Critical Essays (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY III. The Life of Edward Irving. By Mrs. Oliphant. Two Vols. Edward Ikving has been fortunate in his biographer, if not in his life itself. It would scarce have been possible to commit the task of depicting his career in the vivid colours and brilliant effects to which it seems to aspire to hands more apt and skilful for this particular undertaking than those of Mrs. Oliphant. She has for Irving the sympathy and mutual rapport which natives of the same country are wont to have; and Scotch people at least as much as any. She was, like him, brought up in that Presbyterian establishment which looks severe and forbidding enough to those who view it from the outside, but which has, nevertheless, ofttimes enlisted the devoted allegiance of the most imaginative. Lastly, Mrs. Oliphant herself has something of the orator in her, and the trait comes out much more strongly in this work than in her novels. Whilst we cannot but see that a good deal of the dignity and significance of the facts she presents to us is less native to them than derived from her own glowing imagination, yet the very tendency she has towards the superlative admirably qualifies her to appreciate and to reproduce in congenial and often very Carlylean style the excellent but enthusiastic and credulous person about whom, she writes. It is, indeed, an odd kind of disenchantment which is effected by heating the thoughts well through perusing a few of Mrs. Oliphant's chapters, and then turning to the record of the same transactions in one of the ordinary biographical compilations. To the lady the man she has to deal with was quite a hero. His colossal proportions, his dark apostolic head of hair ?a sort of unearthliness about him, his aspect, his height, and presence, all with a female biographer have t...