August 19, 2025 • 21 mins
In Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits, William Hazlitt masterfully captures the essence of his era through insightful monographs on a constellation of literary luminaries. Meet the likes of Jeremy Bentham, the architect of utilitarian philosophy, and William Godwin, who elevated morality beyond human reach. Delve into the minds of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Irving, and Sir Walter Scott, as Hazlitt reveals their distinct contributions to literature and society. From the eloquence of Thomas Campbell, known for Pleasures of Hope, to the impactful thoughts of William Wordsworth and Thomas Malthus, Hazlitt provides a vivid portrayal of his contemporaries. Engaging comparisons between the works of Charles Lamb and Washington Irving further enrich this collection, making it a fascinating exploration of the literary landscape of his time. Summary by Craig Campbell.
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Chapter seventeen of the Spirit of the Age or Contemporary
Portraits by William Haslett. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Arden,
Chapter seventeen Mister T. Moore, mister Lee Hunt or winglet
(00:24):
of the Fairy, humming bird like Adams of the Rainbow,
flattering Man campbell. A lines placed at the head of
this sketch from a contemporary writer appear to us very
descriptive of mister Moore's poetry. His verses, like a shower
of beauty, a dance of images, a stream of music,
are like the spray of the waterfall tinged by the
morning beam of rosy light. The characteristic distinction of our
(00:46):
author's style is this continuous and incessant flow of voluptuous
thoughts and shining illusions. He ought to write with a
crystal pen on silver paper. His subject is set off
by a dazzling veil of poetic diction, like a wreath
of flowers, gem with a numerous dewdrops, weep, tremble and
glitter and liquid softness and pearly light, while the song
of birds ravish as the ear and languid odors breathe around,
(01:09):
and Aurora opens heaven, smiling potles, pears and nymphs peep
through with the golden glades, and an angel's wing glances
over the glossy scene. No dainty flower or herb that
grows on ground, No arborette, but painted blossoms, dressed and
smelling sweeper there it might be found to butt out
fair and its sweet smells throw all around. No tree
(01:30):
whose branches did not bravely spring, no branch whereon a
fine bird did not sit. No bird but did her
shrill notes, sweetly sing, No song, but did contain a
lovely dit Trees, branches, birds, and songs for frame, it
fits for to allure frail minds, to careless ease. Mister
Campbell's imagination is fastidious and slight, and hence, though we
(01:52):
meet with more exquisite beauties in his writings, we meet
with them more rarely. There is comparatively a dearth of ornament.
But mister Moore stretches economy is wasteful and superfluous success.
He is always liberal and never at a loss for
sooner than not stimulate and delight the reader. He is
willing to be tawdry, a superficial or commonplace. His meanings
must be fine at any rate, though she should paint
(02:13):
and were cast off decorations rather than have any lack
of excitement. He repeats himself, and Eden and Ebliss and
Cherub smiles fill up the pauses of the sentiment with
a sickly monotony. It has been too much our author's
object to pander to the artificial taste of the age,
and his productions, however brilliant and agreeable, are in consequence
somewhat meritricious and effeminate. It was thought formerly enough to
(02:36):
have an occasionally fine passage in the progress of a
story or a poem, and an occasionally striking image or
expression in a fine passage or description. But this style,
it seems, was to be exploded as rude, Gothic, meager
and dry, now almost be raised at the same canalyizing
and preposterous level. There must be no pause, no interval,
no repose, no gradation. Simplicity in truth, yield up the
(02:58):
palm to affectation and God the craving of the public
mind after novelty and effect is in a false and uneasy
appetite that must be pampered with fine words. At every step.
We must be tickled with sound, startled with shoe, and
relieved by the importunate, uninterrupted display of fancy and verbal tinsel,
as much as possible, from the fatigue of thought or
(03:18):
shock of feeling. A poem is to resemble an exhibition
of fireworks, with a continual explosion of quaint figures and devices,
flash after flash, that surprise for the moment and leave
no trace of light or warmth behind them. Her modern poetry,
in its retrograde progress, comes at last to be constructed
on the principles of the modern opera, where an attempt
is made to gratify every sense at every instant, and
(03:39):
where the understanding alone is insulted in the heartmont It
is in this view only that we can discover that
mister Moore's poetry is viciated or immoral. It seduces the
taste and innervates the imagination, and creates a false standard
of reference, and inverts or decompounds the natural order of
association in which objects strike the thoughts and feelings. His
(04:00):
is the poetry of the bath of the toilette, of
the saloon of the fashionable world, not the poetry of nature,
or the heart or of human life. He stunts and
enfeebles equally the growth of the imagination and the affections.
Are not taking the seat of poetry and sowing it
in the ground of truth and letting it expand in
the dew and rain, and chew it up to heaven
and spread at sweeles to the air, or dedicate its
(04:22):
beauty to the sun, instead of which he anticipates and
defeats his own object by plucking flowers and blossoms from
the stem and set in them in the ground of
idleness and folly, or in the cap of his own vanity,
where they soon wither and disappear, dying or heavy sicken.
This is but a sort of child's play, a short
sighted ambition. In Milton, we meet with many prosaic lines,
(04:44):
either because the subject does not require raising, or because
they are necessary to connect the story or serve as
a relief to other passages. There is not such a
thing to be found in all mister Moore's writings. His
volumes present us with a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.
But we cannot add where no crude surfeit rains. He
indeed cloys with sweetness. He obscures with splendor, He fatigues
(05:06):
with gayety. We are stifled on beds of roses. We
literally lie on the rack of restless ecstasy. His flowery
fancy looks so fair and smells so sweet that the
scents aches at it. His verse droops and languishes under
a load of beauty, like a bough laden with fruit.
His gorgeous style is like another morn risen on mid noon.
(05:26):
There is no passage that is not made up of
blushing lines, no line that is not enriched with a
sparkling metaphor, no image that is left unadorned with a
double epithet. All his verbs, nouns, udjectives are equally glossy, smooth,
and beautiful. Every stands that is transparent with light, perfumed
with odors, floating in liquid harmony, melting in luxurious, evanescent delights.
(05:47):
His muse is never contented with an offering from one
sense alone, but brings another rifled charm to match it,
and revels in a fairy round of pleasure. The interest
is not dramatic, but melowjerma. It is a mixture of painting, poetry,
and music, of the natural and preternatural, of obvious sentiment
and romantic costume. A rose is a ghoul, a nightingale,
(06:09):
a bow bull. We might fancy ourselves in an Eastern
harem amidst ottomans an auto of roses and vales and
spangles and marble pillars and cool fountains and Arab maids
and genii and magicians and peris and cherubs and whatnot.
Mister Moore has a little mistake in the art of poetry.
For the cosmetic art. It does not compose a historic
(06:30):
group or workout a single figure, but throws a variety
of elementary sensations of vivid impressions together and calls it
a description. He makes out an inventory of beauty, the
smile on the lips, the dimple on the cheeks, item,
golden locks, item, a pair of blue wings, item of
silver sound with breathing fragrance and radiant light, and thinks
(06:51):
it a character or a story. He gets together a
number of fine things and fine names, and thinks that
flung on heaps, they make up a fine poem. This
dissipated full some painted patchwork style may succeed in the
levity and languor the boudoir, or might have been adapted
to the pavilions of royalty. But it is not the
style of Parnassus, nor a passport to immortality. It is
(07:12):
not the taste of the ancients. Tis not classical war,
not the fashioned Tibulus or Theocritus, or Nacarian or Virgil
or Ariosto, or Pope or Byron, or any great writer
among the living or the dead. But it is the
style of our English and Acaran, and is or was
the fashion of the day. Let one example, and that
(07:32):
an admired one taken from l. L Uke suffice to
explain the mystery and to soften the harshness of the
foregoing criticism. Now upon Syria's land of roses softly the
line of eve reposus, and like a glory, the broad's
sun hangs over Sainted Lebanon, whose head and wintry grandeur
towers and weddings with eternal sleep, while summer in a
(07:54):
veil of flowers is sleeping rosy at his feet. To
one who looks from up her air her enchanted regions, there,
how beats must have been the glow the life is
sparkling from below, fair gardens, shining streams or ranks of
golden melons on their banks, more golden ware, the sunlight falls,
gay lizards glittering on the walls of ruined shrines, busy
(08:15):
and bright as they were all alive with light, And
yet more splendid, numerous flocks of pigeons settling on the rocks,
with their rich, restless wings that gleam variously in the
crimson mead of the warm West, as if in lage
were brilliance from the miner made of tearless rainbows, such
as span the unclotted skies, the peristan, and then the
(08:37):
mingling sounds that come of Shepherd's ancient reed with hum
of the wild bees of Palestine banqueting through the flowery
vales enjured in those sweet banks of iron and woods
so full of nightingales. The following lines are the very
perfection of Dela Cruscan sentiment and affected orientalism of style.
The Pari exclaimed, on finding that old housman and hackneyed poet,
(09:00):
medical machine, a penitent here, joy and joy forever. My
task is done. The gates are past, and heaven is won.
Oh Am I not happy. I am I am to
these sweet eten. How dark and sad are the diamond
turrets of shaduk he am, and the fragrant bearers of
them bear a bad There is in all this a
play of fancy, a glitter of words, a shallowness of thought,
(09:22):
and a want of truth and solidity that is wonderful,
and that nothing but the heedless, rapid glod of the
verse could render tolerable. It seems that the poet as
well as the lover, may bestride the gossamer that wantons
in the idle summer air, and yet not fall so
light as vanity. Mister Moore ought not to contend with
serious difficulties or with entire subjects. He can write verses,
(09:44):
not a poem. There is no principle of massing or
of continuity in his productions, neither height nor breadth nor
depth of capacity. There is no truth of representation, no
strong internal feeling, but a continual flutter and display of
affected airs and graces, Like a finisish cook head who
hides the want of symmetry by extravagance of dress, and
the want of passion by flippant forwardness and unmeaning sentimentality,
(10:08):
all is flimsy, all his floorid to excess. His imagination,
may dally with insect beauties at rosicretion. Spells may describe
a butterfly's wing, a flower pot, a fan, but it
should not attempt to span the great outlines of nature,
or keep pace with the sounding march of events, or
grapple with the strong fibers of the human heart. The
(10:29):
great becomes turgid in his hands, the pathetic insipid. If
mister Moore were to describe the heights of Chimboracco, instead
of the loneliness, the vastness, and the shadowy might, he
would only think of adorning it with roseate tints like
a strawberry ice, and would transform a magician's fortress in
the Himalaya, stripped of its mysterious gloom and frowning horrors,
(10:51):
into a jeweler's toy to be set upon a lady's toilette.
In proof of this, see above the diamond turrets of Shadukiam,
et cetera. The description of Mochana in the Fight, though
his spirit and grandeur of effete, has still a great
alloy of the mock heroic in it. The roots of
blood and death, which is otherwise well marked, is infested
with a swarm of firefly fancies and vain mochana midst
(11:14):
the general flesh stands like the red moon and some
stormy night among the fugitive clouds, that hurrying by, leave
only her unshaken in the sky. The simile is fine,
It would have been perfect, but that the moon is
not red, and that she seems to hurry by the clouds,
not they by her. The description of the warrior's youthful adversary,
whose coming seems a lighted glory, such as breaks and dreams,
(11:38):
is fantastic and enervated. I field of battle has nothing
to do with dreams. And again the two lines immediately after,
and every sword true as O're blows, dim the needle
tracks the load star following him are a mere piece
of enigmatical ingenuity and scientific memony. Pemene icanna accept the
Irish maladies from the same censure that these national airs
(12:01):
do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in his countrymen.
The case of Ireland is hopeless that these prettinesses pass
for patriotism. If a country can he from its HeartScore
only these vapid, varnished sentiments, lip deep, and let its
tears blood evaporate in an empty conceit. Let it be
governed as it has been. There are here no tones
to waken liberty, to console humanity. Mister Moore converts the
(12:24):
wild harp of Erron into a musical snout box. Footnote A.
Compare his songs what burns is? We do accept from
this censure, the author's political squibs, and the two penny
post bag. These are essences, our nests of spicery, bitter
and sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so
well describe the set speech of a dull formulist. Footnote B.
(12:46):
There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
and he said, little soul. Let us try, et cetera
parody on there was a little man and he had
a little gun. One should think this exquisite ridicule of
a pedantic effusion might have silenced forever or the automaton
that delivered it. But the official personage in question at
the close of the session addressed an extra official congratulation
(13:07):
to the Prince Regent on a bill that had not passed,
as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were
to justify them, and the footnote bee or the flowing
locks of Dowager in the manner of Acremanne's dresses, for
may his light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body
of the court, hits off the faded graces of an
Adonis of fifty ways. The vanity of fashion in tremulous
(13:30):
scales mimics the grimace of affectation and folly. Choose up
the littleness of the great and spears of failanx of
statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond brooch.
In choosing songs. The regent named had I a heart
for falsehood frame, while gentle Hertford begged and prayed for
young I am and sore afraid. Nothing in Pope or
(13:51):
prior ever surpassed a delicate insinuation and adroit satire. Of
these lions, and hundreds more of our author's composition, we
wish it would not take pains to me make us
think of them with less pleasure than formerly. The Fodge
family is in the same spirit, but with a little
falling off. There is too great a mixture of undisguised
jacobinism and fashionable slaying the divine Fanny, Bias and the mountains,
(14:13):
a Larousse figure in somewhat quaintly with Bonaparte and the Bourbons.
The poet also launches the lightning of political indignation, but
it rather plays round and illumines his own pen than
reaches the devoted heads at which it is aimed. Mister
Moore is in private life an amiable and estimable man.
The embellished and voluptuous style of his poetry, his unpretending origin,
(14:36):
and his Mignon figure soon introduce him to the notice
of the great, and his gaiety has wit. His good
humor and many agreeable accomplishments fixed him there the darling
of his friends and the idle of fashion. If he
is no longer familiar with royalty, as with his daughter,
the fault is not his. His adherence to his principles
caused the separation his laws of his country was the
cloud that intercepted the sunshine of court favor. This is
(14:58):
so far well. Mister More vindicates his own dignity, but
the sense of intrinsic worth, a widespread fame, and of
the intimacy of the great makes him perhaps a little
too fastidious and exigent as to the pretensions of others.
He has been so long accustomed to the society of
whig lords, and so enchanted by the smile of beauty
and fashion, that he really fancies himself one of the
(15:21):
set to which he has admitted on sufferance, and tries
very unnecessarily to keep others out of it. He talks
familiarly of works that are or are not read in
our circle, And seated, smiling and at his ease in
a coronet coach, enlivening the owner by his brisk sallies
and attic conceits as shocked as he passes to see
a peer of the realm shake hands with a poet.
(15:42):
There is a little indulgence of spleen and envy, a
little servility in pandering to aristocratic pride. In this proceeding,
is mister Moore bound to advise a noble poet to
get as fast as possible out of a certain publication,
lest he should not be able to give an account
at Holland or at Lansdowne House, or how his friend
Lord B had associated him himself with his friend l H.
(16:02):
Is he afraid that the spirit of monarchy will eclipse
the fables for the holy alliance and virulence and plain speaking?
Or are the members of the Fudge family to secure
a monopoly for the abuse of the barbons and the
doctrine of divine right? Because he is genteel and sarcastic,
may not others be paradossical and argumentative? Or must no
one bark a minister or a general unless they have
(16:25):
been first dandled like a little French pog dog in
the lap of a lady of quality. Does mister Moore
insist on the double claim of birth and genius as
a title to respectability in all advocates at the popular
side but himself? Or is he anxious to keep the
pretensions of his patrician and plebeian friends quite separate, so
as to be himself the only point of union a
(16:45):
sort of double meaning between the two. It is idle
to think of setting bounds to the weakness and illusions
of self love, as long as it is confined to
a man's own breast. But it ought not to be
made a plea for holding back the powerful hand and
stretched out to save another struggling the tide of popular prejudice,
who has suffered shipwreck of health fame and fortune and
a common cost, and who has deserved the aid and
(17:06):
the good wishes of all who are, on principle embarked
in the same cause by equal zeal and honesty, if
not by equal talents to support and to adorn it.
We shall conclude the present article with a short notice
of an individual who, in the cast of his mind
and in political principle, bears no very remote resemblance to
the patriot and wit is spoken of, and on whose
merits we should be scand at greater length. But that
(17:29):
personal intimacy might be supposed to render us partial, it
is well when personal intimacy it produces this effect, and
when the light had dazzled us at a distance, does not,
in a closer inspection, turn out an opaque substance. This
is a charge that none of his friends will bring
against mister le Hunt. He improves upon acquaintance the author
translates admirably into the man. Indeed, the very faults of
(17:52):
his style of virtues in the individual, his natural gaiety
and sprightliness, the manner, his high animal spirits, and the
vinest quality of his mind, reduced an immediate fascination and
intoxication in those who come in contact with him and
carry off in society. Whatever in his writings may to
some seem flat and impertinent, from great sanguineness of temper,
from great quickness, and unsuspecting simplicity. He runs on to
(18:15):
the public as he does at his own fireside, and
talks about himself, forgetting that he is not always among friends.
His look his tone are required to point many things
that he says. His frank, cordial manner reconciles you instantly
to a little overbearing, overweening self complacency. To be admired,
he needs but to be seen, But perhaps he ought
(18:35):
to be seen to be fully appreciated. No one ever
sought his society who did not come away with a
more favorable opinion of him. No one was ever disappointed,
except those who had entertained idle prejudices against them. He
sometimes trifles with his readers or tires of a subject
of not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate sympathy.
But in conversation he is all life and animation, combining
(18:57):
the vivacity of the schoolboy with a very sore of
the wit and the taste of the scholar. The personal
character the spontaneous impulses do not appear to excuse the
author unless you are acquainted with his situation and habits,
like some proud beauty who gives herself what we think
strange errors and graces under a mask, but who is
instantly forgiven when she shews her face. We have said
(19:19):
that Lord Baron is a sublime Cox's comb, why shall
we not say that mister Hunt is a delightful one.
There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner,
which is more than the strict logical premises warned, and
which dull and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of and cannot
understand till they see it. He is the only poet
or literary man we ever knew who puts us in
(19:41):
mind of Sir John Suckling, or Kiligree or carew Or
who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility.
Mister Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born and
to patronize men of letters. He might then have played
and sung, and laughed and talked his life away, have
written manly prose elgin verse, and a story of riminy
(20:02):
would have been praised by mister Blackwood. As it is,
there is no man now living who, at the same
time mights pose and verse so well, with the exception
of mister Southy, an exception we fear that will be
little palatable to either of these gentlemen. His prose writings, however,
display more consistency of principle than the laureates, his verses
more taste. We will venture to oppose his third canto
(20:24):
of the Story of Rueminy, for classic elegance and natural feeling,
to any equal number of lines from mister Southey's Epochs
or from mister Moore's La Larukee. In a more gay
and conversational style of writing. We think his epistle to
Lord Byron on his going abroad is a masterpiece, and
the feast of the poets has run through several editions.
(20:45):
A light, familiar grace and mild, unpretending pathos are the
characteristics of his more sportive of serious writings, whether in
poetry or prose. A smile plays around the features of
the one, A tear is ready to start from the
thoughtful gaze of the other. He perhaps takes two little
pains and indulges in too much wayward caprice. In both
a wit and a poet, mister Hunt is also distinguished
(21:06):
by fineness of tact and sterling sense. He has only
been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue. What then,
is the drawback to so many shining qualities that has
made them useless or even hurtful to their owner. His
crime is to have been editor of the Examiner ten
years ago, when some allusion was made in it to
the age of the present king, and that though his
majesty has grown older, our luckless politician is no wiser
(21:30):
than he was then. End of Chapter seventeen, recording by
Arden
Chapter seventeen of the Spirit of the Age or Contemporary
Portraits by William Haslett. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Arden,
Chapter seventeen Mister T. Moore, mister Lee Hunt or winglet
(00:24):
of the Fairy, humming bird like Adams of the Rainbow,
flattering Man campbell. A lines placed at the head of
this sketch from a contemporary writer appear to us very
descriptive of mister Moore's poetry. His verses, like a shower
of beauty, a dance of images, a stream of music,
are like the spray of the waterfall tinged by the
morning beam of rosy light. The characteristic distinction of our
(00:46):
author's style is this continuous and incessant flow of voluptuous
thoughts and shining illusions. He ought to write with a
crystal pen on silver paper. His subject is set off
by a dazzling veil of poetic diction, like a wreath
of flowers, gem with a numerous dewdrops, weep, tremble and
glitter and liquid softness and pearly light, while the song
of birds ravish as the ear and languid odors breathe around,
(01:09):
and Aurora opens heaven, smiling potles, pears and nymphs peep
through with the golden glades, and an angel's wing glances
over the glossy scene. No dainty flower or herb that
grows on ground, No arborette, but painted blossoms, dressed and
smelling sweeper there it might be found to butt out
fair and its sweet smells throw all around. No tree
(01:30):
whose branches did not bravely spring, no branch whereon a
fine bird did not sit. No bird but did her
shrill notes, sweetly sing, No song, but did contain a
lovely dit Trees, branches, birds, and songs for frame, it
fits for to allure frail minds, to careless ease. Mister
Campbell's imagination is fastidious and slight, and hence, though we
(01:52):
meet with more exquisite beauties in his writings, we meet
with them more rarely. There is comparatively a dearth of ornament.
But mister Moore stretches economy is wasteful and superfluous success.
He is always liberal and never at a loss for
sooner than not stimulate and delight the reader. He is
willing to be tawdry, a superficial or commonplace. His meanings
must be fine at any rate, though she should paint
(02:13):
and were cast off decorations rather than have any lack
of excitement. He repeats himself, and Eden and Ebliss and
Cherub smiles fill up the pauses of the sentiment with
a sickly monotony. It has been too much our author's
object to pander to the artificial taste of the age,
and his productions, however brilliant and agreeable, are in consequence
somewhat meritricious and effeminate. It was thought formerly enough to
(02:36):
have an occasionally fine passage in the progress of a
story or a poem, and an occasionally striking image or
expression in a fine passage or description. But this style,
it seems, was to be exploded as rude, Gothic, meager
and dry, now almost be raised at the same canalyizing
and preposterous level. There must be no pause, no interval,
no repose, no gradation. Simplicity in truth, yield up the
(02:58):
palm to affectation and God the craving of the public
mind after novelty and effect is in a false and uneasy
appetite that must be pampered with fine words. At every step.
We must be tickled with sound, startled with shoe, and
relieved by the importunate, uninterrupted display of fancy and verbal tinsel,
as much as possible, from the fatigue of thought or
(03:18):
shock of feeling. A poem is to resemble an exhibition
of fireworks, with a continual explosion of quaint figures and devices,
flash after flash, that surprise for the moment and leave
no trace of light or warmth behind them. Her modern poetry,
in its retrograde progress, comes at last to be constructed
on the principles of the modern opera, where an attempt
is made to gratify every sense at every instant, and
(03:39):
where the understanding alone is insulted in the heartmont It
is in this view only that we can discover that
mister Moore's poetry is viciated or immoral. It seduces the
taste and innervates the imagination, and creates a false standard
of reference, and inverts or decompounds the natural order of
association in which objects strike the thoughts and feelings. His
(04:00):
is the poetry of the bath of the toilette, of
the saloon of the fashionable world, not the poetry of nature,
or the heart or of human life. He stunts and
enfeebles equally the growth of the imagination and the affections.
Are not taking the seat of poetry and sowing it
in the ground of truth and letting it expand in
the dew and rain, and chew it up to heaven
and spread at sweeles to the air, or dedicate its
(04:22):
beauty to the sun, instead of which he anticipates and
defeats his own object by plucking flowers and blossoms from
the stem and set in them in the ground of
idleness and folly, or in the cap of his own vanity,
where they soon wither and disappear, dying or heavy sicken.
This is but a sort of child's play, a short
sighted ambition. In Milton, we meet with many prosaic lines,
(04:44):
either because the subject does not require raising, or because
they are necessary to connect the story or serve as
a relief to other passages. There is not such a
thing to be found in all mister Moore's writings. His
volumes present us with a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.
But we cannot add where no crude surfeit rains. He
indeed cloys with sweetness. He obscures with splendor, He fatigues
(05:06):
with gayety. We are stifled on beds of roses. We
literally lie on the rack of restless ecstasy. His flowery
fancy looks so fair and smells so sweet that the
scents aches at it. His verse droops and languishes under
a load of beauty, like a bough laden with fruit.
His gorgeous style is like another morn risen on mid noon.
(05:26):
There is no passage that is not made up of
blushing lines, no line that is not enriched with a
sparkling metaphor, no image that is left unadorned with a
double epithet. All his verbs, nouns, udjectives are equally glossy, smooth,
and beautiful. Every stands that is transparent with light, perfumed
with odors, floating in liquid harmony, melting in luxurious, evanescent delights.
(05:47):
His muse is never contented with an offering from one
sense alone, but brings another rifled charm to match it,
and revels in a fairy round of pleasure. The interest
is not dramatic, but melowjerma. It is a mixture of painting, poetry,
and music, of the natural and preternatural, of obvious sentiment
and romantic costume. A rose is a ghoul, a nightingale,
(06:09):
a bow bull. We might fancy ourselves in an Eastern
harem amidst ottomans an auto of roses and vales and
spangles and marble pillars and cool fountains and Arab maids
and genii and magicians and peris and cherubs and whatnot.
Mister Moore has a little mistake in the art of poetry.
For the cosmetic art. It does not compose a historic
(06:30):
group or workout a single figure, but throws a variety
of elementary sensations of vivid impressions together and calls it
a description. He makes out an inventory of beauty, the
smile on the lips, the dimple on the cheeks, item,
golden locks, item, a pair of blue wings, item of
silver sound with breathing fragrance and radiant light, and thinks
(06:51):
it a character or a story. He gets together a
number of fine things and fine names, and thinks that
flung on heaps, they make up a fine poem. This
dissipated full some painted patchwork style may succeed in the
levity and languor the boudoir, or might have been adapted
to the pavilions of royalty. But it is not the
style of Parnassus, nor a passport to immortality. It is
(07:12):
not the taste of the ancients. Tis not classical war,
not the fashioned Tibulus or Theocritus, or Nacarian or Virgil
or Ariosto, or Pope or Byron, or any great writer
among the living or the dead. But it is the
style of our English and Acaran, and is or was
the fashion of the day. Let one example, and that
(07:32):
an admired one taken from l. L Uke suffice to
explain the mystery and to soften the harshness of the
foregoing criticism. Now upon Syria's land of roses softly the
line of eve reposus, and like a glory, the broad's
sun hangs over Sainted Lebanon, whose head and wintry grandeur
towers and weddings with eternal sleep, while summer in a
(07:54):
veil of flowers is sleeping rosy at his feet. To
one who looks from up her air her enchanted regions, there,
how beats must have been the glow the life is
sparkling from below, fair gardens, shining streams or ranks of
golden melons on their banks, more golden ware, the sunlight falls,
gay lizards glittering on the walls of ruined shrines, busy
(08:15):
and bright as they were all alive with light, And
yet more splendid, numerous flocks of pigeons settling on the rocks,
with their rich, restless wings that gleam variously in the
crimson mead of the warm West, as if in lage
were brilliance from the miner made of tearless rainbows, such
as span the unclotted skies, the peristan, and then the
(08:37):
mingling sounds that come of Shepherd's ancient reed with hum
of the wild bees of Palestine banqueting through the flowery
vales enjured in those sweet banks of iron and woods
so full of nightingales. The following lines are the very
perfection of Dela Cruscan sentiment and affected orientalism of style.
The Pari exclaimed, on finding that old housman and hackneyed poet,
(09:00):
medical machine, a penitent here, joy and joy forever. My
task is done. The gates are past, and heaven is won.
Oh Am I not happy. I am I am to
these sweet eten. How dark and sad are the diamond
turrets of shaduk he am, and the fragrant bearers of
them bear a bad There is in all this a
play of fancy, a glitter of words, a shallowness of thought,
(09:22):
and a want of truth and solidity that is wonderful,
and that nothing but the heedless, rapid glod of the
verse could render tolerable. It seems that the poet as
well as the lover, may bestride the gossamer that wantons
in the idle summer air, and yet not fall so
light as vanity. Mister Moore ought not to contend with
serious difficulties or with entire subjects. He can write verses,
(09:44):
not a poem. There is no principle of massing or
of continuity in his productions, neither height nor breadth nor
depth of capacity. There is no truth of representation, no
strong internal feeling, but a continual flutter and display of
affected airs and graces, Like a finisish cook head who
hides the want of symmetry by extravagance of dress, and
the want of passion by flippant forwardness and unmeaning sentimentality,
(10:08):
all is flimsy, all his floorid to excess. His imagination,
may dally with insect beauties at rosicretion. Spells may describe
a butterfly's wing, a flower pot, a fan, but it
should not attempt to span the great outlines of nature,
or keep pace with the sounding march of events, or
grapple with the strong fibers of the human heart. The
(10:29):
great becomes turgid in his hands, the pathetic insipid. If
mister Moore were to describe the heights of Chimboracco, instead
of the loneliness, the vastness, and the shadowy might, he
would only think of adorning it with roseate tints like
a strawberry ice, and would transform a magician's fortress in
the Himalaya, stripped of its mysterious gloom and frowning horrors,
(10:51):
into a jeweler's toy to be set upon a lady's toilette.
In proof of this, see above the diamond turrets of Shadukiam,
et cetera. The description of Mochana in the Fight, though
his spirit and grandeur of effete, has still a great
alloy of the mock heroic in it. The roots of
blood and death, which is otherwise well marked, is infested
with a swarm of firefly fancies and vain mochana midst
(11:14):
the general flesh stands like the red moon and some
stormy night among the fugitive clouds, that hurrying by, leave
only her unshaken in the sky. The simile is fine,
It would have been perfect, but that the moon is
not red, and that she seems to hurry by the clouds,
not they by her. The description of the warrior's youthful adversary,
whose coming seems a lighted glory, such as breaks and dreams,
(11:38):
is fantastic and enervated. I field of battle has nothing
to do with dreams. And again the two lines immediately after,
and every sword true as O're blows, dim the needle
tracks the load star following him are a mere piece
of enigmatical ingenuity and scientific memony. Pemene icanna accept the
Irish maladies from the same censure that these national airs
(12:01):
do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in his countrymen.
The case of Ireland is hopeless that these prettinesses pass
for patriotism. If a country can he from its HeartScore
only these vapid, varnished sentiments, lip deep, and let its
tears blood evaporate in an empty conceit. Let it be
governed as it has been. There are here no tones
to waken liberty, to console humanity. Mister Moore converts the
(12:24):
wild harp of Erron into a musical snout box. Footnote A.
Compare his songs what burns is? We do accept from
this censure, the author's political squibs, and the two penny
post bag. These are essences, our nests of spicery, bitter
and sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so
well describe the set speech of a dull formulist. Footnote B.
(12:46):
There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
and he said, little soul. Let us try, et cetera
parody on there was a little man and he had
a little gun. One should think this exquisite ridicule of
a pedantic effusion might have silenced forever or the automaton
that delivered it. But the official personage in question at
the close of the session addressed an extra official congratulation
(13:07):
to the Prince Regent on a bill that had not passed,
as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were
to justify them, and the footnote bee or the flowing
locks of Dowager in the manner of Acremanne's dresses, for
may his light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body
of the court, hits off the faded graces of an
Adonis of fifty ways. The vanity of fashion in tremulous
(13:30):
scales mimics the grimace of affectation and folly. Choose up
the littleness of the great and spears of failanx of
statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond brooch.
In choosing songs. The regent named had I a heart
for falsehood frame, while gentle Hertford begged and prayed for
young I am and sore afraid. Nothing in Pope or
(13:51):
prior ever surpassed a delicate insinuation and adroit satire. Of
these lions, and hundreds more of our author's composition, we
wish it would not take pains to me make us
think of them with less pleasure than formerly. The Fodge
family is in the same spirit, but with a little
falling off. There is too great a mixture of undisguised
jacobinism and fashionable slaying the divine Fanny, Bias and the mountains,
(14:13):
a Larousse figure in somewhat quaintly with Bonaparte and the Bourbons.
The poet also launches the lightning of political indignation, but
it rather plays round and illumines his own pen than
reaches the devoted heads at which it is aimed. Mister
Moore is in private life an amiable and estimable man.
The embellished and voluptuous style of his poetry, his unpretending origin,
(14:36):
and his Mignon figure soon introduce him to the notice
of the great, and his gaiety has wit. His good
humor and many agreeable accomplishments fixed him there the darling
of his friends and the idle of fashion. If he
is no longer familiar with royalty, as with his daughter,
the fault is not his. His adherence to his principles
caused the separation his laws of his country was the
cloud that intercepted the sunshine of court favor. This is
(14:58):
so far well. Mister More vindicates his own dignity, but
the sense of intrinsic worth, a widespread fame, and of
the intimacy of the great makes him perhaps a little
too fastidious and exigent as to the pretensions of others.
He has been so long accustomed to the society of
whig lords, and so enchanted by the smile of beauty
and fashion, that he really fancies himself one of the
(15:21):
set to which he has admitted on sufferance, and tries
very unnecessarily to keep others out of it. He talks
familiarly of works that are or are not read in
our circle, And seated, smiling and at his ease in
a coronet coach, enlivening the owner by his brisk sallies
and attic conceits as shocked as he passes to see
a peer of the realm shake hands with a poet.
(15:42):
There is a little indulgence of spleen and envy, a
little servility in pandering to aristocratic pride. In this proceeding,
is mister Moore bound to advise a noble poet to
get as fast as possible out of a certain publication,
lest he should not be able to give an account
at Holland or at Lansdowne House, or how his friend
Lord B had associated him himself with his friend l H.
(16:02):
Is he afraid that the spirit of monarchy will eclipse
the fables for the holy alliance and virulence and plain speaking?
Or are the members of the Fudge family to secure
a monopoly for the abuse of the barbons and the
doctrine of divine right? Because he is genteel and sarcastic,
may not others be paradossical and argumentative? Or must no
one bark a minister or a general unless they have
(16:25):
been first dandled like a little French pog dog in
the lap of a lady of quality. Does mister Moore
insist on the double claim of birth and genius as
a title to respectability in all advocates at the popular
side but himself? Or is he anxious to keep the
pretensions of his patrician and plebeian friends quite separate, so
as to be himself the only point of union a
(16:45):
sort of double meaning between the two. It is idle
to think of setting bounds to the weakness and illusions
of self love, as long as it is confined to
a man's own breast. But it ought not to be
made a plea for holding back the powerful hand and
stretched out to save another struggling the tide of popular prejudice,
who has suffered shipwreck of health fame and fortune and
a common cost, and who has deserved the aid and
(17:06):
the good wishes of all who are, on principle embarked
in the same cause by equal zeal and honesty, if
not by equal talents to support and to adorn it.
We shall conclude the present article with a short notice
of an individual who, in the cast of his mind
and in political principle, bears no very remote resemblance to
the patriot and wit is spoken of, and on whose
merits we should be scand at greater length. But that
(17:29):
personal intimacy might be supposed to render us partial, it
is well when personal intimacy it produces this effect, and
when the light had dazzled us at a distance, does not,
in a closer inspection, turn out an opaque substance. This
is a charge that none of his friends will bring
against mister le Hunt. He improves upon acquaintance the author
translates admirably into the man. Indeed, the very faults of
(17:52):
his style of virtues in the individual, his natural gaiety
and sprightliness, the manner, his high animal spirits, and the
vinest quality of his mind, reduced an immediate fascination and
intoxication in those who come in contact with him and
carry off in society. Whatever in his writings may to
some seem flat and impertinent, from great sanguineness of temper,
from great quickness, and unsuspecting simplicity. He runs on to
(18:15):
the public as he does at his own fireside, and
talks about himself, forgetting that he is not always among friends.
His look his tone are required to point many things
that he says. His frank, cordial manner reconciles you instantly
to a little overbearing, overweening self complacency. To be admired,
he needs but to be seen, But perhaps he ought
(18:35):
to be seen to be fully appreciated. No one ever
sought his society who did not come away with a
more favorable opinion of him. No one was ever disappointed,
except those who had entertained idle prejudices against them. He
sometimes trifles with his readers or tires of a subject
of not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate sympathy.
But in conversation he is all life and animation, combining
(18:57):
the vivacity of the schoolboy with a very sore of
the wit and the taste of the scholar. The personal
character the spontaneous impulses do not appear to excuse the
author unless you are acquainted with his situation and habits,
like some proud beauty who gives herself what we think
strange errors and graces under a mask, but who is
instantly forgiven when she shews her face. We have said
(19:19):
that Lord Baron is a sublime Cox's comb, why shall
we not say that mister Hunt is a delightful one.
There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner,
which is more than the strict logical premises warned, and
which dull and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of and cannot
understand till they see it. He is the only poet
or literary man we ever knew who puts us in
(19:41):
mind of Sir John Suckling, or Kiligree or carew Or
who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility.
Mister Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born and
to patronize men of letters. He might then have played
and sung, and laughed and talked his life away, have
written manly prose elgin verse, and a story of riminy
(20:02):
would have been praised by mister Blackwood. As it is,
there is no man now living who, at the same
time mights pose and verse so well, with the exception
of mister Southy, an exception we fear that will be
little palatable to either of these gentlemen. His prose writings, however,
display more consistency of principle than the laureates, his verses
more taste. We will venture to oppose his third canto
(20:24):
of the Story of Rueminy, for classic elegance and natural feeling,
to any equal number of lines from mister Southey's Epochs
or from mister Moore's La Larukee. In a more gay
and conversational style of writing. We think his epistle to
Lord Byron on his going abroad is a masterpiece, and
the feast of the poets has run through several editions.
(20:45):
A light, familiar grace and mild, unpretending pathos are the
characteristics of his more sportive of serious writings, whether in
poetry or prose. A smile plays around the features of
the one, A tear is ready to start from the
thoughtful gaze of the other. He perhaps takes two little
pains and indulges in too much wayward caprice. In both
a wit and a poet, mister Hunt is also distinguished
(21:06):
by fineness of tact and sterling sense. He has only
been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue. What then,
is the drawback to so many shining qualities that has
made them useless or even hurtful to their owner. His
crime is to have been editor of the Examiner ten
years ago, when some allusion was made in it to
the age of the present king, and that though his
majesty has grown older, our luckless politician is no wiser
(21:30):
than he was then. End of Chapter seventeen, recording by
Arden
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