International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 8, August 19, 1850

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Various. International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 8, August 19, 1850

THE THEATER IN RUSSIA AND POLAND

"DEATH'S JEST BOOK, OR THE FOOL'S TRAGEDY."

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED

VERSES

ARMINIUS

CAMPBELL AND WASHINGTON IRVING

Authors and Books

Recent Deaths

AUGUSTUS WILLIAM NEANDER

JACOB JONES, U.S.N

JULIA BETTERTON GLOVER

THE MORNING SONG

A LESSON

DUST; OR UGLINESS REDEEMED

AN EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY

THE OLD CHURCHWARD TREE

GREECE AND TURKEY.2

DEATH AND SLEEP

Отрывок из книги

The Examiner, for July 20, contains an elaborate review, with numerous extracts, of a play just published under this title in London. "It is radiant," says the critic, "in almost every page with passion, fancy, or thought, set in the most apposite and exquisite language. We have but to discard, in reading it, the hope of any steady interest of story, or consistent development of character: and we shall find a most surprising succession of beautiful passages, unrivaled in sentiment and pathos, as well as in terseness, dignity, and picturesque vigor of language; in subtlety and power of passion, as well as in delicacy and strength of imagination; and as perfect and various, in modulation of verse, as the airy flights of Fletcher or Marlowe's mighty line.

"The whole range of the Elizabethan drama has not finer expression, nor does any single work of the period, out of Shakspeare, exhibit so many rich and precious bars of golden verse, side by side with such poverty and misery of character and plot. Nothing can be meaner than the design, nothing grander than the execution."

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The following exquisite lyric is among the passages with which these judgments are sustained:

Praed, it has always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals. His fugitive lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental, published with Hookham Frere's "Whistlecraft" and Macaulay's Roundhead Ballads, in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and after the suspension of that work, for the most part in the annual souvenirs, are altogether unequaled in the class of compositions described as vers de societie.—Who that has read "School and School Fellows", "Palinodia", "The Vicar", "Josephine", and a score of other pieces in the same vein, does not desire to possess all the author has left us, in a suitable edition? It has been frequently stated in the English journals that such a collection was to be published, under the direction of Praed's widow, but we have yet only the volume prepared by a lover of the poet some years ago for the Langleys, in this city. In the "Memoirs of Eminent Etonians," just printed by Mr. Edward Creasy, we have several waifs of Praed's that we believe will be new to all our readers. Here is a characteristic political rhyme:

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