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"And some him frantic deem'd, and
Some him deem'd a wit."

fellow Lamb. The name of Coleridge appears | is still read, though the works it satirizes have been alone upon the title-page, which is thus described, forgotten long ago. Poems on Various Subject by S. T. Coleridge, late When Wordsworth, in the following year, of Jesus College, Cambridge. Lamb's contribu- (1798,) produced his two duodecimo volumes of tions are distinguished by his initials, and the vol- Lyrical Ballads, few read, liked, or understood ume is remarkable in more ways than one. Cole-them; ridge calls his sonnets Effusions-Effusion 1; Effusion 2. This appellation he removed in a second edition, and called them, what in reality they were, and what, when they were written, he intended Every shaft of ridicule was turned against him, and they should be," Sonnets, attempted in the man- with such success that his "audience" was, inner of Mr. Bowles." Here is his sonnet of grati-deed, but "few." The principle on which his tude to the vicar of Bremhill, a mistaken attack on poems are composed was as yet unrecognized; Rogers, subsequently withdrawn, and the follow- and if the wits, who should have known much beting bold panegyric upon Wordsworth: "The ex-ter, were blind to the several excellencies of his pression green radiance is borrowed," he writes, verse, he had little to look for from the bulk of from Mr. Wordsworth, a poet, whose versifica- readers. It was long, very long, therefore, before tion is occasionally harsh and his diction too fre- he had any ascertained and admitted position in quently obscure, but whom I deem unrivalled the catalogue of English poets. Every description among the writers of the present day in manly sen- of circumstance seemed to go against him. Rogtiment, novel imagery, and vivid coloring." crs put forth his Epistle to a Friend in the autumn of the same year, and Campbell his Pleasures of Hope in the following spring.

""Tis certainly mysterious that the name Of prophet and of poet is the same." One sees the prophetic eye of taste in the printed judgment of Coleridge on this occasion.

The effect was all but instantaneous. Two such noble examples of the school and poetry of Pope revived a predilection for a form of poetry in which Burns is said to have foretold the future fame of so many great efforts had been achieved; and the Sir Walter Scott: "This boy will be heard of Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth were overlooked in yet." But the great poet of Scotland was cold in the fresh triumph of a former favorite, and the first his grave before Scott became a candidate for lit-production of a new and successful writer. erary distinction. He died the very year of Scott's A third publication of the year 1798 was an ocfirst publication. The Chase, and William and tavo volume, since very much enlarged, and entiHelen; two Ballads from the German of Gottfried tled, Plays on the Passions. This was Joanna Augustus Bürger. Edinburgh, 1796. Men who Baillie's first publication, and is likely to see an love to trace the hereditary descent of genius, fore-hereafter, not so much from the exaggerated see a mysterious something in this seeming trans-praises of Scott and Southey, for these can effect migration. Be this as it may, there is little of but little where the substance itself is poor, but Burns in Scott's early publication, little of his own from the intrinsic excellence of the work itself, after-excellence, and, in short, very little to ad- and the fact that it is by far the noblest offspring of the female mind this country has to exhibit, and worth five hundred such Sacred Dramas as Hannah More inflicted on the public for a long succession of years, now happily at an end.

mire.

A third publication of the year 1796 was the Joan of Arc of Southey, the production of a boy of two-and-twenty, and the first of a series of epics remarkable for the even level of their flight, and The last century closed with Campbell's Pleathe wide difference of opinion they are known to sures of Hope, and the new one opened with have occasioned. The new epic, however, had its Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy, and Moore's first own little phalanx of admirers; and when a vol- work, his translation of Anacreon. Cowper and ume of smaller poems from the same pen was pub-the elder Warton were removed in 1800 by death lished a short time after, the poet of Joan of Arc had a second accession of admirers. His noble Inscriptions acquired him not a few; and all who were blind to the nobler portions of his epic could comprehend the beauties of a story in verse like "Mary the Maid of the Inn."

Our poetry was infested at this time with the unpoetic invectives of Wolcot, and the puerile inanities of the Della Cruscan school. Verse and poctry were too commonly confounded, ease and smoothness were mistaken for higher powers, and the rough impudence of Wolcot for the keen, caustic irony of the muse of Satire. It was time to put an end to such pretensions and to sing-song prettinesses with nothing in the world to recommend them. The opportunity was great, nor was there a poet wanting, or, better still, one unwilling to rid our literature of the weeds and vermin that infested it. The poet who came forward was William Gifford, and the poem he produced, his Baviad and Maviad-a clever, well constructed satire, more in Churchill's annihilating manner than the keen, razor-edged satire of Pope or Young. The triumph was complete, and the Baviad and Maviad

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from witnessing the full effects of the example they had set us, for the agreeable Essay on Pope had its influence certainly in hastening the changes completed by the Task. Beattie was suffering from paralysis and age, and Lewis, with his Monk and his Tales of Wonder, engrossed the attention of a London public. The living Parnassus was as yet without its full complement of tenants, but candidates came forward before long to fill the vacant places. Hogg published, in 1801, a little volume of Scottish Pastoral Poems, Songs, &c., written in the Dialect of the South; Leigh Hunt, the same year, a collection of poems entitled Juvenilia; Bloomfield, in 1802, his Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs; Sir Walter Scott, his Glenfinlas and Eve of St. John, more like polished tales than happy imitations of the early ballad, but truly wonderful when viewed in connexion with his after writings; Leyden, in 1803, his Scottish Descriptive Poems; Kirke White, his Chfton Grove; Campbell, his Lochiel and Hohenlinden; and Southey, a second epic, his Thalaba, in an irregular measure of his own inventing.

On the 18th of April, 1802, died Dr. Darwin,

and on the following 14th of August L. E. L. was | judgment and discretion, and not by another Alexborn. In 1803 died Hoole, whose veneer-like ander Chalmers. translation of Tasso was preferred by Johnson to the glowing and substantial beauties of Fairfax. In the same year Lord Strangford put forward his translation from Camoens, and thus was Darwin perpetuated in the gems, and flowers, and odors of L. E. L., and Hoole in the polished refinements of the noble viscount.

The critic was a wise one who, when he reviewed the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in the year 1803, foresaw a score of metrical romances in the materials of three octavo volumes. No better" preparatory school" for a part of Scott's particular genius could have well been found than the course of study which he had formed for himself in bringing the materials of the Minstrelsy together. His mind was thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of the past, as much as it would in all possibility have been had he lived in the times he describes so truly. His powers of observation were keen and scrutinizing; his love of books and nature an increasing kind of appetite; and he was only in want of a metre to suit the stories he had floating before him, when a friend recited to him from memory some of the striking passages of Coleridge's Christabel then unpublished, and then as now, unfortunately a fragment. The rhythmical run of the verse was catching; and a story over which he had long brooded was commenced immediately, in the wild metre of the poem thus opportunely brought beneath his notice.

"The corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic." This, however, like many other popular sayings, admits of some exceptions; for the writers who originated the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey, Brougham, Mackintosh, Sydney Smith, Hallam, and Horner, belonged either to the law or the church, and put forward no pretensions of their own to a grain of ground upon Parnassus. They sat in judgment, however, on the production of the new race of poets with a stern and forbidding countenance "Hard words and hanging," was the doom of all new candidates for the laurel; so that Hogg's translation of their motto, "Judex damnatur absolvitur illis," "I'll be d―d if you escape," was true, at least to the spirit in which the journal was conducted. Young men of the present generation can form from the known character of the Review for the last eight-andtwenty years but a very slender idea of its influence for the first fifteen years of its existence. Nor is this loss of influence to be attributed to any falling off in the quality and value of its articles, for the Edinburgh Review, that can show a paper by Macaulay, or an article like the "Churchill,” from the pen of Mr. Forster, may rank in real worth and importance with the best number of the Review in the most palmy days of its existence. We are to attribute a decay of influence to another cause, to an abuse of its own power, the reversal of many of its own decrees in its own pages; and the simple circumstance, that merit will buoy up at last, for malice and wit, though they may cause an incalculable deal of mischief for a time-it can be but for a time. Dryden's contempt for Shirley has not prevented what was due to him, the publication of a collected edition of his work; and all the wit that was shot against Wither has failed in keeping him from the place he deserves to hold in the catalogue of British poets.

The metre found, the work went on at about the rate he tells us, of a canto per week; and was finally published in January, 1805, in a quarto volume, price twenty-five shillings! Few will require to be told that Scott's first poem was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, that the success of the work exceeded the fondest day dreams of its author, and at once decided that literature should form the main business of his life. "The favor which it at once attained," says Lockhart," had When the Edinburgh Review was in the full first not been equalled in the case of any one poem of swing of its power and patronage, James Montconsiderable length during at least two genera- gomery published his Wanderer in Switzerland; tions; it certainly had not been approached in the Cary, the first part of his well-sustained translation case of any narrative poem since the days of Dry-of Dante; Hogg, his Mountain Bard; Crabbe, .den." The work, brought out on the usual terms of division of profits between the author and publishers, was not long after purchased by them for 5007, to which Messrs. Longman and Co. afterwards added 1007. in their own unsolicited kindness, in consequence of the uncommon success of the work.

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after a silence of twenty years, The Parish Regis-
ter; Tannahill, a volume of Songs; Moore, his
Little's Poems; Scott, his Marmion; and Byron,
his Hours of Idleness. Crabbe alone was a favor-
ite with the Review; Montgomery met with a
severe handling; the Review of Little occasioned
a hostile meeting at Chalk Farm; the critique on
Marmion, the Quarterly Review; and the bitter
and uncalled-for notice of the Hours of Idleness,
the swingeing satire, rough and vigorous, of Eng-
lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
"The poetry
of this young lord," says the Review, "belongs to
the class which neither gods nor men are said to
permit; and our counsel is," it adds, "that he do
forthwith abandon poetry and turn his talents
which are considerable, and his opportunities
which are great, to better account."

injurious and unjust decrees in criticism, for the
The Edinburgh Review may be forgiven all its

entertaining addition it made to our literature in the satire of Lord Byron. Not that the satire itself is a very noble specimen of Byron's muse, or of the school of poetry of which it forms a part; but it is a fine, fearless piece of writing, with a strain of noble invective at times amidst its more prosaic passages and its mere calling of names. The Review, moreover, had this good effect, it

roused a muse of fire before its time, but not before its strength was at its height, and, in all probability, added to the bulk and value of the poems he has left us; for there is little reason to suppose that Byron's life would, under any circumstances, have extended much, if at all, beyond" the six-and thirty years to which it ran.

Birds cease to sing when kites are in the sky, but real poets, though depressed by criticisms for a time, revive with wonted vigor, and try a new flight in the poetic heaven. Byron understood this thoroughly when he sang,

"Yet there will still be bards, though fame is
smoke.

Its fumes are frankincense to human thought;
And the unquiet feelings which first woke
Song in the world, will seek what then they
sought."

The last publication of the year 1812 was the Rokeby of Scott-less successful than any of his former efforts, and with less of the blaze of true genius about it. Copies were scarce at first,Pray have you got Rokeby? for I have got mine, The mail-coach edition, prodigiously fine; and when copies were got, disappointment almost the poem unquestionably there are. as speedily ensued. Fine passages throughout sification was the same with his other poems, and what Curl called "the knack" was caught by a herd of tasteless imitators.

But the ver

"I well remember," writes Lockhart, "being in those days a young student at Oxford, how the booksellers' shops there were beleaguered for the earliest copies, and how he that had been so fortu

nate as to secure one was followed to his chamber by a tribe of friends, all as eager to hear it read as ever horse-jockeys were to see the conclusion of a match at New-market; and, indeed, not a few of those enthusiastic academics had bets depending on the issue of the struggle, which they considered the elder favorite as making to keep his own ground against the fiery rivalry of Childe Harold."

Campbell, the pet of the reviewers, put forward his Gertrude of Wyoming in 1809; Crabbe, another favorite, his Borough, in 1810; Scott, The Lady of the Lake; and Southey, his noblest poem by far, his Curse of Kehama, in the same year. Our accessions were considerable, so were our losses. Anstey was removed from among us Byron had novelty on his side, and Scout had to in 1805, forty years after the publication of The encounter the satiety of the public ear. Other cirNew Bath Guide; Charlotte Smith and Kirke cumstances, moreover, were against him. Moore White in 1806; Home in 1808, sixty years after had given a humorous fling at the poem in his the tragedy of Douglas, and an ode addressed to Twopenny Post Bag; and the Messrs. Smith, in him by Collins, had secured his fame; Miss" A Tale of Drury Lane," in The Rejected AdSeward, whose feeble lucubrations I have omitted to detail, was removed in 1809; Tannahill, in 1810; Grahame and Leyden, in 1811; and in the same year the venerable Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of English Poetry had wrought the changes of which he lived to see so many noble and permanent effects.

Tales in Verse, The World before the Flood, The Isle of Palms, and some of the lighter poems of the year 1812, suffered an eclipse in the great quarto publication of that year, the two first cantos of Childe Harold. Murray gave 6007. for the copyright; the sale was instantaneous, and "I awoke one morning," as the author records, "and found myself famous." The success of the poem was complete, and people applied to the new poet what Waller had said of Denham, " that he broke out like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware or at the least suspected it."

dresses, a ludicrous turn to the manner and matter of his former poems. He felt what Byron calls his "reign" was over, and turning from poetry to prose, left the field of verse to a formidable rival, and employed his pen in the composition of a lighter style of literature-one in which he achieved a second reputation, and one in which he is still without a rival.

The public at large have never cared much about poems written in Spenser's stanzas, and Byron was wise when he postponed the completion of his poem in that measure to a later period. Scott had awakened a taste for incident and story. Of mere description the public had had enough already; and of legendary tales in verse more than enough. People were tired, moreover, of border raids and Highland scenery; they longed for novelty and for another clime, and they got their wish. There was no suspense; the poet kept pace with the public and The Giaour and The Bride of The memorable quarto of the month of March Abydos were still in the infancy of their fame, (Childe Harold) was followed in October by one when The Corsair, Lara, and The Siege of Coof the wittiest little volumes in the English lan-rinth, appeared to await the judgment of the public. guage. The Rejected Addresses of the Messrs. Smith. The Pipe of Tobacco, by Isaac Hawkins Browne, clever as it is, must sink before the little brochure of the successful brothers. Philips, in his Splendid Shilling, is not more happy in his mock imitation of Milton's manner than the Messrs. Smith of Lord Byron's in the stanzas called "Cui Bono?" The Crabbe, the Scott, the Southey, the Wordsworth, are all good-indeed, there is not a bad parody in the volume; the Crabbe, in a word, is better than Crabbe,"Something had happened wrong about a bill, Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill; So to amend it I was told to go,

And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."

Surely "Emanuel Jennings," compared with the above, rises, as the Messrs. Smith remark, to sublimity itself.

The poet was not unmindful of the fate of others. He knew, moreover, the capricious turns of the public taste, and how necessary it was, to maintain his ground, that he should frequently renew his title to the rank assigned him. Afraid that people were beginning to get tired of Turkish tales, he added a third canto to Childe Harold; and when the fourth and last canto of that noble poem was published, he produced a novelty at the same time, a Venetian story (Beppo) in Whistlecraft verse-itself a novelty. Churchill's four years were not better sustained than Byron's twelve. From tales in tripping verse he turned to dramas; and when Manfred and Cain, and Sardanapalus and Werner had done their work, Don Juan was taken up as a new string to his bow. This, his last, and in some respects his ablest, work was left unfinished at his death. What new style he would have attempted

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what success was likely to attend a fifth new manner, I need not stay to conjecture. His career was brilliant but short, and though he excelled in every style he attempted, there is every reason to suppose that he had done his best.

While Byron blazed the comet of a season, Shelley and Keats appeared and passed away, leaving some noble memorials of their genius behind them: The Adonais, The Hyperion, The Cloud, the Sonnet on Chapman's Homer. But Shelley is too obscure, and Keats too mythological; not the obscurity of thoughts too great for words, or a mythological taste derived from a repletion of learning, but the obscurity of haste and the mythological abundance of one who was not a scholar. Other poems of repute and consequence appeared in the same short season. Not a year went by without producing more than one volume of a quality we never see now.

The cobbler kept him to his awl; but now
He'll be a poet, scarce can guide a plough."
BEN JONSON,
But the present condition of our poetry will
afford material for another paper.

PART II. AND CONCLUSION.

Hogg has told an amusing anecdote of Wordsworth at Mount Rydal. It chanced one night while the bard of Kilmeny was at the Lakes with Wordsworth, Wilson, and De Quincey, that a resplendent arch, something like the aurora borealis, was observed across the zenith, from the one horizon to the other. The splendid meteor became the subject of conversation, and the table was left for an eminence outside where its effect could be seen to greater advantage. Miss Wordsworth, the poet's sister, who accompanied them, In 1813, Hogg appeared with The Queen's expressed a fear lest the brilliant stranger might Wake, containing "Bonny Kilmeny;" Allan Cun- prove ominous, when Hogg, thinking he was sayningham, with a volume of songs, some of surpass- ing a good thing, hazarded the remark that it was ing beauty; Moore, with his Twopenny Post- neither more nor less "than joost a treenmphal Bag; Coleridge with a tragedy (Remorse;) and airch raised in honor of the meeting of the poets." Scott, in disguise, with The Bridal of Triermain. Miss Wordsworth smiled, and Wilson laughed and In 1814, Wordsworth enriched our poetry with declared the idea not amiss. But when it was his much-decried Excursion; Moore, with his told to Wordsworth he took De Quincey aside, Irish Melodies; Southey, with his Roderick; and and said loud enough to be heard by more than the Rogers, with his Jacqueline. Scott, in the follow-person he was addressing, "Poets! poets! what ing year, gave us The Lord of the Isles and The does the fellow mean? Where are they?" Hogg Field of Waterloo; and Leigh Hunt, "a real was a little offended at the time, but he enjoyed it good and very original poem," his Rimini. Wil- afterwards; and we have heard him tell the story son, already known by his Isle of Palms, gained in his own "slee" and inimitable manner, and another wreath, in 1816, by his City of the Plague. laugh immoderately as he told it. Poor James Lallah Rookh, and The Sibylline Leaves of Cole- Hogg! Regino has reason to remember James; ridge, containing "The Rime of the Ancient Mar- nor was the poet of "Kilmeny" forgotten when iner," will make the year 1817 a memorable year dead, by the great poet of the Excursion. There in the annals of poetry whenever they are written. is nothing more touching in poetry since the time Keats' Endymion was a publication of the year of Collins than Wordsworth's extempore verses on 1818; Shelley's Cenci, Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, the shepherd's death. He knew his claims to be Rogers' Human Life, and Wordsworth's Peter called a poet, and time will confirm his judgment Bell and The Wagoner, belong to 1819; Keats' and make the Rydal aurora a story merely to Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnus, and other amuse. poems, to 1820; Shelley's Queen Mab and Adonais; Southey's Vision of Judgment, and Byron's parody of the poem, to the year 1821; Rogers' Italy and Scott's Halidon Hill, to 1822; The Loves of the Angels of Moore, to 1823; Campbell's Theodoric, to 1824, and Southey's Tale of Paraguay, to 1825. Song after this began to cease among us; Byron and Shelley, and Keats, were dead; Scott and Southey, silent; Coleridge dreaming away existence,

"Fond to begin, but still to finish loathe;" Campbell past his prime; Rogers and Moore unwilling, rather than unable; Wilson busy with the Noctes Ambrosiana; Wordsworth confined

"Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground;" Hogg cultivating sheep on Yarrow, and Allan Cunningham superintending the marble progeny of Chantrey. Song, truly, had gone out among

us.

No one seems to write from the inborn force of his own genius, from Nature, and his own full thoughts:

"Now each court hobby-horse will wince rhyme ;

Poets, where are they? Is poetry extinct among us, or is it only dormant? Is the crop exhausted, and must the field lie fallow for a time? Or is it that, in this commercial nation of ours, where everything is weighed in Rothschild's scales of pecuniary excellence, that we have no good poetry because we have no demand for it? We falter while we think it is so. Poets we still have, and poetry at times of a rich and novel, but a cultivated flavor. Hardly a week elapses that does not give birth to as many different volumes of verses as there are days in the week. But then there is little that is good; much that was imagination, and much that might have passed for poetry when verse was in its infancy among us. Much of that clock-work tintinabulum of rhymethat cuckoo kind of verse which palls upon the mind and really disgusts you with verse of a higher character. But now we look, and justly too, for something more. Whilst we imitate others we can no more excel than he that sails by others' maps can make a new discovery. All the old dishes of the ancients have been new heated

and new set forth usque ad· But we forbear. in People look for something more than schoolboy common places and thoughts at second-hand, and novelties and nothing more, without a single grain of salt to savor the tun of unmeaningness which they carry with them. It is no easy matter to become a poet,

Both learn'd and unlearn'd, all write plays.
It was not so of old men took up trades
That knew the crafts they had been bred in right;
An honest bilboe-smith would make good blades,

"Consules fiunt quotannis, et novi pro-consules, Solus aut rex aut poeta non quotannis nascitur;" or, as the old water-poet phrased it,

He makes a poet, or at least-a king."

South was of opinion that the composition of an epigram was the next great difficulty to an epic

poem.

And beats at heaven's gates with her bright hoofs ?"-BEN JONSON.

Benjamin West, the painter, trafficked with

"When Heaven intends to do some mighty thing subjects of the same sublime description. And in what way? "Without expression, fancy, or design;" without genius and without art. People forget, or choose to forget, that subject alone is not sufficient for a poem. Look at Burns' "Mouse" or Wordsworth's "Peter Bell," or Wilkie's "Blind Fiddler," or Gainsborough's "Cottager" with a dish of cream. It is the treatment which ennobles. But there is no driving this into some people's ears. Big with the swollen ambition of securing a footing on the sun-bright summits of Parnassus, they plume themselves on borrowed wings and bladders of their own, and after a world of ink, a world of big ideas, and a copied invocation, they struggle to ascend, and pant and toil to the end of an epic, in as many books as the Iliad or the Eneid. Would that your Robert Montgomerys, your Edwin Atherstones, and sundry such who understand the art of sinking in the low profound-would that they would reflect for five minutes on what an epic poem really is! And what it is, and what it ought to be, glorious John Dryden tells us in a very few words. "A heroic poem," he says, "truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform." And so it is.

"And South beheld that master-piece of man." Coxcombs who consider the composition of a song an easy matter, should set themselves down, as Burns says, and try. Ask Tommy Moore how many days and nights he has given to a single stanza in an Irish melody? Ask Sam Rogers how long he has spent over the composition of a couplet in An Epistle to a Friend; or Wordsworth how long he has labored with a sonnet; or Bowlesyes, ask the Vicar of Bremhill, if he does not owe the bright finish of his verse as much to pains as happiness? Dryden toiled for a fortnight over his Alexander's Feast, and yet he wrote with easenot the ease of the mob of gentlemen ridiculed by Pope, but with great fluency of idea and great mastery of expression. Good things are not knocked off at a heat-for a long jump there must be a very long run, and a long preparatory training too. There is no saying, "I will be a poet.' Only consider not the long apprenticeship alone, but the long servitude which the muse requires from those who would invoke her rightly.

"A work," says Milton, "not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapors of wine; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can en"In a poet no kind of knowledge is to be over-rich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends looked; to a poet nothing can be useless. What-out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar ever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant And yet Murray and Moxon are troubled once a with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, the meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety, for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of religious truth, and he who knows the most will have most power of diversifying his scenes and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."*

week, at the least, with the offer of a new epic, for a certain sum-so run the terms-or, in case of declining that, for half profits. As if epics were blackberries, and men sought fame as Smith O'Brien seeks reputation-by an impertinent folly of their own! But "fools rush in," and there will still be poetasters-Black more and his brethrenin spite of critics, hard words, and something harder still-contemptuous neglect.

Every one remembers (poets themselves perFew live to see their fame established on a firm haps excepted) the long course of study and pre- and unalterable foundation. The kind criticisms paration which Milton laid down for himself before of friends conspire at times to give a false position he stripped for the Paradise Lost. And yet one to a poem, or the malice of enemies unite to obtain would hardly think, on first reflection, that any for it one equally undeserved. Who now reads course of preparation was necessary for the poet Hayley? How many are there in the position of of Comus, and Lycidas, and the Hymn on the Na- Gascoigne and Churchyard as described by old tivity of Christ. But Milton fully understood the Michael Drayton?— height of his great argument, and how unequalled Accounted were great meterers many a day, with every lengthened preparation he must be to But not inspired with bravefire; had they record it rightly. But people (not poets) start Lived but a little longer they had seen epics now-a-days without any kind of considera- Their works before them to have buried been." tion. No subject is too great for them. Satan, Chaos, The Messiah, The Omnipresence of the That lived but a little longer!" It is well Deity, the Fall of Nineveh, The World before the they did n't. How will it be with the poets of the Flood. One shudders at the very idea of subjects past generation two hundred years from this? so sublime taken up as holyday recreations by They cannot possibly go down complete." would-be poets without the vision and the faculty divine, or any other merit (if merit it may be called) than the mere impudence of daring :"When will men learn but to distinguish spirits, And set true difference 'twixt the jaded wits That run a broken pace for common hire, And the high raptures of a happy muse, Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,

* Rasselas.

There must be a weeding. Fancy Sir Walter Scott in twelve volumes, Byron in ten, Southey in ten, Moore in ten, Wordsworth in six-to say nothing of Campbell in two volumes, Rogers in two, and Shelley in four. The poets of the last generation form a library of themselves. And if poetry is multiplied hereafter at the same rate, we shall want fresh shelves, fresh patience, and a new lease of life, for threescore and ten of scriptural existence is far too short to get acquainted with the past and keep up our intimacy with the present. The literature of the last fifty years is a study

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