VERSES WRITTEN AFTER A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF SIR WALTER RICARDO MADE EASY; OR, WHAT IS THE RADICAL Difference 718 THE STRANGER IN LONDON, 740 THE POEMS AND BALLADS OF SCHILLER.—No. IV., SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS'S DISCOURSES, DICKENS'S AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION, INDEX, 751 767 783 802 825 EDINBURGH: WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 22, PALL-MALL, LONDON. To whom Communications (post-paid) may be addressed. SOLD ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH. Porson. Many thanks, Mr Southey, for this visit in my confinement. Î do believe you see me on my last legs; and perhaps you expected it. Southey. Indeed, Mr Professor, I expected to find you unwell, according to report; but as your legs have occasionally failed you, both in Cambridge and in London, the same event may happen again many times before the last. The cheerfulness of your countenance encourages me to make this remark. Porson. There is that soft, and quiet, and genial humour about you, which raises my spirits and tranquillizes my infirmity. Why (I wonder) have we not always been friends? Southey.-Alas, my good Mr Professor! how often have the worthiest men asked the same question-not indeed of each other, but of their own heartswhen age and sickness have worn down their asperities, when rivalships have grown languid, animosities tame, inert, and inexcitable, and when they have become aware of approaching more nearly the supreme perennial fountain of benevolence and truth? Porson.-Am I listening to the language and to the sentiments of a poet? I ask the question with this distinction; for I have often found a wide difference between the sentiments and the language. Generally nothing can be purer or more humane than what is exhibited in modern poetry; but I may mention to you, who are known to be exempt from the vice, that the nearest neighbours in the most romantic scenery, where every thing seems peace, repose, and harmony, are captious and carping one at another. When I hear the song of the nightingale, I neglect the naturalist; and in vain does he remind me that his aliment is composed of grubs and worms. Let poets be crop-full of jealousy; let them only sing well-that is enough for me. Southey. I think you are wrong in your supposition that the poet and the man are usually dissimilar. Porson.-There is a race of poets-not, however, the race of Homer and Dante, Milton and Shakespeare-but a race of poets there is, which nature has condemned to a Siamese twinship. Wherever the poet is, there also must the man obtrude obliquely his ill-favoured visage. From a drunken connexion with Vanity this surplus offspring may always be expected. In no two poets that ever lived do we find the fact so remarkably exemplified as in Byron and Wordsworth. But higher power produces an intimate consciousness of itself; and this consciousness is the parent of tranquillity and repose. Small poets (observe, I do not call Wordsworth and Byron small poets) are as unquiet as grubs, which, in their boneless and bloodless flaccidity, struggle VOL. LII. NO. CCCXXVI, 2 z and wriggle and die the moment they tumble out of the nutshell and its comfortable drowth. Shakespeare was assailed on every side by rude and beggarly rivals, but he never kicked them out of his way. Southey.-Milton was less tolerant; he shrivelled up the lips of his revilers by the austerity of his scorn. In our last conversation, I remember, I had to defend against you the weaker of the two poets you just now cited, before we came to Milton and Shakespeare. I am always ready to undertake the task; Byron wants no support or setting off, so many workmen have been employed in the construction of his throne, and so many fair hands in the adaptation of his cushion and canopy. But Wordsworth, in his poetry at least, always aimed at * Porson. My dear Mr Southey! there are two quarters in which you cannot expect the will to be taken for the deed: I mean the women and the critics. Your friend inserts parenthesis in parenthesis, and adds clause to clause, codicil to codicil, with all the circumspection, circuition, wariness, and strictness, of an indenture. His client has it hard and fast. But what is an axiom in law is none in poetry. You cannot say in your profession, plus non vitiat; plus is the worst vitiator and violator of the Muses and the Graces. Be sparing of your animadversions on Byron. He will always have more partisans and admirers than any other in your confraternity. He will always be an especial favourite with the ladies, and with all who, like them, have no opportunity of comparing him with the models of antiquity. He possesses the soul of poetry, which is energy; but he wants that ideal beauty which is the sublimer emanation, I will not say of the real, for this is the more real of the two, but of that which is ordinarily subject to the common senses. With much that is admirable, he has nearly all that is vicious; a large grasp of small things, without selection and without cohesion. This likewise is the case with the other, without the long hand and the strong fist. Southey. I have heard that you prefer Crabbe to either. Porson.-Crabbe wrote with a twopenny nail, and scratched rough truths and rogues' facts on mud walls. There is, however, much in his poetry, and more in his moral character, to admire. Comparing the smartnesses of Crabbe with Young's, I cannot help thinking that the reverend doctor must have wandered in his Night Thoughts rather too near the future vicar's future mother, so striking is the resemblance. But the vicar, if he was fonder of low company, has greatly more nature and sympathy, greatly more vigour and compression. Young moralized at a distance on some external appearances of the human heart; Crabbe entered it on all fours, and told the people what an ugly thing it is inside. Southey. This simple-minded man is totally free from malice and animosity. Porson.-Rightly in the use of these two powers have you discriminated. Byron is profuse of animosity; but I do believe him to be quite without malice. You have lived among men about the Lakes, who want the vigour necessary for the expansion of animosity; but whose dunghills are warm enough to hatch long egg-strings of malice, after a season. Southey. It may be so; but why advert to them? In speaking of vigour, surely you cannot mean vigour of intellect? An animal that has been held with lowered nostrils in the Grotto del Cane, recovers his senses when he is thrown into the Agnano; but there is no such resuscitation for the writer whose head has been bent over that poetry, which, while it intoxicates the brain, deadens or perverts the energies of the heart. In vain do pure waters reflect the heavens to him: his respiration is on the earth and earthly things; and it is not the whispers of wisdom, or the touches of affection-it is only the shout of the multitude-that can excite him. It soon falls, and he with it. Porson.-Do not talk in this manner with the ladies, young or old; a little profligacy is very endearing to them. Southey.-Not to those with whom I am likely to talk. Porson. Before we continue our discussion on the merits of Mr Wordsworth, and there are many great ones, I must show my inclination to impartiality, by adducing a few instances of faultiness in Byron. For you must bear in mind that I am counsel for the crown against your friend, and that it is not my business in this place to call witnesses to his good character. Southey. You leave me no doubt of that. But do not speak in generalities when you speak of him. Lay your finger on those places in particular which most displease you, Porson. It would benumb it—nevertheless, I will do as you bid me; and, if ever I am unjust in a single tittle, reprehend me instantly. But at present, to Byron as I proposed. Give me the volume. Ay, that is it. Southey. Methinks it smells of his own favourite beverage, gin and water. Porson.-No bad perfume after all. "Nought of life left, save a quivering When his limbs were slightly shivering." Pray, what does the second line add to the first, beside empty words? "Around a slaughter'd army lay." What follows? "No more to combat or to bleed." Verily! Well; more the pity than the wonder. According to historians, (if you doubt my fidelity, I will quote them,) slaughtered armies have often been in this condition. "We sat down and wept by the waters Of Babel, and thought of the day, When our foe, in the hue of his slaughters, Made Salem's high places his prey." A prey in the hue of his slaughters." This is very pathetic; but not more so than the thought it suggested to me, which is plainer- "We sat down and wept by the waters Of Camus, and thought of the day, When damsels would show their red garters In their hurry to scamper away." Let us see what we can find where this other slip of paper divides the pages. "Let he who made thee." Some of us at Cambridge continue to say, "Let him go." Is this grammatical form grown obsolete? Pray, let I know. Some of us are also much in the habit of pronouncing real as if it were a dissyllable, and ideal as if it were a trisyllable. All the Scotch deduct a syllable from each of these words, and Byron's mother was Scotch. What have we here? "And spoil'd her goodly lands to gild his waste." I profess my abhorrence at gilding even a few square leagues of waste. Where is the difference? "Thy fanes, thy temples," "Rustic plough." There are more of these than of city ploughs or court ploughs. "Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely walls." What think you of a desolate cloud "O'er Venice' lovely walls?" Where poets have omitted, as in this instance, the possessive s, denoting the genitive case, as we are accustomed to call it, they are very censurable. Few blemishes in style are greater. But here, where no letter s precedes it, the fault is the worst. In the next line we find Athens' armies." Further on, he makes Petrarca say that his passion for Laura was a guilty one. If it was, Petrarca did not think it so, and still less would he have said it. Southey. This arises from his ignorance, that reo in Italian poetry, means not only guilty, but cruel and sorrowful. Porson. He fancies that Shakespeare's Forest of Arden is the Belgian |
