of that fiery drunkard.” Byron's "very contempt is molten; his tears of laughter, as well as of misery, fall in burning showers." Carlyle's conversation "is a river of lava, red, right onward, and irresistible." Over Macaulay, writing in the War-office the Roman Lyrics, "the Genius of Battle might be figured bending, and shedding, from her wings a ruddy light upon his rapidly and furiously-filling page." To Tennyson, poetry "is not a morning flush in the sky of youth," but "it is a consuming and imperishable fire"—"it is fact on fire." John Sterling's genius "dances on a brilliant and shapeless fire-mist." Under Wordsworth's "steadfast look," Windermere "has kindled into a new lustre—like a red western heaven glorifying its waters." Of Alison's Sermons, "few burning embers cling to our memories or our hearts." (Evidently Mr. Gilfillan has no horror of heart-burn,) The historian who wishes to be read, and to "send down a shrill from his red-margined page into the future," must write worthily of revolutionists. Marat was a scarecrow, "with inflamed noddle, and small, keen, bloodshot eyes." Danton's "blasphemies were sublime as those heard in the trance of Sicilian seer, belched up from fallen giants through the smoke of Ætna, or like those which made the 'burning marl' and the 'fiery gulph' quake and recoil in fear,"—and Danton "did not dabble in blood," but only made "one fierce and rapid irruption into the neighbourhood of the 'Red Sea,' and returned sick and shuddering therefrom." The Hebrew prophet's "dark eye swam …. with the light of the divine afflatus,"—he was "a meteor kindled at the eye, and blown on the breath, of the Eternal"—and the "fury of God glared in his eye." David, "firmly, with his blood-red hand, grasps the Book of the Law of God." "The stone-tables provided by Moses, "received and cooled the red-dropping syllables of the fiery Law."
Almost equal is our author's attachment to such words as "shriek," "scream," "sob," "gasp," and all their kith and kin. Shelley discusses a point in Plato, under the twilight trees, "with far-heard shrieking voice"—and runs to his friend Hogg at Oxford, "shrieking out with clasped hands, and streaming eyes, 'I am expelled!'"—and is habitually fast and fervid in conversation, "shrieking out his winged words." Coleridge's verse combines "the softness of the breeze—the shriek of the rising gale." The author of "Satan," "rushes up, at first, with screams of ambitious agony." Lord Brougham's voice is "now exalted to a harrowing shriek, and now sunk to a rasping and terrible whisper." Towards the close of his career, Byron's "wild shrieking earnestness subsided into Epicurean derision." The same noble lord was a Laocoon, "covered from head to foot with snakes of supernal vengeance, bearing their burden with deep agonised silence, starting and shrieking upon the application of a thorn, which the hand of some puny passing malignant had thrust into his foot." King Lear "shrieks up questions to the heavens, which make the gloomy curtains of night to shiver."
As specimens of Mr. Gilfillan's lawless taste, in ambitious passages, take the following. Hamlet is said to "dance on his wild erratic way to his uncle's death," and that uncle to "hiccup aphorisms." "The great dramatist has used Hamlet as Turpin did Black Bess—he has drenched him with the wine of demi-derangement, and thus accomplished his perilous ride." "Strauss is a great blockhead—the last stench of the infidel spirit." In his Astronomical Discourses, Dr. Chalmers "now drifts across the red light of Mars …. now bespeaks the wild comet,
