Monthly Review of Literature, 



80 



is a little treasure for families. A syllabus 

 of the events of each reign is prefixed to each 

 tale. 



The Tale of a Modern Genius, 3 vols. 

 12mo.,- 1827 This we of course expected to 

 be of the lachrymose kind, and we were not 

 mistaken ; but we anticipated a work of fancy, 

 and there we were disappointed, for it proves 

 to be a tale of reality, and a miserable one 

 indeed it is miserable, we mean, as to the 

 facts, but we may add also as to its execution. 

 Whatever of genius lives in the subject of the 

 tale, none is shewn in the telling. There is 

 nothing splendid to dazzle, or shadowy to 

 illude nothing of the vague or general no 

 abstractions of an absorbing cast no aspi- 

 rations that lift us from the earth and its 

 vulgar miseries no glorious visions of mental 

 struggles, or victories, that swell our hearts 

 to rapture, or defeats that command our sym- 

 pathies ; but a revolting representation of 

 stark and unmodified miseries a succession 

 of ill-directed eiforts, with their cold and com- 

 fortless failures an unfolding of the shifts 

 and sufferings of poverty, the want and the 

 search of friends, money, means, and all 

 told in a tone of despairing querulousness, that 

 flings the fault upon any thing and every 

 thing, but the blunders of the agent. 



In short, the work is no romance, but a 

 block of heavy autobiography. The writer 

 is known to publishers, as the author of two 

 epic poems, as he phrases them, and, according 

 to his own story, to readers and non-readers, 

 of all sorts and sizes in the West, as an 

 eternal and itinerant subscription-hunter. Of 

 these blessed epics we ourselves, however, 

 know nothing not even their subject, except, 

 as we gather from the work before us, that 

 one is on some topic of religion, which, in 

 the opinion of the author's correspondents, 

 and beyond all dispute in his own, leaves 

 " Paradise Lost " far behind and Klopstock 

 and Cumberland must not be named on the 

 same day ; but, from other specimens, which 

 his fecundity of verse has scattered over the 

 "tale," we may safely conclude his Epics 

 will never be more known, or rather, less 

 unknown than they are. He has plainly no 

 power of self-criticism ; he can neither select, 

 nor lop, nor compress if any thing can be 

 thrown into a scannable form, that is poetry, 

 and we dare say he never wrote a line which, 

 living or dying, he would wish to blot. 



In bora ssepe ducentos, 

 UT MAGNUM, versus dictabat stans pcde in uno. 



The specimens to which we allude are 

 full of the most prosaic forms of speech, of 

 the commonest thoughts, of threadbare allu- 

 sions, of puerile illustrations and of perhaps 

 unconscious adoptions ecce ! 



MOTHER'S DEATH. 



No more when I, a wanderer through the world, 

 Return heart-broken, or with hope elate, 

 To my loved cottage-home, wilt thoti outstretch 

 Thin* arms to welcome me, or kindly soothe 



[JAN. 



My grief-worn spirit, or partake my joy. 

 No, I oiuBt never, never hear again 



Thy voice, my mother ! 

 O, ever hallowed be thy humble grave I 

 May no rude foot profane it violets, spring 

 Ground the sacred spot, and in those groves 

 That spread their shade about yon place of tombs, 

 \cforest minstrels, a wild requiem chant 

 For the beloved dead! 

 Yes, though no solemn swell of organ dirge 

 For thee through dim cathedral aisles hath pealed. 

 Yet will the thrush, the ousel, and the dove 

 Mingle their jich and soothing minstrelsy 

 In yonder laurel-bowers, that bloom above 

 Thy new-made grave. And when the mournful 



train 



Are all departed, and to solitude, 

 Silence, and dark decay have left thee quite, 

 They, like a band of spirits invisible, 

 Will sweet twilight requiem chant around 

 Thy last dim dwelling place; and plaintive winds 

 Shall join with them their soft inconstant song, 

 As 'mid the aspen leaves and elm-tree boughs, 

 Like virgin fingers o'er the harp-strings laid, 

 They wander for sweet music. 

 Now this is not the poetry of the soul or 

 the genuine promptings of feeling and eleva- 

 tion, or warmth of affection, but the mere 

 froth and scum that float upon the surface of 

 a mind, full of indiscriminate reading, and 

 utterly ignorant of itself too mawkish and 

 maudlin to be read, except by such as find 

 eloquence in sounding phrases, and music in 

 tinkling cymbals. 



The writer, it seems, is wholly self-edu- 

 cated, and he piques himself upon the accom- 

 plishment. Vigour, conflicting and mas- 

 tering difficulties, must always stir our admi- 

 ration ; but the sight of imbecility and its 

 pitiful struggles can awaken nothing but con- 

 tempt ; and scarcely ever do we meet with 

 self-educated people, who are not, we were 

 going to say, self-evident coxcombs, but as- 

 suredly very disagreeable, very conceited, and 

 incorrigibly dogged and supercilious. They 

 take it into their heads that the " educated " 

 are the slaves of rules, and themselves, to 

 whom these rules are wholly unknown, the 

 only free and independent, though all they do 

 shews how much they want the strait waistcoat 

 of discipline. 



This " Modern Genius " for it is himself 

 he thus modestly designates tells his woeful 

 tale in a series of letters to a friend, who takes 

 nopart inthe correspondence and is of course 

 a man of straw. The prime object, in his 

 career, was a patron, and his first Maecenas 

 the captain of a signal station, in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the poet's birth, who reads his 

 verses and criticises them, and introduces him 

 to a curate or two, and undertakes to bring out 

 his first tragedy on the London boards. By- 

 and-by the captain removes and the poet 

 still importuning, the captain invites him to 

 London, where he recommends him to the 

 service of a grocer, in Seven Dials, and on 

 expostulating with his patron for thus wishing 

 to degrade him, the youth is told, that many 

 of his own countrymen the captain was a 



