112 



MONTHLY 11KVIKW OF LITKKATUltE AND ART. 



the sun rise, it has been after getting merry with puerile tipple, from " the 

 big battlements " of Waterloo-bridge. Even when nature is before them they 

 shut their eyes to it, and paint from bad copies. That which is the most re- 

 moved from truth, to them is the purest poetry. They aspire to be purely ethe- 

 rial all mind all imagination : they glory in seeing invisible similitudes to 

 them a dying dolphin is an expiring monarch the fish and the king being 

 equally imaginative. They grapple with non- entities and complacently 

 retire, although discomfited, with flying colours. They are ignorant, and 

 consequently bold ; they smile, with pride, in a pillory of their own fabri- 

 cation, on the spectators who from motives of pity or contempt, do not think 

 proper to pelt them according to their deserts. 



And yet, some among these men, if they took for their motto a passage of 

 Shakspeare of whom they affect to be idolators " thou nature, art my 

 goddess," might become poets, of whom the nation to which they belong 

 would be proud. But they won't. They describe nature not as she is^- 

 fresh, blooming, and vigorous, but as a decayed literary old lady a second 

 Mrs. Piozzi of whom some interesting anecdotes have been preserved. 

 When they copy, they have skill enough to be endureable ; when they venture 

 to be original as they sometimes do they are insufferable. A pure Cockney 

 bard can only be tolerated so long as he keeps within the bounds of poe- 

 tical petty larceny. 



History, science, and all such trifling matters are set at nought in the 

 realms of Cockayne every thing is glazed over with couleur de rose. Even 

 the amiable, talented, and respectable bookseller before us, eulogizes Walton 

 the angler, and that pestiferous hive of thieves who came from Normandy, 

 in the wake of William the Conqueror one of the most consummate scoun- 

 drels that ever the Almighty permitted to be dominant over his fellow men. 

 Speaking of Walton, in his fourteenth sonnet, Mr. Moxon, pensively lauds 

 " the meekness of his plain-contented mind." Apostrophizing the cruel 

 old angler, he says 



" From thee I learn 

 To sympathize with Nature." 



How, let us ask, did the good gentlemen sympathize with Nature ? By 

 dexterously impaling a worm, on a barbed hook, in such a manner as to 

 protract, to the utmost possible extent, his lively agony, so as to attract and 

 delude certain individuals belonging to that large class of animatad nature 

 denominated by the scientific pisces. These, after impaling and half-drown- 

 ing his miserable bait, he hooked up by the lips, the palate, or the throat ; 

 and then, wrenching his hook out of their lacerated flesh, tossed the victim 

 triumphantly into his basket. The hoary villain ! Had the oak been a 

 caddis had the stars been May flies, he would, were it possible, have used 

 them for baits they would have wriggled in mortal throes upon his infernal 

 hook. It enrages us to see this piscatory Belial thus eulogized by a man 

 displaying such powers as Mr. Moxon 



" Methinks ev'n now 



I hear thee, 'neath the milk-white scented thorn, 

 Communing with thy pupil, as the morn 

 Her rosy cheek displays while streams that flow, 

 And all that gambol near their rippling source, 

 Enchanted listen to thy sweet discourse." 



What, if they could understand, would the fish think of it? the creatures 

 that gambolled not merely near but in the rippling source of those streams, 

 about which Walton uttered what is called his sweet discourse. Here is a 

 striking instance of the vice of Cockney poetry. The people who perpetrate 

 it will not look one atom beyond books ; in these they find Isaac Walton 

 and his " calm, sublime philosophy," his " intense admiration of nature, &c. 



