1825.) 
and college-gown put, at once, to flight. 
‘Nay, it may perhaps be doubted, whether 
these very professorships, endowments and 
prize-medals do not retard, rather than 
assist, the developement of poetic faculty. 
Poetry is not to be taught by rules and 
lectures, or purchased by a bribe. It comes, 
not because it is called or bidden, but be- 
cause, and when, it will: and the bidding 
and the invitation are more likely to chase 
it, than to allure. Neither rewards nor 
honours, nor even the love of fame, can be 
admitted as among the genuine motives to 
its highest aspirations. The last of these, 
indeed, may sometimes stimulate, and fre- 
quently assist its earliest flight. But to be 
wooed effectively, it must be loved for itself 
alone: and its highest soarings are always 
then made, when it mounts so high that the 
babble of reputation reaches not its unheed- 
ing ear:—when it soars for the love of soar- 
ing; or to view, from its aérial height, the 
distant regions of futurity; and see the 
sun of its unfading glory slowly rising upon 
other worlds and other generations. — 
But these are the flights of maturer years. 
The callow collegian has not ‘strength of 
pinion for these, even if he had liberty of 
wing; and the greybeards of the college 
never offer to youth the themes to which 
alone the imagination of youth is competent. 
The prize-poems in this volume are four 
in number,— The Death of Don Carlos ; The 
Expedition to the North Pole ; Cimon solicit- 
ing the Body of Miltiades for Interment ; and 
Algiers chastised. To be poetical upon the 
first of these, the poet must at least have 
had some experience of all the thrilling 
agitations of the passion of love,—no very 
fit associatons with the pursuits of collegiate 
study; for the second, where should he 
have sought for familiarity with the scenery 
that should have been paramount in his 
imagination, but in books of voyages and 
travels? for the third, where collect his 
materials but from the bare-worn paths of 
classic erudition? and for the last, what 
inspiration was he likely to draw, except 
from the politics of a newspaper? Is it 
wonderful that poetry is not to be found in 
either of them? He gained the prizes, 
however, by them:—To George Downes, 
Esq. AM. “were awarded the (aceaus 
prizes on the foundation of the Right Hon. 
Lord Downes, the present Vice-Chancellor of 
Trinity College, Dublin!!!’ Our success- 
ful candidate, in this very auspicious compe- 
tition, attempts to treat his subjects in blank 
verse: and blank verse, a certain class of 
Frenchified critics tell us, is only measuréd 
prose. In the hands of Mr. Downes it is 
truly so. For example: — “Some young 
minstrel of the rural choir,” is made to sing 
‘to us, in “an ancient ditty,” 
« how the youth 
Was seized and brought; how variously he sought 
To end his life and sorrow, till at length 
They gave him to the holy Inquisition; 
How pious hands were found, to mix a draught 
Literary and Critical Proémium. 
63 
That ended life and sorrow;. how the Queen 
Beheld them lay his body in the tomb, 
And never spoke again !” 
And so ends, in a hobbling half-line, the 
poem. And this is all the poetry, and all 
the pathos we have respecting the death of 
Don Carlos. The preceding fragment-sketches 
of the unfortunate amour, are equally moy- 
ing and equally measured; and the three 
equally successful poems that follow, are in 
the same strain. Really, when a poet can 
do no better than this, either in sentiment 
or metre, he should at least amuse our ears, 
and endeavour to cover his defects with a 
little of the jingling of rhyme; for blank 
verse is, in fact, as Lord Byron himself at 
last discovered, at once the most difficult, 
and ought to be the most perfect, of all 
versification. ‘‘ Every line,” says he, truly, 
“must be good.” Nor is this enough: 
every successive line, or nearly so, must 
also be varied in its cadences and its pauses. 
It must be music, perpetually varying, and 
perpetually appropriate :—uniting boundless 
variety with strict proportion. Is it won- 
derful that so few have written good blank 
verse ?—that so few have a heart, or an ear, 
capable of its expressive melodies? Mr. D. 
has, of course, his tropes and figures of 
speech; but they are grammatical figures 
from the book of rhetoric, not the meta- 
phors of picturesqueness and emotion, from 
the founts of imagination and the book of 
nature. That of which he seems to be most 
fond is reiteratioi— 
** One voiceless inward voice she heard, which told—’’ 
** Seas, where Leviathan, far, far beyond—” 
«© Where snows, and snows, and snows uninterrupt—’ 
** Still onward, onward fared the chivalry—” 
«*No murmur, foot-fall—silence ! silence! silence !—” 
Really, Mr. D.’s Muse would make an ad- 
mirable instructress for criers in the courts! 
We could still go on, with— 
** Words had no potency; thoughts,—thoughts in- 
tense—” &c. &c 
Even in his shorter measures, he shews the 
constancy of his devotion to the same rhe- 
torical beauty :— 
** T love—I love—the sounds that roll 
Full on the soul! full on the soul !” 
We cannot say that we were much more 
delighted, though we were somewhat less 
ennuyés, by the rhyme than the blank-yerse 
of this little volume—whether translated or 
original. The following specimen of the 
former is from the Spanish :— 
** Queen Blanche is in Sidonia 
In hard captivity, 
A-telling of her bitter woes 
The bitter history ; 
Her faithfullest duenna 
Is listening at her side, 
Content, for her sweet mistress’ sake, 
In prison-house to bide.” 
“ So very simple! sweet simplicity!’ All 
is not, however, quite so bad as this; and 
there is one little ballad, “‘ The Saint-John’s 
Wort,”’ from the German of Stricker, with 
which 
