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elaborately collected charges against Montgomery's poetical reputation are copied seriatim from a new periodical; the (probably deceived) proprietor and editor of which I shall not injure by naming it; the picked and garbled extracts are as unworthy of copy as reply; but among the above-named consecutive copies of alleged faults, one is curious, as it would seem to offer presumptive proof of collusive motives. In the magazine here noticed there is a perverted passage from the Omnipresence, on the death of a war-horse, whose rider falls on the bleeding breast' of his horse, while the dying horse stares ghastly and grimly on the skies.' Will it be believed, that the Edinburgh Reviewer, copying the garbled passage of the magazine, asks how the slain warrior, lying on his bleeding breast,' contrives to stare ghastly and grimly on the skies'? Fie! fie! this perversion is unworthy, and ungentlemanlike; and some writers preferring the rough sincerity of truth to that bienséance, which I shall not lose sight of, would be tempted to call it mendacity and fraud, not criticism, as some readers, I lament to say, have already termed it.

6

The individual thus alleged to be the original author, at least the suggester of the Edinburgh Rejoinder, is, as below, addressed in the Age Reviewed. I need add no comment to the quotation, since the public will probably decide that, even in this stage of the contest, Montgomery has far the best of the set-to'. He hits hard 'facers,' neither readily parried, nor readily forgotten; and though the battered and groaning critics may be anxious to say they have not felt his blows, and that their smarts are imaginary, they will not easily induce the jeering bystanders to think so.

But who is he that with sardonic smile,

And jaundiced eye, and lip weigh'd down with bile,
Sneaks by, with pedlar sketches at his back?
The monarch of the small-beer poet pack!
The mighty would-be cock of prose and rhyme,
Like Balaam's donkey, braying the sublime!
Alike so hated by each friend and foe,

That they applaud, who would not strike the blow.
Did Byron's laurels feel thy blackening slime,
And forged detection of his thought and rhyme ?
For this dull deed, may ne'er thy rhyme again
Crawl through a page, or hobble through a strain ;
But injured genius blast thy venal muse,

And drive thee, snarler, to thy fostering blues.

The attack is repeated in Satan, with more remorse less vituperation and more crushing scorn

E'en now my eye is on a dismal wretch,
In whom is summed up all that can profane
The name of man; ignoble as the dust,
And rocky-hearted as a wretch can be.
&c. &c.

Enough has been advanced to shew the quo animo of the last attacks on Montgomery. He, and all who come before the public, are 'fair game;' an anonymous rejoinder to an anonymous attack, is fair; an anonymous attack on unanonymous writers, though less equal, if frankly conducted, is also fair; but the fair public will never approve of any individual stabbing a long marked victim, under the appearance of fair duello,-like that personification of devilish malice, Goethe's Mephistopheles,-beneath the arm of a deceived ally. The unfairness of quoting none but garbled passages, picked out by an ambushed enemy with leisurely malice, might irritate little minds, but it can only excite a pitying smile in les gens comme il faut.' Alas! for the littleness of all human pretence! It is

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well for real genius, that it is calm, patiently contemptuous of wilful misappreciation, and self-confiding as to ultimate results; that, though prompt in proper season, it is not easily discomposed; and that it is only to the small talent of the smallest witlings, that the proverbial fallacy of talented irritability can justly apply.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES,

Stamford-street.

REPLY

ΤΟ

'FRASER'S' AND THE MONTHLY' MAGAZINES.

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· They praise and they dispraise they know not what,
'And know not why, but as one leads the other;
'Of whom to be dispraised were no slight praise.'

MILTON.

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