nounced brilliant, profound, fascinating, or what not, and is never asked that most important question, the answer to which can alone determine his right to be an author at all, Do you mean any thing? No distinction is made between bookwrights who write because they choose, and those who write because they were born to that precise avocation and no other. If a book be merely the safety-valve for that superfluous activity which might have found an equally satisfactory outlet in the manufacture of a shoe, it is no book at all, and no criticism, how liberal soever, can make it any thing other than so many pages of printed paper. The truth is, that the phrase liberal criticism is purely a misnomer. There can be no such thing, any more than there can be a liberal inch or a liberal ell. Nor, on the other hand, can there, in strict definition, be such a thing as illiberal criticism. If it incline either way from rigid justice, it is either eulogy or detraction. We might as truly call that a balance where short measure is made full by a thread run through the counter. Criticism is the unbiased application of certain well-defined and self-existent principles of judgment, and the first question to be put to a book is, whether it satisfies any want of the time, or, better still, any want of human nature which knows no time, or whether it were honestly intended so to do. They who cry out for liberal criticism are like those worthy Poundtexts who went about proclaiming the accession of King Jesus when they were really only the unconscious heralds of King Log, they, of course, forming the cabinet. Cromwell saw their drift better than they did themselves, and quietly suppressed them before they had a chance to suppress every thing else. For our own part, we cannot see any use that is to be answered by such books as Tancred. It is as dumb as the poor choked hunchback in the Arabian Nights, when we ask it what its business is. There are no characters in it. There is no dramatic interest, none of plot or incident. Dickens, with his many and egregious faults of style, his mannerisms, and his sometimes intolerable descriptive passages, is yet clearly enough a great genius, a something necessary to the world, and the figures upon his canvas are such as Emerson has aptly termed representative, the types of classes, and no truer in London than in Boston. Mr. D'Israeli, when he undertakes to draw a character, sketches some individual whom he happens to like or dislike, and who is no otherwise an individual than by the mere accident of being an actually living person, who has a name on the door in some street or other, who eats, drinks, and like the rest of us is subject to death and bores. For example, we perceive that Mr. Vavasour is intended for Mr. R. M. Milnes, an excellent person and no mean poet, but in no way so peculiar and distinct that this sketch of him presents any definite image, except to those who chance to know the individual intended. In Tancred there are one or two excellent landscapes, and some detached thoughts worth remembering. There are a vast many girds at Sir Robert Peel, who, after all is said, has shown himself capable of one thing beyond Mr. D'Israeli's reach, success, which always gives a man some hold or other, however questionable, upon posterity, and arms him in mail of proof against sarcasm. Mr. D'Israeli uses him as a militia company sometimes serve an unpopular politician. He sets up a rude likeness of him for a practising target; but, no matter how many balls may perforate the wooden caricature, its original still walks about unharmed, and with whatever capacity a politician has for enjoying life undiminished. We are introduced to some Arabs who talk very much in the style of Mr. Cooper's red men. It seems to be a peculiarity of savages (if we may say it without derogating from the claims of civilization), to utter a variety of nothings in a very grave and sententious way. These, at least, are as solemn and as stupid as allegories on the banks of the Nile, or anywhere else. One of them recites a poem which we fancy will never be translated to a place among the Moâllakát. But we cannot undertake to give a sketch of the principal events in Tancred. Such attempts result usually in something like the good monk's epitome of Homer in the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum. In this particular case, whenever we attempt to call up an individual impression of the book, our memory presents us with nothing but a painfully defiant blur. Moralists tell us, that every man is bound to sustain his share in the weight of the world's sorrows and trials, and we honestly feel as if we had done our part by reading Tancred. If our readers have faithfully got to the end of our article, we cry quits. By MRS. BUTLER, New York: Wiley & Putnam. ART. IX. A Year of Consolation. THE invention of that modern figure in the dance of life, the grand tour, of which the trip to Rome is an aliquot part, has wrought a total change in the condition and character of Italy. The annual migration of birds of every feather to the banks of the Tiber, who return to caw, croak, or chatter about the Seven Hills or the Carnival, has reduced that ill-used country to the level of a fashionable watering-place. The classical enthusiasm which which we once hung on the reports of those favored pilgrims, who in their own flesh and blood had stood under the dome of St. Peter's, or climbed the sides of the Coliseum, has long since evaporated; and the journals of travellers in Italy are taken up and laid aside with as little concern as the last trip to Bath, or bulletin from Saratoga. "Nota magis nulli domus est sua, quam mihi lucus In fact, Italy has been most mercilessly rummaged and ransacked. Not a brook, a glen, or a ruin, not a rite, a pageant, or a saint, not a picture, a column, or a symphony, that has not first been plucked in a hand-book, and then hashed to death, and after death, in what is bitterly called a descriptive style. "That which the palmer-worm hath left, hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten." That the caterpillar has left something for a future grub, we have no doubt; for Rome is eternal, and so is human vanity. Human vanity will doubtless have its way, as it always has done. We, at least, will not presume to quarrel with it. It is as omnipresent as dust; and to attempt to lay it by beating it is unphilosophical. If Italy has become fashionable, the more 's the pity; but what will you do about it? Submit, in the first place; and then modestly propose a compromise. Cockneys, parvenus, and amateurs are as necessary a part, we admit, of the human, as wasps, moths, and musquitos of the insect creation. They must unquestionably enlighten the sphere they move in; else how should it be illuminated? We would only, in the most respectful terms, advise them not to be too lavish of their tapers. If, instead of burning daylight, they will stick to their own firmament, their importance will be none the less apparent, and they can settle the matter amicably with the sun, moon, and stars. Prudent fireflies are noted for keeping proper hours. In a word, we go for a just division of labor. Let the great wits take the great topics, and the little wits take the little topics. Scholarship and taste will be fully satisfied with a quiet corner in this ample field, and flippancy and coxcombry can stray at large over the rest. Under such an arrangement it will cease to be necessary that what has been reverently approached by an Addison or a Goethe should be pertly handled by some conceited spark, who treats Italy as his debtor, and offers Vesuvius an opportunity to smoke in his journal " one day more." He might still dive, we care not how deep, into the mysteries of the Carnival; but he would spare us the recital of his impressions and emotions in the Sistine Chapel or the Forum. All this, we are well aware, is stale and musty. Travelling is no longer what it was; it has caught the subjective tendency of the age. Every body knows about Rome; that is brute knowledge; to make it human, we want revelations of feeling. Rome is the city of the soul. Mere description is topographical, physical, sensuous; feeling is universal, infinite, spiritual. Hence the punctilious minuteness with which the universe is informed, that, on such an hour of such a morning, such a fountain imbibed the tribute of Laura Matilda's tear; hence the dying cadences in which Amanda Malvina celebrates her swoon at the first sight of a genuine Etruscan vase; and hence the guardian care with which certain watery stanzas, the fruit of an ill-omened drive on the Campagna, are rescued from the oblivious recesses of Fanny's portfolio. All these seductions do not wean us from our antiquated heresy. When feeling for all mankind' comes to mean feeling that all mankind may know it,' we are superannuated enough to suspect that here also ignorance may be bliss; and so unchristian, too, as to call to mind the moral to the fable of the chariot and the fly. The enigmatical and somewhat affected title of Mrs. Butler's volumes does her injustice. In the phrase, "A Year of Consolation," there is a threat of those gratuitous confidences and revelations, which may be endurable, and even precious, from great men or from characters endeared to us by peculiar ties; but which under other conditions are obtrusive and burdensome. It is in the dialect of that communicative grief which bares its wounds indifferently to the gaze of any one who will pay his paltry dollar for the sight. It savors of the cant of those self-centred tourists in whose inmost souls, as at the gilt pillar in the ancient Forum, all the roads of Italy terminate. Mrs. Butler might have dispensed with an alias for her book. The plain words, Travels in Italy," may have, naturally enough, grown somewhat unmarketable; but they suggest a definite subject; whereas "A Year of Consolation" is as blind as "A Year of Life"; and there is enough in the volumes before us to save them from the fate of the common herd of travels. The book would, indeed, have lost nothing by the suppression of certain dark allusions to private griefs, capriciously interpolated, for the most part in a metrical form, and scarcely intelligible without a biographical commentary. On the 20th of December, 1845, Mrs. Butler, accompanied only by one female attendant, left Southampton for Rome. On her arrival at Paris, instead of following the main road to Lyons, she took a cross route through Nevers to Chalons-sur-Saone, which had been recommended to her by some friend who had tried it in summer. In midwinter she found it extremely inconvenient, and considerably obstructed by a heavy fall of snow. She seems to have made the most of these scanty materials, and, having been thoroughly frightened, slightly quizzed, and roundly cheated, has worked up her sufferings into a melodramatic romance. The whole account is sufficiently amusing,-partly, it must be confessed, at the author's expense. The extravagant air with which these opening pages are turned off is rather ominous for the simplicity of the rest of the book; but it may be intentional, as it certainly affords some scope for the exercise of powers of description, which Mrs. Butler possesses in no ordinary degree. Nothing escapes her vigilant eye, which is as keen to detect personal peculiarities as to note the beauty of natural scenery. To a quick sense of the ridiculous she joins also a humane interest in the condition of her fellow-men. If to this we must add, among |