THE KEEPSAKE AND THE BOOK OF BEAUTY.

THE Annuals have this year an adventitious interest from the recent death of Mr. Heath, the reputed originator of the class, and certainly the designer of the larger Books of Beauty, as well as their courageous sus- tainer when they had outlived the taste which once rendered them fashion- able. Their supporting genius gone, it is probable that they will follow : we may now be looking our last upon a literary "species," whose yearly efflorescence was anxiously expected by the young and fair, and whose beauties after adorning the drawingroom and the boudoir were treasured in the memory and store of the receiver.

Of the two Annuals before us, The Keepsake alone maintains the generic character of its class for variety in plates and letterpress, and for its old distinction of aristocratic contributors, mingled with a fair pro- portion of literary names, though often better known to fame through their gregarious appearances than their own exploits. The late Miss Grace Aguilar, Mrs. Abdy, Mrs. Newton Crosland, (late Camilla Toul- min,) Mr. Nicholas Michell, Mr. Bernal, Mr. Denison, and Lord William Lennox, are among the luminaries shining with reflected light; Sir Bul- wer Lytton, Mr. Monckton Milnes, Mr. Thackeray, Mrs. Romer, Lord John Manners, and Lady Blessington, take rank as independent stars ; and there are some besides, of whom we have no remembrance, or who shroud themselves behind the anonymous veil.

The general character of The Keepsake strikes us as being at least as good as usual, and offering more distinctive traits in the different writers. Lady Blessington has a tale of the late French Revolution, founded on a "heroic fact " ; for we think we have read of a young French girl saving the life of a wounded officer of the National Guard. This is expanded by Lady Blessington ; the heroine becoming a model of virtue and disinter- estedness, sacrificing her savings, and then her locks, to support the youth she has rescued, while he turns out a respectable young man, heir to a competency ; whence the reader may guess the ending. There is not much in " A Tale of the late French Revolution," but it exhibits in a nar- row compass the most striking traits of Lady Blessington,—her childish idea of the events of life, her tendency to exaggerate goodness into stage virtue, the real but literal character of her incidents and descriptions, with her conventional ease of style. Mr. Titmarsh contributes a dessert account of an interesting event, when a very matter-of-fact lover nar- rates his probable loss of an heiress, and his certain loss of a dinner, through the unexpected accouchement of his hostess. It contains a good sketch of common life, where the most every-day things are made telling by the point and truth with which they are told; but "An Interesting Event " owes its attraction to the manner of Mr. Thackeray, rather than to any real substance or interest in itself; it might be rightfully charac-

terized as much ado about nothing. Mrs. Hall contributes a brief Sketch, in which the real is enforced by a vision where the fabulous and thea- trical mingle together ; the object being to inculcate the moral of well- assorted marriages as regards both age and habits. There are a variety of the usual Annual tales, some of modern life, some of what is called romance ; but the best prose story is Mrs. Romer's "Scene on the Shan- non." It exhibits no new phase of Irish life, for it is a tale of cruel and objectless murder discovered in a singular manner ; but the interest is well sustained, the details are in keeping, and the strange, savage, sell.. satisfied criminals, are well delineated. The exciting motive of the mur- derers is a suspicion that John Kenny may inform against them as to some of their former outrages, simply because, having latterly worked a good deal in England, John had adopted some English habits.

" When he once more appeared on the banks of the Shannon, the result of his lengthened sojourn in England became evident in a neatly-thatched cabin, sur-

rounded by a plentifully-cropped garden, from which (to the indignation of his

neighbours) the pig was excluded, and made to confine itself to a sty. 'An iligant sty, they remarked, too grand intirely for a baste to live in; let alone

that, it would never thrive there, shut up by itself, the cratur ! for Irish pigs did not understand English ways: they were used to have the ran of the house, and would fret for want of company I' • " Michael Staunton and his companions rowed sturdily down the river, and landed on the opposite bank just as the last vestige of the setting sun disappeared in the horizon. A few yards only intervened between the spot where they stepped

on shore and English John's cabin; and as they traversed it they could see him busily employed in constructing an outwork to his garden of woven wattles, with a little latched gate to prevent the encroachments of the neighbours' pigs, whose sociable propensities led them to make free with the locality from whence his own live stock were excluded.

" See that, now ! ' exclaimed Mick Staunton; ' if he isn't for shutting out every martial thing from him, the unnatural baste ! I wonder will he let us into it at all?'

" The doubt was at once settled by English John quitting his work and in- viting his friends in; and although he would most certainly 'rather have had their room than their company,' his greeting was kind, although tempered with

gravity.

" That's a handy gate, John,' remarked Bryan Kelly. " 'It is,' returned English John, proud of his work, and of the neat appear- ance it presented, compared with the gap in the wall stopped up with a furze- bush, which constitutes the customary barrier to Irish enclosures; 'see how well it shuts 1' "'Faith, and it does! It shuts like any Christian was the rejoinder. Well then, John, my darling, you may shut it up now, and come into the house with us: we want to discoorse you about going to Tim Doolan's tonight, to burn him out for taking land under Lord —a thieving middleman.' " 'Is it to go with you tonight, you mane? ' said John; seeking to evade a di- rect reply by the truly Irish artifice of substituting a question for an answer. "'Faith, then, what else would we mane?' they all exclaimed at once. And then, in terms that sounded less like an invitation to join them than an order to perform some act of duty to which he was bound, they called upon him to make one in the attack up the river, which they had planned for that night. " He excused himself from compliance, on the pretext of not being prepared foe such an excursion; but they would not listen to his objections, and found a ready rejoinder for every argument advanced by him against yielding to their importu- nities. Something in their voice and manner, and certain telegraphic glances exchanged by the confederates, at last aroused the suspicions of English John as to the real drift of their visit, and he resolved to be open with them. " 'I see what it is,' he said, looking them steadily in the face; ' I know what you are here for! You are sworn among you to take away my life, and the time has come for doing the deed! But if I must die by your hands, let it be here, upon my own floor, that I may be waked by my own people, and buried like a Christian! There,' he continued, opening his shirt and baring his breast to them; ' what you have to do, do it here, boys, and don't be long about it!'" The poetry of The Keepsake is better than usual, for all of it is some- thing more than respectable; but the three most striking compositions are by Monckton Milnes, Bulwer Lytton, and Lord John Manners. Mr. Milnes's " Parting " is indeed rather too artificial in its music, with a mingled echo of Byron and Mrs. Hemans in its style ; but it points a true though a painful conclusion—the impossibility of continuing or re- viving happiness; it may be "a joy for ever," but then it must be "a pleasure of memory." The "May Morning" of Lord John Manners is natural in its imagery, clear in its expression of thoughts and things, agreeable if not forcible in its versification, and concluding with a moral trite if true : but it is a piece worth referring to for the evident presence of the lesser parts of poetry, and the absence of the greater— depth, comprehension, and imagination—that indescribable something which enlarges the actual and idealizes the real. Sir Bulwer Lytton'a "First Violets" must carry off the palm for true poetry; albeit the thought in some of the stanzas has not been laboured into perfect lucidity and force, and the passage in the text hardly required the metaphysical note to bring down its meaning into prose.

" THE FIRST VIOLETS.

" Who that has loved knows not the tender tale Which flowers reveal when lips are coy to tell? Whose youth has paused not, dreaming in the vale, Where the rath violets dwell?

"Lo, when they shrink along the lonely brake, Under the leafless, melancholy tree; Not yet the cuckoo sings, nor glides the snake, Nor wild thyme lures the bee!

" Yet at their sight and scent entranced and thrill'd, All June seems golden in the April skies: How sweet the days we yearn for, till fultill'd ! 0 distant Paradise,— " Dear land to which Desire for ever flees, Time cloth no present to the grasp allow; Say, in the fix'd Eternal shall we seize At last the fleeting Now? • "Dream not of days to come, of that unknown Whither Hope wanders (maze without a clue): Give their true witchery to the flowers—their own Youth in their youth renew.

* "Desire, the condition of mortal being, annihilates for us the Present. Try to think on the present moment ; you cannot,—your thought goes behind or beyond. But if Desire ceases in the secure possession of Eternity, In which nothing is left to wish or to hope for, then, in turn, Past and Future are annihilated, and one Present alone exieta.".

"Avarice ! remember when the cowslip's gold Lured and yet lost its glitter in thy grasp;

Do thy hoards glad thee more than those of old?— Those wither'd in thy clasp.

" From these thy clasp fails palsied !—It was then

That thou went rich;—thy coffers are a lie !

Alas, poor fool! joy is the wealth of men, And care their poverty !

"Come, foil'd Ambition! what hest thou desired?

Empire and power?—O! wanderer, tempest-tort,

These once were thine, when life's gay spring inspired

Thy soul with glories lost !

" Let the flowers charm thee to the jocund prime, When o'er the stars rapt fancy traced the chart; Thou Least an angel's power in that blest time, Thy realm a human heart!

" Hark ! hark! again the tread of bashful feet !

Hark! the boughs rustling round the trysting-place!

Let air again with one dear breath be sweet,

Each fair with one dear face!

"Brief-lived first flowers, first love! the hours steal on, To prank the world in summer's pomp of hue; But what shall flaunt beneath a fiercer sun Worth what we lose in yon?

" Oft, by a flower, a leaf, in some loved book

We mark the lines that charm us most. Retrace Thy life, recall its loveliest passage;—look, Dead violets keep the place l"

27re-Book of Beauty is now a misnomer. Instead of the portraits

dread persons from the belles of our aristocracy, it continues the absurd plan of fancy sketches of the Queens of England, even when actual like- nesses exist. Had such a work been wanted, and the writers had com- bined antiquarian knowledge with a popular style of composition, the idea was not ill adapted for an instructive AnnuaL But Miss Strickland's

elaborate yet entertaining work has superseded all necessity for such an

undertaking, and rendered even the attempt something like a servile imi- tation if not a plagiarism : nor are the lives got up with even an idea of

what such biographies ought to be. In Mary Roberts's fanciful sketch

of "Isabella of France," no one could recognize the " She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate";

for the tragic murder of her husband is left out, as well as all the ro-

mantic circumstances connected with the capture of the Queen and her "gentle Mortimer," and the summary execution of the latter worthy. A good part of Mr. Manse' Reynolds's life of Catherine wife of Henry the Fifth consists of quotations from the chroniclers, or reflections on the

conduct of Harry, leaving small space for the Queen. Even Lady Bles- sington, who inter alia takes Catherine of Arragon and Bloody Mary, falls

into the error of confounding history with biography, especially in Cathe-

rine ; and gives the often-told story of Henry the Eighth without any new fact or reflection. The only writer of the batch who can rise to the idea of history or catch the spirit of the age is Mr. John Foster, who con-

taibutes a life of Anne of Denmark, wile of James the First.

In point of execution, the illustrations cannot in either volume be ac- counted of average goodness. The Keepsake contains some that are

worth the printing,—such as Callow's view of the Boulevard du Temple,

and Corbonld's spirited likeness of Lady Georgians Codrington in her

fratcy dress ; but the variety that once distinguished this Annual has

gone. The imaginary portraits in The Book of Beauty are very poor even as fancy sketches—most of them the mere pattern beauties of a

milliner's magazine.