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the noble homage which he delights in offering to maternal and domestic virtue; such sketches as these demonstrate that there is no malignant worldly rancour in the display of his appalling satiric power, but a virtuous indignation, scorning folly, and hating vice and crime, whether ragged or ribanded, with a perfect hatred.

But who art thou, whose passion-wither'd face
Sheds mournful beauty through the netted lace?
Those radiant orbs, that so obtrusive shine,
Like stars, beneath thine eyebrow's arching line,
That lip's vermilion,-brow of lucid snow,
Can these betray thee, child of sin and woe?
Alas, that ever woman's gentle soul
Should sink to glutted passion's base control!
But still, around thine air there lurks a grief
That longs, yet will not ask, a pure relief;
Perchance, ere villains taught thee thence to roam,
A mother clasp'd thee in her cottage home;
Some grey-lock'd sire sat near his evening hearth,
Hung on thy neck, and bless'd thy happy birth!

Again, so exhaustless is his fertility, that, in the affluent consciousness of power, he tosses from him, with contemptuous waste, the following picture of a metropolitan fire, unmatched, I think, by any writer -certainly by Darwin's balanced and inflated descrip tion of a similar subject.

A FIRE.

But list! huge wheels roll o'er the jarring stones,
I hear the clatt'ring hoofs, and rabble's tones!
Before yon dome the creaking engines wait,
Where shield-mark'd firemen urge the liquid freight,

While, grandly awful to the startled sight,
Rear the red columns of resistless light!
The windows deepen into dreadful glow,
Till the hot glass bursts shatt'ring down below;
While darting fires around their wood-work blaze,
And lick the water, hissing as it plays;

Above the crackling roof fierce flames arise,
And whirl their sparks, careering to the skies;
Triumphantly the ravenous blazes mount,
As if they started from a fiery fount,
Now, cloud-like, piling up in billowy fire,
Now quiv'ring sunk, to re-collect their ire :-
But see! again whirl up the blood-red flames,
In vain the rushing flood their fury tames;
Like burning mountain-peaks, aloft they raise
Their jagged columns of unequal blaze,

Till the loose beams and flaking rafters fall,
And in a thund'ring earthquake bury all!

The concluding moral of this satire, addressed to the virtuous few who might be tempted by the unvarying sight of shallow knavery triumphant, and talented honesty in the dust, to disgust or doubt, has a softened flow of verse, suitable to the noble pathos and moral elevation of the philosophical sentiment.

And thou, lorn wisdom's child, where'er thou art—
That mark'st each May-morn dream of hope depart,
The knave and parasite on fortune's throne,
Whilst thou hast only thought to call thine own;
Still nobly live the solitary sage,

And soar in mind above this venal age;

Rich in thyself, partake the best content,

A heart well govern'd, and a life well spent!

In reverting to all the extracts from Mr. Montgomery's works, and looking to the distinct and peculiar excellencies which they exhibit in so wide a range of

subject, and such various walks of poetry, I feel that I am more liable,—through that guarded and respectful cautiousness of discretion which every writer ought to observe in addressing the entire body of the thinking public,―to the charge of underrating, than to that of overrating Mr. Montgomery's poetical grade. To the evidential investigation of that grade, it would be unwise and ultra quam sat est' to add anything; but this, I now find, I may confidently do-challenge his adversaries to produce from any modern bard whatever (not even excepting Lord Byron) a larger number of forcible and noble passages in the domains of didactic poetry and satire.

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One more argument before I recapitulate and conclude. Besides the eminent and elevated merit of Mr. R. Montgomery's poetry (which for any critic to deny, in the face of the evidence here adduced, and in the face of the public, would be, to use the energetic language of St. Paul, to lie to his own soul"), his didactic works are characterised by a peculiarly high and equally-sustained tone of morals and religion. Hence one class of objectors. May he not breathe the ether of loftier sentiments than may suit the marsh miasma of certain literary coteries, Epicuri de grege porci ;—may not the mountain air to which the broad sail vans' of his eagle wings ascend, be such an atmosphere as the measured and measuring materialism of Utilitarian literature cannot breathe in and live? The Literary Gazette, referring to the religious character pervading

Mr. R. Montgomery's didactic poetry, announces its
In this I concur.

appearance as a new poetical era.
Master minds either are created by, or themselves
create and indicate great social and poetical eras. It is
when the waters are stirred, that the most buoyant
and valuable order of minds rises, like the fire-contain-
ing, inextinguishable oil of the naphtha springs, to the
surface.

Great genius requires great excitement. Extraordinary events are requisite either as the precursors, the stimulants, or the accompaniments of genius. Galvanized into giant force by them, common events touch not its governing nerve; but if it be of heaven, 'heaven born,' it will, in its own unhurried and sure time, make itself manifest and stand. Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Darwin, Byron, were kindled by the feeling of their several eras, and represented that feeling.

Milton embodied the puritanical perfectibility of his age. Darwin, with a different neology, and wielding the new and opposite energies of a deified materialism, harbingered the great revolution which ravaged France, and shook Europe to its foundations-whose vital momentum was a philosophical perfectibilityearthborn, of the earth-earthy.' Byron, and Napoleon (and correctly the first called himself

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The great Napoleon of the realms of rhyme)— represented the matured aspirations of the Revolution, in the full colossal strength of its intellectual ambition, and in the startling contrast of its termination- both dy

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ing when the convulsive throes of the departing giant *, yielding up the ghost amidst eclipse and earthquake, proclaimed One woe is past.' The smoke of the evil cycle has now passed away, and it may be hoped that a day of moral enlightenment will succeed. Historical analogy confirms the hope. Tracing our road by its sugges tions, we may presume that the next era will probably be characterized by a re-ebbing tendency towards a deep and possibly progressive and permanent religious feeling. Poetry, as the expression of a nation's more elevated and excited feeling, will, as before, accompany the change-just as it rushed at once, with the change of manners and morals, from the lofty chastity and republican rigour of Milton, into the licentious ribaldry which stained the poetry of the Restoration: when the

Willing Muses were debauch'd at court.

If reasoning may warrant this expectation, facts too numerous to be cited here-facts pressing us on every side like the air-above, beneath, around us-evince that a great crisis of some kind is even now at hand; imo vero etiam instat in foris.' Cowper boldly predicts that the crisis will be a millennium, shortly to appear. (Winter Walk.) Croly, Irving, Faber, Frere, and Wolfe concur. There is more splendour than proba

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* While exultingly referring to the Birmingham Union of that day, and to the nunc dimittis' of his friend Priestley, Darwin has a magnificent passage, comparing the French Revolution to a giant breaking the innumerable puny bands that bound him to the earth, like Gulliver the threads of the Lilliputians.

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