of classic literature; nor could he devote months and years of learned leisure to the exquisite charms of versification or the refined ornaments of diction. He was a man of business, who had only the intervals of his regular employment to improve his mind by reading and reflection; and his powers appear to have been truly no more than hasty effusions for the amusement of himself and his particular friends. Numbers of works thus produced are born and die in the circle of every year; and it is only by the stamp of real genius that these have been preserved from a similar fate. But nature had bestowed on the author a strong and quick conception, and a wonderful power of bringing together remote ideas, so as to produce the most novel and striking effects. No man ever thought more copiously or with more originality; no man ever less fell into the beaten track of common-place ideas and expressions. That cant of poetical phraseology, which is the only resource of an ordinary writer, and which those of a superior class find it difficult to avoid, is scarcely any where to be met with in him. He has no hacknied combinations of substantives and epithets: none of the tropes and figures of a school-boy's Gradus. Often negligent, sometimes inaccurate, and not unfrequently prosaic, he redeems his defects by a rapid variety of beautics and brilliancies all his own, and affords more food to the understanding or imagination in a line or a couplet than common writers in half a page. In short, if in point of versification, regularity and correctness, his place is scarcely assignable among the poets: in the rarer qualities of variety and vigour of sentiment, and novelty and liveliness of imagery, it would not be easy to find any, in modern times at least, who has a right to rank above him."

This opinion, which belongs chiefly to The Spleen, may be adopted with safety; but the praise bestowed afterwards by the same judicious critic on the author's system, or the philosophy of the poem, although qualified by exceptions, is, perhaps, yet higher than it deserves. To me it appears that Green had no regular or serious purpose in writing this poem, unless to make it the vehicle of satire on opinions and subjects which he had relinquished or disliked. There is so little knowledge of the nature or cure of the Spleen in what he advances, that whoever is induced by the title to consult it, may be occasionally diverted by its wit, but will not benefit by its prescriptions.

What, indeed, is his theory of the disorder, and what his remedy? He begins, not improperly, by informing his friend that he does not mean to write a treatise on the Spleen, but to acquaint that friend with the course he had himself taken to drive the Spleen away and to live quietly. He first adopted the commonly received remedies, temperance, chastity and exercise, and then he expatiates on the use of mirth, but how is mirth to be procured by the melancholy sufferer? By laughing, he tells us, at witlings, bad tragedies, dissenters saying grace, a clergyman preaching for a lectureship, and other common topics, some of which are surely improper topics for laughter, and could excite it only in those who are predisposed to throw ridicule upon

what is serious, which is very far from being the case with persons of a melancholic temperament. He then recommends the playhouse, or a concert; during rainy weather, books, or a visit to the coffee-house, the tavern, the card-table, or a joco-serious cup; and the company of the fair-sex, but with the exception of marriage, Such are the remedies he professes to have taken; and he proceeds next to enumerate the causes of the Spleen which are to be avoided, or which he avoids. He never goes to a dissenting meeting, or to law; never games, rarely bets; does not like to lend money, or to run in debt, by which means he avoids that undoubted cause of melancholy, duns and bailiffs; never meddles with politics in church or state; avoids both the regular clergy and the puritans, but conforms to church and state" both for diversion and defence;" abhors all reformers, and especially the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts, which he reviles, I do not hesitate to say, with contemptuous malignity. In addition to all this, he never dances attendance at the levees of the great; avoids poetical enthusiasm and all its evils, and has no ambition. He then addresses Contentment, expresses a wish for a small farm in the country, has no expectations from a state of future existence, and concludes with a hacknied allegory on human life.

It may be doubted whether, since the days of the Theriaca, a medicine has been composed of such heterogeneous ingredients, or a cure for listlessness and melancholy recommended, which has a more direct tendency to induce insanity, by overthrowing all established opinions, and substituting darkness and perplexity, indolence towards the concerns of our fellow-creatures, and indifference to all the sympathies of civil and social life. If its tendency should fall short of this, it must at least increase that selfish security which so often drives the splenetic into solitude, or renders them inactive members of society.

As an apology for Green's opinions on religious subjects, so freely expressed in this poem, it has been said, that he was bred among puritanical dissenters, whose principles tended to inspire a gloomy, unamiable and unsocial disposition. Of whatever avail this apology may be in the present case, it is not much in its favour that we find it usually advanced by those who are glad of an excuse for looseness of principle and contempt for revealed religion. It may, however, be said, with confidence, that if no other spleen existed than what is induced by strictness of religious principle, it would not be of sufficient consequence to require the aid either of the poet or the physician. The disorder, all experience and observation show, exists among two classes, those who inherit a constitutional melancholy, or those who from defect of education, possess weak minds: it has no natural connection with any system of religion or politics, but much with folly and vice, and most of all, with that waste of time and talents which, in many conditions of life, fashion commands and countenances.

But enough has been said of a system, if it deserves the name, the evil

tendency of which is too obvious and too absurd to create much mischief. The poetical beauties of The Spleen, its original and happy imagery, and its many striking allusions and satirical touches, will ever secure it a place among the most popular collections of English poetry'.

Of Green's lesser poems, The Grotto only was printed in his life-time, and dispersed privately among his friends. When queen Caroline built her grotto, it became a fashion with the minor poets of the day to write verses on it, some in a courtly and some in a satirical strain. A considerable number of these may be seen in the early volumes of the Gentleman's Magazine. Green, on this occasion, contributed the poem before us, under the name of Peter Drake, a fisherman, with a playful allusion to Stephen Duck, the thresher, to whose custody the grotto was committed, but with no assumption of the humble character of a fisherman. The author's aim, indeed is not very clear, unless to introduce a variety of common topics, which he illustrates in a manner very novel, and pleasingly fanciful. The same opinion may be given of the lines on Barclay's Apology, which have yet less regularity. The rest of his pieces require little notice. That entitled Jove and Semele is omitted in this edition on account of its indelicacy.

A very beautiful poem on the Spleen was written long before, by Anne, countess of Winchelsea, It may be seen in her article in the General Dictionary, fol. vol. X.

POEMS

MATTHEW GREEN.