THESE sketches were written by the Author on the flyleaves and covers of his copy of Anderson's British Poets. Unfortunately, the volume containing Pope was missing, which occasions a break in the series. The idea appears to have been taken from Addison's "Account of the greatest English Poets," a youthful composition addressed by him to Mr. Henry Sacheverell, April 3, 1694, in the twenty-second year of his age. The following extract from this poem will show the likeness and difference between the original and the imitation, if such it is to be considered.
Long had our dull forefathers slept supine,
Nor felt the rapture of the tuneful nine,
Till Chaucer first, a merry bard, arose,
And many a story told in rhyme and prose.
But age has rusted what the poet writ,
Worn out his language, and obscur'd his wit.
In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain,
And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.
Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage,
In ancient tales amus'd a barbarous age;
An age that, yet uncultivate and rude,
Where'er the poet's fancy led, pursued
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
But now the mystic tale that pleas'd of yore,
Can charm an understanding age no more.
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.
We view, well-pleased, at distance all the sights
Of arms and palfries, battles, fields, and fights,
And damsels in distress, and courteous knights;
But when we look too near, the shades decay,
And all the pleasing landscape fades away.
How wayward oft appears the poet's fate,
Who still is born too early or too late.
If a bold, fond, imaginative age,
Instinct with amorous, or with martial rage,
Enact more wonders than the mind conceives,
And all that fancy can devise believes,-
If such an age behold a bard, whose sight
Looks on earth's objects by a heaven-born light,
Skill'd to pourtray each lineament of nature,
And shed purpureal grace on every feature,
The fleeting language, to its trust untrue,
Vext by the jarring claims of old and new,
Defeats his beauty, makes his sense the fee
Of a blind, guessing, blundering glossary.
Thus CHAUCER, quaintly clad in antique guise,
With unfamiliar mien scares modern eyes.
No doubt he well invented-nobly felt-
But then, O Lord! how monstrously he spelt.
His syllables perplex our critic men,
Who try in vain to find exactly ten;
And waste much learning to reduce his songs
To modish measurement of shorts and longs.
His language, too, unpolish'd and unfixt,
Of Norman, Saxon, Latin, oddly mixt—
Such words might please th' uneducated ears
That hail'd the blaring trumpets of Poictiers.
They shared the sable Edward's glee and glory,
And, like his conquests, they were transitory.
Then how shall such unpolish'd lingo cope
With polish'd elegance and Mister Pope?
Yet, ancient Bard! let not our judgment wrong Thy rich, spontaneous, many-colour'd song; True mirror of a bold, ambitious age, In passion furious, in reflection sage!An age of gorgeous sights and famous deeds, And virtue more than peace admits or needs; When shiver'd lances were our ladies' sport, And love itself assumed a lofty port;
When every beast, and bird, and flower, and tree, Convey'd a meaning and a mystery;
And men in all degrees, sorts, ranks, and trades,
Knights, Palmers, Scholars, Wives, devoted Maids,
In garb, and speech, and manners, stood confest
To outward view, by hues and signs exprest,
And told their state and calling by their vest.
SWEET was the youth of virgin Poesy,
That virgin sweetness which she gave to thee,
My SPENSER, bard of happy innocence !
For thou didst with a bridegroom's love intense
Caress the fair inventions of thy brain,
Those babes of paradise, without the pain
Of mortal birth, to fairest heritage
Born in the freshness of their perfect age.
Thy Faery Knight had all the world in fee,
For all the world was Faeryland to thee.
Thine is no tale, once acted, then forgot;
Thy creatures never were, and never will be not.
Oh! look not for them in the dark abyss
Where all things have been, and where nothing is
The spectral past;-nor in the troubled sea
Where all strange fancies are about to be—
The unabiding present. Seek them where
For ever lives the Good, the True, the Fair,
In the eternal silence of the heart.
There Spenser found them; thence his magic art
Their shades evoked in feature, form, and limb,
Real as a human self, and bright as cherubim.
And what though wistful love and emulous arms,
And all the wizard might of mutter'd charms,-
Though slimy snakes disgorge their loathly rage,
And monstrous phantoms wait on Archimage:
These are but dreams, that come, and go, and peep
Through the thin curtain of a morning sleep,
And leave no pressure on the soul, that wakes
And hails the glad creation that it makes.
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