logically, and not conformably either to the writer's own views or to public opinion.

The following lines afford an example of a proper and improper use of language in the same passage :

No stars besides their radiance can display,
In Phœbus' presence, the dread lord of day;
E'en Cynthia's self, though regent of the night,
Is quite obscured by his emergent light;
But Venus only, as if more divine,
With Phœbus dares in partnership to shine.

For though Venus is our popular name for the planet, yet Phœbus and Cynthia are not our popular names for the sun and moon; but mythological words applied by the Greeks and Romans to the intellectual deities which, according to them, presided over the sun and moon.

Shakspeare's Oberon, and mythological little fairy Queen Mab, and all her tiny apparatus, is proper, as being agreeable to the popular superstitions of the place where the scene lies, or the time in which Shakspeare lived :

Oh! then I see Queen Mab has been with you:
She is the Fancy's midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a little team of atomies,

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spiders' webs,
The whip of cricket bones, the lash of films,
Her waggoner a small gray-headed gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid,

This, I say, is all proper and beautiful; and for the same reason, the frequent appeals to the gods are proper in the play of Julius Cæsar, (though they are not the gods of Shakspeare,) for the scene of the play lies among the Romans.

When a poet appears in an assumed character, it is not always necessary that he should formally announce it to the reader; but it is necessary that the reader should be aware of it himself, whether the poem be great or small. For the propriety or impropriety of the poet's mythological language and costume depends not on the truth or falsehood of the opinions, but on their conformity to the character assumed. Thus Mr. Southey in his Thalaba and Curse of Kihama evidently assumes an Oriental character: this is instantly perceived by the reader, who is hurried away into the regions of romance, and made acquainted by that most ingenious poet, in his representative character, with the mythologies, poetical fancies, manners and costume of many Eastern nations; and all this with propriety. The reader feels himself all at once in the Deserts of Arabia, and is prepared for a something surprising :

Who at this untimely hour
Wanders o'er the desert sand?

No station is in view,

No palm-tree islanded amid the waste;
The mother and the child,

The widow and the orphan at this hour
Wander o'er the desert sands.

Mr. Walter Scott, in like manner, in his Lay of the

Last Minstrel, by putting his words into the mouth of an ancient minstrel, has made it dramatic throughout; and all we have a right to inquire, is, whether, as a poem, it is constituted on correct principles, and conformably to the costume of the times which are described.

Ten squires, ten yeonien, mail-clad men,
Waited the beck of warders ten.
Thirty steeds, both fleet and wight,
Stood saddled in stable, day and night,-
Barb'd with frontlet of steel, I trow,
And with Jedwood-axe, at saddlebow.
A hundred more fed free in stall:
Such was the custom of Branksome Hall.

But to return to our mythology.

Canto the first.

There is then a proper and improper way of using all superstitions, and allusions to the ancient Greek and Roman mythology among the rest. English poets have often used the improper way :-nor must the imputation lie only on poets. Writers of prose occasionally borrow this ornament; and, through an affectation of classical smartness, use it sometimes with equal impropriety. Thus an orthodox divine and church-historian, describing the inroads of the Danes into this kingdom, and the devastations which they made in Cambridge, observes; "Mars then frightened away the Muses, when the Mount of Parnassus was thrown into a fort, and Helicon derived into a trench*."

* Fuller's History of the University of Cambridge, subjoined to his Church History of Britain.

This essay endeayours to show, that all such smartnesses and classical brilliances are a species of anachronism, resembling those violations of chronology which are often found among painters, and even of eminence: Thus, St. Jerome is put in a picture of the Last Supper; in the Turning of Water into Wine, Paolo Veronese places two Benedictine monks, out of compliment to the order; and in a painting of the Crucifixion, even the great Raphael himself has represented Cæcilia and St. Austin. But, Nunc non erat his locus.

I slightly discussed the subject of Mythology some years ago †, in a critique on the Life and Writings of Mason, and gave examples of the improper use of it in Gray's and Mason's Poems. Colman and Lloyd, in two humorous parodies on their Odes, have also made allusions to it, of which Gray himself confesses, He (Colman) makes tolerable fun enough, when I understand him, which is not often." Gray's Memoirs, by Mason.

* See ample specimens of this sort of anachronism, in Mr. La Motte's Essay on Poetry and Painting.

† In the Annual Necrology for 1797-8. This Life of Mason I have much enlarged, and once had a thought of publishing it in a distinct volume.

CHAPTER XI.

PERSONIFICATION,

IT is not difficult to see how the foreign embellishments alluded to in our last chapter, were superinduced on our English poetry *; for our British and Saxon poetry + have them not. They have proceeded from the writers who

* Mr. David Williams, in his History of Monmouthshire, has observed, that the Welsh bards are better authority, as being more authentic, than the Welsh historians: and Mr. Edward Williams, the Welsh bard, than whom no man is better acquainted with the old Welsh poets, denies, in his notes to his Poems, that there is any thing of fable in the Welsh poets; and that writers have ignorantly ascribed the lies of Geoffry of Monmouth to Taliessin. I, of course, therefore conclude, that what Monsieur Huet says, in his Treatise on Romances, on the Fabulous Histories devised by Taliessin, is a mistake of that learned writer's, whom I do not suspect of having been acquainted with the writings of the Welsh.

+ Though the Saxon poets did not make use of the ancient Greek and Roman fables, yet, as Mr. Turner has proved, (contrary to the opinion of some writers,) they were acquainted with what is called the Metrical Romance. See the account of the Saxon Poetry, in Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons; and I know of no writer who has given so ample and satisfactory an account of the Saxon Poetry as Mr. Turner.