poem has the same reference to Tennyson's “Talking Oak" that a Rembrandt picture, with its deep masses and dark shadows, has to a sunbright Hobbima. Its power, as well as that in "The Haunted House," is effected, as I have said, not by a few bold master-strokes, but by a succession of minute cumulative touches, which make seclusion deepen into awe, and awe to darken into the mysterious gloom of earthquake and eclipse and the shadow of death. "The Song of the Shirt" and "The Workhouse Clock" are only strains prelusive to "The Bridge of Sighs." Throughout these and other lyrics, we have utterances alike deep and high of Hood's genius -a genius resembling that of Charles Lamb, in being at once pleasant and peculiar.

His comic vein was equally remarkable, and was almost the only one that he worked through a succession of years. It is only necessary to mention the "Irish Schoolmaster," "The Last Man," the "Ode on a distant view of Clapham Academy," "Faithless Sally Brown," and "Miss Kilmansegg with her Golden Leg," to awaken pleasant remembrances in many a mind. Yet, like every author distinguished for true comic humour, there was a deep vein of melancholy pathos running through his mirth; and even when his sun shone brightly, its light seemed often reflected as if only over the rim of a cloud. Well may we say in the words of Tennyson "Would he could have stayed with us!" for never could it be more truly recorded of any one-in the words of Hamlet characterising Yorick - that "he was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

I cannot part from Thomas Hood without exhibiting him in one of his most characteristic ballads, wherein we have puns 66 as plenty as blackberries,"—" linen on

every hedge."

"Young Ben he was a nice young man,

A carpenter by trade;

LECTURE VI.

PART FIRST

Female constellation.-Joanna Baillie, Metrical Legends.-Love of Fame.Felicia Hemans.-Historic Scenes, Forest Sanctuary, Records of Woman, and Miscellanies.-Character of her poetry.-Specimens, Dirge, The Trumpet, and Vaudois Hymn.-Caroline Bowles, The Widow's Tale, Solitary Hours, The Birthday, Robin Hood.-Analysis of The Young Grey Head, with extracts. -Mary Russel Mitford, Maria Jewsbury, Letitia Elizabeth Landon; Improvisatrice, Venetian Bracelet, Golden Violet, Remains. — Mary Howitt, the excellence of her ballad poetry: The Spider and the Fly.-Caroline Norton : The Dream, Child of the Islands, and Songs. Lady Flora Hastings, Harriet Drury, and Camilla Toulmin. - - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her genius and its imperfect development: Drama of Exile, Cry of the Children. -Professor R. C. Trench.-Elegiac Poems, Justin Martyr, Poems from Eastern Sources, The Suppliant.-Thomas Pringle, John Clare, Bernard Barton, Thomas Haynes Bayley, Alaric A. Watts.-Specimen, Child blowing bubbles.-T. K. Hervey. Rev. Charles Wolfe.- The Squire's Pew, by Jane Taylor.-Various other poets of the period.

IN the same year that Wordsworth and Coleridge brought out the Lyrical Ballads-the first offerings of a new code of poetry, in contradistinction to that of Hayley, Darwin, and the Della Cruscans, Joanna Baillie gave the first volume of her "Plays on the Passions," to a Drama monopolised by the tame conventionalities of Cumberland and Murphy. Nor were their theories widely different; for, in the Preliminary Discourse by which she ushered in that work, we find her emphatically maintaining, that " one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion, genuine and true to

nature, will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, while the false and unnatural around it fades away on every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." Her dramas, both tragic and comic, were forcible illustrations of this code; and it must be admitted, from published proof, that she thus forestalled—or at least divided -the claim to originality indoctrinated in the theory and practice of Wordsworth, as shown by his "Lyric Ballads" and their preface.

But Joanna Baillie, as the author of " Count Basil" and "De Montfort," is entitled to a much higher place among dramatists, than the author of "Metrical Legends" is among mere poets. With much imaginative energy, much observant thought, and great freedom and force of delineation, together with a fine feeling of nature, and an occasional Massingerian softness of diction, it may be claimed for Joanna Baillie that she uniformly keeps apart from the trite and commonplace; yet we cannot help feeling a deficiency of art, and tact, and taste, alike in the management of her themes and the structure of her verse. Her tales-as tales-often want keeping, and their materials are put together by a hand apparently unpractised. Nor even in her emotional bursts, where she ought to have certainly succeeded, is she always quite happy, as a dash of the falsetto is, occasionally at least, not unapparent.

Of these "Metrical Legends," three in number-“ Sir William Wallace," "Columbus," and "Lady Griseld Baillie," the last ranks highest in poetical merit; although all are more or less liable to the objections just stated. In that dedicated to Columbus, the following spirited lines occur:—

"O! who shall lightly say, that Fame

Is nothing but an empty name !
Whilst in that sound there is a charm

The nerves to brace, the heart to warm,