flame out nor sparkle. As you know, Mr. Professor, it is only a weak wine that sends the cork up to the ceiling.

Porson. I never was fond of the florid: but I would readily pardon the weak wine you allude to for committing this misdemeanor. Upon my word, I have no such complaint to make against it. I said little at the time about these poems, and usually say little more on better. In our praises and censures, we should see before us one sole object-instruction. A single well-set post, with a few plain letters upon it, directs us better than fifty that turn about and totter, covered as they may be from top to bottom with coronals and garlands.

Besides, knowing that my verdicts will be registered and recorded, I dare not utter a hasty or an inconsiderate one. On this ground, the small critics of the Edinburgh Review have incalculably the advantage over us. I lay it down as an axiom, that languor is the cause or the effect of all disorders, and is itself the very worst in poetry. Wordsworth's is an instrument which has no trumpet-stop.

Southey. But, such as it is, he blows it well.

Porson. To continue the metaphor, it seems to me, on the contrary, that a good deal of his breath is whiffed on the outside of the pipe, and goes for nothing. He Southey. We have about a million critics wants absolutely all the four great requiin Great Britain; not a soul of which critics sites-creativeness, constructiveness, the entertains the slightest doubt of his own sublime, and the pathetic; and I see no infallibility. You, with all your learning reason to believe that he is capable or even and all your canons of criticism, will never sensible of the facetious, as Cowper and make them waver. you have proved yourselves to be on many

occasions.

Southey. Among the opinions we form of our faculties, this is the one in which we all are the most liable to err. How many are suspicious that they are witty else? Wit appears to require a certain dewho raise no such suspicion in any one

Porson. We will not waste our breath upon the best of them. Rather let me turn toward you, so zealous, so ardent, so indefatigable a friend, and, if reports are true, so ill-requited. When your client was the ridicule of all the wits in England, of whom Canning and Frere were foremost, by your indignation at injustice he was righted, and more than righted. For although you at- gree of unsteadiness in the character. Diatributed to him what perhaps was not greatly monds sparkle the most brilliantly on heads above his due, yet they who acknowledge stricken by the palsy. your authority, and contend under your banner, have carried him much further; nay, further, I apprehend, than is expedient or safe; and they will drop him before the day closes, where there is nobody to show the way home.

Southey.-Could not you, Mr. Professor, do that good service to him, which others in another province have so often done to you? Porson.-Nobody better, nobody with less danger from interruptions. But I must be even more enthusiastic than you are, if I prefer this excursion to your conversation. My memory, although the strongest part of me, is apt to stagger and swerve under verses piled incompactly. In our last meeting, you had him mostly to yourself, and you gave me abundantly of the best; at present, while my gruel is before me, it appears no unseasonable time to throw a little salt into both occasionally, as may suit my palate. You will not be displeased?

Southey.-Certainly not, unless you are unjust; nor even then, unless I find the injustice to be founded on ill will.

Porson. That cannot be. I stand "Despicere unde queam tales, passimque videre Errare."

Porson.-Yes; but it is not every palsied head that has diamonds, nor every unsteady character that has wit. I am little complimentary; I must, however, say plainly, that you have indulged in it without any detriment to your fame. But where all the higher qualities of the poet are deficient, if we cannot get wit and humor, there ought at least to be abstinence from prolixity and dilation.

Southey. Surely it is something to have accompanied sound sense with pleasing harmony, whether in verse or prose.

Porson. What is the worth of a musical instrument which has no high key? Even Pan's pipe rises above the barytones; yet I never should mistake it for an organ.

Southey. It is evident that you are illdisposed to countenance the moderns; I mean principally the living.

Porson. They are less disposed to countenance one another.

Southey. Where there is genius there should be geniality. The curse of quarrelsomeness, of hand against every man, was inflicted on the children of the desert; not on those who pastured their flocks on the fertile banks of the Euphrates, or contem

keeps open for you, contain a thing in the
form of a sonnet; a thing to which, for in-
sipidity, tripe au naturel is a dainty:
"Great men have been among us, hands that
penned

Young Vane, and others who called Millon friend." When he potted these fat lampreys he forgot the condiments, which the finest lamlaid them! I see nothing in poetry since preys want; but how close and flat he has

plated the heavens from the elevated ranges | sy claymore, and keep in the cabinet or the of Chaldea. boudoir the jewelled hilt of the oriental Porson. Let none be cast down by the dirk. The pages which my forefinger malice of their contemporaries, or surprised at the defection of their associates, when he himself who has tended more than any man living to purify the poetry and to liberalize the criticism of his nation, is represented, by one whom he has called "in-And tongues that uttered wisdom; better none. offensive and virtuous," as an author all The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington, whose poetry is "not worth five shillings," and of whom another has said, that "his verses sound like dumb-bells." Such are the expressions of two among your friends and familiars, both under obligations to you for the earliest and weightiest testimony in their favor. It would appear as if the exercise of the poetical faculty left irritation and weakness behind it, depriving its possessor at once of love and modesty, and making him resemble a spoilt child, who most indulges in its frowardness when you exclaim "what a spoilt child it is!" and carry it crying and kicking out of the room. Your poetical neighbors I hear, complain bitterly that you never have lauded them at large in your Critical Reviews.

"Four-and-twenty fiddlers all in a row,” fit to compare with it. How the good men and true stand, shoulder to shoulder, and keep one another up!

Southey. In these censures and sarcasms you forget

"Alcandrumque Haliumque Nocmonaque Prytanimque."

From the Spanish I could bring forward many such.

Porson. But here is a sonnet; and the sonnet admits not that approach to the prosaic which is allowable in the ballad, particularly in the ballad of action. For which. reason I never laughed, as many did, at "Lord Lion King at Arms."

Southey. I never have; because one grain of commendation more to the one than the other would make them enemies; and no language of mine would be thought adequate by either to his deserts. Each Scott knew what he was about. In his could not be called the greatest poet of the chivalry, and in all the true, gayety is minage; and by such compliance I should have gled with strength, and facility with majesbeen forever divested of my authority as ty. Lord Lion may be defended by the a critic. I lost, however, no opportunity practice of the older poets, who describe of commending heartily what is best in the like scenes and adventures. There is them; and I have never obtruded on any much resembling it, for instance, in Chevy one's notice what is amiss, but carefully Chase. Marmion is a poem of chivalry, concealed it. I wish you were equally

charitable.

particularly in some measures of the ballad, but rising in sundry places to the epic, and closing with a battle worthy of the Iliad. Ariosto has demonstrated that a romance may be so adorned by the apparatus, and so elevated by the spirit of poetry, as to be taken for an epic; but it has a wider field of its own, with outlying forests and chases. Spanish and Italian poetry often seems to run in extremely slender veins through a vast extent of barren ground.

Porson. I will be; and generous, too. There are several things in these volumes besides that which you recited, containing just thoughts poetically expressed. Few, however, are there which do not contain much of the superfluous, and more of the prosaic. For one nod of approbation, I therefore give two of drowsiness. You accuse me of injustice, not only to this author, but to all the living. Now Byron is Southey. But often, too, it is pure and living; there is more spirit in Byron: plastic. The republicans, whose compact Scott is living; there is more vivacity and phalanx you have unsparingly ridiculed in variety in Scott. Byron exhibits disjecti Wordsworth's sonnet, make surely no sormembra poete; and strong muscles quiver rier a figure than throughout-but rather like galvanism than healthy life. There is a freshness in all Scott's scenery; a vigor and distinctness in all his characters. He seems the brother-in-arms of Froissart. I admire his Marmion in particular. Give me his mas

"A Don Alvaro de Luna

Condestable de Castilla

El Re Don Juan el Segundo."

Porson. What an udmirable Spanish scholar must Mr. Wordsworth be! How completely has he transfused into his own

compositions all the spirit of those verses! | best in Europe: there was none promulgated Nevertheless, it is much to be regretted under our Commonwealth.

net; otherwise there are very many in ted. Hercules killed robbers and ravishers Wordsworth which would have obtained with his knotted club: he cleansed also your approbation.

royal stables by turning whole rivers into them. Apollo, with no labor or effort, overcame the Python; brought round him, in the full accordance of harmony, all the Muses: and illuminated with his sole splendor the universal world. Such is the difference I see between Demosthenes and Milton.

Porson. I have no objection to see mincemeat put into small patty-pans, all of equal size, with ribs at odd distances: my objection lies mainly where I find it without salt or succulence. Milton was glad, I can imagine, to seize upon the sonnet, because it restricted him from a profuse expression of what soon becomes tiresome-praise. In addressing it to the Lord Protector, he was aware that prolixity of speech was both unnecessary and indecorous: in addressing it to Vane, and Lawrence, and Lawes, he felt that friendship is never the stronger for run-in ning through long periods: and in addressing it to

"Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-at-Arms," he might be confident that fourteen such glorious lines were a bulwark, sufficient for his protection against a royal army.

Southey. I am highly gratified at your enthusiasm. A great poet represents a great portion of the human race. Nature delegated to Shakspeare the interests and direction of the whole: to Milton a smaller part, but with plenary power over it; and she bestowed on him such fervor and majesty of eloquence as on no other mortal in any age. Porson. Perhaps indeed not on Demos

thenes himself.

Southey. Without many of those quali. ties of which a loftier genius is constituted, without much fire, without an extent of range, without an eye that can look into the heart, or an organ that can touch it, Demosthenes had great dexterity and great force. By the union of those properties he always was impressive on his audience: but his orations bear less testimony to the seal of genius than the dissertations of Milton do.

Porson. You judge correctly that there are several parts of genius in which Demosthenes is deficient, although in none whatever of the consummate orator. In that

be

Porson. Would you have any thing more of Mr. Wordsworth, after the contemplation of two men who resemble a god and a demigod in the degrees of power?

Southey. I do not believe you can find, another of his poems, so many blemishes and debilities as you have pointed out.

Porson. Within the same space, perhaps not. But my complaint is not against a poverty of thought or expression here and there; it is against the sickliness and prostration of the whole body. I should never have thought it worth my while to renew and continue our conversation on it, unless that frequently such discussions lead to something better than the thing discussed; and unless we had some abundant proofs that heaviness, taken opportunely, is the parent of hilarity. The most beautiful Iris rises in bright expanse out of the minutest watery particles. Little fond as I am of quoting my own authority, permit me to repeat, in this sick chamber, an observation I once made in another almost as sick.

"When wine and gin are gone and spent,
Small beer is then most excellent."

But small beer itself is not equally small nor
equally vapid. Our friend's poetry, like a
cloak of gum-elastic, makes me sweat with-
out keeping me warm. With regard to the
texture and sewing, what think you of

"No thorns can pierce those tender feet,
Whose life was as the violet sweet!"

Southey. It should have been written "her tender feet;" because, as the words stand, it is the life of the tender feet that is

sweet as the violet.

character there is no necessity for stageexhibitions of wit, however well it may received in an oration from the most perPorson. If there is a Wordsworth school, suasive and the most stately: Demosthenes, it certainly is not a grammar school. Is when he catches at wit, misses it, and falls there any lower? It must be a school for flat in the mire. But by discipline and train- very little boys, and a rod should be hung ing, by abstinence from what is florid and up in the centre. Take another sample. too juicy, and by loitering with no idle words on his way, he acquired the hard muscles. of a wrestler, and nobody could stand up against him with success or impunity.

"There is blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield." Was ever line so inadequate to its purpose as the second! If the blessing is evident Southey.-Milton has equal strength, with- and certain, the sense of joy arising from it out an abatement of beauty: not a sinew must be evident and certain also, not meresharp and rigid, not a vein varicose or infla-ly seeming. Whatever only seems to yield

Southey. Acknowledging the prosaic flatness of the last verse you quoted, the sneer with which you pronounced the final word In what other author do you find such heaseems to me unmerited. vy trash?

"How do you live? and what is it you do!" Show me any thing like this in the worst poet that ever lived, and I will acknowledge Southey. Sincere conveys a stronger that I am the worst critic. A want of symsense to most understandings than the sub-pathy is sometimes apparent in the midst stantive alone would; words which we can of poetical pretences. Before us a gang of do without, are not therefore useless. Many gypsies, perhaps after a long journey, permay be of service and efficacy to certain haps after a marriage, perhaps after the minds, which other minds pass over inob- birth of a child among them, are found restservantly; and there are many which, how- ing a whole day in one place: What is ever light in themselves, wing the way for the reflection on it? a well-directed point that could never reach the heart without it.