SONNETS BY FELTHAM BURGHLEY. "Only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself Shakespeare to Earl of Southampton. LONDON LONGMAN AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW. 1855. 280.m. 96. "Voici merveilles: nous avons bien plus de poëtes que de juges et interpretes de poësie. Il est plus aysé de la faire, que de la cognoistre—a certaine mesure basse, on la peut juger par les preceptes et par art. Mais la bonne, la su presme, la divine, est au-dessus des regles et de la raison."Essais de Montaigne, Liv. I., chap. 36. WARRINGTON and Co., Printers, Strand. PREFACE. READER, for the first time, Feltham Burghley has the honour to address you. In doing so, he perpetrates two follies. He has written some short poems, and a long preface; he has built a very little house. but has erected a marvellous large entrance. Were it not that he has given you his name he would make a mystery of it, for mystery would serve two purposes: the common purpose of mystery-which is to afford concealment, and the less common purpose-but assured concomitant, the excitation of interest. Anonymous writing is the helmet of Pluto to him who dares the Gorgon of criticism,-for, although, he may ultimately slay the Medusa (out of whose head only blood, no brains appear to have dropped), the encounter is at all times of considerable peril. When the writer is nameless, he offers only his shadow to critical flagellation, which the most thin-skinned may endure. The punishment is even yet more slender than that which Xerxes inflicted upon the Ocean. But I, Feltham Burghley, am of sanguine temperament, sociable disposition, and am naturally trustful of mankind-so that disguise would prove an encumbrance, and an injury, rather than a benefit to me. If any critic find me to maintain heterodox opinions in matters of poetry, I shall try to feel grateful when he steps forward to correct me, even though his method lack courtesy, and though I may tremble at the severity of his logic, so it be logic, I will promise a duteous submission. At present I will pass on to what I conceive to be the great question of the day in respect of poetry. What should be its language and style? Naturalness is the pet theory of Wordsworth. Poetry ought to be clothed in the "language really used by men." Yet there should be introduced "a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." Now I, Feltham, was always a bad logician at school and subsequently-but it appears to me that the foregoing remark amounts to this, that poetical language should not differ from that used by men, but that it should differ from it. To nicely adjust the proper diction from this elementary principle would be a task insuperable to my metaphysics. In France, the barbarity of Shakespeare's plays what we affords the constant pabulum of the critic-there is no unity of action-Shakespeare springs from Venice to Cyprus, and twenty years in his mind may elapse in the shifting of a scene. Dr. Johnson, greatly to his credit, and much to the surprise of the world, gave his sanction to this space-and-time-despising characteristic of our great Bard. He saw, all see now, that the interest of a dramatic representation does not depend upon stage arrangements; that we do not believe at any moment that the stage is Venice, and consequently we are not shocked if we are told in five minutes time that it is Cyprus. The vital interest of the representation resides in the conformity of the sentiments and actions to those of human nature. In these, Shakespeare never fails, in these, the Frenchman seldom succeeds. Now, the naturalness of Wordsworth looks something like a re-institution of these stiff impracticable rules; or, to take its origin in a similar error, in a desire to protect mediocrity from the perpetration of blunders. He was distinctly conscious of the tinsel commonplaces that bad poets have delighted in ever since the time of Pope, and, like every man of cultivated taste, he despised, what is called poetic diction, from the bottom of his heart. Poetry is much indebted to him for his exertions in emancipating her from the trammels of common-place-but, it must be a wrapt |