all." Nevertheless, there is mournful emphasis in these revelations of mickonaree progress—and too much reason to accept the tenor of his remarks as correct, and to bewail the inapplicability to modern missionaries in general, of Wordsworth's lines—
Rich conquest waits them:—the tempestuous sea
Of Ignorance, that ran so rough and high
These good men humble by a few bare words,
And calm with awe of God's divinity.
For does not even so unexceptionable a pillar of orthodoxy as Sir Archibald Alison, express doubt as to the promise of Missions, in relation to any but European ethnology? affirming, indeed,[1] that had Christianity been adapted to man in his rude and primeval state, it would have been revealed at an earlier period, and would have appeared in the age of Moses, not in that of Cæsar:—a dogmatic assertion, by the way, highly characteristic of the somewhat peremptory baronet, and not very harmonious, either in letter or spirit, with the broad text on which worldwide missionary enterprise is founded, and for which Sir Archibald must surely have an ethnic gloss of his own private interpretation: Πορευθεντες μαθητευσατε παγτα τα ἐθνη.
But to Mr. Melville. And in a new, and not improved aspect. Exit Omoo; enter Mardi. And the cry is, Heu! quantum mutatus ab illo—
Alas, how changed from him.
This vein of Ercles, and this soul of whim—
changed enough to threaten an exeunt omnes of his quondam admirers. The first part of "Mardi" is worthy of its antecedents; but too soon we are hurried whither we would not, and subjected to the caprices, velut ægri somnia, of one who, of malice aforethought,
Delphinum silvis appingit, fluctibus aprum—
the last clause signifying that he bores us with his "sea of troubles," and provokes us to take arms against, and (if possible) by opposing, end them. Yet do some prefer his new shade of marine blue, and exult in this his "sea-change into something rich and strange." And the author of "Nile Notes" defines "Mardi," as a whole, to be unrhymed poetry, rhythmical and measured—the swell of its sentences having a low, lapping cadence, like the dip of the sun-stilled, Pacific waves,—and sometimes the grave music of Bacon's Essays! Thou wert right, O Howadji, to add, "Who but an American could have written them." Alas, Cis-Atlantic criticism compared them to Foote's "What, no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber,"—with the wedding concomitants of the Picninnies and Great Panjandrum and gunpowder-heeled terpsichorics—Foote being, moreover, preferred to Melville, on the score of superiority in sense, diversion, and brevity. Nevertheless, subsequent productions have proved the author of "Mardi" to plume himself on his craze, and love to have it so. And what will he do in the end thereof?
In tone and taste "Redburn" was an improvement upon "Mardi," but was as deficient as the latter was overfraught with romance and adventure. Whether fiction or fact, this narrative of the first voyage of Wel-
- ↑ See "Alison's History of Europe" (New Series), vol. i., p. 74.
