Whose tints as gently sunk away
As a departing rainbow's ray -
An eye of most transparent light,
That almost made the dungeon bright,
And not a word of murmur - not
A groan o'er his untimely lot, -
A little talk of better days,
A little hope my own to raise,
For I was sunk in silence - lost
In this last loss, of all the most;
And then the sighs he would suppress
Of fainting nature's feebleness,
More slowly drawn, grew less and less:
I listened, but I could not hear -
I called, for I was wild with fear;
I knew 'twas hopeless, but my dread
Would not be thus admonished;

I called and thought I heard a sound -
I burst my chain with one strong bound,
And rush'd to him: I found him not,
I only stirr'd in this black spot,
I only liv'd - I only drew
The accursed breath of dungeon-dew;
The last-the sole - the dearest link
Between me and the eternal brink,
Which bound me to my failing race,
Was broken in this fatal place.'

When released, the poor solitary mourner had so 'learn'd to love despair' that he 'regain'd his freedom with a sigh,' almost lamenting the very chains and the spiders which he had made his friends, and the mice which he had seen by moonlight play. Such, however, was not the actual case with Bonnivard; who, after his liberation, again took a warm interest in the affairs of the world, rose to honours, and became useful to his country.

To this poem succeeds a sonnet, apostrophizing Lake Leman as having known on its shores Rousseau, Voltaire, our Gibbon, and de Stael; and concluding by a line which we can neither understand nor read, if it be made to rhime with those of its predecessors to which it is intended to be united:

How much more, Lake of Beauty! do we feel,
In sweetly gliding o'er thy crystal sea,
The wild glow of that not ungentle zeal,
Which of the heirs of immortality

Is proud, and makes the breath of glory real!"

This makes our comprehension reel.

Some very tender and impassioned Stanzas to -' follow: but we know not how to fill up this blank, consistently with " existing circumstances" and with the tendency of the lines themselves, and we pass them, with a responsive sigh.

Darkness,' a poem, in blank verse, then envelopes us! and here indeed "Darkness was over the face of the earth." We have not here "thoughts that breathe and words that burn," but thoughts that chill and words that freeze: - a scene that is even more frightful than the display of poor Ugolino in his dungeon; - a sketch with a pen which our great dealer in hob-goblins, Fuseli himself, might be eager to transfer to his canvas. It is a dream, which was not all a dream,' in which the noble sleeper extinguishes the sun, obfuscates the stars, makes morn come and go, and come and bring no day, and all the poor animal-creation, with man at their head, are completely put to a nonplus! The stars were 'rayless and pathless,'' men died, and their bones were tombless,' ' ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,'

the world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless.'-

'The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished; darkness had no need
Of aid from them - She was the universe.'

Now for Mr. Fuseli's Picture:

• The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies; they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects-saw, and shriek'd, and died-
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend.'

After a little tale of a visit to Churchill's grave, we have another Dream,' also in blank verse, but not exactly of the same nature. It is a love-story, and rather mysterious. It has its beauties and tendernesses, and we suspect that there is in it " more than meets the eye." We will not try to raise the veil, however, but merely quote a portion of the second stanza, and of the last:

' I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the last
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and corn fields, and the abodes of men

Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke

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Arising

Arising from such rustic roofs; - the hill
Was crown'd with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fix'd,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing - the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself - but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful :
And both were young-yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had look'd
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in her's;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed her's, and saw with her's,
Which coloured all his objects: - he had ceased
To live within himself; she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all: upon a tone,
A touch of her's, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously - his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.

But she in these fond feelings had no share:

Her sighs were not for him; to her he was

Even as a brother - but no more.'

My dream was past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom

Of these two creatures should be thus traced out

Almost like a reality - the one

To end in madness - both in misery.'

Again the noble author urges his imagination to the utmost verge, and produces an 'Incantation,' in which he appears as by no means an unsuccessful rival of Mr. Southey in his Curse of Kehama. As to the poor witches in Macbeth, they must "hide their diminish'd heads."

Some lines on the story of 'Prometheus' close this selection from Lord Byron's travelling port-folio: which, considered altogether, we must confess that we do not regard as calculated to increase the merited reputation of the noble author. We trust that his Lordship will not forget the respect which is due to it, even from himself, and to the taste and judgment of the public. Art. 11. Mador of the Moor; a Poem. By James Hogg, Author of the Queen's Wake, &c. 8vo. pp. 140. 7s. 6d. sewed. Murray. 1816.

• Wild mirth of the desert! fit pastime for Kings.'

So

So Mr. Hogg intitles his own poem, in a quotation from Mr.

Wilson.

" And is not this a dainty dish to set before a king!" We know not of any vulgarity or want of invention, or rudeness of versification, or any demerit whatever, in the "Queen's Wake," * which does not prominently and transcendantly appear ear in the pages of Mador of the Moor.' We have marked the book through, with indices to various examples of all these vices; and our only difficulty is to do justice to the severity of our censure by exactly appropriate quotations of contemptible passages. Let us, like Homer, begin in the middle.

And behold the heroine of the Poem! about to be united, in holy wedlock, to Albert of the Glen :

Yet

"No youth was he, nor winsomest of men!"

The beauteous May, to parent's will resign'd,
Opposed not that which boded nothing ill;
It gave an ease and freedom to her mind,
And wish, the anxious interval to kill :
She listed wooer's tale with right good will;
And she would jest, and smile, and heave the sigh;
Would torture whining youth with wicked skill,
Turn on her heel, then off like lightning fly,

Leaving the hapless wight resolved forthwith to die.'

We should be contented with this extract, were the author as unpopular, and indeed nearly as unknown, in the northern portion of our island as in the southern: but we understand that this is not the case; and that, beyond the Tweed, persons are to be found who are devoted admirers of Mr. Hogg! In deference to their judgment, we subjoin another selection or two from 'Mador of the Moor.'

The day was wet, the mist was on the moor,
Rested from labour husbandman and maid;
There came a stranger to Kincraigy's door
Of goodly form, in minstrel garb array'd;
Of braided silk his builziment was made:
Short the entreatance he required to stay!
He tuned his viol, and with veh'mence play'd;
Mistress and menial, maid and matron gray,

Soon mix'd were on the floor, and frisk'd in wild affray.'

Every passage, which we might add to our list of quotations, would still more strongly substantiate our condemnation of this author. We really hope that every body will be satisfied with the subjoined; and that we may here be allowed to bid a long adieu to such barbarism, as we have already been forced to admit to the joint disgrace of our pages with many different but equally vile offences of the day.

* We noticed this coarse production in our Number for December 1814, p. 435

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• Why

Why do the maidens of the strath rejoice,
And lilt with meaning gesture on the loan ?
Why do they smirk, and talk with giggling voice
Of laces, and of stays; and thereupon
Hang many a fruitful jest? - Ah! is there none
The truth to pledge, and prove the nuptial vow ?
Alas! the friar on pilgrimage is gone;
Mador is lost - none else the secret knew,
And all is deem'd pretext assumptive and untrue.
• Slander prevails! to woman's longing mind
Sweet as the April blossom to the bee;
Her meal that never palls, but leaves behind
An appetite still yearning food to see:
Kincraigy's dame of perspicacity
Sees nought at all amiss, but flounces on;

Her brawling humour shows increased to be;
Much does she speak, in loud and grumbling tone,
Nor time takes to reflect, nor even a prayer to con.'

If this be not the consummation of vulgarity and dullness combined, we are happy in our ignorance of the perfect results of such an engaging union.

Art. 12. Buonaparte; a Poem. 8vo. pp. 63. Printed at Cork, and sold in London by Hunter.

''Twere worse than vain in feeble verse
A Paget's praises to rehearse;
Or the brave deeds to half display

Of a too ill requited Ney.' Page 32.

Be it so. Why then attempt a Napoleon in page 54.?
For see - who leads the assailants on

That never led a charge in vain,

The invincible Napoleon,

The at once our glory and our bane!'

We shall leave the rest to the unwearied imagination of our readers.

Art. 13. The Battle of Waterloo. A Poem in Two Cantos. By John Haskins. 8vo. pp. 63. Black and Son. 1816. We have not kept a list of the poems on the battle of Waterloo; and we are very sure that posterity will be still more ignorant of their numbers and their merits than even we acknowlege ourselves to be. Yet we have already criticized very many of them; and we do not know that we can take any blame to ourselves for suffering whole files of them to escape our notice. The myriads of gnats in a sun-beam are as countless as these productions, and placed in an incomparably clearer light. We are certain that any person, who was in the least master of the "knack of versifying," would write (if he were not prevented either by genius or by shame,) hundreds and hundreds of such lines as the subjoined, in the first idle morning that he chose to devote to so worthless a purpose.