hundred miles? The nearest is the range of Mocattam

"And crush the work And workmen in their ruins." He tells his brother Epimetheus"Thy brow is bound with silk, not steel." How many thousand years before silk and steel were worked?

"The wise poet," &c., "he is inflated by neither pride nor vanity." If Mr R. had given no more irrefragable proofs that he is not a wise poet, nor any thing like one, he has given it here. We defy the man who possesses more books than Heber ever did, to open any volume, or ten volumes, in his library, containing such an excess of vanity, concluded by the sentence, that the vales, the potentate, is a little lower than the angels; the fulfilment of all which is an obligation upon him, a necessity, and a moral law. He is somewhat more than vates or potentate. "He is the priest of nature, as of humanity."

What can the man mean by this contradistinction? Such a farago of broken down Latin and of false quotations of the commonest texts, such a compilation of notes out of magazines -such confusion and contradiction, ought to secure a place in every curiosity-shop of letters. We now come to the poem itself. Before it opens,

we are told Prometheus is discovered gazing on a statue, which is placed in a recess of the cavern.

Now, it happens that for thousands of years after the death of Prometheus, statuary had not been invented. But Mr Reade has made quite another Prometheus, and very different from the old Titan, who was almost a match for Jupiter. The actual one is little more than a match for Mr Reade. He is a little bit of a Chartist, who wishes to raise the flame of freedom through mankind, and what is more, "To make them know and feel that they

"Which then is greater beneath yonder heaven? "

This is a verse, but a different one from what Mr Reade suspected: we have marked the bars.

It appears that the Shepherd kings were the ancestors of Mr Reade's Prometheus and Epimetheus.

"Of our great sire, take again the branch." This is no verse at all. In the time of Shakespeare, fire was often pronounced as a dissyllable, and sometimes spelt so it retains that form in the adjective fiery; but sire was always a monosyllable.

"For from the moment that a freeman takes

A tyrant's gift, his half of manhood's fled."

This is a very bad version from the Greek tragedian.

"I come, and will interpret his dream to him."

This, also, is a diffuse paraphrase from the Greek. But no Greek verses were like the following, and very few

English, we hope and trust.

"You infinite ether, with its sun and moon, With boundaries known but to the gods alone,

'Tis necessary for man to be happy."

Sigid says of his hands

"They help'd to raise the walls of Thebes, yet I

Have lived to see her in decay." How was this? He must then have lived longer than Methusaleh.

Yet ye marvel when it proves its nature.

Among them of a different stamp, a man In all his inches."

Strange expressions for Prometheus, when stumps and inches had not been invented. But what follows is not half so strange.

"Look at him who stands Apart, pre-eminent above the rest In stature and in 'gait,' that give him height superior."

It would be wonderful if stature did not, and if gait did.

Here is a piece of ill-temper for you!

66 Die, dog, on thy damn'd malice!" The risible muscles that can resist this, may safely read any tragedy our author has written, or will ever write.

"On tyrants, caprices, age, and tribute." We are sincerely sorry if Mr Reade has lost a finger, or the faculty of counting upon his hands. Yet, unless he had, he never could have given us such measure as this. In what manner could he scan the verse? And what passages are these two together?

Oh! the unalienate majesty of right. Confidence in the distrustful public eye."

Here for the first time comes on the stage a new goddess

"Though peace beside her walk'd, and 'blessing' stood,

As of an unalienate liberty;

Though by some storms shatter'd, or the woodman's hand,

To their foundations, Egypt's heart shall answer thee."

The heir-apparent says to King Amasis

"Great king, they have searched hill and dale in vain."

They might have in Egypt searched in vain for hill and dale." He goes on

"At midnight will I offer sacrifice

To the high gods, and, while they reek to Heaven"

What! the gods reek to heaven? Amasis himself is more in the way of reeking.

"Hold; vengeance is wild justice." This is stolen, and worth stealing. "Who is this strange and fearful man?” The word fearful, for terrible, has often been strangely misapplied; more strangely than here. It means precisely the contrary of fearful.

never

"There doth not live on the wide earth a thing,

However foul its nature, that hath not
Something of godlike in it."

It has been said heretofore, that
there is no human being who has not
The
some particle of good in him.
more proper expression, we are afraid,
would be, that has not had. We have
seen statements of criminals in whom
every spark of it seemed utterly ex-
tinguished.

P. 55. He talks of "gilded spires." There never were any in Egypt.

"Clad in white robes as a hierophant," is not a verse; the word is hierophant, not hierophant.

"Enthusiasm even in heaven," &c. Neither is this a verse.

"Then as the chosen priest of liberty." It never occurred to Mr Reade that allegory must not be thus violated. Such language would have suited Robespierre.

P. 60. "

Corruption, and its infinite

abuse."

(This, indeed, is superfluous; he should have omitted through ye.')

"Who part from him like waters: Closing again behind, with myriads round, He walks alone his solitary way."

In the four verses here, are indeed two expletives; but nevertheless they are the best in this work, or in any other of Mr Reade's we have been induced to go through.

P. 68. "Why would ye banish him?
(Nubian.) Because he is

Too great, too good: he makes us feel

we are

Inferior in our natures: so we hate him." Now, in three or four minutes, there was hardly time for this change from

enthusiastic admiration; and men do not so easily say what they feel, when they hate a man for his superiority.

P. 74. "Thy name shall be a watchword to light others."

Watch words do not light; perhaps he meant watch-tower or beacon.

P. 78. Superior, is made a quadrisyllable, genius a trisyllable, power a dissyllable, which is never done in verse. In p. 80,"Prometheus, now captive, is so foolish as to tell Amasis that he hates his own form, because it is like the king's, and is quite ready to die for that very reason."

P. 81. "Truths they responded.
Fame, which thou

Dost so aspire.'

"The punishment of death accorded him who names them."

By way of English.

P. 82. "And these shall be the immortal appendages,

To robe it with a glory of its own." A curious specimen both of verse and English. An appendage robes a thing; no doubt with somewhat belonging to the appendage-not at all; but the appendage is at hand to robe it" with a glory of its own."

P. 83. "I stand erect, And welcome as a friend pale-faced despair.".

Passion does not personify at this rate; and allegories were not yet among the plagues of Egypt, as they are among those of modern poetry. No man, or hero, or demigod, ever welcomed pale-faced despair. She clung to some, but they would have got rid of her if they could.

P. 90. "He will be impaled alive to-
""
morrow's sun.'

Meaning he will be impaled alive tomorrow. To morrow's sun is neither English nor common sense; for the poet does not intend to say that tomorrow's sun will be impaled, which comes nearest the construction.

P. 95. "The soul in its consciousness of freedom."

This, too, is a Readean verse.

theus was no more a Titan than you are: he was the son of Mœris, king of Egypt." With about the same propriety he might represent William the Conqueror as the son of William Pitt, or Joseph the steward of Pharaoh as the son of Joseph Hume. We are unwilling to cast on this gentleman more ridicule than has already been cast on him; but ridicule is the only chastisement of presumption; and was ever presumption equal to his telling us that "he receded from all further effort, as quietly confident of results, as if they had already happen

The results are, he continues. to assure us, that his poetry will "live." That depends, in a great measure, on the quality of the paper. Turning it over, and manipulating it, we think it may. Something of its longevity, he tells Sir Robert Peel in his dedication, will be owing to the patronage of the right honourable gentlemen. Sir Robert Peel is not only a good scholar, but a good tempered and courteous man; he would return a civil answer, with many thanks and courteous expressions, on receiving a book, although he would rather not have received it. He is the last person "to look a gift horse in the mouth," although a roarer or a brokenwinded one, as are Mr Reade's; not to mention that the best of them bear the fire-marks of Lord Byron, and are rather the leaner for the driver. He talks of his " long-laboured Poem of Italy," but he forgets to tell us, what we happen to know without him, that this long-laboured Poem had several other labours beside his own conferred on it. A gentleman in Bath, besides a lady or two, corrected it in several hundred places, we mean the Rev. Mr M.; and Leigh Hunt operated on it with knife and caustic for several months, reducing its bulkiness, and giving it exteriorly a somewhat less sickly appearance. The author was discontented with both for their good offices, and avoided them ever afterwards, as if the correction had been personal. The patient was now discharged from the Infirmary, and began to swagger and challenge in all directions. Then came Catiline, more desperate still. Ben Jonson and Dr Croly had written tragedies on the same subject; but Mr Reade never takes a path of his own, he always

follows close upon others, and treads down their heels; and he has so little judgment, that he always plays this prank with stronger men than himself. In Italy he waylays Byron and Rogers; and he catches at the skirts of Moore to mount among the angels, Italy, "the long-laboured Italy," went through as many hands to bring it to perfection, as a pin does, and was worth about as much when it came out of them. If those hands could polish, they could not point it; and, therefore, it is thrown aside and swept off the carpet some years ago. Mr Reade announced in the public papers, his tragedy of Cain as dedicated to Mr Macready. But as Mr Macready refused to bring it upon the stage, he transferred the signal honour of dedication to Sir Edward Bulwer. This tragedy has already produced its effects, in the following couplet.

"The reign of justice is return'd again: Cain murder'd Abel, and Reade murders Cain."

We willingly pass from Cain to Italy, and from Italy to the Pyramids, in little danger that by going further we may fare worse. There is no probability that we should have ever thought again about the author, if, in the Sun newspaper of May 9, we had not been attracted to him under the article of "Literature," and "A Record of the Pyramids." We should have thought the criticism a severe one, had we not been induced to peruse the poem, the preface, and the notes. We then ac knowledged the leniency of the reviewer in making no quotations from the poetry. The author has made only his from the Latin: in one he

has omitted the very word he wanted; in the other, he has substituted what destroys the metre. The story of Prometheus is known to every schoolboy and school girl of fourteen. The tragedy of Eschylus, founded on it, is familiar to the fifth form. Shelley has unbound the Titan; he never thought of delivering him from the vulture, only to have his sides nibbled at by the tom-tit. Mr Reade talks about his calmness and seclusion and indifference to notoriety; yet most of the critics in England (on good grounds we say it) have been solicited and importuned, from time to time, to pay attention to his poetry. Some have been won over by soft language to make soft replies; others have grown impatient, and have kicked at the sickling. A writer in Blackwood's Magazine showed up him and his letters to the public, and dismissed him with ridicule and scorn. But the unkindest cut of all was inflicted in the sly dexterity of a writer in the Quarterly Review, who placed various stanzas of Italy side by side with the originals in Childe Harold. Another, with less mischief in his head, and more calculation, offered a wager that the words shrine and enshrine terminate at least seventy verses in that poem, and that the interjection Lo! commences as many. Whoever reads only the preface to this Record of the Pyramids, will be ready to believe our declaration, that of all the authors, English or foreign, we have perused in the course of a long life, we never have met with one of so little modesty, so little sense of shame, so little self-knowledge, as Mr John Edmund Reade.