MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. Ill 



nature would have been mountain daisies. We entertain the utmost con- 

 tempt for the school, while our respect is great for many of the individuals 

 composing it. There is more than one of them, who might, perhaps (and 

 this is high praise), had they been excisemen, have approached the excellence 

 of Burns. They seem to want nothing but a knowledge of Nature, to make 

 them manly poets. They look at the fields and the heavens, and all the 

 glorious creations of God, through dandy bits of stained glass, mounted in 

 metal to imitate silver, and bought in Cheapside. They have no idea of the 

 grandeur the breadth the force the sublimity of truth. They lack mental 

 brawn they have no sinew their bones are marrowless. They try to 

 paint pimples into roses. Their conceits are inconceivable. They scorn to 

 give us facts as they find them they describe Bardolph's nose as being de- 

 precated by purple butterflies, who, taking it for a congenial mulberry, have 

 singed their lady-like toes. They hear the trees talking to each other ; they 

 rarely, if ever, mention the whinchat the whitethroat the linnet or the 

 blackcap : the nightingale, being exclusive poetical property, is almost the 

 only bird, except the falcon, " with his felon-swoop," or the mavis, of which 

 they have read, but never saw except in a cage or the lark, screaming his 

 artificial notes imitations of the house-sparrow, combined with those of 

 the " London cries," from some tailor's two-pair window in a blind alley 

 or the raven, known only to them by the recent representative of his species, 

 at the Elephant and Castle, Newington, or at the George, in Little Chelsea. 

 The most laughable mistake under which the Cockney poets who transcribe 

 from their predecessors, instead of depicting from nature labour is that, one 

 and all, they describe the song of a nightingale to be forlorn and sad. Phi- 

 lomel, according to their accounts, and we must admit to those of many 

 more eminent persons, who rank among our poets, is a miserable, whining 

 creature. Mr. Moxon has fallen into the prevailing error. He calls the 

 nightingale in his first sonnet, a " lone midnight-soothing melancholy 

 bird," andjpikens it in his imagination, from its " mournful voice," to some 

 angelic mind weeping over the sins of erring mortals. He goes on thus : ^ 



" In Eden's bowers, as mighty poets tell, 



Didst thou repeat as now that wailing call 

 Those sorrowing notes might seem, sad Philomel 



Prophetic to have mourned of man the fall." 



It is a pity that our talented friend Moxon, prior to the perpetration of 

 this sonnet which has but one fault, that of being totally untrue from be- 

 ginning to end had not gone so far as Fulham, and heard'a nigthingale with 

 his own ears, instead of the asinine auriculars oft own-bred poetasters. He 

 would then we are satisfied from the taste and judgment he has displayed 

 in the poems before us have described the song of the nightingale in a 

 widely different manner. Nothing, in fact, can be more joyous it is the 

 most eloquent out-pouring of a gladsome spirit that can possibly be conceived. 

 There is but one single note in the nightingale's song which is in the slightest 

 degree lugubrious it is the lowest in its gamut, and after having repeated it 

 twice or thrice, it soars up into a perfect revelry of wild enthusiastic jocund 

 music, than which nothing, to the human ear, either natural or artificial, is 

 one-half so exhilirating. Why should the nightingale be sad ? His mate 

 is brooding in the adjacent hedge his song is a song of joy like every other 

 bird of his order, at the period of incubation, his notes are triumphant and 

 rejoicing, they cheer his solitary mate in the hawthorn they constitute a 

 natural domestic concert a merry serenade. The nightingale sings as though 

 he were tipsy with glee. 



But the Cockney gentlemen know nothing of this : if they have heard the 

 chimes at midnight it has been in the vicinity of St. Clements not even 

 in their own darling fields about the hill of Hampstead. If they have seen 



