Adherence is not solidity: and we look not for rigorous unity in cento.

Of the "versification" I delay the strict examination, until my process shall have brought me to the particular pasthat suggest it. Only, in general,

sages

it may be doubted, whether the Quatrain, with alternate rhymes, has that connection with the Elegiac strain that many poets and some critics have conceived. Dryden, who was eminent in both characters, is so clearly of opinion that it is the most magnificent of English measures, that one is apt to wonder how it should have first been thought of as a vehicle for a species of poetry, of which the character is gentleness and tenuity. It is the stanza adopted by Hammond. But the credit of Hammond's poetry was not of magnitude sufficient to give a classical stamp to any kind of versification. Mr Mason thought more favourably of his friend's authority; and, by

his advice, Gray was prevailed on to use the quatrain, that the merit and eminence of this poem might secure to elegy the exclusive and undisturbed possession of that measure.

Such was the idea of Mr Mason, of whose sagacity in foreseeing events, the reader, from his success in this, may form no unfavourable idea. Yet of this measure it may be said with truth, that it brings with it no momentous accession to the powers of English versification. It possesses all the imperfections of blank verse, acquired with all the labour of rhyme. The coincidences of terminating sound, by being alternate, admit of an interruption by which they are either lost, or found at the expence of a labour greater than the gratification they bring : and the stanza, by being limited to a certain definite compass, either forces the poet to end his thought abruptly, or to eke it out with supplemental and exple

tive matter, always weakening expression, and rarely concealing distress. It is somewhat surprising that blank verse, improper in almost all other subjects, should not have been generally thought of as a vehicle for that species of excursive thinking which prevails so much in the elegiac strain. Young has used it with success in his great work, which, in diffusion and desultoriness, approaches to the nature of the Elegy.

Criticism never feels herself more keenly affected, under the sense of humiliation, than when she is laid under the necessity of extending her strictures to margins and title-pages. Yet circumstances will, at times, occur, to make such degradation indispensable. Of the poem now under consideration, the title might have escaped censure, had it not been originally different from what it now is; and had not the author persuaded himself to suppose, that, when he altered it, he mend

ed it of course. It is seldom that the change of a title is a happy change. If it has had a seat in the imagination previous to the operation of composing, or even during its progress, it has considerably influenced the execution. It has so led and regulated the train of thinking, and the mutual dependencies, that the slightest after-deviation from it is in danger of creating inconsistency. It introduces a species of confusion and inconsequence, like that which was introduced into the Dunciad, when Pope, at the instigation of Warburton, changed the hero of that piece; and which, the poet and his Mentor, who kept botching it during the whole of their lives,'

Bowyer. It is to be hoped that the executors of this gentleman will take some method of preventing from perishing the much curious information which his profession and industry enabled him to collect.

2

* Pope did not long survive the change. In the private corrections of Warburton, I find little that can create re

were not able to remove; though the labour of Procrustes was doubled, and both the tortured and instruments of torture were racked to produce accommodation.

Gray has more than once been unfortunate in his fancy of changing his titles. He had composed an Ode, to which he gave the title of "Noon-Tide." Falling out of humour with this title afterwards, for what reason does not appear, he newnamed it an "Ode on Spring." Noontide, however, was in his imagination, when he wrote it; and it is an Ode on Noon-tide still.

2

"Reflections in a Country Churchyard” was the title by which this piece was first known; a title plain, sober, and expressive of its nature; but too undig

gret for that precaution of the poet, which prevented them from being made public.