naturally clothes itself. Imagination has a strange transfusing power over language, it moulds it almost as the passions do the countenance; it compels it to utterance; while cold correctness, aiming at the result alone, falls into the very errors which it conceives itself most secure against.

Is there, then, no such thing as an art of expression? Certainly there is, and one which every man who wishes to write should study deeply. But there is no art of writing apart from expression. Young men are told to form themselves on the "style" of Addison, or Burnet, or Pope, or Chillingworth. Before following this advice, they would do well to consider whether they wish to say the same things. Let them rather examine how great men expressed what they had to express; let them study and feel how their words convey their thoughts. Let them master language; and then, when they have any thing to say, they will be able to say it with force and exactness, and the style will be their own. They must learn to utter themselves, not to handle the utterance of others.

Rogers's two best poems appear to us to be the Human Life and the Italy. True, the latter is little more than a poetical guide-book, and has no claim to be considered a substantive poem; but some of the fragments are not without beauty; they have a greater simplicity and directness than his other poems, bear less trace of effort, and recommend themselves by a certain airy elegance in their descriptions and narrations. The simplicity is that of art, not of nature; but there is an entire absence of affectation. Mr. Rogers is always commonplace; but he is rarely feeble, and never maudlin,defects we are apt to associate with a high degree of refinement. And he is not weak; on the contrary, there is self-reliance, and a sort of stiff elasticity of nature shows itself. He has common, though very common sense, and writes verse as if he might be a good man of business.

The Human Life has many of the faults which belong to his early school. It is, moreover, a very incongruous whole. The life of man is described by tracing the career of an individual made up of Cincinnatus, Lord Russell, Epaminondas, and Mr. Fox; who is represented, now at his plough, now in the senate, now breakfasting comfortably under "fragrant clouds of mocha and souchong," with his newspaper and all modern appliances, now rushing out with helmet and sword on a sudden cry of "to arms!" and dyeing a neighbouring stream with blood. But some of the detached pictures of life are full of graceful drawing, and forbid us to deny Mr. Rogers the claims of affectionate and tender, though not deep or passionate feeling. And he has this high title to respect, that he is genuine, and never affects or strains after a deeper vein of sentiment than is natural to him. We have quoted him often for his defects, let us quote him once for his beauties:

"Nor many moons o'er hill and valley rise

Ere to the gate with nymph-like step she flies,
And their first-born holds forth, their darling boy,
With smiles how sweet, how full of love and joy,
To meet him coming; theirs through every year
Pure transports, such as each to each endear!
And laughing eyes and laughing voices fill
Their home with gladness. She, when all are still,
Comes and undraws the curtain as they lie,
In sleep how beautiful! He, when the sky
Gleams, and the wood sends up its harmony,
When, gathering round his bed, they climb to share
His kisses, and with gentle violence there
Break in upon a dream not half so fair,
Up to the hill-top leads their little feet;
Or by the forest-lodge, perchance to meet

The stag-herd on its march, perchance to hear
The otter rustling in the sedgy mere ;

Or to the echo near the abbot's tree,

That gave him back his words of pleasantry—

When the house stood, no merrier man than he !
And, as they wander with a keen delight,
If but a leveret catch their quicker sight

Down a green alley, or a squirrel then

Climb the gnarled oak, and look and climb again,—
If but a moth flit by, an acorn fall,

He turns their thoughts to Him who made them all;
These with unequal footsteps following fast,

These clinging by his cloak, unwilling to be last."

That Rogers has a charm of his own no one can deny. Yet it is not easy to define it. You seem to have it on the surface of his poetry, and to lose it the moment you go deeper. It is the mark left by his peculiar power, which lay in a very uncommon refinement, perhaps a very rarely equalled refinement of taste and a keen exquisite sense of fitness: he had a wonderful control over all that belongs to words, except their meanings, and a marvellous art of arranging them so as to please both eye and ear, the former especially. Form is always uppermost with him, and the more so the more it is external; the traces of his power are found more in his verse and his diction than in his subject or his thoughts; and we have, as in his own Etruscan vases, wonderful grace and proportion of shape given to the commonest material. Utter poverty of thought is apparent in every page. A great poet pours wine into crystal vessels, Rogers occupies himself in staining them tastefully to hold toast-and-water. As we read him, we may stretch a point to say with Pope's father, "These be good verses;' but never can we say, "This is good poetry.'

139

THOMAS MOORE.*

[July 1856.]

IT is the favourite notion of modern biographers that a man ought to be made to write his own life; that a vivid and faithful image can only be obtained, and can be fully obtained, from the self-delineation, conscious or unconscious, of the man himself, in memoirs or letters. This is one of those ideas which carry so plausible a self-recommendation with them, that they are accepted without examination; and it is not until they have been worked some time as undoubted truths, that, in the course of wear and tear, they begin to betray their alloy of error. The fact is, that though some degree of direct self-delineation may be necessary to supply any complete conception of a man, yet without accessory sources of information it can never be sufficient; and for this there are several simple and sufficient reasons. A man won't tell us all about himself, nor can he if he would. Even a man like Rousseau, who makes it his special boast to let shameless day into the most secret recesses of his life and heart, yet keeps a shade for the devouring cankers of vanity and self-love, which eat deeper and more festering sores than even his morbid taste can bear to probe. We all have two opinions of ourselves: sane men look at the better one, and shake off the terror of the other; and that occasional recurrence to it by which every now and then we balance our self-estimate is not a thing we can place at the disposal of those around us. Nor would we

*Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Edited by the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M.P. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853-1856.

if we could. We can more easily bear to think ill of ourselves than to have others do so; and the allusion by our friends to faults of which we stand self-convicted, yet hoped were hidden, strikes us as one of the most flagrant forms of scandal. Besides we do not know all about ourselves: more than any other we know; but we are not only the being we appear to ourselves, we are also in some sense what we appear to others; and though we should hardly be willing to exchange our self-knowledge for that of others, yet should

"The Gods the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us,"

it would certainly add, however unpleasantly, to the gross amount of our information. Hence, when we read the life of a remarkable man, we wish to know not only what he chooses to divulge of what he knows of himself, or what he unconsciously reveals in his writings; we wish also to know what impression he produced on external observers. Moreover, if a biography is to be a work of art, we must have a biographer: the work must bear the stamp of a creating mind: the artist, as well as the subject of his art, must have a recognisable impress. Rembrandt looks out from the canvas on which he paints the portrait of some burgomaster, and it is the spirit of Claude that is infused through those serene Italian landscapes. Nothing but a daguerreotype can be a mere copy; and what a daguerreotype is to a landscape, are diaries and letters to a biography, an image true only of certain features, necessarily distorted in others, and not a work of art. But we like to have a work of art. We enjoy a pleasure from our sympathy with the creative spirit it displays, and we enjoy the reflected light thrown on the biographer. What would Johnson's life be without the naïve idolatry of Boswell? It is the salt of the whole, and gives the point to half the anecdotes. Moore himself notes down a happy case in point: "Boswell