Character of Mr. James HoGG, the ETTRICK SHEPHERD―as a Poet. Written in 1820.

THE poems of Mr. Hogg are not so popular as many that have less of the fine inspiration of the bard. The ideal beauty, the graces of pure invention, which constitute their excellence, cannot have all their fame until time shall have corrected the errors of opinion, by destroying contemporary interests and prejudices, and leaving to works that aspire to celebrity, no other means of securing it than the virtue that is in them.

Of the poets of Scotland, past or present, the most truly imaginative is the Shepherd of Ettrick; but the general reader is more attracted by Scott's description of real scenery, and his tales of fairy romance and gothic chivalry, than by those mental fictions which create a new world of poetry, that has no connection with vulgar knowledge, early associations, or common experience.

It is true the genius of Byron, though ideally sublime, obtained an early popularity; while Hogg is comparatively little known-but then the former, along with his visions of intellect, describes the fierce passions of the human heart, and the extreme sufferings of humanity, which give a palpable character and tragic effect to his productions, that do not require the assistance of the stage to produce dramatic excitement; whereas the latter scarcely mingles with the clear splendour of intellectual invention, any of that living action or suffering of men, which stimulate the curiosity of all, and excite the impassioned sympathy of many.

The genius of Hogg and Byron are not more distinct from those of all their contemporaries, than different from each other. Byron pourtrays the gloomy and desolating passions of illustrious guilt, with an exasperated energy of expression kindred to his subject. He describes the wild enterprise, the devoted purpose, the onset, career, and extinction of splendid desperadoes, with a power that unites whatever is most fervent in eloquence, to all that is real in narrative; while his characters, at the same time eccentric and probable, alarm the imagination like the spectres of other worlds, and touch our human

sympathies like the real existences of this. In this power he stands alone, as well as in the full, and rich, and mournful elevation of his classic descriptions; which revive the noblest historical remembrances, and twine our affections in the embraces of graceful sorrow around the sepulchral memorials of departed empire the result of exquisite art-and the urns of deceased virtue. There is nothing of this power in Hogg; nor does he attempt it. His imagination abstracts human existence from its mortal passions, but it can display its original and erratic energy in the scenery, which it creates around them. He rarifies, as it were, the human soul, by making it breathe a more spiritual atmosphere than that of our earth, before it can be worthy to be delineated by the fine and ethereal touches of his shadowy pencil. He throws over all the ideal circumstances a soft and visionary beauty, which preserves the unity of the picture; and, thus elevates humanity to the mount which seems fit for the scene of its transfiguration. Byron, in his Giaour and Corsair, has exhibited human virtues, and human talents, with the enterprises of fiends, and the vices of demons; he seems to have given only some mortal attributes, and some human weaknesses to the Satan of Milton:-whereas Hogg has purified even human virtue from the blemishes of our common nature. He has removed all the sources of tragic interest, by taking away the passions; and has produced a being more delicately pure, more endearingly angelic, and one more meet to be the queen and peerless ornament of some fair paradise, than the Eve of our epic bard.

This poet has likewise a power of supernatural description, which none but Milton has excelled. This is greatly manifested in his Pilgrims of the Sun. The imagined objects of wonder and delight, which constitute the beatific vision of the Fair Spirit whom his genius conducts through the starry firmament, are grasped with great inventive felicity, and described with a magnificence of thought, and that exquisite force and melody of language which mark the mind sublime by nature, and temperate in its most adventurous hardihood. In the details of infernal horrors, no British poet has come near the terrible energy, the superhuman fierceness of Milton. Satan whether

he rises on the burning lake, or mounts through chaos, is surrounded by scenery worthy his proud spirit to cope with, and which we cannot conceive altered without being impaired in its grandeur and probability; but we prefer the Heaven of the other poet to his. Milton has introduced too many cares, too material images and earthly associations into the celestial abodes. Hogg has sketched the outline of his paradise with the free and intrepid hand of a master; but he has judiciously left to the imagination the supreme and undefinable glory, which both Milton and Raphael attempted in vain to embody, and only proved that the presumption of the greatest genius can be confounded with the imbecility of the lowest both were profane in their daring, and the act became its own. punishment. We do not compare Hogg with Milton in any other quality, than that grandeur of imagination which excites pleasure, rather than inspires terror; in other qualities of the epic poet, there is no comparison suggested. Milton formed his taste elaborately and successfully on the classic model. He looked up to the divine Homer with a noble fidelity of emulation, and a more sublime nature enabled him to transcend his master. This can be said of no other man. It is the grand and exclusive peculiarity of Milton's fame. His taste was as cultivated as that of Virgil; his genius more daring than that of his Grecian predecessor; and so the third miracle of epic power surpassed the former two.

In his most tender as well as lofty passages, Milton is, in his style of thought and language, distinguished for his classic grace and purity; whereas Hogg, whose natural ambition is not elevated by the inspiring works of antiquity, has more of wild energy and romantic sentiment, than of that disciplined spirit and diction, which remind us of the serene and chastened ambition of the classic ages: still, however, he possesses a native temperance of feeling and emotion, which scarcely ever allows us to be offended by gross or revolting images. He does not indulge in the distempered extravagance, and morbid sensibility of the most affected and presumptuous of the gothic school of style, which is known by the name of German. Without giving to the accomplished reader the

learned associations, by which Milton and his followers charm scholars, he avoids that vulgarity of illustration which weak judgments mistake for naturalness of thought; but which is as opposite to true simplicity, as it is to pleasurable selection.

His fancy is as fertile as that of Collins, and has in its milder spirit much of its pensive and shadowy lustre-much of its power of creating picturesque circumstances, with equal distinctness and profusion-much of its tenderness of hues—its rich broken foregrounds, and ethereal distances; but Collins, like Milton, had the advantage of being a scholar, and the vigour of his productive imagination is graced by its relieving embellishments. He-with more warinth, a better taste, a less promiscuous love of imagery than Spencer, blends with the dreams of playful fancy, or the allegorical beings of his original thought, the pure, the ideal fictions of grace; and so judiciously is the union of the images of memory and invention produced, that the associations of the one seem to be the natural accessaries to the conceptions of the other. Hogg does not interest us in the same way. It is evident that his genius did not pass a charmed infancy in the bowers of Tempe, or on the banks of the Ilissus. His is the spirit familiar with a wilder and a darker region of romance and superstition. The fairy-haunted valley, the blasted heath, the mournful and desolate glen, and all the objects with which savage religion has peopled them, have filled his memory with romantic lore, with gothic legends, and the tales of a barbarous but picturesque mythology, which fill with mild animation his mountain-song, that like the music of the Druids' grove, has a sweet but awful expression. In describing either the grand effects of nature, or the rich, the glowing, and quiet circumstances in which she often appears, in a land of hills and woods and torrents, he has a rapid but judicious pencil, which realizes every vicissitude of scene, with picturesque truth and ardent fidelity. Had his taste, however, been as cultivated as his genius is strong, he would not have mixed the ludicrous with the romantic, and the satirical with the mournful, as he has sometimes done. In this, he reminds us of the exquisite invention, the graceful fictions, and wildness of Shakspeare, in that motley production of gallantry, satire, and delicious

fancy-The Midsummer Night's Dream. But the Shepherd of Ettrick relies for fame altogether upon his natural uncultivated resources; he has no tact, no artifice of composition, no management of his own ideas, or those of others; but if reading has not polished his thoughts, it has not enervated them. He has the great charm of originality, impaired, as it frequently is, by occasional rudeness. His versification is sometimes majestic and powerful, but oftener full of the soft wild tones of aerial melody, which remind us of the magic sweetness of Moore. On the whole, it may be said of him, that if his poetic nature could be improved, it could receive assistance only from the very first order of art.

Spain-ESPARTERO puts to death IRIARTE.-Dec. 1, 1837.

THE atrocious and cowardly murder of the brave General SARSFIELD, inflicted an indelible stain upon the character of the revolutionary troops of the Regent, CHRISTINA-if indeed it was possible to inflict any additional stain upon the reputation of the soldiers of the Spanish movement, begrimed as their military fame already was with the recollection of so many crimes. But ESPARTERO, CHRISTINA'S General-in-chief, merits still deeper execration by the mode which he has taken of avenging the deaths of SARSFIELD, and other distinguished victims of the licentious soldiery.

This General-in-chief has put to death after a mock trial—a melancholy burlesque upon the solemnities of justice-Don Leon IRIARTE, one of the ablest, the most skilful, and most active of the superior officers of CHRISTINA's army in Navarrea soldier indeed, to whose exertions the REGENT is more indebted for any footing in Navarre, at the present moment, than to the prowess and heroism of the prince of Spanish Bobadils, ESPARTERO.

We have said the trial, which terminated in the cold-blooded murder of this brave man and of several others, was a solemn farce. Can anybody deny that, who reads the following account of the tragical proceedings?—which we repeat, not from the statement of any of our own correspondents, but