utterance in general, and verse in particular, naturally demands short poems, it being impossible that a feeling so intense as to require a more rhythmical cadence than that of eloquent prose, should sustain itself at its highest elevation for long together: and we are persuaded that, except in the ages when the absence of written books occasioned all things to be thrown into verse for facility of memory, or in those other ages in which writing in verse may happen to be a fashion, a long poem will always be felt to be something unnatural and hollow; something which it requires the genius of a Homer, a Dante, or a Milton, to induce posterity to read, or at least to read through.

Verse, then, being only allowable where prose would be inadequate; and the inadequacy of prose arising either from its not being sufficiently condensed, or from its not having cadence enough to express sustained passion, which is never long-windedit follows, that if prolix writing is vulgarly called prosy writing, a very true feeling of the distinction between verse and prose shows itself in the vulgarism; and that the one unpardonable sin in a versified composition, next to the absence of meaning, and of true meaning, is diffuseness. From this sin it will be impossible to exculpate M. Alfred de Vigny. His poems, graceful and often fanciful though they be, are, to us, marred by their diffuseness.

Of the more considerable among them, that which most resem-bles what, in our conception, a poem in verse ought to be, is 'Moïse.' The theme is still the sufferings of the man of genius, the inspired man, the intellectual ruler and seer; not however this time, the great man persecuted by the world, but the great man honoured by it, and in his natural place at the helm of it, the man on whom all rely, whom all reverence-Moses on Pisgah, Moses the appointed of God, the judge, captain, and hierarch of the chosen race-crying to God in anguish of spirit for deliverance and rest; that the cares and toils, the weariness and solitariness of heart, of him who is lifted altogether above his brethren, be no longer imposed upon him-that the Almighty may withdraw his gifts, and suffer him to sleep the sleep of common humanity. His cry is heard; when the clouds disperse, which veiled the summit of the mountain from the Israelites waiting in prayer and prostration at its foot, Moses is no more seen and now, marching towards the promised land, Joshua advanced,

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Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage,
With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase
Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow and pain,
From mortal or immortal minds."

pale and pensive of mien; for he was already the chosen of the Omnipotent."

The longest of the poems is Eloa; or, the Sister of the Angels;' a story of a bright being, created from a tear of the Redeemer, and who falls, tempted by pity for the Spirit of Darkness. The idea is fine, and the details graceful, a word we have often occasion to use in speaking of M. de Vigny: but this and most of his other poems are written in the heroic verse, that is to say, he has aggravated the imperfections, for his purpose, of the most prosaic language in Europe, by choosing to write in its most prosaic metre. The absence of prosody, of long and short or accented and unaccented syllables, renders the French language essentially unmusical; while the unbending structure of its sentence, of which there is essentially but one type for verse and prose, almost precluding inversions and elisions all the screws and pegs of the prose sentence are retained to encumber the verse. If it is to be raised at all above prose, variety of rhythm must be sought in variety of versification; there is no room for it in the monotonous structure of the heroic metre. Where is it that Racine, always an admirable writer, appears to us more than an admirable prose writer? In his irregular metres-in the chorusses of Esther and of Athalie. It is not wonderful then if the same may be said of M. de Vigny. We shall conclude with the following beautiful little poem, one of the few which he has produced in the style and measure of lyric verse :

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ART. II.-Transactions of the Statistical Society of London. Vol. I. Part I. London, Charles Knight and Co. 1837.

THE first publication of this society affords us an opportunity

for a few remarks on the principle on which it is founded, and incidentally on the subject it professes to pursue; remarks which we should not have intruded on the public, if we did not think their tendency is to increase the usefulness of the society and advance the knowledge of the subject by removing several prevalent errors.

The pretensions advanced for statistics by the students of it are undoubtedly gaining increased authority with the public.

"The direct and incidental use," says the last Report of the Society, "which, at present, is made of statistical documents in scientific and philosophical writings on the most important moral and political questions, and the now frequent insertion of statistical notices in the periodical publications of the day, may be adduced, as indicating the prevalence of a sense of the indispensable necessity of continually adverting to the tabulated numerical results of systematic inquiries. It is, indeed, truly said, that the spirit of the present age has an evident tendency to confront the figures of speech with the figures of arithmetic, since it is impossible not to observe a growing distrust of mere hypothetical theory and à priori assumption. But a more decisive proof of the just estimate which is formed of the value, and of the deep interest which is felt for the result of statistical researches, is presented in the continual formation of new societies. And the Council have much pleasure in announcing, &c. &c. This statement of the Statistical Council is nothing more than an adoption of one of the common-places which buzz perpetually in every one's ears in certain circles, only the statement is now made by a body of men, whose assertions are entitled to attention and investigation. With all its largeness and vagueness of phrase, this is really a limited statement of the claims which have been set up for statistics. An acute and able writer, the only man we believe in this country who has attempted to tell the public what statistics is, has gone so far as to say-" the same certainty is attainable" in the political and economic sciences which prevails in astronomy and by which the return of Halley's comet was predicted. "The state of our commerce and manufactures, the results of machinery, the effects of free trade, are mere arithmetical problems more or less involved, that may be worked out if correct data are obtained. Their solutions thus reduced should be as certain and as little open to

cavil as a proposition in Euclid or the determination of an algebraic equation.”

It would be a happy thing could all difficulties be got rid of thus summarily. But we are sceptical. Commerce, manufactures, and machinery involve so many human beings in their operations, thoughts and passions, winds and storms, have so much to do with them, that though we believe in many so-called Utopian things, we are not very sanguine of attaining the prophetic perfection realised in the case of Halley's comet. Plans and illustrations of human affairs so complete and satisfactory as we are here promised from statistics are liable to many interruptions:-Professor Puddingdorf satisfactorily illustrated the motion of the earth round the sun by swinging a bucket of water round his own rubicund visage until a wicked pupil caught his arm, and the earth by a deluge extinguished the luminary.

If the pleasure expressed by the Statistical Council were a rejoicing in the growth of a disposition on the part of the public to look more closely into the evidences for opinions than heretofore, there could not be a more legitimate subject of joy: a great and wise people will that be whose politicians and philosophers shall sift their facts and be scrupulous as to the evidence of their theories. But they express pleasure that statistical documents, made as they have caused them to be made, are increasingly quoted in science, politics and philosophy. This is not a matter to be rejoiced in, as we shall show, by the lovers of science. The men who have impressed upon statistics its present form-decided how its tables and researches are made-and influenced the constitutions of Statistical Societies,-have pleasure doubtless in witnessing the widening circles of their own influences; but we are of the number of those who think the influences of this council and its forms, modes, and fundamental principles pernicious,-to us therefore, instead of rejoicing, there belongs the duty of trying them by the principles of science and the nature of statistics itself, in order to show the inconsiderateness or ignorance in which they have been conceived and framedand in which they are advancing to authority in the popular mind.

At the Bristol meeting of the British Association a paper was read by a gentleman, Mr Greg, (who has done good service to the progress of knowledge by his labours in the collection of statistical facts,) in which he irrefutably showed that statistics in its present state is exceedingly destitute both of general propositions and of tangible facts entitled to credence and authority. He is not alone in this conviction. To prove the opinion by an examination of the more important statements of statists would be

foreign to the object of this article, and would be doing over again what he has ably accomplished; suffice it, to say, that statistics has in the experience of many thoughtful men realized an effect which has a tinge of the marvellous in it, by making them doubt demonstration and disbelieve arithmetic. Built seemingly on a foundation which partakes of the certainty of numerical computation, it has nevertheless presented such fallacies and errors to the public, that to minds scrupulous in matters of belief it has successfully evinced the claims of numerical figures to a rivalry with the figures of speech in powers of fiction. When the witty and accomplished author of Crotchet Castle' makes a political economist gravel a poet who observes how beautifully an old oak conveys the idea of duration by stating how much more clearly time is told by figures, in our opinion he awards the victory wrongly if the arithmetical calculations had partaken of the nature of our popular statistics the praise of accuracy ought to have been assigned to the flights of fancy and the encomiums of fiction to the statistical computations.

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It might have been expected that a Central Society, formed for the cultivation of statistics, would have applied itself to the improving the methods of the branch of knowledge it sought to encourage, and removing the causes of its unsatisfactory state. The contrary has been the fact; and the great barrier in this country to the improvement of the condition of statistics is, in our opinion, the fundamental principle on which the Statistical Society of London is constituted.

The errors commonly prevalent on the very nature of statistics and to which we shall refer by and by, have caused the true objects of its tables and researches not only to be overlooked but to be positively and expressly proscribed by the Society. The prospectus, drawn up by Mr Henry Hallam, Mr Charles Babbage, Mr Richard Jones, and Mr John Elliot Drinkwater, and adopted by the Council, contains the following sentence:

"The Statistical Society will consider it the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications."

If we were disposed to amuse ourselves with etymology and word-grubbing we might suggest to the authors of this rule, that Opinion, which they are carefully to exclude, is only a Latin word for thought, and that some persons may be apt to say they have furnished in the rule itself an example of the exclusion enjoined by it.

We have four objections to this rule. It prevents the discovery of new truths;-it deprives the labours of the Society of