fine elements of poetry, is singularly deficient in taste, his familiarity continually bordering on the vulgar, and his seriousness on the morbid and the shocking. His versification, where the force of his thoughts does not compel you to forget it, is a strange kind of bustle between the lameness of Cowper and the slip-shod vigour of Churchill, though I am afraid it has more of the former than the latter. When he would strike out a line partiticularly grand or melodious, he has evidently no other notion of one than what Pope or Darwin has given him. Yet even in his versification, he has contrived, by the colloquial turn of his language and his primitive mention of persons by their christian as well as surname, to have an air of his own; and indeed there is not a greater mannerist in the whole circle of poetry, either in a good or bad sense. His main talent, both in character and description, lies in strong and homely pieces of detail, which he brings before you as clearly and to the life as in a camera obscura, and in which he has been improperly compared to the Dutch painters, for in addition to their finish and identification, he fills the very commonest of his scenes with sentiment and an interest.

7

$ One ten thousandth part of the words and the time, That you've wasted on praises instead of your rhyme,

Might have gain'd you a title to this kind of freedom,

But volumes of endings, lugg'd in as you need 'em,

Of hearts and imparts,-where's the soul that can read 'em?

There is something not inelegant or unfanciful in the conduct of Mr. Hayley's Triumphs of Temper, and the moral is of that useful and desirable description, which from its domestic familiarity is too apt to be overlooked, or to be thought incapable of embellishment :-but in this "as well as in all his other writings, there is so much talking by rote, so many gratuitous metaphors, so many epithets to fill up and rhymes to fit in, and such a mawkish languor of vérsification, with every now and then a ridiculous hurrying for a line or so, that nothing can be more spalling or tiresome. The worst part of Mr. Hayley is that smooth-tongued and overwrought complimentary style, in addressing and speaking of others, which, whether in con

versation or writing, has always the ill-fortune, to say the least of it, of being suspected as to sincerity. His best part, as has been justly observed, is his Annotation. The notes to his poems are amusing and full of a graceful scholarship; and two things must be remembered to his honour,-first, that although he had not genius enough to revive the taste in his poetry, he has been the quickest of our late writers to point out the great superiority of the Italian school over the French; and second, that he has been among the first, and the most ardent of them all, in hailing the dawn of our native painting. Indeed, with the singular exception of Milton, who had visited Italy, and who was such a painter himself, it is to be remembered to the honour of all our poets, great and small, that they have shown a just anxiety for the appearance of the sister art,

And felt a brother's longing to embrace
At the least glimpse of her resplendent face.

It would appear, from some specimens in his notes, that Mr. Hayley would have cut a more advantageous figure as a translator than as an original poet. I do not say he would have been equal to great works; for a translator, to

keep any thing like a pace with his original, should have at least a portion of his original spirit ; but as Mr. Hayley is not destitute of the poet, the thoughts of another might have invigorated him; and he would at any rate have been superior to those mere rhymers,-such men as Hoole, for instance, who, without the smallest pretensions to poetry in their own persons, think themselves qualified to translate epics. In the notes to his Essays on Epic Poetry, there is a pleasing analysis, with occasional versions of twenty or thirty lines, of the Araucana of Alonzo d'Ercilla, and in the same place is a translation of the three first Cantos of Dante, which, if far beneath the majestic simplicity of the original, is at least, for spirit as well as closeness, infinitely superior to such mouthing nonentities as the version of Mr. Boyd. But Dante, to say nothing of his demands upon a variety of powers, in consequence of those varieties of his own, in which after shaking us with his terrors, or shocking us with his resentments and his diabolisms, he will enchant us with his grace, melt us with his tenderness, or refresh us with some exquisite picture of nature, is like all the other poets of the first class, scarcely translatable but

by a kindred genius. The natural language they speak sets at nought the cant habit of books. You might as well endeavour, by the help of a fan, to gather round you the morning freshness of nature, as think of apprehending one of the great spirits of poetry, by means of these toyers in versification. Even the real poets among us have not done justice to those whom they translated, with the exception of some smaller pieces of lyric: Dryden wants the gracefulness and the selectness of Virgil, Chapman all the music of Homer, and Pope all the nature :—what then are we to expect from such a writer as Francis, or from that prince of involuntary crambo, Hoole? No wonder that men of good sense and taste, who happen not to be scholars, have found Horace a dull fellow and Ariosto a dotard.

The best translation, upon the whole, that has been produced in our language, both for closeness to the sense and sympathy with the spirit of its original, appears to me to be Fairfax's Tasso. I do not say that it is a perfect one, or that it is not sometimes straitened for want of room, and sometimes clouded with the obscurities of its age; but Fairfax seems to go along with his author, and to be more of a piece with him, than any translator per