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more striking point of view, with greater variety of dress and attitude, and with more local truth of colouring. His imagery is Gothic and grotesque. The manners and actions have the interest and curiosity belonging to a wild country and a distant period of time. Few descriptions have a more complete reality, a more striking appearance of life and motion, than that of the warriors in the Lady of the Lake' who start up at the command of Roderick Dhu from their concealment under the fern, and disappear again in an instant. The 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and Marmion' are the first, and perhaps the best, of his works. The Goblin Page in the first of these is a very interesting and inscrutable little personage. In reading these poems I confess I am a little disconcerted, in turning over the page, to find Mr. Westall's pictures, which always seem fac-similes of the persons represented, with ancient costume and a theatrical air. This may be a compliment to Mr. Westall, but it is not one to Walter Scott. The truth is, there is a modern air in the midst of the antiquarian research of Mr. Scott's poetry. It is history or tradition in masquerade. Not only the crust of old words and images is worn off with time, the substance is grown comparatively light and worthless. The forms

are old and uncouth; but the spirit is effeminate and frivolous. This is a deduction from the praise I have given to his pencil for extreme fidelity, though it has been no obstacle to its drawing-room success. He has just hit the town between the romantic and the fashionable, and between the two secured all classes of readers on his side. In a word, I conceive that he is to the great poet what an excellent mimic is to a great actor. There is no determinate impression left on the mind by reading his poetry. It has no results. The reader rises up from the perusal with new images and associations, but he remains the same man that he was before. A great mind is one that moulds the minds of others. Mr. Scott has put the Border Minstrelsy and scattered traditions of the country into easy, animated verse. But the notes to his poems are just as entertaining as the poems themselves, and his poems are only entertaining.

Mr. Wordsworth is the most original poet now living. He is the reverse of Walter Scott in his defects and excellences. He has nearly all that the other wants, and wants all that the other possesses. His poetry is not external, but internal; it does not depend upon tradition, or story, or old song: he furnishes it from his

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are novel-writers, and, like Audrey, may' thank the gods for not having made them poetical.' Did any one here ever read Mrs. Leicester's School? If they have not, I wish they would; there will be just time before the next three volumes of the 'Tales of my Landlord' come out. That is not a school of affectation, but of humanity. No one can think too highly of the work, or highly enough of the author.

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The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted before those of any other author, male or female, when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children. I became acquainted with her poetical works long after in Enfield's Speaker,' and remember being much divided in my opinion at that time between her Ode to Spring and Collins's Ode to Evening. I wish I could repay my childish debt of gratitude in terms of appropriate praise. She is a very pretty poetess; and, to my fancy, strews the flowers of poetry most agreeably round the borders of religious controversy. She is a neat and pointed prose-writer. Her 'Thoughts on the Inconsistency of Human Ex

1 A series of Tales for Children, by Miss Lamb, assisted by her brother Charles. The first edition appeared in 1808.-ED.

pectations,' is one of the most ingenious and sensible essays in the language. There is the same idea in one of Barrow's sermons.

Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess, and I believe still living. She has written a great deal which I have never read.

Miss Baillie must make up this trio of female poets. Her tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible; they are not so in Nature, or in Shakspeare. Mr. Southey has, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion that the 'Basil' of Miss Baillie is superior to 'Romeo and Juliet.' I shall not stay to contradict him. On the other hand, I prefer her 'De Montfort,' which was condemned on the stage, to some later tragedies, which have been more fortunate, -to the 'Remorse,' ' Bertram,' and, lastly, 'Fazio.' There is in the chief character of that play a nerve, a continued unity of interest, a setness of purpose and precision of outline, which John Kemble alone was capable of giving; and there is all the grace which women have in writing. In saying that De Montfort was a

character which just suited Mr. Kemble, I mean to pay a compliment to both. He was not a man of no mark or likelihood;' and what he could be supposed to do particularly well, must have a meaning in it. As to the other tragedies just mentioned, there is no reason why any common actor should not 'make mouths in them at the invisible event,' -one as well as another. Having thus expressed my sense of the merits of this authoress, I must add that her comedy of the Election,' performed last summer [1817] at the Lyceum with indifferent success, appears to me the perfection of baby-house theatricals. Everything in it has such a do-me-good air, is so insipid and amiable. Virtue seems such a pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is such a naughty word. It is a theory of some French author that little girls ought not to be suffered to have dolls to play with, to call them 'pretty dears,' to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks, to lament and bewail over them if they fall down and hurt their faces, to praise them when they are good, and scold them when they are naughty. It is a school of affectation; Miss Baillie has profited of it. She treats her grown men and women as little girls treat their dolls, makes moral puppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtue

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