lished in 1789, and a copy of it, coming into the hands of Coleridge, at the age of seventeen, did much to decide the early course of Coleridge's poetry, for he had not then seen any of the work of Cowper, and, as he tells us in the 'Biographia Literaria,' 'of the then living poets Bowles and Cowper were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction: the first who reconciled the heart with the head.' Bowles was afterwards to enter into a controversy with Byron, on the side of nature against the formal art of Pope, and in contention, as he says, that 'passions of nature, not morals, or manners of life, constitute the eternal basis of what is sublime or beautiful in poetry.' It was this tendency, quite out of fashion at the time, that had its effect upon Coleridge, and though the work itself was uninspired, it was unforced. In one of his prefaces Bowles says, 'There is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings, even in poetry,' and there is something which at that time would seem exceptionally natural and direct in sonnets which, as he puts it with his usual awkward straightforwardness, 'exhibit occasional reflections which naturally arose in his mind, chiefly during various excursions undertaken to relieve, at the time, depression of spirits,' due, he tells us, 'to the sudden death of a deserving young woman.' Bowles tells us that he inherited a love of landscape from his father, and from his mother a susceptibility to music, and especially to the sound of bells, of which he says:

"The mournful magic of their mingling chime

First waked my wondering childhood into tears.'

Coleridge's moralising landscapes are distinctly foreshadowed in those of Bowles, and something not altogether of his best manner, something of the over-sweetness of its simplicity, can be seen in lines like these:

'Her voice was soft, which yet a charm could lend

Like that which spoke of a departed friend,

And a meek sadness sat upon her smile.'

Bowles himself, who repaid Coleridge's early devotion with a charming gratitude, guessed that if in future years any one cared to ask who was W. L. Bowles?? it might be for Coleridge's sake, and it is true that we turn to these gentle amiabilities of verse chiefly because they showed Coleridge that contemporary poetry was not obliged to be 'glittering, cold, and transitory,' after the manner of Darwin's 'Botanic Garden,' and that it was possible to look at natural things with the eyes and to express the natural feelings of the heart. 'Genius of the sacred fountain of tears,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge in 1796, with unusual pomp, 'it was he who led you through all this valley of weeping.'

1

GEORGE COLMAN THE YOUNGER (1762-1836) 1

GEORGE COLMAN the Younger was, in his time, a prolific writer of farce; he attempted, in a futile way, to write seriously in blank verse; and to this day his name has not disappeared entirely from the records of acted stage plays. He also attempted humorous verse, and wrote a vulgar kind of it copiously. In his 'Poetical Vagaries,' a quarto heaped up with humourless garbage, after announcing:

'Yet, here, will I apostrophize thee, Time!

If not in reason, why in Crambo Rhime,'

he is reasonable enough to admit to the reader: 'But, should I grow prolix, alas!

Thou never would'st kill Time by reading Me.'

The main part of the volume consists in a coarse and inept parody of 'The Lady of the Lake,' which is called 'The Lady of the Wreck or Castle Blarneygig' and introduced in this man

1

(1) Songs from Two to One, 1784. (2) My Night-Gown and Slippers, 1797. (3) Broad Grins, 1802. (4) Poetical Vagaries, 1812. (5) Vagaries Vindicated, 1813. (6) Eccentricities for Edinburgh, 1816. (7) The Humorous Works of George Colman, no date. 7 plays, 4 vols., Paris, 1827.

ner: "The author of this Work has attempted, in this instance, to become a Maker of the Modern-Antique; a Vender of a new Coinage, being rimed with the ancient oerugo; a Constructor of the dear pretty Sublime, and sweet little Grand.' 'How is such a Writer to be class'd?' he ends by asking. But he has written himself down already as a factor of 'Broad Grins,' and needs no further classing.

SAMUEL ROGERS was not a poet, but he was an unaffected and pleasantly old-fashioned writer of verse; and as he was rich, and kind-hearted, and sharp-tongued, he lived to be a very old man without losing a kind of unofficial leadership of the poetry of his period, though for long, as Byron said, 'retired upon half-pay.' It was Byron who gave him the most thorough praise he got, putting him next to Scott, and thus only just below the apex of his 'triangular Gradus ad Parnassum,' in which Moore and Campbell came third, and Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge just above the indistinguishable 'many.' And when Byron set him there ('more as the last of the best school') he professed to have ‘ranked the names upon my triangle more upon what I believe popular opinion than any decided opinion of my own.' This was merely a way of trying to add weight to what was really his own decided opinion; for he returns to Rogers again and again, in his letters and controversial writings, ranking him with Goldsmith and Campbell as 'the most successful' of the disciples of Pope, and with Crabbe as the only poet of the day who was not 'in the wrong,' 'upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system.' 'And thou, melodious Rogers!' he had in

1 (1) An Ode to Superstition, 1786. (2) The Pleasures of Memory, 1792. (3) Epistle to a Friend, 1798. (4) Columbus, privately printed, 1812. (5) Jacqueline, 1814. (6) Human Life, 1819. (7) Italy, 1822. (8) Italy, second part, 1828.

voked him, in the 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' bidding him 'restore Apollo to his vacant throne.' Fifty years afterwards Rogers is still a notable person to Elizabeth Barrett, who, 'not a devout admirer of "The Pleasures of Memory," does admire this perpetual youth and energy' of the poet of eighty-one whose bank has been robbed of £40,000, and who 'says witty things on his own griefs.' And, in 1850, we find Ruskin still valuing him as a poet and inspirer, and writing to him from Venice: 'Whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent, I used to read over a little bit of the "Venice " in your "Italy," and it put me always into the right tone of thought again.' The old man to whom he was writing had seen Haydn play at a concert in a tie-wig, with a sword by his side, and had met more than one person who remembered Mr. Alexander Pope.

Rogers was born in 1763, before any of those who may be properly called his contemporaries among the poets of the nineteenth century, except Blake and Crabbe, and he died in 1855, after all of them but Landor and Leigh Hunt. He was famous in 1793 as the writer of 'The Pleasures of Memory,' the most popular poem which had appeared since Cowper's 'Task,' seven years earlier; more popular indeed than that poem had ever been. Nearly twenty years afterwards, the 'Edinburgh Review,' in not too amiable an article, could say of it that it was 'to be found in all libraries and in most parlour windows.' Rogers seemed, to the critics of that time, by his 'correctness of thought, delicacy of sentiment, variety of imagery, and harmony of versification,' to be the legitimate 'child of Goldsmith.' Burns was still alive, and he, with Blake and Crabbe, had already published the poems which were the real heralds of the new poetry; but neither Burns nor Crabbe was universally known, and Blake was wholly unknown. Rogers seemed to his contemporaries more 'classical,' more in the tradition, than Cowper; his ease and finish made Hayley and the Della Cruscans impossible. He was accepted

instantly, as Byron was to accept him later, at least in theory, as the chief adherent to 'the Christianity of English Poetry, the poetry of Pope.'

We can read worse things now, but we cannot read 'The Pleasures of Memory.' It is not poetry, and there is nothing in its smooth commonplaces to make up for its not being poetry, as, to some extent, there certainly is in the later, never quite so popular, 'Italy.' But, before 'Italy,' there had been 'An Epistle to a Friend,' which begins to be more personal and thus more interesting; 'The Voyage of Columbus,' which suggested to Byron 'the idea of writing a poem in fragments,' 'The Giaour,' dedicated to Rogers; and 'Jacqueline,' which Byron found 'all grace, and softness, and poetry,' and which was actually published under the same covers with 'Lara.' We can read none of these now, but we can read the 'Italy,' almost as if it were prose, but with no distaste at its being in verse.

'The Pleasures of Memory' fitted the fashion of its day, a fashion which was even then passing; but it could not outlast that fashion, as the work of many poets has done, because it had no energy of life or imagination within it. It was sincere, and we can respect it for its sincerity; but it was the work of one who had trained himself up to be a poet as he trained himself up to appreciate and collect beautiful things, and to acquire worldly wisdom by 'always listening to the conversation of older persons.' His nephew tells us that 'he thought every man ought to have a pursuit, such as the writing of a book, which gave an interest to life such as was not known without it.' His poetry was simply the most serious interest in life of a dilettante who would have lacked only an interest in life without it. 'On all subjects of taste,' said Byron, 'his delicacy of expression is as pure as his poetry.'

And so it is in the 'Italy' that he came nearest to writing anything of value, for that pleasant road-book to Italy is done with a real personal gusto, and in a blank verse which, as