Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/242

228 There is a quatrain worth adding, on behalf of those obstinate people who will mispronounce our gentle Cowper's name; we hope they will learn it by heart, and profit by it, as they ought:Mr. Lowell also emulates Southey's love of whimsical accumulation of rhymes: here, for example, is a dozen at a time—the more the merrier:Southey, however, was rather more unctuous and piquant in his aggregation of symphonic effects. His consonant curiosities come upon you with ever-renewed surprise; you are tickled and taken unawares; while, in most of his imitators, you detect an air of labour, and accept every fresh rhyme as a matter of course, a "base mechanical," made to order. The very happiest of successes in this line of things is no particular honour; but to be only moderately successful is worse than nought. The curiosa felicitas which is minus the felix, is ipso facto excommunicate from the "happy family" of curiosities, or at best is to be eyed as one of the seediest of poor relations.

The "Fable for Critics" is a pretty direct imitation of Leigh Hunt's "Feast of the Poets" and "Blue-stocking Revels." The "Fable," however, has to the "Feast" something of the relation of broad farce to genteel comedy. It has the exaggeration and self-conscious smartness of the American style of fun-making, compared with the more chastened and cautious manner of our home produce. There is about it a superabundant expense of the will-be-witty, an abandon of effervescent cleverness, a dashing determination to make points (without much care for "cutting them fine"), an ingenuity of illustration, and a fertility of resources, which form a highly entertaining and almost irresistible tout ensemble. In spite of its length, and its frequent sins of flippancy, nonsense, and heaviness, the reader reads on, and laughs often, and sometimes admires. This overgrown jeu-d'esprit is in effect the most attractive, if not the most compendious, of existing guides to the study of American authorship. And the criticism is generally shrewd, sagacious, searching; expressed frequently in passages of fine fluent eloquence, and seasoned with no faint spicery of wit and humour. We can only allude to a very few out of the crowded congress of transatlantic celebrities who figure in the "Fable;" some of our previous papers in this series have been indebted