mon sense tells us (and common sense is precisely the monitor to which it would do Mr. Southey the greatest good to listen), that if a language is ill adapted to a particular mode of versification, that particular mode should be let alone. The inconvenience, as to room indeed, which is mentioned in the note to page xv. in the preface, as a consequence of adopting this measure, is a charge that might have been spared by a writer, whose page is of such capacious size, that his lengthy lines may float therein as much at their ease as Leviathan in the great deep.

Mr. Southey, indeed, belongs to a class of writers which may be called the school of independence. It seems as if there was something in his mind which must be at enmity with order in some of its departments; a root of indiscipline, too deep and luxuriant to be destroyed or extirpated; and which, if stopped in one place, will infallibly break out in another. If it be duncery, according to the expression above alluded to, to be insensible to the beauty of his English hexameters, we desire to stand among the foremost of this denounced fraternity, for, in good truth, we like his new poetry no better than his old politics: they are, indeed, somewhat allied: nor can we account for his folly in thus wasting the stock of his reputation, but by considering that vanity has an indestructible privilege of exposing itself: when it can no longer quarrel with authority, it claims a right to revolt against experience.

What the Quarterly Reviewers will do with these hexameters, or how they will get over the difficult and delicate dilemma into which they are brought by this mistake of Mr. Southey, we are at a loss to conjecture. Will they say it was designed to be the last practical exposure of the futility of this often repeated experiment upon our much tormented language? or will they despotically pronounce the work to be a real poem in the disguise of prose, after the manner of Lord Peter? or will they say, with Spurzheim, that there must be a certain organization of the cranium to comprehend the beauties of this measure? or that it appeals to a certain relish of the artificial kind, to be acquired like the taste for tobacco? or that every reader, thinking or feeling differently from this poet, ought to suppose the fault in himself? or that, at any rate, it is the fault of the language, and not of the writer, who has done all that could be done with his materials? or that, to give to this metre its due effect, a certain art in reading it is requisite, which may be learned with somewhat less than two years study, and best perhaps in the Royal Dutch Institute of which Mr. Southey is a member? or that it is enough that Mr. Southey assures us that he can read the lines musically, of which any one may be satisfied personally by a visit to Cumberland, where he may see the lakes into the bargain? or, if none of

these arguments will be thought sufficient, will they remind us that the visions of a trance must be taken as we find them, being a ghostly tribe that defy the manacles of metre? or will they at once magnificently maintain that these poets of the Lakes, live in a franchised district, out of the jurisdiction of common sense and common sound; where the ear has no right of cognizance, and where special customs exclude the sober and ordinary institutions by which the Muses uphold their dominion?

We observed in our last number, that the British Review was free from some of the embarrassments which the state and mutations of parties in the critical, as well as the political, world, must sometimes occasion to other quarterly journals. Mr. Southey's Sapphics have undergone the chastisement of the anti-jacobin critics, but Mr. Southey's hexameters are safe from the anti-jacobin writers of the Quarterly Review. He may sit under the shade of his laurel, and dream or drivel with impunity in his inverted prose and poetry. Another author of minor poems has, as well as Mr. Southey, experienced the severity of the critics. He retorted, and his grey goose quill was felt like the shaft of Percy upon the Scottish border. It was soon perceived that these enemies might undo one another; their politics and morals were the same, and literary envy gave way to the interests of a common cause. These Scotch critics were never more to lash, and this English Pegasus was never more to kick. Pestilential as are the poems of the writer last alluded to, and high as are the pretensions of the Quarterly Reviewers to religion and morality, these writers touch him not; his polluted banner is in the middle of their camp; the infidel passes unrebuked before the champions of the mitre and the sceptre; which things could never be but for some peculiar feeling that perverts the principles of moral and manly criticism.

Mr. Southey's preface is not to be placed among the number of his happiest compositions. He seems to write with a mind not altogether unconscious of the absurdity of his undertaking, and yet forced into it by a sort of destiny which he finds it impossible to resist. The vanity of succeeding where all before him had failed seems to have been his betrayer. So fearfully does he anticipate the censure of the critics, that a method is adopted of frightening them from their purpose, we may say from their duty, which we do not remember to have seen in practice before. He is extremely angry with those who accuse him of preferring the strange inconsonant arbitrary measures, which he has thought fit to adopt, to "the regular blank verse, the noblest measure, in his judgment, of which our admirable language is capable." He has preferred it, as he tells us, only where it suited the character of the poem; as in the rhythmical romance of

Thalaba for example, in which it appeared to him to be the "Arabesque" ornament of" an Arabian tale." And with those unhappy men who did not or would not understand or accede to this distinction," he will enter into no explanations." They are, to say no worse of them, the duncery of the day; and, after some intimations of their being persons of "malevolent" dispositions, and deficient "in the proper sense of honour;" the author pro ceeds to put the point to his readers rather as a question of fact than opinion, and considers his "veracity" concerned in the correctness of what he states to be the disadvantages of his present extraordinary metre, rather than his taste and discernment.

The only way of meeting this new mode of discussing subjects of general criticism and philology, is first to do all manner of justice to the integrity of the writer, by declaring ourselves fully to credit what he says upon his word and honour, of his own preferences, and his reasons for acting in opposition to them; and then to tell him candidly, that we see no sense in his reasons for departing from his own preferences; challenging the same right to be believed upon our words and honours. But whatever defence, in the particular case of Thalaba, the style of what Mr. Southey calls" Arabesque ornament," might have afforded to that singular performance, of which we confess ourselves incompetent judges, being incapable of seeing any thing in this Arabesque style, if such it be, but uncouth extravagance, there surely is no such characteristical fitness with which the exotic verse which Mr. Southey, upon the present occasion, has chosen, adjusts itself to the subject on which it is employed. Hexameters, which have hitherto been the vehicle of idolatrous fables, and have been so long associated with the impure imaginations and superstitious inventions of heathen antiquity, can have no fitness, one would think, from affinity, or use, or habit, for the colloquies of saints and angels, or the transactions of the great day, when Jehovah shall reckon with his creatures, and appoint them their everlasting doom. author will not, surely, say, I do not prefer, as you know, or ought to know, ye "malevolent" dunces, and men" without a proper sense of honour," this metre, so ill suited to our "admirable language," to " regular blank verse;" but it has such a special adaptation to the high and holy theme on which I have chosen to descant, and offers itself as so fit a vehicle for expressing the decrees which are finally to sum up all righteousness, mercy, equity, and truth, that I have given it the precedence to all other metres on this transcendant occasion.

The

I first adventure, follow me who list," is the challenge which this writer proclaims, and proclaims to insensible ears. No one who has a prudent regard to his literary reputation will follow him. Mr. Southey's fame may survive the adventure, but there

are few poets who would not pass along this road through tem→ porary ridicule to final oblivion. There are various modes of mortality by which poets die out of the memory of mankind, but we are persuaded that, if Mr. Southey's example were to excite general imitation, the disease of hexameters would soon, perhaps not unusefully, reduce to one half the population of Parnassus. We say, not unusefully, because we cannot help cordially assenting to Mr. Southey's remarks in the 3d section of his preface, where he very properly, though in terms less forcible and discriminative than might be used, rebukes the contaminating tendency of the greater part of modern poetry. It is, indeed, what we find it here denominated, the "furniture of the brothel." But if the poets of this order could be persuaded to become the imitators of this new style of versification, their pollutions and blasphemies might lie and rot in cold hexameters, forgotten till the day of retribution shall realize something more awful and terrific than Mr. Southey's" Vision of Judgement." In the mean time, however, it will do these noblemen and gentlemen, who have been accumulating against themselves the vengeance of that dreadful day of visitation, no harm to read the just and feeling animadversions of Mr. Southey on their wretched productions:

"The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences which can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after repentance in the writer can counteract.— Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must) will be of no avail. The poignancy of a death-bed repentance cannot cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad; and as long as it continues to be read, so long is he the pandar of posterity, and so long is he heaping up guilt upon his soul in perpetual accumulation.

"These remarks are not more severe than the offence deserves, even when applied to those immoral writers who have not been conscious of any evil intention in their writings, who would acknowledge a little levity, a little warmth of colouring, and so forth, in that sort of language with which men gloss over their favourite vices, and deceive themselves. What then should be said of those for whom the thoughtlessness and the inebriety of wanton youth can no longer be pleaded, but who have written in sober manhood and with deliberate purpose?— Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of

"

Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feelings of hopelessness wherewith it is allied." (Preface, p. xviii.-xxi.)

What seems least explainable in this infatuated attempt of Mr. Southey, is his persisting in it with an apparent conviction of the impossibility of altering the quantities and the general habitual pronunciation of our language without the destruction of its natural emphasis and the worst effects upon the ear. This he re

marks upon as the perpetual cause of the failure of all those who, in the Elizabethan age of our literature, made the experiment. He gives several examples of this failure in Sidney and his followers, who, in defiance of a fixed habit of pronunciation, and the established principles and genius of the language, were bent upon subjecting it to the rules of the Latin prosody. One would have supposed that so experienced a writer, seeing in such a case the alternative to be a departure from the true structure of the hexameter, or a sacrifice of the vernacular pronunciation, would have yielded to so decisive an objection; but with a singular pertinacity of purpose, Mr. Southey has thought good to construct a metre, which, after doing violence to the prosody of one language and the orthoepy of another, results in a barbarous diction, which poetry disclaims and prose rejects; whose only merit will be the negative good it will render to Mr. Southey's well-earned fame, and the republic of letters, by rapidly hurrying back into the limbo of abortive and forgotten things this morbid visionthe untoward offspring of a teeming brain and unsubjugated fancy.

Mr. Southey, after adverting to some proofs of the practicability of the hexameter in our language, given about 20 years ago in some translations of the Messiah of Klopstock, which appeared in the Monthly Magazine, and an eclogue called the Showman, printed in the 2d volume of the Annual Anthology, neither of which specimens we have had the felicity of perusing, written, as he tells us, by his old friend Mr. William Taylor, of Norwich, of whom he takes this occasion of making very honourable mention,-informs us, that in repeating the experiment upon a more adequate scale, and upon a subject suited to the movement, he had fulfilled one of the hopes and intentions of his early life. So that Mr. Southey appears to have been under this infatuation during the greater part of his existence. He seems to have been engaged to the undertaking by some sickly vow made in a moment of constitutional imbecility or morbid delirium, and to have had his fancy so impressed by the fond persuasion as to be utterly incurable by argument or experiment. But the