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NUMBER XII.

Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta,
Quale sopor fessis in gramine-quale per æstum
Dulcis aquæ saliente sitim restinguere rivo.

VIRGIL.

THIS beautiful, but too much neglected poem, had ere this attracted the admiration it so justly merits, had not the stern critique of Dr. Johnson intervened to blast its rising fame. Ajuster relish of the excellences of poetry, and a more candid style of criticism, may be considered as a characteristic of several of the first literary men of the present day; and but for the harsh censure of the author of the Rambler, the pages of Dyer would now, perhaps, have been familiar to every lover and judge of nervous and highly finished description. As it is, however, they are seldom consulted, from an idea, that little worthy of applause would gratify the inquirer. To remove, therefore, VOL. I.

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the prejudices which have been sown, and to place before the reader some of the numerous passages of the FLEECE which are written in the genuine spirit of poetry, form the purport of our paper.

Johnson, to occasional felicity of diction, great purity of moral, and energy of thought, united a very considerable portion of critical acumen, and his Lives of Dryden and Pope are noble specimens of his powers of discrimination; yet, notwithstanding this rare combination of striking qualities, he was deficient in that sensibility to, and enthusiasm for, the charms of nature, in that relish for the simple and pathetic, so absolutely necessary to just criticism in poetry. To these defalcations were superadded an unreasonable antipathy to blank verse, a constitutional ruggedness of temper, and a bigoted, though well-meant, adhesion to some very extravagant political and religious tenets. His biographical details have suffered much from these peculiarities of temper and of taste; and a Milton, an Akenside, a Collins, a Dyer, and a Gray, might upbraid the Literary Dictator for his bitter and illiberal invective, his churlish and parsimonious praise, 'his great and various misrepresentations.

To refute his strictures upon Dyer can prove a task of no very formidable kind, and may restore to due rank a poem which contains a vast variety of landscapes drawn and coloured in the most spirited and fascinating style.

"Of THE FLEECE," says our harsh critic, "which never became popular, and is now universally neglected, I can say little that is likely to recal it to attention. The wool

comber and the poet appear to me such discordant natures, that an attempt to bring them together is to couple the serpent with the fowl. When Dyer, whose mind was not unpoetical, has done his utmost, by interesting his reader in our native commodity, by interspersing rural imagery and incidental digressions, by clothing small images in great words, and by all the writer's arts of delusion, the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture, sink him under insuperable oppression; and the disgust which blank verse, encumbering and encumbered, superadds to an unpleasing subject, soon repels the reader, however willing to be pleased."

"Let me, however, honestly report whatever may counterbalance this weight of censure. I have been told that Akenside, who, upon a poetical question, has a right to be heard, said, "That he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's Fleece, for, if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence."*

In attending to these animadversions it may, in the first place, be observed, that few poetical productions of great and original merit ever rapidly became favourites with the public. They, in general, require their more brilliant passages to be developed and appreciated by men of sound judgment and taste, before they can be relished or understood by the multitude of those who read merely for amusement, and who possess, perhaps, no vigour of understanding, or power of selection, adequate to form a just estimate for themselves. No great length of time had elapsed between the publication of the FLEECE in 1757, and the critical effusions of Johnson; and, if it be considered that

*Johnson's Lives, Vol. iv. p. 321.

didactic poetry, as not immediately addressing the passions, can never hope to vie with the dramatic, in point of celerity of introduction, it may be affirmed that a sufficient space had not been allowed for the acquisition of numerous admirers, when the Doctor passed sentence upon the work, and thwarted its progress towards public esteem. That it was universally neglected, however, at the period when the Biography of Johnson was published, is by no means the fact; Dr. Warton, perhaps the first of our critics, and whose merit Johnson has himself acknowledged in the highest terms, has classed the Fleece, in every edition of his Essay on Pope, among the excellent pieces of the didactic kind which the moderns have produced; and though, as we have already observed, its merits are not duly admitted, yet has it been occasionally quoted from the era of its publication, to the present times, and even a friend of our Biographer, Scott of Amwell, has termed it the "noblest of didactic poems." He who shall peruse the extracts from the Fleece appended to these observations, will hear, with no small indignation, the critic asserting that he "can say little that is likely to recal it to attention,"

Had the

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