PROSE BY A POET, 2 vols. 12mo. pp. 579. Longman & Co. 1824. PROSE by a Poet-Law by a Physician-Divinity by a Lawyer, all sound pretty much alike; but we very much doubt whether such excursions out of their own, into another's province, can prove any recommendation to either. In those instances which have come under our observation we have generally found that such persons, in overstepping "the modesty of Nature," have come short of that reputation, which they might have obtained had they continued within their allotted sphere; while they have incurred that censure, which they might otherwise have escaped. In the volumes before us, the light essays have neither the interest or animation which is necessary to render productions of this nature attractive to the generality of readers. A few pieces in verse exhibit the writer to more advantage, and shew that he does not assume too much when he "writes himself poet." But in his serious effusions he rises to a degree of excellence, which induces us strongly to recommend him to cultivate this style of composition, in preference to all others. Whenever the subject permits him to touch on moral or religious topics, he evinces a simple, unostentatious piety, which cannot but secure the esteem and approbation of every well-disposed reader. In support of this opinion we need only to quote the article entitled "The Last Day," vol. ii. p. 281-290.

"To every thing beneath the sun there comes a last day, and of all futurity this is the only portion of time that can in all cases be infallibly predicted. Let the sanguine then take warning, and the disheartened take courage; for to every joy and every sorrow, to every hope and every fear, there will come a last day; and man ought so to live by foresight, that while he learns in every state to be content, he shall in each be prepared for another, whatever that other may be. When we set an acorn, we expect that it will produce an oak: when we plant a vine, we calculate upon gathering grapes: but when we lay a plan for years to come, we may wish, and we can do no more, except pray, that it may be accomplished, for we know not what even the morrow may bring forth; all that we do know beforehand of any thing is, that to every thing beneath the sun there comes a last day.

"From Adam to Noah sixteen centuries elapsed, during which men multiplied on the earth, and increased in wickedness as in number, till to the forbearance of mercy itself there came a last day, and wrath in one flood of destruction swept away a whole world of transgressors.-The pollutions of Sodom and Gomorrah long insulted the Majesty of Heaven; but a last day came, and the Lord rained fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest, that overthrew them for ever, erasing the very ground on which they stood from the solid surface of the globe. The children of Israel groaned for ages under the yoke of the Egyptians; a last day came, the bands of iron were burst asunder, and the Red Sea, the eastern wall of their prison-house, opened its flood-gates, to let the redeemed of the Lord pass through, but closed them in death on their pursuers, like the temple of Dagon pulled down upon the heads of the Philistines. For almost two thousand years, the law, and the covenant of works, delivered from Mount Sinai, were honoured and violated by the same rebellious and stiff-necked people, who deemed themselves the elect of God, to the exclusion in perpetuity of all kindreds beside; but a last day came, the sceptre departed from Judah, the Holy City was made an abomination of desolations, and the covenant of grace, universal and everlasting, was proclaimed to all mankind.

"In profane history we read similar lessons of mutability, similar evidences of the uncertainty of every day except the last day. The walls of Babylon were built to outstand the mountains, which they rivalled in grandeur and solidity; a last day came, and Babylon is fallen. If you ask, "Where is she?"-" Where

was she?" will be the reply; for she has so fallen, that there remains of her unexampled magnificence, no more vestige on the soil by which she can be traced, than of a foundered ship on the face of the ocean, when the storm is gone by, and the dolphins are bounding among the billows, and throwing out their colours to the sun.-Greece, among the nations like the Pleiades among the stars, a small and beautiful sisterhood of states, flourished in arts and arms without a rival in her own age, and without a parallel in succeeding times; but her last day came, and Greece is gone to decay, unutterable decay; yet she lives in her ruins, amidst the moral desolation of Turkey, and she lives in her glory on the pages of her poets, historians, and orators; yea, and she shall live again in her sons, for the last day of their enslavement is at hand.-Rome was seven hundred and fifty years growing from infancy to maturity; she stood through half that period more in splendid infamy; her last day came, and then she sunk under such a weight of years and trophies, that her relics have buried in their dust the seven hills, on which in her prosperity she had glorified herself, and lived deliciously, saying in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.' Rome was mortal; there can be no revival from her degradation: the last of the Romans perished a thousand years ago, among the millions of barbarians with whom the Roman people were at length indistinguishably and inseparably amalgamated. Rome and Babylon have been equally identified in perdition, as in name, by the "sure word of prophecy;" and the metropolis of modern Italy is no more the one, than Bagdad is the other: a different race possesses each, and their glory or shame in ages to come can never again affect the character of the generations gone by, whose last day stands irreversible in the calendar of time. It is not so with Greece, her posterity was never cut off. Our own country has experienced as many vicissitudes of government as have here been recounted from the annals of the world; to each of these there came a last day: her own last day is not yet come; nor, while she continues pre-eminent in virtue, intelligence, and enterprise, need we fear its arrival.

"Taking the middle age of life as the standard of the present generation, those who are arrived at that period have themselves been living witnesses of more new eras and last days, in which the destiny of nations was implicated, unravelled, and re-woven more strangely and disastrously, than were wont to occur in whole centuries of ordinary time. The French Revolution brought on the last day of the antiquated despotism of the Bourbons; many last days cut off, as suddenly as by strokes of the guillotine, the ephemeral constitutions that followed; till Buonaparte, like Milton's Death, bridging his way from hell to earth, with his "mace petrific" struck, and fixed the jarring, jumbled elements of the political chaos, and seemed for a while to have established an immoveable throne on the rased foundations of every other in Europe; but a last day to his empire came, and wafted him, as passive as a cloud, over the ocean to St. Helena. A last day to his life came also, and he disappeared from the earth.-The universal war in Christendom, which raged from the fall of the Bastile to the fall of Napoleon, found its last day on the plains of Waterloo. Peace followed, but for years it has been like peace on the battle-field, when the conflict is ended the dead alone are at rest; the living are maimed, lacerated, writhing with agony. But let them not faint; they shall yet arise, they are rising-and have half-risen since these speculations were first penned.-A last day to the present miseries of our country will come; the wounds of war will soon be healed entirely. "In the life of every adult there occur many last days. Man is ushered into the world from a source so hidden, that his very parents know him not till he appears, and he knows not himself even then. He passes rapidly through the stages of childhood, youth, maturity, old age; and to each of these there comes a last day. The transitions, indeed, are so gradual as to be imperceptible; no more to be remembered than the moment at which we fell asleep last night, and as little dependent on our will as was the act of awaking this morning. Yet so distinct are these several states of progressive existence, that though all bound together by unbroken consciousness, the changes are in reality as entire as the separate links of one chain. In the issue comes a last day to the whole; and man is withdrawn into an abyss of eternity, as unsearchable by finite thought as that from which he emanated at first.

"It has been already observed, that in the life of every adult individual there

are many last days. There is a last day of the nursery, of the school, of juvenile obedience, of parental authority; there is a last day at our first home, and a last day at every other place that becomes our home in the sequel; there are last days of companionship and of rivalry, of business and of vanity; of promise and exertion, of failure and success; last days of love and of friendship, enjoyment and endearment; every day in its turn is the last to all that went before it. Every year has its last day. Amidst the festivities of Christmas arrives the close of the months; to remind us of the end of all earthly fruition. The most reprobate of men desire to die in peace; on the last night in December, therefore, we should lie down with the same dispositions as if we were making our bed in the grave; on the first morning of January we should rise up with the same hopes as if the trumpet had summoned us to the resurrection of the just: that moment should be to us as the end of time, and this as the beginning of eternity.

"To every thing beneath the sun there comes a last day: from this point our meditations began; at this point they must conclude, leaving those who may have accompanied the writer thus far, to pursue at their leisure the moral inferences associated with the whole. The facts themselves, few, simple, and common-place as they are, cannot have been made to pass, even in this imperfect exhibition, through intelligent minds, without impressing upon them feelings of awe, apprehension and humility, prompting to immediate and unsparing self-examination. From this there can be nothing to fear; from the neglect of it every thing; for however alarming the discoveries of evil unsuspected, or peril unknown may be, such discoveries had better be made now, while escape is before us, than in that day when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, and escape will be impossible, that day which of all others is most emphatically called 'The Last Day!

"

"The Lucid Interval" will afford a fair specimen of the author's claims to poetical eminence, and, if our judgment is not much deceived, the following beautiful stanzas are very nearly related to the "World before the Flood."

"A LUCID INTERVAL.

Oh! light is pleasant to the eye,

And health comes rustling on the gale,
Clouds are careering through the sky,

Whose shadows mock them down the dale;

Nature as fresh and fragrant seems

As I have met her in my dreams.

For I have been a prisoner long
In gloom and loneliness of mind,
Deaf to the melody of song,

To every form of beauty blind;
Nor morning dew, nor evening balm,
Might cool my cheek, my bosom calm.

But now the blood, the blood returns,
With rapturous pulses thro' my veins;
My heart, new-born within me, burns,

My limbs break loose, they cast their chains,
Rekindled at the sun, my sight

Tracks to a point the eagle's flight.

I long to climb those old grey rocks,
Glide with yon river to the deep;

Range the green hills with herds and flocks,
Free as the roe-buck, run and leap;

Then mount the lark's victorious wing,
And from the depth of ether sing.

There is much to admire in the matter of these volumes; and notwithstanding a little redundancy of metaphor, and a too liberal use of the lima labor-which is apt to deprive prose of a certain free and natural air, which answers to the picturesque of the artists—the style is pure, easy, and perspicuous. It abounds with lively and beautiful imagery, whose only fault is that of being too good for its station. In poesy it would have delighted; in prose it is almost lost upon us.

PETER SCHLEMIHL, from the German of Lamotte Fouqué, with plates by George Cruickshank, 12mo. pp. 165. Whittakers.

This tale of the German school, is amusing and interesting, but defies all the general rules of criticism.-Peter Schlemihl is entrapped by the most subtle of all deceivers, to exchange his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus and a variety of other equally productive et ceteras. He is charmed at finding himself possessed of a source of unlimited wealth, and acts with consistent foolishness, under the impulse naturally felt, on obtaining an acquisition, as singular as it was unexpected. When the first scene is passed, and he begins to make use of the treasures at his command,-which he proposes to do very rationally and liberally;-he suddenly finds himself exposed to many difficulties and disasters from the circumstance of his being unattended by a shadow: he becomes a marked man; the outcast of society. To extricate himself from this wretched situation he has recourse to every plan that prudence can suggest, and in adopting these he is much assisted by the exertions of a faithful servant; and thwarted and perplexed by the baseness of a rascally one. After a long course of suffering, "the tall grey man," who tricked him of his shadow, offers to restore it, upon the signing of a contract to deliver up his "eternal jewel" to him, when he shall depart this life. He resists this temptation with exemplary fortitude, and passes a life of great wretchedness, in consequence of his early act of indiscretion. Fastidious readers will find much to censure, but those who seek amusement, and are willing to be pleased, may be much gratified with the perusal of this little romance which is not without its moral. The second chapter has a tendency to enhance the gifts of nature and to depreciate those of fortune. Although decidedly outré, it is sketched with a feeling and consistency which must engage the sympathy of all kind-hearted persons.

"At last," says poor Peter, "I came to myself, and hastened from a place, where apparently I had nothing more to do. I first filled my pockets with gold, then firmly secured the strings of the purse round my neck, taking care to conceal the purse itself in my bosom. I left the park unnoticed, reached the high road, and bent my way to the town. I was walking thoughtfully towards the gate, when I heard a voice behind me: Holla! young squire! holla! don't you hear!' I looked round—an old woman was calling after me;- Take care, sir, take care -you have lost your shadow! Thanks, good woman.'-I threw her a piece of gold for her well-meant counsel, and walked away under the trees.

6

"At the gate I was again condemned to hear from the sentinel, where has the gentleman left his shadow?' and immediately afterwards a couple of women exclaimed, good heavens! the poor fellow has no shadow!' I began to be vexed, and carefully avoided walking in the sun. This I could not always do: for instance, in the Broad-street, where I was next compelled to cross; and as ill luck would have it, at the very moment when the boys were being released from school. A confounded hunch-backed vagabond-I see him at this moment,had observed that I wanted a shadow. He instantly began to bawl out to the young tyros of the suburbs, who first criticised me, and then bespattered me with mud: Respectable people are accustomed to carry their shadows with them when they go into the sun." Í scattered handfuls of gold among them to divert their attention; and with the assistance of some compassionate souls, sprung into a hackney-coach.

"As soon as I found myself alone in the rolling vehicle, I began to weep bitterly. My inward emotion suggested to me, that even as in this world gold weighs down both merit and virtue, so a shadow might possibly be more valuable