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Political Economy of a Famine.

289

poor-law, and the disadvantage of higher prices than our own, she come forth of her famine unscathed and without a death-while the enormous destruction of two millions of human beings, now coolly reckoned on as the likelihood in Ireland, shall be held forth to a wondering world, as England's trophy to the wisdom and the efficacy of her boasted legislation.

But with all the blunders of England's legislation, the heart of England is in its right place-bent with full desirousness on Ireland's large and lasting good. We do hope that ere the close of the Parliamentary Session she will make a clear demonstration of her purposes, by the appointment of a Commission that shall at once represent the largeness of her wishes and the largeness of her means-a Commission that will not let down its labours, till it has left and established in both countries, an unfettered proprietary, a secure and lease-holding tenantry; and, best of all, a population in circumstances, should they have the will, to earn a stable sufficiency for themselves by their own prosperous and well-paid industry. In the prospect of blessings such as these, Ireland would forthwith address itself with alacrity and hope to its present duties; and vigorously work even the existing Relief machinery, with all its defects, rather than that the country should sink, and its people die as heretofore in thousands under the burden of their present distress. With the guidance and guardianship of the Holy Providence above, a harvest of good will ensue from this great temporary evil; and Ireland, let us trust and pray, will emerge from her sore trial, on a bright and peaceful career to future generations.

Such are a few of the general views, we fear somewhat confusedly put together, which have been suggested by these interesting volumes of Correspondence between the officials of Government on the subject of the Scottish and Irish famines. The several hundreds of passages to which we had affixed our notanda as the topics of remark and reflection, must all be laid aside for the present, though rich in materials ample enough for two other Articles on "the Highlands in detail," and "Ireland in detail.” Whether these shall ever be forthcoming or not, the subjects certainly will suffer no decline in point of urgency and importance for many months or perhaps years; and on the vista of Irish questions there opens upon our view an argument of as much higher importance than any that we have now touched upon, as the moral is higher than the economical or the physical,-what is best to be done for the education of a people, using this term in the most comprehensive sense of it, as education both for the present and the future world.

In our dislike to the work of condemnation, we have indicated VOL. VII. NO. XIII.

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rather than pronounced our views in regard to the parties on whom the responsibility lies for these starvations in Ireland. It clearly does not lie upon the Government-but partly on difficulties in the state of the country itself, and partly, we grieve to add, on delinquencies of mischievous and extensive operation, on the part both of proprietors and people. We will never give in to any wholesale calumny on either of these classes; but how can we otherwise account for so great a failure of byegone measures of relief, than by a flagrant misconduct somewhere, when we read the following sentences from a Report of the Relief Commissioners just come to hand :-"We feel that as long as the number of the destitute continue to increase as they have done, at the rate of about 20,000 persons per week, and as long as every person sent to the work must be employed, and, no matter how idle, cannot be dismissed, except on account of insubordination or outrage, the overseers, the greater number of whom have been necessarily taken from the surrounding country, are unable, perhaps sometimes unwilling, to enforce regularity or system in works executed by a mass of unskilful, and frequently weak and even dying creatures."

It further appears from Reports and other documents, that all the instructions "which have been from time to time issued, either to reduce the number of persons upon the works, or not to employ persons rated at £6 and upwards, and every other regulation of similar import, have been found utterly inefficacious to check the inordinate increase of persons upon the Relief Works, and that a large proportion of the Relief Committees have recommended for employment upon those works, in considerable numbers, persons having no claim whatever to relief, and have latterly abandoned all attempt to investigate the claims of the applicants."

Well then are the Lords of the Treasury warranted in their conclusion, "that all effectual control over the increase in the number of persons employed, and over the manner in which the work is executed by them, has, for the present, been lost."

In these circumstances, we would implore the landed proprietors of Ireland to bestir themselves; and see to it, that there shall be a righteous and well-principled administration of the new methods of relief. Without a patriotic co-operation on their part, and on the part of Ireland generally, all effectual good, whether in the shape of relief or amelioration, will be wholly impracticable.

Life of the Rev. H. Cary.

291

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

Memoir of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M. A., Translator of Dante. By his son the Rev. HENRY CARY, M.A., Worcester College, Oxford. In two volumes.

London, 1847.

THE subject of this memoir, having graduated at Oxford, was presented to the vicarage of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire in the year. 1796. The first part of his translation of Dante was published in the year 1805—the fruit of the well-regulated labour of nearly the whole intervening period. Though it holds now so high a place in our literature, its first reception by the public was a cold and unflattering one. The sale scarcely extended beyond the circle of the author's personal friends. Nothing daunted, Mr. Cary prosecuted his task with unre-. laxed diligence. On its completion in 1813, he offered the second part of his translation to the booksellers; but such had been the untoward fate of its predecessor, that none of them would incur the risk of its publication. At a time when he was ill able to do so, its author had to carry it through the press at his own cost. The second reception was as unpropitious as the first. The toil of nearly twenty years appeared to have been fruitlessly thrown away. To the pain of this disappointment that of severe family affliction was now added. Under this latter burden, which few men were ever less able to bear-mind and body both gave way. Relaxation from his ordinary employments, with change of scene and of society, became indispensable; and in the spring of 1818 he went to reside for a season in the retired village of Littlehampton, near Worthing. All hope as to his unfortunate volumes was now wellnigh gone-all thought about them swallowed up by the heavy calamity through which he had passed, and under whichhe still was suffering. He was engaged at this time in reading the classics with his son-the writer of the memoir now before us, who was then in his thirteenth year-and it was their custom, when the toils of their morning exercises were over, to walk out together on the sands, Henry carrying with him his copy of Homer, out of which he had to read aloud to his father as they walked. A stranger had frequently met and passed them on the sands while thus engaged. Mr. Cary, though personally unacquainted with him, recognised and pointed him out to his son as one of the greatest geniuses of the age. One day, however-instead of passing them as was his wont-the stranger placed himself directly in Mr. Cary's path, and accosting him when they met, said "Sir, yours is a face that I should know-I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge." It was the first step towards a friendship destined to bear very precious fruits-so far at least as one of the parties was concerned. Coleridge was not slow in discovering the extensive learning and fine critical powers of his new friend, and they did not separate during the remainder of that day which had witnessed their first

introduction to each other. In the course of that evening's conversaon Dante's "divine" poem was spoken of. Thirteen years had now elapsed since the publication of the first part of Mr. Cary's translation, and five years since the issue of the second part-but Mr. Coleridge had never heard of it till now. He took a copy of it home with him that night, and when he met its author the following day upon the sands whole pages of it came pouring from his lips. He was resolved, he said, to tell the public of its worth; and it was not long till he carried that resolution into effect. In the course of a series of lectures delivered during the same year in London-he made public announcement of the great merit of the neglected work. The effect was instantaneous. The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews re-echoed the applause which such an authority had pronounced, a thousand copies of the translation were almost immediately disposed of, and in less than three months a second edition was imperiously demanded by that public which had shown itself for so many years insensible to its worth.

Mr. Cary's literary reputation was thus made. His services were eagerly sought after by the conductors of the periodical press, and were secured by the publishers of the 'London Magazine,' with which he became connected as one of its regular contributors. This connexion introduced him to Hazlitt, De Quincy, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Hood, Clare, Procter, Darley, and Charles Lamb.' With the two last named his acquaintance ripened into a cordial friendship which endured through life, and of which many affecting memorials still remain. Mr. Cary, indeed, seems never to have lost a friend whom once he had fairly gained. The reader of his life may notice it—that they are the very same persons-the companions of his college days, to whom his earliest letters were written to whom after the lapse of half a century his last published letters were addressed. That Coleridge retained his earlier regard for him unabated is sufficiently indicated by the letters given in the memoir-written during the years 1827-32. We cannot refrain from extracting one of these-as possessing the double interest of showing us, not only what he thought of Mr. Cary, but how he felt as to the defect which has often been alleged to exist in his own writings.

" November, 1830.

"My dear-and in the very centre of my being-respected Friend, Though I am so unwell as not without plausible grounds to suspect that your remarks may come too late for me to make any practical use of them; yet should it please God to grant me a respite, such a sufficiency of bodily negation as (His grace assisting) would enable me to redeem the residue of my time, it would be so great a help to my chance of being useful, to receive from a man like you some data on which I might commence a sincere attempt to ascertain the causes of the obscurity felt generally in my prose writings, whether in the way of expressing my thoughts, or in the injudicious selection of the thoughts themselves,-that I must press on you your kind promise to run your eye once more through my work on the Constitution. All I ask is, merely that you would mention the pages in the second edition which you did not fully comprehend; for I am quite certain that

Life of the Rev. H. Cary.

293 on such a subject what you found a difficulty in understanding ought not, without an adequate preparative, to have been in the book at all. One cause of this defect I suppose to be the contrast between the continuous and systematic character of my principles and the occasional and fragmentary way in which they have hitherto been brought before the public. Yet when I look at my second Lay-Sermon, of which Mr. Green was saying yesterday, that any reader who had not looked at the date on the title-page would have taken for granted that it had been written within the last fortnight, and in which I cannot believe it possible that any educated man would complain of any want of common-sense thoughts in plain motherEnglish-I cannot sincerely and conscientiously attribute the whole of my failure to attract the attention of my fellow-men to faults or defects of my You will believe me when I say, that to win their attention for their own most momentous interests is the wish that so entirely predominates over any literary ambition as to render the existence of the latter latent in my own consciousness.

own.

"My kindest love and regards to Mrs. Cary, and with every prayer of the heart for you and yours,

"I remain-yours truly,

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

Mr. Cary had published a translation of the "Birds" of Aristophanes, and was engaged with his favourite Pindar, when in 1826 he was appointed to the assistant-librarianship in the British Museum. His public duties at that Institution left him little time for regular and continuous study. His miscellaneous notices of the early French and early Italian poets, furnished to the London Magazine, make us regret that he had not leisure to draw up, as he had designed, fuller histories of those periods, with the remains of whose literature he had made himself so familiar. After his retirement from the British Museum in 1837, he was unfortunately obliged to consult more the desires of the publishers than to follow out his own literary projects, and when at last the grant of a pension from Lord Melbourne in 1841 brought with it the opportunity, the power to avail himself of it was sinking fast away. He died in August 1844, and his remains now lie beside those of Samuel Johnson in Westminster Abbey.

The writer of the memoir now before us had a difficult duty to discharge, and he has done it with mingled delicacy and truthfulness. He has given us large extracts from Mr. Cary's literary journal. Such dry records of daily readings will be tedious to not a few; but there are many who will take pleasure in them, and gather therefrom a higher idea than they otherwise could have got of Mr. Cary's scholarship. And there are still a larger number who will look with a sympathizing eye upon that quiet picture of domestic and social life which the pages of this memoir present. That picture had many a dark shade thrown over it, and nothing draws us more in kindly feeling towards him over whom these shadows passed-than to see how peculiarly poignant and intense his grief was whilst under them,-for, gentle and placid above the common measure as was the ordinary current of

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