The Heroine

'In Glamorganshire, of a rapid decline, occasioned by the bursting of a blood-vessel, Eaton Stannard Barrett, esq., a native of Ireland, and a student of the Middle Temple. He published "All the Talents", a Poem, 8vo. 1817.--"The Comet", a mock newspaper, 8vo. 1803.--A very pleasing poem intituled "Woman", 8vo. 1810.--"The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina", 3 vols. 12mo, 2d. edit. 1814. This volume is said to abound in wit and humour.'

Very little can now be added to this obituary notice, which appeared in the __ for April, 1820. The young Irishman whose death it records was born at Cork in 1786, received his education chiefly in London, addicted himself to the law, and was early diverted into the profession of letters, which he practised with great energy and versatility. Besides the works mentioned above, he wrote a serio-comic romance called The Rising Sun, and a farcical comedy, full of noise and bustle, called My Wife, What Wife? The choice of this last phrase (sacred, if any words in poetry are sacred) for the title of a rollicking farce indicates a certain bluntness of sensibility in the author. He was young, and fell head over ears in love with cleverness; he was a law-student, and took to political satire as a duck takes to the rain; he was an Irishman, and found himself the master of a happy Irish wit, clean, quick, and dainty, but no ways searching or profound. At the back of all his satire there lies a simple social creed, which he accepts from the middle-class code of his own time, and does not question. The two of his works which achieved something like fame, Woman, a Poem, and The Heroine, here reprinted, set forth that creed, describing the ideal heroine in verse, and warning her, in prose, against the extravagances that so easily beset her. The mode in female character has somewhat changed since George was king, and the pensive coyness set up as a model in the poem seems to a modern reader almost as affected as the vagaries described in the novel. Yet the poem has all the interest and brilliancy of an old fashion-plate. Here is woman as she wished to be in the days of the Regency, or perhaps as man wished her to be, for it is impossible to say which began it. Both gloried in the contrast of their habits. If man, in that age of the prize-ring and the press-gang, was pre-eminently a drinking, swearing, fighting animal, his indelicacy was redeemed by the shrinking graces of his mate.

For woman is not undevelopt man, But diverse:

as the poet of the later nineteenth century sings. But Tennyson was anticipated in this discovery by Mr. Barrett:

Yes, heaven a contrast not unmeet, designed Between the bearded and the blushing kind.

Those who often see the bearded kind clad in overcoats, carrying umbrellas, and timorous of social greetings, may have some difficulty in recognizing the essential truth of the following lines, which describe man in his grandeur, as his blushing consort loves to think of him:

Man, from those moments, when his infant age Cried for the moon, ambitious aims engage, One world subdued, more worlds he wishes given, He piles his impious tower to clamber heaven; Scoops cities under earth; erects his home On mountains of wild surges, vales of foam; Soars air, and high above the thunder runs, Now flaked with sleet, now reddened under suns. Even in his pastime man his soul reveals; Raised with carousing shout, his goblet reels. Now from his chase imperial lions fly, And now he stakes a princedom on a die. What would he more? The consecrated game Of murder must transmit his epic name, Some empire tempts him; at his stern command, An armed cloud hails iron o'er the land. Earth thunders underneath the pondrous tread, Son slaughters sire, the dying stab the dead. The vallies roar, that loved a warbling mood, Their mutilated lilies float on blood; And corpses sicken streams, and towns expire, And colour the nocturnal clouds with fire. Last, vultures pounce upon the finished strife, And dabble in the plash of human life.