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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.259
this portion of our notice by extracting a short passage in which Southey has given a few touches of his own portrait, and that of another poet of the age:
"I am no Methodist, no sectarian, no bigot, no formalist. My natural spirits are buoyant, beyond those of any other person, - man, woman, or child, - whom I ever saw or heard of.They have had enough to try them and to sink them, and it is by religion alone that I shall be enabled to pass the remainder of my days in cheerfulness and hope. Without hope there can be no happiness, and without religion no hope but such as deceives us. Your heart seems to want an object, and this would satisfy it, and if it has been needed this and only this can be the cure. ... ... Scott is very ill: he suffers dreadfully, but bears his sufferings with admirable equanimity, and looks on to the probable termination of them with calmness and well-founded hope. God grant that he may recover! He is a noble and generous-hearted creature, whose like we shall not look upon again."
Notes. P.59. "Some unkown author has sent a me a poem called 'The Missionary,' not well arranged, but written with great feeling and beauty."
Was not this unknown author the Rev. Mr. Lisle Bowles?
P.192. "Your comments upon the 'Castle of Indolence' express the feeling of every true poet. The second part must always be felt as injuring the first. I agree with you also as respecting the Minstrel. Beautiful and delightful as it is, it still wants that imaginative charm which Thomson has caught from Spenser, but which no poet has ever so entirely possessed as Spenser himself."
As regards the Castle of Indolence, Professor Dugald Stuart says, quoting a letter of Gray's, "Thomson has lately published a poem called The Castle of Indolence, in which there are some good stanzas.' Who could have expected this sentence from the pen of Gray? In an ordinary critic, possessed of one-hundredth part of Gray's sensibility and taste, such total indifference to the beauties of this exquisite performance would be utterly impossible." See Philosophical Essays, p.513. 8vo. But had Gray written, several or many good stanzas, instead of some, we should be inclined to agree with his judgment against his critic. It is not generally known that Mr. Mathias translated this poem into Italian, under the following title;- "Thomson (James) Il Castello dell Ozio, poema in due canti, recento in verso Italiano detto ottava rima da Tommaso Jacopo Mathias. Napoli. 1826." (Privately printed.) There is a very interesting letter on Thomson from Dr. Murdoch in Dr. Wool's Memoir of Joseph Warton, p.252. The style of the "Seasons" was ridiculed in Martinus Scriblerus. Mr. Hazlitt says, "Berni's description of himself and his friend in the last canto of the Orlando Innamorato, seems to have been the origin of the general idea of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and the personal introdcution of himself into poetry, as exemplified in that delightful little work." See Round Table, i. p.184. On Gray's opinion of Beattie's Minstrel, see Forbes's Life of Beattie, vo.i. p.197. Let. xlv. 4to. Beattie is said to have taken his first idea of the poem from Dr, Percy's Ancient Ballads. See a letter from Mr. Forbes to Dr. Percy, in Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol.viii. p.376.
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