No More Learning

Sir Walter may, indeed,
surfeit us: his imitators make us sick! It may be asked, it has been
asked, "Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to
Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this
kind? " And we answer--"Yes! " Every foot of soil is with us worked up:
nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no
room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for
wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen
hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true,
gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they
live under clipped hedges, and repose in camp-beds, and do not perch
on crags, like eagles, or take shelter, like sea-mews, in basaltic
subterranean caverns. We have heaths with rude heaps of stones upon
them: but no existing superstition converts them into the Geese of
Micklestane-Moor, or sees a Black Dwarf groping among them. We have
sects in religion: but the only thing sublime or ridiculous in that way
is Mr. Irving, the Caledonian preacher, who "comes like a satyr staring
from the woods, and yet speaks like an orator! " We had a Parson Adams
not quite a hundred years ago--a Sir Roger de Coverley rather more than
a hundred! Even Sir Walter is ordinarily obliged to pitch his angle
(strong as the hook is) a hundred miles to the North of the "Modern
Athens" or a century back. His last work,[A] indeed, is mystical,
is romantic in nothing but the title-page. Instead of "a
holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable
watering-place--and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down
from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the
level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him
as it has undone us!

Sir Walter has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than
fiction; that there is no romance like the romance of real life; and
that if we can but arrive at what men feel, do, and say in striking and
singular situations, the result will be "more lively, audible, and full
of vent," than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain. With reverence be it
spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig
upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him. Our author
has conjured up the actual people he has to deal with, or as much as he
could get of them, in "their habits as they lived. " He has ransacked old
chronicles, and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out
musty records; he has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sibyls; he
has invoked the spirits of the air; he has conversed with the living and
the dead, and let them tell their story their own way; and by borrowing
of others, has enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth,
and freedom. He has taken his materials from the original, authentic
sources, in large concrete masses, and not tampered with or too much
frittered them away. He is only the amanuensis of truth and history. It
is impossible to say how fine his writings in consequence are, unless we
could describe how fine nature is. All that portion of the history of
his country that he has touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners,
the personages, the events, the scenery, lives over again in his
volumes. Nothing is wanting--the illusion is complete. There is a
hurtling in the air, a trampling of feet upon the ground, as these
perfect representations of human character or fanciful belief come
thronging back upon our imaginations. We will merely recall a few of
the subjects of his pencil to the reader's recollection; for nothing we
could add, by way of note or commendation, could make the impression
more vivid.

There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic;
and Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the
fierce Vich Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie
Gellatly roasting his eggs or turning his rhymes with restless
volubility, and the two stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever
Titian painted, or Paul Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley,
brandishing his sword and his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a
fall with the insolent, gigantic Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and
vanquishing him at the noble battle of Loudonhill; there is Bothwell
himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel, selfish, profligate, but with
the love-letters of the gentle Alice (written thirty years before), and
his verses to her memory, found in his pocket after his death: in the
same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone figure, like a figure in
Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at the turning to the
mountain, to warn Burley that there is a lion in his path; and
the fawning Claverhouse, beautiful as a panther, smooth-looking,
blood-spotted; and the fanatics, Macbriar and Mucklewrath, crazed with
zeal and sufferings; and the inflexible Morton, and the faithful Edith,
who refused to "give her hand to another while her heart was with her
lover in the deep and dead sea. " And in _The Heart of Mid-Lothian_ we
have Effie Deans (that sweet, faded flower) and Jeanie, her more than
sister, and old David Deans, the patriarch of St. Leonard's Crags, and
Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline
Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous swinging in the
wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly
mother. --Again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched
on her bier with "her head to the east," and Dirk Hatterick (equal to
Shakespear's Master Barnardine), and Glossin, the soul of an attorney,
and Dandy Dinmont, with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the
fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old counsellor Pleydell, and
Dominie Sampson,[D] and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyry), and
Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh
Osbaldistone, and Die Vernon, the best of secret-keepers; and in the
_Antiquary_, the ingenious and abstruse Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, and the
old beadsman Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure of old Edith
Elspeith, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long
extinguished, had it not been fed by remorse and "thick-coming"
recollections; and that striking picture of the effects of feudal
tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy Earl of Glenallan; and the Black
Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot (the cheerful hunter), and
his cousin Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the
_Children of the Mint_, and the baying of the blood-hound that tracks
their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears now), and
Amy and her hapless love, and the villain Varney, and the deep voice of
George of Douglas--and the immoveable Balafre, and Master Oliver the
Barber in Quentin Durward--and the quaint humour of the Fortunes of
Nigel, and the comic spirit of Peveril of the Peak--and the fine old
English romance of Ivanhoe. What a list of names! What a host of
associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of
genius! What a world of thought and feeling is thus rescued from
oblivion! How many hours of heartfelt satisfaction has our author given
to the gay and thoughtless! How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain
and solitude! It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened
applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as
they can read, and he does not write himself down. He is always in the
public eye, and we do not tire of him. His worst is better than any
other person's best. His _backgrounds_ (and his later works are little
else but back-grounds capitally made out) are more attractive than the
principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers. His
works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature.
This is indeed to be an author!

The political bearing of the _Scotch Novels_ has been a considerable
recommendation to them. They are a relief to the mind, rarefied as it
has been with modern philosophy, and heated with ultra-radicalism. At a
time also, when we bid fair to revive the principles of the Stuarts,
it is interesting to bring us acquainted with their persons and
misfortunes. The candour of Sir Walter's historic pen levels our
bristling prejudices on this score, and sees fair play between
Roundheads and Cavaliers, between Protestant and Papist. He is a writer
reconciling all the diversities of human nature to the reader. He does
not enter into the distinctions of hostile sects or parties, but treats
of the strength or the infirmity of the human mind, of the virtues or
vices of the human breast, as they are to be found blended in the whole
race of mankind. Nothing can shew more handsomely or be more gallantly
executed. There was a talk at one time that our author was about to take
Guy Faux for the subject of one of his novels, in order to put a more
liberal and humane construction on the Gunpowder Plot than our "No
Popery" prejudices have hitherto permitted. Sir Walter is a professed
_clarifier_ of the age from the vulgar and still lurking old-English
antipathy to Popery and Slavery. Through some odd process of _servile_
logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims of the Stuarts by
the courtesy of romance, the House of Brunswick are more firmly seated
in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning, become
legitimate! In any other point of view, we cannot possibly conceive
how Sir Walter imagines "he has done something to revive the declining
spirit of loyalty" by these novels. His loyalty is founded on _would-be_
treason: he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion. Does
he really think of making us enamoured of the "good old times" by the
faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us
back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system
as "a consummation devoutly to be wished? " Is he infatuated enough,
or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed
prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the
beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when
he himself is obliged to apologise for the horrors he describes, and
even render his descriptions credible to the modern reader by referring
to the authentic history of these delectable times? [E] He is indeed
so besotted as to the moral of his own story, that he has even the
blindness to go out of his way to have a fling at _flints_ and _dungs_
(the contemptible ingredients, as he would have us believe, of a modern
rabble) at the very time when he is describing a mob of the twelfth
century--a mob (one should think) after the writer's own heart, without
one particle of modern philosophy or revolutionary politics in their
composition, who were to a man, to a hair, just what priests, and kings,
and nobles _let_ them be, and who were collected to witness (a spectacle
proper to the times) the burning of the lovely Rebecca at a stake for
a sorceress, because she was a Jewess, beautiful and innocent, and the
consequent victim of insane bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is
at this moment (when the heart is kindled and bursting with indignation
at the revolting abuses of self-constituted power) that Sir Walter
_stops the press_ to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke (as
he thinks) in the wheel of upstart innovation! This is what he "calls
backing his friends"--it is thus he administers charms and philtres to
our love of Legitimacy, makes us conceive a horror of all reform, civil,
political, or religious, and would fain put down the _Spirit of the
Age_. The author of Waverley might just as well get up and make a speech
at a dinner at Edinburgh, abusing Mr. Mac-Adam for his improvements in
the roads, on the ground that they were nearly _impassable_ in many
places "sixty years since;" or object to Mr. Peel's _Police-Bill_, by
insisting that Hounslow-Heath was formerly a scene of greater interest
and terror to highwaymen and travellers, and cut a greater figure in
the Newgate-Calendar than it does at present. --Oh! Wickliff, Luther,
Hampden, Sidney, Somers, mistaken Whigs, and thoughtless Reformers in
religion and politics, and all ye, whether poets or philosophers, heroes
or sages, inventors of arts or sciences, patriots, benefactors of the
human race, enlighteners and civilisers of the world, who have (so far)
reduced opinion to reason, and power to law, who are the cause that we
no longer burn witches and heretics at slow fires, that the thumb-screws
are no longer applied by ghastly, smiling judges, to extort confession
of imputed crimes from sufferers for conscience sake; that men are no
longer strung up like acorns on trees without judge or jury, or hunted
like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the cruelty
of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former times;
to whom we owe it, that we no longer wear round our necks the collar of
Gurth the swineherd, and of Wamba the jester; that the castles of great
lords are no longer the dens of banditti, from whence they issue with
fire and sword, to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in
loathsome dungeons without knowing the cause, or have our right hands
struck off for raising them in self-defence against wanton insult; that
we can sleep without fear of being burnt in our beds, or travel without
making our wills; that no Amy Robsarts are thrown down trap-doors by
Richard Varneys with impunity; that no Red Reiver of Westburn-Flat sets
fire to peaceful cottages; that no Claverhouse signs cold-blooded
death-warrants in sport; that we have no Tristan the Hermit, or Petit-
Andrè, crawling near us, like spiders, and making our flesh creep, and
our hearts sicken within us at every moment of our lives--ye who have
produced this change in the face of nature and society, return to earth
once more, and beg pardon of Sir Walter and his patrons, who sigh at not
being able to undo all that you have done! Leaving this question, there
are two other remarks which we wished to make on the Novels. The one
was, to express our admiration at the good-nature of the mottos, in
which the author has taken occasion to remember and quote almost every
living author (whether illustrious or obscure) but himself--an indirect
argument in favour of the general opinion as to the source from which
they spring--and the other was, to hint our astonishment at the
innumerable and incessant in-stances of bad and slovenly English in
them, more, we believe, than in any other works now printed. We should
think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has
once written it, or overlook the press.

If there were a writer, who "born for the universe"--

"-----------Narrow'd his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for
mankind--"


who, from the height of his genius looking abroad into nature, and
scanning the recesses of the human heart, "winked and shut his
apprehension up" to every thought or purpose that tended to the future
good of mankind--who, raised by affluence, the reward of successful
industry, and by the voice of fame above the want of any but the most
honourable patronage, stooped to the unworthy arts of adulation, and
abetted the views of the great with the pettifogging feelings of the
meanest dependant on office--who, having secured the admiration of the
public (with the probable reversion of immortality), shewed no respect
for himself, for that genius that had raised him to distinction, for
that nature which he trampled under foot--who, amiable, frank, friendly,
manly in private life, was seized with the dotage of age and the fury
of a woman, the instant politics were concerned--who reserved all his
candour and comprehensiveness of view for history, and vented his
littleness, pique, resentment, bigotry, and intolerance on his
contemporaries--who took the wrong side, and defended it by unfair
means--who, the moment his own interest or the prejudices of others
interfered, seemed to forget all that was due to the pride of intellect,
to the sense of manhood--who, praised, admired by men of all parties
alike, repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed
blow at the reputation of every one who was not the ready tool of
power--who strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn
over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the
hot-bed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility--who
supported the worst abuses of authority in the worst spirit--who joined
a gang of desperadoes to spread calumny, contempt, infamy, wherever they
were merited by honesty or talent on a different side--who officiously
undertook to decide public questions by private insinuations, to prop
the throne by nicknames, and the altar by lies--who being (by common
consent) the finest, the most humane and accomplished writer of his age,
associated himself with and encouraged the lowest panders of a venal
press; deluging, nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage
of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar _slang_; shewing no remorse, no
relenting or compassion towards the victims of this nefarious and
organized system of party-proscription, carried on under the mask of
literary criticism and fair discussion, insulting the misfortunes of
some, and trampling on the early grave of others--

"Who would not grieve if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he? "

But we believe there is no other age or country of the world (but ours),
in which such genius could have been so degraded!


[Footnote A: No! For we met with a young lady who kept a circulating
library and a milliner's-shop, in a watering-place in the country, who,
when we inquired for the _Scotch Novels_, spoke indifferently about
them, said they were "so dry she could hardly get through them," and
recommended us to read _Agnes_. We never thought of it before; but we
would venture to lay a wager that there are many other young ladies in
the same situation, and who think "Old Mortality" "dry. "]

[Footnote B: Just as Cobbett is a _matter-of-fact reasoner_. ]

[Footnote C: St. Ronan's Well. ]

[Footnote D: Perhaps the finest scene in all these novels, is that where
the Dominie meets his pupil, Miss Lucy, the morning after her brother's
arrival. ]

[Footnote E: "And here we cannot but think it necessary to offer some
better proof than the incidents of an idle tale, to vindicate the
melancholy representation of manners which has been just laid before
the reader. It is grievous to think that those valiant Barons, to whose
stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their
existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and
capable of excesses, contrary not only to the laws of England, but to
those of nature and humanity. But alas! we have only to extract from the
industrious Henry one of those numerous passages which he has collected
from contemporary historians, to prove that fiction itself can hardly
reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period.

"The description given by the author of the Saxon Chronicle of the
cruelties exercised in the reign of King Stephen by the great barons and
lords of castles, who were all Normans, affords a strong proof of the
excesses of which they were capable when their passions were inflamed.
'They grievously oppressed the poor people by building castles; and when
they were built, they filled them with wicked men or rather devils, who
seized both men and women who they imagined had any money, threw them
into prison, and put them to more cruel tortures than the martyrs ever
endured. They suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet,
or the head, or the thumbs, kindling fires below them. They squeezed the
heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while
they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and
toads. ' But it would be cruel to put the reader to the pain of perusing
the remainder of the description. "--_Henry's Hist_. edit. 1805, vol.
vii. p. 346. ]





* * * * *





LORD BYRON.



Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living[A] the two,
who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the greatest geniuses of
the age. The former would, perhaps, obtain the preference with the fine
gentlemen and ladies (squeamishness apart)--the latter with the critics
and the vulgar. We shall treat of them in the same connection, partly
on account of their distinguished pre-eminence, and partly because they
afford a complete contrast to each other. In their poetry, in their
prose, in their politics, and in their tempers no two men can be more
unlike. If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been

"Born universal heir to all humanity,"

it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension. He is, in a
striking degree, the creature of his own will. He holds no communion
with his kind; but stands alone, without mate or fellow--

"As if a man were author of himself,
And owned no other kin. "

He is like a solitary peak, all access to which is cut off not more by
elevation than distance. He is seated on a lofty eminence, "cloud-capt,"
or reflecting the last rays of setting suns; and in his poetical moods,
reminds us of the fabled Titans, retired to a ridgy steep, playing on
their Pan's-pipes, and taking up ordinary men and things in their hands
with haughty indifference. He raises his subject to himself, or tramples
on it: he neither stoops to, nor loses himself in it. He exists not by
sympathy, but by antipathy. He scorns all things, even himself. Nature
must come to him to sit for her picture--he does not go to her. She must
consult his time, his convenience, and his humour; and wear a _sombre_
or a fantastic garb, or his Lordship turns his back upon her. There is
no ease, no unaffected simplicity of manner, no "golden mean. " All is
strained, or petulant in the extreme. His thoughts are sphered and
crystalline; his style "prouder than when blue Iris bends;" his spirit
fiery, impatient, wayward, indefatigable. Instead of taking his
impressions from without, in entire and almost unimpaired masses, he
moulds them according to his own temperament, and heats the materials
of his imagination in the furnace of his passions. --Lord Byron's verse
glows like a flame, consuming every thing in its way; Sir Walter Scott's
glides like a river, clear, gentle, harmless. The poetry of the first
scorches, that of the last scarcely warms. The light of the one proceeds
from an internal source, ensanguined, sullen, fixed; the other reflects
the hues of Heaven, or the face of nature, glancing vivid and various.
The productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and the freshness
of antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle
from their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and matter. Sir
Walter's rhymes are "silly sooth"--

"And dally with the innocence of thought,
Like the old age"--

his Lordship's Muse spurns _the olden time_, and affects all the
supercilious airs of a modern fine lady and an upstart. The object of
the one writer is to restore us to truth and nature: the other chiefly
thinks how he shall display his own power, or vent his spleen, or
astonish the reader either by starting new subjects and trains of
speculation, or by expressing old ones in a more striking and emphatic
manner than they have been expressed before. He cares little what it is
he says, so that he can say it differently from others. This may account
for the charges of plagiarism which have been repeatedly brought against
the Noble Poet--if he can borrow an image or sentiment from another, and
heighten it by an epithet or an allusion of greater force and beauty
than is to be found in the original passage, he thinks he shews his
superiority of execution in this in a more marked manner than if
the first suggestion had been his own. It is not the value of the
observation itself he is solicitous about; but he wishes to shine by
contrast--even nature only serves as a foil to set off his style. He
therefore takes the thoughts of others (whether contemporaries or not)
out of their mouths, and is content to make them his own, to set his
stamp upon them, by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a
higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic
inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern
style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in
terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies
competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he
must do in a more decided and daring manner than any one else--he lounges
with extravagance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader! Self-will,
passion, the love of singularity, a disdain of himself and of others
(with a conscious sense that this is among the ways and means of
procuring admiration) are the proper categories of his mind: he is a
lordly writer, is above his own reputation, and condescends to the Muses
with a scornful grace!

Lord Byron, who in his politics is a _liberal_, in his genius is haughty
and aristocratic: Walter Scott, who is an aristocrat in principle, is
popular in his writings, and is (as it were) equally _servile_ to nature
and to opinion. The genius of Sir Walter is essentially imitative, or
"denotes a foregone conclusion:" that of Lord Byron is self-dependent;
or at least requires no aid, is governed by no law, but the impulses of
its own will. We confess, however much we may admire independence of
feeling and erectness of spirit in general or practical questions, yet
in works of genius we prefer him who bows to the authority of nature,
who appeals to actual objects, to mouldering superstitions, to history,
observation, and tradition, before him who only consults the pragmatical
and restless workings of his own breast, and gives them out as oracles
to the world. We like a writer (whether poet or prose-writer) who takes
in (or is willing to take in) the range of half the universe in feeling,
character, description, much better than we do one who obstinately and
invariably shuts himself up in the Bastile of his own ruling passions.
In short, we had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the Author
of Waverley) than Lord Byron, a hundred times over. And for the reason
just given, namely, that he casts his descriptions in the mould of
nature, ever-varying, never tiresome, always interesting and always
instructive, instead of casting them constantly in the mould of his
own individual impressions. He gives us man as he is, or as he was, in
almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling. Lord Byron
makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is
a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the
misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters,
burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos
of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all
outward things--sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark
night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom "in cell monastic"--we see
the mournful pall, the crucifix, the death's heads, the faded chaplet of
flowers, the gleaming tapers, the agonized brow of genius, the wasted
form of beauty--but we are still imprisoned in a dungeon, a curtain
intercepts our view, we do not breathe freely the air of nature or of
our own thoughts--the other admired author draws aside the curtain, and
the veil of egotism is rent, and he shews us the crowd of living men and
women, the endless groups, the landscape back-ground, the cloud and
the rainbow, and enriches our imaginations and relieves one passion
by another, and expands and lightens reflection, and takes away that
tightness at the breast which arises from thinking or wishing to think
that there is nothing in the world out of a man's self! --In this point
of view, the Author of Waverley is one of the greatest teachers of
morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty, narrow,
and bigotted prejudices: Lord Byron is the greatest pamperer of those
prejudices, by seeming to think there is nothing else worth encouraging
but the seeds or the full luxuriant growth of dogmatism and
self-conceit. In reading the _Scotch Novels_, we never think about
the author, except from a feeling of curiosity respecting our unknown
benefactor: in reading Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent
from our minds. The colouring of Lord Byron's style, however rich and
dipped in Tyrian dyes, is nevertheless opaque, is in itself an object
of delight and wonder: Sir Walter Scott's is perfectly transparent. In
studying the one, you seem to gaze at the figures cut in stained glass,
which exclude the view beyond, and where the pure light of Heaven is
only a means of setting off the gorgeousness of art: in reading the
other, you look through a noble window at the clear and varied landscape
without. Or to sum up the distinction in one word, Sir Walter Scott is
the most _dramatic_ writer now living; and Lord Byron is the least so.
It would be difficult to imagine that the Author of Waverley is in the
smallest degree a pedant; as it would be hard to persuade ourselves that
the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan is not a coxcomb, though a
provoking and sublime one. In this decided preference given to Sir
Walter Scott over Lord Byron, we distinctly include the prose-works of
the former; for we do not think his poetry alone by any means entitles
him to that precedence. Sir Walter in his poetry, though pleasing and
natural, is a comparative trifler: it is in his anonymous productions
that he has shewn himself for what he is! --

_Intensity_ is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron's
writings. He seldom gets beyond force of style, nor has he produced any
regular work or masterly whole. He does not prepare any plan beforehand,
nor revise and retouch what he has written with polished accuracy. His
only object seems to be to stimulate himself and his readers for the
moment--to keep both alive, to drive away _ennui_, to substitute a
feverish and irritable state of excitement for listless indolence or
even calm enjoyment. For this purpose he pitches on any subject at
random without much thought or delicacy--he is only impatient to
begin--and takes care to adorn and enrich it as he proceeds with
"thoughts that breathe and words that burn. " He composes (as he himself
has said) whether he is in the bath, in his study, or on horseback--he
writes as habitually as others talk or think--and whether we have the
inspiration of the Muse or not, we always find the spirit of the man
of genius breathing from his verse. He grapples with his subject, and
moves, penetrates, and animates it by the electric force of his own
feelings. He is often monotonous, extravagant, offensive; but he is
never dull, or tedious, but when he writes prose. Lord Byron does not
exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into
importance by the romantic associations with which he surrounds them;
but generally (at least) takes common-place thoughts and events, and
endeavours to express them in stronger and statelier language than
others. His poetry stands like a Martello tower by the side of his
subject. He does not, like Mr. Wordsworth, lift poetry from the ground,
or create a sentiment out of nothing. He does not describe a daisy or a
periwinkle, but the cedar or the cypress: not "poor men's cottages, but
princes' palaces. " His Childe Harold contains a lofty and impassioned
review of the great events of history, of the mighty objects left as
wrecks of time, but he dwells chiefly on what is familiar to the mind of
every school-boy; has brought out few new traits of feeling or thought;
and has done no more than justice to the reader's preconceptions by the
sustained force and brilliancy of his style and imagery. Lord Byron's
earlier productions, _Lara_, the _Corsair_, &c. were wild and gloomy
romances, put into rapid and shining verse. They discover the madness
of poetry, together with the inspiration: sullen, moody, capricious,
fierce, inexorable, gloating on beauty, thirsting for revenge, hurrying
from the extremes of pleasure to pain, but with nothing permanent,
nothing healthy or natural. The gaudy decorations and the morbid
sentiments remind one of flowers strewed over the face of death! In
his _Childe Harold_ (as has been just observed) he assumes a lofty and
philosophic tone, and "reasons high of providence, fore-knowledge, will,
and fate. " He takes the highest points in the history of the world,
and comments on them from a more commanding eminence: he shews us the
crumbling monuments of time, he invokes the great names, the
mighty spirit of antiquity. The universe is changed into a stately
mausoleum:--in solemn measures he chaunts a hymn to fame. Lord Byron has
strength and elevation enough to fill up the moulds of our classical and
time-hallowed recollections, and to rekindle the earliest aspirations of
the mind after greatness and true glory with a pen of fire. The names of
Tasso, of Ariosto, of Dante, of Cincinnatus, of Caesar, of Scipio, lose
nothing of their pomp or their lustre in his hands, and when he begins
and continues a strain of panegyric on such subjects, we indeed sit
down with him to a banquet of rich praise, brooding over imperishable
glories,

"Till Contemplation has her fill. "

Lord Byron seems to cast himself indignantly from "this bank and shoal
of time," or the frail tottering bark that bears up modern reputation,
into the huge sea of ancient renown, and to revel there with untired,
outspread plume. Even this in him is spleen--his contempt of his
contemporaries makes him turn back to the lustrous past, or project
himself forward to the dim future! --Lord Byron's tragedies, Faliero,[B]
Sardanapalus, &c. are not equal to his other works. They want the
essence of the drama. They abound in speeches and descriptions, such as
he himself might make either to himself or others, lolling on his couch
of a morning, but do not carry the reader out of the poet's mind to the
scenes and events recorded. They have neither action, character,
nor interest, but are a sort of _gossamer_ tragedies, spun out, and
glittering, and spreading a flimsy veil over the face of nature. Yet
he spins them on. Of all that he has done in this way the _Heaven and
Earth_ (the same subject as Mr. Moore's _Loves of the Angels_) is the
best. We prefer it even to _Manfred_. _Manfred_ is merely himself,
with a fancy-drapery on: but in the dramatic fragment published in the
_Liberal_, the space between Heaven and Earth, the stage on which
his characters have to pass to and fro, seems to fill his Lordship's
imagination; and the Deluge, which he has so finely described, may be
said to have drowned all his own idle humours.

We must say we think little of our author's turn for satire. His
"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is dogmatical and insolent, but
without refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to
transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because
it has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he
endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external
situation. He says of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, that "it is his
aversion. " That may be: but whose fault is it? This is the satire of
a lord, who is accustomed to have all his whims or dislikes taken for
gospel, and who cannot be at the pains to do more than signify his
contempt or displeasure. If a great man meets with a rebuff which he
does not like, he turns on his heel, and this passes for a repartee.
The Noble Author says of a celebrated barrister and critic, that he was
"born in a garret sixteen stories high. " The insinuation is not true; or
if it were, it is low. The allusion degrades the person who makes, not
him to whom it is applied. This is also the satire of a person of birth
and quality, who measures all merit by external rank, that is, by
his own standard. So his Lordship, in a "Letter to the Editor of My
Grandmother's Review," addresses him fifty times as "_my dear Robarts_;"
nor is there any other wit in the article. This is surely a mere
assumption of superiority from his Lordship's rank, and is the sort of
_quizzing_ he might use to a person who came to hire himself as a valet
to him at _Long's_--the waiters might laugh, the public will not. In
like manner, in the controversy about Pope, he claps Mr. Bowles on the
back with a coarse facetious familiarity, as if he were his chaplain
whom he had invited to dine with him, or was about to present to a
benefice. The reverend divine might submit to the obligation, but he has
no occasion to subscribe to the jest. If it is a jest that Mr.
Bowles
should be a parson, and Lord Byron a peer, the world knew this before;
there was no need to write a pamphlet to prove it.

The _Don Juan_ indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the
force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between
that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the
sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are
surprised that any one should turn round and _travestie_ himself: the
drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes
virtue serve as a foil to vice; _dandyism_ is (for want of any other) a
variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing
of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning
and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and
the contents of wash-hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays
_Scrub_ in the farce. This is "very tolerable and not to be endured. "
The Noble Lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents
in this way. He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in
defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our
hopes and our belief in goodness to Heaven only to dash them to the
earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectually from the very
height they have fallen. Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus
turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it, and who thus
fatally quenches the sparks of both. It is not that Lord Byron is
sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate, and
sometimes moral--but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only
preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful _hoax_
upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as if the eagle
were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl were seen soaring
to the mid-day sun. Such a sight might make one laugh, but one would not
wish or expect it to occur more than once! [C]

In fact, Lord Byron is the spoiled child of fame as well as fortune.
He has taken a surfeit of popularity, and is not contented to delight,
unless he can shock the public. He would force them to admire in spite
of decency and common sense--he would have them read what they would
read in no one but himself, or he would not give a rush for their
applause. He is to be "a chartered libertine," from whom insults are
favours, whose contempt is to be a new incentive to admiration. His
Lordship is hard to please: he is equally averse to notice or neglect,
enraged at censure and scorning praise. He tries the patience of the
town to the very utmost, and when they shew signs of weariness or
disgust, threatens to _discard_ them. He says he will write on, whether
he is read or not. He would never write another page, if it were not
to court popular applause, or to affect a superiority over it. In this
respect also, Lord Byron presents a striking contrast to Sir Walter
Scott. The latter takes what part of the public favour falls to his
share, without grumbling (to be sure he has no reason to complain) the
former is always quarrelling with the world about his _modicum_ of
applause, the _spolia opima_ of vanity, and ungraciously throwing the
offerings of incense heaped on his shrine back in the faces of his
admirers. Again, there is no taint in the writings of the Author of
Waverley, all is fair and natural and _above-board:_ he never outrages
the public mind. He introduces no anomalous character: broaches no
staggering opinion. If he goes back to old prejudices and superstitions
as a relief to the modern reader, while Lord Byron floats on swelling
paradoxes--

"Like proud seas under him;"

if the one defers too much to the spirit of antiquity, the other
panders to the spirit of the age, goes to the very edge of extreme and
licentious speculation, and breaks his neck over it. Grossness and
levity are the playthings of his pen. It is a ludicrous circumstance
that he should have dedicated his _Cain_ to the worthy Baronet! Did the
latter ever acknowledge the obligation? We are not nice, not very nice;
but we do not particularly approve those subjects that shine chiefly
from their rottenness: nor do we wish to see the Muses drest out in
the flounces of a false or questionable philosophy, like _Portia_ and
_Nerissa_ in the garb of Doctors of Law. We like metaphysics as well as
Lord Byron; but not to see them making flowery speeches, nor dancing a
measure in the fetters of verse. We have as good as hinted, that his
Lordship's poetry consists mostly of a tissue of superb common-places;
even his paradoxes are _common-place_. They are familiar in the schools:
they are only new and striking in his dramas and stanzas, by being out
of place. In a word, we think that poetry moves best within the circle
of nature and received opinion: speculative theory and subtle casuistry
are forbidden ground to it. But Lord Byron often wanders into this
ground wantonly, wilfully, and unwarrantably. The only apology we can
conceive for the spirit of some of Lord Byron's writings, is the spirit
of some of those opposed to him. They would provoke a man to write any
thing. "Farthest from them is best. " The extravagance and license of the
one seems a proper antidote to the bigotry and narrowness of the other.
The first _Vision of Judgment_ was a set-off to the second, though

"None but itself could be its parallel. "

Perhaps the chief cause of most of Lord Byron's errors is, that he is
that anomaly in letters and in society, a Noble Poet. It is a double
privilege, almost too much for humanity. He has all the pride of birth
and genius. The strength of his imagination leads him to indulge in
fantastic opinions; the elevation of his rank sets censure at defiance.
He becomes a pampered egotist. He has a seat in the House of Lords, a
niche in the Temple of Fame. Every-day mortals, opinions, things are not
good enough for him to touch or think of. A mere nobleman is, in his
estimation, but "the tenth transmitter of a foolish face:" a mere man of
genius is no better than a worm. His Muse is also a lady of quality.
The people are not polite enough for him: the Court not sufficiently
intellectual. He hates the one and despises the other. By hating and
despising others, he does not learn to be satisfied with himself. A
fastidious man soon grows querulous and splenetic. If there is nobody
but ourselves to come up to our idea of fancied perfection, we easily
get tired of our idol. When a man is tired of what he is, by a natural
perversity he sets up for what he is not. If he is a poet, he pretends
to be a metaphysician: if he is a patrician in rank and feeling, he
would fain be one of the people. His ruling motive is not the love of
the people, but of distinction not of truth, but of singularity. He
patronizes men of letters out of vanity, and deserts them from caprice,
or from the advice of friends. He embarks in an obnoxious publication to
provoke censure, and leaves it to shift for itself for fear of scandal.
We do not like Sir Walter's gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron's
preposterous _liberalism_ little better. He may affect the principles of
equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion. His
Lordship has made great offers of service to the Greeks--money and
horses. He is at present in Cephalonia, waiting the event!

* * * * *

We had written thus far when news came of the death of Lord Byron, and
put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was
intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory. Had we known that we
were writing his epitaph, we must have done it with a different feeling.
As it is, we think it better and more like himself, to let what we had
written stand, than to take up our leaden shafts, and try to melt them
into "tears of sensibility," or mould them into dull praise, and an
affected shew of candour. We were not silent during the author's
life-time, either for his reproof or encouragement (such us we
could give, and _he_ did not disdain to accept) nor can we now turn
undertakers' men to fix the glittering plate upon his coffin, or fall
into the procession of popular woe. --Death cancels every thing but
truth; and strips a man of every thing but genius and virtue. It is a
sort of natural canonization. It makes the meanest of us sacred--it
installs the poet in his immortality, and lifts him to the skies. Death
is the great assayer of the sterling ore of talent. At his touch the
drossy particles fall off, the irritable, the personal, the gross, and
mingle with the dust--the finer and more ethereal part mounts with the
winged spirit to watch over our latest memory and protect our bones from
insult. We consign the least worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish
the nobler and imperishable nature with double pride and fondness.
Nothing could shew the real superiority of genius in a more striking
point of view than the idle contests and the public indifference about
the place of Lord Byron's interment, whether in Westminster-Abbey or
his own family-vault. A king must have a coronation--a nobleman a
funeral-procession. --The man is nothing without the pageant. The poet's
cemetery is the human mind, in which he sows the seeds of never ending
thought--his monument is to be found in his works:

"Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven;
No pyramids set off his memory,
But the eternal substance of his greatness. "

Lord Byron is dead: he also died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of
freedom, for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and his
epitaph!


[Footnote A: This Essay was written just before Lord Byron's death. ]

[Footnote B:

"Don Juan was my Moscow, and Faliero
My Leipsic, and my Mont St. Jean seems Cain,"
_Don Juan_, Canto. XI. ]

[Footnote C: This censure applies to the first Cantos of DON JUAN much
more than to the last. It has been called a TRISTRAM SHANDY in rhyme: it
is rather a poem written about itself. ]





* * * * *





MR. CAMPBELL AND MR. CRABBE.



"Mr. Campbell may be said to hold a place (among modern poets) between
Lord Byron and Mr. Rogers. With much of the glossy splendour, the
pointed vigour, and romantic interest of the one, he possesses the
fastidious refinement, the classic elegance of the other. Mr. Rogers, as
a writer, is too effeminate, Lord Byron too extravagant: Mr. Campbell is
neither. The author of the _Pleasures of Memory_ polishes his lines till
they sparkle with the most exquisite finish; he attenuates them into the
utmost degree of trembling softness: but we may complain, in spite of
the delicacy and brilliancy of the execution, of a want of strength
and solidity. The author of the _Pleasures of Hope_, with a richer and
deeper vein of thought and imagination, works it out into figures of
equal grace and dazzling beauty, avoiding on the one hand the tinsel of
flimsy affectation, and on the other the vices of a rude and barbarous
negligence. His Pegasus is not a rough, skittish colt, running wild
among the mountains, covered with bur-docks and thistles, nor a tame,
sleek pad, unable to get out of the same ambling pace, but a beautiful
_manege_-horse, full of life and spirit in itself, and subject to the
complete controul of the rider. Mr. Campbell gives scope to his feelings
and his fancy, and embodies them in a noble and naturally interesting
subject; and he at the same time conceives himself called upon (in these
days of critical nicety) to pay the exactest attention to the expression
of each thought, and to modulate each line into the most faultless
harmony. The character of his mind is a lofty and self-scrutinising
ambition, that strives to reconcile the integrity of general design with
the perfect elaboration of each component part, that aims at striking
effect, but is jealous of the means by which this is to be produced.
Our poet is not averse to popularity (nay, he is tremblingly alive to
it)--but self-respect is the primary law, the indispensable condition
on which it must be obtained. We should dread to point out (even if we
could) a false concord, a mixed metaphor, an imperfect rhyme in any of
Mr. Campbell's productions; for we think that all his fame would hardly
compensate to him for the discovery. He seeks for perfection, and
nothing evidently short of it can satisfy his mind. He is a _high
finisher_ in poetry, whose every work must bear inspection, whose
slightest touch is precious--not a coarse dauber who is contented to
impose on public wonder and credulity by some huge, ill-executed design,
or who endeavours to wear out patience and opposition together by a load
of lumbering, feeble, awkward, improgressive lines--on the contrary, Mr.
Campbell labours to lend every grace of execution to his subject, while
he borrows his ardour and inspiration from it, and to deserve the
laurels he has earned, by true genius and by true pains. There is an
apparent consciousness of this in most of his writings. He has attained
to great excellence by aiming at the greatest, by a cautious and yet
daring selection of topics, and by studiously (and with a religious
horror) avoiding all those faults which arise from grossness, vulgarity,
haste, and disregard of public opinion. He seizes on the highest point
of eminence, and strives to keep it to himself--he "snatches a grace
beyond the reach of art," and will not let it go--he steeps a single
thought or image so deep in the Tyrian dyes of a gorgeous imagination,
that it throws its lustre over a whole page--every where vivid _ideal_
forms hover (in intense conception) over the poet's verse, which
ascends, like the aloe, to the clouds, with pure flowers at its top. Or
to take an humbler comparison (the pride of genius must sometimes stoop
to the lowliness of criticism) Mr. Campbell's poetry often reminds us of
the purple gilliflower, both for its colour and its scent, its glowing
warmth, its rich, languid, sullen hue,

"Yet sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath! "

There are those who complain of the little that Mr. Campbell has done
in poetry, and who seem to insinuate that he is deterred by his own
reputation from making any further or higher attempts. But after having
produced two poems that have gone to the heart of a nation, and are
gifts to a world, he may surely linger out the rest of his life in a
dream of immortality. There are moments in our lives so exquisite that
all that remains of them afterwards seems useless and barren; and there
are lines and stanzas in our author's early writings in which he may
be thought to have exhausted all the sweetness and all the essence of
poetry, so that nothing farther was left to his efforts or his ambition.
Happy is it for those few and fortunate worshippers of the Muse (not
a subject of grudging or envy to others) who already enjoy in their
life-time a foretaste of their future fame, who see their names
accompanying them, like a cloud of glory, from youth to age,

"And by the vision splendid,
Are on their way attended"--

and who know that they have built a shrine for the thoughts and
feelings, that were most dear to them, in the minds and memories
of other men, till the language which they lisped in childhood is
forgotten, or the human heart shall beat no more!

The _Pleasures of Hope_ alone would not have called forth these remarks
from us; but there are passages in the _Gertrude of Wyoming_ of so rare
and ripe a beauty, that they challenge, as they exceed all praise.
Such, for instance, is the following peerless description of Gertrude's
childhood:--

"A loved bequest--and I may half impart
To those that feel the strong paternal tie,
How like a new existence in his heart
That living flow'r uprose beneath his eye,
Dear as she was, from cherub infancy,
From hours when she would round his garden play,
To time when as the ripening years went by,
Her lovely mind could culture well repay,
And more engaging grew from pleasing day to day.

"I may not paint those thousand infant charms
(Unconscious fascination, undesign'd! )
The orison repeated in his arms,
For God to bless her sire and all mankind;
The book, the bosom on his knee reclined,
Or how sweet fairy-lore he heard her con
(The play-mate ere the teacher of her mind)
All uncompanion'd else her years had gone,
Till now in Gertrude's eyes their ninth blue summer shone.

"And summer was the tide, and sweet the hour,
When sire and daughter saw, with fleet descent,
An Indian from his bark approach their bower,
Of buskin'd limb and swarthy lineament;
The red wild feathers on his brow were blent,
And bracelets bound the arm that help'd to light
A boy, who seem'd, as he beside him went,
Of Christian vesture and complexion bright,
Led by his dusty guide, like morning brought by night. "

In the foregoing stanzas we particularly admire the line--

"Till now in Gertrude's eyes their ninth blue summer shone. "

It appears to us like the ecstatic union of natural beauty and poetic
fancy, and in its playful sublimity resembles the azure canopy mirrored
in the smiling waters, bright, liquid, serene, heavenly! A great outcry,
we know, has prevailed for some time past against poetic diction and
affected conceits, and, to a certain degree, we go along with it; but
this must not prevent us from feeling the thrill of pleasure when we see
beauty linked to beauty, like kindred flame to flame, or from applauding
the voluptuous fancy that raises and adorns the fairy fabric of thought,
that nature has begun! Pleasure is "scattered in stray-gifts o'er the
earth"--beauty streaks the "famous poet's page" in occasional lines of
inconceivable brightness; and wherever this is the case, no splenetic
censures or "jealous leer malign," no idle theories or cold indifference
should hinder us from greeting it with rapture. --There are other parts
of this poem equally delightful, in which there is a light startling as
the red-bird's wing; a perfume like that of the magnolia; a music
like the murmuring of pathless woods or of the everlasting ocean. We
conceive, however, that Mr. Campbell excels chiefly in sentiment and
imagery. The story moves slow, and is mechanically conducted, and rather
resembles a Scotch canal carried over lengthened aqueducts and with a
number of _locks_ in it, than one of those rivers that sweep in their
majestic course, broad and full, over Transatlantic plains and lose
themselves in rolling gulfs, or thunder down lofty precipices. But in
the centre, the inmost recesses of our poet's heart, the pearly dew of
sensibility is distilled and collects, like the diamond in the mine, and
the structure of his fame rests on the crystal columns of a polished
imagination. We prefer the _Gertrude_ to the _Pleasures of Hope_,
because with perhaps less brilliancy, there is more of tenderness and
natural imagery in the former. In the _Pleasures of Hope_ Mr. Campbell
had not completely emancipated himself from the trammels of the more
artificial style of poetry--from epigram, and antithesis, and hyperbole.
The best line in it, in which earthly joys are said to be--

"Like angels' visits, few and far between"--

is a borrowed one. [A] But in the Gertrude of Wyoming "we perceive a
softness coming over the heart of the author, and the scales and crust
of formality that fence in his couplets and give them a somewhat
glittering and rigid appearance, fall off," and he has succeeded in
engrafting the wild and more expansive interest of the romantic school
of poetry on classic elegance and precision. After the poem we have
just named, Mr. Campbell's SONGS are the happiest efforts of his
Muse:--breathing freshness, blushing like the morn, they seem, like
clustering roses, to weave a chaplet for love and liberty; or their
bleeding words gush out in mournful and hurried succession, like "ruddy
drops that visit the sad heart" of thoughtful Humanity. The _Battle of
Hohenlinden_ is of all modern compositions the most lyrical in spirit
and in sound. To justify this encomium, we need only recall the lines to
the reader's memory.

"On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay th' untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

But Linden saw another sight,
When the drum beat at dead of night,
Commanding fires of death to light
The darkness of her scenery.

By torch and trumpet fast array'd,
Each horseman drew his battle blade,
And furious every charger neigh'd,
To join the dreadful revelry.

Then shook the hills with thunder riv'n,
Then rush'd the steed to battle driv'n,
And louder than the bolts of heav'n
Far flash'd the red artillery.

But redder yet that light shall glow
On Linden's hills of stained snow,
And bloodier yet the torrent flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.

'Tis morn, but scarce yon level sun
Can pierce the war-clouds, rolling[B] dun,
Where furious Frank and fiery Hun
Shout in their sulph'rous canopy.

The combat deepens. On, ye brave,
Who rush to glory, or the grave!
Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave!
And charge with all thy chivalry!

Few, few shall part, where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre. "

Mr. Campbell's prose-criticisms on contemporary and other poets (which
have appeared in the New Monthly Magazine) are in a style at once
chaste, temperate, guarded, and just.

Mr. Crabbe presents an entire contrast to

Mr. Campbell:--the one is the most ambitious and aspiring of living
poets, the other the most humble and prosaic. If the poetry of the one
is like the arch of the rainbow, spanning and adorning the earth, that
of the other is like a dull, leaden cloud hanging over it. Mr. Crabbe's
style might be cited as an answer to Audrey's question--"Is poetry
a true thing? " There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no
illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality,
one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe. Literal fidelity serves
him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of
petty details; he rivets attention by being tedious. He not only deals
in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most
familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he
relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with
which he dissects the most trivial objects--and for the interest he
excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most
painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called
in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches of the
peace; and makes out a parochial list of accidents and offences. He
takes the most trite, the most gross and obvious and revolting part of
nature, for the subject of his elaborate descriptions; but it is Nature
still, and Nature is a great and mighty Goddess! It is well for the
Reverend Author that it is so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only
definition of poetry. Whatever _is_, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever
makes an exact image of any thing on the earth, however deformed or
insignificant, according to him, must succeed--and he himself has
succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of our
living authors. That he is so, can be accounted for on no other
principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world about us, and
our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any manner powerfully and
directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not one of _the Daughters of
Memory_, but the old toothless, mumbling dame herself, doling out the
gossip and scandal of the neighbourhood, recounting _totidem verbis et
literis_, what happens in every place of the kingdom every hour in the
year, and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.
But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous, leaving
nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest grievances, a
village-oracle and critic, most veritable, most identical, bringing us
acquainted with persons and things just as they chanced to exist, and
giving us a local interest in all she knows and tells. Mr. Crabbe's
Helicon is choked up with weeds and corruption; it reflects no light
from heaven, it emits no cheerful sound: no flowers of love, of hope,
or joy spring up near it, or they bloom only to wither in a moment. Our
poet's verse does not put a spirit of youth in every thing, but a spirit
of fear, despondency, and decay: it is not an electric spark to kindle
or expand, but acts like the torpedo's touch to deaden or contract. It
lends no dazzling tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the
heart, it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view the
current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited, half under ground,
muddy, and clogged with all creeping things. The world is one vast
infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author
is the overseer: to read him is a penance, yet we read on! Mr. Crabbe,
it must be confessed, is a repulsive writer. He contrives to "turn
diseases to commodities," and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us
out of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do;
yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to another. His morbid
feelings droop and cling to the earth, grovel where they should soar;
and throw a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after the good
or beautiful. By degrees we submit, and are reconciled to our fate, like
patients to the physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell. We can
only explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives
us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the
distressing; that he does this thoroughly and like a master, and we
forgive all the rest.

Mr. Crabbe's first poems were published so long ago as the year 1782,
and received the approbation of Dr. Johnson only a little before he
died. This was a testimony from an enemy; for Dr. Johnson was not an
admirer of the simple in style or minute in description. Still he was an
acute, strong-minded man, and could see truth when it was presented to
him, even through the mist of his prejudices and his foibles. There was
something in Mr. Crabbe's intricate points that did not, after all, so
ill accord with the Doctor's purblind vision; and he knew quite
enough of the petty ills of life to judge of the merit of our poet's
descriptions, though he himself chose to slur them over in high-sounding
dogmas or general invectives.