Page:The Maclise Portrait-Gallery.djvu/46

 The "Ode to Superstition" appeared in 1786; then the "Pleasures of Memory," —its every line redolent of Goldsmith in structure and diction,—tender, classical and refined, it is true, but with little of the divine afflatus of original genius,—inferior in power to the "Pleasures of the Imagination" of Akenside, which preceded it, and in episodic beauty to the "Pleasures of Hope" of Campbell, which it suggested. The Italy,—ascribed to Southey on its first anonymous appearance, — gemmed with charming descriptions of Ausonian life and scenery, and exquisite graces of style and language; "Human Life," warm in colour, deep in feeling, tender in conception; and " Columbus," a fragmentary epic, which obscure, inelegant in machinery, wanting in ease and spontaneity, and harsh in transition, hardly perhaps merited the severe castigation which it received in the Quarterly Review at the hands of Lord Dudley, the corrosive sublimate of whose bitter article the retaliative poet sought to neutralize by an epigram, which in its manifestation of the true Greek talent of expressing by implication what it wishes to convey, may be pronounced one of the best in the English language:—

When the estro of composition was over,—the muse of Rogers was hard-bound, gave birth but seldom, and was long in travail—the poet sat down to perfect the material form of his darling offspring. Stothard, with his tender and graceful pencil,—our English Raphael,—and Turner, the northern Claude, with his rainbow-tinted palette,—were summoned to collaborate. The production of the two volumes. Poems, and Italy, published by Moxon, 1830-4, is said to have cost the^r author between £10,000 and £12,000; and as they have never been excelled in beauty and taste by any books anywhere or any when,—and as, moreover, the art of the painter and the poet is so happily married as to be indivisible, — it is possible that there may be some applicability in the wicked parody of Pope's distich:—

or the wickeder couplet:—

However this may be, there is little doubt that the marvellous engravings from Turner's exquisite drawings, and Stothard's pure and graceful designs have done much to perpetuate the poems which they so happily illustrate. The successive issues are numerous between 1830 and 1859; but it is of course the early copies of the first edition,—identified by the head and tail-pieces to the Poem on a Tomb being worked off in wrong positions,—which are most highly prized by the cognoscenti. Any, however, are better than none; Ruskin enjoins the student of drawing to " possess himself first of the illustrated edition."

For the drawings, Turner was to have received £50 apiece; but as it