BOOKS.

MOXON'S MINIATURE POETS.*

THE editor of this selection from Sir Walter Scott's poems, Mr. Mortimer Collins, calls the author of Marmion the Homer of Scotland. This title of panegyric seems to us a very mistaken one, if only for this clear reason,—that Homer's verse was the medium in which the poet expressed all he saw and knew of Greek life and nature, while Sir Walter Scott's verse was by no means the medium in which be expressed most easily and most naturally what he knew and saw of life and nature. So far is this from the truth, that it is only now and again,—say, in a song of Friar Tuck's or Madge Wildfire's, or in one of the humorous and sententious mottoes composed to illustrate the beat chapters of his novels,—that Sir Walter Scott ever embodied his most dramatic and most characteristic thoughts in verse at all. His humour, his wide knowledge of character, his semi- Shakespearian knowledge of the Scottish peasantry, his sagacious aphorisms on human manners, his finest conceptions of historical figures, and of the historical meaning of special periods, not only . were not rendered in his verse, but were conceived in a style and mood altogether different in kind from that which animated his poetry. Homer's poetry was a medium naturally adapted for all he knew, and saw, and felt,—Sir Walter Scott's only for one com- paratively narrow vein of his nature,--the chivalric and romantic vein, in which he chronicled the exploits of love and war. You see this not only in the very ballad-metre in which his verse is almost exclusively composed,--.a metre in which it would have been utterly impossible for Sir Walter Scott's large and genial humour to pour itself out,—but in the purely romantic tinge which the characters of all his poems take. To compare, for instance, the Stuarts of his poems with the Stuarts . of his novels is in a small way to compare Scott with Homer. In the Knight of Snowdon of the Lady of the Lake or the James IV. of Marmion we have mere romantic pictures, without individu- ality, as without truth. In the Mary Stuart of the Abbot, or the Charles II. of Peveril of the Peak, or the James and Charles of the Fortunes of Nigel, we have historical portraits of the most striking value, however lightly the painter may have passed over the worst lines in the countenance, and however strongly he may have marked some of the most noble. In a word, to Homer and all poets of the Homeric class, verse is the medium of the truest, and largest, and easiest delineation. The real and the ideal alike,—for the ideal is but one element of the real to such poets as these, — take their place side by side, blended in the most perfect union, in poetry of the first class. But that sort of verse which, like Scott's is only used to express the romantic side of life, the enter- prises of love and war, of danger and despair, of eager hope and joy, can never be properly compared to the poetry of the former class. In Sir Walter Scott, all the width, all the play, all the lnunour, almost all the nature, are reserved for his prose ;—with the exception, as we have said, of a few dramatic songs and a few pithy maxims, it is only the dash, the romance, the Salvator Rosa side of life, which he throws into poetry. Good and spirited as it is, his verse is never keen, and shrewd, and playful, and observant, and rich, like his prose. In fact, the ideal side of his mind was but seldom really and truly blended with the real. Even in his novels you generally have the romance kept very much apart from the realism ;—not always, indeed, for in his great historical pictures he seems to have had just the requisite impulse needful to balance the two ; but, for the most part, and except when he had the imaginative stimulus of recall- ing the real figures of a past age, he is only too apt to let the stream of romance and the stream of living observation run side • A Selection from the Works of Sir Walter Scott, Barintet. Edited by Mortimer Collius. London: Mexon mid Co.

Selection front the Works of Lord Houghton. .ondon Iflosou and Co.

by side, without any thorough and permanent mingling. Meg Merrilies, for instance, is to Dandle Dinmont much what all the romantic figures of Sir Walter Scott's ballads are to the historical figures of his greatest tales. Mr. Collins would find it hard to show that Scott's verse was ever in any degree the natural medium of expression for his largest nature. He threw into it his sym- pathy with the enterprises of knights, and the love of lovers, and his admiration of external nature, and little more. Homer threw into his poetry the whole of his nature.

Limited, however, as Sir Waiter Scott's poetry is,—vastly inferior as it is to the work which best represents his whole power as an artist,—it is good of its kind, and a selection, like the present, intended "to guide those who read it to the complete works of the poet," has its charm. Mr. Collins is absurdly magniloquent when he describes his task as having for its object, "to quicken a desire to enter the temple whose statues have the true Olympian air, whose capitals mock the acanthus with their marble wreathing." One of his objects should surely have been not merely to incite to further study, but to collect the easily separable bits of Sir Walter's poetry in a single collection, even for those who know it well already. And in this view of his work, we could wish he had made no extracts from the narrative poems except the songs embodied in them, and had collected all the Mottoes and songs from the romances. There would still have been enough to give some fair conception of the rapid march of Sir Walter's poetic romance, and we should have had a most useful and convenient collection of his poetry of wisdom, as well as selection from his poetry of sentiment. But we cannot quarrel with Mr. Collins for having aimed at soinething different from this. Certainly, the most perfect conceivable specimens of Sir Walter's power as a poet would require lengthened extract from the body of the narrative poems, as well as the collection from them of the interspersed lyrics. And, of course, long extracts from the body of Marmion and Scott's other romances in verse, entirely prevent, in any book of moderate compass like those of Mr. Moxou's series, a complete collection of the songs and mottoes.

Mr. Collins's selection seems to us, on the whole, very good, and guided by a true feeling for Scott's genius. Of course he leaves out often what we should have liked to see him select, and selects often what we should have left out,—but this is inevitable, and he has at least selected nothing that is unworthy of Scott, if, in the case of a man whose poetical writings 86 uniformly reached a cer- tain standard of merit any such piece there be. The only criticism we have to offer is on the arrangement. Mr. Collins has, we think, made a great mistake in arranging the mottoes which he has selected from each novel all together, as if in a quasi-chrono- logic order, motto to chapter v., motto to chapter viii., and so on. This seems to us a hard, unpoetical, and tminstructive method of arrangement to pursue. We do not, of course, object to the exact references, which arc on every account desirable and useful, but to the failure to arrange in some relation to sub- ject, and with a view to give related thoughts on a certain class of living interests. These mottoes went nearer towards giving Sir Walter Scott's aphorisms on life with a sort of Shakespearian width, pithiness, and sagacity, than anything else that he embodied either in his prose or poetical writings, and it would have been a new poetical pleasure to find them so grouped us to connect his aphorisms on connected subjects. Thus the first two of the three following, taken from the mottoes to consecutive chapters in "The Monastery," are quite Shakespearian in their wide, easy sagacity of insight, but they have absolutely no intellectual relation to each other :—

" CHAPTER XIV.

"Nay, let me have the friends who eat my victuals, As various as my dishes. The feast's naught Where one huge plate predominates—John Plaintext, He shall be mighty beef, our English staple; The worthy Alderman, a butter'd dumpling; You pair of whisker'd Cornets, ruffs and trees; Their friend the Dandy, a green goose in sippets. And so the board is spread at once and fill'd On the same principle—Variety.

"CHAPTER XV.

"He strikes no coin, 'tis true, but coins new phrases,

And vends them forth as knaves vend gilded counters, Which Wil30 men scorn, and fools accept in payment.

"CHAPTER XVI.

"A courtier extraordinary, who by diet Of meats and drinks, his temperate exercise, Choice music, frequent bath, his horary shifts Of shirts and waistcoats, means to immortalize Mortality itself, and makes the essence Of his whole happiness the trim of court."

Now, here the two last happen to be intellectually associated,—the

last but one describing the art of making words which foolish per- sons accept as things, and the last describing the kind of man who most profits by this wisdom, and is most interested in making clothes take the place of the person who should be inside the clothes. But they are put together not for this reason, but because the motto to chapter xvi. was next in order to the motto to chapter xv. ; and the motto to chapter xiv., which precedes them, is really quite out of place where it stands. We think, too, Mi.. Collins has left out too many mottoes of the first order of merit as sententious sayings. He gives us none from a great many of the romances at all,—none, for example, from Wood- stock, yet how humorous and Shakespearian in its power is this, from the novel we have last named, on two men echoing each other's sayings for want of an independent mind !- "Here have we one head

Upon two bodies,—your two-headed bullock Is but an ass to such a prodigy.

These two have but one meaning, thought, and counsel; And when the single noddle bath spoke out,

The four legs scrape assent to it."

If Mr. Collins had taken more pains in arranging such sayings as these, so as to give in a single group Scott's criticisms on some one . kind of manners, life, character, and human strength or weakness, he would have added a great charm to a volume already sufficiently attractive.

The selection from Lord Houghton's poems was, of course, a much easier task, and has been well done. If we had any criticism to make upon it, it would be rather for faults of com- mission than omission. We see with great pleasure the beautiful lines otu Wilkie's conversation with a Geronomite friar in some Spanish conven,t on the picture of the Last Supper. They are among Lord Houghton's finest verses, and were left out from his last selection:— " A SPANISH ANECDOTE.

"it was a holy usage to record,

Upon each Refectory's side or end, This last mysterious Supper of our Lord, That meanest appetites might upward tend.

"Within the Convent-Palace of old Spain,

Rich with the gifts and monuments of kings, Hung such a picture, said by some to reign

The sovereign glory of those wondrous things.

"A Painter of far fame, in deep delight, Dwelt on each beauty he so well discerned, While, in low tones, a grey Geronomite This answer to his ecstacy returned,— " Stranger! I have received my daily meal In this good company now threescore years, And thou, whoe'er thou art, carest hardly feel How Time these lifeless images endears.

" Lifeless,—ah, no! both Faith and Art have given That passing hour a life of endless rest, And every soul who loves the food of Heaven May to that table come a welcome guest :

" Lifeless,—ah, no! while in mine heart are stored Sad memories of my brethren dead and gone, Familiar places vacant round our board, And still that silent Supper lasting on ; "'While I review my youth,—what I was then, — What I am now, and ye, beloved ones all ! It seems as if these were the living men, And we the coloured shadows on the wall.'"

But there are some poems included which can scarcely rank as poems at all, like the rubadub verses on the funeral of Napoleon. Lord Houghton's forte is graceful sentiment with a touch of subtlety, not melodramatic rhetoric. "The Violet Girl" and "Half-Truth" are, perhaps, next to the lines we have quoted, the best specimens of what he has done and can do better than any other of our minor poets.