"O, for a draft of vintage! that hath been "Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, "Tasting of Flora and the country green, "Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt "mirth!

"O, for a beaker full of the warm South,

"Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, "With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

"And purple-stained mouth;

• That I might drink and leave the world unseen, “And with thee fade away into the forest dim.”

So sang a young poet, who, if he had lived, would have been one of the greatest since the days of Milton. He was so: for he gave proof that he inherited his great intellectual estate, though he did not live to spend it. He had his cup full of the warm South, and in the South itself, "He bowed to taste, and died." See an

Ode to a Nightingale, in "Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems, by John Keats." A celebrated living poet (and justly celebrated to a certain extent, though not in the more poetical parts of poetry) once asked me, what was meant by " a beaker full of the warm South." So different is the leading poetry of one age from that of another!

Note 38, page 71.

You know Lamporecchio, the castle renown'd
For the gardener so dumb, whose works did abound.

An allusion to the story in Boccaccio, Book the First, Third Day. Lamporecchio is in the neighbourhood of Pistoia. The modern Italians, gay or grave, are not aware of the real merits of Boccaccio. His greatest admirers talk of little but

his mirth, his knowledge of the knavish part of the world, and his style. If an ecclesiastic defends him, it is upon the ground of his affording warnings to young men, and of his not meaning any thing against the church. Eulogiums on his style always follow as a matter of course. Nothing is said, or said with any real conviction, of all those delightful pictures of innocent love, tenderness, and generosity, which are enough to keep some of the finest parts of our nature young and healthy. It was not in this spirit that Petrarch delighted in the story of Griselda; or that Chaucer translated Palemon and Arcite, and the story of Troilus and Cressida; for both come out of other works of Boccaccio. Dryden, fine as his versions are, spoiled the sentiment of Boccaccio's love-stories with his Charles-theSecond taste. The new grossness must ever be rendered orthodox, for the sake of decency; and

in Tancred and Sigismunda a priest is brought in to sanction the lovers in their impatience,an impatience, not like that of Romeo and Juliet, or Boccaccio's own lover, but one that despises the warrant it makes use of. Mr. Hazlett was the first to point out to our own times the nobler character of Boccaccio; which Mr. Keats, Mr. Barry Cornwall, and others, have shewn how well they appreciated.

I will here observe that Chaucer's versions of Palemon and Arcite, and Troilus and Cressida, besides their known merits, exhibit an extraordinary instance of the vigour of his poetical faculty. In Boccaccio, they are each of them, long poems, whole tedious volumes. The originals of most of the finer passages in Chaucer are there, but drawn out into a languid redundancy. Boccaccio is aware of the propriety of

a natural style, but wants the great test and property of the natural style poetical, which is concentration. It is the possession of this property which renders the great epic poet so astonishing; and the want of it, that makes all other epic pretensions so ridiculous. One of the productions of the former is a series of volumes concentrated; of the latter, a small poem spun out into volumes. The former bring an universe of things into a focus, like the sight of one's eye: the others, with a dim magnifying glass, make a mighty business of a little print. Novelists however are not bred to be poets; and it appears to me, that a true talent for one sort of writing, great or small, unfits a man for the other. The poet's business, let him write as much as he pleases, is always concentration;-concentration of passages, of places, of words; not in order to be short, but to be intense: and he indulges our