minute matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure ornament of society lately deceased in some obscure town, as

"Among the hills of Athol he was born.
There on a small hereditary farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty:
While he, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little one-unconscious of their loss.
But 'ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed mother, for a second mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction."

"From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer, tended cattle on the hills;

But through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
To his step-father's school."-&c.

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.

Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other

of two evils result. diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.

Either the thoughts and

The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this class, I comprize occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of progression of thought. As instances, see page 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems, Vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the Sixth Book of the Excursion.

Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion, This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness

and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.

It is a well known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression, But if we describe this in such lines, as

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medly from this couplet to

"And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils." Vol. I. p. 320.

The second instance is from Vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of gypsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with

their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. "Twelve hours," says he,

"Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours, are gone while I Have been a traveller under open sky,

Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I find them here!"

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries:

"The weary SUN betook himself to rest,
-Then issued VESPER from the fulgent west,

Outshining, like a visible God,

The glorious path in which he trod!

And now ascending, after one dark hour,

And one night's diminution of her power,

Behold the mighty MOON! this way
She looks, as if at them-but they

Regard not her:-oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!

The silent HEAVENS have goings on:

The STARS have tasks!-but these have none!"

The last instance of this defect, (for I know no other than these already cited) is from the Ode, page 351. Vol. II. where, speaking of a child," a six year's darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him:

"Thou best philosopher who yet dost keep
Thy heritage! Thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind-
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find!

Thou, over whom thy immortality

Broods like the day, a master o'er the slave.
A presence that is not to be put by!"

Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, philosopher) the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "master brood o'er a slave," or the day brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age