tion would not really be accepted by those who have written admiringly of this kind of composition. No one would wish to exclude either Swift's Lines to Stella,' or Praed's own 'Lillian,' from the class of vers de société. Hence we must now extend the name a little. Vers de société, to include all that seems naturally to fall under the title, will be poetry in which creative imagination, passions lying deep in human nature, scenes of universal interest, with whatever tends to break through boudoir-decorum, and requires a stronger attention than can be given during the intervals of fireside talk, will be generally out of place; poetry, not of that absorbing character which calls for solitude and study for its enjoyment, and, as Charles Lamb said of Milton, should have a grace said before it;'-poetry, in short, intermediate between the poetry of Shakspeare or Shelley, and prose.

It may be thought that the species of verse before us is reduced thus to a comparatively low level. Horace's famous lines may be quoted, or, as we should contend, misquoted against us. Is not this, (it might be argued), that mediocre poetry which neither gods (critics, of course), nor men, nor booksellers, can put up with? But such is far from our intention. Poetry, as Coleridge observed, is antithetical, not to prose, but to science. And pure science has its place in literature, to be found in those books which, like Euclid's Elements,' or the System of Linnæus, are simply records of ascertained natural law or natural phenomena. The name prose is almost inapplicable to them; they are often as much written in diagrams as in words. Prose pure, wherein the way in which the matter is set forth, is not less considered by the writer than the matter itself, comes next in the gradations of literature. Such prose is of every degree in merit, from the careless, irregular, style in which nineteentwentieths of English contemporary works are composed, or the inartistic heaviness too frequent in German, to the exquisite completeness, the clear-as-crystal arrangement and diction which have made modern French the international or cosmopolitan language, as German is the language of the philosopher, and our own of the imperial race.

Undoubtedly at the head of the series,-by virtue at once of its greater thoroughness in art, of its concise and rememberable mode of putting thought or narrative, and of its sensuous hold upon human feeling; in a word, as the organ of the highest and most enduring pleasure, will be poetry,-poetry in the sense of Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare. But there is much that their higher Muses cannot or will not efficiently deal with, which yet deserves, and gains by metrical form and that more imagi

native treatment which metrical form permits. High poetry cannot give that minuteness of narrative detail which is so delightful in Miss Austen or Walter Scott. What it does give,Tennyson's Maud' may be named as one of our choicest instances, is indeed the most concentrated and valuable detail; but if it attempts more, the poem invariably loses caste, and falls at once into the prosaic. Great as Wordsworth is, he has not escaped,-nay, he has often lapsed before the danger. There is a sense in which the high imagination is too unbending, (although unbending is not the right word), too impatient, perhaps, for the representation of multitudinous fact. It is too elevated, also, not indeed for the smallest feelings or ways of real life, but for those which belong essentially to the life of civilised man,-especially that most conventionalised portion of it which is expressed by 'society.' Lamentable as the confession may be, we are bound to make it:-Except satirically (when the idea is to point out that the thing is unpoetical), as in some of the indignant phrases of 'Maud,' Poetry pure can hardly enter a 'good' house, or join in a valse; she can accept kid gloves and tarlatan, suppers and dowagers, but in silence only; if she has to speak of them, it is too likely to be with something of the white and serene scorn which might wreathe the lips of the Praxitelean Aphrodite. Next minute, perhaps, she will be seen talking, as friend with friend, to the Shepherd Michael on the hillside over Grasmere, or to Enoch Arden on his southern island, or to Robert Browning's poet in the Spanish town, whose coat was threadbare and shiny, who came

'On the main promenade, just at the wrong time,' and died at last in perfectly decent and perfectly unpicturesque poverty.*

And what a different note from that of the vers de société does the Muse strike when it is of her own subjects that she is singing!

or,

'Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,
Begin; and somewhat loudly sweep the string:'

'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past:'

*Let us here, as space allows no more at present, draw attention to the lately published 'Atalanta in Calydon,' by Mr. Algernon Swinburne, as the most recent attempt in English literature within the precincts of what we have called the 'higher Muse."

or,

or, once more, in her 'own ownest' tongue,

• Αναξιφόρμιγγες ὕμνοι

τίνα θεόν, τίν' ἥρωα, τίνα δ ̓ ἄνδρα κελαδήσομεν ;

alas! these are no echoes from the ballroom; no strains which can be set to a three-time motif by the great Strauss, however perfumed and fashionable. In short, the Muse of lofty look and high imagination, despite her long robe and classical sandals, is not (you see) by any means at home in the right set. She has a wide range, indeed, and can sing of a god, or a hero, (not a novelist's hero, however), or a man; but he must be man simple, not merely cultivated man, or 'senator,' or belle at a thé dansant, or young person thoroughly as he ought to be.'

-Nos alio mentes, alio divisimus aures:

Jure igitur vincemur!'

Are we then to judge Poetry incapable, or civilization in the wrong? Poets have too often decided for the latter; not only declining to put the common incidents of their own or their contemporaries' lives into their verse, but speaking of the present as an essentially unpoetical age. Thus we see Scott, Byron, Wordsworth (to take men who had average experience of society), each flying from his own personality and class, and seeking subjects in the middle ages, in Turkey, or among the Westmorland statesmen; or, if they touch on contemporary social ways, painting them with the stoical half-contempt of the Excursion,' or the wrathful wit of Don Juan.' Possibly the dominant genius of these great men,-great with whatever limitations truth must allow in each instance,--may have rendered such a tone inevitable.

'I have not loved the world, nor the world me:'

-Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn :'—

Such may be the proper moral with which the imaginative mind must sum up its experiences:-yet there is much that the world may plead in its own favour. When we have recog

nised, ever so frankly, the grandeur of the naked passions of ruder ages, the simple nobleness of poverty, the enduring and transcendent charm of those spheres of action and of thought which the vision and the faculty' are wont, by Divine privilege, to unveil to us,- -our own life, with its own ways, feelings, and incidents, will assert its claim, and even call sometimes on the Muse to quit those more distant, if more lofty, regions, interpret the present to itself, and give civilised society its share also in poetry.

Here,

All

Here, then, we should look for the field of that species of poetry which will range, as we said above, next to prose. those aspects of contemporary life which are too immediate, or too temporary, or too nearly allied to the artificial and the conventional, for the exercise of the higher imagination, the severer forms of poetry proper, will fall to that mode of composition which has sometimes been called vers de société, or occasional, or minor, but which, if it were convenient to fix upon a single name, we might perhaps name simply Verse. Poetry; Verse; Prose; Science; these will then embrace the whole cycle of Literature, -Science being here used, of course, in the sense before indicated, as the written record of facts without any further aim than that of affording or preserving information. Leaving then all comparison between these several orders of literature, it requires no long argument to show the importance of the functions fulfilled by that which we have named Verse. The indication already given of them appears to us sufficient in itself to prove that writing of this nature has its own fit place, and to disarm those arguments which would rank it as second-rate, and therefore condemnable or contemptible. Life has not so many pure and elevating pleasures, that we can afford to miss one of them.

We wish that space permitted us to pursue the history of Verse, in the larger signification claimed for it, in England. A few of the specimens already quoted have been taken from the last century, when writing of this kind abounded, which is now (in our judgment) very much less known than it should be. So great is the concentrating power of poetical form, so much, even when engaged on what is more or less fugitive and trivial, does it eliminate the pettiness of its subject, so vivid is the picture which it is thus enabled to stamp on the mind, that we venture to put Verse, in real interest, above all prose but that of the first or most imaginative quality. Those who have read, and read for a second time with increasing pleasure, that vast series of the unjustly-depreciated English poets who lived between Dryden and Cowper, know with how strange and delightful a clearness the common ways and thoughts and fashions of our own ancestors and predecessors revive before us; how much good sense, and acute observation, and strokes of real beauty, are walled up, as it were, in the collections of Johnson and Chalmers, not to speak of the anthologies of Southey, Peartch, Dodsley, and many others; with how much more invigorated a mind we rise from an hour with these verse-writers, than from reading all but the hundredth among every ninety-nine of the books of the season.' Poetry has its 'schools' and its 'imitators,'

no

no doubt; yet it is singular how far less than in prose are we affronted and wearied by that pouring from one cup into another, that dead want of originality, which is the bane of our present prose literature.

Before quitting the eighteenth century, let us note that (according to the classification here suggested) by far the finest example of Verse that English literature presents will be found, -not in Swift or Prior, great as they were, in Praed or Hood or the Antijacobin,'-but in Pope's Rape of the Lock.' And it may be added, as a mere hint thrown out in faint hope that some one may be willing to undertake the labour of writing at least one chapter in our neglected literary history, that English Verse, in its earliest form, is to be looked for amongst the anthologies of the period from Edward VI. to James I. It has there a pastoral, occasionally a moral character, verging more and more, as politics became prominent in the national mind, on satire :-the larger part of which falls strictly within our definition of Verse. Herrick may be said to mark the boundary between the first and the second period. Many of his graceful little poems are quite 'occasional' in character. The school which follows is best known, or perhaps we should say, more commonly recognised as that in which vers de société became prominent. Through Waller, Cowley, and much of Dryden, it leads us to Queen Anne and the poets already dwelt on. This was the age when to throw every-day sentiments and words into light verse was esteemed a gentlemanly accomplishment; an age now (as we have said) unfairly decried. We only wish that there were more gentlemen among us who wrote with ease,' or anything like it! Verse in that century, like music in the sixteenth, reckoned as the natural accomplishment of people comme il faut ;' the quantity produced, as we have said, was immense; nay, it is not to be denied that this form of literature at last overflowed, and that something like the stern protest of Wordsworth, or the fiery onslaught of Byron, was necessary to reinstate Poetry upon her proper throne among us. How nobly, in Cowper and Burns, she ascended that throne, we have tried to paint in a former paper; how long and how splendidly she held it, may be a fit subject for future writing. We resume to our proper task.

Praed's style, both in his romantic and his every-day vein, was manifestly formed upon Scott and Byron, Moore and Heber, He represents thus the influences of the earlier part of this century; before the deeper melodies of Coleridge and Shelley, the less artificial language of Wordsworth, the colour and profusion of Keats were known; whilst, also, the greater liveliness and clearness in expression which mark the writers named

as