1825.] 
cause of liberty,—could not be, of 
course, expected. But, mark how the 
political predilections of the two censors 
ean influence their perceptions of poetic 
grace and beauty. With the Quarterly 
critic, this “noble Ode” is classed 
among those 
“ Fugitive Pieces to which 100 pages of 
this little volume are assigned, that were 
born, and should haye been suffered to die 
and be buried in the pages of a Magazine,” 
instead of being collected by the author as 
if they were of any “‘ positive value.” 
Or, ifany distinction, or preservation 
were due to it, it is such, they seem to 
think,-as belongs to the gibbeted felon. 
** One very fervent and furious piece, 
Stanzas to the Memory of the Spanish Patriots 
killed in resisting the Regency and the Duke 
of Angouléme, is worthy of preservation for 
its hard words; it is levelled against ‘ kings, 
bigots, and Bourbons,’ who ‘ mangle mar- 
tyrs with hangman fingers ;’ of ‘ cowl’d de- 
mons of the Inquisitorial cell,’ and ‘ Au- 
tochthones of hell,’ who are bid togo and— 
* Smile o’er the gaspings of spine-broken men; 
Preach, perpetrate damnation in your den.’” 
Now, for our parts,—who endeavour, 
as much as possible, to keep our politi- 
eal and’ our critical judgments perfectly 
distinct,—while we applaud the senti- 
ment of the production, quite as much 
as the Edinburgh Reviewer, and abhor, 
with all the depth of conviction, the 
politics of the Quarterly scribes,—hav- 
ing even no sort of objection to calling 
such kings as Ferdinand the Seventh, 
and some others who haye borne the 
name of Bourbon, “ hangmen,” &c.; 
only that we think the common execu- 
tioner degraded by the comparison,— 
we, at the same time, cannot go quite 
the length of the Edinburgh pane- 
gyrist, even if, instead of perusing the 
whole, we were to judge from the more 
favourable passage quoted to support 
the panegyric. We do not see the 
poetical nobleness,—the grace, the 
euphony, or even the grammatical pro- 
priety, of such lines as the following :— 
«« There shall be hearts in Spain 
To honour and embrace your martyr’d lot, 
Cursing the Bigots and the Bourbons’ chain, 
And looking on your graves, though trophied not, 
As holier, hallow’d ground than priests could make 
the spot.” 
We do not very clearly understand 
the idea of martyring a Jot (or doom), 
or admire the practice of putting -syl- 
lables to the torture of inversion, &c. 
(trophied not, for untrophied), obviously 
for the sake of the rhyme:* and Jot, not, 
_ * We had had “ Beside your cannon, 
Philosophy of Contemporary Criticism—No. XLIV. 
333 
spot, appear to us, as here used, to be 
very costive rhymes, after all; and the 
hard-straining of the inversion, for the 
second of them, is even as cacophonou in 
effect as affected in the construction ;—- 
while the sense being complete, in the 
last line, without the metonymical addi- 
tion or mutation of ground into spot, 
reminds us of the censure in’ Pope’s 
Essay on Criticism — 
«* A needless Alexandrine ends the song.” 
Nor do we see much more grace or 
propriety in the following line, from the 
next-quoted stanza :— 
*«From persecution—shew her mask ff-torn.” 
Not that we have any hypercritical 
aversion to compound epithets ; but we 
expect that such compounds should not 
be cacophonous: nor do we allow that 
merely inverting two monosyllables, and 
putting a hyphen between them, consi’- 
tutes a compound word; we expect that 
they should amalgamate upon the ear 
as well as to the eye; and we should be 
glad to learn by what mode of pronun- 
ciation these two syllables can be made 
to do so. We have very little respect 
for typographical tropes that cannot 
indicate a specific action to the organs. 
The first line of the third stanza quoted, 
* Glory to them that die in this great cause ria 
if it had been printed as_ prose, 
would have passed off upon our ear, 
very plausibly, as such. Nor can any 
arrangement of the printer’s enable us to 
make any thing else of—“ Still in your 
prostrate land there shall be some proud 
hearts :’’—to say nothing of the meta- 
phorical propriety of “the shrines of a 
flame,” immediately following. 
As little, however, on the other hand, 
can we agree with the snarler in the 
Quarterly, that the stanzas are worthy 
of preservation only for their hard 
words, either in their sense of the term, 
or of our own. The just standard of 
estimation, in this instance, at least, 
will be found, we believe, somewhere 
about midway between the extremes of 
the antagonist reviewers. 
With respect to some other of these 
poems, however, the “ Domestic Tale,” 
for example, which gives its prominent 
title to the volume, we feel ourselves 
compelled to lean much nearer to the 
judgment. of the more hostile critic. 
We confess, that with Mr. Campbell’s 
Theodrie we were completely ‘disap- 
pointed. Fixed, though, perhaps, pecu- 
liar, 
conquer’d not,” afew lines before, without 
even the excuse of necessity for a rhyme. 
