LITERARY LEAFLETS.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

No. XXVIII.-MRS. JAMESON'S COMMON-PLACE BOOK.* MRS. JAMESON has long ago secured to herself the certainty of a constant, hearty, and respectful welcome. Her presence is ever felt to be refreshing, elevating, bettering. She humanises and refines the mind -makes us feel the world is too much with us, and allures to a brighter if not always another. Especially in this latest work of hers do we recognise such a spiritualising influence; it is rich in words of wisdom, deeply felt, calmly pondered, and often exquisitely expressed; the beautiful book of a beautiful writer. Within and without, in the spirit and in the letter, by the value of the text and the adornments of letter-press and illustrative designs, it is such a gift-book as may be well called pleasant to the sight, and to be desired to make one wise. Commend us to that sire, as of approved taste and feeling, who should select it, before a host of glittering "annuals," as the gift-book for his heart's darling; and to that bridegroom, as an intelligent man and a deserving, who should put it into the hands and press it on the interest of his betrothed. The external grace and the inward excellence of the volume remind us of what is said of the "virtuous woman, whose price is far above rubies," in the words of King Lemuel, the creed that his mother taught him that she maketh herself clothing of silk and purple,which is good; and, that she openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness,-which is far better. Wisdom, and the law of kindness, are eminently, pre-eminently characteristic of the ethical and critical writings of Mrs. Jameson.

dissent.

Not that this present volume contains nothing, or indeed little, that will be accepted by thinking people, without demur or gainsaying. On the contrary, it is, in page after page, provocative of hesitation and question-frequently of very qualified assent, and sometimes of absolute Mrs. Jameson is a reader of Emerson, and the Westminster and Prospective Reviews, and quotes them with zest, and is a gentle free-thinker on her own account, and quotes her own free-thinkings too. Hers is the common-place book of no common-place woman, but of one naturally and habitually meditative; given to speculate in her quest of wisdom, addicted to guesses at truth, and frank in the expression of the conclusions she has arrived at, or the suggestive queries which are all she can throw out. With this cast of mind, and independence of spirit, it cannot be but that from time to time she should produce results too debatable for her readers to acquiesce in-indeed indolent acquiescence is the last thing she would ask or be grateful for, on the part of those she confers with; and the very fact of suggestiveness implies difference of view in minds differently constituted, or at different stages of progress on the same general route. Mrs. Jameson avers that never, in any one of the many works she has given to the public, has she aspired to teach -"being myself," she says, "a learner in all things;"-and in sending forth this selection of thoughts, memories, and fancies, she professes

* A Common-place Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies, Original and Selected. By Mrs. Jameson. With Illustrations and Etchings. Longman. 1854.

herself guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, sometimes devious enough, of an "inquiring spirit," even by the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way-side. She recognises one way only of doing good in a book "so supremely egotistical and subjective;" namely, that it may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of sympathy and reflection; may excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement; and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind-which hers emphatically is—may suggest far higher and better thoughts to higher and more productive minds. "If I had not the humble hope," she adds, "of such a possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and worldexperience into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must have gone into the fire as the only alternative left." Such is her modest apology, or explanation, in publishing what she seems, sensitive in her respect for her public, to apprehend liable to suspicion, in limine, of book-making "presumptuous or careless." For many years she has been accustomed, we learn, to make a memorandum of any thought which may have come across her-if pen and paper were at hand; and to mark, and remark, any passage in a book which may have excited either a sympathetic or antipathetic feeling. This collection of notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare's Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, &c., "sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown," which, the author hardly knew how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What was she to do, however, with the fragments that remained—Teploσevμata kλaaμaтwv—without beginning, and without end-μητε 'αρχην μητε τελος εχοντα links of a hidden or a broken chain? Unwilling to decide for herself, she resolved to abide by advice of friends; and hinc illa delicia; hence this charming "Common-place Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies"-by a woman of pure and aspiring thoughts, and tender memories, and graceful fancies.

The thirty pages devoted to what she calls "A Revelation of Childhood," will, by many, be considered the most interesting passage in the book. It is a delightsome piece of autobiography, valuable from its psychological character, and the pervading philosophical tone of its brief narrative. It is the seriously indited remonstrance against educational fallacies, abuses, and anomalies, of one who pleads for childhood and reverences its possibilities, of one who deeply feels that we do not sufficiently consider that our life is "not made up of separate parts, but is one-is a progressive whole. When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind." Mrs. Jameson here puts together some recollections of her own child-life, not, she says, because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence, but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many children; many children having at least come under her notice as thriving or suffering from the same or similar unseen causes, even under external conditions and management every way dissimilar. She describes herself as not being "particularly”

anything, as a child, unless "particularly naughty;" and that she gives on the authority of elders who assured her of it twenty times a day, rather than from any conviction of her own: looking back, she is not conscious of having perpetrated more than the usual amount of so-called "mischief" which every lively active child perpetrates between five and ten years old. She had the usual desire to know, and the usual dislike to learn; like her coevals she loved fairy tales, and hated French exercises. But, she goes on to say, “but not of what I learned, but of what I did not learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could not teach me ; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak." Very early memories she thus brings before us, with a sacred freshness and vivid reality; for she can testify, as so many have testified already, that as we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a strange vividness ; a period indeed there is when the overflowing, tumultuous life of our youth rises up between us and those first years" but as the torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never more forget!" She can remember in infancy being sung to sleep, and even the tune which was sung to her, and she begs "blessings on the voice that sang it!" She recals the affliction she endured at six years old from the fear of not being loved where she had attached herself, and from the idea that another was preferred before her-such anguish it was, she says, "as had nearly killed me,”—and which left a deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and one so far salutary, that in afterlife she guarded herself against the approaches of "that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which men call "jealousy," as she would from " tack of cramp or cholera." With a good temper she was endued with the capacity of "strong, deep, silent resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind" the latter a source, for several years, of intense, untold suffering, of which no one but the sufferer was aware: "I was left to settle it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by religious influences they passed over my mind, and did not at the time sink into it, and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either when most wanted." She further represents herself as having had, "like most children," confused ideas about truth, more distinct and absolute ones about honour -to tell a lie was wicked, and, by her infant code of morals, worse than wicked-dishonourable. But she had no compunction about telling fictions, in which practice she disdains "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude," as nothing in comparison to herself. Not naturally obstinate, she records how she was punished as such-whereby hangs a tale, well worth noting for the sake of the moral. An especial cause of childish suffering, again, was fear,-"fear of darkness and supernatural influences"-at first experienced in vague terrors, "haunting, thrilling, stifling"-afterwards in varied form, the most permanent being the ghost in Hamlet, derived from an old engraving: "O that spectre! for three years it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the blessed light had power to exorcise it.” Another grim presence not to be put by, was the figure of Bunyan's Apollyon looming over Christian, also due to an old engraving. And worst of all were "certain phantasms without shape," like the spirit that

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passed before the seer, which stood still, but he could not discern the form thereof, and inarticulate voices, whose burden was the more oppressive because so unintelligible-voices as emphatic in sound as indistinct in utterance. These were the dread accessories of darkness to the imaginative child; the thoughtful woman's account of which will excite sympathetic recollections in many a woman, and man too, and may avail to ward off increase of suffering from many a child. Mr. Leigh Hunt has wisely said that such things are no petty ones to a sensitive child, when relating how himself was the victim of an elder brother's delight to "aggravate"-the big boy taking advantage of the little one's horror of the dark, and (like Mrs. Jameson in this also) of dreadful faces gathered from illustrated books-which brotherly attentions helped largely, he says in his Autobiography, "to morbidise all that was weak in my temperament, and cost me many a bitter night.” By day, Mrs. Jameson describes her little self as having been "not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to defy all power and brave all danger,' provided always the danger could be seen. "She remembers volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only with a little stick; but first she said the Lord's Prayer fervently. "In the ghastly night," she adds, "I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in this way I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and does not encourage the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the evil." In her own case, the power of these midnight terrors vanished gradually before what she calls a more dangerous infatuation-the propensity to reverie: from ten years old to fifteen, she lived a double existence: like Hartley Coleridge with his dreamland Ejuxria, like Thomas de Quincey with his dreamland Gombroon, she imagined new worlds, and peopled them with life, and crowded them with air-castles, and constructed for the denizens a concatenated series of duly developed action and carefully evolved adventures; and this habit of reverie, so systematical, so methodical, grew upon her with such strength, that at times she scarcely took cognisance of outward things and real persons, and, when punished for idleness by solitary confinement, exulted in the sentence as giving thrice-welcome scope for uninterrupted day-dreams. She was always a princess-heroine in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, innocent of tears, of tasks, and of laws,―of caged birds and of tormented kittens. From her earliest days she can remember her delight in the beauties of nature-foiled but not dulled by a much-regretted change of abode from country to town— which intense sense of beauty gave the first zest to poetry-making Thomson's "Seasons" a favourite book before she could yet understand one-half of it-and St. Pierre's "Indian Cottage," and the "Oriental intoxication" of the "Arabian Nights." Shakspeare she had read all through ere she was ten years old, having begun him at seven : the Tem

pest and Cymbeline were the plays she liked, and knew the best. Shakspeare was, indeed, on the forbidden shelf; but the most genial and eloquent of his female commentators-not to throw in, as some will think we might, the worser half of creation-protests once and again, with an emphatic "bless him!" that Shakspeare did her no harm. But of some religious tracts and stories by Hannah More, the loan of a parish clerk, she asserts: "It is most certain that more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all Shakspeare's plays together. Those socalled pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a vulgar religion-the fear of being hanged and the fear of hell became coexistent in my mind." She adds her conviction, that she read the Bible too early, too indiscriminately, and too irreverently; the "letter" of the Scriptures being familiarised to her by sermonising and dogmatising, long before she could enter into the "spirit.' But the histories out of the Bible (the Parables especially) were enchanting to her, though her interpretation of them was, in some instances, the very reverse of correct or orthodox. A tendency to become pert and satirical which showed itself about this age (ten), was happily checked by a good clergyman's seasonable narration of a fine old Eastern fable, which gave wholesome pain to the conscience of the young satirist, and taught her so impressively how easy and vulgar is the habit of sarcasm, and how much nobler it is to be benign and merciful, that she was, by the recoil, "in great danger of falling into the opposite extreme-of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of the corrupt and the repulsive." "Pity," she continues, "a large element in my composition, might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has ever completely righted itself, I am not sure." Nor must we forget to add, as characteristic of the quality of her child-life, her sensibility to music; and how Mrs. Arkwright used to entrance her with her singing, so that the songster's very footfall made the tiny listener tremble with expectant rapture. "But her voice!-it has charmed hundreds since; whom has it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of me-fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of playing these experiments on me. The music of 'Paul and Virginia' was then in vogue, and there was one air—a very simple air— in that opera, which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush out of the room." With her wonted candour, and didactic intent, Mrs. Jameson owns, that she became at last aware that this musical flight was sometimes done to please her parents, or amuse or interest others by the display of such vehement emotion; her infant conscience became perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it: people are not always aware, she remarks-and if a truism, it will stand another reading-of the injury done to children by repeating before them the things they say, or describing the things they do: words and actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and conscious. "I can speak of the injury [thus] done to myself between five and eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious actress-danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other children-but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment excited in my mind." From beginning to (too