voluptuousness of tone; and Byron bathed in its darker fountains of passion, and revived its faded blasphemies, and sucked poison from its brilliant flowers-Southey has aspired to mate with the mightier and elder shapes of its superstition; to reanimate the cold idols of its worship; to climb its Swerga, to dive into its dreary Domdaniel caves, to rekindle the huge heaps of its ashes, or to rear over them a mausoleum, proud, large, and elaborate, as their own forms. In this attempt he has had little sympathy. Hindooism is too far gone in dotage and death, to bleed the generous life-blood of poetry to any lancet. Its forms are too numerous, capricious, and ugly; its mythology too intricate, its mummeries too ridiculous, its colouring of blood too uniform. Byron and Moore knew this; and, while the former, except in one instance, where he bursts into the neighbourhood of Eden, has never gone farther east than Turkey; the other flits about the fire summits of Persia, and seeks to collect in his crystal goblet no element more potent or hazardous than the poetical essence of the faith of Mahomet. In "Madoc," again, Southey has gone to the opposite quarter of the globe, has leaped into the new world, disturbed by his foot a silence unbroken from the creation, and led us amid those abysses of primeval darkness into which a path for the sunbeams had to be hewn, and amid which the lightning, sole visiter since the deluge, entered trembling, and withdrew in haste. Tearing, without remorse, the crown of discovery from the head of Columbus, he guides the bark of Madoc, a Welsh prince, through silent seas, to the American continent, and recounts many strange adventures which befell him there. There is much boldness, some poetry, and more tediousness in the attempt; and we could have wished that the shade of Columbus had appeared (like that dire figure in Scott's noble picture of Vasco di Gama passing the Cape) to his slumbering spirit, and warned him off the forbidden shores. "Wat Tyler" is a feverish effusion of youth, love, and revolutionary mania. "Joan of Arc" we have never read. Many of his smaller poems are fine, particularly the "Holly Tree." Ah! he foresaw not that the high smooth leaves on its top were to be withered and blackened where they grew! But "Roderick, the last of the Goths," is the main pillar of his poetical reputation. It is a deep, sober, solemn narrative, less ambitious and more successful than his others. The author, as well as the hero, appears in it, a penitent for his former sins of subject and treatment. A shade of pensive piety hovers meekly over it. It is written all in a quiet under tone, which were monotonous, but for the varied and picturesque story it tells. And behind it, in noble background, lies the scenery of Spain, with its mountain mosses, corktree groves, orange tints, and dancing fireflies—the country of Cervantes and Don Quixote, where they still sing, as they go

His lau

forth to labour, the "ancient ballad of Roncesvalles." reate odes are in general failures. Who can write poems any more than "yield reasons upon compulsion, Hal?" It is an incubus of obligation, under which the wings of genius higher than Southey's might succumb. We have sometimes figured to ourselves the horrible plight of one who was compelled to produce two poems in a week, as a minister has to preach two sermons. Scarce inferior to such a slavery, is that of a laureate who must sweat poetry out of every birth, baptism, burial, and battle, that occurs in the circle of the royal household or in the public history of the country. "The Vision of Judgment" brings this deplorable bondage to a point. We know not whether its design or its execution, its spirit or its versification, be more unworthy of the writer. It is half ludicrous, half melancholy, to see it now preserving its sole existence in the notes of Byron's parody. There, degraded as if to the kitchen of that powerful but wicked jeu d'esprit, it serves only to sauce its poignancy. When shall the lines on the "Burial of Sir John Moore," or the "Dream," or Campbell's "Last Man," be thus kicked down stairs by their caricatures? Never. Had not Southey's poem been worthless it would have defied fifty parodies to laugh it out of circulation.

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The leading qualities of his poetry are exuberance of imagery; diffusion of style; manifest facility of execution; a somewhat ostentatious display of intimacy with the costume, or history, of the theme, or period; a wild, varied, and often exquisite versification; a frequent looseness and vagueness of phrase, strangely connected with an utter absence and abhorrence of mysticism, in the proper sense of the term; a sluggishness of occasional movement; a general want of condensation and artistic finish; and a pervading tone of moral and religious principle. His genius emits a deep, steady, permanent glow-never sharp tongues of flame. His poems, excellent in most of their parts, are heavy as wholes and he must have been mortified, but need not have been surprised, that, while the brilliant pamphlets of Byron were racing on through instant popularity to eternal fame before his very eyes, his own larger, equally genuine, and far more laboured works, were so slowly gaining their way to a disputed immortality. After all, his principal defect as a poet is size-his ghosts are too tall-his quaintnesses are in quarto-his airy verse, which had been admirable in short effusions, wearies when reverberated throughout the long vista of interminable narratives-his genius wears a train-with it has been entangled, and over it has wellnigh fallen. Very different it is with his prose. Here his fatal facility of verse forsakes him. He knows where to stop; and his language is pure, pellucid, simple, proper words dropping as by instinct into proper places. We prefer his style to Hall's, as less

finished, but more natural, and better adapted for the uses of every-day composition. You never, go as early as you please, catch the one in undress; the other always wears an elegant dishabille. Had Hall written a history or biography, it had been a stiff brocade business. Southey tells his story almost as well as Herodotus or Walter Scott. His lives of Henry Kirke White and Nelson, attest this; but so do also his other works-the "Life of Wesley," the "Book of the Church," the "Doctor" (containing, besides, so many odd fancies, and so much quaint humour, that men were slow to believe it his), his "Colloquies on Society," his "Lives" of Cowper and Bunyan, and his articles in the "Quarterly," all of which were purchased cheaply at £100 each.

We love him for his liking to dear old John Bunyan, though it cost him a wry face or two to digest the tough old Baptist. Next to the Bible, the "Pilgrim's Progress" is to us the Book. Never, while our soul is in time or eternity, can we forget thee, " ingenious dreamer," or that immortal road which thy genius has mapped out. Never can we forget the cave where thou dreamest, Dante-like, thy dream—the man with the book in his hand-the Slough of Despond-the apparition of Help-the sigh with which we saw Pliable turning round on the wrong side the starry wicket-gate shining through the darkness the cliffs of Sinai overhanging the bewildered wanderer-the Interpreter's house, with its wondrous visions-the man in the cage, and Him, the nameless, rising from the vision of the Judgment for evermorethe Hill Difficulty, with the two dreary roads, Danger and Destruction, diverging from its base-the arbour half-way upthe lions on the summit-the house Beautiful-that very solitary place the Valley of Humiliation, with now Apollyon spreading his dragon-wings in the gloom, and now, how sweet the contrast! the boy with the herb "heart's-ease in his bosom, and that soft hymn upon his lips, reclining fearless among its gentle shades -that "other place," the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with its shuddering horrors-the town of Vanity-the dungeons of Despair-the Delectable Mountains, overtopped by Mount Clear, and that again by the golden gates of the city-the short cut to hell the enchanted ground-Beulah, that lovely land, where the sun shineth night and day-the dark river over which there is no bridge, the ridges of the Everlasting Hills rising beyond. As to the characters, we love them all-Christian with his burden, and the key called Promise in his bosom; Hopeful, ever answering to his name; Faithful, mounting on his fiery whirlwind the nearest way to the Celestial Gate; good Evangelist; manly Greatheart; Valiant-for-truth, with his "right Damascus blade" cleaving in blood to his hand; Little-faith grasping his jewels; Fearing, wallowing in his slough; Despondency and Much-afraid; even

green-headed Ignorance and his complacent ferry-man; and have a slight tenderness for Byends himself, and that strange figure Old Atheist, with his hollow laughter; and " one will we mention dearer than the rest," Mercy, whom we love for the sweet name she bears, and because she approaches the very ideal of womanliness and modesty of character. "O rare John Bunyan!" what a particle of power was deposited in thy rude body and ruder soul! With a "burnt stick for a pencil," what graphic, pathetic, powerful, tender, true, and terrible pictures, hast thou drawn! Thou hast extorted admiration from infidels and high churchmen; from boys and bearded men; from a clown and a Coleridge (who read it now as a critic, regarding it as the first of allegories; now as a theologian, considering it the best system of divinity; and again as a boy, surrendering himself to the stream of the story); from a Thomas Campbell and a Robert Southey.

Southey was a very eloquent and generous critic, when no prejudice stood in the way. As a thinker, he was clear, rather than profound; fond of crotchets, and infected with a most unaccountable and unreasonable aversion to the periodical press. As a religionist, his views were exceedingly definite and decided. His formula of Church of Englandism fitted his mind exactly as a glove his hand. He had no patience with the mystic piety of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and would have recoiled from the transcendental charity of Carlyle. His opinions on all subjects. were sharp, narrow, and prominent, as the corners of a triangular hat. Perhaps he had been yet more amiable, if his virtues had hung about him in softer and easier folds; if they had not been gathered in around him with such austere and Roman precision; and if they had rendered him more tolerant to the failings of others. Fiercely assailed by William Smith and Lord Byron, his retorts, keen and eloquent as they were, showed too plainly that the iron had entered into his soul. His change of political principle we hope to have been the result of conscientious conviction. The only blot on his escutcheon we know was his conduct to poor Shelley. We do not refer to his transcription and circulation of the mad post-fix in the album at Montanvert, but to the dark hints he threw out in one of his letters in reference to disclosures Shelley had made to him about himself, in the confidence of private communication. No provocation could justify such a breach of trust towards one who, as a "pilgrim of his genius," had visited his home. The obscurity of the insinuations only makes the matter worse.

Southey had much, it is said, of the poet in his appearancewas stately in form-had the " eye of the hawk and the fire therein " -a Roman nose forming his most expressive feature. On the whole, if not the greatest poet, he was the most industrious and accomplished literateur of the day; and, if not the

most marked, or unique, or attractive, was probably the most faultless of its literary characters.

Note. Our recent reading of Cottle's "Recollections" has confirmed us in our verdict on Southey. He was undoubtedly harsh in his judgments both of Coleridge and Shelley. Possessed himself of a firm belief, he could not sympathise with the frantic but sincere struggles of one unhappily destitute of it; and, enjoying perfect self-control, he had not sufficient allowance to make for one in whose nature it had been omitted, and who could as soon have acquired a new sense. His hinting to Cottle that he knew the whole of Shelley's early history (which he got from himself, communicated in the impetuous fulness of a spirit that knew no disguise), and which he pronounces "execrable," was itself a piece of "execrable" meanness. His tone, too, in his correspondence, in reference to poor Coleridge, is stern, cold, and haughty.

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.

THERE is a certain stern, masculine, and caustic type of mind which is, we think, disappearing from the higher walks of our literature. It is as if the English element were departing from the English mind, and were being exchanged, partly for good and partly for evil, for an infusion of foreign blood. Our national peculiarities of thought are fast melting down into the great general stream of European literature. Where now that rugged Saxon strength, sagacity, and sarcastic vein that simple manly style that clear logical method-that dogged adherence to the point in hand-that fearless avowal of national prejudices, hatreds, and contempts that thorough-going insular spirit which distinguished the Drydens, the Swifts, and, in part, the Johnsons of a bygone period? They are, in a great measure, gone; and in their stead we have the vagueness, the mistiness, the exaggeration, the motley and mosaic diction, along with the earnestness, the breadth, and the cosmopolitanism, "wide and general as the casing air," of Germany, transferred or transfused into our English tongue. It were vain to protest against, or to seek to retard, an influence which is fast assuming the character of an irresistible infection. There is no disguising the fact. For better or for worse, our poetry and our prose, our history and our criticism, our profane and our sacred literature, are fast charging with Germanism, as clouds with thunder. Be this potent element a devil's elixir, or the wine of life, the thinkers of both Britain and America seem determined to dare the experiment of drain-. ing its cup to the dregs. And at this stage of the trial, it is