was towards its setting when that of Wordsworth arose. Throwing aside pedantic trammels and metrical singsong, he dared, after his own fashion, to look upon and describe nature, as well as men and manners; and he gave to his pictures a freedom and a freshness which had been for centuries banished from poetical limnings. To walk abroad, even in the city, with Cowper in our hearts, is the next best thing to a walk in the country itself. All his sketches are full of truth and nature; and nothing can surpass his winter scenery-his snowcovered valleys and frozen brooks, and leafless trees, and hungry birds picking on the highway. He deals not, like Thomson, so much in general description as in presenting to the mind's eye a series of features, the aggregate of which forms a perfect portrait. We delight in Thomson as an instructor, while we look up to him with something of reverence and awe ; but we sit down on the sofa with Cowper, and feel that we love him as a friend.

It was not to be expected, however, that an innovation like that of Cowper in his "Task," was immediately to influence, and carry with it, the undivided suffrages of a generation which had so enthusiastically rejoiced in Darwin, Hayley, and Seward. He was content to divide the laurels with them, and even compliments were bandied between them; while, in their hands, poetry continued to carry on a strange immigration into the regions of science. Steam-engines boiled in song; and flowers wooed and won each other according to the most approved doctrines of their high-priest, Linnæus. Wedgwood was immortalised, together with all the patterns of his exquisite procelain ; and Lunardi ascended in his parachute to the music of heroic verse. In short, by a series of inverted rules applied to the art, whatever had been previously the favourite subjects for embellishment, from the days of Hesiod and Homer downwards, were utterly neglected; that subjects,

which had never been before supposed capable of poetical embellishment, might be attempted. Like all ingenious novelties, the system for a while attracted attention, and gained disciples, until it was carried to degrees either of monstrosity or silliness perfectly intolerable. The Laura Matildas, the Mrs Robinsons, and Bertie Greatheads, and Merrys, and Westons, and Parsons, and the rest of the Della Cruscan school, the rough-knuckled Gifford demolished in a twinkling, and pilloried them in the "Mæviad and Baviad;" while Hookham, Frere, and Canning, in the "Anti-Jacobin," did the same good turn to the poetical votaries of science, by "The Loves of the Triangles."

Although the lights of Rogers, Bowles, Crabbe, Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, had already, at the close of last century, begun to irradiate the literary hemisphere, we find that the stars then nearest the zenith were Darwin, Hayley, and Cowper-that of the last-mentioned being, as it deserved, strongly and steadily in the ascendant. A greater perhaps still -Robert Burns-had just untimeously set; but the universality of fame which was thereafter for ever to attend that miracle of human nature, was as yet but slowly irradiating from a local centre ;

'First the banks of Doon beheld it,
Then his own land formed its span,
Ere the wide world was its empire,

And its home the heart of man."

In Robert Burns, poetry showed itself no longer a weak nursling, like cresses reared on flannel floated on water, but a healthy plant springing from the soil, and redolent of its racy qualities. He wrote not from the mere itch of writing, but from the fulness of inspiration; and coming from the heart, his poetry went to the heart. Much, therefore, as we owe to Cowper, yet probably more-although in a more indirect way—we

WILLIAM HAYLEY.

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owe to the author of "Tam O'Shanter," "Hallowe'en," and "The Cottar's Saturday Night;" for, although successors caught his manly tone, his manner and subjects must have remained for a considerable period, to the English reader, matters of mere admiration and wonder. Burns threw himself unreservedly upon domestic life, and triumphantly showed that the morally sublime might be united to the extrinsically humble; thus proving-long before Wordsworth's day-that humanising sentiment could be extracted from the daisy beneath his feet, as well as ennobling emotions from

"The lingering star with lessening ray,"

that ushers in the light of the morn. "The fire," as James Montgomery has finely said, "which burns through his poems, was not elaborated, spark by spark, from mechanical friction in the closet. It was in the open field, under the cope of heaven, this poetical Franklin caught his lightnings from the cloud as it passed over him; and he communicated them too by a touch, with electrical swiftness and effect."

The popularity of Hayley in an age so artificial and so pragmatical as that wherein he flourished-an age of minuets, and hoops, and pomatum, and powdered queues, and purple-velvet doublets, and flesh-coloured silk stockings-is not much to be wondered at, when we consider the subjects on which he wrote, and the real graces of his style. Such poetry was relished, because it was called forth by the exigencies, and adapted to the taste, of the particular time at which it was written. It was a reflection of existing modes and habits of thought; and it must be allowed that his mastery over versification was of no common order. True it is, that his mawkish or overstrained sentiment might at times expose him to ridicule; but the praise he received from Cowper is a strong proof of the influence which his writings at that time exercised over

society. That power and that popularity have now alike utterly passed away, for he was deficient in truth and nature; his house was built on the sand; and except the case of Churchill, it would be difficult to point out another whose reputation had assumed so much the aspect of a fixed star, and yet only proved "the comet of a season."

Anna Seward, yclept the Swan of Litchfield, was the Sappho of that era of ribbons and gumflowers, and a fitting one for such a Juvenal as Hayley, and such a Lucretius as Darwin. She wrote with fluency, and poured out a cataract of verse. Her elegies on Captain Cook and Major André, from the interest attached to the subjects, and the kind of electro-galvanic animation which characterised her compositions, attracted general attention, and ran successfully the round of popularity. With equal adaptation to the prevailing tastes, Paul Whitehead wore the laurel crown; and, mounted on his spavined Pegasus, duly chanted his New Year and Birthday Odes, according to the terms of the statute.

As nothing in reference to literature, except what is founded on truth and nature, can be expected to be permanent and as Darwin, Hayley, and the Litchfield coterie were deficient in both-so their triumph was an evanescent one. It has been well said, that "the poetry of Darwin was as bright and transient as the plants and flowers that formed the subject of his verse." He had fancy, command of language, varied metaphor, and magniloquent versification; but the want of nature marred all; and although his bow was bent occasionally with nervous strength, and always with artistic skill, yet his arrows fell pointless to the earth. He had no repose, no passion; and consequently his poetry alike palled on the ear and failed to touch the heart. He had the power to astonish and to dazzle, but lacked that tenderness necessary to create sympathetic interest, and without which the other is but a tinkling cymbal.

LAKE AND DARWINIAN SCHOOLS.

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In matter and in manner, the Lake and Darwinian schools of poetry are the very antipodes of each other— hostile in every doctrine, and opposed in every characteristic. The extreme radical error of the former consists in the debasing what is in itself essentially dignified and lofty, by meanness of style, triteness of simile, and puerility of description: it clothes Achilles once more in female habiliments, and sets Hercules to the distaff. The other endeavours (if I may be allowed the comparison) to buoy up the materials of prose into the regions of poetry, by putting them into an air-balloon, not expanded by the divine afflatus, but by hydrogenous gas; while the aeronaut, as he ascends, waves his embroidered flag, and scatters among the gaping crowds below gilded knick-knacks, tinsel-trinkets, and artificial flowers, amazingly like nature! The one reminds us of Cincinnatus throwing aside the ensigns of office, and withdrawing from the bustle of camps and cabinets to the tranquillity of his Sabine farm: the other to Abon Hassan in the Arabian Tales, transported from the tavern to the palace, when under the influence of a somniferous potion, and awaking amid the music of a morning concert, surrounded with the splendours of mock royalty.

Were it not for the similes, which are, however, too frequently pressed into the service, "The Botanic Garden," and "The Temple of Nature," with all their luxuriant description, splendid imagery, and pompous versification, would be the most tedious and uninteresting performances imaginable; "altogether flat, stale, and unprofitable." The subject-matter, abstractedly considered, wholly precludes pathos and sympathy— elements without which, in our critical opinion, poetry is a mere caput mortuum, and stripped of all fascination. We can easily conceive how Lucretius could construct a grand poem, "De Rerum Naturâ," and how the genius of Virgil could be suitably employed on "The Georgics;"