trade of Cockney-poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses, much neglected by the public. His vanity was probably wrung not less than his purse; for he had it upon the authority of the Cockney Homers and Virgils, that he might become a light to their region at a future time. But all this is not necessary to help a consumption to the death of a poor sedentary man, with an unhealthy aspect, and a mind harassed by the first troubles of versemaking. The New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the Quarterly Review." O flesh, how art thou fishified!"-There is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review-for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been inflicted at least as long since. We are not now to defend a publication so well able to defend itself. But the fact is, that the Quarterly finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners and of masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote indecently, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities. He selected from Boccacio, and, at the feet of the Italian Priapus, supplicated for fame and farthings. "Both halves the winds dispersed in empty air." Mr P. B. Shelly having been the person appointed by the Pisan triumvirate to canonize the name of this apprentice, 66 nipt in the bud," as he fondly tells us, has accordingly produced an Elegy, in which he weeps "after the manner of Moschus for Bion." The canonizer is worthy of the saint.-"Et tu, Vitula !"-Locke says, that the most resolute liar cannot lie more than once in every three sentences. Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove, from the present Elegy, that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of every three. A more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred, or,-as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas,leaving about five readable lines in the entire. It thus commences: Died Adonais! till the future does Now, of this unintelligible stuff the On these principles, a hundred or a hundred thousand verses might be made, equal to the best in Adonais, without taking the pen off the paper. The subject is indifferent to us, let it be the "Golden age,' or "Mother Goose," "Waterloo," or the " Wit of the Watchhouse," "Tom Thumb," or "Thistlewood." We will undertake to furnish the requisite supply of blue and crimson daisies and dandelions, not with the toilsome and tardy lutulence of the puling master of verbiage in question, but with a burst and torrent that will sweep away all his weedy trophies. For example-Wontner, the city marshal, a very decent person, who campaigns it once a year, from the Mansion-house to Blackfriars bridge, truncheoned and uniformed as becomes a man of his military habits, had the misfortune to fracture his leg on the last Lord Mayor's day. The subject is among the most unpromising. We will undertake it, however, (premising, that we have no idea of turning the accident of this respectable man into any degree of ridicule.) O WEEP FOR ADONAIS, &c. 0 for Wontner, for his leg is broke, weep O weep for Wontner, though our pearly fear, Haughty Geranium, in your beaupots set, Were then your soft and starry eyes unwet? The pigeons saw it, and on silver wings Hung in white flutterings, for they could not fly, Hoar-headed Thames checked all his crystal springs, Day closed above his pale, imperial eye, The silken Zephyrs breathed a vermeil sigh. High Heavens! ye Hours! and thou Úra-ni-a! Where were ye then? Reclining languidly Upon some green Isle in the empurpled Sea, Where laurel-wreathen spirits love eternally. Come to my arms, &c. We had intended to call attention by italics to the picturesque of these lines; but we leave their beauties to be ascer tained by individual perspicacity; only requesting their marked admiration of the epithets coquetting, fond, fearless, and haughty, which all tastes will feel to have so immediate and inimitable an application to mignionet, hyacinths, myrtles, and geraniums. But Percy Byshe has figured as a sentimentalist before, and we can quote largely with out putting him to the blush by praise. What follows illustrates his power over the language of passion. In the In charnel pits! Poh! I am choak'd! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me, 'tis substantial, heavy, thick. I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves My flesh to a pollution," &c. &c. So much for the history of "Glue" -and so much easier is it to rake to gether the vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism, than to paint the workings of the mind. This raving is such as perhaps no excess of madness of a Cockney, determined to be as mad ever raved, except in the imagination lections of the shambles. as possible, and opulent in his recol In the same play, we have a speci men of his "art of description." He tells of a ravine "And in its depths there is a mighty Rock, Which has, from unimaginable years, Sustain'd itself with terror and with toil! Over a gulph, and with the agony With which it clings, seems slowly coursing down; Even as a wretched soul, hour after hour, Clings to the mass of life, yet clinging leans, And leaning, makes more dark the dread In which it fears to fall. Beneath this abyss ze of despair! Soul becomes substanal, and darkens a dread abyss. Such e Cockney darings before "the ods, and columns" that abhor medierity. And is it to this dreary nonnse that is to be attached the name poetry? Yet on these two passages e whole lauding of his fellow-Cockeys has been lavished. But Percy yshe feels his hopelessness of poetic putation, and therefore lifts himself the stilts of blasphemy. He is the ly verseman of the day, who has dad, in a Christian country, to work it for himself the character of direct THEISM! In his present poem, he lks with impious folly of" the enjous wrath of man or GOD!" Of a Branded and ensanguined brow, Which was like Cain's or CHRIST's." Offences like these naturally come efore a more effective tribunal than at of criticism. We have heard it entioned as the only apology for the redominant irreligion and nonsense f this person's works, that his underanding is unsettled. But in his Prece, there is none of the exuberance f insanity; there is a great deal of lly, and a great deal of bitterness, ut nothing of the wildness of his oetic fustian. The Bombastes Fuioso of these stanzas cools into sneerg in the preface; and his language gainst the death-dealing Quarterly leview, which has made such havoc 1 the Empire of Cockaigne, is merely alignant, mean, and peevishly peronal. We give a few stanzas of this erformance, taken as they occur. O weep for Adonais! He is dead! Veep, melancholy mother, wake and weep; Yet wherefore? quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep ike his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep, For he is gone, where all things wise and fair Descend! Oh dream not that the amorous deep Will yet restore him to the vital air. Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair." The seasons and a whole host of ersonages, ideal and otherwise, come o lament over Adonais. They act in The following manner : - Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down Her kindling buds, as if the Autumn were, Or they dead leaves, since her delight is flown, For whom should she have wak'd the sullen year? To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear, Nor to himself Narcissus, as to both, Thou, Adonais; wan they stand, and sere, Amid the drooping comrades of their youth, With dew all turn'd to tears, odour to sighing ruth." Here is left, to those whom it may concern, the pleasant perplexity, whether the lament for Mr J. Keats is shared between Phoebus and Narcissus, or Summer and Autumn. It is useless to quote those absurdities any farther en masse, but there are flowers of poesy thickly spread through the work, which we rescue for the sake of any future Essayist on the Bathos. Absurdity. The green lizard, and the golden snake, Like unimprison'd flowers out of their trance awake. An hour Dart thy spirit's light Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam Satiate the void circumference ! Her distress Roused Death. Death rose and smiled- As this wild waste of words is altogether beyond our comprehension, we will proceed to the more gratifying office of giving a whole, unbroken spe cimen of the Poet's powers, exercised on a subject rather more within their sphere. The following Poem has been sent to us as written by Percy Byshe, and we think it contains all the essence of his odoriferous, colorific, and daisyenamoured style. The motto is from "Adonais." ELEGY ON MY TOM CAT. "And others came.-Desires and Adorations, Wing'd Persuasions, and veil'd Destinies, Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incantations Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; Weep for my Tomcat! all ye Tabbies weep, That by some violet-sided smiling river And fair Aurora, o'er her young believer. With fingers gloved with roses, doth make moan, And every bud its petal green doth sever, And others come! ye Splendours! and ye Ye Raptures! with your robes of pearl Ye blushing Wonders! with your scarlet shoe-ties; Ye Horrors bold! with breasts of lilyhue; Ye Hope's stern flatterers! He would trust to you, Whene'er he saw you with your chesnut hair, Dropping sad daffodils; and rosepinks true! Ye Passions proud! with lips of bright despair; Ye Sympathies! with eyes like evening star. crimson car. Purple as woman's mouth, o'er ocean Thy quivering rose-tinged tongue-thy Thy whisker-waving lips, as o'er the swamp stale." of the improvement that an appropri This poem strikes us as an evidence ate subject makes in a writer's style. It is incomparably less nonsensical, verbose, and inflated, than Adonais; while it retains all its knowledge nature, vigour of colouring, and fellcity of language. Adonais has been pubIlished by the author in Italy, the fitting soil for the poem, sent over to his honoured correspondents throughout the realm of Cockaigne, with a delightful mysteriousness worthy of the dignity of the subject and the writer. MECHANIQUE CELESTE; OR THE PROPHETIC ALMANACK, FOR 1822. 'ERHAPS no greater demonstration of he utter contempt in which any indiidual held the understanding of a eople, was ever exhibited than that f Cobbet bringing over the bones of Tom Paine from America, in the hope f making as profitable a thing of the peculation as the Jew dealers in the ags and relics of the Christian maryrs made of old, when it became a art of religion to venerate such trumpry. The scheme, however, failed; the eople of England rejected, with deriion, the rotten remnants of the Apostle f Anarchy; and Cobbet, convinced hat although many among them were ainted with the political heresies of his ect, they yet entertained some fear of od, and hopes of an hereafter, threw he bones to the dogs, and betook himelf to writing religious tracts. It is in fact no longer the custom mong the Radical chiefs to affect to onsider the multitude as a "thinking eople." They have changed their node, and now really treat them as far elow the scale of rational beings, in he nineteenth century, and in England 00, as they formerly affected to conider them above it. Instead, therefore, of appealing to their reason with alleged acts and assumed grievances, they adress them as if they were depraved to he superstition of the middle ages, and attack their fears with every species of evil augury and omen. The estimate in the one case is, we are persuaded, as eroneous as it was in the other, and the poch of Radical superstition will prove out the shadow of the departed Radical nsubordination. But it is not wise to allow the imposition to gather strength unnoticed. The New Prophetic Almanack," with its malignant bodements, has enjoyed one year of proitable imposture, and it is time that the public attention should be directed to its frauds and its character. The study of astrology itself, as professing to discover, by celestial phenomena, future mutations in the elements and terrestrial bodies, ought,* perhaps, not to be despised. The theory of the tides, for example, is alto gether an astrological doctrine; and No years increase it, and no years can waste; same. It stands secure from Time's devouring rage, For 'tis a god, nor can it change with age.” And therefore, say the astrologers, who require us to grant the unchangeable nature of the universe, that a correspondence and coincidence must exist throughout the whole universal phenomena; as in the machinery of a clock, in which the state of one part indicates what has passed, or is to happen, in another. The notion of the unalterability of * Sir Christopher Heyden's Defence of Astrology, p. 2. Ed. 1603. + Dr Mead's Treatise concerning the Influence of the Sun and Moon upon Human Bodies. See also Edinburgh Review, Vol. XII. p. 36.-Balfour on Sol-Lunar InAuence. VOL. X. 4 T |