Perhaps no branch of literary reputation is so difficult to establish as
that of first-rate poetic excellence. During the last fifty years, many
meritorious competitors for bardic renown have successively aspired to
public favour, and have each in their turns exhibited their fancy-woven
_bouquets_, as containing a more beautiful assemblage of "flowers of all
hue," as Milton divinely sings, than those which their equally emulative
and praiseworthy compeers have, in their best attempts, laid out upon
the _parterre_ of the public. In the poetic foreground of the above
period, are to be seen the names of Pye, Ogilvie, Whitehead, Tasker,
Mason, Cowper, Merry, Jerningham, Woty, Hurdis, Pratt, Fitzgerald, &c.
over whose metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and
sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue.
Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in
1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have
long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was
discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing
Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a
beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should have
screened their writer from the venomous shaft of Byron, have already
sunk beneath the meridian of their popularity; and the loaded ornamental
rhymes of Darwin; the prettily embroidered couplets of Miss Seward,
together with the Della Cruscan Rhymes of Mary Robinson, Mrs. Cowley,
&c. are left like daisies, plucked from the greensward, to perish
beneath unfeeling neglect. Who now reads the verses of Ann Yearsley, the
poetic milkwoman, who was so lauded beyond her deserts, by Mrs. H.
More?--few or none. Why is this revolution in public taste? Because
those master-spirits which guide the present age, have given birth to a
species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more
valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. Instead of the "namby
pamby" verses of the period I have alluded to, and the coarse scurrility
of style which runs with a discolouring vein through the satirical pages
of Dr. Wolcot, we have now the heart-stirring metres of a Campbell, as
in that beautiful rainbow of poetic loveliness and imagination, his
"Pleasures of Hope." We have now a series of pictures bearing an impress
as pleasant as the gleams of warm autumn in the "Pleasures of Memory,"
by Rogers; the wildness of Loutherbourgh, the grandeur of Salvator Rosa,
the terror-striking forms of Fuseli, embodied with increased energy in
the immortal Lays of Byron: the every-day incidents of life, copied with
the graphic fidelity of a Sharp, and bearing the faithful stamp of
cottage grouping, which distinguished the pencil of a Morland,--in the
natural paintings of Crabbe. We have Catullus stealing from his couch,
to breathe a new intonation into the harp of Moore; and last of all, we
have the votaress of virtue and moral feeling, the Cambrian minstrel,
Mrs. Hemans, making melancholy appear as delightful as love.
_The Author of a Tradesman's Lays._
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