have not been able to find them]; but, without consulting her, he had substituted for the last six lines eight of his own. He afterwards, and again without the knowledge of their author, made them the exordium to the First Part of his poem, published, for certain reasons, some years after the Second Part had appeared. No acknowledgment was made that those verses were the work of another pen. Such acknowledgment ought to have been made, especially since they passed the press in the name of their real author. They are somewhat altered in the exordium to Dr. Darwin's poem, and eighteen lines of his own are interwoven with them." The lines having been only fortysix originally, and twenty-six of those in the Doctor's exordium being thus admitted to be of his own composition, it might seem that the theft was reduced to a somewhat small matter; but Miss Seward, not unreasonably, holds that in thus rifling her poem, probably of its best verses, Darwin did her the same injury as if he had appropriated the whole; and therefore in returning, in a subsequent page, to this "extraordinary, and, in a poet of so much genius, unprecedented instance of plagiarism," and quoting against him one of his own critical canons, that "a few common flowers of speech may be gathered as we pass over our neighbour's ground, but we must not plunder his cultivated fruit," she bitterly charges him with having "forgotten that just restraint when he took, unacknowledged, forty-six entire lines, the published verses of his friend, for the exordium of the first part of his work." After all, it has been doubted by the world if that scene of the flower-bank and the tablets was anything more than a pleasant dream of Anna's, or if she had anything to do with the authorship of the forty-six verses at all, beyond allowing them to be published with her name in the magazines. She has been proved to be incorrect in her recollections of other matters about which she was as obstinate as she was about this: her memory had the worst defect, of being apt to remember too much. Miss Seward's own poetry, with much more sentimentality and much less sense and substance, belongs to the same school with Darwin's. Hers is the feeble commonplace of the same laboured, tortuous, and essentially unnatural and untrue style out of which he, with his more powerful and original genius, has evolved for himself a distinctive form or dialect. This style has subsisted among us, in one variation or another, and with more or less of temporary acceptance, in every era of our poetry. It is mimicked by Pope, in his Song by a Person of Quality, written in the year 1733; it is the Euphuism of the Elizabethan age, gently ridiculed by Shakespeare, in his Love's Labours Lost, though then made brilliant and imposing by the wit and true poetic genius of Lilly; it is the same thing that is travestied by Chaucer in his Rime of Sir Thopas. Perhaps, however, it had in no former time made so much din, or risen to such apparent ascendancy, as at the date of which we are now speaking, the last years of the eighteenth century. Nor had it ever before assumed a shape or character at once so extravagant and so hollow of all real worth or power. The first impulse seems to have been caught from Italy, the foreign country whose literature has in every age exercised, for good or for evil, the greatest influence upon our own. The writers of what is called the Della Cruscan school had their predecessors and progenitors in the small manufacturers of rhyme, male and female, collected about her by Lady Miller, who, when she set up her Parnassus and Wedgwood-ware vase at Bathcaston, and established the weekly competitions in elegies and epigrams, songs and sonnets, which went on through the instrumentality of the said mystic vase till her death in 1781, had just returned from a tour in Italy with her husband, of which she published an account, in three volumes of Letters, in 1776. Their performances were given to the world under the title of Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath, in a succession of volumes which appeared between 1770 and 1780. Miss Seward was one of the contributors to this Batheaston poetry. It does not seem, however, to have attracted much notice beyond the circle in which the writers and their patroness moved; at most it was regarded as belonging rather to the provincial than to either the national or the metropolitan literature of the time. In the Della Cruscan school the thing came to a head. "In 1785," as the matter is recorded in the Introduction to the Baviad and Mæviad, a few English of both sexes, whom chance had jumbled together at Florence, took a fancy to while away their time in scribbling high-flown panegyrics on themselves; and complimentary canzonettas on two or three Italians, who understood too little of the language in which they were written to be disgusted with them." Among them were Mrs. Piozzi, the widow of Johnson's friend Thrale, now the wife of her daughter's music-master; 66 Mr. Bertie Greathead, a man of property and good family; Mr. Robert Merry, who specially took to himself the designation of Della Crusca; Mr. William Parsons, another English gentleman of fortune; &c. These people first printed a volume of their ́ rhymes under the title of The Florence Miscellany. Afterwards they and a number of other persons, their admirers and imitators, began to publish their lucubrations in England, chiefly in two new daily newspapers, called The World and The Oracle ; from which they were soon collected, and recommended with vast laudation to the public attention, in a volume entitled The Album, by Bell the printer. "While the epidemic malady was spreading from fool to fool," continues Gifford, "Della Crusca came over, and immediately announced himself by a sonnet to Love. Anna Matilda wrote an incomparable piece of nonsense in praise of it; and the two great luminaries of the age,' as Mr. Bell calls them, fell desperately in love with each other. From that period not a day passed without an amatory epistle, fraught with lightning and thunder, et quicquid habent telorum armamentaria coli. The fever turned to a frenzy: Laura Maria, Carlos, Orlando, Adelaide, and a thousand other nameless names caught the infection; and, from one end of the kingdom to the other, all was nonsense and Della Crusca." After this had gone on for some time, Gifford took up his pen, and in 1794 produced his Baviad, which in 1796 was followed by its continuation, the Mæviad. It is only in these two poems that the memory of most of the unhappy Della Cruscan songsters has been preserved-an immortality which may be compared with that conferred by the Newgate Calendar. We may transfer to our historic page the principal names, in addition to those already mentioned, that figure in these celebrated satires-adding a few particulars as to some of them gleaned from other sources. A few of the writers, we may remark, that got bespattered in the course of Gifford's somewhat energetic horse-play, have survived and recovered from his corrosive mud and any connexion they may have had with the Della Cruscan folly :-such as the dramatists O'Keefe, Morton, Reynolds, and Holcroft; the younger Colman, who had already, in 1795, produced his Sylvester Daggerwood, besides other dramatic pieces; Mrs. Cowley, the clever authoress of The Belle's Stratagem; and no less a person than the prince of biographers, James Boswell, of whose Johnsonianism, however, people in general as yet discerned only the ludicrous excess ;-not to speak of such rather more than respectable rhymers as Edward Jerningham, the author of numerous plays and poems; Miles Peter Andrews, noted for his prologues and epilogues, which were occasionally lively as well as rattling; and perhaps we ought also to add, in a proper spirit of gallantry, the somewhat too famous Mrs. Robinson, who, with all her levity, intellectual as well as moral was not without some literary talent and poetical feeling. Mrs. Piozzi, too, of course, though not the wisest of women, must be held to have been by no means all ignorance and pretension.* But the general herd of the Della Cruscans may be safely set down as having been mere blatant blockheads. Of some of the fictitious signatures quoted by Gifford we find no interpretation: such as Arno, Cesario, Julia, &c. Others of the names he mentions are real names. Topham, for instance, is Mr. Edward Topham, the proprietor of The World; "monosoph Este," as he calls him, is the Rev. Charles Este, principal editor of that paper; Weston is Joseph Weston, a small magazine critic of the day. Two of the minor offenders, to whom he deals a lash or two in passing, are James Cobbe, a now forgotten farce-writer; and Frederick Pilon, who was, we believe, a player by profession. The most conspicuous names, besides Merry and Greathead, are Mit Yenda, or Mot Yenda, stated to be the anagram of a Mr. Timothy or Thomas Adney, of whom we know nothing; Edwin, which stands for a Mr. Thomas Vaughan, the same person, we suppose, who wrote a farce called The Hotel, and one or two other things of the same sort, about twenty years before this time; and especially Tony or Anthony Pasquin, the nom de guerre of a John Williams, the author of loads both of verse and prose. If we may judge by a collection of the Poems, as they are called, of this Williams, or Pasquin, published, in two volumes, in 1789-a second edition, with a long list of subscribers, sparkling with titled names— Gifford's representation of the emptiness, feebleness, and sounding stupidity of the Della Cruscans is no exaggeration at all. Nothing, certainly, was ever printed on decent paper more worth * Much new light has been lately thrown on the life and character of this famous lady by Mr. Hayward's two lively and amusing volumes, entitled, Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), Lon. 1861. See, also, for a view of some parts of the subject different from that of Mr. Hayward, the article on his book in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1861. VOL. II. 2 c less and utterly despicable in every way than this poetry of the great Anthony Pasquin, who, in quite a lofty and patronizing style, dedicates one of his volumes to Mr. Pitt, and the other in part to Sir Joshua Reynolds, in part to Warren Hastings (so economically does he distribute the precious honour);-who has all these three distinguished persons among his subscribers, in company with most of the rank and eminence of the time;-and whom his friends and admirers, West Dudley Digges, W. Whitby of Cambridge, Thomas Bellamy, Frederick Pilon, William Upton, and J. Butler-all, he tells us, "of high estimation in the world of literature," in a series of introductory odes and other rhyming laudations, extol as another Martial and Juvenal combined, -the reformer of the age the scourge of folly-animating the just criticism of Persius with a brighter fire than Churchill's—“ at once the Pride and Terror of the Land "-a Dryden come to life again-the greatest wit since Butler-a giant, magnanimous and proud, fit only to contend with giants. "Our children's children," exclaims Dudley Digges, "Our children's children o'er thy honoured dust Shall raise the sculptured tomb and laureled bust ; While the big tears in gushing torrents flow!" "Resistless bard!" Pilon breaks out "by every science owned, Thou shalt be universally renowned! Well may you tread all competition down : But far beyond this is the fine frenzy of William Upton. "Pasquin! Can nought thy daring pen impede, By heaven! I'll probe thee to the heart's warm core, To bring, by strength Samsonian, to the ground! "For know, that giants should with giants vie, &c." "Pas |