Innumerable voices fill With everlasting harmony; The towering headlands, crowned with mist, Thy pinions, universal air, Ever waving to and fro, Are delegates of harmony, and bear Strains that support the seasons in their round: Turn to the pages of Pope or of his imitators : the sound comes like the melody from a well-tuned and well-touched musical instrument; but when you listen, with an ear well cultivated by the study of the metrical combination and flow of words, to the measured music that may be heard, either sensibly or imaginatively, from the pages of the greater poets, the sound comes with the touching and ever-varied harmony of nature,-at one time with the loud voice of the stormy wind, again with the soothing murmur of a breeze blowing through the tops of pine-trees; at one time with surges like ocean angry and enchafed, again like the ripples of a lake or river touching the sides of an anchored ship, or the gentle sounds of a running brook. I notice this subject of versification because the merits of Pope in this department have been, I think, exaggerated in a manner injurious to English poetry, as superseding its noblest and most varied metres. A style of versification was introduced which fascinated the ear, because the tune, though soon monotonous, was not only smooth but marked. If the ear once content itself with this form, it is apt to neglect that cultivation which is essential for the enjoyment of the finest poetical melody in the language. It was a sign of the coming regeneration of English poetry when some appeared who sought other forms of verse than that one which Pope had bequeathed to his imitators. Simultaneous with this was a returning sense of what was due to nature, an evident desire to quit the path which had been so artificially cut and beaten. Pope's immediate followers had pushed the system to its limits; and readers began at last to ask themselves whether something else was not wanted besides polished language, verse of an unrelieved smoothness, and a certain perpetually-recurring assortment of images, which had become so much the traditional property of the versifiers that a writer could set himself in the business, as any tradesman might supply himself with his stock in trade. People were growing weary of hearing nothing but cold mythological personifications. They scarcely ventured to say so; but, for all that, it was a relief to hear the sun called by his simple almanac-name instead of the loftier prescriptive title of Phoebus. The moon had been known only as Diana. Naiads were as plenty in every watercourse as fish. Dryads were as common as birds; and every west wind that blew, whether it was "the sweet south or the blustering northwester, was a gentle zephyr." The versifiers who took Pope for their model were like the artists who illustrated his poems by carrying the system out to all its consequences. In one of the early editions of his poems there is an engraving prefixed to the "Essay on Criticism," representing some venerable ancient introducing Pope, the little Queen Anne's poet, wrapped in a Roman toga, to the nine Muses, who are seated by the side of a kind of creek, clad in the usual amount of clothing deemed appropriate to the com fort of a Muse,—one of them with a foot in the water and looking up to the sky, and another seated on a small eminence and busy performing on the bass-viol. This was the taste of the times: poetry had set the fashion, and the arts followed in the train. If Pope was followed by servile imitators, there also came after him poets who, with a truer fervour of inspiration, sought to unfetter the poetry of their country from the technicalities and the artifices which had been woven round it. They were obliged to toil against the influence of established authority and a dominant false taste. Thomson, and Gray, and Goldsmith, and Beattie, and Churchhill, and Collins, contributed to the revival of a truer spirit of poetry, and have left behind them poems which it is much easier for me to find space for in my good opinion than in my lectures. There was Chatterton, too truly "The marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride." Hereditary insanity and the frenzy of a frustrated ambition tortured his young heart; and, after having baffled half the learning of Britain by his impostures, he ended his brief agony of life by poison. The poets of the eighteenth century, especially its latter portion, deserved much for ridding English poetry of its cold formalities and pouring fresh life-blood into it. Especially was this the merit of him whom in the last lecture I presented to you in such a hurried, crowded comment,—the happy, unhappy-the cheerful, melancholy -Cowper. These poets not only threw off the depressing weight of an artificial taste still remaining from the Anglo Gallian school of poetry, but there was an adverse authority, in the literary dictatorship of Dr. Johnson. This authority was exerted not only to the full extent of his colloquial influence, but made still more absolute and more lasting in a work to which I have alluded once or twice in the course of these lectures, and on which I must now dwell for a few minutes. rature. Let me preface what I have to say either directly or in illustration of Dr. Johnson with the remark that it applies to him solely as a critic of poetry. As the maker of the great Dictionary of our language, he is entitled to the most reverential gratitude of every student of English liteHe has written much excellent morality, and as a man he was kind in deeds while harsh in words. When the late Bishop White, visiting England in early life, was introduced to him, Dr. Johnson said to him, in allusion to the then recent Stamp Act difficulties, “Sir, if I had been prime minister I would have sent a frigate and levelled one of your principal cities." "But," added the bishop, in recording this remark, with the admirable discrimination of a gentle-hearted man, "I heard from him sentiments convincing me he would not have done as he said." The present examination has reference, however, to Dr. Johnson's words, his critical judgments. I have no ambition to stretch myself to the tiptoe height of my small stature to strike a blow at a lofty name. The reputation of Dr. Johnson, and the want of a better work on the subject, has given to his "Lives of the Poets" a circulation which has beyond all question been injurious to the cause of our imaginative literature. It was a luckless day for the poets when they fell into the hands of Samuel Johnson. This work, which it is absolutely necessary for me to notice, because it is the very book which is always resorted to as authority in the history and criticism of English poetry, this work has an absurdity in the capital letters of its title-page:-"The Lives of the most Eminent English Poets;" and when we open it, to our astonishment, as has been well said, the first name we find is that of Cowley. What has become of the morning star of English poetry? where is the bright Elizabethan constellation? Or, if names be more acceptable than images, where is the ever-to-be-honoured Chaucer? Where is Spenser? Where Sydney? And, lastly, where is Shakspeare. These, and a multitude of others, not unworthy to be placed near them, their contemporaries and successors, we have not. But in their stead we have Roscommon, Stepney, and Phillips, and Walsh, and Smith, and Duke, and King, and Sprat, Halifax, Granville, Sheffield, Congreve, Broome, and other, reputed magnates, metrical writers utterly worthless and useless, except as instances to show what a small quantity of brains is necessary to procure a considerable stock of admiration, provided the aspirant will accommodate himself to the likings and fashions of the day. The truth is, that, amidst all the small deer that were herded together by Johnson as the most eminent English poets, Milton is the one solitary poet of high eminence. But the wrong does not stop here. Passing by the consideration that Johnson's registry excludes all but one of the greatest names, and includes all the little ones, or, at the least, abundance of them, the execution of the work is as wrong as the plan. It is full of false canons of criticism,-false, I do not hesitate to say as absolutely as Dr. Johnson could make an assertion,-false because at variance with the unimpeach |