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and so forth, I always continued to pay her a visit now and then, and see how her affairs were going on. Indeed, there were few months that I did not see her, although I am sure her talk was very wearisome. Her daughter, that has been out of the country, was sent for when her end was supposed to be near; for the old body was quite sensible of her state, and knew she could not last above a month or two, and indeed gave directions about her funeral, and desired to be interred in her old blue gown in which she had been married. She was buried in the church-yard, in the same grave with old Maggie Reekie, her cousin; and the principal mourner was one Hughie, who had lived in her house for some time, and was supposed to be privately married to her. The old woman's character suffered greatly at one time in consequence of her connexion with this man, but dead dogs are all good. Some old people of the parish lament the mistress; such as old Adam, he that was once the principal lawyer of these parts, Mrs P., also long Bob the witty writer in South-side, who is supposed to have been familiar with her in her youth; he wears a crape on his hat ever since. Your Lordship's principal tenant, Frank, took no concern in the matter, and would not even allow the old woman a single drop of wine from his cellar, to keep soul and body together. Notice was taken of her death in a very indifferent discourse preached by a dominie from the Border, who has paid great attention to her daughter since she came; as also, surly James Horn in Roseside. These two had a farm held at will from a laird over the glen, but he turned them out, being incapable. Both of them are much with her, but people say she will not marry either of them, although I hear it whispered she is thicker than she should be with both; as also with some others, particularly Hughie (which shocks every body that reflects on the footing he was on with her mother). Indeed, if all be true that is said, there is scarcely a shabby sort of fellow in the country-side but what she draws up with. She is said to keep company with cheeping Charlie; but this must be mere reports. In the mean time she has dropt her mother's name, and passes by the name of Reekie, which

she thinks more genteel, in consequence of some bit heritage to which it is not certain whether she have much title. I take the liberty of writing your Lordship these few lines, merely to put your Lordship on your guard against granting this ill-behaved young woman any renewal of the tack, which I hear expires in two years. At least, your Lordship should insist on her parting with the Dominie and James Horn, which are a disgrace to any respectable person to be seen with, and to see if she cannot get herself married upon some decent young man of your Lordship's tenantry, who will endeavour to improve the farm, which seems to be as yet in the same old-fashioned state that the old woman had always been used to. Your Lordship will see that I have no motive in all this but merely your Lordship's interest, and a regard for the family; with kind compliments to Mr Fyfe and Mr Shaw, and all inquiring friends, I remain, till death, your Lordship's obedient servant, and friend at command,

DANDIE DINMONT.

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM IN GERMANY.

MR EDITOR,

The first section of the work on Animal Magnetism, to which I have referred in your last Number, after some general reflections on Animal Magnetism, and on the Organic Ether, by Professor Eschenmayer, contains an account of a remarkable prophecy of the death of an eminent person, by two somnambulists, which was fulfilled in the end of October 1816. Professor Eschenmayer, who communicates this account, pledges himself for its truth, having himself received the particulars of it from persons of the highest rank and respectability. The names of all the witnesses, and of the person whose death is prophesied, are given in initials; but it is declared, that any one desirous of more particular information respecting them may without difficulty obtain it.

Mademoiselle W. (a celebrated somnambulist mentioned in Hufeland's Journal, in an account given by the court physician, Klein) prophesied in 1812, on the 12th of July, in the

presence of the court physician, Kl-, and three other persons of distinction, that S. M. would die in the year 1816, between the 18th and 20th of April, in an uncommon manner. The somnambulist at the same time enjoined all present to preserve the strictest silence, as the smallest indiscretion would subject her and them to very unpleasant consequences: she, in particular, would be regarded as insane. Mademoiselle W. had often said, that none of her prophecies ought to be regarded as positive, till she had confirmed them in her next crisis. On this account her divinations were always made the subject of inquiry during the succeeding paroxysm. Accordingly, when the question regarding the fulfilment of this prediction was put to her, in a crisis, the date of which has been forgotten, she replied, that the year of the death was determined, but that she might have erred in the month. This prophecy was imparted but to a few friends. The period of its fulfilment was very distant, and other circumstances required silence. Professor Eschenmayer had heard of it as a dark saying; but at that time he had no belief in such gifts of divination, and no desire to make more minute inquiries. Three years after this, a second somnambulist predicted the same event; and not only was the year and the month foretold, but also the day of the death pointedly fixed. It was in April 1816 that the Professor heard from a friend the particular details of both the first and second predictions; but he could give no credit to such extraordinary phenomena. He had indeed written a treatise upon Animal Magnetism, and endeavoured therein to explain, upon physical principles, the universal appearances of the soul, which seem to render us independent of time and space; but such a power of divination, which, without acknowledging the influence of a higher world, appears incomprehensible, exceeded his belief.

On the 17th of April 1816, Kr-, a somnambulist magnetised by Dr N. prophesied, in presence of the court physician, Kl-, Dr N. and Professor L-t, that S. M. would die in that year, in the month of October. Many important bets were lost and won on this subject; but how exactly every thing came to pass in the end of October 1816, those who are acquainted with the event do not require to be

told. In the first prophecy it is particularly mentioned that Mademoiselle W. said to Dr Kl-, that he should be sent for before the death; and this in reality took place.

"This is the fact," says Eschenmayer, "and nothing but the fact ;let they who please exercise upon it their cold scepticism or their amusing ridicule. They are both alike unworthy of regard, and I meet them with the motto from Hufeland and Stieglits,

"Factum infectum fieri nequit.'

This one resource still remains: It was all Chance. Miserable evasion!"

The third communication in this section of the Archives is by Professor Nasse, and contains an account of a case which, in the Professor's opinion, points out a relation of the Animal Magnetism hitherto unobserved. It is entitled, "The Dependence which a dying Person who has been magnetised has on the Magnetiser."

Professor Nasse was called to the assistance of the wife of Mr Zimmermann in Bielefeld, who was dying of consumption. All the usual remedies had been tried in vain, and Dr Nasse proposed animal magnetism.

Zimmermann, who was sincerely attached to his wife, undertook the manipulation himself. At first it had the usual effect of producing sleep, and a few incoherent words were uttered during the crisis; but after it had been continued twenty-four days, the patient shewed no symptoms of amendment.

At the commencement, the Magnetism had made her more cheerful; but now she became very peevish and suspicious; and her husband confessed candidly to Dr Nasse, that he doubted much that the change in his wife's temper and behaviour had made him lose the lively interest he had at first felt for her recovery. As there were evident proofs of mutual dislike, Dr Nasse thought it advisable that Zimmermann should give up the manipulation; but there was no one the Doctor knew, who was sufficiently interested in the patient to carry it on. She continued to grow worse every day, and her strength was quite exhausted. About a week after the discontinuance of the Animal Magnetism, the hour of death approached; but there occurred at the same time this remarkable phenomenon, that the patient could not die. Dr Nasse had

often sat beside the dying, watching the eventful moment of death; but he had never witnessed so tedious a departure as in this patient. For two days life and death struggled together. Often she lay surrounded by her friends, pale and breathless, and life, to all appearance, entirely extinguished; when suddenly she would open her eyes, look up, breathe more strongly, and seem again recalled to existence. This happened so repeatedly, that Dr Nasse, who at first had considered it as perhaps depending on the state of the lungs of the patient, became more attentive and anxious to find out the cause of so singular a circumstance. To his astonishment, he discovered that the sudden recall to life never failed to take place every time the patient's husband entered the room; and as soon as he left it, she again sank down pale and exhausted. This was so remarkable, that it did not escape her husband's observation, and he was very desirous to renew the magnetical operations. But Dr Nasse thought it improper to continue it to the very brink of the grave; and therefore Mr Zimmermann, yielding to the arguments and persuasions of Dr Nasse, quitted the room for a considerable time, and permitted his wife to depart in peace.

The communication which precedes this, by Nasse, is an account, by Dr Tritschler of Cannstadt, of a boy of thirteen years of age, cured in an astonishing manner by Animal Magnetism. But as this case is given at great length, I shall reserve the abridgement of it for your next Number. In the mean time, I leave your readers to make their own comments on the short specimens of magnetical prophecy and physic, which have now been given. G.

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whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called THE LAKE SCHOOL, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of THE COCKNEY SCHOOL. Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects. He is a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr Hoole. As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done. He has never read Zaïre nor Phedre. To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, Mr Hunt is an absolute stranger. Of Spanish books he has read Don Quixote (in the translation of Motteux), and some poems of Lope de Vega in the imitations of my Lord Holland. Of all the great critical writers, either of ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant, excepting only Mr Jeffrey among ourselves.

With this stock of knowledge, Mr Hunt presumes to become the founder of a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the chance which he might have had of gaining some true poetical fame, had he been less lofty in his pretensions. The story of Rimini is not wholly undeserving of praise. It possesses some tolerable passages, which are all quoted in the Edinburgh Reviewer's account of the poem, and not one of which is quoted in the very illiberal attack upon it in the Quarterly. But such is the wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed, that most certainly

no

and patriotic feeling, have no place in his writings. His religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphemies of the Encyclopaedie-his patriotism a crude, vague, ineffectual, and sour Jacobinism. His works exhibit no reverence either for God or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes. He speaks well of nobody but two or three great dead poets, and in so speaking of them he does well; but, alas! Mr Hunt is no conjurer

man who reads it once will ever be able to prevail upon himself to read it again. One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawingroom of a little mincing boardingschool mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house. Every thing is pretence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness. The beaux are attorneys' apprentices, with chapeau bras & λaveaves. He pretends, indeed, and Limerick gloves-fiddlers, harpteachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizens' wives. The company are entertained with lukewarm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano-forte.

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All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; but Mr Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits. He is the ideal of a Cockney Poet. He raves perpetually about "green fields," "jaunty streams,' and " o'er-arching leafiness," exactly as a Cheapside shop-keeper does about the beauties of his box on the Camberwell road. Mr Hunt is altogether unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes-till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different "high views" which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties, at which he has assisted in the neighbourhood of London. His books are indeed not known in the country; his fame as a poet (and I might almost say, as a politician too,) is entirely confined to the young attorneys and embryo-barristers about town. In the opinion of these competent judges, London is the world-and Hunt is a Homer.

Mr Hunt is not disqualified by his ignorance and vulgarity alone, for being the founder of a respectable sect in poetry. He labours under the burden of a sin more deadly than either of these. The two great elements of all dignified poetry, religious feeling,

to be an admirer of Spenser and
Chaucer, but what he praises in them
is never what is most deserving of
praise-it is only that which he hum-
bly conceives bears some resemblance
to the more perfect productions of Mr.
Leigh Hunt; and we can always dis-
cover, in the midst of his most violent
ravings about the Court of Elizabeth,
and the days of Sir Philip Sidney, and
the Fairy Queen-that the real objects
of his admiration are the Coterie of
Hampstead and the Editor of the Ex-
aminer. When he talks about chi-
valry and King Arthur, he is always
thinking of himself, and "a small
party of friends, who meet once a-week
at a Round Table, to discuss the merits
of a leg of mutton, and of the subjects
upon which we are to write."-Mr
Leigh Hunt's ideas concerning the su-
blime, and concerning his own powers,
bear a considerable resemblance to
those of his friend Bottom, the weaver,
on the same subjects;
"I will roar,
that it shall do any man's heart good
to hear me."-" I will roar you an
'twere any nightingale."

The poetry of Mr Hunt is such as might be expected from the personal character and habits of its author. As a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel-in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand. He has been allowed to look for a moment from the antichamber into the saloon, and mistaken the waving of feathers and the painted floor for the sine qua non's of elegant society. He would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-coloured silkstockings. He sticks an artificial rosebud into his button hole in the midst of winter. He wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the Prints of Petrarch. In his verses

he is always desirous of being airy, graceful, easy, courtly, and ITALIAN. If he had the smallest acquaintance with the great demi-gods of Italian poetry, he could never fancy that the style in which he writes, bears any, even the most remote, resemblance to the severe and simple manner of Dante -the tender stillness of the lover of Laura-or the sprightly and good-natured unconscious elegance of the inimitable Ariosto. He has gone into a strange delusion about himself, and is just as absurd in supposing that he resembles the Italian Poets, as a greater Quack still (Mr Coleridge) is, in imagining that he is a Philosopher after the manner of Kant or Mendelshonand that "the eye of Lessing bears a remarkable likeness to MINE," i. e. the eye of Mr Samuel Coleridge.*

*

The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets. How could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the surface of Mr Hunt's Hippocrene? His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl. Some excuse for her there might have been, had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition. Surely they who are connected with Mr Hunt by the tender relations of society, have good reason to complain that his muse should have been so prostituted. In Rimini a deadly wound is aimed at the dearest confidences of domestic bliss. The author has voluntarily chosen-a subject not of simple seduction alone one in which his mind seems absolutely to gloat over all the details of adultery and incest.

The unhealthy and jaundiced medium through which the Founder of

* Mr Wordsworth (meaning, we presume, to pay Mr Coleridge a compliment,) makes him look very absurdly,

"A noticeable man, with large grey eyes."

the Cockney School views every thing like moral truth, is apparent, not only from his obscenity, but also from his want of respect for all that numerous class of plain upright men, and unpretending women, in which the real worth and excellence of human society consists. Every man is, according to Mr Hunt, a dull potato-eating blockhead-of no greater value to God or man than any ox or drayhorse-who is not an admirer of Voltaire's romans, a worshipper of Lord Holland and Mr Haydon, and a quoter of John Buncle and Chaucer's Flower and Leaf. Every woman is useful only as a breeding machine, unless she is fond of reading Launcelot of the Lake, in an antique summer-house.

How such an indelicate writer as Mr Hunt can pretend to be an admirer of Mr Wordsworth, is to us a thing altogether inexplicable. One great charm of Wordsworth's noble compositions consists in the dignified purity of thought, and the patriarchal simplicity of feeling, with which they are throughout penetrated and imbued.

We can conceive a vicious man admiring with distant awe the spectacle of virtue and purity; but if he does so sincerely, he must also do so with the profoundest feeling of the error of his own ways, and the resolution to amend them. His admiration must be humble and silent, not pert and loquacious. Mr Hunt praises the purity of Wordsworth as if he himself were pure, his dignity as if he also were dignified. He is always like the ball of Dung in the fable, pleasing himself, and amusing bye-standers with his " nos poma natamus.' For the person who writes Rimini, to admire the Excursion, is just as impossible as it would be for a Chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or a gilder of tea-cups, to burst into tears at the sight of the Theseus or the Torso.

The Founder of the Cockney School would fain claim poetical kindred with Lord Byron and Thomas Moore. Such a connexion would be as unsuitable for them as for William Wordsworth. The days of Mr Moore's follies are long since over; and, as he is a thorough gentleman, he must necessarily entertain the greatest contempt for such an under-bred person as Mr Leigh Hunt. But Lord Byron! How must the haughty spirit of

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