University of Virginia Library

Our hero appears to have been “all naked feeling and raw life,” like Arvalan in the Curse of Kehama.

This is the Pegasa of the Cumberland school of poetry. Old Poulter's Mare is the heroine “of one of our old ballads, so full of beauty.” A modern bard, “whose works will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten,” was at infinite trouble to procure an imperfect copy of this precious piece of antiquity, and has rescued it from oblivion, si dîs placet, in the pages of Thalaba.

After all, perhaps, there is not much bragging in the speech of our hero. He has classical authority for self-panegyric, and, what is still better, the authority of Mr. Southey:

And again:

What degree of pleasure Cato would have derived from the Carmen Triumphale for the year 1814, is a point that remains to be decided.

Ranarian minstrels of all ages and nations have entertained a high opinion of their own melody. The Muses of Styx, the Πιεριδες Καταχθονιαι, have transferred their seat in modern days to the banks of the Northern Lakes, where they inflate their tuneful votaries with inspiration and egotism. O dolce concento! when, to the philosophic wanderer on the twilight shore, ascends from the depths of Winander the choral modulation:

This seems to be an imitation of two lines in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, selected by Mr. Southey as the motto to the Curse of Kehama:

It is not at all surprising, that a man, under a process of moral and political metamorphosis, should desire the patronage of this multiform god, who may be regarded as the tutelary saint of the numerous and thriving sect of Anythingarians. Perhaps the passage would have been more applicable to himself, though less so to his poem, if he had read, suo periculo:

This language was not much known to our ancestors; but it is now pretty well understood by the majority of the H---of C---, by the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly venders of panegyric and defamation, and by the quondam republicans of the Northern Lakes. The echoes of Grasmere and Derwentwater have responded to its melodious vocables. The borderers of Tweed and Teviot, and the “Braw, braw lads of Edinbroo’,” are well versed in its tangible eloquence. Specimens of its use in composition may be seen in the Courier newspaper, in the Quarterly Review, in the Edinburgh Annual Register, and in the receipts of the stamp-commissioners for the county of Westmoreland.

C---s: This is a learned man, “who does not want instruction:” an independent man, “who always votes according to his conscience,” which has a singular habit of finding the minister invariably right: a free man, who always “takes the liberty” to do that which is most profitable to himself: a man, in short, of the first magnitude, that “don't care nothing for nobody” whom he cannot turn a penny by: Rarum ac memorabile magni Gutturis exemplum, conducendusque magister: who will be inexhaustible food for laughter while he lives; and, though not witty himself, be the cause of wit in others: and who, when he shall have been found, cum capite in lasano, dead of a surfeit after a civic feast, shall be entombed in some mighty culinary utensil, vast as the patina of Vitellius, or the fish-kettle of Domitian, which shall be erected in the centre of the salle des gourmands, with this Homeric inscription, to transmit his virtues to posterity: ΜΕΤΕΠΡΕΠΕ : ΓΑΣΤΕΡΙ : ΜΑΡΓΗΙ : ΑΖΗΧΕΣ : ΦΑΓΕΜΕΝ : ΚΑΙ : ΠΙΕΜΕΝ : ΟΨΔΕ : ΟΙ : ΗΝ : Ις : ΟΨΔΕ : ΒΙΗ : ΕΙΔΟΣ : ΔΕ : ΜΑΛΑ : ΜΕΓΑΣ : ΗΝ : ΟΡΑΑΣΘΑΙ.

This must have been something which had finished its education, as the saying is, at one of our learned universities.

There is a modern bubble-blower of this description, whose philosophical career it is agreeable to trace. First, we discover him up to his neck in fluids and crystallizations, laboring to build a geological system, in all respects conformable to the very scientific narrative of that most enlightened astronomer and profound cosmogonist, Moses. Emerging from his “primitive ocean,” he soars into the opaque atmosphere of scholastic dialectics, whence he comes forth the doughty champion of that egregious engine of the difficiles nugæ and labor ineptiarum, syllogism. Armed with this formidable weapon, he rushes into the metaphysical arena, in the consistent character of a dogmatising antihyloist, insanire parans certa ratione modoque: maintaining the existence of three distinct substances, that of God, that of angels, and that of the souls of men, and annihilating in toto the sun, moon, and stars, and all “the visible diurnal sphere;” denying the evidence of his senses, and asserting the reality of chimæras. Man, according to him, is a being spiritual, intelligent, and immortal, while all other animals are insentient machines; a proposition which must be amply established in the mind of every one, who will take the trouble of comparing a man-milliner with a lion, an alderman with an elephant, or a Bond-street lounger with a Newfoundland dog.—See the Geological, Logical, and Metaphysical Essays of Richard Kirwan, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., P.R.I.A., &c. &c. &c.

Metaphysical science, in the hands of a Locke, a Berkeley, an Hume, or a Drummond, demands and receives my utmost respect and admiration; but I must confess there are moments, when, after having fatigued my understanding with the lucubrations of such a systematical déraisonneur as this, I am tempted to exclaim with Anacreon:

The third part of the Metaphysical Essays will afford a delectable treat to the observer of phænomena, who may be desirous of contemplating a meteorosophistical spider completely entangled in his own cobweb; and I can scarcely help thinking it was to some such paradoxographical philosophaster that Virgil alluded, when he said:

It is much to be lamented, that, before Sir Proteus quitted his metaphysical shape, it did not occur to our hero to propound to him the celebrated philosophical question: Utrum, Protée omniforme se faisant cigale, et musicalement exerçant sa voix és jours caniculaires, pourroit, d'une rosée matutine soigneusement emballée au mois de Mai, faire une tierce concoction, devant le cours entier d'une escharpe zodiacale?—Perhaps Mr. Kirwan himself will undertake the solution: I know no man so well qualified.

Cowper.

The severity of this blue-jacketed gentleman has been productive, on many occasions, of very salutary effects. He is much more reprehensible for having condescended to play the part of Justice Midas to Mr. Wordsworth, Mrs. Opie, Mr. Wilson, &c. &c. &c., while superior claimants have been treated with harshness or contempt. If praise be withheld from Moore, comparative justice requires that it should not be given to Bloomfield. The philosophical enemy of idolatry may tear the laurel wreath from the brow of Apollo; but he must not transfer it to the statue of Pan.

Mare Australe Incognitum. For a satisfactory account of this undiscovered sea, consult the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth, Esq.

John Bull is here alluded to in his domestic capacity. He is a sturdy wight, but the arch-fiend Corruption has proved too strong for him. Let not the temporary elation of triumph over his most inveterate foreign foe blind him to the insidious inroads of that more formidable enemy, which has already plunged him so deep in the alkaline ebullitions mentioned in the text. Among the causes which have contributed to his submersion may be enumerated the selfish and mercenary apostacy of his quondam literary champions. Where is now “the eye that sees, the heart That feels, the voice that in these evil times, Amid these evil tongues, exalts itself, And cries aloud against iniquity?” Let the Edinburgh Annual Register answer the question. Where are “the skirts of the departing year?” Waving, like those of a Courier's jacket, in the withering gales of ministerial influence.—The antique enemies of “the monster Pitt” are now the panegyrists of the immaculate Castlereagh. The spell which Armida breathed over her captives was not more magically mighty in the operation of change, than are the golden precepts of the language politic, when presented in a compendious and tangible shape to the “sons of little men.”

These three wiseacres go to sea in their tub, as their prototypes of Gotham did in their bowl, not to fish for the moon, but to write nonsense about her.

Who knows not Alice Fell? the little orphan Alice Fell? with her cloak of duffel grey? and Harry Gill, whose teeth they chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter still? and Jack and Jill, that climbed the hill, to fetch a pail of water; when Jack fell down, and cracked his crown, and Jill came tumbling after?

Surely this cannot allude to Mr. ΕΣΤΗΣΕ Coleridge, the profound transcendental metaphysician of the Friend, the consistent panegyrical politician of the Courier, the self-elected laureate of the asinine king, the compounder of the divinest narcotic under the shape of a tragedy that ever drugged the beaux of Drury-Lane, the author of that irresistibly comic ballad, the Ancient Mariner, and of a very exquisite piece of tragical mirth, also in the form of a ballad, entitled the Three Graves, which read—“if you can!”

The adventures of this worthy are narrated in a rhapsodical congeries of limping verse, entitled the Isle of Palms, very loftily extolled by the Edinburgh Reviewers, and very peremptorily condemned by the tribunal of common sense.

The whining cant and drivelling affectation of this author, with his “dear God,” his “blessed creatures,” and his “happy living things,” which would be insufferable in a spinster half-dying with megrim, become trebly disgusting in the mouth of a man, who has no such fine sympathies with the animal creation, and is not only an indefatigable angler, but a cock-fighter of the first notoriety. It is a curious fact, that as he was one day going to a match, accompanied by a man who carried two bags of fighting-cocks, he unexpectedly met his friend Wordsworth (who was coming to visit him), and immediately caused the man to secrete himself and the cocks behind the hedge; an anecdote which redounds greatly to the credit of Mr. Wordsworth's better feelings, and makes me strongly inclined to forgive him his Idiot Boy, and the Moods of his own mind, and even Harry Gill.

The twilight of this wanderer's day is a dim morning twilight, on which no sun will rise. The day-beams of genius are quenched in the mists of fanaticism.

Conon was a farmer's boy, a minstrel of cows and cow-sheds, and cow-dung, and cow-pock; yet nevertheless a considerable favourite with the delicate and fashionable fair-ones of his day: et quis fuit alter? scil. the bellman: the bellman, κατ' εξοχην. He was a character very ridiculously remarkable in the annals of rural perfumery, who most ludicrously mistook himself for a poet and philosopher, passed much of his time in star-gazing, wrote some dismal jargon which he christened Sonnets on the Petrarchan Model, kept a journal of the rain and wind, and rang many a peal of nonsense in praise of his friend Conon, the farmer's boy, who was indeed tali dignus amico.

Note, by Professor Nodus-in-Scirpo, of the University of Cambridge.—It is well known that a certain little poet challenged a certain great critic to the deadly arbitrament of powder and wadding. Of this circumstance the multiform Proteus here seems to make himself symbolical. The wig seems to typify the body corporate of criticism, which, being roughly handled in one of its side-curls, opens fire from all its frizzles on the daring assailant in a volley of Indian crackers, the different colours of which are composed of the party-colours supposed to be worn by the respective corps of critics militant.

Of Reviews in the present day we have satis superque. We have the Edinburgh Review, already eulogised; and the Monthly Review, which I believe is tolerably impartial, though not very remarkable either for learning or philosophy; and the Quarterly Review, a distinguished vehicle of compositions in the language politic; and the British Critic, which proceeds on the enlightened principle that nothing can possibly be good coming from an heretic or a republican; and the Antijacobin Review, . . . .; and the British Review, of which I can say nothing, never having read a single page of it; and the Eclectic Review, an exquisite focus of evangelical illumination; and the New Review, which promises to be an useful Notitia Literaria; and the Critical Review, which I am very reluctant to mention at all, as I can only dismiss it in the words of Captain Bobadil:—“It is to gentlemen I speak: I talk to no scavenger.”

A wooden car, perpetuo revolubile gyro, may rumble through Ireland, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, and annoy the ears of the English metropolis with the heavy echo of its wheels; but it must not pretend to be the vehicle of poetic inspiration, unless the inutile lignum be mechanically impelled to the proclamation of its own emptiness. To illustrate this proposition by a case in point. A minute inspection of the varieties of human absurdity brings us acquainted with the existence of a certain knight, who has travelled rapidly, profited sparingly, and published enormously. Sublimed into extraordinary daring by the garlands of dwarf-laurel, torn from the bogs of the Shannon and the shores of the Caledonian lakes, he has actually made a profane excursion on the boundaries of Parnassus, and presented the public with a curious collection of weeds, under the facetious title of Poems, by Sir John Carr! Amongst these is one on a paper-mill. The knight has been so good a friend to the paper-mill, that had his benefactions stopped with his custom, he would have merited the eternal gratitude of all that band of mechanics, who begin, what other mechanics like himself conclude, the process of making a book. But his bounty does not stop so short. Not satisfied with having raised the price of rags and the wages of the paper-millers, he has actually favoured the world with a poem on the subject, written, as he says, en badinage. We ought to be much obliged to him for the information, as it shews, by contradistinction, that some of his works have been written in sober sadness; though I believe the greater part of those indefatigable devourers of new publications, who, by the aid of snuff and coffee, have contrived to keep themselves awake over his lucubrations, have imagined all his works to have been designed for badinage, from the burlesque solemnity and grave no-meaning of his statistical, political, and topographical discussions, to the very tragical merriment of his retailed puns and right pleasant original conceits. But here is a poem written professedly en badinage. Therefore badinons un peu with the worthy cavaliere errante.

Written en badinage, after visiting a paper-mill near Tunbridge Wells, in consequence of the lovely Miss W., who excels in drawing, requesting the author to describe the process of making paper in verse.”

I should imagine, from the young lady's requesting Sir John to employ his grey quill on a paper-mill, that the lovely Miss W. excels in quizzing as much as she does in drawing.

Or that ever came from it, Sir John might have added.

Sir John has been cut up so often, that he must be well used to the operation: it is satisfactory to find him so well pleased with it. Nature indeed seems to have formed him for the express purpose of being cut in pieces. He is a true literary polypus, and multiplies under the knife of dissection.

This line lets us into an extraordinary piece of taste on the part of the Knight. He does not like to be hanged. Non porrigit ora capistro.

Vivide et εναργως.

“The stout press:”—Stout, indeed, when even Sir John's quartos have not broken it down.—“Had forced me flat:”—Sir John, we see, is of opinion that great force would be requisite to make him flat. For my part, I think that he is quite flat enough already, and that he has rather communicated his own flatness to the press, than derived that quality from it.

This is gallantry indeed: for the sake of the lovely Miss W. Sir John would even suffer the suspension of his outward man, notwithstanding his singular antipathy to the process.

Cut first, sir, and dried after, like one of his own cut and dried anecdotes, introduced so very apropos, as “a curious circumstance that happened to me.”

By dint of cutting up and hanging Sir John is made useful. Presently he will be ornamental.

We see Sir John does not think of praying till after he has been hanged, contrary to the usual process on similar occasions.

Nay, nay, Sir John, not on you. “Verse must be dull on subjects so d---d dry.”

A classical exclamation, equivalent to the medius-fidius of Petronius, the Ædepol of Terence, and the νη τον ουρανον of Aristophanes.

The world is well aware of Sir John's talent for conveying the pretty chit-chat of his acquaintance into his dapper quartos; but how pleasant the operation has proved to any one but himself, I am not prepared to decide.

An Attic contraction.

If this should ever be the case, I can furnish the young lady with a suitable exordium from an old Italian poet:

I know not what success the lovely Miss W. might have in making Sir John ornamental. Gillray, we all know, tried his pencil on him very successfully, and fixed a glowing tint (of anger, not of shame) on the cheek of the exasperated Sir John.

So ends this miserable shred of what Sir John calls badinage. “Away! thou rag! thou quantity! thou remnant!” And so much for the Poems of Sir John Carr.

Non multum abludit imago from Mr. W. R. Spenser, a writer of fantastical namby-pambies and epigrammatico-sentimental madrigals, on the clasp of a waist or the tie of a garter, on the ancle of Lady H---k, or the bosom of Lady J---y, &c. &c. &c. Mr. S. trespasses so often on forbidden ground, that the reader begins to anticipate strange things, and is almost ready to exclaim, Quos agor in specus?

The fashionable world has its own luminaries of taste and genius. Solem suum sua sidera norunt. But they have more of the meteor than the star, and even of the meteor more of its transience than its lustre. The little lustre they possess is indeed meteoric, for it shines within a narrow circle, and only a feeble report of its existence passes the limits of its sphere. Ad nos vix tenuis famæ perlabitur aura. The solitary philosopher reads in some critical ephemeris that such a meteor has been observed: he notices the subject for a moment, and returns to the contemplation of those stars, which have shone and will continue to shine for ages.

There are no results of human art, in which the fluxum atque caducum is so strikingly exemplified as in those productions which constitute what may be denominated fashionable literature. This is one of the affairs of men in which there is no tide. There is no refluence in fashionable taste. It is an everflowing stream, which rolls on its inexhaustible store of new poems, new romances, new biography, new criticism, new morality, —to that oblivious gulph, from which a very few are redeemed by the swans of renown. The few so redeemed cease to be fashionable, and to the really literary part of mankind they scarcely begin to be known, when to the soi-disant literati of the fashionable world they are already numbered with the things that were; with Dryden, and Drayton, and Spenser, and other obsolete worthies; of every one of whom the fashionable reader may exclaim: Notus mihi nomine tantum! and who have been rudely thrust aside to make way for these new-comers, as the choicest productions of Greek and Roman taste were trampled into the dust on the irruption of the Goths and Vandals, or as the statues of Apollo, Venus, and the Graces were thrown down and demolished by the more barbarous fanatics of the dark ages, in order that St. Benedict, and St. Dominic, and St. Anthropophagos might be placed upon their pedestals.

The great desideratum in fashionable literature is novelty. The last publications which have issued from the press in the department of the belles lettres must cooperate with the last princely fête, the last elegant affair of crim. con., the last semivir imported from Italy, in filling up that portion of fashionable conversation, which is not engrossed by pure no-meaning, by party, or by scandal. These publications are caught up wet from the press, and thrown carelessly on the table, the sofa, or the ottoman, to furnish a ready answer to the certain questions of the lounging visitor: Is this Mr. S.'s new poem? Have you seen Mr. L.'s romance? Have you met with Miss M.'s puritanical novel? Have you fallen asleep, as I did, over the last Battle? till some newer effusion of fancy dispossess them of their post of honor, and send them to a private station on the shelves of the library, to sleep with those that have been mighty in their day, with the Tales of Wonder and the Botanic Garden, with the flowery Wreath of Della Crusca and the barren Landscape of Knight, with the Travels of Sir John Carr, the Biography of Mr. Shepherd, and the Criticism of Dr. Drake.

This undistinguishing passion for literary novelty seems to involve nothing less than a total extinction of every thing like discrimination in taste and nature in imagination: and it would be rendering no slight service to the cause of sound criticism and philosophical literature, to hold up Banquo's mirror to the readers of the fashionable world, and shew them, at one view, the phantoms of those productions which they have successively admired and forgotten, from the days of love-sick marygolds and sentimental daffydowndillies, to these of pathetic ruffians, poetical bandits, and “maids that love the moon.” If, in the execution of this office, it should sometimes be necessary to perform the part of a resurrection-man in criticism, and compel the canonized form of many a would-be poet and pilferer of old romances to burst the cerements of his literary sepulchre, the operation would not be wholly without its use. The audible memento which these spectres would thunder in the ears of the indefatigable scribblers of the day would operate in terrorem on the side of common sense, and by stifling in its birth many a crude embryo of nonsense, save many a groan to the press, many a head-ache to the critic, and much perversion of intellect to the rising generation.

Praise, when well deserved, should be freely given: but in cases so desperate as the present, the severity of justice should not be tempered by the least degree of unmerited mercy.—Common sense and taste can scarcely stem the torrent of doggrel and buffoonery, which is daily poured forth by the press,

The gardens of Parnassus are over-run with weeds, which have been suffered to fatten in obscurity by the mistaken lenity of contempt. To bruise their heads is useless: they must be torn up by the roots before any wholesome plant can have room to flourish in the soil.—If we desire that Philosophy may re-enter the temple of Apollo, we must not hesitate to throw down the Corycian Cave the rubbish that defiles its courts and chokes its vestibule. I would apply to subjects of taste the severe morality of Sophocles:

Southey's Curse of Kehama.

Sir Proteus, having fixed himself in the shape most peculiarly remote from taste and nature, that of a minstrel of the Scottish border, continues to act up to the full spirit of the character he has assumed, by fiddling with indefatigable pertinacity to the fall of the curtain.

For a particular description of the roots of the ocean, see Mr. Southey's Thalaba.

Lady of the Lake.

Southey's Madoc.

“A long, shrill, piercing, modulated cry.” Southey's Madoc.

This would be no ill compliment to the author last cited, a professed admirer and imitator of Sternhold and Hopkins.

There is a gentleman in this condition in Mr. Southey's Curse of Kehama, who is nevertheless perfectly alive and vigorous, makes two or three attempts to ravish a young lady, and is invariably repelled by a very severe fustigation. The times have been, that when the brain was out the man would die; but, with so many living contradictions of this proposition, we can scarcely rank the dead-alive Arvalan among the most monstrous fictions of Hindoo mythology; whatever we may think of the spinning-wheel arms of Kehama, who contrives to split himself into eight pieces, for the convenience of beating eight devils at once: for which profane amusement he is turned to a red-hot coal. Voilà la belle imagination!

“The good Lord Marmion, by my life!”

Sir Proteus appears to borrow this part of his many-changing melody from the exordium of Mr. Scott's Rokeby, which is in manner and form following:

It would not be easy to find a minstrel strain more opposite, in every respect, to taste and nature than this. What is the summer glow of the moon? Glow is heat or the appearance of heat. But there is no heat in the moon's rays, nor do I believe that the face of that planet ever presented such an appearance. The cloud, which racks over the face of the moon, and varies the tincture of her shroud, is a very incomprehensible cloud indeed. By rack I presume Mr. Scott to understand the course of the clouds when in motion. This, Mr. Tooke has shewn, is not the true meaning of the word. Rack is merely that which is reeked: a vapour, a steam, an exhalation. It is the past participle of the Anglo-saxon verb, pecan, exhalare: but to talk of a cloud reeking or steaming over the face of the moon would be downright nonsense. But whether rack signify motion or vapour, what is the shroud of the moon, of which the cloud varies the tincture? It cannot be the cloud itself, for in that case the cloud would be said to vary its own tincture. It plainly implies something external to the moon and different from the cloud, and what is that something? Most assuredly nothing that ever came within the scope of meteorological observation. The moon, thus clouded and shrouded, reflects on her disk various mental phænomena, which are seen by the warder. Now it is most probable, that the warders of past days, like the centinels of the present, were in the habit of looking at nature with the eyes of vulgar mortals, and not of remarking mental phænomena in the disk of the moon. Had the poor little pitiful whining Wilfrid discovered these chimæras, it would at least have been more in character. The dark-red appearance, which would characterise the flame of anger and the glow of apprehension,the moon never assumes but when very near the horizon, and in that position her tincture does not vary. “Shifting a shade to come and go” will scarcely pass for good English on this side of the Tweed. The livery of sorrow, if it mean any thing, must mean a mourning coat, and what idea is conveyed to the mind, by the figure of a black livery dying in darkness?

Our hero is not singular. The harp of Israel is exalted above the lyre of Greece by the poetical orthodoxy of the bards of the lakes:

which accounts for the air of conscious superiority and dignified contempt they assume towards those perverted disciples of Homer and Sophocles, who are insensible to the primitive mellifluence of patriarchal modulation. It is not less creditable to the soundness of their theology than to the purity of their taste, that they herein differ toto cælo from the profane Frenchman, who concludes his poem with a treaty between the principal personages of the ancient and modern religions of Europe, by which it is stipulated, that the latter shall continue throned in glory on Mount Sinai, while the former shall retain the exclusive and undisturbed possession of Mount Parnassus.

This shot, I am informed, is still to be seen at Sheerness.

See page 289, sqq.

Wordsworth's Poems, vol. ii. p. 72.

The dwarf-laurel is a little stunted plant, growing in ditches and bogs, and very dissimilar to that Parnassian shrub, “which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore;” as in the Carmen Triumphale for the year 1814, mellifluously singeth the Protean bard, Robert Southey, Esquire, Poet-Laureate!!!