soul-that has driven Hunt and others into such a reckless and unfinished style, and made them so eager, in their disgust at trivial rules in non-essentials, to rush out of the common road, and snatch at those graces only that are beyond the reach of art. Wakefield's pronunciation of the word pour (power) is as bad as Goldsmith's Irish criticism of a poet, who had made key rhyme to be. He thought it a good joke to say "let key be called kee, and then it rhymes with be."

A. We cannot arrive at any very certain conclusions on the subject of pronunciation from Pope's rhymes, which were frequently so grossly inexact, that Swift, who was a very careful rhymster himself, used to remonstrate with him for setting so bad an example. I suspect, however, that in Pope's time the in the word fault must have been silent, or he would hardly have rhymed it with thought.

We know there are to whose presumptuous thoughts,
Those free'r beauties e'en in them seem faults.

Before his sacred name flies every fault,
And each exalted stanza teems with thought.

Dryden also adopts the same rhymes:

I who have all the while been finding fault
E'en with my master, who first satire taught.

And Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, says

Yet modern laws are made for later faults,

And new absurdities inspire new thoughts.

H.-You may come down much later with your examples. Take Goldsmith;

Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught

The love he bore to learning was in fault.

Indeed you may refer to a writer who died but a year or two ago-Charles Lamb, who adopts the same pronunciation of the word fault, in some doggrel lines addressed "To an infant that died as soon as it was born."

Just when she had exactly wrought

A finished pattern, without fault.

The lines were published in the Gem, a literary Annual, for 1829, edited by Hood. They are not in Lamb's collected works, I think. Here is an amusingly absurd couplet from the same poem

Mother's prattle, mother's kiss,

Baby fond thou ne'er wilt miss.

The fondness or affection of a child that died as soon as it was born must have been inexpressibly passionate and profound.

A. It is strange that a man like Lamb should be guilty of such wretched stuff; as to his dropping the 7 in fault, it must have been purely the repetition of an old poetical license. He could not have supposed that the word was thus pronounced in his own times.

H.-Talking of the pronunciation of particular words, according to poetical authority, what think you of Kemble's obstinacy respecting the word aches?

A. He was both right and wrong: as a critic he was right, as an actor he was wrong. He ought not to have persisted in such a trifle against the judgment or prejudice of his audience. It was pedantry and presumption. An actor must speak the language of his day, and not go back to past times for rules of pronunciation. It is quite true that Shakspeare made the word aches a dissyllable. So even did Butler; in a not very decent couplet he makes it rhyme to catches.

H.-But Dryden, in his school production on the death of Lord Hastings, pronounces it akes—

Must then old three legged grey-beards, with the gout,
Catarrhs, rheums, aches, live three long ages out?

A. To return to Hunt and his School:-I could forgive the bold irregularities of their own style if they did not judge so harshly of their more careful contemporaries. Byron and Thomas Campbell contrive to combine art and nature, and are at once spirited and correct. Byron writes "all like a man”—and so

does Campbell.

Their admirers are not obliged to explain their meaning, or to defend them from the charge of inaccuracy or affectation. They are never verbose or vulgar. They have no prosaic drivelling, no pompous emphasis upon trifles-no twaddle. They have a masculine directness of purpose, and do not pretend to an ecstatic inebriation on the plain bread and water of daily life. Their readers can sympathize with their emotions and understand their thoughts. The man of true genius is not he who is conversant with his own egotistical nature only, but he who can force his way into the hearts of others, and whose passions differ not in kind but in degree, from those of his fellow men. Shakspeare felt more intensely, but not differently from mankind in general.

H.-I am afraid we cannot fairly mention Shakspeare's name in any discussion relating to the merits of the writers of this century. It is the heaviest stone that you can fling at the stoutest scull. Shakspeare was a giant; and though individual pigmies may be proud of their strength and stature amongst the people of their own race, they dwindle into pitiful and ludicrous insignificance as soon as they are brought into comparison with Titanic natures. Let us compare living or late writers with their own contemporaries, but not with Shakspeare. I used to think the "Great Hill" of Penang, a noble mound of earth, and was delighted to look down from its highest point on the diminished town and trees upon the plain;-but, then, I never compared it with the Himalayeh mountains. I loved it too well. There is something in the poetry of Goldsmith which pleased me in my boyhood, and which is scarcely less pleasing to me now; but, much as I appreciate its gentle melodies, I cannot thoroughly enjoy them when people force upon my notice their "odious compari sons." It is an injustice to the poet and an insult to his admirer to dash the glowing ardor of an enthusiasm kindled by the merit of the poetry which is the immediate object of admiration, by an ill-timed and ungenerous reference to poetry of a different and a higher order. There are numberless kinds and degrees of true poetry, and we should confine our attention for the time to that

which is under our notice, and not spoil our pleasure by thinking of something different or better. Apollo's rich domains have not sky-piercing mountains only-but smooth lakes and gentle slopes, and little green nest-like nooks, and low shadowy dells.

A. Yes, you are right enough in maintaining the propriety of enlarging the circle of intellectual delight, by cultivating a taste for all sorts and degrees of excellence, but I cannot think how a mind like yours can bring itself into a sort of sympathy with the low trivialities of Wordsworth-look at them how you will, they discover no kind of merit.

H.-Let that pass-you and I must not allow Wordsworth's poetry to be any longer a question to be discussed. Perhaps an impartial arbitrator would decide that you think too meanly of him and I too well. What think you of Crabbe?

A. He is a clever writer-a shrewd, caustic, close observer of human life, and has mastered the ordinary mechanism of verse; but Nature never meant him for a poet. He has neither fancy nor imagination.

H.-But he has feeling and truth.

A. He is not without such feeling as all amiable men possess ; but he has not the feeling of a poet, and though in one sense the poetical must be true, it is not all truth that is poetical. Crabbe deals in truths that are no more poetical than the fact that two and two make four. His son tells us that his father was insensible to the charms of music, and could look with frigid indifference on the most exquisite landscape in the world. But yet, after all, I would greatly prefer Crabbe to Wordsworth, because he is a far manlier writer, and has a healthy and genuine simplicity about his style that is "quite refreshing," as Jeffrey would say, if contrasted with the affected simplicity of the poet of the Lakes.

H.-Surely there must be poetry in those verses which "obtained the praise of Johnson and Burke and cheered the deathbed of Fox"-and which were the last melodies that soothed the ear of Scott.

A.-Why, I have said before that I look upon Scott as one of the worst of critics. Crabbe's poetry was not too elevated or

refined for Johnson, over whose soul the poetry of Milton and Shakspeare passed without leaving an impression, and who had no eye for nature and no ear for music. Burke was a man of taste, but his heart was so gentle and generous that it often threw a thick veil over the defects of those whom he loved or patronized.

H.-I will not maintain that Crabbe had much delicacy of taste, or much sympathy for the sublime and beautiful; but his descriptive passages often exhibit extraordinary force and truth, and in dealing with human passion he has sometimes a manly pathos. A. His descriptions are literal-taken down in a note-book. What he saw with his fleshly eye never passed through his soul. It was not colored and animated with thought and passion. With all his coarse strength and good sense and literal truth he is sinking fast into oblivion. His name is now rarely referred to, and his works are still more rarely read.

No. III.

LANDOR--HAZLITT--BYRON--SOUTHEY--GIFFORD--DRYDEN

POPE, &c.-CHARACTERS OF WOMEN-BIGOTRY.

H.-You were speaking the other day of the extreme rarity of critical judgment. I was dipping this morning into Walter Savage Landor's profound and eloquent work entitled The Pentameron, and found a passage that I think will please you. He puts it into the mouth of Petrarch, in a sort of "Imaginary Conversation" with Boccaccio. "All correct perceptions," says Petrarch, or rather Landor," are the effect of careful practice. We little doubt that a mirror would direct us to the most familiar of our features, and that our hand would follow its guidance until we try to cut a lock of our hair. We have no such criterion to demonstrate our liability to error in judging of poetry: a quality so rare that, perhaps, no five contemporaries ever were masters of it."