cause we strive, there are whose betters amongst men would be hardly found, if they did not live amongst men, but in some wilderness by themselves." Hooker, b. 1.

THE COLUMBIAD, A POЕМ. BY JOEL BARLOW.-1 vol. royal 8vo. 342 pages of verse, 74 of notes, 33 of introduction, and an index. Phillips, London. 1809.

THERE is more injury to be dreaded from overlooking the errors of a bad book, than from depreciating the merits of a good one. The undeserved success of a feeble or affected writer, continues to have a baneful influence on the world of literature, long after the temporary tumult of popular applause has subsided into silence. It may be doubted, therefore, whether the critic, who should treat the spurious offspring of a perverted taste, or a prurient imagination, with a weak and mistaken tenderness, would not be guilty of greater injustice to the interests of literature, than he whose veneration for established excellence should lead him to receive the first attempts of a meritorious writer with a degree of sceptical frigidity, that his friends and admirers might hastily ascribe to the influence of dishonourable passions.

Whatever the phalanx of unsuccessful writers may be willing to assert, of the malignity and injustice of modern criticism, a very slight review of the literary history of the last century must convince the disinterested part of our readers, that the majority of the periodical journals are rather to be condemned for undeserved indulgence than for undue severity. Of the innumerable productions which have received the rapturous plaudits of contemporary critics, how few have descended to posterity; or passed from the last generation to the present, with a character in any degree elevated above that

of unoffending mediocrity? Yet it has still more rarely happened, that a book, which, at its first appearance, was received with coldness or reprehension, has afterwards commanded, by the resistless power of intrinsic excellence, the tribute of a late and unwilling admiration.

When, however, we are compelled by a conscientious regard to the responsibility of our situations, to discountenance the unfounded pretensions of assuming mediocrity, or to dissipate the delusions of vanity, and the dreams of inexperience, it is a painful sacrifice of inclination to integrity. Our feelings would persuade us to be lenient; but our duty commands us to be just. A feeble versifier may be in himself too insignificant to excite our anger, and too inoffensive to deserve our castigation; but when he is elevated by the indiscretion of his admirers, to a temporary rivalry with the acknowledged standards of poetical perfection, his admirers alone are answerable for the prominence of his deformities, and the severity of his punishment.

When the production that now presents itself to our consideration was first announced to the world, arrayed in all the adventitious splendour that mediocrity can receive from the hand of national partiality, the judicious and the candid were inclined to regard it as a phænomenon in the world of litera\ture; as an unexpected and preternatural realization of the wishes of our transatlantic imitators, rather than as a poem of which the appearance could have been reasonably anticipated from a dispassionate estimation of the moral and political causes which were likely to bias the attempts, and influence the exertions of American genius. It was scarcely to be expected, that a people, of whom the local institutions were so little calculated to cherish, or excite the fervour of poetical enthusiasm; whose manners were not only inimical to every feeling of sentimental association, but apparently unsusceptible of future cultivation; inhabiting a country which, while

it displayed every charm of the unanimated landscape, was deficient in all the requisites that give interest or animation to poetical description; should be the favoured brethren of a poet who delineated with equal felicity the magnificent and the beautiful: of whom the pathos was unvitiated by affectation, and the sublimity undegraded by bombast; superior to Pope in the lighter graces of humourous composition, and the softer delineation of the tender passions, and little inferior to Milton in the loftier flights of an excursive imagination; uniting to every quality of original and unfettered genius, the ornaments, and the elegancies of a versification at once unrestrained, energetic, and harmonious!

If such were the sensations of surprise and satisfaction with which an English critic received the first annunciation of the VISION OF COLUMBUS, they were succeeded on its actual appearance, by feelings of a very opposite description. The rapidity of its local circulation, and the extent of its local fame were soon discovered, to afford only a melancholy proof of the barrenness of contemporary genius, and the conscious hopelessness with which the Americans themselves looked forward to the appearance of a national Homer. We have not selected it, therefore, as a subject of review on account of its intrinsic merits; but because it is in some degree elucidative of the progress of criticism and poetry in the United States, and of those restraints, and inconveniences to which every transatlantic writer must be partially subjected. We are likewise afraid, that unless the faults and imperfections of Mr. Barlow become the object of impartial exposition, his singularities may become fashionable, and that his poem, instead of being judged by those rules which criticism has been able to deduce from a philosophical examination of the ancient productions of poetic art, will itself become the model of a new school of transatlantic imitation, of which the unnatural proportions, and the frantic gesture, display as little resemblance

to the acknowledged standards of legitimate excellence, as the wild monstrosity of the mishapen idols of the Western-peninsula, to the grace and symmetry of the Apollo Belvidere.

Though we are by no means inclined to ascribe to Mr. Barlow the possession of very uncommon abilities; yet we willingly allow, that many of his defects are to be imputed to the disadvantages of his situation, rather than to the mediocrity of his talents; and as a candid examination of the causes of his failure may tend to discourage his literary countrymen from an attempt which reason and experience have taught us to regard as hopeless; we shall gladly incur the risk of exciting their present displeasure, in the expectation of being able to deserve their future gratitude.

How much the poetry of Europe has been indebted, for its most pleasing ornaments, and its most interesting subjects, to the fables of classical mythology, and the legends of popish superstition, it would be useless to explain. The delusions of ignorance and idolatry, however they may be regretted by the philanthropist, or despised by the philosopher, have always been a fertile source of materials to the poet. Even the most sacred offspring of human genius, the poems which commemorate the triumph of our Saviour over the idols of ancient adoration, are indebted for their most beautiful allusions, and their happiest illustrations, to those very fables, of which the absurdity and profaneness are the first great foundations of their argument. Nor have the local superstitions of our own country been less adapted to the purposes of poetical amplification. The dramas of Macbeth and of the Midsummer Night's Dream, are in themselves sufficient to demonstrate how much assistance the real poet can derive from the grossest absurdities of vulgar superstition. It is better for every purpose of the poet, that our groves should have been consecrated to Wodla, and our rivers to Sabrina; than that they should still be remembered as the favourite haunts of cannibalism, or designated by

appellations that convey no other impressions to the mind than horror and aversion.

There is no duty more congenial to the feelings, or more worthy the genius of a poet, than to describe the manners, and celebrate the virtues of the early inhabitants of our native country. We love to trace in the untutored wildness of the aboriginal Britons, the leading features of that manly and independent character which is at once the pride and security of their civilized descendants.

The prowess of Boadicea, and the fortitude of Caractacus, will always excite emotions of pathetic enthusiasm in a people, of which bravery and intrepidity are the characteristic virtues. Even in the earliest period of European civilization, and the darkest ages of monastic ignorance, Britain has been the native soil of patriots and heroes. We may still look back with pride and pleasure to the days of Alfred, and of Edward, and may still recall to our remembrance with feelings of patriotic exultation, the plain of Runnymede, and the field of Agincourt. The feudal subjection of our ancestors was favourable to the display of the nobler feelings and the severer virtues. The austere intrepidity, the untutored eloquence, and the unpolished hospitality of the chief, contrasted by the patient attachment, the proud fidelity, and the submissive courage of his retainers, are well adapted for the purposes of poetical delineation, and still supply the materials of a picture which the inheritors of their virtues, and the improvers of their political institutions may contemplate with gratitude and wonder.

But to what period in the history of his country, can the American look back with other feelings than humiliation, and disgust? Those favoured spots which are now the seats of legislation, and the emporia of commerce, were once the refuge of uncivilized Barbarians; cruel in prosperity, and servile in misfortune; unsusceptible of intellectual improve