With one

I could offend any member of the republic of letters. solitary exception, in which my words were first mis-stated, and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a course of lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of the English poetry in its different eras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusive to Thompson; and third, from Cowper to the present day, I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the two former eras, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply, my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington, Machiavel and Spinosa, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company, no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reason and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where, however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides, I well know, and I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment, are the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. "Sint unicuique sua premia."

How, then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? The solution may seem to have been given, or at least suggested, in a note to a preceding page. I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than removes, the difficulty. Be it, that by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, "noscitur a socio," my literary friends are never under the water-fall of

criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray: yet, how came the torrent to descend upon them?

First, then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general reception of his earlier publications, viz. the poems published with Mr. Lovell, under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to :-careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and, (in the lighter works,) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting, a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who, with all the courage of uncorrupted youth, had avowed his zeal for a cause which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression, by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamt of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or, indeed, that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction beside that which we may all learn from Horace, Quintilian, the admirable dialogue de Causis Corruptæ Eloquentiæ, or Strada's Prolusions; if, indeed, natural good sense, and the early study of the best models in his own language, had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced, was, that in his taste and estimation of writers, Mr. Southey agreed far more with Warton than with Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny that, at all times, Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sydney, in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry, to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendor, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the period be-but whenever the time shall come when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust, that an excerpta of all the passages in which his writings, name, and character, have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompani

ment.

Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare not

hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate, and such readers will become, in all probability, more numerous in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism brings with it petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sunk still lower, to that of entertaining companions; and, at present, they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision, (in the words of Jeremy Taylor,) "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner."

The same gradual retrograde movement may be traced in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed toward their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon : "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which, that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest;" or from dedication to monarch or pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged from PINDAR'S

επ' άλλοι

-ςι δ' ἄλλοι μεγάλοι, τό δ' ἔσχατον κορυ-
-φᾶται βασιλέυςι. μηκέτι

Πάπταινε πόρσιον.

Εΐη δὲ σε τόσον

Υψῖ χρόνον πατεῖν εμέ

Τε τοςςαδε νικαρόροις

Ομιλέιν, προφανσον ςορίαν καθ' Ελ

-λανας εοντα παντᾶ.

OLYMP. OD. I.

Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to "learned readers ;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader ;" till the critic, still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of literature, collectively, were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all read

ers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the harem. Thus, it is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus, too, St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art, and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion, hereafter, to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius, and morality.

In the "Thalaba," the "Madoc," and still more evidently in the unique * "Cid," the " Kehama," and as last, so best, the "Don Roderick," Southey has given abundant proof," se cogitasse quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non sæpe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat." Plin. Ep. Lib. 7. Ep. 17. But, on the other hand, I guess, that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or, to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age, "perituræ parcere chartæ," is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper, than all the silly criticisms, which prove no more than that the critic was not one of those for whom the trifle was written, and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public. As if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once locomotive power

I have ventured to call it "unique," not only because I know no work of the kind in our language (if we except a few chapters of the old translation of Froissart,) none which, uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation which, in the various excellences of translation, selection, and arangement, required, and proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the original

composers.

and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if, in a volume of poetry, the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter (not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but) by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit, or pass slightly over, the expression, grace, and grouping of Raphael's figures; but ridicule in detail the knittingneedles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit, that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his sonnets, quote “a book was writ of late called Tetrachordon ;" and as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second psalm! In order to justify yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellences of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself,

But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till, in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man, reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves, to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader, it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are