imitators, dramatists are the most perverse, the most unconscionable, or the most unconscious, and have been so time out of mind. Euripides and Sophocles were merely echoes of Æschylus, and not only was Terence Menander and nothing beyond, but of the sole Roman tragedies extant, (the ten attributed to Seneca,) nine are on Greek subjects. Here, then, is cause enough for the decline of the drama,” if we are to believe that the drama has declined. But it has not on the contrary, during the last fifty years it has materially advanced. All other arts, however, have, in the same interval, advanced at a far greater rate - each very nearly in the direct ratio of its non-imitativeness painting, for example, least of all- and the effect on the drama is, of course, that of apparent retrogradation. It is James Montgomery who thinks proper to style McPherson's "Ossian" a "collection of halting, dancing, lumbering, grating, nondescript paragraphs.' I have never yet seen an English heroic verse on the proper model of the Greek - although there have been innumerable attempts, among which those of Coleridge are, perhaps, the most absurd, next to those of Sir Philip Sidney and Longfellow. The author of "The Vision of Rubeta" has done better, and Percival better yet; but no one has seemed to suspect that the natural preponderance of spondaic words in the Latin and Greek must, in the English, be supplied by art that is to say, by a careful culling of the few spondaic words which the language affords - as, for example, here: Man is a complex, | compound, | compost, | yet is he | Godborn. This, to all intents, is a Greek hexameter, but then its spondees are spondees, and not mere trochees. The verses of Coleridge and others are dissonant, for the simple reason that there is no equality in time between a trochee and a dactyl. When Sir Philip Sidney writes, So to the woods Love | runnes as well as rides to the palace, he makes an heroic verse only to the eye; for "woods Love" is the only true spondee, "runs as,' "well as," and "palace," have each the first syllable long and the second short that is to say, they are all trochees, and occupy less time than the dactyls or spondee hence the halting. Now, all this seems to be the simplest thing in the world, and the only wonder is how men professing to be scholars should attempt to engraft a verse, of which the spondee is an element, upon a stock which repels the spondee as antagonistical. "The day is done, and the darkness As a feather is wafted downward The single feather here is imperfectly illustrative of the omni-prevalent darkness; but a more especial objection is the likening of one feather to the falling of another. Night is personified as a bird, and darkness — the feather of this bird - falls from it, how? as another feather falls from another bird. Why, it does this of that is to say, course. null. The illustration is identical It has no more force than an identical proposition in logic. 1 Pröem to Longfellow's "Waif." IV. [Text: Godey's Lady's Book, September, 1845.]1 66 WORDS printed ones especially are murderous things. Keats did (or did not) die of a criticism, Cromwell, of Titus' pamphlet Killing no Murder," and Montfleury perished of the "Andromache." The author of the Parnasse Réformé," makes him thus speak in Hades "L'homme donc qui voudrait savoir ce dont je suis mort, qu'il ne demande pas s'il fut de fièvre ou de podagre ou d'autre chose, mais qu'il entende que ce fut de L' Andromaque." As for myself, I am fast dying of the "Sartor Resartus." Since it has become fashionable to trundle houses about the streets, should there not be some remodeling of the legal definition of realty, as "that which is permanent, fixed, and immoveable, that cannot be carried out of its place?" According to this, a house is by no means real estate. Voltaire, in his preface to Brutus," actually boasts of having introduced the Roman senate on the stage in red mantles. One of the most singular pieces of literary Mosaic is Mr. Longfellow's "Midnight Mass for the Dying Year." The general idea and manner are from Tennyson's "Death of the Old Year," several of the most prominent points are from the death scene of Cordelia in “Lear,” and the line about the "hooded friars” is from the Comus" of Milton. Some approach to this patchwork may be found in these lines from Tasso · "" was: "Mar 1 [Poe's title for this installment of "Marginalia ginal Notes... No. II. A sequel to the Marginalia' of the 'Democratic Review.' - ED.] Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed herba : E l'huom d'esser mortal par che si sdegni." This is entirely made up from Lucan and Sulpicius. The former says of Troy "Iam tota teguntur Pergama dumetis: etiam perire ruinae.” Sulpicius, in a letter to Cicero, says of Megara, Egina, and Corinth "Hem! nos homunculi indignamur si quid nostrum interiit, quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot oppidorum cadavera projecta jaceant." 66 A few nuts from memory for Outis. Carey, in his "And pilgrim newly on his road, with love Gray says "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." Like those of angels, short and far between." Campbell says Butler says "Like angel visits, few and far between." "Each window a pillory appears, With heads thrust through nailed by the ears." Young says "An opera, like a pillory, may be said To nail our ears down and expose our head.' Young says "Man wants but little, nor that little long." Goldsmith says · "Man wants but little here below, "David for him his tuneful harp had strung, And heaven had wanted one immortal song." Pope says "Friend of my life, which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song.' |