JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES (1784-1862) 1 JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES had some of the Irish qualities for writing for the stage, and was, besides, himself an actor. All the 'ebullition of an Irish heart,' as the prologue to one of his plays called it, did not prevent him from writing much dull work of the romantic kind, in which the Elizabethan domestic drama, as we see it in such plays as 'A Woman Killed with Kindness,' is imitated in a merely exterior way, without any of the natural pathos and instinctive poetry of that minor growth of a great period. Where he is at his best is in a comedy like 'The Love-Chase,' which does over again, with vitality and lightness, some of the characteristic comic work of the eighteenth century. The verse is adequate to material so slight and effective, and the two women, the hoyden Constance and the Widow Green, are good studies in almost serious farce. Elsewhere in plays that try to represent romance in modern life, the form and material never come together, and the colloquial verse of the speech is apt to take refuge in the worse than prose of such inversions as: 'Where bought you it?' The romance is of a purely stage kind, and the touches of nature that come into it are hardly at home there. It seems to be trying to fill a gap between the stage and literature. In all the verse, among much clever writing, and some good sense and piquancy in what it has to render, there is never anything one can properly call poetry. It is quite easy to see that such work must have been popular in its time. 1 (1) The Welsh Harper, 1796. (2) Fugitive Pieces, 1810. (3) Brian Boroihme, 1811. (4) Caius Gracchus, 1815. (5) Virginius, 1820. (6) William Tell, 1825. (7) Alfred the Great, 1831. (8) A Masque on the Death of Sir Walter Scott, 1832. (9) The Hunchback, 1832. (10) The Wife, 1833. (11) The Beggar of Bethnal Green, 1834. (12) The Daughter, 1837. (13) The Love-Chase, 1837. (14) The Bridal, 1837. (15) Woman's Wit, 1838. (16) The Maid of Mariendorpt, 1838. (17) Love, 1839. (18) John of Procida, 1840. (19) Old Maids, 1841. (20) The Rose of Aragon, 1842. (21) The Secretary, 1843. (22) True unto Death, 1863. THE Quaker poet, Bernard Barton, is remembered only because he was a friend of Lamb. We gather a pleasant sense of him as a man from Lamb's letters and from the memorial sketch by Edward FitzGerald, printed as an introduction to the last collection of his poems. FitzGerald admits that 'he was not fastidious himself about exactness of thought or of harmony of numbers, and he could scarce comprehend why the public should be less easily satisfied.' Lamb said that one poem in memory of Bloomfield was 'sweet with Doric delicacy,' and here and there we may find a sort of pious epigram not wholly without merit, to those at least who do not require pleasant versification to be poetry. Gentle and ineffectual, he is without affectation, and it is easy to see what Lamb, who was lenient to his friends, found to like in verses that are hardly likely to be read any longer. WILLIAM TENNANT (1784-1848) * TENNANT'S 'Anster Fair,' published in 1814, is a partly burlesque and partly realistic poem, written in the ottava rima, 'shut with the Alexandrine of Spenser, that its close may be 1 (1) Metrical Effusions, 1812. (2) The Convict's Appeal, 1818. (3) Poems by an Amateur, 1818. (4) Poems, 1820. (5) Napoleon and other Poems, 1822. (6) Verses on the Death of P. B. Shelley, 1822. (7) Devotional Verses, 1826. (8) A Missionary's Memoir, 1826. (9) A Widow's Tale, 1827. (10) A New Year's Eve, 1828. (11) The Reliquary (with his daughter), 1836. (12) Household Verse, 1845. (13) Seaweeds, 1846. (14) Birthday Verses at Eighty-four, 1846. (15) A Memorial of J. J. Gurney, 1847. (16) A Brief Memorial of Major E. M. Wood, 1848. (17) On the Signs of the Times, 1848. (18) Ichabod, 1848. (19) Poems and Letters, 1849. 2 (1) Anster Fair, 1814. (2) Elegy on Trottin' Nanny, 1814. (3) Dominie's Disaster, 1816. (4) The Thane of Fife, 1822. (5) Cardinal Beaton, 1823. (6) John Balliol, 1825. (7) Papistry Storm'd, 1827. (8) Hebrew Dramas, 1845. more full and sounding.' The metrical ignorance shown in this disfigurement of a fine metre, wholly adequate within its own limits, is further shown by the attempt to get burlesque rhymes out of such combinations as 'Hercules' and 'a most confounded yerk, alas.' 'Ancient and modern manners are mixed and jumbled together,' as the writer truthfully admits, 'to heighten the humour or variegate the description.' Local colour there is, but of a truly jumbled kind; and the humour, part pleasant, part fairy, is unconvincing. The writer's prayer was no doubt answered: 'O that my noddle were a seething kettle, Frothing with bombast o'er the Muses' fire!' 'The Thane of Fife,' written seven years afterwards in the same metre, tries to be more serious, and introduces imagery of this kind: 'Now, in the very navel of the sky, Rolled in the vestment of her own fair light, The gentle moon was walking upon high.' It ends in the middle of a stanza, and the author (though, he says, 'I have never allowed the writing of verses to interfere either with my professional duties or my more solid and nutritive studies') promises, in return for approval, a continuation, which never seems to have been required. JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859) 1 THE poetry of Leigh Hunt has more importance historically than actually. Historically, it has its place in the romantic 1 (1) Juvenilia, 1801. (2) The Feast of the Poets, 1814. (3) The Descent of Liberty, 1815. (4) The Story of Rimini, 1816. (5) Foliage, 1818. (6) Poetical Works, 1819. (7) Hero and Leander, 1819. (8) Amyntas, 1820. (9) Ultra-Crepidarius, 1823. (10) Bacchus in Tuscany, from Francesco Redi, 1825. (11) Captain Sword and Captain Pen, 1835. (12) Blue Stocking Revels, undated. (13) The Legend of Florence, 1840. (14) The Palfrey, 1842. (15) Stories in Verse, 1855. (16) Poetical Works, incomplete, 1860. movement, where Leigh Hunt is seen fighting, though under alien colours, by the side of Wordsworth. His chief aim was to bring about an emancipation of the speech and metre of poetry, and he had his share in doing so. The early style of Keats owes much of its looseness and lusciousness to an almost deliberate modelling himself upon the practice and teaching of Hunt. 'I have something in common with Hunt,' Keats admitted, in a letter written in 1818; and the 'Quarterly,' in its review of 'Endymion,' defined Keats as a 'simple neophyte of the writer of "The Story of Rimini."? That poem had been published only two years, but had already made a small revolutionary fame of its own. --- For its actual qualities, this poetry, which seems now to have so slight an existence by the side of the still almost popular prose-writings, is not so easily valued. Infinite tiny sparks flicker throughout, but are rarely alight long enough to set a steady fire burning. One lyric, a few sonnets, an anecdote or two, a few passages of description or of dialogue, can we reckon up more than these in a final estimate of the value of this poetry as a whole? Yet are not these few successful things, each rare of its kind, themselves sufficient to make the reputation of one who was content to be remembered in whatever 'humble category of poet, or in what humblest corner of the category,' it remained for 'another and wholly dispassionate generation' to place him? 'The Story of Rimini' as it was published in 1816 is a very different thing from the revised version of 1832, with its 'rejection of superfluities,' its correction of 'mistakes of all kinds.' It may be quite true, as the author protested, that the first edition contained weak lines, together with 'certain conventionalities of structure, originating in his having had his studies too early directed towards the artificial instead of the natural poets.' Yet, in fact, the second version is much more artificial than the first, and what was young, spontaneous, really new at the time, has given way to a firmer but less felicitous style of speech and versification. Such puerilities, of the kind which Hunt very nearly taught to Keats, as, 'What need I tell of lovely lips, and eyes, A clipsome waist, and bosom's balmy rise?' are indeed partly, though not wholly obliterated, and for the better; and the terrible line, revealing all Hunt's vulgarities at a stroke, 'She had stout notions on the marrying score,' disappears into the discreet She had a sense of marriage, just and free.' Yet what goes, and is ill supplied, is such frank bright speech 'The crowd are mute; and from the southern wall, The simple country landscape is changed, because the author has seen Italy, to the due citrons and pine-trees; but such evocations of the fancy cannot be done twice over, and the freshness goes as the 'local colour' comes on. Even more inexcusable are the moral interpositions, such as the tears and explanations of Francesca at the fatal moment, by which Dante and the picture are spoiled. 'The mode of treatment still remains rather material than spiritual,' Hunt admits, without fully realising how much he is losing in material beauty, and how incapable he is of replacing it by any kind of spiritual beauty. Byron, to whom 'The Story of Rimini' is dedicated, said of it in a letter: 'Leigh Hunt's poem is a devilish good one quaint here and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test.' It has not |