CENSURA LITERARIA.

NUMBER X.

[Being the Second Number of Vol. III.]

ART. I. A sketch of the genius and writings of Dr. Beattie, with extracts from his Life and Letters, lately published by Sir William Forbes.

SIR William Forbes's long-expected Life of Dr. Beattie has at length appeared in two quarto volumes: and I cannot refrain from indulging myself with a few cursory remarks, and a few extracts, while my heart and my head are warm with the subject. Has it added to our admiration of him as an author and a man? It has done both. There are many circumstances which combine to qualify Sir William, in a very uncommon degree, for the biographer of this great poet and philosopher: their long, intimate, and uninterrupted friendship, their habits of constant correspondence, and their congenial turns of mind, in particular; while the talents, and the character of the survivor, and his very extensive and near acquaintance with the most eminent men in the literary world, give a force and authority to his narration, which few eulogists can confer.

But with due respect to the examples of Mr. Mason, and Mr. Hayley, I confess I am not entirely satisfied with the plan of leaving a man to be principally his own biographer, by means of a series of letters, connected by a few short and occasional narratives. I do not mean indeed to depreciate those of Mr. Hayley, by comparing them with his predecessor's, which always from a boy disgusted me with their stiff and barren frigidity; while those of the former glow with all the warmth of friendship, and congenial poetic feeling: but I allude only to the plan.

There are many points on which there is no doubt that an author can best delineate his own character: but there are others, of which he is totally disqualified to give a fair portrait, and of which, even if he were qualified, it is highly improbable that his Letters should furnish an adequate account.

I trust therefore I may be excused for venturing the opinion which I have long formed, that, though Letters are an excellent, and almost necessary, accompaniment of a Life; and though appropriate extracts from them, and continued references to them may well be introduced in the narrative, yet they should not form the principal part of that narrative, which, as it seems to me, should exhibit one unbroken composition. To leave the generality of readers to collect and combine an entire portrait, or a regular series of events, from the scattered notices of a variety of desultory letters, is to give them credit for a degree of attention, and a power of drawing results, which few will be found to possess, and fewer still have leisure to exercise.

Having thus frankly declared my sentiments, it is almost unnecessary to add, that I prefer the plan

adopted

adopted by Dr. Currie, in his Life of Burns, to that, which has been chosen by Sir William Forbes for the life of his illustrious friend. In the execution of the mode he has followed, Sir William has discovered a soundness of judgment and taste in his selection, an elegance of language, a purity of sentiment, and an ardour of friendship, which will do him immortal honour. But, as my purpose is not to criticise the biographer, but to make some slight remarks on the poet, I must proceed.

Beattie was born a poet; that is, he was born with those talents and sensibilitics, which, with the assistance of the slightest education, are almost certain in due time to vent themselves in poetry. In the first occupation of his manhood, the care of an obscure country school, Sir Wm. Forbes says, "he had a never failing resource in his own mind; in those medi-. tations which he loved to indulge, amidst the beautiful and sublime scenery of that neighbourhood, which furnished him with endless amusement. At a small distance from the place of his residence, a deep and extensive glen, finely cloathed with wood, runs up into the mountains. Thither he frequently repaired; and there several of his earliest pieces were written. From that wild and romantic spot he drew, as from the life, some of his finest descriptions, and most beautiful pictures of nature, in his poetical compositions. He has been heard to say, for instance, that the description of the owl, in his charming poem "On Retirement,"

"Whence the scar'd owl on pinions grey
Breaks from the rustling boughs;

And down the lone vale sails away

To more profound repose;"

was drawn after real nature.

And the seventeenth stanza of the second Book of The Minstrel, in which he so feelingly describes the spot, of which he most approved, for his place of sepulture, is so very exact a picture of the situation of the churchyard of Lawrencekirk, which stands near to his mother's house, and in which is the school-house where he was daily taught, that he must certainly have had it in his view, at the time he wrote the following beautiful lines.

'Let Vanity adorn the marble tomb

With trophies, rhymes, and scutcheons of renown,
In the deep dungeon of some Gothic dome,
Where Night and Desolation ever frown!
Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down,
Where a green grassy turf is all I crave,
With here and there a violet bestrown,

Fast by a brook, or fountain's murmuring wave;
And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave.'

"It was his supreme delight to saunter in the fields the livelong night, contemplating the sky, and marking the approach of day; and he used to describe with peculiar animation the soaring of the lark in a summer morning. A beautiful landscape, which he has magnificently described in the twentieth stanza of the first book of The Minstrel, corresponds exactly with what must have presented itself to his poetical imagination, at those occasions, on the approach of the rising sun, as he would view the grandeur of that scene from the hill in the neighbourhood of his native village. The high hill, which rises to the west of Fordoune would, in a misty morning, supply him with one of the images so beautifully described in the twenty-first

stanza.

stanza. And the twentieth stanza of the second book of the Minstrel describes a night-scene unquestionably drawn from nature, in which he probably had in view Homer's sublime description of the Moon, in the eighth book of the Iliad, so admirably translated by Pope, that an eminent critic has not scrupled to declare it to be superior to the original. He used himself to tell, that it was from the top of a high hill in the neighbourhood, that he first beheld the ocean, the sight of which, he declared, made the most lively impression on his mind.

"It is pleasing, I think, to contemplate these his early habits, so congenial to the feelings of a poetical and warm imagination; and therefore, I trust, I shall be forgiven for having dwelt on them so long.

Sir William Forbes need have made no apology for the length of these passages. I would have said "O si sic omnia!" but that it would seem to imply some censure; and I well know that all could not be like this. We cannot always be watching the dawn of day "on the misty mountain's top;" nor be constantly wandering "alone and pensive" by the "pale beams" of the "Queen of Night." But it will not be doubted, that in the occupations of " young Edwin" the poet described many of his own early propensities and amusements. I do not agree therefore with an eminent critic, who observing that Edwin "is marked from his cradle with those dispositions and propensi ties, which were to be the foundation of his future destiny," adds, "I believe it would be difficult in real biography to trace any such early indications of a

Dr. Aikin's Letters on English Poetry.