So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed,

Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipp'd Health,

Thy gentlest influence own,

And hymn thy favourite name."

Hammond, whose poems are bound up with Collins's, in Bell's pocket

edition, was a young gentleman, who appears to have fallen in love about

the year 1740, and who translated Tibullus into English verse, to let

his mistress and the public know of it.

I should conceive that Collins had a much greater poetical genius

than Gray: he had more of that fine madness which is inseparable from

it, of its turbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to the verge of

agony or rapture. Gray's Pindaric Odes are, I believe, generally given

up at present: they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical

borrowed phrenzy. But I cannot so easily give up, nor will the world be

in any haste to part with his Elegy in a Country Church-yard: it is one

of the most classical productions that ever was penned by a refined and

thoughtful mind, moralising on human life. Mr. Coleridge (in his

Literary Life) says, that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to

shew that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible: it has, however,

been understood! The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is more

mechanical and common-place; but it touches on certain strings about the

heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever

passes by Windsor's "stately heights," or sees the distant spires of

Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should

think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling,

ever-watchful ear to "the still sad music of humanity."--His Letters

are inimitably fine. If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic,

his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon

paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without

pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and

contemplative indolence. He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but

smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of

retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on "those

reverend bedlams, colleges and schools!" He had nothing to do but to

read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His

life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream. "Be mine," he says in one of his

Letters, "to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon." And

in another, to shew his contempt for action and the turmoils of

ambition, he says to someone, "Don't you remember Lords ------ and ------,

who are now great statesmen, little dirty boys playing at cricket? For

my part, I do not feel a bit wiser, or bigger, or older than I did

then." What an equivalent for not being wise or great, to be always

young! What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing in the game of

human life, by being never any thing more than a looker-on!

How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to be looked at: who

withdrew from the world to be followed by the crowd, and courted

popularity by affecting privacy! His Letters shew him to have lived in a

continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary

coquet. He seems always to say, "You will find nothing in the world so

amiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us." His poems are

indifferent and tasteless, except his Pastoral Ballad, his Lines on

Jemmy Dawson, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect piece of

writing.

Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a

great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the

subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style

and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very

exhilarating subject--The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill's

Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the

subjects deserved--they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of

hardened assurance. I ought not to pass over without mention Green's

Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer's Grongar Hill.

The principal name of the period we are now come to is that of

Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or fairer in the annals of

modern literature. One should have his own pen to describe him as he

ought to be described--amiable, various, and bland, with careless

inimitable grace touching on every kind of excellence--with manners

unstudied, but a gentle heart--performing miracles of skill from pure

happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own

worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers

since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and with a

peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated

with delightful effect: such as--

"------His lot, though small,

He sees that little lot, the lot of all."

* * * * *

"And turn'd and look'd, and turn'd to look again."

As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe. What

reader is there in the civilised world, who is not the better for the

story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so

deliberately with the poker--for the knowledge of the guinea which the

Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets--the adventure of the

picture of the Vicar's family, which could not be got into the house--

and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their

hands--or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the

cosmogony?

As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr.

Liston's face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! how

happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had

the pleasure of reading his own works! He had only the satisfaction of

good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation

of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and

interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in

the world, Boswell's Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall

always bloom in Boswell's writings, and his fame survive in his own!--

His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do

nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he

did not adorn with the graces of his own mind. Almost all the latter

part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken

from Joseph Andrews; but the circumstances I have mentioned above are

not.

The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character

of a country school-master, and that prophetic description of Burke in

the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, are as

agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic

discourses.

Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease, learned without

affectation. He had a happiness which some have been prouder of than he,

who deserved it less--he was poet-laureat.

"And that green wreath which decks the bard when dead,

That laurel garland crown'd his living head."

But he bore his honours meekly, and performed his half-yearly task

regularly. I should not have mentioned him for this distinction alone

(the highest which a poet can receive from the state), but for another

circumstance; I mean his being the author of some of the finest sonnets

in the language--at least so they appear to me; and as this species of

composition has the necessary advantage of being short (though it is

also sometimes both "tedious and brief"), I will here repeat two or

three of them, as treating pleasing subjects in a pleasing and

philosophical way.

_Written in a blank leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon_

"Deem not, devoid of elegance, the sage,

By Fancy's genuine feelings unbeguil'd,

Of painful pedantry the poring child;

Who turns of these proud domes the historic page,

Now sunk by Time, and Henry's fiercer rage.

Think'st thou the warbling Muses never smil'd

On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage

His thoughts, on themes unclassic falsely styl'd,

Intent. While cloister'd piety displays

Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores

New manners, and the pomp of elder days,

Whence culls the pensive bard his pictur'd stores.

Not rough nor barren are the winding ways

Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers."

_Sonnet. Written at Stonehenge._

"Thou noblest monument of Albion's isle,

Whether, by Merlin's aid, from Scythia's shore

To Amber's fatal plain Pendragon bore,

Huge frame of giant hands, the mighty pile,

T'entomb his Britons slain by Hengist's guile:

Or Druid priests, sprinkled with human gore,

Taught mid thy massy maze their mystic lore:

Or Danish chiefs, enrich'd with savage spoil,

To victory's idol vast, an unhewn shrine,

Rear'd the rude heap, or in thy hallow'd ground

Repose the kings of Brutus' genuine line;

Or here those kings in solemn state were crown'd;

Studious to trace thy wondrous origin,

We muse on many an ancient tale renown'd."

Nothing can be more admirable than the learning here displayed, or the

inference from it, that it is of no use but as it leads to interesting

thought and reflection.

That written after seeing Wilton House is in the same style, but I

prefer concluding with that to the river Lodon, which has a personal as

well as poetical interest about it.

"Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,

Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown'd,

And thought my way was all through fairy ground,

Beneath the azure sky and golden sun:

When first my Muse to lisp her notes begun!

While pensive memory traces back the round

Which fills the varied interval between;

Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.--

Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure

No more return, to cheer my evening road!

Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure

Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd

From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature,

Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd."

I have thus gone through all the names of this period I could think

of, but I find that there are others still waiting behind that I had

never thought of. Here is a list of some of them--Pattison, Tickell,

Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne,

Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott,

Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock.--I think

it will be best to let them pass and say nothing about them. It will be

hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers,

and if we give them any praise, they will send others.

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside: they

have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by

misfortune--I mean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I think of him, and

that is not what is generally thought. I pass over the disputes between

the learned antiquaries, Dr. Mills, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether

he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after

Shakspeare alone. A living poet has borne a better testimony to him--

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;

And him [8] who walked in glory and in joy

Beside his plough along the mountain side."

I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together;

but I cannot find in Chatterton's works any thing so extraordinary as

the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and

knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would

not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not shew extraordinary

powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would

have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would

have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of

to kill themselves; for their mind to them also "a kingdom is." With an

unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the

youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing

to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his

best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into AEtna, to ensure

immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain!--

___

[8] Burns.--These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr.

Wordsworth's poem of the LEECH-GATHERER.

___

LECTURE VII.

ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.

I am sorry that what I said in the conclusion of the last Lecture

respecting Chatterton, should have given dissatisfaction to some

persons, with whom I would willingly agree on all such matters. What I

meant was less to call in question Chatterton's genius, than to object

to the common mode of estimating its magnitude by its prematureness. The

lists of fame are not filled with the dates of births or deaths; and the

side-mark of the age at which they were done, wears out in works

destined for immortality. Had Chatterton really done more, we should

have thought less of him, for our attention would then have been fixed

on the excellence of the works themselves, instead of the singularity of

the circumstances in which they were produced. But because he attained

to the full powers of manhood at an early age, I do not see that he

would have attained to more than those powers, had he lived to be a man.

He was a prodigy, because in him the ordinary march of nature was

violently precipitated; and it is therefore inferred, that he would have

continued to hold on his course, "unslacked of motion." On the contrary,

who knows but he might have lived to be poet-laureat? It is much better

to let him remain as he was. Of his actual productions, any one may

think as highly as he pleases; I would only guard against adding to the

account of his _quantum meruit_, those possible productions by which the

learned rhapsodists of his time raised his gigantic pretensions to an

equality with those of Homer and Shakspeare. It is amusing to read some

of these exaggerated descriptions, each rising above the other in

extravagance. In Anderson's Life, we find that Mr. Warton speaks of him

"as a prodigy of genius," as "a singular instance of prematurity of

abilities": that may be true enough, and Warton was at any rate a

competent judge; but Mr. Malone "believes him to have been the greatest

genius that England has produced since the days of Shakspeare." Dr.

Gregory says, "he must rank, as a universal genius, above Dryden, and

perhaps only second to Shakspeare." Mr. Herbert Croft is still more

unqualified in his praises; he asserts, that "no such being, at any

period of life, has ever been known, or possibly ever will be known." He

runs a parallel between Chatterton and Milton; and asserts, that "an

army of Macedonian and Swedish mad butchers fly before him," meaning, I

suppose, that Alexander the Great and Charles the Twelfth were nothing

to him; "nor," he adds, "does my memory supply me with any human being,

who at such an age, with such advantages, has produced such

compositions. Under the heathen mythology, superstition and admiration

would have explained all, by bringing Apollo on earth; nor would the God

ever have descended with more credit to himself."--Chatterton's

physiognomy would at least have enabled him to pass _incognito_. It is

quite different from the look of timid wonder and delight with which

Annibal Caracci has painted a young Apollo listening to the first sounds

he draws from a Pan's pipe, under the tutelage of the old Silenus! If

Mr. Croft is sublime on the occasion, Dr. Knox is no less pathetic. "The

testimony of Dr. Knox," says Dr. Anderson, (Essays, p. 144.), "does equal

credit to the classical taste and amiable benevolence of the writer, and

the genius and reputation of Chatterton." "When I read," says the

Doctor, "the researches of those learned antiquaries who have

endeavoured to prove that the poems attributed to Rowley were really

written by him, I observe many ingenious remarks in confirmation of

their opinion, which it would be tedious, if not difficult, to

controvert."

Now this is so far from the mark, that the whole controversy might

have been settled by any one but the learned antiquaries themselves, who

had the smallest share of their learning, from this single circumstance,

that the poems read as smooth as any modern poems, if you read them as

modern compositions; and that you cannot read them, or make verse of

them at all, if you pronounce or accent the words as they were spoken at

the time when the poems were pretended to have been written. The whole

secret of the imposture, which nothing but a deal of learned dust,

raised by collecting and removing a great deal of learned rubbish, could

have prevented our laborious critics from seeing through, lies on the

face of it (to say nothing of the burlesque air which is scarcely

disguised throughout) in the repetition of a few obsolete words, and in

the mis-spelling of common ones.

"No sooner," proceeds the Doctor, "do I turn to the poems, than the

labour of the antiquaries appears only waste of time; and I am

involuntarily forced to join in placing that laurel, which he seems so

well to have deserved, on the brow of Chatterton. The poems bear so many

marks of superior genius, that they have deservedly excited the general

attention of polite scholars, and are considered as the most remarkable

productions in modern poetry. We have many instances of poetical

eminence at an early age; but neither Cowley, Milton, nor Pope, ever

produced any thing while they were boys, which can justly be compared to

the poems of Chatterton. The learned antiquaries do not indeed dispute

their excellence. They extol it in the highest terms of applause. They

raise their favourite Rowley to a rivalry with Homer: but they make the

very merits of the works an argument against their real author. Is it

possible, say they, that a boy should produce compositions so beautiful

and masterly? That a common boy should produce them is not possible,"

rejoins the Doctor; "but that they should be produced by a boy of an

extraordinary genius, such as was that of Homer or Shakspeare, though a

prodigy, is such a one as by no means exceeds the bounds of rational

credibility."

Now it does not appear that Shakspeare or Homer were such early

prodigies; so that by this reasoning he must take precedence of them

too, as well as of Milton, Cowley, and Pope. The reverend and classical

writer then breaks out into the following melancholy raptures:--

"Unfortunate boy! short and evil were thy days, but thy fame shall

be immortal. Hadst thou been known to the munificent patrons of

genius . . .

"Unfortunate boy! poorly wast thou accommodated during thy short

sojourning here among us;--rudely wast thou treated--sorely did thy

feelings suffer from the scorn of the unworthy; and there are at last

those who wish to rob thee of thy only meed, thy posthumous glory.

Severe too are the censures of thy morals. In the gloomy moments of

despondency, I fear thou hast uttered impious and blasphemous thoughts.

But let thy more rigid censors reflect, that thou wast literally and

strictly but a boy. Let many of thy bitterest enemies reflect what were

their own religious principles, and whether they had any at the age of

fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Surely it is a severe and an unjust

surmise that thou wouldst probably have ended thy life as a victim to

the laws, if thou hadst not ended it as thou didst."

Enough, enough, of the learned antiquaries, and of the classical and

benevolent testimony of Dr. Knox. Chatterton was, indeed, badly enough

off; but he was at least saved from the pain and shame of reading this

woful lamentation over fallen genius, which circulates splendidly bound

in the fourteenth edition, while he is a prey to worms. As to those who

are really capable of admiring Chatterton's genius, or of feeling an

interest in his fate, I would only say, that I never heard any one speak

of any one of his works as if it were an old well-known favourite, and

had become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his

youth, and what he might have lived to have done, that excite our wonder

and admiration. He has the same sort of posthumous fame that an actor of

the last age has--an abstracted reputation which is independent of any

thing we know of his works. The admirers of Collins never think of him

without recalling to their minds his Ode on Evening, or on the Poetical

Character. Gray's Elegy, and his poetical popularity, are identified

together, and inseparable even in imagination. It is the same with

respect to Burns: when you speak of him as a poet, you mean his works,

his Tam o'Shanter, or his Cotter's Saturday Night. But the enthusiasts

for Chatterton, if you ask for the proofs of his extraordinary genius,

are obliged to turn to the volume, and perhaps find there what they

seek; but it is not in their minds; and it is of _that_ I spoke. The

Minstrel's song in AElla is I think the best.

"O! synge untoe my roundelaie,

O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee,

Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie,

Lycke a rennynge ryver bee.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Black hys cryne as the wyntere nyght,

Whyte hys rode as the sommer snowe,

Rodde hys face as the mornynge lyghte,

Cale he lyes ynne the grave belowe.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Swote hys tongue as the throstles note,

Quycke ynne daunce as thought cann bee,

Defte his taboure, codgelle stote,

O! hee lys bie the wyllowe-tree.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge,

In the briered dell belowe;

Harke! the dethe-owle loude dothe synge,

To the nygthe-mares as theie goe.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gone to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie;

Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude;

Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie,

Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Heere, upon mie true loves grave,

Schalle the baren fleurs be layde,

Ne one hallie seyncte to save

Al the celness of a mayde.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to his deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Wythe mie hondes I'll dent the brieres

Rounde hys hallie corse to gre,

Ouphante fairies, lyghte your fyres,

Heere mie boddie stille schalle bee.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Comme, wythe acorne-coppe and thorne,

Drayne my hartys blodde awaie;

Lyfe and all yttes goode I scorne,

Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gonne to hys deathe-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe-tree.

Water wytches, crownede whthe reytes,

Bere mee to yer leathalle tyde.

I die; I comme; mie true love waytes.

Thos the damselle spake, and dyed."

To proceed to the more immediate subject of the present Lecture, the

character and writings of Burns.--Shakspeare says of some one, that "he

was like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring." Burns, the poet,

was not such a man. He had a strong mind, and a strong body, the fellow

to it. He had a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom--

you can almost hear it throb. Some one said, that if you had shaken

hands with him, his hand would have burnt yours. The Gods, indeed, "made

him poetical"; but nature had a hand in him first. His heart was in the

right place. He did not "create a soul under the ribs of death," by

tinkling siren sounds, or by piling up centos of poetic diction; but for

the artificial flowers of poetry, he plucked the mountain-daisy under

his feet; and a field-mouse, hurrying from its ruined dwelling, could

inspire him with the sentiments of terror and pity. He held the plough

or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp; nor did he cut out poetry as

we cut out watch-papers, with finical dexterity, nor from the same

flimsy materials. Burns was not like Shakspeare in the range of his

genius; but there is something of the same magnanimity, directness, and

unaffected character about him. He was not a sickly sentimentalist, a

namby-pamby poet, a mincing metre ballad-monger, any more than

Shakspeare. He would as soon hear "a brazen candlestick tuned, or a dry

wheel grate on the axletree." He was as much of a man--not a twentieth

part as much of a poet as Shakspeare. With but little of his imagination

or inventive power, he had the same life of mind: within the narrow

circle of personal feeling or domestic incidents, the pulse of his

poetry flows as healthily and vigorously. He had an eye to see; a heart

to feel:--no more. His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of

quaint humour, are equal to any thing; they come up to nature, and they

cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the

sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners--the large tear rolled

down his manly cheek at the sight of another's distress. He has made us

as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be; has let out the

honest impulses of his native disposition, the unequal conflict of the

passions in his breast, with the same frankness and truth of

description. His strength is not greater than his weakness: his virtues

were greater than his vices. His virtues belonged to his genius: his

vices to his situation, which did not correspond to his genius.

It has been usual to attack Burns's moral character, and the moral

tendency of his writings at the same time; and Mr. Wordsworth, in a

letter to Mr. Gray, Master of the High School at Edinburgh, in

attempting to defend, has only laid him open to a more serious and

unheard-of responsibility. Mr. Gray might very well have sent him back,

in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love's Labour's

Lost:--"_Via_ goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while."

The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is

pompous in pretension, shews a great dislike of Robespierre, Buonaparte,

and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes

together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that

have appeared in his (Mr. Wordsworth's) remembrance; but he betrays very

little liking to Burns. He is, indeed, anxious to get him out of the

unhallowed clutches of the Edinburgh Reviewers (as a mere matter of

poetical privilege), only to bring him before a graver and higher

tribunal, which is his own; and after repeating and insinuating

ponderous charges against him, shakes his head, and declines giving any

opinion in so tremendous a case; so that though the judgment of the

former critic is set aside, poor Burns remains just where he was, and

nobody gains any thing by the cause but Mr. Wordsworth, in an increasing

opinion of his own wisdom and purity. "Out upon this half-faced

fellowship!" The author of the Lyrical Ballads has thus missed a fine

opportunity of doing Burns justice and himself honour. He might have

shewn himself a philosophical prose-writer, as well as a philosophical

poet. He might have offered as amiable and as gallant a defence of the

Muses, as my uncle Toby, in the honest simplicity of his heart, did of

the army. He might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry

faces over the matter, that Burns had written Tam o'Shanter, and that

that alone was enough; that he could hardly have described the excesses

of mad, hairbrained, roaring mirth and convivial indulgence, which are

the soul of it, if he himself had not "drunk full ofter of the ton than

of the well"--unless "the act and practique part of life had been the

mistress of his theorique." Mr. Wordsworth might have quoted such lines

as--

"The landlady and Tam grew gracious,

Wi' favours secret, sweet, and precious";--

or,

"Care, mad to see a man so happy,

E'en drown'd himself among the nappy";--

and fairly confessed that he could not have written such lines from a

want of proper habits and previous sympathy; and that till some great

puritanical genius should arise to do these things equally well without

any knowledge of them, the world might forgive Burns the injuries he had

done his health and fortune in his poetical apprenticeship to

experience, for the pleasure he had afforded them. Instead of this, Mr.

Wordsworth hints, that with different personal habits and greater

strength of mind, Burns would have written differently, and almost as

well as _he_ does. He might have taken that line of Gay's,

"The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,"--

and applied it in all its force and pathos to the poetical character. He

might have argued that poets are men of genius, and that a man of genius

is not a machine; that they live in a state of intellectual

intoxication, and that it is too much to expect them to be distinguished

by peculiar _sang froid_, circumspection, and sobriety. Poets are by

nature men of stronger imagination and keener sensibilities than others;

and it is a contradiction to suppose them at the same time governed only

by the cool, dry, calculating dictates of reason and foresight. Mr.

Wordsworth might have ascertained the boundaries that part the provinces

of reason and imagination:--that it is the business of the

understanding to exhibit things in their relative proportions and

ultimate consequences--of the imagination to insist on their immediate

impressions, and to indulge their strongest impulses; but it is the

poet's office to pamper the imagination of his readers and his own with

the extremes of present ecstacy or agony, to snatch the swift-winged

golden minutes, the torturing hour, and to banish the dull, prosaic,

monotonous realities of life, both from his thoughts and from his

practice. Mr. Wordsworth might have shewn how it is that all men of

genius, or of originality and independence of mind, are liable to

practical errors, from the very confidence their superiority inspires,

which makes them fly in the face of custom and prejudice, always rashly,

sometimes unjustly; for, after all, custom and prejudice are not without

foundation in truth and reason, and no one individual is a match for the

world in power, very few in knowledge. The world may altogether be set

down as older and wiser than any single person in it.

Again, our philosophical letter-writer might have enlarged on the

temptations to which Burns was exposed from his struggles with fortune

and the uncertainty of his fate. He might have shewn how a poet, not

born to wealth or title, was kept in a constant state of feverish

anxiety with respect to his fame and the means of a precarious

livelihood: that "from being chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt,

he had passed into the sunshine of fortune, and was lifted to the very

pinnacle of public favour"; yet even there could not count on the

continuance of success, but was, "like the giddy sailor on the mast,

ready with every blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the

deep!" He might have traced his habit of ale-house tippling to the last

long precious draught of his favourite usquebaugh, which he took in the

prospect of bidding farewel for ever to his native land; and his

conjugal infidelities to his first disappointment in love, which would

not have happened to him, if he had been born to a small estate in land,

or bred up behind a counter!

Lastly, Mr. Wordsworth might have shewn the incompatibility between

the Muses and the Excise, which never agreed well together, or met in

one seat, till they were unaccountably reconciled on Rydal Mount. He

must know (no man better) the distraction created by the opposite calls

of business and of fancy, the torment of extents, the plague of receipts

laid in order or mislaid, the disagreeableness of exacting penalties or

paying the forfeiture; and how all this (together with the broaching of

casks and the splashing of beer-barrels) must have preyed upon a mind

like Burns, with more than his natural sensibility and none of his

acquired firmness.

Mr. Coleridge, alluding to this circumstance of the promotion of the

Scottish Bard to be "a gauger of ale-firkins," in a poetical epistle to

his friend Charles Lamb, calls upon him in a burst of heartfelt

indignation, to gather a wreath of henbane, nettles, and nightshade,

"------To twine

The illustrious brow of Scotch nobility."

If, indeed, Mr. Lamb had undertaken to write a letter in defence of

Burns, how different would it have been from this of Mr. Wordsworth's!

How much better than I can even imagine it to have been done!

It is hardly reasonable to look for a hearty or genuine defence of

Burns from the pen of Mr. Wordsworth; for there is no common link of

sympathy between them. Nothing can be more different or hostile than the

spirit of their poetry. Mr. Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of mere

sentiment and pensive contemplation: Burns's is a very highly sublimated

essence of animal existence. With Burns, "self-love and social are the

same"--

"And we'll tak a cup of kindness yet,

For auld lang syne."

Mr. Wordsworth is "himself alone," a recluse philosopher, or a reluctant

spectator of the scenes of many-coloured life; moralising on them, not

describing, not entering into them. Robert Burns has exerted all the

vigour of his mind, all the happiness of his nature, in exalting the

pleasures of wine, of love, and good fellowship: but in Mr. Wordsworth

there is a total disunion and divorce of the faculties of the mind from

those of the body; the banns are forbid, or a separation is austerely

pronounced from bed and board--_a mensa et thoro_. From the Lyrical

Ballads, it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in

marriage. If we lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths,

and not by bread or wine, or if the species were continued like trees

(to borrow an expression from the great Sir Thomas Brown), Mr.

Wordsworth's poetry would be just as good as ever. It is not so with

Burns: he is "famous for the keeping of it up," and in his verse is ever

fresh and gay. For this, it seems, he has fallen under the displeasure

of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the still more formidable patronage of

Mr. Wordsworth's pen.

"This, this was the unkindest cut of all."

I was going to give some extracts out of this composition in support

of what I have said, but I find them too tedious. Indeed (if I may be

allowed to speak my whole mind, under correction) Mr. Wordsworth could

not be in any way expected to tolerate or give a favourable

interpretation to Burns's constitutional foibles--even his best

virtues are not good enough for him. He is repelled and driven back into

himself, not less by the worth than by the faults of others. His taste

is as exclusive and repugnant as his genius. It is because so few things

give him pleasure, that he gives pleasure to so few people. It is not

every one who can perceive the sublimity of a daisy, or the pathos to be

extracted from a withered thorn!

To proceed from Burns's patrons to his poetry, than which no two

things can be more different. His "Twa Dogs" is a very spirited piece of

description, both as it respects the animal and human creation, and

conveys a very vivid idea of the manners both of high and low life. The

burlesque panegyric of the first dog,

"His locked, lettered, braw brass collar

Shew'd him the gentleman and scholar"--

reminds one of Launce's account of his dog Crabbe, where he is said, as

an instance of his being in the way of promotion, "to have got among

three or four gentleman-like dogs under the Duke's table." The

"Halloween" is the most striking and picturesque description of local

customs and scenery. The Brigs of Ayr, the Address to a Haggis, Scotch

Drink, and innumerable others are, however, full of the same kind of

characteristic and comic painting. But his master-piece in this way is

his Tam o'Shanter. I shall give the beginning of it, but I am afraid I

shall hardly know when to leave off.

"When chapman billies leave the street,

And drouthy neebors, neebors meet,

As market-days are wearing late,

And folk begin to tak the gate;

While we sit bousing at the nappy,

And getting fou and unco happy,

We think na on the lang Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,

That lie between us and our hame,

Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

This truth fand honest Tam o'Shanter,

As he frae Ayr ae night did canter;

(Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses,

For honest men and bonny lasses.)

O Tam! hadst thou but been sae wise,

As ta'en thy ain wife Kate's advice!

She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,

A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum;

That frae November till October

Ae market-day thou was na sober;

That ilka melder, wi' the miller,

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;

That ev'ry naig was ca'd a shoe on,

The smith and thee gat roaring fou on;

That at the Lord's house, ev'n on Sunday,

Thou drank wi' Kirton Jean till Monday--

She prophesy'd, that late or soon,

Thou wad be found deep drown'd in Doon;

Or catch't wi' warlocks in the mirk,

By Alloway's auld haunted kirk.

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,

To think how mony counsels sweet,

How mony lengthen'd, sage advices,

The husband frae the wife despises!

But to our tale: Ae market night,

Tam had got planted unco right

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,

Wi' reaming swats, that drank divinely;

And at his elbow, Souter Johnny,

His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony;

Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither;

They had been fou for weeks thegither.

The night drave on wi' sangs an clatter,

And aye the ale was growing better:

The landlady and Tam grew gracious

Wi' favours secret, sweet, and precious:

The Souter tauld his queerest stories;

The landlord's laugh was ready chorus:

The storm without might rair and rustle,

Tam did na mind the storm a whistle.

Care, mad to see a man sae happy,

E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy;

As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure,

The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure:

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,

O'er a' the ills of life victorious!

But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flow'r--its bloom is shed;

Or like the snow, falls in the river,

A moment white--then melts for ever;

Or like the Borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;

Or like the rainbow's lovely form,

Evanishing amid the storm.--

Nae man can tether time or tide,

The hour approaches, Tam maun ride;

That hour o' night's black arch the key-stane,

That dreary hour he mounts his beast in,

And sic a night he taks the road in,

As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.

The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last;

The rattling showers rose on the blast,

The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd,

Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow'd:

That night a child might understand,

The Deil had business on his hand.

Weel mounted on his grey mare, Meg,

A better never lifted leg,

Tam skelpit on thro' dub and mire,

Despising wind, and rain, and fire;

Whiles haulding fast his gude blue bonnet;

Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet;

Whiles glowring round wi' prudent cares,

Lest bogles catch him unawares;

Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,

Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry.--

By this time Tam was cross the ford,

Whare in the snaw, the chapman smoor'd;

And past the birks and meikle stane,

Whare drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;

And thro' the whins, and by the cairn,

Where hunters fand the murder'd bairn;

And near the thorn, aboon the well,

Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel.--

Before him Doon pours all his floods;

The doubling storm roars thro' the woods;

The lightnings flash from pole to pole;

Near and more near the thunders roll:

Whan, glimmering thro' the groaning trees,

Kirk-Alloway seem'd in a bleeze;

Thro' ilka bore the beams were glancing;

And loud resounded mirth and dancing.

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!

What dangers thou canst make us scorn!

Wi' Tippenny, we fear nae evil,

Wi' Usqueba, we'll face the devil!

The swats sae ream'd in Tammie's noddle,

Fair play, he car'd na de'ils a boddle.

But Maggie stood right sair astonish'd,

Till by the heel and hand admonish'd,

She ventur'd forward on the light,

And, vow! Tam saw an unco sight!

Warlocks and witches in a dance,

Nae light cotillion new frae France,

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,

Put life and mettle in their heels.

As winnock-bunker, in the east,

There sat auld Nick, in shape o' beast;

A touzie tyke, black, grim, and large,

To gie them music was his charge;

He screw'd the pipes, and gart them skirl,

Till roof and rafters a' did dirl.--

Coffins stood round like open presses,

That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses;

And, by some devilish cantrip slight,

Each in its cauld hand held a light--

By which heroic Tam was able

To note upon the haly table,

A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns;

Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns;

A thief, new cutted frae a rape,

Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape;

Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted;

Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted;

A garter, which a babe had strangled;

A knife, a father's throat had mangled,

Whom his ain son o' life bereft,

The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;

Wi' mair, o' horrible and awfu',

Which e'en to name wad be unlawfu'.

As Tammie glowr'd amaz'd, and curious,

The mirth and fun grew fast and furious:

The Piper loud and louder blew;

The dancers quick and quicker flew;

They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit,

Till ilka Carlin swat and reekit,

And coost her duddies to the wark,

And linket at it in her sark!

Now Tam, O Tam! had they been queans

A' plump and strapping in their teens;

Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen,

Been snaw-white seventeen hundred linen!

Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,

That ance were plush, o' guid blue hair,

I wad hae gi'en them aff my hurdies,

For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies!

But wither'd beldams, auld and droll,

Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,

Louping and flinging on a crummock,

I wonder did na turn thy stomach.

But Tam ken'd what was what fu' brawly,

There was ae winsome wench and waly,

That night enlisted in the core,

(Lang after ken'd on Carrick shore;

For mony a beast to dead she shot,

And perish'd mony a bonnie boat,

And shook baith meikle corn and bear,

And kept the country-side in fear--)

Her cutty sark o' Paisley harn,

That while a lassie she had worn,

In longitude tho' sorely scanty,

It was her best, and she was vaunty.--

Ah! little ken'd thy reverend grannie,

That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,

Wi' twa pund Scots ('twas a' her riches),

Wad ever grac'd a dance of witches!

But here my Muse her wing maun cour;

Sic flights are far beyond her power:

To sing how Nannie lap and flang,

(A souple jade she was, and strang)

And how Tam stood like ane bewitch'd,

And thought his very een enrich'd;

Ev'n Satan glowr'd and fidg'd fu' fain,

And hotch't, and blew wi' might and main;

Till first ae caper, syne anither,

Tam tint his reason a' thegither,

And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty Sark!"

And in an instant all was dark;

And scarcely had he Maggie rallied,

When out the hellish legion sallied.

As bees biz out wi' angry fyke

When plundering herds assail their byke;

As open pussie's mortal foes,

When, pop! she starts before their nose;

As eager rins the market-crowd,

When "Catch the thief!" resounds aloud;

So Maggie rins--the witches follow,

Wi' mony an eldritch skreech and hollow,

Ah, Tam! ah, Tam! thou 'll get thy fairin'!

In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'!

In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin'!

Kate soon will be a waefu' woman!

Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg,

And win the key-stane o' the brig;

There, at them thou thy tail may toss,

A running stream they dare na cross;

But ere the key-stane she could make,

The fient a tail she had to shake!

For Nannie, far before the rest,

Hard upon noble Maggie prest,

And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle;

But little wist she Maggie's mettle--

Ae spring brought off her master hale,

But left behind, her ain grey tail:

The Carlin claught her by the rump,

And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.

Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read,

Ilk man and mother's son tak heed:

Whane'er to drink you are inclin'd,

Or Cutty Sarks rin in your mind,

Think, ye may buy the joys owre dear;

Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare."

Burns has given the extremes of licentious eccentricity and convivial

enjoyment, in the story of this scape-grace, and of patriarchal

simplicity and gravity in describing the old national character of the

Scottish peasantry. The Cotter's Saturday Night is a noble and pathetic

picture of human manners, mingled with a fine religious awe. It comes

over the mind like a slow and solemn strain of music. The soul of the

poet aspires from this scene of low-thoughted care, and reposes, in

trembling hope, on "the bosom of its Father and its God." Hardly any

thing can be more touching than the following stanzas, for instance,

whether as they describe human interests, or breathe a lofty devotional

spirit.

"The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes,

This night his weekly moil is at an end,

Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,

And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

At length his lonely cot appears in view,

Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;

Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through

To meet their dad, wi' flichterin noise and glee.

His wee-bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,

His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile,

The lisping infant, prattling on his knee,

Does a' his weary carking cares beguile,

And makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.

Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in,

At service out, amang the farmers roun',

Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin

A cannie errand to a neebor town;

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown,

In youthfu' bloom, love sparkling in her e'e,

Comes hame, perhaps, to shew a braw new gown,

Or deposit her sair-won penny-fee,

To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.

Wi' joy unfeign'd, brothers and sisters meet,

An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers;

The social hours, swift-winged, unnotic'd fleet;

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears:

The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;

Anticipation forward points the view;

The mither, wi' her needle an' her shears,

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new;

The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.

* * * * * * *

But, hark! a rap comes gently to the door;

Jenny, wha kens the meaning o' the same,

Tells how a neebor lad cam o'er the moor,

To do some errands, and convoy her hame.

The wily mother sees the conscious flame

Sparkle in Jenny's e'e, and flush her cheek;

With heart-struck, anxious care, inquires his name,

While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak;

Weel pleas'd the mother hears it's nae wild, worthless rake.

Wi' kindly welcome, Jenny brings him ben;

A strappan youth; he taks the mother's eye;

Blithe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en;

The father craks of horses, pleughs, and kye.

The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy,

But blate an' laithfu', scarce can weel behave;

The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy

What makes the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave;

Weel-pleas'd to think her bairn's respected like the lave.

But now the supper crowns their simple board,

The halesome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food:

The soupe their only hawkie does afford,

That 'yont the hallan snugly chows her cood:

The dame brings forth, in complimental mood,

To grace the lad, her weel-hain'd kebbuck, fell,

An' aft he's prest, an' aft he ca's it guid;

The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell,

How 'twas a towmond auld, sin' lint was i' the bell.

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face,

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;

The sire turns o'er, with patriarchal grace,

The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride:

His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,

His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare;

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion wi' judicious care;

And "Let us worship God!" he says, with solemn air.

They chant their artless notes in simple guise;

They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim:

Perhaps Dundee's wild-warbling measures rise,

Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;

Or noble Elgin beets the heav'n-ward flame,

The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays:

Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame;

The tickled ears no heart-felt raptures raise;

Nae unison hae they with our Creator's praise."--

Burns's poetical epistles to his friends are admirable, whether for

the touches of satire, the painting of character, or the sincerity of

friendship they display. Those to Captain Grose, and to Davie, a brother

poet, are among the best:--they are "the true pathos and sublime of

human life." His prose-letters are sometimes tinctured with affectation.

They seem written by a man who has been admired for his wit, and is

expected on all occasions to shine. Those in which he expresses his

ideas of natural beauty in reference to Alison's Essay on Taste, and

advocates the keeping up the remembrances of old customs and seasons,

are the most powerfully written. His English serious odes and moral

stanzas are, in general, failures, such as The Lament, Man was made to

Mourn, &c. nor do I much admire his "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." In

this strain of didactic or sentimental moralising, the lines to

Glencairn are the most happy, and impressive. His imitations of the old

humorous ballad style of Ferguson's songs are no whit inferior to the

admirable originals, such as "John Anderson, my Joe," and many more. But

of all his productions, the pathetic and serious love-songs which he has

left behind him, in the manner of the old ballads, are perhaps those

which take the deepest and most lasting hold of the mind. Such are the

lines to Mary Morison, and those entitled Jessy.

"Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear--

Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear--

Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,

And soft as their parting tear--Jessy!

Altho' thou maun never be mine,

Altho' even hope is denied;

'Tis sweeter for thee despairing,

Than aught in the world beside--Jessy!"

The conclusion of the other is as follows.

"Yestreen, when to the trembling string

The dance gaed through the lighted ha',

To thee my fancy took its wing,

I sat, but neither heard nor saw.

Tho' this was fair, and that was bra',

And yon the toast of a' the town,

I sighed and said among them a',

Ye are na' Mary Morison."

That beginning, "Oh gin my love were a bonny red rose," is a piece of

rich and fantastic description. One would think that nothing could

surpass these in beauty of expression, and in true pathos: and nothing

does or can, but some of the old Scotch ballads themselves. There is in

them a still more original cast of thought, a more romantic imagery--

the thistle's glittering down, the gilliflower on the old garden-wall,

the horseman's silver bells, the hawk on its perch--a closer intimacy

with nature, a firmer reliance on it, as the only stock of wealth which

the mind has to resort to, a more infantine simplicity of manners, a

greater strength of affection, hopes longer cherished and longer

deferred, sighs that the heart dare hardly heave, and "thoughts that

often lie too deep for tears." We seem to feel that those who wrote and

sung them (the early minstrels) lived in the open air, wandering on from

place to place with restless feet and thoughts, and lending an ever-open

ear to the fearful accidents of war or love, floating on the breath of

old tradition or common fame, and moving the strings of their harp with

sounds that sank into a nation's heart. How fine an illustration of this

is that passage in Don Quixote, where the knight and Sancho, going in

search of Dulcinea, inquire their way of the countryman, who was driving

his mules to plough before break of day, "singing the ancient ballad of

Roncesvalles." Sir Thomas Overbury describes his country girl as still

accompanied with fragments of old songs. One of the best and most

striking descriptions of the effects of this mixture of national poetry

and music is to be found in one of the letters of Archbishop Herring,

giving an account of a confirmation-tour in the mountains of Wales.

"That pleasure over, our work became very arduous, for we were to

mount a rock, and in many places of the road, over natural stairs of

stone. I submitted to this, which they told me was but a taste of the

country, and to prepare me for worse things to come. However, worse

things did not come that morning, for we dined soon after out of our own

wallets; and though our inn stood in a place of the most frightful

solitude, and the best formed for the habitation of monks (who once

possessed it) in the world, yet we made a cheerful meal. The novelty of

the thing gave me spirits, and the air gave me appetite much keener than

the knife I ate with. We had our music too; for there came in a harper,

who soon drew about us a group of figures that Hogarth would have given

any price for. The harper was in his true place and attitude; a man and

woman stood before him, singing to his instrument wildly, but not

disagreeably; a little dirty child was playing with the bottom of the

harp; a woman in a sick night-cap hanging over the stairs; a boy with

crutches fixed in a staring attention, and a girl carding wool in the

chimney, and rocking a cradle with her naked feet, interrupted in her

business by the charms of the music; all ragged and dirty, and all

silently attentive. These figures gave us a most entertaining picture,

and would please you or any man of observation; and one reflection gave

me a particular comfort, that the assembly before us demonstrated, that

even here, the influential sun warmed poor mortals, and inspired them

with love and music."

I could wish that Mr. Wilkie had been recommended to take this group

as the subject of his admirable pencil; he has painted a picture of

Bathsheba, instead.

In speaking of the old Scotch ballads, I need do no more than mention

the name of Auld Robin Gray. The effect of reading this old ballad is as

if all our hopes and fears hung upon the last fibre of the heart, and we

felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for

grief and despair!

"My father pressed me sair,

Though my mother did na' speak;

But she looked in my face

Till my heart was like to break."

The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is

excessive; and yet the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection

triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. Lady Ann

Bothwell's Lament is not, I think, quite equal to the lines beginning--

"O waly, waly, up the bank,

And waly, waly, down the brae,

And waly, waly, yon burn side,

Where I and my love wont to gae.

I leant my back unto an aik,

I thought it was a trusty tree;

But first it bow'd, and syne it brak,

Sae my true-love's forsaken me.

O waly, waly, love is bonny,

A little time while it is new;

But when its auld, it waxeth cauld,

And fades awa' like the morning dew.

When cockle-shells turn siller bells,

And muscles grow on every tree,

Whan frost and snaw sall warm us aw,

Then sall my love prove true to me.

Now Arthur seat sall be my bed,

The sheets sall ne'er be fyld by me:

Saint Anton's well sall be my drink,

Since my true-love's forsaken me.

Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw,

And shake the green leaves aff the tree?

O gentle death, whan wilt thou cum,

And tak' a life that wearies me!

'Tis not the frost that freezes sae,

Nor blawing snaw's inclemencie,

'Tis not sic cauld, that makes me cry,

But my love's heart grown cauld to me.

Whan we came in by Glasgow town,

We were a comely sight to see,

My love was clad in black velvet,

And I myself in cramasie.

But had I wist before I kist,

That love had been sae hard to win;

I'd lockt my heart in case of gowd,

And pinn'd it with a siller pin.

And oh! if my poor babe were born,

And set upon the nurse's knee,

And I mysel in the cold grave!

Since my true-love 's forsaken me."

The finest modern imitation of this style is the Braes of Yarrow; and

perhaps the finest subject for a story of the same kind in any modern

book, is that told in Turner's History of England, of a Mahometan woman,

who having fallen in love with an English merchant, the father of Thomas

a Becket, followed him all the way to England, knowing only the word

London, and the name of her lover, Gilbert.

But to have done with this, which is rather too serious a subject.--

The old English ballads are of a gayer and more lively turn.

They are adventurous and romantic; but they relate chiefly to good

living and good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes. Robin Hood

is the chief of these, and he still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood

Forest. The archers green glimmer under the waving branches; the print

on the grass remains where they have just finished their noon-tide meal

under the green-wood tree; and the echo of their bugle-horn and twanging

bows resounds through the tangled mazes of the forest, as the tall slim

deer glances startled by.

"The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good;

The grass beneath them now is dimly green:

Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,

With loose-slung bugle, met within the wood?

No arrow found--foil'd of its antler'd food--

Struck in the oak's rude side?--Is there nought seen

To mark the revelries which there have been,

In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

Go there with summer, and with evening--go

In the soft shadows, like some wand'ring man--

And thou shalt far amid the forest know

The archer-men in green, with belt and bow,

Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan,

With Robin at their head, and Marian." [9]

___

[9] Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J.H. Reynolds, Esq.

___

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE LIVING POETS.

"No more of talk where God or Angel guest

With man, as with his friend, familiar us'd

To sit indulgent."------

Genius is the heir of fame; but the hard condition on which the

bright reversion must be earned is the loss of life. Fame is the

recompense not of the living, but of the dead. The temple of fame stands

upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the

ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot till

the breath of genius is extinguished. For fame is not popularity, the

shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the

soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a

man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying

and imperishable. It is the power which the intellect exercises over the

intellect, and the lasting homage which is paid to it, as such,

independently of time and circumstances, purified from partiality and

evil-speaking. Fame is the sound which the stream of high thoughts,

carried down to future ages, makes as it flows--deep, distant,

murmuring evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean. He who has ears

truly touched to this music, is in a manner deaf to the voice of

popularity.--The love of fame differs from mere vanity in this, that

the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted. It is

not the direct and gross homage paid to himself, that the lover of true

fame seeks or is proud of; but the indirect and pure homage paid to the

eternal forms of truth and beauty as they are reflected in his mind,

that gives him confidence and hope. The love of nature is the first

thing in the mind of the true poet: the admiration of himself the last.

A man of genius cannot well be a coxcomb; for his mind is too full of

other things to be much occupied with his own person. He who is

conscious of great powers in himself, has also a high standard of

excellence with which to compare his efforts: he appeals also to a test

and judge of merit, which is the highest, but which is too remote,

grave, and impartial, to flatter his self-love extravagantly, or puff

him up with intolerable and vain conceit. This, indeed, is one test of

genius and of real greatness of mind, whether a man can wait patiently

and calmly for the award of posterity, satisfied with the unwearied

exercise of his faculties, retired within the sanctuary of his own

thoughts; or whether he is eager to forestal his own immortality, and

mortgage it for a newspaper puff. He who thinks much of himself, will be

in danger of being forgotten by the rest of the world: he who is always

trying to lay violent hands on reputation, will not secure the best and

most lasting. If the restless candidate for praise takes no pleasure, no

sincere and heartfelt delight in his works, but as they are admired and

applauded by others, what should others see in them to admire or

applaud? They cannot be expected to admire them because they are _his_;

but for the truth and nature contained in them, which must first be inly

felt and copied with severe delight, from the love of truth and nature,

before it can ever appear there. Was Raphael, think you, when he painted

his pictures of the Virgin and Child in all their inconceivable truth

and beauty of expression, thinking most of his subject or of himself? Do

you suppose that Titian, when he painted a landscape, was pluming

himself on being thought the finest colourist in the world, or making

himself so by looking at nature? Do you imagine that Shakspeare, when he

wrote Lear or Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear and Othello?

Or that Mr. Kean, when he plays these characters, is thinking of the

audience?--No: he who would be great in the eyes of others, must first

learn to be nothing in his own. The love of fame, as it enters at times

into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is

the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest

authority--that of time.

Those minds, then, which are the most entitled to expect it, can best

put up with the postponement of their claims to lasting fame. They can

afford to wait. They are not afraid that truth and nature will ever wear

out; will lose their gloss with novelty, or their effect with fashion.

If their works have the seeds of immortality in them, they will live; if

they have not, they care little about them as theirs. They do not

complain of the start which others have got of them in the race of

everlasting renown, or of the impossibility of attaining the honours

which time alone can give, during the term of their natural lives. They

know that no applause, however loud and violent, can anticipate or

over-rule the judgment of posterity; that the opinion of no one

individual, nor of any one generation, can have the weight, the

authority (to say nothing of the force of sympathy and prejudice), which

must belong to that of successive generations. The brightest living

reputation cannot be equally imposing to the imagination, with that

which is covered and rendered venerable with the hoar of innumerable

ages. No modern production can have the same atmosphere of sentiment

around it, as the remains of classical antiquity. But then our moderns

may console themselves with the reflection, that they will be old in

their turn, and will either be remembered with still increasing honours,

or quite forgotten!

I would speak of the living poets as I have spoken of the dead (for I

think highly of many of them); but I cannot speak of them with the same

reverence, because I do not feel it; with the same confidence, because I

cannot have the same authority to sanction my opinion. I cannot be

absolutely certain that any body, twenty years hence, will think any

thing about any of them; but we may be pretty sure that Milton and

Shakspeare will be remembered twenty years hence. We are, therefore, not

without excuse if we husband our enthusiasm a little, and do not

prematurely lay out our whole stock in untried ventures, and what may

turn out to be false bottoms. I have myself out-lived one generation of

favourite poets, the Darwins, the Hayleys, the Sewards. Who reads them

now?--If, however, I have not the verdict of posterity to bear me out

in bestowing the most unqualified praises on their immediate successors,

it is also to be remembered, that neither does it warrant me in

condemning them. Indeed, it was not my wish to go into this ungrateful

part of the subject; but something of the sort is expected from me, and

I must run the gauntlet as well as I can. Another circumstance that adds

to the difficulty of doing justice to all parties is, that I happen to

have had a personal acquaintance with some of these jealous votaries of

the Muses; and that is not the likeliest way to imbibe a high opinion of

the rest. Poets do not praise one another in the language of hyperbole.

I am afraid, therefore, that I labour under a degree of prejudice

against some of the most popular poets of the day, from an early habit

of deference to the critical opinions of some of the least popular. I

cannot say that I ever learnt much about Shakspeare or Milton, Spenser

or Chaucer, from these professed guides; for I never heard them say much

about them. They were always talking of themselves and one another. Nor

am I certain that this sort of personal intercourse with living authors,

while it takes away all real relish or freedom of opinion with regard to

their contemporaries, greatly enhances our respect for themselves. Poets

are not ideal beings; but have their prose-sides, like the commonest of

the people. We often hear persons say, What they would have given to

have seen Shakspeare! For my part, I would give a great deal not to have

seen him; at least, if he was at all like any body else that I have ever

seen. But why should he; for his works are not! This is, doubtless, one

great advantage which the dead have over the living. It is always

fortunate for ourselves and others, when we are prevented from

exchanging admiration for knowledge. The splendid vision that in youth

haunts our idea of the poetical character, fades, upon acquaintance,

into the light of common day; as the azure tints that deck the

mountain's brow are lost on a nearer approach to them. It is well,

according to the moral of one of the Lyrical Ballads,--"To leave Yarrow

unvisited." But to leave this "face-making," and begin.--

I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they

appear to me like so many modern Muses. I could be in love with Mrs.

Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame

D'Arblay: but they are novel-writers, and, like Audrey, may "thank the

Gods for not having made them poetical." Did any one here ever read Mrs.

Leicester's School? If they have not, I wish they would; there will be

just time before the next three volumes of the Tales of My Landlord come

out. That is not a school of affectation, but of humanity. No one can

think too highly of the work, or highly enough of the author.

The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works

I became acquainted before those of any other author, male or female,

when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books

for children. I became acquainted with her poetical works long after in

Enfield's Speaker; and remember being much divided in my opinion at that

time, between her Ode to Spring and Collins's Ode to Evening. I wish I

could repay my childish debt of gratitude in terms of appropriate

praise. She is a very pretty poetess; and, to my fancy, strews the

flowers of poetry most agreeably round the borders of religious

controversy. She is a neat and pointed prose-writer. Her "Thoughts on

the Inconsistency of Human Expectations," is one of the most ingenious

and sensible essays in the language. There is the same idea in one of

Barrow's Sermons.

Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess, and I believe

still living. She has written a great deal which I have never read.

Miss Baillie must make up this trio of female poets. Her tragedies

and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately

from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in

poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and

indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakspeare. Mr. Southey

has, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion, that the Basil of Miss

Baillie is superior to Romeo and Juliet. I shall not stay to contradict

him. On the other hand, I prefer her De Montfort, which was condemned on

the stage, to some later tragedies, which have been more fortunate--to

the Remorse, Bertram, and lastly, Fazio. There is in the chief character

of that play a nerve, a continued unity of interest, a setness of

purpose and precision of outline which John Kemble alone was capable of

giving; and there is all the grace which women have in writing. In

saying that De Montfort was a character which just suited Mr. Kemble, I

mean to pay a compliment to both. He was not "a man of no mark or

likelihood": and what he could be supposed to do particularly well, must

have a meaning in it. As to the other tragedies just mentioned, there is

no reason why any common actor should not "make mouths in them at the

invisible event,"--one as well as another. Having thus expressed my

sense of the merits of this authoress, I must add, that her comedy of

the Election, performed last summer at the Lyceum with indifferent

success, appears to me the perfection of baby-house theatricals. Every

thing in it has such a _do-me-good_ air, is so insipid and amiable.

Virtue seems such a pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is such a

naughty word. It is a theory of some French author, that little girls

ought not to be suffered to have dolls to play with, to call them

_pretty dears_, to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks, to lament

and bewail over them if they fall down and hurt their faces, to praise

them when they are good, and scold them when they are naughty. It is a

school of affectation: Miss Baillie has profited of it. She treats her

grown men and women as little girls treat their dolls--makes moral

puppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtue and act vice,

according to their cue and the title prefixed to each comedy or tragedy,

not from any real passions of their own, or love either of virtue or

vice.

The transition from these to Mr. Rogers's Pleasures of Memory, is not

far: he is a very lady-like poet. He is an elegant, but feeble writer.

He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is

full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and

scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no

particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. He differs from

Milton in this respect, who is accused of having inserted a number of

prosaic lines in Paradise Lost. This kind of poetry, which is a more

minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan, is like the game of

asking what one's thoughts are like. It is a tortuous, tottering,

wriggling, fidgetty translation of every thing from the vulgar tongue,

into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping _mimminee-pimminee_

of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have

nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression. The fastidious

and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance

in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea. You

cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for

the finery, the picture for the varnish. The whole is refined, and

frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and

tremulous imbecility.--There is no other fault to be found with the

Pleasures of Memory, than a want of taste and genius. The sentiments are

amiable, and the notes at the end highly interesting, particularly the

one relating to the Countess Pillar (as it is called) between Appleby

and Penrith, erected (as the inscription tells the thoughtful traveller)

by Anne Countess of Pembroke, in the year 1648, in memory of her last

parting with her good and pious mother in the same place in the year

1616--

"To shew that power of love, how great

Beyond all human estimate."

This story is also told in the poem, but with so many artful innuendos

and tinsel words, that it is hardly intelligible; and still less does it

reach the heart.

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope is of the same school, in which a

painful attention is paid to the expression in proportion as there is

little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the

composition of poetry. How much the sense and keeping in the ideas are

sacrificed to a jingle of words and epigrammatic turn of expression, may

be seen in such lines as the following:--one of the characters, an old

invalid, wishes to end his days under

"Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form

Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm."

Now the antithesis here totally fails: for it is the breeze, and not the

tree, or as it is quaintly expressed, _hamlet shade_, that affords

health, though it is the tree that affords shelter in or from the storm.

Instances of the same sort of _curiosa infelicitas_ are not rare in this

author. His verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden have considerable spirit

and animation. His Gertrude of Wyoming is his principal performance. It

is a kind of historical paraphrase of Mr. Wordsworth's poem of Ruth. It

shews little power, or power enervated by extreme fastidiousness. It is

"------Of outward show

Elaborate; of inward less exact."

There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than

to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be

thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on

superfine wove paper, to have a disproportionate eye to points and

commas, and dread of errors of the press. He is so afraid of doing

wrong, of making the smallest mistake, that he does little or nothing.

Lest he should wander irretrievably from the right path, he stands

still. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the Muses

no violence. If he lights upon a good thought, he immediately drops it

for fear of spoiling a good thing. When he launches a sentiment that you

think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza,

he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands

shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the

fathomless abyss. _Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum_. His very

circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that

deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just

as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging

himself out of it when it is too late. Mr. Campbell too often maims and

mangles his ideas before they are full formed, to fit them to the

Procustes' bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in

the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh

Review. He plays the hypercritic on himself, and starves his genius to

death from a needless apprehension of a plethora. No writer who thinks

habitually of the critics, either to tremble at their censures or set

them at defiance, can write well. It is the business of reviewers to

watch poets, not of poets to watch reviewers.--There is one admirable

simile in this poem, of the European child brought by the sooty Indian

in his hand, "like morning brought by night." The love-scenes in

Gertrude of Wyoming breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment; but

they are generally broken off in the middle; they are like the scent of

a bank of violets, faint and rich, which the gale suddenly conveys in a

different direction. Mr. Campbell is careful of his own reputation, and

economical of the pleasures of his readers. He treats them as the fox in

the fable treated his guest the stork; or, to use his own expression,

his fine things are

"Like angels' visits, few, and far between." [10]

There is another fault in this poem, which is the mechanical structure

of the fable. The most striking events occur in the shape of antitheses.

The story is cut into the form of a parallelogram. There is the same

systematic alternation of good and evil, of violence and repose, that

there is of light and shade in a picture. The Indian, who is the chief

agent in the interest of the poem, vanishes and returns after long

intervals, like the periodical revolutions of the planets. He

unexpectedly appears just in the nick of time, after years of absence,

and without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the

astonishment of the reader; as if nature were a machine constructed on a

principle of complete contrast, to produce a theatrical effect. _Nec

Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus_. Mr. Campbell's savage never

appears but upon great occasions, and then his punctuality is

preternatural and alarming. He is the most wonderful instance on record

of poetical _reliability_. The most dreadful mischiefs happen at the

most mortifying moments; and when your expectations are wound up to the

highest pitch, you are sure to have them knocked on the head by a

premeditated and remorseless stroke of the poet's pen. This is done so

often for the convenience of the author, that in the end it ceases to be

for the satisfaction of the reader.

___

[10] There is the same idea in Blair's Grave.

"------Its visits,

Like those of angels, short, and far between."

Mr. Campbell in altering the expression has spoiled it. "Few," and "far

between," are the same thing.

___

Tom Moore is a poet of a quite different stamp. He is as heedless,

gay, and prodigal of his poetical wealth, as the other is careful,

reserved, and parsimonious. The genius of both is national. Mr. Moore's

Muse is another Ariel, as light, as tricksy, as indefatigable, and as

humane a spirit. His fancy is for ever on the wing, flutters in the

gale, glitters in the sun. Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles in his

poetry, while over all love waves his purple light. His thoughts are as

restless, as many, and as bright as the insects that people the sun's

beam. "So work the honey-bees," extracting liquid sweets from opening

buds; so the butterfly expands its wings to the idle air; so the

thistle's silver down is wafted over summer seas. An airy voyager on

life's stream, his mind inhales the fragrance of a thousand shores, and

drinks of endless pleasures under halcyon skies. Wherever his footsteps

tend over the enamelled ground of fairy fiction--

"Around him the bees in play flutter and cluster,

And gaudy butterflies frolic around."

The fault of Mr. Moore is an exuberance of involuntary power. His

facility of production lessens the effect of, and hangs as a dead weight

upon, what he produces. His levity at last oppresses. The infinite

delight he takes in such an infinite number of things, creates

indifference in minds less susceptible of pleasure than his own. He

exhausts attention by being inexhaustible. His variety cloys; his

rapidity dazzles and distracts the sight. The graceful ease with which

he lends himself to every subject, the genial spirit with which he

indulges in every sentiment, prevents him from giving their full force

to the masses of things, from connecting them into a whole. He wants

intensity, strength, and grandeur. His mind does not brood over the

great and permanent; it glances over the surfaces, the first impressions

of things, instead of grappling with the deep-rooted prejudices of the

mind, its inveterate habits, and that "perilous stuff that weighs upon

the heart." His pen, as it is rapid and fanciful, wants momentum and

passion. It requires the same principle to make us thoroughly like

poetry, that makes us like ourselves so well, the feeling of continued

identity. The impressions of Mr. Moore's poetry are detached, desultory,

and physical. Its gorgeous colours brighten and fade like the rainbow's.

Its sweetness evaporates like the effluvia exhaled from beds of flowers!

His gay laughing style, which relates to the immediate pleasures of love

or wine, is better than his sentimental and romantic vein. His Irish

melodies are not free from affectation and a certain sickliness of

pretension. His serious descriptions are apt to run into flowery

tenderness. His pathos sometimes melts into a mawkish sensibility, or

crystallizes into all the prettinesses of allegorical language, and

glittering hardness of external imagery. But he has wit at will, and of

the first quality. His satirical and burlesque poetry is his best: it is

first-rate. His Twopenny Post-Bag is a perfect "nest of spicery"; where

the Cayenne is not spared. The politician there sharpens the poet's pen.

In this too, our bard resembles the bee--he has its honey and its

sting.

Mr. Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, even for three

thousand guineas. His fame is worth more than that. He should have

minded the advice of Fadladeen. It is not, however, a failure, so much

as an evasion and a consequent disappointment of public expectation. He

should have left it to others to break conventions with nations, and

faith with the world. He should, at any rate, have kept his with the

public. Lalla Rookh is not what people wanted to see whether Mr. Moore

could do; namely, whether he could write a long epic poem. It is four

short tales. The interest, however, is often high-wrought and tragic,

but the execution still turns to the effeminate and voluptuous side.

Fortitude of mind is the first requisite of a tragic or epic writer.

Happiness of nature and felicity of genius are the pre-eminent

characteristics of the bard of Erin. If he is not perfectly contented

with what he is, all the world beside is. He had no temptation to risk

any thing in adding to the love and admiration of his age, and more than

one country.

"Therefore to be possessed with double pomp,

To guard a title that was rich before,

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,

To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper light

To seek the beauteous eye of heav'n to garnish,

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."

The same might be said of Mr. Moore's seeking to bind an epic crown, or

the shadow of one, round his other laurels.

If Mr. Moore has not suffered enough personally, Lord Byron (judging

from the tone of his writings) might be thought to have suffered too

much to be a truly great poet. If Mr. Moore lays himself too open to all

the various impulses of things, the outward shews of earth and sky, to

every breath that blows, to every stray sentiment that crosses his

fancy; Lord Byron shuts himself up too much in the impenetrable gloom of

his own thoughts, and buries the natural light of things in "nook

monastic." The Giaour, the Corsair, Childe Harold, are all the same

person, and they are apparently all himself. The everlasting repetition

of one subject, the same dark ground of fiction, with the darker colours

of the poet's mind spread over it, the unceasing accumulation of horrors

on horror's head, steels the mind against the sense of pain, as

inevitably as the unwearied Siren sounds and luxurious monotony of Mr.

Moore's poetry make it inaccessible to pleasure. Lord Byron's poetry is

as morbid as Mr. Moore's is careless and dissipated. He has more depth

of passion, more force and impetuosity, but the passion is always of the

same unaccountable character, at once violent and sullen, fierce and

gloomy. It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or

the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying upon itself, and

disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things. There is nothing

less poetical than this sort of unaccommodating selfishness. There is

nothing more repulsive than this sort of ideal absorption of all the

interests of others, of the good and ills of life, in the ruling passion

and moody abstraction of a single mind, as if it would make itself the

centre of the universe, and there was nothing worth cherishing but its

intellectual diseases. It is like a cancer, eating into the heart of

poetry. But still there is power; and power rivets attention and forces

admiration. "He hath a demon:" and that is the next thing to being full

of the God. His brow collects the scattered gloom: his eye flashes livid

fire that withers and consumes. But still we watch the progress of the

scathing bolt with interest, and mark the ruin it leaves behind with

awe. Within the contracted range of his imagination, he has great unity

and truth of keeping. He chooses elements and agents congenial to his

mind, the dark and glittering ocean, the frail bark hurrying before the

storm, pirates and men that "house on the wild sea with wild usages." He

gives the tumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despair of

thought. In vigour of style and force of conception, he in one sense

surpasses every writer of the present day. His indignant apothegms are

like oracles of misanthropy. He who wishes for "a curse to kill with,"

may find it in Lord Byron's writings. Yet he has beauty lurking

underneath his strength, tenderness sometimes joined with the phrenzy of

despair. A flash of golden light sometimes follows from a stroke of his

pencil, like a falling meteor. The flowers that adorn his poetry bloom

over charnel-houses and the grave!

There is one subject on which Lord Byron is fond of writing, on which

I wish he would not write--Buonaparte. Not that I quarrel with his

writing for him, or against him, but with his writing both for him and

against him. What right has he to do this? Buonaparte's character, be it

what else it may, does not change every hour according to his Lordship's

varying humour. He is not a pipe for Fortune's finger, or for his

Lordship's Muse, to play what stop she pleases on. Why should Lord Byron

now laud him to the skies in the hour of his success, and then peevishly

wreak his disappointment on the God of his idolatry? The man he writes

of does not rise or fall with circumstances: but "looks on tempests and

is never shaken." Besides, he is a subject for history, and not for

poetry.

"Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread,

But as the marigold at the sun's eye,

And in themselves their pride lies buried;

For at a frown they in their glory die.

The painful warrior, famoused for fight,

After a thousand victories once foil'd,

Is from the book of honour razed quite,

And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd."

If Lord Byron will write any thing more on this hazardous theme, let him

take these lines of Shakspeare for his guide, and finish them in the

spirit of the original--they will then be worthy of the subject.

Walter Scott is the most popular of all the poets of the present day,

and deservedly so. He describes that which is most easily and generally

understood with more vivacity and effect than any body else. He has no

excellences, either of a lofty or recondite kind, which lie beyond the

reach of the most ordinary capacity to find out; but he has all the good

qualities which all the world agree to understand. His style is clear,

flowing, and transparent: his sentiments, of which his style is an easy

and natural medium, are common to him with his readers. He has none of

Mr. Wordsworth's _idiosyncracy_. He differs from his readers only in a

greater range of knowledge and facility of expression. His poetry

belongs to the class of _improvisatori_ poetry. It has neither depth,

height, nor breadth in it; neither uncommon strength, nor uncommon

refinement of thought, sentiment, or language. It has no originality.

But if this author has no research, no moving power in his own breast,

he relies with the greater safety and success on the force of his

subject. He selects a story such as is sure to please, full of

incidents, characters, peculiar manners, costume, and scenery; and he

tells it in a way that can offend no one. He never wearies or

disappoints you. He is communicative and garrulous; but he is not his

own hero. He never obtrudes himself on your notice to prevent your

seeing the subject. What passes in the poem, passes much as it would

have done in reality. The author has little or nothing to do with it.

Mr. Scott has great intuitive power of fancy, great vividness of pencil

in placing external objects and events before the eye. The force of his

mind is picturesque, rather than _moral_. He gives more of the features

of nature than the soul of passion. He conveys the distinct outlines and

visible changes in outward objects, rather than "their mortal

consequences." He is very inferior to Lord Byron in intense passion, to

Moore in delightful fancy, to Mr. Wordsworth in profound sentiment: but

he has more picturesque power than any of them; that is, he places the

objects themselves, about which _they_ might feel and think, in a much

more striking point of view, with greater variety of dress and attitude,

and with more local truth of colouring. His imagery is Gothic and

grotesque. The manners and actions have the interest and curiosity

belonging to a wild country and a distant period of time. Few

descriptions have a more complete reality, a more striking appearance of

life and motion, than that of the warriors in the Lady of the Lake, who

start up at the command of Rhoderic Dhu, from their concealment under

the fern, and disappear again in an instant. The Lay of the Last

Minstrel and Marmion are the first, and perhaps the best of his works.

The Goblin Page, in the first of these, is a very interesting and

inscrutable little personage. In reading these poems, I confess I am a

little disconcerted, in turning over the page, to find Mr. Westall's

pictures, which always seem _fac-similes_ of the persons represented,

with ancient costume and a theatrical air. This may be a compliment to

Mr. Westall, but it is not one to Walter Scott. The truth is, there is a

modern air in the midst of the antiquarian research of Mr. Scott's

poetry. It is history or tradition in masquerade. Not only the crust of

old words and images is worn off with time,--the substance is grown

comparatively light and worthless. The forms are old and uncouth; but

the spirit is effeminate and frivolous. This is a deduction from the

praise I have given to his pencil for extreme fidelity, though it has

been no obstacle to its drawing-room success. He has just hit the town

between the romantic and the fashionable; and between the two, secured

all classes of readers on his side. In a word, I conceive that he is to

the great poet, what an excellent mimic is to a great actor. There is no

determinate impression left on the mind by reading his poetry. It has no

results. The reader rises up from the perusal with new images and

associations, but he remains the same man that he was before. A great

mind is one that moulds the minds of others. Mr. Scott has put the

Border Minstrelsy and scattered traditions of the country into easy,

animated verse. But the Notes to his poems are just as entertaining as

the poems themselves, and his poems are only entertaining.

Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. He is the

reverse of Walter Scott in his defects and excellences. He has nearly

all that the other wants, and wants all that the other possesses. His

poetry is not external, but internal; it does not depend upon tradition,

or story, or old song; he furnishes it from his own mind, and is his own

subject. He is the poet of mere sentiment. Of many of the Lyrical

Ballads, it is not possible to speak in terms of too high praise, such

as Hart-leap Well, the Banks of the Wye, Poor Susan, parts of the

Leech-gatherer, the lines to a Cuckoo, to a Daisy, the Complaint,

several of the Sonnets, and a hundred others of inconceivable beauty, of

perfect originality and pathos. They open a finer and deeper vein of

thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has done, or

attempted. He has produced a deeper impression, and on a smaller circle,

than any other of his contemporaries. His powers have been mistaken by

the age, nor does he exactly understand them himself. He cannot form a

whole. He has not the constructive faculty. He can give only the fine

tones of thought, drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the

sounds drawn from the AEolian harp by the wandering gale.--He is

totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry. His _Excursion_, taken

as a whole, notwithstanding the noble materials thrown away in it, is a

proof of this. The line labours, the sentiment moves slow, but the poem

stands stock-still. The reader makes no way from the first line to the

last. It is more than any thing in the world like Robinson Crusoe's

boat, which would have been an excellent good boat, and would have

carried him to the other side of the globe, but that he could not get it

out of the sand where it stuck fast. I did what little I could to help

to launch it at the time, but it would not do. I am not, however, one of

those who laugh at the attempts or failures of men of genius. It is not

my way to cry "Long life to the conqueror." Success and desert are not

with me synonymous terms; and the less Mr. Wordsworth's general merits

have been understood, the more necessary is it to insist upon them. This

is not the place to repeat what I have already said on the subject. The

reader may turn to it in the Round Table. I do not think, however, there

is any thing in the larger poem equal to many of the detached pieces in

the Lyrical Ballads. As Mr. Wordsworth's poems have been little known to

the public, or chiefly through garbled extracts from them, I will here

give an entire poem (one that has always been a favourite with me), that

the reader may know what it is that the admirers of this author find to

be delighted with in his poetry. Those who do not feel the beauty and

the force of it, may save themselves the trouble of inquiring farther.