Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845
Nothing, perhaps, is more astonishing in these letters – considering the date of them, 1809-10 – than the utter silence maintained on the state of public affairs. The French are mentioned once or twice – but generally in praise – Napoleon as often; but not a word to show that there was any stirring in the German mind on the subject of their country or independence. There they went on, smoking and drinking beer, writing treatises on the Greek article, or poems on Oriental subjects, in the same prosy, dull, dreamy fashion as ever, with the cannon of Jena sounding in their ears, and the blood of Hofer fresh upon the ground. Well done, then, beautiful, merry, deep-souled, tender-hearted Bettina! From her windows at Munich, she saw the smoke of the burning villages in the Tyrol; and her constant wish is for men's clothes and a sword, to go and join the patriots, and have a dash at the stupid, dunderheaded Bavarians. But our clever little friend is not alone in her good feelings. Count Stadion, a dignitary of the church, and Austrian ambassador, is her sworn ally; and few things are more beautiful than the descriptions of the reverend diplomatist and the fiery-eyed little Bettina being united by their sympathy in what was then a fallen and hopeless cause. But there was still another sympathiser, and the discovery of his feelings we will let Bettina herself describe: —
Next day was Good-Friday. Stadion took me with him to read me mass. I told him, with many blushes, the great longing I had to join the Tyrolese. Stadion told me to depend on him; he would take a knapsack on his back and go into the Tyrol, and do all I wanted to do instead of me. This was the last mass that he could read to me, for his departure in a few days was settled. Ah me! it fell heavy on my heart that I was to lose so dear a friend. After mass, I went into the choir, threw on a surplice, and joined in Winter's Lament. In the mean time, the Crown-prince and his brother came in – the crucifix lay on the ground – both the brothers kissed it, and afterwards embraced. They had had a quarrel till that day about a court tutor, whom the Crown-prince had thought ill of, and dismissed from his brother's service. They were reconciled in the way I have said, in the old church, and it was a delightful thing to see it. Bopp, an old music-master of the Crown-prince, who also gave me some lessons, accompanied me home. He showed me a sonnet composed by the Crown-prince that morning. It speaks well for his 'inner soul,' that he feels this inclination to poetry in interesting circumstances. Nature assuredly asserts her rights in him, and he will surely not let the Tyrolese be hardly dealt with. Yes, I have great trust in him. Old Bopp told me many things that raised my opinion of him to the highest pitch. On the third holiday, he carried me to the English garden to hear the Crown-prince's address to the assembled troops, with whom he was going, to serve his first campaign. I could hear nothing distinctly, but what I did hear, I did not at all like; he spoke of their bravery, their perseverance, and loyalty, and that he, with their assistance, would bring back the Tyrolese to obedience, and that he considered his own honour conjoined to theirs, &c. &c. As I went home, this worried me very much. I saw that the Crown-prince, in the hands of his generals, would do all that his heart rebelled against. I thought, as I returned from the show, that no man in the world ever speaks truth to one in power, but rather that there are always flatterers to approve of all he does; and the worse his conduct, the greater their fear that he may doubt of their approbation. They have never the good of mankind in their eye, but only the favour of their master. So I determined to take a bold step, to satisfy my own feelings – and I hope you will excuse me if you think I did wrong.
"After expressing to the Crown-prince my love, and respect for his genius, I confessed to him my sentiments towards the Tyrolese, who were gaining such a heroic crown – my confidence that he would show mildness and forbearance, where his people were now giving way only to cruelty and revenge – I asked him if the title 'Duke of the Tyrol' had not a nobler sound than the names of the four kings who had united their power to exterminate those heroes? And, however it turned out, I hoped he would acquire from his conduct even the title of 'The Humane.'
"This was the contents of a letter that filled four pages. After writing it in the most furious excitement, I sealed it very calmly, and gave it into the music-master's hands, telling him – 'This is something about the Tyrolese that may be very useful to the Crown-prince.'
"How glad a man is to make himself of importance! Old Bopp nearly tumbled down-stairs it his hurry to give such an interesting letter to the Prince; and I, with my usual light-headedness, forgot all about it. I went to Winter to sing hymns – to Tieck – to Jacobi – nowhere could I find any body to agree with me; every where there seemed nothing but fear; and if they had known what I had done, they would have forbidden me their houses. I looked bitterly on them all, and thought – Be you Bavarian and French – I and the Crown-prince are German and Tyrolese. Or he gets me put in prison – and then I am at once free and independent; and if I ever get out again, I will go over to the Tyrolese, and meet the Crown-prince on the field, and force from him what he now refuses to my entreaty.
"The old music-master came back, pale and trembling.
"'What was there in the paper you gave me for the Crown-prince?' he said. 'It may ruin me for life. The Crown-prince looked excited as he read it – ay, angry; and when he saw me there, he ordered me off without one gracious word.'
"I could not help laughing. The music-master grew more and more anxious, and I more and more delighted. I rejoiced already in my imprisonment; and I thought how I could carry on my philosophic speculations in my solitude. Once only I saw the Crown-prince at the theatre. He gave me a friendly nod. Very good. For eight days I had not seen Stadion; but, on the 10th of April, I got certain information that he had gone off by night. I was very sorry to think I had seen him for the last time; and it struck me, with strange significance, that he read his last mass on Good-Friday. At last my long repressed and dissembled feelings burst forth in tears. It is in solitude one knows his own wishes and his helplessness. I found no place of repose for my struggling heart; and, tired with weeping, I at length fell asleep. Have you ever fallen asleep worn out with weeping? But men do not weep. You have never wept so that the sobs shook your breast even in your sleep? Sobbing in my dreams, I heard my name. It was dark. By the faint glimmer of the street lamps, I perceive a man near me, in a foreign military uniform, sabre, sabretash – dark hair. I should have thought it was Black Fred, (Stadion's name among his intimates.)
"No – it is no mistake; it is indeed Black Fred, come to take his leave.
"'My carriage is at the door – I am going – as a soldier – to the Austrian army; and with regard to your Tyrolese friends, you shall have nothing to reproach me with, or you never see me more; for I give you my word of honour I will not consent to their being betrayed. I have this moment been with the Crown-prince. He drank with me the health of the Tyrolese, and a 'pereat' to Napoleon. He took me by the hand, and said – 'Remember that, in the year nine, in April, during the Tyrolese rebellion, the Crown-prince of Bavaria opposes Napoleon.' And so saying, he clanged his glass on mine so, that he broke the foot of it off.'
"I said to Stadion – 'Now then I am all alone, and have no friend left.'
"He smiled, and said – 'You write to Goethe. Write him from me that the Catholic priest will gather laurels on the Tyrolese battle-field.'
"I said – 'I shall not soon hear a mass again.'
"'And I shall not soon read one,' he answered.
"He then took up his weapons, and reached me his hand to say good-by. I am sure I shall never see him again.
"Scarcely was he gone, when a knock came to the door, and old Bopp came in. It was still dark in the room, but I knew by his voice he was in good-humour. He held out a broken glass to me; with great solemnity, and said – 'The Crown-prince sends you this, and bids me tell you that he drank the health of those you take under your protection out of it; and here he sends you his cockade, as a pledge of honour that he will keep his word to you, and prevent all cruelty and injustice.'"
The fate of Hofer comes unfortunately to our memory to mar the pleasantness of this little dramatic incident; but the whole story gives a favourable impression of the Crown-prince, who is now the poetical Louis of Bavaria – the dullest and stupidest of whose works (we may observe in a parenthesis) makes a poor figure in its Greek dress, and had better be retranslated as quickly as possible into its original Teutsch.
It is curious to see the sort of society that Bettina moves in – crown-princes, and prince-bishops, and ambassadors-extraordinary – and all treating her with the greatest regard. There must have been something very taking in the bright black eyes and rosy lips of the correspondent of Goethe, and friend, apparently, of all the German magnificoes; for she uses them with very little ceremony, and holds her head as high among them as if she knew there was more in it than was contained under all their crowns and mitres. But it was not with the magnates of the land alone that she was on such terms. The literary potentates were equally pleased with her attention. If a rising artist wants encouragement, he applies to Bettina. Sculptors, painters, musicians, all lay their claims before her; and we find her constantly using her influence on their behalf with the literary dictator of Weimar. If a scholar or philosopher is sick, she sits at his bedside; and in the midst of all the playfulness, wildness, eccentricity, (and perhaps affectation,) we meet with in the letters, we see enough of right spirit and good heart to counterbalance them all; and such a malicious little minx! and such a despiser of prudery, and contemner of humbug in all its branches! It is delightful to reflect on the torment she must have been to all the silly stiff-backed old maids within reach of tongue and eye. And therefore – and for many reasons besides – we maintain that Bettina, from fifteen to seventeen, is an exquisite creature, fiery and impassioned as Juliet, and witty as Beatrix. We will also maintain till our dying day, that neither her Romeo nor Benedict was near sixty years old.
The information given by the Frau Rath about her son has already been incorporated in the thousand and one memoirs and recollections supplied by the love and admiration of his friends; – we will therefore not follow Bettina in her record of his boyish days, as gathered from his mother and reported to himself, further than to remark, that vanity seems from the very first to have been his prevailing characteristic – even to so low a pitch as the "sumptuousness of apparel." Think of a little snob in the Lawnmarket – son of a baillie – dressing himself two or three times a-day – once plainly – once half-and-half – and finally in hat and feather – silks and satins – a caricature of a courtier of Louis XIV.; and all this at the age of eight or nine!
We have said that our love for Bettina only extends to the three years of her life from 1807 to 1810. At that period it dies a natural death. She assumed at fourteen the feelings of a love-inspired, heart-devoted "character" – as fictitious, we are persuaded, as any created by dramatist or poet; and it was pleasant to see with what art and eloquence she acted up to it. It seemed a wonderful effort of histrionic skill, and superior, in an infinite degree, to the mere representation on the stage of an Ophelia or Miranda. But when years passed on, and she still continued the same "character," she strikes us with the same feelings that would be excited by some actress who should grow so enamoured of her favourite part, as to go on Opheliaizing or Desdemonaing off the stage – singing snatches of unchristian ballads, with the hair dishevelled, during prayers in church; or perpetually smothering herself with pillows on the drawing-room sofa. It is as if General Tom Thumb were to grow to a decent size, and still go on imitating Napoleon, and insisting on people paying a shilling to see his smallness. Bettina should have stopped before she grew womanly; for though we have not the least suspicion of her having had any meaning in what she did – further than to show her cleverness – still, the attitudes that are graceful and becoming in a children's dance, take a very different expression in an Indian nautch. And therefore we return to our belief at the commencement of this paper, that the "child" of Goethe's correspondence died, and was buried in a garden of roses, in the year 1810 —De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.
No. VIII
Supplement to MacFlecnoe and the Dunciad
Well, then, we have once more – to wit a month ago – wheeled round and encountered face to face our two great masters, with whom we at first set out – John Dryden and Alexander Pope. We found them under a peculiar character, that of Avengers – to be imaged by the Pythean quelling with his divine and igneous arrows the Python, foul mud-engendered monster, burthening the earth and loathed by the light of heaven.
Dryden and Pope! Father and son – master and scholar – founder and improver. Who can make up his election, which of the two he prefers? – the free composition of Dryden that streams on and on, full of vigour and splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or some special gift of the universal Mother – or the perfected art of Pope? Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.
Dryden is all power – and he knows it. He soars at ease – he sails at ease – he swoops at ease – and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable —
"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"
and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (in blanks, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet – alone of those who have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look after the rhyme – these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the clumsy clowns to glorious John: – sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile, stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth – or sitting his horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt. His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance —
"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes —
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."
But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism, however excellent, in a Supplement – and therefore gladden you all with a specimen – without note or comment – from the second part of Absalom and Achitophel.
"Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad:
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satyr,
For still there goes some thinking to ill nature:
He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
All his occasions are to eat and drink.
If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
He means you no more mischief than a parrot:
The words for friend and foe alike were made,
To fetter them in verse is all his trade.
For almonds he'll cry whore to his own mother:
And call young Absalom king David's brother.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hang'd who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key:
Let him rail on, let his invective Muse
Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence,
In fire-works give him leave to vent his spight,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show,
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keeps him all the year.
"Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
For here's a tun of midnight-work to come,
Og from a treason-tavern rowling home,
Round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue:
A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
As all the devils had spew'd to make the batter,
When wine has given him courage to blaspheme,
He curses God, but God before curst him;
And, if man could have reason, none has more,
That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor.
With wealth he was not trusted, for heaven knew
What 'twas of old to pamper up a Jew;
To what would he on quail and pheasant swell,
That ev'n on tripe and carrion could rebel?
But though heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making;
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing – Be thou dull:
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do any thing but write:
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men,
A strong nativity – but for the pen!
Eat opium, mimic arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason botcht in rhyme will be thy bane:
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck:
Why should thy metre good King David blast?
A psalm of his will surely be thy last.
Dar'st thou presume in verse to meet thy foes,
Thou whom the penny pamphlet foil'd in prose?
Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made,
O'er-tops thy talent in thy very trade;
Doeg to thee, thy paintings are so coarse,
A poet is, though he's the poet's horse.
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason, and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hang'd for nonsense is the devil:
Had thou the glories of thy king exprest,
Thy praises had been satyr at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defy'd the Lord's anointed:
I will not rake the dunghill for thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,
May all be like the young man Absalom!
And for my foes, may this their blessing be,
To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"
This is the ne plus ultra of personal satire. Yet there are passages of comparable excellence in the Dunciad. Aha! what have we here? A contemptuous attack on Pope by – a Yankee-Cockney! What a cross! John Russell Lowell from Massachusets thus magpie-like chattereth at the Nightingale.
"Philip.– You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a French pinchbeck age.
"John.– Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affection. If I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have caught you more than once with the Tatler in your hand, and have heard you praising Dryden's prefaces.
"Philip.– You and I have very different notions of what poetry is, and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable cæsura to his verse; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savour of Jack Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp field. Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice – these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out. To the poet nothing is mean, but every thing on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty.
"But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, as the best writer of English whom that period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very much as his own 'mockery king of snow' must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those important-looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in Chaucer and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike.
"John.– Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an entirely different subject. What else can you bring forward?
"Philip.– Only the fact, that, by going back to the more natural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop, or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the walls of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the couplet."
Master Lowell gives tongue with a plagiarism from Southey. In his Life of Cowper that great writer somewhat rashly says, "The age of Pope was the golden age of poets – but it was the pinchbeck age of poetry." What is pardonable in Southey is knoutable in his ape. Think of one American Cantab playfully rating and complimenting another on having caught him more than once with the Tatler in his hand, and with having heard him praising Dryden's prefaces! What liberality – nay, what universality of taste! Absolutely able, in the reaches of his transatlantic soul, to relish Dryden's prefaces! But in his appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, Philip cannot, crop-sick, but nauseate the thought of Pope being a poet.
The whole dialogue – somewhat of the longest —tedious exceedingly – is polluted with similar impudencies. "The strong point in Pope's displays of sentiment, is in the graceful management of a cambric handkerchief. You do not believe a word that Heloïse says, and feel all the while that she is squeezing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge." Such is the effect of too copious draughts from that Hippocrene which alternately discharges cock-tail and mint-julep. John, however, does not go the whole hog with Philip. He erects his ears to their full length, and brays thus – "I do not think that you do Pope justice!" and then does Pope justice as follows: "His translation of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit!" I admit! "But surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and ingenious fancy to his 'Rape of the Lock;' nor of knowledge of life, and a certain polished classicalness, to his epistles and satires. His portraits are like those of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks and satins are the best part of them." But poor, cautious, timid, trimming, turn-about John cannot so conciliate bully Philip, who squabashes at once both poet and critic.
"Philip.– I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best pictures, the drapery, though you may almost hear it rustle, is wholly a subordinate matter. Witness some of those in our College-hall here at Cambridge – that of Madam Boylston especially. I remember being once much struck with the remark of a friend, who convinced me of the fact, that Copley avoided the painting of wigs whenever he could, thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope would have made them a prominent object. I grant what you say about the 'Rape of the Lock,' but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If you wish an instance of a poet's fancy, look into the 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' I can allow that Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely not poetical. Show me a line that makes you love God and your neighbour better, that inclines you to meekness, charity, and forbearance, and I will show you a hundred that make it easier for you to be the odious reverse of all these. In many a Pagan poet there is more Christianity. No poet could write a 'Dunciad,' or even read it. You have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poet, as, in looking for a long time at a stick which we believe to be an animal of some kind, we fancy that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but do not increase one's respect for him. When you speak of his being classical, I am sure that you jest."
The waves of the Atlantic have wafted acorns dropped from the British oak to the Western shores, and a wide and strong grove is growing up there. We feel our kindred with the fellow-beings of our tongue, and rejoice with a natural and keen interest in every thing true, great, and good that is produced within the States. Powers are moving there, that may, that do, want much tempering; but of which, when tempered, we augur high things. One such tempering is reverence of the past, and Pope is one of the great names which England tenders to young America. We augur ill, and are uneasy for our cousins or nephews, when we see them giving themselves airs, and knowing better than their betters. What are we to think, when instead of the fresh vigour which should rise on the soil of the self-governed, we find repetition, for the worse, of the feeblest criticisms which have disgraced some of our own weaklings? This presumptuous youngling talks technically, and does not know what he is talking about. Pope has not but one invariable cæsura to his verse. He has an ordinary range of four places for his cæsura, and the variety and music which he manages to give his verse under that scheme, dictated by a sensitive ear, is truly wonderful. That Pope is only a satirist, and can find nothing in humanity but its faults, infirmities, and disgraces to feed upon with delight, is a shameful falsehood. He is as generous in praise as he is galling in sarcasm; and the voice of Christian Europe has pronounced him a moral and religious poet. It is rather strange to see the stickler for the beauty and exaltation of poetry, diligent in purifying and ennobling the taste of his countrymen, by raking in the dirt for disgusting and loathsome images, to express his slanderous character of a writer, eminent among the best for purity and refinement. We take leave of Mr Lowell with remarking, that his affected and hyperbolical praises heaped on the old English dramatists are as nauseous as any ignorant exaggeration can be, bombastically protruded on us at second-hand, from an article in an old number of the Retrospective Review, from which most of the little he knows is taken, and in the taking, turned into most monstrous nonsense.