aic; but he unbends from this graver strain of eflection, to tenderness, and even to playfulness, with an ease and grace almost exclusively his own: and connects extensive views of the happiness and interests of society, with pictures of life, that touch the heart by their familiarity. His language is cerainly simple, though it is not cast in a rugged or areless mould. He is no disciple of the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. Deliberately as he wrote, he cannot be accused of wanting natural and idiomatic expression; but still it is select and refined expression. He uses the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the utmost care and still, to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more of this elegant simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of words, in Goldsmith, than in any modern poet, or perhaps than would be attainable or desirable as a standard for every writer of rhyme. In extensive narrative poems such a style would be too difficult. There is a noble propriety even in the careless strength of great poems as in the roughness of castle walls; and, generally speaking, where there is a long course of story, or observation of life to be pursued, such exquisite touches as those of Goldsmith would be too costly materials for sustaining it. The tendency towards abstracted observation in his poetry agrees peculiarly with the compendious form of expression which he studied; whilst the homefelt joys, on which his fancy loved to repose, required at once the chastest and sweetest colours of language, to make them harmonize with the dignity of a philosophical poem. His whole manner has a still depth of feeling and reflection, which gives back the image of nature unruffled and minutely. He has no redundant thoughts, or false transports; but seems on every occasion to have weighed the impulse to which he surrendered himself. Whatever ardour or casual felicities he may have thus sacrificed, he gained a high degree of purity and self-possession. His chaste pathos makes him an insinuating moralist; and throws a charm of Claude-like softness over his descriptions of homely objects, that would seem only fit to be the subjects of Dutch painting. But his quiet enthusiasm leads the affections to humble things without a velgar association; and he inspires us with a fondness to trace the simplest recollections of Auburn, till we count the furniture of its ale. house, and listen to the varnished clock that clicked behind the door.'". "-pp. 261-263.

certain tone of exaggeration is incident, we fear, to the sort of writing in which we are engaged. Reckoning a little too much, per haps, on the dulness of our readers, we are often led, unconsciously, to overstate ocr sentiments, in order to make them understood; and, where a little controversia. warmth is added to a little love of effect, an excess of colouring is apt to steal over the canvass which ultimately offends no eye so much as our own. We gladly make this expiation to the shade of our illustrious countryman.

In his observations on Joseph Warton, Mr. C. resumes the controversy about the poetical character of Pope, upon which he had entered at the close of his Essay; and as to which we hope to have some other opportunity of giving our opinions. At present, however, we must hasten to a conclusion; and shall make our last extracts from the notice of Cowper, which is drawn up on somewhat of a larger scale than any other in the work. The abstract of his life is given with great tenderness and beauty, and with considerable fulness of detail. But the remarks on his poetry are the most precious,-and are all that we have now room to borrow.

The nature of Cowper's works makes us peculiarly identify the poet and the man in perusing them. As an individual, he was retired and weaned from the vanities of the world; and, as an original writer, he left the ambitious and luxuriant subjects of fiction and passion, for those of real life and simple nature, and for the development of his own earnest feelings, in behalf of moral and religious truth. His language has such a masculine idiom. atic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments having come from the author's heart; and of the enthu siasm, in whatever he describes, having been unfeigned and unexaggerated. He impresses us with the idea of a being, whose fine spirit had been long enough in the mixed society of the world to be polished by its intercourse, and yet withdrawn so simplicity. He was advanced in years before he soon as to retain an unworldly degree of purity and became an author; but his compositions display a tenderness of feeling so youthfully preserved, and even a vein of humour so far from being extinguished by his ascetic habits, that we can scarcely regret his For he blends the determination of age with an not having written them at an earlier period of life. exquisite and ingenuous sensibility; and though he sports very much with his subjects, yet, when he is in earnest, there is a gravity of long-felt conviction in his sentiments, which gives an uncommon ripe. ness of character to his poetry.

There is too much of William Whitehead, and almost too much of Richard Glover, and a great deal too much of Amhurst Selden, Bramston, and Meston. Indeed the ne quid nimis seems to have been more forgotten by the learned editor in the last, than in any of the other volumes. Yet there is by no means too much of Burns, or Cowper, or even of the Wartons. The abstract of Burns' life is beauiful; and we are most willing to acknowledge that the defence of the poet, against some of the severities of this Journal, is substantially successful. No one who reads all that we unaffectedness and authenticity of his works, con"It is due to Cowper to fix our regard on this have written of Burns, will doubt of the sin-sidered as representations of himself, because he cerity of our admiration for his genius, or of forms a striking instance of genius writing the histhe depth of our veneration and sympathy for tory of its own secluded feelings, reflections, and his lofty character and his untimely fate. enjoyments, in a shape so interesting as to engage We still think he had a vulgar taste in letter- the imagination like a work of fiction. He has invented no character in fable, nor in the drama; but writing; and too frequently patronized the he has left a record of his own character, which belief of a connection between licentious in- forms not only an object of deep sympathy, but a dulgences and generosity of character. But, subject for the study of human nature. His verso on looking back on what we have said on it is true, considered as such a record, abounds with these subjects, we are sensible that we have expressed ourselves with too much bitterness, and made the words of our censure far more comprehensive than our meaning. A

opposite traits of severity and gentleness, of playfulness and superstition, of solemnity and mirth, which appear almost anomalous; and there is, undoubtedly, sometimes an air of moody versatility in the extreme contrasts of his feelings. But looking

298

to his poetry as an entire structure, it has a massive | beauties of creation; but it gives his taste & con-
air of sincerity. It is founded in steadfast princi- tentment and fellowship with humble things. It
ples of belief; and, if we may prolong the archi- makes him careless of selecting and refining his
tectural metaphor, though its arches may be some views of nature beyond their actual appearances.
times gloomy, its tracery sportive, and its lights and He contemplated the face of plain rural English
shadows grotesquely crossed, yet altogether it still life, in moments of leisure and sensibility, till its
forms a vast, various, and interesting monument of minutest features were impressed upon his fancy;
the builder's mind. Young's works are as devout, and he sought not to embellish what he loved.
as satirical, sometimes as merry, as those of Cow. Hence his landscapes have less of the ideally beau-
per; and, undoubtedly, more witty. But the melan-tiful than Thomson's; but they have an unrivalled
choly and wit of Young do not make up to us the charm of truth and reality.
idea of a conceivable or natural being. He has
sketched in his pages the ingenious, but incongruous
form of a fictitious mind-Cowper's soul speaks
from his volumes."

66

Considering the tenor and circumstances of his life, it is not much to be wondered at, that some asperities and peculiarities should have adhered to the strong stem of his genius, like the moss and fungus that cling to some noble oak of the forest, amidst the damps of its unsunned retirement. It is more surprising that he preserved, in such seclusion, so much genuine power of comic observation. There is much of the full distinctness of Theophrastus, and of the nervous and concise spirit of La Bruyère, in his piece entitled Conversation,' with a cast of humour superadded, which is peculiarly English, and not to be found out of England."-Vol. vii. pp. 357, 358. Of his greatest work, The Task, he afterwards observes,

"His whimsical ou set in a work, where he
promises so little and performs so much, may be
advantageously contrasted with those magnificent
commencement of poems, which pledge both the
reader and the writer, in good earnest, to a task.
Cowper's poem, on the contrary, is like a river,
which rises from a playful little fountain, and
gathers beauty and magnitude as it proceeds. He
leads us abroad into his daily walks; he exhibits
the landscapes which he was accustomed to con-
template, and the trains of thought in which he
habitually indulged. No attempt is made to in-
terest us in legendary fictions, or historical recol-
lections connected with the ground over which he
expatiates; all is plainness and reality: But we
instantly recognise the true poet, in the clearness,
sweetness, and fidelity of his scenic draughts; in
his power of giving novelty to what is common;
and in the high relish, the exquisite enjoyment of
rural sights and sounds, which he communicates
to the spirit. His eyes drink the rivers with de-
light.' He excites an idea, that almost amounts to
sensation, of the freshness and delight of a rural
walk, even when he leads us to the wasteful com-
mon, which

Overgrown with fern, and rough
With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deform'd,
And dang'rous to the touch, has yet its bloom,
And decks itself with ornaments of gold,
Yields no unpleasing ramble. There the turf
Smells fresh, and, rich in odorif' rous herbs
And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxuries of unexpected sweets.'

"His rural prospects have far less variety and compass than those of Thomson; but his graphic touches are more close and minute: not that Thomson was either deficient or undelightful in circumstantial traits of the beauty of nature, but he looked to her as a whole more than Cowper. His genius was more excursive and philosophical. The poet of Olney, on the contrary, regarded human philosophy with something of theological contempt. To his eye, the great and little things of this world were levelled into an equality, by his recollection of the power and purposes of Him who inade them. They are, in his view, only as toys spread on the lap and carpet of nature, for this childhood of our immortal being. This religious indiference to the world is far, indeed, from blunting his sensibility to the genuine and simple

neither in descriptions nor acknowledgments of He is one of the few poets, who have indulged the passion of love; but there is no poet who has female influence. Of all the verses that have been given us a finer conception of the amenity of those in his winter evening, at the opening of the ever devoted to the subject of domestic happiness. fourth book of The Task, are perhaps the most beautiful. In perusing that scene of intimate delights,' 'fireside enjoyments,' and home-born happiness,' we seem to recover a part of the forgotten value of existence; when we recognise the means of its blessedness so widely dispensed, and so cheaply attainable, and find them susceptible of description at once so enchanting and so faithful.

retirement, the poem affords an amusing perspec"Though the scenes of The Task are laid in from the stir of the great Babel, from the contive of human affairs. Remote as the poet was engaged the attention of his contemporaries. On fusa sonus Urbis, et illætabile murmur,' he glances those subjects, it is but faint praise to say that he at most of the subjects of public interest which espoused the side of justice and humanity. Abundsame side, rather injuring than promoting the cause, by its officious declamation. But nothing ance of mediocrity of talent is to be found on the can be further from the stale commonplace and cuckooism of sentiment, than the philanthropic eloquence of Cowper-he speaks like one having authority.' Society is his debtor. Poetical expo. sitions of the horrors of slavery may, indeed, seem very unlikely agents in contributing to destroy it; and it is possible that the most refined planter in the West Indies, may look with neither shame of Cowper. But such appeals to the heart of the community are not lost! They fix themselves nor compunction on his own image in the pages silently in the popular memory; and they become, at last, a part of that public opinion, which must. sooner or later, wrench the lash from the hand of the oppressor."-pp. 359–364.

this delightful occupation; and take our final But we must now break away at once from farewell of a work, in which, what is original, lished, and in which the genius of a living is scarcely less valuable than what is repub Poet has shed a fresh grace over the fading glories of so many of his departed brothers. We wish somebody would continue the work, by furnishing us with Specimens of our Living Poets. It would be more difficult, to be sure, and more dangerous; but, in some respects, it would also be more useful. The beauties of the unequal and voluminous writers would be more conspicuous in a selection; and the different styles and schools of poetry would be brought into fairer and nearer terms of comparison, by the mere juxtaposition of their best productions; while a better and clearer view would be obtained, both of the general progress and apparent tendencies of the art, than can easily be gathered from the separate study of each important production. The mind of the critic, too, would be at once enlightened and tranquillized by the very greatness of the horizon thus subjected to bis

survey; and he would probably regard, both subject him to the most furious imputations with less enthusiasm and less offence, those of unfairness and malignity. In point of contrasted and compensating beauties and courage and candour, we do not know any. defects, when presented together, and as it were in combination, than he can ever do when they come upon him in distinct masses, and without the relief and softening of so varied an assemblage. On the other hand, it cannot be dissembled, that such a work would be very trying to the unhappy editor's prophetic reputation, as well as to his impartiality and temper; and would, at all events,

body who would do it much better than ourselves! And if Mr. Campbell could only impart to us a fair share of his ele gance, his fine perceptions, and his conciseness, we should like nothing better than to suspend, for a while, these periodical lucubrations, and furnish out a gallery of Living Bards, to match this exhibition of the Departed."

(August, 1811.)

The Dramatic Works of JOHN FORD; with an Introduction and Explanatory Notes. By HENRY WEBER, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 950. Edinburgh and London: 1811.

them, not merely of great talents and ac complishments, but of vast compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly creative and original;-not perfecting art by the delicacy of their taste, or digesting knowledge by the justness of their reasonings; but making vast and substantial additions to the materials upon which taste and reason must hereafter be employed, and enlarging, to an incredible and unparalleled extent, both the stores and the resources of the human facul ties.

ALL true lovers of English poetry have-and Napier, and Milton, and Cudworth, been long in love with the dramatists of and Hobbes, and many others;-men, all of the time of Elizabeth and James; and must have been sensibly comforted by their late restoration to some degree of favour and notoriety. If there was any good reason, indeed, to believe that the notice which they have recently attracted proceeded from any thing but that indiscriminate rage for editing and annotating by which the present times are so happily distinguished, we should be disposed to hail it as the most unequivocal symptom of improvement in public taste that has yet occurred to reward and animate our labours. At all events, however, it gives us a chance for such an improvement; by placing in the hands of many, who would not otherwise have heard of them, some of those beautiful performances which we have always regarded as among the most pleasing and characteristic productions of our native genius. Ford certainly is not the best of those neglected writers,— -nor Mr. Weber by any means the best of their recent editors: But we cannot resist the opportunity which this publication seems to afford, of saying a word or two of a class of writers, whom we have long worshipped in secret with a sort of idolatrous veneration, and now find once more brought forward as candidates for public applause. The am to which they belong, indeed, has always appeared to us by far the brightest in the history of English literature, or indeed of human intellect and capacity. There never was, any where, any thing like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the period of the Restoration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., nor of Louis XIV., can come at all into comparison: For, in that short period, we shall find the names of almost all the very great men that this nation has ever produced, the names of Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and Sydney, and Hooker, and Taylor, and Barrow, and Raleigh,

Whether the brisk concussion which was given to men's minds by the force of the Reformation had much effect in producing this sudden development of British genius, we cannot undertake to determine. For our own part, we should be rather inclined to hold, that the Reformation itself was but one symptom or effect of that great spirit of progression and improvement which had been set in operation by deeper and more general causes; and which afterwards blossomed out into this splendid harvest of authorship. But whatever may have been the causes that determined the appearance of those great works, the fact is certain, not only that they appeared together in great numbers, but that they possessed a common character, which, in spite of the great diversity of their subjects and designs, would have made them be classed together as the works of the same order or description of men, even if they had appeared at the most distant intervals of time. They are the works of Giants, in short, and of Giants of one nation and family; and their characteristics are, great force, boldness, and originality; together with a certain raciness of English peculiarity, which distinguishes them from all those per formances that have since been produced among ourselves, upon a more vague_and general idea of European excellence. Their sudden appearance, indeed, in all this splen. dour of native luxuriance, can only be com

pared to what happens on the breaking up of | forth upon every occasion, and by which they a virgin soil,-where all the indigenous plants illuminated and adorned the darkest and mos: spring up at once with a rank and irrepressi- rugged topics to which they had happened to ble fertility, and display whatever is peculiar turn themselves, is such as has never been or excellent in their nature, on a scale the equalled in any other age or country; and most conspicuous and magnificent. The crops places them at least as high, in point of are not indeed so clean, as where a more fancy and imagination, as of force of reason, exhausted mould has been stimulated by or comprehensiveness of understanding. In systematic cultivation; nor so profitable, as this highest and most comprehensive sense where their quality has been varied by a of the word, a great proportion of the writers judicious admixture of exotics, and accom- we have alluded to were Poets: and, without modated to the demands of the universe by going to those who composed in metre, and the combinations of an unlimited trade. But chiefly for purposes of delight, we will vento those whose chief object of admiration is ture to assert, that there is in any one of the the living power and energy of vegetation, prose folios of Jeremy Taylor more fine fancy and who take delight in contemplating the and original imagery-more brilliant concep various forms of her unforced and natural tions and glowing expressions-more new perfection, no spectacle can be more rich, figures, and new applications of old figuressplendid, or attractive. more, in short, of the body and the soul of In the times of which we are speaking, poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that classical learning, though it had made great have since been produced in Europe. There progress, had by no means become an exclu- are large portions of Barrow, and of Hooker sive study; and the ancients had not yet and Bacon, of which we may say nearly as been permitted to subdue men's minds to a much nor can any one have a tolerably ade sense of hopeless inferiority, or to condemn quate idea of the riches of our language and the moderns to the lot of humble imitators. our native genius, who has not made himself They were resorted to, rather to furnish ma-acquainted with the prose writers, as well as terials and occasional ornaments, than as the poets, of this memorable period. models for the general style of composition; The civil wars, and the fanaticism by which and, while they enriched the imagination, and they were fostered, checked all this fine bloom insensibly improved the taste of their suc- of the imagination, and gave a different and zessors, they did not at all restrain their free-less attractive character to the energies which dom, or impair their originality. No common they could not extinguish. Yet, those were standard had yet been erected, to which all the times that matured and drew forth the the works of European genius were required dark, but powerful genius of such men as to conform; and no general authority was Cromwell, and Harrison, and Fleetwood, &c. acknowledged, by which all private or local the milder and more generous enthusiasm ideas of excellence must submit to be corrected. Both readers and authors were comparatively few in number. The former were infinitely less critical and difficult than they have since become; and the latter, if they were not less solicitous about fame, were at least much less jealous and timid as to the hazards which attended its pursuit. Men, indeed, seldom took to writing in those days, unless they had a great deal of matter to communicate; and neither imagined that they could make a reputation by delivering commonplaces in an elegant manner, or that the substantial value of their sentiments would be disregarded for a little rudeness or negligence in the finishing. They were habituated, therefore, both to depend upon their own resources, and to draw upon them without fear or anxiety; and followed the dictates of their own taste and judgment, without standing much in awe of the ancients, of their readers, or of each other.

The achievements of Bacon, and those who set free our understandings from the shackles of Papal and of tyrannical imposition, afford sufficient evidence of the benefit which resulted to the reasoning faculties from this happy independence of the first great writers of this nation. But its advantages were, if possible, still more conspicuous in the mere literary character of their productions. The quantity of bright thoughts, of original images, and splendid expressions, which they poured

of Blake, and Hutchison, and Hampdenand the stirring and indefatigable spirit of Pym, and Hollis, and Vane-and the chival rous and accomplished loyalty of Strafford and Falkland; at the same time that they stimu- . lated and repaid the severer studies of Coke, and Selden, and Milton. The Drama, however, was entirely destoyed, and has never since regained its honours; and Poetry, in general, lost its ease, and its majesty and force, along with its copiousness and origi nality.

The Restoration made things still worse: for it broke down the barriers of our literary independence, and reduced us to a province of the great republic of Europe. The genius and fancy which lingered through the usurpation, though soured and blighted by the severities of that inclement season, were still genuine English genius and fancy; and owned no allegiance to any foreign authori ties. But the Restoration brought in a French taste upon us, and what was called a classical and a polite taste; and the wings of our Eng lish Muses were clipped and trimmed, and their flights regulated at the expense of all that was peculiar, and much of what was brightest in their beauty. The King and his courtiers, during their long exile, had of course imbibed the taste of their protectors; and, coming from the gay court of France, with something of that additional profligacy that belonged to their outcast and adventurer

character, were likely enough to be revolted | fashionable style of writing, and actualy feei by the peculiarities, and by the very excel- ashamed of their own richer and more varied ences, of our native literature. The grand productions. and sublime tone of our greater poets, ap- It would greatly exceed our limits to depeared to them dull, morose, and gloomy; scribe accurately the particulars in which and the fine play of their rich and unre- this new Continental style differed from our strained fancy, mere childishness and folly: old insular one: But, for our present purpose, while their frequent lapses and perpetual ir- it may be enough perhaps to say, that it was regularity were set down as clear indications more worldly, and more townish,-holding of barbarity and ignorance. Such sentiments, more of reason, and ridicule, and authoritytoo, were natural, we must admit, for a few more elaborate and more assuming-addressdissipated and witty men, accustomed all ed more to the judgment than to the feelings, their days to the regulated splendour of a and somewhat ostentatiously accommodated court to the gay and heartless gallantry of to the habits, or supposed habits, of persons French manners-and to the imposing pomp in fashionable life. Instead of tenderness and and brilliant regularity of French poetry. fancy, we had satire and sophistry-artificial But, it may appear somewhat more unac- declamation, in place of the spontaneous anicountable that they should have been able to mation of genius-and for the universal lanimpose their sentiments upon the great body guage of Shakespeare, the personalities, the of the nation. A court, indeed, never has so party politics, and the brutal obscenities of much influence as at the moment of a resto- Dryden. Nothing, indeed, can better charac ration: but the influence of an English court terize the change which had taken place in has been but rarely discernible in the litera- our national taste, than the alterations and ture of the country; and had it not been for additions which this eminent person presumed the peculiar circumstances in which the nation-and thought it necessary-to make on the was then placed, we believe it would have resisted this attempt to naturalise foreign notions, as sturdily as it was done on almost every other occasion.

characters, by lending a more disgusting indecency to the whole dramatis persona.

productions of Shakespeare and Milton. The heaviness, the coarseness, and the bombast of that abominable travestie, in which he has exhibited the Paradise Lost in the form of an At this particular moment, however, the opera, and the atrocious indelicacy and comnative literature of the country had been sunk passionable stupidity of the new characters into a very low and feeble state by the rigours with which he has polluted the enchanted of the usurpation,-the best of its recent solitude of Miranda and Prospero in the models laboured under the reproach of re- Tempest, are such instances of degeneracy publicanism, and the courtiers were not only as we would be apt to impute rather to some disposed to see all its peculiarities with an transient hallucination in the author himself, eye of scorn and aversion, but had even a than to the general prevalence of any sysgood deal to say in favour of that very oppo- tematic bad taste in the public, did we not site style to which they had been habituated. know that Wycherly and his coadjutors were It was a witty, and a grand, and a splendid in the habit of converting the neglected dramas style. It showed more scholarship and art, of Beaumont and Fletcher into popular plays, than the luxuriant negligence of the old merely by leaving out all the romantic sweetEnglish school; and was not only free from ness of their characters-turning their meiomany of its hazards and some of its faults, dious blank verse into vulgar prose-and but possessed merits of its own, of a charac-aggravating the indelicacy of their lower ter more likely to please those who had then the power of conferring celebrity, or condemning to derision. Then it was a style Dryden was, beyond all comparison, the which it was peculiarly easy to justify by greatest poet of his own day; and, endued argument; and in support of which great as he was with a vigorous and discursive authorities, as well as imposing reasons, were imagination, and possessing a mastery over always ready to be produced. It came upon his language which no later writer has atas with the air and the pretension of being the tained, if he had known nothing of foreign style of cultivated Europe, and a true copy literature, and been left to form himself on of the style of polished antiquity. England, the models of Shakespeare, Spenser, and on the other hand, had had but little inter-Milton; or if he had lived in the country, course with the rest of the world for a con- at a distance from the pollutions of courts, siderable period of time: Her language was not at all studied on the Continent, and her native authors had not been taken into account in forming those ideal standards of excellence which had been recently constructed in France and Italy upon the authority of the Roman classics, and of their own most celebrated writers. When the comparison came to be made, therefore, it is easy to imagine that it should generally be thought to be very much to our disadvantage, and to understand how the great multitude, even among ourselves, should be dazzled with the pretensions of the

factions, and playhouses, there is reason to think that he would have built up the pure and original school of English poetry so firmly, as to have made it impossible for fashion, or caprice, or prejudice of any sort, ever to have rendered any other popular among our own inhabitants. As it is, he has not written one line that is pathetic, and very few that can be considered as sublime.

Addison, however, was the consummation of this Continental style; and if it had nc: been redeemed about the same time by the fine talents of Pope, would probably have so