that Hong merchants and West India captains seldom read poetry.

A book may be perfectly original, and yet not contain a thought, simile, pun, or allusion that is new. Who cannot distinguish a man, or a book, that is talking by rote?

There is in all such talkers, and all such books, an air of studied facility that instantly betrays them. What is called a fluent man, who talks " like a prent book," in whose discourse are no verbless nominative cases, and nominative-caseless verbs, is, depend upon it, always a shallow man. Of course, I speak of those to whom the faculty of easy speaking is natural. The deepest intellects may acquire it by practice. There is ever an analogy between the state of literature and the state of society. There was an age, perhaps, when the wide earth, and he that first entered on the fair plain, or took upon himself to clear the woodland of its waste fertility, might call the spot he occupied his own. That age is past; yet every man, who has the means, may make a plot of earth his own. So it is in the world of imagination.

No doubt there has been a time when the moon and the blue sky, and the rose and the lily, and the dove and the nightingale, were new in verse: there must have been a poet who first introduced them. Yet the moon shines still, the sky has not ceased to be blue; the rose and the lily are fair and sweet as ever; the dove is just as gentle and loving as when she brought the olive-leaf to the sole human family; and the nightingale sings as sweetly to us as to that

sweet-witted Persian who first called the rose her

paramour. And do we, in these later days, merely inherit our love for these things, so fair and lovely? Thanks to the great men of old; we love them for their sakes, but we love them for their own too. Our affection is hereditary, but it is original also. We know not whether Pythagoras was the first or only man that ever conceived the famous forty-seventh proposition; yet who would deny to his rapturous Eureka the joy and triumph of originality?

There is one thing which I trust has been repeated from generation to generation, which is, nevertheless, a complete original, without which all originality is worse than good for nothing-an overflowing fountain of noble thoughts and kind emotions, which are its own, and none can take from it—a thing which must ever be original, for no art can copy it, and God alone can bestow it—a good heart.

LOVE-POETRY.

But a notion long

LOVE is certainly a poetical subject. All poets who deserve the name are, or have been, lovers; and a considerable portion of lovers wish to be poets. How comes it, then, that of the innumerable amatory effusions which comprise more than half the minor literature of the world, so few are even tolerable. If the lover would but express his real feelings in plain language, with such figures, and such only, as the passion spontaneously suggested, surely we should have sense at least, if not poetry. prevailed that poetry must be something different from sense, and that love must be irrational because it is sometimes indiscreet. Love is a divinity; therefore, it must talk as unintelligibly as the Pythian Prophetess. He is a child; therefore, it is proper he should whine and babble: or, to speak less like a Pagan, it is too genteel an emotion to call anything by its proper name. Love-poets seem to have borrowed from the amorous Italians a fashion of paying their addresses in masquerade. The fair lady is changed into a nymph, a siren, a goddess, a shepherdess, or a queen. She lives upon air, like the chameleon, or on dew, like the grasshopper. Like the

bird of paradise, she disdains to touch the earth. She is not to be courted, but worshipped. She is not composed of flesh and blood, but of roses and lilies and snow. In short, she is altogether overwhelmed and mystified with the multitude of her own perfections. The adorer is Damon or Strephon; a shepherd, or a pilgrim, or a knight-errant; and his passion is a dart, a flame, a wound, a Cupid, a religion,anything but itself.

We are afraid that the weary iteration of these extravagant common-place conundrums arises from a source very different from passionate admiration. Authors are but too apt to have a mean opinion of the female intellect. Ladies' men of the school of Will Honeycomb rarely appreciate women as they should do, and recluse students, conscious of their own deficiency in the graces which are supposed indispensable to gain the favour of the fair, endeavour to despise the sex which overawes them. Another source of this silly sameness of love-verses is the notion that a lover must compose as well as dress in the height of the fashion. Hence the endless repetition of stock phrases and similes-the impertinent witticism-the wilful exclusion of plain sense and plain English-the scented, powdered, fringed, and furbelowed coxcombry of quality love-poets. The drawing-room style is, however, well nigh obsolete. We hear little of the Damons and Strephons, with their Phillis and Amaryllis, for all the world like the porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses that used to adorn our mantel-pieces before geology

and mineralogy became fashionable for ladies. Diana and Minerva, and Hebe and Aurora, and the rest of those folks, are left to slumber peacefully in Tooke's Pantheon, though a certain class of poets have bestowed the names of those divinities on a whimsical set of beings of their own invention.

We should not, however, censure the introduction of the Grecian deities in Greek and Roman poetry. Not only were they objects of popular belief, but distinct and glorious forms, familiar as household things to every eye and memory. Sculpture and painting had given them a real being; their names immediately suggested a fair or sublime image,-a delightful recollection of the wonders of art sanctified by something of a religious feeling that inspired them with immortal life, and invested them with imaginary beauty. Even the classic allusions of our own early writers may be defended, but on different ground. Mythologic names were not then unavoidably associated with school-boys' tasks and court or cockney poetry. They were flowers fresh from the gardens of Italy and Greece, perfumed with recollection of the olden time. They did not, indeed, suggest distinct images to ordinary readers; but, what perhaps was better, they gave a momentum to the imagination in a certain direction; they excited an indefinite expansion,-a yearning after the ideal,-a longing for beauty beyond what is seen by the eye or circumscribed by form and colour, a passionate uncertainty.