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titude; and, in regard to his seamen especially, with all the extravagance of eulogy. He never found any difficulty in making up a crew; and desertion from his ship was unknown.

In the various relations of private life he was no less unexcep tionable. As a citizen he was exemplary-as a friend sincere as a husband tender and affectionate. The affability and frankness of his deportment ingratiated him with all who enjoyed the pleasure of his acquaintance: there was a native humour in his character which gave it peculiar interest. His mansion was ever the residence of hospitality. Jealous of his own honour, he was never known to injure, designedly, the feelings of any one; and though possessed of a quickness of sensibility to the appearance of offence or impropriety, he never failed to express his regret, and make atonement for injuries prompted by an excess of feel, ing. He was just, charitable, and without disguise. As he was educated in the habits of religion, so he cultivated them through life; he enforced a strict observance of divine worship on board his ship, and scrupulously attended to the moral deportment of his crew: he had himself experienced the comforts of religion, and he died in its faith.

We will only add, as a sanction for what has been said, that general Washington had the highest opinion of his merit, and entertained for him a sincere and lasting friendship.

Commodore Barry was in size above the ordinary stature: his person was graceful and commanding. His whole deportment was marked by dignity unmixed with ostentation; and his strongly marked countenance was expressive at once of the qualities of his mind and the virtues of his heart.

The prefixed portrait is an admirable likeness of the original.

CRITICISM.-FOR THE PORT FOLIO.

CUM TABULIS ANIMUM CENSORIS SUMET HONESTI.-Hor. ROKEBY: a poem, by Walter Scott, esq. Philadelphia. Bradford & Inskeep. THE earliest specimens of English poetry are metrical romances. They are the composition of unlettered bards, and

possess the characteristics of untutored genius. They are simple, harsh, enthusiastic and prolix; but, then, they have about them qualities not destitute of attractions. Their topics are highly poe tical: strange vicissitudes of fortune, high-toned honour, heroic fortitude, desperate valour, and romantic courtesy, will always, when properly described, arrest the heart and animate the fancy. This species of poetry, in some of its modifications, prevailed in England till near the time of the reformation. At that era, the more general diffusion of learning, the art of printing, the erecting of a third class between the barons and vassals—a class diligent, active and inquisitive-and the models of classic elegance, which the destruction of the monasteries yielded to the world, called off the attention, from the fantastic minstrelsey of the bards, and gave occasion to juster ideas of poetic excellence. But these causes had a further and more important operation: they not only diverted the minds of men from worthless productions, but in their collision, developed, in all its force, the British genius; giving birth to a race of writers, who, for originality, boldness, compass of understanding, munificence of fancy, and all the attributes of high intellect, have not been equalled in any age or any nation. The period to which we refer, comprises the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles; and it is a period which we have always considered as the golden age of English literature. Then flourished Shakspeare, and Spencer, and Massinger, and Jonson, and Sidney, and Milton; then flourished Ascham, and Hooker, and Taylor, and Reynolds, and Barrow, and Bacon, and Coke. These writers, to use the language of one of them. selves, form "the wells of English undefiled." They are emphatically and peculiarly English. They are not characterized by the uniform and maintained elegance of the classics of antiquity, nor the measured march and formal dignity of the writers of France, nor the mellifluous flow of those of Italy. Their character is the character of the nation: The English feel profoundly; but it is the nature of deep feeling to be short and variable. Of this temperament are these writers. They are unequal, irregular and affected; but, then, they rise upon you bold and lofty and majestic, with bursts of feeling and fancy and animation, and the most poetic imagery.

The historians of our literature have, commonly, fixed upon the reign of Ann, as the Augustan age of England. Nothing can be more erroneous. The writers of that era possessed none of the peculiarities of British genius. Their taste is completely continental; the British classics, completely insular. Compare Shakspeare with Congreve, Milton with Dryden, Spencer with Pope, and the inquirer will be astonished, that in so short an interval, so prodigious a revolution should have occurred, in the very elements of composition. The origin of this revolution in letters, is found in the political revolution of that period. Among the other benefactions which Louis the XIV accorded to Charles II in his exile, he conferred upon him the French taste in literature, as well as in morals; and it was a taste singularly adapted to the genius of that witty monarch, and the beaux esprits who composed his court. On the return of these gallant cavaliers to England, gratitude and intimacy would have inclined them to propagate the principles of their French protectors: but this effect did not require the aid of such generous causes, for the taste itself was not worthless, and passion was enlisted on the side of their inclination, when they found that the classic writers had been active leaders in the rebellion. They, forthwith, commenced upon them a war of wit, and succeeded in overwhelming them, and their works, with contempt and obscurity.* From an alliance of causes so unexampled, the native writers were persecuted into exile, and a Gallic tyranny was, again, seated on the throne, whose laws and language were uncongenial with the temper of the people.

The French taste is distinguished from the English in its loftier parts, as being more rhetoric, more equable, more elaborately grand; and in its lighter departments, as being more airy, satiric, epigrammatic, and fashionable. Dryden, Addison,

* Upon this subject Voltaire must be considered as a disinterested judge. Hear what he says in his "Essai sur la Poésie Epique," when speaking of Milton: "Il employa neuf années à composer le Paradis Perdu. Il avait alors très-peu de réputation; les beaux esprits de la cour de Charles II. ou ne le connaissaient pas, ou n'avaient pour lui nulle estime. Il n'est pas étonnant, qu' un ancien secretaire de Cromwell, vieilli dans la retraite, aveugle et sans bien, fût ignoré ou méprisé dans une cour qui avait fait succéder à l'austérité du gouvernement du protecteur, toute la galanterie de la cour de Louis XIV et dans laquelle on ne goûtait que les poésies efféminées, la mollesse de Waller; les satyres du comte de Rechester, et l'esprit de Cowley.

Tickel, Littleton and Prior, with a laudable industry, endeavoured to naturalize this taste in England; but it required the fine talents of Pope to give a round and finish to the empire. Pope has produced the most refined melody of versification, the most sustained excellence and sagacious views of fashionable life; but, in all his works, there is not a syren verse which can "take the prison'd soul and lap it in Elysium." From the time of Pope, till a period very recent, there has been a lamentable dearth of poetic genius. The perfection of that great master, probably, generated despair, and left to his successors nothing but the power of imitation, or a false refinement: and a species of fantastic foppery is the refinement of the continental taste, when elaborated into its genuine corruption. Thus, doctor Darwin endeavoured to improve both its topics and its style, and "enlisting the imagination under the banners of botany," versified Linnæus for the benefit of the ladies. Della Crusca and his coadjutors improved upon doctor Darwin, and did up much delicious nonsense, which, in its time, was highly popular among polite people. To avoid the tinsel and bombast of Darwin and Della Crusca, Coleridge and Wordsworth adopted a more than patriarchal simplicity-like the Grecians, who, because Orsippus was entangled in his clothes, decreed that all the olympic combatants should go naked. But it would carry us too far to describe all the forms of imbecility, and all the varieties of affectation, which successively rose and sunk upon the public attention.

The close of the last century left the world filled with despair of the talents of the privileged poets, and the acknowledged weakness of the established government, has, within a few years, encouraged some bold spirits to rebellion. Campbell, Southey, and Scott, within this period, have departed, very widely, from the institutes of Dryden and Pope; and in many marked particu lars, from all preceding writers. Campbell is rich in genius, but it is not the negligent munificence of the poets of Elizabeth and James; and the soft and lambent fancy, which wanders over all his scenes, is peculiarly his own. But if that pathos and sublimity, to be found in the better parts of our earlier poets, be regarded as the orthodox perfection of English poetry, then

Campbell must be considered as a disciple of this genuine faith, and one, who, by his practice and example, resisted the influence of foreign heresies, and endeavoured to bring back the church to its pristine simplicity. But it was Mr. Southey who adventured the boldest departure from established models. His fable is brought from the wildest marvels of Oriental supersti tion. In its conduct, although he often chills the reader by his extravagance, yet he oftener warms him with an excellence never found among the poets of the continental school. Mr. Southey, we think, is original in the management of his story. Superna tural agency, indeed, finds a place in almost every epic; but we know of no other poet, except it be Dante, who, at once, raps you, extra flammantia mania mundi; and whose actors and means have nothing in common with this lower world. His system of versification is more unprecedented than his fable. Abandoning the rhymed couplets of Pope, and the blank heroics of Milton, his lines have every variety of length, and his cadences no other restraint than what his taste or his subject imposes. Mr. Southey has not yet received his full desert of praise. He has great faults, but they spring from an exuberance of genius and feeling; and he will discover, probably too late, that to acquire popularity with an audience, accustomed to the tenseness and narrowness of the European dress, it will be necessary for him to girdle up the robes of his Oriental magnificence into less redundant folds.

Such is the history of our poetry, and such the state of the poe. tic world, at the time Mr. Scott made his appearance; and it was thought necessary to give this rapid sketch, that the distinctive character and merits of this author might be justly estimated. Mr. Scott was first known to the public as the editor of some lyric pieces on border chivalry, among which he mingled some ballads of his own. We have already intimated, that it was the hopeless condition of the regular poets, and the hackneyed state of the traditionary topics, which induced Mr. Southey to wander, for a subject, to the banks of the Ganges; and the same causes, in all probability, carried this poet to the marauding borders of Scotland. We have never understood that Mr. Scott gathered much reputation from his ballads, although they contain many

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