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and concede that Shakspeare may, after all, have been as learned as Daniel?

So much for the English histories; now for the ROMAN and GREEK.

young Ascanius from her arms by night ?* Does Shakspeare confound the rites of modern chivalry with the practices of ancient warriorship? Which of his contemporaries did not do the same? He arrays Troilus for the field with the sleeve of the inconstant Cressida in his helmet; but is he not matched by George Peele, "Maister of Artes in Oxenforde," as he underwrites himself, who, in

Mount Ida "nine knights in armour, treading a warlike almain, by drum and fife," for the entertainment of the three rival goddesses? And doth not the same George Peele, in his poem entitled "The Beginning, End, and Accidents of the War of Troy," exhibit, on the banks of the Scamander,

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Sir Paris, mounted, in his armour bright,
Prick forth, and on his helm his mistress' sleeve ?"

The concluding observations on the foregoing head will suffice for these. They are not professed chronicles; they are built on the "famam”—the popular account of the characters and events they record; and as North's "Plutarch" then stood in that rela-his "Arraignment of Paris," brings in upon tion, and was, without concealment, the source from whence Shakspeare drew, the poet, if true to that, was as true to history as he intended to be; and for the errors into which he may have fallen, his authority is to be held in fault, and not himself. Even in this respect, we doubt whether Ben Jonson's Roman plays, though drawn directly from the fountains of Sallust and Tacitus, be more correct. We have already shown that his recourse to a translation is no proof of his inability to consult the original. He did in this case precisely what Lodge had done; and his performances in this branch of history are certainly as correct as that of his learned contemporary, the author of "The Wounds of Civil War." In truth, compared with any of the historical plays of his time, whether of ancient or modern story, the productions of Lylie, Greene, Marlow, Peele, Lodge, Nash, &c., &c., those of Shakspeare are infinitely superior, not merely in poetical power, which is a gift, but in historical knowledge, which is an acquirement of study. Why, then, should he be held inferior to them in this branch of the accomplishments

of a scholar?

But his gross violations of chronology prove his deficiency in learning! Do they, indeed? Then the reproach cannot reach him till it has pierced through the ribs of Virgil, who, notwithstanding his synchronism of Dido and Æneas, stands invulnerable as a poet, accomplished in all the learning of his times. Then will he only bear the reproach of ignorance in common with most of the poets and dramatists of his day. Does he, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," people Athens and the woods adjoining with fairies? And do not Christopher Marlow and Thomas Nash-the one a master and the other a bachelor of arts in the University of Cambridge-in their joint production of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," represent her majesty's nurse complaining that " fairies have beguiled her," and stolen the

some

Again, do not Beaumont and Fletcher, both of them university scholars of repute, in their "Humorous Lieutenant," make Leontius desire the king's son to

"Hang all his ladies' favours on his crest,
And let them fight their shares"

for him in the ensuing battle? And this
battle, by the way, reminds us of another

* Ben Jonson equally confounds the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome with those of modern Europe in our author's time. In his masque of the "Fairy Prince," (written for Prince Henry,) the first person introduced is "a Satyr calling upon Chromis and Mnasy!," ("two young Satyrs, as he tells us, "found in the 6th Eclogue of Virgil,") "to know whether they have seen any thing of late of Silenus, the pædagogue of Bacchus." Receiving no response, he winds his horn, and forthwith enter Cercops, and Silenus, and Sylvanus, ensues, in which Silenus informs the good company and groups of Satyrs and Silvanes; and a dialogue that

"These are nights

Solemn to the shining rites

Of the Fairie Prince and Knights, While the moone their orgies lights. Satyr 2. Will they come abroad anon? Satyr 3. Shall we see young Oberon ?" &c. After much more of this, and some singing and dancing, the whole palace opens, and the nation of Fays [Elves and all] are discovered, and knights and masquers sitting in their several sieges; and at the farther end of all, Oberon, in a chariot drawn by two white bears; and finally, the whole party, Satyrs, Sylvans, Nymphs, Silenus and Sylvanus and the rest, together with Oberon and the greater and the lesser Fays and Elves, fall a dancing their measures, corantos, galliards, &c., until Phosphorus appears, and the whole, with its machinery, vanishes!

there) frump the Trojans for their want of an "academie" like to the Grecians, and commend the moral philosophy of Appian to their study? and doth not Andromache, waxing "a little pleasaunt and satyricall," reply with a "quip modest" against the "self-conceit of the Grecian ladies in their wysedome?" "Our ladyes," quoth she, "like homely huswyfes, beguile time with the dystaffe; but your dames apply their myndes to their books, and become so well lettered, that after long study they proove as vertuous as Helena." Iphigenia of course blushes, apologizes, and defends. Cassandra takes

flagrant anachronism of our poet. Does he | ladies, held at the Grecian tents during an not, in his 1st Henry IV., represent the interval of the siege-does he not we say, Douglas amusing himself at sparrow-shoot- make Iphigenia (however that lady came ing with a pistol,* long before the invention of gunpowder? But Beaumont and Fletcher are at it much earlier; for, in the aforesaid "Humorous Lieutenant,"-the time of which is the close of the reign of Alexander the Great,-Demetrius enters with a loaded pistol in his hand, presents and fires it at the Lieutenant. The victim falls, indeed, but only to rise a better man than before! And apropos to such anachronistic weapons, can it be forgotten that Thomas Heywood, Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, provides his Psyche with "a sharp-set razor" to cut Cupid's throat withal? or that Marlow and Nash furnish Eneas with a "tinder- up her parable, and spouts Latin; and box," and represent him as a civil engineer, laying down plans and elevations of Carthage with "paper," and doubtless with pen and ink, in his hand? Could those "art-masters" have seen as far forward into time as they looked back into its records, we should probably have beheld the hero of the play taking gradients for a line of railway between the capitals of the Sidonian Dido and the Getulian Tarbas.

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the wily Ulysses quotes Horace! And moreover, doth not the same worthy, in conjunction with Thomas Lodge, A.M., Cantab., in the "Looking-Glass for London," make Rasni, the King of Nineveh in the days of Jonas the prophet, quote from Virgil's celebrated distich; and to show himself perfect master of the language, modify it (without the aid of Lilly's Syntax) to his own purpose? And are not the rabblement of that doomed city as intimate with Galen as their monarch with Maro? And do they not, moreover, prate as familiarly (though it is rather out of place, both here and there) of rapiers, ale-houses, parish churches, sextons, squires, and christening cakes, as Parson Adams or Doctor Paley, in more modern times, could do for their lives? But enough of this. Even a more serious charge against his chronology, involving the occasional misplacing of historical facts with reference to the real order of their occurrence, must be postponed for a more convenient opportunity.

BAYARD TAYLOR'S POEMS.

Messrs. Ticknor, Reed & Fields are doing | cess, and which, united with his talents the community a great service in their publication of a uniform edition of American Pocts. As the poetical works of many of our eminent countrymen have successively appeared from their press, we have taken pleasure in committing them to our library and to our memory, as worthy of being preserved and of being remembered. We have accustomed ourselves to regard their names upon the title-page of a volume of poems as a guaranty of its excellence. We have always believed them eminently disposed to lend a helping hand to all efforts of real and persevering genius. We have always found them considerate toward the rights of American men of letters, and very sparing in gratifying our unnational taste for pirated literature. When to this it is added, that the publications of their house are uniformly refining and pure in their tendencies, and unexceptionable alike in the internal spirit and the external letter, we must feel assured that whatever volumes thay may continue to publish are worthy of being commended

to the attention of all readers.

have proved the harmony of the union between labor and genius, and the wisdon of employing the one to minister to the ful development of the other. His steady and onward course furnishes one more instance to disprove the oft-alleged inseparableness between poetical talent and moral enfeeblement, and to establish the fact that a favorite of the Muses may be also an upright. laborious, practical man. If men were not by nature disposed to look obliquely at any qualification which they do not themselves possess, and to ally the worst of faults with the most eminent of capabilities, whenever such a union is sanctioned by a single precedent, we should think it worth while to spend a little time in combating a popular notion that a poet must be visionary, spendthrift, or dissipated; that he must rave with Shelley, scatter with Savage, or tipple with Byron; that he must be a child in practical affairs, unfit to manage a household, disqualified for the duties of an active citizen, a day-dreamer, and an idle participant in the blessings provided by others.

But without stopping to make war upon a very ill-founded theory, we may say that Mr. Taylor has probably written better verses, and that his mind is in better order

But our estimate of Mr. Taylor's poems is not based upon the name of his publishers. We have watched Mr. Taylor's poetical career for some years with no ordinary interest, and with each of his successive effusions, | for the production of good poetry, than if he our confidence in his powers and in his suc- had devoted himself entirely to poetical cess has been strengthened. There is nothing labor from the day he began to write verses of feebleness in Mr. Taylor; he is never at all, and, shutting himself up among his strained, never affected, and never untrue to books, had entered upon a life of intellectual a fine vein of healthy sentiment, which per- seclusion. Mr. Taylor, as is very well known, vades the entire composition of his mind. is a prominent member of the editorial corps From the day on which he embarked for of a leading daily journal of this city, and, Europe, a mere stripling, with no advan-in his professional duty, performs day by tages of education beside those which, with day an amount of work which might amply infinite difficulty, he had provided for him-justify any man in entire relaxation during self, with very little money in his pocket, all his intervals of leisure. But as a life of and very unsubstantial prospects of obtain- idleness makes no man a poet, so the poetiing more, until now, when the literary ambi-cal spirit of no man is stifled by daily exertion of most men would be satisfied with the honors he has gained, he has continually shown a perseverance, a self-reliance, and a willingness to work, which of themselves could scarcely have failed to command suc

cise in the conflicts of life. While the busy man labors, he can not only think, but he can gather materials for after-thought. Amid the most active duties, the intellect is never debarred from noticing all that is noticeable,

and analyzing all that challenges its power. | adorning fragments of legendary narrative, And it is more than probable that the very or mythological fable, where the other bent points on which it seizes, under such a con- its powers under the weight of the gravest dition of its use, are the points most calcu- matters of history or metaphysical speculalated to interest the majority of men, but tion. And, regarding the portentous volupon which they may not have time or umes of our earlier poets, we cannot wonder ability to comment for themselves. It must that their descendants are not as emulous be true, that the writer who mingles most of their untiring prolixity as of their poetiwith men is able, other things being equal, cal ambition. From any other than the to write most acceptably to the majority of briefest of volumes, the reading community readers. If Shelley had passed six hours a of the present day start back in positive disday with his fellow-Englishmen, the number may. We have no time for poems comof his readers would have increased a hun- prising twelve or twenty-four books, though dred-fold. If Southey had been a merchant, built according to the precepts of Boileau or a practitioner at the bar, he might have and the example of Milton, and though they written less poetry, but what he might have may treat of the greatest of national or hiswritten would have been vastly more read- torical affairs. We ask for the pith of able. Abstraction, and a misguided aver- volumes in sentences; history, philosophy, sion to the duties of common life, destroyed scientific speculations are alike subjected to the power of the marvellous genius of Keats. a universally demanded compression, and Similar traits of character, but partially sub- poets find that the shorter and the more dued, neutralize the effect of many of the vigorous are their effusions, the more nuefforts of Tennyson. Poets cannot know merous and the better pleased are their every thing by intuition; and the greatest readers. and most prolific of all their themes, human character, requires an amount of study which can only be successfully and fully performed by constant intercourse with the world, by cheerfully participating in its duties, and sharing whatever of rational pleasure or inevitable sorrow its unceasing revolutions may bring.

We consider Mr. Taylor a very eminent example of the poetical talent of Young America, classing him among those writers who have appeared since the commencement of the decade recently passed; a decade whose early barrenness gave but slight token of the richness of its latter half. The writers of whom we speak (Saxe, Stoddard, Fields, Lowell,)-are distinguished for lyrical fire, a practical vein of metaphysics, a happy boldness of language, sensuousness of fancy, deficiency in all but the more earthly qualities of imagination, and, in common with their transatlantic brethren, for inability or unwillingness to undertake epical or even prolonged efforts. When we compare these writers, not with their elders in poetical literature, but with the poets of an carlier generation, the Trumbulls, the Dwights and the Barlows, we cannot but notice a great and a peculiar difference. We see one generation, occupying a field which lay barren before the eyes of the other, composing songs where the other elaborated epics;

If the only recommendation of our rising poets, beyond that which we award to their forerunners in American letters, consisted in brevity, we should feel that we were saying but little in their praise. But, happily, we are not obliged to stop here. We hazard nothing in saying that the productions of our earlier poets are at once less powerful and less natural, less imbued with the true poetical fervor, the hearty abandon to the impulses of the imagination or the fancy, and therefore less fitted to produce that effect upon the reader which is the aim of all poetry, than the works of our living writers. Our present poets sweep the lyre with a bolder and a stronger hand, are truer to their native instinct, are more fervid, more passionate, less regardful of critical codes, and less distrustful of a response from their hearers. From the very nature of what they write, they become self-reliant, and hopeful of favor from the world. If they were obliged to devote years to a single piece, whose success should determine their reputation for ever, we can imagine the diffidence, the frequent heart-sinkings, the oft-recurring temptations to a total abandonment of their work, under which they would inevitably labor; we can readily see that they would grow timid, would prefer safe mediocrity to perilous brilliancy, would often become dull from fear of being thought profane, and

would imitate well-known models rather than risk their fame by trusting to an untried and uncertain originality. How different from this is the courage of a writer who feels that he may commit many failures before he is condemned; who is conscious that, if he errs to-day, he may correct his mistake to-morrow; whose path is guided, not by one, but by many verdicts upon his past course, and whose ripening and improving powers are for ever employed on fresh efforts, instead of being hampered by a connection with some protracted and feebly commenced undertaking, which it is scarcely possible to improve without total reconstruction, and which cannot be abandoned without a sacrifice of much toilsome and as yet unremunerated labor!

than of interest, and each one has felt him self obliged to devote more or less labor t the task of making a savage, unimaginative and cowardly race appear intellectual, aspir ing, and heroic. And whatever of rud interest may exist in the aboriginal nature no poetical efforts have as yet been successfu in commending it to our admiration, or ever to our sympathy. And our prose writers have fared scarcely better in their dealings with sc unpromising a theme. Mr. Cooper is the only exception to the long list of failures. Yet, even in Cooper's novels, we are willing to leave it with the reader to determine whether the backwoodsman is not a more heroic and a more interesting character than the Indian; whether we do not watch his career with more enthusiasm; whether we do not grieve Mr. Taylor has included in the volume more readily over his misfortunes; and whose title forms the heading of this article, whether, in spite of all the dignities that art nearly all the poems he has written since has attempted to throw over the red man's the publication of his former work, the nature, we do not constantly regard him Rhymes of Travel." Many of these poems with distrust and aversion, even if he is have appeared in the Philadelphia maga- made too conspicuous for indifference, and zines, to which Mr. Taylor is a regular con- too generous to be met with our natural tributor; and having been extensively repub-hostility. We trust that Mr. Taylor, having lished by the newspaper press, have aided in no small degree to increase the reputation of their author. The few of his productions which he has seen fit to omit, are precisely those in which we have found least to admire, either from the presence of positive defects, or from the absence of any thing that could distinguish them from the general run of magazine poetry. We should have been pleased, however, to have seen the "Song of the Dreams," originally published in Sartain's Magazine, with some slight alterations, included in this collection; and we regret that it has been condemned by its author to share the same fate with that much-talked-about offering to the Queen of Song, which for the time placed Mr. Taylor's name in such close juxtaposition with the names of Messrs.

66

Genin and Barnum.

"Mon-da-min, or the Romance of Maize," an Indian legend, the longest poem of the volume, placed, in conformity to poetical usage, in advance of all the others, is a very unfortunate effort. As a work of art, it is unquestionably good; but the subject is uninteresting and prosaic, and would have remained so in the hands of much more eminent poets than any now living. The Indian character seems to have been with American writers a subject of duty rather

satisfied his conscience and freed himself from all obligation towards a very unsatisfactory subject for poetry, may hereafter abstain from a theme so uncongenial to the muse.

"Hylas," a few pages beyond, is a production of great beauty, full of fire, strongly and graphically written, and abounding in those fine rhetorical passages which constitute one of Mr. Taylor's peculiar excellences. Most of our readers will recollect the story. A Greek boy, while bathing in the river Scamander, is spied by water-nymphs, and in spite of his struggles is made a prisoner to their violent love, and, like the unwary voyagers upon the Rhine, who have been fascinated by the melodious voice of Loralie, is for ever detained below the waters. We have only room for one or two extracts from this poem, and we select the following lines as a specimen of Mr. Taylor's powers of description:

And felt with shrinking feet the crispy verdure,
"Then, stooping lightly, loosened he his buskins,
Naked, save one light robe, that from his shoulder
Hung to his knee, the youthful flush revealing
Of warm, white limbs, half nerved with coming
manhood,

The thick, brown locks, tossed backward from his
Yet fair and smooth with tenderness of beauty.

forehead,

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