them, brighter and fairer than any that illumined their path in past days. My answer is that many admire him openly, many others secretly in spite of themselves; few love him, for few understand him. But they who do love him love him above all the world. MORITZ BUSCH. RECENT LITERATURE. I. THERE is a kind of criticism which has in modern times come into fashion, of which Professor Goldwin Smith's "Cowper" is a fair example.* As a condensed biography of the poet, his book may be of value to cursory readers, though we have failed to discover in it any fresh fact, or any evidence of original research. The materials which the author has employed were open to everybody, and were already familiar to every student of biography. Besides the somewhat heavy, and, we may say, stupid life by Hayley, we had already the very minute work of Southey; and, considering the entirely recluse existence of Cowper, we have sometimes thought it remarkable that we know so much of him, and are in possession of so many of the particulars of his singular and melancholy experiences. We owe this advantage-if it be an advantage to the passion of evangelical persons for the smallest details of personal religion. Following the traditions which connect Newton, who is one of the saints of a special class of saintly persons, with the author of "The Task," these have pleased to regard the invalid and the hypochondriac as a wonderful example of the necessity of working out salvation with fear and trembling. Besides this, there have been unspeakable scandals circulated about Cowper, which we believe to be falsehoods, impure if simple. Professor Smith darkly alludes to this foolish gossip, but, if he has heard the worst of it, he does not say so. Cowper will be grateful It is doubtful whether the admirers of for this new discussion of his infirmities. there should be some law of limitation. mains, and will remain while the English language is written, and some of it, of a proverbial kind, as long as it is spoken. But those * Cowper. By Goldwin Smith. New York: Harper & Brothers. who love the tenderness of Cowper, his fresh and original relatioto Nature, his kindly humor, his never ill-natured wit; those who have been charmed by his domestic life in its best aspects, and think of him as preeminently the poet of home and of the domestic affections; those who have found plenary evidence of his innate manliness in the strongest of his poems, and of his loving heart in the tenderest-may well ask to be excused from any further studies in morbid anatomy, from any further discussion of his weakness of body and of mind, from the prying curiosity which seeks to fathom the inscrutable, and from a renewal of the tragic tale of his infirmities. Evidently he was an invalid and a hypochondriac, with suicidal tendencies from the start. He had very old blood in his veins, and some of it was not of the best. His grandfather, the Chancellor, had been tried for murder. The poet was a weakly boy, and at Westminster School he had been ill treated. He was set to studying the law, because his grandfather had been a good lawyer, though nobody could have been less fitted for the profession than this timid and shrinking youth. At thirty-two he was a lunatic. There was an injudicious attempt to force him into the office of the Clerk of the Journals in the House of Lords, and he tried to kill himself because a horror of the publicity of the place had disturbed his intellect. Thus far, it will be observed, religion had nothing to do with his melancholy. Nor can it be held justly that it had anything to do with his subsequent despondencies. If he had remained a man of the world-if he had, at intervals, continued "to giggle and make giggle" with the London wits-it is more than probable that he would still have been subject to fits of despondency, though the remorse which he experienced would have been occasioned by secular rather than religious influences. He was a sick man all his life. It is with pleasure that we turn from this melancholy view of Cowper's character, and consider what a noble work he performed in spite of a hundred adverse circumstances. All here is fresh and beautiful. Usually he is cheerful, almost always he is vigorous; his poetic sense invested the homeliest natural and social objects with an exquisite charm, and he absolutely rescued English poetry from studied artificiality. Grateful for the pure enjoyment which his poetry gives us, let us try, at least while we read it, to forget that clouds and shadows were about him as he wrote, and that he smiled at the world through his bitter tears! Let us not suffer impertinent and over-curious discussion to disturb our appreciation of one of the sweetest, most scholarly, and most vigorous of English poets! II. SPECIMENS of the English poets, selections from their works with brief biographies appended, are not a novelty in literature. The work has before been done by Anderson, by Dr. Aikin, by Hazlitt, and by Thomas Campbell, some of whose critical notices are among the best things which ever came from the pen of that singularly unequal writer. We have here another book of " Elegant Extracts," in the matters of taste and critical judgment superior, perhaps, to any of its predecessors.* Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his introduction, goes over the whole ground of what are and what are not English classics, and is particularly ample in his criticism of Chaucer and of Burns, while he has a good deal to say of what poetry is, and of how it should be read, with other writing of that speculative character of which the present generation of readers seems to be specially fond. Notices of the other poets are by other writers of greater or less reputation. All of them appear to be carefully written. And the plan, it is evident, has great advantages. A single editor, bringing to his work preconceived notions, and his preferences, if not his prejudices, might easily fall into unintentional injustice, while experience has amply shown that the general effect of his researches might be monotonous. The exact value of compilations of this character is a little doubtful. To the thorough and earnest student it is necessarily small. Poets are not to be judged by tid-bits, and great works must suffer by this sort of dissection. Perhaps no writer can be fairly estimated by "specimens" of his production. He would have a right to say, if he could speak to the matter, that the interposition of a middleman to tell the reader what he is and what he is not to admire, is impertinent. If poetical literature shall increase in bulk in the future as it has in the past, and is still increasing at present, some guide will become absolutely necessary to those who would not waste precious time. The worst of "specimens" is, that they can give no idea of the artistic proportions of the great works from which they are rudely severed. They are incomplete, however complete in themselves they may appear to be. It might be cruel to ask anybody at this time of day to read the "Paradise Lost" or *The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions by Various Writers, and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold. Edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, A. M. 2 vols. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. "The Faerie Queen" from beginning to end; but it would be equally cruel to ask him to make up his mind critically about these great poems from half a dozen shreds and fragments of them, however judiciously selected. This remark, of course, does not apply to many entire poems of the shorter kind which are included in these volumes. Nor would we be understood to say that they are nothing better than crutches for the critically lame, or lifts for the hopelessly lazy. But, while they may help the young reader in forming his poetical taste, there can be no harm in cautioning him to search for himself in the great mine of English poetry which is so full of wealth, and alas! of rubbish. One should not be always in leading-strings; and no man can study for another, especially in this department of literature. A work like this is full of somewhat melancholy suggestions. The perishable nature of poetical fame is inevitably indicated by these efforts to preserve or revive it. How many who have been of great consideration in their own day, in even the day following, are now known only to scholars, and to those who search in libraries for works which are no longer upon the counters of the booksellers! To be ancient is to be obsolete. The lyrical writers, if once they get a hold upon the hearts of the people, are comparatively safe; and brevity is often a passport to a precarious remembrance. But if every time sings its own songs as it should, it will not care much, in a popular sense, for the songs which are a century or two old. The very greatest poems in all languages can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Yet our bards still go on with their production, and every week witnesses the birth of a new book of verses. If any of these shall be remembered sufficiently at some distant day to be included in a volume of "specimens," we can not wish their writers more judicious and sensible treatment than Mr. Ward's corps of critics has bestowed upon the English poets from Chaucer to Dryden, and promise to extend to the others from Dryden to Keble and Clough. III. THERE are lyrics, at once light, elegant, and ingenious, which charm by their manner and disarm criticism by their jocund harmlessness; Mr. Austin Dobson's poems* are of this description. Mr. Edmund C. Stedman, in the introduction which he has furnished to * Vignettes in Rhyme, and other Verses. By Austin Dobson. New York: Henry Holt & Co. |