opinions that ought to be, and she shall be brought forward with all her poetical sins on her head;—nay, let a married lady give us but an account of her voyage to India in following her husband, and she shall have gone there to get one ;-but speak not of " the imputed weaknesses of the great."* Princes might formerly have kept mistresses; they might also have discarded them; and these discarded mistresses, if they sinned in rhyme, might be denounced accordingly, even to their rheumatism and their crutches; † ---but no such things are done now, either by princes or by the favourites of princes; speak not of " the imputed weaknesses of the great ;"-there were vices at court formerly,-vices in Juvenal's time,-vices even in our own time, when bad poets were going and ladies fell lame,-but now,-talk of no such thing; every prince lives with his wife as he ought to do, keeps the most virtuous company as he always did, and is hailed, of course, wherever he goes, with * Quarterly Review, No. 18, p. 148. See a pleasant and manly fling at Mrs. Robinson's crutches" in the Baviad, v. 28. shouts of a cordial popularity:-the vices, that might reverse such a character, are only " imputed" to him ;-to use a pithy and favourite mode of quotation, "There's no such thing!" With regard to Mr. Gifford's poetical claims, which I had nearly forgotten, he seems to have thought very justly, that the Juvenal required something better than the usual monotonous versification; but in aiming at vigour and variety, he has fallen into no versification at all, and become lame and prosaical. The only approach that he ever made to the poetical character was in some pleasing and even pathetic lines in the notes to his Moviad, beginning I wish I was where Anna lies ; but such lines coming in such a place, in the very thick of petty resentments and vulgar personalities, contradict the better taste that is in them, and give the reader perhaps as distasteful an idea of the author, at the time of life when he inserted them, as any one passage of his writings. 10 For his host was a God,-what a very great thing! And what was still greater in his eyes,—a King! Αναξ Απολλων, — King Apollo, -a common title with the old Grecian poets.-See the following note. 11 Be original, man; study more, scribble less, Of Mr. Walter Scott's innate and trusting reverence for thrones and dominations, the reader may find specimens abundantly nauseous in the edition of Dryden. His style in prose, setting aside it's Scotticisms, is very well where he affects nothing beyond a plain statement or a brief piece of criticism; and it is not to be supposed that his critical observations are always destitute of acuteness or even of beauty; but the moment he attempts any thing of particular ease or profundity, he only becomes slovenly in the one instance and poetically pedantic in the other. His politics may be estimated at once by the simple fact, that of all the advocates 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 reader 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 |