Nature of Didactic and Descriptive Poetry:- Death and Life, the earliest Specimen of English Blank Verse:- Bishop Hall's Satires:-Brown's Pastorals:-Donne:- Butler's Hudibras:- Dryden, Pope, Akenside, Dyer, Ancient Minstrels, Troubadours, and Ballad-Writers: - Abundance and Beauty of the old English Lyrical Poems:-Sir Thomas Wyatt:-Beaumont and Fletcher: - Martin Llewellyn: - Sir Walter Raleigh: - George Herbert : Translations of the Psalms :- Modern Ballad-Writers: - Modern Odes: Dryden, Pope, HAIL Bards triumphant! born in happier days! Whose honours with increase of ages grow, POPE. LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY ANALYSIS. General Historical Summary:-' Ir may appear somewhat presumptuous to hope to interest your attention, by a series of Lec-. tures upon English Poetry, after the power and ability with which the mechanical and useful Arts have so recently been discussed and explained, on the same spot; and the wonders and mysteries of those Sciences laid open, which contribute so much to the happiness, the com B forts, and even the necessities, of ordinary life. In introducing Poetry to your notice, I am constrained to confess that it is a mere superfluity and ornament. As Falstaff said of Honour, "it cannot set to a leg, or an arm, or heal the grief of a wound; it has no skill in Surgery." Still, within the mind of man there exists a craving after intellectual beauty and sublimity. There is a mental appetite, which it is as necessary to satisfy as the corporeal one. There are maladies of the mind, which are even more destructive than those of the body; and which, like the demon driven out of Saul by the sound of the sweet harp of David, have been known to yield to the soothing influence of Poetry. The earliest accomplishment of the rudest and wildest stages of society, it is also the crowning grace of the most polished and civilized. Nations the most illustrious in Arts and arms, have also been the most celebrated for their cultivation of letters; and when the monuments of those Arts, and the achievements of those arms, have passed away from the face of the earth, they have transmitted their fame to the remotest ages through the medium of Literature alone. The genius of Timanthes lives but in the pages of Pliny; and the sword of Cæsar has been rendered immortal only by his pen. The canvas fritters into shreds, and the column moulders into ruin; the voice of Music is mute; and the beautiful expression of Sculpture a blank and gloomy void; the right hand of the Mechanist forgets its cunning, and the arm of the Warrior becomes powerless, in the grave; but the lyre of the Poet still vibrates : ages listen to his song and honour it; and while the pencil of Apelles, and the chisel of Phidias, and the sword of Cæsar, and the engines of Archimedes, live only in the breath of tradition, or on the page of history, or in some perishable and imperfect fragment; the pen of Homer, or of Virgil, or of Shakspeare, is an instrument of power, as mighty and magical as when first the gifted finger of the Poet grasped it, and with it traced those characters which shall remain unobliterated, until the period when this great globe itself,— "And all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like an insubstantial Pageant faded, The history of the Poetry of England exhi bits changes and revolutions not less nume |