I cannot help giving also the conclusion of the Epistle to Jervas.

"Oh, lasting as those colours may they shine,

Free as thy stroke, yet faultless as thy line;

New graces yearly like thy works display,

Soft without weakness, without glaring gay;

Led by some rule, that guides, but not constrains;

And finish'd more through happiness than pains.

The kindred arts shall in their praise conspire,

One dip the pencil, and one string the lyre.

Yet should the Graces all thy figures place,

And breathe an air divine on ev'ry face;

Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll

Strong as their charms, and gentle as their soul;

With Zeuxis' Helen thy Bridgewater vie,

And these be sung till Granville's Myra die:

Alas! how little from the grave we claim!

Thou but preserv'st a face, and I a name."

And shall we cut ourselves off from beauties like these with a

theory? Shall we shut up our books, and seal up our senses, to please

the dull spite and inordinate vanity of those "who have eyes, but they

see not--ears, but they hear not--and understandings, but they

understand not,"--and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope

was a poet or not? It will never do. Such persons, when you point out to

them a fine passage in Pope, turn it off to something of the same sort

in some other writer. Thus they say that the line, "I lisp'd in numbers,

for the numbers came," is pretty, but taken from that of Ovid--_Et

quum conabar scribere, versus erat_. They are safe in this mode of

criticism: there is no danger of any one's tracing their writings to the

classics.

Pope's letters and prose writings neither take away from, nor add to

his poetical reputation. There is, occasionally, a littleness of manner,

and an unnecessary degree of caution. He appears anxious to say a good

thing in every word, as well as every sentence. They, however, give a

very favourable idea of his moral character in all respects; and his

letters to Atterbury, in his disgrace and exile, do equal honour to

both. If I had to choose, there are one or two persons, and but one or

two, that I should like to have been better than Pope!

Dryden was a better prose-writer, and a bolder and more varied

versifier than Pope. He was a more vigorous thinker, a more correct and

logical declaimer, and had more of what may be called strength of mind

than Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacy of feeling.

Dryden's eloquence and spirit were possessed in a higher degree by

others, and in nearly the same degree by Pope himself; but that by which

Pope was distinguished, was an essence which he alone possessed, and of

incomparable value on that sole account. Dryden's Epistles are

excellent, but inferior to Pope's, though they appear (particularly the

admirable one to Congreve) to have been the model on which the latter

formed his. His Satires are better than Pope's. His Absalom and

Achitophel is superior, both in force of invective and discrimination of

character, to any thing of Pope's in the same way. The character of

Achitophel is very fine; and breathes, if not a sincere love for virtue,

a strong spirit of indignation against vice.

Mac Flecknoe is the origin of the idea of the Dunciad; but it is less

elaborately constructed, less feeble, and less heavy. The difference

between Pope's satirical portraits and Dryden's, appears to be this in a

good measure, that Dryden seems to grapple with his antagonists, and to

describe real persons; Pope seems to refine upon them in his own mind,

and to make them out just what he pleases, till they are not real

characters, but the mere driveling effusions of his spleen and malice.

Pope describes the thing, and then goes on describing his own

description till he loses himself in verbal repetitions. Dryden recurs

to the object often, takes fresh sittings of nature, and gives us new

strokes of character as well as of his pencil. The Hind and Panther is

an allegory as well as a satire; and so far it tells less home; the

battery is not so point-blank. But otherwise it has more genius,

vehemence, and strength of description than any other of Dryden's works,

not excepting the Absalom and Achitophel. It also contains the finest

examples of varied and sounding versification. I will quote the

following as an instance of what I mean. He is complaining of the

treatment which the Papists, under James II. received from the church of

England.

"Besides these jolly birds, whose corpse impure

Repaid their commons with their salt manure,

Another farm he had behind his house,

Not overstocked, but barely for his use;

Wherein his poor domestic poultry fed,

And from his pious hand "received their bread."

Our pampered pigeons, with malignant eyes,

Beheld these inmates, and their nurseries;

Though hard their fare, at evening, and at morn,

(A cruise of water, and an ear of corn,)

Yet still they grudged that _modicum,_ and thought

A sheaf in every single grain was brought.

Fain would they filch that little food away,

While unrestrained those happy gluttons prey;

And much they grieved to see so nigh their hall,

The bird that warned St. Peter of his fall;

That he should raise his mitred crest on high,

And clap his wings, and call his family

To sacred rites; and vex the ethereal powers

With midnight mattins at uncivil hours;

Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest,

Just in the sweetness of their morning rest.

Beast of a bird! supinely when he might

Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!

What if his dull forefathers us'd that cry,

Could he not let a bad example die?

The world was fallen into an easier way:

This age knew better than to fast and pray.

Good sense in sacred worship would appear,

So to begin as they might end the year.

Such feats in former times had wrought the falls

Of crowing chanticleers in cloister'd walls.

Expell'd for this, and for their lands they fled;

And sister Partlet with her hooded head

Was hooted hence, because she would not pray a-bed."

There is a magnanimity of abuse in some of these epithets, a fearless

choice of topics of invective, which may be considered as the heroical

in satire.

The _Annus Mirabilis_ is a tedious performance; it is a tissue of

far-fetched, heavy, lumbering conceits, and in the worst style of what

has been denominated metaphysical poetry. His Odes in general are of the

same stamp; they are the hard-strained offspring of a meagre,

meretricious fancy. The famous Ode on St. Cecilia deserves its

reputation; for, as piece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, or

recited in alternate strophe and antistrophe, with classical allusions,

and flowing verse, nothing can be better. It is equally fit to be said

or sung; it is not equally good to read. It is lyrical, without being

epic or dramatic. For instance, the description of Bacchus,

"The jolly god in triumph comes,

Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;

Flush'd with a purple grace,

He shews his honest face"--

does not answer, as it ought, to our idea of the God, returning from the

conquest of India, with satyrs and wild beasts, that he had tamed,

following in his train; crowned with vine leaves, and riding in a

chariot drawn by leopards--such as we have seen him painted by Titian

or Rubens! Lyrical poetry, of all others, bears the nearest resemblance

to painting: it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, which depend

for effect, not on the working out, but on the selection. It is the

dance and pantomime of poetry. In variety and rapidity of movement, the

Alexander's Feast has all that can be required in this respect; it only

wants loftiness and truth of character.

Dryden's plays are better than Pope could have written; for though he

does not go out of himself by the force of imagination, he goes out of

himself by the force of common-places and rhetorical dialogue. On the

other hand, they are not so good as Shakspeare's; but he has left the

best character of Shakspeare that has ever been written. [5]

His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio shew a greater knowledge

of the taste of his readers and power of pleasing them, than

acquaintance with the genius of his authors. He ekes out the lameness of

the verse in the former, and breaks the force of the passion in both.

The Tancred and Sigismunda is the only general exception, in which, I

think, he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioned

declamation of the original. The Honoria has none of the bewildered,

dreary, preternatural effect of Boccaccio's story. Nor has the Flower

and the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicity and concentrated

feeling of Chaucer's romantic fiction. Dryden, however, sometimes seemed

to indulge himself as well as his readers, as in keeping entire that

noble line in Palamon's address to Venus:

"Thou gladder of the mount of Cithaeron!"

His Tales have been, upon the whole, the most popular of his works;

and I should think that a translation of some of the other serious tales

in Boccaccio and Chaucer, as that of Isabella, the Falcon, of Constance,

the Prioress's Tale, and others, if executed with taste and spirit,

could not fail to succeed in the present day.

___

[5] "To begin then with Shakspeare: he was the man who of all modern,

and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.

All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not

laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see

it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give

him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not

the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her

there. I cannot say, he is every where alike; were he so, I should do

him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times

flat, and insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious

swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion

is presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his

wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

_Quantum lenta solent inter Viburna Cupressi_."

___

It should appear, in tracing the history of our literature, that

poetry had, at the period of which we are speaking, in general declined,

by successive gradations, from the poetry of imagination, in the time of

Elizabeth, to the poetry of fancy (to adopt a modern distinction) in the

time of Charles I.; and again from the poetry of fancy to that of wit,

as in the reign of Charles II. and Queen Anne. It degenerated into the

poetry of mere common places, both in style and thought, in the

succeeding reigns: as in the latter part of the last century, it was

transformed, by means of the French Revolution, into the poetry of

paradox.

Of Donne I know nothing but some beautiful verses to his wife,

dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad, and some

quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could not unravel.

Waller still lives in the name of Sacharissa; and his lines on the

death of Oliver Cromwell shew that he was a man not without genius and

strength of thought.

Marvel is a writer of nearly the same period, and worthy of a better

age. Some of his verses are harsh, as the words of Mercury; others

musical, as is Apollo's lute. Of the latter kind are his boat-song, his

description of a fawn, and his lines to Lady Vere. His lines prefixed to

Paradise Lost are by no means the most favourable specimen of his

powers.

Butler's Hudibras is a poem of more wit than any other in the

language. The rhymes have as much genius in them as the thoughts; but

there is no story in it, and but little humour. Humour is the making

others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously: wit is the pointing out

and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less

ill-nature. The fault of Butler's poem is not that it has too much wit,

but that it has not an equal quantity of other things. One would suppose

that the starched manners and sanctified grimace of the times in which

he lived, would of themselves have been sufficiently rich in ludicrous

incidents and characters; but they seem rather to have irritated his

spleen, than to have drawn forth his powers of picturesque imitation.

Certainly if we compare Hudibras with Don Quixote in this respect, it

seems rather a meagre and unsatisfactory performance.

Rochester's poetry is the poetry of wit combined with the love of

pleasure, of thought with licentiousness. His extravagant heedless

levity has a sort of passionate enthusiasm in it; his contempt for every

thing that others respect, almost amounts to sublimity. His poem upon

Nothing is itself no trifling work. His epigrams were the bitterest, the

least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written.

Sir John Suckling was of the same mercurial stamp, but with a greater

fund of animal spirits; as witty, but less malicious. His Ballad on a

Wedding is perfect in its kind, and has a spirit of high enjoyment in

it, of sportive fancy, a liveliness of description, and a truth of

nature, that never were surpassed. It is superior to either Gay or

Prior; for with all their _naivete_ and terseness, it has a Shakspearian

grace and luxuriance about it, which they could not have reached.

Denham and Cowley belong to the same period, but were quite distinct

from each other: the one was grave and prosing, the other melancholy and

fantastical. There are a number of good lines and good thoughts in the

Cooper's Hill. And in Cowley there is an inexhaustible fund of sense and

ingenuity, buried in inextricable conceits, and entangled in the cobwebs

of the schools. He was a great man, not a great poet. But I shall say no

more on this subject. I never wish to meddle with names that are sacred,

unless when they stand in the way of things that are more sacred.

Withers is a name now almost forgotten, and his works seldom read;

but his poetry is not unfrequently distinguished by a tender and

pastoral turn of thought; and there is one passage of exquisite feeling,

describing the consolations of poetry in the following terms:

"She doth tell me where to borrow

Comfort in the midst of sorrow;

Makes the desolatest place [6]

To her presence be a grace;

And the blackest discontents

Be her fairest ornaments.

In my former days of bliss

Her divine skill taught me this,

That from every thing I saw,

I could some invention draw;

And raise pleasure to her height,

Through the meanest object's sight,

By the murmur of a spring,

Or the least bough's rusteling,

By a daisy whose leaves spread

Shut when Titan goes to bed;

Or a shady bush or tree,

She could more infuse in me,

Than all Nature's beauties can,

In some other wiser man.

By her help I also now

Make this churlish place allow

Some things that may sweeten gladness

In the very gall of sadness.

The dull loneness, the black shade,

That these hanging vaults have made,

The strange music of the waves,

Beating on these hollow caves,

This black den which rocks emboss,

Overgrown with eldest moss,

The rude portals that give light

More to terror than delight,

This my chamber of neglect,

Wall'd about with disrespect,

From all these and this dull air,

A fit object for despair,

She hath taught me by her might

To draw comfort and delight.

Therefore, thou best earthly bliss,

I will cherish thee for this.

Poesie; thou sweet'st content

That ere Heav'n to mortals lent:

Though they as a trifle leave thee,

Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee,

Though thou be to them a scorn,

That to nought but earth are born:

Let my life no longer be

Than I am in love with thee.

Though our wise ones call thee madness,

Let me never taste of sadness,

If I love not thy maddest fits,

Above all their greatest wits.

And though some too seeming holy,

Do account thy raptures folly,

Thou dost teach me to contemn

What makes knaves and fools of them."

___

[6] Written in the Fleet Prison.

___

LECTURE V.

ON THOMSON AND COWPER.

Thomson, the kind-hearted Thomson, was the most indolent of mortals

and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of

poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote "no line which

dying he would wish to blot." Perhaps a better proof of his honest

simplicity, and inoffensive goodness of disposition, would be that he

wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should

blot. Indeed, he himself wished, on his death-bed, formally to expunge

his dedication of one of the Seasons to that finished courtier, and

candid biographer of his own life, Bub Doddington. As critics, however,

not as moralists, we might say on the other hand--"Would he had

blotted a thousand!"--The same suavity of temper and sanguine warmth

of feeling which threw such a natural grace and genial spirit of

enthusiasm over his poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vices and

defects. He is affected through carelessness: pompous from unsuspecting

simplicity of character. He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in

his style, because he had no consciousness of these vices in himself. He

mounts upon stilts, not out of vanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a

good line, but he makes up for it by a bad one. He takes advantage of

all the most trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction

as a kindly relief to his Muse, and as if he thought them quite as good,

and likely to be quite as acceptable to the reader, as his own poetry.

He did not think the difference worth putting himself to the trouble of

accomplishing. He had too little art to conceal his art: or did not even

seem to know that there was any occasion for it. His art is as naked and

undisguised as his nature; the one is as pure and genuine as the other

is gross, gaudy, and meretricious.--All that is admirable in the

Seasons, is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of

his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled for, and departs

unbidden. But he takes no pains, uses no self-correction; or if he seems

to labour, it is worse than labour lost. His genius "cannot be

constrained by mastery." The feeling of nature, of the changes of the

seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling

to the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression; but if the

expression did not come of itself, he left the whole business to chance;

or, willing to evade instead of encountering the difficulties of his

subject, fills up the intervals of true inspiration with the most vapid

and worthless materials, pieces out a beautiful half line with a

bombastic allusion, or overloads an exquisitely natural sentiment or

image with a cloud of painted, pompous, cumbrous phrases, like the

shower of roses, in which he represents the Spring, his own lovely,

fresh, and innocent Spring, as descending to the earth.

"Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come,

And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,

While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower

Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend."

Who, from such a flimsy, round-about, unmeaning commencement as this,

would expect the delightful, unexaggerated, home-felt descriptions of

natural scenery, which are scattered in such unconscious profusion

through this and the following cantos? For instance, the very next

passage is crowded with a set of striking images.

"And see where surly Winter passes off

Far to the north, and calls his ruffian blasts:

His blasts obey, and quit the howling hill,

The shatter'd forest, and the ravag'd vale;

While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch

Dissolving snows in livid torrents lost,

The mountains lift their green heads to the sky.

As yet the trembling year is unconfirmed,

And Winter oft at eve resumes the breeze,

Chills the pale morn, and bids his driving sleets

Deform the day delightless; so that scarce

The bittern knows his time with bill ingulpht

To shake the sounding marsh, or from the shore

The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath,

And sing their wild notes to the list'ning waste."

Thomson is the best of our descriptive poets: for he gives most of

the poetry of natural description. Others have been quite equal to him,

or have surpassed him, as Cowper for instance, in the picturesque part

of his art, in marking the peculiar features and curious details of

objects;--no one has yet come up to him in giving the sum total of

their effects, their varying influences on the mind. He does not go into

the _minutiae_ of a landscape, but describes the vivid impression which

the whole makes upon his own imagination; and thus transfers the same

unbroken, unimpaired impression to the imagination of his readers. The

colours with which he paints seem yet wet and breathing, like those of

the living statue in the Winter's Tale. Nature in his descriptions is

seen growing around us, fresh and lusty as in itself. We feel the effect

of the atmosphere, its humidity or clearness, its heat or cold, the glow

of summer, the gloom of winter, the tender promise of the spring, the

full overshadowing foliage, the declining pomp and deepening tints of

autumn. He transports us to the scorching heat of vertical suns, or

plunges us into the chilling horrors and desolation of the frozen zone.

We hear the snow drifting against the broken casement without, and see

the fire blazing on the hearth within. The first scattered drops of a

vernal shower patter on the leaves above our heads, or the coming storm

resounds through the leafless groves. In a word, he describes not to the

eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his

heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he

touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying

soul. His faults were those of his style--of the author and the man;

but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his

imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings were bedded,

were too much for him to counteract by neglect, or affectation, or false

ornaments. It is for this reason that he is, perhaps, the most popular

of all our poets, treating of a subject that all can understand, and in

a way that is interesting to all alike, to the ignorant or the refined,

because he gives back the impression which the things themselves make

upon us in nature. "That," said a man of genius, seeing a little shabby

soiled copy of Thomson's Seasons lying on the window-seat of an obscure

country alehouse--"That is true fame!"

It has been supposed by some, that the Castle of Indolence is

Thomson's best poem; but that is not the case. He has in it, indeed,

poured out the whole soul of indolence, diffuse, relaxed, supine,

dissolved into a voluptuous dream; and surrounded himself with a set of

objects and companions, in entire unison with the listlessness of his

own temper. Nothing can well go beyond the descriptions of these inmates

of the place, and their luxurious pampered way of life--of him who

came among them like "a burnished fly in month of June," but soon left

them on his heedless way; and him,

"For whom the merry bells had rung, I ween,

If in this nook of quiet, bells had ever been."

The in-door quiet and cushioned ease, where "all was one full-swelling

bed"; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by "the stock-dove's plaint

amid the forest deep,"

"That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale"--

are in the most perfect and delightful keeping. But still there are no

passages in this exquisite little production of sportive ease and fancy,

equal to the best of those in the Seasons. Warton, in his Essay on Pope,

was the first to point out and do justice to some of these; for

instance, to the description of the effects of the contagion among our

ships at Carthagena--"of the frequent corse heard nightly plunged amid

the sullen waves," and to the description of the pilgrims lost in the

deserts of Arabia. This last passage, profound and striking as it is, is

not free from those faults of style which I have already noticed.

"------Breath'd hot

From all the boundless furnace of the sky,

And the wide-glitt'ring waste of burning sand,

A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites

With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,

Son of the desert, ev'n the camel feels

Shot through his wither'd heart the fiery blast.

Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,

Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,

Commov'd around, in gath'ring eddies play;

Nearer and nearer still they dark'ning come,

Till with the gen'ral all-involving storm

Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise,

And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown,

Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,

Beneath descending hills the caravan

Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets,

Th' impatient merchant, wond'ring, waits in vain;

And Mecca saddens at the long delay."

There are other passages of equal beauty with these; such as that of

the hunted stag, followed by "the inhuman rout,"

"------That from the shady depth

Expel him, circling through his ev'ry shift.

He sweeps the forest oft, and sobbing sees

The glades mild op'ning to the golden day,

Where in kind contest with his butting friends

He wont to struggle, or his loves enjoy."

The whole of the description of the frozen zone, in the Winter, is

perhaps even finer and more thoroughly felt, as being done from early

associations, than that of the torrid zone in his Summer. Any thing more

beautiful than the following account of the Siberian exiles is, I think,

hardly to be found in the whole range of poetry.

"There through the prison of unbounded wilds,

Barr'd by the hand of nature from escape,

Wide roams the Russian exile. Nought around

Strikes his sad eye but deserts lost in snow,

And heavy-loaded groves, and solid floods,

That stretch athwart the solitary vast

Their icy horrors to the frozen main;

And cheerless towns far distant, never bless'd,

Save when its annual course the caravan

Bends to the golden coast of rich Cathay,

With news of human kind."

The feeling of loneliness, of distance, of lingering, slow-revolving

years of pining expectation, of desolation within and without the heart,

was never more finely expressed than it is here.

The account which follows of the employments of the Polar night--of

the journeys of the natives by moonlight, drawn by rein-deer, and of the

return of spring in Lapland--

"Where pure Niemi's fairy mountains rise,

And fring'd with roses Tenglio rolls his stream,"

is equally picturesque and striking in a different way. The traveller

lost in the snow, is a well-known and admirable dramatic episode. I

prefer, however, giving one example of our author's skill in painting

common domestic scenery, as it will bear a more immediate comparison

with the style of some later writers on such subjects. It is of little

consequence what passage we take. The following description of the

first setting in of winter is, perhaps, as pleasing as any.

"Through the hush'd air the whitening shower descends,

At first thin wav'ring, till at last the flakes

Fall broad and wide, and fast, dimming the day

With a continual flow. The cherish'd fields

Put on their winter-robe of purest white:

'Tis brightness all, save where the new snow melts

Along the mazy current. Low the woods

Bow their hoar head; and ere the languid Sun,

Faint, from the West emits his ev'ning ray,

Earth's universal face, deep hid, and chill,

Is one wide dazzling waste, that buries wide

The works of man. Drooping, the lab'rer-ox

Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands

The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heav'n,

Tam'd by the cruel season, crowd around

The winnowing store, and claim the little boon

Which Providence assigns them. One alone,

The red-breast, sacred to the household Gods,

Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky,

In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves

His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man

His annual visit. Half-afraid, he first

Against the window beats; then, brisk, alights

On the warm hearth; then hopping o'er the floor,

Eyes all the smiling family askance,

And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is:

Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbs

Attract his slender feet. The foodless wilds

Pour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,

Though timorous of heart, and hard beset

By death in various forms, dark snares and dogs,

And more unpitying men, the garden seeks,

Urg'd on by fearless want. The bleating kind [sic]

Eye the bleak heav'n, and next, the glist'ning earth,

With looks of dumb despair; then, sad dispers'd,

Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

It is thus that Thomson always gives a _moral sense_ to nature.

Thomson's blank verse is not harsh, or utterly untuneable; but it is

heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-hill. The selections

which have been made from his works in Enfield's Speaker, and other

books of extracts, do not convey the most favourable idea of his genius

or taste; such as Palemon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Celadon and

Amelia. Those parts of any author which are most liable to be stitched

in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best.

The moral descriptions and reflections in the Seasons are in an

admirable spirit, and written with great force and fervour.

His poem on Liberty is not equally good: his Muse was too easy and

good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against

unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutional

monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the

establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of

hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived. Thomson was but an

indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of

liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny. Spleen is

the soul of patriotism, and of public good: but you would not expect a

man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his

waistcoat pockets, to be "overrun with the spleen," or to heat himself

needlessly about an abstract proposition.

His plays are liable to the same objection. They are never acted, and

seldom read. The author could not, or would not, put himself out of his

way, to enter into the situations and passions of others, particularly

of a tragic kind. The subject of Tancred and Sigismunda, which is taken

from a serious episode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorly

handled: the ground may be considered as still unoccupied.

Cowper, whom I shall speak of in this connection, lived at a

considerable distance of time after Thomson; and had some advantages

over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision

and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and

leisurely choice of such topics only as his genius and peculiar habits

of mind prompted him to treat of. The Task has fewer blemishes than the

Seasons; but it has not the same capital excellence, the "unbought

grace" of poetry, the power of moving and infusing the warmth of the

author's mind into that of the reader. If Cowper had a more polished

taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more

impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject.

If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the

author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events;

in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the

private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or

not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please

himself than the public. There is an effeminacy about him, which shrinks

from and repels common and hearty sympathy. With all his boasted

simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general

descriptions of nature: he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and

from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now

and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being

caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any

untoward accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with

nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads "his Vashti"

forth to public view with a look of consciousness and attention to

etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is

delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic

adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a

common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the

tea-kettle--No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured

tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn. His walks and

arbours are kept clear of worms and snails, with as much an appearance

of _petit-maitreship_ as of humanity. He has some of the sickly

sensibility and pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope prided

himself in them: whereas, Cowper affects to be all simplicity and

plainness. He had neither Thomson's love of the unadorned beauties of

nature, nor Pope's exquisite sense of the elegances of art. He was, in

fact, a nervous man, afraid of trusting himself to the seductions of the

one, and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to an intimacy with

the other: but to be a coward, is not the way to succeed either in

poetry, in war, or in love! Still he is a genuine poet, and deserves all

his reputation. His worst vices are amiable weaknesses, elegant

trifling. Though there is a frequent dryness, timidity, and jejuneness

in his manner, he has left a number of pictures of domestic comfort and

social refinement, as well as of natural imagery and feeling, which can

hardly be forgotten but with the language itself. Such, among others,

are his memorable description of the post coming in, that of the

preparations for tea in a winter's evening in the country, of the

unexpected fall of snow, of the frosty morning (with the fine satirical

transition to the Empress of Russia's palace of ice), and most of all,

the winter's walk at noon. Every one of these may be considered as

distinct studies, or highly finished cabinet-pieces, arranged without

order or coherence. I shall be excused for giving the last of them, as

what has always appeared to me one of the most feeling, elegant, and

perfect specimens of this writer's manner.

"The night was winter in his roughest mood;

The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon

Upon the southern side of the slant hills,

And where the woods fence off the northern blast,

The season smiles, resigning all its rage,

And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue,

Without a cloud, and white without a speck

The dazzling splendour of the scene below.

Again the harmony comes o'er the vale;

And through the trees I view th' embattled tow'r,

Whence all the music. I again perceive

The soothing influence of the wafted strains,

And settle in soft musings as I tread

The walk, still verdant, under oaks and elms,

Whose outspread branches overarch the glade.

The roof, though moveable through all its length,

As the wind sways it, has yet well suffic'd,

And, intercepting in their silent fall

The frequent flakes, has kept a path for me.

No noise is here, or none that hinders thought.

The redbreast warbles still, but is content

With slender notes, and more than half suppress'd.

Pleas'd with his solitude, and flitting light

From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes

From many a twig the pendent drop of ice,

That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below.

Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,

Charms more than silence. Meditation here

May think down hours to moments. Here the heart

May give a useful lesson to the head,

And Learning wiser grow without his books.

Knowledge and Wisdom, far from being one,

Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells

In heads replete with thoughts of other men;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells,

By which the magic art of shrewder wits

Holds an unthinking multitude enthrall'd.

Some to the fascination of a name

Surrender judgment hood-wink'd. Some the style

Infatuates, and through labyrinths and wilds

Of error leads them, by a tune entranc'd.

While sloth seduces more, too weak to bear

The insupportable fatigue of thought,

And swallowing therefore without pause or choice

The total grist unsifted, husks and all.

But trees, and rivulets whose rapid course

Defies the check of winter, haunts of deer,

And sheep-walks populous with bleating lambs,

And lanes, in which the primrose ere her time

Peeps through the moss that clothes the hawthorn root,

Deceive no student. Wisdom there, and truth,

Not shy, as in the world, and to be won

By slow solicitation, seize at once

The roving thought, and fix it on themselves."

His satire is also excellent. It is pointed and forcible, with the

polished manners of the gentleman, and the honest indignation of the

virtuous man. His religious poetry, except where it takes a tincture of

controversial heat, wants elevation and fire. His Muse had not a

seraph's wing. I might refer, in illustration of this opinion, to the

laboured anticipation of the Millennium at the end of the sixth book. He

could describe a piece of shell-work as well as any modern poet: but he

could not describe the New Jerusalem so well as John Bunyan;--nor are

his verses on Alexander Selkirk so good as Robinson Crusoe. The one is

not so much like a vision, nor is the other so much like the reality.

The first volume of Cowper's poems has, however, been less read than

it deserved. The comparison in these poems of the proud and humble

believer to the peacock and the pheasant, and the parallel between

Voltaire and the poor cottager, are exquisite pieces of eloquence and

poetry, particularly the last.

"Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door,

Pillow and bobbins all her little store;

Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay,

Shuffling her threads about the live-long day,

Just earns a scanty pittance, and at night,

Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light;

She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,

Has little understanding, and no wit,

Receives no praise; but, though her lot be such,

(Toilsome and indigent) she renders much;

Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true--

A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew;

And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes

Her title to a treasure in the skies.

O happy peasant! Oh unhappy bard!

His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward;

He prais'd, perhaps, for ages yet to come,

She never heard of half a mile from home:

He lost in errors his vain heart prefers,

She safe in the simplicity of hers."

His character of Whitfield, in the poem on Hope, is one of his most

spirited and striking things. It is written _con amore_.

"But if, unblameable in word and thought,

A man arise, a man whom God has taught,

With all Elijah's dignity of tone,

And all the love of the beloved John,

To storm the citadels they build in air,

To smite the untemper'd wall ('tis death to spare,)

To sweep away all refuges of lies,

And place, instead of quirks, themselves devise,

Lama Sabachthani before their eyes;

To show that without Christ all gain is loss,

All hope despair that stands not on his cross;

Except a few his God may have impressed,

A tenfold phrensy seizes all the rest."

These lines were quoted, soon after their appearance, by the Monthly

Reviewers, to shew that Cowper was no poet, though they afterwards took

credit to themselves for having been the first to introduce his verses

to the notice of the public. It is not a little remarkable that these

same critics regularly damned, at its first coming out, every work which

has since acquired a standard reputation with the public.--Cowper's

verses on his mother's picture, and his lines to Mary, are some of the

most pathetic that ever were written. His stanzas on the loss of the

Royal George have a masculine strength and feeling beyond what was usual

with him. The story of John Gilpin has perhaps given as much pleasure to

as many people as any thing of the same length that ever was written.

His life was an unhappy one. It was embittered by a morbid affection,

and by his religious sentiments. Nor are we to wonder at this, or bring

it as a charge against religion; for it is the nature of the poetical

temperament to carry every thing to excess, whether it be love,

religion, pleasure, or pain, as we may see in the case of Cowper and of

Burns, and to find torment or rapture in that in which others merely

find a resource from _ennui_, or a relaxation from common occupation.

There are two poets still living who belong to the same class of

excellence, and of whom I shall here say a few words; I mean Crabbe, and

Robert Bloomfield, the author of the Farmer's Boy. As a painter of

simple natural scenery, and of the still life of the country, few

writers have more undeniable and unassuming pretensions than the

ingenious and self-taught poet, last-mentioned. Among the sketches of

this sort I would mention, as equally distinguished for delicacy,

faithfulness, and _naivete_, his description of lambs racing, of the

pigs going out an acorning, of the boy sent to feed his sheep before the

break of day in winter; and I might add the innocently told story of the

poor bird-boy, who in vain through the live-long day expects his

promised companions at his hut, to share his feast of roasted sloes with

him, as an example of that humble pathos, in which this author excels.

The fault indeed of his genius is that it is too humble: his Muse has

something not only rustic, but menial in her aspect. He seems afraid of

elevating nature, lest she should be ashamed of him. Bloomfield very

beautifully describes the lambs in springtime as racing round the

hillocks of green turf: Thomson, in describing the same image, makes the

mound of earth the remains of an old Roman encampment. Bloomfield never

gets beyond his own experience; and that is somewhat confined. He gives

the simple appearance of nature, but he gives it naked, shivering, and

unclothed with the drapery of a moral imagination. His poetry has much

the effect of the first approach of spring, "while yet the year is

unconfirmed," where a few tender buds venture forth here and there, but

are chilled by the early frosts and nipping breath of poverty.--It

should seem from this and other instances that have occurred within the

last century, that we cannot expect from original genius alone, without

education, in modern and more artificial periods, the same bold and

independent results as in former periods. And one reason appears to be,

that though such persons, from whom we might at first expect a

restoration of the good old times of poetry, are not encumbered and

enfeebled by the trammels of custom, and the dull weight of other men's

ideas; yet they are oppressed by the consciousness of a want of the

common advantages which others have; are looking at the tinsel finery of

the age, while they neglect the rich unexplored mine in their own

breasts; and instead of setting an example for the world to follow,

spend their lives in aping, or in the despair of aping, the hackneyed

accomplishments of their inferiors. Another cause may be, that original

genius alone is not sufficient to produce the highest excellence,

without a corresponding state of manners, passions, and religious

belief: that no single mind can move in direct opposition to the vast

machine of the world around it; that the poet can do no more than stamp

the mind of his age upon his works; and that all that the ambition of

the highest genius can hope to arrive at, after the lapse of one or two

generations, is the perfection of that more refined and effeminate style

of studied elegance and adventitious ornament, which is the result, not

of nature, but of art. In fact, no other style of poetry has succeeded,

or seems likely to succeed, in the present day. The public taste hangs

like a millstone round the neck of all original genius that does not

conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only

without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied mass of

materials for his mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciously to

itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and

in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction,

and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserved ridicule.

But to return.

Crabbe is, if not the most natural, the most literal of our descriptive

poets. He exhibits the smallest circumstances of the smallest

things. He gives the very costume of meanness; the nonessentials

of every trifling incident. He is his own landscape-painter,

and engraver too. His pastoral scenes seem pricked on paper

in little dotted lines. He describes the interior of a cottage

like a person sent there to distrain for rent. He has an eye to the

number of arms in an old worm-eaten chair, and takes care to inform

himself and the reader whether a joint-stool stands upon three legs or

upon four. If a settle by the fire-side stands awry, it gives him as

much disturbance as a tottering world; and he records the rent in a

ragged counterpane as an event in history. He is equally curious in his

back-grounds and in his figures. You know the Christian and surnames of

every one of his heroes,--the dates of their achievements, whether on a

Sunday or a Monday,--their place of birth and burial, the colour of

their clothes, and of their hair, and whether they squinted or not. He

takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the same manner as of

the furniture of a sick room: his sentiments have very much the air of

fixtures; he gives you the petrifaction of a sigh, and carves a tear, to

the life, in stone. Almost all his characters are tired of their lives,

and you heartily wish them dead. They remind one of anatomical

preservations; or may be said to bear the same relation to actual life

that a stuffed cat in a glass-case does to the real one purring on the

hearth: the skin is the same, but the life and the sense of heat is

gone. Crabbe's poetry is like a museum, or curiosity-shop: every thing

has the same posthumous appearance, the same inanimateness and identity

of character. If Bloomfield is too much of the Farmer's Boy, Crabbe is

too much of the parish beadle, an overseer of the country poor. He has

no delight beyond the walls of a workhouse, and his officious zeal would

convert the world into a vast infirmary. He is a kind of Ordinary, not

of Newgate, but of nature. His poetical morality is taken from Burn's

Justice, or the Statutes against Vagrants. He sets his own imagination

in the stocks, and his Muse, like Malvolio, "wears cruel garters." He

collects all the petty vices of the human heart, and superintends, as in

a panopticon, a select circle of rural malefactors. He makes out the

poor to be as bad as the rich--a sort of vermin for the others to hunt

down and trample upon, and this he thinks a good piece of work. With him

there are but two moral categories, riches and poverty, authority and

dependence. His parish apprentice, Richard Monday, and his wealthy

baronet, Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place, are the same individual--

the extremes of the same character, and of his whole system. "The latter

end of his Commonwealth does not forget the beginning." But his parish

ethics are the very worst model for a state: any thing more degrading

and helpless cannot well be imagined. He exhibits just the contrary view

of human life to that which Gay has done in his Beggar's Opera. In a

word, Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the

_still life_ of tragedy: who gives the stagnation of hope and fear--

the deformity of vice without the temptation--the pain of sympathy

without the interest--and who seems to rely, for the delight he is to

convey to his reader, on the truth and accuracy with which he describes

only what is disagreeable.

The best descriptive poetry is not, after all, to be found in our

descriptive poets. There are set descriptions of the flowers, for

instance, in Thomson, Cowper, and others; but none equal to those in

Milton's Lycidas, and in the Winter's Tale.

We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not

Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age

of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any

landscapes like those of Claude Lorraine. The best parts of Spenser's

Shepherd's Calendar are two fables, Mother Hubberd's Tale, and the Oak

and the Briar; which last is as splendid a piece of oratory as any to be

found in the records of the eloquence of the British senate! Browne, who

came after Spenser, and Withers, have left some pleasing allegorical

poems of this kind. Pope's are as full of senseless finery and trite

affectation, as if a peer of the realm were to sit for his picture with

a crook and cocked hat on, smiling with an insipid air of no-meaning,

between nature and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a lasting

monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that

of "the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old," peeps out

once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and

scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin's picture,

in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the

spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription--"I also was an

Arcadian!" Perhaps the best pastoral in the language is that prose-poem,

Walton's Complete Angler. That well-known work has a beauty and romantic

interest equal to its simplicity, and arising out of it. In the

description of a fishing-tackle, you perceive the piety and humanity of

the author's mind. It is to be doubted whether Sannazarius's Piscatory

Eclogues are equal to the scenes described by Walton on the banks of the

river Lea. He gives the feeling of the open air: we walk with him along

the dusty road-side, or repose on the banks of the river under a shady

tree; and in watching for the finny prey, imbibe what he beautifully

calls "the patience and simplicity of poor honest fishermen." We

accompany them to their inn at night, and partake of their simple, but

delicious fare; while Maud, the pretty milk-maid, at her mother's

desire, sings the classical ditties of the poet Marlow; "Come live with

me, and be my love." Good cheer is not neglected in this work, any more

than in Homer, or any other history that sets a proper value on the good

things of this life. The prints in the Complete Angler give an

additional reality and interest to the scenes it describes. While

Tottenham Cross shall stand, and longer, thy work, amiable and happy old

man, shall last!--It is in the notes to it that we find that character

of "a fair and happy milkmaid," by Sir Thomas Overbury, which may vie in

beauty and feeling with Chaucer's character of Griselda.

"A fair and happy milk-maid is a country wench that is so far from

making herself beautiful by art, that one look of her's is able to put

all face-physic out of countenance. She knows a fair look is but a dumb

orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellences

stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her

knowledge. The lining of her apparel (which is herself) is far better

than outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of

the silkworm, she is decked in innocency, a far better wearing. She doth

not, with lying long in bed, spoil both her complexion and conditions.

Nature hath taught her, too immoderate sleep is rust to the soul: she

rises therefore with chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night makes

the lamb her curfew. Her breath is her own, which scents all the year

long of June, like a new-made haycock. She makes her hand hard with

labour, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall

early (sitting at her merry wheel) she sings a defiance to the giddy

wheel of Fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems

ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well.

She bestows her year's wages at next fair; and in choosing her garments,

counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are

all her physic and chirurgery, and she lives the longer for't. She dares

go alone, and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill,

because she means none: yet, to say the truth, she is never alone, for

she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers,

but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not

palled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste,

that she dare tell them; only a Friday's dream is all her superstition;

that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she; and all her care is

she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her

winding-sheet."

The love of the country has been sung by poets, and echoed by

philosophers; but the first have not attempted, and the last have been

greatly puzzled to account for it. I do not know that any one has ever

explained, satisfactorily, the true source of this feeling, or of that

soothing emotion which the sight of the country, or a lively description

of rural objects hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Some have

ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty of the objects themselves;

others to the freedom from care, the silence and tranquillity which

scenes of retirement afford; others to the healthy and innocent

employments of a country life; others to the simplicity of country

manners, and others to a variety of different causes; but none to the

right one. All these, indeed, have their effect; but there is another

principal one which has not been touched upon, or only slightly glanced

at. I will not, however, imitate Mr. Horne Tooke, who after enumerating

seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as

deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell

us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out "the

heart of his mystery." I will say at once what it is that distinguishes

this interest from others, and that is its _abstractedness_. The

interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the

individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and

transferable from one object to all others of the same class. Thus.

Rousseau in his Confessions relates, that when he took possession of

his room at Annecy, he found that he could see "a little spot of green"

from his window, which endeared his situation the more to him, because,

he says, it was the first time he had had this object constantly before

him since he left Boissy, the place where he was at school when a child.

[7] Some such feeling as that here described will be found lurking at

the bottom of all our attachments of this sort. Were it not for the

recollections habitually associated with them, natural objects could not

interest the mind in the manner they do. No doubt, the sky is beautiful,

the clouds sail majestically along its bosom; the sun is cheering; there

is something exquisitely graceful in the manner in which a plant or tree

puts forth its branches; the motion with which they bend and tremble in

the evening breeze is soft and lovely; there is music in the babbling of

a brook; the view from the top of a mountain is full of grandeur; nor

can we behold the ocean with indifference. Or, as the Minstrel sweetly

sings,

"Oh, how canst thou renounce the boundless store

Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!

The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,

The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;

All that the genial ray of morning gilds,

And all that echoes to the song of even,

All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,

And all the dread magnificence of heaven,

Oh, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!"

___

[7] Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post

which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought up.

___

It is not, however, the beautiful and magnificent alone that we

admire in Nature; the most insignificant and rudest objects are often

found connected with the strongest emotions; we become attached to the

most common and familiar images, as to the face of a friend whom we have

long known, and from whom we have received many benefits. It is because

natural objects have been associated with the sports of our childhood,

with air and exercise, with our feelings in solitude, when the mind

takes the strongest hold of things, and clings with the fondest interest

to whatever strikes its attention; with change of place, the pursuit of

new scenes, and thoughts of distant friends; it is because they have

surrounded us in almost all situations, in joy and in sorrow, in

pleasure and in pain; because they have been one chief source and

nourishment of our feelings, and a part of our being, that we love them

as we do ourselves.

There is, generally speaking, the same foundation for our love of

Nature as for all our habitual attachments, namely, association of

ideas. But this is not all. That which distinguishes this attachment

from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to

physical objects; the associations connected with any one object

extending to the whole class. Our having been attached to any particular

person does not make us feel the same attachment to the next person we

may chance to meet; but, if we have once associated strong feelings of

delight with the objects of natural scenery, the tie becomes

indissoluble, and we shall ever after feel the same attachment to other

objects of the same sort. I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and

grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed

to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I

had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same

sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me. Whence

comes this difference? It arises from our always imperceptibly

connecting the idea of the individual with man, and only the idea of the

class with natural objects. In the one case, the external appearance or

physical structure is the least thing to be attended to; in the other,

it is every thing. The springs that move the human form, and make it

friendly or adverse to me, lie hid within it. There is an infinity of

motives, passions, and ideas, contained in that narrow compass, of which

I know nothing, and in which I have no share. Each individual is a world

to himself, governed by a thousand contradictory and wayward impulses. I

can, therefore, make no inference from one individual to another; nor

can my habitual sentiments, with respect to any individual, extend

beyond himself to others. A crowd of people presents a disjointed,

confused, and unsatisfactory appearance to the eye, because there is

nothing to connect the motley assemblage into one continuous or general

impression, unless when there is some common object of interest to fix

their attention, as in the case of a full pit at the play-house. The

same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness,

vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets

of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal

identity. Every new face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the

same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as

a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf

of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to

nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight.

The greatest number and variety of physical objects do not puzzle the

will, or distract the attention, but are massed together under one

uniform and harmonious feeling. The heart reposes in greater security on

the immensity of Nature's works, "expatiates freely there," and finds

elbow room and breathing space. We are always at home with Nature. There

is neither hypocrisy, caprice, nor mental reservation in her favours.

Our intercourse with her is not liable to accident or change, suspicion

or disappointment: she smiles on us still the same. A rose is always

sweet, a lily is always beautiful: we do not hate the one, nor envy the

other. If we have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled

into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its foot, we are

sure that wherever we can find a shady stream, we can enjoy the same

pleasure again; so that when we imagine these objects, we can easily

form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them,

Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence

the origin of the Grecian mythology. All objects of the same kind being

the same, not only in their appearance, but in their practical uses, we

habitually confound them together under the same general idea; and

whatever fondness we may have conceived for one, is immediately placed

to the common account. The most opposite kinds and remote trains of

feeling gradually go to enrich the same sentiment; and in our love of

nature, there is all the force of individual attachment, combined with

the most airy abstraction. It is this circumstance which gives that

refinement, expansion, and wild interest, to feelings of this sort, when

strongly excited, which every one must have experienced who is a true

lover of nature.

It is the same setting sun that we see and remember year after year,

through summer and winter, seed-time and harvest. The moon that shines

above our heads, or plays through the checquered shade, is the same moon

that we used to read of in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. We see no

difference in the trees first covered with leaves in the spring. The dry

reeds rustling on the side of a stream--the woods swept by the loud

blast--the dark massy foliage of autumn--the grey trunks and naked

branches of the trees in winter--the sequestered copse, and

wide-extended heath--the glittering sunny showers, and December snows

--are still the same, or accompanied with the same thoughts and

feelings: there is no object, however trifling or rude, that does not in

some mood or other find its way into the heart, as a link in the chain

of our living being; and this it is that makes good that saying of the

poet--

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Thus nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to

us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks; for there is that consent

and mutual harmony among all her works, one undivided spirit pervading

them throughout, that to him who has well acquainted himself with them,

they speak always the same well-known language, striking on the heart,

amidst unquiet thoughts and the tumult of the world, like the music of

one's native tongue heard in some far-off country.

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man,

So shall it be when I grow old and die.

The child's the father of the man,

And I would have my years to be

Linked each to each by natural piety."

The daisy that first strikes the child's eye in trying to leap over

his own shadow, is the same flower that with timid upward glance

implores the grown man not to tread upon it. Rousseau, in one of his

botanical excursions, meeting with the periwinkle, fell upon his knees,

crying out--_Ah! voila de la pervenche!_ It was because he had thirty

years before brought home the same flower with him in one of his rambles

with Madame de Warens, near Chambery. It struck him as the same

identical little blue flower that he remembered so well; and thirty

years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his memory. That, or

a thousand other flowers of the same name, were the same to him, to the

heart, and to the eye; but there was but one Madame Warens in the world,

whose image was never absent from his thoughts; with whom flowers and

verdure sprung up beneath his feet, and without whom all was cold and

barren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo, "that wandering

voice," that comes and goes with the spring, mocks our ears with one

note from youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming round the traveller's

path, repeats for ever the same sad story of Tereus and Philomel!

LECTURE VI.

ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS, &c.

I shall in the present Lecture go back to the age of Queen Anne, and

endeavour to give a cursory account of the most eminent of our poets, of

whom I have not already spoken, from that period to the present.

The three principal poets among the wits of Queen Anne's reign, next

to Pope, were Prior, Swift, and Gay. Parnell, though a good-natured,

easy man, and a friend to poets and the Muses, was himself little more

than an occasional versifier; and Arbuthnot, who had as much wit as the

best of them, chose to shew it in prose, and not in verse. He had a very

notable share in the immortal History of John Bull, and the inimitable

and praiseworthy Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. There has been a great

deal said and written about the plagiarisms of Sterne; but the only real

plagiarism he has been guilty of (if such theft were a crime), is in

taking Tristram Shandy's father from Martin's, the elder Scriblerus. The

original idea of the character, that is, of the opinionated, captious

old gentleman, who is pedantic, not from profession, but choice, belongs

to Arbuthnot.--Arbuthnot's style is distinguished from that of his

contemporaries, even by a greater degree of terseness and conciseness.

He leaves out every superfluous word; is sparing of connecting

particles, and introductory phrases; uses always the simplest forms of

construction; and is more a master of the idiomatic peculiarities and

internal resources of the language than almost any other writer. There

is a research in the choice of a plain, as well as of an ornamented or

learned style; and, in fact, a great deal more. Among common English

words, there may be ten expressing the same thing with different degrees

of force and propriety, and only one of them the very word we want,

because it is the only one that answers exactly with the idea we have in

our minds. Each word in familiar use has a different set of associations

and shades of meaning attached to it, and distinguished from each other

by inveterate custom; and it is in having the whole of these at our

command, and in knowing which to choose, as they are called for by the

occasion, that the perfection of a pure conversational prose-style

consists. But in writing a florid and artificial style, neither the same

range of invention, nor the same quick sense of propriety--nothing but

learning is required. If you know the words, and their general meaning,

it is sufficient: it is impossible you should know the nicer inflections

of signification, depending on an endless variety of application, in

expressions borrowed from a foreign or dead language. They all impose

upon the ear alike, because they are not familiar to it; the only

distinction left is between the pompous and the plain; the

_sesquipedalia verba_ have this advantage, that they are all of one

length; and any words are equally fit for a learned style, so that we

have never heard them before. Themistocles thought that the same

sounding epithets could not suit all subjects, as the same dress does

not fit all persons. The style of our modern prose writers is very fine

in itself; but it wants variety of inflection and adaptation; it hinders

us from seeing the differences of the things it undertakes to describe.

What I have here insisted on will be found to be the leading

distinction between the style of Swift, Arbuthnot, Steele, and the other

writers of the age of Queen Anne, and the style of Dr. Johnson, which

succeeded to it. The one is English, and the other is not. The writers

first mentioned, in order to express their thoughts, looked about them

for the properest word to convey any idea, that the language which they

spoke, and which their countrymen understood, afforded: Dr. Johnson

takes the first English word that offers, and by translating it at a

venture into the first Greek or Latin word he can think of, only

retaining the English termination, produces an extraordinary effect upon

the reader, by much the same sort of mechanical process that Trim

converted the old jack-boots into a pair of new mortars.

Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man, who liked to think and talk,

better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too

often by rote. His long compound Latin phrases required less thought,

and took up more room than others. What shews the facilities afforded by

this style of imposing generalization, is, that it was instantly adopted

with success by all those who were writers by profession, or who were

not; and that at present, we cannot see a lottery puff or a quack

advertisement pasted against a wall, that is not perfectly Johnsonian in

style. Formerly, the learned had the privilege of translating their

notions into Latin; and a great privilege it was, as it confined the

reputation and emoluments of learning to themselves. Dr. Johnson may be

said to have naturalised this privilege, by inventing a sort of jargon

translated half-way out of one language into the other, which raised the

Doctor's reputation, and confounded all ranks in literature.

In the short period above alluded to, authors professed to write as

other men spoke; every body now affects to speak as authors write; and

any one who retains the use of his mother tongue, either in writing or

conversation, is looked upon as a very illiterate character.

Prior and Gay belong, in the characteristic excellences of their

style, to the same class of writers with Suckling, Rochester, and

Sedley: the former imbibed most of the licentious levity of the age of

Charles II. and carried it on beyond the Revolution under King William.

Prior has left no single work equal to Gay's Fables, or the Beggar's

Opera. But in his lyrical and fugitive pieces he has shown even more

genius, more playfulness, more mischievous gaiety. No one has exceeded

him in the laughing grace with which he glances at a subject that will

not bear examining, with which he gently hints at what cannot be

directly insisted on, with which he half conceals, and half draws aside

the veil from some of the Muses' nicest mysteries. His Muse is, in fact,

a giddy wanton flirt, who spends her time in playing at snap-dragon and

blind-man's buff, who tells what she should not, and knows more than she

tells. She laughs at the tricks she shews us, and blushes, or would be

thought to do so, at what she keeps concealed. Prior has translated

several of Fontaine's Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing

in the translation, either of their wit or malice. I need not name them:

but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus's

doves. No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose

moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he

gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and

confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to

seize on all the ticklish parts of his subject, from their involuntarily

shrinking under his grasp. Some of his imitations of Boileau's servile

addresses to Louis XIV. which he has applied with a happy mixture of wit

and patriotic enthusiasm to King William, or as he familiarly calls him,

to

"Little Will, the scourge of France,

No Godhead, but the first of men,"

are excellent, and shew the same talent for _double-entendre_ and the

same gallantry of spirit, whether in the softer lyric, or the more

lively heroic. Some of Prior's _bon mots_ are the best that are

recorded.--His serious poetry, as his _Solomon_, is as heavy as his

familiar style was light and agreeable. His moral Muse is a Magdalen,

and should not have obtruded herself on public view. Henry and Emma is a

paraphrase of the old ballad of the Nut-brown Maid, and not so good as

the original. In short, as we often see in other cases, where men thwart

their own genius, Prior's sentimental and romantic productions are mere

affectation, the result not of powerful impulse or real feeling, but of

a consciousness of his deficiencies, and a wish to supply their place by

labour and art.

Gay was sometimes grosser than Prior, not systematically, but

inadvertently--from not being so well aware of what he was about; nor

was there the same necessity for caution, for his grossness is by no

means so seductive or inviting.

Gay's Fables are certainly a work of great merit, both as to the

quantity of invention implied, and as to the elegance and facility of

the execution. They are, however, spun out too long; the descriptions

and narrative are too diffuse and desultory; and the moral is sometimes

without point. They are more like Tales than Fables. The best are,

perhaps, the Hare with Many Friends, the Monkeys, and the Fox at the

Point of Death. His Pastorals are pleasing and poetical. But his capital

work is his Beggar's Opera. It is indeed a masterpiece of wit and

genius, not to say of morality. In composing it, he chose a very

unpromising ground to work upon, and he has prided himself in adorning

it with all the graces, the precision, and brilliancy of style. It is a

vulgar error to call this a vulgar play. So far from it, that I do not

scruple to say that it appears to me one of the most refined productions

in the language. The elegance of the composition is in exact proportion

to the coarseness of the materials: by "happy alchemy of mind," the

author has extracted an essence of refinement from the dregs of human

life, and turns its very dross into gold. The scenes, characters, and

incidents are, in themselves, of the lowest and most disgusting kind:

but, by the sentiments and reflections which are put into the mouths of

highwaymen, turnkeys, their mistresses, wives, or daughters, he has

converted this motley group into a set of fine gentlemen and ladies,

satirists and philosophers. He has also effected this transformation

without once violating probability, or "o'erstepping the modesty of

nature." In fact, Gay has turned the tables on the critics; and by the

assumed licence of the mock-heroic style, has enabled himself to _do

justice to nature_, that is, to give all the force, truth, and locality

of real feeling to the thoughts and expressions, without being called to

the bar of false taste and affected delicacy. The extreme beauty and

feeling of the song, "Woman is like the fair flower in its lustre," are

only equalled by its characteristic propriety and _naivete_. _Polly_

describes her lover going to the gallows, with the same touching

simplicity, and with all the natural fondness of a young girl in her

circumstances, who sees in his approaching catastrophe nothing but the

misfortunes and the personal accomplishments of the object of her

affections. "I see him sweeter than the nosegay in his hand; the

admiring crowd lament that so lovely a youth should come to an untimely

end:--even butchers weep, and Jack Ketch refuses his fee rather than

consent to tie the fatal knot." The preservation of the character and

costume is complete. It has been said by a great authority--"There is

some soul of goodness in things evil":--and the _Beggar's Opera_ is a

good-natured but instructive comment on this text. The poet has thrown

all the gaiety and sunshine of the imagination, all the intoxication of

pleasure, and the vanity of despair, round the shortlived existence of

his heroes; while _Peachum_ and _Lockitt_ are seen in the back-ground,

parcelling out their months and weeks between them. The general view

exhibited of human life is of the most subtle and abstracted kind. The

author has, with great felicity, brought out the good qualities and

interesting emotions almost inseparable from the lowest conditions; and

with the same penetrating glance, has detected the disguises which rank

and circumstances lend to exalted vice. Every line in this sterling

comedy sparkles with wit, and is fraught with the keenest sarcasm. The

very wit, however, takes off from the offensiveness of the satire; and I

have seen great statesmen, very great statesmen, heartily enjoying the

joke, laughing most immoderately at the compliments paid to them as not

much worse than pickpockets and cut-throats in a different line of life,

and pleased, as it were, to see themselves humanised by some sort of

fellowship with their kind. Indeed, it may be said that the moral of the

piece is _to shew the vulgarity of vice_; or that the same violations of

integrity and decorum, the same habitual sophistry in palliating their

want of principle, are common to the great and powerful, with the

meanest and most contemptible of the species. What can be more

convincing than the arguments used by these would-be politicians, to

shew that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery, they do not come up

to many of their betters? The exclamation of _Mrs. Peachum_, when her

daughter marries _Macheath_, "Hussy, hussy, you will be as ill used, and

as much neglected, as if you had married a lord," is worth all Miss

Hannah More's laboured invectives on the laxity of the manners of high

life!

I shall conclude this account of Gay with his verses on Sir Richard

Blackmore, which may serve at once as a specimen of his own manner, and

as a character of a voluminous contemporary poet, who was admired by Mr.

Locke, and knighted by King William III.

"See who ne'er was nor will be half-read,

Who first sung Arthur, then sung Alfred;

Praised great Eliza in God's anger,

Till all true Englishmen cried, 'Hang her!'--

Maul'd human wit in one thick satire;

Next in three books spoil'd human nature:

Undid Creation at a jerk,

And of Redemption made damn'd work.

Then took his Muse at once, and dipt her

Full in the middle of the Scripture.

What wonders there the man, grown old, did?

Sternhold himself he out Sternholded.

Made David seem so mad and freakish,

All thought him just what thought King Achish.

No mortal read his Solomon

But judg'd Re'boam his own son.

Moses he serv'd as Moses Pharaoh,

And Deborah as she Siserah,

Made Jeremy full sore to cry,

And Job himself curse God and die.

What punishment all this must follow?

Shall Arthur use him like King Tollo?

Shall David as Uriah slay him?

Or dextrous Deborah Siserah him?

No!--none of these! Heaven spare his life!

But send him, honest Job, thy wife!"

Gay's Trivia, or Art of Walking the Streets, is as pleasant as walking

the streets must have been at the time when it was written. His ballad

of Black Eyed Susan is one of the most delightful that can be imagined;

nor do I see that it is a bit the worse for Mr. Jekyll's parody on it.

Swift's reputation as a poet has been in a manner obscured by the

greater splendour, by the natural force and inventive genius of his

prose writings; but if he had never written either the Tale of a Tub or

Gulliver's Travels, his name merely as a poet would have come down to

us, and have gone down to posterity with well earned honours. His

Imitations of Horace, and still more his Verses on his own Death, place

him in the first rank of agreeable moralists in verse. There is not only

a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his

pen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the

most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His

Description of the Morning in London, and of a City Shower, which were

first published in the Tatler, are among the most delightful of the

contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the most

sensible of the poets; he is also distinguished as one of the most

nonsensical of them. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical,

slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which

are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in

fact, only shew his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself.

He has gone so far as to invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen

syllable lines for Mary the cookmaid to vent her budget of nothings, and

for Mrs. Harris to gossip with the deaf old housekeeper. Oh, when shall

we have such another Rector of Laracor!--The Tale of a Tub is one of

the most masterly compositions in the language, whether for thought,

wit, or style. It is so capital and undeniable a proof of the author's

talents, that Dr. Johnson, who did not like Swift, would not allow that

he wrote it. It is hard that the same performance should stand in the

way of a man's promotion to a bishopric, as wanting gravity, and at the

same time be denied to be his, as having too much wit. It is a pity the

Doctor did not find out some graver author, for whom he felt a critical

kindness, on whom to father this splendid but unacknowledged production.

Dr. Johnson could not deny that Gulliver's Travels were his; he

therefore disputed their merits, and said that after the first idea of

them was conceived, they were easy to execute; all the rest followed

mechanically. I do not know how that may be; but the mechanism employed

is something very different from any that the author of Rasselas was in

the habit of bringing to bear on such occasions. There is nothing more

futile, as well as invidious, than this mode of criticising a work of

original genius. Its greatest merit is supposed to be in the invention;

and you say, very wisely, that it is not _in the execution_. You might

as well take away the merit of the invention of the telescope, by saying

that, after its uses were explained and understood, any ordinary

eyesight could look through it. Whether the excellence of Gulliver's

Travels is in the conception or the execution, is of little consequence;

the power is somewhere, and it is a power that has moved the world. The

power is not that of big words and vaunting common places. Swift left

these to those who wanted them; and has done what his acuteness and

intensity of mind alone could enable any one to conceive or to perform.

His object was to strip empty pride and grandeur of the imposing air

which external circumstances throw around them; and for this purpose he

has cheated the imagination of the illusions which the prejudices of

sense and of the world put upon it, by reducing every thing to the

abstract predicament of size. He enlarges or diminishes the scale, as he

wishes to shew the insignificance or the grossness of our overweening

self-love. That he has done this with mathematical precision, with

complete presence of mind and perfect keeping, in a manner that comes

equally home to the understanding of the man and of the child, does not

take away from the merit of the work or the genius of the author. He has

taken a new view of human nature, such as a being of a higher sphere

might take of it; he has torn the scales from off his moral vision; he

has tried an experiment upon human life, and sifted its pretensions from

the alloy of circumstances; he has measured it with a rule, has weighed

it in a balance, and found it, for the most part, wanting and worthless

--in substance and in shew. Nothing solid, nothing valuable is left in

his system but virtue and wisdom. What a libel is this upon mankind!

What a convincing proof of misanthropy! What presumption and what

_malice prepense_, to shew men what they are, and to teach them what

they ought to be! What a mortifying stroke aimed at national glory, is

that unlucky incident of Gulliver's wading across the channel and

carrying off the whole fleet of Blefuscu! After that, we have only to

consider which of the contending parties was in the right. What a shock

to personal vanity is given in the account of Gulliver's nurse

Glumdalclitch! Still, notwithstanding the disparagement to her personal

charms, her good-nature remains the same amiable quality as before. I

cannot see the harm, the misanthropy, the immoral and degrading tendency

of this. The moral lesson is as fine as the intellectual exhibition is

amusing. It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the

world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it. It is,

indeed, the way with our quacks in morality to preach up the dignity of

human nature, to pamper pride and hypocrisy with the idle mockeries of

the virtues they pretend to, and which they have not: but it was not

Swift's way to cant morality, or any thing else; nor did his genius

prompt him to write unmeaning panegyrics on mankind!

I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift's moral or

intellectual character, given by an eminent critic, who does not seem to

have forgotten the party politics of Swift. I do not carry my political

resentments so far back: I can at this time of day forgive Swift for

having been a Tory. I feel little disturbance (whatever I might think of

them) at his political sentiments, which died with him, considering how

much else he has left behind him of a more solid and imperishable

nature! If he had, indeed, (like some others) merely left behind him the

lasting infamy of a destroyer of his country, or the shining example of

an apostate from liberty, I might have thought the case altered.

The determination with which Swift persisted in a preconcerted

theory, savoured of the morbid affection of which he died. There is

nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid

of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an

obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable. Swift

was not a Frenchman. In this respect he differed from Rabelais and

Voltaire. They have been accounted the three greatest wits in modern

times; but their wit was of a peculiar kind in each. They are little

beholden to each other; there is some resemblance between Lord Peter in

the Tale of a Tub, and Rabelais' Friar John; but in general they are all

three authors of a substantive character in themselves. Swift's wit

(particularly in his chief prose works) was serious, saturnine, and

practical; Rabelais' was fantastical and joyous; Voltaire's was light,

sportive, and verbal. Swift's wit was the wit of sense; Rabelais', the

wit of nonsense; Voltaire's, of indifference to both. The ludicrous in

Swift arises out of his keen sense of impropriety, his soreness and

impatience of the least absurdity. He separates, with a severe and

caustic air, truth from falsehood, folly from wisdom, "shews vice her

own image, scorn her own feature"; and it is the force, the precision,

and the honest abruptness with which the separation is made, that

excites our surprise, our admiration, and laughter. He sets a mark of

reprobation on that which offends good sense and good manners, which

cannot be mistaken, and which holds it up to our ridicule and contempt

ever after. His occasional disposition to trifling (already noticed) was

a relaxation from the excessive earnestness of his mind. _Indignatio

facit versus_. His better genius was his spleen. It was the biting

acrimony of his temper that sharpened his other faculties. The truth of

his perceptions produced the pointed coruscations of his wit; his

playful irony was the result of inward bitterness of thought; his

imagination was the product of the literal, dry, incorrigible

tenaciousness of his understanding. He endeavoured to escape from the

persecution of realities into the regions of fancy, and invented his

Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, and Houynhyms, as a diversion

to the more painful knowledge of the world around him: _they_ only made

him laugh, while men and women made him angry. His feverish impatience

made him view the infirmities of that great baby the world, with the

same scrutinizing glance and jealous irritability that a parent regards

the failings of its offspring; but, as Rousseau has well observed,

parents have not on this account been supposed to have more affection

for other people's children than their own. In other respects, and

except from the sparkling effervescence of his gall, Swift's brain was

as "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." He hated absurdity--

Rabelais loved it, exaggerated it with supreme satisfaction, luxuriated

in its endless varieties, rioted in nonsense, "reigned there and

revelled." He dwelt on the absurd and ludicrous for the pleasure they

gave him, not for the pain. He lived upon laughter, and died laughing.

He indulged his vein, and took his full swing of folly. He did not baulk

his fancy or his readers. His wit was to him "as riches fineless"; he

saw no end of his wealth in that way, and set no limits to his

extravagance: he was communicative, prodigal, boundless, and

inexhaustible. His were the Saturnalia of wit, the riches and the

royalty, the health and long life. He is intoxicated with gaiety, mad

with folly. His animal spirits drown him in a flood of mirth: his blood

courses up and down his veins like wine. His thirst of enjoyment is as

great as his thirst of drink: his appetite for good things of all sorts

is unsatisfied, and there is a never-ending supply. _Discourse is dry_;

so they moisten their words in their cups, and relish their dry jests

with plenty of Botargos and dried neats' tongues. It is like Camacho's

wedding in Don Quixote, where Sancho ladled out whole pullets and fat geese

from the soup-kettles at a pull. The flagons are setting a running,

their tongues wag at the same time, and their mirth flows as a river.

How Friar John roars and lays about him in the vineyard! How Panurge

whines in the storm, and how dexterously he contrives to throw the

sheep overboard! How much Pantagruel behaves like a wise king! How

Gargantua mewls, and pules [sic], and slabbers his nurse, and demeans

himself most like a royal infant! what provinces he devours! what seas

he drinks up! How he eats, drinks, and sleeps--sleeps, eats, and

drinks! The style of Rabelais is no less prodigious than his matter. His

words are of marrow, unctuous, dropping fatness. He was a mad wag, the

king of good fellows, and prince of practical philosophers!

Rabelais was a Frenchman of the old school--Voltaire of the new.

The wit of the one arose from an exuberance of enjoyment--of the

other, from an excess of indifference, real or assumed. Voltaire had no

enthusiasm for one thing or another: he made light of every thing. In

his hands all things turn to chaff and dross, as the pieces of silver

money in the Arabian Nights were changed by the hands of the enchanter

into little dry crumbling leaves! He is a Parisian. He never

exaggerates, is never violent: he treats things with the most provoking

_sang froid_; and expresses his contempt by the most indirect hints, and

in the fewest words, as if he hardly thought them worth even his

contempt. He retains complete possession of himself and of his subject.

He does not effect his purpose by the eagerness of his blows, but by the

delicacy of his tact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as

scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its "mortal

consequences." His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists

he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well.

He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things

below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did

not degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true

value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible

as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and

mankind! His _Candide_ is a masterpiece of wit. It has been called "the

dull product of a scoffer's pen"; it is indeed the "product of a

scoffer's pen"; but after reading the Excursion, few people will think

it _dull_. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance

of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence.

There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral

good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer

this living death, than a living martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him

further." The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of

Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a

great evil." Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short apophthegm into

a voluminous common-place. Voltaire's traveller (in another work) being

asked "whether he likes black or white mutton best," replies that "he is

indifferent, provided it is tender." Dr. Johnson did not get at a

conclusion by so short a way as this. If Voltaire's licentiousness is

objected to me, I say, let it be placed to its true account, the manners

of the age and court in which he lived. The lords and ladies of the

bedchamber in the reign of Louis XV. found no fault with the immoral

tendency of his writings. Why then should our modern _purists_ quarrel

with them?--But to return.

Young is a gloomy epigrammatist. He has abused great powers both of

thought and language. His moral reflections are sometimes excellent; but

he spoils their beauty by overloading them with a religious horror, and

at the same time giving them all the smart turns and quaint expression

of an enigma or repartee in verse. The well-known lines on

Procrastination are in his best manner:

"Be wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer;

Next day the fatal precedent will plead;

Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life.

Procrastination is the thief of time;

Year after year it steals, till all are fled,

And to the mercies of a moment leaves

The vast concerns of an eternal scene.

Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears

The palm, "That all men are about to live,"

For ever on the brink of being born.

All pay themselves the compliment to think

They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride

On this reversion takes up ready praise;

At least, their own; their future selves applauds;

How excellent that life they ne'er will lead!

Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vails:

That lodg'd in Fate's, to Wisdom they consign;

The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone.

'Tis not in Folly, not to scorn a fool;

And scarce in human Wisdom to do more.

All Promise is poor dilatory man,

And that through every stage. When young, indeed,

In full content we, sometimes, nobly rest,

Un-anxious for ourselves; and only wish,

As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.

At thirty man suspects himself a fool;

Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;

At fifty chides his infamous delay,

Pushes his prudent purpose to Resolve;

In all the magnanimity of thought

Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

And why? Because he thinks himself immortal.

All men think all men mortal, but themselves;

Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate

Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread;

But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,

Soon close; where past the shaft, no trace is found.

As from the wing no scar the sky retains;

The parted wave no furrow from the keel;

So dies in human hearts the thought of death.

Ev'n with the tender tear which nature sheds

O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave."

His Universal Passion is a keen and powerful satire; but the effort

takes from the effect, and oppresses attention by perpetual and violent

demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic.

Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finest lines in it are the

burst of triumph at the end, when his revenge is completed:

"Let Europe and her pallid sons go weep,

Let Afric on her hundred thrones rejoice," &c.

Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, who had perhaps less

general power of mind than Young; but he had that true _vivida vis_,

that genuine inspiration, which alone can give birth to the highest

efforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain

traces of thought and feelings which never wear out, because nature had

left them in his own mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of

whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the

greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning,

and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of

Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the

Muses. With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he has not

been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works

there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination,

which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first

depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarrassment, and at length buried

in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady. How many poets have

gone through all the horrors of poverty and contempt, and ended their

days in moping melancholy or moody madness!

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them of too fine

a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patron of dead

merit? Read the account of Collins--with hopes frustrated, with

faculties blighted, at last, when it was too late for himself or others,

receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only

to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early

grave. He was found sitting with every spark of imagination

extinguished, and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left

--with only one book in his room, the Bible; "but that," he said, "was

the best." A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his

faculties--a canker had consumed the flower of his life. He produced

works of genius, and the public regarded them with scorn: he aimed at

excellence that should be his own, and his friends treated his efforts

as the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on

Evening, his Ode on the Passions (particularly the fine personification

of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on

Thomson's Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But

perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich

distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden

cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like

the candied coat of the auricula. His Ode to Evening shews equal genius

in the images and versification. The sounds steal slowly over the ear,

like the gradual coming on of evening itself:

"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,

Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs and dying gales,

O nymph reserv'd, while now the bright-haired sun

Sits on yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts

With brede ethereal wove,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat,

With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,

Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises midst the twilight path,

Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.

Now teach me, maid compos'd,

To breathe some soften'd strain,

Whose numbers stealing through thy darkling vale

May not unseemly with its stillness suit,

As musing slow, I hail

Thy genial, lov'd return!

For when thy folding star arising shews

His paly circlet, at his warning lamp

The fragrant Hours and Elves

Who slept in flow'rs the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge,

And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still,

The pensive Pleasures sweet

Prepare thy shadowy car;

Then lead, calm Votress, where some sheety lake

Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile,

Or upland fallows grey

Reflect its last cool gleam.

But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain,

Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,

That from the mountain's side

Views wilds and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim discover'd spires,

And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all

Thy dewy fingers draw

The gradual dusky veil.

While Spring shall pour his show'rs, as oft he wont,

And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!

While Summer loves to sport

Beneath thy lingering light;

While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves;

Or Winter yelling through the troublous air,

Affrights thy shrinking train,

And rudely rends thy robes;