་ ་ tle often exhibit faculties which are great in kind, though limited in degree, and exhibit them also as centred in character. In their expression there is none of the hardness which distinguishes the tough vitality and vigor of men in whom understanding predominates. The little there is in them melts, flows, fuses, shines. They can create and combine, though their creations and combinations be petty and of small account; and they leave the permanent print of their natures in those sly corners and crevices of the literature of a language, which the omnivorous general reader delights to explore. Colley Cibber, for instance, is a small creature enough, but still an indissoluble unit and representative of flippant character, endowed with a delightful little imagination exactly answering to the demands of his little nature, and fertile in little creations and bright and shallow gossip, always meaning well and never meaning much. Horace Walpole, a higher example of the same flippancy, built up, through an assimilation of all the frippery of literature and all the frippery of fashionable life, a character perfect in its kind, and within its sphere undoubtedly creative. The affectation of his style has its roots in the affectation of his nature, and it is an admirable style for him. The sarcastic pertness of his diction, in which wit and observation tend to crystallize in words, and become brittle as they grow sparkling, shows a nature not so fluid as Cibber's, and acting more by starts and flings of fanciful inspiration. His wit is unmistakably original, sometimes in kind. An old and pious lady, into whose hands some of Lord Rochester's licentious letters came, burned them," for which," Walpole petulantly says, "she is now burning in heaven." Occasionally a single word does the work of a paragraph. "Lady" he remarks in one of his letters, "looks ghastly and going." Geniality is a finishing grace to intellectual character, and we especially feel its sweetness in natures of great reach and depth; but in minds whose endowments are by no means extraordinary, it sometimes amounts to a weakness. Leigh Hunt is an example of what we should call a fondling character, and a great master of its verbal expression. Language in his hands is the most flexible of instruments to convey dainty and pleasant sensations. His self-content is so great, that it flows out in content with all the world. He fondles everything and everybody. Shakespeare, Spenser, Shelley, Coleridge, he dandles on his knee, as if they were babies, paws them, and would fill their dear little mouths with sugared epithets of eulogy. This he seems to think is genial criticism. Even divine things cannot escape his all-tolerating kindliness; for, whatever sects and churches may say, he knows that the world was made after the image of Leigh Hunt. The Deity with him is not so much Infinite Goodness as infinite good-nature, and we believe he has lately published a devotional book to inculcate that doctrine. He talks very cosily about Dante, and appeals to the readers whom he conducts through the "Inferno," if they really can believe that such fine fellows as they there behold in torments ought to be treated in that way. Throughout his writings, indeed, he seems to think that the wax taper, which he holds so jauntily, can light up all the gloom and darkness of the moral universe. This foppery is of a different kind from Walpole's, and is much more delightful, but it is still foppery, though the foppery of philanthropy. We have, doubtless, said more than enough respecting words as media for the transpiration of character, and it would be a waste of illustration to trace the working of the principle through other forms of personality, such as the sentimental, the satanic, the eccentric, the religious, and the heroic. In all of these, however, language is moulded into the organic body of thought, and the organisms stand out in literature with the distinctness and the diversity of organic forms in nature. The words are veined, and full of the lifeblood of the creative individualities projected into them with unsparing energy. In criticizing such works we soon discover that what we at first call faults of style are in reality faults of character, But such individualities are more or less narrow and peculiar; and it is only when we arrive at those rare natures, with sensibility, reason, fancy, wit, humor, imagination, all included in the operations of one mighty, spiritual force, which we feel to be greater than one or all of the faculties and passions, that we compass the full meaning of intellectual char acter in apprehending its highest form. Such men - Shakespeare, for example-appear to be impersonal simply because their personality is so broad. They are impersonal relatively, not positively. Capable of discerning, interpreting, representing, all actual and possible peculiarities of human character, they seem to have few peculiarities of their own. They have no leading idea, because they have so many ideas; no master passion, because they have so many passions; no hobby, great or little, sublime or mean, because they possess a vital conception of relations, as well as a vital conception of things and persons. But they never really pass, as creative minds, beyond the limits of their characters; for it is always men that create, not some vagrant faculty of men. It is sometimes doubted if the style of such writers can be taken as the measure of their power and variety of power. Now there is in the smallest individual intelligence an abstract possibility which is never realized in any mode of expression while he is in the body, and this limitation is especially felt when we read the works of the greatest individualized intelligences. So far, and only so far, are we inclined to concede that the great masters and creators of language find in words but a partial expression of their natures. What is directly conveyed in words and images, according to their literal interpretation, is, of course, inadequate to fix and embody a mind like Shakespeare's; but then the marvel of Shakespeare's diction is its immense suggestiveness, his power of radiating through new verbal combinations or through single expressions a life and meaning which they do not retain in their removal to dictionaries. When the thought is so subtile, or the emotion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it cannot be flashed upon the "inward eye," it is hinted to the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. These irradiations and melodies of thought and feeling are seen and heard only by those who think into the words, but they are nevertheless there, whether perceived or not. An American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing it describes. "The recitation," he says, "begins: one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes"! He who has not felt this witchery in Shakespeare's style has never read him. He may have looked at the words, but has never looked into them. We have been able, in these hasty observations on the use and misuse of words, to touch upon only a few topics connected with our theme. There are many others that would repay investigation, which we have hardly named, such as the intimate connection between clearness and freshness of expression, the sources of the pleasure we take in style apart from the importance of the matter it conveys, - the difference between an author's expressing an idea to himself and expressing it to others, the power of words, as wielded by a man of genius, to create or evoke in another mind the thought or emotion they embody, the peculiar vitality and the amazing mystical significance of language when used as the organ for expressing the phenomena of rapture and ecstasy, and the interior laws which regulate the construction and movement of style, according as the object is to narrate, describe, reason, or invent. But we have not space at present to consider these topics with the attention they deserve. In the somewhat extended remarks into which we have been provoked by the publication of Dr. Roget's "Thesaurus," we have confined ourselves to a few obvious principles, and have labored to show the hopelessness of all attempts to make language really express any thing finer, deeper, higher, or more forcible, than what lives in the mind and character of the writer who uses it. Especially in all that relates to strength of diction, we think it will be found that the utmost affluence in energetic terms will, of itself, fail to impress on style any vital energy of soul; for this energy, whether it work like lightning or like light, whether it smite and blast, or illumine and invigorate, ever comes from the presence of the man in the words. ART. VIII.—1. Voyage en Chine et dans les Mers et Archipels de cet Empire pendant les Années 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850. Par M. JURIEN DE LA GRAVIÈRE, Capitaine com. mandant la corvette La Bayonnaise, expédiée par le Gouvernement français dans ces parages. Avec une belle carte gravée sur acier. Paris: Charpentier, Libraire-éditeur. 1853. 2 vols. 8vo. 2. History of the Insurrection in China; with Notices of the Christianity, Creed, and Proclamations of the Insurgents. By MM. CALLERY and YVAN. Translated from the French, with a Supplementary Chapter, narrating the most recent Events, by JOHN OXENFORD. With a Fac-simile of a Chinese Map of the Course of the Insurrection, and a Portrait of Tièn-tè, its Chief. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1853. 24mo. pp. 301. Ar a period of profound and universal peace, when the gates of Janus, over all the face of the world, were for the moment closed, the rude bruit of clashing arms has reached our ears from two mighty continents; and in either case we find, singularly enough, that it is from the two great Tartar empires in extent, in population, and as to their respective standards of civilization, paralleled only by each other-that these sounds proceed. The more immediate interests involved in the Russian troubles have not diverted our attention from the anomalous and mysterious struggle going on in China. To give a passing glance at the physical and moral condition of the Chinese people, to point out the footprints of the messengers of the Gospel among them, and to exhibit, so far as is permitted us by the meagre reports that from time to time have reached this country, the origin, progress, and present aspect of the insurrection, will be the object of this paper. For two centuries the Ta-tsing dynasty has continued to rule over a territory as large as that of all Christian Europe, with a population nearly eighteen times more numerous than that of the United States. The Mant-chou race, from which was sprung Tae-tsung-wan-hang-te, the first of that line who |