134 



POETRY AND POETS. 



he ever had on the question did 

 not arise from thinking them too 

 good to be Scott's, but, on the con- 

 trary, from the infinite number of 

 clumsy things in them ; common- 

 place contrivances, worthy only of 

 the Minerva press, and such bad 

 vulgar English as no gentleman of 

 education ought to have written. 

 When I mentioned the abundance 

 of them, as being rather too great 

 for one man to produce, he said, 

 that great fertility was the charac- 

 teristic of all novelists and story- 

 tellers. Richardson could have gone 

 on for ever ; his Sir Charles Gran- 

 dison was originally in thirty vo- 

 lumes. Instanced Charlotte Smith, 

 Madame Cottin, &c., &c. Scott, 

 since he was a child, accustomed 

 to legends, and to the exercise of 

 the story-telling faculty, sees no- 

 thing to stop him as long as he can 

 hold a pen. Spoke of the very 

 little knowledge of real poetry that 

 existed now ; so few men had time 

 to study. For instance, Mr. Can- 

 ning ; one could hardly select a 

 cleverer man ; and yet, what did 

 Mr. Canning know of poetry ? 

 What time had he, in the busy po- 

 litical life that he led, to study 

 Dante, Homer, &c., as they ought 

 to be studied, in order to arrive at 

 the true principles of taste in works 

 of genius ? Mr. Fox, indeed, to- 

 wards the latter part of his life, 

 made leisure for himself, and took 

 to improving his mind ; and, accord- 

 ingly, all his later public displays 

 bore a greater stamp of wisdom and 

 good taste than his early ones. Mr. 

 Burke alone was an exception in 

 this description of public men ; by 

 far the greatest man of his age ; 

 not only abounding in knowledge 

 himself, but feeding, in various di- 

 rections, his most able contempo- 

 raries ; assisting Adam Smith in 

 his Political Economy and Rey- 

 nolds in his Lectures on Painting 

 Fox, too, who acknowledged that 

 all he had ever learned from books 



was nothing to what he had de- 

 rived from Burke." 



EDGAR ALLEN POE. 



The conversation of Edgar Allen 

 Poe, the gifted American poet, was 

 at times, says R. W. Griswold, al- 

 most supermortal in its eloquence. 

 Eis voice was modulated with as- 

 ishing skill, and his large and 

 variably expressive eyes looked re- 

 pose or shot fiery tumult into theirs 

 who listened, while his own face 

 glowed or was changeless in pallor 

 as his imagination quickened his 

 blood or drew it back frozen to his 

 heart. His imagery was from the 

 worlds which no mortal can see but 

 with the vision of genius. Sud- 

 denly starting from a proposition 

 exactly and sharply defined in terms 

 of utmost simplicity and clearness, 

 he rejected the forms of customary 

 logic, and, by a crystalline process 

 of accretion, built up his ocular de- 

 monstrations in forms of gloomiest 

 and ghastliest grandeur, or in those 

 of the most airy and delicious 

 beauty so minutely and distinctly, 

 yet so rapidly, that the attention 

 which was yielded to him was 

 chained till it stood among his won- 

 derful creations, till he himself dis- 

 solved the spell, and brought his 

 hearers back to common and base 

 existence by vulgar fancies or exhi- 

 bitions of the ignoblest passion. 



CHARLES LAMB. 



It is told of Charles Lamb, that 

 one afternoon re turning from a din- 

 ner-party, haA r ing taken a seat in a 

 crowded omnibus, a stout gentle- 

 man subsequently looked in, and 

 politely asked, "All full inside?" 

 " I don't know how it may be with 

 the other passengers," answered 

 Lamb, " but that la st piece of oyster- 

 pie did the business for me" 



Coleridge, during one of his in- 

 terminable table - talks, said to 

 Lamb, " Charley, did you ever hear 

 me preach?" "I never heard you 



