feelings should judge truly of the poet- ass-self!" He is to sit down and coolly examine that which naturally arouses his finest passions, and act the unbiassed judge in a cause as to which he has been full of prejudices from the very hour of his birth; that the struggle to go through so unnatural a task as this, should occasion all sorts of extremes and absurdities is not extraordinary. Poetical criticism demands other than poetical nerves. It is one man's calling to create a beautiful metaphor, and another's to dissect it. It is for your cold-blooded experimentalist to stare a simile out of countenance, on pretence of criticising the regularity of its features, or to make mouths at the pathetic, under a pretext of subjecting it to the test of ridicule, as an urchin grins in your face in the hope of making you as ridiculous as himself. Of the fact of good poets being, in general, bad critics, the instances are "as plenty as blackberries." His lordship of Byron is one of the most modern and eminent examples. This is apparent, not only in the recent Bowles Controversy-to which one wonders at those who are sorry that he " condescends," for it is highly witty and amusing, and cannot hurt his reputation as a poet with any one who has common sense, but may be, more or less, detected in many other transactions of his life. Byron is truly a poet by intuition. In his juvenile poems, that tendency to melancholy, and to the depicting the darker passions, which has all along characterized him, is decidedly developed. He was then too young to suffer it to take such complete possession of him as it has since done, nor had he then attained to that nervous strength, either of thought or language, which imparts a double force to his misanthropical reflections. He accordingly wrote less from his own ideas of style and subject than from those of others; and whenever Lord Byron has been an imitator, he has, in one or other sense of the word, failed. With a predisposition, thus early, towards a certain style and colouring of thought, his judgment has been constantly overpowered by the peculiarities of his poetical temperament. This is evident even in what he has said respecting the Elgin marbles; difference of opinion is common, but there has been no measure in his wrath. He will find very few to join him in his exaggerated vituperations of the noble conoisseur, for rescuing these exquisite remains from the hands of Time and the Turk. The only pity is that it had not been done five hundred years sooner. But the eye of Byron had seen these unmatched sculptures in their original situation; and he loved them with the enthusiasm of a poet.* With such feelings it were in vain to reason. Talk of utility or expediency! we might as well expect the lover to cut off his mistress's beautiful hair to prevent it coming out, or draw her frontteeth to preserve the rest from caries. His opinions on poetry, even when he has endeavoured to rest them on first principles, or logical deductions, seem to have veered and varied all his life; and with his opinions, variable as they have been, his practice has generally contrived to be inconsistent. In his criticisms in the satire of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' even when they are not warped by irritated passions, it would be difficult to shew any one rule to which he has adhered throughout; if there be any, it is the rule of contrariety. His imitations have not been less inconsistent, nor less unfortunate. They are, however, often fortunately unfortunate. Unfortunate in not being like the style imitated, and fortunate in being better. The versification, for instance, of the "Bride of Abydos" is clearly intended to resemble that of Sir Walter Scott,-whose poems, by the bye, This is not correct. The marbles were removed from the Parthenon before his Lordship visited Athens.-C. N. he had ridiculed,-but it is more condensed and more correct than that of Sir Walter. Again, he has nearly spoiled the third canto of "Childe Harold," by mixing some unintelligible mysticism, about mountains and storms, with his own vigorous and well defined conceptions, under an idea that he was rivalling Wordsworth. "When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood, I can't help putting in my claim to praise." Don Juan. The controversy with Bowles is an other instance of the work which poetical prepossessions make with the critical judgment of a poet. Lord Byron may persuade himself, if he can, that Pope is, after all, the greatest of poets and that he thinks him so; but he shall not persuade the public to believe either of these propositions, for all the syllogisms that he has yet put forth. In truth, it is ten to one but he hates Pope and his poetry from the very bottom of his soul, and if he were to make an affidavit of the contrary to-morrow, the question would still remain where it was. He is, in fact, the dupe of his own feelings. Aware of the occasional hollowness-the sometime extravagance, of those bursts of exalted poetry, which are congenial and natural to his own mind, he distrusts himself. Such poetry is an everyday feeling with him, and he tires of himself. Like the bank, he can command an unlimited issue of his own coin, and he depreciates himself. With these feelings, he endeavours to erect an artificial standard of merit, in direct opposition to that which he feels to be the true standard, and, in doing so, he has, for lack of better, floundered upon the precious piece of logic, that because morals are the best of studies, and Pope has written moral essays in rhyme, therefore Pope is the best of poets. He might as well say, that because mahogany is the best of woods, therefore an ode to Honduras must exceed all possible odes to any possible collection of trees; or, that because the prospect of Eton is the best of prospects, and Eton the best of colleges, therefore, Gray's ode must be the best that could be written on the Prospect of a College. If reasoning like this may hold, the celebrated metrical version of the Holy Scriptures deposited in the University library at Glasgow, but which the worthy professors are so strangely shy of shewing, must be, to all Christian readers, the paragon of all earthly poetry,—that is, has been, or shall be. That a mind gifted like that of the author of Childe Harold, should prefer Pope, sensible, witty, and elegant as he is, to Shakespeare, to Milton, or to himself, and for such a reason as this, is next to impossible.-Yet we must believe this before we can put faith in Lord Byron's criticism. Lord Byron has been mentioned first as being perhaps the most notorious instance of the principle which these remarks are intended to enforce. Corroborative examples, however, are sufficiently abundant. Milton, like Byron, seems to have been born a poet, though, to his native loftiness and fire, he has superadded all the majestic and fanciful graces which a profound knowledge of classical poetry could afford him. His genius tended evidently to the higher beauties of poetry,-to the sublime and the pathetic, rather than to the witty, the ingenious, or the elegant. Like Byron, however, Milton is known to have preferred the works of one, the tendencies of whose genius were as opposite to those of his own, as can well be conceived. Cowley, the quaint, the metaphysical, the artificial Cowley, was the favourite of Milton, who preferred him to Dryden. Dryden, Rochester, and the rest of King Charles the Second's pet poets, however, returned the compliment, and were injudicious enough to express their contempt of Milton, whose Paradise Lost was characterized amongst the courtiers as a " dull poem," by one Milton, a blind old rebel, who had been Latin secretary to Cromwell, and narrowly escaped hanging at the Restoration, which, if he had not, they seem to have thought would have been no great matter for regret. Pope is another instance of the inability of great poets to become good critics. He is the poet of good sense, wit, and judgment. His style, however, is plainly the effect of intense labour. Its polish is the result of repeated touches, and its correctness, of anxious and perpetual pruning. A genius like that of Pope could not cordially relish the natural and luxurious freedom of the older poets. Their thoughts rushed on like the stream of a mountain torrent, whilst his flowed on with the equable current of a ca nal. It was hardly possible that he could really enjoy the works of men like these; nor did he enjoy them. Spence has put it upon record that he esteemed the writings of Ben Jonson, upon the whole, as "trash." His sentence on Young was, that he was "a genius without common-sense"-but what tells against him most strongly is, that his edition of Shakespeare is probably the worst ever published. Of the conjectural emendations, Johnson's are very middling, Warburton's worse than middling, and Pope's worst of all. They are universally and woefully flat. A fashionable canzonet occurring in the midst of Moore's Irish, or Burns' Scottish melodies, could not sound more deplorably. Theobald, the ci-devant hero of the Dunciad poor Tib," as Johnson called him, has experimentally and practically falsified the celebrated couplet of his enemy, and proved that it is one thing to write a poetical "Essay on Criticism," and another to practise it. "Let those judge others who, themselves, excel, And censure freely who have written well." The comparison between Pope's and Theobald's edition of Shakespeare, is in the very teeth of the maxiin. If we come a little nearer our own time, and examine the literary opinions of Gray, Johnson, and Horace Walpole, we shall find the same narrowness in their critical decisions. Gray predicted ill of Collins, and especially, discovered in the writings of the young bard of the Passions, a paucity of images! Mason and himself were more a kin-and Mason he preferred. Dr Johnson makes out a passage in Congreve's Mourning Bride, to be more poetically descriptive than any thing in Shakespeare; and Horace Walpole, reluctantly allowing him genius, despises all the other dramatists his contemporaries. Nay, the Doctor would discourage quotations from the works of a man, of whose admirable expressions, numbers have become idiomatic in the language, by saying that he who brings a passage from Shakespeare as a specimen of his powers, is like the pedant, who brought a brick as a sample of the building. As if Shakespeare's materials, like those of Mrs Centlivre, or Mrs Behn, were essentially commonplace, and he, like them, only remarkable for the art of unravelling plots, or contrasting characters. After saying that Fleet-street was his favourite prospect, it was natural to expect that he should run down Pastorals. The poet of "London" was not likely to relish Tasso, Guarini, or Allan Ramsay. Nor was he a very fair judge of Ossian, or even Dr Percy's ballads. Amongst the living poets the same intemperate judgments are daily manifested. Byron," in his own despite," sets up Pope for a model; deprecates cant in one breath, and cants about morals in the next. Percy Shelley, and the rest of the school of "naturals," gibe at the "artifice" and "sing song" of Pope, and are in love with the unintelligible beauties of Chaucer, making out in the excesses of their creed, "All discord, harmony-not understood.” Nay, there was Leigh Hunt, the other day, doating upon the exquisite pronunciation of tobacco," as a rhyme to " acre,"―tobaccre! and imprumortification of all those who feel sore dently avowing his fondness, to the at the jokes lately played off on the peculiaritics of what is termed the Cockney School of Poetry."* The Lake poets sneer at every body, and if Dr Southey be not careful with his hexameters, they run some risk of a return. Indeed, the Laureat's "Specimens" of English Poetry are in themselves no bad specimen of that perverse singularity of judgment which haunts the tribe of poets; nor is Mr Campbell's selections without some tendencies of this sort, though more judicious than Southey's. Sir Walter Scott's confirmed predilection for antiquarian description, and heroes who "cannot spell," is well known; and to complete the list, this infirmity of judgment, so fatal to great poets, is apparent even in the venerable father of "The Leg of Mutton School," who, it is plain, must have taken the hint of praising all his great dining acquaintance from Pope's idea of writing "panegyrics on all the kings in Europe," unmindful that the plan was, upon second thoughts, abandoned by its original and equally illustrious author. In this principle may be found the origin of that illiberal habit more or • See Notice of the Works of Charles Lamb.-Examiner. less common to all nations, of depreciating each other's literature, and especially poetical literature. A nation, like a poet, necessarily has a favourite style; the national style is only more extended than that of the individual. Any national standard of taste must, of course, be to the nation that owns it, as near perfection as possible; and because one people is incapable of entering into some of the peculiar feelings of another, these feelings are ridiculed, or even denied to exist. Thus the French, bigotted to the dramatic unities, and believing that nature and Aristotle are the same, designate the works of Shakespeare, 66 monstrous farces." And when Lord Byron, in his Don Juan, first fairly introduced into English literature that fantastic mixture of the serious and comic, in which Pulci, and some of the other precursors of Ariosto, and Ariosto himself delighted, many of our horror-stricken critics imagined, that the noble poet sat deliberately down to insult and confound the best feelings of our nature. Their very hair stood on end at such couplets as, “They grieved for those that perish'd with the cutter, And likewise for the bisquit-casks and butter." So difficult is it to reconcile one's self at first to any thing that is in opposition to a preconceived standard of taste. The Edinburgh Review has lately let itself down, by shewing some feelings of this sort with respect to French literature; but it is most apparent in our dramatic criticisms, which go beyond all bounds in expressing contempt for the very opposite styles of our neighbours. It is hardly necessary to instance any particular passage; but a specimen occurred to me the other day, so trans cendantly unjust, and divertingly impudent, that it is impossible to help giving it, once for all, especially as it comes from a quarter in which good sense, if not great genius, might have been expected. It is the prefatory address prefixed to Shadwell's "Miser," which commences thus: 66 Reader, the foundation of this play I took from one of Moliere's, called L'Avare; but that having too few persons, and too little action for an English theatre, I added to both so much that I may call more than half of this play my own, and I think I may say, without vanity, that Moliere's part has not suffered in my hand; nor did 1 ever know a French comedy made use of by the worst of our poets, that was not bettered by 'em. 'Tis not barrenness of wit or invention that makes us borrow from the French, but laziness—; and this was the occasion of my making use of L'Avare!"-Poor Moliere! It is difficult to read such things as this without thinking of Prior's well-known epigram." Ned" had probably hit upon this sally of Shadwell's, amongst his other proofs of the absurdities of poets; and could his "inverted rule,” as Prior wishes, "Prove every fool to be a poet," I am not inclined to think he would have turned out half so great a one as the elegant and witty epigrammatist. It may be observed, in conclusion, that Prior himself was one of the many poets who have preferred their worst work. As Milton doated upon "Paradise Regained," so Prior was enraptured with his prosing poem of " Solomon," and is said to have been highly vexed on hearing that some one had put it below the humorous and exquisite" Alma." T. D. [We have inserted this ingenious paper, on account of its literary merits; but we must take leave to enter our protest against the doctrine which the author attempts to inculcate.-We think it indisputable, in so much as poetry is an art, that poets, like other artists, must be the best judges of each other's skill. In what, therefore, relates to the rhythm, the construction of the verse, and to the melody of the numbers, a poet, we conceive, must necessarily be a better judge than any ordinary critic, precisely as a painter is a better judge of pictures, that is, of the style, the drawing, and the colouring, than any ordinary spectator. We think it is paradoxical, therefore, to deny the superiority of a poet's critical judgment;-and we think so too with respect even to the element of poesy itself. The taste of a gay and jovial Anacreon, is not likely to find the same delight in the solemn and serious compositions of a Milton, a Danté, or a Byron, that he would in those of a Moore: but it does not surely follow, that he is less a judge of poetry than the critic who does not possess the same delicacy of tact in any class of the art. We do not, however, wish to enter into a controversy on the subject, but merely to give a caveat against the principle assumed by our respected correspondent.-C. N.] GRACIOUS RAIN. THE east wind has whistled for many a day, The butterfly folded her wings as if dead, I too shrunk and shiver'd, and eyed the cold earth, But, lo! while I listen'd, down heavily dropt A few tears, from a low-sailing cloud: Large and slow they descended; then thicken'd-then stopt - Oh, the rapture of beauty, of sweetness, of sound, With laughter and singing the vallies rang round, The wind sunk away, like a sleeping child's breath, And the sun, like a spirit, triumphant o'er death, On this beautiful world !-such a change had been wrought On some cold stony heart might be work'd too (methought,) If a few virtuous tears by the merciful shed Touch'd its hardness, perhaps the good grain That was sown there and rooted, though long seeming dead, And the smile of the virtuous, like sunshine from heaven, And remorse, when the rock's flinty surface was riven, Oh! to work such a change-by God's grace to recal To this joy that the angels partake, what were all C. |