Charles Lamb - The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

Scott

The last two lines have more music than Denham's can possibly boast.

Ritson

May I have leave to conjecture, that in the very last line of all, the word "the" has erroneously crept in? I am persuaded that the poet wrote "his." To my mind, at least, this reading, in a surprising degree, heightens the idea of the extreme clearness and transparency of the stream, where a man might see more than his face (as it were) in it.

Scott

The second of these little pieces, called Hassan, or the Camel Driver, is of superior character. This poem contradicts history in one principal instance; the merchants of the east travel in numerous caravans, but Hassan is introduced travelling alone in the desart. But this circumstance detracts little from our author's merit; adherence to historical fact is seldom required in poetry.

Ritson

It is always , where the poet unnecessarily transports you to the ends of the world. If he must plague you with exotic scenery, you have a right to exact strict local imagery and costume. Why must I learn Arabic, to read nothing after all but Gay's Fables in another language?

Scott

Abra is introduced in a grove, wreathing a flowery chaplet for her hair. Shakspeare himself could not have devised a more natural and pleasing incident, than that of the monarch's attention being attracted by her song:

Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray,

By love conducted from the chace away.

Among the vocal vales he heard her song——

Ritson

Ch—t?

O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny,

No longer friendly to my life, to fly——

Scott

From the pen of Cowley, such an observation as Secander's, "that his feet were no longer friendly to his life," might have been expected; but Collins rarely committed such violations of simplicity.

Ritson

Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley would have written?

Save where the beetle wheels——

Scott

The beetle was introduced in poetry by Shakspeare * * *. Shakspeare has made the most of his description; indeed, far too much, considering the occasion:

——to black Hecate's summons

The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hum

Hath rung night's yawning peal.——

The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this ill-placed exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this passage, must have had in his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen Goddess, of a beetle, of night, of a peal of bells, and of that action of the muscles, commonly called a gape or yawn.

Ritson

Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own numbscull.

Scott

The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say what no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself has thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well.

Ritson

In other words, all that is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as well as the poet; but that cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to Mr. Scott, as well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham.

Scott

Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it has a Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a happy rusticity .

Ritson

Come, see

Rural felicity.

No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,

But all the bloomy flush of life is fled—

All but yon widow'd solitary thing,

That feebly bends beside the plashy spring;

She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread,

To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,

Scott

Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness. After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life," the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush of life is all fled but one old woman."

Ritson

Yet Milton could write:

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth,

Or the bell-man's drowsy charm—

and I dare say he was right. O never let a quaker, or a woman, try their hand at being witty, any more than a Tom Brown affect to speak by the spirit!

Scott

——Aaron Hill, who, although, in general, a bombastic writer, produced some pieces of merit, particularly the Caveat, an allegorical satire on Pope.

Ritson

Say rather his verses on John Dennis, beginning "Adieu, unsocial excellence!" which are implicitly a finer satire on Pope than twenty Caveats. All that Pope could or did say against Dennis, is there condensed; and what he should have said, and did not, for him, is there too. [44]

[44]

Table of Contents

Adieu, unsocial excellence! at last

Thy foes are vanquish'd, and thy fears are past:

Want, the grim recompense of truth like thine,

Shall now no longer dim thy destined shrine.

The impatient envy, the disdainful air,

The front malignant, and the captious stare,

The furious petulance, the jealous start,

The mist of frailties that obscured thy heart—

Veil'd in thy grave shall unremember'd lie;

For these were parts of Dennis born to die.

But there's a nobler deity behind;

His reason dies not, and has friends to find:

Address to the Angler to spare the young fish

If yet too young, and easily deceived,

A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod,

Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space

He has enjoy'd the vital light of heaven,

Soft disengage, and back into the stream

The speckled infant throw.——

Scott

The praise bestowed on a preceding passage, cannot be justly given to this. There is in it an attempt at dignity above the occasion. Pathos seems to have been intended, but affectation only is produced.

Ritson

It is not affectation, but it is the mock heroic of pathos, introduced purposely and wisely to attract the reader to a proposal, which from the unimportance of the subject—a poor little fish—might else have escaped his attention—as children learn, or may learn, humanity to animals from the mock romantic "Perambulations of a Mouse."

——Infant hands

Trail the long rake; or, with the fragrant load

O'er-charged, amid the kind oppression roll.

Scott

"Kind oppression" is a phrase of that sort, which one scarcely knows whether to blame or praise: it consists of two words, directly opposite in their signification; and yet, perhaps, no phrase whatever could have better conveyed the idea of an easy uninjurious weight—

Ritson

—and yet he does not know whether to blame or praise it!

Though here revenge and pride withheld his praise,

No wrongs shall reach him through his future days;

The rising ages shall redeem his name,

And nations read him into lasting fame.

In his defects untaught, his labour'd page

Shall the slow gratitude of Time engage.

Perhaps some story of his pitied woe,

Mix'd in faint shades, may with his memory go,

To touch fraternity with generous shame,

And backward cast an unavailing blame

On times too cold to taste his strength of art,

Yet warm contemners of too weak a heart.

Rest in thy dust, contented with thy lot,

Thy good remember'd, and thy bad forgot.