This boisterousness sinks at times to vulgarity, but of a wild, hearty sort, and is rarely without a real mastery of comic metre. O'Keeffe's most perfect extravagance, his rhythm at its best, is to be found in this splendid tune, which Leigh Hunt vainly tried to copy:

'Amo, amas,

I love a lass,

As cedar tall and slender;

Sweet cowslip's face

Is her nominative case,

And she 's of the feminine gender.

Horum quorum,

Sunt divorum,

Harum, scarum, Divo;

Tag rag, merry derry, periwig and hatband,

Hic, hoc, harum, genitivo.'

There, if you like, is nonsense; but how convincing to the

ear!

JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN (1750-1817) 1

CURRAN, a man of wit and a great speaker, of whom Byron said 'I have heard that man speak more poetry than I have ever seen written,' wrote one poem and one only which is worth remembering. It is in one of the good old Irish stanzas which Dr. Hyde has made familiar and beautiful to us, and it has a kind of laughter heard through a cry, an audacity in the face of death, which, in a 'Deserter's Meditation,' anticipates the great gallows-song of Burns. Here are the two stanzas:

'If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,

Could more than drinking my cares compose,
A cure for sorrow from sighs I'd borrow,
And hope to-morrow would end my days.
But as in wailing there's nought availing,
And Death unfailing will strike the blow,
Then for that reason, and for a season,
Let us be merry before we go.

1 The Life of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran. By his son,

William Henry Curran. 2 vols. 1822.

"To joy a stranger, a way-worn ranger,
In every danger my course I've run;

Now hope all ending, and Death befriending,
His last aid lending, my cares are done.

No more a rover, a hapless lover,

Those cares are over, and my glass runs low;

Then for that reason, and for a season,

Let us be merry before we go.'

If any one can read the refrain of this song without a stirring in the blood, there must be ice in him.

IN the honest fragment of autobiography which prefaces his translation of Juvenal, Gifford tells us, perhaps needlessly, that he had no natural instinct for poetry. He comments on his 'gloom and savage unsociability' and on his waste of exertion on 'splenetic and vexatious tricks'; and 'The Baviad' and 'The Mæviad' are hardly more than so much waste, the waste of a prose-writer who takes up verse to chastise the writers of bad verse. Only from the actual evidence of the footnotes can we believe in the existence of 'Laura's tinkling trash' and the varied and unending ineptitudes of Della Crusca. The school existed, and Gifford killed it; yet such small game leaves but mangled carrion behind, and verse and notes are now equally unreadable.

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) 2

I

BLAKE was twofold a poet, in words and in lines, and it has often been debated whether he was a greater poet in words

1 (1) Baviad, 1794. (2) Mæviad, 1795. (3) Epistle to Peter Pindar, 1800. (4) Juvenal, 1820. (5) Persius, 1821.

2 (1) Poetical Sketches, privately printed, 1783. (2) Songs of Innocence, 1789. (3) The Book of Thel, 1789. (4) The Marriage of Heaven

or in lines. If greatness includes, as I think it must, a technique able not only to suggest, but to embody, then the writer of the 'Songs of Innocence' and the 'Songs of Experience' is unquestionably greater than the designer of all those magnificent suggestions which may be more justly compared with the scattered splendours of the Prophetic Books. In the writings of the Prophetic Books there are fine passages, but no achieved fineness of result: inspiration comes and goes, unguided; while in the best of the lyrics we have an inspiration which is held firmly under control. In the best of the lyrics there is an art of verse which neither Coleridge nor Shelley has ever surpassed; can it quite be said of even the very best of the designs, that they have not been surpassed, in the actual art of design, by Leonardo and Michael Angelo?

It is only in his earliest work, in the volume of 'Poetical Sketches,' printed in 1783 but never published, that any origins can be found for the poetry of Blake, and even there they are for the most part uncertain and of little significance. We are told in the 'advertisement' at the beginning of the book that 'the following Sketches were the production of and Hell, probably 1790. (5) Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793. (6) For Children; The Gates of Paradise, 1793. (7) America, 1793. (8) Europe, 1794. (9) Songs of Experience, 1794. (10) The First Book of Urizen, 1794. (11) The Song of Los, 1795. (12) The Book of Los, 1795. (13) The Book of Ahania, 1795. (14) Milton, 1804. (15) Jerusalem, 1804. (16) The Ghost of Abel, 1822. All these, except the first, are engraved by Blake, with his own illustrations on the pages. The first collected edition of the Poems, without the Prophetic Books, but containing the poems in the Rossetti manuscript, first printed in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, 1863, was edited for the Aldine Series by Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1874. The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited by E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, followed in 1893, in three volumes, containing facsimiles of most of the Prophetic Books and the first printed conjectural text of Vala. Other editions of the poems have followed, but the only authoritative text is that of Mr. John Sampson, Oxford, 1904. This edition, however, does not contain the Prophetic Books; Jerusalem and Milton were printed under the editorship of A. G. B. Russell and R. D. Maclagan in 1904 and 1907, and the complete text of the Prophetic Books was given by Mr. Edwin Ellis in his Poetical Works of William Blake, 2 vols. 1906.

untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year'; that is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe these dates) after Chatterton's death but before his poems had been published. 'Ossian' had appeared in 1760, Percy's 'Reliques' in 1765. The 'Reliques' probably had their influence on Blake, Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled with the influence of Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books. It has been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and his 'fiend in a cloud,' came from Ossian; and Ossian is very evidently in the metrical prose of such pieces as 'Samson' and even in some of the imagery ('their helmed youth and aged warriors in dust together lie, and Desolation spreads his wings over the land of Palestine'). But the influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence which could hardly have found its way to Blake before the year 1777. In the fifth chapter of the fantastic 'Island in the Moon' (probably written about 1784) there is a long discussion on Chatterton, while in the seventh chapter he is again discussed, in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Wordsworth's preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads': 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient is so'; and, on another page: 'I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any poet whatever: of Rowley and Chatterton also.' Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say, but if the 'Mad Song' of Blake has the hint of any predecessor in our literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy and stormy masculine splendour of the High Priest's Song in 'Aella,' 'Ye who hie yn mokie ayre'; and if, between the time of the Elizabethans and the time of 'My silks and fine array' there had been any other song of similar technique and similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's Song in 'Aella': 'O! synge untoe mie roundelaie.'

Of the direct and very evident influence of the Elizabethans we are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness: 'Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," "Tarquin and Lucrece," and his Sonnets, poems, now little read, were favourite studies of Mr. Blake's early days. So were Johnson's Underwoods and his Miscellanies.' 'My silks and fine array' goes past Johnson, and reaches Fletcher if not Shakespeare himself. And the blank verse of 'King Edward the Third' goes straight to Shakespeare for its cadence and for something in its manner of speech. And there is other blank verse which, among much not even metrically correct, anticipates something of the richness of Keats.

Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only by the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudoGothic of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the 'Castle of Otranto'; as 'Gwin King of Norway' takes after the Scandinavian fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or 'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. 'Blindman's Bluff,' too, is a piece of eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses' that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies the smooth convention of the eighteenth-century classicism, and, as he reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light it had rejected:

'How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few!'

In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music; and from this time forward we find, in the rest of Blake's work, only a proof of his own assertion: that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.'

To define the poetry of Blake one must find new definitions for poetry; but, these definitions once found, he will seem to be the only poet who is a poet in essence; the only poet who