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a touch. Wit, certainly, is not wanting; but unluckily what there is of pure wit is generally of the lowest and coarsest kind. Of humour-according to the usual notion of that rather impalpable quality-we discover remarkably little. And, to speak last of what is, perhaps, the most singular failure of all, they are wonderfully defective for the most part in metre and in rhythm. A smart ballad-to whatever other qualities it may make pretence- ought at all events, according to our notions, to run glibly over the tongue and scan with facility. Our ancestors seem to have thought otherwise. Unequal lines and halting metre seem not to have shocked their ears in the least. It might be said of a song, with more truth than of any other poem, that if it rhymes and rattles, all is well;' but at least half of those here contained rhyme very imperfectly, and their rattle is as that of a cart over a street in process of repair. They evince, too, the want of musical appreciation with which our nation is charged, in the poverty and scantiness of the tunes to which they are set; Which nobody can deny.' 'Antony, now, 'now now; 'Packington's Pound,' Hey boys, up go we!' 'Mortimer's Hole;' and two or three more such venerable favourites, seem to have furnished the narrow repertory of the balladmonger almost exclusively, and his hearers would perhaps have endured nothing else. It must however be added that a marked but gradual progress in the appreciation of metrical evenness as a requisite in versification can be traced in these slight productions, plainly as in more substantial English poetry. Pope macadamised our English heroic verse, and it has ever since retained that somewhat monotonous cadence of which he approved and it was precisely in his time, the reigns of the two first Georges, that the old string-halt of the common musical ballad gave place to a smoother and easier jog-trot.

Sir Charles Hanbury Williams was, however, the first writer of political songs in our language who may be said to have attained distinction through the merit of his compositions, and not merely from their public interest, or their scurrility. And Mr. Wilkins's collection only just includes the Whig baronet. Should he furnish us with a continuation, he will have a far better field to select from. For if the general tone of political ballad poetry was feeble before 1760, it attained in no long time afterwards to a very high point of perfection. The reign of George III. saw the dulness of former times dissipated by the wit of that brilliant generation which produced the 'Rolliad' and the Anti-Jacobin.' And it may be said, we think, without fear of refutation, that these volumes, though pretty adequately representing the period which they embrace, contain absolutely

nothing which will stand comparison with the wit of Moore, the pungency of Theodore Hook, or the fun and spirit of Tom Taylor.

Among the satires of the Rebellion period, with which Mr. Wilkins's collection commences, we select as a specimen some stanzas from one new to ourselves, and of which we do not know the authorship or the history, Mr. Wilkins being, as usual, silent on that score. It has the ordinary stamp of those times, but with better workmanship in the execution than is common among them:

THE ANARCHIE, OR THE BLESSED REFORMATION SINCE 1640.

(Vol. i. p. 32.)

Now that, thanks to the powers below,

We have e'en done our do;

The mitre is down,

And so is the crown,

And with them the coronet too:

Come clowns and come boys,
Come hober-de-hoys,

Stretch your throats, bring in your votes,
And make good the Anarchie.

And thus it shall go, says Alice,
Nay, thus it shall go, says Amy;
Nay, thus it shall go, says Taffy, I trow,
Nay, thus it shall go, says Jamy.

Well, let the truth be where it will,
We're sure all else is ours;

Yet these divisions in our religions
May chance abate our powers;

Then let's agree on some one way,

It skills not much how true :

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Take Prynne and his clubs, or Say and his tubs,
Or any sect, old or new :

The devil's in the pack, if choice you can lack,
We're fourscore religions strong

Take your choice, and the major voice

Shall carry it, right or wrong.
Then we'll be of this, says Megg,
Nay, we'll be of that, says Tibb,
Nay, we'll be of all, says pitiful Paul,'
Nay, we'll be of none, says Gibb.

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Some new and happy course;

The country's grown sad, the city gone mad,
And both the Houses are worse.
The Synod hath writ, the General hath,
And both to like purpose too;
Religion, laws, the truth, the cause,

Are talkt of, but nothing we do.

Come, come, shall's have peace? says Nell;
No, no, but we won't, says Madge;
But I say we will, says fiery-faced Phil;
We will and we won't, says Hadge.'

On the Royalist side the popular political balladmonger of those days was the soldier-poet, John Cleveland; but the great vogue which his compositions in this line attained, is not very comprehensible to modern understandings. For Cleveland,

though not without poetical stuff in his composition, was bitten by the prevailing metaphysical mania which produced and spoiled so many verse-makers, from Donne to Cowley. Whatever the merits of that style might be, anything less suited than its laboured, sententious laconicism, and far-fetched imagery, to the purposes of the ephemeral satirist, can hardly be imagined. Accordingly, while Cleveland's other compositions have their merit, his would-be witty rhyming attacks on his Roundhead adversaries thoroughly deserve the contempt with which the Roundheads themselves treated them. For the story goes that when he was at last taken by them at Newark (where he had served as judge-advocate with Charles's last army), he presented himself to his captors with all the conscious dignity of a prisoner of importance; and the contemptuous indifference with which they suffered him to go his ways-the collapse at once of his loved cause and his fancied celebrity-broke the poor poet's heart. The only specimen culled from his poems by Mr. Wilkins, entitled The Parlia'ment' (vol. i. p. 28.), is a very pointless affair. In justice to the shade of one who did not lack loftiness nor warmth of sentiment, though very deficient in ability to express them, and who may pass as the earliest known of English political poets, we subjoin a little specimen of his powers in a style better suited to them his Epitaph on Lord Strafford.'

'Here rests wise and valiant dust,
Huddled up twixt fitt and just,
Strafford, who was banded hence
"Tween treason and convenience;
Who lived and died in a mist,
A Papist and a Calvinist;

His Prince's nearest joy and griefe,
Who had, yet wanted, all reliefe ;
The prop and ruin of the State;
The people's violent love and hate;
One in extremes lov'd and abhorr❜d—
Riddles lye here; or in a word,
Here lies Blood, and let it lye
Speechless still, and never cry.'

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These verses may be noted as an example, though but an inferior one, of a class of composition very characteristic of that truly and rarely heroic age, the period of the great Rebellion; the political ode,' which then had its birth, and continued in vogue until the beginning of the following century. Under the influence of exciting and engrossing speculation on matters of the deepest interest to man, temporal and spiritual, the world had grown very rapidly and almost preternaturally old. When we compare the tone of thought and writing prevalent in 1620 with that of 1650, we seem to have advanced in one generation from the childhood to the maturity of a people. But this very intensity of thought o'er informed its tenement of clay.' The language itself had not grown sufficiently to meet the development of political ideas. How, we may ask, could an author produce an intelligible essay on social science, without the use of such words as interesting,' 'individual,' 'impression,' 'moral and social phenomena,' historical inquirer, improvement,' 'civilisation,' 'intelligence,' 'culture?' all of which we cull from the first two pages of an essay of Mill, opened at hazard, and not one of which was used at all, or in its present learned sense, in the reign of Charles I. The poets were by no means exempt from similar difficulties. Nor was their language only inadequate to express their ideas; the ideas themselves were prematurely forced; men saw, darkly and through a haze, conclusions pressing on them for which nothing in the training of antecedent generations had prepared them. There was something incomplete, fragmentary, almost chaotic in their mode of delivering themselves of the burden thus laid upon them. Their political poets (the best of them), while full of vigour, seem constantly struggling with an incapacity to say all they mean; combined with those literary tendencies of the Metaphysical' school to which we have already adverted. The result was an ambitious, antithetical terseness, which often renders them harsh, and sometimes obscure. Butler ridiculed these peculiarities: yet had a tendency himself to fall into them. The style of Cowley carries them to the extreme. But he, too, in his political odes, exhibits no small share of that masculine appreciation of great events, and great qualities, which belonged to his time.

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encounter, in the prologue to his Essay on the Government of England,' with the great vision of the Lord Protector's armed angel, the figure of a man taller than a giant, or indeed than 'the shadow of any giant in the evening,' on the top of that 'famous hill in the island Mona, which has the prospect of three 'great, and not long since, most happy kingdoms,' is indeed but the product of a tortured fancy, not of spontaneous imagination. Nevertheless there are noble lyric fragments interspersed in it; such as that, by quoting which, Sir Robert Peel once revived the memory of a long-forgotten poem:

'Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be,
Come sink us rather in the sea;

Come rather pestilence and reap us down,

Come God's sword rather than our own.
Rather the Roman come again,

The Saxon, Norman, and the Dane;

In all the chains we ever wore

We griev'd, we sigh'd, we wept: we never blushed before.' There is something of the same elevation of thought, struggling with an imperfect power of language, and an artificial conciseness, in that fine, though youthful, epitaph, by the second Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, on his father-in-law, which begins,

Under this tomb doth lye

One born for victory,

Fairfax the Valiant, and the only he

Who e'er, for it alone, a conqueror would be.'

But a far nobler specimen exists in that magnificent ode of Andrew Marvell's, if his it be, of which the evidence seems slight, on the Protector: stanzas, in which the poet so daringly combined a tribute to the conqueror and the victim, and, all Republican as he was, paid a homage to what there was of greatness in the martyred King far more choice, and more dignified, than ever was tendered by Royalist versifier. They have been quoted often enough; but no one will grudge reading them again, and they seem both in their beauties and defects to illustrate our meaning.

'And, if we will speak true,

Much to the man is due,

Who from his private garden, where
He lived reserved and austere,

As 'twere his choicest plot
To plant the bergamot,

'Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,

VOL. CXIII. NO. CCXXIX.

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