eminence, whom I have found it so delightful to read in, or so tedious to read through. Give me Chaucer in preference. He slaps us on the shoulder, and makes us spring up while the dew is on the grass, and while the long shadows play about it in all quarters. We feel strong with the freshness round us, and we return with a keener appetite, having such a companion in our walk. Among the English poets, both on this side and the other side of Milton, I place him next to Shakspeare; but the word next, must have nothing to do with the word near. I said before, that I do not estimate so highly as many do the mushrooms that sprang up in a ring under the great oak of Arden.

must have been acknowledged for earnestness in
the greater question, might have been mistaken
for captiousness in the less. His partisans, no
one of whom probably ever read Chaucer, would
be indignant at your preference. They would
wonder, but hardly with the same violence of
emotion, that he was preferred to Shakspeare.
Perhaps his countrymen in his own age, which
rarely happens to literary men overshadowingly
great, had glimpses of his merit. One would
naturally think that a personage of Camden's
gravity, and placed beyond the pale of poetry,
might have spoken less contemptuously of some
he lived among, in his admiration of Chaucer.
He tells us both in prose and verse, by implica-
tion, how little he esteemed Shakspeare. Speak-
ing of Chaucer, he says, "he, surpassing all others,
without question, in wit, and leaving our smatter-
ing poetasters by many leagues behind him,
Jam monte potitus

Southey. These authors deal in strong distilla-
tions for foggy minds that want excitement. In
few places is there a great depth of sentiment, but
everywhere vast exaggeration and insane display.
I find the over-crammed curiosity-shop, with its
incommodious appendages, some grotesquely rich,
all disorderly and disconnected. Rather would I
find, as you would, the well-proportioned hall, students in poetry and criticism :
with its pillars of right dimensions at right dis-
tances; with its figures, some in high relief and
some in lower; with its statues and its busts of
glorious men and women, whom I recognise at
first sight; and its tables of the rarest marbles
and richest gems, inlaid in glowing porphyry,
and supported by imperishable bronze. Without
a pure simplicity of design, without a just sub-
ordination of characters, without a select choice
of such personages as either have interested us
or must by the power of association, without
appropriate ornaments laid on solid materials, no
admirable poetry of the first order can exist.

Ridet anhelantem dura ad fastigia turbam.'" Which he thus translates for the benefit of us

Porson. Well, we can not get all these things, and we will not cry for them. Leave me rather in the curiosity-shop than in the nursery. By your reference to the noble models of antiquity, it is evident that those poets most value the ancients who are certain to be among them. In our own earlier poets, as in the earlier Italian painters, we find many disproportions; but we discern the dawn of truth over the depths of expression. These were soon lost sight of, and every new comer passed further from them. I like Pietro Perugino a thousand-fold better than Carlo Maratta, and Giotto a thousand-fold better than Carlo Dolce. On the same principle, the daybreak of Chaucer is pleasanter to me than the hot dazzling noon of Byron.

Southey. I am not confident that we ever speak quite correctly of those who differ from us essentially in taste, in opinion, or even in style. If we cordially wish to do it, we are apt to lay a restraint on ourselves, and to dissemble a part of our convictions.

Porson. An error seldom committed.

Southey. Sometimes, however. I for example did not expose in my criticisms half the blemishes I discovered in the style and structure of Byron's poetry, because I had infinitely more to object against the morals it disseminated; and what

"When once himself the steep-top hill had won,
At all the sort of them he laught anon,
To see how they, the pitch thereof to gain,
Puffing and blowing do climbe up in vain."

Nevertheless we are indebted to Camden for pre-
serving the best Latin verses, and indeed the only
good ones, that had hitherto been written by any
of our countrymen. They were written in an age
when great minds were attracted by greater, and
when tribute was paid where tribute was due, with
loyalty and enthusiasm.

"Drace! pererrati novit quem terminus orbis
Quem-que simul mundi vidit uterque polus.
Si taceant homines, facient te sidera notum ;
Sol nescit comitis immemor esse sui."

Porson. A subaltern in the supplementary company of the Edinburgh sharpshooters, much prefers the slender Italians, who fill their wallets with scraps from the doors of rich old houses. To compare them in rank and substance with those on whose bounty they feed, is too silly for grave reprehension. But there are certain men who are driven by necessity to exhibit some sore absurdity; it is their only chance of obtaining a night's lodging in the memory.

Southey. Send the Ismaelite back again to his desert. He has indeed no right to complain of you; for there are scarcely two men of letters at whom he has not cast a stone, although he met them far beyond the tents and the pasturage of his tribe; and leave those poets also; and return to consider attentively the one, much more original, on whom we began our discourse.

Porson. Thank you. I have lain in ditches ere now, but not willingly, nor to contemplate the moon, nor to gather celandine. I am reluctant to carry a lantern in quest of my man, and am but little contented to be told that I may find him at last, if I look long enough and far enough. One who exhibits no sign of life in the duration

G

of a single poem, may at once be given up to the composed and complacent upon the cool clear undertaker.

Southey. It would be fairer in you to regard the aim and object of the poet, when he tells you what it is, than to linger in those places where he appears to disadvantage.

Porson. My oil and vinegar are worth more than the winter cabbage you have set before me, and are ill spent upon it. In what volume of periodical criticism do you not find it stated, that the aim of an author being such or such, the only question is whether he has attained it? Now, instead of this being the only question to be solved, it is pretty nearly the one least worthy of attention. We are not to consider whether a foolish man has succeeded in a foolish undertaking; we are to consider whether his production is worth anything, and why it is, or why it is not? Your cook, it appears, is disposed to fry me a pancake; but it is not his intention to supply me with lemon-juice and sugar. Pastiness and flatness are the qualities of a pancake, and thus far he has attained his aim; but if he means it for me, let him place the accessaries on the table, lest what is insipid and clammy, and (as housewives with great propriety call it) sad, grow into duller accretion and inerter viscidity the more I masticate it. My good Mr. Southey, do not be offended at these homely similies. Socrates uses no other in the pages of the stately Plato; they are all, or nearly all, borrowed from the artisan and the trader. I have plenty of every sort at hand, but I always take the most applicable, quite indifferent to the smartness and glossiness of its trim. If you prefer one from another quarter, I would ask, where is the advantage of drilling words for verses, when the knees of those verses are so weak that they can not march from the parade?

eminence, and hears within himself, amid the calm he has created, the tuneful pæan of a godlike victory. Yet he loves the Virtue more because he fought for her than because she crowned him. The scholar who has deducted from adolescence many hours of recreation, and, instead of indulging in it, has embarked in the depths of literature; he who has left his own land far behind him, and has carried off rich stores of Greek; not only values it superlatively, as is just, but places all those who wrote in it too nearly on a level one with another, and the inferior of them above some of the best moderns.

Porson. Dignity of thought arose from the Athenian form of government, propriety of expression from the genius of the language, from the habitude of listening daily to the most elaborate orations and dramas, and of contemplating at all hours the exquisite works of art, invited to them by gods and heroes. These environed the aspiring young poet, and their chasteness allowed him no swerving.

Southey. Yet weakly children were born to Genius in Attica as elsewhere.

Porson. They were exposed and died. The Greek poets, like nightingales, sing "in shadiest covert hid;" you rarely catch a glimpse of the person, unless at a funeral or a feast, or where the occasion is public. Mr. Wordsworth, on the contrary, strokes down his waistcoat, hems gently first, then hoarsely, then impatiently, rapidly, and loudly. You turn your eyes, and see more of the showman than of the show. I do not com plain of this; I only make the remark.

Southey. I dislike such comparisons and similies. It would have been better had you said he stands forth in sharp outline, and is, as the moon was said to be, without an atmosphere.

Southey. Flatnesses are more apparent to us in Porson. Stop there. I discover more atmoour language than in another, especially than in sphere than moon. You are talking like a poet; Latin and Greek. Beside, we value things pro- I must talk like a grammarian. And here I am portionally to the trouble they have given us in reminded I found in his grammar but one prothe acquisition. Hence, in some measure, the noun, and that is the pronoun I. He can devise importance we assign to German poetry. The no grand character, and indeed no variety of meaning of every word, with all its affinities and smaller : his own image is reflected from floor to relations, pursued with anxiety and caught with roof in every crystallisation of the chilly cavern. difficulty, impresses the understanding, sinks He shakes us with no thunder of anger; he leads deep into the memory, and carries with it more us into no labyrinth of love; we lament on the than a column of our own, in which equal thought stormy shore no Lycidas of his; and even the is expended, and equal fancy is displayed. The Phillis who meets us at her cottage-gate, is not Germans have among them many admirable Phillis the neat-handed. Byron has likewise poets; but if we had even greater, ours would been censured for egoism, and the censure is seem smaller, both because there is less haziness applicable to him nearly in the same degree. about them, and because, as I said before, they But so laughable a story was never told of Byron would have given less exercise to the mind. He as the true and characteristical one related of who has accumulated by a laborious life more your neighbour, who, being invited to read in than a sufficiency for its wants and comforts, company a novel of Scott's, and finding at the turns his attention to the matter gained, often- commencement a quotation from himself, totally times without a speculation at the purposes to forgot the novel, and recited his own poem from which he might apply it. The man who early beginning to end, with many comments and more in the day has overcome, by vigilance and commendations. Yours are quite gratuitous; restraint, the strong impulses of his blood toward for it is reported of him that he never was heard intemperance, falls not into it after, but stands to commend the poetry of any living author.

Southey. Because he is preparing to discharge mination: but Mr. Wordsworth has got into the the weighty debt he owes posterity. Instead of wasting his breath on extraneous praises, we never have been seated five minutes in his company, before he regales us with those poems of his own, which he is the most apprehensive may have slipped from our memory; and he delivers them with such a summer murmur of fostering modulation as would perfectly delight you.

same habit on whatever he writes. Whortleberries are neither the better nor the worse for extending the hard slenderness of their fibres, at random and riotingly, over their native wastes; we care not how much of such soil is covered with such insipidities; but we value that fruit more highly which requires some warmth to swell, and some science and skill to cultivate it. To descend from metaphor: that is the best poetry which, by its own powers, produces the greatest and most durable emotion on generous, well-informed, and elevated minds. It often happens that what belongs to

Porson. My horse is apt to shy when I hang him at any door where he catches the sound of a ballad; and I run out to seize bridle and mane, and grow the alerter at mounting. Southey. Wordsworth has now turned from the the subject is attributed to the poet. Tenderness, ballad style to the philosophical.

melancholy, and other affections of the soul, at

Porson. The philosophical, I suspect, is anta- tract us toward him who represents them to us; gonist to the poetical.

and while we hang upon his neck, we are ready

Southey. Surely never was there a spirit more to think him stronger than he is. No doubt, it philosophical than Shakspeare's.

Porson. True, but Shakspeare infused it into living forms, adapted to its reception. He did not puff it out incessantly from his own person, bewildering you in the mazes of metaphysics, and swamping you in sententiousness. After all our argumentation, we merely estimate poets by their energy, and not extol them for a congeries of piece on piece, sounding of the hammer all day long, but obstinately unmalleable into unity and cohesion.

Southey. I can not well gainsay it. But pray remember the subjects of that poetry in Burns and Scott which you admire the most. What is martial must be the most soul-stirring.

Porson. Sure enough, Mr. Wordsworth's is neither martial nor mercurial. On all subjects of poetry, the soul should be agitated in one way or other. Now did he ever excite in you any strong emotion? He has had the best chance with me; for I have soon given way to him; and he has sung me asleep with his lullabies. It is in our dreams that things look brightest and fairest, and we have the least control over our affections.

Southey. You cannot but acknowledge that the poetry which is strong enough to support, as his does, a wide and high superstructure of morality, is truly beneficial and admirable. I do not say that utility is the first aim of poetry; but I do say that good poetry is none the worse for being useful; and that his is good in many parts, and useful in nearly all.

is very natural that the wings of the Muse should seem to grow larger the nearer they come to the ground! Such is the effect, I presume, of our English atmosphere! But if Mr. Wordsworth should at any time become more popular, it will be owing in great measure to your authority and patronage; and I hope that, neither in health nor in sickness, he will forget his benefactor.

Southey. However that may be, it would be unbecoming and base in me to suppress an act of justice toward him, withholding my testimony in his behalf when he appeals to the tribunal of the public. The reader who can discover no good or indeed no excellent poetry in his manifold productions, must have lost the finer part of his senses.

Porson. And he who fancies he has found it in all or in most of them, is just as happy as if his senses were entire. A great portion of his compositions is not poetry, but only the plasma or matrix of poetry, which has something of the same colour and material, but wants the brilliancy and solidity.

Southey. Acknowledge at least, that what purifies the mind elevates it also; and that he does it.

Porson. Such a result may be effected at a small expenditure of the poetical faculty, and indeed without any. But I do not say that he has none, or that he has little; I only say, and I stake my credit on it, that what he has is not of the. higher order. This is proved beyond all controversy by the effect it produces. The effect of the higher poetry is excitement; the effect of the infePorson. An old woman who rocks a cradle in rior is composure. I lay down a general princia chimney-corner, may be more useful than the ple, and I leave to others the application of it, joyous girl who wafts my heart before her in the to-day, to-morrow, and in time to come. Little waltz, or holds it quivering in the bonds of har- would it benefit me or you to take a side; and mony; but I happen to have no relish for the old still less to let the inanimate raise animosity in woman, and am ready to dip my fork into the us. There are partisans in favour of a poet, and little well-garnished agro-dolce. It is inhuman oppositionists against him; just as there are in to quarrel with ladies and gentlemen who are regard to candidates for a seat in Parliament; easily contented; that is, if you will let them and the vociferations of the critics and of the pohave their own way; it is inhuman to snatch a pulace are equally loud, equally inconsiderate and childish book from a child, for whom it is better insane. The unknown candidate and the unread than a wise one. If diffuseness is pardonable poet has alike a mob at his heels, ready to swear anywhere, we will pardon it in Lyrical Ballads, and fight for him. The generosity which the passing over the conceited silliness of the deno-political mob shows in one instance, the critical

DEMOSTHENES AND EUBULIDES*.

1

is fed incessantly by the fuel of slavish desires, blown by fulsome breath and fanned by cringing follies. It melts mankind into one inert Eubulides. When I had repeated in the morn- mass, carrying off and confounding and consuming to Cynobalanos part of a conversation I helding all beneath it, like a torrent of Etnean lava, with you the evening before, word for word, my bright amid the darkness, and dark again amid memory being very exact, as you know, and especi- the light. ally in retaining your phrases, he looked at me with a smile on his countenance, and said, "Pardon me, O Eubulides, but this surely is not the language of Demosthenes." In reality, you had then, as you often do when we are alone together, given way to your genius, and had hazarded an exuberance of thought, imagination, and expression, which delighted and transported me. For there was nothing idle, nothing incorrect, but much both solid and ornamental; as those vases and tripods are which the wealthy and powerful offer to the gods.