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DOES any one ever open 'The Minstrel' of Beattie? In the preface to a little old undated copy, printed at Alnwick and decorated with quaint engravings, I find that in the opening lines of that poem it seemed to the editor that 'every point that imagination can conceive, constituting excellence in poetical composition, is there displayed in its fullest extent.' Beattie was more modest, and, in addressing what he called his 'Gothic lyre,' he declares: 'I only wish to please the simple mind.' His moralisings seem now a little out of date, yet it is still amusing to read:

'Blest be the day I 'scaped the wrangling crew,
From Pyrrho's maze, and Epicurus' stye,'

and to be reminded that these 'pointed lines' refer to Hume and his disciples, with whom the Gothic bard had had a famous controversy. Remembering that he was fond of music, and that he 'disliked his own favourite violoncello' after the death of his son, whom he used to accompany while he sang, we can still find a personal note in a stanza which is in every way characteristic of his style:

'Is there a heart that music cannot melt?
Alas! how is that rugged heart forlorn!

Is there, who ne'er those mystic transports felt
Of solitude and melancholy born?

He needs not woo the Muse; he is her scorn.

The sophist's rope of cobweb he shall twine;

Mope o'er the schoolman's peevish page; or mourn

And delve for life in Mammon's dirty mine;

Sneak with the scoundrel fox, or grunt with glutton swine.' Little village pictures, though of the cataloguing kind, have their fresh detail, where

'Crown'd with her pail the tripping milk-maid sings,'

1 (1) Original Poems and Translations, 1761. (2) The Judgement of Paris, 1765. (3) Verses on the Death of Churchill, 1765. (4) Poems on Several Subjects, 1766. (5) The Minstrel, 1771. (6) Poems on Several Occasions, 1776. (7) Poetical Works, Aldine Edition, 1830.

and some of the descriptions of what seemed to him the best poetical materials in nature,

'Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size,

And glittering cliffs on cliffs,'

or some 'vale romantic,' or some mountain from whose 'easy swell might be seen

'Blue hills, and glittering waves, and skies in gold arrayed,' still retain some faint glow of the enthusiasm that gave them their momentary existence. It is best not to go beyond the pages containing 'The Minstrel,' or we may come on epithets as innocently startling, in the eighteenth-century manner, as this, of 'the oblivious lap of soft Desire.'

JOHN WOLCOT (1738-1819)

THE vulgarity of the Englishman when he fights has never been seen so shamelessly in verse as in the voluminous rhymed verse of Peter Pindar. These rabid impromptus spare neither the living nor the dead, in their

'desultory way of writing,

A hop and step and jump way of inditing,'

in which there is sometimes a coal-heaver's vigour of speech,

as

'Once more forth volcanic Peter flames.'

He is himself his own best characteriser, and bids himself, though to no avail,

'Envy not such as have in dirt surpassed ye;

'T is very, very easy to be nasty.'

Nor does he take the advice which he gives, when he says:

'Build not, alas! your popularity

On that beast's back ycleped Vulgarity.'

Such popularity as he got in his time was built on the back of just such a 'little old black beast.' 'The leading feature seems to be impudence,' he says of one of his own versicles, and declares rightly that another 'is verily exceeded by nothing in the annals of impertinence.' His jokes, which beslime most of the pages, are hardly ever funny, even when they are grossest; nor is there even fun in the attempts at serious sentiment which are strangely interlarded here and there. A bunch of 'New-Old Ballads,' done, we are told, 'as innocent deceptions,' seem not less out of place among the slatternly 'odes' which do not even imitate good models, but are content to be personal at the expense of every quality which could give them merit. Gifford has been blamed for outdoing Wolcot's defamatory and disreputable filth in an 'Ode to Peter Pindar,' which is not pleasant reading. But no punishment could be too humiliating for one whose doggerel is worse than anything left by the lowest brawlers of the Elizabethan age; for these were poets stooping to wield muckrakes, and this the stye's natural guardian.

WILLIAM COMBE (1741-1823)1

WILLIAM COMBE is still remembered as 'Dr. Syntax,' but it is because of Rowlandson's coloured etchings, for which the verses were written, rather than for any tolerable qualities

1 (1) The Diaboliad, 1776. (2) Additions to the Diaboliad, 1777. (3) The Diabolo-Lady; or, a Match in Hell, 1777. (4) Anti-Diabolo-Lady, 1777. (5) The First of April; or, The Triumph of Folly, 1777. (6) A Dialogue in the Shades, 1777. (7) Heroic Epistle to a Noble D- 1777. (8) A Poetical

Epistle to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1777. (9) A Letter to her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire, 1777. (10) A Second Letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, 1777. (11) The Duchess of Devonshire's Cow, a Poem, 1777. (12) An Heroic Epistle to the Noble Author' of 'The Duchess of Devonshire's Cow,' 1777. (13) The Royal Register; or, Observations on the Principal Characters of the Church, State, Court, etc., 1777-84. (14) Perfection; a Poetical Epistle, 1778. (15) The Diaboliad, Part II, 1778. (16) The Justification, 1778. (17) The Auction; a Town Eclogue, 1778. (18) An

in the jogging couplets, tamely trying to be burlesque, with their broken and irrelevant narrative. The writer modestly enough explains that when the first print came to him he did not know what would be the subject of the second. Rowlandson's designs require no comment; the line and colour have the beauty of the finest burlesque, and they live a rollicking life of their own. Combe ambles after them with a halting gait, prosing and moralising. He supposed that he was imitating Butler in 'Hudibras.' Of the eighty-six publications which have been identified as his work, none were published under his name. His satires however, such as the 'Diaboliad ' series, seem to have been undisguised in their application. In his dedication to the latter he said, needlessly, that he was a careless writer. 'I was not born,' he explains, 'to refine and polish my own compositions. The long habit of making rapid sketches of men and things has rendered me wholly incapable of filling up an outline with those effectual masses of light and shade, and that happy, harmonising mixture of colours, which distinguished the work of judicious application.' 'The Diaboliad' and its successors plaster crude daubs clumsily on unprepared canvases. Dashes, whole lines of asterisks, pretend to conceal meanings too definite to be written. What is written is never of any better quality than such a couplet as this:

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'With these supports, the modest Peer preferr'd

His claim, which Satan with attention hears.'

Interesting Letter to the Duchess of Devonshire, 1778. (19) An Heroic Epistle to Sir James Wright, 1778. (20) An Heroic Epistle to an Unfortunate Monarch, 1778. (21) The Philosopher in Bristol, 1778. (22) The World as it goes, 1779. (23) The Fast Day; a Lambeth Eclogue, 1780. (24) The Traitor, a Poem, 1781. (25) The Royal Dream; or, the P- in a Panic, an Eclogue, 1791. (26) Carmen Seculare, 1796. (27) Clifton, a Poem, in imitation of Spenser, 1803. (28) The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, 1812. (29) Six Poems, 1813. (30) Poetical Sketches of Scarborough, 1813. (31) The English Dance of Death, 2 vols. 1815-16. (32) The Dance of Life, 1816. (33) The Second Tour of Dr. Syntax, 1820. (34) The Third Tour of Dr. Syntax in search of a wife, 1821. (35) Johnny Quae Genus; or, the Little Foundling, 1822.

The aim of his 'Diabolo-Lady' he assures us was to 'damn Women to everlasting fame.' But his libels and his feeble evidences are happily forgotten.

ANNA LÆTITIA BARBAULD (1743-1825) 1

1

ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD was a writer of great diligence, who had the good luck to concentrate her various talents into a single poem, which has been universally appreciated. The last lines, beginning 'Life! we've been long together,' are not less than an inspiration, a woman's, in which sadness, tenderness, and hope are mingled.

HANNAH MORE (1745-1833) 2

HANNAH MORE was a copious writer of prose and verse. Her plays were acted by Garrick, her story of 'Cœlebs in Search of a Wife' has come down almost to our generation, and in her own time she was praised by Johnson and popular with the general and later in life with the pious public. I have a copy before me of the 'Sacred Dramas; chiefly intended for Young Persons,' and 'calculated,' we are told in the introductory memoir, 'to repress the luxuriance of juvenile imaginations,' a lamentable task which worse books and less intelligent women have undertaken. The little plays, 'the subjects taken from the Bible' with considerable skill and discretion, are still readable, on a dull afternoon, and though they are scarcely in the proper sense dramatic, it is

1 (1) Poems, 1773. (2) Poem, with Poetical Epistle to William Wilberforce, 1792. (3) Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 1811. (4) Works, 1825. 2 (1) The Inflexible Captive, 1774. (2) Sir Edred of the Bower, and the Bleeding Rock, 1776. (3) Percy, 1777. (4) The Fatal Falsehood, 1779. (5) Sacred Dramas, 1782. (6) Slavery, 1788. (7) The Feast of Freedom, 1827. (8) Collected Poems, 1816 and 1829.

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