on which no poet ever was or ever will be placed by his contemporaries.

We have hitherto only considered the labour bestowed upon Gertrude of Wyoming as an impediment to the flow of popularity which has in the present day attended poems of a ruder structure. But the public taste, although guided in some degree by caprice, is also to a certain extent correctly grounded upon critical doctrine; and the truth is, that an author cannot work upon a beautiful poem beyond a certain point, without doing it real and irreparable injury in more respects than

one.

It is, in the first place, impossible to make numerous and minute alterations, to alter the position of stanzas, to countermarch and invert the component parts of sentences, without leaving marks of their original array. The epitaph of the Italian Valetudinary will apply as well in poetry as in regimen; and it may be said of many a laboured effort of genius, "Stava bene, ma per star meglio, sto qui." There are in Gertrude passages of a construction so studiously involved, that nothing but the deepest consideration could have enabled the author to knit the Gordian knot by which his meaning is fettered, and which unfortunately requires similar exertion of intellect ere it can be disentangled. An ordinary reader is sometimes unable and always unwilling to make such an effort, and hence the volume is resigned and condemned in a moment of splenetic impatience. Some of the introductory stanzas have their beauties thus obscured, and afford rather a

conjectural than a certain meaning. We allude to the second in particular. Similar indistinctness occurs in the construction of the following sentence:

"But high in amphitheatre above

His arms the everlasting aloe threw :

Breathed but an air of heaven, and all the grove
Instinct as if with living spirit grew."

The idea here is beautiful, but it is only on reflection that we discover that the words in italics mean not that the aloe breathed an air of heaven, but that the grove grew instinct with living spirit so soon as the slightest air of heaven breathed on Sometimes passages, of which the tone is simple and natural, are defaced by affected inversion, as in Gertrude's exclamation :—

it.

"Yet say! for friendly hearts from whence we came
Of us does oft remembrance intervene ?"

Again, in altering and retouching, inverting and condensing his stanzas, an author will sometimes halt between his first and his latter meaning, and deviate into defects both of sense and grammar. Thus in the Oneyda's first song we have

"Sleep, wearied one! and in the dreaming land
Shouldst thou the spirit of thy mother greet,
O say to-morrow that the white man's hand

Hath plucked the thorns of sorrow from thy feet."

Lastly, and above all, in the irksome task of repeated revision and reconsideration, the poet loses, if we may use the phrase, the impulse of inspiration; his fancy, at first so ardent, becomes palled and flattened, and no longer excites a correspondent glow of expression. In this state of mind he may

correct faults, but he will never add beauties; and so much do we prefer the stamp of originality to tame correctness, that were there not a medium which ought to be aimed at, we would rather take the prima cura, with all its errors and with all its beauties, than the over-amended edition in which both are obliterated. Let any one read the most sublime passage in Shakspeare an hundred times over without intermission, it will at length convey to the tired ear neither pathos nor sublimity, hardly even an intelligible idea. Something analogous to this occurs to every poet in the melancholy task of correction. The Scythians, who debated their national affairs first in the revel of a festival, and afterwards during a day of fasting, could hardly experience a greater sinking of spirit in their second consultation, than the bard, who, in revising the offspring of moments of enthusiastic feeling, experiences that

"The dear illusion will not last,

The era of enchantment's past."

Then occur the doubtful and damping questions, whether the faded inspiration was genuine-whether the verses corresponded in any degree to its dictates, or have power to communicate to others a portion of the impulse which produced them? Then comes the dread of malignant criticism; and last, but not least tormenting, the advice of literary friends, each suggesting doubts and alterations, till the spirit is corrected out of the poem, as a sprightly boy is sometimes lectured and flogged, for venial indiscretions, into a stupid and inanimate dunce. The beautiful poem of Lochiel, which Mr Camp

bell has appended to the present volume as if to illustrate our argument, exhibits marks of this injudicious alteration. Let us only take the last lines, where, in the original edition, the champion declares, that even in the moment of general rout and destruction,

"Though my perishing ranks should be strew'd in their gore, Like ocean-weeds heap'd on the surf-beaten shore,

Lochiel, untainted by flight or by chains,

While the kindling of life in his bosom remains,

Shall victor exult, or in death be laid low,

With his back to the field, and his feet to the foe!
And, leaving in battle no blot on his name,

Look proudly to heaven from the death-bed of fame."

The whole of this individual, vigorous, and marked picture of the Highland chieftain lying breathless amid his broken and slaughtered clana picture so strong, that we even mark the very posture and features of the hero-is humbled and tamed, abridged and corrected, into the following vague and inexpressive couplet :

"Lochiel

Shall victor exult in the battle's acclaim,

Or look to yon heaven from the death-bed of fame."

If the pruning knife has been applied with similar severity to the beauties of Gertrude of Wyoming, the hatchet of the Mohawk Brandt himself was not more fatally relentless and indiscriminate in its operations.

The book contains, besides Gertrude of Wyoming, several smaller pieces. Two beautiful war odes, entitled The Mariners of England and The Battle of the Baltic, afford pleasing instances of that short and impetuous lyric sally in which Mr Campbell

excels all his contemporaries. Two ballads, Glenara and Lord Ullin's Daughter,—the former approaching the rude yet forcible simplicity of the ancient minstrels, the latter upon a more refined plan, conclude the volume. They are models in their several styles of composition.

ARTICLE XI.

THE BATTLES OF TALAVERA. A POEM.

[By the Right Hon. J. W. CROKER.

November, 1809.]

Quarterly Review,

THERE is no point in which our age differs more from those which preceded it, than in the apparent apathy of our poets and rhymers to the events which are passing over them. From the days of Marlborough to those of Wolfe and Hawke, the Tower and Park guns were not more certain proclaimers of a victory, than the pens of contemporary bards. St James's had then its odes, and Grub Street poured forth its ballads upon every fresh theme of national exultation. Some of these productions, being fortunately wedded to popular tunes,