poems, were composed in the year, in which he lost his friend West. Did low spirits suppress his future efforts? Or were his powers paralyzed by too anxious a desire to preserve rather than hazard his established fame? Such an anxiety would prove that timid weakness, which seems to me the main defect in the poet's character.

Facility is acquired by practice; and ease and simplicity of manner, which are among the greatest charms of composition, are the probable result. Gray therefore might even have improved his powers by further exercise. But even if he had not, it becomes a manly mind not to be too fearful of fame: we should endeavour to deserve it by rational means; and have the fortitude to endure the consequences, if we fail. A petty solicitude never yet obtained its end.

It is not sufficient to feel and think poetically; before any one can win the wreath of a poet, he must be able to arrest, clothe in language, and communicate to others, his thoughts. This is, in truth, the very difficulty and essence of the art; our ideas are so transient and fugitive, (and they are generally so in proportion to the richness and variety of the mind, which produces them,) that it requires great happiness, great practice, and a great and rapid command of words to seize and delineate them.

If they are not thus seized, if the produc

tion is the result of slow thoughts, and forced conceptions, they may wear the outward form of poetry, and obtain the praise of a cold-hearted critic who judges by rule; but they will never exhibit the charms of true poetry, nor be permanently popular.

Gray therefore would have deserved still better of posterity, if he had exercised the wonderful faculties given him by Nature more frequently.

April 8, 1808.

N° XXX.

On the Severity of Fashionable Criticism.

INDISCRIMINATE praise is nauseous; but there is a fashion, lately grown up, still more disgusting than indiscriminate praise. The public is now to be gratified by malignant criticism, exercised upon all occasions at the expense of justice and truth.

It is a bad trait of the age, that it can be gratified at such an abuse of the powers of argument and wit. Ill temper may, no doubt, be connected with acute discrimination and admirable faculties of taste. But when we know that writers are actuated by mercenary motives to feed a depravity of public appetite, we are so far from feeling the motive to be an apology, that we think it less excusable, than if they were impelled by the spleen of a bitter judgment.

To turn the tide of fashion, to counteract that extreme to which the popular rage is always verging, may indeed admit of some excuse, and deserve even some praise. An insipid style of criticism may gradually lose all the wholesome powers of correction, which are necessary to be

exercised by the public censors. But it is at least equally injurious, and far more unamiable, to be uniform in the use of the rod! False praise never yet exalted the undeserving into permanent popularity; false abuse has nipped the bud of many a rising genius, and silenced many an inspired tongue for ever.

The exquisite and almost angelic strains of Kirke White, emanating from the lips of a boy, were nearly extinguished by the stupid, ignorant, and insolent sarcasms of a tasteless and presumptuous reviewer; and Cowper was told, on the publication of his first volume, that he had not a spark of genius, or poetical fancy. When Charlotte Smith first published her Sonnets, some of the hireling critics spoke of her, as one of whom motives of charity might induce them to speak leniently, but who scarcely deserved a place among the meanest of our versifiers.

They, who know how our works of periodical criticism are manufactured, will not wonder at this; but it would be vain to deny that they have a temporary and wide effect on the public. When a certain Review came out, and I noticed it in the possession of one, who I thought cared little about literature, "Yes," said he, "I can take but one; and I am determined that that shall be piquant!”

But will not high-seasoning at last lose its effect?

Dram-drinkers in the end lose all the pleasure of the taste, but feel the result in the decay of their bodily and mental faculties.

While the public keenness is thus gratified only to have its sense of enjoyment palled, what possible good can arise from thus damping all energy, and even annihilating hope in the candidates for honourable fame? The pretender is not deterred; he is too presumptuous and unfeeling; the well-qualified aspirer to intellectual honours shrinks like the sensitive plant at the touch, and perhaps closes his leaves, and shuts his bosom for ever!

There is no work which may not be made ridiculous, if the sole object be to find fault; there is none perhaps, to which ingenuity may not discover well-founded objections. Were the Paradise Lost to be now given to the world for the first time, how practicable it would be, according to the modern system of criticism, to convince those who had not seen it, that it was a work dull, prosaic, tedious, and without a spark of genius!

April 8, 1808.