Ere his very thought could pray, To the last a renegade." P. 45, 6. Still less do we like the irreverend compound invented by Lord B. to express the infant Saviour: "When pictured there we kneeling see Her, and the Boy-God on her knee." And we are afraid that the lines which describe the effects of Minotti's setting fire to the train under the church, are rather too ludicrous for the occasion: "Up to the sky like rockets go Some fell in the gulf, which received the sprinkles With a thousand circling wrinkles; Some fell on the shore, but, far away, Scattered o'er the isthmus lay." P. 52, 3. We now come to PARISINA. It is prefaced by the noble bard with an apology for choosing such a subject for his muse : "I am aware," says he, "that in modern times the delicacy of the reader may deem such subjects unfit for the purposes of poetry. The Greek dramatists, and some of the best of our old English writers, were of a different opinion: as Alfieri and Schiller have also been more recently on the continent. The following extract from Gibbon's Antiquities of the House of Brunswick, will explain the facts on which the story is founded. The dame of Azo is substituted for Nicholas as more metrical: "Under the reign of Nicholas III., Ferrara was polluted with a do mestic tragedy. By the testimony of an attendant, and his own observation, the Marquis of Este discovered the incestuous loves of his wife Parisina, and Hugo his bastard son, a beautiful and valiant youth. They were beheaded in the castle by the sentence of a father and husband, who published his shame, and survived their execution. He was unfortunate if they were guilty; if they were innocent, he was still more unfortunate nor is there any possible situation in which I can sincerely approve the last act of the justice of a parent." " : Gibbon's approbation of any motive springing from a sense of the purity of a moral or religious act, can be of no importance whatever, among those who have not read him with minds tinctured, like his own, with a shameless infidelity. Lord Byron felt that he was about to build on an improper foundation"that in modern times the delicacy of the reader might deem "such subjects unfit for the purposes of poetry ;" and he rests his justification on the practice of the Greeks, some of the old English, and some of the modern German writers-authorities (the Greeks especially) well enough suited to justify almost any thing shocking to decency and good manners. There are but few poets among the Greeks and Romans, and scarcely one of their gods (who, as well as their crimes, were the creation of the poets) who are not fairly chargeable with either the artful palliation, or the audacious perpetration of abominable crimes, for which (were this the scene of their exploits) a London or Westminster mob would duck them in the Thames a hundred times. The subject was every way ineligible; and the alternative, which some other poets would have embraced, was obvious to his Lordship,-to throw Gibbon and his impurities aside, and, till a better topic should present itself, his pen into the bargain. This he should have done, not doubting but that his imitators would, in due time, contrive effectual means of sufficiently soothing and saddening the public. This production is far from being destitute of poetic merit. Parisina's charms are admirably described; and so are Hugo's gallant aspect and demeanour. But the cold and unfeeling manner in which Azo reproves the baseness of his wife and son, and passes sentence on them, is any thing but natural; and the long lecture which Hugo reads his father on hearing his doom pronounced, is very different from what one would have expected him to read or to be permitted to read, on such an occasion and before such a person. We can make room for only one stanza. It is the introductory one, and all who see it will allow it to be "It is the hour when from the boughs Seem sweet in every whispered word; Each flower the dews have lightly wet, And on the wave is deeper blue, And on the leaf a brighter hue, And in the heaven that clear obscure, very As twilight melts beneath the moon away." fine : 389 By ART. V.-Redemption; a Poem, in Twenty Books. GEORGE WOODLEY, Author of "The Church Yard," and other Poems. Law and Whittaker, and Hatchard, London. 1816. 2 vols. 8vo. Pr. 16s. WHEN Milton gave his great epic poems to the world, he was covered by the cloud which the errors and excesses of his politics had raised; and by that cloud, far more than by the ignorance or indifference to literary merit of his cotemporaries, his works also were hid from public view. The candour and moderation of succeeding reigns, unimpeded by the warmth excited by his college polemics, admitted of justice being done to the merits of Paradise Lost and Regained; and their reputation continued increasing till our own times, when it stood so high, that it was considered impossible even to approach their transcendant excellence. Mr. Townsend has however published Armageddon, a poem on a kindred subject-in heroics never so harsh as many of Milton's; and in a variety of passages, as beautiful and sublime as the more admired of them. In reading it, we often forget that it is not Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained, on which its great author set, or affected to set, a higher value than he did on that which we so decidedly prefer, is brought to our recollection again and again by Redemption"—although the latter is very far from being an imitation of that work. The apparently higher estimation in which Milton held Paradise Regained, arose, no doubt, from the praises bestowed on it being comparatively scanty, and from the greater difficulty which he had experienced in composing it. This difficulty might be owing to the nature of the subject which, demanding a becoming adherence to those revelations with which every christian is acquainted, occasionally checked the exuberance of his genius. The same-nay a much greater limitation has been set to the imagination of Mr. Woodley who, however, from a reverence for the Scriptures, which leads him to set scarce any value on what they do not contain, seems not to regret the circumstance. Milton's object did not require a constant strict adherence either to the facts, or to the order of the facts, contained in the New Testament. Mr. Woodley's did; and he has complied so conscientiously, that his readers will sometimes be disposed to pronounce his work little else than a piously-conceived, smoothly-expressed, and well adorned paraphrase of the glad tidings of salvation. They will not, however, have reason to consider it as altogether deficient in that which is the chief ingredient in poetry-Invention. They will find it interspersed with descriptions full of genuine nature, and kindly feeling, the perusal of which will incline them to think better than they did before of the whole christian dispensation. From Paradise Lost, several hints have been taken from Paradise Regained, from which one would expect the most to be borrowed, scarcely any thing has been taken. Mr. Woodley's muse is by no means so aspiring as Milton's was; and it is well she is not-nothing being more mortifying than disappointed ambition. She tempts him but rarely to seek untrodden paths, and to woo imagination amid the depths of science, or on nature's airy heights. We do not insist on any close resemblance between the two authors, in point either of genius, or of erudition. In ardent piety, however, and profound reverence for the supreme being, a very close one is obvious. In other respects, they differ completely.-Milton, sprung from an affluent family, was educated at Cambridge, and made the tour of Europe with a view to the increase of his knowledge, and the enlargement of his views of mankind. Mr. Woodley is of an indigent family-has been educated not at Cambridge, but in Cornwall -the boundaries of which, have in all probability been the limits of his travels in search of the, knowledge of men and manners. Milton's earlier poems added to his literary fame while abroad; and his political pamphlets gave him a name, and placed him in the distinguished office of private secretary to the Protector. Mr. Woodley's publication of his little poem, called the Church Yard, involved him in pecuniary difficulties, and laid him, not indeed in the place which he had described so well, but in a jail. On the Restoration of Charles II, Milton, conscious of the part he had taken in favour of the usurper, hardly ventured to hold up his head before that public, for which he was preparing his two immortal productions. Somewhat in the same manner, Woodley has been constrained to write, as he tells us, during the darkness of the night-not however because his life had been offensive to his sovereign or his fellow-subjects; but from an absolute necessity of devoting the whole of each day, to the duty of procuring sustenance for his family. "If all beside With learning's lore, and unsupported too By those facilities to thought and song "Wake, then, my muse, my glory and my crown: Will wake and sing; nor shall the night prevent Sing that pure life which honour'd every law. Which Love to Justice gave; then swell the strain;- "Asham'd I take a retrospective glance What though not yet the hand of hoary time And grief's corroding streams-more baleful foes old age B. i. p. 5, 6. To give an analysis of this poem, would be tantamount to giving an epitome in Mr. Woodley's words, of the life of our Saviour. We shall therefore only make a few additional extracts, that his style and cast of thought may be sufficiently comprehended. The following is part of his description of the manner in which Hell became ignited. "At length their weary feet some solid found Yet what, or where, they knew not; nor till now ^ |