We now come to the Forest Fay, the metre of which poem is copied from the Forsaken Indian of Mr. Wordsworth. The plagiarisms here, which are innumerable, are mostly in masquerade; but Mr. Bayley's wardrobe not being very large, a passing look is sufficient to detect them. To string together parallel passages is the fashionable criticism of the day, and considered as mere criticism it is idle and worthless work. In

the present instance it becomes an act of justice to expose an impostor.

"Then point I out the squirrel's hoard,
Then point I out what trees afford
Safe nourishment and wholesome food
Among the treasures of the wood.
1 guide to where sweet berries grow,
Where earth-nuts in the turf abound.”
Bayley, 62.
Filched in spirit, and partly in words

from the Mad Mother.

"I know the poisons of the shade,
I know the earth-nets fit for food."
Lyrical Ballads, i. 142.

"Then ditties fill the air around,
Then choral strains together rise;
Now one soft, flowing single sound."
Bayley, 62.

"Sometimes all little birds that are How they seen'd to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning.

And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute,

And now it is an angel's song
That makes the heavens be mute."
Lyrical Ballads, i. 170.

"a goblin rout
Swim to and fro, and in and out,
They coil about in wreaths like snakes
And swarm thick-clustering in the light,
Then dash the fire about in flakes,
And skirmish with well-mimick'd fight;
And oft the fire-flood shifts its hue,
Green, purple, yellow, red or blue."
Bayley, 68.

"To and fro they were hurried about,
And to and fro and in and out.
Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watch'd the water-snakes,

They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they rear'd, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watch'd their rich attire;
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coil'd and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire."

Lyrical Ballads, i. 164.

"About, about, in reel and rout
The death fires danced at night,
The water like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white."
Ibid. 154.

"Oh, sovereign Nature! thou whose sacred sway Softens the rugged heart; by thee beguil'd The soul new-moulds its essence; soft and mild

Is the sweet influence that soothes away Each jarring discord: thou with thy sweet play

Of forms and tints, waters and thickets wild,
So strongly workest on thy wayward child,
That, conquer'd, all his soul receives thy ray.”
Bayley, Sonnet, i. 79.
-"till his very soul
Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deform'd
By sights of ever more deformity.

Healest thy wandering and distemper'd child: Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing

With other ministrations thou, O Nature!

sweets,

Thy melodies of woods, and winds and waters,

Till he relent and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy."
Lyrical Ballads, vol. ii.

The Sonnets are chiefly stolen from Mr. Bowles, sometimes the theft is verbal, more frequently the thoughts and plan are pilfered. True to his golden rule of writing by pattern, Mr. Peter Bayley has extended it from one or two lines to whole poems. He has even invented a new mode of plagiarism, that of translating from his contemporaries, unless indeed it be imitated from the common school exercise of turning an Ode of Horace into a different metre-thus the following Sonnet is reversified from Mr. Bowles.

"To a Flowering Shrub-in Winter. "How art thou chang'd, once-blooming tree! when last

Amid these paths I gave my feet to stray, Cherish'd by gales and show'rs, and sum

mer's ray,

Fair didst thou flourish.-But thy hour is past;

And, scatter'd by the fury of the blast,

Thy blushing flow'rs, the gift of rosy May, Thy buds, and verdant leaves are whirl'd

away,

And all thy honours to the earth are castAh! yet a little, and the breath of spring Shall crown thee with fresh flow'is; again shall bring

Fragrance to thy young buds, and new-born bloom,

Again shall fan thee with propitious wing. But oh! what spring shall dawn upon the gloom

That dwells around the cold and silent tomb!"

Bayley. "How shall I meet thee, summer, wont to All

My heart with gladness, when thy pleasant tide First came, and on each coomb's romantick side

Was heard the distant cuckoo's hollow bill? Fresh flowers shall fringe the wild-brink of the stream,

As with the songs of joyance and of hope The hedge-rows shall ring loud, and on the slope

The poplars sparkle in the transient beam; The shrubs and laurels which I lov'd to tend, Thinking their May-tide fragrance might delight,

With many a peaceful charm, thee, my best friend,

Shall put forth their green shoot, and cheer the sight!

But I shall mark their hues with sickningeyes,
And weep for her who in the cold
grave lies."
Bowles, i. 32.

In another Sonnet Mr. Bayley has fitted in the same conclusion. "That now has left me here to weep and mourn Her that lies buried in the silent tomb." Bayley, 85.

The Sonnet "at Harlech Castle," thus affectedly entitled, in imitation of Mr. Bowles, is stolen in the same manner from Mr. Lloyd, more impudently, as the original thoughts are more marked." "HARLECH! with many a pause

tread

and cautious

I climb'd thy hills; while, wafted from the main

With low wail, as of one long rack'd by pain, Through thy lone tow'rs the breezes sigh; its head

The long lank grass that o'er thy tops is spread

Waves wildly; thy hoar ruins shew how vain Conquest's proud pageant, vict'ry's lofty

strain,

And the priz'd wreath that shades the hero's

head.

Thy turret tops, shall give her minstrelsy; And Mercy smiles, e'en in thy courts, to see The waving harvest all its stores reveal."

"To Craig Miller Castle.

This hoary labyrinth, the wreck of Time, Solicitous with timid step I tread, Scale the stern battlement, or venturous climb Where the rent watch-tower bows its grassy head.

These dark damp caverns breathe mysterious

dread,

Haply still foul with tinct of ancient crime;
Methinks some spirit of the ennobled dead,
High-bosom'd maid, or warrior form sublime
Haunts them; the flapping of the heavy bird
Imagined warnings fearfully impart,
And that dull breeze below that feebly stin'd,
Seem'd the deep breathing of an o'ercharg'd
heart!

Proud Tower, thy halls now stable the lean herd,

And musing Mercy smiles that such thou art."

Coleridge's Poems, 2d edition.

Mr. Bowles has been plundered as unmercifully as Mr. Wordsworth, by this dealer in shreds and patches. "Oh! breathe once more that air; Oh! yet

same author.

But it were endless to enumerate all the petty larcenies of this literary Bar rington. Any person conversant with Mr. Bowles's Sonnets who shall perust

"And oh, the look! when from that tree
At length she turn'd her eyes on me!
That look may never pass away;
Even now it works upon my mind,

And in its magic I shall find

Subject and food for many a future day."
Bayley, 102.
The look with which they look'd on me
Had never pass'd away."

Lyrical Ballads, i. 103.

"with pleasing hopes That in this moment there is life and food For future years."

ibid. i. 194. This is by no means an uninteresting specimen of Mr. Bayley's general prac ice of plagiarism; having the Lyrical Ballads by heart, he fits in the scraps as they are wanted, with the same facility that a school-boy caps verses. Why is my hand upon my heart?" Bayley, 100.

and again, in the last stanza of the same

Mr. Bayley, in this "Ivy Seat," has kept his eye throughout upon the last quoted poem. His Gentle Maid, in this piece of patch-work, is a second translation from the Nightingale--with this difference, that the Nightingale is changed into a Blackbird. Yet Mr. Peter Bayley himself thinks, that to pass off compilations for original compositions, is roguery. "Mr. Kelly does compile with a vengeance," says honest Mr. Peter Bayley. "When a man publishes in his own name mere musical centos, it is time to hint to him, that borrowing here a little, and there a little, procured Arne the appellation of "pilfering Tommy Arne. But enough of musical rogues." p. 138.

Pilfering Peter Bayley perhaps supposes, that he has made the thoughts of others his own by his manner of remodelling them. There is a passage in one of Donne's Satires which will fit this gentleman.

"But he is worst who, beggarly doth chaw Others wits fruits, and in his rav'nous maw Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue As his own things; and they're his own 'tis

true:

For if one eat my meat, tho' it be known
The meat was mine,

Old Donne is somewhat coarse in his expression; but Mr. Bayley may turn to the thirtieth line of his second satire, to see how such gentlemen as himself appropriate their neighbours meat.

But enough of versifying rogues. It is sufficient to add, that Mr. Peter Bayley has pillaged Akenside as he has Mr. Bowles and Mr. Wordsworth; that he may be tracked to Cowper and to Charlotte Smith; in short, that his whole volume is one mass of patchwork. Enough of versifying rogues! We have a heavier charge than that of simple roguery to bring against this dishonest man.

That Mr. Bayley should never praise, never refer to the authors whom he has plundered, was to be expected; to have so named them would have been giving a hint to his detection. This is the common trick of plagiarists; but Mr. Bayley is no common plagiarist, and he has advanced one step farther in meanness. After having made up his own poems by scraps from Mr. Wordsworth's, he has had the baseness to attempt to ridicule Mr. Wordsworth, and has sneered at him by name; in the hope, that those of his readers who have never read the Lyrical

Ballads, may be prevented from reading them by the contempt which he has thus expressed. The miserable vanity which tempted this gentleman to build his own fame upon another's merits, to pilfer the reputation of a contemporary, to plume his own magpye tail with the feathers of the bird of paradise, this wretched craving for notoriety would have deserved no heavier punishment than the contempt and scorn which necessarily would follow detection; but this other offence

is of a deeper die. Like a loathsome reptile, it is not enough for him to feed and fatten, but he must endeavour to sting and to stain with his pollutions. 'The moral turpitude of this action ex cites our wonder and indignation. We know not the name which is hidden un der this alias of Peter Bayley; and happy it is for him, that he can be thus conceal ed; but be he whom he may, this we shall say of him—

ན་

We

for poetical fame, taught by the doctrine of chances and by sad experience to expect something which we cannot honestly praise, and yet should be unwil ling to condemn. In the present age every pretender to poetry can versify well, and many a volume, which now sinks quietly into oblivion, would have acquired no trifling celebrity in the days of Dryden and Pope, or even at the commencement of the present reign. But it requires something more now to qualify a writer for a place among the British poets, than was admitted by our forefathers as a qualification. Reputation may be acquired by striking defects as well as striking beauties, but dullness and mediocrity have now no chance or possibility of success.

It is, therefore, with no common pleasure that we announce these extraordinary productions of early genius. It will require some faith in the reader to believe, that the following Ode was written by a boy of thirteen.

"To an early Primrose.
"Mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire!
Whose modest form, so delicately fine,

Was nurs'd in whirling storms
And cradled in the winds.
Thee, when young spring first question'd

winter's sway,

And dar'd the sturdy blust'rer to the fight, Thee on this bank he threw

To mark his victory.

"In this low vale, the promise of the year,
Serene, thou openest to the nipping gale
Unnotic'd, and alone
Thy tender elegance.

Hic niger est, hunc tu Romane careto!

with other Poems. By HENRY KIRKE 12mo. pp. 111.

"So virtue blooms, brought forth amid the

storms

Of chill adversity, in some low walk

Of life, she rears her head
Obscure and unobserv'd.

"While every bleaching breeze that on her Chastens her spotless purity of breast, blows,

And hardens her to bear
Serene the ills of life."

The author of these poems is now only seventeen. He shall plead in his own

cause.

"The unpremeditated effusions of a boy from his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary information, but in the more active business of life, must not he expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a Virgil, or the mort vigorous compression of a Horace. Men are not, I believe, frequently known to bestow much labour on their amusements; and thest poems were most of them written merely to beguile a leisure hour, or to fill up the la guid intervals of studies of a severer nature.

σε πως το οικείος έργον αγαπάει - Ε one loves his own work, says the Stagyrite, but it was no overweening affection of this kind which induced this publication. Had the author relied on his own judgment only, these poems would not, in all probabili, ever have seen the light.

"Perhaps it may be asked of him, what are his motives for this publication. He answers simply these: The facilitation through its means of those studies which from his earliest infancy have been the prin cipal objects of his ambition; and the increase of the capacity to pursue these incli nations which may one day place him in honorable station in the scale of society."

However desirous we should be, for the sake of their future fame, to dissuade all young poets from premature publication, it is evident that no such pruder tial notions could apply to the present instance. The author has expressed a