Loose-trowser'd beaux, and looser-moral'd belles ;

With ancient quizzes underneath the trees Reading the daily journals, or conversing; And, here and there, a black-eyed Grisette nursing."

In the Palais Royal, the Nos. 109, and 154, have probably had a larger proportion of visitants of all nations than any other spot in Paris. Their charm is the possession of the Roulet, and Rouge et Noir tables. If there ever should be a general history of vice, the annals of those two suites of rooms may form the most pregnant and most original portion. Half the crimes, and all the suicides of Paris, are concocted within those walls. They stand in the centre of the most profligate spot in Europe, and they deserve to stand in its centre. The whole district is the classic ground of iniquity, but within those boundaries are the Campi Phlegræi,

From the Palais Royal the poet strays to Frescati, the fantastic name of a celebrated gaming-house on the Boulevards, the resort of the better dressed ruffians of Paris, and of London. Want of room prevents us from giving a number of other extracts from this clever and ingenious volume, which we understand is from the pen of a gentlemen of the name of Read, and which does equal honour to his head and heart.

The selection of the Ottava Rima was judicious, from the general facility of the measure, and perhaps from it having become popular through Beppo and Whistlecraft. But the use of any thing that has been used before, seems to sit painfully on the author's conscience, and he accordingly attempts to lighten his obligation to the moderns, by shewing that they were indebted to a remote ancestry. But Chaucer and Fairfax would, in all pro

bability, have slept unthanked, but for Lord Byron and Mr Frere. After all, this is an idle delicacy, the stanza is free to the human race," like a wildgoose flies unclaimed of any man." Imitation is of an altogether different family. If this were the place to trouble ourselves with laying down the law on this subject, we should say, that there is no imitation except where the peculiarities of an author are transferred. Crabbe's clearness of rustic description, his vigorous seizure of the form and pressure of village habits, and his shrewd and simple pleasantry on obscure ambition and petty vanity, may attract authorship to the investigation of rural life. But the similarity of subject is not imitation, nor is the encreased acuteness of inquiry, nor is the more pointed vigour of versification, nor is the mixture of seriousness and pleasantry; for all of those may have arisen naturally in the course of the general and individual improve ment of poetry. It might as well be asserted, that every man who looks through a telescope, is a degraded imitator of Galileo; or that the whole rising generation, with their unshattered faces, are nothing better than plunderers of Jenner, and the Glostershire milk-maids.

The true imitation of Crabbe would be in his pressure of trivialities into the service; in his sending out, stamped with equal labour, the unimportant and the valuable specimens of his nu mismata rustica; in the Dutch delight of his painted straws, and flies on tankards, and red-nosed Boors in extravagant frolic or maudlin repentance.

Lord Byron's strength of expression, and that decision of view by which he passes over the feebler features of the terrain, and seizes on the commanding points, are common property, neither his discovery nor that of any man living, but as old as poetry and nature. He may, like other men of talents, have assisted in leading the authorship of England back into the original track from which bad taste and evil times had turned it away, yet to which it was rapidly reverting. But he was not the earliest even of his day, who stood upon the hill and made signals to the multitude wandering through the shade and the valley. The "Lay of the Last Minstrel," if we are to distinguish a peculiar agency, was the morning star of the modern age. But the transit of

powerful and brilliant intelligences across the same region, is free and glorious still, and no invasion of the orbit of that glittering leader of the day.

The true doctrine is, that imitation cannot be laid to the poet's charge, but A where there is an adoption of defect. Servility is the soul of imitation. It must be laid in the indictment that the author has been excited to the commission of absurdity by the instigation of some potential evil spirit that has made the offence prevalent over his feebler love of common sense. To conviet him on the statute, proof must be brought not of excellence, but of error. Parnassus will throw out the bill, alleging that a writer has been guilty of Byronism, on no more substantive charge, than that he has force of expression and depth of thought-that his imagination is vivid, or his sensibility exciteable. To secure a conviction, it must be proved that he has a propensity to laud and magnify the bolder vices; to select for his heroes compounds of the desperate aud the malignant ; and to feel his triumph in making the ruffians of the earth estimate their talents by their profligacy. The same induction may lead us to the imitators of the other prominent writers; but, in all cases, the conclusion is irresistible, that, as imitation is a literary crime, and as excellence is not criminal, deficiency must be the object of the charge. The imitator must imitate to the extent of losing his judgment-he must be so bowed down before his Pope, that he cannot recover his posture, but must continue in a perpetual osculation of the pontific toe. He must swear that my Lord Peter's loaf contains the essence of bread, mutton, beer, and all other nutriments and condiments. He must gradually acquire the inverted taste that loves the worst as well as, or better than the best of the enslaver's attributes ;-not merely worship the jewels on his Sultan's cap, but lick up the dust shaken from his slippers.

If he has Childe Harold on his table, and reads it at breakfast, he must sleep with Don Juan under his pillow, and make it the matter of his dreams.

The nobler genius will turn away from this prone idolatry, both because he cannot stoop, and because, if he could, he disdains to stoop. He will not insolently reject the inventions of other men when they can assist him in the common object of all the greater minds-the delight and instruction of his species. If on the height to which he had climbed by the vigour of his natural powers, he finds the wings which had been invented by some powerful wanderer through the brilliant realm that lies above the reach of ordinary mankind, he would not fling himself wingless upon the air. The noble invention would be turned to a purpose worthy of its nobleness, and some unconquered portion of the new region would be brought within the common dominion of the mind. The perfection of poetry consists in the problem," to express the greatest number of thoughts in the smallest number of words." Condensation is power. The finest poetic mind is the' most fertile of thought;-the most vivid poetic expression is the most compressed. Prolixity is in poetry what expansion is in physics,—the waste, the scattering away into an invisibility and feebleness, the mighty agency that wants only compression to move, or perhaps disrupt the frame of the world. But these truths are as old as Homer, or as man. Lord Byron has failed in dramatic writing, the first in dignity, by the want of this compression. The bonds of rhyme seem essential to his vigour. Blank-verse suffers him to wander away into endless diffusion. He is thus still below the summit of poetry, and must be so until he shall have produced a drama capable of standing beside those of the elder glorious time of England.

VOL. X.

30

Loose-trowser'd beaux, and looser-moral'd belles;

With ancient quizzes underneath the trees Reading the daily journals, or conversing; And, here and there, a black-eyed Grisette nursing."

In the Palais Royal, the Nos. 109, and 154, have probably had a larger proportion of visitants of all nations than any other spot in Paris. Their charm is the possession of the Roulet, and Rouge et Noir tables. If there ever should be a general history of vice, the annals of those two suites of rooms may form the most pregnant and most original portion. Half the crimes, and all the suicides of Paris, are concocted within those walls. They stand in the centre of the most profligate spot in Europe, and they deserve to stand in its centre. The whole district is the classic ground of iniquity, but within those boundaries are the Campi Phlegræi,

From the Palais Royal the poet strays to Frescati, the fantastic name of a celebrated gaming-house on the Boulevards, the resort of the better dressed ruffians of Paris, and of London. Want of room prevents us from giving a number of other extracts from this clever and ingenious volume, which we understand is from the pen of a gentlemen of the name of Read, and which does equal honour to his head and heart.

The selection of the Ottava Rimą was judicious, from the general facility of the measure, and perhaps from it having become popular through Beppo and Whistlecraft. But the use of any thing that has been used before, seems to sit painfully on the author's conscience, and he accordingly attempts to lighten his obligation to the moderns, by shewing that they were indebted to a remote ancestry. But Chaucer and Fairfax would, in all pro

bability, have slept unthanked, but for Lord Byron and Mr Frere. After all, this is an idle delicacy, the stanza is free to the human race, "like a wildImitation is of an altogether different goose flies unclaimed of any man." family. If this were the place to trouble ourselves with laying down the law on this subject, we should say, that there is no imitation except where the peculiarities of an author are transferred. Crabbe's clearness of rustic description, his vigorous seizure of the form and pressure of village habits, and his shrewd and simple pleasantry on obscure ambition and petty vanity, may attract authorship to the investigation of rural life. But the similarity of subject is not imitation, nor is the encreased acuteness of inquiry, nor is the more pointed vigour of versification, nor is the mixture of seriousness and pleasantry; for all of those may have arisen naturally in the course of the general and individual improve ment of poetry. It might as well be asserted, that every man who looks through a telescope, is a degraded imitator of Galileo; or that the whole rising generation, with their unshattered faces, are nothing better than plunderers of Jenner, and the Glostershire milk-maids.

The true imitation of Crabbe would be in his pressure of trivialities into the service; in his sending out, stamped with equal labour, the unimportant and the valuable specimens of his nu mismata rustica; in the Dutch delight of his painted straws, and flies on tankards, and red-nosed Boors in extravagant frolic or maudlin repentance.

Lord Byron's strength of expression, and that decision of view by which he passes over the feebler features of the terrain, and seizes on the commanding points, are common property, neither his discovery nor that of any man living, but as old as poetry and nature. He may, like other men of talents, have assisted in leading the authorship of England back into the original track from which bad taste and evil times had turned it away, yet to which it was rapidly reverting. But he was not the earliest even of his day, who stood upon the hill and made signals to the multitude wandering through the shade and the valley. The "Lay of the Last Minstrel," if we are to distinguish a peculiar agency, was the morning star of the modern age. But the transit of