Exact, yet free, without inflation bold,
To dignify that theme; must try to form
Such magic sympathy of sense with sound
As pictures all it sings; while Grace awakes

At each blest touch, and on the lowliest things
Scatters her rainbow hues.'

But this is a merit to which the mere artist may attain. It is the poet only who could have observed how the owl, in quest of prey, with sleepy wing

Swims o'er the corn-field studious;'

it is only the poet who would have noted,

the grazing ox

His dewy supper from the savoury herb
Audibly gathering :'

and the redbreast, when in winter

the household bird, with the

red stomacher,' as an elder poet calls him,

'Sits budge, a feathery bunch:'

it is the poet only who would have described the sea as

'Raking with harsh recoil the pebbly steep ;'

it is the poet only who would say of himself, when he has ascended the downs,

It shall not grieve me if the gust be free,
And to withstand its overbearing gale
I lean upon the tide of air unseen :'

who, looking at a churchyard, would speak of

youth and age

And sexes mingled in the populous soil,

Till it o'erlooks with swoln and ridgy brow
The smoother crop below :'

and who, in thinking of a church, could bring forward with a charm of novelty, the oldest and most familiar of all its moral illustrations:

Say, ancient edifice, thyself with years
Grown gray, how long upon the hill has stood
Thy weather-braving tower, and silent mark'd
The human leaf inconstant bud and fall;
The generations of deciduous man,
How often hast thou seen them pass away?'

Hurdis describes himself as having been

A silent, shame-faced, hesitating boy.'

He was a meek, gentle, affectionate spirit, in which no worldly ambition could have place; he seems not even to have felt it in the art which he loved, but to have practised poetry for its own sake, indulging in it as the natural expression of warm, and innocent, and virtuous feelings, without an aspiration or a wish for

fame,

fame, contented in a humble station, and thankful for the blessings which he enjoyed in it:

'Leisure and freedom, and a mind at ease,

Books, and the shady vale, and evening's walk,
Cheerful companions, and the sweet return

Of music ever various. Who needs more?' &c.

This was the temper which Hurdis expressed in his verses, and it was not contradicted by the tenour of his life. The Queen was pleased with the poems of this very amiable man; and some years after his death, when such of them as were deemed worthy of being collected were re-published by his surviving sisters, (to whom he had been most affectionately attached,) it was notified to them, without any solicitation on their part, that they might be dedicated to her Majesty. With the exception of Adriano, they ought to be inserted in any future collection of the British Poets.

Merry's verses were like the froth and bubbles of a rapid and shallow stream. Poetry proceeded in him from an empty mind, as in Darwin it did from a full one. Darwin's bore the stamp of his own character, but that of the age also not less decidedly: it embodied the material philosophy of the day, and, like it, was gross, earthly, and anti-spiritual; but it was the work of deliberation, thought, knowledge, and patient labour. Cowper's was a natural strain, proceeding from a playful temper and a serious heart: neither he, nor his disciple, Hurdis, seems to have felt the slightest impulse of vanity or ambition; it was as natural for them to give utterance to their feelings in verse, as for the birds to sing. Sayers had nothing in common with either of these, his contemporaries, except that, like Darwin, he was ambitious of fame as a poet, and, like him, was willing to bestow upon his compositions all the careful correction necessary for bringing them to the standard of perfection. He was the poet of art rather than of nature, of determination rather than of impulse; and this appears, both in the subjects which he selected, the form in which he cast his materials, and in his manner of composing. In the choice of subjects he was in some degree influenced by the age. Gray's versions of the Runic poems had strongly impressed the rising generation of poets, and that impression had been aided by Percy's Northern Antiquities, and by the translations, which the same very useful and influential writer published, of the more celebrated remains of the Skalds. Although these books obtained so little general notice, that the sale probably never defrayed the costs of publication, their effect upon English literature was visible. Cupid and the Muses will keep their place in verse as long as there are rhymers in the world; but the other heathen gods and goddesses were grown stale: angels and demons had been found poor substitutes by those who

tried to introduce them; and the existing race of poets seemed very well disposed to transfer their devotion to the gods and heroes of Valhalla, who every day hunted and killed the eternal boar, Serimner, and every night supped upon his eternal pork. Minor pieces, drawn from the stores of Scandinavian antiquity, had been composed by Miss Seward, by Mr. Polwhele, and by others of the contributors to a collection of poems, chiefly by gentlemen of Devon and Cornwall, which appeared just at this time; and Mr. Hole, a little before, had founded, upon the Runic mythology, a poem of more pretensions in its extent and structure, than anything which had appeared since the Leonidas and the Epigoniad-poems which Smollett has oddly coupled, and more oddly enumerated among the glories of George the Second's reign.

Dr. Sayers derived the form of his dramas from Mason and Klopstock, as much as from the ancients. His avowed reason for adopting the Greek form was, that it afforded in its chorus the most favourable opportunity for the display of mythological imagery; but where this is the poet's main object, it may surely be better effected in narrative than in dramatic poetry. Mr. Taylor has described his mode of composition: 'I was admitted,' he says, 'behind the curtain, saw his works, as it were, on the easel, first in the outline, then garishly shaded, and, lastly, with the blended and finished colouring. His first care was to round the fable, and everywhere to foresee his drift; the dialogue was then rapidly composed, and always the shortest cut taken to the purpose in view; the critical situations were afterwards raised into effect, and brightened into brilliance, by consulting analogous effects of celebrated writers, with the intention of transplanting beauties of detail; and finally, the lyrical ornaments, in which he mainly excelled, were inserted at every opportunity. A process so methodical would of itself show, that Sayers was not of the school of Shakspeare. Indeed,

his own classification, he would be enumerated among the followers of that Greek school, of which he has named Collins and Gray as the founders; but of which Mason, rather than Collins, may be considered as joint-founder with Gray, and to which Gilbert West may be referred, and, with strong shades of individual difference, Akenside and Glover.

The simplest of the Greek dramas are not so simple in their construction as these dramatic sketches: Moina, Carrol, and a chorus of bards, constitute all the persons of the first drama. In an afteredition, the author hesitated at retaining the word bard, thus improperly applied to designate a Saxon poet; but the title of Skald appeared to him not sufficiently naturalized, and perhaps as in itself unfortunate. The scene is laid in Britain, and the time during the first ages of the Saxon conquest, previous to their con

version.

version. Moina, the daughter of a British chief, has fallen by the chance of war into the hands of the Saxon Harold, who, using the right of victory, has made her his wife. Fifty days have elapsed since she was made a prisoner, and the drama opens with her lamentations for her parents; for Carril, her betrothed lover, who in defending her had fallen by Harold's arm; and for her own lot in being made by compulsion the wife of one whom she detests as the enemy of her country, and still more as being stained with Carril's blood. The chorus enter and salute her as the favourite of the Goddess Frea. She asks if Harold is returned from battle, and pours out imprecations against his life. They hint that, in so doing, she is imprecating evil upon herself; and as she departs they call upon Odin either to send him back with victory, or give him a glorious and triumphant death in the field. Carril enters to them in the disguise of a bard. He had fallen among the slain; but having been assisted in time, and recovered from his wound, is come in search of Moina. From the chorus he learns that she is the lady of the castle which he has now reached, and is Harold's wife. Just then Moina re-enters; Carril relates his own story; she retires at the tale, and sends for him to attend her: force alone, she tells him, has made her Harold's wife; but being his wife, his she must remain while he lives, and his death alone can set her free-were that happy event indeed to occur in battle, then might she flee with Carril; it will be in vain for him to challenge Harold in the hope of delivering her, for were he successful it would only bring destruction upon himself and her; but she sends him to consult a Runic prophetess concerning their fate. When they have left the stage, a soldier enters, bringing news to the chorus that Harold is slain, and that the people, having discovered his body, are bringing it home for interment. Here the first act concludes. When Carril returns from the prophetess, Moina greets him with the joyful tidings of Harold's death. The prophetess (like Erichtho) had re-animated a new-slain body, and from its lips obtained a prediction of Harold's fate, and that before sunset Moina should be at rest from her woes. Believing that the latter part of the prediction would be as happily accomplished as the first, Moina tells Carril to await her in a neighbouring dell, whither she will escape to him as soon as the funeral But no sooner has he left her in this expectation, than Moina is summoned by the chorus to undergo the law, by which the surviving wife is to be buried in the grave with her husband. It is related, that when the earth was cast on her she called on Carril; Carril, to whom from the place of sacrifice she had despatched a messenger, enters, learns her fate, and, declaring his intention of throwing himself from the nearest precipice, rushes out.

is over.

The

The fable of the second drama, which is founded, not upon the Scandinavian, but the Keltic system of mythology, is equally simple. Starno, a British chief, whose daughter, Daura, has been taken by the Saxons, is gone to battle, having made a vow that if he returns victorious, his noblest captive shall be sacrificed to Hesus. During the action Daura flies to her father's army with Kelric, the son of the Saxon leader, whom she had persuaded to accompany her, and for her life yield himself a willing prisoner. The Druids demand him for their victim: moved by his daughter's supplication, Starno resolves to protect him, and says he will offer up a milk-white bull in his stead. But the Druids are inexorable; they threaten the chieftain with excommunication and all its dreadful consequences. Starno would have defied their vengeance, and sacrificed his own life to save his daughter and her husband; but Kelric, disdaining to live upon such terms, delivers himself up to the priests; and Daura, after taking leave of him, who is led to the altar, leaves the scene with the implied intention of destroying herself.

There are two other of these pieces: one is a monodrama, the first in our language;—it is the soliloquy of a northern chieftain, oppressed with age and painful dreams, and resolving, as was esteemed honourable in such circumstances, to die by his own hand; the other is a masque upon the descent of Frea, suggested by a Danish drama upon the death of Balder by Johannes Ewald. The lyrical parts of this masque are written in rhyme; those on Moina and Starno in an unrhymed measure. These are the most peculiar, as well as the most elaborate, of his productions; and the partial biographer says of them, that they display the fancy of Pindar without his extravagance, and the feeling of Sophocles without his tameness. It is injudicious thus to depreciate Sophocles and Pindar: no such comparison was called for. These choruses are in all respects original, composed upon the author's own theory of lyrical composition, and in a measure also which was wholly his own. The theory, which he subsequently explained in an essay on the poetic character of Horace, was this:

'The Ode, like any other piece of poetical composition, is written with some determined end; and this end should be one. Whether a hero is to be praised, a mourner to be soothed, a virtue to be inculcated, or a vice to be reproved, the subject of the ode is single and defined. Of the great direction and purpose of the performance, therefore, the poet should never lose sight. An unconnected group of thoughts and images, however striking and affecting, form not a good ode. Whatever is introduced should tend evidently to the end which is in view; whatever is unconnected with this end is idle and ineffective, and spoils that wholeness which is essential to the excellence of the piece.

Nei

ther