66 but there are some sweet touches of nature. Though these extracts have proved of greater length than was intended, I trust the reader will forgive them, and join with me in commending the total absence of all frigid, unmeaning epithets, and mere ambitious verbal delineation. "There is none of that adulterated phraseology," as the philosophic Wordsworth says, none of that unusual language vulgarly called 'poetic diction,' which thrusts out of sight the plain humanities of nature," but the story runs on to its fulfilment, with the same unity of feeling as if it had been thrown off at a sitting. I cannot tell how tempered may be the heart of the reader, but for mine own part, I confess, that even now while perusing this tale of true love for the twentieth time, my throat swells, and my eyes gush out with tears.-Perhaps, however, there is something in the congenial season,-the gray and watery sky above, the dank grass below, and flagging Auster blowing heavily against the trees, shattering the tawney leaves, but I forget myself. The remarks that are purposed on the principal poem, must not be delayed farther; and, first, for Marlow's share. 66 There is in all the Elizabethan writers a wonderful exuberance and display of mental riches: they give full measure, heaped, and running over." They mingle every thing," says that choice critic Lamb, run line into line, embarrass sentences and metaphors. The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed with the confluence of images," &c. These general remarks apply to the particular case before us. Taken as a whole, Marlow's "Hero and Leander contains much to blame, but, considered by sections, more out of all proportion to praise. The quickness of his fancy would not allow him to treat the story simply he was obliged to branch forth into splendid superfluities.-The human part of his ! plot is good, but he could not let well alone.Thus he has scarcely finished Leander's passionately eloquent wooing, and the rich-haired Hero's unconscious assent, given with such sweet naiveté, when he launches out into an episode, brightly coloured, and ingeniously compacted it is true; but which from its needlessness to the human interest of the poem, becomes neither more or less than an overgrown conceit. This mode of judging bears still harder on that long description in the Second Sestyad, of Leander's swimming; where it seems extremely difficult for Marlow to decide whether Neptune shall be a real God, or a mere personification of the waves. An author should be consistent with himself,-it will never do to make use of Mercury, or Cupid, or Neptune now as mythological personages, and then as abstractions-but enough already of vituperation.—The versification is extremely musical, and preserves a mean between the monotony of Pope, and the tiresome frequency of Chalkhill's overlappings:—many of the lines might be securely dove-tailed into Dryden's narrative poems. Neither is the language unsuited by its harshness to the melody of the verses, being remarkably free from quaintnesses, which in Marlow consist not in phrases, but in ideas. Our author employs not many direct similes, though expository comparisons often :-- he sprinkles, rather liberally, moral sentences, glosses on the text, parenthetical apothegms.-A considerable store of classical learning is revealed in many passages;-the idea of Apollo's harp sounding forth "musick to the ocean," is a well-known antique piece of mystification; see Book II. where, likewise Leander's ineptness in` love, seems suggested by that of Daphnis in Longus's exquisite Pastoral Romance.-Deep knowledge of the human heart is displayed in Hero's longing shame facedness, which wears the. semblance of hypocrisy, and yet is not.-Leander 66 -knock'd and call'd, at which celestial noise, The longing heart of Hero much more joys, Than nymphs and shepherds, when the timbrel rings, * These lines would be highly gratifying to the derisive qualities of a French critic: but here, in England, their reign is over; and thanks to the Germans, with the Schlegels at their head, a truer philosophical method of judging, is beginning to obtain among us. And ran into the dark herself to hide ; Unto her was he led, or rather, drawn By those white limbs which sparkled through the lawn,” &c. How much more truly is this in the genuine nature of woman, and therefore how much more lovely to a healthy mind than either those outrageous personifications of ill-timed chastity, so common in romances ten or twelve years ago, or that unrestrained prostitution of the person which seems considered so venial by Percy B. Shelley and Co.-The two lines "Then standing at the door she turn'd about As loth to see Leander going out:" contain a pretty illustration of the extreme of love-some of our diluting modern writers would have spun out this light touch to a fine length. What a brilliant fancy shines out in the following verses: "The men of wealthy Sestos, every year, |