bold and active disposition,'' has attractions also for the firm even mind of manhood and the pensiveness of age: the truth and vividness of its painting, whether of manners or of nature, delight the one; the healthy buoyancy of tone, recalling the days of its youthful vigour, pleasantly interests the other.

The following extract is from the well-known Pirate's Song, with which the Corsair opens:

O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

Our thoughts as boundless and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home.
These are our realms, no limits to their sway-
Our flag the sceptre all who meet obey.
Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Oh, who can tell? not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave!
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!

Whom slumber soothes not-pleasure cannot please.-
Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,
The exulting sense-the pulse's maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way;
That for itself can woo the approaching fight,
And turn what some deem danger to delight;
That seeks what cravens shun with more than zeal,
And where the feebler faint-can only feel :-
Feel-to the rising bosom's inmost core,
Its hope awaken and its spirit soar!

Moore's Lalla Rookh is also a romantic poem, more musical and more equably sustained than those of Byron, but inferior to his in force, and to Scott's both in force and nobleness. One passage we will give ;-it is that in which the Peri, whose admission to Paradise depends upon her finding a gift for the Deity which will be meet for His acceptance, and who has already vainly offered the heart's blood of a hero fallen in his country's defence, and the last

Life of Scott: Diary.

sigh of a maiden who had sacrificed her life for her lover, -finds, at last, the acceptable gift in the tear of penitence shed by one who had seemed hardened in crime :But, hark! the vesper-call to prayer,

As slow the orb of daylight sets,
Is rising sweetly on the air

From Syria's thousand minarets!
The boy has started from the bed
Of flowers, where he had laid his head,
And down upon the fragrant sod
Kneels, with his forehead to the South,
Lisping the eternal name of God

From purity's own cherub mouth,
And looking, while his hands and eyes
Are lifted to the glowing skies,
Like a stray babe of Paradise,
Just lighted on that flowery plain,

And seeking for its home again!

Oh, 'twas a sight-that Heaven-that child

A scene which might have well beguiled

Ev'n haughty Eblis of a sigh

For glories lost and peace gone by.

And how felt he, the wretched man
Reclining there-while memory ran
O'er many a year of guilt and strife,
Flew o'er the dark field of his life,
Nor found one sunny resting-place,

Nor brought him back one branch of grace!
'There was a time,' he said, in mild
Heart-humbled tones,-thou blessed child!
When, young and haply pure as thou,
I looked and prayed like thee,—but now
He hung his head, each nobler aim
And hope and feeling which had slept
From boyhood's hour, that instant came

Fresh o'er him, and he wept-he wept !

5. The Historical poem is a metrical narrative of public events, extending over a period more or less prolonged of a nation's history. It lies open to the obvious objection that, if the intention be merely to communicate facts; they can be more easily and clearly described in prose; if to write something poetically beautiful, the want of unity

of plan, and the restraints which the historical style imposes on the imagination, must be fatal to success. Hence the rhyming chronicles of Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, and Robert Manning, though interesting to the historian of our literature, are of no value to the critic. In Dryden's Annus Mirabilis the defects of this style are less apparent, because the narrative is confined to the events of one year, and that year (1666) was rendered memorable by two great calamities, neither of which was unsusceptible of poetic treatment-the Great Plague, and the Fire of London. Yet, after all, the Annus Mirabilis is a dull poem; few readers would now venture upon the interminable series of its lumbering stanzas.

Didactic Poetry: The 'Hind and Panther;' 'Essay on Man;' 'Essay on Criticism;' 'Vanity of Human Wishes.'

We have now arrived at the didactic class of poems, those, namely, in which it is the express object of the writer to inculcate some moral lesson, some religious tenet, or some philosophical opinion. Pope's Essay on Man, Dryden's Hind and Panther, and many other well-known poems, answer to this description.

All, or very nearly all, the Anglo-Saxon poetry composed subsequently to the introduction of Christianity, bears a didactic character. Of Cadmon the Venerable Bede remarks, that he never composed an idle verse;' that is to say, his poetical aims were always didactic. A large proportion also of the English poetry produced in the three centuries following the Conquest had direct instruction in view. Most of Chaucer's allegories point to some kind of moral; but the father of our poetry seems to have thought that when a writer desired to be purely and simply didactic, he should employ prose; for the only two of the Canterbury Tales which answer to that description -the Parson's Tale on Penance, and the Tale of Meli

bæus, enforcing the duty of the forgiveness of injuries—are in prose. Shakspeare never wrote a didactic poem; though there is no limit to the suggestiveness and thought-enkindling power of his pregnant lines. The same may be said of Milton; yet, as might be expected from the extreme earnestness of the man, a subordinate didactic purpose is often traceable, not only in the Paradise Lost but in the Comus, the Lycidas, and even the Sonnets. The earliest regular didactic poem in the language is the Hind and Panther of Dryden, who, it will be remembered, was always a good and ready prose writer, who developed his poetical talent late, and who, but for his marvellous genius for rhyme, which grew constantly with his years, would have preferred, one might fancy, prose to verse for a religious polemic, as he had preferred it twenty years before for an essay on the Drama. However, we must be thankful that by indulging his genius in this instance, he has left us a very extraordinary specimen of metrical dialectics.

The Hind and Panther cannot properly be called an allegory, for over the greater portion of it there is no second meaning in reserve; the obvious sense is the only one. The interlocutors and mute personages are allegorical, and that is all. Instead of Bossuet and Burnet, we have the Hind and the Panther; but the expressions which are put in the mouths of the animals are, for the most part, precisely those which might have been put in the mouths of the divines. In the two following extracts the rival disputants are introduced to the reader :

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,

Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;

Without unspotted, innocent within,

She feared no danger, for she knew no sin :

Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds,

And Scythian shafts; was often forced to fly,

And doomed to death, though fated not to die.

The Independents, Quakers, Free-thinkers, Anabaptists, Socinians, and Presbyterians, are next enumerated, under

the emblems of the Bear, the Hare, the Ape, the Boar, the Fox, and the Wolf. The Lion, whose business, as king of beasts, is to keep order in the forest, is, of course, James II. The Panther is then introduced:

The Panther, sure the noblest next the Hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
Oh, could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!
How can I praise or blame and not offend,
Or how divide the frailty from the friend?
Her faults and virtues lie so mix'd, that she
Not wholly stands condemn'd nor wholly free.
Then, like her injur'd Lion, let me speak;
He cannot bend her, and he would not break.

Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell,
Who just dropped half way down, nor lower fell;
So poised, so gently she descends from high,

It seems a soft dismission from the sky.

The first two books are taken up with doctrinal discussions. The third opens with a long desultory conversation, partly on politics, partly on pending or recent theological controversies (that between Dryden and Stillingfleet, for instance), partly on church parties and the sincerity of conversions. The language put in the mouth of the Hind often jars most absurdly with the gentle magnanimous nature assigned to her; and in her sallies and rejoinders the tone of the coarse unscrupulous party-writer appears without the least disguise. This conversation is ended by the Panther proposing to relate the tale of the Swallows. By these birds the English Catholics are intended, who, following the foolish counsels of the Martin (Father Petre, James's trusted adviser), are expelled from their nests, and perish miserably. A conversation follows on the politics of the Church of England. Viewed in the light of subsequent events, the confidence expressed by the Hind in the Panther's immovable adherence to her non-resistance