polite age, can it, under any circumstances, be rendered attractive. But poetical prose, though the dullest, heaviest, clumsiest kind of literature, has, in some notorious instances, found more favour. In French, indeed, from the absolute want of a genuine poetical diction,-neither the rhythm, the rhyme, nor the reason, it may be said of the language, allowing "thoughts that breathe" to vent themselves in "words that burn,"-a florid prose style has been adopted with signal effect in the Télémaque of Fenelon, which no mastery of his native tongue could have made tolerable in French verse, any more than the most consummate mastery of our own could make tolerable to a good ear in English prose. I cannot stay to justify this remark, but I am sure that it is correct. 66 Some works of this description, however, have been extensively read in our refractory language, but their day is gone by. The pious sentiments of Hervey's Meditations," recommended the fantastic style in which they were disguised to multitudes, who persuaded themselves that they were pleased, because they supposed that, in such a case, they ought to be, with fine words, and so many of them. The interesting scenes, circumstances, and actors in "The Death of Abel," translated from the German of Gesner, in like manner, made that farrago of bad taste a favourite book for nearly half a century, The language of the original, indeed, has such compass and capabilities for every kind of composition, that poetical prose, and even prosaic verse, may be made agreeable in it; but no versions of either, into our severe and uncompromising tongue, can rise above the dead level of mediocrity. Ossian's Poems, as Macpherson's rhapsodies were called, obtained, in their turn, a sudden, factitious, and deservedly transient reputation. From whatever relics of ancient song these may have been borrowed,-a question with which we have nothing to do at present, they are composed in such "a Babylonish dialect," that it might be presumed no ear, accustomed to the melody of pure verse or the freedom of eloquent prose, could endure the incongruities of a stylé in which broken verse of various measures is blended with halting prose of unmanageable cadences and compound sentences, as difficult to read and as dissonant to hear as a strain of music would be in execution and effect, if every bar were set to a different time and in a different key. Horace's description of a heterogeneous body, compiled of flesh, fish, and fowl, to make certainly no "Some faultless monster which the world ne'er saw"→ might aptly enough be applied to characterize the cacophonous rhythm, ill-jointed clauses, and dislocated feet, in all kinds of metre, of this prodigious birth of a distempered brain; in which iambics, trochees, napæsts, dactyls, spondees, and every form of syllable, word, accent, or quantity, that can enter into English sentences, are jumbled in juxtaposition, like disrupted strata, where convulsions of nature have thrown down mountains and heaved up valleys. Characteristics of Prose and Verse. There is reason as well as custom in that conventional simplicity which best becomes prose, and that conventional ornament which is allowed to verse; but splendid ornament is no more essential to verse than naked simplicity is to prose. The gravest cirtics place tragedy in the highest rank of poetical achievements, "Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy, With sceptred pall, come sweeping by, Or the tale of Troy divine."--Il Penseroso G Yet the noblest, most impassioned scenes are frequently distinguished from prose only by the cadence of the verse: which, in this species of composition, is permitted to be so loose, that where the diction is the most exquisite the melody of the rhythm can scarcely be perceived except by the nicest ear. King Lear, driven to madness by the ingratitude and cruelty of his two elder daughters, is found by the youngest, Cordelia, asleep upon a bed, in a tent in the French camp, after having passed the night in the open air, exposed to the fury of the elements during a tremendous thunder-storm. A physician and attendants are watching over the sufferer. While the dutiful daughter is pouring out her heart in tenderness over him, recounting his wrongs, his afflictions, and the horrors of the storm, the king awakes ;-bu we will take the scene itself. After some inquiries, concerning his royal patient, the physician asks. "So please your majesty, That we may wake the king? He hath slept long. CORDELIA. Be govern'd by your knowledge, and proceed GENTLEMAN. Ay, madam; in the heaviness of his sleep, PHYSICIAN. Be by, good madam, when we do awake him; CORDELIA. Very well. PHYSICIAN. Please you draw near. Louder the music there' CORDELIA. Oh, my dear father! Restoration hang KENT. Kind and dear princess! CORDELIA. Had you not been their father, these white flakes Of quick, cross lightning? * * * * Mine enemy's dog, + Though he had bit me, should have stood that night PHYSICIAN. Madam, do you; 'tis fittest. CORDELIA. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty! LEAR. You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:- Upon a wheel of fire. Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I will not swear these are my hands:-let's see. CORDELIA. O look upon me, sir! And hold your hands in benediction o'er me :- LEAR. Pray, do not mock me, 1 am a very foolish, fond old man, Fourscore and upward; and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. 'Methinks I should know you, and know this man; To be my child Cordelia! CORDELIA. And so I am; I am." It cannot be doubted that the whole of this scene is poetry of the highest proof; and yet, except in the passage referring to the storm (in which those wonderful lines descriptive of the lightning might have been struck out by the flash itself), there is scarcely a phrase which could not have been employed in the humblest prose record of this conversation. Try the experiment: break up the rhythm, the only thing that constitutes the lines verse, and mark the issue: the same sentiments will remain, in nearly the same words; yet the latter being differently collocated, and wanting the inimitable cadence of such verse as none but Shakspeare has been able to construct, the charm will be broken, and the pathos subdued, though no mutilation could destroy it. How much the power of poetry depends upon the nice inflections of rhythm alone may be proved, by taking the finest passages of Milton or Shakspeare, and merely putting them into prose, with the least possible variation of the words themselves. The attempt would be like gathering up dewdrops, which appear jewels and |