force, or beauty, or langour, of its language-the broad picture of life it presents-prove it, apart from its theological pretensions, the poem of the age's hope, even as "Sartor Resartus" is the prose record of the age's experience. We should, perhaps, forbear to add, that besides the warm verdict of the thinking youth of the country, it has gained the praise of Bulwer, Montgomery, Wilson, Tennyson, Binney, David Scott, Professor Nichol, Samuel Brown, and others of equal note. Partial, or insincere, or interested praise (although we by no means apply these terms to the above), and also malicious censure, may be told here to stand aside, inasmuch as "Festus" has written its own indelible impress upon a very broad, true, and responsive section of the intellectual world. "You may know it by its fruits."

"The young mind of the age!" What a multitude of thoughts crowd on us when we utter these simple words! What mingled hope and fear-what tremulous anticipations rush in, as we think of what it is, and of what it may become of the work it has to do, and the sufferings it has to endure. Never was there an age when there were so many young, ardent, and gifted spirits-never was there an age when they more required wise guidance. The desideratum may be thus expressed, "Wanted, a tutor to the rising age; he must be a creedless Christian-full of faith, but full of charity-wise in head and large in heart—a poet and a priest-an 'eternal child,' as well as a thoroughly furnished man."

This advertisement has not yet been fully answered. The work of Carlyle and Emerson has been principally negative, and it seems now nearly perfected. We wait a new teacher, who, by uniting the spirit of Christianity to that of philosophy, shall present us with a satisfactory whole-with nothing less than which our eager inquirers will rest contented. May all the quick and cunning forces of nature combine in forming such an august spirit! Yet

are we not at all sanguine of his speedy advent. Things, we fear, must be worse ere they are better. And, perhaps, the deepest hour of the darkness may be cloven by no earthly radiance, but by the wide wings of that advent for which the weary Church and the wearier world, are beginning to pant, with unutterable groanings. Meanwhile, many gifted spirits, besides Bailey, are working a good work. Some poets of uncommon promise are ever and anon appearing. Among these we may mention the author of "Nimrod," a work containing much fine description and exquisitely developed character. Aytoun has given us one admirable ballad on “Montrose," although his vein is not of the deepest; Henry Sutton, A. J. Symington, Strype, and William Allingham, are all gifted and promising persons. But our greatest hope is fixed on Sidney Yendys, of Cheltenham; this young gentleman has written a drama entitled "The Roman,” still in MS., of which Shelley himself would not have been ashamed. With something of the diffusion and exaggeration of youth, it has a richness of thought, a felicity of language, a copiousness of imagery, a music of versification, not easy in any first effort to be paralleled. It contains passages of beauty or power which absolutely startle you, and specimens of every variety of excellence, from the lofty declamation to the melting ballad. We stake whatever critical reputation we have on the prediction, that no recent poem, save "Festus," shall make a profounder impression upon the lovers of poetry when it appears, than "The Roman." It is a very conflagration of genius, as well as in many parts a high triumph of art.*

* Bailey's theory is said to be derived, in a great measure, from the writings of that extraordinary man, David Thom of Liverpool.

JOHN STERLING.

THE removal of a young man of high performance and still higher promise is in all circumstances melancholy. It is more so, if with the youth has expired either a new vein of poetry or a new view of truth; and it is scarcely less so when the youth has been unconsciously the type of a large class of cultivated and earnest minds, and when his partial successes, baffled endeavours-his admitted struggles, and his premature fate-have been in some measure vicarious.

These three short and simple sentences appear to us to include, positively and negatively, the essence of the late John Sterling, and shall form the leading heads in our after remarks on his genius and character. He was, in the judgment of all who knew or had carefully read him a person of very distinguished abilities, and of still more singular promise. He did not, in our view of him, exhibit indications of original insight or of creative genius. But he has, from his peculiar circumstances, from his speculative and practical history, from his exquisitely-tuned and swiftly-responsive symphonies with his age and its progressive minds, acquired a double portion of interest and importance; his experience seems that of multitudes, and in that final look of disappointed yet submissive inquiry which he casts up to heaven, he is but the foremost in a long, fluctuating, and motley file.

The external evidences of his powers and acquirements are numerous and irresistible. In his boyhood he discovered striking tokens of a mind keen, sensitive, and turned in the direction of those high speculations from which his eye, till death, was never entirely diverted. While barely eight, "he distinctly remembered having speculated on points of philosophy, and especially on the

idea of duty, which presented itself to him in this way— If I could save my papa and mamma from being killed, I know I should at once do it. Now, why? To be killed would be very painful, and yet I should give my own consent to being killed." The solution presented itself as “a dim awe-stricken feeling of unknown obligation." When about nine, "he was much struck by his master's telling him that the word sincere was derived from the practice of filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence cine sera came to mean pure, not vamped up." This explanation, he said, gave him great pleasure, and abode in his memory, as having first shown him that there is a reason in words as well as in other things. When a boy, he read through the whole "Edinburgh Review," of which his biographer says, a diet than which hardly any could yield less wholesome food for a young mind, and which could scarcely fail to puff it up with the wind of self-conceit." We doubt the validity of this dictum. We conceive that, to a fresh elastic mind, the crossing of such varied territories of thought, the coming in contact with so many vigorous minds, the acquiring such stores of miscellaneous information, the mere reading of such a mass of masculine English, as the perusal of the entire "Edinburgh Review" implies, must have been beneficial, and tended to awaken curiosity, to kindle ambition, to stifle mannerism of style, and, as the likely result of the many severe criticisms in which the book abounds, to allay instead of fanning the feeling of self-conceit. Who but commends the industry of the boy who reads all the English essayists-a course of reading certainly much more dissipating; or the youth who reads all Bayle's "Dictionary"—a course of reading much more dangerous than the "Edinburgh Review?" Let the boy read at his pleasure-the youth will study, and the man think and act.

At Cambridge, Sterling did not greatly distinguish himself, nor did he bear any violent affection to his alma

mater. For mathematics he had little taste; the classics he rather relished than thoroughly knew. He early commenced the study of philosophy, deeming it at once the key to a scientific theology and to a lofty literature, although latterly he all but left the cold and perilous crags of speculation for the flowery meadows of poetry and æsthetics. At the feet of Coleridge no one ever sat with a feeling of more entire and childlike submission; the house at Highgate was to him the shrine of a god, and his biographer regrets that he "did not preserve an account of Coleridge's conversations, for he was capable of representing their depth, their ever-varying hues, their sparkling lights, their oceanic ebb and flow." He began soon to empty out his teeming mind, in the forms both of verse and prose. In the course of his short life we find him connected, more or less intimately, with the following periodicals: the "Athenæum," "Blackwood's Magazine," the "Quarterly," and the London and Westminster "Reviews." At a peculiarly dull period in the history of "Maga” he appeared, amid a flourish of trumpets, as a "new contributor," and did succeed in shooting a little new blood into her withered veins. In the "Quarterly" he wrote a paper on Tennyson, which was attributed at the time to Henry Nelson Coleridge. Differing as he did in many material points from the new school of Radicals who conducted the "Westminster," he seemed more at home in their company than in that of the knights of the Noctes; and his contributions to their journal are all characteristic. These articles have been reprinted by Dr Hare, and, along with the poems, his tragedy of "Stafford," a few letters, and other remains, constitute all his written claims to consideration.

He has certainly in them raised no very great or compact basis for future fame; but we are entitled to adduce, in addition, the testimony of his friends, who all speak with rapture of the possibilities of his mind—of his talent as a debater and of his ready, vivid, and brilliant talk. In