of this break of the couplet in his Cambuscan; a story which lingered in the ear of Milton. And Milton himself, in a passing way, has used the license nobly, in the lines before quoted.

Listening to what the unshorn Apollo sings

To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings

Immortal nectar to her kingly sire :

Then passing through the spheres of watchful fire
And misty regions of wide air," &c.

I make no apology for repeating thus much of the passage. Fine music provokes repetition.* The following is one of the passages alluded to in Chaucer. It

to the general formality of their rhyming system, would appear unaccountable, if the national character, for so many generations, did not seem made up of a similar compound of extremes, of a rejection and approbation of restraint, each excess tending to a counterpoise from the other. Our gallant neighbours, however, treated the world with a fine practical specimen of the beau ideal in the year 1830, a super-epical chapter in the history of nations, imaginative enough in all conscience, and the only vi et armis piece of Christian warfare ever truly described by those contradictory words. Let us not doubt the " preferment" of it in the long run.

There is a beautiful, and manifestly conscious use of this pause in the concluding passage of Mr. Campbell's Pleasures of Hope.

exhibits several examples of the like modulation in its

progress.

"At Sarra, in the land of Tartariè,

Ther dwelt a king that warried Russiè,

Through which ther dièd many a doughty man :—

This noble king was clepèd Cambuscan,

Which in his time was of so great renown,

That ther was no wher, in no regioun,

So excellent a lord in allè thing:

Him lacked nought that longeth to a king
As of the sect of which that he was borne;
He kept his law to which he was ysworn;

And thereto he was hardie, wise, and rich,

And piteous, and just, and alway yliche, (always alike)

Trewe of his word, benigne and honourable,

Of his courage as any centre stable;

Young, fresh, and strong, in arms desirous,

As any bachelor of all his house.

A fair person he was, and fortunate,

And kept alway, so well, real estate, (royal estate)

That ther was no wher such another man.

This noble king, this Tartar, Cambuscùn,

The poet has intimated the marked pleasure he took in it, by his full stop, and the dash by which it is strengthened.

"Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime

Peal'd their first notes to sound the march of Time,

Thy joyous youth began—but not to fade.—

When all the sister planets have decayed."

Hadde two sonnes by Elfeta his wife,

Of which the eldest sonne hight Algarsife—" &c.

So in the Knight's Tale, after the paragraph ending,

"Ther as this Emelie had her playing.

Bright was the sonne, and clear the morwening”

which, by the way, is a noble re-commencing verse. The trissyllable mōrwěning is particularly beautiful, --much better than morning, or even than morrowning, which was its next modification.

It seems to me, that beautiful as are the compositions which the English language possesses in the heroic couplet, both by deceased and living writers, it remains for some poet hereafter to perfect the versification, by making a just compromise between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets in general, (who were greatest in greater measures,) and the regularity of Dryden himself; who, noble as his management of it is, beats, after all, too much upon the rhyme. It hinders his matter from having due pre-eminence before his manner. If any one could unite the vigour of Dryden with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late Mr. Crabbe, and the lovely poetic consciousness in the Lamia of Keats, in which the lines seem to take pleasure in the

progress of their own beauty, like sea-nymphs luxuriating through the water, he would be a perfect master of rhyming heroic verse.

my

life;

To quit these considerations of the more bodily part of poetry, and say something of the spirit of the following pieces :-I took up the subject of the Story of Rimini at one of the happiest periods of otherwise I confess I should have chosen a less melancholy one. Not that melancholy subjects are unpopular, or that pain, for any great purpose, is to be avoided; much less so sweet a one as that of pity. I am apt enough to think, with the poet's good-natured title to his play, that "All's well that ends well;" and am as willing as any man to bear my share of suffering, for the purpose of bringing about that moral to human story. My life has been half made up of the effort. Neither is every tragical subject so melancholy as the word might be supposed to imply; for not to mention, those balms of beauty and humanity with which great poets reconcile the sharpest wounds they give us, there are stories, (Hero and Leander is one of them,) in which the persons concerned are so innocent, and appear to have been happy for so long a time, that the most distressing termination of their felicity hardly hinders a secret conviction, that they might well suffer

bitterly for so short a one. Their tragedy is the termination of happiness, and not the consummation of misery.

But besides the tendency I have from animal spirits, as well as from need of comfort, to indulge my fancy in happier subjects, it appears to me, that the world has become experienced enough to be capable of receiving its best profit through the medium of pleasurable, instead of painful, appeals to its reflection. There is an old philosophic conviction reviving among us as a popular one, (and there could not be one more desirable,) that it is time for those who would benefit their species, to put an end to recriminations, and denouncements, and threats, and agree to consider the sufferings of mankind as arising out of want of knowledge rather than defect of goodness,-as intimations which, like the physical pain of a wound, or a galling ligament, tell us that we are to set about removing the causes of pain, instead of venting the spleen of it.

Agreeably to this conviction, and to the goodnature of it, it appears desirable, that tragical stories should be so written, as to leave no chance of misconception with regard to the first discernible causes of the error that produced the tragedy. Now what is this first cause in the story which stands at the head of