tions of poetry, which is a mark of no ordinary genius for narrative. But when the novelty of a particular 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 cramasie," 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, 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 fact, he talks the language of no times and of no feelings, for his style is too flowing to be ancient, too antique to be modern, and too artificial in every respect to be the result of his own first impressions. There is indeed a general want of ambition about Mr. Scott, and a contentedness with what is shewy rather than solid, that look like a poet of no very great order. His resorting to a style so easy of imitation, his giving himself up to a profusion of words and prettinesses on which he might rhyme by the hour, and his coming out, year after year, with a new poem provocative of all sorts of suspicions connected with the trade,-all exhibit something, ready indeed, and entertaining, and penny-turning, but very far from what is either lasting or noble. Mr. Scott writes a very sprightly ballad, can sketch a good character from the life, and can hide himself to advantage in the costume of other times; but brought forward in his own unassisted person, and judged by a high standard of poetry, he wants originality and a language. 12 But there's one thing I've always forgotten to men tion, Your versification,-pray give it invention. Mr. Campbell seems to have hampered his better genius between the versification of others and the struggle to express his own thoughts in their natural language. I speak not of the Pleasures of Hope, which though abundant in promise, is a young and uninformed production in comparison with his subsequent performances: but I am persuaded that nobody would ever have thought of comparing that poem with the Gertrude of Wyoming, or of undervaluing the latter in general, and regarding it as not answering the promise of his youth, if in quitting the ordinary versification of the day, he had not deviated into another imitation and got into the trammels of Spenser. The style perhaps is not so much an imitation of Spenser, as of Thomson, the imitator of Spenser; but the want of originality is certainly not lessened by this remove from the fountain-head. In Spenser's style and stanza there is undoubtedly a great deal of harmony and dignity, and specimens And of almost every beauty of writing may be found in them; but they will hardly be pleasing now-a-days in a poem of any length, unless the subject involves a portion of the humourous or satirical, as in the School-Mistress and the Castle of Indolence, where the author looks through his seriousness with a smile, and the quaintnesses of the old poetry fall in with his lurking archness or his assumed importance. the reasons would seem to be obvious; for not to dwell upon the inherent and unaccommodating faults of the stanza in a long English poem, such as it's tendency to circumlocution and its multitude of similar rhymes, it has always an air of direct imitation, which is unbefitting the dignity of an original seriousness; and it's old words and inversions contradict that freshness and natural flow of language, which we have a right to expect in the poet that would touch our affections. We demand,-not the copy of another's simplicity, but the simplicity of the speaker himself; we want an unaffected, contemporaneous language, such as our ears and our hearts shall equally recognize, and such as our own feelings would utter, |