regard the putting this into heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms" is no imputation on the pious raptures of the Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other respects to his Lordship's taste, which is more than we can pretend to determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject, and transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and sophistically.

"The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

That not in Fancy's maze he wander'd long,

But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song.

He should have written rose to truth.' In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton's and Dante's, and even Dante's powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth-his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the forests' that ever were walked' for their 'description,' and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly, even a finer poem than the Æneid.

Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.

The proper study of mankind is man. "It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call imagination' and invention,'— the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect: his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious." P. 42.

Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former the great man he supposes?

The invention of his system-the discovery of sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that the mere repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning them into verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither one nor the other; though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the highest class of poetry, “because it would do that in verse, which one of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose." Such is the way in which his Lordship transposes the common sense of the question,-because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the first author, and the general idea, which forms the basis of didactic poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in

his manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor Indian, and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of that muchtalked-of production. Lord Byron clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this ethical or didactic truth as 66 a lie." Is Lear a lie? Or does his Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in sop's Fables? He asks "why must the poet mean the liar, the feigner, the tale-teller? A man may make and create better things than these." -He may make and create better things than a common-place, and he who does not, makes and creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as "lies," "feigning," and "tale-telling," are infinite, and give endless scope to the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by the truth and purity of the moral-so we find it "in the bond," and yet Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry "requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry that ever was written:" and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it down, that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not perceive the inference here. "Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.

The proper study of mankind is man.”

Does our author mean that this was Virgil's reason for liking his pastoral poetry better than his description of Dido and Eneas? But farther, there is a Latin poem (that of Lucretius) superior even to the Georgics; nay, it would have been so to any poem now in existence, but for one unlucky circumstance. And what is that? "Its ethics! So that

ethics have spoiled the finest poem in the world. This is the rub that makes didactic poetry come in such a questionable shape. If original, like Lucretius, there will be a difference of opinion about it. If trite and acknowledged, like Pope, however pure, there will be little valuable in it. It is the glory and the privilege of poetry to be conversant about those truths of nature and the heart that are at once original and self-evident. His Lordship ought to have known this. In the same passage, he speaks of imagination and invention as "the two commonest of qualities. We will tell his Lordship what is commoner, the want of them. "An Irish peasant," he adds, "with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than "(What? Homer, Spenser, and Ariosto? No: but than)-" would furnish forth a modern poem." That we will not dispute. But at any rate, when sober the next morning, he would be as "full of wise saws and modern instances as his Lordship; and in either case, equally positive, tetchy, and absurd!

His Lordship, throughout his pamphlet, makes a point of contradicting Mr. Bowles, and, it would seem, of contradicting himself. He cannot be said to have any opinions of his own, but whatever any one else advances, he denies out of mere spleen and rashness. "He hates the word invariable," and not without reason. "What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is invariable?'

There is one of the particulars in this enumeration, which seems pretty invariable, which is death. One would think that the principles of poetry. are so too, notwithstanding his peevish disclaimer: for towards the conclusion of this letter he sets up Pope as a classic model, and considers all modern deviations from it as grotesque and barbarous.

"They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior and purely

beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for

ever and ever."

Lord Byron has here substituted his own invariable principles for Mr. Bowles's, which he hates as bad as Mr. Southey's variable politics. Will nothing please his Lordship-neither dull fixtures nor shining weathercocks? We might multiply instances of a want of continuous reasoning, if we were fond of this sort of petty cavilling. Yet we do not know that there is any better quarry in the book. Why does his Lordship tell us that "ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry," and yet that "Petrarch the sonnetteer is esteemed by good judges the very highest poet of Italy? Mr. Bowles is a sonnetteer, and a very good one. Why does he assert that "the poet who executes the best is the highest, whatever his department," and then affirm in the next page that didactic poetry requires more mind, more wisdom, more power than all the forests that ever were walked for their description;" and then again, two pages after, that "a good poet can make a silk purse of a sow's ear;" that is, as he interprets it, "can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America?" That's a Non Sequitur, as Partridge has it. Why, contending that all subjects are alike indifferent to the genuine poet, does he turn round upon himself, and assume that "the sun shining upon a warmingpan cannot be made sublime or poetical?" Why does he say that "there is nothing in nature like the bust of the Antinous, except the Venus," which is not in nature? Why does he call the first" that wonderful creation of perfect beauty," when it is a mere portrait, and on that account so superior to his favourite coxcomb, the Apollo? Why does he state that " more poetry cannot be gathered into existence than we here see, and yet that this poetry arises neither from nature nor moral exaltedness; Mr. Bowles and he being at issue on this very point, viz. the one affirming that the essence of poetry is derived

"

from nature, and his Lordship, that it consists in moral truth? Why does he consider a shipwreck as an artificial incident? Why does he make the excellence of Falconer's Shipwreck consist in its technicalities, and not in its faithful description of common feelings and inevitable calamity? Why does he say all this, and much more, which he should not? Why does he write prose at all? Yet, in spite of all this trash, there is one passage for which we forgive him, and here it is.

"The truth is, that in these days the grand primum mobile of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fashion, and while it lasts, will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the times. I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided among themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum." These words should be written in letters of gold, as the testimony of a lofty poet to a great moral truth, and we can hardly have a quarrel with the writer of them.

There are three questions which form the subject of the present pamphlet; viz. What is poetical? What is natural? What is artificial? And we get an answer to none of them. The controversy, as it is carried on between the chief combatants, is much like a dispute between two artists, one of whom should maintain that blue is the only colour fit to paint with, and the other that yellow alone ought ever to be used. Much might be said on both sides, but little to the purpose. Mr. Campbell leads off the dance, and launches a ship as a beautiful and poetical artificial object. But he so loads it with patriotic, natural, and foreign associations, and the sails are "so perfumed that the winds are love-sick," that Mr. Bowles darts upon and seizes it as contraband to art, swear

ing that it is no longer the work of the shipwright, but of Mr. Campbell's lofty poetic imagination; and dedicates its stolen beauty to the right owners, the sun, the winds, and the waves. Mr. Campbell, in his eagerness to make all sure, having overstepped the literal mark, presses no farther into the controversy; but Lord Byron, who is "like an Irishman in a row, any body's customer," carries it on with good polemical hardihood, and runs a very edifying parallel between the ship without the sun, the winds and waves,—and the sun, the winds, and waves without the ship. "The sun," says Mr. Bowles, "is poetical, by your Lordship's admission." We think it would have been so without it. But his Lordship contends that "the sun would no longer be poetical, if it did not shine on ships, or pyramids, or fortresses, and other works of art," (he expressly excludes "footmen's liveries" and "brass warming-pans" from among those artificial objects that reflect new splendour on the eye of Heaven) to which Mr. Bowles replies, that let the sun but shine, and it is poetical per se," in which we think him right. His Lordship decompounds the wind into a caput mortuum of poetry, by making it howl through a pig-stye, instead of Roaming the illimitable ocean wide; and turns a water-fall, or a clear spring, into a slop-bason, to prove that nature owes its elegance to art. His Lordship is "ill at these numbers." Again, he affirms that the ruined temple of the Parthenon is poetical, and the coast of Attica with Cape Colonna, and the recollection of Falconer's Shipwreck, classical. Who ever doubted it? What then? Does this prove that the Rape of the Lock is not a mock-heroic poem? He assures us that a storm with cock-boats scudding before it is interesting, particularly if this happens to take place in the Hellespont, over which the noble critic swam; and makes it a question, whether the dark cypress groves, or the white towers and minarets of Constantinople are more impressive to the imagination? What has this to do with Pope's grotto at Twickenham, or the boat in which he paddled across the Thames to Kew?

Lord Byron tells us (and he should know) that the Grand Canal at Venice is a muddy ditch, without the stately palaces by its side; but then it is a natural, not an artificial canal; and finally, he asks, what would the desert of Tadmor be without the ruins of Palmyra, or Salisbury Plain without Stone-Henge? Mr. Bowles who, though tedious and teazing, has" damnable iteration in him,' and has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert alone " conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of solitude;" and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath, chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, 66 carts, caravans, raree-showmen, butchers' boys, coaches with coronets, and livery servants behind them," even though Stone-Henge did not lift its pale head above its barren bosom. Indeed, Lord Byron's notions of art and poetry are sufficiently wild, romantic, far-fetched, obsolete: his taste is Oriental, Gothic; his Muse is not domesticated; there is nothing mimmineepimminee, modern, polished, light, fluttering, in his standard of the sublime and beautiful: if his thoughts are proud, pampered, gorgeous, and disdain to mingle with the objects of humble, unadorned nature, his lordly eye at least "keeps distance due" from the vulgar vanities of fashionable life; from drawing-rooms, from card-parties, and from courts. He is not a carpet poet. He does not sing the sofa, like poor Cowper. He is qualified neither for poet-laureate nor court-newsman. He is at issue with the Morning Post and Fashionable World, on what constitutes the true pathos and sublime of human life. He hardly thinks Lady Charlemont so good as the Venus, or as an Albanian girl, that he saw mending the road in the mountains. If he does not like flowers and forests, he cares as little for stars, garters, and princes' feathers, for diamond necklaces and paste-buckles. If his Lordship cannot make up his mind to the quiet, the innocence, the simple, unalterable grandeur of nature, we are sure that he hates the frippery, the foppery, and pert grimace of art, quite as much. His Lordship likes the poetry, the imaginative part of

art, and so do we; and so we believe did the late Mr. John Scott. He likes the sombre part of it, the thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the individual and the moment, (these are to him not "luscious as locusts, but bitter as coloquintida "); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of Time and Fate over the proudest works of man-with the crumbling monuments of human glory-with the dim vestiges of countless generations of men with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with the elements of nature. This is what he calls art and artificial poetry. But this is not what any body else understands by the terms, commonly or critically speaking. There is as little connexion between the two things as between the grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts, who appeared at court the other day, and Lady Godiva-as there is between a reigning toast and an Egyptian mummy. Lord Byron, through the whole of the argument, pelts his reverend opponent with instances, like throwing a stone at a dog, which the incensed animal runs after, picks up, mumbles between his teeth, and tries to see what it is made of. The question is, how ever, too tough for Mr. Bowles's powers of mastication, and though the fray is amusing, nothing comes of it. Between the Editor of Pope, and the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine, his Lordship sits

high arbiter,

And by decision more embroils the fray.

What is the use of taking a work of art, from which "all the art of art is flown," a mouldering statue, or a fallen column in Tadmor's marble waste, that staggers and overawes the mind, and gives birth to a thousand dim reflections, by seeing the power and pride of man prostrate, and laid low in the dust; what is there in this to prove the self-sufficiency of the upstart pride and power of man? A Ruin is poetical. Because it is a work of art, says Lord Byron. No, but because it is

a work of art o'erthrown. In it we see, as in a mirror, the life, the hopes, the labour of man defeated, and crumbling away under the slow hand of time; and all that he has done reduced to nothing, or to a useless mockery. Or as one of the breadand-butter poets has described the same thing a little differently, in his tale of Peter Bell the potter,

The stones and tower
Seem'd fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.

If this is what Lord Byron means by artificial objects and interests, there is an end of the question, for he will get no critic, no school to differ with him. But a fairer instance would be a snug citizen's box by the road-side, newly painted, plastered and furnished, with every thing in the newest fashion and gloss, not an article the worse for wear, and a lease of one-and-twenty years to run, and then let us see what Lord Byron, or his friend and "host of human life" will make of it, compared with the desolation, and the waste of all these comforts, arts, and elegances. Or let him take-not the pyramids of Egypt, but the pavilion at Brighton, and make a poetical description of it in prose or verse. We defy him. The poetical interest, in his Lordship's transposed cases, arises out of the imaginary interest. But the truth is, that where art flourishes and attains its object, imagination droops, and poetry along with it. It ceases, or takes a different and ambiguous shape; it may be elegant, ingenious, pleasing, instructive, but if it aspires to the semblance of a higher interest, or the ornaments of the highest fancy, it necessarily becomes burlesque, as for instance, in the Rape of the Lock. As novels end with marriage, poetry ends with the consummation and success of art. And the reason (if Lord Byron would attend to it) is pretty obvious. Where all the wishes and wants are supplied, anticipated by art, there can be no strong cravings after ideal good, nor dread of unimaginable evils; the sources of terror and pity must be dried up where the hand has done every thing, nothing is left for the imagination to do or to attempt: where all is regulated by