interesting to discuss the qualities by the justly remarks in his own figurative aid of which he has contrived to fascinate phrase, the fumes of presumption;" his public. Instead, therefore, of storm- "The cordial quaffed with thirst may generate ing at his reputation, or attributing it to the energies of the publishing department, we shall simply strive to understand it. His popularity is one of the most unquestionable facts of the day. As he himself remarks, with his usual depth of thought and strength of conception, and, whatever the very curious physiologico-chemical process here supposed to take place in Mr. Tupper's brain may be "That which is can never not have been; facts generation of sulphuric-acid fumes in are solid as the pyramids ;" a truth which Mrs. Gamp illustrates with less dignity but greater vivacity, where she parenthetically observes on facts"being stubborn and not easy drove." Mr. Tupper will perhaps think that in say ing thus much we have already done more for his fame than any criticisms we can offer will be able to undo. As he observes of great authors "The honest giant careth not to be patted on the back by pigmies: Flatter greatness, he brooketh it good-humoredly; blame him, thou tiltest at a pyramid. But we have no more intention of tilting at our pyramidal giant than we have of "patting him on the back." We are quite aware that it would be utterly beyond our strength to displace him from his stronghold in public favor. Still, being unfortunate enough to belong to that small but respectable minority who regard Mr. Tupper's versicular philosophy as superficial and conceited twaddle-as a new manifestation to these latter days of weakness and sentimentalism under the solemn form of the Oracular-we feel only the more called upon to explain, as far as we are able, the apparent anomaly of our position. If we seem less reserved in the expression of our honest judgment on Mr. Tupper-whom we need scarcely say we know solely through his works-than is in accordance either with our custom or our taste, it must be remembered that we are not called upon to be tender in the case of one who has already received, and is still receiving, no doubt, a temporary but exceedingly substantial reward. Mr. Tupper is himself always great on the subject of "compensations." He has more than his fair share of good thingsboth emolument and fame. A man may easily have too much praise; or, as he which reminds us, by the way, of an elaborate process carefully described in the work of an eminent chemist for the leaden chambers-we fear we can trace the finished product, the "presumption," in the latest of Mr. Tupper's works. The moral twaddle of the Proverbial Philosophy has certainly so fermented as to give off unmistakable" fumes of presumption " in the amazing_trash called Rides and Reveries of Esop Smith. There is enough of empirical dexterity in the Proverbial Philosophy to give us some conception of the origin of its popularity; but no public could ever have been taken in for the first time by such insufferable rubbish as has attained type under the title of the latter work. We feel no scruple or hesitation, therefore, in administering our minute dose of "" compensation" for his great success, and only wish we could make it even more drastic. To assume for a moment his own pure stylewe can not be sure that we hit the farmer's trot of the meter "Dost thou feel oppressed by the Embonpoint of constant popular favor? Then go drink the Epsom salts from the cup of ungenial Criticism: It shall make thee comparatively whole, if it be not too late for that treatment." We have said that when we call Mr. Tupper's poems a result of literary charlatanerie, we do not at all mean to charge upon him any conscious intention of abusing the confidence of the public. But we mean by quackery any substitute for true art which, either from ignorance or any other cause, wins favor and attention by addressing itself to the superficial notions and feelings of those who are not good judges in their own case. Whenever any one appeals, consciously or unconsciously, to a class of notions and feelings that are not at the root of the matter, and thus gains popularity by falsifying the true proportions of things in the haste to be effective, we truly call him a quack. If a physician treats symptoms only, when he ; The same inference may be drawn from the popularity of Mr. Gilfillan as a critic a writer whose capacity can not be more adequately shadowed forth than by using his own words in explaining what the faculty of a certain great poet-Pope-did not, but what every one who knows him will admit that the faculty of Mr. Gilfillan does resemble, namely, "the feather of the wing of a great eagle, dipping into the night-tempest which raves around the inaccessible rock of his birth-place." How imposing would be an edition of Martin Tupper from the pen of the Rev. George Gilfillan ! ought to know the deeper causes of symp-genius; and we shall presently find in the toms, we call him a quack. When an weakly moralities, the sentimentalism, and artist studies the picturesque at the ex- the extravagant coloring of the Proverbial pense of true drawing, faithful coloring, Philosophy, very much to remind us of and reality of thought, we call him a Bleak House and Little Dorrit. quack. When a manufacturer studies to attract by show and price, rather than by the real worth of his goods, we call him a quack. And so also when a littérateur ministers principally to superficial or vulgar propensities, instead of attempting to rectify them by exhibiting their true relation to human nature- be it from blindness, or from baste, or from the desire to please we call such a littérateur a quack. And in the characteristic features of the method by which such an empiric wins his fame, we may see reflected as in a mirror the leading deficiencies and weaknesses, or, in some cases, the vices even, of the public mind he addresses. We do not accuse Mr. Tupper, however, of making capital out of any thing worse than the defective education and consequent appetite for decidedly bad literature observable in a certain class of the English public. It is necessary to remember, in attempting to account for the marvelous success of the Proverbial Philosophy, that the vastly larger part of the English reading world now consists of a class which, a few generations ago, contained no consumers of literature scarcely even of newspaper literature-at all. It has often been hastily, but we believe erroneously, assumed, that writers so foolish as Mr. Martin Tupper and Mr. Robert Montgomery circulate entirely within the circle of imbecile "fashionable" religion. We do not believe that that world is large enough to create even a small fraction of the gigantic demand which has arisen for these gentlemen's writings. Probably the largest audience yet commanded by any English writer has been commanded of late years by Mr. Dickens. And we think it beyond question that his audience-we mean his audience of recent years, since the establishment of Household Wordsevinces many of the same class of deficiencies in literary taste and sentiment to which Mr. Tupper appeals. Mr. Dickens has himself told us, that his two latest and worst works-works of which few cultivated men have been able to read more than a very brief specimen-have secured a far wider popularity than any of the really great productions of his early Now these defects of taste and temperament are neither inexplicable, nor even lamentable, but simply natural, in a class that has not yet had time or opportunity to learn literary discrimination-to know the difference between half truths and whole truths, or the tests which distinguish the semblance of good feelings from the reality; whereas, did they prevail in classes that have long had the advantage of real culture, they would compel us to attribute to the readers the full fatuity of the writers they admire. We think, then, that we may fairly assume, as our own experience would certainly assure us, that Mr. Robert Montgomery and Mr. Tupper find the majority of their audience in a class, not of depraved literary taste, but whose literary tastes of any sort are of quite recent origin. And this conviction it is which gives us some real interest in analyzing the causes of their unmerited success. To investigate the secret of that morbid stimulus which is administered to degenerated and worn-out minds, would indeed be a heartless task; but to study the weak side of the half-educated classes just emerging into the world of literary interests, is far otherwise. We have some light on the subject from the analogous case of the first literary interests of the young, whatever be their class and education. For, the first. stirrings of literary appetite, whether in individuals or classes, are never marked by strength or purity of taste. Indeed, it is not usually in any way the merit of the author which first fascinates the attention in such cases, but the degree in which he happens to rouse and draw out into the | turity, nay, of that stage of immaturity in light, as it were, thos e opening faculties which we rather need reässurance that and sentiments which have no sufficient we have a certain class of sentiments at expression in the real world. Hence this all than any clearer insight into them; craving is at first most easily satisfied by just as the infant loves bright dancing exaggerated and false pictures of life, colors which excite the eye long before it stimulating most strongly those awakening takes any interest in discriminating forms. feelings which, real as they are, are yet And thus we account for the popularity but dimly understood. When, either in of Mr. Tupper's great predecessor. The an individual or a class, a whole world of passionate, abysmal, and picturesque ashitherto latent life is beginning to unfold, pects of poetry were then in the ascendthe first delight is in any thing, however ant, even in the cultivated classes, owing false, exciting, or showy, that distinctly to the influence of Byron. Mr. Robert stimulates that life. In such a phase of Montgomery introduced the same aspects our education, we do not care to see the of life into his so-called religious poem true proportion, extent, and limitations of for the uncultivated classes; and he obhuman character clearly indicated and re- tained his marvelous success merely becognized, but rather to have the new cause the people he addressed were just world we are beginning to see presented beginning to feel that religion had an exstrongly to us. This is the secret of the citing and picturesque, as well as a didac love of romance quite apart from its merit, tic side that Nature ought to be grandthat always shows itself as the first phase er, and human passion more terrible, if of literary taste, either in the young or they were seen to exist, as they do exist, the half-educated. The world of romance in the constant presence of God. They is a world of new experience, which the devoured Mr. Robert Montgomery's jarnovice is eager to comprehend-of strange gon about the "Omnipresence of the tendencies within him, the issues of which Deity," because it stimulated the growing he endeavors to anticipate by entering feeling that the shadow of religious myinto the fictitious experience of others. steries ought to give new magnificence to Directly we clearly know that the roman- the external universe and to the inward tic delineations of life caricature and fal- passions of man. Gaudy metaphor, vulgar sify the deepest life within us, they be allegory, profuse personification, were the come stale, flat, and unprofitable; but in natural baits to stimulate those first the mean time that author will get most floundering attempts of literary inexperhold of us.who fosters those elements of ience to peep'into the relation of God with our nature which are as yet only in the outward Nature and inward experience. germ. Any one who professes to unwind Giddy and swimming eyes were not likely for us our newly-discovered clues of in- to find fault with glaring and muddy stinct or hope, will fascinate our attention colors. at once; and fascinate it the more readily, perhaps, if he do not make too much appeal to the real experience of those who have already unwound them for themselves. Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper, M.A. of Christchurch, Oxford, has caught the prophetic mantle dropped by Mr. Robert Montgomery; and though the charlata nerie of his Proverbial Philosophy seems And hence we can not wonder that to us as conspicuous as that of The Omniwhen a large and uncultivated class be-presence of the Deity, its general characgins to care about religious poetry at all, teristics are different, and no doubt evince it should at first be enraptured by the a certain sort of advance in the class with glaring magniloquence of such men as whom it is popular. The Omnipresence of Mr. Robert Montgomery. It is in the the Deity was a vulgar daub, with nothvery stage most adapted for the influence ing tolerable about its execution; and of an empiric, with religious sentiment was acceptable only as empty political just romantic enough to desire excitement, eloquence is acceptable in a time of poliand yet inexperienced enough, both in tical wrong and coming revolution-that taste and maturity of feeling, to prefer is, as the sign of feelings stirring in the dazzling colors to clearer vision. His breasts of the multitude, not as an augury readers evidently cared more for new of any thing better. The style of the excitement of certain vague feelings than Proverbial Philosophy bears the same refor new guidance; a sure sign of imma-lation to Keble and Tennyson that the style of the Omnipresence of the Deity bore to that of Byron. As the latter production gives us the quack-poet's conception of "the tremendous," so the former gives us the empiric's notion of "the inward." The one makes a wretched attempt at religious sublimities, the other at religious tenderness and profoundities. Both alike are empirics; but Mr. Tupper is the empiric of a more reflective age. Again, where Mr. Robert Montgomery was overwhelming and gigantic, Mr. Tupper is minute and microscopic, only in one or two instances accidentally soaring into immensity. He professes to verify religious and moral truth by detailed personal experience; and his observations may often tend to excite observation and reflection in those who have never thought before, and who are not too much irritated with the pompous truisms and strained imagery of the man. That the book should have been written by a Master of Arts of Oxford is simply a new testimony how very little power education has to eradicate obstinate conceit, to prune empty metaphor, and to shame windy rhetoric, in a mind constitutionally prolific of these tendencies. But, nevertheless, we do not doubt that the book may have a useful function to those who have reached only a certain very early stage of selfconscious life. Indeed, we are convinced that for one short transition period, when either individuals or classes are passing from an unreflective to a reflective view of the world around them, what would otherwise be very unhealthy, and what is very superficial, trash, may discharge for a short time a very healthy and natural function. It requires a work of real genius to be permanently popular with any class of society whatever. But a mind of no genius at all, a mere charlatan writer, may often hit the humor of the moment, and assist a moral transition which the greatest genius, from the very thoroughness of its intellectual work, may be unable to help. kind of poetical Pecksniff; and takes for his motto: "My friends, let us be moral." But a simple man is easily taken in; and Mr. Tupper's readers, finding now and then themes for their own thought, are blind to the ostentatious tediousness with which { he dilutes them. He is a sort of homeopathic metaphysician, and only makes his little modicum of truism visible at all by the immense proportion of sugary simile in which he wraps it up. He has the art of "pondering" in vacuo, without giving you any idea what he is pondering about. Mr. Robert Montgomery rejoiced in strong assertion; he delighted, for example, to inform Death, in his mighty trumpet-tones, what was the effect on the world at large of his (Death's) birth: "O Death! thou dreadless vanquisher of Earth! The elements shrank blasted at thy birth," etc. But Mr. Tupper's line is very different. He is feebly interrogative, and almost always suggests a plurality of equally indefinite answers, contriving to prove nothing except that he is not thinking about his question at all further than as an excuse for literary dawdling : "O Death! what art thou? Antitype of Nature's marvels; The seed and dormant chrysalis bursting into energy and glory: The calm safe anchorage for the shattered hulls of men; The spot of gelid shade after the hot-breathed dust," etc. Mr. Tupper is a sort of stage-anchorite. He is always hushing us, and whispering how good it is to live in a spiritual hermitage, and be visited by blessed gleams of tranquil wisdom. His hospitality, however, is oppressive: "Come into my cool dim grotto, that is watered by the rivulet of truth, And over whose time-stained walls climb the fairy flowers of content: Here, upon this mossy bank of leisure, fling thy load of cares; Taste my simple store, and rest one soothing hour." This is the case with Mr. Tupper. He fills his writings with what, to his own class, are the baldest truisms; and spoils even these by adding a pompous and vulgar fringe of artificial simile. But his The invitation itself, and the "simple truisms are not always truisms to his read-store" of Truism, remind us irresistibly ers; and his atrocious taste in ornament of Mr. Pecksniff's similar invitation: is not perceived. As we said, he is a quack "Let us make merry, my friends," said of the "inward " school. He is the victim Mr. Pecksniff; "and he took a captain's of his own thronging fancies. He is a biscuit." But it is time to sketch generally the characteristics of the Proverbial Philoso "The chance pearls flung among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion," seems to us to succeed only in bringing up the empty-shell truisms instead; with which, however, he fearlessly proceeds to build the "cool dim grotto " that has extracted so successful a tribute from an en phy in their relation to the wants of the class with which it has found favor. We believe that if we are to mean by a charlatan one who gives a spurious and surface answer to a real want-without reference, of course, to the motive or sin-thusiastic public. His philosophy consists cerity of the giver-we could not find a much purer specimen of charlatan religious poetry than the work we are reviewing It may benefit, perhaps has benefited, the class by whom it is devoured, as it benefits a lad to pass through the belief in Rhetoric and find it empty, or to plunge into the Lalla-Rookh stage of sentiment and find it unwholesome; but it will certainly have benefited its readers most when they have outgrown it. Let us consider, then, the various aspects of Mr. Tupper's poetic wisdom. Moral and religious poetry of the meditative sort is clearly his aim; so that we may assume that it should reflect, after some meditative fashion, the moral and religious life of the day. And this is what he propos ed to himself: " Thoughts that have tarried in my mind, and scum and the lees of speculation; And come up again to the surface-world with mark as the falcon to its quarry; of Wisdom! These give I to thy gentle hand, thou lover of the right." Mr. Tupper, then, will be a poetic philosopher; thoughts and fancies, and convictions and speculations, and high arguments and the results of experience, are to be poured out by him, and welcomed by the "scholar of wisdom" and by the "lover of the right." We find him, however, a living impersonation of the "oracular." His thought, while it follows the fashion of the day by directing the mind inwards, and dives with remarkable pertinacity for what he calls in personifying states of mind by abstract names; writing them with capital letters, and parading the shroud of mystery in which he finds them. His poetry is only a beading-over of all he has to say with artificial similitudes or metaphors; his sentiment is a trickling stream of sentimentality; and finally, the self-respect of true genius is parodied by a pervading air of puffy self-sufficiency, which grates on the religious themes, and gives to the work what we have termed its silly oracular tone. First, as to Mr. Tupper's "words of wisdom," as he himself describes them. They gain their popularity by directing the reader with much solemnity to look inwards, as the temper of the age requires: then giving all the splash and excitement of a very deep spiritual dive, while really you only go under enough to confuse the eyesight; and finally coming up triumphant with a very big and empty truism, which every body recognizes as true, and which those who are taken in by Mr. Tupper give themselves a good deal of credit for recognizing to be true, and verifying from their own experience, after all the "laborious musing" by which it has been ushered in. "Here is a man," the reader thinks, "who clearly goes down into the depths of self-knowledge; and I find it quite easy to go with him, and recognize my own former thoughts again in his rich language; so that he must be teaching me to know myself." For example, we open our library copy of Mr. Tupper, and find many passages marked by an enthusiastic disciple. Amongst them is this: "Content is the true riches, for without it there is no satisfying; But a ravenous all-devouring hunger gnaweth the vitals of the soul." Had this stood alone, we doubt if it would have excited much enthusiasm. We have, we believe, met with the sentiment occasionally in copy-books. But let us consider the setting. It comes in the middle of certain musings "Of Wealth," which |