cation, and attempted the other day to give his harp a higher and more various strain in the fragment upon Columbus ;-but the strings appear to have been in danger of snapping. It was ludicrous enough however, and affords a singular instance of the habitual ignorance of versification in general, to find the Quarterly Review objecting to a line in this fragment, for running a syllable out of it's measure and attempting to snatch one of the finest graces of our older poetry.

The best thing in Mr. Rogers's productions appears to me to be his Epistle to a Friend, describing a house and it's ornaments. It has a good deal of elegant luxury about it, and seems to have been the best written because the most felt. Here he was describing from his own taste and experience, and not affecting a something which he had found in the writers before him.

7 But mind that you treat him as well as you're able, And let him have part of what goes from the table.

Mr. Crabbe is unquestionably a man of genius,

possessing imagination, observation, originality: he has even powers of the pathetic and the terrible, but with all these fine elements of poetry, is singularly deficient in taste, his familiarity continually bordering on the vulgar, and his seriousness on the morbid and the shocking. His versification, where the force of his thoughts does not compel you to forget it, is a strange kind of bustle between the lameness of Cowper and the slip-shod vigour of Churchill, though I am afraid it has more of the former than the latter.

When he would strike

out a line particularly grand or melodious, he has evidently no other notion of one than what Pope or Darwin has given him. Yet even in his versification, he has contrived, by the colloquial turn of his language and his primitive mention of persons by their christian as well as surname, to have an air of his own; and indeed there is not a greater mannerist in the whole circle of poetry, either in a good or bad sense. His main talent, both in character and description, lies in strong and homely pieces of detail, which he brings before you as clearly and to the life

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.

8 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 description, 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 sus→ pected 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

have shewn a just anxiety for the appearance of the

sister art,

And felt à brother's longing to embrace

At the least glimpse of her resplendent face.

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 is a 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