ters which move before the observer in a large city; but he
has not enough of the vision and the faculty divine, to make them
more than melancholy ghosts of what they profess to be. The
attempts at humor are inexpressibly dismal; the burlesque
overpowers the most determined reader, by its leaden dulness. The
style is ingeniously tasteless and feeble. He who has read it
through can do or dare any thing. Mr. MATHEWS suffers from several
erroneous opinions. He seems to think that literary elegance
consists in the very qualities which make elegance impossible.
Simplicity and directness of language he abominates. When he has
an idea to express, he aims, apparently, to convert it into a
riddle, by inventing the most forced, unnatural, and distorted
expressions. If the thing can be obscured, he is sure to obscure
it. He seems to say to the reader, 'Can you guess? do you give it
up?' But then, less obliging than the maker of charades, he leaves
the puzzled victim without an explanation at last. He studies a
singularity of phrase at once crabbed and finical, and overloads
his pages with far-fetched epithets, that are at once harsh and
unmeaning. He seems to have been told that he has wit and humor,
and--strange delusion!--to believe it. He writes as if he imagined
that he possessed the inventive power: never was a greater
mistake. These qualities and these mistakes make his prose
writings unreadable and intolerable, at least all the later ones.
But when to the charms of his ordinary style are added the
attractions of verse, then the sense aches with the combined and
heightened beauties. The present volume exaggerates all his
literary vices. The plan of these poems is very well; if executed
with taste and power, the volume would have been interesting. As
it is, we have here and there a good line, a striking figure, or a
bold expression. But most of the poems are deformed by harshness
of versification, feebleness of thought, and every species of bad
writing. Compounded words, never seen before, and impossible to be
pronounced, epithets detailed on service for which they are wholly
unfit, figures that illustrate nothing but their own absurdity,
and rhymes that any common book would die of, astonish the reader
on every page. Had the poet purposely aimed to twist the English
language into ever