MY DEAR PROстов, You see I write quite familiarly to you, though I never have had the pleasure of beholding the light of your countenance. You are a man for whom, as ODoherty says, I have a particular regard, and therefore do not stand upon matters of mere ceremony. As for styling you Barry Cornwall, for God's sake, drop that horrid humbug. Everybody is laughing at you about it; and in reality it is not right or creditable to have an alias. Write as Cobbett and I do, always with your real name. It would be much more sensible, and less pick-pocket like.

I cannot charge my memory, or my conscience, with having read any of your poetry. I occasionally see scraps of it in periodical works, of which you know I am a most ardent and constant reader, but I regularly skip them. I understand that you have a fancy that you can write after the manner of "those old, down-looking Greeks;" but do give up the idea. It is fudge at this time of the day-mere fudge and more particularly in you, who know nothing of the language or the

ideas of the people. When Quintus Horatius Flaccus, of whom you may have heard under the name of Francis's Horace, botched it, though he had lived in the country-spoken the language-wrote in it-knew the people thoroughly-professed the creed of its mythology-you may take it for granted that you cannot do any good in the line. In like manner, I am told, you are vainly at work on Italian literature, writing about Colonnas, Mirandolas, &c. Let me beg of you to give up that too. You are aware that you do not know as much Italian as would suffice you to call for a mouthful of bread, and if you were left alone in any town of Italy, you would be compelled to open your mouth, and point to it, whenever your nether guts grumbled for their mess of pottage. In this state of things, you can never be a Boccace-by the by, an Italian scholar like you, ought to know that his name is Boccaccio]-in rhyme. In a word, let me inform you, that it is always as well to let writing on subjects which have engaged master minds altogether alone; and that a know

ledge of such subjects is not to be acquired by any one, without deep and severe study-if, indeed, a foreigner can ever acquire it at all.

But though I have not read your verse, I am a great reader of your prose. This, indeed, I-do ex officio. For I rejoice to perceive that you contribute to various magazines, reviews, and newspapers, wherewith I regale myself; and, as I said before, I am a great swallower of that kind of nutriment. In particular, I read the Edinburgh Review, a circumstance, I should suppose, of which you are aware, and in it I frequently, with much pleasure and profit, peruse your lucubrations on poetry. On the subject of your last appearance in print, it is that I am about to address you-you know I mean the review of Percy Shelley's poetry, which appeared in the last number of that excellent and highlyrespectable periodical, and must tend to uphold the present general opinion of the wit and wisdom displayed in its pages.

As that Journal does not go much into public, you will no doubt feel gratified when I announce to you, that it is my intention to make some remarks on your article, which will, I am pretty sure, have the effect of drawing more attention to it than it would otherwise have received. I am, in general, very much thanked by my friends for such favours; but, my dear Bryan, between you and me, such compliments would be quite superfluous. Without further preamble, then, we may as well get at once to the matter in hand; and, therefore, I just copy out, "slick right away," the very first sentence of your composition.

"Mr Shelley's style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science-a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

There is a degree of clearness in this description of Shelley's poetry, that must strike the most unenlightened. Obtuse must be the pericranium of that plebeian who would not, off-hand, understand the whole history and mystery of the business, out of this simple paragraph. Pray, Mr Tims," Miss

"vat is

Anner Mariar Price will say, your hown hopinion hof Mr Shelley's werses?"-" Vy, ma'am," Mr Tims, graciously bending over his tea-cup, will answer, "hit his to poetry vat hastrojoly his to natteral science.""Look, just now only think o' that!" Miss Anner Mariar will exclaim; "vy, Mr Tims, you ave it the nail on the ead, and taken the right sow by the hear."

Such will be the conversation, dear Proctor, among your friends; but, as I have not time to go through all they will say from that to the seventh cup, I shall quote no more of their interesting chit-chat. Your next observation is kind and considerate. 66 Poetry, we [that is I, Bryan Proctor grant, creates a world of its own. After this permission, it would go to work without delay, but, unfortunately, the next clause hurts the grant somewhat."But it creates it out of existing materials." Now this is a queer sort of creation. John Locke (he was an eminent metaphysician and commissioner in the days of King William, Bryan, and perhaps you may have heard of his name) would demur a little, but that, to be sure, is nothing to you. Henceforth we shall never say at Ambrose's, “Make me a tumbler of punch ;”but "Create a tumbler." It is a magnificent word. It will have a grand sound to say, "What are you doing

down at the end of the table, Jamie Hogg?"- "CREATING a bowl!"

"I thank thee, scribe, for teaching me that word," and shall certainly use it hereafter.

"Mr Shelley," you next tell us, "is the maker of his own poetry out of nothing." If he were so, he would be a creator in good earnest, but unluckily it happens not to be the case. The materials of Shelly's poetry existed as much as those of any other poet in the world. He imposed on you and other profound and original thinkers. like you, nonsense for sublimity, but in his most ultra-mundane flight, you will find that there is not an idea which is not as mundane as one of Hogg's novels, and, moreover, ninetenths of them, such as they are, were in print, in types, Bryan, before he was created.

"In him," we find as we get on, "fancy, will, caprice, predominated over, and absorbed, the natural influences of things." This is a touch beyond me. What are the natural influ

ences of things? How does fancy absorb them? Drop me a note by return of post, for I have been ransacking my brains these three hours about this sentence, and now must leave it in my rear while I march on. But the remainder of this second paragraph is indeed difficult reading, being composed in that style of which you are a distinguished professor, and which may be classed under the great generic name of havers. As you write for a Scotch review, I need not add the interpretation of that admirable word.] There are two pretty specimens which I shall embalm by reprinting them.

"When we see the dazzling beacon-light straining over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below."

Here Shelley is an abyss of rather a singular nature, with beacon-lights above it, and quicksands and rocks below it; but in the next he is a mere segar. "The fumes of his vanity rolled volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy tabernacle of his thought." This is fine. Cloudy tabernacle is a famous name for a tobacco-box. Henceforward, when I call my boy after dinner, it shall be thus: Ho, flunky of mine, bring me my cloudy tabernacle, that I may roll a volume of smoke. But after all, it is not fair to call Mr Shelley's book "volumes of smoke," though, to be sure, they might serve to light a pipe well enough.

Having thus so successfully settled his genius, we now come to his per

son.

"Mr Shelley was a remarkable man; his person was a type and shadow of his genius; [Did it not strike you, Bryan, that it is rather impossible that it should be both? his complexion fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light." In my school-boy days-alas! a long time ago I remember we used to frighten the neighbourhood by setting a scooped turnip upon a pole, with a candle in it, making its countenance transparent with an inward light," to the great terror of the rustics; but I cannot agree with you, my dear Proctor, that it was a very handsome-looking physiognomy. However, " de gustibus," &c. Nor do I agree with you, that freckles are so peculiarly beautiful; but in this I am not positive, recollecting that the Duchess of Orleans declares, that one of the beauties of Louis the Fourteenth's court was

66

"belle comme une ange," though from head to foot she was "entirement rousse;" which my friend Whittaker's delightful translator renders "red-haired," he being as intimately and gracefully skilled in the language as yourself.

However, let us keep moving. Shelley" reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid's fables." In the name of Jupiter, Bryan, keep away from the classics. Of which of the fables? Was he like Actæon, horned? or like Lycaon, raving against the gods, and howling for human blood? or like Medea, scattering poison? or like Bottom the weaver, with a Whig head upon his shoulders? You know, Bryan, you will find this eminent classic in the 53d book of the Metabamesean, l. 1416, a book which you have read, I am sure, as often as you have read Ovid in Latin.] Or rather like Narcissus, I suppose, for "his form, graceful and slender, stooped like a flower in the breeze"-in other words, he was round-shouldered. But, in truth, is there not something sickening and Italianized in thus beslavering a man's personal appearance? What need MEN care about his freckled phiz and his hang-a-bone stoop?

"He

Let us turn to the criticism, which you continue with your usual wisdom. I shall skip a few sentences, in order to exhibit your reasoning powers in a most amiable light. thought," you tell us, and acted logically;" though how you, who do not know a syllogism in Barbara from a paralogism in Darapti, discovered this fact, is hard to conjecture; but you soon explain it to us. This gentleman, who, Mr Barry Cornwall informs us, thought logically, "spurning the world of realities, rushed into the world of nonentities and contingencies like air into a vacuum. If a thing was old and established, this was with him a certain proof of its having no foundation to rest upon; if it was new, it was good and right. EVERY PARADOX

WAS TO HIM A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH.

After which it is quite evident that he had a logical mind, and that you are the boy who can judge of one.

You soon take a fine fizgig into your head, but I shall let you speak for yourself. "The two extremes [infidelity and orthodoxy] in this way often meet, jostle, and confirm one another. The infirmities of age are a foil to the presumption of youth; and

then the antics sit' mocking one another-the ape Sophistry, pointing with reckless scorn at palsied eld,' and the bed-rid hag Legitimacy, rattling her chains, counting her beads, dipping her hands in blood, what, while counting her beads ?-think for a while, Bryan, and you will find it a difficult operation, and blessing herself while counting her beads, and dipping her hands in blood from every appeal to common sense and reason. As polite commentators say, I shall not weaken the force of that fine passage by a word, but recommend you to get your friend Haydon, the Raphael of the Cockneys, to paint the subject on an acre of canvass, and exhibit it at the first show of Incurables, in Suffolk-Street. In a sentence or two after this, your logical mind shows forth to great advantage. "The martello towers, with which we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and oppression, should not be castles in the air, or clouds on the verge of the horizon; but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have arisen out of their own continuance." From which it follows, logically, that in order to carry on the war against fraud and oppression successfully, we must accumulate abuses, and make them into martello towers. Oh, my logician!

Your knowledge of mechanics, which shines very soon after, is quite equal to your dialectics. "To be convinced of the existence of wrong, we should read history rather than poetry,-[a deep discovery-the levers with which we must work out our own regeneration, are not the cobwebs of the brain, but the warm, palpitating fibres of the human heart." Á palpitating fibre would make a pretty lever-almost as good as a cobweb-but as that is nothing to you, Bryan, we must pass over it, as I shall do the remainder of the paper, including the exalting and purifying Promethean heat" which concludes it.

"Mr Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr Keats's poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom"-rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's poetry on board! Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr Shelley's poems we are told that "his vessel bore out of sight with a favourable wind;" but

what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig-iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a "swirl !" I lay a wager that it righted soon after ejecting Jack. "These are two out of four poetspatriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years." Stop for a moment, Bryan; I cannot let you go on quite so fast. The four who visited Italy were not four poets-they were one poet, one rover, one blockhead, and one KING OF THE COCKNEYSand I am sorry to say, that the taint of the last corrupted the entire mass. Poor Byron sunk under the connexion, and, sick of his associates, left Italy in despair, to die in Greece of vexation and dread. May his death be a warning to all men of genius, that there is a depth of infamy, from which it is impossible for any talent to extricate itself! I own, Bryan, you are pathetic on the subject of Jack. "Keats died young, and yet his infelicity had years too many. A canker had blighted the tender bloom that overspread a face, in which youth and genius shone with beauty." (What! beslobbering men's faces again-fie! fie!) "The shaft was sped-venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to the grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower-men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment -who laugh loud over the silent urn of genius, and play out their games of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of genius!" In this last passage you must allude to Cobbett and Tom Paine, for I know not any other person who made play with the crumbling bones of genius on, or rather under, the earth. But do you forget that Byron laughed most heartily of all, at Keats's cause of death? I had hoped you might remember his capital couplet

Strange that the soul's etherial particle Should let itself be snuffed out by an article!

And, indeed, the brains of him who imagines that Keats or anybody else was killed by the strictures of Mr Murray's Review, must be madness itself. It comes, moreover, with peculiar bad grace in the pages of Mr Jeffrey's work, which has sneered, with the most venal and spiteful malignity conceiva