allege. Her virtues, however, were her own; her delinquencies, of the religion in which she had been bred, and the age in which she lived. It was the age, and she had been bred in the court, which witnessed the successive murders of the Duke of Guise and the Admiral Coligni at the court of France; the Massacre of St Bartholomew by a French king, and the fires of Smithfield lighted by an English queen. To one period, and that the most interesting of her life, unmixed praise may be given. From the day of her landing in England, her conduct was one of dignity, innocence, and heroism; and if her previous life was stained by the imputation of having permitted one murder, suggested to herself by despair, and recommended by others from profligacy, she expiated it by being the victim of another, suggested by jealousy, executed by rancour, and directly ordered by a cruel relative and a vindictive rival.

If there is any blemish in the very interesting volume, of which our limits will only permit a more cursory notice than its high merits deserve, it is to be found in the too frequent use of quotations from old authorities or original letters in the text, and the mosaic-like appearance which is often given to her pages, by the introduction of quaint and antiquated expressions drawn from contemporary writers in the body of the narrative. We are well aware of the motive which has led to this, and we respect it as it deserves it arises from the wish to be accurate and trustworthy, the anxious desire to make her Lives a faithful transcript of the times-to exhibit

their very "form and pressure." The object was good, the desire was laudable; but it is quite possible to be carried too far, even in working out the most praiseworthy principle. Long accounts of dresses, decorations, and processions; entries of expenses in Treasurers' accounts; even original letters, unless on very particular occasions, are the materials of biography, but they are not biography itself. It is living character, not still life, which we desire to see delineated: the latter is the frame of the picture, but it is not the picture itself. Such curious details are characteristic, generally amusing, often interesting; but they, in general, do better in foot-notes than in the body of the narrative. We must admit, however, that Miss Strickland has exhibited equal judgment and skill in the manner in which she has fitted in those contemporary extracts into the body of the narrative, and the selection she has made of such as are most curious and characteristic of the times. By many, we are well aware. they will be considered as not the least interesting part of her very interesting volumes. It is the principle of introducing them in the text that we wish her to reconsider. Unity of composition is not less essential to the higher productions of art, in history or biography, than in painting or the drama; and Miss Strickland writes so powerfully, and paints so beautifully, that we cannot but often regret when we lose the thread of her flowing narrative, to make way for extracts from a quaint annalist, or entries from the accounts of a long-forgotten exchequer.

WOLF, the learned German, was certainly very far wrong—as Germans in their endless speculations are apt to be when he set himself to explain the Iliad without Homer; an attempt which, to our British ears, generally sounded pretty much as profane as to explain the world without God, or, according to Cicero's simile against the Epicureans, to explain the existence of a book by the mere accidental outtumbling of alphabetic counters on the ground. The Iliad could not have existed without Homer-so the rude instinct of the most unlearned and most unmetaphysical English Bull declared against the cloud-woven theories and the deep-sunk lexicographical excavations of the famous Berlin professor; and the rude instinct, after much philological sapping and mining, stands ground. But Wolf did not labour in vain. Though he did not take the citadel, he made breaches into many parts of our classical circumvallation, formerly deemed most strong, and made us change, in great measure, the fashion of our fortifications. In the same manner Niebuhr, with his knotty club, made sad havoc among the waxen images of the old Romans, which the piety of Livy taking them for genuine granite statues-had set forth with such a wealth of fine patriotic elocution; but after all this work of destruction, Rome still remains with its Tiber, and, in the minds of most sane persons, Romulus also, we imagine; while the great Julius shines a kingly star every inch, as much after Niebuhr's strong brush as before. What, then, was the great truth by virtue of which-as stupid sermons are redeemed by a good text -Wolf, with his startling antiHomeric gospel, made so many proselytes, and such fervid apostles, among the learned and the poetic of his countrymen? Plainly this, that he seized with a keen glance, and a grand comprehensiveness, the minstrel

character of the POPULAR EPOS of early ages, as distinguished from the more artificial and curiously-piled compositions of more polished times, bearing the same name. Wolf was wrong-say mad, if you please-in asserting that Pisistratus, with a whole army of such refurbishers of old wares as Önomacritus, could have put together such a glowing vital whole as the Iliad; but he was right, and altogether sound, when he looked upon the great Epic song of the wrath of Achilles as a thing essentially different, not only in degree, but in kind, from the Eneid of Virgil, or the Paradise Lost of our Milton. Many men of learning and taste, from Scaliger downwards, have instituted large and curious comparisons between the great national Epos of the Greeks, and that of the Romans; but the comparison of things that have a radically different character can seldom produce any result beyond the mere expression of liking and disliking; as if, among critics of trees, one should say, I prefer a bristling pine, while another says, Give me the smooth beech. Or, a result even more unsatisfactory might be produced. Starting from the beech as a sort of model tree, a forest critic, predetermined to admire the pine also, might spin out of his brain a number of subtle analogies to prove that a pine, though bearing a different name, is, in fact, the same tree as a beech, and possesses, when more philosophically considered, all the essential characteristics of this tree. You laugh ?—but so, and not otherwise, did it fare with old Homer, at the hands of many professional philologists and literary diletantes, who, with a perfect appreciation of such works of polished skill as the Eneid and the Jerusalem Delivered -as being akin to their own modern taste-must needs apply the same test to take cognisance of such strange and far-removed objects as the Iliad and Odyssey. Such transference

of the mould that measures one thing to another, and an altogether different thing, is indeed a common enough trick of our every-day judgments; but it is, nevertheless, a sort of criticism altogether barren of any positive results, and which ends where it begins -in talk. To the character and certainty of a science, it can assuredly have no claim. If you wish to descant with any beneficial result upon roses, pray compare one English rose with another, and not with a Scotch thistle. Bring not the fine city dame into contact with the brown country girl; but let Lady B's complexion be more delicate than Lady C's, and the brown of Bessie be more healthy than that of Jessie. Jessie, if you will consider the matter, has nothing in common with Lady B, except this, that she is a woman. As little has Homer in common with Virgil, or Tasso, or Milton. With whom, then, is Homer to be compared? A hundred years ago, Voltaire, with all his wit, could not have answered that question-the whole age of European criticism of which Voltaire was the oracle and the god could not have answered it; but thanks after the Percy Ballads, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, and Southey, and Burns-to Frederick Augustus Wolf, that question we can answer now in the simplest and most certain way in the world, by pointing to the famous Spanish CID, and the old Teutonic LAY of the NIEBELUN

GEN.

To the Cid, we may presume that those of our readers who love popular poetry, and are not happy enough to know the sonorous old Castilian, have been happily introduced by the great work of Southey. But, with respect to the other great popular Epos of Western Europe, we suspect Mr LETTSOM is only too much in the right when he says, that this venerable monument of the old German genius is "so little known amongst us, that most ordinary readers have not so much as heard of it. Even amongst the numerous and increasing class of those who are acquainted with German, few pay attention to the ancient

literature of Germany: they are generally conversant only with the productions of the day, or, at farthest, with those of the most celebrated authors." So, indeed, it must be; the necessary business and amusements of life leave but few of us at liberty to follow the example of the learned Germans, and refuse to look at Helen before we have critically investigated the history of Jove's amours, and of Leda's egg. So much the more are we beholden to gentlemen like the present translator, who, by the patient exercise of those pious pains which are the pleasure of poets, put us into the condition of being able to hear the notes of that strange old Teutonic lyre prolonged through the aisles of an English echo-chamber. Mr Lettsom has done a work, much wanted for the English lover of poetry, honestly and well: this we can say from having compared it in various places with a prose translation of the old German poem, published at Berlin in 1814;1 also from the distinct recollection which we have of the character and tone of the modern German version of Marbach, which we read for the first time several years ago.

But Mr Lettsom's translation bears also internal evidence of its excellence: there is a quiet simplicity and easy talkative breadth about it, characteristic no less of the general genius of the Germans than of the particular mediæval epoch to which it belongs. With a perfect confidence, therefore, in the trustworthiness of the present English version, we proceed to lay before our readers a rapid sketch of the Epic story of the Niebelungen, accompanied with such extracts as may serve to convey an idea of the general tone and character of the composition.

At Worms, upon the Rhine, (so the poem opens,) there dwelt three puissant kings-Gunther and Gernot and Gieselher-three brothers, of whom Gunther was the eldest, and, in right of primogeniture, swayed the sceptre of Burgundy.† These kings had a sister named Kriemhild, the real heroine and fell female Achilles of the