—the flagrant vermilion—the flaunting scarlet. Anti-Romanist as he is, he could not help painting the Church as a scarlet lady. Glance with us, reader, in desultory fashion, over some[1] of his ruddy sketches, and judge for yourself his fondness for this hectic pigment—his fiery zeal for "rubric" and red letters—his relish for lightning, sheet or forked, it matters not.
The "Hellas" of Shelley, he tells us, is a "wild, prophetic impromptu, half white foam, and half red fire." The same poet's "Ode to Naples" travels "on storm wings of shadowy fire." Lord Brougham's eye "shines like a sunken pit of fire suddenly disclosed—his arms vibrate like sharp tongues of flame in the blast." Before the view of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," "some great mountain of past crime for ever rears its forked and blood-red peaks." Pollok's "Course of Time" contains lines "memorable, as if written in red characters"—(according to which doctrine, Mr. Gilfillan's books will be very memorable, indeed); and his "descriptions of Hell show a man who had rolled the red idea in the furnace of his mind, till it was rounded into fearful distinctness of shape and symmetry." "The red source of Byron's genius, shut in death, sullenly opens at his (Pollok's) spell, and, dipping his pencil in it, the painter hastily limns him in burning colours." Thrice dear are such lines in Aird and others as describe Galilean demoniacs who already "dwell 'mid horned flames and blasphemy in the red range of hell," and gibbering ghosts, with "fire-curled, cinder-crusted tongues." One of Aird's prose works is "red with fiery and convulsive life," and precious fragments are quoted about "sounding rains of fire that come ever on," and Ambition "lashed with a bigger and redder billow," and Avarice with "its awful Java of fierce, but unregenerating, fire;" while the same poet's "Devil's Dream" provides its delighted expositor with an interminable series of "red sheets of fire," "flakes of flame," "red bewildered maps" of sky-scenery, lakes like a "red and angry plate," "fiery coasts," "salted fires," "crested waves of grizzly gleam," &c. &c. Southey has a "flaming genius"—though a few pages later we are informed, "his genius emits a deep, steady, permanent glow—never those sharp tongues of flame, &c." Robert Hall's "Discourse on War" is pronounced "beautiful, but faint—done in water-colours, when he should have dipped his pencil in blood." Godwin "had not the huge one-glaring orb of a Cyclops, letting in a flood of rushing and furious splendour." "No devouring fire of purpose has hitherto been seen to glare in Sir Bulwer Lytton's eye." But the baronet's Pompeii novel "glows like a cinder from Vesuvius," and depicts "most gorgeously the reelings
- ↑ This mode of treating Mr. Gilfllan's writings is objectionable to his admirers, naturally enough. "Nothing is more easy," says one of them, "than to pick out a few such maculæ, and parade them, as affording a fair specimen of his style." (Palladium, vol. ii.) "His very faults," says another, "on which some minor critics show themselves so large, are often faults which the said critics could not commit." (Brit. Quart. Review, vol. xi.) However, it is tranquillising to reflect on the inevitable innocuousness of aught we can do in this direction; for we are assured, from the same quarter, that "such cheap und petulant criticism will ultimately do harm only to those who are mean enough to indulge in it, - Mr. Gilfillan has taken too high a place in public estimation to be touched by such ill-fledged arrows." Happy man be his dole!
The "elegant extracts" which adorn the text, ut suprà, are culled from the flower-show of his writings in general—including his uncollected contributions to Tait, the Instructor, the Critic, &c.
