"Consules fiunt quotannis, et novi proconsules, thing He makes a poet, or at least-a king." South was of opinion that the composition of an epigram was the next great difficulty to an epic poem. "And South beheld that master-piece of man." Coxcombs who consider the composition of a song an easy matter should set themselves down, as Burns says, and try. Ask Tommy Moore how many days and nights he has given to a single stanza in an Irish melody? Ask Sam Rogers how long he has spent over the composition of a couplet in An Epistle to a Friend; or Wordsworth how long he has labored with a sonnet; or Bowles-yes, ask the Vicar of Bremhill, if he does not owe the bright finish of his verse as much to pains as happiness? Dryden toiled for a fortnight over his Alexander's Feast, and yet he wrote with easenot the ease of the mob of gentlemen ridiculed by Pope, but with great fluency of idea and great mastery of expression. Good things are not knocked off at a heatfor a long jump there must be a very long run, and a long preparatory training too. There is no saying "I will be a poet." Only consider not the long apprenticeship alone, but the long servitude which the muse requires from those who would invoke her rightly. "In a poet no kind of knowledge is to be overlooked; to a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, the meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety, for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of religious truth, and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."* Every one remembers (poets themselves perhaps excepted) the long course of study and preparation which Milton laid down for himself before he stripped for the Par * Rasselas. adise Lost. And yet one would hardly think, on first reflection, that any course of preparation was necessary for the poet of Comus and Lycidas, and the Hymn on the Nativity of Christ. But Milton fully understood the height of his great argument, and how unequalled with every lengthened But people (not poets) start epics nowadays preparation he must be to record it rightly. without any kind of consideration. No subject is too great for them. Satan, Chaos, The Messiah, The Omnipresence of the Deity, the Fall of Nineveh, The World before the Flood. One shudders at the very idea of subjects so sublime taken up as holyday recreations by would-be poets, without the vision and the faculty divine, or any other merit (if merit it may be called) than the mere impudence of daring : “When will men learn but to distinguish spirits, Benjamin West, the painter, trafficked with subjects of the same sublime description. And in what way? "Without expression, fancy, or design;" without genius and without art. People forget, or choose to forget, that subject alone is not sufficient for a poem. Look at Burns's "Mouse," or Wordsworth's "Peter Bell," or Wilkie's "Blind Fiddler," or Gainsborough's "Cottager" with a dish of cream. It is the treatment which ennobles. But there is no driving this into some people's ears. Big with the swollen ambition of securing a footing on the sun-bright summits of Parnassus, they plume themselves on borrowed wings and bladders of their own, and after a world of ink, a world of big ideas, and a copied invocation, they struggle to ascend, and pant and toil to the end of an epic in as many books as the Iliad or the Æneid. Would that your Robert Montgomerys, your Edwin Atherstones, and sundry such who understand the art of sinking in the low profound-would that they would reflect for five minutes on what an epic poem really is! And what it is, and ought to be, glorious John Dryden tells us in a very few words. "A heroic poem," he says, "truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform." And so it is. "A work," says Milton, "not to be raised] from the heat of youth or the vapors of wine: but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit ledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." who can enrich with all utterance and know And yet Murray and Moxon are troubled once a-week, at the least, with the offer of a new epic, for a certain sum-so run the terms-or, in case of declining that, for half profits. As if epics were blackberries, and men sought fame as Smith O'Brien seeks reputation-by an impertinent folly of their own! But "Fools rush in," and there will still be poetasters-Blackmore and his brethren-in spite of critics, hard words, and something harder still-contemptuous neglect. Few live to see their fame established on a firm and unalterable foundation. The kind criticisms of friends conspire at times to give a false position to a poem, or the malice of enemies unite to obtain for it one equally undeserved. Who now reads Hayley? How many are there in the position of Gascoigne and Churchyard as described by old Michael Drayton ? with. There is Mr. Dickens's last book on the table, which I have not as yet had time to read, and old Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy by its side, coaxing me to renew a youthful acquaintance with its pages; and there are Tristram Shandy, and Humphrey Clinker, and dear delightful Amelia, which I fain would read again, but cannot, I fear, for want of time. Only observe the dust on that fine Froissart on my shelves, and that noble old copy of Ben Jonson's works in folio, with a mark, I could swear, in the third act of the Alchemist or the Silent Woman. There is no keeping pace with the present while we pay any thing like due attention to the past. I pity that man who reads Albert Smith who never read Parthenissa; but perhaps he pities me because I am indifferently up in the writer he admires. How people are cut off from the full literary enjoyments of this life who never read" Munro his Expedition," or the Duchess of Newcastle's Life of the Duke her husband, or Tom Brown, or Ned Ward, or Roger L'Estrange, or Tom Coryat, or the works sixty-three in number" of old John Taylor, the sculler on the Thames ! 66 We wish for poets who will write when Nature and their full thoughts bid them, and are not exacting when we look for more than one sprig of laurel to grace a garland. We have already enough of would-be poets-Augustus Cæsar, King James I., Cardinal Richelieu, the great Lord Clarendon, the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, the famous Lord Chatham; but poetry is what old George Chapman calls ait,-a flower of the sun, which disdains to open to the eye of a candle. "No power the muses' favor can command. What Richelieu wanted Louis scarce could gain, And what young Ammon wish'd, and wish'd in vain." That "lived but a little longer!" It is well they didn't. How will it be with the poets of the past generation two hundred years from this? They cannot possibly go down "complete." There must be weeding. Fancy Sir Walter Scott in twelve volumes, Byron in ten, Southey in ten, Moore in ten, Wordsworth in six-to say nothing of Campbell in two volumes, Rogers in two, and Shelley in four. The poets of the last generation form a library. of themselves. And if poetry is multiplied hereafter at the same rate, we shall want Your "rich ill poets are without exfresh shelves, fresh patience, and a new cuse."* "Your verses, good sir, are no lease of life, for threescore and ten of poems, they'll not hinder your rising in the scriptural existence is far too short to get state."+ "Tis ridiculous for a lord to acquainted with the past and keep up our print verses; 'tis well enough to make intimacy with the present. The literature them to please himself, but to make them of the last fifty years is a study of itself-public is foolish." People affect to think Scott's novels, Scott's poetry, Scott's Mis- that the same talents and application which cellanies, and Scott's Life! Then of the raised Lord Mansfield to the highest honor present, there are the daily papers, the weekly journals, the monthly magazines, the quarterly reviews, all of which we are expected to have a fair passing acquaintance * Lord Roscommon. t Ben Johnson. of the gown, would, had they been turned to the study of poetry, have raised him to as high a position in the catalogue of our poets. 'Tis pretty enough when told in verse- "How many an Ovid was in Murray lost;" yet we are inclined to think that there is very little in it, and that Wordsworth is nearer the mark, who says of self communing and unrecorded men,— the good nature of an easy moment, hardly applicable to the volumes of verse we see published now. Surely there are many put forth without a redeeming stanza or passage to atone for the dry desert of a thousand lines through which the critic is doomed to wander in quest of beauties which he fain would find. Surely Coxeter's collection contained a very large number of one-idea'd volumes! We could have helped him from our own shelves to a very fair collection of verse printed before 1747, when this "curious" collector died, full of the most trivial nothingnesses. For a little volume of verse of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, said to be unique, or nearly so, Mr. Miller has been But this one word " accomplishment" im-known to give twenty guineas or more, and plies a good deal more than mere dexterity and ease-culture and the inspiring aid of books, "Oh, many are the poets that are sown By nature; men endowed with highest gifts, "Pauses, cadence, and well-vowell'd words, And all the graces a good ear affords. For words are in poetry what colors are in painting, and the music of numbers is not to be matched or done without. Look at Donne. Would not Donne's Satires, which abound with so much wit, appear more charming if he had taken care of his words and of his numbers? Whereas his verse is now-if verse it may be called "A kind of hobbling prose, Which limps along and tinkles in the close." There goes much more to the composition of even a third-rate poet than rhymesters at first are willing to allow, for to nature, exercise, imitation, study, art must be added to make all these perfect,- ουτε φυσις ικανή γίνεται τεχνης ατερ, ούτε παν τεχνη μη φυσιν κεκτεμενη Without art nature can never be perfect, and without nature art can claim no being. One of Boswell's recorded conversations with the great hero of his admiration was on the subject of a collection being made of all the poems of all the English poets who had published a volume of poems. "Johnson told me," he says, "that a Mr. Coxeter, whom he knew, had gone the greatest length towards this, having collected about 500 volumes of poets whose works were little known; but that upon his death Tom Osborne bought them, and they were dispersed, which he thought a pity, as it was curious to see any series complete, and in every volume of poems something good may be found." think himself lucky that he has been let off It is the rust we value, not the gold." It is curious, however, to see any collection complete; and Mr. Miller is to be praised for his unceasing endeavors to make his collection of English poetry (literally so called) as complete as possible. observation when at Abbotsford, too curiThe poet of the Irish Melodies made an ous to be passed over in a paper of this dethe remark itself, the rank of the poet who scription, when we consider the merit of made it, and the reputation of the poet who responded to its truth: Scott turned with a look of shrewd humor on his friend, as if chuckling over his own success, and said, "Ecod, we were in the luck of it to come before these fellows!" and added, playfully flourishing his stick as he spoke, we have, like Boabdil, taught them to beat us at our own weapons.' There cannot be a doubt but that the poetry of the present day is of that mediocre level of description which neither pleases This was a kindly criticism, uttered in nor offends; and that much of it, if pub lished sixty years ago, or even thirty years | When poetry was all but extinct among us, ago, would have secured for more than one Cowper and Burns came forward to revive writer a high reputation at the time, and the drooping Muse, and show us, unmispossibly a place in Chalmers' collected edi- takeably enough, that men and studies may tion of our British Poets. Such a reputa-decay, but Nature never dies. tion as Miss Seward achieved, or Hayley, or Oram, or Headley, or Hurdis :"Fame then was cheap, and the first comers sped; And they have kept it since by being dead." DRYDEN. There is little reason to suppose that the great poet of the Excursion is likely to remain more than a few years among us; for though, thank God, in health and vigor, and as fond of poetry as ever, he has outThere was a time when a single poem, lived by the period of an apprenticeship, nay, a decent epigram, procured a niche the threescore years and ten, the Scriptural for its writer in the temple of our poetry; limitation of the life of man. When Wordsbut these times are gone by, inundated as worth dies, there will be a new Session of we now are with verses of one particular the poets for the office of poet-laureate. level of merit, as flat as the waste of Cum-To whom will the lord-chamberlain assign berland, and equally unprofitable; so that the laurel, honored and disgraced by a vathe poet, ambitious of a high reputation in our letters, must make it upon something that is completely novel; and there, as Scott remarked, will rest the only chance for an extended reputation. riety of wearers? To whom will the un- And Apollo himself was at it, they say; And, Poetry has become an easy art, and people have been taught to pump for poetry without a Gildon or a Bysshe to aid their labors. Wakley can laugh in the House of Commons at the poetry of Wordsworth, and treat the senators who surround him with a happy imitation of the great poet of his time. Verse has become an extempore kind of art, a thing to be assumed when wanted; and O'Connell can throw off at a heat a clever parody upon Dryden's famous epigram; as if, like Theodore Hook, he had served an apprenticeship to the art of happy imitation. That the bulk of the socalled poetry of the present day—" nonsense, well tuned and sweet stupidity"-is injurious to a proper estimation of the trueborn poets who still exist, there cannot be a doubt; that it is injurious, moreover, to the How Suckling would put them forward, advancement of poetry among us, is, I think, we must leave to the fancy of the reader. equally the case. Poetry in the highest sense We can do very little more than enumerof the word, was never better understood, ate the names of candidates likely to be though never, perhaps, less cultivated than present on the occasion. We can conceive it is now. Criticism has taken a high stand; their entry somewhat after the following and when the rage for rhyme has fairly ex- manner. A herald, followed by an attendhausted itself, nature will revive among us, ant with a tray of epics from Nineveh at and we shall have a new race of poets to twelve shillings to Orion at a farthing, and uphold, if not to eclipse, the glories of the the authors arranged pretty nearly as folold. There are many still among us to re-lows:-Atherstone first (as the favorite peat without any kind of braggart in their blood: "Therefore, the wits of the town came thither, poet of Lord Jeffrey's later lubrications); Robert Montgomery, 2; Heraud, 3; Read, 4; Horne, 5; and Ben Disraeli, 6. To the epic portion of the candidates the dramatists will succeed, fresh from Sadler's Wells and the Surrey, and led by Talfourd and Bulwer, and followed by Mr. Marston, Mr. Trowton, Mr. Henry Taylor, Sir Coutts Lindsay, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. ing. His poems are, in some respects, an Spicer; Jerrold representing comedy, with-accession to our literature. out a fellow to rival or support him. Then right stuff in him, and he may yet do more; will follow the ballad-writers; Macaulay by but unless it is better than what he has alhimself, and Smythe and Lord John Man-ready done, he had better withhold it. His ners walking like the Babes in the Wood admirers-and he will never be without together. To the trio will succeed Alfred" the few"-will always augur well of afterTennyson and Robert Browning, Monck-performances (though never realized) from ton Milnes, Charles Mackay, and Coventry what has gone before, and attribute to Patmore, followed by a galaxy of ladies for indolence and a pension what from fear and the gallery, led by Mrs. Norton and Miss inability he was unable to accomplish. Barret; with Camilla Toulmin, with a His detractors, on the other hand, will have bunch of flowers; Frances Brown, with a little to lay hold of; they may flatter themnumber of the Athenæum; Eliza Cook, selves with having frightened him into siwith Mr. Cayley's commendation; Miss lence, but their liking for his verses will Costello, with a Persian rose; and Mrs. warm as they grow older. He has nothOgilvy, with her quarto volume of minstrel-ing, however, to fear, if he writes nobly sy from the North. We can fancy Apol-from himself, and the Muse is willing and lo's confusion at the number; and should consenting. in some measure be inclined to abide by his opinion, should he give the laurel at the end, as Suckling has made him, to an alderman of London: "He openly declared that 't was the best sign At this all the wits were in such a maze, That for a good while they did nothing but gaze One upon another, not a man in the place "Only," and how admirable the wit is :- "Only the small poets clear'd up again, Great works "A work t'outwear Seth's pillars, brick and stone, And (Holy Writ excepted) made to yield to none."-Dr. DONNE, appear too rarely to raise expectation that this or that person is likely to produce one. It is near 200 years since Milton began to prune his wings for the great epic of his age and nation; and what has our poetry produced since then in any way approaching what Milton accomplished? Much that is admirable, and much that will live as long as Milton himself, but nothing of the same stamp, for though Scott may affect to speak of Manfred as a poem wherein Byron "matched Milton upon his own ground," yet we all of us pretty well know otherwise; and that the Muse of Byron is as inferior to Paradise Lost, as the Farmer's Boy to The Seasons; or any of the great dramatists of the age of Shakspeare to Shakspeare himself. "O rare Sir John Suckling!" Is Alfred Tennyson a poet? His merits divide the critics. With some people he is every thing, with others he is little or nothing. Betwixt the extremes of admira- Before Mr. Tennyson tries the temper of tion and malice, it is hard to judge uprightly the public for a third time (which we hope of the living. The zeal of his friends is he will do, and before very many years go too excessive to be prudent, the indifference by), it behoves him to consider the strucof his enemies too studied to be sincere.ture of his verse and the pauses of his He is unquestionably a poet, in thought, numbers a little more maturely than he has language, and in numbers. But the New hitherto done. It behoves him, moreover, Timon tells us he is not a poet; Peel tells to rub off a few affectations of style, the us that he is, and gives him a pension of besetting sin of too many of his verses, 2001. a-year to raise him above the exigen- and too often mistaken, by the young escies of the world. But the satirist has pecially, for one of the marks of originality, dropped his condemnation from the third and not for what it is-one of its peculiariedition of his poem, and the pension still ties; and what is more, a very bad pecucontinues to be paid. Is it, therefore, de- liarity both in matter and in manner. Coleserved? We think it is, not from what Mr. ridge understood the deficiencies of Mr. Tennyson has as yet performed, but what Tennyson's Muse when he uttered the folhe has shown himself capable of perform-lowing capital criticism upon him : |