of Gosfield, with whom he visited the continent for several summers. He was next patronised by Frederick, Prince of Wales, then head of the Opposition, and by command of the prince, he wrote, in conjunction with Thomson, the mask of Alfred, which was performed in 1740, at Cliefden, the summer residence of his royal highness. In this slight dramatic performance-which was afterwards altered by Mallet, and brought upon the stage at Drury Lane in 1751-Rule Britannia first appeared; a song which, as Southey said, will be the political hymn of this country as long as she maintains her political power.' Whether Thomson or Mallet was the author of Rule Britannia is not quite settled. A competent critic, Mr Bolton Corney, ascribes it to Mallet, who indirectly claimed it as wholly his own composition, but his assertion carries little weight with it, and the lyric seems to breathe the higher inspiration and more manly and patriotic spirit of Thomson. The neat artistic hand of Mallet may, however, have been employed on some of the stanzas. In the same year (1740), Mallet wrote a life of Bacon, prefixed to an edition of the works of the philosopher. In 1742, he was appointed under-secretary to the Prince of Wales, with a salary of £200 per annum ; and a fortunate second marriage-nothing is known of his first-added to his income, as the lady had a fortune of seven or eight thousand pounds. She was daughter of Lord Carlisle's steward. Both Mallet and his wife professed to be deists, and the lady is said to have surprised some of her friends by commencing her arguments with: 'Sir, we deists.' When Gibbon the historian was dismissed from his college at Oxford for embracing popery, he took refuge in Mallet's house, and was rather scandalised, he says, than reclaimed, by the philosophy of his host. Wilkes mentions that the vain and fantastic wife of Mallet one day lamented to a lady that her husband suffered in reputation by his name being so often confounded with that of Smollett; the lady wittily answered: Madam, there is a short remedy; let your husband keep his own name.' On the death of the Duchess of Marlborough, it was found that she had left £1000 to Glover, author of Leonidas, and Mallet jointly, on condition that they should draw up from the family papers a life of the great duke. Glover, indignant at a stipulation in the will, that the memoir was to be submitted before publication to the Earl of Chesterfield, and being a high-spirited man, devolved the whole on Mallet, who also received a pension from the second Duke of Marlborough to stimulate his industry. He pretended to be busy with the work, and in the dedication to a small collection of his poems published in 1762, he stated that he hoped soon to present his grace with something more solid in the life of the first Duke of Marlborough. Mallet had received the solid money, and cared for nothing else. On his death, it was found that not a single line of the memoir had been written. In 1747, appeared Mallet's poem, Amyntor and Theodora. This, the longest of his poetical works, is a tale in blank verse, the scene of which is laid in the solitary island of St Kilda, whither one of his characters, Aurelius, had fled to avoid the religious persecutions under Charles II. Some highly wrought descriptions of marine scenery, storms, and shipwreck, with a few touches of natural pathos and affection, constitute the chief characteristics of the poem. The whole, however-even the very names in such a locality-has an air of improbability and extravagance. In 1749, Mallet came forward as the ostensible editor of Bolingbroke's Patriot King-insulting the memory of his benefactor Pope; and the peer rewarded him by bequeathing to him the whole of his works, manuscripts, and library. Mallet's love of money and infidel principles were equally gratified by this bequest-he published the collected works of Bolingbroke in 1754* His next appearance was also of a discreditable character. When the government became unpopular by the defeat at Minorca, Mallet was employed (1756) in its defence, and under the signature of a Plain Man, he published an address imputing cowardice to the admiral of the fleet. He succeeded: Byng was shot, and Mallet was pensioned. The accession of George III. opened a way for all literary Scotsmen subservient to the crown. Mallet was soon a worshipper of the favourite Lord Bute. In 1761, he published a flattering poetical epistle, Truth in Rhyme, addressed to Lord Bute, and equally laudatory of the king and the minister. Of this piece Chesterfield said: It has no faults, or I no faults can spy: Astrea from her native sky beholds the virtues of the patriot king,' and summons Urania to sing his praises. Urania doubts whether a prince deserving but shunning fame, would permit her strains, but she calls upon all Britons to emulate their king, and, considering to whom such 'grateful lays' should be sent, To strike at once all scandal mute, The goddess found, and fixed on Bute! Such is the poor conceit on which the rhyme is built. Mallet afterwards dedicated his tragedy of Elvira (1763) to Lord Bute, and was rewarded with the office of Keeper of the Book of Entries for the port of London, which was worth £400 per annum. He enjoyed this appointment little more than two years, dying in London, April 21, 1765. Gibbon anticipated that if ever his friend Mallet should attain poetic fame, it would be by his Amyntor and Theodora; but, contrary to the dictum of the historian, the poetic fame of Mallet rests on his ballads, and chiefly on his William and Margaret, which, written about the age of twenty-two, afforded high hopes of ultimate excellence. The simplicity, here remarkable, he seems to have thrown aside when he assumed the airs and dress of a man of taste and fashion. All critics, from Dr Percy downwards, have united in considering William and Margaret one of the finest compositions of the kind in our language. Sir Walter Scott conceived that Mallet had imitated an old Scottish tale to be found in Allan Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany, beginning: There came a ghost to Margaret's door. The resemblance is striking. Mallet confessed only Johnson's sentence on the noble author and his editor is one of his most pointed conversational memorabilia: Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderresolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly buss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death.' -in a note to his ballad-to the following verse in Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle: When it was grown to dark midnight, And all were fast asleep, In came Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet. In the first printed copies of Mallet's ballad, the first two lines were nearly the same as the above When all was wrapt in dark midnight, And all were fast asleep. He improved the rhyme by the change; but beautiful as the idea is of night and morning meeting, it may be questioned whether there is not more of the ballad simplicity in the old words. William and Margaret. 'Twas at the silent solemn hour, When night and morning meet; In glided Margaret's grimly ghost, And stood at William's feet. Her face was like an April morn So shall the fairest face appear, When youth and years are flown: Such is the robe that kings must wear, When death has reft their crown. Her bloom was like the springing flower, But love had, like the canker-worm, The rose grew pale, and left her cheek, 'Awake!' she cried, 'thy true love calls, Come from her midnight grave: Now let thy pity hear the maid 'This is the dark and dreary hour When injured ghosts complain; When yawning graves give up their dead, To haunt the faithless swain. 'Bethink thee, William, of thy fault, Thy pledge and broken oath! And give me back my maiden vow, And give me back my troth. 'Why did you promise love to me, 'How could you say my face was fair, 'Why did you say my lip was sweet, 'That face, alas! no more is fair, Those lips no longer red: Dark are my eyes, now closed in death, 'The hungry worm my sister is; 'But hark! the cock has warned me hence; A long and last adieu ! Come see, false man, how low she lies, The lark sung loud; the morning smiled He hied him to the fatal place Where Margaret's body lay; And stretched him on the green-grass turf That wrapt her breathless clay. And thrice he called on Margaret's name, Then laid his cheek to her cold grave, The Birks of Invermay. The smiling morn, the breathing spring, For soon the winter of the year, Some additional stanzas were added to the above by Dr Bryce, Kirknewton. Invermay is in Perthshire, the native county of Mallet, and is situated near the termination of a little picturesque stream called the May. The 'birk' or birch-tree is abundant, adding grace and beauty to rock and stream. Though a Celt by birth, Mallet had none of the imaginative wildness or superstition of his native country. Macpherson, on the other hand, seems to have been completely imbued with it. MARK AKENSIDE, The author of The Pleasures of Imagination, one of the most pure and noble-minded poems of the age, was of humble origin. His parents were dissenters, and the Puritanism imbibed in his early years seems, as in the case of Milton, to have given a gravity and earnestness to his character, and a love of freedom to his thoughts and imagination. MARK AKENSIDE was the son of a respectable butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he was born, November 9, 1721. An accident in his early years-the fall of one of his father's cleavers, or hatchets, on his foot-rendered him lame for life, and perpetuated the recollection of his lowly birth. The Society of Dissenters advanced a sum for the education of the poet as a clergyman, and he repaired to Edinburgh for this purpose in his eighteenth year. He afterwards repented of this destination, and, returning the money, entered himself as a student of medicine. He was then a poet, and in his Hymn to Science, written in Edinburgh, we see at once the formation of his classic taste, and the dignity of his personal character: That last best effort of thy skill, Raise me above the vulgar's breath, And all in life that's mean; have been a caricature of Akenside. The description, for rich humour and grotesque combinations of learning and folly, has not been excelled by Smollett; but it was unworthy his talents to cast ridicule on a man of high character, learning, and genius. Akenside died suddenly of a putrid sore throat, on the 23d of June 1770, in his 49th year, and was buried in St James's Church. With a feeling common to poets, as to more ordinary mortals, Akenside, in his latter days, reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a fourth book of the Pleasures of Imagination, written in the last year of his life, there is the following beautiful passage: O ye dales Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where The spirit of Milton seems to speak in this strain of lofty egotism!* A youth animated by such sentiments, promised a manhood of honour and integrity. The medical studies of Akenside were completed at Leyden, where he took his degree of M.D. May 16, 1744. Previous to this he had published anonymously his Pleasures of Imagination, which appeared in January of that year, and was so well received that a second edition was called for within four months. The price demanded for the copyright was £120, a large sum; but Dodsley the publisher having submitted it to Pope, the latter advised him not to make a niggardly offer, 'for this was no everyday writer.' The success of the work justified alike poet, critic, and publisher. The same year Akenside in a poetical epistle attacked Pulteney under the name of Curio, but desirous of some more solid support than the Muse, he commenced physician at Northampton. The ground was preoccupied, and he did not succeed. He then published a collection of Odes, and in The Pleasures of Imagination is a poem seldom January 1746, he engaged to contribute to Dods- read continuously, though its finer passages, by ley's Museum an essay and review of new books frequent quotation, particularly in works of critionce a fortnight, for which he was to receive cism and moral philosophy, are well known. Gray £100 per annum. He continued also to practise censured the mixture of spurious philosophyas a physician, first at Hampstead, and afterwards the speculations of Hutcheson and Shaftesburyin Bloomsbury Square, London, and he published which the work contains. Plato, Lucretius, and several medical treatises. At Leyden he had formed even the papers by Addison in the Spectator, were an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, also laid under contribution by the studious author. Jeremiah Dyson, Esq. which ripened into a friend- He gathered sparks of enthusiasm from kindred ship of the most close and enthusiastic description: minds, but the train was in his own. The pleasand Mr Dyson-who was afterwards clerk of the ures which his poem professes to treat of, 'proHouse of Commons, a lord of the treasury, &c-ceed,' he says, either from natural objects, as had the generosity to allow the poet £300 a year. from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring After writing a few Odes, and attempting a total fountain, a calm sea by moonlight, or from works alteration of his great poem-in which he was far of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a from successful-Akenside made no further efforts statue, a picture, a poem.' These, with the moral at composition. In 1757, appeared the enlargement and intellectual objects arising from them, furnish of the First Book of his Pleasures of Imagination, of the Second Book in 1765, and a fragment of an intended Fourth Book was published after his death. The society of the poet was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients, exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle, who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, is supposed to Thus Milton in his Apology for Smectymnuus: Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught; then with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish, obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations. See also the fine passage ante, page 330. abundant topics for illustration; but Akenside compromised his dignity, though he blended dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, pertaining sweetness with its expression. He more to philosophy than to poetry. He did not seek to graft upon them human interests and passions. In tracing the final causes of our emotions, he could have described their exercise and effects in scenes of ordinary pain or pleasure in the walks of real life. This does not seem, however, to have been the purpose of the poet, and hence his work is deficient in interest. seldom stoops from the heights of philosophy and classic taste. He considered that physical science improved the charms of nature. Contrary to the feeling of another poet (Campbell) who repudiates these 'cold material laws,' he viewed the rainbow with additional pleasure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of lights and colours : Nor ever yet The melting rainbow's vernal tinctured hues In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west Akenside's Hymn to the Naiads has the true classical spirit. He had caught the manner and feeling, the varied pause and harmony, of the Greek poets, with such felicity, that Lloyd considered his Hymn as fitted to give a better idea of that form of composition, than could be conveyed by any translation of Homer or Callimachus. Gray was an equally learned poet, perhaps superior his knowledge was better digested. But Gray had not the romantic enthusiasm of character, tinged with pedantry, which naturally belonged to Akenside. He had also the experience of mature years. The genius of Akenside was early developed, and his diffuse and florid descriptions seem the natural product-marvellous of its kind -of youthful exuberance. He was afterwards conscious of the defects of his poem. He saw that there was too much leaf for the fruit; but in cutting off these luxuriances, he sacrificed some of the finest blossoms. Posterity has been more just to his fame, by almost wholly disregarding this second copy of his philosophical poem. In his youthful aspirations after moral and intellectual greatness and beauty, he seems, like Jeremy Taylor in the pulpit, an angel newly descended from the visions of glory.' In advanced years, he is the professor in his robes; still free from stain, but stately, formal, and severe. The blank verse of the Pleasures of Imagination is free and well modulated, and seems to be distinctly his own. Though apt to run into too long periods, it has more compactness of structure than Thomson's ordinary composition. Its occasional want of perspicuity probably arises from the fineness of his distinctions, and the difficulty attending mental analysis in verse. He might also wish to avoid all vulgar and common expressions, and thus err from excessive refinement. A redundancy of ornament undoubtedly, in some passages, takes off from the clearness and prominence of his conceptions. His highest flights, however-as in the allusion to the death of Cæsar, and his exquisitely wrought parallel between art and nature-have a flow and energy of expression, with appropriate imagery, which mark the great poet. His style is chaste, yet elevated and musical. He never Aspirations after the Infinite. Say, why was man so eminently raised To chase each partial purpose from his breast: The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns And continents of sand, will turn his gaze Patriotism. Mind, mind alone-bear witness, earth and heaven!— Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand Look, then, abroad through nature, to the range When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud Taste. What, then, is taste, but these internal powers The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds, His rude expression and untutored airs, How lovely! how commanding! But though heaven And gentlest beauty. Hence when lightning fires Amid the mighty uproar, while below O blest of heaven! whom not the languid songs Of luxury, the siren! not the bribes Of sordid wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils Those ever-blooming sweets, which from the store To charm the enlivened soul. What though not all This fair inspired delight: her tempered powers The world's foundations: if to these the mind Will be the change, and nobler. Would the forms Of ignorance and rapine, bow her down He meant, he made us to behold and love |