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geon, would sooner have lost his right hand, than the poor little mouse, which, grown confident with indulgence, used to beguile the tedious hours of imprisonment with its gambols. For my own part, I believe my dog, who, at this moment, seated on his hinder legs, is wistfully surveying me, as if he was conscious of all that is passing in my mind:-my dog, I say, is as sincere, and, whatever the world may say, nearly as dear a friend as any I possess; and, when I shall receive that summons which may not now be far distant, he will whine a funeral requiem over my grave, more piteously than all the hired mourners in Christendom. Well, well, poor Bob has had a kind master of me, and, for my own part, I verily believe there are few things on this earth I shall leave with more regret than this faithful companion of the happy hours of my infancy.

VOL. II.

R

W.

MELANCHOLY HOURS.

[No. V.]

Un Sonne sans defaut vaut seul un long poeme.
Mais en vain mille auteurs y pensent arriver;
A peine....

peut-on admirer deux ou trois entre mille:

Boileau.

THERE is no species of poetry which is better adapted to the taste of a melancholy man than the sonnet. While its brevity precludes the possibility of its becoming tiresome, and its full and expected close accords well with his dejected and perhaps somewhat languid tone of mind, its elegiac delicacy and querimonious plaintiveness come in pleasing consonance with his feelings.

This elegant little poem has met with a peculiar fate in this country: half a century ago it was regarded as utterly repugnant to the nature of our language, while at present it is the popular vehicle of the most admired sentiments of our best living poets. This remarkable mutation in the opinions of our countrymen may, however, be accounted for on plain and common principles. The earlier English sonnetteers confined themselves, in general, too strictly to the Italian model, as well in the disposition of the rhymes as in the cast of the ideas. A

sonnet, with them, was only auother word for some metaphysical conceit, or clumsy antithesis, contained in fourteen harsh lines, full of obscure inversions and ill-managed expletives. They bound themselves down to a pattern, which was in itself faulty, and they met with the common fate of servile imitators, in retaining all the defects of their original, while they suffered the beauties to escape in the process. Their sonnets are like copies of a bad picture: however accurately copied, they are still bad. Our contemporaries, on the contrary, have given scope to their genius in the sonnet without restraint, sometimes even growing licentious in their liberty, setting at defiance those rules which form its distinguishing peculiarity, and, under the name of sonnet, soaring or falling into ode or elegy. Their compositions, of course, are impressed with all those excellencies which would have marked their respective productions in any similar walk of poetry.

It has never been disputed that the sonnet first arrived at celebrity in the Italian: a language which, as it abounds in a musical similarity of terminations, is more eminently qualified to give ease and elegance to the legitimate sonnet, restricted as it is to stated and frequentlyrécurring rhymes of the same class. As to the inventors of this little structure of verse, they are involved in impenetrable obscurity. Some authors have ascribed it singly to Guitone D'Arrezzo, an Italian poet of the thirteenth century, but they have no sort of authority to adduce in support of their assertions. Arguing upon probabilities, with some slight co-incidental corroborations,

I should be inclined to maintain that its origin may be referred to an earlier period; that it may be looked for amongst the Provençals, who left scarcely any combination of metrical sounds unattempted; and who, delighting as they did in sound and jingle, might very possibly strike out this harmonious stanza of fourteen lines. Be this as it may, Dante and Petrarch were the first poets who rendered it popular, and to Dante and Petrarch therefore we must resort for its required rules.

In an ingenious paper of Dr. Drake's "Literary Hours," a book which I have read again and again with undiminished pleasure, the merits of the various English writers in, this delicate mode of composition, are appreciated with much justice and discrimination. His veneration for Milton however has, if I may venture to oppose my judgment to his, carried him too far in praise of his sonnets. Those to the Nightingale and to Mr. Lawrence are, I think, alone entitled to the praise of mediocrity, and, if my memory fail me not, my opinion is sanctioned by the testimony of our late illustrious biographer of the poets.

The sonnets of Drummond are characterised as exquisite. It is somewhat strange, if this description be just, that they should so long have sunk into utter oblivion, to be revived only by a species of black-letter mania, which prevailed during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and of which some vestiges yet remain; the more especially as Dr. Johnson, to whom they could scarcely be

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unknown, tells us, that "The fabric of the sonnet has never succeeded in our language." For my own part, I can say nothing of them. I have long sought a copy of Drummond's works, and I have sought it in vain; but from specimens which I have casually met with, in quotations, I am forcibly inclined to favour the idea, that, as they possess natural and pathetic sentiments, clothed in tolerably harmonious language, they are entitled to the praise which has been so liberally bestowed on them.

Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella consists of a number of sonnets, which have been unaccountably passed over by Dr. Drake, and all our other critics who have written on this subject. Many of them are eminently beautiful. The works of this neglected poet may occupy a future number of my lucubrations.

Excepting these two poets, I believe there is scarcely a writer who has arrived at any degree of excellence in the sonnet, until of late years, when our vernacular bards have raised it to a degree of eminence and dignity, among the various kinds of poetical composition, which seems almost incompatible with its very circumscribed limits.

Passing over the classical compositions of Warton," which are formed more on the model of the Greek epigram, or epitaph, than the Italian sonnet, Mr. Bowles and Charlotte Smith are the first modern writers who

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