was an unkind cut; but, nevertheless, finding that he, no more than the Danes in former days, could put down an Alfred, quietly continued his subscription under the management of that committee of which he no longer made a part. He was very busy there during the rumpus between Sabine and others, which we mention, merely as an excuse to tell a joke. Hylton Jolliffe, he of the hat, was very active against Sabine; and Tom Murdock, when he heard about the quarrel, said, that it reminded him of his school-boy days, it being a revival of the war between the Sabines and Rum-'uns [Romans]. It is not a bad pun for Murdock.

The puppy tone follows Davy even in his writings, and in his lectures was a perfect bore. We see him continually straining after effect, and anxious to show you that he knows literature, altogether as well as he does chemistry. For instance, what can be more puerile than his turning away to waste an entire page upon the proper mode of forming a Greek name for Iodine. (It is quite evident, en passant, that he knows nothing of Greek). And, in his lectures, though people came to hear chemical facts, they were entertained half their time with passages of his own poetry; the most stupid things conceivablewhich he chaunted forth with unwearied throat, and immeasurable ears gaping for a tribute of applause, at the end of each putrid morceau.

Of his government of the Royal Society, it is not our intention here to speak, having an idea of over-hauling that learned body altogether some fine morning; and we may as well now put an end to our paper. Davy, the gentleman, is a HUMBUG OF THE AGE. If he

would forswear fine clothes, and fine company; if he would give up the notion of being a clever man in genteel society or polite conversation; if he would stick to his own particular profession, every body would rejoice in his talents, tempered, as they then would be, with modesty. As it is, he may believe us when we assure him, that Voltaire's complaint about Congreve is often repeated at his expense. Congreve sunk the author when Voltaire called to see him, and did the gentleman. The Frenchman was displeased, and very justly said, “If Mr. Congreve were no more than a gentleman, he should not have been troubled with my visit." So say we of Davy. If his merit only lay in wearing a green gold-bespangled velvet waistcoat in a blue-stocking party, he would not be troubled with this paper. We should have thought as little about him as we do of one of his nonsensical ship-models, which he keeps floating in stinking salt-water, in Somerset-House, to the great dissatisfaction of the nasal organs in their neighbourhood. The people there call the reservoir in which they are, Numps's pond-we should prefer styling it Davy's locker; and there, or in the more ample reservoir which goes by that name among our tars, might repose, for aught we care, the person of Sir Humphrey the gentleman. would not so easily part with Sir Humprey the chemist, and are not without hopes that this paper will do him some essential service.

We

Farewell then, Mr. P. R. S. Next for a man of note. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the honour of announcing to your consideration, for October, BISHOP, THE Composer.

sonings from our own feelings or our own speculations, must, when applied to savage life, be at best only conjectural; and, in such cases as the present, we always reason from our own Botions, whether we be aware of it or not. -But, however such feelings and opinions originated, we are certain that they are universally diffused, and, of course, must have an equally universal interest and influence, and must give a colouring and a character to all the pursuits and all the modes of thinking which prevail among men. We know, from historical fact, that this is so we know, that, in all ages and nations, the reigning mythology has stamped its character on manners, on government, and on the feelings; and given an aspect of grandeur or of awful mystery to almost every national event, and almost every individual movement,

This is the point where some modern critics of high authority have made their stand, to show that the superstiti ous systems of the heathen world were alone fitted for all the grand and magnificent displays of human superiority in the regions of taste and fancy; while christianity, by dispelling the darkness of superstition, has frozen up and blasted all the fair promises of modern genius, has left the ancients the undisputed masters of every talent and every excellence, and has made it impossible for a modern poet, or a modern painter, to do more than an infant could have done when the ancient mythology reigned in all its glory, and in all the splendid magnificence of its wild and its lofty conceptions.

Now, it is asserted, all this has been swept away by the plain realities of christianity, and the vision of Olympus, and its celestial population of Gods and Demi-Gods, is no more ;-and the rays of their divinity have been bedimmed and darkened by the dazzling light of our religion, and in the blaze, all the fire of genius has also been outshone. For poetry has ceased to come upon us with the fire of its former inspirations; and painting has been tamed down to soberness and reality, and charms us no more with the heavenly freshness which breathed from the canvass of Zeuxis and Apelles; and architecture is now heavy and deformed, and taste

less-a ludicrous and jarring mixture of barbarism and beauty-the result of an impossible effort to conjoin the light, tasteful, and harmonious style of antiquity with the rude, Gothic taste which has now been entailed on genius in every department of the Fine Arts.*

Now, there is no splendid mythology in credit and in belief, from which to derive the machinery of an epic poem or the interest of a drama, no, not even to give fire to an ode, or to cast an elysian air over a pastoral. Now, allegory is for ever destroyed, for the religion on which it rested has vanished from our belief; and the painter or the statuary, who dreams of obtaining fame by allegory, is the dupe of a vision which he can never realize; for nobody will now give a moment's credit to such fictions as pretend to represent the genius of a nation or of a river, or to embody in female forms the virtues or the vices of human nature. The modern painter tries in vain to be great or sublime. He cannot introduce the Gods of antiquity without producing what is tame and uncredited. Christianity curbs and hems him in wherever he tries to advance; and its truths and its realities look coldly and unwelcomely on all his creations of fancy, and blast every vigorous and luxuriant scion of his rising genius.

Now, the architect has no longer to contrive the graceful porticos of a temple, uncontaminated with Gothic arches and Gothic bas-reliefs, and all the trumpery of towers and turrets, and colonnades in solemn mimickry of foresttrees, bedizened with fantastic carvings in wood and stone, and with other symbols of folly and of tastelessness.

Now

the architect must become a mere builder, and must lower his genius to the contrivance of vulgar rows of windows, --which may indeed be useful enough to admit light, but are monstrous corruptions of the simplicity of the ancient temples.+

All this corruption, it is asserted, is plainly chargeable on our religion, which is the very bane of genius-the deadening draught which makes the heart beat languidly,-checks the dance of the spirits, and unfeathers the wing of fancy the instant she tries to ascend or to soar. A man of genius, therefore,