vances she makes from one season to another, or to observo her conduct in the successive production of plants and flowers; he may draw into his description all the beauties of spring and autumn, and make the whole year contribute something to render it the more agreeable. His rose-trees, woodbines, and jessamines may flower together, and his beds be covered at the same time with lilies, violets, and amaranths. His soil is not restrained to any particular set of plants; but is proper either for oaks or myrtles, and adapts itself to the products of every climate. Oranges may grow wild in it; myrrh may be met with in every hedge; and if he thinks it proper to have a grove of spices, he can quickly command sun enough to raise it. Nay, he can make several new species of flowers with richer scents and higher colors than that any in the gardens of nature. His concerts of birds may be as full and harmonious, and his woods as thick and gloomy, as he pleases. He is at no more expense in a long vista than in a short one, and can as easily throw his cascades from a precipice of half a mile high, as from one of twenty yards. He has his choice of the winds, and can turn the course of his rivers, in all the variety of meanders that are most delightful to the reader's imagination."

Such are a poet's prerogatives, and would

grow

"Classic Hallam, much renown'd for Greek,"

snatch these from Spenser,

"High priest of all the Muses' mysteries?"

In the same spirit he presumes, with some misgivings, however, to object to the celebrated stanza describing the varied concert of winds, waves, birds, voices, and musical instruments in the "Bower of Bliss," and compares it to that which tormented Hogarth's "Enraged Musician!" And this is a critic on poetry worse, if possible, than a pre-Raphaelite on art.

His account of Shakspeare begins with the following elegant sentence:-" Of William Shakspeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his mighty mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know anything." Certainly, in another sense, he knows little of

him! In the account that follows of Shakspeare's plays, he actually sets "Love's Labor Lost," that dull tissue of " mere havers," as they say in Scotland, and which many have doubted to be Shakspeare's, since it displays not a spark of his wit, genius, or even sense, above the "Comedy of Errors," the most laughable farce in the world, above the romantic "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and above the "Taming of the Shrew," that delightful half-plagiarism of the great dramatist's. He accuses "Romeo and Juliet" of a "want of thoughtful philosophy." It is true that it does not abound in set didactic soliloquies, like those of "Hamlet" or "Timon;" but how much of the essence of profoundest thought has gone to the production of Mercutio and of the Apothecary, and that wierd shop of his. "Twelfth Night" he underrates when compared to "Much Ado about Nothing." We dare to dif fer from him in this, and to prefer the humors of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew-not to speak of Malvolio-to the immortal Dogberry and Verges themselves. How feeble what he says of Lear, having in madness" thoughts more profound than in his prosperous hour he could have conceived," when compared to Charles Lamb's remarks on the same subject, although suggested apparently by them! Of "Timon" he coldly predicates, "It abounds with signs of his genius." "Timon!" the grandest burst of poetic misanthropy ever written, certain soliloquies, nay, sentences in which, condense all the satire of Juvenal and the invective of Byron! What, wouldst thou to Athens?" asks Apemantus. "Thee thither in a whirlwind."-"What wouldst thou best liken to thy flatterers?" "Women nearest, but men--men are the things themselves!" Another critic speaks of the excellent scolding of Timon, as if it were the Billingsgate of a furious fishwoman, and not the foul spittle of an angry God. Just as we have said elsewhere that De Quincey's third "Suspirium de Profundis" is a sigh that can only be answered by the Second Advent, so Shakspeare's protest in "Timon" against man as he is and things as they are, lies yet, and shall lie, unlifted and unreplied to, till the great Day of Judgment. That Coriolanus has the "grandeur of sculpture," is a criticism suggested rather by Kemble's personation of him than by the character himself. He, as Shakspeare describes him, is no more like

sculpture than Fergus MacIvor, or any other fierce, proud, restless Highland chieftain. He may be, as a marble statue, colossal; but surely not, as a marble statue, calm. The rest of his remarks on Shakspeare are just the thousand times reiterated truisms about his creative power, knowledge of human nature, superiority to the dramatists of his age, and contain nothing but what has been said before, and said far better, by Johnson and Hazlitt.

His observations on Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger show deep acquaintance with those writers, deeper than most people who regard their own moral reputation would now care to be known to possess. We may once for all tell the uninitiated that more beastly, elaborate, and incessant filth and obscenity are not to be found in all literature, than in the plays of these three dramatists; and that we, at least, could only read one or two of them through. They repelled us by the strong shock of disgust, and we have never since been able to understand of what materials the men are made who have read and re-read them, paused and lingered over them, dwelt fondly on their beauties, and even ventured to compare them to the plays of Shakspeare; the morality of which, considering his age, is as wonderful as the genius. If our readers think this criticism extreme, let them turn, not to the disgusting books themselves, but to Coleridge's "Table Talk," and note what he says of them. Hallam, while admitting that there was much to condemn in their indecency and even licentiousness of principle, says, "Never were dramatic poets more thoroughly gentlemen, according to the standard of their times." May our age be preserved from such gentility! In his criticism on (6 Lycidas" occurs this sentence, which we beg our readers to compare with what he had said previously of the forest in the "Fairy Queen :"

"Such poems as Lycidas' are read with the willing abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only that general possibility, that combination of images, which common experience does not reject as incompatible!"

So that thus common experience is made the guage of the poet's waking dreams. Alas! poor Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, what is to become of your revolts of Islam, Hyperions, and Rimes of the Ancient Marinere, when tried by "common

experience," assisted in her assizes by the author of the "Constitutional History!"

In the next paragraph but one he tells us that the " Ode on the Nativity" is truly "Pindaric;" one of the most unlucky epithets ever applied. What resemblance there is between the swift, sharp-glancing, and fiery odes of the "inspired Olympic jockey," and that slow-moving, solemn strain of the English poet, we cannot even divine. In his account of "Paradise Lost," he assures us that the "subject is managed with admirable skill!" We rather like this Perge Puer style, this clapping on the back, from such a man as Henry Hallam to such a man as John Milton. It requires, too, a certain power and courage in a man to be able so gravely to enunciate such truisms as the above, and as the following:"The Fall of Man has a more general interest than the Crusade." A little farther on, however, we are startled with what is neither a truism, nor even true. "The first two books confirm the sneer of Dryden, that Satan is Milton's hero, since they develop a plan of action in that potentate which is ultimately successful; the triumph which he and his host must experience in the fall of man being hardly compensated by their temporary conversion into serpents.' As if that were the only compensation; as if the tenor of the whole_argument were not to show that the second Adam was to bruise the Serpent's head by recovering the majority of the race from Satan's grasp, and by, at last, "consuming Satan and his perverted world." The object of Satan was not only to ruin man, but to rob God of glory; and the purpose of the poet is to show how neither part of the plan was successful, but that it all redounded to the devil's misery and disgrace, and to the triumph of God and of the Messiah. So that, if it be essential to the hero of an epic that he be victorious, Satan is not the hero of the "Paradise Lost," any more than of the “Paradise Regained," although he is undoubtedly the most interesting and powerfully-drawn character in the former.

Or what do our readers think of this?" Except one circumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than anything else, we do not find any sign of depravity superinduced upon the transgression of our first parents." Has Mr. Hallam forgotten that magnificent scene of their mutual recrimi

nation, and of the gross injustice Adam does to Eve, by calling her "that bad woman,' ,"" that serpent," &c. ? Was there no sign of begun depravity there? And was even "physical intoxication" possible to undepraved beings"

In the next paragraph he speaks of Homer's "diffuseness;" rather a novel charge, we ween. Of repetition he has often been accused, but never before of diffuseness. His lines are lances, as compressed as they are keen.

A few pages afterwards Hallam says:-"I scarcely think that he had begun his poem before the anxiety and trouble into which the public strife of the Commonwealth and the Restoration had thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations." Aubrey, on the contrary, expressly asserts that Milton began his great work two years before the Restoration. A fine sentence follows, in which the bust really seems nearly alive, and you cry, O si sic omnia, or even multa !—“ Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path, like the moon emerging from the clouds." Then follows an attempt at antithesis, which seems to us extremely unsuccessful:-"Milton is more a musical than a picturesque poet. He describes visible things, but he feels music." What does this mean? or, at least, where is its force? Had he said, "He is," or "becomes music," it had been a novel and a beautiful thought. He then brings forward the old exploded objection to Milton's lists of sonorous names. Many have stated, but few, we hope, have ever felt this objection. To those possessed of historical lore, these names, as Macaulay remarks, are charmed names; to others they are like a foreign language spoken by a Gavazzi, or sung by a Jenny Lind-their music affects them almost as deeply as their meaning could. If jargon, they are at least the mighty jargon of a magician opening doors in rocks, rooting up pines, and making palaces and mountains come and go at his plea

sure.

After somewhat underrating "Paradise Regained," he closes his estimate of Milton with a good account of "Samson Agonistes" a poem, the "sculptural simplicity" of which seems to suit his taste better than the grandeurs of the "Paradise Lost," or the graces of the "Paradise Regained."

We could have gone on much longer, proving Hallam's