ternally writhing beneath his own contempt, -he would fain conceal, under anonymous bluster, and a vain endeavour to obtain the esteem of others, after having for ever lost his own, his leprous sense of his own degradation. What is there in such a man to "envy?" Who ever envied the envious? Is it his birth, his name, his fame, or his virtues, that I am to "envy?" I was born of the aristocracy, which he abhorred; and am sprung, by my mother, from the kings who preceded those whom he has hired himself to sing. It cannot, then, be his birth. As a poet, I have, for the past eight years, had nothing to apprehend from a competition; and for the future," that life to come in every poet's creed," it is open to all. I will only remind Mr. Southey, in the words of a critic, who, if still living, would have annihilated Southey's literary existence now and hereafter, as the sworn foe of charlatans and impostors, from Macpherson downwards, that "those dreams were Settle's once and Ogilby's;" and, for my own part, I assure him, that whenever he and his sect are remembered, I shall be roud to be "forgot." That he is not content with is success as a poet may reasonably be believedle has been the nine-pin of reviews; the Edinburgh | nocked him down, and the Quarterly set him up; the government found him useful in the periodical line, and made a point of recommending his works to purchasers, so that he is occasionally bought (I mean his books, as well as the author), and may be found on the same shelf, if not upon the table, of most of the gentlemen employed in the different offices. With reard to his private virtues, I know nothing-of his rinciples, I have heard enough. As far as having een, to the best of my power, benevolent to others, I o not fear the comparison; and for the errors of the assions, was Mr. Southey always so tranquil and tainless? Did he never covet his neighbour's wife? Did he never calumniate his neighbour's wife's daughter, be offspring of her he coveted? So much for the postle of pantisocracy.

Of the "lofty-minded, virtuous" Wordsworth, one necdote will suffice to speak his sincerity. In a onversation with Mr.upon poetry, he concluded

with, "After all, I would not give five shillings for Il that Southey has ever written." Perhaps this calulation might rather show his esteem for five shilngs than his low estimate of Dr. Southey; but cousiering that when he was in his need, and Southey had shilling, Wordsworth is said to have had generally ixpence out of it, it has an awkward sound in the way f valuation.

This anecdote was told me by persons ho, if quoted by name, would prove that its genealogy 3 poetical as well as true. I can give my authority or this; and am ready to adduce it also for Mr. outhey's circulation of the falsehood before menioned.

Of Coleridge, I shall say nothing-why, he may

ivine. (1) I have said more of these people than I intended in his place, being somewhat stirred by the remarks hich induced me to commence upon the topic. I see othing in these men as poets, or as individuals— ttle in their talents, and less in their characters, ▸ prevent honest men from expressing for them con

(1) See Moore's Life of Byron.-L. E.

(2) "Tassoni was almost the only Italian poet of the era which he flourished, who withstood the general corruption taste introduced by Marino and his followers, and by the

siderable contempt, in prose or rhyme, as it may happen. Mr. Southey has the Quarterly for his field of rejoinder, and Mr. Wordsworth his postscripts to Lyrical Ballads, where the two great instances of the sublime are taken from himself and Milton. "Over her own sweet voice the stock dove broods;" that is to say, she has the pleasure of listening to herself, in common with Mr. Wordsworth upon most of his public appearances. "What divinity doth hedge" these persons, that we should respect them? Is it Apollo? Are they not of those who called Dryden's Ode " drunken song?" who have discovered that Gray's Elegy is full of faults (see Coleridge's Life, vol. i. note, for Wordsworth's kindness in pointing this out to him), and have published what is allowed to be the very worst prose that ever was written, to prove that Pope was no poet, and that William Wordsworth is?

a

In other points, are they respectable, or respected? Is it on the open avowal of apostasy, on the patronage of government, that their claim is founded? Who is there who esteems those parricides of their own principles? They are, in fact, well aware that the reward of their change has been any thing but honour. The times have preserved a respect for political consistency, and, even though changeable, honour the unchanged. Look at Moore: it will be long ere Southey meets with such a triumph in London as Moore met with in Dublin, even if the government subscribe for it, and set the money down to secret service. It was not less to the man than to the poet, to the tempted but unshaken patriot, to the not opulent but incorruptible fellow-citizen, that the warm-hearted Irish paid the proudest of tributes. Mr. Southey may applaud himself to the world, but he has his own heartiest contempt; and the fury with which he foams against all who stand in the phalanx which he forsook, is, as William Smith described it, "the rancour of the renegado," the bad language of the prostitute who stands at the corner of the street, and showers her slang upon all, except those who may have bestowed upon her her "little shilling."

Hence his quarterly overflowings, political and literary, in what he has himself termed "the ungentle craft," and his especial wrath against Mr. Leigh Hunt, notwithstanding that Hunt has done more for Wordsworth's reputation, as a poet (such as it is), than all the Lakers could in their interchange of self-praises for the last twenty-five years.

And here I wish to say a few words on the present state of English poetry. That this is the age of the decline of English poetry will be doubted by few who have calmly considered the subject. That there are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the fact, because it has been well said, that 66 next to him who forms the taste of his country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it." No one has ever denied genius to Marino, (2) who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite 'imitated imitators' of Lope de Vega; and he opened a new path, in which a crowd of pretenders have vainly endeavoured to follow him." Foscolo.-L. E.

opinions have united upon this topic. Warton and Churchill began it, having borrowed the hint probably from the heroes of the Dunciad, and their own internal conviction that their proper reputation can be as nothing till the most perfect and harmonious of poetshe who, having no fault, has had REASON made his reproach was reduced to what they conceived to be his level; but even they dared not degrade him below Dryden. Goldsmith, and Rogers, and Campbell, his most successful disciples; and Hayley, who, however feeble, has left one poem "that will not be willingly let die" (the Triumphs of Temper), kept up the reputation of that pure and perfect style; and Crabbe, the first of living poets, has almost equalled the master. Then came Darwin, who was put down by a single poem in the Antijacobin;(1) and the Cruscans, from Merry to Jerningham, who were annihilated (if Nothing can be said to be annihilated) by Gifford, the last of the wholesome satirists.

verse.

At the same time Mr. Southey was favouring the public with Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc, to the great glory of the drama and epos. I beg pardon: Wat Tyler, with Peter Bell, was still in MS., and it was not till after Mr. Southey had received his Malmsey butt, and Mr. Wordsworth (2) became qualified to gauge it, that the great revolutionary tragedy came before the public and the Court of Chancery. Wordsworth was peddling his lyrical ballads, and brooding a preface, to be succeeded in due course by a postscript; both couched in such prose as must give peculiar delight to those who have read the prefaces of Pope and Dryden-scarcely less celebrated for the beauty of their prose, than for the charms of their Wordsworth is the reverse of Molière's gentleman, who had been "talking prose all his life without knowing it;" for he thinks that he has been all his life writing both prose and verse, and neither of what he conceives to be such can be properly said to be either one or the other. Mr. Coleridge, the future vates, poet and seer of the Morning Post (an honour also claimed by Mr. Fitzgerald, of the Rejected Addresses, (3) who ultimately prophesied the downfall of Bonaparte, to which he himself mainly contributed, by giving him the nickname of "the Corsican," was then employed in predicating the damnation of Mr. Pitt, and the desolation of England, in the two very best copies of verses he ever wrote: to wit, the infernal eclogue of Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, and the Ode to the departing Year.

These three personages, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope; and I respect them for it, as the only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to pre

serve.

But they have been joined in by those who have joined them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully de

(1) The Loves of the Triangles, the joint production of Messrs. Canning and Frere.-L. E.

(2) "Goldsmith has anticipated the definition of the Lake poetry, as far as such things can be defined. "Gentlemen, the present piece is not of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Didos in it; it is an historical description of nature. I only beg you'll endeavour to make your souls in unison with mine, und hear with the same en

viated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do s till my dying day. I would rather see all I have eve written lining the same trunk in which I actually rea. the eleventh book of a modern epic poem (4) at Mau, in 1811 (I opened it to take out a change after the paroxysm of a tertian, in the absence of my servant, and found it lined with the name of the maker, Ește, Cockspur Street, and with the epic poetry alluded to than sacrifice what I firmly believe in as the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.

But the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the Lakers, as Hunt and his school, and every body else with their school, and even Moore without a school, and dilet tanti lecturers at institutions, and elderly gentlemen who translate and imitate, and young ladies who listen and repeat, baronets who draw indifferent frontispieces ¦ for bad poets, and noblemen who let them dine with them in the country, the small body of the wits and¦¦ the great body of the blues, have latterly united in a depreciation, of which their fathers would have been as much ashamed as their children will be. In the mean time, what have we got instead? The Lais school, which begun with an epic poem, "written a six weeks" (so Joan of Arc proclaimed herself, finished with a ballad composed in twenty years, a Peter Bell's creator takes care to inform the few wh will inquire. What have we got instead? Adela of flimsy and unintelligible romances, imitated from Scott and myself, who have both made the best of bad materials and erroneous system. What have w got instead? Madoc, which is neither an epic Do any thing else; Thalaba, Kehama, Gebir, and sa gibberish, written in all metres and in no langu Hunt, who had powers to have made the Stary Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has th fit to sacrifice his genius and his taste to some> telligible notions of Wordsworth, which I defy m explain. Moore has——But why continue?with the exception of Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbe who may be considered as having taken their sta will, by the blessing of God, survive their own r tation, without attaining any very extraordinary pe riod of longevity. Of course there must be a further exception in favour of those who, having ne obtained any reputation at all, unless it be as provincial literati, and their own families, have na to lose; and of Moore, who, as the Burns of Irela possesses a fame which cannot be lost.

The greater part of the poets mentioned, howent, have been able to gather together a few followers, paper of the Connoisseur says, that “it is obser by the French, that a cat, a priest, and an old wo are sufficient to constitute a religious sect in Englan The same number of animals, with some difference in kind, will suffice for a poetical one. If we take St George Beaumont instead of the priest, and Mr. Werd worth for the old woman, we shall nearly complete quota required; but I fear that Mr. Southey will bat

thusiasm with which I have written." Would not this har made a proper proem to the Excursion, and the peei his pedlar? It would have answered perfectly for purpose, had it not unfortunately been written in fut English.

(3) See antè, p. 49.-P. E.

(4) Sir James Bland Burgess's Richard I. [See al 184, col. 2.-P. E.]

1

indifferently represent the CAT, having shown himself but too distinctly to be of a species to which that noble creature is peculiarly hostile.

Nevertheless, I will not go so far as Wordsworth in his postscript, who pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame; which, being interpreted, means that William Wordsworth is not quite so much read by his contemporaries as might be desirable. This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present popularity: he recited,and, without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their contemporaries. The very existence of a poet, previous to the invention of printing, depended upon his present popularity; and how often has it impaired his future fame? Hardly ever. History informs us, that the best have come down to us. The reason is evident; the most popular found the greatest number of transcribers for their MSS., and that the taste of their contemporaries was corrupt can hardly be avouched by the moderns, the mightiest of whom have but barely approached them. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, were all the darlings of the contemporary reader.

Dante's poem

was celebrated long before his death; and, not long after it, states negotiated for his ashes, and disputed for the sites of the composition of the Divina Commedia. Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol. Ariosto was permitted to pass free by the public robber who had read the Orlando Furioso. I would not recommend Mr. Wordsworth to try the same experiment with his Smugglers. Tasso, notwithstanding the criticisms of the Cruscanti, would have been crowned in the Capitol, but for his death.

It is easy to prove the immediate popularity of the chief poets of the only modern nation in Europe that has a poetical language, the Italian. In our own, Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Young, Shenstone, Thomson, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, were all as popular in their lives as since. Gray's Elegy pleased instantly, and eternally. His Odes did not, nor yet do they, please like his Elegy. Milton's politics kept him down. But the Epigram of Dryden,(1) and the very sale of his work, in proportion to the less reading time of its publication, prove him to have been honoured by his contemporaries. I will venture to assert, that the sale of the Paradisc Lost was greater in the first four years after its publication, than that of The Excursion in the same number, with the difference of nearly a century and a half between them of time, and of thousands in point of general readers. Notwithstanding Mr. Wordsworth's

(1) The well-known lines under Milton's picture,— "Three poets, in three distant ages born," etc.-L. E. (2) The Rev. Richard Hole. He published, in early life, a versification of Fingal, and, in 1789, Arthur, a Poetical Romance. He died in 1803.-L. E.

(3) Charles Hoyle, of Trinity College, Cambridge, author of Exodus, an epic in thirteen books.-L. E.

(4) "Peter Bell first saw the light in 1798. During this long interval, pains have been taken at different times to make the production less unworthy of a favourable reception; or rather, to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the literature of my country." Wordsworth, 1819.-L. E.

(5) "I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that

having pressed Milton into his service as one of those not presently popular, to favour his own purpose of proving that our grandchildren will read him (the said William Wordsworth), I would recommend him to begin first with our grandmothers. But he need not be alarmed; he may yet live to see all the envies pass away, as Darwin and Seward, and Hoole, and Hole,(2) and Hoyle, (3) have passed away; but their declension will not be his ascension: he is essentially a bad writer, and all the failures of others can never strengthen him. He may have a sect, but he will never have a public; and his "audience" will always be "few," without being "fit,"-except for Bedlam.

It may be asked, why, having this opinion of the present state of poetry in England, and having had it long, as my friends and others well know-possessing, or having possessed too, as a writer, the ear of the public for the time being-I have not adopted a different plan in my own compositions, and endeavoured to correct rather than encourage the taste of the day. To this I would answer, that it is easier to perceive the wrong than to pursue the right, and that I have never contemplated the prospect "of filling (with Peter Bell, (4) see its Preface) permanently a station in the literature of the country." Those who know me best know this; and that I have been considerably astonished at the temporary success of my works, having flattered no person and no party, and expressed opinions which are not those of the general reader. Could I have anticipated the degree of attention which has been accorded me, assuredly I would have studied more to deserve it. But I have lived in far countries abroad, or in the agitating world at home, which was not favourable to study or reflection; so that almost all I have written has been mere passion,-passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion: for in me (if it be not an Irishism to say so) my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience, and not the philosophy of nature. Writing grows a habit, like a woman's gallantry: there are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only; so there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one. And thus, having written once, I wrote on; encouraged no doubt by the success of the moment, yet by no means anticipating its duration, and, I will venture to say, scarcely even wishing it. But then I did other things besides write, which by no means contributed either to improve my writings or my prosperity.

I have thus expressed publicly upon the poetry of the day the opinion I have long entertained and expressed of it to all who have asked it, and to some who would rather not have heard it: as I told Moore not very long ago, "we are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell." (5) Without being old in

peculiar walk of the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who stood up for particular 'schools' of poetry, and yet, at the same time, maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little, however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from him will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion in Detached Thoughts:-One of my notions different from those of my contemporaries, is, that the present is not a high age of English poetry. There are more poets (soi-disant) than ever there were, and proportionally less poetry. This thesis I have maintained for some years, but, strange to say, it meeteth not with favour from my brethren of the shell. Even Moore shakes his head, and firmly believes that it is the grand age of British poesy." Moore.-L.E.

years, I am old in days, and do not feel the adequate spirit within me to attempt a work which should show what I think right in poetry, and must content myself with having denounced what is wrong. There are, I trust, younger spirits rising up in England, who, escaping the contagion which has swept away poetry from our literature, will recall it to their country, such as it once was and may still be.

In the mean time, the best sign of amendment will be repentance, and new and frequent editions of Pope and Dryden.

There will be found as comfortable metaphysics, and ten times more poetry in the Essay on Man, than in the Excursion. If you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger than in the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, or in Palamon and Arcite? Do you wish for invention, imagination, sublimity, character? seek them in the Rape of the Lock, the Fables of Dryden, the Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day, and Absolom and Achitophel: you will discover, in these two poets only, all for which you must ransack inhumerable metres, and God only knows how many writers of the day, without finding a tittle of the same qualities,—with the addition, too, of wit, of which the latter have none. I have not, however, forgotten Thomas Brown the Younger, nor the Fudge Family, (1) nor Whistlecraft; but that is not wit-it is humour. I will say nothing of the harmony of Pope and Dryden in comparison, for there is not a living poet (except Rogers, Gifford, Camp-| bell, and Crabbe), who can write an heroic couplet. The fact is, that the exquisite beauty of their versification has withdrawn the public attention from their other excellences, as the vulgar eye will rest more upon the splendour of the uniform than the quality of the troops. It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him:-because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the "Poet of Reason," as if this was a reason for his being no poet. Taking passage for passage, I will undertake to cite more lines teeming with imagination from Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may. To take an instance at random from a species of composition not very favourable to imagination-Satire: set down the character of Sporus, (2) with all the wonderful play of fancy which is scattered over it, and place by its side an equal number of verses, from any two existing poets, of

(1) In 1812, Mr. Moore published The Two-penny Postbag. by Thomas Brown the Younger; and, in 1818, The Fudge Family in Paris.-L. E.

(2) "P. Let Sporus tremble.-4. What! that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and sings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys;
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks;

the same power and the same variety-where will you find them?

I merely mention one instance of many, in reply to the injustice done to the memory of him whe harmonised our poetical language. The attorneys clerks, and other self-educated genii, found it easier to distort themselves to the new models, than to tel after the symmetry of him who had enchanted the fathers. They were besides smitten by being tok that the new school were to revive the language of Queen Elizabeth, the true English; as every body in the reign of Queen Anne wrote no better than French, by a species of literary treason.

Blank verse, which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,-or else such rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it. I am aware that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that be could not "prevail upon himself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer." The opinions of that truly great man, whom it is also the present fashion i decry, will ever be received by me with that deference which time will restore to him from all; but, with all humility, I am not persuaded that the Parsdise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language. The Seasons of Thomson would have been better is rhyme, although still inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also ta the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate's Odes by the side of Dryden's on "Saint Cecilia," but let him be sure to read first those Mr. Southey.

To the heaven-born genii and inspired young scriveners of the day much of this will appear pa radox: it will appear so even to the higher order f our critics; but it was a truism twenty years 25, and it will be a re-acknowledged truth in ten more. In the mean time, I will conclude with two quotations, both intended for some of my old classical friends who have still enough of Cambridge abou them to think themselves honoured by having a John Dryden as a predecessor in their college, and to recollect that their earliest English poetical plea sures were drawn from the "little nightingale" d Twickenham. The first is from the notes to the Poem of the Friends : (3) —

Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies, Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies, His wit all see-saw, between that and this, Now high, now low, now master up, now miss, And he himself one vile antithesis. Amphibious thing! that acting either part, The trifling head, or the corrupted heart, Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board, Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. Eve's tempter thus the Rabbins have express'd, A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest: Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust Prol, to Sat.-LE (3) Written by Lord Byron's early friend, the Rev Frant Hodgson.-L. E.