we will just give the author's own view of the case: "For my part, I will back an English highwayman, masked, armed, mounted, and trotting over Hounslow Heath, against the prettiest rascal the Continent ever produced." These did not possess such bad materials for a hero; the days are quite past for readers to be contented with the condescending court-suits which enchanted our grandmothers, or with "dark-haired young gentlemen, born to be the destruction of every one connected with them." Mr. Bulwer required a hero surrounded with difficulties, and beset with the temptations to which poverty is subjected in real and social life—such a hero is Paul Clifford. Critics, like copy-books, are ruled by columns—our limits forbid its extract; but we must say how eloquent and how just is the sketch of our late monarch.* [1] It is a fine historical picture, discriminating between good and evil, neither trenching upon the sanctity of the grave with false panegyric nor with coarse insult, and drawing from faults, it were vain to deny, a warning, not a reproach.—The "Siamese Twins" came last. We think scant justice has been done to the passages of the Corinthian order of poetry with which it abounds—the splendid address to Earl Grey; the beautiful descriptions of sleep; the noble tribute to Burns; the exquisite single lines, "painting by words," such as hopes
"That colour while they point the goal ;"
or such a description as
"The storm slept dark on the dull sea."
The author says, in the preface to the second edition, "that he would himself rest his fame on 'Milton.'† [2] It would rest on a sure foundation. "Milton" is a noble poem, "a worthy offering to the immortal dead." "The Westminster" has a fine remark on Channing's Essay on Milton: it says—"The spirit of Milton was upon him, and possessed him; and he writes as one constrained to do so by thoughts too fervid, intense, and expansive to be restrained. He speaks as a priest, under the immediate influence of the god at whose altar he was ministering—so should genius be honoured!" We can have nothing to say that will better apply to this poem. We have heard the term satire objected to, as applied to "The Siamese Twins;" we confess it does not belong to the Sunday-newspaper school of satirists, in which real names and nicknames, personality and brutality constitute what is called a powerful article; but if abuse is not the whole of wit, to wit—the keen and the ready—this poem may well lay claim. If Mr. Bulwer wants any thing, it is that innate gaiety, which in a writer, like good spirits in a companion, carries us along with it. Mr. Bulwer's serious satire is more apparent than his more playful vein, simply because the one has, and the other has not, the impress of his own mind. Nothing, especially in poetry, divides opinion more than great originality; readers are at fault when no good old rule is at hand to serve as a guage—and when at a loss, it is always safest to condemn. To be the first to praise requires more self-reliance than the generality of people possess, and the "Siamese Twins" is too different
