in forming an arrangement of songs into a few distinct classes. The rude original pastoral poetry of vour country furnishes the first class in the popular pieces called Ballads. These consist of the Village Tale, the Dialogue of Rustic Courtship, the Description of Natural Objects, and the Incidents of a Rural Life. Their language is the language of nature, simple and unadorned; their story is not the wild offspring of fancy, but the probable adventure of the cottage; and their sentiments are the unstudied expressions of passions and emotions common to all mankind. Nature, farther refined, but still nature, gives the second class of pieces containing the sentimental part of the former, abstracted from the Tale and Rural Landscape, and improved by a more studied observation of the internal feelings of passion and their external symptoms. It is the natural philosophy of the mind, and the description of sensations. Here love appears in all its various forms of desire, doubt, jealousy, hope, despair; and suggests a language, rich, strong, and figurative. This is what may strictly be called the pathetic in poetry. The third class is formed upon an artificial turn of thinking, and the operation of the fancy. Here the sentiments arise from cool reflection and curious speculation, rather than from a present emotion. They accordingly require enlivening by ingenious comparison, striking contrast, unexpected turns, a climax finishing in a point, and all the pleasing refinements of art which give the denomination of ingenious and witty to our conceptions. Some essential distinctions will appear in this class arising from the various kinds of wit; but they all agree in the circumstance of springing rather from fancy than passion, and consequently of exciting pleasure and surprise rather than the sympathetic emotions. It is observable that it is this class alone which answers the idea Mr. Phillips gives of song-writing in his little Essay; and hence he has been betrayed into a little inconsistency; for while he compares song-writing in general to the gay and amorous species of ancient Lyric poetry, he refers us to the French Songs, as examples of perfection, which are almost solely of the witty and ingenious kind, and totally different from most of the remains of antiquity. In particular, the little epigrammatic song which he there cites and translates, is so entirely dissimilar to the celebrated piece of Sappho which he has so happily made his own, that it is wonderful the distinction did not strike him. I shall just farther remark with regard to the proposed arrangement of our collection, that when genius is left to itself without fixed laws to conduct it, each different species of writing is so apt by imperceptible gradations to slide into the next in kindred, that it is frequently impossible for the critic to preserve his classes pure and free from mixture, without a scrupulous rejection of pieces really beau tiful, though somewhat faulty in regularity. The reader will easily perceive, and I hope make proper allowances for several instances of equivocal arrangement, which from this cause I have not been able to avoid. [23] ESSAY ́ ON BALLADS AND PASTORAL SONGS. THE Ballad may be considered as the native species of Poetry of this country. It very exactly answers the idea formerly given of original Poetry, being the rude uncultivated verse in which the popular tale of the times was recorded. As our ancestors partook of the fierce warlike character of the northern nations, the subjects of their Poetry would chiefly consist of the martial exploits of their heroes, and the military events of national history, deeply tinctured with that passion |