Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.612
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 1 p.612
and "that," he says, "is so cold, that I expect every morning to see the snow lie on the summit of it." The Specimens of the English Poets, intended as supplementary to Mr. Ellis's book, deserved its fate, for it was very negligently and hastily prepared; the list of poets was very defective, and the critical notices of them short* and superficial. Mr. Campbell's Specimens are executed in a different manner, with judgment and taste; but notices of the minor poets, whose writings are necessary to complete the history of our poetry, are still wanting. Southey became acquainted with Walter Scott and Mr. Savage Landor, the latter of whom in his love for the muses, offered to print Kehama at his own expense.† The history of a man of letters is for the most part a history of his works, and, if this is generally true, it is emphatically so of the one before us. In 1809 we find him correcting the sheets of his History of Brazil, commencing his poem Pelayo (Roderick), getting twenty guineas a sheet for his Life of Nelson, and having a profitable engagement in the historical department of the Edinburgh Annual Register, and, as this was not enough, he brooded over a poem upon Philip's war with the New Englanders, which was the decisive struggle between the red and white races in America. One of his chief characters - his hero - was to be a Quaker, and the rest Puritans, and he says he was writing that and Pelayo together - being probably the only poet who would venture on two epic poems at the same time - a kind of poetical polygamy, as dangerous and difficult to manage as the social one. And now, having accompanied our indefatigable scribe thus far in our second journey, we must say farewell, and continue our notes on literary subjects mentioned by him, for which, if an apology were necessary, we should find it in the following passage, p.332. "One thing which I will do, whenever I can afford leisure for the task, will be to write and leave behind me my own memoirs: they will contain so much of the literary history of the times as to have a permanent value on that account." Let us then endeavour to perform the humble and dutiful task of shewing our gratitude to the author by making his literary history as clear and useful as we can. Vol.ii. p.210. "Do you see - and if you have seen the Morning Post you will have seen - that a poem upon Amadis is advertised. This is curious enough. It seems by the advertisement that it only takes in the first book."The editor should have mentioned that the poem alluded to was "Amadis de Gaul, a poem in three books, formerly translated from the first part of the French version by Nicolas de Heberay, Sieur des Essars, with Notes by William Stewart Rose, esq. 1803." It is a very elegant and classical publication, dedicated to Dr. Goodall; with two Epistles in Latin verse by Hon. and Rev. William Herbert, - Elisena Perioni - Guendolena Locrino. It was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review. P.211. "I have just gone through the Scottish Ballads. Walter Scott is himself a man of great talent and genius; but wherever he patches an old poem it is always with new bricks. Of the modern ballads, his own fragment is the only good one, and that is very good."On what appeared for the first time in Scott's "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," see Motherwell's "Ancient Minstrelsy," p.lxxix. In a letter from Dr. Anderson to Bishop Pervy on Scott's ballads and Minstrelsy in June 1800, Anderson calls Scott "an ingenious friend;" he says the first edition of this work was printed at Kelso, in one volume. See Prior's Life of Goldsmith, ii. p.78. |
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* Ex. gratia - "Thomas Sprat, the Bishop of
Rochester, aptly named sprat, as being without
exception one of the least among the poets." i. 168.
† We had no competent idea before of the voracious nature of the biped called bookseller and publisher, though we have suffered a little from some bites we have received. Mr. Southey says, "The bookseller's share is too much like the lion in the fable, 20 or 33 per cent. They first deduct as booksellers, and then half the residue as publishers." No wonder that the single sermons we are in the habit of composing and printing produce us so little that we find it difficult to live on the produce. "Librarius, ait Plutarchus, est animal quod dentibus incedit." |
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