nature, he flatters himself, which produced Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, and to which you, gentle reader, are indebted for Firmilian," and for all those to whom you may give the honour of the poetic name. For in Mr. Jones's firm opinion, "all high poetry is, and must be, spasmodic." Yet he has no call to "the devil." No; he distinctly renounces that agent and his black art, scorning the "buffooneries " of Goethe, and scarcely forbearing to sneer at Shakspeare's Witches, and the Ghost in Hamlet. By the spasmodic energy of his genius he can dispense with supernatural agencies, and pile the agony" to any height ever attained by mortal inspiration.

The result of his efforts is before us, and all he asks of the critic is to notice it. He is not greedy of indiscriminate praise, nor "at all deterred by hostile criticism." On the contrary, he thanks those gentlemen, who, however censorious, have "brought him forward."

His own opinion, however, he frankly avows to be, that "the utter extravagance which some writers affect to have discovered in his play is traceable only to their own defects in high ima ginative development;" and he concludes his preface with this modest challenge :

"I am not arrogant enough to assert that this is the finest poem which the age has produced; but I shall feel very much obliged to any gentleman who can make me acquainted with a better.

"T. PERCY JONES.

"Streatham, July, 1854."

And now for the matter of this spasmodic tragedy. "Firmilian; a Student of Badajoz," a "great youth baptised to song," is urged by the voice of universal Pan to rise up in his might, be great in guilt, and making his song a tempest, shake the earth to its foundation. Accordingly, he sits down to write a tragedy upon "the first murder;" but finding, for want of experience, that he can but feebly

"Paint the mental spasms that tortur'd Cain," he concludes that the best way to master his subject will be to kill two or three particular friends, and thereby obtain the right sensation.

"What do I know as yet of homicide? Nothing. Fool! fool! to lose thy precious time

In dreaming of what may be, when an act,
Easy to plan, and easier to effect,
Can teach thee every thing."

Thus Michael Angelo is apocryphally reported to have nailed his "model" to a cross, that he might catch a grace beyond the reach of art, in finishing off his great work of The Crucifixion. In this case, however, a difficulty presents itself, like that which puzzled Tom Sheridan when advised by his father to take a wife. "With all my heart, father; but whose wife shall I take?" Firmilian knows so many who are dear to him, that he cannot choose all in a

moment whose life he shall take. "There's Lilian, pretty maid," who loves him dearly; she is entitled to the preference; but her uncle, the Inquisitor, might haply set troublesome inquiries on foot; "therefore, dear Lilian, live!" Then Mariana, his own betrothed. It is tempting; but—

"We're not married yet. It will be time enough to think of her After her lands are mine."

The respectable artist, Mr. Burke Kirwan, would have highly appreciated this spasmodic idea. Well, but there is yet a third, a black beauty, Indiana ; of her, however, he is not yet sufficiently tired to afford to give her up. He, therefore, proceeds with a catalogue raisonnée of his male friends.

Haverillo, a brother poet, has lent him a great deal of money, but retains securities for it, which, in a certain event, might fall into the hands of executors, and they would sue for the debt. Haverillo consequently holds 66 a bond of fate," which saves him this turn, though, as we shall see anon, it will not always avail him. But there are three other excellent good fellows, one of whom, the kinsman of Mariana, he "loves like a brother." That is just the sort of victim a would-be Čain should croak for; so, to make sure work, he poisons all three after a brawl at a tavern.

Having provoked the nearest and dearest of the trio to strike him, a long altercation ensues, from which we select a few spasmodic passages:

FIRMILIAN.

"You struck me, sir!"

D'AGUILAR.

"I did."

FIRMILIAN.

"And you're aware, "Of course, of what the consequence must be,

Unless you tender an apology ?"

D'AGUILAR.

"Of course I am."

FIRMILIAN.

"Madman! would'st thou provoke The slide o' the avalanche ?"

D'AGUILAR.

"I wait its fall

In perfect calmness."

PEREZ.

"My brain swims too. Hark! what is that without?

[The passing bell tolls, and monks are heard chanting the Penitential Psalms. Slow and wailing music as the scene closes.]

Should all this fail to put our hero in the proper train for his muse, he must be utterly unimpressionable. But it does fail, because he knows not the right way to go about it. Nat Lee when he desired to conjure a spirit to aid his tragic conceptions, was used to sup on raw pork. The visions which diversified his slumbers after that repast were unequalled in horrible imaginings. His Bajazets, Alexanders, and Hannibals were all marked visibly with griskin. But Firmilian, as soon as he had paid the sexton and the monks for their charitable offices over his three friends, went fasting to bed,

"And all night long he dreamed of Indiana."

He had palpably taken a wrong method of wooing Melpomene, whose other name is Dyspepsia. Remorse is still, as before, a stranger to his pillow and his stomach. He has, in fact, digestion for anything; consequently he has lost his labour, and is about to give his tragedy up in despair, when chance (for Mr. Jones, as we have seen, repu diates the mere devil) throws in his way a graduate with Lollard tendencies, and a priest, from whose discourse he picks up the information, that the Grand Inquisitor, Lilian's uncle, is to preside at a great festival in the cathedral on the following Tuesday; and the good father intimates a holy fear lest the principles eliminated by the free-thinking graduate

leaving the poor sceptic in for all penal consequences.

Besides the chance of winding himself up thereby for his tragedy, two objects are to be gained by such an achievement. Lilian's uncle will be translated to the skies-"an opportunity too rare to be allowed to pass "and an ancient raw will be wreaked upon the priest, whose discipline in the schoolroom had left traces never to be forgotten by our hero "while memory holds her seat" within his trews.

"He is my old perceptor, and instilled,

By dint of frequent and remorseless stripes Applied at random to my childish rear, Some learning into me. I owe him much, And fain I would repay it. Ha, ha, ha!"

The next time we meet Firmilian he is standing upon the top of the Pillar of St. Simeon Stylites (in the Square of Badajoz), where he had appointed Haverillo to meet him for the settlement of their book account, and to be sure to bring a receipt with him. The soliloquy pronounced upon that bad eminence informs us that the deed has been done; that the cathedral and all its parts

"With a singed swarm of mortals intermixed,

Were whirled in anguish to the shuddering stars;"

and that "it was a grand spectacle ;" but still there he is, like Mark Tapley, too "jolly" to go on with his immortal work. He cannot yet comprehend how Cain's punishment was greater than he could bear. The reason is that he had hitherto attempted to buy his sensations wholesale

"I've been too coarse

And general in this business."

He makes up his mind, therefore, to assassinate his intimate friend, Haverillo. Those whom he had destroyed

were

"The tag, and rag, and bobtail of mankind, Whom having scorch'd to cinders, I no

more

Feel ruth for what I did, than if my hand Had thrust a stick of sulphur in the nest Of some poor hive of droning humble bees, And smoked them into silence."

tion fails not to strike the old inquisitor, to whom it is addressed, and who immediately replies

"Porcupines

Are worse than hedgehogs."

A highly characteristic remark, we may be permitted to say, for inquisitors of all kinds, have a natural abhorrence of quills.

Meanwhile the unconscious Firmilian is preparing a new kind of exaltation for his genius, in a tripartite marriage, which he proposes to establish with the three beauties mentioned at the beginning of this eventful history. The suggestion is artfully introduced by the plucking of a rose by his fair bride, from whom he extracts a confession that she would prefer a bouquet consisting of that unique flower blended with a lily and the "dark, full-scented night-stock.'

Why not?" says the unwary girl. "It is by union that all things are

Last scene of all-our hero, now an outlaw pursued by alguazils, finds himself on a barren and misty moor, hard by a dangerous quarry-hole, into which, two years before, he had wantonly misled a blind beggar. Here he is set upon by "Ignes Fatui" (devils in their way, by-the-bye), who bring all his dark exploits to remembrance, among which they hint at a catastrophe not previously recorded:

"Firmilian! Firmilian!

What have you done to Lilian? There's a cry from the grotto, a sob by the

stream

A woman's loud wailing, a little babe's scream!

How fared it with Lilian
In the pavilion,
Firmilian! Firmilian!"

Not one word says the "villian." Similar inuendoes point to the fate of the black maiden, deep in the snow." But before we can discover any more of his unknown pranks, he makes one irrevocable faux pas, and down souses, with a spasmodic splash, into the pit,

where, if he has found a bottom, happy man be his dole. In the words of Sir Boyle Roche, we advise him "to stop there."

There is a long episode apropos to the tavern victims, where a greedy father-confessor insists upon a large fee, and gets more than he bargained for. But we must leave our readers to unravel this mystery for themselves. Enough has been said and sung to make them acquainted with the claims of "Firmilian" to be deemed "the finest poem of the age."

P.S.-Lest the gentle reader should be mystified wholly, we think it but fair to state our own grave suspicion, that "Percy Jones" is a myth; that "Streatham" is situate somewhere in the latitude of Clerihughs; and "Firmilian "a burlesque from end to end. The wag who wrote it may fall short of Mr. Bays in solemn irony, and of Sir Fretful Plagiary or Mr. Puff in smart vivacity; but he knows right well what he is at; and as for spasms, never a wink is upon him.

THESE Volumes comprise the history of society and of European civilisation for a period of a thousand years. Mr. Milman uses the designations of Greek Christianity, Latin Christianity, and Teutonic Christianity, to express different portions of the subject with which he has been for so many years engaged, and of which his History of the Jews and, we may almost add, his edition of Gibbon, are to be regarded as fragments. He uses the word Christianity in a wider meaning than is familiar with Church historians-one, in some respects, as extensive as the thought which is expressed by the word "Christendom." "I use," he says, "Christianity, and, indeed, Teutonic Christianity, in its most comprehensive significance-from national episcopal Churches like that of England, which aspires to maintain the doctrines

and organisation of the apostolic, or immediately post-apostolic ages, onward to that dubious and undefinable verge where Christianity melts into a high moral theism, a faith which would expand to purer spirituality with less distinct dogmatic system; or that which would hardly call itself more than a Christian philosophy-a religi ous rationalism. I presume not, neither is it the office of the historian to limit the blessings of our religion either in this world or the world to come : there is One who will know His own. As an historian, I can disfranchise none who claim, even on the slightest grounds, the privileges and the hopes of Christianity-repudiate none who do not place themselves without the pale of believers and worshippers of Christ or of God through Christ." The history of society itself, under the