production. There is reason however to suppose that they were written in the interval between the composition of Comus and that of Lycidas. The opening lines of the latter poem seem to refer to some work of a more recent date than the Mask, since the representation of which three years had now elapsed; and we cannot, with the least pretence of probability, assign their origin to any other portion of their author's life than to that which was passed at Horton. The evidence of their ripened excellence would not allow us to ascribe them to his more youthful years, even if the accurate and circumstantial account, which has been transmitted to us, of the produce of those years had left us any doubt upon the subject. With his compositions during his residence in Italy we are so particularly acquainted as not to be permitted to hesitate when we exclude from their number the objects of our reference; and the character also of these pieces establishes them to be properly and strictly English. Their lineaments and their tints are so specific, and so peculiarly genuine as to prove them to be drawn from the vivid nature before the poet's eye, and not from the * See a note in the Appendix on a letter of Sir William Jones's referring to the time and the place when and where these poems were composed.

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dimmer reflection of his mind. The landscape indeed, with all its shades, is of his own country, and when he speaks of " towers and battlements"

Bosom'd high in tufted trees,

Where perhaps some beauty lies

The Cynosure of neighb'ring eyes,

we may suppose that his sight was directed immediately to the woods and the mansion of Harefield.

These poems, then, must be received as the indisputable natives of our island; and they cannot be considered as born after their parent's return from the continent, when his talents were withdrawn from the Muses; and when, immersed in the capital and in polemics, his thought could not easily escape to play and to cull flowers among the scenery of the country. L'Allegro and Il Penseroso therefore were certainly written at Horton, and probably at no long period before the Lycidas, which was the last of our author's works while he resided with his father. They were unquestionably composed in the happiest humour of the poet's mind, when his fancy was all sunshine and no cloud, or, to obstruct her view,

......

Star interposed..

We may contemplate them not as the ef fects or qualities, (if the allusion may be par

doned,) but as the very substance of poetry, as its "hidden soul untied," and brought forward to our sight.

It is not easy to adjust the precedency between these victorious efforts of the descriptive Muse. No No passage in II Penseroso is perhaps equally happy with the following in L'Allegro:

And ever against eating cares
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,

Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed and giddy cunning,

The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony.

But if my judgment were to decide, I should award the palm, though with some hesitation, to Il Penseroso. The portrait of contemplation; the address to Philomel; the image of the moon, wandering through heaven's pathless way; the slow swinging of the curfeu over some wide-water'd shore; the flaming of the night-lamp in some lonely tower; the unsphering of the spirit of Plato to disclose the residence of the unbodied soul; the arched walks of twilight groves; the mysterious dream by the murmuring waters; the sweet music of the friendly spirit

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of the wood; the pale and studious cloister; the religious light thrown through the storied windows; the pealing organ, and finally the peaceful hermitage-form together such a mass of poetic imagery as was never before crowded into an equal space: the impression made by it on the imagination is to be felt, and not explained.

Although these poems obtained some early notice, the number of their admirers was for a long time small. Even from the wits of our Augustan age, as the age of Addison and Pope has sometimes been called, their share of notice was inconsiderable; and it is in only what may be regarded as the present generation, that they have acquired any large proportion of their just praise. Their reputation seems to be still increasing;

"Perhaps," says Mr. Warton on this line, "To walk the studious cloisters pale,"

The studious cloister's pale.".

If this unlucky" perhaps" were to be regarded, the beauty of the line would be injured, and its propriety annihilated. Pale, as an epithet to cloister, is most happily poetic, and holds a large and animated picture to the imagination. It shows to us the ghostly light of the place, and it shows to us also the sickly cheek of timorous superstition, the wan and faded countenance of studious and contemplative melancholy. The cloister's pale, or fence, is tautological and weak; and to walk a pale, which, if it mean any thing, must mean to walk upon a pale, is a feat of rather difficult accomplishment.

and we may venture to predict that it will yet increase, till some of those great vicissitudes, to which all that is human is perpetually exposed and which all that is human must eventually experience, shall blot out our name and our language, and bury us in barbarism. But even amid the ruins of Britain, Milton will survive: Europe will preserve one portion of him; and his native strains will be cherished in the expanding bosom of the great queen of the Atlantic, when his own London may present the spectacle of Thebes, and his Thames roll a silent and solitary stream through heaps of blended desolation."

m I am reminded on this occasion of a beautiful passage in the " Essay on the dramatic character of Sir John Falstaff," written by the late Maurice Morgann, Esq. "Yet whatever may be the neglect of some, or the censure of others, there are those who firmly believe that this wild and uncultivated * Barzarian has not obtained one half of his fame.". -When the hand of time shall have brushed off his present editors and commentators, and when the very name of Voltaire, and even the memory of the language in which he has written, shall be no more, the Apalachian mountains the banks of the Ohio and the plains of Sciola shall resound with the accents of this barbarian. In his native tongue he shall roll the genuine passions of nature: nor shall the griefs of Lear be alleviated, or the charms and wit of Rosalind be abated by time," p. 64.

This Essay forms a more honourable monument to the memory of Shakspeare than any which has been reared to him by the united labours of his commentators. The portrait, of

* Shakspeare, so called by Voltaire.