WAITE THE DENTIST,-AND BLAKE THE BARBER.

The death of Waite is a shock to the teeth as well as to the feelings of all who knew him.* He and Blake both gone! I left them both in the most robust health and little thought of the national loss in so short a time as five years. They were both as much superior to Wellington in rational greatness, as he who preserves the hair and the teeth is preferable to the "bloody blustering warrior" who gains a name by breaking heads and knocking out grinders. Who succeeds him? Where is tooth-powder mild and yet efficacious-where is tincture-where are clearing roots and brushes now to be obtained? Pray obtain what information you can upon these "Tusculan questions." My jaws ache to think on't. Poor fellows! I anticipated seeing both again; and yet they are gone to that place where both teeth and hair last longer than they do in this life. I have seen a thousand graves opened, and always perceived, that whatever was gone, the teeth and hair remained with those who had died with them. Is not this odd? They go the very first things in youth, and yet last the longest in the dust, if people will but die to preserve them. To Mr. Murray, Ravenna, Nov. 18, 1820.

JOHNSON'S "VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES.'

Read Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes,”—all the examples and mode of giving them sublime, as well as the latter part, with the exception of an occasional

* The fashionable dentist of Old Burlington Street. "Went," says Lord Byron, "to Waite's. Teeth all right and white; but he says that I grind them in my sleep, and chip the edges."-Journal, 1814.

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couplet. I do not so much admire the opening. I remember an observation of Sharpe's, (the Conversationist, as he was called in London, and a very clever man,) that the first line of this poem was superfluous, and that Pope (the best of poets, I think,) would have begun at once, only changing the punctuation

"Survey mankind from China to Peru." *

The former line, "Let observation," &c., is certainly heavy and useless. But 'tis a grand poem-and so true!-true as the 10th of Juvenal himself. The lapse of ages changes all things-time-language-the earth. -the bounds of the sea-the stars of the sky, and every thing "about, around, and underneath" man, except man himself, who has always been, and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment.-Diary, Jan. 9, 1821.

THE POETRY OF NATURE AND ART.

[In the "Essay on English Poetry" which Campbell prefixed to his "Specimens of the British Poets," he defended Pope's genius from the disparaging remarks of Mr. Bowles in his edition

* The opening couplet of Johnson's imitation

"Let observation with extensive view

Survey mankind from China to Peru "

is much surpassed by the corresponding lines of Dryden, in his translation of the tenth satire :—

"Look round the habitable world, how few

Know their own good, or knowing it pursue."

The bulk, however, of Johnson's magnificent poem outdoes not only Dryden, but the original of Juvenal. Sir Walter Scott often said that neither his own, nor any modern popular style of composition, was that from which he derived most pleasure; and when Ballantyne asked him what it was that he preferred, he answered "Johnson's; and that he had more pleasure in reading 'London,' and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes,' than any other poems he could mention." "I

VOL. I.

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of that author. The argument upon which Mr. Bowles laid the greatest stress in proof of the inferiority of Pope, was that his images were drawn from art more than from nature, and Campbell contended in reply that artificial objects were often no less worthy of description, and required no less genius to describe them, than simple physical appearances. Among his observations there occurs the following admirable passage, upon which the subsequent controversy mainly turned :-"Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship of the line, will perhaps forgive me for adding this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. They seem yet before me.-I sympathise with their deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When the vast bulwark sprung from her cradle, the calm water on which she swung majestically round gave the imagination a contrast of the stormy element on which she was soon to ride. All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being." Mr. Bowles replied in a pamphlet entitled "The Invariable Principles of Poetry," in which he maintained that the ship was indebted to nature and not to art for its poetical attributes. It is to the refutation of this position that Lord Byron addressed himself in the extract which we give from his "Letter to John Murray, Esq., on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope." "I mean," he wrote shortly before, "to plunge thick into the contest upon Pope, and to lay about

"

think," says Ballantyne, "I never saw his countenance more indicative of high admiration than while reciting aloud from those productions.' "Yet it is the cant of our day," adds Lockhart, "above all of its poetasters, that Johnson was no poet. To be sure, they say the same of Pope, and hint it occasionally even of Dryden."

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me like a dragon till I make manure of Bowles for the top of Parnassus."]

Mr. Bowles asserts that Campbell's "Ship of the Line" derives all its poetry, not from "art," but from "nature." "Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c., one will become a strip of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coarse canvass on three tall poles." Very true; take away the "waves," ," "the winds," and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose; and take away "the sun," and we must read Mr. Bowles's pamphlet by candlelight. But the "poetry" of the "Ship" does not depend on the waves," &c.; on the contrary, the "Ship of the Line" confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. I do not deny that the ". waves and winds," and above all "the sun," are highly poetical; we know it to our cost, by the many descriptions of them in verse; but if the waves bore only the foam upon their bosoms, if the winds wafted only the seaweed to the shore, if the sun shone neither upon pyramids, nor fleets, nor fortresses, would its beams be equally poetical? I think not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. Take away "the Ship of the Line" "swinging round" the "calm water," and the calm water becomes a somewhat monotonous thing to look at, particularly if not transparently clear; witness the thousands who pass by without looking on it at all. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical "calm water" at Wapping, or in the "London Dock," or in the Paddington Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase. They might have heard the poetical winds howling through the chinks of a pigsty, or the garret window; they might have seen the sun shining on a footman's livery, or on a brass warming-pan; but

could the "calm water," or the "wind," or the "sun," make all or any of these "poetical?" I think not. Mr. Bowles admits "the Ship" to be poetical, but only from those accessories; now, if they confer poetry so as to make one thing poetical, they would make other things poetical; the more so, as Mr. Bowles calls a 'ship of the line " without them-that is to say, its 66 masts and sails and streamers "—"blue bunting," and coarse canvass," and "tall poles." So it is; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

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Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a sea-piece. Did any painter ever paint the sea only, without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object, with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship? or, in the poem of the Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much, undoubtedly ; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteemed a high order of that art.

I recollect, when anchored off Cape Sigeum, in 1810, in an English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sunset, so violent as to make us imagine that the ship would part cable, or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum,