a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth.

It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life of which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances. But though not useful, it may be said it is highly ornamental, and deserves to be cultivated for the pleasure it yields. Even if this be granted, it does not follow that a writer of poetry in the present state of society is not a waster of his own time, and a robber of that of others. Poetry is not one of those arts which, like painting, require repetition and multiplication, in order to be diffused among society. There are more good poems already existing than are sufficient to employ that portion of life which any mere reader and recipient of poetical impressions should devote to them, and these having been produced in poetical times, are far superior in all the characteristics of poetry to the artificial reconstructions of a few morbid ascetics in unpoetical times. To read the promiscuous rubbish of the present time to the exclusion of the select treasures of the past, is to substitute the worse for the better variety of the same mode of enjoyment.

But in whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study and it is a lamentable spectacle to see minds, capable of better things, running to seed in the specious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion. Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to sleep by the jingle of silver bells.

As to that small portion of our contemporary poetry, which is neither descriptive, nor narrative, nor dramatic, and which, for want of a better name, may be called ethical, the most distinguished portion of it, consisting merely of querulous, egotistical rhapsodies, to express the writer's high dissatisfaction with the world and everything in it, serves only to confirm what has been said of the semi-barbarous character of poets, who from singing dithyrambics and "Io Triumphe," while society was savage, grow rabid, and out of their element, as it becomes polished and enlightened.

Now when we consider that it is not to the thinking and studious, and scientific and philosophical part of the community, not to those whose minds are bent on the pursuit and promotion of permanently useful ends and aims, that poets must address their minstrelsy, but to that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to anything beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted; charmed by harmony, moved by sentiment, excited by passion, affected by pathos, and exalted by sublimity; harmony, which is language on the rack of Procrustes; sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head when we consider that the great and permanent interests of human society become more and more the main-spring of intellectual pursuit; that in proportion as they become so, the subordinacy of the ornamental to the useful will be more and more seen and acknowledged, and that therefore the progress of useful art and science,

and of moral and political knowledge, will continue more and more to withdraw attention from frivolous and unconducive, to solid and conducive studies that therefore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish in the proportion of its number to that of the rest of the reading public, but will also sink lower and lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement: when we consider that the poet must still please his audience, and must therefore continue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community is rising above it: we may easily conceive that the day is not distant, when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been and this not from any decrease either of intellectual power, or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rhymesters, and their olympic judges, the magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry, as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and, knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with which the drivellers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair.

VIII.

LETTER OF MESSRS. JOHN BALLANTYNE & Co. CONCERNING "THE WANDERING JEW."

SIR,

Edinburgh, September 24th, 1810.

The delay which occurred in our reply to you, respecting the poem you have obligingly offered us for publication, has arisen from our literary friends and advisers (at least such as we have confidence in) being in the country at this season, as is usual, and the time they. have bestowed on its perusal.

We are extremely sorry at length, after the most mature deliberation, to be under the necessity of declining the honour of being the publishers of the present poem; -not that we doubt its success, but that it is perhaps, better suited to the character, and liberal feelings of the English, than the bigoted spirit, which yet pervades

This is the letter referred to in Shelley's letter to Stockdale, dated the 28th of September, 1810, and printed at p. 332 of the present volume. Mr. Garnett makes the following very pertinent remarks on this letter (Macmillan's Magazine, June, 1860, pp. 103-4):—

"Now, had Shelley told any of his friends that the 'Lady of the Lake' had been assailed in Scotland on the ground of atheism, and professed to have derived his information from the Ballantynes, the circumstance would ere this have made its appearance in print as a proof of his irresistible tend

ency to 'hallucinations,' and his 'inability to relate anything exactly as it happened.' Here, however, we see that he would not have spoken without authority. It is, of course, quite possible that the Ballantynes may themselves have been mystified or mystificators-otherwise it would appear that it had, in that fortunate age, been vouchsafed to certain Scotch clergymen to attain the ne plus ultra of absurdity

'Topmost stars of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane'

or insane, whichever may be the

many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter Scott, is assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual, and Evangelical magazines, and instructors, for having promulgated atheistical doctrines in the Lady of the Lake.

We beg you will have the goodness to advise us how it should be returned, and we think its being consigned to the care of some person in London, would be more likely to ensure its safety than addressing it to Horsham. We are, sir,

Your most obedient humble servants,

JOHN BALLANTYNE & Co.

·

correct reading. It is needless to add that the Wandering Jew' is quite guiltless of atheism, or any 'ism' but an occasional solecism. Whatever precautions may have been taken to ensure the safety of the MS., they failed to bring it into Stockdale's hands. He never received it, and it seems to have remained peaceably at Edinburgh till its discovery in 1831, when a portion of it appeared in Fraser's Magazine, and has since been reprinted in one of the many unauthorised editions of Shelley's works. According to Captain Medwin, indeed, Shelley left it at his lodgings in Edinburgh in 1811. But the Captain evidently knew nothing of the negotiation with the Ballantynes, which affords a much more plausible explanation