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sea, and the innumerable islands which constitute the site of this extraordinary city.

Take

ship was bulged upon them. There are a thousand rocks and capes, far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what The very Cloace of Tarquin at Rome are as poetical are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of as Richmond Hill; many will think more so. Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra away Rome, and leave the Tiber and the seven hills, in in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras the nature of Evander's time; let Mr Bowles, or Mr of Spain? But it is the « art,», the columns, the tem- Wordsworth, or Mr Southey, or any of the other « natuples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique rals,» make a poem upon them, and then see which is and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. most poetical, their production, or the commonest Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed guide-book which tells you the road from St Peter's' and unknown; buried, like Babylon and Nineveh, in to the Coliseum, and informs you what you will see indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without exist-by the way. The ground interests in Virgil, because it ence but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were will be Rome, and not because it is Evander's rural transported, if they were capable of transportation, | domain. like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon's head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.

Mr Bowles contends, again, that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical, because of the association with boundless deserts,» and that a « pyramid of the same dimensions» would not be sublime in «Lincoln's Inn Fields;» not so poetical certainly; but take away the « pyramids,» and what is the desert?» Take away Stone-henge from Salisbury plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St Peter's, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michel Angelo, and all the higher works of Canova (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England), are as poeticalas Mont Blane or Mount Etua, perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinosa, that the world is the deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea, or the canals?

The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose!

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Is it the canal which runs between the palace and the prison, or the Bridge of Sighs» which connects them, that render it poetical? Is it the « Canal Grande,» or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line, and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? Mr Bowles will say, perhaps, that the Rialto is but marble, the palaces and churches only stone, and the gondolas a «coarse» black cloth, thrown over some planks of carved wood, with a shining bit of fantastically-formed iron at the prow, « without» the water. And I tell him that without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch; and whoever says the contrary, deserves to be at the bottom of that where Pope's heroes are embraced by the mudnymphs. There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for the artificial adjuncts above mentioned, although it is a perfectly natural canal, formed by the

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Mr

Mr Bowles then proceeds to press Homer into his service, in answer to a remark of Me Campbell's, that « Homer was a great describer of works of art.» Bowles contends that all his great power, even in this, depends upon their connexion with nature. The « shield of Achilles derives its poetical interest from the subjects described on it.» And from what does the spear of

Achilles derive its interest? and the helmet and the mail worn by Patroclus, and the celestial armour, and the very brazen greaves of the well-booted Greeks? Is it solely from the legs, and the back, and the breast, and the human body, which they inclose? In that case, it would have been more poetical to have made them fight naked: and Gulley and Gregson, as being nearer to a state of nature, are more poetical, boxing in a pair of drawers, than Hector and Achilles in radiant armour, and with heroic weapons.

Instead of the clash of helmets, and the rushing of chariots, and the whizzing of spears, and the glancing of swords, and the cleaving of shields, and the piercing of breast-plates, why not represent the Greeks and Trojans ¦ like two savage tribes, tugging and tearing, and kicking, and biting, and gnashing, foaming, grinning, and gouging, in all the poetry of martial nature, unincumbered with gross, prosaic, artificial arms, an equal superfluity to the natural warrior, and his natural poet? Is there any thing unpoetical in Ulysses striking the horses of Rhesus with his bow (having forgotten his thong), or would Mr Bowles have had him kick them with his foot, or smack them with his hand, as being more unsophisticated?

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In Gray's Elegy, is there an image more striking than his shapeless sculpture?» Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to he found in actual nature. This at least is the general | opinion; but, always excepting the Venus di Medicis, I differ from that opinion, at least as far as regards female beauty, for the head of Lady Charlemont (when I first saw her, nine years ago) seemed to possess all that sculpture could require for its ideal. I recollect seeing something of the same kind in the head of an Albanian girl, who was actually employed in mending a road in the mountains, and in some Greek, and one or two Italian faces. But of sublimity, I have never seen any thing in human nature at all to approach the expression of sculpture, either in the Apollo, the Moses, or other of the sterner works of ancient or modern art.

Let us examine a little further this babble of green fields,» and of bare nature in general, as superior to artificial imagery, for the poetical purposes of the fine

arts.

pare his beloved's nose to a « tower» on account of its length, but of its symmetry; and, making allowance for eastern hyperbole and the difficulty of finding a discreet image for a female nose in nature, it is perhaps as good a figure as any other.

In landscape painting, the great artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and composes one. Nature, in her actual aspect, does not furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires. Even where he presents you with some famous city, or celebrated scene from mountain or other nature, it Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes. must be taken from some particular point of view, and What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object with such light, and shade, and distance, etc. as serve of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their not only to heighten its beauties, but to shadow its de-dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symformities. The poetry of nature alone, exactly as she metry of their position and movements. A Highlandappears, is not sufficient to bear him out. The very skyer's plaid, a Mussulman's turhan, and a Roman toga, of his painting is not the portrait of the sky of nature; are more poetical than the tattoed or untattoed butit is a composition of different skies, observed at diffe-tocks of a New Sandwich savage, although they were rent times, and not the whole copied from any particu- described by William Wordsworth himself like the lar day. And why? Because Nature is not lavish of « idiot in his glory.»> her beauties; they are widely scattered, and occasionally displayed, to be selected with care, and gathered with difficulty.

Of sculpture I have just spoken. It is the great scope of the sculptor to heighten nature into heroic beauty, i. e. in plain English, to surpass his model. When Canova forms a statue, he takes a limb from one, a hand from another, a feature from a third, and a shape, it may be, from a fourth, probably at the same time improving upon all, as the Greek of old did in embodying his Venus.

Ask a portrait painter to describe his agonies in accommodating the faces with which Nature and his sitters have crowded his painting-room to the principles of his art; with the exception of perhaps ten faces in as many millions, there is not one which he can venture to give without shading much and adding more. Nature, exactly, simply, barely nature, will make no great artist of any kind, and least of all a poet-the most artificial, perhaps, of all artists in his very essence. With regard to natural imagery, the poets are obliged to take some of their best illustrations from art. You say that « a fountain is as clear or clearer than glass,» to express its beauty

O fons Bandusiæ, splendidior vitro!

I have seen as many mountains as most men, and more fleets than the generality of landsmen: and to my mind, a large convoy, with a few sail of the line to conduct them, is as noble and as poetical a prospect as all that inanimate nature can produce. I prefer the « mast of some great ammiral,» with all its tackle, to the Scotch fir or the Alpine tannen: and think that more poetry has been made out of it. In what does the infinite superiority of « Falconer's Shipwreck,» over all other shipwrecks, consist? In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailor's description of the sailor's fate. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem. Why? because he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet art will not be found less ornamental than nature. It is precisely in general nature, and in stepping out of his element, that Falconer fails; where he digresses to speak of ancient Greece, and << such branches of learning.»

In Dyer's Grongar Hill, upon which his fame rests, the very appearance of Nature herself is moralised into an artificial image:

Thus is Nature's vesture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay,

To disperse our cares away.

And here also we have the telescope, the mis-use of

In the speech of Mark Antony, the body of Cæsar is which, from Milton, has rendered Mr Bowles so triumphdisplayed, but so also is his mantle :

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aut over Mr Campbell:

So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed through Hope's deluding glass.

And here a word, en passant, to Mr Campbell

As yon summits, soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which, to those who journey near
Barren, brown, and rough appear.
Still we tread the same coarse way-
The present's still a cloudy day.

If the poet had said that Cassius had run his fist through
the rent of the mantle, it would have had more of Mr
Bowles's << nature» to help it; but the artificial dagger is
more poetical than any natural hand without it. In the
sublime of sacred poetry, «Who is this that cometh
from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah ?» Would
<< the comer» be poetical without his a dyed garments?» Is not this the original of the far-famed

which strike and startle the spectator, and identify the
approaching object.

The mother of Sisera is represented listening for the a wheels of his chariot.» Solomon, in his Song, compares the nose of his beloved to a « tower,» which to us appears an eastern exaggeration. If he had said, that her statue was like that of a tower, it would have been as poetical as if he had compared her to a tree.

The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex,

is an instance of an artificial image to express a moral superiority. But Solomon, it is probable, did not com

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure bue!

To return once more to the sea. Let any one look ou the long wall of Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea and its master. Surely that Roman work (I mean Roman in conception and performance), which says to the ocean, « thus far shalt thou come, and no further,» and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.

Mr Bowles makes the chief part of a ship's poesy depend on the « wind:» then why is a ship under sail more

poetical than a log in a high wind? The hog is all nature, the ship is all art, « coarse canvas,» « blue bunting,» and «tall poles;» both are violently acted upon by the wind, tossed here and there, to and fro; and yet nothing but excess of hunger could make me look upon the pig as the more poetical of the two, and then only in the shape of a griskin.

Will Mr Bowles tell us that the poetry of an aqueduct consists in the water which it conveys? Let him look on that of Justinian, on those of Rome, Constantinople, Lisbon, and Elvas, or even at the remains of that in Attica.

place him? with Dante and the others? No: but, as I have before said, the poet who executes best is the highest, whatever his department, and will ever be so rated in the world's esteem.

Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy, high as he stands, I am not sure that he would not stand higher; it is the corner-stone of his glory; without it, his odes would be insufficient for his fame. The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long, But stoop'd to truth, and moralised his song. He should have written « rose to truth.» In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton's and Dante's, and even Dante's powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What

We are asked, « what makes the venerable towers of Westminster Abbey more poetical, as objects, than the tower for the manufactory of patent shot, surrounded by the same scenery?» I will answer-the architecture, Turn Westminster Abbey, or Saint Paul's, into a powder magazine, their poetry, as objects, remains the same; the Parthenon was actually converted into one by the Turks, during Morosini's Venetian siege, and part of it destroyed in consequence. Cromwell's dragoons stalled their steeds in Worcester cathedral; was it less poetical, as an object, than before? Ask a foreigner on his ap-made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truthproach to London, what strikes him as the most poetical of the towers before him; he will point out St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, without, perhaps, kuowing the names or associations of either, and pass over the « tower for patent shot,» not that, for any thing he knows to the contrary, it might not be the mausoleum of a monarch, or a Waterloo column, or a Trafalgar monument, but because its architecture is obviously inferior. To the question, whether the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest?»> it may be answered, that the materials are certainly not equal; but that the artist,» who has rendered the game of cards poetical,» is by far the greater of the two. But all this « ordering» of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different « orders» of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art.

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his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God
hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts.
And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men
and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his gospel
by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical
poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you
term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser,
is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be
told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires
more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the
<<< forests» that ever were « walked» for their descrip-
tion,» and all the epics that ever were founded upon
fields of battle. The Georgies are indisputably, and, į
I believe, undisputedly, even a finer poem than the
Eneid. Virgil knew this; he did not order them to be
burnt.

The proper study of mankind is man.

It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call imagination» and « invention,» the two commonest of qualities: an irish peasant, with a little

Tragedy is one of the highest presumed orders. Hughes has written a tragedy, and a very successful one; Fenton another; and Pope none. Did any man, how-whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more ever,—will even Mr Bowles, himself rank Hughes and Fenton as poets above Pope? Was even Addison (the author of Cato), or Rowe (one of the higher order of dramatists, as far as success goes), or Young, or even Otway and Southerne, ever raised for a moment to the same rank with Pope in the estimation of the reader or the critic, before his death or since? If Mr Bowles will contend for classifications of this kind, let him recollect that descriptive poetry has been ranked as among the lowest branches of the art, and description as a mere ornament, but which should never form «the subject» of a poem. The Italians, with the most poetical language, and the most fastidious taste in Europe, possess now five great poets, they say, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and lastly Alfieri; and whom do they esteem one of the highest of these, and some of them the very highest? Petrarch, the sonneteer: it is true that some of his Canzoni are not less esteemed, but not more; who ever dreams of his Latin Africa!

Were Petrarch to be ranked according to the « order» of his compositions, where would the best of sonnets

than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious. In speaking of artificial objects, I have omitted to touch upon one which I will now mention. Cannon may be presumed to be as highly poetical as art can make her objects. Mr Bowles will, perhaps, tell me that this is because they resemble that grand natural article of sound in heaven, and simile upon earth-thunder. I shall be told triumphantly, that Milton made sad work with his artillery, when he armed his devils therewithal. He did so; and this artificial object must have had much of the sublime to attract his attention for such a conflict. He has made an absurd use of it; but the absurdity consists not in using cannon against the angels of God, but any material weapon. The thunder of the clouds would have been as ridiculous and vain in the hands of the

devils, as the «villanous saltpetre:» the angels were as | tation of Milton's style, as burlesque as the « Splendid impervious to the one as to the other. The thunder- Shilling.» These two writers (for Cowper is no poet) bolts became sublime in the hands of the Almighty, come into comparison in one great work-the transnot as such, but because he deigns to use them as a means lation of Homer. Now, with all the great, and maniof repelling the rebel spirits; but no one can attribute fest, and manifold, and reproved, and acknowledged, their defeat to this grand piece of natural electricity: and uncontroverted faults of Pope's translation, and the Almighty willed, and they fell; his word would have all the scholarship, and pains, and time, and trouble, been enough; and Milton is as absurd (and in fact, and blank verse of the other, who can ever read Cowper? blasphemous) in putting material lightnings into the and who will ever lay down Pope, unless for the hands of the Godhead, as in giving him hands at all. original? Pope's was «not Homer, it was Spondanus ;» but Cowper's is not Homer, either, it is not even Cowper. As a child I first read Pope's Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever afford; and children are not the worst judges of their own language. As a boy I read Homer in the original, as we have all done, some of us by force, and a few by favour; under which description I come is nothing to the purpose, it is enough that I read him. As a man I have tried to read Cowper's version, and I found it impossible. Has any human reader ever succeeded?

The artillery of the demons was but the first step of his mistake, the thunder the next, and it is a step lower. It would have been fit for Jove, but not for Jehovah. The subject altogether was essentially unpoetical; he has made more of it than another could, but it is beyond him and all men.

In a portion of his reply, Mr Bowles asserts that Pope «envied Phillips» because he quizzed his pastorals in the Guardian, in that most admirable model of irony, his paper on the subject. If there was any thing enviable about Phillips, it could hardly be his pastorals.

And now that we have heard the Catholic reproached with envy, duplicity, licentiousness, avarice-what was the Calvinist? He attempted the most atrocious of crimes in the Christian code, viz. suicide-and why? Because he was to be examined whether he was fit for an office which he seems to wish to have made a sinecure. His connexion with Mrs Unwin was pure enough, for the old lady was devout, and he was deranged; but why then is the infirm and then elderly Pope to be reproved for his connexion with Martha Blount? Cowper was the almoner of Mrs Throgmorton; but Pope's charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant. Pope was

They were despicable, and Pope expressed his contempt. If Mr Fitzgerald published a volume of sonnets, or a « Spirit of Discovery,» or a « Missionary,» and Mr Bowles wrote in any periodical journal an ironical paper upon them, would this be «envy?» The authors of the «Rejected Addresses» have ridiculed the sixteen or twenty «first living poets» of the day; but do they «envy» them? «Envy» writhes, it don't laugh. The authors of the «Rejected Addresses» may despise some, but they can hardly «envy» any of the persons whom they have parodied; and Pope could have no more envied Phillips than he did Welsted, or Theobalds, or Smedley, or any other given hero of the Dunciad. He could not have envied him, even had he himself not been the greatest poet of his age. Did Mr Jags «envy» Mr Phillips, when he asked him, «how came your Pyrrhus to drive oxen, and say, I am goaded on by contain a simple, household, « indoor,» artificial, and ordinary image. love!» This question silenced poor Phillips; but it no more proceeded from «envy» than did Pope's ridicule. Did he envy Swift? Did he envy Bolingbroke? Did he envy Gay the unparalleled success of his «Beggar's Opera?» We may be answered that these were his friends-true; but does friendship prevent envy! Study the first woman you meet with, or the first scribbler, let Mr Bowles himself (whom I acquit fully. of such an odious quality) study some of his own poetical intimates: the most envious man I ever heard of is a

butį

poet, and a high one; besides it is an universal passion. Goldsmith envied not only the puppets for their dancing, and broke his shins in the attempt at rivalry, but was seriously angry because two pretty women received more attention than he did. This is envy; where does Pope show a sign of the passion? In that case, Dryden envied the hero of his Mac Flecknoe. Mr Bowles compares, when and where he can, Pope with Cowper (the same Cowper whom, in his edition of Pope, he laughs at for his attachment to an old woman, Mrs Unwin: search and you will find it; I remember the passage, though not the page); in particular he requotes Cowper's Dutch delineation of a wood, drawn like a seedsman's catalogue, with an affected imi

up

'I will submit to Mr Bowles's own judgment a passage from another poem of Cowper's, to be compared with the same writer's Sylvan Sampler. In the lines to Mary,

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary,

I refer Mr Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines about needles are not worth all the boasted twaddling about trees, so

triumphantly re-quoted? and yet in fact what do they convey? A homely collection of images and ideas associated with the darning of stockings, and the bemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and pathetic as addressed by Cowper to his nurse? The trash of trees reminds me

of a saying of Sheridan's. Soon after the Rejected Address» scene, in 1812, I met Sheridan. In the course of dinner, he said, Lord

Byron, did you know that amongst the writers of addresses was Whitbread himself? I answered by an enquiry of what sort of an address he had made. Of that, replied Sheridan, I remember little, except that there was a phoenix in it. A phoenix!! Well, how did he

describe it? Like a poulterer, answered Sheridan: it was green, and yellow, and red, and blue: he did not let us off for a single feather. And just such as this poulterer's account of a phoenix, is Cowper's stick-picker's detail of a wood, with all its petty minutia

of this, that, and the other.

One more poetical instance of the power of art, and even its superiority over nature, in poetry, and I have done:-the bust of Antinous! Is there any thing in nature like this marble, excepting the Venus? Can there be more poetry gathered into existence than in that wonderful creation of perfect beauty? But the poetry of this bust is in no respect derived from nature, nor from any association of moral exaltedness; for what is there in common with moral nature and the male minion of Adrian? The very execution is not natural, but supernatural, or rather super-artificial, for nature has never done so much.

Away, then, with this cant about nature and invariable principles of poetry! A great artist will make a block of stone as sublime as a mountain, and a good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inbabits the forests of America. It is the business and the proof of a poet to give the lie to the proverb, and sometimes to « make a silken purse out of a sow's ear; and to conclude with another homely proverb, a good workman will not find fault with his

tools..

the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most bigoted of sects; and Cowper the most bigoted and despondent sectary that ever anticipated damnation to himself or others. Is this harsh? I know it is, and I do not assert it as my opinion of Cowper personally, but to show what might be said, with just as great an appearance of truth and candour, as all the odium which has been accumulated upon Pope in similar speculations. Cowper was a good man, and lived at a fortunate time for his works.

Mr Bowles, apparently not relying entirely upon his own arguments, has, in person or by proxy, brought forward the names of Southey and Moore. Mr Southey «agrees entirely with Mr Bowles in his invariable principles of poetry.» The least that Mr Bowles can do in return is to approve the « invariable principles of Mr Southey.» I should have thought that the word invariable» might have stuck in Southey's throat, like Macbeth's «Amen!» I am sure it did in mine, and I am not the least consistent of the two, at least as a Moore (et tu Brute!) also approves, and a Mr J. Scott. There is a letter also of two lines from a gentleman in asterisks, who it seems, is a poet of the highest rank»-who can this be? not my friend, Sir Walter, surely. Campbell it can't be; Rogers it won't

voter.

be.

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I remain, yours, affectionately.
(Four Asterisks.)

And in asterisks let him remain.
Whoever this person
may be, he deserves, for such a judgment of Midas,
that the nail» which Mr Bowles has hit in the head>
should be driven through his own cars; I am sure that
they are long enough.

The attention of the poetical populace of the present day to obtain an ostracism against Pope is as easily accounted for as the Athenian's shell against Aristides; they are tired of hearing him always called «the Just.» They are also fighting for life; for if he maintains his, station, they will reach their own falling. They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shame, them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be told that amongst those I have been (or it may be still am) conspicuoustrue, and I am ashamed of it. I have been amongst the builders of this Babel, attended by a confusion of tongues, but never amongst the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor. I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious

and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of <«< schools» and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their set, have ever written, should

Line trunks, clothe spice, or, duttering in a row
Befringe the rails of Bedlam or Scho!

There can

will not. You, Sir, know how far I am sincere, and
whether, my opinion, not only in the short work in-
tended for publication, and in private letters which
can never be published, has or has not been the same.
I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry;
no regard for others, no selfish feeling, can prevent me
from seeing this, and expressing the truth.
be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the |
depreciation of Pope. It would be better to receive for
proof Mr Cobbett's rough but strong attack upon
Shakspeare and Milton, than to allow this smooth and
«candid» undermining of the reputation of the most
perfect of our poets and the purest of our moralists.
Of his power in the passions, in description, in the
mock-heroic, I leave others to descant. I take him on
his strong ground, as an ethical poet: in the former
none excel, in the mock-heroic and the ethical none
equal him; and, in my mind, the latter is the highest
of all poetry, because it does that in verse, which the
greatest of men have wished to accomplish in prose.
If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the
dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would
have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth
and wisdom, is the only true « poet» in its real sense
«the maker,» « the creator»-why must this mean the
<<< liar, the < feigner,» « the tale-teller?» A mau may
make and create better things than these.

1 shall not presume to say that Pope is as high a poet as Shakspeare and Milton, though his enemy. Warton, places him immediately under them. I would no more say this than I would assert in the mosque (once Saint Sophia's), that Socrates was a greater man than Mahomet. But if I say that he is very near them, it is no more than has been asserted of Burns, who is supposed

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To rival all but Shakspeare's name below.

I say nothing against this opinion. But of what «order,» according to the poetical aristocracy, are Burns's poems. These are his opus magnum, «Tam O Shanter,» a tale; the «Cotter's Saturday Night,» a descriptive sketch; some others in the same style; the rest are songs. So much for the rank of his productions; the rank of Burns is the very first of his art. pressed my opinion elsewhere, as also of the effect Of Pope I have exwhich the present attempts at poetry have had upon our literature. vulsion could or should overwhelm your country, in If any great national or natural.comsuch sort as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all the most living of human things, a dead language, to be studied and read, and imitated by the wise of future and far generations upon foreign shores; if your literature should become the learning of mankind, divested of, and prejudice; an Englishman, anxious that the pos party cabals, temporary fashions, and national pride terity of strangers should know that there had been ¦ for the preservation of Shakspeare and Milton; but such a thing as a Pritish Epic and Tragedy, might wish the surviving world would snatch Pope from the wreck. and let the rest sink with the people.

He is the mora!

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poet of all civilization, and, as such, let us hope that' he will one day be the national poet of mankind. is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whos faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your i There are those who will believe this, and those who eye over his productions; consider their extent, and

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