fingers good to touch, so smooth is the versification and the wire-wove paper. Never will the 'Pleasures of Memory' be forgotten till the world is in its dotage."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North. "The transition from these to Mr. Rogers's 'Pleasures of Memory' is not far. He is a very lady-like poet: he is an elegant but feeble writer. He wraps up obvious thoughts in a glittering cover of fine words; is full of enigmas with no meaning to them; is studiously inverted, and scrupulously far-fetched; and his verses are poetry, chiefly because no particle, line, or syllable of them reads like prose. He differs from Milton in this respect, who is accused of having inserted a number of prosaic lines in 'Paradise Lost.' This kind of poetry, which is a more minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan, is like the game of asking what one's thoughts are like. It is a tortuous, tottering, wriggling, fidgety translation of everything from the vulgar tongue into all the tantalizing, teasing, tripping, lisping, mimminee-pimminee of the highest brilliancy and fashion of poetical diction. You have nothing like truth of nature or simplicity of expression. The fastidious and languid reader is never shocked by meeting, from the rarest chance in the world, with a single homely phrase or intelligible idea. You cannot see the thought for the ambiguity of the language, the figure for the finery, the picture for the varnish. The whole is refined and frittered away into an appearance of the most evanescent brilliancy and tremulous imbecility. There is no other fault to be found with the 'Pleasures of Memory,' than a want of taste and genius."HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets. Thomas Campbell. --- "What shall we say of the Pleasures of Hope'? That the harp from which that music breathed was an Æolian harp placed in the window of a high hall, to catch airs from heaven, when heaven was glad, as well she might be, with such moon and such stars, and streamering half the region with a magnificent aurora borealis. Now the music deepens into a majestic march-now it swells into a holy hymn; and now it dies away elegiac-like, as if mourning over a tomb. Vague, indefinite, uncertain, dream-like, and visionary all; but never else than beautiful; and ever and anon, we know not why, sublime. In his youth Campbell lived where distant isles could hear the loud Corbrechtan roar,' and sometimes his poetry is like that whirlpool—the sound as of the wheels of many chariots."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North. "Campbell's Pleasures of Hope' is of the same school, in which a painful attention is paid to the expression, in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. There are painters who trust more to the setting of their pictures than to the truth of the likeness. Mr. Campbell always seems to me to be thinking how his poetry will look when it comes to be hot-pressed on superfine wove paper; to have a disproportionate eye to points and commas, and a dread of errors of the press. He writes according to established etiquette. He offers the muses no violence. When he launches a sentiment that you think will float him triumphantly for once to the bottom of the stanza, he stops short at the end of the first or second line, and stands shivering on the brink of beauty, afraid to trust himself to the fathomless abyss. Tutus nimium, timidusque procellarum. His very circumspection betrays him. The poet, as well as the woman, that deliberates, is undone. He is much like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out of it, when it is too late. Mr. Campbell, too, often maims and mangles his ideas before they are full-formed, to form them to the Procrustes' bed of Criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest it should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review.'"-HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets. Robert Southey. "Southey, among our living poets, stands aloof and 'alone in his glory; for he alone, of them all, has adventured to illustrate in poems of magnitude, the different characters, customs, and manners of nations. Joan of Arc' is an English and French story; Thalaba,' Arabian; Kehama,' Indian; 'Madoc,' Welsh and American; and 'Roderick,' Spanish and Moorish: nor would it be easy to say (setting aside the first, which was a very youthful work) in which of these noble poems Mr. Southey has most successfully performed an achievement entirely beyond the power of any but the highest genius. Seldom, if ever, has one and the same poet exhibited such power in such different kinds of poetry-in truth a master, and in fiction a magician. The greatness as well as the originality of Southey's genius, is seen in the conception of every one of his five chief works. They bear throughout the impress of original power, and breathe a moral charm in the midst of the wildest, and sometimes even extravagant, imaginings, that shall preserve them for ever from oblivion, embalming them in the spirit of delight and of love."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North. "Of Mr. Southey's larger epics I have but a faint recollection at this distance of time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant, heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointed style is well imitated in the 'Rejected Addresses.' The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be that the one is heavy and the other light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give a Catalogue Raisonné of the performances of the living undertaker of epics. 'Kehama' is a loose, sprawling figure, such as we see cut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread to make sudden or surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them. The little he has done of true or sterling excellence is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out every year, 'prosing or versing,' with equally mechanical and irresistible facility. His essays, or political and moral disquisitions, are not so full of original matter as Montaigne's. They are second or third rate compositions in that class.”—HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets. Joanna Baillie. "But our own Joanna has been visited with a loftier inspiration. She has created tragedies which Sophocles-or Euripides-nay even Eschylus himself might have feared in competition for the crown. She is our Tragic Queen; but she belongs to all places as to all times. Plays on the passions! 'How absurd,' said one philosophical writer: 'this will never do.' It has done-perfectly. What, pray, is the aim of all tragedy? The Stagyrite has told us-to purify the passions by pity and terror. They ventilate and cleanse the soul till its atmosphere is like that of a calm, bright summer day. All plays therefore must be on the passions. One passion was constituted sovereign of the soul in each glorious tragedysovereign sometimes by divine right-sometimes an usurpergenerally a tyrant. In 'De Montfort' we behold the horrid reign of Hate. But in his sister—the seraphic sway of Love. 'Count Basil!' A woman only could have imagined that divine drama. How different the love Basil feels for Victoria from Antony's for Cleopatra! Pure, deep, high, as the heaven and the sea. Yet on it we see him borne away to shame, destruction, and death. To paint bad passions is not to praise them; they alone can paint them well who hate, fear, or pity them; and therefore Baillie has done so-nay, start notbetter than Byron."-WILSON. Recreations of Christopher North. "Miss Baillie must make up this trio of female poets. Her tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are like the French Republic, one and indivisible; they are not so in nature or in Shakspeare. Mr. Southey has, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion that the 'Basil' of Miss Baillie is superior to Romeo and Juliet.' I shall not stay to contradict him. On the other hand, I prefer her ' De Montfort,' which was condemned on the stage, to some later tragedies which have been more fortunate. Having thus expressed my sense of the merits of this authoress, I must add that her comedy of 'The Election,' performed last summer at the Lyceum with indifferent success, appears to me the perfection of baby-house theatricals. Everything in it has such a do-me-good air, is so insipid and amiable. Virtue seems such a pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is such a naughty word. It is a theory of some French author, that little girls ought not to be suffered to have dolls to play with, to call them pretty dears, to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks, to lament and bewail over them, if they fall down and hurt their faces, to praise them when they are good and scold them when they are naughty. It is a school of affectation. Miss Baillie has profited by it. She treats her grown men and women as little girls treat their dolls—makes moral puppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtue and act vice according to their cue and the title prefixed to each comedy or tragedy, not from any real passions of their own, or love either of virtue or vice."-HAZLITT. Lectures on the English Poets. These are a few samples of modern Criticism. Among such a heap of contradictions, how is it possible to form a correct idea of the merits of an author? According to Wilson, Scotland has reason to be proud of her great national minstrel, who has achieved an immortal triumph. In the opinion of Hazlitt, the Scottish minstrel is but a metre ballad-monger, and the definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality. In Wordsworth's "Excursion," Wilson sees nothing but elegance, grace, beauty, loveliness, strength, state, |