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der mental anxiety and physical sufferings. They chose their moment well, and used it remorselessly.

To all the assaults in the Commons, Mr. Lords, his new Whig allies rendered full and Canning made instant response. In the ample justice to his character. only one speech left unanswered-that of Lord Grey.

There was

This was a speech which does little honor to the memory of a Whig noted in his day, but yet a man who often betrayed narrow views and strong prejudices.

happily triumphed, through his own inherent strength, backed as it was by public opinion all but universal; for the party opposed to Canning's appointment to the place of First Minister was not numerically greater nor much more weighty, when fairly placed in the scale, than that of those noble individuals now termed "Protectionists." It must have been a proud moment for Canning when, in spite of the formidable combination of peers and boroughmongers, in contempt of their protests and remonstrances, Mr. C. Wynn rose in the House of Commons and moved for a new In the beginning of July, Parliament writ of the borough for which Canning sat, was prorogued. The fearful excitement he "having accepted the office of First was over; and the Premier, already underCommissioner of the Treasury." This mined in health, sank into collapse. On was on the 12th of April, 1827; and on the 20th of July, having accidentally taken the 8th of August he expired, at the age of cold and suffered from rheumatism, he refifty-seven; his death accelerated, if not in moved to the Duke of Devonshire's villa a great measure caused, by the most unre- for change of air. On the 30th he waited mitting and ungenerous party-hostility ever for the last time on the King at Windsor, witnessed in England, acting upon a proud who could not fail to perceive his condiand singularly sensitive mind. Deserted in tion; and after suffering the most severe the most ignominious way by the leaders of pain, he died on the 8th of the following what had been his own party, he sought month, in the same chamber where Fox and found able auxiliaries among the had breathed his last breath. He was buWhigs; and wanted but a longer term of ried at the foot of Mr. Pitt's tomb in Westlife to have consolidated a strong and anminster Abbey; and whatever may be the improved government; though we do not permanent estimate which posterity will pretend to say that, comparing Mr. Canning with the men who have succeeded him, the cause of rational freedom has by his death lost any thing.

In Cabinet cycles the same state of things often curiously comes round again. But though without the same hearty support from the opposition which Canning received, Sir Robert Peel is in every way too powerful to be so easily assailed or shaken as the earlier victim.

Of Canning's last struggle it is said:

The tone of the opposition throughout the irregular and intemperate discussions which took place at different times on the ministerial changes, plainly betrayed the animus which lay at the bottom. Mr. Canning was literally baited in both Houses. The attacks which were made upon him are unparalleled in our parliamentary history for personality; their coarseness, malignity, and venom are all of a

form of his public character and services, no English minister was ever more profoundly and generally lamented. His death was universally felt as a national calamity, and mourned over as a private sorrow.

We are certainly much indebted to Mr. Bell for his able and compendious Life of Canning, with which the world must be contented till, in the fulness of time, " The Canning Papers" shall emerge into the broad light of The Row. His letters of forty years to his mother, who predeceased him only by a few months, and which were returned to the writer on her death, would of themselves form a most interesting collection.

From Fraser's Magazine.

personal character. It was not against a sys- PAST AND PRESENT CONDITION OF BRIT

tem of policy they were directed-nor against special opinions or doctrines; but against Mr. Canning himself. His eminence, his pop

ISH POETRY.

ularity, his talents, made him the prey of envy ume appeared in London with the plain and 'Tis sixty years since a thin quarto voland detraction; and this was the ground of hostility upon which he was hunted to the unpretending title of An Ode to Superstideath, when official difficulties were thickening tion, and some other Poems, and exactly round him, and his health was giving way un-the same number of years since a thin oc

tavo appeared at Kilmarnock, entitled, verse was to usurp the place of poetry, dePoems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. sire for skill, and the ambition and impruThe thin quarto was the production of dence of daring for the flight and the rapSamuel Rogers, a young gentleman of ed- tures of the true-born poet. ucation, the son of a London banker; the thin octavo the production of Robert Burns, a Scottish ploughboy, without education, and almost without a penny in the world.

'Tis fifty years since Burns was buried in the kirkyard of St. Michael's:

"O early ripe, to thy abundant store,

What could advancing age have added more!" While the poet of the Ode to Superstition is still among us, full of years and full of health, and as much in love with poetry as ever. "It is, I confess," says Cowley, "but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man; for when once we fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life." It was so with Waller when he was eightytwo, and is so with Mr. Rogers now that he is eighty-one. Long may it be so :

"If envious buckies view wi' sorrow

Thy lengthened days on this blest morrow,
May Desolation's long-teethed harrow,
Nine miles an hour,

Rake them, like Sodom and Gomorrah,
In brunstane stoure."

Waller was the delight of the House of Commons, and, even at eighty, he said the liveliest things of any among them." How true of Rogers, at eighty, at his own, or at any other table!

If such is the case, that Poetry is pretty well extinct among us-which no one, I believe, has the hardihood to gainsay-a retrospective review of what our great men accomplished in the long and important reign of King George III. (the era that has just gone by) will not be deemed devoid of interest at this time. The subject is a very varied one, is as yet without an historian, nor has hitherto received that attention in critical detail so pre-eminently due to a period productive of so many poems of real and lasting merit,-poems as varied, I may add, as any era in our literature can exhibit, the celebrated Elizabethan period, perhaps, but barely excepted.

A new race of poets came in with King George III., for the poets of the preceding reigns who lived to witness the accession of the king either survived that event but a very few years, or were unwilling to risk their reputations in any new contest for distinction. Young was far advanced in years, and content-and wisely so-with the fame of his Satires aud his Night Thoughts; Gray had written his Elegy and his Odes, and was annotating Linnæus within the walls of a college; Shenstone found full occupation for the remainder of his life in laying out the Leasowes to suit the genius of the place; Johnson was put above necessity and the booksellers by a pension from the crown; Akenside and Armstrong were pursuing their profession of physicians; Lyttleton was busy putting The poet of An Ode to Superstition has points and periods to his History; Smollett, outlived a whole generation of poets, poet-in seeking a precarious livelihood from asters, and poetitos; has seen the rise and prose; and Mallet employed in defending decline of schools, Lake, Cockney, and the administration of Lord Bute, and earnSatanic-the changeful caprices of tase-ing the wages of a pension from the ministhe injurious effects of a coterie of friends ter. Three alone adhered in any way to -the impartial verdicts of Time and a third generation-another Temple of Fame -a new class of occupants in many of the niches of the old-restorations, depositions, and removals, and what few are allowed to see, his own position in the Temple pretty well determined, not so high as to be wondered at, nor so low that he can escape from envy and even emulation. Nor is this all he has lived to see poetry at its last gasp among us; the godlike race of the last generation expiring or extinct, and no new-comers in their stead; just as if Nature chose to lie fallow for a time, and

verse Mason was employed in contemplating his English Garden; Glover, in brooding over his posthumous Athenaid; and Home, in writing new tragedies to eclipse, if possible, the early lustre of his Douglas.

There was room for a new race of poets. Nor was it long before a new set of candidates for distinction came forward to supply the places of the old. The voice of the Muse was first awakened in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. I can find no earlier publication of the year 1760 than a thin octavo of seventy pages, printed at Edinburgh, entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collect

ed in the Highlands of Scotland, and first. His name was heard in every circle translated from the Gaelic or Erse lan- of fashion, and in every coffee-house in guage, the first edition of a work which has town. Nor did he suffer his reputation to had its influence in the literature of our flag, but kept the public in one continual country, the far-famed Ossian, the favorite state of excitement for the remainder of his poem of the great Napoleon. "Have you life. He attacked the whole race of acseen," says Gray, "the Erse Fragments tors in his Rosciad; the Critical Reviewsince they were printed? I am more puz-ers (the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewzled than ever about their antiquity, though ers of the day), in his Apology; the whole I still incline (against every body's opinion) to believe them old." Many, like Gray, were alive to their beauties: inquiry was made upon inquiry, and dissertation led to dissertation. It was long, however, before the points in dispute were settled, and the authorship brought home to the pen of the translator. The Fragments have had a beneficial and a lasting effect upon English literature. The grandeur of Ossian emboldened the wing of the youthful Byron. and the noble daring of the allusions and illustrations countenanced the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in what was new and hazardous, when Hayley held, and Darwin was about to assume, a high but temporary position in our poetry.

Scottish nation, in his Prophecy of Fam-
ine; Dr. Johnson, in The Ghost; and Ho-
garth, in A Familiar Epistle. Every per-
son of distinction expected that it was to
be his turn next; and there was no saying
where his satire would not have reached, for
he was busy with a caustic dedication to
Warburton when, on the 4th of November,
1764, he died at Boulogne, at the too early
age of three-and-thirty. Dr. Young sur-
vived him nearly a year.
What the pre-
decessor of Pope in Satire thought of the
new satirist, no one has told us.

our island poetry. The popularity of Churchill kept it on the shelves of the booksellers for a time, but it soon rose into a reputation, and nothing can now occur to keep it down.

While "the noisy Churchill" engrossed to himself the whole attention of the public, a poem appeared in May 1762, likely to outlive the caustic effusions of the satThe Aberdeen volume of poems and irist, because, with equal talent, it is based translations (8vo. 1761) was the first pub- on less fleeting materials. This was The lication of Beattie, the author of The Shipwreck, a Poem, in Three Cantos, by a Minstrel. So lightly, we are told, did Sailor; better known as Falconer's ShipBeattie think of this collection that he used wreck, and deservedly remembered for its to destroy all the copies he could procure," simple tale," its beautiful transcripts of and would only suffer four of the pieces-reality, and as adding a congenial and peand those much altered-to stand in the culiarly British subject to the great body of same volume with the Minstrel. Beattie acquired a very slender reputation by this first heir of his invention; nor would it appear to have been known much beyond the walls of the Marischal College, before the Minstrel drew attention to its pages, When Goldsmith published his first poem and excited curiosity to see what the suc- (The Traveller) in the December of 1764, cessful poet on this occasion had written Churchill had been dead a month, and unsuccessfully before. In the same year there was room for a new poet to supply in which Beattie appeared, a new candi- his place. Nor were critics wanting who date came forward to startle, astonish, and were able and willing to help it forward. annoy. The reputation of a poet of higher "Such is the poem," says Dr. Johnosn, who powers than Beattie seemed likely to ex-reviewed it in the Critical Review, “on hibit would have sunk before the fame of the new aspirant. I allude to Churchill, whose first publication, The Rosciad, appeared in the March of 1761, and without the author's name. This was a lucky, and, what is more, a clever hit. The town, a little republic in itself, went mad about the poem; and when the author's name was prefixed to a second edition, the poet was welcomed by the public, as no new poet had ever been before. Nor was his second publication-his Apology-inferior to his

which we now congratulate the public, as on a production to which, since the death of Pope, it will not be easy to find any thing equal." This was high praise, not considered undeserved at the time, nor thought so now. Such, indeed, was the reputation of the Traveller, that it was likely to have led to a further succession of poets in the school of Pope, but for the timely interposition of a collection of poems which called our attention off from the study of a single school, and directed

the young and rising poets to a wider range for study and imitation.

his encomiums "in kind."

But the poet

of the year 1766 was Anstey, with his New Bath Guide.

"There is a new thing published," says Walpole, "that will make you split your cheeks with laughing. It is called the New Bath Guide. It stole into the world, and, for a fortnight, no soul looked into it, concluding its name was its true name. No such thing. It is a set of letters in verse, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally every thing else; but so much wit, so much humor, fun, and poetry, never met together before. I can say it by heart, and, if I had time, would write it you down; for it is not yet reprinted, and not one to be had."

This collection of poems was Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, one of the most tasteful collections of poems in any language, and one of the best and most widely known: "The publication of which," says Southey, "must form an epoch in the history of our poetry whenever it is written." The first edition appeared in 1765, a year remarkable in more ways than one. Dr. Young, the sole survivor of the poets of the last generation, died at the great age of eighty-four, on the 5th of April; and Mr. Rogers, the still surviving patriarch of the past generation of poets, was born on the 30th of July of the same Gray commended it to Wharton, and Smolyear. lett wrote his Humphrey Clinker (the last The effect of the Reliques was more im-and best of his works) on Anstey's princimediate than some have been willing to ple in his Guide. imagine. The Hermit of Goldsmith, a A publication of the year 1767, called publication of the following year, originat- the Beauties of English Poesy, selected by ed in the Reliques; and the Minstrel of Oliver Goldsmith, deserves to be remarked. Beattie, a publication of the year 1771, in The selection seems to have been made as the preliminary dissertation prefixed to the a sort of antidote to Percy's Reliques. volumes. If Percy had rendered no other "My bookseller having informed me," he service to literature than the suggestion of says, "that there was no collection of Engthe Minstrel, his name would deserve re- lish poetry among us of any estimation, . spect. "The Minstrel," says Southey,. . . I therefore offer this," he adds, to was an incidental effect of Percy's vol- the best of my judgment, as the best columes. Their immediate consequence was lection that has yet appeared. I claim no to produce a swarm of legendary tales,' merit in the choice, as it was obvious, for bearing, in their style, about as much re- in all languages the best productions are semblance to the genuine ballad as the he- most easily found." It will hardly be beroes of a French tragedy to the historical lieved by any one who hears it for the first personages whose names they bear, or a set time, that a poet of Goldsmith's taste in of stage-dances to the lads and lasses of a poetry could have made a selection from village-green, in the old times of the may- our poets without including a single poet pole." This was the more immediate ef- (Milton excepted) from the noble race of fect; the lasting result of the Reliques poets who preceded the Restoration. Yet was their directing the rude groupings of such, however, is the case, ; and I can only genius in a Scott, a Southey, a Coleridge, account for the principle on which the seand a Wordsworth. lection would appear to have been made, that it was meant as an antidote to Percy's publications, or that Goldsmith (and this is not unlikely) was perfectly unacquainted with the poets of a period previous to Dryden and Pope.

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Beattie reappeared in 1766 with a volume of poems, better by far than what he had done before, but still insufficient to achieve the reputation which the Minstrel subsequently acquired for the author of the volume. A second candidate was Cunningham, a player, still remembered for his Kate of Aberdeen, a short but charming piece of simple-hearted poetry. Poor Cunningham made no great way with his verse; he had dedicated his volume, with all the ambition of an actor, to no less a personage than Garrick; but the head of the patentee players received the stroller's poetry with indifference, and did not on this occasion repay-which he commonly did

66

Michael Bruce, a young and promising poet, died in the year 1767, at the too early age of twenty-one. Some of his poems, and they were posthumously published, without the last touches of the authorpossess unusual beauties. His Lochleven is callen by Coleridge, "a poem of great merit ;" and the same great critic directs attention to what he calls "the following exquisite passage, expressing the effects of a fine day on the human heart :"

"Fat on the plain and mountain's sunny side,
Large droves of oxen, and the fleecy flocks,
Feed undisturb'd; and fill the echoing air
With music grateful to the master's ear.
The traveller stops, and gazes round and round

O'er all the scenes that animate his heart
With mirth and music. Ev'n the mendicant,
Bowbent with age, that on the old grey stone,
Sole sitting, suns him in the public way,
Feels his heart leap, and to himself he sings."

Another poet whose song ceased before he had time to do still better things, was poor Falconer, who perished at sea, in the Aurora frigate, in the year 1769. He had sung his own catastrophe in his Shipwreck

only a few years before.

The poem of the year 1770 was The Deserted Village-in some respects a superior poem to The Traveller. It was immediately a favorite, and in less than four months had run through five editions. Gray thought Goldsmith a genuine poet. "I was with him," says Nicholls, at Malvern when he received the Deserted Village, which he desired me to read to him; he listened with fixed attention, and soon exclaimed, This man is a poet !'

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osity of an unselfish one. "This of all others," he says, is my favorite stanza: it is true poetry, it is inspiration." The stanza is well known,

"O, how canst thou renounce,"

and shares with a stanza in the Castle of Indolence the applause of nations.

Mason, in 1771, put forth a new edition
of his Poems, and in a separate publication
the same year the first book of his English
Garden. To the Poems he has made a few
additions, but nothing so beautiful as his
epitaph on his wife, inscribed upon her
grave in Bristol Cathedral. The lines are
well known, but not so the circumstance
lines were written by Gray :--
only recently published, that the last four

"Tell them, though 'tis an awful thing to die,
('Twas e'en to thee) yet the dread path once
trod,

Heav'n lifts its everlasting portals high,
And bids the pure in heart behold their
God.'

We learn from the same unquestionable If The Deserted Village was, as it cer- quarter (the Reminiscences of the Rev. tainly is, an accession to our poetry, the Norton Nicholls), that Gray thought very death of Akenside and the far too prema- little of what he had seen of the English ture removal of Chatterton were real losses Garden." He mentioned the poem of the in the very same year in which Goldsmith's Garden with disapprobation, and said it great poem appeared. Akenside had, no should not be published if he could prevent doubt, sang his song, but Chatterton was it." There are lines and passages, howevonly in his eighteenth year. What a production for a boy was the ballad of "Sir Charles Bawdin!" There is nothing nobler of the kind in the whole compass of our poetry. "Tasso alone," says Campbell, "can be compared to him as a juvenile prodigy. No English poet ever equalled

him at the same age.

er, of true poetry throughout the poem,
which form in themselves an agreeable ac-
cession to our stock of favorite passages.
How exquisite, for instance, is this:-

The haunt of wood-gods only; where, if art
"Many a glade is found
E'er dared to tread, twas with unsaddled foot,
Printless, as if the place were holy ground."

The poem, however, made but a very slender impression on the public mind, nor is it now much read, save by the student of our poetry, to whom it affords a lesson of im

The Deserted Village of the year 1770 was followed in 1771 by the first book of The Minstrel, a poem which has given more delight to minds of a certain class, and that class a high one, than any other poem in the English language. Since Beat-portance. tie composed the poem on which his fame The only remembered publication in porelies, and securely too for an hereafter, etry of the year 1773 was The Heroic many poems of a far loftier and even a Epistle to Sir William Chambers,—a causmore original character have been added to tic attack, replete with wit, humor, and inthe now almost overgrown body of our po- vective, on the architect's Chinese eccenetry, yet Beattie is still the poet for the tricities in the gardens at Kew. It was young; and still in Edwin-that happy long before Mason was suspected of the personification of the poetic temperament satire. Tom Warton was the first to attrib-young and enthusiastic readers delight ute it to his pen; he said it was Walpole's and recognize a picture of themselves. buchramed up by Mason. But Walpole, Gray lived to commend and to correct it from a letter to Mason only recently publishwith the taste of a true poet and the gener-ed, would appear to have had nothing to do

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