And thou, dear Kitty, peerless maid,
Do thou a pensive ear incline;
For thou canst weep at every wo,
And pity every plaint but mine.
Young Dawson was a gallant youth,
A brighter never trod the plain;
And well he loved one charming maid,
And dearly was he loved again.
One tender maid she loved him dear,
Of gentle blood the damsel came :
And faultless was her beauteous form,
And spotless was her virgin fame.
But curse on party's hateful strife,
That led the favoured youth astray;
The day the rebel clans appeared,
O had he never seen that day! Their colours and their sash he wore,
And in the fatal dress was found; And now he must that death endure,
Which gives the brave the keenest wound. How pale was then his true love's cheek, When Jemmy's sentence reached her ear! For never yet did Alpine snows
So pale or yet so chill appear.
With faltering voice she weeping said,
Oh Dawson, monarch of my heart!
Think not thy death shall end our loves,
For thou and I will never part.
Yet might sweet mercy find a place,
And bring relief to Jemmy's woes,
O George! without a prayer for thee
My orisons should never close.
The gracious prince that gave him life
Would crown a never-dying flame;
And every tender babe I bore
Should learn to lisp the giver's name.
But though, dear youth, thou shouldst be dragged
To yonder ignominious tree,
Thou shalt not want a faithful friend
To share thy bitter fate with thee.
O then her mourning-coach was called,
The sledge moved slowly on before;
Though borne in her triumphal car,
She had not loved her favourite more.
She followed him, prepared to view
The terrible behests of law;
And the last scene of Jemmy's woes
With calm and steadfast eye she saw.
Distorted was that blooming face,
Which she had fondly loved so long;
And stifled was that tuneful breath,
Which in her praise had sweetly sung:
And severed was that beauteous neck,
Round which her arms had fondly closed;
And mangled was that beauteous breast,
On which her love-sick head reposed:
And ravished was that constant heart,
She did to every heart prefer;
For though it could its king forget,
'Twas true and loyal still to her.
Amid those unrelenting flames
She bore this constant heart to see;
But when 'twas mouldered into dust,
Now, now, she cried, I follow thee.
My death, my death alone can show
The pure and lasting love I bore : Accept, O Heaven! of woes like ours, And let us, let us weep no more.
The dismal scene was o'er and past,
The lover's mournful hearse retired; The maid drew back her languid head, And, sighing forth his name, expired. Though justice ever must prevail,
The tear my Kitty sheds is due ;
For seldom shall she hear a tale
So sad, so tender, and so true.
[Written at an Inn at Henley.]
To thee, fair Freedom, I retire
From flattery, cards, and dice, and din;
Nor art thou found in mansions higher
Than the low cot or humble inn.
'Tis here with boundless power I reign,
And every health which I begin
Converts dull port to bright champagne :
Such freedom crowns it at an inn.
I fly from pomp, I fly from plate,
I fly from falsehood's specious grin;
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an inn.
Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lackeys else might hope to win; It buys what courts have not in store, It buys me freedom at an inn. Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.
DAVID MALLET, author of some beautiful ballad stanzas, and some florid unimpassioned poems in blank verse, was a successful but unprincipled literary adventurer. He praised and courted Pope while living, and, after experiencing his kindness, traduced his memory when dead. He earned a disgraceful pension by contributing to the death of a brave naval officer, Admiral Byng, who fell a victim to the clamour of faction; and by various other acts of his life, he evinced that self-aggrandisement was his only steady and ruling passion. When Johnson, therefore, states that Mallet was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend, he pays a compliment to the virtue and integrity of the natives of Scotland. The original name of the poet was Malloch, which, after his removal to London, and his intimacy with the great, he changed to Mallet, as more easily pronounced by the English. His father kept a small inn at Crieff, Perthshire, where David was born about the year 1700. He attended Aberdeen college, and was afterwards received, though without salary, as tutor in the family of Mr Home of Dreghorn, near Edinburgh. He next obtained a similar situation, but with a salary of £30 per annum, in the family of the Duke of Montrose. In 1723, he went to London with the duke's family, and next year his ballad of William and Margaret appeared in Hill's periodical, ⚫ The Plain Dealer." He soon numbered among his friends Young, Pope, and other eminent persons, to whom his assiduous attentions, his agreeable manners, and literary taste, rendered his society acceptable. In 1733 he published a satire on Bentley, inscribed to Pope, entitled Verbal Criticism, in which he characterises the venerable scholar as
In error obstinate, in wrangling loud,
For trifles cager, positive, and proud;
Deep in the darkness of dull authors bred,
With all their refuse lumbered in his head.
and Margaret,' which, written at the age of twentythree, afforded high hopes of ultimate excellence. The simplicity, here remarkable, he seems to have thrown aside when he assumed the airs and dress of a man of taste and fashion. All critics, from Dr Percy downwards, have united in considering ⚫ William and Margaret' one of the finest compositions of the kind in our language. Sir Walter Scott conceived that Mallet had imitated an old Scottish tale to be found in Allan Ramsay's 'Tea-Table Miscellany,' beginning,
There came a ghost to Margaret's door.
The resemblance is striking. Mallet confessed only (in a note to his ballad) to the following verse in Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle :
Mallet was appointed under secretary to the Prince
of Wales, with a salary of £200 per annum; and, in
conjunction with Thomson, he produced, in 1740, the
Masque of Alfred, in honour of the birth-day of the
Princess Augusta. A fortunate second marriage
(ucthing is known of his first) brought to the poet
a fortune of £10,000. The lady was daughter of
Lord Carlisle's steward. Both Mallet and his wife
professed to be deists, and the lady is said to have
surprised some of her friends by commencing her
arguments with-Sir, we deists.' When Gibbon
the historian was dismissed from his college at
Oxford for embracing popery, he took refuge in
Maliet's house, and was rather scandalised, he says,
than reclaimed, by the philosophy of his host.
Wilkes mentions that the vain and fantastic wife of
Mallet one day lamented to a lady that her husband
offered in reputation by his name being so often
confounded with that of Smollett; the lady wittily
swered, Madam, there is a short remedy; let
your husband keep his own name.' To gratify Lord
Bolingbroke, Mallet, in his preface to the Patriot
King, heaped abuse on the memory of Pope, and
Bolingbroke rewarded him by bequeathing to him
the whole of his works and manuscripts. When
the government became unpopular by the defeat at
Minorca, he was employed to defend them, and
under the signature of a Plain Man, he published
an address imputing cowardice to the admiral of
the fleet. He succeeded: Byng was shot, and Mallet
was pensioned. On the death of the Duchess of Marl-words.
hough, it was found that she had left £1000 to
Glover, author of Leonidas,' and Mallet, jointly,
a condition that they should draw up from the
family papers a life of the great duke. Glover, in-
egnant at a stipulation in the will, that the memoir
wis to be submitted before publication to the Earl
of Chesterfield, and being a high-spirited man, de-
vdved the whole on Mallet, who also received a
pension from the second Duke of Marlborough, to
ulate his industry. He pretended to be busy with the work, and in the dedication to a small collection of his poems published in 1762, he stated that he hoped soon to present his grace with some
12 more solid in the life of the first Duke of Marlborough. Mallet had received the solid money, and cared for nothing else. On his death, it was
d that not a single line of the memoir had been white. In his latter days the poet held the lucra*ive mtnation of Keeper of the Book of Entries for the sert of London. He died April 21, 1765. Malet wrote some theatrical pieces, which, though party successful on their representation, are now ny forgotten. Gibbon anticipated, that, if ever friend should attain poetic fame, it would be red by his poem of Amyntor and Theodora. the longest of his poetical works, is a tale in verse, the scene of which is laid in the solitary And of St Kilda, whither one of his characters, Aarslins, had fled to avoid the religious perse
sander Charles II. Some highly-wrought ptions of marine scenery, storms, and shipw with a few touches of natural pathos and ton, constitute the chief characteristics of the The whole, however, even the very names arba locality, has an air of improbability and Another work of the same kind, but e in execution, is his poem The Excursion, in imitation of the style of Thomson's The defects of Thomson's style are ly copied; some of his epithets and express are also borrowed; but there is no approach to electing graces and beauties. Contrary to He datarea of Gibbon, the poetic fame of Mallet s on his ballads, and chiefly on his William
When it was grown to dark midnight,
And all were fast asleep,
In came Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
In the first printed copies of Mallet's ballad, the two first lines were nearly the same as the above
When all was wrapt in dark midnight,
And all were fast asleep.
He improved the rhyme by the change; but beautiful as the idea is of night and morning meeting, it may be questioned whether there is not more of superstitious awe and affecting simplicity in the old
William and Margaret.
'Twas at the silent solemn hour,
When night and morning meet;
In glided Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
Her face was like an April morn
Clad in a wintry cloud;
And clay-cold was her lily hand
That held her sable shroud.
So shall the fairest face appear
When youth and years are flown :
Such is the robe that kings must wear,
When death has reft their crown.
Her bloom was like the springing flower,
That sips the silver dew;
The rose was budded in her cheek,
Just opening to the view.
But love had, like the canker-worm,
Consumed her early prime;
The rose grew pale, and left her cheek-
She died before her time.
Awake! she cried, thy true love calls,
Come from her midnight grave:
Now let thy pity hear the maid
Thy love refused to save.
This is the dark and dreary hour
When injured ghosts complain;
When yawning graves give up their dead,
To haunt the faithless swain.
Bethink thee, William, of thy fault,
Thy pledge and broken oath!
And give me back my maiden-vow,
And give me back my troth.
Why did you promise love to me,
And not that promise keep?
Why did you swear my eyes were bright,
Yet leave those eyes to weep?
How could you say my face was fair,
And yet that face forsake?
How could you win my virgin heart,
Yet leave that heart to break?
Why did you say my lip was sweet,
And made the scarlet pale?
And why did I, young witless maid!
Believe the flattering tale?
That face, alas! no more is fair,
Those lips no longer red:
Dark are my eyes, now closed in death,
And every charm is fled.
The hungry worm my sister is;
This winding-sheet I wear:
And cold and weary lasts our night,
Till that last morn appear.
But hark! the cock has warned me hence;
A long and last adieu !
Come see, false man, how low she lies,
Who died for love of you.
The lark sung loud; the morning smiled
With beams of rosy red:
Pale William quaked in every limb,
And raving left his bed.
He hied him to the fatal place
Where Margaret's body lay;
And stretched him on the green-grass turf That wrapt her breathless clay.
And thrice he called on Margaret's name,
And thrice he wept full sore;
Then laid his cheek to her cold grave,
And word spake never more!
Edwin and Emma.
Far in the windings of a vale,
Fast by a sheltering wood,
The safe retreat of health and peace,
A humble cottage stood.
There beauteous Emma flourished fair,
Beneath a mother's eye;
Whose only wish on earth was now
To see her blest, and die.
The softest blush that nature spreads
Gave colour to her cheek;
Such orient colour smiles through heaven,
When vernal mornings break.
Nor let the pride of great ones scorn
This charmer of the plains:
That sun, who bids their diamonds blaze,
To paint our lily deigns.
Long had she filled each youth with love,
Each maiden with despair;
And though by all a wonder owned,
Yet knew not she was fair:
Till Edwin came, the pride of swains,
A soul devoid of art;
And from whose eye, serenely mild,
Shone forth the feeling heart.
A mutual flame was quickly caught,
Was quickly too revealed;
For neither bosom lodged a wish
That virtue keeps concealed.
What happy hours of home-felt bliss
Did love on both bestow!
But bliss too mighty long to last,
Where fortune proves a foe.
His sister, who, like envy formed,
Like her in mischief joyed,
To work them harm, with wicked skill,
Each darker art employed.
The father too, a sordid man,
Who love nor pity knew,
Was all unfeeling as the clod
From whence his riches grew.
Long had he seen their secret flame,
And seen it long unmoved;
Then with a father's frown at last
Had sternly disapproved.
In Edwin's gentle heart, a war
Of differing passions strove:
His heart, that durst not disobey,
Yet could not cease to love.
Denied her sight, he oft behind
The spreading hawthorn crept, To snatch a glance, to mark the spot Where Emma walked and wept.
Oft, too, on Stanmore's wintry waste, Beneath the moonlight shade,
In sighs to pour his softened soul,
The midnight mourner strayed.
His cheek, where health with beauty glowed, A deadly pale o'ercast;
So fades the fresh rose in its prime,
Before the northern blast.
The parents now, with late remorse,
Hung o'er his dying bed;
And wearied Heaven with fruitless vows,
And fruitless sorrows shed.
"Tis past! he cried, but, if your souls
Sweet mercy yet can move,
Let these dim eyes once more behold
What they must ever love!
She came; his cold hand softly touched,
And bathed with many a tear:
Fast-falling o'er the primrose pale,
So morning dews appear.
But oh his sister's jealous care,
A cruel sister she!
Forbade what Emma came to say;
'My Edwin, live for me!'
Now homeward as she hopeless wept,
The churchyard path along,
The blast blew cold, the dark owl screamed
Her lover's funeral song.
Amid the falling gloom of night,
Her startling fancy found
In every bush his hovering shade,
Ilis groan in every sound.
Alone, appalled, thus had she passed
The visionary vale-
When lo! the death-bell smote her ear,
Sad sounding in the gale!
Just then she reached, with trembling step,
Her aged mother's door :
He's gone! she cried, and I shall see
That angel-face no more.
I feel, I feel this breaking heart
Beat high against my side!
From her white arm down sunk her headShe shivered, sighed, and died.
The smiling morn, the breathing spring,
Invite the tunefu' birds to sing;
And, while they warble from the spray,
Love melts the universal lay.
Let us, Amanda, timely wise,
Like them, improve the hour that flies;
And in soft raptures waste the day,
Among the birks of Invermay.
For soon the winter of the year,
And age, life's winter, will appear;
At this thy living bloom will fade,
As that will strip the verdant shade.
Our taste of pleasure then is o'er,
The feathered songsters are no more;
And when they drop and we decay,
Adieu the birks of Invermay!
Some additional stanzas were added to the above by Dr Bryce, Kirknewton. Invermay is in Perthshire, the native county of Mallet, and is situated near the termination of a little picturesque stream called the May. The 'birk' or birch-tree is abundant, adding grace and beauty to rock and stream. Though a Celt by birth and language, Mallet had none of the imaginative wildness or superstition of his native country. Macpherson, on the other hand, seems to have been completely imbued with it.
The author of The Pleasures of Imagination, one of the most pure and noble-minded poems of the age, was of humble origin. His parents were dissenters, and the Puritanism imbibed in his early years seems, as in the case of Milton, to have given a gravity and earnestness to his character, and a love of freedom to his thoughts and imagination. MARK AKENSIDE was the son of a respectable
House in which Akenside was born.
butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was born, November 9, 1721. An accident in his early years
the fall of one of his father's cleavers, or hatchets, on his foot-rendered him lame for life, and perpetuated the recollection of his lowly birth. The Society of Dissenters advanced a sum for the education of the poet as a clergyman, and he repaired to Edinburgh for this purpose in his eighteenth year. He afterwards repented of this destination, and, returning the money, entered himself as a student of medicine. He was then a poet, and in his Hymn to Science, written in Edinburgh, we see at once the formation of his classic taste, and the dignity of his personal character:
That last best effort of thy skill,
To form the life and rule the will,
Propitious Power! impart ;
Teach me to cool my passion's fires,
Make me the judge of my desires,
The master of my heart.
Raise me above the vulgar's breath,
Pursuit of fortune, fear of death,
And all in life that's mean;
Still true to reason be my plan,
Still let my actions speak the man,
Through every various scene.
A youth animated by such sentiments, promised a manhood of honour and integrity. years spent in Edinburgh, Akenside removed to Leyden to complete his studies; and in 1744 he was admitted to the degree of M.D. He next established himself as a physician in London. In Holland he had (at the age of twenty-three) written his 'Pleasures of Imagination,' which he now offered to Dodsley, demanding £120 for the copyright. The bookseller consulted Pope, who told him to make no niggardly offer, since this was no every-day writer.' The poem attracted much attention, and was afterwards translated into French and Italian. Akenside established himself as a physician in Northampton, where he remained a year and a-half, but did not succeed. The latter part of his life was spent in London. At Leyden he had formed an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, Jeremiah Dyson, Esq., which ripened into a friendship of the most close and enthusiastic description; and Mr Dyson (who was afterwards clerk of the House of Commons, a lord of the treasury, &c.) had the generosity to allow the poet £300 a-year. After writing a few Odes, and attempting a total alteration of his great poem (in which he was far from successful), Akenside made no further efforts at composition. His society was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients, exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle, who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, is supposed to have been a caricature of Akenside. The description, for rich humour and grotesque combinations of learning and folly, has not been excelled by Smollett; but it was unworthy his talents to cast ridicule on a man of high character and splendid genius. Akenside died suddenly of a putrid sore throat, on the 23d of June 1770, in his 49th year, and was buried in St James's church. With a feeling common to poets, as to more ordinary mortals, Akenside, in his latter days, reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a fourth book of The Pleasures of Imagination,' written in the last year of his life, there is the following beautiful passage:
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Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands:
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream!
How gladly I recall your well-known seats
Beloved of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Nor will I e'er forget you; nor shall e'er
The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice
Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim
Those studies which possessed me in the dawn
Of life, and fixed the colour of my mind
For every future year: whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn,
And, while the world around lies overwhelmed
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts
Of honourable fame, of truth divine
Or moral, and of minds to virtue won
By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.
The spirit of Milton seems to speak in this strain of
lofty egotism!
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learned poet, perhaps superior. His knowledge was
better digested. But Gray had not the romantic
enthusiasm of character, tinged with pedantry, which
naturally belonged to Akenside. He had also the
experience of mature years. The genius of Aken-
side was early developed, and his diffuse and florid
descriptions seem the natural product-marvellous
of its kind-of youthful exuberance. He was after-
wards conscious of the defects of his poem. He saw
that there was too much leaf for the fruit; but in
cutting off these luxuriances, he sacrificed some of
the finest blossoms. Posterity has been more just
to his fame, by almost wholly disregarding this
second copy of his philosophical poem. In his youth-
ful aspirations after moral and intellectual great-
ness and beauty, he seems, like Jeremy Taylor in
the pulpit,
an angel newly descended from the
visions of glory.' In advanced years, he is the pro-
fessor in his robes; still free from stain, but stately,
formal, and severe. The blank verse of The Plea-
sures of Imagination' is free and well-modulated, and
seems to be distinctively his own. Though apt to
run into too long periods, it has more compactness
of structure than Thomson's ordinary composition.
Its occasional want of perspicuity probably arises
from the fineness of his distinctions, and the diffi-
culty attending mental analysis in verse. He might
also wish to avoid all vulgar and common expres-
sions, and thus err from excessive refinement. A
redundancy of ornament undoubtedly, in some pas-
sages, takes off from the clearness and prominence
of his conceptions. His highest flights, however-
as in the allusion to the death of Cæsar, and his
exquisitely-wrought parallel between art and na-
ture-have a flow and energy of expression, with
appropriate imagery, which mark the great poet.
His style is chaste, yet elevated and musical. He
never compromised his dignity, though he blended
sweetness with its expression.
The Pleasures of Imagination' is a poem seldom
read continuously, though its finer passages, by fre-
quent quotation, particularly in works of criticism
and moral philosophy, are well known. Gray cen-
sured the mixture of spurious philosophy the spe-
culations of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury-which the
work contains. Plato, Lucretius, and even the papers
by Addison in the Spectator, were also laid under
contribution by the studious author. He gathered
sparks of enthusiasm from kindred minds, but the
train was in his own. The pleasures which his poem
professes to treat of, 'proceed,' he says, either from
natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear
and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight,
or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a mu-
[Aspirations after the Infinite.]
sical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem.' These, with Say, why was man so eminently raised
the moral and intellectual objects arising from them, Amid the vast creation; why ordained
furnish abundant topics for illustration; but Aken-Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
side dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, pertaining
more to philosophy than to poetry. He did not
seek to graft upon them human interests and pas-
sions. In tracing the final causes of our emotions,
he could have described their exercise and effects in
scenes of ordinary pain or pleasure in the walks
of real life. This does not seem, however, to have
been the purpose of the poet, and hence his work is
deficient in interest. He seldom stoops from the
heights of philosophy and classic taste. He con-
sidered that physical science improved the charms of
nature. Contrary to the feeling of an accomplished
living poet, who repudiates these cold material
laws, he viewed the rainbow with additional plea-
sure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of
lights and colours.
The melting rainbow's vernal tinctured hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of Science pointed out the path
In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west
Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient.
Akenside's Hymn to the Naiads has the true classical
spirit. He had caught the manner and feeling, the
varied pause and harmony, of the Greek poets, with
such felicity, that Lloyd considered his Hymn as
fitted to give a better idea of that form of compo-
sition, than could be conveyed by any translation
of Homer or Callimachus. Gray was an equally
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theatre, to run
The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;
To chase each partial purpose from his breast;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,
The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns
In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope,
That breathes from day to day sublimer things,
And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace
Majestic forms; impatient to be free,
Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns
To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black
with shade,
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
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