Now, God forbid! Marlotes, and Mary, his dear mother, For women- -I've one wife in France, and I'll wed no more in Spain; I change not faith, I break not vow, for courtesy or gain.' Wroth waxed King Marlotes, when thus he heard him say, With fetters bound in darkness deep, far off from sun and sky. With iron bands they bound his hands. That sore unworthy plight Three times alone, in all the year, it is the captive's doom On three high-feasts they bring him forth, a spectacle to be, And on that morn, more solemn yet, when the maidens strip the bowers, Days come and go of gloom and show. Seven years are come and gone, Marlotes, in his joy and pride, a target high doth rear, Below the Moorish knights must ride, and pierce it with the spear; Wroth waxed King Marlotes, when he beheld them fail, The whisker trembled on his lip, and his cheek for ire was pale; And heralds proclamation made, with trumpets, through the town, Nor child should suck, nor man should eat, till the mark was tumbled down. The cry of proclamation, and the trumpet's haughty sound, Did send an echo to the vault where the Admiral was bound. Now, help me, God! the captive cries, what means this din so loud? O, Queen of Heaven! be vengeance given on these thy haters proud! O, is it that some Pagan gay doth Marlotes' daughter wed, And that they bear my scorned Fair in triumph, to his bed? Or is it that the day is come, one of the hateful three, When they, with trumpet, fife, and drum, make Heathen game of me?', This is the joyful morning of John the Baptist's day, When Moor and Christian feasts at home, each in his nation's way; Give me my grey, old Trebizond, so be he is not dead, And give me the lance I brought from France, and if I win it not, The jailor wonder'd at his words. Thus to the knight said be, The Jailor put his mantle on, and came unto the king, They have girded on his shirt of mail, his cuisses well they've clasp'd, And they've barr'd the helm on his visage pale, and his hand the lance hath grasp'd, And he stands bridled at the gate—once more caparison'd. When the knight came out the Moors did shout, and loudly laugh'd the king, But Guarinos whisper'd in his ear, and look'd into his face, Then stood the old charger like a lamb, with a calm and gentle grace. Oh! lightly did Guarinos vault into the saddle-tree, And slowly riding down made halt before Marlotes' knee; Again the heathen laugh'd aloud," All hail, sir knight," quoth he, With that Guarinos, lance in rest, against the scoffer rode, Pierced at one thrust his envious breast, and down his turban tred. Now ride, now ride, Guarinos-nor lance nor rowel spare Slay, slay, and gallop for thy life. The land of France lies there! We have now done enough to make known to our readers the literary character of this edition. As it is one which must have a place in every English library, we are rather sorry that it is not set forth with a little more external splendour. These five duode cimos are certainly prettily printed, and very well adapted for ordinary use; but when the book comes to be reprinted, we would advise the publishers to let it be in the form of a large and handsome octavo, in four volumes. It is a pity to see those ballads crowded into a narrow page. And why deprive the noble Don of his usual accompani ment of engravings? We cannot away with the want of Sancho's flying out of the carpet-Don Quixote hanging from the hole in the wall, &c. Smirke's designs are admirable; but the native old Spanish ones of Castillo, engraved in the Academy's large edition of 1781, are infinitely the best. And, indeed, we think Don Quixote never ought to appear without THEM. This book, printed in a more splendid shape, and illustrated with etchings, no matter how slight, from Castillo and Brunete, would be all that any one would de sire to possess in the shape of an Eng lish QUIXOTE. Indeed, so far as the editor is concerned, we are not aware of his having overlooked any source to which he ought to have applied, excepting only the German labours of Ludavig Tieck. His notes, read continuously, and without reference to the text they so admirably illustrate, would form a most delightful book. Indeed, what can be more interesting than such a collection of rare anecdotes, curious quotations from forgotten books, and beautiful versions of most beautiful ballads? Printed in a volume by themselves, these notes to Don Quixote would constitute one of the most entertaining Ana in our language, or in any other that we are acquainted with. But, above all, to the student of Spanish, who attacks the Don in the original, they must be altogether invaluable, for Cervantes allusions to the works of Spanish authors, particularly his own contemporaries, are so numerous, that when Don Quixote appeared, it was regarded by the literati of Madrid almost as a sort of Spanish Dunciad. LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF SCOTTISH LIFE. We happened to make a remark not long ago very hastily, which, upon more mature consideration, we are inclined to think, on the whole, extremély just, viz, that the writing of verses is at present an unpopular and unprofitable exercise. Both Scott and Crabbe have retired from the field, at least for a season, Southey has done nothing worth talking of since his RODERICK; and that splendid poem, prized as it is, and ever will be, by those with whom literature is a study, is forgotten, or very nearly so, by the reading public. Wordsworth is always writing verses; and occasionally he sends forth a small pamphlet, containing several pages of the finest verses possible; but there is no striving against the stream, even for a Wordsworth; and we suppose his publishers never think of venturing beyond a 500 or 750 edition, which, as editions go now, is just nothing. Miss Baillie's Metrical Legends were a damp er. On Lallah Rookh, as on a gilded funeral pile, the fame of Mr Moore flashed up, and vanished. Coleridge has published no verses that we know of these some years past, the more's the pity, except a few occasional stanzas in the pages of this Miscellany. Wilson's "Lays of Fairy-Land" have been, it is probable, knocked out of his head by Scotch metaphysics. Campbell's Gertrude is now a lady of very mature years. Barry Cornwall is as much passé as Rosa Matilda. Hogg, now a great sheep-farmer, is at last real ly deserving of the name of " the Ettrick Shepherd." Nobody would publish a poem of the Cockney-school nowa-days; and, in short, all the older hands, except Byron, good, bad, and Indifferent, are resting upon their oars. Even his Lordship has not been doing much of late to his own purpose or to his publisher's purpose or to any good purpose whatever, except his printer's. Don Juan, although second to none of his works in poetical merits, for obvious reasons never sold to any great extent; and as for his tragedies, we all know they have hung very very heavy in the market. Cain, to be sure, has sold well; but, then, this is true only of the sixpenny editions, which the honest Radicals hawk about the different stands from which the Camberwell, Clapham, and Hampstead coaches set off; and, of course, neither Byron, nor Mr Murray, nor the reading public, are much the better for these. Whether they who have bought the sixpenny copies have been the better or the worse for them, it would be dif ficult to say. Perhaps neither the one nor the other. In fact, we shrewdly suspect, that Cain, though it has its faults no doubt, is a production which even the worthy Chancellor of England has not been able to force into any very distinguished favour among the habitual disciples of the Hones and the Carliles. In short, Byron, Croly, and Milman, are the only people who now write verses worthy of the name. The first is on the wane; the third is not increscent; and the second still owes his chief fame to " Paris in 1815.”† Still, however, there are a multitude of readers of poetry among us; and the question arises, what poetry do these chiefly indulge on? We shall endeavour to answer this question generally and briefly, as is our custom on such occasions. And first of all, to clear away some of the rubbish at once, nobody reads the Cockneys. The very copies of them in circulating libraries are asleep on dusty shelves. Even among the frail sisterhood, since Juan appeared, a better taste has sprung up, and Rimini pimps in vain. Queen Mab disturbs no lady's slumbers. She does not even tickle the noses of parsons. Wordsworth is much studied and cherished by a few devoted lovers of poetry and by none more so than Mr Francis Jeffrey. Southey is a great favourite with young men of a classical taste. He is quite the standing author at Oxford and Cambridge, particularly among those who are not quite Bachelors of Arts. But these gentlemen, when they quit the university, generally dispose of their books, to pay off a few ticks, and they forget the Laureate to a culpable degree when they have taken their degrees, and fairly nestled into curacies. Southey's chief consolation, therefore, must be the same Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. A Selection from the Papers of the late Arthur Austin. Post 8vo. Blackwood, Edinburgh; Cadell, London. 1822. + Our Reviewer had not seen Catiline.-C. N. as Wordsworth's. As for Coleridge, his Ancient Mariner and Genevieve are known by heart by some hundreds and the million knows nothing more of him than they do of Marvel or Cowley; while Bowles is, strange to say, more known by his pamphlets than those beautiful sonnets, which first touched the poetic spark slumbering in the young heart of Coleridge. Miss Baillie, over and above that small class of the truly initiated, who will never forget her BASIL and MONT FORT, enjoys an extensive popularity among the elderly and more sentiment al members of her own sex, who probably read her works chiefly because they are the works of a woman-just as thousands of sober people read Cowper, merely from some obscure sort of idea that Cowper was a very religious character, and, perhaps, some vague feeling that THE TASK is not quite such tough work on a hot Sunday evening in July, as Magee on the Atonement, or Butler's Analogy, or Watson's Apology, or any other professedly theological work equally above their comprehension. Campbell's Pleasures of Hope have now little vogue; but Gertrude, and his exquisite minor poems, are still as popular as ever. They are not much mentioned, it is true; but that is merely owing to the universal agreement about their merits. He is, perhaps, the poet of our own day, who is most generally considered as having passed into the calm state of an established classical author of the second order. People would as soon think of raving away at a tea-table about Goldsmith, or Rogers, or Hamilton of Bangour, as about Mr Campbell. Of some of the other poets we al luded to in the opening of this article, all, we have time to say is, that the bulk of their books is forgotten, but that a few detached passages and mi nor pieces of theirs have passed into the standard corpus of our poetry, and, will there live for ever. The three most popular names, Scott, Crabbe, Byron, still remain to be dis cussed. Each in his way has become a British classic of the first class; and, generally speaking, they are none of them much spoken about, any more than Dryden or Pope. Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, still certainly stand by themselves. But, perhaps, it would be no easy matter to say, which is, at this moment, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, or the seventh name in the calendar of English verse. No man can shew his face in decent company without being, or pretending to be, perfectly familiar with our three living classics. Their works are almost essential parts of the furniture of a decent house, as the dinner-table itself; whereas the books of our other poetical friends may be likened rather to your billiard-tables,-chess-boards,— Commodes,-Bühl cabinets, and so forth. As for Hogg, his situation in the library of an ENGLISH gentleman, five hundred miles from Yarrow-water, is, perhaps, like nothing so much as that of some stuffed native of Botany Bay, grinning down from a bracket in a stair-case. On VERSE, therefore, at the present crisis of affairs, little or no productive labour is employed. But is the same thing true as to POETRY? No, most assuredly. On the contrary, there can be no doubt that the Author of Waverly, single-handed, pours forth more good poetry in one year just now, than ever Sir Walter Scott did in two years when he was writing verses-(and, perhaps, a greater proportion of this in a higher kind of poetry than he ever clothed in verse at all)-or than Lord Byron ever produced in a similar period of time-or Mr Crabbe in a dozen of years. In like manner, the Author of Anastasius, though we are not aware of his ever having written a single stanza, is a true and a noble poet; and that no one can doubt who has ever read his story of Euphrosyne or his Voyage to Venice. In a word, people may be sick even of good verse, but people never can be sick of good poetry and of good poetry, therefore, we still have enough and to spare," day by day, and year by year." sid on Perhaps, however, the aversion to writing verse has gone too far. At least, we could not help thinking so many dozen times, while engaged in the perusal of this volume, entitled, "Lights and Shadows;"a volume most indubitably full of exquisite poetry and of poetry which we do think ought not to have been written, at least a great part of it, in any thing but verse. Our meaning is that in this bookfor a book written in prose-the purely poetical materials bear too great a proportion to the prosaic; and it is this we think that is likely to be felt as the chief imperfection of a very delightful, and in many instances a very powerful performance. Our notion of the mat ter is, that the author would have produced a much better book had he intermingled verse and prose. Exquisite prose he has produced in abundance; but we feel quite certain that had he followed the free motives of his own genius, without paying any attention to the little capricious whims of the moment, there are ideas, and feelings, and delineations of passion in this vo lume, which would have received the ornaments of versification ;-things, in a word, which Nature meant to receive these ornaments; and which have, by not receiving them, been, to a certain extent, "shorn of their beams!" What a pity would it have been had Wordsworth written his "Ruth," or Wilson his "Scholar's Funeral," or Goldsmith his " Sweet Auburn," in prose. Yet six or seven things at least, quite as culpable as these would have been, have really been committed by "the late William Austin"-whoever that we doubt not living and life like person may chance to be. There is so much knowledge of "affairs in general" displayed in his little volume, that we have no doubt the author will take our admonition in good part, and hereafter be more moderate in his use of condiments. In the meantime, we must try to give our readers who have not seen the book, some notion of its character and con tents. Here is then-a very thick postoctavo volume, of upwards of 430 pages, printed in the most beautiful manner, by Ramsay. (Either Davison or Ballantyne might have been proud of putting such a thing through their hands.) Twenty-four separate tales are discussed within these limits; and the whole, laying other merits out of view, is certainly one of the prettiest story books" that any man can put into his library, or lay upon his draw ing-room table, for the benefit of the "youths and virgins" of his house hold. It is a " story book," however, of a kind quite new, at least in English literature; for we rather suspect that the Germans have several nearly of the same sort; and these written by the very greatest of their authors. It is a book full of power, and full, which every book of tales ought to be, though few of them are so, of VARIETY. Scot tish life, and that, generally speaking, not of the highest order, is delineated in its pages; and these, like that which they shadow forth, are grave and gay, melancholy and cheerful, by turns; though, perhaps, upon the whole, the predominating vein may be not unfitly characterized as that of a gentle and graceful pathos. The images on which the fancy of the writer seems to dwell with the most delight, are those of beauty, innocence, repose. External nature, however, is, in all her provinces, equally familiar to him; and in describing the scenery of Scotland, whether in the green pastoral valleys of the South, or in the dark and shadowy glens of the Highlands, he reveals a power that is altogether admirable, and an originality at the same time, which, considering how lately the book must have been written, is to us quite astonishing. Were Turner to paint Italian scenery, his pictures would not be like those of either Claude or of Salvator; but they would be something worthy of Turner, and therefore as good as either.-In like manner, the quiet struggles of gentle bosoms are what our author chiefly describes; yet here and there the deepest and darkest parts of our nature fall in his way, and he grapples with them strongly and terribly. After reading one of his more sombre and tragic pieces, one turns, perhaps in the next page, to something which the serene and happy love of early and innocent youth would seem to have inspired; and it is then that we feel how well the book deserves its title; and how widely and wisely the eye of genius has been ranging over the whole surface of our troubled and uncertain existence. The narrow limits within which each tale is confined, have prevented the author from entering into any thing like complex plots or artful denouements. The structure of many of them reminds us of our old simple ballads. We have generally two, or at the most three characters in a piece; these are not elaborately brought out, but generally well-defined, and at times most clearly defined, by a few apparently unlaboured epithets. A few incidents, commonly quite natural, and often as new as natural, bring the story to its happy or sorrowful close. In some of the tales, again, we have perhaps no |