when a volume of smaller poems from the same pen was published 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 Wolcott, and the puerile inanities of the Della Cruscan school. Verse and poetry were too commonly confounded, ease and smoothness were mistaken for higher powers, and the rough impudence of Wolcott 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

The joint publication of Southey and Lovell, in 1795, was followed the next year by a similar kind of publication, between Coleridge aud his school-fellow Lamb The name of Coleridge appears alone upon the title-page, which is thus inscribed, Po ems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge. Lamb's contributions are distinguished by his initials, and the volume is remarkable in more ways than one. Coleridge calls his sonnets Effusions,-Effusion I; 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 they should be, " Sonnets, attempted in the manner of Mr. Bowles." Here is his sonnet of gratitude to the vicar of Bremhill, a mistaken attack on Rogers, in the world to recommend them. The subsequently withdrawn, and the following bold panegyric upon Wordsworth: "The expression green radiance is borrowed," he writes, "from Mr. Wordsworth, a poet, whose versification is occasionally harsh and his diction too frequently obscure, but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid coloring."

"'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 oc

casion.

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 is still read, though the works it satirizes have been forgotten long ago.

When Wordsworth, in the following year (1798), produced his two duodecimo volumes of Lyrical Ballads, few read, liked, or understood them;

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

"

Burns is said to have foretold the future fame of Sir Walter Scott: "This boy will be heard of yet." But the great poet of Scotland was cold in his grave before Scott became a candidate for literary distinction. He died the yery year of Scott's Every shaft of ridicule was turned against first publication. The Chase, and William him, and with such success that his "audiand Helen; two Ballads from the German ence was, indeed, but "few." The of Gotfried Augustus Bürger. Edinburgh, principle on which his poems are composed 1796. Men who love to trace the heredi- was as yet unrecognized; and if the wits, tary descent of genius foresee a mysterious who should have known much better, were something in this seeming transmigration. blind to the several excellencies of his Be this as it may, there is little of Burns verse, he had little to look for from the in Scott's early publication, little of his bulk of readers. It was long, very long, own after-excellence, and, in short, very therefore, before he had any ascertained little to admire. and admitted position in the catalogue of English poets. Every description of circumstance seemed to go against him. Rogers put forth his Epistle to a Friend in the autumn of the same year, and Campbell his Pleasures of Hope in the following spring.

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 wide difference of opinion they are known to have occasioned. The new epic, however, had its own little phalanx of admirers; and

The effect was all but instantaneous. Two such noble examples of the school

and poetry of Pope revived a predilection | Tasso was preferred by Johnson to the for a form of poetry in which so many glowing and substantial beauties of Fairgreat efforts had been achieved; and the fax. In the same year Lord Strangford Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth were put forward his translation from Camoens, overlooked in the fresh triumph of a for- and thus was Darwin perpetuated in the mer favorite, and the first production of a gems, and flowers, and odors of L. E. L., new and successful writer. and Hoole in the polished refinements of the noble viscount.

A third publication of the year 1798 was an octavo volume, since very much enlarged, and entitled, Plays on the Passions. This was Joanna Baillie's first publication, and is likely to see an hereafter, not so much from the exaggerated praises of Scott and Southey, for these can effect but little where the substance itself is poor, but from the intrinsic excellence of the work itself, 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.

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 particu lar 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 The last century closed with Campbell's were keen and scrutinizing; his love of Pleasures of Hope, and the new one opened books and nature an increasing kind of with Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy, and Moore's appetite; and he was only in want of a first work, his translation of Anacreon. Cow-metre to suit the stories he had floating beper and the elder Warton were removed in fore him, when a friend recited to him from 1800 by death from witnessing the full ef- memory some of the striking passages of fects of the example they had set us, for Coleridge's Christabel, then unpublished, the agreeable Essay on Pope had its influ- and then as now, unfortunately a fragment, ence certainly in hastening the changes The rythmical run of the verse was catchcompleted by the Task. Beattie was suf-ing; and a story over which he had long fering from paralysis and age, and Lewis, brooded was commenced immediately, in with his Monk and his Tales of Wonder, the wild metre of the poem thus opporengrossed 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; Kirk White, his Clifton Grove; Campbell his Lochiel and Hohenlinden; of Dryden." The work, brought out on and Southey, a second epic, his Thalaba, in an irregular measure of his own inventing.

tunely brought beneath his notice.

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 not been equalled in the case of any one poem of considerable length during at least two generations: it certainly had not been approached in the case of any narrative poem since the days

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

On the 18th of April, 1802, died Dr.
Darwin, and on the following 14th of Au-
gust, L. E. L. was born. In 1803 died
Hoole, whose veneer-like translation of success of the work.

The year introduced by The Lay, closed with Madoc and The Sabbath. Madoc, a new epic by Southey; The Sabbath, a didactic poem by James Grahame -the sepulchral Grahame of the satire of Lord Byron. Madoc found few admirers at the time, nor has it many now, or the number it deserves to have; and The Sabbath of Grahame, though full of fine thoughts, and well sustained throughout, made but little way with poets, or with the public:

"Why, authors, all this sera w and scribbling

sore?

To lose the present, gain the future age,
Praised to be when you can hear no more,
And much enrich'd with Fame when useless
worldly store."

But Madoc and The Sabbath are sure of being included in the bulk of our British poetry, whenever that large body is re-edited by a poet of true judgment and discretion, and not by another Alexander Chal

mers.

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.

his

When the Edinburgh Review was in the full first swing of its power and patronage, James Montgomery published his Wanderer in Switzerland; Cary, the first part of his well-sustained translation of Dante; Hogg, his Mountain Bard; Crabbe, after a silence of twenty years, The Parish Register; Tannahill, a volume of songs; Moore, his Little's Poems; Scott, Marmion; and Byron, his Hours of Idleness. Crabbe alone was a favorite 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 English 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.'

"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, Sidney 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 The Edinburgh Review may be forgiven that Hogg's translation of their motto, all its injurious and unjust decrees in criti"Judex damnatur absolvitur illis," "I'll cism, for the entertaining addition it made be d-d if you escape," was true, at to our literature in the satire of Lord Byleast, to the spirit in which the journal was ron. Not that the satire itself is a very conducted. Young men of the present noble specimen of Byron's Muse, or of the generation can form from the known char-school of poetry of which it forms a part; acter of the Review for the last eight-and- but it is a fine fearless piece of writing, twenty 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

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,

not more happy in his mock imitations 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

"Yet there will still be bards: though fame is volume; the Crabbe, in a word, is better

smoke,

Its fumes are

thought;

frankincense to human

And the unquiet feelings which first woke Song in the world, will seek what then they sought."

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 in 1805, forty years after the publication of The New Bath Guide; Charlotte Smith and Kirk White in 1806; Home in 1808, sixty years after the tragedy of Douglas, and an ode addressed to him by Collins, had secured his fame; Miss Seward, whose feeble lucubrations I have omitted to detail, was removed in 1809; Tannahill, in 1810; Graham 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.

་་

tunate as to secure one was followed to his cham

"I well remember," writes Lockhart, "being in those days a young student at Oxford, how the Tales in Verse, The world before the booksellers' shops there were beleaguered for the Flood, The Isle of Palms, and some of the earliest copies, and how he that had been so forlighter poems of the year 1812, suffered an ber by a tribe of friends, all as eager to hear it eclipse in the great quarto publication of read as ever horse-jockeys were to see the conthat year, the two first Cantos of Childe clusion of a match at Newmarket; and, indeed, Harold. Murray gave 6007. for the copy-not a few of those enthusiastic academics had bets right; the sale was instantaneous, and depending on the issue of the struggle, which they considered the elder favorite as making to keep awoke one morning," as the author re- his own ground against the fiery rivalry of Childe cords," and found myself famous." The Harold." success of the poem was complete, and people applied to the new poet what Waller Byron had novelty on his side, and Scott had said of Denham, "that he broke out had to encounter the satiety of the public like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thou-ear. Other circumstances, moreover, were sand strong, when nobody was aware or at the least expected it."

against him. Moore had given a humorous fling at the poem in his Two-penny PostThe memorable quarto of the month of Bag; and the Messrs. Smith, in "A Tale March (Childe Harold) was followed in of Drury Lane," in The Rejected Addresses, October by one of the wittiest little volumes a ludicrous turn to the manner and matter in the English language. The Rejected of his former poems. He felt what Byron Addresses of the Messrs. Smith. The calls his "reign" was over, and turning Pipe of Tobacco, by Isaac Hawkins from poetry to prose, left the field of verse Browne, clever as it is, must sink before to a formidable rival, and employed his pen the little brochure of the successful broth in the composition of a lighter style of liteers. Philips, in his Splendid Shilling, israture,-one in which he achieved a second.

out a rival.

reputation, and one in which he is still with- 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 public at large have never cared much about poems written in Spenser's Stanzas, and Byron was wise when he post- In 1813, Hogg appeared with The Queen's poned the completion of his poem in that Wake, containing " Bonny Kilmeny;" Almeasure to a later period. Scott had awa-lan Cunningham, with a volume of songs, kened a taste for incident and story. Of some of surpassing beauty; Moore, with mere description the public had had enough his Two-penny Post-Bag; Coleridge with already; and of legendary tales in verse a tragedy (Remorse); and Scott, in dismore than enough. People were tired, guise, with The Bridal of Triermain. In moreover, of border raids and Highland 1814, Wordsworth enriched our poetry with scenery; they longed for novelty and for his much-decried Excursion; Moore, with another clime, and they got their wish. his Irish Melodies; Southey, with his RoThere was no suspense: the poet kept pace derick; and Rogers, with his Jacqueline. with the public; and The Giaour and The Scott, in the following year, gave us The Bride of Abydos were still in the infancy Lord of the Isles and The Field of Waterof their fame, when The Corsair, Lara, loo; and Leigh Hunt, "a real good and and The Siege of Corinth, appeared to very original poem," his Rimini. Wilson, await the judgment of the public. The already known by his Isle of Palms, gained poet was not unmindful of the fate of others. another wreath, in 1816, by his City of the He knew, moreover, the capricious turns Plague. Lallah Rookh, and The Sybilline of the public taste, and how necessary it Leaves of Coleridge, containing "The was, to maintain his ground, that he should Rime of the Ancient Mariner," will make frequently renew his title to the rank as- the year 1817 a memorable year in the ansigned him. Afraid that people were be-nals of poetry whenever they are written. ginning to get tired of Turkish tales, he Keats' Endymion was a publication of the added a third canto to Childe Harold; and year 1818; Shelley's Cenci, Crabbe's Tales when the fourth and last canto of that noble of the Hall, Rogers' Human Life, and poem was published, he produced a novelty Wordsworth's Peter Bell and The Wagat 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, or 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.

goner, belong to 1819; Keats' Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnus, and other 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 1925. 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 Ambrosiane; Wordsworth confined

"Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground;"

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 reple-ble progeny of Chantrey. Song, truly, had tion of learning, but the obscurity of haste and the mythological abundance of one who was not a scholar. Other poems of repute

Hogg cultivating sheep on Yarrow, and
Allan Cunningham superintending the mar-

gone out among us. No one seems to write
from the inborn force of his own genius,
from Nature, and his own full thoughts —