Ode on the Duke of Wellington, 1814.
[By John Wilson Croker.]

Victor of Assaye's orient plain,
Victor of all the fields of Spain,
Victor of France's despot reign,
Thy task of glory done!

Welcome! from dangers greatly dared;
From triumphs with the vanquished shared;
From nations saved, and nations spared;
Unconquered Wellington!

Unconquered! yet thy honours claim
A nobler than a conqueror's name:
At the red wreaths of guilty fame

Thy generous soul had blushed:

The blood-the tears the world has shed-
The throngs of mourners-piles of dead-
The grief-the guilt-are on his head,
The tyrant thou hast crushed.

Thine was the sword which Justice draws;
Thine was the pure and generous cause,
Of holy rites and human laws,

The impious thrall to burst;
And thou wast destined for thy part!
The noblest mind, the firmest heart-
Artless but in the warrior's art-
And in that art the first.

And we, who in the eastern skies
Beheld thy sun of glory rise,
Still follow with exulting eyes

His proud meridian height.
Late, on thy grateful country's breast,
Late may that sun descend to rest,
Beaming through all the golden west
The memory of his light.

[The November Fog of London.]
[By Henry Luttrel.]

First, at the dawn of lingering day,
It rises of an ashy gray;
Then deepening with a sordid stain
Of yellow, like a lion's mane.
Vapour importunate and dense,
It wars at once with every sense.
The ears escape not. All around
Returns a dull unwonted sound.
Loath to stand still, afraid to stir,
The chilled and puzzled passenger,
Oft blundering from the pavement, fails
To feel his way along the rails;
Or at the crossings, in the roll
Of every carriage dreads the pole.
Scarce an eclipse, with pall so dun,
Blots from the face of heaven the sun.
But soon a thicker, darker cloak
Wraps all the town, behold, in smoke,
Which steam-compelling trade disgorges
From all her furnaces and forges
In pitchy clouds, too dense to rise,
Descends rejected from the skies;
Till struggling day, extinguished quite,
At noon gives place to candle-light.
O Chemistry, attractive maid,
Descend, in pity, to our aid:
Come with thy all-pervading gases,
Thy crucibles, retorts, and glasses,
Thy fearful energies and wonders,
Thy dazzling lights and mimic thunders;
Let Carbon in thy train be seen,
Dark Azote and fair Oxygen,
And Wollaston and Davy guide
The car that bears thee at thy side.

If any power can, any how,
Abate these nuisances, 'tis thou;
And see, to aid thee in the blow,
The bill of Michael Angelo;

O join (success a thing of course is)
Thy heavenly to his mortal forces;
Make all chimneys chew the cud
Like hungry cows, as chimneys should!
And since 'tis only smoke we draw
Within our lungs at common law,
Into their thirsty tubes be sent
Fresh air, by act of parliament.

In this period many translations from classic and foreign poets have appeared, at the head of which stands the version of Dante by the REV. H. F. CARY -universally acknowledged to be one of the most felicitous attempts ever made to transfuse the spirit and conceptions of a great poet into a foreign tongue. The third edition of this translation was published in 1831. Versions of Homer, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Oberon of the German poet Wieland, have been published by WILLIAM SOTHEBY, whose original poems have already been noticed. The comedies of Aristophanes have been well translated, with all their quaint drollery and sarcasm, by MR MITCHELL, late fellow of Sidney-Sussex college, Cambridge. LORD STRANGFORD has given translations from the Portuguese poet Camoens; and DR JOHN BOWRING, specimens of Russian, Dutch, ancient Spanish, Polish, Servian, and Hungarian poetry. A good translation of Tasso has been given by J. H. WIFFEN, and of Ariosto by MR STEWART ROSE. LORD FRANCIS EGERTON, MR BLACKIE, and others, have translated the Faust of Goëthe; and the general cultivation of the German language in England has led to the translation of various imaginative and critical German works in prose. MR J. G. LOCKHART's translation of Spanish ballads has enriched our lyrical poetry with some romantic songs. The ballads of Spain, like those of Scotland, are eminently national in character and feeling, and bear testimony to the strong passions and chivalrous imagination of her once high-spirited people.

SCOTTISH POETS.

ROBERT BURNS.

After the publication of Fergusson's poems, in a collected shape, in 1773, there was an interval of about thirteen years, during which no writer of eminence arose in Scotland who attempted to excel in the native language of the country. The intellectual taste of the capital ran strongly in favour of metaphysical and critical studies; but the Doric muse was still heard in the rural districts linked to some popular air, some local occurrence or favourite spot, and was much cherished by the lower and middling classes of the people. In the summer of 1786, ROBERT BURNS, the Shakspeare of Scotland, issued his first volume from the obscure press of Kilmarnock, and its influence was immediately felt, and is still operating on the whole imaginative literature of the kingdom.* Burns was

*The edition consisted of 600 copies. A second was published in Edinburgh in April 1787, no less than 2800 copies being subscribed for by 1500 individuals. After his unexampled popularity in Edinburgh, Burns took the farm of Ellisland, near Dumfries, married his bonny Jean,' and entered upon his new occupation at Whitsunday 1788. He had obtained an appointment as an exciseman, but the duties of this office, and his own convivial habits, interfered with his management of the farm, and he was glad to abandon it. In 1791 he removed to the town of Dumfries, subsisting entirely on his situation in

then in his twenty-seventh year, having been born in the parish of Alloway, near Ayr, on the 25th of January 1759. His father was a poor farmer, a man of sterling worth and intelligence, who gave his son what education he could afford. The whole, however, was but a small foundation on which to erect the miracles of genius! Robert was taught

Robert Burns.

English well, and by the time he was ten or eleven years of age, he was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles.' He was also taught to write, had a fortnight's French, and was one summer-quarter at land-surveying. He had a few books, among which were the Spectator, Pope's Works, Allan Ramsay, and a collection of English songs. Subsequently (about his twenty-third year) his reading was enlarged with the important addition of Thomson, Shenstone, Sterne, and Mackenzie. Other standard works soon followed. As the advantages of a liberal education were not within his reach, it is scarcely to be regretted that his library was at first so small. What books he had, he read and studied thoroughly his attention was not distracted by a multitude of volumes-and his mind grew up with original and robust vigour. It is impossible to contemplate the life of Burns at this time, without a strong feeling of affectionate admiration and respect. His manly integrity of character (which, as a peasant, he guarded with jealous dignity), and his warm and true heart, elevate him, in our conceptions, almost as much as the native force and beauty of his poetry.

the excise, which yielded L.70 per annum. Here he published, in 1793, a third edition of his poems, with the addition of Tam o'Shanter, and other pieces composed at Ellisland. He died at Dumfries on the 21st of July 1796, aged thirty-seven years and about six months. The story of his life is so well known, that even this brief statement of dates seems unnecessary. In 1798 a fourth edition of his works was published in Edinburgh Two years afterwards, in 1800, appeared the valuable and complete edition of Dr Currie, in four volumes, containing the correspondence of the poet, and a number of songs, contributed to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, and Thomson's Select Scottish Melodies. The editions of Burns since 1800 could with difficulty be ascertained; they were reckoned a few years ago at about a hundred. His poems circulate in every shape, and have not yet' gathered all their fame.'

We see him in the veriest shades of obscurity toiling, when a mere youth, like a galley-slave,' to support his virtuous parents and their household, yet grasp. ing at every opportunity of acquiring knowledge from men and books-familiar with the history of his country, and loving its very soil-worshipping the memory of Scotland's ancient patriots and defenders, and exploring every scene and memorial of departed greatness-loving also the simple peasantry around him, 'the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers.' Burning with a desire to do something for old Scotland's sake, with a heart beating with warm and generous emotions, a strong and clear understanding, and a spirit abhorring all meanness, insincerity, and oppression, Burns, in his early days, might have furnished the subject for a great and instructive moral poem. The true elements of poetry were in his life, as in his writings. The wild stirrings of his ambition (which he so nobly compared to the 'blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave'), the precocious maturity of his passions and his intellect, his manly frame, that led him to fear no competitor at the plough, and his exquisite sensibility and tenderness, that made him weep over even the destruction of a daisy's flower or a mouse's nest, these are all moral contrasts and blendings that seem to belong to the spirit of romantic poetry. His writings, as we now know, were but the fragments of a great mind-the hasty outpourings of a full heart and intellect. After he had become the fashionable wonder and idol of his day-soon to be cast into cold neglect and poverty!-some errors and frailties threw a shade on the noble and affecting image, but its higher lineaments were never destroyed. The column was defaced, not broken; and now that the mists of prejudice have cleared away, its just proportions and exalted symmetry are recognised with pride and gratitude by his admiring countrymen.

Burns came as a potent auxiliary or fellow-worker with Cowper, in bringing poetry into the channels of truth and nature. There were only two years between the Task and the Cotter's Saturday Night. No poetry was ever more instantaneously or universally popular among a people than that of Burns in Scotland. It seemed as if a new realm had been added to the dominions of the British muse-a new and glorious creation, fresh from the hand of nature. There was the humour of Smollett, the pathos and tenderness of Sterne or Richardson, the real life of Fielding, and the description of Thomson-all united in delineations of Scottish manners and scenery by an Ayrshire ploughman! The volume contained matter for all minds-for the lively and sarcastic, the wild and the thoughtful, the poetical enthusiast and the man of the world. So eagerly was the book sought after, that, where copies of it could not be obtained, many of the poems were transcribed and sent round in manuscript among admiring circles. The subsequent productions of the poet did not materially affect the estimate of his powers formed from his first volume. His life was at once too idle and too busy for continuous study; and, alas! it was too brief for the full maturity and development of his talents. Where the intellect predominates equally with the imagination (and this was the case with Burns), increase of years generally adds to the strength and variety of the poet's powers; and we have no doubt that, in ordinary circumstances, Burns, like Dryden, would have improved with age, and added greatly to his fame, had he not fallen at so early a period, before his imagina tion could be enriched with the riper fruits of knowledge and experience. He meditated a national drama; but we might have looked with more

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infinitely more diversified, including a varied and romantic landscape, the customs and superstitions of his country, the delights of good fellowship and boon society, the aspirations of youthful ambition, and, above all, the emotions of love, which he depicted with such mingled fervour and delicacy. This ecstacy of passion was unknown to the author of the Task. Nor could the latter have conceived anything so truly poetical as the image of Coila, the tutelar genius and inspirer of the peasant youth in his clay-built hut, where his heart and fancy overflowed with love and poetry. Cowper read and appreciated Burns, and we can picture his astonishment and delight on perusing such strains as Coila's address:

'With future hope I oft would gaze
Fond on thy little early ways,
Thy rudely carolled, chiming phrase,
In uncouth rhymes,

Fired at the simple, artless lays,
Of other times.

I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;
Or when the north his fleecy store
Drove through the sky,
I saw grim nature's visage hoar

Strike thy young eye.

Or when the deep green-mantled earth
Warm cherished every flowret's birth,
And joy and music pouring forth

In every grove,

I saw thee eye the general mirth With boundless love.

When ripened fields and azure skies,
Called forth the reapers' rustling noise,
I saw thee leave their evening joys,
And lonely stalk,

To vent thy bosom's swelling rise
In pensive walk.

When youthful love, warm-blushing, strong,
Keen-shivering shot thy nerves along,
Those accents, grateful to thy tongue,
The adored Name,

I taught thee how to pour in song,
To soothe thy flame.

I saw thy pulse's maddening play,
Wild send thee pleasure's devious way,
Misled by Fancy's meteor-ray,

By passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven.

I taught thy manners-painting strains,
The loves, the ways of simple swains,
Till now, o'er all my wide domains
Thy fame extends;

And some, the pride of Coila's plains,
Become thy friends.

Thou canst not learn, nor can I show,
To paint with Thomson's landscape glow;
Or wake the bosom-melting throe,

With Shenstone's art;
Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow
Warm on the heart.

Yet, all beneath the unrivalled rose,
The lowly daisy sweetly blows;
Though large the forest's monarch throws
His army shade,

Yet green the juicy hawthorn grows
Adown the glade.

Then never murmur nor repine;
Strive in thy humble sphere to shine;
And trust me, not Potosi's mine,
Nor king's regard,
Can give a bliss o'ermatching thine,
A rustic bard.

To give my counsels all in one-
Thy tuneful flame still careful fan;
Preserve the dignity of man,
With soul erect;

And trust, the universal plan
Will all protect.

And wear thou this'-she solemn said,
And bound the holly round my head:
The polished leaves, and berries red,
Did rustling play;

And, like a passing thought, she fled
In light away.

Burns never could have improved upon the grace and tenderness of this romantic vision-the finest revelation ever made of the hope and ambition of a youthful poet. Greater strength, however, he undoubtedly acquired with the experience of manhood. His Tam o' Shanter, and Bruce's Address, are the result of matured powers; and his songs evince a conscious mastery of the art and materials of composition. His Vision of Liberty at Lincluden is a great and splendid fragment. The reflective spirit evinced in his early epistles is found, in his Lines Written in Friars' Carse Hermitage, to have settled into a deep vein of moral philosophy, clear and true as the lines of Swift, and informed with a higher wisdom. It cannot be said that Burns absolutely fails in any kind of composition, except in his epigrams; these are coarse without being pointed or entertaining. Nature, which had lavished on him such powers of humour, denied him wit.

In reviewing the intellectual career of the poet, his correspondence must not be overlooked. His prose style was more ambitious than that of his poetry. In the latter he followed the dictates of nature, warm from the heart, whereas in his letters he aimed at being sentimental, peculiar, and striking; and simplicity was sometimes sacrificed for effect. As Johnson considered conversation to be an intellectual arena, wherein every man was bound to do his best, Burns seems to have regarded letter-writing in much the same light, and to have considered it necessary at times to display all his acquisitions to amuse, gratify, or astonish his patronising correspondents. Considerable deductions must, therefore, be made from his published correspondence, whether regarded as an index to his feelings and situation, or as models of the epistolary style. In subject, he adapted himself too much to the character and tastes of the person he was addressing, and in style, he was led away by a love of display. A tinge of pedantry and assumption, and of reckless bravado, was thus at times superinduced upon the manly and thoughtful simplicity of his natural character, which sits as awkwardly upon it as the intrusion of Jove or Danaë into the rural songs of Allan Ramsay.*

* The scraps of French in his letters to Dr Moore, Mrs Riddell, &c. have an unpleasant effect. If he had an affectation in anything,' says Dugald Stewart, 'it was in introducing occasionally [in conversation] a word or phrase from that language.' Campbell makes a similar statement, and relates the following anecdote :- One of his friends, who carried him into the company of a French lady, remarked, with surprise, that he attempted to converse with her in her own tongue, Their French, however, was mutually unintelligible. As far as Burns could make himself understood, he unfortunately offended the foreign lady. He meant to tell her that she was a

Burns's letters, however, are valuable as memorials of his temperament and genius. He was often distinct, forcible, and happy in expression-rich in sallies of imagination and poetical feeling-at times deeply pathetic and impressive. He lifts the veil from the miseries of his latter days with a hand struggling betwixt pride and a broken spirit. His autobiography, addressed to Dr Moore, written when his mind was salient and vigorous, is as remarkable for its literary talent as for its modest independence and clear judgment; and the letters to Mrs Dunlop (in whom he had entire confidence, and whose ladylike manners and high principle rebuked his wilder spirit) are all characterised by sincerity and elegance. One beautiful letter to this lady we are tempted to copy: it is poetical in the highest degree, and touches with exquisite taste on the mysterious union between external nature and the sympathies and emotions of the human frame:

ELLISLAND, New-Year-Day Morning, 1789.

This, dear madam, is a morning of wishes, and would to God that I came under the apostle James's description!-the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. In that case, madam, you should welcome in a year full of blessings: everything that obstructs or disturbs tranquillity and self enjoyment should be removed, and every pleasure that frail humanity can taste should be yours. I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve of set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion, for breaking in on that habituated routine of life and thought which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little better than mere machinery.

This day, the first Sunday of May, a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn; these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.

I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the charming person, and delightful in conversation, but expressed

himself so as to appear to her to mean that she was fond of speaking: to which the Gallic dame indignantly replied, that it was quite as common for poets to be impertinent as for women to be loquacious.' The friend who introduced Burns on this occasion (and who herself related the anecdote to Mr Campbell) was Miss Margaret Chalmers, afterwards Mrs Lewis Hay, who died in 1843. The wonder is, that the dissipated aristocracy of the Caledonian Hunt, and the buckish tradesmen of Edinburgh,' left any part of the original plainness and simplicity of his manners. Yet his learned friends saw no change in the proud self-sustained and self-measuring poet. He kept his ground, and he asked no more. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters,' says the quaint but true and searching Thomas Carlyle, this winter in Edinburgh did afford him; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to play their parts; nay, had himself stood in the midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than ever that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that splendid game. From this time a jealous indignant fear of social degradation takes possession of him; and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this.

It was clear also that he willed something far different, and

therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had

not power to choose the one and reject the other, but must balt for ever between two opinions, two objects; making ham

pered advancement towards either. But so it is with many men: "we long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price;" and so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night come, and our fair is over!'

Spectator-the Vision of Mirza-a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a word of three syllables: "On the 5th day of the moon, which, according to the custom of my forefathers, I always keep holy, after having washed myself, and offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high hill of Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer." We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Eolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities-a God that made all things--man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or wo beyond death and the grave.'

To the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, Burns seems to have clung with fond tenacity: it survived the wreck or confusion of his early impressions, and formed the strongest and most soothing of his beliefs. In other respects his creed was chiefly practical. Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others,' he says, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my reason of iniquity. The same feeling he had expressed in one of his early poems—

But deep this truth impressed my mind,
Through all his works abroad,
The heart benevolent and kind

The most resembles God.

Conjectures have been idly formed as to the probable effect which education would have had on the mind of Burns. We may as well speculate on the change which might be wrought by the engineer, the planter, and agriculturist, in assimilating the wild scenery of Scotland to that of England. Who would wish (if it were possible), by successive graftings, to make the birch or the pine approximate to the oak or the elm? Nature is various in all her works, and has diversified genius as much as she has done her plants and trees. In Burns we have a genuine Scottish poet: why should we wish to mar the beautiful order and variety of nature by making him a Dryden or a Gray? Education could not have improved Burns's songs, his Tam o' Shanter, or any other of his great poems. He would never have written them but for his situation and feelings as a peasant and could he have written anything better? The whole of that world of passion and beauty which he has laid open to us might have and worthily employed in embellishing rustic life, been hid for ever; and the genius which was so well and adding new interest and glory to his country, would only have swelled the long procession of English poets, stript of his originality, and bearing, though proudly, the ensign of conquest and submission.