published his Wanderer in Switzerland; Cary, the first part of his well-sustained translation of Dante; Hogg, his Mountain Bard; Crabbe, after a silence of twenty years, The Parish Register; Tannahill, a volume of Songs; Moore, his Little's Poems; Scott, his Marmion; and Byron, his Hours of Idleness. Crabbe alone was a favourite with the Review; Montgomery met with a severe handling; the review of Little occasioned a hostile meeting at Chalk Farm; the critique on Marmion, the Quarterly Review; and the bitter and uncalled-for notice of the Hours of Idleness, the swingeing satire, rough and vigorous, of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. poetry of this young lord," says the Review, "belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit; and our counsel is," it adds, "that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents which are considerable, and his opportunities which are great, to better account."

"The

The Edinburgh Review may be forgiven all its injurious and unjust decrees in criticism, for the entertaining addition it made to our literature in the satire of Lord Byron. Not that the satire itself is a very noble specimen of Byron's Muse, or of the school of poetry of which it forms a part; but it is a fine, fearless piece of writing, with a strain of noble invective at times amidst its more prosaic passages and its mere calling of names. The Review, moreover, had this good effect, it roused a Muse of fire before its time, but not before its strength was at its height, and, in all probability, added to the bulk and value of the poems he has left us; for there is little reason to suppose that Byron's life would, under any circumstances, have extended much, if at all, beyond the six-and-thirty years to which it ran.

Birds cease to sing when kites are in the sky, but real poets, though depressed by criticisms for a time, revive with wonted vigour, and try a new flight in the poetic heaven. Byron understood this thoroughly when he sang,

"Yet there will still be bards: though fame is smoke,

Its fumes are frankincense to human thought;

Campbell, the pet of the Reviewers, put forward his Gertrude of Wyoming in 1809; Crabbe, another favourite, his Borough, in 1810; Scott, The Ludy of the Lake; and Southey, his noblest poem by far, his Curse of Kehama, in the same year. Our accessions were considerable, so were our losses. Anstey was removed from among us in 1805, forty years after the publication of The New Bath Guide; Charlotte Smith and Kirke White in 1806; Home in 1808, sixty years after the tragedy of Douglas, and an ode addressed to him by Collins, had secured his fame; Miss Seward, whose feeble lucubrations I have omitted to detail, was removed in 1809; Tannahill, in 1810; Graham and Leyden, in 1811; and in the same year the venerable Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of English Poetry had wrought the changes of which he lived to see so many noble and permanent effects.

Tales in Verse, The World before the Flood, The Isle of Palms, and some of the lighter poems of the year 1812, suffered an eclipse in the great quarto publication of that year, the two first cantos of Childe Harold. Murray gave 6007. for the copyright; the sale was instantaneous, and "I awoke one morning," as the author records, "and found myself famous." The success of the poem was complete, and people applied to the new poet what Waller had said of Denham, "that he broke out like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware or at the least suspected it."

The memorable quarto of the month of March (Childe Harold) was followed in October by one of the wittiest little volumes in the English language, The Rejected Addresses of the Messrs. Smith. The Pipe of Tobacco, by Isaac Hawkins Browne, clever as it is, must sink before the little brochure of the successful brothers. Philips, in his Splendid Shilling, is not more happy in his mock imitation of Milton's manner than the Messrs. Smith of Lord Byron's in the stanzas called "Cui Bono?" The Crabbe, the Scott,

the Southey, the Wordsworth, are all good, indeed, there is not a bad parody in the volume; the Crabbe, in a word, is better than Crabbe,—

'Something had happened wrong about a bill,

Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill;

So to amend it I was told to go,

And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."

Surely "Emanuel Jennings," compared with the above, rises, as the Messrs. Smith remark, to sublimity itself.

The last publication of the year 1812 was the Rokeby of Scott,-less successful than any of his former efforts, and with less of the blaze of true genius about it. Copies were scarce at first,

"Pray have you got Rokeby? for I have got mine,

The mail-coach edition, prodigiously fine;"

and when copies were got, disappointment almost as speedily ensued. Fine passages throughout the poem unquestionably there are. But the versification was the same with his other poems, and what Curl called "the knack was caught by a herd of tasteless imitators.

“I well remember," writes Lockhart, "being in those days a young student at Oxford, how the booksellers' shops there were beleaguered for the earliest copies, and how he that had been so fortunate as to secure one was followed to his cham. ber by a tribe of friends, all as eager to hear it read as ever horse-jockeys were to see the conclusion of a match at Newmarket; and, indeed, not a few of those enthusiastic academics had bets depending on the issue of the struggle, which they considered the elder favourite as making to keep his own ground against the fiery rivalry of Childe Harold."

Byron had novelty on his side, and Scott had to encounter the satiety of the public ear. Other circumstances, moreover, were against him. Moore had given a humorous fling at the poem in his Twopenny Post-Bag; and the Messrs. Smith, in "A Tale of Drury Lane," in The Rejected Addresses, a ludicrous turn to the manner and matter of his former poems. He felt what Byron calls his "reign" was over, and turning

from poetry to prose, left the field of verse to a formidable rival, and employed his pen in the composition of a lighter style of literature,-one in which he achieved a second reputation, and one in which he is still without a rival.

The public at large have never cared much about poems written in Spenser's stanzas, and Byron was wise when he postponed the completion of his poem in that measure to a later period. Scott had awakened a taste for incident and story. Of mere description the public had had enough already; and of legendary tales in verse more than enough. People were tired, moreover, of border raids and Highland scenery; they longed for novelty and for another clime, and they got their wish. There was no suspense: the poet kept pace with the public; and The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos were still in the infancy of their fame, when The Corsair, Lara, and The Siege of Corinth, appeared to await the judgment of the public. The poet was not unmindful of the fate of others. He knew, moreover, the capricious turns of the public taste, and how necessary it was, to maintain his ground, that he should frequently renew his title to the rank assigned him. Afraid that people were beginning to get tired of Turkish tales, he added a third canto to Childe Harold; and when the fourth and last canto of that noble poem was published, he produced a novelty at the same time, a Venetian story (Beppo) in Whistlecraft verse-itself a novelty. Churchill's four years were not better sustained than Byron's twelve. From tales in tripping verse he turned to dramas; and when Manfred and Cain, and Sardanapalus and Werner, had done their work, Don Juan was taken up as a new string to his bow. This, his last, and in some respects his ablest, work was left unfinished at his death. What new style he would have attempted, or what success was likely to attend a fifth new manner, I need not stay to conjecture. His career was brilliant but short, and though he excelled in every style he attempted, there is every reason to suppose that he had done his best.

While Byron blazed the comet of a season, Shelley and Keats appeared

and passed away, leaving some noble memorials of their genius behind them: The Adonais, The Hyperion, The Cloud, the Sonnet on Chapman's Homer. But Shelley is too obscure, and Keats too mythological,-not the obscurity of thoughts too great for words, or a mythological taste derived from a repletion of learning, but the obscurity of haste and the mythological abundance of one who was not a scholar. Other poems of repute and consequence appeared in the same short season. Not a year went by without producing more than one volume of a quality we

never see now.

In 1813, Hogg appeared with The Queen's Wake, containing "Bonny Kilmeny;" Allan Cunningham, with a volume of songs, some of surpassing beauty; Moore, with his Twopenny Post-Bag; Coleridge with a tragedy (Remorse); and Scott, in disguise, with The Bridal of Triermain. In 1814, Wordsworth enriched our poetry with his much-decried Excursion; Moore, with his Irish Melodies; Southey, with his Roderick ; and Rogers, with his Jacqueline. Scott, in the following year, gave us The Lord of the Isles and The Field of Waterloo; and Leigh Hunt, “ real good and very original poem," his Rimini. Wilson, already known by his Isle of Palms, gained another wreath, in 1816, by his City of the Plague. Lallah Rookh, and The Sibylline Leaves of Coleridge, containing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," will make the year 1817 a memorable year in the annals of poetry whenever they are written. Keats' Endymion was a publication of the year 1818; Shelley's Cenci, Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, Rogers' Human Life, and Wordsworth's Peter Bell and The Waggoner, belong to 1819; Keats'

a

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnus, and other poems, to 1820; Shelley's Queen Mab and Adonais; Southey's Vision of Judgment, and Byron's parody of the poem, to the year 1821; Rogers' Italy and Scott's Halidon Hill, to 1822; The Loves of the Angels of Moore, to 1823; Campbell's Theodoric to 1824, and Southey's Tale of Paraguay, to 1825. Song after this began to cease among us; Byron, and Shelley, and Keats, were dead; Scott and Southey silent; Coleridge dreaming away existence,—

"Fond to begin, but still to finish
loathe;"

Campbell past his prime; Rogers and Moore unwilling, rather than unable; Wilson busy with the Noctes Ambrosiana; Wordsworth confined

"Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground;"

Hogg cultivating sheep on Yarrow, and Allan Cunninghami superintending the marble progeny of Chantrey. Song, truly, had gone out among us. No one seems to write from the inborn force of his own genius, from Nature, and his own full thoughts :

"Now each court hobby-horse will wince in rhyme;

Both learn'd and unlearn'd, all write plays. It was not so of old men took up trades That knew the crafts they had been bred in right;

An honest bilboe-smith would make good blades,

The cobler kept him to his awl; but now He'll be a poet, scarce can guide a plough."-BEN JONSON.

But the present condition of our poetry will afford material for another paper.