And of Barras, his brother Director; Who betrayed his old friend and protector. With the exception, however, of some pieces by Gifford, the editor, all the valuable portions of the Anti-Facobin humour were the productions of Canning and Frere, with, in one or two instances, the One is tempted to exclaim here that addition of a few harmonious bits by Ellis, "the calling of names is no argument; the intimate friend, from an early period, and indeed we are now touching upon the of both of them. With his occasional com- darker side of the Anti-Facobin's characbination, Canning and Frere continued ter. Its very name, it is true, to some extheir singular arrangement of joint-stock tent prepares us for considerable viruauthorship, "suggesting to each other lence of language; our forefathers no here a line, there a phrase, very much as doubt heartily enjoyed those furious onthey might have done when schoolboys slaughts, which we peruse (in view of the at Eton."* When written, the articles authorship) with painful astonishment, were copied out by Wright's assistant, till by an effort we bring before our Upcott, before being sent to the printer.mind's eye the exact state in which EngThe Anti-Facobin now went briskly land stood three-quarters of a century and fiercely on. We will mention the ago; till we "acclimatize "ourselves to the headings of some of the poetic onslaughts storminess of the political and social on alleged "Sansculottic " sympathizers atmosphere enveloping all ranks; till we in England and on the French nation in remember the then recent horrors of general, following in succession : "La the great Reign of Terror, and the abhorSainte Guillotine; "The Soldier's rence thereby excited in the majority of Friend Dactylics," in which a Friend Englishmen towards all supposed to be of Humanity is represented as in a giving tainted with the leaven of Sansculottism. mood: Unless we do so (bearing in mind, too, the changes in manners since 1797) we can hardly comprehend, much less make allowance for, the torrent of ridicule and fierce abuse poured on such men in Eng| land as Fox, as Erskine, as Coleridge, as Priestley (driven from Birmingham in those times by a brutal mob, but to whom Birmingham now erects a statue), the unmitigated villany imputed to all the French Revolutionists, and the coarse taunts broad-scattered, of some of which even the meaning is now obsolete. In Come, little Drummer-Boy, lay down your knapsack here; I am the Soldier's Friend-here are some books for you; Here's half-a-crown for you-here are some some; Tell them the Sailors are all in a Mutiny ! Then there came out "An Ode to Anarchy by a Jacobin; ""The Duke and the Taxing Man; ""Brissot's Ghost;." "A Bit of an Ode to Mr. Fox," &c., to none of which can we award much merit. Here is the opening stanza of a song by Canning, Frere, and Ellis, which they "recommend to be sung at all convivial meetings convened for the purpose of opposing the Assessed Tax Bill. The correspondent who has transmitted it to us, informs us that he has tried it with great success among many of his well-disposed neighbours, who had been at first led to apprehend that the hundred and twentieth part of their income was too great a sacrifice for the preservation of the remainder of their property from French confiscation: " You have heard of Rewbell, New Morality," the finely-written poem with which Canning adorned the last number of the Anti-Facobin, one of the honestest and purest of the Girondins, the 66 rigide ministre" with whose portrait in Carlyle's French Revolution we are all familiar, and his high-minded wife Madame Roland, are, without any excuse, made the subject of vulgar sneers. The high-minded, if over-ardent, Thelwall was frequently the object of AntiJacobin derision: Thelwall, and ye that lecture as ye go, And in the following lines Coleridge, Southey, and Charles Lamb (!) were all represented as approvers of the peculiar religious system of one of the French Directors, Revellière-Lepaux; and, in fact, as little better than atheists Pichegru is meant; but the accusation against Moreau-the victor of Hohenlinden-of having be trayed him, is overcharged. And ye five other wandering bards that move Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux. Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, complains bitterly of the calumnious lines, and a note appended to them. City and country both thy worth attest. Bid him leave off his shallow.Eton wit, Man," and "The Loves of the Triangles," we see Canning and Frere at their best again. Their smooth versification, perfectly classical, yet happily humorous, is conspicuously displayed in these two mock-heroic poems. They are too long, and of too even merit for us to select much from; we will, however, take one short specimen of each. Lamb was most probably in total ignorance of the creed of Lepaux - hardly But to pass from these observations, knew even of his existence. Some lovers for our purpose is rather to relate the of Elia may perhaps thank us for repro- progress and exhibit the humour of the ducing here two pieces which he indited Anti-Facobin than to dilate upon the some time later, as they are not fre- blemishes of its political satire in the quently to be met with. They were con-two pieces entitled "The Progress of tributed to Thelwall's newspaper, the Champion, and we are not aware that they have ever appeared in any collection of Lamb's works, although three pieces under the same initials, in the same periodical" The Three Graves," "St. Crispin to Gifford," and "Triumph of the Whale," have been included. The "extremist" tone in them was doubtless assumed, but the rancour against Canning seems genu- In 1796 Mr. R. Payne Knight had pubine. We do not think the one mention lished "The Progress of Civil Society; a of his own name would have stirred "the Didactic Poem in six books." This progentle Elia" to it; but he could not for-duction, which contained some passages give the plentiful mockery of his two friends Thelwall and Coleridge, by the "shallow Eton wit" of the Anti-Facobin. L THE UNBELOVED. Not a woman, child, or man in II. SONNET TO MATTHEW WOOD, ESQ. Hold on thy course uncheck'd, heroic Wood! The stage's scum, and refuse of the play ers * Addington. arguing a decided preference for man in In softer notes bids Libyan lions roar, First — to each living thing, whate'er its kind, Some lot, some part, some station is assigned. The feathered race with pinions skim the air, Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear; This roams the wood, carniv'rous, for his prey, That, with soft roe, pursues his watery way, This, slain by hunters, yields his shaggy hide, That, caught by fishers, is on Sundays cried.* As "The Progress of Man" was first conceived and commenced by Canning, So "The Loves of the Triangles was the original idea of Frere, and then, like the other, was jointly carried out. Like "The Progress of Man," it parodied the production of a learned man, but indifferent poet, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who had brought out" The Loves of the Plants." No one was better qualified to write of plants than Dr. Darwin, but scientifically, "not poetically. Jeffrey pronounced "The Loves of the Triangles" to be the perfection of parody. The contest between Parabola, Hyperbola, and Ellipsis for the love of the Phoenician Cone is certainly very amusing. We will rather select, however, the following incidental description of the Thames and old London Bridge, which has a pleasant old-world flavour, recalling to our minds some of the best passages in Gay's “Trivia.” So thy dark arches, London Bridge, bestride Indignant Thames, and part his angry tide. There oft-returning from those green re treats 66 We trace in Horace Walpole's Letters a hint that some part of Canning's anti-Jacobin poetry was written a year or more before the starting of the periodical and, in MS., had already amused select circles. send you," Walpole writes on March 22, 1796, to the Rev. W. Mason, "a parody on two lines of Mr. Knight's, which will show you that his poem is seen in its true light by a young man of allowed parts, Mr. Canning, whom I never saw. 'Some fainter irritations seem to feel, Which o'er its languid fibres gently steal.' - Knight. 'Cools the crimp'd cod, to pond-perch pangs imparts, Thrills the shell'd shrimps, and opens oysters' hearts.' Canning." The A.-7. lines, it will be observed, vary from these. oar, Bounds o'er the buoyant wave, and climbs the applauding shore. Canning and Frere to the columns of the The few prose articles contributed by Anti-Facobin offer but little for remark. They are not reprinted with the poetry in Mr. Edmonds' edition of 1854. We must not, however, pass by one pre-eminent specimen of banter which is buried among them - a supposed Meeting of the Friends of Freedom," in which the oratory of Erskine was caricatured. It is stated in the recent memoir of Frere that it proceeded from his pen alone. 66 Mr. Erskine now arose, in consequence of some allusions which had been made to the trial by jury. He professed himself to be highly flattered by the encomiums which had been lavished upon him; at the same time, he was conscious that he could not, without some degree of reserve, consent to arrogate to himself those qualities which the partiality of his friends had attributed to him. He had on former occasions declared himself to be clothed with the infirmities of man's nature; and he now begged leave, in all humility, to reiterate that confession. He should never cease to consider himself as a feeble, and, with respect to the extent of his faculties, a finite being; he had ever borne in mind, and he hoped he should ever continue to bear in mind, those words of the inspired penman, "Thou [Note A.-7.] "Fare," a person, or any number of persons, conveyed in a hired vehicle by land of water. his pamphlets had gone through thirty edi. hast made him less than the angels, to crown him with glory and honour." These lines were indeed applicable to the state of man in general, but of no man more than himself; they appeared to him pointed and personal, and little less than prophetic; they were always present to his mind; he could wish to wear On another occasion there appeared, them in his breast, as a sort of amulet against under the heading of "Foreign Intellithe enchantment of public applause, and the gence Extraordinary," a soi-disant deheries of vanity and self-delusion: yet if patch of Buonaparte, announcing prog he were indeed possessed of those superhu- ress and victories of a most unheard-of man powers-all pretensions to which he character. It was professed "with that again begged leave most earnestly to disclaim if he were endowed with the eloquence of priority of intelligence which has ever an angel, and with all those other faculties distinguished our paper" to have been which we attribute to angelic natures, it would received from a "correspondent, a curbe impossible for him to do justice to the elo-rant merchant at Zante-by a neutral quence with which the honourable gentleman ship which arrived in the river last night. who opened the meeting (Mr. Fox) had-defended the cause of freedom, identified, as he conceived it to be, with the persons and government of the Directory. In his present terrestrial state he could only address it as a prayer to God, and as counsel to man, that the words which they had heard from that honourable gentleman might work inwardly in their hearts, and in due time produce the fruit of liberty and revolution. The conduct of the Directory, with regard to the exiled deputies, had been objected to by some persons on the score of a pretended rigour. For his part, he should only say that having been, as he had been, both a soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either of those two relations to the Directory as a man, and as a major-general, he should not have scrupled to direct his artillery against the national representation; as a naval officer he would undoubtedly have undertaken for the removal of the exiled deputies; admitting the exigency, under all its relations as it appeared to him to exist, and the then circumstances of the times, with all their bearings and dependencies, branching out into an infinity of collateral considerations, and involving in each a variety of objects, political, physical, and moral; and these again under their distinct and separate heads, ramifying into endless sub-divisions, which it was foreign to his purpose to consider. In this, though the irony is not so minute and delicate as in "Erskine's Speech," the "big bow-wow" style frequently displayed in Napoleon's early bulletins is very successfully hit off — so much so, indeed, that, as the editor of the collection of 1799 asserts, another journal using the freedom of the press actually copied the news as authentic information for the eager public! Head Quarters, Salamis, 18 Prairial. Citizen Directors, The brave soldiers who conferred liberty on Rome have continued to deserve well of their country. Greece has joyfully received her deliverers. The tree of liberty is planted on the Piræus. Thirty thou sand Janissaries, the slaves of despotism, had taken possession of the Isthmus of Corinth. Two demi-brigades opened us a passage. After ten days' fighting we have driven the Turks from the Morea. The Peloponnesus is now free. Every step in my power has been taken to revive the ancient spirit of Sparta. The inhabitants of that celebrated city, seeing the black broth of my troops, and the scarcity of specie to which we have been long accustomed, will, I doubt not, soon acquire the frugal virtues of their ancestors. As a proper measure of precaution, I have removed all Pitt's gold from the country. Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating in On landing at this island I participated in a a strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, scene highly interesting to humanity. A poor the several more prominent heads of his fisherman, of the family of Themistocles, atspeech He had been a soldier and a sailor, tended by his wife, a descendent of the virtuand had a son at Winchester School -he had ous Phryne, fell at my feet. I received him been called by special retainers, during the with the fraternal embrace, and promised him summer, into many different and distant parts the protection of the Republic. He invited of the country, travelling chiefly in post-me to supper at his hut; and in gratitude to chaises. He felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country of the free and enlightened part of it, at least. He stood here as a man. He stood in the eye, indeed in the hand, of to whom (in the presence of the company and waiters) he solemnly appealed. He was of noble, perhaps royal, blood-he had a house at Hampstead· was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform God his deliverer, presented me with a memorable oyster-shell, inscribed with the name of his illustrious ancestor. As this curious piece of antiquity may be of service to some of the Directory, I have enclosed it in my despatches, together with a marble tablet, containing the proper form for pronouncing the sentence of Ostracism on Royalist Athenians. Baraguay d'Hilliers, with the left wing of the army of Egypt, has fixed his headquarters at Jerusalem. He is charged to restore the of the literary partnership of its authors Jews to their ancient rights. Citizens Jacob wit, banter, and style had full play Jacobs, Simon Levi, and Benjamin Solomons, in this piece. The subject of attack was of Amsterdam, have been provisionally ap- the new-born German drama in general, pointed Directors. I beg you will ratify a which was peculiarly obnoxious to the grant which I have made of the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra to a society of Illuminati from Anti-Jacobins by its supposed subversive tendencies. The English press and Bavaria. They may be of service in extendstage had begun to be flooded with bad ing our future conquests. I have received very satisfactory accounts translations of some of the least meritofrom Desaix, who had been sent, by Berthier,rious youthful works of Goethe, Schiller, into the interior of Africa. That fine country Kotzebue, and lesser German writers, has been too long neglected by Europeans. and Frere, Canning, and Ellis again In manners and civilization it much resembles espied a fair target whereat to wing their France, and will soon emulate our virtues. shafts. Already does the torrid zone glow with the ardour of freedom. Already has the altar of this onslaught of the English humourists on the exaggerations which undeniably were to be found in the then immature theatre of his country. 66 It is curious to note the touchiness of man a great German of letters liberty been reared in the Caffrarian and Equi-Niebuhr, the historian-in reference to noctial Republics. Their regenerated inhabitants have sworn eternal amity to us at a civic feast, to which a detachment of our army was invited. This memorable day would have terminated with the utmost harmony, if the Caffrarian Council of Ancients had not devoured the greater part of General Desaix's étatmajor for their supper. I hope our ambassador will be instructed to require that civic feasts of this nature be omitted for the future. The Directory of the Equinoctial Republic regret that the scarcity of British cloth in Africa, and the great heat of the climate, prevent them from adopting our costume. Canning," says the great reconstructor of Roman history (Geschichte des Zeitalters der Revolution), joined the Society of the Anti-Jacobins, which defended everything connected with existing institutions. This society published a journal, in which the most honoured names of foreign countries were attacked in the most scandalous We hope soon to liberate the Hottentots, manner. German literature was at that time and to drive the perfidious English from the little known in England, and it was associated extremities of Africa and of Europe. Asia, there with the idea of Jacobinism and revolutoo, will soon be free. The three-coloured tion. Canning then published in the Antiflag floats on the summit of Caucasus; the Jacobin the most shameful_pasquinade which Tigrine Republic is established; the Cis and was ever written against Germany, under the Trans-Euphratean Conventions assem-title of Matilda Pottingen. Gottingen is debled; and soon shall Arabia, under the mild influence of French principles, resume her ancient appellation, and be again denominated "the Happy.' are A broken column will be sent from Carthage it records the downfall of that commercial city, and is sufficiently large for an inscription (if the Directory should think proper to place it on the banks of the Thames) to inform posterity that it marks the spot where London once stood. Health and fraternity, BUONAPARTE. We have abbreviated the above somewhat from the original in No. 33 of the Anti-Facobin (June 25, 1798). The piece was doubtless struck off by Canning alone, as no reference is made to it in the memoir of Frere. scribed in it as the sink of all infamy; professors and students as a gang of miscreants. Such was Canning. He was at all events —a sort of political Cossack. useful It is to be remarked that Niebuhr who by-the-bye resided in London in 1798, and probably read "The Rovers in the Anti-Facobin as it came out - has not even correctly quoted the title of the burlesque over which he somewhat wastes needless indignation. But few words will be necessary to introduce our extracts; the "plot" is, as far as it is possible or necessary to state it, thus formed. Casimere, a Polish officer, and husband of Cecilia Muckenfeldt, allows his amorous passions to betrays him into the "double arrange. ment,' "which gives the second title to the play, and is in mood (like Captain Macheath) to wish it a single one. Let his words from a scene a little way on in the piece explain : We now come to "The Rovers; or, the Double Arrangement; which by its combination of much broad fun, clever parody, and ludicrous juxtaposition of impossible chronology, approaches, and if further elaborated might have ranked with, the much better-known "Critic" of Casimere. What a contrast! you are flying Sheridan. The leading characteristics to liberty and your home; I, driven from my |