The analogy, it must be confessed, is not very striking; but, nevertheless, it is not altogether void of propriety. The poet reasons thus: as the south wind, though generally attended with rain, is often known to dispel the clouds, and render the weather serene; so do you, though generally on the rack of thought, remember to relax sometimes, and drown your cares in wine. As the south wind is not always moist, so you ought not always to be dry. A few instances of inaccuracy, or mediocrity, can never derogate from the superlative merit of Homer and Virgil, whose poems are the great magazines, replete with every species of beauty and magnificence, particularly abounding with similes, which astonish, delight, and transport the

reader.

Every simile ought not only to be well adapted to the subject, but also to include every excellence of description, and to be coloured with the warmest tints of poetry. Nothing can be more happily hit off than the following in the Georgics, to which the poet compares Orpheus lamenting his lost Eurydice:—

Qualis populeâ marens Philomela sub umbrâ
Amissos queritur foetus, quos durus arator
Observans nido implumes detraxit; at illa
Flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen
Integrat, et moestis late loca questibus implet.
So Philomela, from th' umbrageous wood,
In strains melodious mourns her tender brood,
Snatched from the nest by some rude plough-
man's hand:

On some lone bough the warbler takes her stand;
The live-long night she mourns the cruel wrong,
And hill and dale resound the plaintive song.

Here we not only find the most scrupulous propriety, and the happiest choice, in comparing the Thracian bard to Philomel, the poet of the grove; but also the most beautiful description, containing a fine touch of the pathos-in which last particular, indeed, Virgil, in our opinion, excels all other poets, whether ancient or modern.

One would imagine that nature had exhausted itself, in order to embellish the poems of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, with

similes and metaphors. The first of these very often uses the comparison of the wind, the whirlwind, the hail, the torrent, to express the rapidity of his combatants; but when he comes to describe the velocity of the immortal horses that drew the chariot of Juno, he raises his ideas to the subject, and, as Longinus observes, measures every leap by the whole breadth of the horizon.

Οσσον δ' ἠεροειδὲς ἀνὴρ ἴδεν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν Ἥμενος ἐν σκοπιῇ, λεύσσων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον,

Τόσσον ἐπιθρώσκουσι θεῶν ὑψηχέες ἵπποι.

For, as a watchman, from some rock on high,
O'er the wide main extends his boundless eye;
Through such a space of air, with thund'ring
sound,

At every leap th' immortal coursers bound.

The celerity of this goddess seems to be a favourite idea with the poet; for in another place he compares it to the thought of a traveller revolving in his mind the different places he had seen, and passing through them, in imagination, more swift than the lightning flies from east to west.

In the third

Homer's best similes have been copied by Virgil and almost every succeeding poet, howsoever they may have varied in the manner of expression. book of the Iliad, Menelaus seeing Paris is compared to a hungry lion espying a hind or goat :

Ωστε λέων ἐχάρη μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι κύρσας

Εὐρὼν ἢ ἔλαφον κεραόν, ἢ ἄγριον αἶγα,

Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds
A gamesome goat who frisks about the folds,
Or beamy stag that grazes on the plain;
He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane:
He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws-
The prey lies panting underneath his paws;
He fills his fainish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er
With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the
gore.-DRYDEN.

The reader will perceive that Virgil has improved the simile in one particular, and in another fallen short of his original. The description of the lion shaking his mane, opening his hideous jaws distained with the blood of his prey, is great and picturesque; but, on the other hand, he has omitted the circumstance of devouring it without being intimidated or restrained by the dogs and youths that surround him-a circumstance that adds greatly to our idea of his strength, intrepidity, and importance.

more severe.

ESSAY XVII.

Hyperbole. Of all the figures in poetry, that called the hyperbole is managed with the greatest difficulty. The hyperbole is an exagge ration with which the Muse is indulged for the better illustration of her subject, when she is warmed into enthusiasm. Quintilian calls it an ornament of the bolder kind. Demetrius Phalereus is still He says the hyperbole is of all forms of speech the most frigid; Máλιστα δὲ ἡ ὑπερβολὴ ψυχρότατον πάντων: but this must be understood with some grains of allowance. Poetry is animated by the passions; and all the passions exaggerate. Passion itself is a magnifying medium. There are beautiful instances of the hyperbole in the Scripture, which a reader of sensibility cannot read without being strongly affected. The difficulty lies in choosing such hyperboles as the subject will admit of; for, according to the definition of Theophrastus, the frigid in style is that which exceeds the expression suitable to the subject. The judgment does not revolt against Homer for representing the horses of Ericthonius running over the standing corn without breaking off the heads, because the whole is considered as a fable, and the north wind is represented as their sire; but the imagination is a little startled, when Virgil,

in imitation of this hyperbole, exhibits Camilla as flying over it without even touching the tops:

Illa vel intactæ segetis per summa volaret
Gramina.

This elegant author, we are afraid, has, into the frigid, in straining to improve upon some other occasions, degenerated upon his great master.

Homer, in the Odyssey, a work which Longinus does not scruple to charge with bearing the marks of old age, describes a storm in which all the four winds were concerned together:

Σὺν δ' Εὐρός τε, Νοτός τ ̓ ἔπεσε, Ζεφυρός τε δυσαής,

Καὶ Βορέης αιθρηγενέτης μέγα λύμα κυλίν δων.

We know that such a contention of contrary blasts could not possibly exist in nature; for, even in hurricanes, the winds

blow alternately from different points of the description, and adds to its extrathe compass. Nevertheless, Virgil adopts vagance:

Incubuere mari, totumque à sedibus imis Una Eurusque Notusque ruunt, creberque procellis

Africus.

Here the winds not only blow together, but they turn the whole body of the ocean topsy-turvy:

East, west, and south, engage with furions

sweep,

And from its lowest bed upturn the foaming deep.

The north wind, however, is still more mischievous:

-Stridens aquilone procella Velum adversa ferit, fluctusque ad sidera tollit. The sail then Boreas rends with hideous cry, And whirls the madd'ning billows to the sky.

The motion of the sea between Scylla and Charybdis is still more magnified; and Etna is exhibited as throwing out volumes of flame which brush the stars. Such expressions as these are not intended as a real representation of the thing specified: they are designed to strike the reader's imagination; but they generally serve as marks of the author's sinking under his own ideas, who, apprehensive

of injuring the greatness of his own conception, is hurried into excess and extravagance.

Quintilian allows the use of hyperbole when words are wanting to express any thing in its just strength or due energy: then, he says, it is better to exceed in expression than fall short of the conception; but he likewise observes, that there is no figure or form of speech so apt to run into fustian: "Nec alia magis via in какoŋAíar itur."

If the chaste Virgil has thus trespassed upon poetical probability, what can we expect from Lucan but hyperboles even more ridiculously extravagant? He represents the winds in contest, the sea in suspense, doubting to which it shall give way. He affirms, that its motion would have been so violent as to produce a second deluge, had not Jupiter kept it under by the clouds; and as to the ship during this dreadful uproar, the sails touch the clouds, while the keel strikes the ground:

Nubila tanguntur velis, et terra carina. This image of dashing water at the stars Sir Richard Blackmore has produced in colours truly ridiculous. Describing spouting whales in his Prince Arthur, he makes the following comparison :

Like some prodigious water-engine made To play on heaven, if fire should heaven invade. The great fault in all these instances is a deviation from propriety, owing to the erroneous judgment of the writer, who, endeavouring to captivate the admiration with novelty, very often shocks the understanding with extravagance. Of this nature is the whole description of the Cyclops, both in the Odyssey of Homer and in the Eneid of Virgil. It must be owned, however, that the Latin poet, with all his merit, is more apt than his great original to dazzle us with false fire, and practise upon the imagination with gay conceits, that will not bear the critic's examination. There is not in any of Homer's works now subsisting such an example of the false sublime as Virgil's description of the thunderbolts forging under the hammers of the Cyclops:

Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis et alitis Austri.
Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more,
Of winged southern winds and cloudy store
As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame.
DRYDEN.

This is altogether a fantastic piece of affectation, of which we can form no sensible image, and serves to chill the fancy, rather than warm the admiration, of a judging reader.

Extravagant hyperbole is a weed that of our admired Shakespeare. In the folgrows in great plenty through the works celebrated, one sees he has had an eye to lowing description, which hath been much Virgil's thunderbolts :

:

Oh, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairy's midwife; and she comes,
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep:
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinner's legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
The traces, of the smallest spider's web;
The collars, of the moonshine's watery beams,
&c.

Even in describing fantastic beings there is a propriety to be observed; but surely nothing can be more revolting to common sense, than this numbering of the moonbeams among the other implements of Queen Mab's harness, which, though extremely slender and diminutive, are nevertheless objects of the touch, and may be conceived capable of use.

The Ode and Satire admit of the boldest

hyperboles: such exaggerations suit the impetuous warmth of the one; and in the other have a good effect in exposing folly, and exciting horror against vice. They may be likewise successfully used in Comedy, for moving and managing the powers of ridicule.

ESSAY XVIII.

Versification. VERSE is an harmonious arrangement of long and short syllables, adapted to different kinds of poetry, and owes its origin entirely to the measured cadence, or music, which was used when the first songs and hymns were recited. This music, divided into different parts, required a regular return of the same measure, and thus

Various essays have been made in different countries to compare the characters of ancient and modern versification, and to point out the difference beyond any possibility of mistake. But they have made distinctions where, in fact, there was no difference, and left the criterion unobserved. They have transferred the name of rhyme to a regular repetition of the same sound at the end of the line, and set up this vile monotony as the characteristic of modern verse, in contradistinction to the feet of the ancients, which they pretend the poetry of modern language will not admit. Rhyme, from the Greek word pueμós, is nothing else but number, which was essential to the ancient as well as to the modern versification. As to the jingle of similar sounds, though it was never used by the ancients in any regular return in the middle or at the end of the line, and was by no means deemed essential to the versification, yet they did not reject it as a blemish, where it occurred without the appearance of constraint. We meet with it often in the epithets of Homer-apyvρέοιο βιοῖο, "Αναξ ἀνδρῶν ̓Αγαμέμνων : almost the whole first ode of Anacreon is what we call rhyme. The following line of Virgil has been admired for the similitude of sound in the first two words:

Ore Arethusa tuo Siculis confunditur undis.

Rhythmus, or number, is certainly essential to verse, whether in the dead or living languages; and the real difference between the two is this: the number in ancient verse relates to the feet, and in modern poetry to the syllables; for to assert that modern poetry has no feet is a ridiculous absurdity. The feet that principally enter into the composition of Greek and Latin verses are either of two or three syllables. Those of two syllables are either both long, as the spondee; or both short, as the pyr.

1

From the different combinations of these feet, restricted to certain numbers, the ancients formed their different kinds of verses, such as the hexameter, or heroic, distinguished by six feet, dactyls and spondees, the fifth being always a dactyl, and the last a spondee. Exempli gratiá:

Cum mala per lon-gas invalu-ere mo-ras. They had likewise the iambic of three sorts-the dimeter, the trimeter, and the tetrameter-and all the different kinds of lyric verse specified in the odes of Sappho, Álcæus, Anacreon, and Horace. Each of these was distinguished by the number as well as by the species of their feet; so that they were doubly restricted. Now all the feet of the ancient poetry are still found in the versification of living languages; for as cadence was regulated by the ear, it was impossible for a man to write melodious verse without naturally falling into the use of ancient feet, though perhaps he neither knows their measure nor denomination. Thus Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and all our poets, abound with dactyls, spondees, trochees, anapests, &c. which they use indiscriminately in all kinds of composition, whether tragic, epic, pastoral, or ode, having in this particular greatly the advantage of the ancients, who were restricted to particular kinds of feet in particular kinds of verse. If we, then, are confined with the fetters of what is called rhyme, they were restricted to particular species of feet; so that the advantages and disadvantages are pretty equally balanced: but indeed the English are more free in this particular than any other modern nation. They not only use blank verse in tragedy and the epic, but even in lyric poetry. Milton's translation of Horace's ode to Pyrrha is universally

known and generally admired, in our opinion much above its merit. There is an ode extant without rhyme addressed to Evening, by the late Mr. Collins, much more beautiful; and Mr. Warton, with some others, has happily succeeded in divers occasional pieces, that are free of this restraint: but the number in all of these depends upon the syllables, and not upon the feet, which are unlimited.

It is generally supposed that the genius of the English language will not admit of Greek or Latin measure; but this, we apprehend, is a mistake, owing to the prejudice of education. It is impossible that the same measure, composed of the same times, should have a good effect upon the ear in one language and a bad effect in another. The truth is, we have been accustomed from our infancy to the numbers of English poetry, and the very sound and signification of the words dispose the ear to receive them in a certain manner; so that its disappointment must be attended with a disagreeable sensation. In imbibing the first rudiments of education, we acquire, as it were, another ear for the numbers of Greek and Latin poetry; and this being reserved entirely for the sounds and significations of the words that constitute those dead languages, will not easily accommo- | date itself to the sounds of our vernacular tongue, though conveyed in the same time and measure. In a word, Latin and Greek have annexed to them the ideas of the ancient measure, from which they are not easily disjoined. But we will venture to say this difficulty might be surmounted by an effort of attention and a little practice; and in that case we should in time be as well pleased with English as with Latin hexameters.

Sir Philip Sydney is said to have miscarried in his essays; but his miscarriage was no more than that of failing in an attempt to introduce a new fashion. The failure was not owing to any defect or imperfection in the scheme, but to the want of taste, to the irresolution and ignorance of the public. Without all doubt the ancient measure, so different from that of modern poetry, must have appeared remarkably uncouth to people in general, who were ignorant of the classics; and

nothing but the countenance and perseverance of the learned could reconcile them to the alteration. We have seen several late specimens of English hexameters and sapphics so happily composed that, by attaching them to the idea of ancient measure, we found them in all respects as melodious and agreeable to the ear as the works of Virgil and Anacreon, or Horace.

Though the number of syllables distinguishes the nature of the English verse from that of the Greek and Latin, it constitutes neither harmony, grace, nor expression. These must depend upon the choice of words, the seat of the accent, the pause, and the cadence. The accent or tone is understood to be an elevation or sinking of the voice in reciting: the pause is a rest that divides the verse into two parts, each of them called an hemistich. The pause and accent in English poetry vary occasionally, according to the meaning of the words; so that the hemistich does not always consist of an equal number of syllables; and this variety is agreeable, as it prevents a dull repetition of regular stops, like those in the French versification, every line of which is divided by a pause exactly in the middle. The cadence comprehends that poetical style which animates every line, that propriety which gives strength and expression, that numerosity which renders the verse smooth, flowing, and harmonious, that significancy which marks the passions, and in many cases makes the sound an echo of the sense. The Greek and Latin languages, in being copious and ductile, are susceptible of a vast variety of cadences which the living languages will not admit; and of these a reader of any ear will judge for himself.

ESSAY XIX.

Schools of Music.

A SCHOOL, in the polite arts, properly signifies that succession of artists which has learned the principles of the art from some eminent master, either by hearing his lessons or studying his works, and consequently who imitate his manner either through design or from habit. Musicians seem agreed in making only three prin cipal schools in music; namely, the school of Pergolese in Italy, of Lully in France,