Qui fait qu'à son mérite incessamment i] rit,
Qu'il se sait si bon gré de tout ce qu'il écrit.[1]
Furthermore, he is himself forward to justify critical censure, when there is a call for it: meeting the remark of Lord Cockburn’s reviewer in the Eclectic, that it would not be graceful to point out the blemishes of the "Life of Jeffrey," by this elegant reply: "That is, you walk along Prince's-street, you see a gentleman whose coat has been torn, and, saying to yourself it would not be graceful to apprise him of such a vulgar accident, you pass forward, and allow the poor fellow to go on amid a general grin till he reaches the North Bridge." Upon this hint, we speak—albeit hopeless of persuading Mr. George Gilfillan that his black coat has an unseemly rent in it, and is in fact a coat of too many colours. To him it is a Joseph's coat, for he has dreamed Joseph's dreams, and seen his brethren bowing down to him, and is entirely persuaded that the ὀναρ ἐστι Διος.
But who is Mr. Gilfillan, now interjects a hitherto patient and much-enduring reader; who is he, and what has he written to deserve all this fuss? His début, then, was in the part of a painter of "Literary Portraits"—of which he has thrown open to the public two "Galleries"—many of the heads being finished off with no little cleverness and originality, but nearly all marred by grotesque touches and queer "effects." The intensely complacent air of the artist gives him, all the while, the look of a charlatan; and we seem to hear him commenting on his labours in the language of Mascarille, "Les portraits sont difficiles, et demandent un esprit profond: vous en verrez de ma manière qui ne vous déplairont pas."[2] More recently, he has produced what he calls a "prose poem," under the title of the "The Bards of the Bible," and which is a tesselated mass of almost beauties and downright absurdities. Sometimes he gives you a paragraph of daring and dashing eloquence; but it either limps off with a lame and impotent conclusion, or is succeeded by some monstrous amalgam of crude conceit and exaggerated diction. Speaking for ourselves, we find little in this book, that is calculated to deepen our reverence for the sacred oracles of which it treats:
Ακουε τἀνδρος τοῡδε, καὶ σκοπει κλυων
Τα σεμν᾿ ἱν᾽ ἡκει τοῡ θεοῠ μαντευματα.[3]
To the periodical press of the day, Mr. Gilfillan is also a liberal contributor; his name and style being familiar to the readers of the British Quarterly Review, the Eclectic, the Critic, Hogg's Instructor, &c. He has also given notice that he is at present engaged on a history of the Scotch Covenanters; and has occasionally thrown out a hint of his design to perpetrate a novel in Longfellow's style, or an allegory in his own.
He is here presented as a mature specimen of the "splendid" writer—a class especially in demand among half-educated and fanatical dabblers in literature, who crave stimulants and excitement in the pulpit and the
- ↑ Molière: "Les Femmes Savantes."
- ↑ "Les Précieuses Ridicules." And our Mascarille, too, has, here and there, his Madelon to exclaim, "Je vous avoue que je suis furieusement pour les portraits: je ne vois rien de si galant que cela." (Scene X.)
- ↑ "Œdip. Tyran." 951–2.
