There are,of course,fierce rival attorneys;electors of all creeds and complexions to be canvassed:a poor stupid Borough thrown all into red or white heat;into blazing paroxysms of activity and enthusiasm,which render the inner life of it (and of England and the world through it)luminously transparent,so to speak;--of which opportunity our friend and his "Muse"take dexterous advantage,to delineate the same.His pictures are uncommonly good;brief,joyous,sometimes conclusively true:in rigorously compressed shape;all is merry freshness and exuberance:we have leafy summer embowering red bricks and small human interests,presented as in glowing miniature;a mock-heroic action fitly interwoven;--and many a clear glance is carelessly given into the deepest things by the way.Very happy also is the little love-episode;and the absorption of all the interest into that,on the part of Frank Vane and of us,when once this gallant Frank,--having fairly from his barrel-head stated his own (and John Sterling's)views on the aspects of the world,and of course having quite broken down with his attorney and his public,--handsomely,by stratagem,gallops off with the fair Anne;and leaves free field to Mogg,free field to the Hippopotamus if it like.This portrait of Mogg may be considered to have merit:--"Though short of days,how large the mind of man;A godlike force enclosed within a span!
To climb the skies we spurn our nature's clog,And toil as Titans to elect a Mogg.
"And who was Mogg?O Muse!the man declare,How excellent his worth,his parts how rare.
A younger son,he learnt in Oxford's halls The spheral harmonies of billiard-balls,Drank,hunted,drove,and hid from Virtue's frown His venial follies in Decorum's gown.
Too wise to doubt on insufficient cause,He signed old Cranmer's lore without a pause;And knew that logic's cunning rules are taught To guard our creed,and not invigorate thought,--As those bronze steeds at Venice,kept for pride,Adorn a Town where not one man can ride.
"From Isis sent with all her loud acclaims,The Laws he studied on the banks of Thames.
Park,race and play,in his capacious plan,Combined with Coke to form the finished man,Until the wig's ambrosial influence shed Its last full glories on the lawyer's head.
"But vain are mortal schemes.The eldest son At Harrier Hall had scarce his stud begun,When Death's pale courser took the Squire away To lands where never dawns a hunting day:
And so,while Thomas vanished 'mid the fog,Bright rose the morning-star of Peter Mogg."[25]
And this little picture,in a quite opposite way:--"Now,in her chamber all alone,the maid Her polished limbs and shoulders disarrayed;One little taper gave the only light,One little mirror caught so dear a sight;'Mid hangings dusk and shadows wide she stood,Like some pale Nymph in dark-leafed solitude Of rocks and gloomy waters all alone,Where sunshine scarcely breaks on stump or stone To scare the dreamy vision.Thus did she,A star in deepest night,intent but free,Gleam through the eyeless darkness,heeding not Her beauty's praise,but musing o'er her lot.
"Her garments one by one she laid aside,And then her knotted hair's long locks untied With careless hand,and down her cheeks they fell,And o'er her maiden bosom's blue-veined swell.
The right-hand fingers played amidst her hair,And with her reverie wandered here and there:
The other hand sustained the only dress That now but half concealed her loveliness;And pausing,aimlessly she stood and thought,In virgin beauty by no fear distraught."Manifold,and beautiful of their sort,are Anne's musings,in this interesting attitude,in the summer midnight,in the crisis of her destiny now near;--at last:--"But Anne,at last her mute devotions o'er,Perceived the feet she had forgot before Of her too shocking nudity;and shame Flushed from her heart o'er all the snowy frame:
And,struck from top to toe with burning dread,She blew the light out,and escaped to bed."[26]
--which also is a very pretty movement.
It must be owned withal,the Piece is crude in parts,and far enough from perfect.Our good painter has yet several things to learn,and to unlearn.His brush is not always of the finest;and dashes about,sometimes,in a recognizably sprawling way:but it hits many a feature with decisive accuracy and felicity;and on the palette,as usual,lie the richest colors.A grand merit,too,is the brevity of everything;by no means a spontaneous,or quite common merit with Sterling.
This new poetic Duodecimo,as the last had done and as the next also did,met with little or no recognition from the world:which was not very inexcusable on the world's part;though many a poem with far less proof of merit than this offers,has run,when the accidents favored it,through its tens of editions,and raised the writer to the demigods for a year or two,if not longer.Such as it is,we may take it as marking,in its small way,in a noticed or unnoticed manner,a new height arrived at by Sterling in his Poetic course;and almost as vindicating the determination he had formed to keep climbing by that method.Poor Poem,or rather Promise of a Poem!In Sterling's brave struggle,this little _Election_is the highest point he fairly lived to see attained,and openly demonstrated in print.His next public adventure in this kind was of inferior worth;and a third,which had perhaps intrinsically gone much higher than any of its antecessors,was cut off as a fragment,and has not hitherto been published.