developed and the aspect of the head and passed away, crowding the graves with face was darker, more concentrated than their honored remains. But a few days either; and then I compared the eyes of ago Allan himself was amongst us; at his Cunningham and Sadler, having great faith post during the day to fulfil Chantry's in eyes, which are, according to my belief, wishes, and at night poring over his last the true indexes of a poetic temperament, great work. No man was ever more just and the most expressive of all the features. or more unflinching than the poet CunningAfter their discussion was ended, so quickly ham. He was a brave and sincere Conserwere my ears attuned to catch their words, that I heard the deep, monotonous voice of the author of "The Excursion" reciting some lines that forced his friends, who gathered in his words with bended heads, to exchange glances of admiration, until at last Allan could not help exclaiming, "Ah! but that is nature!" Those were brilliant hours-brilliant and full of pleasant memories. I often please myself by fixing my mind upon them without suffering it to dwell upon the intermediate times, when so few remain of those who enjoyed with me that and other evenings as full of wit as mirth, and all that gives a relish to the realities of life. vative, firm to Church and State. Sir Robert Peel proved his respect for the man by providing for one of his sons. But, though Allan Cunningham was proud and grateful for such a distinction, he craved no favors. HE WORKED and must have died with the comfort that his family were what the world calls "settled" by the fruits of his honorable industry. I have often heard it said that he had good friends; and so he had, because he commanded respect; nor would Allan have admitted any person to his house whom he did not think entitled to this distinction. It is difficult to portray any human being more perfect in all the relations of private life than Allan Cunningham; as a husband, a father, a friend, he was perfection. And, great as is his loss to the republic of letters, it is as nought, when compared to what his family and friends must unrivalled for purity of composition; they are delicate and exquisite in their delineations, and at the same time healthy and vigorous. His "Lives," I think, will increase in value. I should like to see a collected edition of his works; but whether such a publication would succeed during the present depression is uncertain. Where are they all now? Of the five literary ladies who were present on that evening only two survive. (Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. S. C. Hall.) The other three died prematurely in foreign lands- suffer. Some of his fugitive poems are Miss Landon in Africa, Miss Jewsbury in India, and Miss Roberts in India too. Miss Jewsbury's fate was, it is said, not much happier than poor Miss Landon's. Be that as it may, there was no one to tell the tale to those who loved them in their native England. "They died and made no sign." Miss Landon's existence was replete with performance. Miss Jewsbury's was certain to bring forth a late, but abundant, fruitage. Her mind was a treasure-house of things as rich as rare. But now all is over for time in this world. The heather blooms upon the grave of the Ettrick Shepherd; Michael Thomas Sadler died at Belfast; Wallace, the amiable and kind-hearted barrister, Another link of the chain is brokenanother of our great ones passed into eternity, the eternity we all hope for. I shall long miss his cheerful voice, and the pressure of his friendly hand, for he was indeed, for truth, talent, and uprightness, one amongst a thousand. HE Loved nature. the above from the Britannia, and (We copy whom all men loved, and, though he could are especially interested in it, from the supposi hardly be called "literary," was so much tion that it is written by Mrs. S. C. Hall; and with literary persons as to be so called, he that at the evening party which it describes we is dead, and would, perhaps, have slept be- had the lively pleasure, for the first time, of lookneath a nameless grave, but for the gene-ing at and listening to many with whose names rosity, as deep as it is true, of his friend and works we had long been familiar. E. L.) Macready, who erected a monument to him at his own expense. John Banim, also, was TER SAVAGE LANDOR. From Blackwood's Magazine. there; poor Banim! his accent was a sa- IMAGINARY CONVERSATION. BY WALvory of the Irish as Hogg's of the Scotch; and when he lighted up he could be as racy as the best of them, and as original. He is gathered to his fathers in his own land. Wilkie found a grave amid the billows of the ocean-Michael Thomas Sadler died a linen-manufacturer at Belfast; others have Porson. Many thanks, Mr. Southey, for this visit in my confinement. I do believe you see me on my last legs; and perhaps you expected it. Southey. Indeed, Mr. Professor, I ex- their boneless and bloodless flaccidity, pected to find you unwell, according to re- struggle and wriggle and die the moment port; but as your legs have occasionally they tumble out of the nutshell and its comfailed you, both in Cambridge and in Lon- fortable drowth. Shakspeare was assailed don, the same event may happen again on every side by rude and beggarly rivals, many times before the last. The cheerful- but he never kicked them out of his way. ness of your countenance encourages me to make this remark. Porson. There is that soft, and quiet, and genial humor about you, which raises my spirits and tranquillizes my infirmity. Why (I wonder) have we not always been friends? Southey. Alas, my good Mr. Professor! how often have the worthiest men asked the same question-not indeed of each other, but of their own hearts-when age and sickness have worn down their asperities, when rivalships have grown languid, animosities tame, inert, and inexcitable, and when they have become aware of approaching more nearly the supreme perennial fountain of benevolence and truth? Porson.-Am I listening to the language and to the sentiments of a poet? I ask the question with this distinction; for I have often found a wide difference between the sentiments and the language: Generally nothing can be purer or more humane than what is exhibited in modern poetry; but I may mention to you, who are known to be exempt from the vice, that the nearest neighbors in the most romantic scenery, where every thing seems peace, repose and harmony, are captious and carping one at another. When I hear the song of the nightingale, I neglect the naturalist; and in vain does he remind me that his aliment is composed of grubs and worms. Let poets be crop-full of jealousy; let them only sing well-that is enough for me. Southey. I think you are wrong in your supposition that the poet and the man are usually dissimilar. Porson. There is a race of poets-not, however, the race of Homer and Dante, Milton and Shakspeare-but a race of poets there is, which nature has condemned to a Siamese twinship. Wherever the poet is, there also must the man obtrude obliquely his ill-favored visage. From a drunken connection with Vanity this surplus offspring may always be expected. In no two poets that ever lived do we find the fact so remarkably exemplified as in Byron and Wordsworth. But higher power produces an intimate consciousness of itself; and this consciousness is the parent of tranquillity and repose. Small poets (observe, I do not call Wordsworth and Byron small poets) are as unquiet as grubs, which, in Southey.-Milton was less tolerant; he shrivelled up the lips of his revilers by the austerity of his scorn. In our last conversation, I remember, I had to defend against you the weaker of the two poets you just now cited, before we came to Milton and Shakspeare. I am always ready to undertake the task; Byron wants no support or setting off, so many workmen have been employed in the construction of his throne, and so many fair hands in the adaptation of his cushion and canopy. But Wordsworth, in his poetry at least, always aimed at Porson. My dear Mr. Southey! there are two quarters in which you cannot expect the will to be taken for the deed: I mean the women and the critics. Your friend inserts parenthesis in parenthesis, and adds clause to clause, codicil to codicil, with all the circumspection, circuition, wariness, and strictness, of an indenture. His client has it hard and fast. But what is an axiom in law is none in poetry. You cannot say in your profession, plus non vitiat; plus is the worst vitiator and violator of the Muses and the Graces. Be sparing of your animadversions on Byron. He will always have more partisans and admirers than any other in your confraternity. He will always be an especial favorite with the ladies, and with all who, like them, have no opportunity of comparing him with the models of antiquity. He possesses the soul of poetry, which is energy; but he wants that ideal beauty which is the sublimer emanation, I will not say of the real, for this is the more real of the two, but of that which is ordinarily subject to the common senses. With much that is admirable, he has nearly all that is vicious; a large grasp of small things, without selection and without cohesion. This likewise is the case with the other, without the long hand and the strong fist. Southey.--I have heard that you prefer Crabbe to either. Porson.-Crabbe wrote with a twopenny nail, and scratched rough truths and rogues' facts on mud walls. There is, however, much in his poetry, and more in his moral character, to admire. Comparing the smartnesses of Crabbe with Young's, I cannot help thinking that the reverend doctor must have wandered in his Night Thoughts rather too near the future vicar's future mother, so striking is the resemblance. But the vicar, if he was fonder of low company, has greatly more nature and sympathy, greatly more vigor and compression. Young moralized at a distance on some external appearances of the human heart; Crabbe entered it on all fours, and told the people what an ugly thing it is inside. Southey. Methinks it smells of his own favorite beverage, gin and water. Porson. No bad perfume after all. "Nought of life left, save a quivering When his limbs were slightly shivering." Pray, what does the second line add to the first, beside empty words? "Around a slaughter'd army lay." What follows? "No more to combat or to bleed." Well; more the pity than the According to historians, (if you doubt my fidelity, I will quote them,) slaughtered armies have often been in this condition. Southey. This simple-minded man is totally free from malice and animosity. Porson.-Rightly in the use of these two Verily! powers have you discriminated. Byron is wonder. profuse of animosity; but I do believe him to be quite without malice. You have lived among men about the Lakes, who want the vigor necessary for the expansion of animosity; but whose dunghills are warm enough to hatch long egg-strings of malice, after a season. Southey. It may be so; but why advert to them? In speaking of vigor, surely you cannot mean vigor of intellect? An animal that has been held with lowered nostrils in the Grotto del Cane, recovers his senses when he is thrown into the Agnano; but there is no such resuscitation for the writer "We sat down and wept by the waters Of Babel, and thought of the day, When our foe, in the hue of his slaughters, Made Salem's high places his prey. A prey "in the hue of his slaughters." This is very pathetic; but not more so than the thought it suggested to me, which is plainer: "We sat down and wept by the waters Of Camus, and thought of the day, When damsels would show their red garters In their hurry to scamper away." Let us see what we can find where this other slip of paper divides the pages. "Let he who made thee." whose head has been bent over that poetry, which, while it intoxicates the brain, deadens or perverts the energies of the heart. In vain do pure waters reflect the Some of us at Cambridge continue to say, heavens to him his respiration is on the "Let him go." Is this grammatical form earth and earthly things; and it is not the grown obsolete? Pray, let I know. Some whispers of wisdom, or the touches of af- of us are also much in the habit of profection-it is only the shout of the multi-nouncing real as if it were a dissyllable, and tude that can excite him. It soon falls, and he with it. Porson. Do not talk in this manner with the ladies, young or old; a little profligacy is very endearing to them. Southey-Not to those with whom I am likely to talk. Porson. Before we continue our discussion on the merits of Mr. Wordsworth, and there are many great ones, I must show my inclination to impartiality, by adducing a few instances of faultiness in Byron. For you must bear in mind that I for the crown against your friend, and that it is not my business in this place to call witnesses to his good character. am counsel Southey. You leave me no doubt of that. But do not speak in generalities when you speak of him. Lay your finger on those places in particular which most displease you. I ideal as if it were a trissyllable. All the Scotch deduct a syllable from each of these words, and Byron's mother was Scotch. What have we here? "And spoil'd her goodly lands to gild his waste." profess my abhorrence at gilding even a few square leagues of waste. Thy fanes, thy temples." "Rustic plough." Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely walls." What think you of a desolate cloud "O'er Venice' lovely walls?" Where poets have omitted, as in this instance, the possessive s, denoting the genitive case, as we are accustomed to call it, they are very censurable. Few blemishes in style are greater. But here, where no letter s precedes it, the fault is the worst, Porson. It would benumb it-nevertheless, I will do as you bid me; and, if ever I am unjust in a single tittle, reprehend me In the next line we find instantly. But at present, to Byron as I proposed. Give me the volume. Ay, that is it. "Athens' armies." Further on, he makes Petrarca say that his passion for Laura was a guilty one. If it was, Petrarca did not think it so, and still less would he have said it. Southey. This arises from his ignorance, that reo in Italian poetry, means not only guilty, but cruel and sorrowful. Porson. He fancies that Shakspeare's Forest of Arden is the Belgian Forest of the same name, differently spelt, Ardennes; whereas it began near Stratford upon Avon, and extended to Red-ditch and the Ridgeway, the boundary of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, having for its centre the little town Henley, called to this day Henley in Arden. Southey. You will never find in Wordsworth such faults as these. Porson. Perhaps not ; but let us see. I am apprehensive that we may find graver, and without the excuse of flightiness or incitation. We will follow him, if you please, | where you attempted (as coopers do in their business more successfully) to draw together the staves of his quarter-cask, by putting a little fire of your own chips in it. Yet they start and stare widely; and even your practised hand will scarcely bring it into such condition as to render it a sound or saleable commodity. You are annoyed, 1 perceive, at this remark. I honor your sensibility. There are, indeed, base souls which genius may illuminate, but cannot elevate. "Struck with an ear-ache by all stronger lays, They writhe with anguish at another's praise.' Meantime, what exquisite pleasure must you have felt, in being the only critic of our age and country, laboring for the advancement of those who might be thought your rivals! No other ventured to utter a syllable in behalf of your friend's poetry. While he “ wheeled his downy light," it lay among the thread-papers and patchwork of the sedater housewifes, and was applied by them to the younger part of the family, as an antidote against all levity of behavior. The last time we met, you not only defended your fellow-soldier while he was lying on the ground, trodden and wounded, and crying out aloud, but you lifted him up on your shoulders in the middle of the fight. Presently we must try our strength again, if you persist in opposing him to the dramatists of Athens. Southey. You mistake me widely in imagining me to have ranked him with the Greek tragedians, or any great tragedians whatsoever. I only said that, in one single poem, Sophocles or Euripides would probably have succeeded no better. Porson.--This was going far enough. But I will not oppose my unbelief to your belief, which is at all times the pleasanter. Poets, I find, are beginning to hold critics cheap, and are drilling a company out of their own body. At present, in marching they lift up their legs too high, and in firing they shut their eyes. Southey. There is little use in arguing with the conceited and inexperienced, who, immersed in the slough of ignorance, cry out, "There you are wrong; there we differ," &c. Wry necks are always stiff, and hot heads are still worse when they grow cool. Porson.Let me ask you, who, being both a poet and a critic, are likely to be impartial, whether we, who restore the noble forms which time and barbarism have disfigured, are not more estimable than those artisans who mould in coarse clay, and cover with plashy chalk, their shepherds and shepherdesses for BagniggeWells ? Southey. I do not deny nor dispute it; but, awarding due praise to such critics, of whom the number in our own country is extremely small, bishoprics having absorbed and suffocated half the crew, I must, in defence of those particularly whom they have criticised too severely, profess my opinion that our poetry, of late years, hath gained to the full as much as it hath lost. Porson. The sea also, of late years, and all other years too, has followed the same law. We have gained by it empty cockleshells, dead jelly-fish, sand, shingle, and voluminous weeds. On the other hand, we have lost our exuberant meadow-ground, slowly abraded, stealthily bitten off, morsel after morsel; we have lost our fat saltmarshes; we have lost our solid turf, besprinkled with close flowers; we have lost our broad umbrageous fences, and their trees and shrubs and foliage of plants innumerably various; we have lost, in short, every thing that delighted us with its inex. haustible richness, and aroused our admi. ration at its irregular and unrepressed luxuriance. Southey. I would detract and derogate from no man; but pardon me if I am more inclined towards him who improves our own literature, than towards him who elucidates any other. Porson. Our own is best improved by the elucidation of others. Among all the bran in all the little bins of Mr. Wordsworth's beer-cellar, there is not a legal quart of that stout old English beverage with which the good Bishop of Dromore regaled us. The buff jerkins we saw in Chevy Chase, please me better than the linsy-woolsy which en wraps the puffy limbs of our worthy host at Southey. I would have added, that each Grasmere. resents in another any injustice; and reSouthey Really this, if not random ma-sents it indeed so violently, as to turn unlice, is ill-directed levity. Already you have acquired that fame and station to which nobody could oppose your progress; why not let him have his? just on the opposite side. Wordsworth, in whose poetry you yourself admit there are many and great beauties, will, I am afraid, be tossed out of his balance by a sudden jerk in raising him. Southey. You cannot be accused of either fault; but you demand too much, and pardon no remissness. However, you have at no time abetted by your example the paltry pelters of golden fruit paled out from them. Porson. So he shall; this is the mark I aim at. It is a difficult matter to set a weak Porson. Nothing more likely. The reman right, and it is seldom worth the trou-action may be as precipitate as the pull is ble; but it is infinitely more difficult, when now violent against him. Injudicious friends a man is intoxicated by applauses, to per- will cause him less uneasiness, but will do suade him that he is going astray. The him greater mischief than intemperate opmore tender and coaxing we are, the oftener ponents. is the elbow jerked into our sides. There are three classes of sufferers under criticism-the querulous, the acquiescent, and the contemptuous. In the two latter, there is usually something of magnanimity; but in the querulous we always find the imbecile, the vain, and the mean-spirited. I do not hear that you ever have condescended to notice any attack on your poetical works, either in note or preface. Meanwhile, your neighbor would allure us into his cottage by setting his sheep-dog at us; which guardian of the premises runs after and snaps at every pebble thrown to irritate him. Porson.-Removed alike from the crowd and the coterie, I have always avoided, with timid prudence, the bird-cage walk of literature. I have withholden from Herman and some others, a part of what is due to them; and I regret it. Sometimes I have been arrogant, never have I been malicious. Unhappily, I was educated in a school of criticism where the exercises were too gladiatorial. Looking at my elders in it, they appeared to me so ugly, in part from their contortions, and in part from their Porson. Those always will be who show scars, that I suspected it must be a dangerone weakness at having been attacked on ous thing to wield a scourge of vipers; and another. I admire your suavity of temper, I thought it no very creditable appointment and your consciousness of worth; your to be linkboy or pandar at an alley leading disdain of obloquy, and your resignation to down to the Furies. Age and infirmity the destinies of authorship. Never did have rendered me milder than I was. I am either poet or lover gain any thing by com-loth to fire off my gun in the warren which plaining. Southey. Pray, leave these tropes and metaphors, and acknowledge that Wordsworth has been scornfully treated. Southey-Such sparks as our critics are in general, give neither warmth nor light, and only make people stare and stand out of the way, lest they should fall on them. Porson. Those who have assaulted you and Mr. Wordsworth are perhaps less malicions than unprincipled ; the pursuivants of power, or the running footmen of faction. Your patience is admirable; his impatience is laughable. Nothing is more amusing than to see him raise his bristles and expose his tusk at every invader of his brushwood, every marauder of his hips and haws. Southey-Among all the races of men, we English are at once the most generous and the most ill-tempered. We all carry sticks in our hands to cut down the heads of the higher poppies. Porson. A very high poppy, and surcharged with Lethean dew, is that before us. But continue. lies before us; loth to startle the snug little creatures, each looking so comfortable at the mouth of its burrow, or skipping about at short distances, or frisking and kicking up the sand along the thriftless heath. You have shown me some very good poetry in your author; I have some very bad in him to show you. Each of our actions is an incitement to improve him. But what we cannot improve or alter, lies in the constitution of the man: the determination to hold you in one spot until you have heard him through; the reluctance that any thing should be lost; the unconsciousness that the paring is less nutritious and less savory than the core; in short, the prolix, the prosaic; a sickly sameness of color; a sad deficiency of vital heat. Southey. Where the language is subdued and somewhat cold, there may nevertheless be internal warmth and spirit. There is a paleness in intense fires; they do not |