Remarks on Shelley's Adonais.*

BETWEEN thirty and forty years ago, the Della Crusca school was in great force. It poured out monthly, weekly, and daily, the whole fulness of its raptures and sorrows in verse, worthy of any "person of quality." It revelled in moonlight, and sighed with evening gales, lamented over plucked roses, and bid melodious farewells to the "last butterfly of the season." The taste prevailed for a time; the more rational part of the public, always a minority, laughed and were silent; the million were in raptures, and loud in their raptures. The reign of "sympathy" was come again,-poetry, innocent poetry, had at length found out its true language. Milton and Dryden, Pope and the whole ancestry of the English Muse, had strayed far from nature. They were a formal and stiff-skirted generation, and their fame was past and for ever. The trumpet of the morning paper, in which those "inventions rich" were first promulgated, found an echo in the more obscure fabrications of the day, and milliners' maids and city apprentices pined over the mutual melancholies of Arley and Matilda.

At length, the obtrusiveness of this tuneful nonsense grew insupportable; a man of a vigorous judgment shook off his indolence, and commenced the long series of his services to British literature, by sweeping away, at a brush of his pen, the whole light-winged, humming, and loving population. But in this world folly is immortal; one generation of absurdity swept away, another succeeds to its glories and its fate. The Della Crusca school has visited us again, but with some slight change of localities. Its verses now transpire at one time from the retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs; sometimes they visit us by fragments from Venice, and sometimes invade us by wainloads from Pisa. In point of subject and execution,

* I give this review of Shelley's Adonais, (an elegy on the death of John Keats, author of "Endymion,") as the earliest specimen I can present of the slashing order of criticism of which Maginn subsequently became so thorough a master. It appeared in Blackwood for December, 1821.-M.

there is but slight difference; both schools are "smitten with nature, and nature's love," run riot in the intrigues of anemonies, daisies and butter-cups, and rave of the "rivulets proud, and the deep blushing stars." Of the individuals in both establishments, we are not quite qualified to speak, from the peculiarity of their private habits; but poor Mrs. Robinson* and her correspondents are foully belied, if their moral habits were not to the full as pure as those of the Godwinian colony, that play "the Bacchanal beside the Tuscan sea." But we must do the defunct Della Crusca the justice to say, that they kept their private irregularities to themselves, and sought for no reprobate popularity, by raising the banner to all the vicious of the community. They talked nonsense without measure, were simple down to the lowest degree of silliness, and "babbled of green fields" enough to make men sicken of summer, but they were not daring enough to boast of impurity; there was no pestilent hatred of every thing generous, true, and honourable; no desperate licentiousness in their romance; no daring and fiend-like insult to feeling, moral ties, and Christian principle. They were foolish and profligate, but they did not deliver themselves, with the steady devotedness of an insensate and black ambition, to the ruin of society.

We have now to speak of Mr. P. B. Shelley and his poem. Here we must again advert to the Della Crusca. One of the characteristics of those childish persons was, the restless interest which they summoned the public to take in every thing belonging to their own triviality. If Mrs. Robinson's dog had a bad night's repose, it was duly announced to the world; Mr. Merry's accident in paring his nails solicited a similar sympathy; the falling off of Mrs. R.'s patch, at the last ball, or the stains on Mr. M.'s full dress coat, from the dropping of a chandelier, came before the earth with praise-worthy promptitude. All within

* Mrs. Robinson, the "Perdita" of that voluptuary George IV., was one of the Della Crusca poetlings of the latter days of the 18th century, and wrote as "Laura Maria.” — M.

Mr. Robert Merry, who died in America in 1798, was founder of the Della Crusca school of poetry, and immortalized as such, by the satiric pen of Gifford.-M.

their enchanted ring was perfection; but there the circle of light and darkness was drawn, and all beyond was delivered over to the empire of Dulness and Demogorgon. The New School are here the humble imitators of those original arbiters of human fame.

The present story is thus: -A Mr. John Keats, a young man who had left a decent calling for the melancholy trade of cockney-poetry, has lately died of a consumption, after having written two or three little books of verses, much neglected by the public. His vanity was probably wrung not less than his purse; for he had it upon the authority of tho Cockney Homers and Virgils, that he might become a light to their region at a future time. But all this is not necessary to help a consumption to the death of a poor sedentary man, with an unhealthy aspect, and a mind harassed by the first troubles of versemaking. The New School, however, will have it that he was slaughtered by a criticism of the Quarterly Review.-"O flesh, how art thou fishified!"-There is even an aggravation in this cruelty of the Review-for it had taken three or four years to slay its victim, the deadly blow having been afflicted at least as long since. We are not now to defend a publication so well able to defend itself. But the fact is, that the Quarterly finding before it a work at once silly and presumptuous, full of the servile slang that Cockaigne dictates to its servitors, and the vulgar indecorums which that Grub Street Empire rejoiceth to applaud, told the truth of the volume, and recommended a change of manners and of masters to the scribbler. Keats wrote on; but he wrote indecently, probably in the indulgence of his social propensities. He selected from Boccacio, and, at the feet of the Italian Priapus, supplicated for fame and farthings.

"Both halves the winds dispersed in empty air."

Mr. P. B. Shelley having been the person appointed by the Pisan triumvirate to canonize the name of this apprentice, “nipt in the bud," as he fondly tells us, has accordingly produced an Elegy, in which he weeps "after the manner of Moschus for Bion." The canonizer is worthy of the saint.—“ Et tu, Vitula!" -Locke says, that the most resolute liar cannot lie more than

once in every three sentences. Folly is more engrossing; for we could prove, from the present Elegy, that it is possible to write two sentences of pure nonsense out of every three. A more faithful calculation would bring us to ninety-nine out of every hundred, or, as the present consists of only fifty-five stanzas,leaving about five readable lines in the entire. It thus com

mences:

-

"O weep for Adonais- he is dead!

O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad hour! selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say with me
Died Adonais! till the future does

Forget the past. His fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light!! unto eternity."

Now, of this unintelligible stuff the whole fifty-five stanzas are composed. Here an hour. a dead hour too-is to say that Mr.

J. Keats died along with it! yet this hour has the heavy business on its hands of mourning the loss of its fellow-defunct, and of rousing all its obscure compeers to be taught its own sorrow, &c. Mr. Shelley and his tribe have been panegyrized in their turn for power of language; and the man of "Table-talk" swears by all the gods he owns, that he has a great command of words, to which the most eloquent effusions of the Fives Court are occasionally inferior. But any man may have the command of every word in the vocabulary, if he will fling them like pebbles from his sack; and even in the most fortuitous flinging, they will sometimes fall in pleasing though useless forms. The art of the modern Della Cruscan is thus to eject every epithet that he can conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon, and throw them out to settle as they will. He follows his own rhymes, and shapes his subject to the close of his measure. He is a glutton of all names of colours, and flowers, and smells, and tastes, and crowds his verse with scarlet, and blue, and yellow, and green; extracts tears from every thing, and makes moss and mud hold regular conversations with him. "A goose-pye talks," it does more, it thinks, and has its peculiar sensibilities,—it smiles and weeps, VOL. II.-9