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Notice of Hazlitt's Lectures on English Poetry. -a recluse philosopher, or a reluctant spectator of the scenes of many-coloured life, moralizing on them, not describing or entering into them. Burns has exerted all the vigour of his mind-all the general spirit of his nature, in exalting the pleasures of wine, love, and good fellowship. But in Wordsworth there is a total disunion of the faculties of the mind from those of the body. From the Lyrical Ballads it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry, or are given in marriage. If we lived by every sentiment that proceeds out of our mouths, and not by bread alone, or if the species were continued like trees, Wordsworth's poetry would be just as good

Lecture Eighth.-On the Living Poets.

as ever.

MR HAZLITT commenced this lecture with some remarks on the nature of true fame, which he described as not popularity-the shout of the multitude-the idle buzz of fashion-the flattery of favour or of friendship,but the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men. Fame is not the recompence of ple of fame stands upon the grave: the living, but of the dead. The temthe flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of those to whom the incense is offered. He who has ears truly touched to the music of fame, is in a manner deaf to Mr Hazlitt now proceeded to rethe voice of popularity.-The love of mark on some of Burn's poems. He the one is immediate and personal, the fame differs from vanity in this, that pointed out the "Twa Dogs" as a other ideal and abstracted. The lover very spirited piece of description, and of true fame does not delight in that as giving a very vivid idea of the manners both of high and low life. He self, but in that pure homage which is gross homage which is paid to himdescribed the Brigs of Ayr, the Ad- paid to the eternal forms of truth and dress to a Haggis, Scotch Drink, and beauty, as they are reflected in his many others, as being full of the best mind. He waits patiently and calmly kind of characteristic and comic paint- for the award of posterity, without ening; but Tam o' Shanter as the master-piece in this way. deavouring to forestall his immortaliIn Tam o' ty, or mortgage it for a newspaper Shanter, and in the Cottar's Saturday puff. The love of fame should be, in Night, Burns has given the two ex- reality, only another name for the love tremes of licentious eccentricity and of excellence. convivial indulgence, and of patriarchal simplicity and gravity. The latter of these poems is a noble and pathetic picture of human manners, mingled with a fine religious awe: it comes over the mind like a slow and solemn strain of music. But of all Burns's productions, Mr Hazlitt described his pathetic and serious love-songs as leaving the deepest and most lasting impression on the memory. He instanced, in particular, the lines entitled Jessie, and those to Mary Morrison; and concluded the lecture by a few remarks on the old Scottish and English ballads, which he described as possessing a still more original cast of thought, and more romantic imagery -a closer intimacy with nature-a firmer reliance on that as the only stock of wealth to which the mind has to resort-a more infantine simplicity of manners a greater strength of affection hopes longer cherished, and longer deferred-sighs that the heart dare not leave-and "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

most entitled to fame, are always the Those who are the most content to wait for it; for they know that, if they have deserved it, it will not be withheld from them. It is the award of successive generations that they value and desire; for the brightest living reputation cannot be equally imposing to the imagination with that which is covered and rendered venerable by the hoar of innumerable ages.

marks to this effect, and a few words After further reon the female writers of the day, Mr ing poets. He began with Mr Rogers, Hazlitt proceeded to speak of the livpoet-as an elegant but feeble writer, whom he described as a very lady-like who wraps up obvious thoughts in a enigmas with no meaning to them. cover of fine words-who is full of His poetry is a more minute and inoffensive species of the Della Cruscan. There is nothing like truth of nature, not see the thought for the ambiguity or simplicity of expression. You canof the expression-the figure for the finery-the picture for the varnish.

As an example of this, Mr H. referred to the description of a friend's icehouse, in which Mr Rogers has carried the principle of elegant evasion and delicate insinuation of his meaning so far, that the Monthly Reviewers mistook his friend's ice-house for a dogkennel, and the monster which was emphatically said to be chained up in it for a large mastiff dog.

Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, the lecturer described as of the same class with the poetry of the foregoing author. There is a painful attention paid to the expression, in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is mistaken for the composition of poetry. The sense and keeping in the ideas is sacrificed to a jingle of words and an epigrammatic form of expression. The verses on the Battle of Hohenlinden, Mr H. described as possessing considerable spirit and animation; but he spoke of the Gertrude of Wyoming as exhibiting little power, or power suppressed by extreme fastidiousness. The author seems so afraid of doing wrong, that he does little or nothing. Lest he should wander from the right path, he stands still. He is like a man whose heart fails him just as he is going up in a balloon, and who breaks his neck by flinging himself out when it is too late. He mangles and maims his ideas before they are full-formed, in order to fit them to the Procrustes' bed of criticism; or strangles his intellectual offspring in the birth, lest they should come to an untimely end in the Edinburgh Review. No writer, said Mr Hazlitt, who thinks habitually of the critics, either to fear or contemn them, can ever write well. It is the business of Reviewers to watch poets, not poets to watch reviewers. Mr H. concluded his remarks on Campbell by censuring the plot of Gertrude of Wyoming, on account of the mechanical nature of its structure, and from the most striking incidents all occurring in the shape of antitheses. They happen just in the nick of time, but without any known cause, except the convenience of the author.

MOORE was described as a poet of quite a different stamp,-as heedless, gay, and prodigal of his poetical wealth, as the other is careful, reserved, and parsimonious. Mr Moore's muse was compared to Ariel-as light, as tricksy, VOL. III.

as indefatigable, and as humane a spirit. His fancy is ever on the wing; it flutters in the gale, glitters in the sun. Every thing lives, moves, and sparkles in his poetry; and over all love waves his purple wings. His thoughts are as many, as restless, and as bright, as the insects that people the sun's beam. The fault of Moore is an exuberance of involuntary power. His levity becomes oppressive. He exhausts attention by being inexhaustible. His variety cloys; his rapidity dazzles and distracts the sight. The graceful ease with which he lends himself to all the different parts of his subject, prevents him from connecting them together as a whole. He wants intensity, strength, and grandeur. His mind does not brood over the great and permanent, but glances over the surfaces of things. His gay laughing style, which relates to the immediate pleasures of love and wine, is better than his sentimental and romantic view; for this pathos sometimes melts into a mawkish sensibility, or crystallizes into all the prettinesses of allegorical language, or hardness of external imagery. He has wit at will, and of the best quality. His satirical and burlesque poetry is his best. Mr Moore ought not to have written Lalla Rookh, even for three thousand guineas, said Mr Hazlitt, His fame was worth more than that. He should have minded the advice of Fadladeen. It is not, however, a failure, so much as an evasion of public opinion, and a consequent disappointment.

If Moore seems to have been too happy, continued Mr Hazlitt, LORD BYRON, from the tone of his writings, seems to have been too unhappy to be a truly great poet. He shuts himself up too much in the impenetrable gloom of his own thoughts. The Giaour, the Corsair, Childe Harolde, &c. are all the same person, and they are apparently all himself. This everlasting repetition of one subject, this accumulation of horror upon horror, steels the mind against the sense of pain as much as the unceasing sweetness and luxurious monotony of Moore's poetry makes it indifferent to pleasure. There is nothing less poetical than the unbending selfishness which the poetry of Lord Byron displays. There is no thing more repulsive than this ideal absorption of all the good and ill of life in the ruling passion and moody ab

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straction of a single mind, as if it would make itself the centre of the universe, and there was nothing worth cherishing but its intellectual diseases. It is like a cancer eating into the heart of poetry. But still there is power, and power rivets attention and forces admiration. "His genius hath a demon," and that is the next thing to being full of the God. The range of Lord Byron's imagination is contracted, but within that range he has great unity and truth of keeping. He chooses elements and agents congenial to his mind-the dark and glittering ocean-the frail bark hurrying before the storm. He gives all the tumultuous eagerness of action, and the fixed despair of thought. In vigour of style, and force of conception, he surpasses every writer of the present day. His indignant apothegms are like oracles of misanthropy. Yet he has beauty allied to his strength, tenderness some times blended with his despair. But the flowers that adorn his poetry bloom over the grave.

Mr Hazlitt next spoke of WALTER SCOTT; whose popularity he seemed to attribute to the comparative mediocrity of his talents to his describing that which is most easily understood in a style the most easy and intelligible, and to the nature of the story which he selects. Walter Scott, said the lecturer, has great intuitive power of fancy, great vividness of pencil in placing external objects before the eye. The force of his mind is picturesque rather than moral. He conveys the distinct outlines and visible changes in outward objects, rather than their "mortal consequences." He is very inferior to Lord Byron in intense passion, to Moore in delightful fancy, and to Wordsworth in profound sentiment; but he has more picturesque power than any of them. After referring to examples of this, Mr H. observed, that it is remarkable that Mr Westall's illustrations of Scott's poems always give one the idea of their being fac similes of the persons represented, with ancient costume, and a theatrical air. The truth is, continued he, there is a modern air in the midst of the antiquarian research of Mr Scott's poetry. It is history in masquerade. Not only the crust of old words and images is worn off, but the substance is become comparatively light and worthless. The forms are old and uncouth, but

the spirit is effeminate and fashionable. This, however, has been no obstacle to the success of his poetry-for he has just hit the town between the romantic and the modern, and between the two, has secured all classes of readers on his side. In a word, said Mr Hazlitt, I conceive that he is to the great poet what an excellent mimic is to a great actor. There is no determinate impression left on the mind by reading his poetry. The reader rises from the perusal with new images and associations, but he remains the same man that he was before. The notes to his poems are just as entertaining as the poems themselves, and his poems are nothing but entertain-ing.

Mr H. now proceeded to speak of WORDS WORTH, whom he described as the most original poet now living, and the reverse of Walter Scott in every particular,-having nearly all that the other wants, and wanting all that the other possesses. His poetry is not external, but internal; he is the poet of mere sentiment. Great praise was given to many of the Lyrical Ballads, as opening a finer and deeper vein of thought and feeling than any poet in modern times has done or attempted ; but it was observed, that Mr Wordsworth's powers had been mistaken, both by the age and by himself. He cannot form a whole, said Mr H.-he wants the constructive faculty. He can give the fine tones of thought drawn from his mind by accident or nature, like the sounds of the Eolian harp; but he is totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry.

Mr Hazlitt here entered at some length into the origin of what has been called the Lake School of Poetry, and endeavoured to trace it to the convulsion which was caused in the moral world by the events of the French revolution. This, and his concluding remarks on Southey and Coleridge, we omit, partly for want of room, but chiefly on account of the indefinite and personal nature of those remarks.

When we undertook to give the foregoing abstract of Mr Hazlitt's Lectures, it was not our intention to have accompanied it by a single observation in the shape of judgment, as to their merits or defects; but we find, that our own opinions have been strangely supposed to be identified

with those we have done nothing more than detail. We choose, therefore, to say a few words on the impression we have received from these, and from Mr Hazlitt's previous writings on similar subjects.

We are not apt to imbibe half opinions, or to express them by halves; we shall therefore say at once, that when Mr Hazlitt's taste and judgment are left to themselves, we think him among the best, if not the very best, living critic on our national literature. His sincere and healthful perceptions of truth and beauty, of falsehood and deformity, have a clearness, a depth, and a comprehensiveness, that have rarely been equalled. They appear to come to him by intuition; and he conveys the impression of them to others, with a vividness and precision that cannot be surpassed. But his genius is one that will not be "constrained by mastery." When, in spite of himself, his prejudices or habits of personal feeling interfere, and attempt to shackle or bias its movements, it deserts him at once. It is like a proud steed that has been but half broke to the bitt; when at liberty, it bounds along, tossing its head to the free air, and seeming to delight and glory in the beauty that surrounds it. But the moment it feels constraint, it curvets, and kicks, and bites, and foams at the mouth, and does nothing but mischief.

As we have not scrupled to declare, that we think Mr Hazlitt is sometimes the very best living critic, we shall venture one step farther, and add, that we think he is sometimes the very worst. One would suppose he had a personal quarrel with all living writers, good, bad, or indifferent. In fact, he seems to know little about them, and to care less. With him, to be alive is not only a fault in itself, but it includes all other possible faults. He seems to consider life as a disease, and death as your only doctor. He reverses the proverb, and thinks a dead ass is better than a living lion. In his eyes, death, like charity, "covereth a multitude of sins." In short, if you want his praise, you must die for it; and when such praise is deserved, and given really con amore, it is almost worth dying for.

By the bye, what can our Editor's facetious friend mean by "pimpled Hazlitt?" If he knows that gentle

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I DARE say, that when you receive this letter, you will wonder what the deuce Timothy Tickler has got to say to you; and, no doubt, that slavish herd of boy-admirers that dog your heels, will think it excessively impertinent that an obscure person like me should offer admonition to so exalted a personage as the Editor of the Edinburgh Review. But the truth is, that I admire you as much as they do, though I have not been able to bring myself, like them, to think you an oracle, whose inspiration, it is blasphemy to doubt, and whose very name ought to be kept in reverential and inviolable silence. For nearly twenty years you have made pretty free with the names, talents, and acquirements, of all the literary men in Britain; and have decided upon their pretension to glory, if not with dogmatical, at least with authoritative assurance. Something of this has been owing to the constitution of your mind, which has made you, on the whole, greatly to overrate your own talents, and greatly to underrate the talents of others; and I am willing to believe, that still more of it has been owing to the influence of your assumed character as Critic of the age; fully to support which, it was necessary that you should subdue within yourself all misgivings arising from the occasional consciousness of inferiority, and at all times show a bold and defying front to the enemy. Yet I am much mistaken if you, after all, have succeeded in deceiving either yourself or others into the belief that you are the leading Spirit of the Age. With all your cleverness, ingenuity, and wit, there is a melancholy want about all your writings. You can expose what is little, but when have you created what is great? You can follow with nimble steps the route of other men, but into what recesses of

knowledge have you ever conducted them as a guide? It is a truth which will not be concealed, that you are not a great man. There is something meteorous about you-and it is pleasant to see that brilliant light glancing through the lower regions of the sky -but we fix our eyes at last on the large bright stars of heaven, and the track of the kindled vapour is forgot

ten.

I beg your pardon, my dear Jeffrey, for this inflated manner of writing, so ill-suited to epistolary correspondence, and forming so very awkward an introduction to the very trifling and ludicrous subject on which I am about to put a few questions. You have yourself such an exquisite perception of the absurd-you are so alive to the follies and whimsies of others-that I am sure you will pardon me for laughing very heartily at yourself, when you chance to make yourself ridiculous. And surely, if ever man did make himself ridiculous, you have done so, by your note on page 509, &c. of the 56th Number of your Review, which, by some accident, I saw yesterday for the first time. Perhaps it may not be quite fair to allude to what is now forgotten-for I have regularly observed, that each Number of your Work is so much better than that which preceded it, that the existence of the one destroys all remembrance of the other; so that, in reality, there is but one Number of the Edinburgh Review existing in the world; and of all that mighty family of pamphlets we see before us, only the last-born, Benja

min the Ruler.

Who ever thought they would live to see the day, when the Editor of the Edinburgh Review would publish in that work a bulletin of his tea-drinking at Keswick? I forget-it was not tea, but coffee. What an image! The stern destroyer of systems, political, poetical, metaphysical-having "coffee handed to him" by Robert Southey's servant-lass! He sips it-while the destined Laureate stands aloof" with cold civility," and the "Ancient Mariner" "holds him with his glittering eye," so that he can with the utmost difficulty snatch a moment's intermission for a mouthful of buttered toast! In this sublimated state of happiness, "an hour or two" passes away, and then Mr Francis Jeffrey returns to "the Inn," the name of which, my

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dear friend, you ought to have given, that in future times pilgrims might repair to the spot, and worship the chair on which you took your evening nap, haply beneath the wings of the Spread Eagle," or the mane of the "Red Lion," or the bushy locks of the "Queen's Head." What is the use of a bulletin at all, unless it be comprehensive and complete? The importance of the subject would have justified the most lengthened detail, for what was the meeting of Kings and Emperors on "that famous Raft," "to the celestial colloquy sublime," of Reviewer and Bard, in the back parlour of an Inn at Keswick ?

How you passed the night-how many blankets you slept under-and whether the hair mattrass was beneath or above the feather-bed, you have, with that forgetfulness so characteristic of genius, omitted to inform the world. But next day "you walked into the fields with Mr Coleridge," he clad, I presume, in " russet weeds," and you in a natty surtout and hessians. "His whole conversation was poetry;" and when that light fare was digested," he did you the honour to dine with you at the Inn." Next morning, you parted to meet no more

or, in your own simple words, "I left Keswick, and have not seen him since."

I cannot well understand, my dear Jeffrey, the nature of those feelings which induced you to publish this bulletin. They seem to have been strangely compounded of excessive egotism and shrinking timidity. Mr Coleridge, it appears, had brought forward some vague and indefinite charges against you, the head and front of which was, that you had handled severely the poems of a certain bard, after you had eaten his beef and drunk his wine; whereas, the truth is, you had only sipp'd his coffee, and perhaps munch'd his muffins. Even if it had been as the "Ancient Mariner" asserted, the world, who seldom take a deep interest in affairs of that kind, would not have thought a whit the worse of you. But you began to think that the fifteen million inhabitants of these kingdoms had their eyes all fixed upon you-and in the silence of night you heard voices calling on you to vindicate yourself against the Feast of the Poets. The public, who you imagined were thinking only upon you,

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