indeed was not slow to confess the relationship; and Fairfax, in renewing his claims upon our attention, may boast that he has been praised by Collins, and imitated by Milton.

The flowing versification of Fairfax has even drawn some writers into a love of him, who in other respects were not very seducible by the higher species of poetry. Among these is. Hume, who compared a thing called Wilkie's Epigoniad to Virgil, and who was much inclined, in compliment to the rest of his French taste in literature, to call Shakspeare a barbarian.* Hume however is wrong when he says that each line" in Tasso "is faithfully rendered by a correspondent line in the translation." The faithfulness, it is true, is for the most part as surprising as he represents it, and the number of lines is the same in both poems; but Fairfax has occasionally substituted a line of his own for the sense of the original, sometimes, as may be supposed, with no good to his author, yet sometimes even.

* See the Appendix to the reign of James the First.

with improvement, and the line has always something poetical in it, though it's taste may not be the true one. In the third book for instance, stanza 21st, where Tancred unknowingly encounters Clorinda, and knocks off her helmet, Fairfax says

About her shoulders shone her golden locks,
Like sunny beams on alabaster rocks.

2

This is a splendid image; but Tasso merely says, with a more natural and momentary touch, that her golden locks were shaken out in the wind, and a young female appeared before him:→→

E le chiome dorate al vento sparse, 0%

Giovane donna in mezzo 'l campo apparse.

The conclusion of the succeeding stanza has also a turn with it unlike the original, and not in so allowable a taste, though it's faultiness is Italian. But in other instances Fairfax can contend with his author, even at his best; as in that close of the 14th stanza, canto 1st, describing the descent of the angel Gabriel, who is represented by Tasso as first dropping his flight upon Lebanon, and balancing

2

himself, as he lights, on equalized wings su l'

adeguate penne― (

Pria sul Libano monte ei si ritenne,

E si libró su l'adeguate penne.

This elegant imitation of Virgil, Fairfax improved

into a thought as new as it was beautiful,

On Lebanon at first his foot he set,

And shook his wings with rory may-dew's wet.

Milton, passing over the original in this passage, copies the translator, and that nothing may be lost, adds attitude to the motion from Virgil, and turns the due into fragrance from Sannazarius :

Like Maia's son he stood,"

And shook his plumes, that heav'nly fragrance fill'd
The circuit wide.

Book 5.

But I am getting unawares into a luxurious gossipIng, quite out of my subject. The chief purpose for which I mentioned Fairfax was to suggest republication of him in preference to the commonplace dulness of Hoole, who would assuredly have never been tolerated, had not the last age of poetry, in which he lived, been given up to the lees of the

French taste. The love of Italian literature which began to revive among a few scholars of that age, is beginning to have it's effect upon this; and if it continue, will do a great deal of good both to our fancy and versification,-I mean, will put them both in a right way of exercising their faculties and help them to think and speak for themselves; for there is no danger that we shall fall into those errors of the Italian school, which however they may have been exaggerated by superficial observers, certainly do exist, and which are the natural overgrowth of fancy at certain periods of it's flourishing. Our long habits of criticism will save us from those.

It is to be observed, after all, in speaking of schools of poetry, that they are only to be recommended comparatively. We are much more likely to get at a real poetical taste through the Italian than through the French school,-through Spenser, Milton, and Ariosto, than Pope, Boileau, and their followers; the former will teach us to vary our music and to address ourselves more directly to nature; but nature herself is, of course, the great and perfecting mis

tress, without whom we become either eccentric pretenders, or danglers after inferior beauty, or repeaters, at best, of her language at second hand. We must study where Shakspeare studied,—in the fields, in the heavens,-in the heart and fortunes of man;—and he, and the other great poets, should be our reading out of school-hours.

9 So saying, he rang, to leave nothing in doubt, And the sour little gentleman bless'd himself out. Mr. Gifford is a man of strong natural sense, with such acquired talents, as are apt to impress us with double respect, when their history is connected with early difficulties and an humble origin. The manner in which he has related those difficulties, in the interesting little memoir prefixed to his Juvenal, is calculated to give his readers a regard for him as well as respect; and upon the whole, there is no living author perhaps, who might have enjoyed a more unmingled reputation, of the middle species, than Mr. Gifford. But a vile, peevish temper, the more inexcusable in it's indulgence, because he appears to