Mickle, or his friends, suspected that Adam Smith and David Hume had maliciously stood between him and the Buccleuch patronage. This was a mere suspicion, which our author and his friends ought either to have proved or suppressed. Mickle was indeed the declared antagonist of Hume; he had written against him, and could not hear his name mentioned with temper but there is not the slightest evidence that the hatred was mutual. That Adam Smith should have done him a mean injury no one will believe probable who is acquainted with the traditional private character of that philosopher. But Mickle was also the antagonist of Smith's doctrines on political economy, as may be seen in his Dissertation on the Charter of the East India Company.' The author of The Wealth of Nations,' forsooth, was jealous of his opinions on monopolies! Even this paltry supposition is contradicted by dates, for Mickle's tract upon the subject of monopolies was published several years after the preface to The Lusiad.' Upon the whole, the suspicion of his philosophical enemies having poisoned the ear of the Duke of Buccleuch seems to have proceeded from the same irritable vanity which made him threaten to celebrate Garrick as the hero of a second Dunciad' when he refused to accept of his tragedy The Siege of Marseilles.' 6 Though The Lusiad' had a tolerable sale, his circumstances still made his friends solicitous that he should obtain some settled provision. Dr. Lowth offered to provide for him in the church. He refused the offer with honourable delicacy, lest his former writings in favour of religion should be attributed to the prospect of reward. At length the friendship of his kinsman, Commodore Johnstone, relieved him from unsettled prospects. Being appointed to the command of a squadron destined for the coast of Portugal, he took out the translator of Camoens as his private secretary. Mickle was received with distinguished honours at Lisbon. The Duke of Braganza, in admitting him a member of the Royal Academy of Lisbon, presented him with his own picture. He returned to England in 1780, with a considerable acquisition of prize-money, and was appointed an agent for the distribution of the prize profits of the cruise. His fortune now enabled him to discharge the debts of his early and mercantile life. He married the daughter of Mr. Tomkins, with whom he had resided while translating The Lusiad ;' and, with every prospect of spending the remainder of his life in affluence and tranquillity, purchased a house and settled at Wheatley, near Oxford. So far his circumstances have almost the agreeable air of a concluding novel; but the failure of a banker with whom he was connected as prize-agent, and a Chancery suit in which he was involved, greatly diminished his finances, and disturbed the peace of his latter years. He died at Forest Hill, after a short illness. His reputation principally rests upon the translation of 'The Lusiad,' which no Englishman had attempted before him, except Sir Richard Fanshawe. Sir Richard's version is quaint, flat, and harsh; and he has interwoven many ridiculously conceited expressions which are foreign both to the spirit and style of his original; but in general it is closer than the modern translation to the literal meaning of Camoens. Altogether, Fanshawe's representation of the Portuguese poem may be compared to the wrong side of the tapestry. Mickle, on the other hand, is free, flowery, and periphrastical; he is incomparably more spirited than Fanshawe; but still he departs from the majestic simplicity of Camoens' diction as widely as Pope has done from that of Homer.* The sonorous and simple language of the Lusitanian epic is like the sound of a trumpet; and Mickle's imitation like the shakes and flourishes of the flute. *A happy example of this occurs in the description of De Gama's fleet anchoring by moonlight in the harbour of Mozambique:— "The moon, full orb'd, forsakes her watery cave, The snowy splendours of her modest ray Stream o'er the glistening waves, and glistening play: The watchman's carol, echoed from the prows, In this beautiful sea-piece the circumstance of "the mast's tall shadow trembling o'er the deep," and of the "carol of the watchman echoed from the prows," are touches of the translator's addition. Mickle has, however, got more credit for improving 'The Lusiad' than he deserves. Although he was not responsible for the faults of the original, he has taken abundance of pains to defend them in his notes and preface. In this he has not been successful. The long lecture on geography and Portuguese history which Gama delivers to the King of Melinda is a wearisome interruption to the narrative; and the use of Pagan mythology is a radical and unanswerable defect. Mickle informs us as an apology for the latter circumstance that all this Pagan machinery was allegorical, and that the gods and goddesses of Homer were allegorical also; an assertion which would require to be proved before it can be admitted. Camoens himself has said something about his concealment of a moral meaning under his Pagan deities; but if he has any such morality it is so well hidden that it is impossible to discover it. The Venus of The Lusiad,' we are told, is Divine Love; and how is this Divine Love employed? For no other end than to give the poet an opportunity of displaying a scene of sensual gratification, an island is purposely raised up in the ocean; Venus conducts De Gama and his followers to this blessed spot, where a bevy of the nymphs of Venus are very good-naturedly prepared to treat them to their favours, not as a trial, but as a reward for their virtues! Voltaire was certainly justified in pronouncing this episode a piece of gratuitous indecency. In the same allegorical spirit, no doubt, Bacchus, who opposes the Portuguese discoverers in the councils of Heaven, disguises himself as a Popish priest, and celebrates the rites of the Catholic religion. The imagination is somewhat puzzled to discover why Bacchus should be an enemy to the natives of a country the soil of which is so productive of his beverage, and a friend to the Mahometans, who forbid the use of it; although there is something amusing in the idea of the jolly god officiating as a Romish clergyman. Mickle's story of Syr Martyn' is the most pleasing of his original pieces. The object of the narrative is to exhibit the degrading effects of concubinage, in the history of an amiable man, who is reduced to despondency and sottishness under the dominion of a beldam and a slattern. The defect of the moral is, that the same evils might have happened to Syr Martyn in a state of matrimony. The simplicity of the tale is also, unhappily, overlaid by a weight of allegory and of obsolete phraseology which it has not importance to sustain. Such a style, applied to the history of a man and his housekeeper, is like building a diminutive dwelling in all the pomp of Gothic architecture.* TIMOTHY DWIGHT. Of this American poet I am sorry to be able to give the British reader no account. I believe his personal history is as little known as his poetry on this side of the Atlantic. THOMAS WARTON. [Born, 1728. Died, 1790.] THOMAS WARTON was descended from an ancient family, whose residence was at Beverley, in Yorkshire. One of his ancestors was knighted in the civil wars for his adherence to Charles I.; but by the failure of the same cause the estate of the family was confiscated, and they were unable to maintain the rank of gentry. The Toryism of the historian of English poetry was, therefore, hereditary. His father was fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; professor of poetry in that university; and vicar of Basingstoke, in Hants, and of Cobham, in Surrey. At the age of sixteen our author was admitted a commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, of which he continued a member, and an ornament, for forty-seven years. His first poetical appearance in print has been traced to five eclogues in blank verse, the scenes of which are laid among the shepherds oppressed by the wars in Germany. They appeared in Pearch's Supplement to Dodsley's Collection of Fugitive Pieces.' Warton disavowed those eclogues in his riper years. They are not discreditable to him as the verses of a boy; but it was a superfluous offering to the public to subjoin them to his other works in Mr. Chalmers' edition of 'The British Poets.'† * [Mickle was the author of that very beautiful song, 'There's nae luck about the house,' and on his ballad of Cumnor Hall' Scott founded his romance of Kenilworth.'] [Mr. Southey, in his review of Chalmers' collection, is of a different opinion. "A valuable addition is made," he says, 66 to T. Warton's works, by the discovery of five pastoral eclogues, the scenes of which are laid among the shepherds oppressed by the war in Germany. They were published in 1745, and ascribed to him on the competent authority of Isaac Reed. They are certainly remarkable productions for a youth of eighteen."—Quar. Rev., vol. xi. p. 501.] His poem, "The Pleasures of Melancholy,' was written not long after. As the composition of a youth, it is entitled to a very indulgent consideration; and perhaps it gives promise of a sensibility which his subsequent poetry did not fulfil. It was professedly written in his seventeenth, but published in his nineteenth year, so that it must be considered as testifying the state of his genius at the latter period, for until his work had passed through the press he would continue to improve it. In the year 1749 he published his Triumph of Isis,' in answer to Mason's poetical attack on the loyalty of Oxford. The best passage in this piece, beginning with the lines, "Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, Ye towers, that wear the mossy vest of time," discovers that fondness for the beauties of architecture which was an absolute passion in the breast of Warton. Joseph Warton relates, that, at an early period of their youth, his brother and he were taken by their father to see Windsor Castle. Old Dr. Warton complained, that, whilst the rest of the party expressed delight at the magnificent spectacle, Thomas made no remarks; but Joseph Warton justly observes, that the silence of his brother was only a proof of the depth of his pleasure; that he was really absorbed in the enjoyment of the sight; and that his subsequent fondness for "castle imagery," he believed, might be traced to the impression which he then received from Windsor Castle. 6 In 1750 he took the degree of a master of arts, and in the following year succeeded to a fellowship. In 1754 he published his Observations on Spenser's Faëry Queen,' in a single volume, which he afterwards expanded into two volumes in the edition of 1762. In this work, he minutely analyses the classic and romantic sources of Spenser's fiction; and so far enables us to estimate the power of the poet's genius that we can compare the scattered ore of his fanciful materials with their transmuted appearance in the Faëry Queen.' This work probably contributed to his appointment to the professorship of poetry in the university in 1757, which he held, according to custom, for ten years. While possessed of that chair, he delivered a course of lectures on poetry, in which he introduced his translations from the Greek Anthology, as well as the substance of his remarks on the Bucolic poetry of the Greeks, which were afterwards pub |