the efficient value of a work depends, as well as the degree of genius manifested in it; and we should say, that each of Mr. Taylor's dramas may be considered as, in some respects, superior in attractiveness, though not in merit, to the others. Isaak Comnenus,' for instance, which is materially improved in the present edition by a few singularly judicious alterations, is the most fortunate in its plot, the most compact in its action, and strikes us, on the whole, as the one which could be most easily adapted to the stage. In all the higher attributes of poetry, in depth of thought, in imaginative beauty and pathos, and in that indescribable union of the graceful and the strong in style, which is amongst the highest and rarest proofs of poetic genius, Mr. Taylor's latest work, Edwin the Fair,' has the pre-eminence. Intermediate between the two, and partaking of the characteristics of both, stands Philip van Artevelde,' the longest and the most popular of the three. We should be doing injustice both to our readers and to Mr. Taylor, if we endeavoured to compress a detailed account of these three works within the limits to which we must confine ourselves: we shall therefore restrict our critical analysis to the last-named poem, and endeavour to illustrate, by quotations taken almost exclusively from it, the views which we hold of Mr. Taylor's poetry in general.

6

Philip van Artevelde' is a work so singularly in contrast with the poetry which has been most popular in recent times, that, on its first publication, it was spoken of as a literary experiment. We are glad to see by the cheap edition which has been called for, after the sale of the previous editions, that this experiment has been a successful one. The success of a work which had so little to captivate the mere passions or appetites of the many, we cannot but regard as creditable to the popular taste. It is a common complaint, that little encouragement is now given to poetry; perhaps, however, it would be more just to say, that too much was given some five-and-twenty years ago. We cannot think that poetry was ever intended to be a lucrative art, or that it can become so without sustaining a serious loss, and imperceptibly degrading itself to the level of the readiest market. Too large a demand will produce too quick a supply. Meat cooked before too hot a fire is not the best done; and trees that grow too rapidly do not make the best timber. We hardly understand how an extraordinary degree of popularity can be attained by a poet who does not write for the taste of the hour, in a degree scarcely consistent with the illustration of the deeper spirit of the age, and unfavourable to that independent reliance on himself; that calm but courageous trust in his own convictions, instincts, and tastes, that probing of his own nature, and slow crystallization of his moral experiences, which are

amongst the moral requisites of a great poet. However this may be, the popularity of Philip van Artevelde' is fully equal to what we could have wished or expected, though it has not equalled the rapid sale of Lord Byron's works, many of which, by the way, were published in such a form, as to give them the same advantage now possessed by works circulated in periodic numbers. Indeed, a total absence of immediate success could not have been regarded as a proof of want of merit in a work, avowedly modelled on principles so opposed to those prevalent at the time of its appearance, though now held in little regard. In a critical preface, which the author has prefixed to his work, he boldly throws down the gauntlet, and declares war on some of the strongest prejudices of the age. After commenting on the poetical taste to which some of the popular poets of this century gave birth,' poets whose works, he says, will always 'produce a powerful impression on young readers,' he proceeds as follows:

'These poets were characterised by great sensibility and fervour, by a profusion of imagery, by force and beauty of language, and by a versification peculiarly easy and adroit, and abounding in that sort of melody, which, by its very obvious cadences, makes itself most pleasing to an unpractised ear. They exhibited, therefore, many of the most attractive graces and charms of poetry-its vital warmth not less than its external embellishments; and had not the admiration which they excited, tended to produce an indifference to higher, graver, and more various endowments, no one would have said that it was, in any evil sense, excessive. But from this unbounded indulgence in the mere luxuries of poetry, has there not ensued a want of adequate appreciation for its intellectual and immortal part? I confess that such seems to me to have been both the actual and the natural result; and I can hardly believe the public taste to have been in a healthy state whilst the most approved poetry of past times was almost unread. We may now, perhaps, be turning back to it; but it was not, as far as I can judge, till more than a quarter of a century had expired, that any signs of re-action could be discerned. Till then, the elder luminaries of our poetical literature were obscured or little regarded; and we sate with dazzled eyes at a high festival of poetry, where, as at the funeral of Arvalan, the torch-light put out the star-light.

'So keen was the sense of what the new poets possessed, that it never seemed to be felt that anything was deficient in them. Yet their deficiencies were not unimportant. They wanted, in the first place, subject matter. A feeling came more easily to them than a reflection, and an image was always at hand when a thought was not forthcoming. Either they did not look upon mankind with observant eyes, or they did not feel it to be any part of their vocation to turn what they saw to account. It did not belong to poetry, in their apprehension, to thread the mazes of life in all its classes, and under all its circumstances, common as

well as romantic, and, seeing all things, to infer and to instruct on the contrary, it was to stand aloof from everything that is plain and true; to have little concern with what is rational or wise; it was to be, like music, a moving and enchanting art, acting upon the fancy, the affections, the passions, but scarcely connected with the exercise of the intellectual faculties. These writers had, indeed, adopted a tone of language which is hardly consistent with the state of mind in which a man makes use of his understanding. The realities of nature, and the truths which they suggest, would have seemed cold and incongruous, if suffered to mix with the strains of impassioned sentiment and glowing imagery in which they poured themselves forth. Spirit was not to be debased by any union with matter, in their effusions; dwelling, as they did, in a region of poetical sentiment which did not permit them to walk upon the common earth, or to breathe the common air.

Writers, however, whose appeal is made so exclusively to the excitabilities of mankind, will not find it possible to work upon them continuously without a diminishing effect. Poetry of which sense is not the basis, though it may be excellent of its kind, will not long be reputed to be poetry of the highest order. It may move the feelings and charm the fancy; but failing to satisfy the understanding, it will not take permanent possession of the strongholds of fame. Lord Byron, in giving the most admirable example of this species of poetry, undoubtedly gave the strongest impulse to the appetite for it. Yet this impulse is losing its force, and even Lord Byron himself repudiated, in the latter years of his life, the poetical taste which he had espoused and propagated.'-Philip van Artevelde, pp. x.—xiii.

Disapproving thus of the substance of the Byronian poetry, he has but little respect for Lord Byron's estimate of character:

'These imperfections are especially observable in the portraitures of human character (if such it can be called) which are most prominent in Lord Byron's works. There is nothing in them of the mixture and modification,-nothing of the composite fabric which Nature has assigned to Man. They exhibit rather passions personified than persons impassioned. But there is a yet worse defect in them. Lord Byron's conception of a hero is an evidence, not only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to construct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and essentially, therefore, weak of mind. Strip them of the veil of mystery and the trappings of poetry, resolve them into their plain realities, and they are such beings as, in the eyes of a reader of masculine judgment, would certainly excite no sentiment of admiration, even if they did not provoke contempt. When the conduct and feelings attributed to them are reduced into prose, and brought to the test of a rational consideration, they must be perceived to be beings in whom there is no strength, except that of their intensely selfish passions, -in whom all is vanity; their exertions being for vanity under the name of love or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded

as heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what is low in sentiment, or infirm in character ?

'How nobly opposite to Lord Byron's ideal was that conception of an heroical character which took life and immortality from the hand of Shakspeare:

"Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core; aye, in my heart of heart."

Philip van Artevelde, pp. xv. xvi.

We agree, in the main, with Mr. Taylor's estimate of Lord Byron's poetry, though we must dissent from the judgment which he pronounces on Mr. Shelley. Of the latter, and of the poets belonging to what he calls the phantastic school,' Mr. Taylor says:

They would transfer the domicile of poetry to regions where reason, far from having any supremacy or rule, is all but unknown, an alien and an outcast; to seats of anarchy and abstraction, where imagination exercises the shadow of an authority, over a people of phantoms, in a land of dreams.'-P. xx.

We do not think that, in Mr. Shelley, the faculty of thought was eclipsed by that of imagination. We know of no modern poet in whose works passages of subtle, comprehensive, or vigorous thought, are to be found in more compressed language. In judgment Mr. Shelley was deficient, and in moral deliberation still more so. The consequence was, that he had flung himself upon opinions on religious and social subjects, so extravagantly erroneous, that much of his reasoning goes for nothing; the ultimate conclusions at which he arrived, and his whole process of thought, retaining that obliquity which was impressed upon them by the error in his postulates. It is to the defects in his moral nature, and his absence of spiritual faith, that we attribute mainly the defects in his poetic judgment, and the degree in which his extraordinary gifts, both of thought and imagination, were rendered nugatory. Neither are we sure how far we agree with Mr. Taylor's statement, that poetry, of which sense is not the basis, though it may be excellent of its kind, will not long be reputed to be poetry of the highest order.' If by the word sense Mr. Taylor means judgment, we readily grant that the faculty is as necessary in the delineation of an Ariel or Caliban, as of Othello, and that it is not more found in the simplest and most familiar of Mr. Wordsworth's poems, than in that sublimest of his works, his mystical Ode on the Intimations of Immortality; but, if he means that no poetry is of first-rate excellence, except that which rests on common life, we must protest against such a limitation of the ample region of poetry. We apprehend that the examples of Homer, of Eschylus, of Shakspere, of

Milton, and especially of Dante, are sufficient to prove, not only that poetry has its supernatural region as well as its natural; but that the region above the line of perpetual snow, the less earthly department of poetry, is not less ample than that where the goatherd may freely range, and the shepherd's song is heard. It is true, that a human interest must ever mingle with that which is more than human; we should tire of the fairies in the Midsummer Night's Dream,' but for Hermia and Helena; and the poet will ever have to twine together a coarser with a finer thread, if his work be one of any considerable length: but this is hardly sufficient to prove that poetry has no wings, or that she can only leave the solid earth by a leap-not a flight. The chivalrous sensibility of Petrarca; the moral beauty of Spenser; the buoyancy, the freshness, and the grace of our earlier lyric poets, can never be degraded to the class of inferior poetry; yet, we think, it would be hard to prove, that the interests of common life formed the basis of their excellence. The truth is, that poetry is a vast world in itself, comprising many elements, differently apportioned to different masters. In Mr. Taylor's work we find more of earth and fire than of the more fluent or aerial elements, which predominate in the works of other poets. In the case of Mr. Shelley and Mr. Coleridge, the balance, perhaps, inclined in the opposite direction. Every poet will value most that particular department in which his own strength principally lies; but still we must protest against anything like a limitation of that world-wide region which belongs to poetry. If, however, Mr. Taylor merely means to censure that species of poetry which subverts, while it creates nothing; which, instead of introducing us to a new world, throws the old world into confusion; which loses the truth of fact without giving us the truth of idea,—in this sense we sympathize with his dislike to the 'phantastic school,' as thoroughly as with that which he expresses against the poetry which consists only in exaggeration and convulsion.

We shall not, however, inquire very deeply into Mr. Taylor's theory, we have more attractive matter before us. Poetry, indeed, written according to a theory, could not but be deficient in that inspiration, in conjunction with which the poet's labour and care are alone available. We rejoice, therefore, to find that Mr. Taylor's 'critical views have rather resulted from composition than directed it.' This we should have expected. In the whole of Philip van Artevelde' we find a reality, which belongs only to the genial products of the mind, to those works which do not merely take their mould from the plastic mind, but grow out of it as a tree from the soil, and partake of its substance. It is throughout consistent with itself; and though the author