phael, to go along with them in their imitation of Nature, is to be so far like them to be occupied only with that in which they fell short of others, instead of that in which they soared above them, shows a vulgar, narrow capacity, insensible to any thing beyond mediocrity, and an ambition still more grovelling. To be dazzled by admiration of the greatest excellence, and of the highest works of genius, is natural to the best capacities, and the best natures; envy and dulness are most apt to detect minute blemishes and unavoidable inequalities, as we see the spots in the sun by having its rays blunted by mist or smoke. It may be asked, then, whether mere extravagance and enthusiasın are proofs of taste? And I answer, no, where they are without reason and knowledge. Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence is. To admire and be wrapt up in what is trifling or absurd, is a proof of nothing but ignorance or affectation on the contrary, he who admires most what is most worthy of admiration, (let his raptures or his eagerness to express them be what they may,) shows himself neither extravagant nor" unwise." When Mr Wordsworth once said that he could read the description of Satan in Milton,

"Nor seem'd

Less than archangel ruin'd, and the excess Of glory obscur'd,"

till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth of feeling. When the same author, or his friend Mr Southey, says, that the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost, this appears to me, I confess, a great piece of impertinence, or an unwarrantable stretch of friendship. Nor do I think the preference given by certain celebrated reviewers, of Mr Rogers's Human Life over Mr Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, founded on the true principles of poetical justice; for something is, after all, better than nothing.

We have not ventured to make any change in the words of the ingenious essayist, although we are by no means ourselves of opinion either that Mr Rogers's poem on Human Life is nothing, or Mr

To hasten to a conclusion of these desultory observations. The highest taste is shown in habitual sensibility to the greatest beauties; the most general taste is shown in a perception of the greatest variety of excellence. Many people admire Milton, and as many admire Pope, while there are but few who have any relish for both. Almost all the disputes on this subject arise, not so much from false, as from confined taste. We suppose that only one thing can have merit : and that, if we allow it to any thing else, we deprive the favourite object of our critical faith of the honours due to it. We are generally right in what we approve ourselves; for liking proceeds from a certain conformity of objects to the taste; as we are generally wrong in condemning what others admire; for our dislike mostly proceeds from our want of taste for what pleases them. Our being totally senseless to what excites extreme delight in those who have as good a right to judge as we have, in all human probability implies a defect of faculty in us, rather than a limitation in the resources of nature or art. Those who are pleased with the fewest things, know the least; as those who are pleased with every thing, know nothing. Shakespeare makes Mrs Quickly say of Falstaff, by a pleasant blunder, that "Carnation was a colour he could never abide." So there

Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads only something. We have long intended to give our readers some quotations from the first of these poets, whose late work we have unaccountably passed over; and we hope yet to do so. We owe likewise an amende honorable to Mr Wordsworth, who, by the way, has now added a Benjamin to his Bell, and we shall certainly give it These are poets him one day or other.

whom it is never too late to take up, because they are among our classics, and Milton. Who told this lively writer that we speak of them as we do of Pope or Mr Southey ever preferred the Excursion to the Paradise Lost? He might, perhaps, have traced, with truth, some resem blance in the genius of the two poets. We wish our essayist would carry his own principles throughout, and think it a proof of taste to admire poets of his own as well as of former days, or at least let him End all dispute, and fix the year precise, When British bards begin t'immortalize!

En.

are persons who cannot like Claude, because he is not Salvator Rosa; some who cannot endure Rembrandt, and others who would not cross the street to see a Vandyke; one reader does not like the neatness of Junius, and another objects to the extravagance of Burke; and they are all right, if they expect to find in others what is only to be found in their favourite author or artist, but equally wrong if they mean to say, that each of those they would condemn by a narrow and arbitrary standard of taste, has not a peculiar and transcendant merit of his own. The question is not, whether you like a certain excellence, (it is your own fault if you do not,) but whether another possessed it in a very eminent degree. If he did not, who is there that possessed it in a greater-that ranks above him in that particular? Those who are accounted the best, are the best in their line. When we say that Rembrandt was a master of chiaro-scuro, for instance, we do not say that he joined to this the symmetry of the Greek statues, but we mean that we must go to him for the perfection of chiaro-scuro, and that a Greek statue has not chiaro-scuro. If any one objects to Junius's Letters, that they are a tissue of epigrams, we answer, Be it so; it is for that very reason that we admire them. Again, should any one find fault with Mr Burke's writings as a collection of rhapsodies, the proper answer always would be, Who is there that has written finer rhapsodies? I know an admirer of Don Quixote who can see no merit in Gil Blas, and an admirer of Gil Blas who could never read through Don Quixote. I myself have great pleasure in reading both these authors, and in that respect think I have an advantage over both these critics. It always struck me as a singular proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend who had Paine's Rights of Man and

Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together, they made a very good book. To agree with the greatest number of good judges, is to be in the right; and good judges are persons of natural sensibility and acquired knowledge.

I apprehend that natural is of more importance than acquired sensibility.

On the other hand, it must be owned, there are critics whose praise is a libel, and whose recommendation of any work is enough to condemn it. Men of the greatest genius and originality are not always persons of the most liberal and unprejudiced taste ; they have a strong bias to certain qualities themselves, are for reducing others to their own standard, and lie less open to the general impressions of things. This exclusive preference of their own peculiar excellencies to those of others, in writers whose merits have not been sufficiently understood or acknowledged by their contemporaries, chiefly because they were not common-place, may sometimes be seen mounting up to a degree of bigotry and intolerance, little short of insanity. There are some critics I have known who never allow an author any merit till all the world" cry out upon him," and others who never allow another any merit that any one can discover but themselves. So there are connoisseurs who spend their lives and waste their breath in extolling sublime passages in obscure writers, and lovers who choose their mistresses for their ugly faces. This is not taste, but affectation. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity, had in general much better remain in it. M. N.

He then

-Be the apostles twelve,
Though thou be the devil himselve,
Thou shalt me serve at this need.-
Now God for his namés seven,
That is one God in trinity,
In his name I command thee,
That thou serve me at will.

He shook his head, and stood full still.
To-morrow, as soon as it is light, the
two armies are arrayed for battle.
The Saracens mustering,

Of Saudons and of heathen kings,
above one hundred, the least of whom
led thirty thousand men to battle;

and their line extended no less than ten miles, while the Christian leaders did not exceed a dozen.

King Richard look'd, and gan to see
As snow liggés on the mountains
Beheld were hills and plains,
With hawberk bright and helmés clear,
Of trumpets and of taborere,
To hear the noise it was wonder,
As though the world, above and under,
Should fall.-

but, if the Soldan should conquer, then

The Christian men should go
Out of that land for evermoe,

And Saracens should have their will in wold.

Richard vaults upon his steed, and encounters the Soldan, whose chief hopes were reposed in his enchanted

mare.

Her crupper hang all full of bells,
Her poitrel and her arsoun
Three miles men might hear the soun",
The mere gan neigh, her bells to ring,
For great pride without leasing.
A broad fauchon to him he bare,

For he thought that he wold there
When his hourse had kneeled down
Have slain King Richard with treasoun,
As a colt that shoud souk,
And he was 'ware of that pouk.
His ears with wax were stopped fast,
Therefore he was nought aghast.

He struck the fiend that under him yede,
And gave the Saudon dint of dead-
With the speer that Richard heeld

He bare him through and under the shield.
None of his arms might last,
Bridle and poitrel all to brest.
The mere to the ground gan go.
His girth and his stirrups also
Maugre him he garr'd him stoop

Backward over his mere's croupe,
The feet toward the firmament,

Behind the Saudon the spear outwent.
He let him lie upon the green,
He prick'd the fiend with his spores keen,

In the name of the Holy Ghost,
He drives into the heathen host,
And all so soon as he was come
He brake asunder the sheltrum,
For all that e'er before him stode
Horse and man to the earth yode,
Twenty foot on every side
Whom that he overraught that tide
Of life ne was their warrant none.
Throughout he made his horse to gone
As bees swarmen in the hives.
The Christian men in afterdrives
Striken thorough that down ligs
Through the middle and the rigs—
Six he slew of heathen kings
To tell the soothe in all things.
In the gest, as we find,
That moe than sixty thousind
Of empty steeds abouten yode
Up to their fetlocks in blood.

The battle was finished only with the day, The Christians lost three hun

dred men. At last,

They kneel'd, and thanked God of Heaven, Worship'd him and his names seven.

Nothing gave fairies and evil spirits such power over the inhabitants