the soundness of these critical awards, and if we had, it would require a volume as large as the one we review.

It would be difficult to make any extract from this little poem which could give any thing like a just idea of its character; it must be read as a whole. But the style of the prose criticism may be judged of from the notes on Crabbe and on Spencer, Rogers and Montgomery, which we select, not as the ablest, but because they afford, in a short compass, a fair specimen of the author's ordinary manner, and of his peculiar literary opinions and taste in versification.

"These writers, though classed together, and equally denied admittance to Apollo's dinner table, either from ineligibility to his greater honours, or inability to sustain the strength of his wine, are, it must be confessed, of very unequal merits. Mr. Montgomery is, perhaps, the most poetical of the three, Mr. Rogers the best informed, and Mr. Spencer the soonest pleased with himself. The first seems to write with his feelings about him, the second with his books, the third with his recollections of yesterday, and his cards of invitation. The most visible defect of Mr. Montgomery, who appears to be an amiable man, is a sickliness of fancy, which throws an air of feebleness and lassitude on all that he says;-the fault of Mr. Rogers is direct imitation of not the best models, written in a style at once vague and elaborate. His Pleasures of Memory-a poem, at best, in imitation of Goldsmith-is written in the worst and most monotonous taste of modern versification; to say nothing of the never-failing souls and controls, thoughts and fraughts, tablets, tracings, impartings, and all the endless commonplaces of magazine rhyming. Mr. Rogers, of late years, seems to have become aware of the defects of his versification, and attempted the other day to give his harp a higher and more various strain in the fragment upon Columbus; but the strings appear to have been in danger of snapping. It was ludicrous enough, however, and affords a singular instance of the habitual ignorance of versification in general, to find the Quarterly Review objecting to a line in this fragment, for running a syllable out of its measure, and attempting to snatch one of the finest graces of our older poetry.

"The best thing in Mr. Rogers's productions appears to me to be his Epistle to a Friend, describing a house and its ornaments. It has a good deal of elegant luxury about it, and seems to have been the best written because the most felt. Here he was describing from his own

taste and experience, and not affecting a something which he had found in the writers before him."

"Mr. Crabbe is unquestionably a man of genius, possessing imagination, observation, originality: he has even powers of the pathetic and the terrible, but, with all these fine elements of poetry, is singularly deficient in taste; his familiarity continually bordering on the vulgar, and his seriousness on the morbid and the shocking. His versification, where the force of his thoughts does not compel you to forget it, is a strange kind of bustle between the lameness of Cowper and the slipshod vigour of Churchill, though I am afraid it has more of the former than the latter. When he would strike out a line particularly grand or melodious, he has evidently no other notion of one than what Pope or Darwin has given him. Yet even in his versification, he has contrived, by the colloquial turn of his language, and his primitive mention of persons by their christian as well as surname, to have an air of his own; and, indeed, there is not a greater mannerist in the whole circle of poetry, either in a good or bad sense. His main talent, both in character and description, lies in strong and homely pieces of detail, which he brings before you as clearly and to the life as in a camera obscura, and in which he has been improperly compared to the Dutch painters; for, in addition to their finish and identification, he fills the very commonest of his scenes with sentiment and an interest."

Several smaller poems and translations are added at the end of the volume. Most of them are very well, but of no peculiar excellence; the last, however, entitled Politics and Poetics, though careless and unfinished, is a fine sport of fancy. The poet seems to have filled his mind with the fantastic sprites and fairies of the Midsummer's Night Dream, and since poetry and painting are said to be sister arts, this may be properly enough considered as a fit companion-piece for Fuseli's wildly beautiful picture of Titania and her train of fairies, goblins, and dapper elves.

In short, this volume must not be taken up with overstrained expectation, or read with the microscopic eye of fastidious criticism. If these conditions are honestly complied with, we do not hesitate to promise the good-humoured reader that he will find the Feast of the Poets an elegant repast of literary luxury.

We cannot close this article without noticing the freedom with which the author wanders from the public to the private character

of the subjects of his satire. He takes the same liberties with Mr. Canning, and "Old Brinsley, too, with whiskey dead alive," that he does with that "sour little gentleman, Mr. Gifford" and "sweet Billy Diamond a patting his hair up." In truth, the taste of the British public has become exceedingly depraved in this respect. From the style of some of their periodical and other publications, which surpass in vulgar abuse the worst of our political papers, it would seem, that what with the influence of their gross and licentious caricatures upon the mob, and that of such popular writings as the witty and classical lampoons of the Anti-Jacobin,† the waspish little sarcasms of Gifford, and the droll scurrility of that arch old profligate Peter Pindar, upon the reading classes of society, they have lost the due sense of the delicacy and inviolability of private character. The author of the Feast of the Poets is seldom grossly personal or malignant; but if unluckily any American satirist should treat the great men of Europe, or even some of our own, with as little ceremony, wo betide him; the Quarterly Reviewers and the host of underling scribblers who reëcho their cry, would visit his sins with tenfold abuse, not only upon his own head but upon that of his country.

Cobbett's Anti-Jacobin Review, Scourge, Satirist, &c. &e.

†The weekly paper, not the Review of that name, which has now nothing witty or classical about it.

250

DR. JOHNSON.

[The subjoined extract from an original preface by Dr. Johnson, not inserted in his works, and never before published in this country, will be doubtless highly interesting to all the admirers of the great English moralist.]

The Rev. Mr. Maurice has appended to his Westminster Abbey, with other Occasional Poems, (just published by subscrip tion, in large octavo, with three splendid engravings, of which one is the head of Sophocles, for 11. 5s.) a free Translation of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. It was written as an exercise, whilst the author was under the tuition of Dr. Parr, at Stanmore. Only a few copies of it were printed at the time. It had the good fortune "to pass under the eye of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who condescended to write the preface, which bears internal evidence of its origin." As this preface contains some remarks on the plan of this play, we doubt not that our readers will be obliged to us for presenting them with it entire.

"The tragedy of which I have attempted to convey the beauties into the English language in a free translation, stands amidst the foremost of the classical productions of antiquity. Of tragical writing it has ever been esteemed the model and the masterpiece. The grandeur of the subject is not less eminent than the dignity of the personages who are employed in it; and the design of the whole can only be rivalled by that art with which the particular parts are conducted. The subject is a nation labouring under calamities of the most dreadful and portentous kind; and the leading character is a wise and mighty prince, expiating by his punishment the involuntary crimes of which those calamities were the effect. The design is of the most interesting and important nature; to inculcate a due moderation in our passions, and an implicit obedience to that Providence of which the decrees are equally unknown and irresistible.

"So sublime a composition could not fail to secure the applause and fix the admiration of ages. The philosopher is exercised in the contemplation of its deep and awful morality; the critic is captivated by its dramatic beauties; and the man of feeling is interested by those strokes of genuine passion which prevail in almost every page-which every character excites, and every new event tends to diversify in kind or in degree.

"The three grand unities of time, place, and action, are observed with scrupulous exactness. However complicate its various parts may, on the first view, appear, on a nearer and more accurate examination, we find every thing useful, every thing necessary;

some secret spring of action laid open, some momentous truth inculcated, or some important end promoted: not one scene is superfluous, nor is there one episode that could be retrenched. The successive circumstances of the play arise gradually and naturally one out of the other, and are connected with such inimitable judgment, that if the smallest part were taken away, the whole would fall to the ground. The principal objection to this tragedy is, that the punishment of Oedipus is much more than adequate to his crimes: that his crimes are only the effect of his ignorance, and that, consequently, the guilt of them is to be imputed, not to Oedipus, but Apollo, who ordained and predicted them, and that he is only phœbi reus, as Seneca expresses himself. In vindication of Sophocles, it must be considered that the conduct of Oedipus is by no means so irreproachable as some have contended; for, though his public character is delineated as that of a good king, anxious for the welfare of his subjects, and ardent in his endeavours to appease the gods by incense and supplication, yet we find him in private life choleric, haughty, inquisitive; impatient of control, and impetuous in resentment. His character, even as a king, is not free from the imputation of imprudence, and our opinion of his piety is greatly invalidated by his contemptuous treatment of the wise, the benevolent, the sacred Tiresias. The rules of tragic art scarcely permit that a perfectly virtuous man should be loaded with misfortunes. Had Sophocles presented to our view a character less debased by vice, or more exalted by virtue, the end of his performance would have been frustrated; instead of agonizing compassion, he would have raised in us indignation unmixed, and horror unabated. The intention of the poet would have been yet more frustrated on the return of our reason, and our indignation would have been transferred from Oedipus to the gods themselves-from Oedipus who committed parricide, to the gods who first ordained, and then punished it. By making him criminal in a small degree, and miserable in a very great one, by investing him with some excellent qualities, and some imperfections, he at once inclines us to pity and to condemn. His obstinacy darkens the lustre of his other virtues; it aggravates his impiety, and almost justifies his sufferings. This is the doctrine of Aristotle and of nature, and shows Sophocles to have had an intimate knowledge of the human heart, and the springs by which it is actuated. That his crimes and punishment still seem disproportionate, is not to be imputed as a fault to Sophocles, who proceeded only on the ancient and popular notion of destiny; which we know to have been the basis of pagan theology.

"It is not the intention of the translator to proceed farther in a critical discussion of the beauties and defects of a tragedy which hath already employed the pens of the most distinguished com