might lay bloom on the cheek of beauty; but Shakspere's pencil was suited only to imbrown coarser manhood:

Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came,
The next in order, as the next in name;

With pleased attention midst his scenes we find
Each glowing thought that warms the female mind;
His ev'ry strain the smiles and graces own,

But stronger Shakspere felt for man alone.

What is Walpole's sneer at Thomson to this? And who will hereafter complain of critical insensibility or twisted eyesight? The author of the Odes to the Passions and Evening was blind and deaf to Miranda, Imogen, Constance, Juliet, Desdemona, Katherine, and the long gallery of nature's beauties.

One poet there was whom Walpole could comprehend and admire with all his heart-Dr. Darwin. He told Hannah More that the Botanic Garden was an admirable poem, abounding in similes, "beautiful, fine, and sometimes sublime.” The Triumph of Flora he considered to be "enchantingly imagined;" and the description of the creation of the world out of chaos, to be the grandest passage in any author or language! Thomson is a king of diamonds, with a gaudy train; and Darwin is the brother and companion of Milton. I am not running down the Lichfield

Virgil. His talents were great. In his own way he is surprising. In a certain theatrical splendour of impersonation, such as the man escaping from a house on fire

Pale Danger glides along the flaming roof

he may be compared with Mason. His descriptions of the infant on the mother's breast, the army of Cambyses in the desert, and Love riding on the lion, are worthy of being remembered with Gray. He is astonishingly happy in occasional epithets-reflections of a poem in a word; as when he speaks of the bristling plumes of the eagle. I may say of him, in the language of one of his friends, even more grandiloquent than himself, but shrewd and clever withal-His poetry "is a string of poetical brilliants; but the eye will be apt to want the interstitial black velvet to give effect to their lustre." And now that the gossip of his flatterers about the "softness of Claude," the "sublimity of Salvator," &c., is forgotten, criticism may fairly give him his due. Cary compared the Botanic Garden to a picture by Breughel-flower or velvet Breughel, as he was called. And the resemblance is obvious. If Darwin had painted a Madonna and Child, he would have put them, as Breughel did, in a garland of flowers.

He worked after a bad pattern. Akenside was his favourite. An universal glitter strikes the eye. The reader feels that oppression of light which Gray apprehended in his own splendid fragment on Education and Government. Where all is finished and all shines, the general effect fails, by wanting the chiaro-scuro.

JULY 26th.-The longer we live among books and men, the less we ought to be surprised by anything we read or hear. But this morning my caution was quite overturned by a philosopher and a poet. Thus writes Sir Thomas Brown:"Another misery there is in affection, that whom we truly love like ourselves we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain the idea of their faces; and it is no wonder, for they are ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our own." And this is the commentary of Mr. Coleridge :-" A thought I have often had, and once expressed it in a line. The fact is certain." Strange delusion! The words should be reversed. Rather say: We forget our own faces in the faces of those whom we love. We disappear in themhave no living, breathing existence apart from theirs. Our recollection is not limited to the features, the shape of the countenance, the complexion. Nothing has faded. The colour of the

eyes in the changefulness of pleasure, sadness, health, or pain, lives before us, as if Titian or Lely had kept watching them with a pencil. No canvas absorbs colours like memory. It makes every thing minister to itself. A field-path, a seat under trees, a garden-bed, a particular flower, recal the posture, the look, even the glow of sunset, or fainter moonshine, that tinged the cheek or hair of a dear companion in some hour of unusual interest. John Newton, Cowper's friend, said, in after life, that the face of the young girl whom he so passionately loved, used to shine down upon the lonely deck as he stood at the wheel, steering the ship through the tempest. Amid foam and lightning, or the dreadfuller storms of his own troubled spirit, there was she -rebuking, cheering, and blessing him.

This reviving influence applies, in a pathetic fulness, to the departed-the lost. Affection has its pure crystal, never stained or broken except in death. The hand and the mirror fall together. On this bright surface of love's remembrance, we behold our friends with the clearness of natural faces reflected in a glass; and we see them in connexion with the parting, closing scene. That room may have crumbled before the hammer, or the saw; its furniture may be scattered or destroyed. But for us all things remain as they were.

Not a

chair has been moved; not a fold of drapery has been rumpled by time. The Bible lies open upon the bed; the book of prayer has the familiar page turned down; the watch hangs by the pillow; the "asking eye" turns to ours! Thus, indeed, affection makes the dear faces always present to us; and instead of their looks being effaced, we forget our own.

JULY 27th.-The "Homeric" question, as I may call it, seems to be the silliest that ever was put to a critical vote. Schlegel denied that the poet was blind-Coleridge, that he lived. One gives him eyes; the other takes his life. They who adopt the German theory of multiplied authorship must be ignorant of the unity of the Iliad. It is as much built on a plan as St. Paul's; the master-mind is felt in every part. It would be as true to call Wren a concrete name for the bricklayers of the Cathedral, as Homer a traditional synonyme with the Iliad. However, I have nothing to do with the quarrels of ingenious persons, poetical or otherwise:

"Twere wiser far

For me, enamour'd of sequester'd scenes
And charm'd with rural beauty, to repose

Where chance may throw me, beneath elm or vine,
My languid limbs when summer sears the plains;
Or when rough winter rages, on the soft

And sheltered sofa, while the nitrous air

Feeds a blue flame, and makes a cheerful hearth.