have certainly been made in some way or other, he sees reason to hope that not less important amelioration may in time succeed. If our improved chemistry (says he,) should ever discover the art of making sugar from fossile or aerial matter, without the assistance of vegetation, food for animals would then become as plentiful as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying on each other, as thick as blades of grass, without restraint to their numbers but the want of local room: no very comfortable prospect, it must be owned, especially to those who are aware of the alarming ratio in which, according to later discoveries, population is found to multiply it self; a consummation that would scarcely produce that at which he thought it the chief duty of a philosopher to aim: namely, the greatest possible quantity of human happiness. On being made acquainted with reveries such as these, through the means of the press, we are inclined to doubt the justice of his encomium on the art of printing, since which discovery, he tells us, superstition has been much lessened by the reformation of religion; and necromancy, astrology, chiromancy, witchcraft, and vampyrism, have vanished from all classes of society; though some are still so weak in the present enlightened times as to believe in the prodigies of animal magnetism, and of metallic tractors. What then is to be said of the prodigies of spontaneous vitality? To a system which removes the Author of all so far from our contemplation, we might well prefer the faith of

the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.

The father of English poetry, who well knew what qualities and habits might with most probability be assigned to men of different professions, has made it a trait in the character of his Doctour of Phisike

that

His study was but little in the Bible. Though there are illustrious examples of the contrary, yet it may sometimes be with the physician as Shakspeare said of himself, when complaining of the influence which the business of a player had on his mind, that

-his nature is subdued

To that it works in.

A propensity to materialism had not, however, so subdued the mind of Darwin, as to prevent him from acknowledging the existence of what he terms the Great Cause of Causes, Parent of Parents, Ens Entium. Nay, he went the length of maintaining, that his doctrine of spontaneous vitality was not inconsistent with Scripture.

But whatever may be thought of his creed, it must be recorded of him that he discharged some of the best duties of religion in a manner that would have become its most zealous professors. He was bountiful to the poor, and hospitable to his equals. To the inferior clergy, when he resided at Lichfield, he gave his advice unfeed, and he attended diligently to the health of those who were unable to requite him. Johnson is said, when he visited his native city, to have shunned the society of Darwin: Cowper, who certainly was as firm a believer as Johnson, thought it no disparagement to his orthodoxy to address some complimentary verses to him on the publication of his Botanic Garden.

This poem ought not to be considered more than as a capriccio, or sport of the fancy, on which he has expended much labour to little purpose. It does not pretend to any thing like correctness of design, or continuity of action. It is like a picture of Breughel's, where every thing is highly coloured, and every thing out of order. In the first part, called the Economy of Vegetation, the Goddess of Botany appears with her attendants, the Powers of the Four Elements, for no other purpose than to describe to them their several functions in carrying on the operations of nature. In the second, which has no necessary connexion with the first, the Botanic Muse describes the Loves of the Plants. Here the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is done throughout. This second part has been charged with an immoral tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a burlesque

upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not in the pages of the poet. For these amours, he might have found a better motto than that which he has prefixed from Claudian, in the following stanza of Marini.

Ne' fior ne' fiori istessi Amor ha loco,.
Ama il giglio il ligustro e l'amaranto,
E Narciso e Giacinto, Ajace e Croco,
E con la bella Clitia il vago Acanto;
Arde la Rosa di vermiglio foco,
L'odor sospiro e la rugiada è pianto :
Ride la Calta, e pallida e essangue
Vinta d'amor la violetta langue.

Adone, Canto 6. He was apt to confound the odd with the grotesque, and to mistake the absurd for the fanciful. By an excellent landscape-painter now living, I was told that Darwin proposed as a subject for his pencil a shower, in which there should be represented a red-breast holding up an expanded umbrella in its claws.

An Italian critic, following a division made by Plotinus, has distributed the poets into three classes, which he calls the musical, the amatorial, and the philosophic. In the first, he places those who are studious of softness and harmony in their numbers; in the second, such as content themselves with describing accurately the outward appearances of real or fancied objects; and in the third, those who penetrate to the qualities of things, draw out their hidden beauties, and separate what is really and truly fair from that which has only its exterior semblance. Among the second of these, Darwin might claim for himself no mean station. It was, indeed, a notion he had taken up, that as the ideas derived from visible objects (to use his own words) are more distinct than those derived from any other source, the words expressive of those ideas belonging to vision make up the principal part of poetic language. So entirely was he engrossed by this persuasion, as too frequently to forget that the admirers of poetry have not only eyes but ears and hearts also; and that therefore harmony and pathos are required of the poet, no less than a faithful delineation of visible objects.

Yet there is something in his versification also that may be considered

as his own. His numbers have less resemblance to Pope's, than Pope's to those of Dryden. Whether the novelty be such as to reflect much credit on the inventor, is another question. His secret was, I think, to take those lines in Pope which seemed to him the most diligently elaborated, and to model his own upon them. But with those forms of verse which be borrowed more particularly from Pope, in which one part is equally balanced by the other, and of which each is complete in itself without reference to those which precede or follow it, he has mingled one or two others that had been used by our elder poets, but almost entirely rejected by the refiners of the couplet measure till the time of Langhorne; as where the substantive and its epithet are so placed, that the latter makes the end of an iambic in the second, and the former the beginning of a trochee in the third foot.

And showers the still snow from his hoary urns.

Darwin, Botanic Garden, p. 1, c. 2, 28. Or dart | the red flash through the circling band.

Ibid. 361. Or rests her fair | cheek on | his curled brows. Ibid. c. 2, 252. Deserve | ǎ sweet | look from | Demetrius' eye. Shakspeare, Mid. N. D. Infect the sound pine and divert his grain. Shakspeare, Tempest. on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells.

Which

Shakspeare, Sonnet 99. To lay their jūst | hands on the golden key. Milton, Comus. Or where they make the end of an iambic in the first, and the beginning of a spondee in the second foot, as The wan | stars glimmering through its

silver train.

few of the first and simplest rules of syntax. On these he rings what changes he may, by putting the verb before its nominative or vocative case. Thus in the following verses from the Temple of Nature:

On rapid feet o'er hills, and plains, and rocks,

Speed the scared leveret and rapacious fox; On rapid pinions cleave the fields above, The hawk descending, and escaping dove; With nicer nostril track the tainted ground, The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound;

Converge reflected light with nicer eye, The midnight owl, and microscopic fly; With finer ear pursue their nightly course, The listening lion, and the alarmed horse. C. 3, 93. Sometimes he alternates the forms;

awes,

And grasps the lightning in his shining claws.

Botanic Garden, p. 1, c. 1, 205. where I cannot but observe the peculiar beauty of the epithet_applied to the plumes of the eagle. It is the right translation of the word by which Pindar has described the ruffling of the wings on the back of Zete and Calaïs.

-πτεροῖσιν νώτα πεν φρίκοντας ἄμφω πορφυρέους.

Pyth. 4, 326. which an Italian translator has entirely mistaken;

Uomin' ambi, ch'orrore a' risguardanti
Facean coi rosseggianti
Vanni del tergo.

But Darwin could have known nothing of Pindar; and the word may perhaps be found with a similar ap plication in one of our own poets.

caused them to be too much admired As the singularity of his poems at first, so are they now more neglected than they deserve. There is about as much variety in them as in a bed of tulips, of which the shape is the same in all, except that some are a little more rounded at the points than others; yet they are diversely streaked and freckled, with a profusion of gay tints, in which the bizarre (as it is called by the fan ciers of that flower) prevails. They are a sight for one half hour in the spring, and no more; and are utterly devoid of odour.

THE widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but surely I never sawit. I take her to be lineally descended from the maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders; and, as she stoopeth in her gait -with as few offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's daughters-her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the peccadillos that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her waistor what she is pleased to esteem as such-nearly up to her shoulders, from beneath which, that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person is a burthen to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her. To her mighty bone, she hath a pinguitude withal, which makes the depth of winter to her the most desirable sea

son.

rate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden chair. She setteth out with you at a fair foot gallop, which she keepeth up till you are both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few se conds. Then she is up again, for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth-her movement, on these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying. Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres on those well-wooded and well-watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather, situated between the frontiers of that and ******* college-some litigation latterly, about repairs, has vested the property of it finally in ******’ "s-where at the hour of noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting-so she calls it by courtesy-but in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a book-blest if she can but intercept some resident Fellow (as usually there are some of that brood left behind at these periods); or stray Master of Arts (to most of whom she is better known than their dinner bell); with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from the length of Maud

lin grove, and warily glide off into another walk-true monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of her polished converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating solitariness! Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental, in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine; but till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the world like that of a piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth -running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and surprising. The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth

withal a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an attenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her humours and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs-being six foot high. She languisheth-being two feet wide. She worketh slender sprigs upon the delicate muslin-her fingers being capable of moulding a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily-her capacity being that of a tun of Heidelburg. She goeth mincingly with those feet of hers-whose solidity need not fear the black ox's pressure. Softest, and largest of thy sex, adieu! by what parting attribute may I salute thee-last and best of the Titanesses

Ogress, fed with milk instead of blood-not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately structuresOxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it.

ELIA.

OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS, THERE can scarcely be two opinions about the feeling with which cruelty of every description should be regarded. It may be difficult to bring people to one judgment as to what constitutes cruelty: some will stop at blood, while others will go as far as bones; but there is a degree of the crime which all will agree to look upon with unqualified abhorrence; conceding to it no palliation on any account-none resulting from the power and dignity of the brute that inflicts it; and none, undoubtedly, from the meanness or helplessness of the object on whom it is exercised. Our poor fellowcreatures on all fours, if they had no claims to our active care and kindness from their manifold services in our behalf, have, from their mere community with us in the great inheritance of flesh and blood and sense of pain, an undeniable title to our mercy and forbearance. In the relation between man and horse,