their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legis

lators of the world.

LORD BYRON

(1788-1824)

THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGLISH POETRY.

The Preface to "Don Juan," first published in 1822. THAT this is the age of the decline of English poetry will be doubted by few who have calmly considered the subject. That there are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the fact, because it has been well said, that "next to him who forms the taste of his country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it." No one has ever denied genius to Marino, who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic. Warton and Churchill began it, having borrowed the hint probably from the heroes of the Dunciad, and their own internal conviction that their proper reputation can be as nothing till the most perfect and harmonious of poets-he who, having no fault, has had REASON made his reproach was reduced to what they conceived to be his level; but even they dared not degrade him below Dryden. Goldsmith, and Rogers, and Campbell, his most successful disciples; and Hayley, who, however feeble, has left one poem "that will not be willingly let die" (the Triumphs of Temper), kept up the reputation of that pure and perfect style; and Crabbe, the first of living poets, has almost equalled the master. Then came Darwin, who was put down by a single poem n the Antijacobin; and the Cruscans, from Merry to The Loves of the Triangles, the joint production of Messrs. anning and Frere.

Jerningham, who were annihilated (if Nothing can be said to be annihilated) by Gifford, the last of the wholesome satirists.

At the same time Mr. Southey was favouring the public with Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc, to the great glory of the drama and epos. I beg pardon: Wat Tyler with Peter Bell, was still in MS., and it was not till after Mr. Southey had received his Malmsey butt, and Mr. Wordsworth became qualified to gauge it, that the great revolutionary tragedy came before the public and the Court of Chancery. Wordsworth was peddling his lyrical ballads, and brooding a preface, to be succeeded in due course by a postscript; both couched in such prose as must give peculiar delight to those who have read the prefaces of Pope and Dryden-scarcely less celebrated for the beauty of their prose, than for the charms of their verse. Wordsworth is the reverse of Molière's gentleman, who had been "talking prose all his life without knowing it"; for he thinks that he has been all his life writing both prose and verse, and neither of what he conceives to be such can be properly said to be either one or the other. Mr. Coleridge, the future vates, poet and seer of the Morning Post (an honour also claimed by Mr. Fitzgerald, of the Rejected Addresses, who ultimately prophesied the downfall of Bonaparte, to which he himself mainly contributed, by giving him the nickname of "the Corsican," was then employed in predicating the damnation of Mr. Pitt, and the desolation of England, in the two very best copies of verses he ever wrote: to wit, the infernal eclogue of Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, and the Ode to the Departing Year.

These three personages, Southey, Wordsworth, and

Goldsmith has anticipated the definition of the Lake poetry. as far as such things can be defined. Gentlemen, the present piece is not of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Didos in it; it is an historical description of nature. I only beg you'll endeavour to make your souls in unison with mine, and hear with the same enthusiasm with which I have written." Would not this have made a proper proem to the Excursion, and the poet and his pedlar ? It would have answered perfectly for that purpose, had it not unfortunately been written in good English.

Coleridge, had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope; and I respect them for it, as the only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to preserve. But they have been joined in it by those who have joined them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers. by the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do so till my dying day. I would rather see all I have ever written lining the same trunk in which I actually read the eleventh book of a modern epic poem at Malta, in 1811 (I opened it to take out a change after the paroxysm of a tertian, in the absence of my servant, and found it lined with the name of the maker, Eyre, Cockspur Street, and with the epic poetry alluded to), than sacrifice what I firmly believe in as the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.

But the Edinburgh Reviewers, and the Lakers, and Hunt and his school, and everybody else with their school, and even Moore without a school, and dilettanti lecturers at institutions, and elderly gentlemen who translate and imitate, and young ladies who listen and repeat, baronets who draw indifferent frontispieces for bad poets, and noblemen who let them dine with them in the country, the small body of the wits and the great body of the blues, have latterly united in a depreciation, of which their fathers would have been as much ashamed as their children will be. In the meantime, what have we got instead? The Lake school, which begun with an epic poem, written in six weeks" (so Joan of Arc proclaimed herself), and finished with a ballad composed in twenty years, as Peter Bell's creator takes care to inform the few who will inquire. What have we got instead? A deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances, imitated from Scott and myself, who have both made the best of our bad materials and erroneous system. What have we got instead? Madoc, which is neither an epic nor anything else; Thalaba,

Kehama, Gebir, and such gibberish, written in all metres and in no language. Hunt, who had powers to have made the Story of Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius and his taste to some unintelligible notions of Wordsworth, which I defy him to explain. Moore hasBut why continue? All, with the exception of Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, who may be considered as having taken their station, will, by the blessing of God, survive their own reputation, without attaining any very extraordinary period of longevity. Of course there must be a still further exception in favour of those who, having never obtained any reputation at all, unless it be among provincial literati, and their own families, have none to lose; and of Moore, who, as the Burns of Ireland, possesses a fame which cannot be lost.

The greater part of the poets mentioned, however, have been able to gather together a few followers. A paper of the Connoisseur says, that "it is observed by the French, that a cat, a priest, and an old woman, are sufficient to constitute a religious sect in England." The same number of animals, with some difference in kind, will suffice for a poetical one. If we take Sir George Beaumont instead of the priest, and Mr. Wordsworth for the old woman, we shall nearly complete the quota required; but I fear that Mr. Southey will but indifferently represent the CAT, having shown himself but too distinctly to be of a species to which that noble creature is peculiarly hostile.

Nevertheless, I will not go so far as Wordsworth in his postscript, who pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame; which, béing interpreted, means that William Wordsworth is not quite so much read by his contemporaries as might be desirable. This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer's glory depended upon his present popularity: he recited, and, without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and given it to tradition? Ennius, Terence, Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all the great poets of antiquity, were the