Shakspeare succeeds the English Ariosto, "not," we are told, "as a great power, bearing a great name, but Shakspeare in his less divine character as a lover and a man.' "Our author has correctly estimated his sonnets. There are certainly some effusions among them, which for graceful and impassioned tenderness may vie with any thing of the kind in the language; and it is only in his sonnets that we are able to trace the circumstances of the individual man. In the drama, to borrow an idea of the late Mr. Canning, it was his privilege, Proteus like, to assume every transformation, and remain the god in each; there is no current of personal feeling; no human selfishness colouring the imagination with its own peculiarities. From the elves that walk the sand and turf with a printless foot, that delight to hear the solemn curfew, and revel amidst moonlight and flowers; to the dark grandeur of the tyrant, half maddened with terrible dreams, through each conception of character, Shakspeare is totally forgotten: but in his sonnets, fiction is laid aside; he is no longer merged in an ideal existence; we contemplate the suppressed workings of the volcano whose succeeding eruption was to startle a world. The accounts of Shakspeare are contradictory and inaccurate. He is said to have been of humble parentage, and married at the age of eighteen, to a woman eight years older than himself. The suspicion of infidelity attaches to her memory, corroborated by the slight mention made of her in his will: evidently it was not the wife that excited the burning strains which are to be classed among his earlier productions. The object of his passion eludes our curiosity; and the cause of this obscurity may be appreciated, when we find the lover imploring her, in unsurpassed poetry, that all memory of his attachment might be laid with him in the grave, "Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone." "I rejoice," says our author, in concluding her remarks on the great dramatist, "I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all! The creator of Desdemona, and Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia, and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the poet of womankind." The chapter upon the gallant Sir Philip Sidney, is characteristic of our author. She thinks he is less read at the present day than he deserves; we confess that we have never received much delight from his quaint conceits and elaborate versification; but he was a rare spirit in his day. His celebrated Stella was Lady Penelope Devereux, sister to the favourite Essex. She soon discarded the Poet and married Lord Rich, and Sir Philip con soled himself with a daughter of Secretary Walsingham. He survived his marriage but a short time. Queen Elizabeth, Drayton, Daniel, and other distinguished personages of that era, claim the next chapter. From Mary of Scotland, our author is led to illustrate the attachments of some of the earlier French poets. A great portion of them, though. considerable proficients in affectation, were by no means happy in giving language to la belle passion. Tasso and Leonora d'Este succeed; and our author's ingenuity is exerted to free the lady from the imputation of frigidity and fickleness. Tasso's misfortunes and confinement are known to all: as a man of genius, his alliance would have conferred dignity on the proudest lineage of Europe; yet we are scarcely prepared to say that the Duke Alphonso deserved the bitter obloquy, which an illustrious bard, lately dead, has seen fit to heap upon him. The ancient and established prejudices of society on the subject of ancestry, together with the strong evidences of insanity exhibited by the bard, previous to his confinement, tend greatly to extenuate the conduct of Alphonso. We may regret the duke was not superior to his age; we may regret that when the high toned instrument which was capable of such glorious music, became, in some of its chords, fretted and dissonant, greater skill and delicacy were not used to recall the lost harmony; but on a dispassionate inquiry, Alphonso will appear neither more nor less than an overweening and dull patrician, acting under the dictates of education and the usages of his rank. The next chapter is devoted to Milton, the first of modern poets. It is not only his writings, but the grandeur of a nobly sustained and rugged life, that marks this man as one -"Solemnly elected, With gifts and graces eminently adorned, To some great work." And every effort to throw light upon his career should command respect. The records of his period unfortunately furnish no original of the transcendant delineation of sinless and accomplished Eve, or the lady in Comus. They are unrivalled in English, or we believe any other poetry; in them, as in his conception of spiritual life, Milton appears like a being descended from more purified existence, to proclaim among mankind the legends of eternity, and the perfect loveliness of virtue and truth. Our author, we think, ascribes too much to the influence of Leonora Baroni, a public singer whom the poet saw at Rome. She for a short time filled his imagination, and was the object of his Italian sonnets; but the charm soon lost its potency. From the discord of his first wife and daughters, he modelled perhaps one or two scenes in Paradise Lost, and the sex can scarcely claim honour for having afforded him so painful an illustration. of the fall. We conceive that no poet has equalled Milton's dream of womanly grace and purity; and certainly but few through life have been less indebted to them. Our author passes from Milton to Carew, a small poet at the court of Charles I.; who, after being jilted by his mistress, killed himself with dissipation. The gallant Colonel Lovelace, author of some pretty songs addressed to Lucy Sacheverel, then obtains her commiseration. After spending his whole fortune in the king's service abroad, he returned to England, and found his betrothed married to another. And the colonel took immediate revenge, by dying in great poverty and wretchedness, in the very prime of his life. Our author utters rigid judgment against his fickle mistress,-"let her stand forth condemned and scorned forever, as faithless, heartless,-light as air, false as water, and rash as fire.-I abjure her." Waller and his Sacharissa, the Lady Dorothea Sydney, follow; our author well remarks, "He was a great poet in days when Spencer was forgotten, Milton neglected, and Pope unborn." The lady was unpropitious, and Waller married a city widow worth thirty thousand pounds. Lady Sydney afterwards accepted the Earl of Sunderland, and from our author's account, was a very worthy personage. We are then introduced to the beauties and poets nearly cotemporary with Lady Sunderland. The Countess of Carlisle, the Countess of Bedford, complimented by Ben Jonson; the Lady Anne Rich, writing upon whom Waller has given a signal example of the art of sinking in poetry. "That horrid word at once like lightning spread, Our author remarks, "There was at this time a kind of traffic between rich beauties and poor poets. The fees paid for dedications, odes, and sonnets, were any thing but sentimental, can we wonder, if under such circumstances the profession of a poet was connected with personal abasement, which made it disreputable; or that women, while they required the tribute, despised those who paid it, and were paid for it,-not in sweet looks, soft smiles, and kind wishes, but with silver and gold, a cover at her ladyship's table below the salt, or a bottle of sack from my lord's cellar ;—it was a miserable state of things." A few remarks on Dryden follow, but the great poet does not stand high with our author as a lover and husband. The bard married Lady Elizabeth Howard; the following anecdote is related of him, but with decided expressions of disapproval. "Lady Elizabeth being rather annoyed at her husband's studious habits, wished herself a book, that she might have a little more of his attention."Yes, my dear,” replied Dryden, "an almanack," "why an almanack," asked the wife innocently; "because then, my dear, I should change you once a year." Addison was mar ried to the Countess of Warwick; "poor man" says our author, "I believe his patrician bride did every thing but beat him." Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, married Lady Elizabeth Lee, but this union was also an unhappy one. These are succeeded, under the head of conjugal poetry, by those bards, male and female, who after matrimony have made laudable efforts to celebrate its holy estate. Clotilde de Surville, a French poetess of the fifteenth century, is the subject of some entertaining pages; Clotilde was an authoress of considerable merit, and during the absence of her spouse, who followed Charles VII. to the field, addressed to him some beautiful effusions: we give two stanzas of an apostrophe to her sleeping child, as an example of her superiority in composition to the age in which she lived; the spelling has been modernized, but not a word of the original changed. "Arrête, cher enfant! j'en frémis tout entièr Mon fils pour un moment-ah revois la lumiere ! Douce erreur! il dormait-c'est assez, je respire. Ah! quand verrai celui pour qui mon cœur soupire, Clotide survived for a long time the loss of her husband, who closed his career at the siege of Orleans. The fame of her poetical talents conferred upon her great celebrity, and she at last died in 1492, at the advanced age of ninety. A neat chapter follows on Vittoria Colonna, the wife of the Marquis Pescara; a ladypoet of Italy, and the bien aimée of Michel Angelo, but all in honour. Pescara died in his thirty-fifth year, and most of her subsequent pieces are addressed to him. Veronica Gambara, Portia Rota, etc. were ladies of a somewhat similar stamp. Dr. Donne, a grating poet, but an excellent man, affords a fine theme to our author, and she has not disfigured it. Donne, when about thirty years of age, after he had lavished a fortune in travelling and the acquisition of profound learning, contracted an imprudent and secret marriage with the daughter of Sir George Moore. The father-in-law bitterly resented his alliance; and by his influence had him dismissed from an office by which he gained a livelihood. For many years after, Donne's life was a continual struggle against poverty; at last, having entered holy orders, he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's in London, and from this time his situation was comfortable. Habington, an inferior writer of the seventeenth century, follows Donne; our author views his poetical merits through an exaggerating medium; and we are disposed to find the same fault with the next chapter on Lord Lyttleton. His monody verges strongly towards the ridiculous, while it is yet undetermined, whether he composed it before or after the death of his wife; if, as we think quite probable, before, it appears to us to have been exceedingly well calculated to terrify her into a speedy departure. With a slight notice of Prince Frederick, grandfather to the present king, who in his own way was a sort of poet; and of Dr. Parnell, who, on the death of his wife, fell a victim to dissipation; our author introduces us to a really fine scene of conjugal happiness. Klopstock and his first wife Meta Muller, she tells us, "were mutually possessed with the idea, that they had been predestined to each other from the beginning of time, and that their meeting on earth was merely a prelude to an eternal and indivisible union in heaven." And spirituality so pervaded their brief connexion, that in sober truth they might seem almost justified in their belief. Our author gives Meta's own account of her first interview with Klopstock, contained in her correspondence with Richardson; it is marked with the simplicity and eloquence of unconstrained feeling, and displays Meta as not unworthy of her eminently adorned husband. Of the poet our author remarks: "Klopstock was the first to impress on the poetry of his country the stamp of nationality. He was a man of great and original genius,-gifted with an extraordinary degree of sensibility and imagination; but these being united to the most enthusiastic religious feeling, elevated, and never misled him. His life was devoted to the three noblest sentiments that can fill and animate the human soul, -religion, patriotism, and love. To these, from early youth, he devoted his faculties and consecrated his talents. He had, even in his boyhood, resolved to write a poem which should do honour to his God, his country, and himself, and he produced the Messiah. It would be difficult to describe the enthusiasm this work excited when the first three cantos appeared, in 1746. If poetry had its saints, says Madame de Stael, then Klopstock would be at the head of the calendar; and she adds, with a burst of her own eloquence,-Ah, qui' il est beau le talent, quand on ne l'a jamais profané! quand il n'a servi qu'a revèler aux hommes, sous la forme attrayante des beaux arts, les sentiments genereux, et les esperances réligieuses obscurcies au fond de leur cœur." Meta perished, with her child, in, we believe, her first confinement. The inscription from the Messiah, "Seed sown by God to ripen for the harvest," was by her request engraved upon the coffin in which mother and infant were buried. Klopstock was at first inconsolable, but he comforted himself by falling in love with a young girl of Blackenburgh. For some reasons not given, he was unsuccessful; and about twenty years after he married Johanna Von Wentham, "whose affectionate attentions," says our author, "cheered the remaining years of his life." He died at Hamburgh, in 1813, at the age of eighty. A clever chapter upon Burns follows, illustrating his passion for Bonnie Jean and Highland Mary, and delicately noticing his supernumerary loves. Vincenzo Monti, the distinguished Italian poet, lately dead, is the subject of a short chapter, and our author proceeds to the |