THE OLD RULE OF DRINKING. FROM THE GREEK OF EUBULUS. A MAN of sense three cups may take: The seventh-will bring him knock-down blows, A quadruped, on hands and feet; THE MODERN RULE OF DRINKING. A man of sense may take three glasses: What bard would libel number nine? Pray, why not finish the half score? There stands the mighty Magnum sparkling, While all the world is round us darkling. Eleven-one must stop at length Poh! wine is spirit, wit, and strength. Twelve-better still-no man can cozen Life's troubles under the round dozen. Hang counting, when one's health's in question, Here, bumpers! None but men of Gotham Would stop before they reach'd the bottom. ARION. ARION. CONTEMPORARY SPANISH LITERATURE. "BRING in the prisoner!" A TRIAL SCENE. of verity, that the said Don Eugenio de Ochoa is guilty, actor, art and part, of all and each, or one or other of the said crimes, aggravated as aforesaid; in so far as, some time in the year eighteen hundred and forty, at or within the city of Paris, he did edit and publish two volumes of a goodly size, and very insinuating paper and type, bearing the following title, videlicet- Apuntes para una Bibliotheca de Escritores Españoles Contemporaneos, en Prosa y Versasignifying, in our vernacular-" Specimens of Contemporary Spanish Writers, in Prose and Verse"-and other works; and did wilfully and maliciously affix or prefix to each of the specimens a laudatory notice of the contemporary writer thereof, the same being in many instances totally undeserved, and calculated to lead to wrong ideas of the merits of the said contemporary authors-all which, or part thereof, being found proven, by the verdict of an assize, before our right trusty and right well-beloved cousin and counsellor Christopher North, to be holden by him in the Grand Saloon of Number Forty-five, the said Don Eugenio de Ochoa ought to be punished with the heaviest end of the crutch, to deter others from committing the like crimes in all time coming." The accuser then resumed his speech The court had been filled for some time; the oval table in the Grand Saloon covered with black cloth; the contributors ranged round it, according to seniority; and Mr North, sitting in a lofty arm-chair, prepared to dispense justice the crutch being just visible within reach of his Rhadamanthine hand. A space was left at the foot of the table for the accused and his counsel, and expectation was raised to the highest pitch, when the macer again went to the door and shouted, "Bring in the prisoner!" In a few minutes, he walked rather jauntily into the room-a dark, foreign-looking in dividual, smelling strongly of paper cigars, with one or two of the beads of a rosary hanging out of his waistcoat pocket. When the usual preliminaries had been gone through, he answered in a loud voice, when the clerk of the arraigns asked his name, "Don Eugenio de Ochoa." The prosecutor then rose and said, " My lord, I beg that the indictment may be read." The clerk accordingly read as follows:-" Whereas it is humbly meant and complained to us, by our right trusty Hannibal Smith, contritributor to our Magazine, upon Don Eugenio de Ochoa, that, by the laws of this and every well governed realm, the wickedly and ridiculously writing or editing stupid books-the puffing "The character of a nation is the same into sale by advertisements formed by its history, its manners, in newspapers and other vehicles of its religion, and the peculiarities of public delusion, representing the same its soil and climate; and the same to be clever and entertaining, whereas elements which form a national chathey are in reality dull and disgust-racter form also a national literature. ing-more particularly, pretending, in the said books and writings, to give a view of the literature of a great and distinguished nation with which we are in alliance and amity, thereby bringing the literature of the said nation into ridicule and contempt; as also the charging for the said books and writings a sum altogether beyond their value, thereby wasting the substance of our loving lieges, and hurt ful to our (half-) crowns and dignityare all and each, or one or other of them, crimes of a heinous nature, and severely punishable; yet true it is and VOL. L. NO. CCCXII. If this be true, there never was a 2 K rich plains and beside the magnificent were collected and annotated by a rivers of Spain. An architecture German, (Depping;) and it was left arose, rich, varied, romantic. Arts for two Americans to publish lives of were cultivated, science was promoted. Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand But the cross steadily gained ground. and Isabella. But a literature, my lord, Closer and closer the followers of the is not entirely composed of history; Prophet were driven back upon each and we may therefore, in as far as that other. Unity was seen to be strength. noblest branch of it is concerned, reThe Catalan felt himself as much a ceive blandly the confessions of a comSpaniard as the Castilian. Spain patriot of the prisoner, (Lampillas,) became one mighty kingdom, and who gave to his work the modest and vanquished at last, though not dis- appropriate name of Ensayo Histohonoured-long files of Moslem war- rico-apologetico de la Literatura Esriors issued sorrowfully from the pañola.' The religion of Spain would noble towers of Granada, and left a seem at first sight no less adapted to land which they had ruled as masters, foster a national literature than her and would not submit to inhabit as history, if we did not reflect, that subjects, perhaps as slaves. There wherever the Roman Catholic power had been episodes of love and gallantry has been undisputed, it has repressed between the Moorish maidens and the every effort of the human mind. Christian knights-the minstrelsy of Where its dogmas are questioned, the Alhambra was borrowed by the literature revives. But it is impossicourt of Castile. There had been ble for even the Inquisition to banish courteous intercourse between the the effect of the next cause, the domescontending chiefs-the splendour and tic manners, from the literature of a gorgeousness of the Paynim gave a country; and what manners, I would love of show and magnificence to the ask, are so enchanting-so fitted to descendants of the Goth. The people give life to description-to furnish inin humbler ranks of life had made cidents for narrative-as those of the friendships and even alliances with sunny and luxurious south? Are the each other; and when the exiles took dark-eyed girls of Cadiz to furnish no their way to the sea-coast, the triumph aid to literature any more than if they was chiefly confined to the priests, were Hottentots? Why, the very who saw in the destruction of the mantilla itself, that graceful heritage Mahommedan power, a means of rais from the harem of the Almoravides, ing their own. But the Moors left is enough to enrich play writers and more enduring traces behind them novelists for ever with plots and strathan their towers and palaces. The tagems. The masks, still or till lately population had Moorish features worn, were another inexhaustible mine wild flashing eyes, and swarthy of adventures and discoveries; and the brows; there was blood in their veins whole spirit of Spanish society is so that boiled with the heat of African exciting to the imagination, by its exsuns. Proud, brave, and chivalrous, traordinary mixture of more than there is no nobler object than a Spa- European freedom with the remnants nish gentleman of the days of Ferdi- of something very much resembling mand and Isabella. People at that Asiatic seclusion, that dull and unentime began to dream of new worlds dowed with even a fragment of a soul that lay beyond the seaa-lands inter- must be the escritores contemporaneos, minable in extent-boundless in if they do not grow bright and delightriches. They were annexed to the ful under its influence. Have we forcrown of Spain. A French king was gotten how the same circumstances a prisoner in Madrid. The prince of worked upon Cervantes-on LopeSpain-was consort of the queen of on Calderon-on almost all the draEngland. A Spaniard, though the matists, whose plots, absurdly missubject, was also the countryman of placed in rigorous and prosaic Eng the first potentate in the world; and land, have been the stock material of yet, my lord, it is not many years since our stage from Dryden down to the a learned but dry work was published last farce? Read the little stories by Condé on the Dominion of the introduced in that greatest of Epic Arabs in Spain.' The history of Charles Poems, the life of the incomparable the Fifth, and of America, was written knight and thorough gentleman, Don by a Scotchman; the Moorish Ballads Quixote de la Mancha, and you will see what scope there is for writers who have sense and talent enoughit does not need genius-to transfer to their pages the very incidents that are happening every day before their eyes. And now, my Lord Northomitting history, in which they are deficient; omitting religion, in which they are perhaps superabundant, considering its quality; and directing our attention only to what is more properly called literature-what do we find in these two large volumes, pretending to represent the present intellect of Spain, but miserable trash, without the stamp of nationality about it at all-with not even a scene at a bull-fight-but looking marvellously as if it had been written in the Palais Royal, in feeble imitation of some imitator of the French litterateurs. The first volume contains extracts from the works of four-and-twenty authors, all in a row. The first is from an archbishop, the last is from a duke; so that the contributors are from nearly the same exalted stations in life as your own. But I am proud to say, my lord, that none of us would or could have written-nor would you have inserted-nor would the printer have printed-nor the printer's devil have carried-any composition resembling those of the most illustrious lord, Don Felix Amat, archbishop of Palmira, and the most excellent lord, the Duke de Frias; and yet, my lord, if you reflect on the laboriousness of such an extensive and populous diocess, you will be surprised that his ecclesiastical grace has had time to write any thing, except perhaps homilies, like the latter compositions of his right reverend brother the Archbishop of Granada. However, let us pass the grandees, who seem both to be most excellent men, though rather of the hum-drum order, and go at once to some writer on subjects more interesting than the church history of the prelate, or the congratulatory sonnet of the duke, and open the volume at the extracts from Campo Alange-a story called Pamplona y Elizondo". Here the prisoner's counsel rose :"My lord, I object to that- story being read. I confess it is very poor -not much better than Yes and No." "My learned friend pleads guilty am I to understand to the whole charge?" "My learned friend, my lord, will do, of course, as he pleases, when it is his turn to speak. In the mean time, I will not insult your judgment by believing that you will hesitate a moment in finding the prisoner guilty of the offences libelled, especially when even the ingenuity of my learned friend can find no excuse for the extracts I have alluded to, and pleads guilty in the case of every one of the poetasters. What will your lordship say, when I tell you that there is scarcely one of those 'contemporary authors' who does not consider himself a poet. You find Sonnets to the Moon,' and Odes on the deaths of beautiful ladies,' and such small- beer, appended to the prose contributions of almost all-and if I can satisfy your lordship that the individuals whom my learned friend will probably call forward in his defence, were the inditers of the aforesaid odes and sonnets, I trust you will allow them to neutralize any small degree of merit in the prose which the acumen of my learned friend may enable him to find out. But it is not merely the extracts from other authors to which I wish to call your attention. The preliminary notices by the prisoner himself add inconceivably to the stupidity, and therefore the wickedness of the book, and bring him, if I mistake not, within the letter of the law, beyond all hope of pardon or escape. Listen, my lord, to the critical and historical editor of the Litera ture of Spain: - The death of the Earl of Essex, Robert D'Evereux, has been the subject of various tragedies, both English and French. the latter, we may particularly notice one by La Calprenède, which was acted in 1638; and one by Peter Corneille, brother of the great poet of that name, which was published in Of ." 1678. It has also been the argument of a multitude of novels; but as these, no less than the tragedies, are founded on a supposed love between the Earl and Elizabeth of England, they all offend equally against nature and historical truth; for when Elizabeth began to show her favour to Essex, she had attained the respectable age of fifty-eight. Now for the accuracy of this stickler for nature and historical truth: The cause of her favour was sufficiently singular. The old queen was walking one day in the park of one of her palaces, and came to a puddle in which she must have dirtied her feet, if the Earl of Essex had not spread his gold-embroidered cloak over it, by way of a carpet-a stroke of gallantry so exotic and unexampled, that it gained him great approbation; though a tinker of Lavapies, or a gipsy of Triana, would scarcely gain a smile for a similar complaisance-the one from his Dolly and the other from his trull. But in truth, the gallant who, in this Spain of ours, places his cloak on the ground, runs generally no greater risk than that of getting it a little dirty, while in cloudy England the results of a similar politeness might be a good deal more disastrous." "I object to the reading of that passage, my lord; it is in a different work altogether, and not in the volumes named in the libel." "My lord, the accusation is, that the prisoner has published specimens, &c., and other works.' I rest, my lord, on the other works." "Then, my lord, I throw into the other scale Lope de Vega, Calderon, Moratin, and the Romanceros-for all these he has published; and I apprehend I can claim the merit of those illustrious writers, if we are to be arraigned for the defects of any other volumes of the series. My lord, I took it for granted that the issue was joined on the two volumes of the Contemporary Writers." "My lord," continued the prose cutor, "to save further trouble, I withdraw my accusation, so far as the other volumes are concerned, for the present; and restrict my remarks to the 'Specimens,' or even, if it be agreeable to my learned friend, to the first volume of them." "I agree to that arrangement." "Well then, my lord, I contend that, in the first volume, there is a mass of dulness enough for half-a-dozen ; that there are no distinctive features by which to recognize it as Spanish literature, more than any other literature-and that in ushering such a collection of common-places and platitudes into the world, the prisoner has been guilty of a high crime; that he has brought his nation into contempt, and himself-if I succeed in getting you to agitate the crutch-into a pretty considerable scrape. My lord, is it to be believed, that while the whole Peninsula is yet ringing with the shouts of the victims of Badajos and Salamanca, and the last echoes of the retreating Frenchmen shrieking for mercy have scarcely died away from the banks of the Bidassoa, there is not, throughout the volume mention made of Wellington or the English?— throughout the whole volume I have only seen one direct allusion to the tight little Island, and that is in an ode on the battle of Trafalgar." "I give up the poetasters"- me. The author of the ode is considered a first-rate poet, and there are some lines in the poem which are exceedingly good." "I claim the benefit of that admission." "With this observation tacked to it, that they make the rest of the performance more stupid and dull; and that the goodness I granted is not positive goodness, but relative merely to the rest of the lines." "The words were, 'there are some lines in the poem which are exceedingly good.'-My lord, it will not do to fritter away that concession." "The lines are good then-for a Spaniard on such a subject as Trafal gar. Let us hear how he speaks of " "My lord, I am content to receive the verdict of my learned friend on some of the lines; granting, if he is so inclined, that the others are not so good." "Execrable!-What can be worse than addresses to Clio, and Mars, and Bellona ? Harsh-voiced Bellona's iron cry When on all sides, before his eyes, |