S. W. BENEDICT,
Ster. & Print., 16 Spruce St., N. Y.
INDEX TO THE ECLECTIC MAGAZINE.-VOL. XIII.
FROM JANUARY TO APRIL, 1848.
January. The Plate for January is a well execut- ed mezzotint from a highly popular subject by Ward, derived from an incident in Goldsmith's life, which Boswell narrates in his Life of John- son, as told by himself. "I received," said John- son, one morning, a message from poor Gold- smith that he was in great distress, and begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went to him as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had al- rested him for his rent, at which he was in a vio- lent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired that he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. looked into it, and saw its merit, told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a book- seller, sold it for sixty pounds." This," says Boswell," was the Vicar of Wakefield." February.The subject of this Plate is from a French artist, Labouchere, and is a finely con- ceived group, consisting of Luther, Melancthon, Pomeranius, and Cruciger, engaged in translat ing the Bible. The attitudes and expression of the different figures are strikingly characteristic. March.-A beautiful portrait of the poet Tennyson. April.-The Love Letter, from a subject by Hilton, R. A., possessing great merits as a work of art, which have been transferred by the engraver with unusual fidelity and force.
Girondins, Lamartine's History of.-Edin- burgh Review,
75 Gilfillan, Rev. George-Hogg's Weekly In- structor,
Hobbes, Thomas, Life and writings of- British Quarterly Review,
Hints upon History.-Fraser's Magazine, 512 History of the Girondins. See Girondins. Humboldt's Kosmos-Edinburgh Review,. Herschel's Sir John, Astronomical Obser- vations.-North British Review,
See Shelley. Hobbes. See Hobbes,
of Elizabeth Fry. See Fry.
Lenormand, Mademoiselle.-Dublin Univer-
Maria Louisa.-New Monthly Magazine, Madame Adelaide. See Adelaide.
Pleasure of Botany and Gardening. See Botany.
Paris to Cadiz. See Dumas.
Pastoral Cantons of Switzerland. See Swit- zerland.
173 Prison Discipline.-Quarterly Review. Pius IX.-Quarterly Review,
POETRY.-Go to the Fields; A Vision; Spirit So- lace, 137; The Dumb Girl; The Truest Friend; Realization of a Dream; Judge Not, 138; The Charm of Friendship; Memory; Infancy; Princi- ple and Opinion, 139; Visions of th Past; The Return Home, 281; A Voice from ature; Mo- therwell's Grave; Room for the Right, 282; The Pioneer of Progress; The Voice of the Grass; Remembrance, 283; Song of the Watchers on the Shore; The Angel Watch, 427; No Surrender; Days that are no more; Common things; The Wife's Song, 428; Forgiveness; Song; Stanzas; The Last Wild Flower, 567; Unknown Heroes; Retrospection, 568.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Life and Writings of. -North British Review,
Statistics of Commerce of America. See
Shelley, Mrs. See Female Authors. Six Decisive Battles of the World. See Bat-
Switzerland and its Condition.-Westminster Review,
An Old Man's Recollections of the Pastoral Cantons of.-Bentley's Mis., Spain, Newspaper Press of.—British Quar- terly Review,
MISCELLANIES-Interments in London, 65; Cracow, 74; Destruction of Chartley House, 91; The Arctic Expedition, 109; The Birth-place of Canova, 140; Pickwick, Boz, and other matters, 141; Affectation; The Dulce and the Utile; The Wars between England and France, 142; A Cottager's Daughter Marchion- ess of Exeter; Prize Essay on Hydrophobia; Shak- speare's Plays; Heathenish Christian Names, 143; The Vocative of Cat; Revival of the Earldom of Strafford; Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors; Analysis of the House of Commons; Camels in Australia; Finances of Russia; Last Compliment to Jenny Lind; a Genoese Raphael, 144; A Roman Relic; Monastic Institution in Glasgow; The Pro- gress of Liverpool; The Electric Clock; Curious List of Vessels; The Edinburgh Review, 158; Sur- names; Artificial Stone, 186; Nitre Lakes of Egypt, 201; Recollections of Old Mortality, 243. man Literary Piracy; Druidical Temples of Scot- land, 257; Newspapers in Paris; Anecdote of O'Connell, 275; The National Clock, 284; Peri- odicals of the French Revolution; Literary Super- annuation; Shelley and Byron, 285; The Bur- mese Throne; Longevity; American's inheriting Property in England, 286; Nature of Spots on the Sun, 287; What makes marriages unhappy; Very true, 295; Astronomical Discovery, 388; Naval preparations in France, 398; Cromwell Letters, 409; Lithography; Louis Philippe and Danton, 421; Progress of Milton's Blindness; Australia, 426; The Gold Mines of Russia; Summit of the Island of Ascension; A Catch, 429; The Late Prin- cess Adelaide of Orleans; The Earl of Dalhousie's Passage through Egypt and the Desert, 430; Ros- sini; Shakspeare's Name, 431; Miss Caroline Lu-Tennyson, Alfred.-Hogg's Weekly Instructor, 289 cretia Herschel; The Vernon Gallery, 432; Tra- vellers in Abyssinia; Light from Electricity, 445; Sale of Landseer's Pictures, 493; The Glass of Bo- hemia, 524; The London Press, 566; Death of the elder Disraeli, 569; Chronology of European Sove- reigns, 570; The Extraordinary Fatality of the House of Stuart; Charles the Second's Courtship of
Separate System, the. See Prison Discipline. Syracuse, Battle of. See Battles. Sweden and Oscar I.--Fraser's Magazine, Scott, Sir Walter, Visit to.-New Monthly Magazine,.
Thorwaldsen, the Sculptor.-Bentley's Mis. 110, 178 Turner's Paintings.-British Quar. Rev., Turenne, Memoir of Marshal.--Sharpe's Magazine,.
1. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by MRS. SHELLEY. London, 1847.
2. Shelley at Oxford-Papers in the New Monthly Magazine, Vols. 36 and 37. 3. The Life of P. B. Shelley. By THOMAS MEDWIN. 2 vols. London, 1847. 4. Gallery of Literary Portraits. By GEORGE GILFILLAN. Edinburgh, 1845. 5. An Address to the Irish People. By PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. Dublin, 1812.
THE poems of Shelley have been gradual- in the County of Sussex, and the family of ly assuming a high place in our literature. the poet is traced to the time of Richard The incidents of his life, unimportant ex-II. In 1611, Sir John Shelley of Mares- cept as they illustrate his writings, have field was created a baronet-and the family been told gracefully and well by Mrs. Shel- of Castle-Goring, now represented by the ley in the notes to her exceedingly beauti-son of the poet, is descended from a young- ful edition of his poetical works. His own er son of Sir John Maresfield. Bysshe letters to Mr. Peacock and others have been Shelley, the grandfather of the poet, was published, and everywhere exhibit the born at Newark in North America, in 1731. habits of thinking of a man singular- He began life as a quack doctor, and seems ly truthful, generous, and good. These to have early turned his attention to mak- letters and Mrs. Shelley's notes form a ing his way in the world by matrimonial perfect memoir of his life from his twenty-speculations. The widow of a miller is second year. His life at Oxford has been said to have been his first wife. However well described by his friend Mr. Hogg, in a this be-for Captain Medwin, who men- series of papers printed in the New Month-tions the fact, does not vouch for its truth- ly Magazine, some five-and-twenty years we find him in England soon after, running ago, and Captain Medwin had contributed away with an heiress, through whom the some account of his earlier life to the Athe-bunch of his descendants with whom we næum, which has, we believe, been reprinted in a separate volume. From these means of information, what is now called the "Life of Shelley" is compiled by the last mentioned writer. The book is hastily and carelessly put together, and adds nothing to what is already known.
The name of Shelley is an ancient one VOL. XIII. No. I.
are chiefly concerned are possessed of the estate of Horsham. In some short time Sir Bysshe finds himself an active widower, and lays siege to the heart of Miss Sidney Perry-the heiress of Penshurst, the estate of Sir Philip Sidney. The present Lord De Lisle and Dudley represents this branch of Sir Bysshe's descendants. Through
some mistake the poet Shelley is repeatedly minds of the family was ancestral pride. represented-even by such writers as Mr. The one great and irreparable offence which Howitt, as a descendant of Sir Philip Shelley could commit against the family Sidney. The sole connexion between them was to unite himself in marriage unsuitably. -if it can be called such--was that which In remote parts of the country, among the we have stated. It, however, gratified the less educated part of the higher gentry, imagination of the poet. this feeling often strengthens itself into something little short of insanity, and the fortunate adventures of Sir Bysshe Shelley, and the mésalliances of his daughters, were not unlikely to render the Shelleys most incurably mad.
Bysshe Shelley was raised to the baronetage in 1806. He died in 1815. Medwin tells us,
"I remember Sir Bysshe in a very advanced age, a remarkably handsome man, fully six feet in height, and with a noble and aristocratic bear 1792, and brought up at Field-Place (his The poet was born the 4th of August, ing, Nil fuit unquam sic impar sibi. His manner of life was most eccentric, for he used to frequent father's residence) till his tenth year with daily the tap-room of one of the low inns in Hors- his sisters, and taught the rudiments of ham, and there drank with some of the lowest Latin and Greek. He was then sent to citizens, a habit he had probably acquired in the Sion House, Brentford, where Medwin had New World. Though he had built a castle been already placed. (Goring-Castle) that cost him upwards of £80,000, he passed the last twenty or thirty years of his existence in a small cottage looking on the riously managed, and the boys for the most River Arun, at Horsham, in which all was mean part the sons of London shop-keepers. The and beggarly the existence indeed of a miser-lady who was supposed to manage the enriching his legatees at the expense of one of his household details was too fine for her busisons, by buying up his postobits."-MEDWIN'S ness; but--as a part of her stock in trade Life of Shelley, vol. i., p. 8.
The school was a cheap bad school, penu
-had a pedigree at least as good as Shelley's. She was a cousin to the Duke of Medwin was related to one of Sir Bys- Argyle. We rather like the poor woman she's wives, and his account of a family the better for this, we own, and though the whom he must have known perfectly well is instincts of self-defence, and the sense of far from favourable to any of them. He de- what was due to her family, made her perscribes Timothy Shelley, the poet's father, haps treat the Sussex Squirearchy less deas watching with impatience for his father's ferentially than they expected, her sister, death, and he speaks of two of Sir Bysshe's who must have been as nearly related to daughters as marrying without his consent; the Duke as herself, was (( an economist of of which he availed himself-for so we un- the first order." derstand the statement-to avoid giving After all, if boys of whatever rank are them any fortune whatever.
“He died at last, and in his room were found
bank-notes to the amount of £10,000, some in the
leaves of the few books he possessed, others in the folds of his sofa, or sewed into the lining of his dressing gown."-MEDWIN, p. 9.
sent to schools selected for their cheapness, they ought not to remember and resent, as
if it were the fault of their masters or mistresses, the stinginess of their parents. The usual stories of the sufferings of boys, whose health is in any way infirm or whose spirits are too weak for the kind of ordeal Shelley's father is described as a man to which their fellow students subject them, whose early education had been much neg-are tediously told by " the wearisome Caplected. He had, however, taken a degree tain." The incompetence of the master is at Oxford-made the grand tour, and sat proved by his punishing Shelley for some in Parliament for a family borough. Med-faults in an exercise written for him by win's recollections of him are unfavourable. Medwin, who had cribbed the bad Latin, it He tells us that he was a man who "re-seems, from Ovid. This ineident, and the duced all politeness to forms, and moral fact that Shelley disliked learning to dance, virtue to expediency." In short he was a are the Captain's sole records of Brentford man very like other men of whom there is school. It was scarce worth making a book little to be said that can furnish a page to for this and yet in one point of view the biographer. The one feeling which Medwin's testimony is not without some seems to have absorbed all others in the value. Shelley's detestation of school and "Visits to Remarkable Places," vol.; and the tyranny of the elder boys, has been in general understood as exclusively to be re
also "Homes and Haunts of the Poets."
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