of verse, not of a striking character, but yet not wanting either in cordiality of feeling or grace of manner, appeared in 1820; James Grahame (b. 1765, d. 1811), best known as the author of The Sabbath, originally published without his name in 1804, but whose Birds of Scotland, which followed in 1806, and his British Georgics in 1809, have also been highly praised for the truth and vividness, though in a style simple sometimes to homeliness, of their pictures of natural objects and scenery, among others, James Montgomery going so far as to declare that, although his readers may be few, yet whoever does read him will probably be oftener surprised into admiration than in the perusal of any one of his contempora ries"; John Leyden, whose philological as well as poetic ardor, and sudden extinction in the midst of his career (at Batavia, in 1811, at the age of thirty-six), have been sung by Scott:

the Rev. Charles Wolfe (b. 1791, d. 1823), an Irishman, the writer of the famous lines on the death of Sir John Moore, first given to the world in 1817; Reginald Heber, whose fine prize-poem of Palestine was produced in 1803, and who held the bishopric of Calcutta from 1823 till his lamented death, at the age of fortythree, in 1826; the Hon. and Rev. William Herbert (b. 1778, d. 1847), whose elegant and spirited Translations from the Norse appeared in 1806, and his original poems of Helga and Attila in 1815 and 1838; Robert Bloomfield (b. 1766, d. 1823), the selftaught author of The Farmer's Boy, first published in 1798, and of other pieces full of truth to nature and also not without something of conventional cultivation; John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant, born in 1793, whose first volume of Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery appeared in 1820, and his Village Minstrel and other Poems, in two volumes, the year following, showing less indebtedness to books and more originality than Bloomfield; Hector M'Neill (b. 1746, d. 1818), who wrote only in his native Scottish dialect, but acquired great popularity among his countrymen, more especially by his Will and Jean, first published in 1795; Robert Tannahill (b. 1774, d. 1810), some of whose Scottish songs have almost the sweetness and pathos, though

none of the fire, of those of Burns; James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, as he was commonly called (b. 1772, d. 1835), who first made himself known by a volume of poems published in 1801, from which date his irregular but affluent and vigorous genius continued to pour forth both verse and prose at an accelerating rate as long as he lived, and whose Queen's Wake, produced in 1813, would, if he had never written anything else, have placed him perhaps at the head of the second or merely imitative class of the uneducated poets of Scotland - far, indeed, below Burns, but above Allan Ramsay; his countryman Allan Cunningham (b. 1784, d. 1842), the author of many clever songs, also, however, all of an imitative character, as well as an expert and voluminous writer in prose; William Tennant (b. 1774, d. 1848), another Scotsman, whose bright and airy Anster Fair appeared in 1812; John Wilson (b. 1788, d. 1855), the renowned Christopher North of Blackwood's Magazine, whose potent pen was wielded chiefly in prose eloquence, of every variety, from the most reckless comedy and satire to the loftiest heights of description, criticism, and declamatory denunciation, but who first became known by his two poems of The Isle of Palms, published in 1812, and The City of the Plague, in 1816, both rich in passages of tender and dreamy beauty; the late Lord Strangford, the translator of the minor poems of Camoens (1803); the late Lord Thurlow, the author of various volumes of verse, the earliest of which appeared in 1812; Matthew Gregory Lewis (b. 1773, d. 1818), whose Tales of Wonder appeared in 1801, and whose skill in the management of the supernatural and showy versification are still familiar to all readers in his tale of Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene; the Right Hon. John Hookham Frere, notable for his metrical version in the English of the fourteenth century, first published in Ellis's Specimens of the Poets, of the Anglo-Saxon Ode on Athelstan's Victory at Brunanburg, executed while he was a schoolboy at Eton, for a translation of almost unequalled merit from one of the old Spanish poetical romances, published (without his name) in Southey's Chronicle of the Cid (1808),—and for his Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, &c., published (also anonymously) in 1817, which set the example of the new manner soon after adopted by Byron in his Beppo and Don Juan, - to say nothing of his transations from Aristophanes and other Greek poets, brought out at

Malta, where he had long been resident, and where he died, at the age of seventy-seven, in 1846; Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, the first of whose many publications, both in verse and prose, a volume of Sonnets and other Poems, appeared in 1785, and who survived till 1837, cultivating literature throughout his long life always with enthusiasm, if at times with a somewhat eccentric and fantastic taste; Sir Martin Archer Shee, whose clever Rhymes on Art were first published soon after the commencement of the century; the brothers James and Horace Smith, the joint authors of the celebrated Rejected Addresses (1812), the happiest of modern jeux d'esprit; Thomas Pringle (b. 1788, d. 1834), whose verses, "Afar in the desert I love to ride," descriptive of the life he had known in South Africa, and throbbing with the patriotic longings of the exile, were admired by Coleridge; the Rev. George Croly (b. in Dublin, 1780, d. in London, 1860), whose first poetical work, Paris in 1815, was followed by The Angel of the World, Gems from the Antique, and others, and whose verse, more especially in his shorter pieces, sometimes surprises us with sudden felicities, although in general, perhaps, in everything at least except the sound, rather too like prose, as his prose certainly too much resembles verse; Savage Landor, Milman, and Procter ("Barry Cornwall"), who all still live and continue to write; Anster, whose most English of all our Fausts, published so long ago as 1835, will yet, it is to be hoped, be completed by an equally brilliant reproduction of the Second Part of the great German poem ; Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Letitia Aikin, b. 1743, d. 1825), one of the most popular writers of her day, and the author of several volumes of careful and not inelegant verse, the first of which (her earliest publication) appeared in 1773; Mrs. Hunter (Anne Home, b. 1742, d. 1821), the wife of the great anatomist, whose widow, however, she had been for many years when she published in 1806 the first collection of her poems, which are radiant with no common lyrical beauty, and several of which still retain their hold of the national ear and heart; her husband's niece, Joanna Baillie (b. 1762, d. 1851), all whose poetry is classical and graceful, but who is best known for her series of dramas on the Passions, the first volume of which was published in 1798, and among which the tragedies are probably, with all their deficiencies, the best ever written by a woman; Mrs. Tighe (Mary Blackford), an Irish lady, the subject of Moore's beautiful song, "I saw thy form in youthful

prime" (she died, after years of suffering, in 1810, at the age of thirty-seven), and whose poem of Psyche, written in the Spenserian stanza, displays everywhere an imagination, immature, indeed, and wanting in vigor, but yet both rich and delicate, such as might have shone forth in Spenser himself if he had been a woman, or, as compared to that which we have in the Fairy Queen, something like what moonlight is to sunshine; Mrs. Grant (Anne Macvicar, b. 1754, d. 1838), best known through her Letters from the Mountains, and other prose works, but who began her literary career by the publication in 1803 of a volume of verse (Original Poems, with some Translations from the Gaelic); Mrs. Opie (Amelia Alderson), wife of Opie the painter, whom, however, she survived for nearly half a century, having died only in 1853, at the age of eighty-five, to be remembered chiefly, no doubt, for her exquisite Father and Daughter, and other prose works of fiction, but the authoress also of some very sweet and tender poetry; Mary Russell Mitford (b. 1789, d. 1855), whose popularity also in her latter days rested almost entirely on her prose writings, but who first attracted notice by several publications in verse, a volume of Poems in 1810, her Christina the Maid of the South Seas, in 1811, her Watlington Hill in 1812, and her Poems on the Female Character the same year, besides her three tragedies of Julian (1823), Foscari (1826), and Rienzi (1828); Mrs. Hemans (Felicia Dorothea Browne), who, on the contrary, confined herself to verse, and was unquestionably the most of a born as well as of a trained poet of all the female writers of this period, and who scarcely ever allowed her pen to rest from the production of her first volume when she was only fifteen till her premature death in 1835, at the age of forty-one; and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (poor L. E. L.), who, after earning wide public favor by an untiring flow of occasional poetry, often full both of heart and of fancy, besides a long poem entitled The Improvisatrice, published in 1824, followed her in 1838 at that of thirty-six; to carry our enumeration no further. Some of those in this long list, indeed, may merit no higher designation than that of lively and agreeable versifiers; but others, even of this throng of minor voices, will be allowed to have received no stinted measure of the divine gift of

song.

On the whole, this space of somewhat less than half a century, dating from the first appearance of Cowper and Burns, must be

pronounced to be the most memorable period in the history of our poetical literature after the age of Spenser and Shakspeare. And if, in comparing the produce of the two great revivals, the one happening at the transition from the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, the other at that from the eighteenth into the nineteenth, we find something more of freshness, freedom, raciness, and true vigor, warmth, and nature, in our earlier than in our recent poetry, it is not to be denied, on the other hand, that in some respects the latter may claim a preference over the former. It is much less debased by the intermixture of dross or alloy with its fine gold- much less disfigured by occasional pedantry and affectation much more correct.and free from flaws and incongruities of all kinds. In whatever regards form, indeed, our more modern poetry must be admitted, taken in its general character, to be the more perfect; and that notwithstanding many passages to be found in the greatest of our elder poets which in mere writing have perhaps never since been equalled, nor are likely ever to be excelled; and notwithstanding also something of greater boldness with which their position enabled them to handle the language, thereby attaining sometimes a force and expressiveness not so much within the reach of their successors in our own day. The literary cultivation of the language throughout two additional centuries, and the stricter discipline under which it has been reduced, may have brought loss or inconvenience in one direction, as well as gain in another; but the gain certainly preponderates. Even in the matter of versification, the lessons of Milton, of Dryden, and of Pope have no doubt been upon the whole instructive and beneficial; whatever of misdirection any of them may have given for a time to the form of our poetry passed away with his contemporaries and immediate followers, and now little or nothing but the good remains the example of the superior care and uniform finish, and also something of sweetest and deepest music, as well as much of spirit and brilliancy, that were unknown to our earlier poets. In variety and freedom, as well as in beauty, majesty, and richness of versification, some of our latest writers have hardly been excelled by any of their predecessors; and the versification of the generality of our modern poets is greatly superior to that of the common run of those of the age of Elizabeth and James.

One remarkable distinction between the Elizabethan and the recent era is, that of the poetical produce of the latter a much