of Charles the Second, he is the least scrupulous in mentioning his crimes, because he is the least abashed. Other writers have paid decency the compliment of doubting their extent or of keeping them in the back-ground; but here we have the plainest, toothpicking acknowledgements, that Charles was a pensioner of France, a shameless debauchee, a heartless friend, and an assassinating master, and yet all the while he is little else but the " gay monarch," the "merry monarch," the "witty monarch," the "goodnatured monarch;" and Mr. Scott really appears to think little or nothing of all that he says against him. On the other hand, let a villain be but a Whig, or let any unfortunate person, with singular, Southern notions of independence, be but an opposer of Charles's court, and he is sure to meet with a full and crying denunciation of his offences, with raised hands and lifted eyeballs. The execution of Charles the First Mr. Scott calls an enormity unequalled in modern history, till the present age furnished a parallel massacres, of course, and other trifles of that sort, particularly when kings and courtiers are the

actors, fade before it; St. Bartholomew's day deserves to be counted lucky in comparison with it; and princely villains like Henry the Eighth, Ezzelino, and Borgia, are respectable and conscientious men by the side of the President Bradshaw and his colleagues. At the same time, a king, who by the basest means and for the slightest cause would assassinate a faithful servant in the very act of performing his duty, is only ungenerous,-one of whom the said servant has no small reason to complain. The rea der may think this representation exaggerated, but let the author speak for himself. "His political principles (the Earl of Mulgrave's) were those of a staunch Tory, which he maintained through his whole life; and he was zealous for the royal prerogative, although he had no small reason to complain of Charles the Second, who to avenge himself of Mulgrave for a supposed attachment to the Princess Anne, sent him to Tangiers, at the head of some troops, in a leaky vessel, which it was supposed must have perished in the voyage. Though Mulgrave was apprised of the danger, he scorned to shun it; and the Earl

of Plymouth, a favourite son of the King, generously insisted upon sharing it along with him. This ungenerous attempt to destroy him in the very act of performing his duty, with the refusal of a regiment, made a temporary change in Mulgrave's conduct." Notes on Absalom and Achitophel in Dryden's Works, vol. ix. p. 304.

Of Mr. Walter Scott's poetry the estimate is sufficiently easy, and will now perhaps, after the surfeit he has given us of it, be pretty generally acknowledged. It is little more than a leap back into the dress and the diction of rude but gorgeous times, when show concealed a great want of substance, and a little thinking was conveyed in a great many words. Thus it is not invidious to call the late demand for it a fashion, for it was almost as mere a fashion as the revival of any other artificial mode, and just as likely to go out again. That Mr. Scott is a poet is not to be controverted ;-he has a lightsome fancy, pleasing circumstance, luxury of description; and in his idea of Marmion has shewn a taste for that mixture of genuine human character with the abstrac

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tions of poetry, which is a mark of no ordinary genius for narrative. But when the novelty of a parti cular mode of style is gone, a poet will obtain reputation for little else than a discernment of other men's beauties, who has no natural language and no style of his own,-who cannot describe what he sees and feels but in phrases previously set down for him, and who must therefore be suspected of seeing and feeling, not so much from his own perceptions, as from the suggestions of those that have gone before him. Mr. Scott's ladies gay and barons bold, his full-wells and I-pray-yous, his drinkings of the red wine" and his "kirtles of the craniasie," his rhymes pressed in to the service, and his verses dancing away now and then out of the measure, may have been new to the town in general, but they are as ancient as recollection itself to the readers of poetry; and a person tolerably well read in old songs and stories might exclaim with Dr. Johnson on a similar occasion,

Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is old and nothing new,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet.

The plea, if any such has been made, of suiting the language of the poem to the manners of the story, is a mere excuse for want of power to talk naturally: for to say nothing of the continued modern smoothness which is added to the old versification, and of the different periods of time to which the self-same language is applied, no writers, not excepting the old romancers themselves, ever did or could adapt their language to the times of their story, unless the events they described were contemporary. The romancers indeed notoriously violated every species of proper costume to suit themselves to their own period, and if they had attempted to retain an improper costume and to talk in the language of previous times, we should in vain have looked for those natural bursts of passion, and all those affecting simplicities, which they were enabled to put in the mouths of others, by speaking, as they felt, from their own. Thus even what was a natural language in these writers, becomes, from the imitation, an unnatural and affected one in Mr. Scott; and in