portant, and gives the least regard to the more important particulars under consideration.

Apostrophe is an abrupt address to the absent. It sometimes partakes of the character of personification: as St. Paul, in holy rapture, exclaims.

"Oh Grave! where is thy victory? Oh Death! where is thy sting?"

The Minstrel in Scott's Lay, breaks out, at the thought of his beloved country, into this apostrophe :

"O Caledonia, stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band

That knits me to thy rugged strand !"

Personification is the investing of qualities, or things inanimate, with the character of persons, or the introducing of dead or absent persons as if they were alive and present.

The following example of the figure of personification is from Milton's Comus. The poet personifies Virtue, Wisdom, and Contemplation:

"Virtue could see to do what virtue would

By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,

Where with her best nurse, Contemplation,

She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort

Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired."
Cowper has personified Winter, as the

"King of intimate delights,

Fire-side enjoyments, homeborn happiness"

and has introduced him in a very picturesque description: thus, "O Winter, ruler of the inverted year,

Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled,
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapped in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,

But urged by storms along its slippery way,

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem'st,
And dreaded as thou art !"

Allegory is a prolonged use of figures, so connected in sense as to form a parable or fable. Gray's Ode to Adversity is an allegory.

66 ODE TO ADVERSITY.

"Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best!
Bound in thy adamantine chain,
The proud are taught to taste of pain,
And purple tyrants vainly groan

With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone.

When first thy sire to send on earth
Virtue, his darling child, designed,
To thee he gave the heav'nly birth,
And bade to form her infant mind.
Stern rugged nurse! thy rigid lore
With patience many a year she bore:

What sorrow was, thou bad'st her know,

And from her own she learned to melt at others' wo.

Scared at thy frown terrific, fly
Self-pleasing Folly's idle brood,

Wild laughter, noise, and thoughtless joy,
And leave us leisure to be good.
Light they disperse; and with them go
The summer friend, the flattering foe;

By vain prosperity received,

To her they vow their truth, and are again believed.

Wisdom in sable garb arrayed,

Immersed in rapturous thought profound,

And Melancholy, silent maid,

With leaden eye that loves the ground,
Still on thy solemn steps attend:

Warm Charity, the general friend,

With Justice, to herself severe,

And Pity, dropping soft the sadly pleasing tear.

1

Oh, gently on thy suppliant's head,

Dread Goddess, lay thy chast'ning hand!
Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad,

Not circled with the vengeful band

(As by the impious thou art seen)

With thundering voice, and threatening mien,
With screaming horror's funeral cry,
Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty:

Thy form benign, oh Goddess! wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic train be there

To soften, not to wound my heart.
The generous spark extinct revive,
Teach me to love, and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,

What others are to feel, and know myself a man.”

Mr. Gray has thus personified Misfortune or Adversity. He has represented her as the daughter of the supreme Deity, but employed to affright the bad, and afflict the best men-" Whom he loveth, he chasteneth," or purifieth, say the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps this excellent poet had this passage in his mind when he wrote this stanza. "Sweet are the uses of adversity,' says Shakspeare, and so has Gray represented them." By the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better," says Solomon. Taught by our sufferings, we learn to pity others; we abandon our follies, and gain leisure to be good. When we are in affliction, the sordid, and the frivolous, who shared the pleasures of our prosperity, forsake us; but our virtues-wisdom, meditation, charity, justice, and pity, remain with us, and console us. The poet, having asserted this, changes the form of his verses to apostrophe, and entreats the goddess, as he terms Adversity, to spare him from the severest inflictions of her hand, and to purify and exalt his heart. Young persons should commit these fine verses to memory.

Antithesis is a figure by which words and ideas very different, or contrary, are placed together, in contrast or opposition, that they may mutually set off and illustrate each other.

In Blair's Sermon on Gentleness the annexed example of Antithesis may be found:

"As there is a worldly happiness which God perceives to be no more than disguised misery; as there are worldly honours which in his estimation are reproach: so there is a worldly wis

dom which in his sight is foolishness. Of this worldly wisdom the characters are given in the Scriptures, and placed in contrast with those of the wisdom which is from above. The one is the wisdom of the crafty; the other that of the upright: the one terminates in selfishness; the other in charity: the one is full of strife and bitter envyings; the other of mercy and of good fruits."

The antithetical words of this passage are printed in italicsHappiness and misery, honour and reproach, wisdom and foolishness, are ideas in direct opposition-and the remaining antitheses of the period are, it is presumed, quite as clear.

The preceding definitions are not as full as might be, but they are simple, and necessary to be understood in order to read poetry with satisfaction and good taste.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY.

Young persons at all instructed in modern history know, that the English language is formed from several more ancient languages. The Romans carried the Latin into Britain half a century before the birth of Christ. About four hundred years after, the Saxons, a warlike people from Germany, succeeded the Romans as masters of England, and, with their dominion, introduced and established their speech. The language of England for several centuries was what is called the Anglo-Saxon, but this was superseded, in great measure, by the Norman French.

In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, in France, conquered England, and established his power in the country. He brought with him a multitude of followers whom he distributed over the kingdom, and caused the ministration of religion and the laws to be announced in the Norman French. This language gradually combined itself with the previous dialect of England, and our English language, by slow degrees, has been drawn from these sources.

The Anglo-Saxons were not wholly without literature; they had wandering minstrels who sung verses, and in their convents some of the priests composed in rhyme. The Normans brought to England their own poetry, which consisted chiefly of songs, satires, morality, and rhyming chronicles. But in the twelfth century, the Crusades, or religious wars, carried on by the Europeans in Palestine, furnished romantic adventures which the poets rehearsed in verse; and at the same time, narrative poems from scripture, and classical subjects began to appear in England. In the thirteenth century it became customary for the minstrels to "sing devotional strains to the harp on Sundays, for the edification of the people, instead of the verses on gayer subjects which were sung at public entertainments.”

The first original poem of any extent in the English language is ascribed to Robert Langlande, a priest. It describes the Christian life, and the abuses of religion under the authority of the Pope. It is to the honour of poetry that among the first efforts of her power over a partially civilized people she should fearlessly utter the dictates of truth, undismayed by arbitrary princes, and selfish priests. "The mind," says Mr. Campbell, speaking of Langlande, "is struck with his rude voice, proclaiming independent and popular sentiments, from an age of slavery and superstition, and thundering a prediction in the ear