trusting that the reader will have kept pace with us, and be ready to open the second book of the translation with us when we meet again in April.

(To be continued.)

ART. VIII. The Pleasures of Love. A Poem. By John Stewart, Esq. Small 8vo. Mawman. 1806.

THOUGH the present age may not be qualified to contend with some of its predecessors for the crown of poetry, it cannot be regarded as altogether destitute of poetical talent. Besides a variety of smaller poems, in a few instances of sufficient merit to engage the attention of posterity, not less than six epic* or heroic poems have appeared to distinguish the present day from any which has elapsed since the death of the indefatigable and the fluent Blackmore. Not to digress for the purpose of adverting to the relative merits of these productions, of which some have been intended to impress us with the idea of extreme facility, and some with that of admirable assiduity and patience, we may adduce them all, with the exception of the Calvary of Mr. Cumberland, and the Alfred of Mr.Pye, to demonstrate that an irregular and vicious taste is the predo minating defect of the existing generation of poets. It has frequently been remarked; that, when the mind of a nation has been educated to a high point of refinement, and has produced admirable models in the various provinces of composition, it has appeared to lose part of that force which distinguished the efforts of its youth, and part of that fine sensibility of rectitude which characterised those of its maturity. Fearful of success in a fair competition with the great masters who have preceded them, the writers of a later period have endeavoured either to strike with novelty, or to please a luxurious and satiated public with superfluous and meretricious embellishment. Of Greece, indeed, the genius seemed to decline rather than the judgment; and till a very late age, her authors are more to be pitied for their inferiority of power, than to be censured for their affectation or their degeneracy in taste: but with Rome the case was quite otherwise. Her golden age of composition, which was of short continuance, was succeeded by a period

This title is disclaimed by the author of Madoc, as too vilified for his ambition, See Critical Review for last month.

during which her writers, with no diminution of talent, betrayed much corruption of taste, and, presumptuously deviating from the track of their predecessors, wandered proportionably far from the right way. Something similar to this has occurred in the literary history of our own country. In that term, which comprises the close of the seventeenth, and the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, our national composition seems to have reached its summit; and while our prose was brought to a degree of purity, beyond which it has not been since advanced, by the pens of Swift, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Bolingbroke, our poetry, softened and unfolded into its fullest harmony by the genius of Dryden, received its ultimate polish from the industry and the judgment of Pope. Gray and Mason were contented, to form themselves on the models which had been bequeathed to them: but the ambition of our more modern bards has been disdainful of similar prudence, and by attempting extraordinary modes to please, has failed egregiously of its object. One class of these candidates for poetic fame has tricked out the muse like a modern fine lady, bespangled by the jeweller, and blossoming from the shop of the artificial. flower maker; while another has offered incense, (and has demanded our applause for the decd) to a poor and lame and impotent thing; a species of mock muse, without power and without voice-a stranger to the visions of the Aönian land, and who never sipped a drop of inspiration from the Pierian spring. By those votaries of the tuneful power we have been dazzled and fatigued with unmitigated glitter and gaudiness; and by these we have been seriously presented with prose adapted to poetic feet, with variety of cadence extorted from violated harmony, with rudeness and nakedness, under the specious names of simplicity and nature. These faulty extremes, of which the florid is unquestionably the most alluring and the most entitled to the honours of poetry, have respectively been sanctioned by writers who, able to seize on a temporary popularity, have each of them attracted a train of imitators to reflect and heighten their defects. To the first of these classes of modern poetry must be assigned the author of the poem which is now be fore us. The same profusion of glaring colouring, the sanie display of scientific or technical language, the same multitude of ambitious epithets, the same finery and spangle, in short, which cover the page of Darwin, are visible in that of Mr. Stewart. But besides the faults of his model, Mr. Stewart is chargeable with many immediately of his own, His composition betrays the characters of a juvenile pen, and

discovers that its author has not attained, by exercise and discipline, to the faculty of distinguishing and arranging his ideas. A general confusion and cloudiness pervades and involves the work. What the writer intends to say, is at once redundantly and defectively told: and when we have been compelled to re-peruse some of his pages for the purpose of apprehending his meaning, we have found the labour of the pursuit ill requited by the value of the capture. A penury of thought is every where to be distinguished under an exuberant diction; and if our ear is never offended, our understandings are never satisfied, and our judgment is perpetually set at defiance. It is painful to us to hurt the feelings of an author, to whose sentiments and object no objections can be formed: but, as guardians of the public taste, we feel it to be our duty not to permit false poetry to usurp the reward of true; or the press to be overflowed by the works of men who can merely throw ten syle lables into such an order as may please the ear, and them can tag them with rhyme.

Compelled, however, as we are to pronounce Mr. Stewart's present attempt to be a failure, we are disposed to give him credit for the possession of powers, which; by the etfect of proper cultivation, and the study of correct models, may lead him to ultimate success; or may place him, at least, in a station above the mere mechanic framer of an harmonious verse. Instead of exhibiting, by any minute process of critical dissection, the faults of Mr. Stewart's production, we shall subinit such a portion of it to our readers as may enable them to form their own judgment of its merits, and to reverse our sentence, if it should be found to be the result either of erroneous principles of criticism, or of a defective taste. Of the following extract, however, which constitutes the opening of the poem, and is intended, as we believe, (for we are not quite certain,) to be a description of the creation, and of the birth of woman, the general faultiness and the particular trespasses against taste and accurate composition will be sufficiently obvious and striking, as we conceive, to ratify the truth of our decision

'O'er Heaven's high arch the infant Hours unfold
'The Orient Morn, in canopy of gold,

From silver urus their balmy showers effase,
And bathe her silk checks in ambrosial dews;
Now peep the smiles, the vermeil dimples dawn,
And hues of saffron streak the azure lawn;
Now, hinged on pearl, she turns in bright display,
The eastern portals reddening into day,

Whose genial blush bids new creations spring;
And warm with life, their natal anthem sing.
Thus the mute canvass, touch'd by Genius, lives,
And fairy worlds the mimic pencil gives;
Up-spring the hills, with cots romantic crown'd;
The ivied towers, the sloping vales around,
The glittering waves that roll in limpid pride,
The bending woods that clothe the glassy tide,
Charm'd we survey, where not a tint was seen,
Attractive graces harmonize the scene!

Lo! 'mid the ambient blue new lustres beam,
Fire the dun shade, and o'er the concave stream,
As the new Sun through ether's fulgid course
Now shot benign in vivifying force;

With arrowy ægis lit the sapphire main,"
And bathed, in fluid gold, the ripening plain;
Flush'd the full blade, his mellow beauties shed,
And o'er the earth her vital glories spread.

Here glow the flowers soft-dipt in Fancy's loom
That smile in tears, in rays calorie bloom;
Round the fond elm the ruby tendril throws
The fruit full ripened, and the bus that blows ;
The down-wove peach, the lily's virgin beil,
Bask in the blaze, with hue prolific swell;
There, girt in foam, the stores of ocean roil,
And lash the strand, impatient of controul.

'See! the warm clay, in mould celestial plann'd; Roll the blue eye, and poise the sinewy hand! Life's rushing tides a kindling glow impart, And fire the veins successive from the heart: It moves, it speaks, complete the matchless planMajestic beauty stamps aspiring man! Soon shall the tawny sheaf, the purpling vine, Cluster in gold, in tumid nectar shme; For him the gilded spoil, the honied store, Load every sea, and burnish every shore.

How vain the charms in bounteous nature drest, To beam contentment on the care-worn breast! No jocund draught can pleasure's balin dispense, If cold satiety arrest the sense;

No mild luxuriance, no enamell'd sky,

Paint the blanch'd check, or point the rayless cyé
But Hope with Ariel-wand, her visions gives,
And rich with bliss the magic landscape lives.
She to new joy can rouse th' enthusiast heart,
And sweeter hours and softer scenes impart ;
The silken tresses, and the neck of snow,
The smiles that sparkle, and the tears that filów,

The blush, the glance, the languor, and the sigh,
In soft succession, as she calls, move by.

In Music light awoke the Seraph's song,
Where crown'd with palms Euphrates glides along,
And fairy woods in gay reflection pass,
The spangled fruitage nodding from the glass;
As by the margin slept the blushing fair,
On scented thyme that dew'd her silken hair ;
But ah! not yet her eyes of liquid blue
Had tried their power, and gloried to subdue!
Not half so pure, the crystal tears adorn
The violets mild sweet-opening to the morn.

'In Eden shades with flowers eternal crown'd.
Where citron arbours breathed their odours round,
Primeval Love first view'd, with blushes warm,
Each flexile beauty and each orient charm;
In the clear wave her sportive image 'spies
Come as she comes, and vanish as she flies;
Sees rival tints a soften'd radiance speak,
And blend the rose and lily on her cheek;
And all the fluttering Loves the nectar sip,
Or nestle gaily on the coral lip:

Her eyes told more than all the Muses tell,
Though sweet to passion's ear the mimic swell
Her ringlet locks with hyacinths entwined,
Gave their rich clusters to the perfumed wind,
Or now luxuriant o'er her ivory neck
In golden waves, her tumid bosom deck,
Whose crimson currents, exquisitely fine,
Through lucid snow in blue meanders shine:
Her buoyant limbs, in just proportion wove,
Elastic float and frolic through the grove;
In motion charm, in grace quiescent please,
With pliant swim or harmonizing ease.' P. 1.

We have not thought it requisite to notice the small pieces in lyric measure, which occasionally interrupt the continuity of Mr. Stewart's heroic pages. It may be proper for us, therefore, just to remark, that the effect of variety, thus obtained, is, in our opinion, far from happy; and that the merit of the pieces in question, with reference either to the fancy, or to the command of numbers which they discover, is too inconsiderable to justify their intrusion, or to entitle them to any peculiar praise.