220

Since startled Metre fled before thy face,
Well wert thou doomed the last of all thy race!
Well might triumphant Genii bear thee hence,
Illustrious conqueror of common sense!
Now, last and greatest, Madoc spreads his sails,
Cacique in Mexico,1 and Prince in Wales;
Tells us strange tales, as other travellers do,
More old than Mandeville's, and not so true.
Oh, SOUTHEY! SOUTHEY!' cease thy varied song!
A bard may chaunt too often and too long:
As thou art strong in verse, in mercy, spare!

A fourth, alas! were more than we could bear.
But if, in spite of all the world can say,

Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way; 230

or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, first played in 1730 at the Haymarket.]

1. [Southey's Madoc is divided into two parts-Part I., "Madoc in Wales:" Part II., "Madoc in Aztlan." The word "cacique" ("Cacique or cazique... a native chief or 'prince' of the aborigines in the West Indies :" New Engl. Dict., Art. "Cacique") occurs in the translations of Spanish writers quoted by Southey in his notes, but not in the text of the poem.]

2. We beg Mr. Southey's pardon: "Madoc disdains the degraded title of Epic." See his Preface. ["It assumes not the degraded title of Epic."-Preface to Madoc (1805), Southey's Poetical Works (1838), vol. v. p. xxi.] Why is Epic degraded? and by whom? Certainly the late Romaunts of Masters Cottle, Laureat Pye, Ogilvy, Hole,* and gentle Mistress Cowley, have not exalted the Epic Muse; but, as Mr. SOUTHEY'S poem disdains the appellation," allow us to ask -has he substituted anything better in its stead? or must he be content to rival Sir RICHARD BLACKMORE in the quantity. as well as quality of his verse?

66

*For "Hole," the MS. and British Bards read "Sir J. B. Burgess; Cumberland."

If still in Berkeley-Ballads most uncivil,

Thou wilt devote old women to the devil,1

The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue:
"God help thee," SOUTHEY,' and thy readers too.

Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule,
The simple WORDSWORTH, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favourite May,

Who warns his friend "to shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books, for fear of growing double ; " 4
Who, both by precept and example, shows

That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,

Poetic souls delight in prose insane ;

240

1. See The Old Woman of Berkeley, a ballad by Mr. Southey, wherein an aged gentlewoman is carried away by Beelzebub, on a "high trotting horse."

2. The last line, "God help thee," is an evident plagiarism from the Anti-Facobin to Mr. Southey, on his Dactylics :

"God help thee, silly one!"

Poetry of the Anti-Facobin, p. 23. 3. [In the annotated copy of the Fourth Edition Byron has drawn a line down the margin of the passage on Wordsworth, lines 236-248, and adds the word "Unjust." The first four lines on Coleridge (lines 255-258) are also marked "Unjust." The recantation is, no doubt, intended to apply to both passages from beginning to end.]

["Unjust."-B., 1816. (See also Byron's letter to S. T. Coleridge, March 31, 1815.)]

4. Lyrical Ballads, p. 4.-"The Tables Turned," Stanza I.
"Up, up, my friend, and clear your looks,
Why all this toil and trouble?

Up, up, my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double."

And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of "an idiot Boy;"

A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,

And, like his bard, confounded night with day;1
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the "idiot in his glory"
Conceive the Bard the hero of the story.

Shall gentle COLERIDGE pass unnoticed here,2
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?

Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still Obscurity's a welcome guest.

If Inspiration should her aid refuse

To him who takes a Pixy for a muse,3

1

250

260

1. Mr. W. in his preface labours hard to prove, that prose and verse are much the same; and certainly his precepts and practice are strictly conformable :

"And thus to Betty's questions he

Made answer, like a traveller bold.
'The cock did crow, to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold.""

Lyrical Ballads, p. 179.

[Compare The Simpliciad, 11. 295-305, and note.]

2. He has not published for some years."—British Bards. [A marginal note in pencil.] [Coleridge's Poems (3rd edit.) appeared in 1803; the first number of The Friend on June 1, 1809.]

3. COLERIDGE's Poems, p. 11, "Songs of the Pixies," i.e. Devonshire Fairies; p. 42, we have "Lines to a Young Lady; and, p. 52, "Lines to a Young Ass." [Compare The Simpliciad, 11. 211, 213

"Then in despite of scornful Folly's pother,

Ask him to live with you and hail him brother."]

Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass

The bard who soars to elegize an ass :

So well the subject suits his noble mind,"
He brays, the Laureate of the long-eared kind.".

Oh! wonder-working LEWIS!1 Monk, or Bard, Who fain would make Parnassus a church-yard! iii.

i. How well the subject.-[MS. First to Fourth Editions.]
ii. A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind.-

[British Bards, First to Fourth Editions.] iii. Who fain would'st.-[British Bards, First to Fifth Editions.] 1. [Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), known as "Monk" Lewis, was the son of a rich Jamaica planter. During a six months' visit to Weimar (1792-3), when he was introduced to Goethe, he applied himself to the study of German literature, especially novels and the drama. In 1794 he was appointed attaché to the Embassy at the Hague, and in the course of ten weeks wrote Ambrosio, or The Monk, which was published in 1795. In 1798 he made the acquaintance of Scott, and procured his promise of co-operation in his contemplated Tales of Terror. In the same year he published the Castle Spectre (first played at Drury Lane, Dec. 14, 1797), in which, to quote the postscript "To the Reader," he meant (but Sheridan interposed) "to have exhibited a whole regiment of Ghosts." Tales of Terror were printed at Weybridge in 1801, and two or three editions of Tales of Wonder, to which Byron refers, came out in the same year. Lewis borrowed so freely from all sources that the collection was called "Tales of Plunder." In the first edition (two vols., printed by W. Bulmer for the author, 1801) the first eighteen poems, with the exception of The Fire King (xii.) by Walter Scott, are by Lewis, either original or translated. Scott also contributed Glenfinlas, The Eve of St. John, Frederick and Alice, The Wild Huntsmen (Der Wilde Jäger). Southey contributed six poems, including The Old Woman of Berkeley (xxiv.). The Little Grey Man (xix.) is by H. Bunbury. The second volume is made up from Burns, Gray, Parnell, Glover, Percy's Reliques, and other sources.

A second edition, published in 1801, which consists of thirty-two ballads (Southey's are not included), advertises "Tales of Terror printed uniform with this edition of Tales

Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
Thy Muse a Sprite, Apollo's sexton thou!
Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand,
By gibb'ring spectres hailed, thy kindred band; 270
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,

To please the females of our modest age;

of Wonder." Romantic Tales, in four volumes, appeared in 1808. Of his other works, The Captive, A Monodrama, was played in 1803; the Bravo of Venice, A Translation from the German, in 1804; and Timour the Tartar in 1811. His Journal of a West Indian Proprietor was not published till 1834. He sat as M.P. for Hindon (1796-1802).

He had been a favourite in society before Byron appeared on the scene, but there is no record of any intimacy or acquaintance before 1813. When Byron was living at Geneva, Lewis visited the Maison Diodati in August, 1816, on which occasion he "translated to him Goethe's Faust by word of mouth," and drew up a codicil to his will, witnessed by Byron, Shelley, and Polidori, which contained certain humane provisions for the well-being of the negroes on his Jamaica estates. He also visited him at La Mira in August, 1817. Byron wrote of him after his death: "He was a good man, and a clever one, but he was a bore, a damned boreone may say. But I liked him.”

To judge from his letters to his mother and other evidence (Scott's testimony, for instance), he was a kindly, wellintentioned man, but lacking in humour. When his father condemned the indecency of the Monk, he assured him "that he had not the slightest idea that what he was then writing could injure the principles of any human being." "He was," said Byron, "too great a bore to lie," and the plea is evidently offered in good faith. As a writer, he is memorable chiefly for his sponsorship of German literature. Scott said of him that he had the finest ear for rhythm he ever met with-finer than Byron's; and Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth, Jan., 1798 (Letters of S. T. C. (1895), i. 237), and again in Table Talk for March 20, 1834, commends his verses. Certainly his ballad of "Crazy Jane," once so famous that ladies took to wearing "Crazy Jane" hats, is of the nature of poetry. (See Life, 349, 362, 491, etc.; Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (1839), i. 158, etc.; Life of Scott, by J. G. Lockhart (1842), pp. 80-83, 94.)]