met them, each and all, some two or three hundred times before, and that they have formed, in a greater or less degree, the staple material of every Hop-O'My-Thumb tragedy since the flood? There is not an incident, from the first page of "The Spanish Student" to the last and most satisfactory, which we would not undertake to find bodily, at ten minutes' notice, in some one of the thousand and one comedies of intrigue attributed to Calderon and Lope de Vega.

But if our poet is grossly unoriginal in his subject, and in the events which evolve it, may he not be original in his handling or tone? We really grieve to say that he is not, unless, indeed, we grant him the meed of originality for the peculiar manner in which he has jumbled together the quaint and stilted tone of the old English dramatists with the dégagée air of Cervantes. But this is a point upon which, through want of space, we must necessarily permit the reader to judge altogether for himself. We quote, however, a passage from the second scene of the first act, by way of showing how very easy a matter it is to make a man discourse Sancho Panza ::

"Chispa. Abernuncio Satanas! and a plague upon all lovers who ramble about at night, drinking the elements, instead of sleeping quietly in their beds. Every dead man to his cemetery, say I; and every friar to his monastery. Now, here's my master Victorian, yesterday a cow-keeper and to-day a gentleman; yesterday a student and to-day a lover; and I must be up later than the nightingale, for as the abbot sings so must the sacristan respond. God grant he may soon be married, for then shall all this serenading cease. Ay, marry, marry, marry! Mother, what does marry mean? It means to spin, to bear children, and to weep, my daughter! And, of a truth, there is something more in matrimony than the wedding-ring. And now, gentlemen, Pax vobiscum as the ass said to the cabbages!"

And, we might add, as an ass only should say.

In fact, throughout "The Spanish Student," as well as throughout other compositions of its author, there runs a very obvious vein of imitation. We are perpetually reminded of something we have seen before some old acquaintance in manner or matter; and even where the similarity cannot be said to amount to plagiarism, it is still injurious to the poet in the good opinion of him who reads.

Among the minor defects of the play, we may mention the frequent allusion to book incidents not generally known, and requiring each a note by way of explanation. The drama demands that everything be so instantaneously evident that he who runs may read; and the only impression effected by these notes to a play is, that the author is desirous of showing his reading.

We may mention, also, occasional tautologies, such as :

"Never did I behold thee so attired

And garmented in beauty as to-night!"

Or

"What we need

Is the celestial fire to change the fruit

Into transparent crystal, bright and clear!"

We may speak, too, of more than occasional errors of grammar. For example, p. 23:

"Did no one see thee? None, my love, but thou."

Here "but" is not a conjunction, but a preposition, and governs thee in the objective. "None but thee" would be right; meaning none except thee, saving thee. At page 27, mayst" is somewhat incorrectly written "may'st." At page 34 we have :—

"I have no other saint than thou to pray to."

Here authority and analogy are both against Mr. Longfellow. "Than" also is here a preposition governing the objective, and meaning save, or except. "I have none other God than thee," etc. See Horne Tooke. The Latin "quam te" is exactly equivalent. At page 80 we read:

"Like thee I am a captive, and, like thee,

I have a gentle gaoler."

Here "like thee" (although grammatical of course) does not convey the idea. Mr. L. does not mean that the speaker is like the bird itself, but that his condition resembles it. The true reading would thus be :

"As thou I am a captive, and, as thou,

I have a gentle gaoler:"

That is to say, as thou art, and as thou hast.

66

Upon the whole, we regret that Professor Longfellow has written this work, and feel especially vexed that he has committed himself by its republication. Only when regarded as a mere poem can it be said to have merit of any kind. For in fact it is only when we separate the poem from the drama that the passages we have commended as beautiful can be understood to have beauty. We are not too sure, indeed, that a dramatic poem is not a flat contradiction in terms. At all events a man of true genius (and such Mr. L. unquestionably is) has no business with these hybrid and paradoxical compositions. Let a poem be a poem only; let a play be a play and nothing more. As for "The Spanish Student," its thesis is unoriginal; its incidents are antique; its plot is no plot; its characters have no character; in short, it is little better than a play upon words to style it "A Play" at all.

LONGFELLOW'S BALLADS.

"Il y à parier," says Chamfort, "que toute idée publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenue au plus grand nombre," One would be safe in wagering that any given public idea is erroneous, for it has been yielded to the clamour of the majority;—and this strictly philosophical, although somewhat French assertion, has especial bearing upon the whole race of what are termed maxims and popular proverbs; nine-tenths of which are the quintessence of folly. One of the most deplorably false of them is the antique adage, De gustibus non est disputandum-there should be no disputing about taste. Here the idea designed to be conveyed is that any one person has as just right to consider his own taste the true, as has any one other that taste itself, in short, is an arbitrary something, amenable to no law, and measurable

by no definite rules. It must be confessed, however, that the exceedingly vague and impotent treatises which are alone extant have much to answer for as regards confirming the general error. Not the least important service which, hereafter, mankind will owe to Phrenology, may, perhaps, be recognised in an analysis of the real principles, and a digest of the resulting laws of taste. These principles, in fact, are as clearly traceable, and these laws as readily susceptible of system, as are any whatever.

In the meantime, the insane adage above mentioned is in no respect more generally, more stupidly, and more pertinaciously quoted than by the admirers of what is termed the "good old Pope," or the "good old Goldsmith school" of poetry, in reference to the bolder, more natural, and more ideal compositions of such authors as Coëtlogon and Lamartine* in France; Herder, Körner, and Uhland in Germany; Brun and Baggesen in Denmark; Bellman, Tegnér, and Nyberg+ in Sweden; Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Tennyson in England; Lowell and Longfellow in America. "De gustibus non," say these "good-old-school" fellows; and we have no doubt that their mental translation of the phrase is —“We pity your taste-we pity everybody's taste but our own."

It is our purpose to controvert the popular idea that the poets just mentioned owe to novelty, to trickeries of expression, and to other meretricious effects their appreciation by certain readers:-to demonstrate (for the matter is susceptible of demonstration) that such poetry and such alone has fulfilled the legitimate office of the muse; has thoroughly satisfied an earnest and unquenchable desire existing in the heart of man.

This volume of Ballads and Tales includes, with several brief original pieces, a translation from the Swedish of Tegnér. In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to

* We allude here chiefly to the "David" of Coëtlogon, and only to the "Chute d'un Ange" of Lamartine.

+ Julia C. Nyberg, author of the "Dikter von Euphrosyne."

his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well, and what, from the nature of language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or, we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In the Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only "compound," "context," "footfall," and a few other similar ones. This is the difficulty; and that it is so will become evident upon reading "The Children of the Lord's Supper," where the sole readable verses are those in which we meet with the rare spondaic dissyllables. We mean to say readable as hexameters; for many of them will read very well as mere English dactylics with certain irregularities.

Much as we admire the genius of Mr. Longfellow, we are fully sensible of his many errors of affectation and imitation. His artistical skill is great, and his ideality high. But his conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong; and this we shall prove at some future day-to our own satisfaction, at least. His didactics are all out of place. He has written brilliant poems-by accident; that is to say when permitting his genius to get the better of his conventional habit of thinking-a habit deduced from German study. We do not mean to say that a didactic moral may not be well made the under-current of a poetical thesis; but that it can never be well put so obtrusively forth, as in the majority of his compositions. There is a young American who, with ideality not richer than that of Longfellow, and with less artistic knowledge, has yet composed far truer poems, merely through the greater propriety of his themes.

We have said that Mr. Longfellow's conception of the aims of poesy is erroneous; and that thus, labouring at a disadvantage, he does violent wrong to his own high powers; and now the question is, What are his ideas of the aims of the Muse, as we gather these ideas from the general tendency of his poems? It will be at once evident that, imbued with the peculiar spirit of German song (a pure conventionality) he regards the inculcation of a moral as essential.

Here we