AMONG the political satires of the age, crude, townish, and temporary, we need not linger over 'The Criticisms of the Rolliad,' which appeared in 1784-85, and were followed by 'Probationary Odes for the Laureateship'; they were the work of many contributors, now mostly forgotten, and they are now amusing only to those who are acquainted with Mason and Warton, and Lord Monboddo, who invented the human ourangoutang before Peacock, and cantankerous scholars like Sir John Hawkins, and Mrs. George Anne Bellamy, the impecunious actress. The prose parodies are the best, and anticipate the prose of the 'Anti-Jacobin,' while the verse of the probationary odes must have suggested part of the plan of the 'Rejected Addresses.' But it is in the 'Anti-Jacobin' (1799-1800) that we have the finest satire. It was written mainly by Canning, Frere, and George Ellis, and Canning was the finest wit among them.

The satire was directed against the stultification of ideas, the absurdities of literature and politics, and, unlike most satires, it has survived its occasion. The 'Poetry of the AntiJacobin' has been imitated ever since, by political and social and literary satirists, but it has never been excelled in its own way; and the salt in it has not yet lost its savour. It set a fashion, and one can trace Barham and Calverley in it, and later men. The needy knife-grinder's answer to the friend of humanity is one of the remembered lines of English poetry, and the inscription on Mrs. Brownrigg is one of the classics of parody. And, throughout, there are lyric high-spirits, and the dancers brandish real swords.

1 Poems, 1823.

HENRY BOYD (probably born about 1770; he died in 1832) is generally said to be the first translator of Dante into English verse. His 'Inferno' was published in 1785, and Hayley, in the voluminous notes to his 'Essay on Epic Poetry, had already, in 1782, published a translation in terza rima of the first three cantos. 'I believe,' he says, 'no entire Canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . He has endeavoured to give the English reader an idea of Dante's peculiar manner, by adopting his triple rhyme; and he does not recollect that this mode of versification has ever appeared before in our language.' He adds, with his usual imperturbable impertinence, that he had been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante: 'but the extreme inequality of this Poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking.' From the specimens, we may be grateful that Hayley carried his translation no further. It is just possible, however, that Blake may have got his first lessons in Dante and Italian from these parallel columns in the two languages, at the later period when Hayley notes in one of his letters: 'Read Klopstock aloud to Blake.' For Hayley's version though not a poet's of a poet, is almost word for word (so that fastidiosi verme figures as 'fastidious worms'), and would have been useful as a lesson.

It was not only in his translation of Dante that Hayley anticipated Boyd, but in an analysis and partial rendering of the 'Araucana' of the Spanish poet Ercilla. Boyd's translation was finished, though apparently not printed, in 1805. Hayley, in the notes to this third epistle, gives a hundred pages to Ercilla, whom he finds more palatable than Dante. Like Dante, he finds him unequal, but, with all his defects, one of the

1 (1) Dante's 'Inferno,' 1785. (2) Poems, Chiefly Dramatic and Lyric, 1793. (3) Dante's 'Divina Commedia,' 3 vols., 1802. (4) Monti's 'Penance of Hugo, a Vision,' 1805. (5) The Woodman's Tale, 1805. (6) The Triumphs of Petrarch, 1807.

most extraordinary and engaging characters in the poetical world.' 'This exalted character,' he says, 'is almost unknown in our country'; although his style, 'notwithstanding the restraint of rhyme, has frequently all the ease, the spirit, and the volubility of Homer.'

The metre used by Boyd in his Dante and Monti is a sixline stanza, formed of two couplets divided by two single lines; for Ariosto he used the Spenserian stanza, and for Petrarch, to his disadvantage, the heroic couplet. The Dante is not without merit; Boyd is always aware that he is translating a poet. Left alone, he wrote but mediocre verse, a temperance allegory called 'The Woodman's Tale,' a drama on David and Bathsheba, and some odes and epitaphs.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832) 1

SCOTT was twenty-six, the age of Keats at his death, before he wrote any original verse. He then wrote two poems to two ladies: one out of a bitter personal feeling, the other as a passing courtesy; neither out of any instinct for poetry. At twenty-four he had translated the fashionable 'Lenore' of Bürger; afterwards he translated Goethe's youthful play, 'Goetz von Berlichingen.' In 1802 he brought out the first two volumes of the 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,' in which the resurrection of the old ballad literature, begun in 1765 by Percy's 'Reliques,' was carried on, and brought nearer to the interest of ordinary readers, who, in Scott's admirable introductions and notes, could find almost a suggestion of what

1 (1) The Eve of St. John, 1800. (2) Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805. (3) Ballads and Lyrical Pieces, 1806. (4) Marmion, 1808. (5) The Lady of the Lake, 1810. (6) The Vision of Don Roderick, 1811. (7) Glenfinlas and other Ballads, 1812. (8) Rokeby, 1813. (9) The Bridal of Triermain, 1813. (10) The Lord of the Isles, 1815. (11) The Field of Waterloo, 1815. (12) Harold the Dauntless, 1817. (13) Miscellaneous Poems, 1820. (14) Halidon Hall, 1822.

was to come in the Waverley Novels. The 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' was begun in 1802, and published, when Scott was thirty-four, in 1805. It was begun at the suggestion of the Duchess of Buccleugh, and continued to please her. Lockhart tells us: 'Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation of Coleridge's unfinished "Christabel " had fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory; and it occurred to him that, by throwing the story of Gilpin Horner into somewhat similar cadence, he might produce such an echo of the later metrical romances as would seem to connect his conclusion of the primitive "Sir Tristrem" with the imitation of the popular ballad in the "Grey Brother" and the "Eve of St. John." Its success was immediate, and for seven years Scott was the most popular poet in England. When the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' appeared in 1812, there was a more popular poet in England, and Scott gave up writing verse, and, in the summer of 1814, took up and finished a story which he had begun in 1805, simultaneously with the publication of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the story of 'Waverley.' The novelist died eleven years later, in 1825; but the poet committed suicide, with 'Harold the Dauntless,' in 1817.

Until he was thirty-one Scott was unconscious that he had any vocation except to be a 'half-lawyer, half-sportsman.' At forty-three he discovered, sooner than all the world, that he had mistaken his vocation; and with that discovery came the other one, that he had a vocation, which he promptly accepted, and in which, with his genius for success, he succeeded, as instantaneously, and more permanently. He was always able to carry the world with him, as he carried with him his little world of friends, servants, dogs, and horses. And how deeply rooted in the work itself was this persuasive and overcoming power is proved by the fact that 'Waverley' was published anonymously, and that the other novels were only known, for many years, as by the author of 'Waverley.' None of the prestige of the poet was handed over to the novelist. Scott at

tacked the public twice over, quite independently, and conquered it both times easily.

Success with the public of one's own day is, of course, no fixed test of a man's work; and, while it is indeed surprising that the same man could be, first the most popular poet and then the most popular novelist of his generation, almost of his century, there is no cause for surprise that the public should have judged, in the one case, justly, and in the other unjustly. The voice of the people, the voice of the gods of the gallery, howls for or against qualities which are never qualities of literature; and the admirers of Scott have invariably spoken of his verse in praise that would be justified if the qualities for which they praise it were qualities supplementary to the essentially poetic qualities: they form no substitute. First Scott, and then Byron, partly in imitation of Scott, appealed to the public of their day with poems which sold as only novels have sold before or since, and partly because they were so like novels. They were, what every publisher still wants, 'stories with plenty of action'; and the public either forgave their being in verse, or for some reason was readier than usual, just then, to welcome verse. It was Scott himself who was to give the novel a popularity which it had never had, even with Fielding and Richardson; and thus the novel had not yet flooded all other forms of literature for the average reader. Young ladies still cultivated ideals between their embroidery frames and their gilt harps. An intellectual democracy had not yet set up its own standards, and affected to submit art to its own tastes. This poetry, so like the most interesting, the most exciting prose, came at once on the wave of a fashion: the fashion of German ballads and 'tales of wonder' and of the more genuine early ballads of England and Scotland; and also with a new, spontaneous energy all its own. And it was largely Scott himself who had helped to make the fashion by which he profited. The metrical romance, as it was written by Scott, was avowedly derived from the metrical romances of the Middle Ages,