Were it as easy to do, as to know what ought to be done, chapels ' had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.' Many a critic has, we fear, been often justified in damning a play, and hissing a performance, though of infinitely less demerit than any possibility of his own. Our verses may claim, at least, the negative propriety of keeping somewhat closer to the metrical movement of the German; nor have we put into the mouth of a dragoon the words of a maudlin maiden, and let him speak of a soldier's death as the term of his sorrows;' nor have we made the last notes of a flourish of trumpets for the charge send these veteran fatalists into the fight with an omen of discomfiture-in the disheartening close, who stakes it may lose'-ringing in their ears:

To horse, my brave comrades, to horse! once met
In the field, we're again our own;
In the field a man is worth something yet,

And the strength of his heart is known:
There nobody takes of the soldier the wall,
'Tis man and himself-to stand or fall.

All care about life he has thrown far away,
Nor hears tell of fear or sorrow;

Boldly he rides to his fate to-day

If it comes not to-day, it will come to-morrow!
Then, if we've no morrow, to-day let us sup
Our last joyous drops from Time's holiday cup.

'Tis folly to strive, and to struggle, and toil,
When Heaven sends a life of pleasure;
Let Hodge pass his days in upturning the soil,
And grovelling for hidden treasure:

He digs and he shovels, a pitiful knave,

Till at fourscore he finds himself digging his grave.

'One spring from his steed, and the rider alights,
A swift and fearful guest;

The bride-torch burns bright on the castle heights,
Uninvited, he joins the feast:

He stops not of parley or ransom to hear—

The storm of a midnight's the pay

of a year.

Why mourneth the maiden, and weepeth so sore ?
Our motto is-Move, boys, move—
Our billets are quarter'd the wide world o'er,

And leaves us small leisure for faithful love :
In no happy valley our tents are cast,

Fierce destiny urges us forward too fast.

Then up, my brave comrades, and on with the bridle!
More freely we breathe in the thick of the fight;
The foam of youth's torrent is all the idle

Brush off-but let us do our work ere night.

Set your lives on the cast, and dash gallantly in:
Who nothing will venture, they nothing shall win.'

Poetry with Lord L. Gower is evidently an art and an accomplishment; not a prophetical impulse, or divine necessity of nature. There is nothing of that which the spirit putteth into 'my mouth, that must I speak.' The only object in publishing verses written for mere amusement, must be that their author may obtain, in some way or other, the opinion of the public; therefore we feel at liberty to tell Lord Leveson, that he has conceived, from the first, far too humble an idea of poetry, even as an art; and that, if he has found amusement in these matters, he has acquired an art far better than the poetaster's,-to wit, that of being easily amused. Nevertheless, there are scattered up and down sufficient proofs of a light and lively hand, and a versatile management of numbers, to show that (in case he be willing to stoop to the requisite degree of concealed labour) he may look to a higher station than that in which the present volumes will place him among the middling poets of the day. It is our deliberate opinion, that he should patiently adhere to his plan of translating the thoughts of others, rather than risk any rash experiments with his own. As far as the choice of a subject is concerned, he appears much better qualified to do justice to writers characterised by spirited movement, or familiar and pointed sallies, than to masters of a higher mood, or to the minglers of the bright and delicate shades of feeling and expression. He will find ample scope and verge enough in the hourly enlarging field of German literature. Its philosophy, indeed, is too subtle and airy for our coarse and mechanical understandings, which seem to insist on some practical application even in the case of metaphysics. But German poetry has an affinity with our own. There is a beautifully imagined ode by Klopstock, where he represents the Muse of Germany entering the lists, as for a race, with that of England. The cloud of dust and the intervening distance are supposed, as the competitors approach

the goal, to conceal them from his sight. We moderns shall have shame, rather than honour, from the testimony borne in it to our mighty masters, if we can consent to an inglorious repose upon ancient, though indeed immortal, laurels. We would fain explain the woful exhibitions so long made by us in the Drama, by the single error of our having been tempted to try our fortune on this course under the cramping pressure of French pumps, rather than in the noble buskins of our forefathers, glorious in the dust of a hundred triumphs. Under this impression, we see no reason why we should shrink more in the case of tragic than in any other form of poetical rivalry, from Klopstock's challenge. When the clouds roll from before that goal, God grant that our nineteenth century may show us (what, assuredly, our eighteenth cannot) an English dramatic poet, whose name is worthy to be mentioned with the names of Goethe and of Schiller!

ART. XIII.—1. The Result of the General Election; or, What has the Duke of Wellington gained by the Dissolution? Third Edition. London: 1830.

2. The Duke of Wellington and the Whigs. London : 1830. 3. Government without Whigs; being an Answer to The Country without a Government,' and the Edinburgh Review. London: 1830.

THE HE readers of this journal will certainly not expect us to take a side with the partisans who range themselves in opposite factions in a purely personal affray. But we must again disclaim any participation in the silly notion that mea'sures, not men,' deserve the people's attention,-a doctrine always ventilated, or rather an outcry always raised, by the slavish adherents of bad rulers, for the purpose of giving their employers breathing time to work mischief, and preventing the people from looking after their own rights and their own interests, until it is too late. It is a doctrine which, if universally accepted, leaves the worst of tyrants nothing to desire-no help to seek in the compassing of his most flagitious designs. To preach it now requires no common portion of assurance, when the late events in France were notoriously rendered necessary by the prevalence of this very heresy. Yes! the revolution which expelled the Bourbons was called down upon their heads by those who held it to be clear that France had no right to complain of the Polignacs, and the Peyronnets, until some measures of an evil nature should be attempted by them. Accord

ingly, the desired time was given, and the first attempt, the 'measure' which these men' brought forward, if it had not overthrown the monarchy, would have destroyed the liberties of the country. Yes! the blood which flowed in the streets of Paris was exacted by the folly of those in France, and their abettors in England, who denied that it was of any moment who held the seals of office, and bade us wait till we saw their acts before we demanded their removal.

It pleases the same reasoners (shall we call them?) to advance a like doctrine in our own country, and to urge its application to the conduct of our own affairs. According to them, it signifies not that the ministers who rule us should be, with one exception, men of no account, destitute of all will of their own, blindly submissive to the dictates of an imperious colleague, and that colleague professedly ignorant of any civil lesson which can befit a statesman's vocation. It is of no moment that they should almost all be persons devoted to the worst principles of policy, foreign and domestic, the well-wishers of arbitrary power in every form, the enemies of improvement at home as of liberty abroad. Look at their acts,' it is said. Have they not allowed the Dissenters and the Catholics to be emancipated? Have they not passed the beer bill? The answer is, that, in spite of their uttermost exertions, the Dissenters carried their own measure, and the government yielded; that rather than resign their places, the ministers resigned, some with a better, and some with a worser grace, their steady attachment to the Penal Code; and that the measure of their adversaries respecting beer, which they had so often resisted, they now adopt as their own, without one additional reason being discovered in its favour since they last joined in defeating it.

The Tracts before us are on opposite sides of the question, and of unequal merit. The first is one of great and admitted force; the second is of a dulness and debility which might bespeak its relationship with almost any member of the cabinet; the third is far less defective in ability, by no means wanting generally in candour, but marked with extraordinary inconsistency, and not a few perversions of known facts.

The Result,' as its title implies, is chiefly occupied with a detail of the effects produced by the late elections upon the numerical strength of the parties which divide our senate. It seems the Minister had promised his Sovereign to strengthen himself by the dissolution. As long as the late King lived, no proposition could be made to extend the basis of the ministry, by including in its service the ablest of its antagonists, even after the principal bone of contention had been removed, the Catholic

question. His late Majesty was always guided by personal considerations, and he must not have his temper ruffled by names of grating sound.' This being founded in fact, served excellently well for a reason why the Duke of Wellington should not propose Lord Grey to his master as a colleague, and why Lord Grey's Friends, who had refused to join the ministry of 1827, because of his exclusion, or rather his voluntary standing aloof from it, should now consent to join the Duke of Wellington, who chose to exclude the noble Earl when he no longer stood aloof. The king died; his successor had rather a liking for Lord Grey and his friends than any prejudice against them; indeed, he was closely connected by marriage with one great Whig house. There was an end then of the former reason: we call it not, as many did, and far more think themselves now entitled to do, a pretence. Some new ground must be discovered for refusing to coalesce with Lord Grey; accordingly, it is stated, that on his Majesty graciously and wisely, and very naturally, asking the question, Don't you want strength ?'-The answer was-The general election will strengthen us.' Possibly the minister who so informed his royal master was so ignorant of his new trade as to have made a calculation that he should really gain in numbers. But did he could he know so very little of his position, as to deem that any gain of mere numbers would cover its weakness? Did he indeed fancy that so deplorable a spectacle as his debates in both Houses exhibited last session, could be mended by a few added to his divisions only? We are bound, at all events, to believe that he thought as he said to his sovereign, and that he has since lost no time in laying before him the Result of the General Election,' and showing how grievously he had miscalculated.

The tract before us is intended to help both parties; the Minister, in setting his Master right, after having misled him through ignorance-through an ignorance hardly to be imagined, of the country he pretends to administer—and his Royal Master, should the Minister, by any oversight, neglect to correct the gross errors of his former statement. Instead of gaining, the list of places and names proves him to have lost above twenty. The runners of the Treasury had boasted that they should gain ninety-three,—an odd number, assumed of course to give a delusive resemblance of reality to the statement. brag has come down to twenty-one since the election; but the authors of the tract before us (for it bears plain marks of being the contribution of more authors than one) having gotten hold of the Treasury calculation, by which it was reckoned that the Opposition gained twenty-five in England and six in Ireland,'

Their