E391100A. Findens’ Tableaux (1840).
The Metropolitan Magazine, November 1839, pp. 91–92.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 412.
Here we have twelve compositions by J. Browne, which have all very considerable merit, with indications of higher power than is usually employed in this way. The artist seems to have been an attentive student of Retzsch and the other modern Germans. The little groups in outline arranged round the centre figure, and illustrating different points of the same story, are clever, graceful, and imaginative; but the cutting of the corners, and making the main picture an octagon, has, to our eyes, somewhat of an artificial effect. The engraving, in most of the plates, is exceedingly delicate and beautiful. The size of the plates is a great advantage.
The literature of the volume is far superior in quality to any that we have lately seen in Annuals, and does infinite credit to Miss Mitford’s taste. She herself, always industrious and conscientious, contributes no fewer than six tales and sketches in prose—her own graceful and unaffected prose, which is worth a great deal more than most other people’s poetry. Yet here she has given us some poetry, the productions of her friends, of a very high quality indeed. “The Fetches,” by Mr. Horne, the original-minded author of “Cosmo de’ Medici,” and “The Death of Marlowe,” (the latter a wonderful fragment, which has not yet attracted a tithe of the attention it merits,) is an exquisite specimen of dramatic poetry. The whole plan of the piece, which is founded on the old German superstition of the Death Fetch, is novel, wild, and most impressive. There are in it some snatches of song. The following lyric might be fathered upon some of the Shaksperian men.
[Following are sixteen lines from “The Fetches.”]
“The Dream,” by E.B. Barrett; “Venice,” by Barry Cornwall; and “The King’s Forrester,” by J. Hughes, are beautiful little poems. The [p. 92→] “Legend of the Brown Rosarie,” also by Miss Barrett, seems to have been inspired by a part of that genius which suggested Goethe’s Faust. Each and all of these things give a rare value to the book.
The binding of the volume is in excellent taste.
Reviewed:
Findens’ Tableaux, ed. M.R. Mitford, London: 1840.
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