worthy all that is professed, yet the former disposition is so much more fatal to generosity and kindly feeling than the latter, that the error of it, although less extensive, is more mischievous. Cowper does not lose sight of this probable revulsion from too much confidence to too little, and very fairly states the common sense of the matter, thus:

"But here again a danger lies,
Lest having misapplied our eyes,
And taken trash for treasure ;
We should unwarily conclude
Friendship a false ideal good,
A mere utopian pleasure.

"An acquisition rather rare
Is yet no subject of despair,

Nor is it wise complaining;

If either on forbidden ground,
Or where it was not to be found,
We sought without attaining."

The poem then goes on with a variety of hints, of admirable shrewdness, touching those points which interfere with the permanency of friendship. For example:

"A man renown'd for repartee
Will seldom scruple to make free
With friendship's finest feeling;
Will thrust a dagger at your breast,
And say he wounded you in jest
By way of balm for healing."

This rhyme is as true as any prose that ever was written, and the following stanza is not only true, but has a drollery of allusion that even Sydney Smith might be proud of:

"A friendship that in frequent fits
Of controversial rage emits

The sparks of disputation;

Like "Hand-in-Hand' insurance plates,
Most unavoidably creates

The thought of conflagration."

The following is still more important as a common-sense observation upon rude familiarity, and not less humorously put:

"The man that hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit,

Is such a friend, that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed

To pardon or to bear it."

But we must come to the decision of what a friend ought to be, and here we have it:

"Pursue the search, and you will find
Good sense and knowledge of mankind
To be at least expedient;

And after summing all the rest,
Religion, ruling in the breast,

A principal ingredient."

This is what your friend should be-now for your own part:

"Then judge yourself, and prove your man
As circumspectly as you can,

And, having made election,
Beware no negligence of yours,
Such as a friend but ill endures,

Enfeeble his affection."

They who are familiar with Cowper will see what strange liberties I have taken with the

order of his stanzas.

For this I hope to be for

given, as I have put them so as best to illustrate (at least in my opinion) the course of the subject under discussion.

DRAMATIC POETRY.

ALTHOUGH it be true that a poet must be born a poet, and cannot be made by dint of labour and study, yet it is no less true that poetry is a thing to be weighed and estimated by the dictates of common sense, and that the powers of common sense carefully directed to the subject of poetry will enable any one to see the difference between poetry and mere extravagance-between imaginative creations expressed in numbers, and the outpourings of merely modulated nonsense. From what one sees, however, of modern publications and the degree of ephemeral popularity -such as it is-which attends them, it may fairly be concluded that not only do readers and listeners omit the exercise of reason in passing their judgment upon performances professing to be poetical, but even the writers of these works permit themselves a similar indulgence. Day after day do we find poems, some of them narrative, some descriptive, some dramatic, presented to the public, which poems indicate that, so far as the authors of them are concerned, Aristotle and Horace have written in vain upon

poetic art. And thus it happens that poems and plays are submitted to public notice, and receive some short-lived public applause, which, though not utterly destitute of bright thoughts, nor of agreeable fancies, nor of momentarily affecting situations, are nevertheless most fitly described by the old illustration-that is to say, they are, taking them for all in all, as destitute of reasonableness as the performances of a painter would be, who should think fit to paint human heads upon the necks of horses, or to join together the lovely bust of a woman, and the tail of an ugly fish.

A good poetical taste, which may be defined to be a rapid and just perception of the reasonable and becoming in works of imagination, will immediately recoil from such extravagant and incongruous creations, even without the aid of education in poetic art. They who possess such a taste will be displeased with such productions, although perhaps unable to explain the reason why. They will revolt from them through what is called (whether correctly or not I cannot now stop to discuss)—an intuitive perception of their violation of the natural and just. Such a taste, however, does not seem to be a very general possession. Out of every twenty persons in society some dozen and a half seem to be pleased with that which dazzles and surprises, and to have no judgment—no sense of fitness

and congruity-commingled with their perceptions of the pleasurable, in poems or plays.

It is in dramatic poetry that violations of fitness and propriety are most apt to give offence to persons of correct taste; that is, to those whose sense of the eloquent, the touching, or the beautiful, is under the government of common sense and rational probability. It is not enough that a dramatic poet makes his characters speak in energetic, or brilliant, or affecting language. If they do not speak in language appropriate to themselves, and to the circumstances in which they are placed, that which they say will offend the judicious, by giving rise to a strong sense of inappropriateness. But so senseless is the crowd, and so fond of that vulgar thing, mere surprise, that we frequently find the most applause bestowed on that which is most incongruous and unnatural, and which, because it is so, has been least expected. In like manner it is probable that this crowd would gaze with more interest upon a picture of a human head joined to a horse's neck, than upon some well-imagined combination of the harmonies of

nature.

I have been led to talk of these matters in consequence of having been presented with a book-a thin smooth book in delicate buff covers, as if made to match kid gloves-which contains two plays, purporting to have been written by