"The scull was of so remarkable a conformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual, as well as its worse physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined _palace of the mind_. Still, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, the traveller may survey that _airy hall_, within whose cunning galleries and elaborate chambers, once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul of Arbaces the Egyptian!"
But Byron said, long ago, in Childe Harold, when gazing on a skull:
"Yes, this was once ambition's _airy hall_, The dome of thought, _the palace of the soul_," etc.
And, once more, the fashionable Pelham moralizes: "and as the Earth from the Sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, _which is the smile upon the face of God_."[12] This he italicises as one of his most wondrous original reflections--yet it may be found in the Diary of a Physician.[13]
[Footnote 13: In the story called 'A Young Man about Town,' we think.]
Mr. Bulwer is particularly conceited and arrogant with respect to his subject. He asserts that all others have failed in attempting to describe the destruction of Pompeii, and that, therefore, he will stand alone, the intellectual monarch of the Ruins. The candid and modest and original gentleman probably forgot 'Valerius' and Croly and Milman and Dr. Gray and ourself; but the productions of such persons can be of little consequence to such a Paul Clifford in letters and Mirabeau in morals.
Mr. Bulwer, likewise, is ostentatious of his learning, and he quotes from ancient authors with an air of infinite self-complacency, though his citations had been conveniently collected, a _century_ since, in the Archæologia Græca of Archbishop Potter! These volumes now lie before us, and there may all his erudition be found within a very accessible compass. His theological knowledge or deistical design, we know not which, is not more profound or canonical; for he makes his Christian Olinthus say, that "eighty years ago," that is from the birth of Christ, "there was no assurance to man of God or of a certain or definite future beyond the grave"!!
We have now done with Mr. Bulwer, his immoralities, and his plagiarisms. We have sought to be very brief in our exposition, and, for the first time that we ever expressed such a desire, we request the literary periodicals, with which we exchange, to reprint this article.