tity of elk. Every thing is burnt up, but it must be a good place in wet weather. On the road to Palootopane I shot six elephants." He had no more shooting till he reached a place called Madooenwelle on the 13th, whence he writes:"Left early for Madooenwelle; found a very civil Modliar, and a good house. Heard of three tuskers, fell in with one, and killed him; and the next day with the second, and the day after with the third, killing them, with three others. There were plenty of elephants, but the jungle as bad as possible, so thick and thorny." The remainder of his route was without adventure as regards sport, until the 26th, when, while breakfasting at Nambapanè on the Kaloo river, after a ride of twenty miles, he heard tidings of a large herd, with a tusker among them. He accordingly went out, and in a very thick jungle of the clumpy bamboo came near, though he could not see them. One fellow was evidently very angry, growling and screaming out sharp shrill trumpets every now and then. On passing into a small opening, G— heard, and almost at the same moment saw, an elephant, dashing at him. He fired his two barrels, but a clump of the bamboos making the beast take a diagonal direction at the moment, the shot was a slanting one. His gun-bearer gallantly put a fresh gun into his hand, but in taking it he slipped and fell, and, as the elephant was then right above him, fired upwards under his trunk. The beast dropped over G-, who ascribes his safety to his being either under his neck or between his legs. He says the sensation was what he should expect if a mountain were to fall on him, and he had a confused fancy that the beast kicked him from his fore to his hind legs, and back again. All that is certain is, that the elephant must have been well bothered, and went away leaving G- with his pretty Purdy smashed to pieces, and himself very much bruised in the legs and body, and with several ugly gashes on his face, which was afterwards awfully swollen and discoloured. He, however, rode on near twenty miles that day, and arrived at Colombo next morning quite exhausted; all he could say to account for his appearance at the door of a brother-officer being the word "Elephant, elephant." By the care of his medical friends, he was set up again in about a fortnight, and is now at this present writing with merely a couple of little scars on his nose and lip, laboriously endeavouring, by every sophistry of calcu lation, to antedate the period when he may be again at work. Shooting singly is a good deal practised, but of course it multiplies the unfavour able chances of the sport very considerably. Nor does a large party very much diminish them, as after the elephants break it is every one for himself. The safest mode is to shoot by twos, who agree to take alternate shots; but men separate even with this arrangement. And now, sir, I fear we have given you a surfeit of elephant-shooting; but it was our wish to shew the sort of sport it is, and to assure those brother-officers who may be destined to serve here, and who care for shooting, that to ramble over this most beautiful of created lands with this sport as an object is a good to thank Heaven for, which lightens beyond conception the tiresome monotony of tropical life. I do not think that the conscientious could object to it on the score of cruelty, for the elephants destroy a very great deal of cultivation, and no inconsiderable number of lives. But there are other objections which it is easier to state than to answer, and here, against the sport by some who which I do not deny are urged, even have, as well as by many who have not, enjoyed it. Take them in the words of Molière: "Si c'étoit qu'on ne fut à la chasse Qui n'ont aucun respect pour les faces Et qui courent les gens, qui les veulent courir, C'est un sot passe-temps qui je ne puis souffrir!" After all, what say you, Mr. "Lead we not here a jolly life, PAST AND PRESENT CONDITION OF BRITISH POETRY. 'Tis sixty years since a thin quarto volume appeared in London with the plain and unpretending title of An Ode to Superstition, and some other Poems, and exactly the same number of years since a thin octavo appeared at Kilmarnock, entitled, Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The thin quarto was the production of Samuel Rogers, a young gentleman of education, the son of a London banker; the thin octavo the production of Robert Burns, a Scottish ploughboy, without education, and almost without a penny in the world. 'Tis fifty years since Burns was buried in the kirkyard of St. Michael's: "O early ripe, to thy abundant store, What could advancing age have added more!" While the poet of the Ode to Superstition is still among us, full of years and full of health, and as much in love with poetry as ever. "It is, I confess," says Cowley, "but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man; for when once we fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life." It was so with Waller when he was eighty-two, and is so with Mr. Rogers now that he is eighty-one. Long may it be so :— "If envious buckies view wi' sorrow Waller "was the delight of the House of Commons, and, even at eighty, he said the liveliest things of any among them." How true of Rogers, at eighty, at his own, or at any other table! The poet of An Ode to Superstition has outlived a whole generation of poets, poetasters, and poetitos; has seen the rise and decline of schools, Lake, Cockney, and Satanic-the changeful caprices of taste the injurious effects of a coterie of friends—the impartial verdicts of Time and a third generation—another Temple of Fame-a new class of occupants in many of the niches of the old-restorations, depositions, and removals, and, what few are allowed to see, his own position in the Temple pretty well determined, not so high as to be wondered at, nor so low that he can escape from envy and even emulation. Nor is this all: he has lived to see Poetry at its last gasp among us; the godlike race of the last generation expiring or extinct, and no new-comers in their stead; just as if Nature chose to lie fallow for a time, and verse was to usurp the place of poetry, desire for skill, and the ambition and impudence of daring for the flight and the raptures of the true-born poet. The If such is the case, that Poetry is pretty well extinct among us-which no one, I believe, has the hardihood to gainsay a retrospective review of what our great men accomplished in the long and important reign of King George III. (the era that has just gone by) will not be deemed devoid of interest at this time. yet without an historian, nor has subject is a very varied one, is as hitherto received that attention in critical detail so pre-eminently due to a period productive of so many poems of real and lasting merit,— poems as varied, I may add, as any era in our literature can exhibit, the celebrated Elizabethan period, perhaps, but barely excepted. A new race of poets came in with King George III., for the poets of the preceding reigns who lived to witness the accession of the king either survived that event but a very few years, or were unwilling to risk their reputations in any new contest for distinction. Young was far advanced in years, and content and wisely so-with the fame of his Satires and his Night Thoughts; Gray had written his Elegy and his Odes, and was annotating Linnæus within the walls of a college; Shenstone found full occupation for the remainder of his life in laying out the Leasowes to suit the genius of the place; Johnson was put above necessity and the booksellers by a pension from the crown; Akenside and Armstrong were pursuing their profession of physicians; Lyttelton was busy putting points and periods to his History; Smollett, in seeking a precarious livelihood from prose; and Mallet employed in defending the administration of Lord Bute, and earning the wages of a pension from the minister. Three alone adhered in any way to verse: Mason was employed in contemplating his English Garden; Glover, in brooding over his posthumous Athenaid; and Home, in writing new tragedies to eclipse, if possible, the early lustre of his Douglas. There was room for a new race of poets. Nor was it long before a new set of candidates for distinction came forward to supply the places of the old. The voice of the Muse was first awakened in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. I can find no earlier publication of the year 1760 than a thin octavo of seventy pages, printed at Edinburgh, entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language, the first edition of a work which has had its influence in the literature of our country, the far-famed Ossian, the favourite poem of the great Napoleon. "Have you seen," says Gray, "the Erse Fragments since they were printed? I am more puzzled than ever about their antiquity, though I still incline (against every body's opinion) to believe them old." Many, like Gray, were alive to their beauties: inquiry was made upon inquiry, and dissertation led to dissertation. It was long, however, before the points in dispute were settled, and the authorship brought home to the pen of the translator. The Frag ments have had a beneficial and a lasting effect upon English literature. The grandeur of Ossian emboldened the wing of the youthful Byron, and the noble daring of the allusions and illustrations countenanced the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in what was new and hazardous, when Hayley held, and Darwin was about to assume, a high but temporary sition in our poetry. po The Aberdeen volume of poems and translations (8vo. 1761) was the first publication of Beattie, the author of The Minstrel. So lightly, we are told, did Beattie think of this collection that he used to destroy all the copies he could procure, and would only suffer four of the pieces-and those much altered-to stand in the same volume with the Minstrel. Beattie acquired a very slender repu tation by this first heir of his invention; nor would it appear to have been known much beyond the walls of the Marischal College, before the Minstrel drew attention to its pages, and excited curiosity to see what the suc cessful poet on this occasion had written unsuccessfully before. In the same year in which Beattie appeared, a new candidate came for ward to startle, astonish, and annoy. The reputation of a poet of higher powers than Beattie seemed likely to exhibit would have sunk before the fame of the new aspirant. I allude to Churchill, whose first publication, The Rosciad, appeared in the March of 1761, and without the author's name. This was a lucky, and, what is more, a clever hit. The town, a little republic in itself, went mad about the poem; and when the author's name was prefixed to a se cond edition, the poet was welcomed by the public as no new poet had ever been before. Nor was his se cond publication-his Apology-inferior to his first. His name was heard in every circle of fashion, and in every coffee-house in town. Nor did he suffer his reputation to flag but kept the public in one continual state of excitement for the remainder of his life. He attacked the whole race of actors in his Rosciad; the Critical Reviewers (the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers of the day), in his Apology; the whole Scottish nation, in his Prophecy of Famine; Dr. Johnson, in The Ghost; and Hogarth, in A Familiar Epistle. Every person of distinction expected that it was to be his turn next; and there was no saying where his satire would not have reached, for he was busy with a caustic dedication to War burton when, on the 4th of No vember, 1764, he died at Boulogne, at the too early age of three-and-thirty. Dr. Young survived him nearly a year. What the predecessor of Pope in satire thought of the new satirist, no one has told us. 盟 12 While "the noisy Churchill" engrossed to himself the whole attention of the public, a poem appeared in May 1762, likely to outlive the caustic effusions of the satirist, because, with equal talent, it is based on less fleeting materials. This was The Shipwreck, a Poem, in Three Cantos, by a Sailor; better known as Falconer's Shipwreck, and deservedly remembered for its "simple tale," its beautiful transcripts of reality, and as adding a congenial and peculiarly British subject to the great body of our island poetry. The popularity of Churchill kept it on the shelves of the booksellers for a time, but it soon rose into a reputation, and nothing can now occur to keep it down. When Goldsmith published his first poem (The Traveller) in the December of 1764, Churchill had been dead a month, and there was room for a new poet to supply his place. Nor were critics wanting who were able and willing to help it forward. "Such is the poem," says Dr. Johnson, who reviewed it in the Critical Review, "on which we now congratulate the public, as on a production to which, since the death of Pope, it will not be easy to find any thing equal." This was high praise, not considered undeserved at the time, nor thought so now. Such, indeed, was the reputation of the Traveller, that it was likely to have led to a further succession of poets in the school of Pope, but for the timely interposition of a collection of poems which called our attention off from the study of a single school, and directed the young and rising poets to a wider range for study and imitation. was This collection of poems Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, one of the most tasteful collections of poems in any language, and one of the best and most widely known: "The publication of which," says Southey,"must form an epoch in the history of our poetry whenever it is written." The first edition appeared in 1765, a year remarkable in more ways than one. Dr. Young, the sole survivor of the poets of the last generation, died, at the great age of eighty-four, on the 5th of April; and Mr. Rogers, the still surviving patriarch of the past generation of poets, was born on the 30th of July of the same year. The effect of the Reliques was more immediate than some have been willing to imagine. The Hermit of Goldsmith, a publication of the following year, originated in the Reliques; and the Minstrel of Beattie, a publication of the year 1771, in the preliminary dissertation prefixed to the volumes. If Percy had rendered no other service to literature than the suggestion of the Minstrel, his name would deserve respect. "The Minstrel," says Southey, 66 was an incidental effect of Percy's volumes. Their immediate consequence was to produce a swarm of legendary tales,' bearing, in their style, about as much resemblance to the genuine ballad as the heroes of a French tragedy to the historical personages whose names they bear, or a set of stage-dances to the lads and lasses of a village-green in the old times of the maypole." This was the more immediate effect; the lasting result of the Reliques was their directing the rude gropings of genius in a Scott, a Southey, a Coleridge, and a Wordsworth. Beattie reappeared in 1766 with a volume of poems, better by far than what he had done before, but still insufficient to achieve the reputation which the Minstrel subsequently acquired for the author of the volume. A second candidate was Cunningham, a player, still remembered for his Kate of Aberdeen, a short but charming piece of simplehearted poetry. Poor Cunningham made no great way with his verse; he had dedicated his volume, with all the ambition of an actor, to no less a personage than Garrick; but the head of the patentee players received the stroller's poetry with indifference, and did not on this occasion repay which he commonly did-his encomiums "in kind." But the poet of the year 1766 was Anstey, with his New Bath Guide. "There is a new thing published," says Walpole," that will make you split your cheeks with laughing. It is called the New Bath Guide. It stole into the world, and, for a fortnight, no soul looked into it, concluding its name was its true name. No such thing. It is a set of letters in verse, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally every thing else; but so much wit, so much humour, fun, and poetry, never met together be Gray commended it to Wharton, and A publication of the year 1767, called the Beauties of English Poesy, selected by Oliver Goldsmith, deserves to be remarked. The selection seems to have been made as a sort of antidote to Percy's Reliques. 66 My bookseller having informed me," he says, "that there was no collection of English poetry among us of any estimation, I there fore offer this," he adds, " to the best of my judgment, as the best collection that has yet appeared. I claim no merit in the choice, as it was obvious, for in all languages the best productions are most easily found." It will hardly be believed by any one who hears it for the first time, that a poet of Goldsmith's taste in poetry could have made a selection from our poets without including a single poet (Milton excepted) from the noble race of poets who preceded the Restoration. Yet such, however, is the case; and I can only account for the principle on which the selection would appear to have been made, that it was meant as an antidote to Percy's publication, or that Goldsmith (and this is not unlikely) was perfectly unacquainted with the poets of a period previous to Dryden and Pope. Michael Bruce, a young and promising poet, died in the year 1767, at the too early age of twenty-one. Some of his poems-and they were posthumously published, without the last touches of the author-possess unusual beauties. His Lochleven is called, by Coleridge, "a poem of great merit;" and the same great critic directs attention to what he calls "the following exquisite passage, expressing the effects of a fine day on the human heart: "Fat on the plain and mountain's sunny side, Large droves of oxen, and the fleecy Feed undisturb'd; and fill the echoing air The traveller stops, and gazes round and round O'er all the scenes, that animate his heart With mirth and music. Ev'n the men. dicant, Bowbent with age, that on the old grey stone, Sole sitting, suns him in the public way, Feels his heart leap, and to himself he sings." Another poet, whose song ceased before he had time to do still better things, was poor Falconer, who perished at sea, in the Aurora frigate, in the year 1769. He had sung his own catastrophe in his Shipwreck only a few years before. The poem of the year 1770 was The Deserted Village-in some respects a superior poem to The Traveller. It was immediately a favou rite, and in less than four months had run through five editions. Gray thought Goldsmith a genuine poet. "I was with him," says Nicholls, "at Malvern, when he received the Deserted Village, which he desired me to read to him; he listened with fixed attention, and soon exclaimed, This man is a poet !'" If The Deserted Village was, as it certainly is, an accession to our poetry, the death of Akenside and the far too premature removal of Chatterton were real losses in the very same year in which Goldsmith's great poem appeared. Akenside had, no doubt, but Chatterton was song, sang his only in his eighteenth year. What a production for a boy was the ballad of "Sir Charles Bawdin!" There is nothing nobler of the kind in the whole compass of our poetry. "Tasso alone," says Campbell, "can be compared to him as a juvenile prodigy. No English poet ever equalled him at the same age." The Deserted Village of the year 1770 was followed in 1771 by the first book of The Minstrel, a poem which has given more delight to minds of a certain class, and that class a high one, than any other poem in the Eng lish language. Since Beattie composed the poem on which his fame relies, and securely too for an hereafter, many poems of a far loftier and even a more original character have been added to the now almost overgrown body of our poetry, yet Beattie is still the poet for the young; and still in Edwin-that happy personification of |