two, for the reality of thought is ever connected with sympathy for the realities of life. Brilliant descriptions of nature may be thrown off by a tour de force, but habitual observation is necessary in order that descriptive poetry should be in keeping. In like manner, without a consistent method of thought, the subtlest reflections will fail to impart that moral ethos without which no poem can be of first-rate excellence. It is possible, without plagiarism, to produce poetry which is evidently rather distilled from other poetry than drawn from the living fountains either of mind or of nature. Mr. Taylor's poetry is plainly taken from life, not from books, least of all from books of poetry and to this circumstance we attribute the soundness of its tone, and that freshness of complexion for which, in spite of its gravity, it is remarkable.

6

The style of Philip van Artevelde' is one of its chief charms. It advances to perfection from the beginning of the work to the end; but throughout it is characterized by significance and vigour, as well as by the memorable force of single lines. It is marked by that deliberate self-collectedness which is necessary to make style correct, without seeming to have been retouched, and thus to give it the masterly handling of drawings executed in few, but clean and forcible, strokes. Poetry is the especial guardian of language; and every poem of which the verbal structure is radically corrupt must crumble into oblivion, no matter what its attractions. This has hardly been sufficiently attended to of late. Some of our recent poets have cared little how they sinned against grammar; whilst others, eluding the difficulty rather than overcoming it, have tacked clause to clause by no other bond than the conjunction disjunctive of a printer's dash, paying no attention to the periodic framework of sentences, and apparently hoping only to avoid grammatical errors, by remaining professed outlaws from the region of grammar. An eminent poet has said, 'It is a great secret to know when to be plain, and when poetical or figurative.' Mr. Taylor seems to us to have learned this secret: his style rises or sinks with the occasion: there is no straining after effect in it, no ambition to push any one merit, expressiveness or simplicity, fulness or compression, to an extreme: and this poetic moderation we regard as among the chief poetic gifts. He is very sparing in the use of personification and apostrophes, and not only avoids hyperbole altogether, but also, by a rigid temperance of language, and frequent understatement, impresses us to a degree that is sought for in vain through exaggeration. He does not deal in those conventional, broken, and covert tropes, which make up that florid style which is equally remote from just thought and sound imagination, and so often offends us in those epicene productions which are

neither poetry nor prose. The metaphors which he uses are no mere euphonistic form of expression; they always contribute to significance or brevity, strength or genuine beauty, and they are introduced with a singular felicity, as well as with a wise reserve. His diction, which is plain without being rustic, has a slight archaic colouring, which secures it from trivial associations: it is unaffected and classical, free from compound words, and distinguished by its purity as well as its clearness, which last quality proceeds not a little from its absence of redundancy, for those who use few words must use right words, or be content to remain unintelligible. It is polished and felicitous, closely woven and finely riveted, firm as a suit of chain-armour, and, like it, moulding itself to the changes of the meaning which it invests.

There is one more point of view in which we must consider this poem. Our estimate of a work is not determined only by the pleasure we have felt while reading it, but also by the impression which it leaves behind. After we have risen from the sea-shore, we seem to carry its sound away with us: there is an analogous charm about a great poem; it follows us with a spell, and exercises a remoter as well as an immediate influence over us. A mere work of poetic art has no such power; but a truly noble poem is haunted by a spirit which belongs to it, as the genius of old to the heroic or kingly house, and makes itself felt by all who pass its threshold. Let a work be ever so perfect as to material, form, or style, we shall ever ask at the end, what is its spirit? The spirit of lyrical poetry is chiefly elevating, that of dramatic, searching and instructive. That of Philip van Artevelde is eminently philosophic, not only from the moral truth with which the character of the hero, who may be regarded as a type of the natural man, is illustrated, and the skill with which his errors and calamities are connected, but also from the general drift of the story. Nowhere has the revolutionary cause been more eloquently stated than in several passages of this work, and certainly the author has shown no disposition to throw discredit upon it by magnifying the virtue of loyalty, or painting hereditary greatness in too partial colours; yet, as the poem proceeds, and the story is evolved, the political problem works itself out; nor is it without meaning for discerning eyes. Violence runs its giddy circle only to return to its starting post; craft trips itself up in its own cloak, and falls into the pit it had prepared for another; the noblest abilities are brought in vain to the support of a bad cause; triumphant democracy swims down the tide of temporary prosperity with a suicidal success: and from those scenes of White Hood merriment, half ghastly, half comic, at the beginning, to that final scene in which the revolutionary cause is engulfed in the swamps of the Lis, we are

significantly reminded of the passage from Hobbes, which is prefixed as a motto to this work: No arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' This moral is the more impressive from being unobtrusive. It is not by set speeches against private irregularities or public crimes that the poets can best assert that moral law, of which, so long as the eternal harmony between the beautiful and the good subsists, they must ever remain the chief secular assertors; but, by making man acquainted with his own nature, by pointing out, as with a magic wand, the hidden fountain-heads of our actions, and revealing to us through an atmosphere of supernatural clearness their remotest consequences; by abolishing, for a moment, the chains of conventional littleness; by so working on pity and sympathy, as to cleanse our mortal affections in the flames of their own ardours, and by maintaining a fairer ideal, and raising a higher standard than finds acceptance in actual life. In the last particular only do we note any deficiency in the moral spirit of the work before us.

It has been frequently remarked how few great poems have been produced in an age so rich in poetry as our own. In all ages great poems have been the rarest of all things; but it is observable how large a number of our recent poets have written as if they only expected their works to live in books of extracts, and cared not how slender was the cord on which they strung their grave thoughts or brilliant fancies. No one will deny that Childe Harold abounds in splendid passages, but to what class of poetry can it be referred as a whole; what is its subjectmatter or its principle of unity? Is it a didactic poem, or a descriptive; a biography, or a satire; or a poetical guide-book for the European traveller in this age of locomotion? Mr. Shelley's longest poem, The Revolt of Islam,' is as decidedly lyrical in its spirit as it is narrative in its structure; it is, indeed, more like the legendary digression' of some gigantic Pindaric Ode than a tale of historic interest. Mr. Southey's Thalaba' and 'Kehama,' and his majestic Roderick,' are exceptions to this general rule; but we really know not where to find in the range of modern poetry, another work, which at once equals Philip van Artevelde in compass of interest, and is as strongly stamped with a genial individuality and moral unity.

461

ART. VI.-Marco Visconti. From the Italian of TOMASO GROSSI. 2 Vols. London: Burns. 1845.

THEY still write novels in Italy. After a long interval of stiffness and pedantry, and an affectation of classical taste more barren and hollow even than that of France and England-after the reign of Metastasio and Alfieri-story-telling is begun again— the old Italian fashion of story-telling, rich, hearty, full of humour and character. Italy was the land of novels. Every one knows where the English dramatists went for their materials; not merely for their plots, but for their stuff. The men and women of their plays are Italians all but in language. And now that the ice of coteries and coxcombry of academies has been disturbed by revolutions, the old genius is stirring the genius of Boccaccio, and the numberless and nameless writers of tales, merry and doleful, who amused our ancestors-the genuine Italian vein, and in the hands of men who dare not profane the gift, as of old it was profaned.

The Italian novel is a thing of its own kind. It does not like to confine itself to one class of society; it likes to have an assemblage of all sorts, big people and little; it is not easy without its princes, its priests, and its contadini; it wants them all; it takes society vertically, from top to bottom,-not by cross slices, which give only individual differences. The exalted and grand in station and bearing are essential elements; but they must also have along with them the freedom and genuineness of the lower ranks, and the two must work together. They must be on easy terms with one another, and neither must appropriate the interest of the story. The one gives it state, and magnificence, and pomp, indispensable matters to an Italian mind; but just as much attention is paid to the whims, and ways, and sayings of the inferior actors; their pictures are as prominent, as carefully and richly painted. The novelists learned their profession in old republican Italy; its history and circumstances formed their school. In other countries, greatness is confined to one spot; all that is high and magnificent is collected round one centre; a few favoured places see the pomp of a court; but to the rest of the people, it is known only by report. The country people gaze at a distance at an occasional nobleman,-a stray star from the grand court constellation. To the town population, a mayor, or a judge, or a sheriff, are the sole specimens of dignity and power. But republican Italy blazed with courts: every small city

was filled with princes and nobles of its own; not mere attendants on a supreme distant invisible court, but members of ruling houses and aristocracies, who were absolute where they lived. Everywhere the people had their lords and potentates-the fastigia of human greatness within their view; for the Emperor and the Pope were of a greatness something more than human. And these princes were grand people in their way; a few square miles of earth was all that they had to play their part in, but they made those few square miles illustrious. They were real princes,real nobles,-not a whit inferior in temper and mould, in energy, keenness, loftiness of mind, daring, to their less crowded cotemporaries in the north. They were as high-spirited and courageous, as ambitious, as magnificent to look at,-in their narrow bounds, and under their burning sky, wrought up to a strange pitch of intensity,-to subtlety of the keenest edge. Before the eyes of the common people, the most strange histories went on-revolutions of all kinds, of the most strange complication; royal tragedies, comedies, in a never-ceasing whirl, were to be seen and commented upon in every Italian town, by a population as intelligent, as full of passion and imagination, as the greater actors themselves.

'When for the first time we fix our eyes on this history, we are seized with a sort of giddiness, like that which is felt on looking down from a great height on a crowd which is moving about in the plain below. Every one is in a state of rapid and never-ceasing motion; feelings, unknown to us, are influencing them; they are jostled together, crossing, passing, fighting with one another, and the eye cannot follow or distinguish them. But the local history, the history in detail of each Italian town, gives names to each of these figures; it discloses the secret of each character, and the motive which influences it; it unfolds generous feelings, deep thoughts, lofty plans in each of those groups which at first sight seemed so small. The more we study them, the more we feel convinced that political greatness is not relative, and that in all contests for freedom and power, whether in a village or in the empire of the world, the same interests are involved-interests the highest and noblest which the human heart can know there are the same talents at work, the study of men is equally complete. This universal agitation, these strong passions, this importance of individual men, have made the history of Italy an inexhaustible source of instruction. There is not a town which has not three or four historians, often many more; and the interest of each of these historians is the greater in proportion as he is more voluminous, and has written in greater detail. The collection alone of the middle-age Italian writers, anterior to the sixteenth century, contains the chronicles of sixty-eight towns or regions; several supplements have been added to this collection, but the still more voluminous writers of the three last centuries have not been included. The historical bibliography of the States of the Pope,