ne desirous of seeing more. His
remarks on the characters in Homer are, I think, the best part of them.
He sometimes talks of what he probably knew little about; as when he
tells us that "he had never been able to discover anything in
Aristophanes that might not he consigned to eternal oblivion, without
the least detriment to literature;" that "his wit and humour are now
become almost invisible, and seem never to have been very conspicuous;"
with more that is equally absurd, to the same purpose.

The few of his poems which he thought worthy of being selected from the
rest, and of being delivered to posterity, have many readers, to whom
perhaps one recommendation of them is that they are few. They have,
however, and deservedly, some admirers of a better stamp. They soothe
the mind with indistinct conceptions of something better than is met
with in ordinary life. The first book of the Minstrel, the most
considerable amongst them, describes with much fervour the enthusiasm of
a boy "smit with the love of song," and wakened to a sense of rapture by
all that is most grand or lovely in the external appearances of nature.
It is evident that the poet had felt much of what he describes, and he
therefore makes his hearers feel it. Yet at times, it must be owned, he
seems as if he were lashing himself into a state of artificial emotion,
as in the following lines:

O! Nature, how in every charm supreme!
Whose votaries feast on raptures ever new!
O! for the voice and fire of seraphim,
To sing thy glories with devotion due!

We hear, indeed, too often of "nature's charms."

Even here he cannot let the metaphysicians rest. They are, in his mind,
the grievance that is most to be complained of in this "vale of tears."

There was one other thing that Beattie detested nearly as much as
"metaphysic lore." It was the crowing of a cock. This antipathy he
contrived to express in the Minstrel, and the reader is startled by the
expression of it, as by something out of its place.

Of the stanza beginning, "O, how canst thou renounce," Gray told him
that it was, of all others, his favourite; that it was true poetry; that
it was inspiration; and, if I am not mistaken, it is related of Bishop
Porteus, that when he was once with Beattie, looking down on a
magnificent country that lay in prospect before them, he broke out with
much delight into the repetition of it. Gray objected to one word,
_garniture_, "as suggesting an idea of dres