VI. The fragrant noon-tide grove The moon-light's lone and silent bowers, The sweet haunts once of ecstacy and love, But breathe of happier hours! I seek thine early tomb VII. With sad and unavailing tears, While echo wakes amid the cheerless gloom, SONNET-A STORM. (WRITTEN IN INDIA.) THE strife is hushed,-yet lingering shadows lower Lies hid in mist,-the tempest-swollen rill Where droops the wet-winged minah, cold and still. The mighty spirit of the midnight storm Passed where for ages rose the greenwood's pride, And what availed its glory? Its vast form, Stretched on the groaning earth, but serves to hide The serpent's dwelling; and decay's dull worm Soon in its mouldering bosom shall abide! MASSINGER. WHEN We reflect upon the personal history of Massinger, and the sad obscurity of his career, it is gratifying to observe that the justice which was refused to him in his life-time, and for more than a century after, has been awarded to him in the present age. His name and his writings are at this day familiar to every student of English Literature, though when Johnson wrote his Lives of the Poets, he knew so little of one of our greatest dramatic authors, that he seems to have been ignorant that the Fair Penitent of Rowe was a plagiarism from the Fatal Dowry of Massinger. It is now well-known that Rowe had prepared an edition of the entire works of Massinger, of whose genius, at that period so rarely recognized, he appears to have been a warm admirer. When, however, his own avarice of distinction led him to covet the gold and jewels that adorned his idol, he determined to leave him in that obscurity from which alone he could hope for the concealment of his own sacrilegious theft. About the middle of the seventeenth century appeared an edition of Massinger prepared by Coxeter. This was an attempt, but a very unsuccessful one, to correct the numerous blunders of the old editions. It was followed soon after by an equally incorrect edition published by Mr. Davies, and to this succeeded that of Mason. None, however, of these reprints did any essential service to the poet's reputation, and it was not till Mr. Gifford produced his very careful and excellent edition in 1805, that the works of Massinger were generally read and justly appreciated. The only drawback from the gratification that every student of English poetry has received from this edition, is the excessive arrogance and acrimony which the editor has displayed in his very numerous notices of the errors of his predecessors. He never makes a silent correction, when he has an opportunity of expressing his malignant triumph over the ruin of another's fame. He seems to speak with the bitterness of personal hatred of men whom he never saw, or who were at rest in the grave before he himself was in his cradle. This virulence and ferocity introduced into questions of no moral consequence, not only interferes materially with the more pleasurable and peaceful emotions which the contemplation of the poet's beauties is calculated to excite, but leads us to call in question even the personal character of the editor, and makes us less disposed than we otherwise should be, to recognise the indications of his laborious care and his critical acumen. Mr. Gifford is guilty of another, but a more amiable and more common fault—a highly exaggerated estimate of the genius of the poet on whom he comments. There is no question that Massinger was a most distinguished ornament of what is called the age of Elizabeth, which, in reference to the History of our Literature, is generally made to include the reign of James the first. But I cannot agree with Gifford, that Massinger is, in any one respect that has relation to the higher qualities of genius, a rival of the immortal Shakespeare, or that his superiority to all his other contemporaries is quite so decided as he would have us think. Some commendatory verses, addressed to Massinger by a friend, ought to have suggested to Mr. Gifford the propriety of praising his favorite poet with somewhat more reserve. The following passage in these verses reminds me of a correspondent sentiment in Pope*. "Yet whoso e'er beyond desert commends, * Praise undeserved is censure in disguise.-Pope. It is but fair to presume from the following compliment, (a very awkward one if not well founded,) that Massinger did not himself pretend to an equality with the greatest of his contemporaries. "You are not, I assure Myself, envious, but you can endure To hear their praise, whose worth long since was known, I know, you'd take it for an injury A foolish competition: 'tis too bold A task, and to be shunned; nor shall my praise In fact, Massinger's modesty is placed beyond a doubt by the fact, that the same poetical friend subsequently wrote a similar address to him, in which he says, somewhat inconsistently with his first epistle : "You remember how you. chid me, when I ranked you equal with those glorious men, * * * * * I did but justice when I placed you so." Perhaps after all, Mr. Gifford's fault was not so much an undue partiality as defective judgment. For though an acute and clever critic within a certain limit, and endowed with a quick sense of the lesser proprieties, the minor morals of literature, he had not a true relish of poetical excellence of the highest order. He would have written a better essay on Pope than on Shakespeare. As a critic he was of the school of Johnson, who wrote so much more ably on Dryden than on Milton. He was readier at the discovery of slight errors than of great beauties. He was a kind of legal critic, who deemed it more his business and found it a more congenial task to discover a flaw or condemn an infraction of certain arbitrary laws, than to recognize and applaud those noble but irregular virtues that rise above them. He had evidently no sympathy for those pocts "Who snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." When he criticised the poetry of Shelley, he could discover not a single indication of sense or genius in the rich and wild imaginings of that daring genius. To him it was a midnight chaos, fitfully illumined by unwholesome meteors-a darkness visible, that served only to discover dismal vapours and demoniac phantoms. A critic of this sort is precisely the kind of person to prefer Massinger to Shakespeare. Mr. Monk Mason had remarked the general harmony of the former's versification, which he pronounced superior to that of any other writer with the exception of the generally acknowledged monarch of the English Drama. Mr. Gifford most unreasonably objects to this exception and asserts that rhythmical modulation is not in the list of Shakespeare's merits! He thinks that Shakespeare has been overrated; that Beaumont is as sublime, Fletcher as pathetic, and Jonson as nervous; and that wit is the only quality by which he is raised above all competitors! Here is a critic that would have pleased Voltaire. It would have been amusing enough if Mr. Gifford had been compelled to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He would have afforded a strong illustration of the absurdity and presumption of a mere satirist-an acute fault finder "A word-catcher that lives on syllables," attempting to take the measure of such a gigantic mind as that of Shakespeare. It is not difficult to understand why a critic who counts syllables upon his fingers should prefer the verse of |