A. Those of Rosseau. They possess great beauty both of sentiment and expression. Q. What lyric poets have appeared among the English? A. Dryden, Gray, and Cowley. DIDACTIC POETRY-DESCRIPTIVE POETRY. Q. What is Didactic Poetry? A. Poetry, the professed intention of which is to convey knowledge and instruction. Q. What is the highest species of it? A. A regular treatise on some philosophical or useful subject; as Virgil's Georgics, Horace's Art of Poetry, Pope's Essay on Criticism, Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. Q. In what consists its fundamental merit? A. In sound thought, just principles, clear and apt illustrations. Q. What is essentially requisite in didactic. works? A. Method and order; so that a connected train of instruction may be exhibited to the reader. Q. Who has failed most here? A. Horace, in his art of poetry. Q. What liberty is here allowed in episodes and embellishments? A. Great as on these depends the interest of the poem. In his digressions lie the principal beauties of Virgil's Georgics. Q. Who has attempted the richest and most poetical form of didactic writing in English? A. Dr. Akenside, in his Pleasures of the Imagination; a work of much genius. Q. What is the style of Satires and Epistles ? A. More familiar than solemn philosophical poetry. Q. Who were the principal satirists amongst the ancients? A. Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. A. The reformation of morals. They boldly censured vice and vicious characters. Q. Whose ethical epistles deserve to be mentioned with signal honour as a model. A. Pope's. Q. What is his standing as a poet? A. In the more sublime parts of poetry he is not so distinguished as some; but, within a certain limited region, he has been outdone by none. He is remarkable for a concise, spirited style, which gives animation to satires and epistles. Q. What are some of his principal productions ? A. A translation of the Iliad; his Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man; Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard; and Imitations of Horace. Q. What moral and didactic poet, among the English, deserves particular notice? A. His Universal Passion, and Night Thoughts. Q. What may be said of his Night Thoughts? A. There is in them much energy of expression, many pathetic passages, happy images, and pious reflections; but the senti ments are frequently overstrained, and the style is too obscure to be pleasing. Q. What French poet has excelled in the didactic? A. Boileau, who produced many valuable satires and epistles. Q. What is Descriptive Poetry? A. Not any particular form of composition, but it enters into every species of poetry, and demands no small attention. Q. Of what is description the great test? A. Of a poet's imagination; it always distinguishes an original from a second rate genius. Q. How does nature appear to an inferior genius ? A. Exhausted by those who have gone before him in the same tract; his conceptions of it are loose and vague; and his expressions, feeble and general. Q. How does a true poet present an object? A. So that we imagine we see it before our eyes; he catches the distinguishing features, and gives it the colours of life and reality. Q. In what lies the great art of picturesque description? A. In the selection of circumstances. Q. What should these be? A. Such as are new and original; as particularize the object, and mark it strongly. Q. What should. be mixed with inanimate objects to enliven description? A. Living beings. Scenes of dead and still life are apt to pall upon us. * Q. On what does much of the beauty of descriptive poetry depend? A. On a right choice of epithets. Such epithets as barbarous discord, mighty chiefs, hateful envy, swell the language; but impart neither force nor beauty to the poem. Q. Which is the largest and fullest of all professed descriptive compositions? A. Thompson's Seasons; a work which possesses very uncommon merit. Q. Which is the richest and most remarkable? The following is a powerful description of the pestilence that destroyed the English fleet at Carthagena: "You, gallant Vernon, saw The miserable scenes; you pitying saw To infant weakness, sink the warrior's arms: No more with ardour bright; you heard the groans Heard nightly plung'd, amid the sullen waves, A. Milton's Allegro and Penseroso.* Q. What other poets are remarkable for description? A. Homer and Virgil, Ossian and Shakespeare. They are all simple and concise, and give an idea which a painter or statuary could lay hold of and work after them; which is one of the strongest and most decisive trials of the real merit of description. POETRY OF THE HEBREWS. Q. Which of the Sacred Writings are poetical? * The following from the Penseroso is very pictu resque. I walk unseen On the dry, smooth shaven green, To bless the doors from nightly harm." |