genius it requires, but from certain suspicions, founded on a perusal of the Notes, that, to sail in safety, Mr Hodgson must steer by the rudder and compass of another man's thoughts.

ART. IV. Lectures on the truly Eminent English Poets. By Percival Stockdale. Printed for the Author, and sold by Longman Hurst Rees & Orme. 2 vol. large Svo. Price one guinea in boards. 1807.

WHATEVER truth there may be in the assertion, that none but

a poet should criticize a poet, we are nevertheless extremely happy to meet now and then with dissertations on poetry in sober prose; for most of our modern bards, as if they were afraid that posterity would not take the trouble to be their commentators, have enshrined themselves in their own annotations.

The author before us seems to have written the greater part of these remarks at a time when the subjects of criticism, on which he enters, excited a livelier interest than they do at present in the public mind. More than half of his pages is devoted to the refutation of Dr Johnson's heretical dogmas on the merits of our best writers. There was a time when no true admirer of Milton or Gray could speak without a rapture of indignation of Johnson's blasphemies against those poets. We know not if any duels were fought in that fashionable controversy, as they were in the course of another, which did not long precede it, in this part of the island, viz. the guilt or innocence of Mary Queen of Scots ; but if blood was not spilt, a great deal of gall was generated. Nearly coeval with these, was the Rowleyan controversy, concerning the authenticity of the poems produced by Chatterton. On this subject also, Mr Stockdale has taken the field with as much ardour as we should now expect in a writer on the Catholic question, or the expedition to Copenhagen. On both questions, whether as the adversary of Johnson or of Miller and Bryant, Mr Stockdale appears to us rather impetuous as an advocate; yet generally, and with good feelings, in the right. We are only afraid this ingenuous veteran will find the public interest not so warm as his own. Johnson's true glory will live for ever; his violent prejudices have already lost their authority. The refutation of his errors, therefore, is not now called for. Of all that was ever written against him, there is but one worthy of being preserved as a literary curiosity; we mean the continuation of his criticism on Gray's Elegy, being an admirable imitation of his style, and a temperate caricature of the unfairness of his strictures. Still, however,

though

though the names and fashions of our literary controversies have changed, there is much matter in these lectures of a general and imperishable interest.

The series of Mr Stockdale's Eminent Poets commences with Spencer. In going further back, in point of date, than Johnson, his plan is commendable. Spencer, however antiquated his style, is certainly the earliest of our modern English poets. Surrey and Wyatt, though they are found in the mighty chasm that occurs in our poetical history between Chaucer and Spencer, and though they are sufficiently intelligible to be called modern, are still not sufficiently great to stand as the leaders of a new dynasty. The metaphysical school, who succeeded Spencer and Shakespeare, were unworthy to stand in Johnson's list as the only surviving predecessors of Milton.

The outlines of Spencer's poetical character are pretty faithfully drawn by our author, though, as he duly acknowledges, with ample obligations to the labours of a preceding critic, Warton. The principal circumstance which seems to have debarred Spencer from attaining, as he has certainly approached the throne of poetical excellence, seem to be the excessive wildness of that machinery which he has adopted from the more extravagant of the Italian schools, from Ariosto, and not from Tasso. Under this may perhaps be included the fault of his excessive allegory and personification, which associates personified abstract ideas and human beings at the battle as well as the banquet, to the exclusion of even that faint consistency which fable ought to preserve. The form of his stanza has been pronounced by many critics to be tedious and monotonous. Our author confesses that he does not think so; and yet he supposes that it is owing to the shackles of this stanza, that the poetry of Spencer has been loaded with so many passages of languor, tautology, and violated grammar. Undoubtedly the stanza of Spencer is less easily constructed in our language than in Italian; but none of the faults of Spencer can be justly attributed to the form of his metre. It is by far the richest and the sweetest of our measures. More definite than blank verse, it admits both of simplicity and magnificence of sound and language. Without the terseness of unvaried rhyme, a measure unfitted to long narration, it is sufficiently uniform to please the ear, and sufficiently various to protract the pleasure, Spencer owes his languid lines merely to the careless taste" of an age which set no value on condensed expression. Without disrespect to our truly majestic measure of blank verse, let some of the rich passages in Spencer, or of the Castle of Indolence, be produced,-those passages especially of the Fairy Queen, in which Spencer's genius has put forth a diligent hand,

and

and we shall find, that the melody and the pomp of this measure, while it accords with the humbler, gives dignity to the loftiest conceptions. When the difficulty of any measure is such as to occasion more restraint in overcoming it than effect when it is overcome, that measure may be called a shackle upon genius. But where so much effect is produced, the difficulty that is overcome becomes a triumph to genius; and the restraint operates like those obstacles of oblique pressure in mechanics, which ultimately augment the impetus of projectile bodies, though, for a while, they seemed to oppose it. But, in truth, if we except the unfortunate adoption of extravagantly allegorical machinery, the few imperfections of Spencer seem to arise from his carelessness. The life of man was not sufficient to have wrought up to classical purity so much composition as he has left behind him. Profusion was the fault of his bountiful genius, as prolixity was that of his minor contemporaries. It was the custom to write much on the minutest subject; and though the fertile mind of Spencer precludes that profusion which gives words without ideas, stilf there is an accumulation of characters, events, speeches and descriptions, which bewilder the reader, not so much with enchantment, as confusion. The story of the Fairy Queen is more like a succession of triumphal arches, than a regular building We pass on with admiration and delight; but yet both are occasionally cooled by the labyrinthical irregularity of the design. We miss that regular subserviency of minor events and characters to those which are great and important, which constitutes the charm of a perfect story, whether we call it Epic, or by any other appellation. The characters are in vain varied from each other by a charming verisimilitude and fidelity to human nature.. They are in vain elevated to the most heroic scale of excellence to produce that entire interest, of which Spencer's genius could not otherwise have failed. Superlative heroes and peerless beauties are crowded upon us in such numbers, that we lose sight' of them in the blaze of each other. Had Spencer lived later in the days of poetry, there is every reason to suppose he would have simplified his plan, and condensed the versification of his poem. In a poem of a few hundred pages, the stanza would not seem monotonous; in one, amounting to thousands of pages, blank verse itself would at least wear us out.

Let it not be held sacrilegious that these remarks are made on a name so justly revered by Englishmen; on one who, if Chaucer be called the day-star, may certainly be pronounced the sun-rise of our poetry. What shall we think of that romantic poem, which, with all the faults of its structure and careless execution,

is still the wonder of a third century, and the fountain from which our great poets of the last age imbibed their inspir tion most deeply. We shall give, however, the praises of Spencer in our author's own language.

• When I fit down to read Spencer, (I prefume not to determine with what preparation of the mind he fhould be read by others), I never think of tracing his allegory. I only wish to imbibe the animated and glowing page before me. I forget this world, and am tranfported to the bright and variegated regions of imagination. His defcriptions are prefented with fuch infinuating eloquence, and with fuch a force of colouring, that even his figures of a grotefque wildness must please those who are most pleased with chafter beauties. You view pictures drawn by the hand of a master, endowed with contrafted talents, the mild and beaming fkies of Lorraine, the rude and tangled precipices of Salvador Rofa. And though his heroes are the heroes of chivalry and romance, you are often entertained and interested with ftriking examples of the real nature of man,-of what comes home to focial and domeftic life. All the paffions of the human breast he exhibits with their characteristic features and emotions, particularly the most univerfally active and powerful of our paffions, love. It is remarked by the belt critics, that he is particularly powerful in the plaintive and pathetic ftrain. The truth of this obfervation is evinced in many paffages of the Fairy Queen, and in thofe of his smaller poems, which are exprefsly elegiac. Vol. I. p. 27. The subject of the next Lecture is Shakespeare; of whom it seems difficult to say any thing that has not been said before-a difficulty which Mr Stockdale has not overcome. Of Shakespeare's minor poems he thinks unfavourably; an opinion with which the reasonable worshippers of our greatest bard are likely to coincide. All the praise that can be given to those pieces for which his contemporaries gratuitously called him the honeytongued Shakespeare, is, that they are bad resemblances of the heaviest passages of Spencer. But, when we compare the dramatic style of Shakespeare with the descriptive of Spencer, it is then that we are conscious how rich the age of Elizabeth was, which at once contained two such masters, so high in their degree, yet so different in the species of their merit. In Spencer, we see, as it were, the painter; in Shakespeare the statuary, of imitated nature. Instead of the rich and highly-coloured style of Spencer, so peculiarly suited to description, Shakespeare presents us with the simple and complete imitation of naked nature. His style, therefore (unless where it suits pedantic characters, or complies with his own occasional love of latinizing the mean g of words), is more like the language of life, varying from the ludicrous to the sublime with the characters who address us. Shakespeare is more eminently the poet of nature; he bris nature more palpably before us; his imitation is nearer.

Among other remarks by no means original we are told, that invention

VOL. XII. NO. 23,

E

;

invention is one of the grand characteristics of Shakespeare that no poet ever possessed this faculty in a more fertile or vigorous degrée; and we are taught to discriminate between the poetical gifts of invention and imagination. The inventive poet (says Mr Stockdale) signalizes himself by combining remoter images. Such a writer is emphatically the Пons, the poet, the maker, almost the creator. Yet,

"What can we reafon but from what we know?"

This question, unanswerable as it seems, he answers by immediately subjoining, The inventive or creative genius sometimes disdains the walk of man; nay, it will not be limited by the various, the vast, and the apparently unbounded region of nature. He then gives the wierd sisters, the airy dagger, and the enchanted island, as the wonderful, the charming, or the striking productions of Shakespeare's invention; the finest assemblage of objects (he continues) which have obeyed the common and established laws of nature. Human characters, however forcibly or humorously drawn, I beg permission to class with the works of imagination. Caliban and Prospero, according to this distinction, are the boast of Shakespeare's invention; Shylock and Falstaff those of his imagination. All this distinction appears to us superfluous. To divide invention from imagination, seems to be merely dividing the included from the including term. Imagination (as the most luminous of moral philosophers has described it) is a complex power; it includes conception, or simple apprehension, which enables us to form a notion of those former objects of perception, or of knowledge, out of which we are to make a selection; abstraction, which separates the selected materials from the qualities and circumstances which are connected with them in nature; and judgment and taste directs their combination. To these powers we may add, that particular habit of association to which we give the name of fancy, as it is this which presents to our choice all the different materials which are subservient to the efforts of imagination, and which may therefore be considered as forming the groundwork of poetical genius.'

Now, this description of imagination will apply with equal propriety to Shakespeare's enchanted island, and to his character of Falstaff, leaving no greater merit to his supernatural than his mortal agents. In fact, in point of consummate excellence, the character of Falstaff, though human, is more truly original than that of the monster himself. He found materials for both in the characters of men, and in their reigning superstitions. We may allow poetry to boast, in her own language, of him who

exhausted worlds,

Stewart's Elements of the Philofophy of the Human Mind.