great work is the 'Pleasures of Imagination;' a performance which, published as it was at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations that were not very amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular notice, as an example of great felicity of genius, and uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them. With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author I have nothing to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of examples and illustrations; and it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design. His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression, that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a 'Veil of Light; they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth, comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing. To his versification justice requires that praise should not be denied. In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior to any other writer of blank-verse; his flow is smooth, and his pauses are musical: but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency. The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated clauses, and as nothing is distinguished nothing is remembered. The exemption which blank-verse affords from the necessity of closing the sense with the couplet betrays luxuriant and active minds into such self-indulgence, that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank-verse will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome. His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaic, and elegant as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense however of his words is strained, when "he views the Ganges from Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps. And the pedantry surely intrudes (but when was blank-verse without pedantry?) when he tells how "planets absolve the stated round of Time." It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had made, are very properly retained in the late Collection. He seems to have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional book, the 'Tale of Solon' is too long. One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by Mr Walker," unless it may be said in his defence, that what he has omit ted was not properly in his plan. "His picture of man is grand and beautiful, but unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is scarcely once hinted throughout the poem. This deficiency is amply supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young; who, like a good philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man, from the grandeur of his conceptions, and the meanness and misery of his state; for this reason, a few passages are selected from the 'Night Thoughts,' which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view of the powers, situation, and end of man. His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration will dispatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so diligently to lyric poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the 14 'Exercises for Improvement ir Elocution,' p. 66.—JOHNSON. grander ode. When he lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp, his former powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyrics, that, having written with great vigour and poignancy his Epistle to Curio,' he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to its author. Of his odes nothing favourable can be said: the sentiments commonly want force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth, the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant, or unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too little regard to established use, and therefore perplexing to the ear, which in a short composition has not time to grow familiar with an innovation. To examine such compositions singly, cannot be required: they have doubtless brighter and darker parts: but when they are once found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared; for to what use can the work be criticised that will not be read ?" 16 The amplest and ablest memoir of Akenside is by Mr. Dyce in the Aldine edition of Akenside's Poems, 1887. The following letters (three in number) are now published for the first time : AKENSIDE TO MR. DAVID FORDYCE. To be left at the shop of Mr Gavin Hamilton, Bookseller in Edinburgh. Saturday night, ten o'clock. DEAR SIR,-About ten minutes ago I received your letter. I hope I may congratulate you on the pleasures you are now enjoying at Edinburgh among those whose conversation I envy you, and to whom I envy your conversation. Your reflections on the face of society in those countries you have been travelling through, are, I dare say, extremely just; but I am afraid we have at present no prospect of any valuable change, any general introduction either of plenty or independence among the multitude, much less of that manly and rational spirit of thinking and acting which ought to be the very end of society, since it can never be obtained but by society, and is the best and noblest of those enjoyinents which society produces. I am very sensibly vexed when I hear people asserting that nine-tenths of the human species must, by the necessity of civil government, remain ignorant of this divine possession, brutal and without even a comprehension of the ends of life, which they spend in vain as to their own parts, going out of the world just as they came into it, without nourishment or growth to their minds, without advancing one step in the scale of nature. What can I think of that scene of government which naturally leads men to a position so shocking and absurd? Your view of the Inquiry about the Sciences is perfectly congruous to mine. As to your Initiation and Oath, I like it extremely-only do not you think those terms or appellations, the Throne of Honour and the Chamber of heroic Virtue, will look rather affected? If we conceive the thing as actually existI am ing, and students at an academy calling chambers, &c., by such names, afraid we should think the fashion strained almost to pedantry. The statues of Virtue and Liberty on each side the rostrum are, I think, very proper; also the inscription and the other bustos, excepting only Machiavel. He was, no doubt, a man of genius, and has wrote well as far as his materials allowed him to go; but being conversant ouly with little Italian republics and principalities, where personal considerations are the principal or only springs of action, and consequently where government is often subservient to the worst passions, and earried on by the worst arts-from these causes having no comprehension of an extensive and virtuous plan of a Constitution, he has often wrote crudely, generally so monstrous wickedly, that I think you should not allow him a place among those heroes, but put Sir Thomas More in his stead. I have enclosed the Oath as I would choose it: the alterations are marked with figures:-1. This passage redundant. 2. Systems too recluse and subtle a word. 3. King has naturally a bad or sordid idea. 4. Honourable more sober and moral than glorious. 5. So, &c., too vulgar and trivial a phrase. As for the poem, I am just respiring from a pretty bold undertaking, not only in poetry, let me tell you, but even in philosophy-namely, to develope and describe the general species and laws of ridicule in the characters of men, and give an universal idea of it in every other subject. I have been grievously put to it in the descriptive part. The general idea of the poem is rather bashfully candid-excuse the phrase-and ill admits any appearance of sat.re, though this Inquiry was absolutely necessary to the plan as relating to the materials and ground of comedy. "Lo, thus far, With bold adventure to the Mantuan lyre, I sing of Nature's charms, and touch, well pleas'd, The lighter province of the comic scene." 16 I am filing and re-touching every day, and confess I long to see the first 'book fairly and entirely transcribed; and if I had it once off my hands, I imagine my thoughts would be freed from some constraint and anxiety. For to you I dare pretend to so much philosophy, as that I shall not be much disturbed about its success; and I fancy my mind will be much more at leisure ́after putting an end to this task I have so long imposed on myself; for, though this be but a small part of the design, yet I have no views of completing the remainder otherwise than in the most leisurely manner in the world; for this, if it be worth aught, must answer all the ends I propose by it at present; and you know that if it do answer them, I shall have other matters to mind than versifying. I expect to finish the transcribing part in a fortnight or three weeks. I must have a few notes too; but I blush to have said so much. I have been for these three weeks proposing every post to write to Mr. B., but shall certainly muster up courage to do it next post, for does it not require (if not courage) resolution, at least, and self-control? Remember me to all our friends, and believe me, dear Sir, Yours most affectionately, M. A. P.S.-Write to me soon, and in my next I will tell you what to do about those letters you are so good as to mention. M. A 10 This was afterwards introduced into 'The Pleasures of Imagination,' book ül |