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as in a camera obscura, and in which he has been improperly compared to the Dutch painters, for in addition to their finish and identification, he fills the very commonest of his scenes with sentiment and an interest.

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One ten thousandth part of the words and the time, That you've wasted on praises instead of your rhyme, Might have gain'd you a title to this kind of free-. dom,

But volumes of endings, lugg'd in as you need 'em, Of hearts and imparts,-where's the soul that can

read 'em?

There is something not inelegant or unfanciful in the conduct of Mr. Hayley's Triumphs of Temper, and the moral is of that useful and desirable descrip tion, which from its domestic familiarity is too apt to be overlooked, or to be thought incapable of embellishment:-but in this as well as in all his other writings, there is so much talking by rote, so many gratuitous metaphors, so many epithets to fill up and rhymes to fit in, and such a mawkish languor

of versification, with every now and then a ridiculous hurrying for a line or so, that nothing can be more palling or tiresome. The worst part of Mr. Hayley is that smooth-tongued and overwrought complimentary style, in addressing and speaking of others, which, whether in conversation or writing, has always the ill-fortune, to say the least of it, of being suspected as to sincerity. His best part, as has been justly observed, is his Annotation. The notes to his poems are amusing and full of a graceful scholarship; and two things must be remembered to his honour, first, that although he had not genius enough to revive the taste in his poetry, he has been the quickest of our late writers to point out the great superiority of the Italian school over the French; and second, that he has been among the first, and the most ardent of them all, in hailing the dawn of our native painting. Indeed, with the singular exception of Milton, who had visited Italy, and who was such a painter himself, it is to be remembered to the honour of all our poets, great and small, that they

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have shewn a just anxiety for the appearance of the

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It would appear, from some specimens in his notes, that Mr. Hayley would have cut a more advantageous figure as a translator than as an original poet, I do not say he would have been equal to great works; for a translator, to keep any thing like a pace with his original, should have at least a portion of his original spirit; but as Mr. Hayley is not destitute of the poet, the thoughts of another might have invigorated him; and he would at any rate have been superior to those mere rhymers, such men as Hoole, for instance, who without the smallest pretensions to poetry in their own persons, think themselves qualified to translate epics. In the notes to his Essays on Epic Poetry, there isva pleasing analysis, with occasional versions of twenty or thirty lines, of the Araucana of Alonzo d'Ercilla, and in the same place is a translation of the three

first Cantos of Dante, which if far beneath the majestic simplicity of the original, is at least, for spirit as well as closeness, much above the mouthing nonentities which have been palmed upon us of late years for that wonderful poet. But Dante, to say nothing of his demands upon a variety of powers, in consequence of those varieties of his own, in which after shaking us with his terrors, or shocking us with his resentments and his diabolisms, he will enchant us with his grace, melt us with his tenderness, or refresh us with some exquisite picture of nature, is like all the other poets of the first class, scarcely translatable but by a kindred genius. The natural language they speak sets at nought the cant habit of books. You might as well endeavour, by the help of a fan, to gather round you the morning freshness of nature, as think of apprehending one of the great spirits of poetry, by means of these toyers in versification. Even the real poets among us have not done justice to those whom they translated, with the exception of some smaller pieces of

lyric Dryden wants the gracefulness and the selectness of Virgil, Chapman all the music of Homer, and Pope all the nature-what then are we to expect from such a writer as Francis, or from that prince of involuntary crambo, Hoole? No wonder that men of good sense and taste, who happen not to be scholars, have found Horace a dull fellow and Ariosto a dotard.

The best translation, upon the whole, that has been produced in our language, both for closeness to the sense and sympathy with the spirit of its original, appears to me to be Fairfax's Tasso. I do not say that it is a perfect one, or that it is not sometimes straitened for want of room, and sometimes clouded with the obscurities of it's age; but Fairfax seems to go along with his author, and to be more of a piece with him, than any translator perhaps that has yet appeared. The versification is singularly free for it's closeness, and has always been accounted one of the earliest harmonizers of our poetry: Dryden calls him on this account the father of Waller, who

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