thoroughly 'tortured from its sense' by any ancient or modern ARISTARCHUS, than the scene in question here:

'We are now introduced to a new personage called Caliban, the son of a certain witch, whose services Prospero thus recounteth:

'We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us. What, ha! slave! Caliban!
Thou earth, thou! speak!'

'It would seem, however, that fetching in wood was his principal occupation, for, without asking what his master wanted, he replies:

'There 's wood enough within,

PROS. Come forth, I say; there's other business for thee.'

'Yet it turns out that it is none other than this very business on which he was to be employed: 'PROS. Hag-seed, hence!

Fetch us in fuel, and be quick, (thou wert best,' etc.)

'Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples, who had been just 'cooling the air with sighs' for his father, whom he supposed to be drowned, now enters, accompanied by Ariel, invisible, who sings a charming song of his own composition, of which we can only afford to give the conclu

sion:

Hark! hark! Bow-wow; the watch-dogs bark,

Bow-wow.

Hark! hark! I hear

The strain of strutting chanticleer

Cry cock-a-doodle-doo!'

'Ferdinand calls this a 'sweet air!'... 'The second act introduces us to the king of Naples and his lords, who have escaped from drowning; but his majesty, happening to miss his son, is very naturally made to express a strong curiosity to know what kind of fish had eaten him:

O thou, mine heir

Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal of thee?'

'After some farther conversation, Mr. S., not knowing what to do with the personages he has brought on the stage, devises the notable expedient of making them all fall suddenly asleep:

'GONZ. Will you laugh me asleep, for I am very heavy!
ALON. What all so soon asleep? I wish mine eyes
Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts: I find
They are inclined to do so.

SEB. Please you, Sir,

Do not omit the heavy offer of it, etc.

ALON. Thank you. Wondrous heavy.

SEB. What a strange drowsiness oppresses them!

ANT. It is the quality o' the climate.'

"The invention of that author who bethought him of sending his characters off kneeling was great, but it was nothing to this. It is evidently a favorite contrivance of the author for terminating a scene, and is here employed in order to introduce Caliban at his everlasting work of fetching in wood.

Enter Caliban with a bundle of wood. He sees a sailor:

'CAL. Here comes a spirit of his now to torment me
For bringing wood in slowly.'

'Supposing every body to be as fond of wood as Prospero, he adds:

I'll show thee the best springs, I '11 pluck thee berries;

I 11 fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.'

'The act ends with this seducing person getting drunk and singing this delicious lay:

No more dams I 'll make for fish,
Nor fetch firing at requiring.
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish.
Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban,

Has a new master. Get a new man.'

'The third act represents Ferdinand at the eternal employment of fetching in wood. Then follows a love-scene, which we omit.'

How many petty enemies had the 'myriad-minded SHAKSPEARE,' who would have chuckled over this criticism, had it actually appeared in his day! What nuts it would have been for that feeble reviler and feebler rival of his, 'one HILL!' The summing up of the reviewer is quite in keeping with the fine fancy and striking acumen displayed

in the detail of his criticism. The Tempest,' he says, 'shows us how ridiculous are those rules, to which writers have hitherto subjected themselves, for the purpose, as they fondly imagined, of giving interest to their dramas. It is to be hoped that Mr. SHAKSPEARE'S example will release them, in future, from all obligation to pay any regard to probability in their incidents, or to nature in their characters. It is evidently much more easy to invent a jargon for witches, demons, and spirits, than to deal with human passions and human affections; and it is clearly quite unnecessary to diversify a play with pathetic incidents, when the sleep which has hitherto been confined to the spectators is here transferred to the persons of the drama. Writers need no longer search for lofty subjects, which have been so absurdly deemed requisite to tragedy, when every one can readily find a storm either at sea or on shore. Many improvements will no doubt be made upon the new system, and we may shortly expect to see tragedies upon a fall of snow or a heavy shower of rain. 'The Tempest' fairly entitles Mr. SHAKSPEARE to the honors due to a reformer of our poetry, and if it produces as much profit as some of those plays in which he has praised princes and traduced the people, we shall be convinced that there are other persons beside Lapland conjurors who can make a comfortable living upon contrary winds and wrecked vessels.'

Turn we now to GIFFORD's review of MILTON'S 'Paradise Lost,' in which the cutand-slash style of that great critic, which was 'nothing if not personal,' is very faithfully portrayed. It opens as follows:

'A CONSIDERABLE part of this poem, we understand, was written in gaol; and, though the knowledge of such a fact is by no means likely to prejudice us in favor of the author or his work, we can assure our readers that we have come to the examination of Paradise Lost without any personal feelings toward Mr. MILTON, though we believe he is the same person who, after canting about liberty, sold his flattery to a tyrant and usurper; that he is the author of various seditious pamphlets, of which we have never read a line, and of a book on divorce, so infamous as to have been deemed by the bench of bishops worthy of being burned by the common hangman. A poem founded on a fact recorded in Scripture by a person notorious for his hatred to the church was of itself sufficiently curious to justify us in taking an early notice of it; but we found it at once so extravagant and so unreadable, that we should not have troubled the public with any account of its demerits, had not the author, in a most affected preface, announced certain new notions about rhyme, and laid claim to the merit of setting an admirable example to the writers of all future epics. The subject of Mr. M.'s poem would appear from the title to be the Fall of Adam; but what will our readers think when we assure them that almost the whole of the poem is made up of the disputes, adventures, battles, and defeats of devils, who make war upon their Creator; a monstrous fiction, founded upon the apocryphal book of Enoch? There is only one book out of the the twelve (the ninth) in which there is any thing about the loss of Paradise. Throughout the whole poem the author seems always glad to quit our first parents to get back to the devil, who is by far the most brilliant and interesting character of his pages, and on whose feats, indeed, he reposes with a delight not unworthy of a Manichee. All the lofty enterprises of this amiable personage are related with a feeling of partiality for their hero, which would be amusing were they not told in a singularly involved, obscure, and affected diction. Mr. MILTON's idiom is generally Hebrew or Greek; but, when he condescends to be familiar, the structure of his sentences is modelled upon the Latin. He never condescends to use a plain term when there is a scientific one, an English word when he can find a foreign one, nor an old word when he can coin a new one. Dry with him is adust; a close vest is a habit succinct; starry is stellar; flag is gonfalon; four is quaternion; powerful is pleni-potent; and mingled is interfused. To tell us that war is at hand, he says that it is in precinct; and, to tell us something else, he makes GOD address this line to the angels, counting, no doubt, upon their power of divining what is quite unintelligible to mere mortals:

'Meanwhile, inhabit lax, ye powers of heaven!'

'A learned angel, who gives Adam the history of the creation, illustrates his meaning by such terins as quadrate, cycle, and epicycle, centric and eccentric, nocturnal and diurnal rhomb, etc.; and the same personage is so unacquainted with the language of this earth as to form such nouns and adjectives as hosting, battalions, aspect, solstitial, vacuous, opacous, etc.

We have a proper sense of the obligation our language has to Mr. MILTON for these splendid additions; our only fear is that it will sink under them. Mr. MILTON was some time at the University, and there, perhaps, became so enamored of the ancients. Had his college residence not been so abruptly terminated, perhaps he might have learned that the language of poetry, in order to be delightful, should be intelligible, and that HOMER and VIRGIL never attempted to engraft foreign words upon the languages which were spoken and understood in the age and country in which their immortal poems were written.'

After a querulous consideration of his preface, and an examination of what MILTON calls English heroic verse without rhyme,' GIFFORD enters upon the work:

The first book opens with a description of hell, of which the flames give 'no light, but darkness VOL. XXII 35

taste (to say nothing of truth) than the occasional instances of an opposite tendency which might be pointed out; such as the beast enjoying his grunt and stye;' or the coy damsel, of whom the writer says:

'One moment grows she most abruptly willing,
The next, she slaps the chaps that think of billing!'

We should not have felt ourselves justified in passing unnoticed the defects which we have indicated; the more that the following stanzas evince the ability of the writer, when he gives to natural thoughts their natural expression, to avoid these and kindred

errors:

'GLANCING my vision o'er the world's affairs,

Surveying this and that, of strange and common,
Its double singles and divided pairs,

Its human brutes and brutes that might be human,

All vexing life with sad and fruitless cares,

Yet all made agents of that creature, woman;
I've come to this conclusion: that 't were better
If we poor bachelors had never met her.

'Better we had not seen and could not fancy

So sad and strange conception; could not want
Her presence, nor beneath her necromancy

Feel the torn bosom and vex'd pulses pant,
With dreams and hopes that not a step advance ye
To health or happiness, but rather daunt,
At each impassion'd move, the weary spirit,
That sees the joy receding as we near it.

'Better in single blessedness had Adam,

Stout father-farmer, in his garden trod;
Unvexed by daily strife with maid or madam,
And free to eat his fruit and meet his God:
I'm sure his fate had not been half so sad-am
Certain he had not then been thrust abroad
With breeches made of fig-leaves, quickly rended,
More quickly than his wife could get them mended.

'Do you stray beside her in the

-buttery! Does not this word 'buttery' seem impressed for the sake of oddity and the rhyme? To our apprehension and ear it is objectionable, alike in truth and in sound; scarcely less so, indeed, than the close of the annexed lines, which require no comment. DON PONCE, a Spanish knight,

Had passed his days in stupor most sublime,
His nights in deep allegiance to his pillow;
Untroubled by the crown, the church-bell's chime,
Sleep, garlic, wine, and oil, a constant fill o'!'

In prose as well as in verse Mr. SIMMS, by common consent of his critics, fails in the humorous. It is not his rôle. How much more creditable, even than the foregoing, are the subjoined stanzas, illustrating the fact that it is mental and not physical suffering which constitutes the pain of death; the 'parting from those who loved and love us :'

THIS is the mental death-the agony
Beyond all pain of limb, all fever smart,
All racking of the joints: this is to die;

Sad burial of the hope that lit the heart;

Love mourning, doomed affections lingering by,

Muttering the words of death: 'We part, we part!'
Ah! what the trial, where the pangs, the fears,

To equal this sad source of thousand tears?

'And when the lamp of life upon a verge
Unseated as a vision, sinks at last;
And when the spirit launches on the surge
Of that dark, drear, unfathomable vast

We call eternity, its latest dirge

Bemoans not pangs, still pressing, not o'erpast,
But that all natural things, forms, stars, and skies,
And the more loved than all, are fading from its eyes.

"Thus still beloved, though all relentless fair,

I part from thee and perish. Never more
Shall I win sweetness from the desolate air,
Or find a fragrant freshness in the shore;
The sea that images my deep despair

Hath still a kindred language in its roar,
And in the clouds that gather on our lee
A mournful likeness to my soul I see.

"The sense of life grows dim; the glories pass,
Like those of melting rainbows from my sight;
Dark aspects rise as in the wizard's glass,
Reflect my inner soul, and tell of night;
Glooms gather on my vision, in a mass,

And all my thoughts, beheld in their dread light,
Rise like unbidden spectres; rise to rave

Above the heart, which soon may be their grave.'

The purpose of the author to preserve this youthful effort of his muse from oblivion, by giving it in a printed form to the public, will not, we may believe, be subserved; for although portions of it are undeniably clever, yet as a whole it lacks the elements of life; a fact, indeed, of which the writer himself seems sufficiently aware, if we interpret aright the long introduction with which he has deemed it necessary to preface a short poem. The little volume, which is very neatly executed, is dedicated to one who is himself well qualified to appreciate, and on occasion to produce, good poetry-JAMES LAWSON, Esq., of this city.

CHANGE FOR THE AMERICAN NOTES: in Letters from London to New-York. By an American Lady. New-York: HARPER AND BROTHERS.

WHO jeers the Tartar, must beware of his dirk!' is a lesson which this well-tempered book will teach certain of our neighbors on the other side of the great water; for it contains stabs at national abuses and local follies, which 'pierce to the hilt;' and we are not sorry that at this moment, throughout the Union, this exposition of them as well as of the time-honored game of 'tit-for-tat,' has been as widely perused as the work which prompted it- the 'American Notes' of Mr. DICKENS. This fact, we need not add, will prevent us from entering upon a detailed review of a work already so current, at the low price of one shilling. We shall only ask such of our readers as are at all sensitive in relation to the slurs upon our country and its institutions which may from time to time reach us from abroad, to bear in mind the ignorance in which they have their origin. 'One ought to have,' says our countrywoman, 'a temper as imperturbable as FRANKLIN'S, to hear patiently the absurd remarks made in England upon the United States. Here are hundreds of thousands, with ample means and leisure, whose reading is confined to certain portions of certain newspapers; yet one of this class will deliver his judgment upon America in a manner which shows his belief that what he says is decisive. There is, there should be, no appeal. He has spoken. Englishmen have a vague notion about America, and Indians, and General WASHINGTON, and there being neither king nor lords, and the storming of Quebec, and the burning of the Caroline, and the loss of the President! But as to the vast resources of our country; the nature of her laws and institutions; of her cities rising amid primeval forests; of the capabilities of her rivers and bays; of the love of freedom in her children, which love, men say, is the parent of all the best virtues that can adorn a state; of these things they know

nothing. Talk to one of these persons about the cotton grown in the Southern States, and he will immediately speak of Manchester, where he has a cousin, a manufacturer, worth a hundred thousand pounds; mention one of those matchless prairies in the Far West (a noble sight, though Boz was disappointed,) and my gentleman, as soon as he is made to understand what a prairie is, turns the conversation to Salisbury Plain, or the moors of Scotland! These gentry generally are, or have been, connected with commercial pursuits, and plume themselves upon being, not reading, but practical men. I admit they are impartial in their ignorance, knowing as little of the past history of their own country as of the present state of ours.' 'The English view America in such a petty spirit! They judge of in the spirit that prompts their judgment in their own small matters; their clubs, or parishes, or corporations. They cannot conceive a nation without a titled and privileged aristocracy. What is not subserviency they consider anarchy; and then a country without a regular standing army! How can justice be administered by wigless judges? What but barbarism can exist, where poor men object to wear liveries! Then comes a summing up of American enormities: they sit in a manner the English do not; consequently the American way must be wrong. Vast distance, different customs and institutions, have caused a diversity of language, therefore the American language must be low; the Americans grow and use tobacco, and the necessary consequences are attributed to them as a national dishonor! How comes it that the French and other travellers do not dwell upon these things, but pass them over as matters of little moment? Is it jealousy, or ignorance, or littleness, on the part of the British?' It is all three; but America will be looked upon with far different eyes by and by; and in the meantime she is living down the slurs, slanders, and satires of her traducers, (which this little volume will teach us still more to disregard) every day. We have but one fault to find with the Change for the American Notes.' There is too much foreign coin in it. One who can write so well as our author, does not need to force French and Italian into English sentences, to show that she can do it, nor to eke out her pages with scraps of verse. Think of a hundred and fifteen little bits of poetry, from a single line upward, in a prose volume of eighty-eight pages!' 'Tis 'too much poetry for a shilling!'

HARP OF THE VALE: A COLLECTION OF POEMS BY PAYNE KENYON KILBOURNE. Hartford: CASE, TIFFANY AND BURNHAM.

THIS little volume comes to us recommended by the same neatness of mechanical execution which was displayed in the last edition of the poetical remains of the lamented BRAINARD, published in the same city. We are glad to see in it indications that the native State of that fine genius can still inspire poetic aspirations, and produce poetic minds. The young author of these fugitive pages deserves consideration; in a degree for what he has done, more for what his gifts promise. There are many passages and several entire poems of very considerable merit in the volume. The Skeptic,' with which it commences, being of the greatest length and importance, is perhaps also the best. None of the thoughts, however, can claim to be very original; yet they are evidently natural to the writer, and are set forth in flowing and well-measured verse. The opening lines are vigorous, and afford a good indication of the merit of the piece :

'No GOD! O impious sophist! then are we
Cast pilotless upon an unknown sea;
Gazing all wildly on the void profound,
Unknowing whence we came or whither bound:
The forms around us are not what they seem,
Men are but shadows, life is but a dream;
And the bright worlds that run their glorious race
Mere bubbles floating in the realms of space;
Self-poised they roll, and self-illumed they shine,
Rise without cause, and sink without design!