No. V.

BROWNING-SHELLEY-SHAKSPEARE-SCHLEGEL
GARRICK.

A.-What can the Examiner mean by puffing Browning in the way it does?

H.-I suppose you allude to the review of his new tragedy of Luria.

A. Yes, I do. You may observe that the Examiner has a certain set that it delights to laud. All other authors are beyond the pale. Bulwer, Talfourd, and Knowles have for some time been Fonblanque's pets, and he has lately admitted Browning into the favored circle. Those once admitted are for ever after like Kings-they can do no wrong.

H.-I cannot say that I see any thing like puffery in the notice of Browning. There can be no question that he is a man of true genius.

A.—I have not myself seen the evidences of it. The passages quoted as favorable specimens, no man could read a second time. They want passion and distinctness; it is absurd to call them dramatic. Whatever other talent Browning may possess, he cannot pretend to the rarest of all poetical qualifications the dramatic faculty. No living writer possesses it, and it is clear that Browning does not understand what dramatic power is, or he would never, as he has done, have called Walter Savage Landor"a great Dramatic Poet."

H.-I agree with you that we have no true Dramatist now living, but I am sure that you do gross injustice to Browning. He is not an every-day writer. There is originality in all his productions.

A. That there may be-but it is not poetical originality. He would, perhaps, show himself to be a subtle metaphysician, if

he would condescend to write in plain prose, and get rid of his chaotic phantasies. Even the Examiner is compelled to acknowledge that his author's metaphysics are spoilt by his poetry, and his poetry by his metaphysics. This was the case with Shelley. Depend upon it, no poetry will live that cannot make itself felt by the great general heart. It is melancholy to see how much powerful talent and deep learning and ingenious thought, by being tortured into the form of verse, are lost entirely to the world. Poetry and metaphysics have been aiming at wedlock this last fifty years. But it wont do. They are utterly unsuited to each other. There is always an unostentatious philosophy in the highest sort of poetry, but not the metaphysics of the schools.

H. If Shelley lost a world of readers by his mysticism and metaphysics, what was it that prevented Southey from being the most popular of modern poets, as he was certainly the most intelligible? He never called back his reader to consider the meaning of a single line amidst his countless thousands.

A. I think it was the want of compression. He certainly possessed a rich though not vivid imagination. The general effect of his long poems is highly impressive. The reader is led captive, from page to page, from canto to canto, but when he comes to examine particular lines and passages, he finds nothing remarkable. Poetry of the right sort is the spirited. concentration of truth and beauty: so that in a single linesometimes in a single word-the poet throws more light upon a subject than a prose writer in fifty pages. No line, or half line, or single word of Southey's is quoted or recited. There is a fine tone (but a little monotonous) in his blank-verse, though it is too much, perhaps, the echo of Akenside's, and there is something very striking in all his longer poems but after all, one is more inclined to recognize his extensive acquirements and his general powers of mind than his poetical inspiration. You must have observed how flat and dull most of his brief occasional verses are. I would lay my life that scarcely a single one of them would gain admittance as an anonymous contribution to a Magazine of the day.

L.-By the way, did you observe in the papers a paragraph announcing that a monument had been erected to Southey in Westminster Abbey? The penny-a-liner adds to the intelligence that "it is but an appropriate compliment that this monument is placed near that of Shakspeare." It is terrible to see how the greatest of earthly names is thus taken in vain whenever a compliment is to be paid to a poet of later times. Your friend Landor says, that England has produced four men so pre-eminently great, that no name, modern or ancient, can stand very near the lowest these are Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, and Newton.

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H.-I could point out several exquisitely beautiful descriptive passages in Southey's Epics, to which even you would not venture to refuse the title of genuine poetry, and some of his ballads are still popular. His little poem of the Battle of Blenheim is better than a quarto volume of sermons against the vanity and wickedness of war.

A.-Southey was a happy fellow-quite proof against all the objections of the critic, or the satirist, or the logician. He was the greatest egotist that ever lived, and never hesitated to speak of his own certain immortality as a poet. As a philosopher and as a politician he was beneath contempt. As a poet with many defects, he has his merits, but they are not of the highest order. Landor loved Southey, but he loves truth better, and would be as much shocked as any one to hear it stated that Southey was entitled to a place by the side of Shakspeare. In a note to one of Landor's dramas, the author says of Shakspeare that he was the only man that ever existed who was superior to Bacon in intellectual power.

H.-I recollect the note you allude to. It illustrates a passage in Landor's "Essex and Bacon," one of his "Five Dramatic Scenes," dedicated to Southey. It is very difficult to settle the rival claims of men whose intellectual powers take quite opposite directions.

L. The papers have just recorded the death of Augustus William Schlegel, the celebrated German critic, who, in his Lectures on Dramatic Literature, has done so much justice to

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the character of our greatest poet. Though all Europe owes Schlegel a debt immense of endless gratitude," it is England that owes the largest share of that debt, and should be most eager to acknowledge it. It is a singular circumstance in the History of Literature that a great poet should be best appreciated and most happily interpreted by a foreigner. A prophet is said to be better estimated in any other land than his own country; but this is the first instance that occurs to my memory of a poet being more esteemed and better understood abroad than at home. The name of Schlegel ought to be a household word with the countrymen of Shakspeare. The extravagant eulogy inscribed beneath "the Harlequin figure" of Garrick in Westminster Abbey, in which the recovery of Shakspeare from oblivion is attributed to the actor, would apply with far more propriety to his great foreign critic, if we could only suppose or admit for a moment that the poet's "forms" were ever "sunk in death."

To expand his fame

Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came;
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,

The actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick called them back to day.

For Garrick and actor, we should read Schlegel and critic, and then there might be a touch of truth in verses that are, as Charles Lamb justly describes them, "a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense." Garrick's true merit must not be depreciated; but the verse which makes Shakspeare and Garrick "twin stars," so outrageously oversteps the modesty of truth as to assume the aspect of a satire.

A. When Garrick attempted to adapt Shakspeare's plays to the stage, and inlay them with passages of his own, he soon betrayed the difference between the power which enables a man to mimic the outward and visible signs of passion, and that faculty by which a great poet obtains an insight into the innermost workings of the human heart.

H.-It would be a graceful and honorable indication of the

gratitude and admiration of the English people if some statue or monument were erected in our country to the memory of a foreign writer who has paid to English Literature the highest compliments it has yet received from other nations-who has made the flippant criticisms of Voltaire on the greatest of English Poets supremely contemptible and ridiculous, even in the partial judgment of the French-and who, by spreading the fame and circulating the golden thoughts of Shakspeare over Europe, has contributed, in no slight degree, to increase the moral influence of England, and to benefit mankind.

No. VI.

THE MINISTRY-WELLINGTON-HAYDON.

A. I am glad that you are again well enough to come abroad and that we can renew our old discussions.

H.-What highly interesting events have occurred in the brief interval!

A. You allude to the change of Ministry ?*

H.-Partly. To what a pitiful condition the Tories were reduced! They could not get rid of a liberal conservative without making way for the Whigs. They do not now even dream of a Tory administration. England will never be ruled again by a Tory cabinet.

A.-The Castlereaghs and Eldons have had their day. They little imagined to what a state things were coming, and into what supreme contempt their most cherished opinions would be thrown by the general advance of knowledge. Peel himself is in a curious position. He has been carried on by the stream, and on looking back to his past life must acknowledge that his mind has undergone changes as complete as those of the physical

* In 1846.