pathetic
playfulness displayed in it.]

[Footnote 34:

"Pity it was to hear the Elfins' wail
Rise up in concert from their mingled dread,
Pity it was to see them all so pale
Gaze on the grass as for a dying bed.
But Puck was seated on a spider's thread
That hung between two branches of a brier,
And 'gan to swing and gambol, heels o'er head,
Like any Southwark tumbler on a wire,
For him no present grief could long inspire."

_Plea of the Midsummer Fairies._]

[Footnote 35: Witness the terror of Aram _after_ his victim lies dead
before him--(we quote from memory.)

"Nothing but lifeless flesh and bone
That could not do me ill!
And yet I fear'd him all the more
For lying there so still;
_There was a manhood in his look_
_That murder could not kill._"

_Dream of Eugene Aram._]

[Footnote 36:

"For Guilt was my grim chamberlain
Who lighted me to bed,
And drew my midnight curtains round
With fingers bloody red."

_Dream of Eugene Aram._]

[Footnote 37: See his impressive poem on _The Elm-Tree_. It appeared, a
couple of years back, in _The New Monthly Magazine_.]

[Footnote 38:

"Before I lived to sigh,
Thou wert in Avon, and a thousand rills,
Beautiful Orb! and so, _whene'er I lie_
_Trodden_, thou wilt be gazing from thy hills.
Blest be thy loving light, where'er it spills,
And blessed be thy face, O Mother Mild!"

_Ode to the Moon, published likewise in Blackwood_, 1829.]

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

NO. V.

DRYDEN ON CHAUCER.--_Concluded._

Dryden's poetical power appears most of all, perhaps, in his
translations; and his translation of the most vulgar renown is that
which unites his name to that of the great Roman epopeist; but it is not
his greatest achievement. The tales modernized and paraphrased from
Chaucer, and those filled up into poetical telling from Boccacio, as
they are the works of Dryden's which the most fasten themselves with
interest upon a mind open to poetry and free from preconceived literary
opinion, so do they seem to us to be, after all, those which a versed
critic must distinguish as stamped, beyond the others, with the skilled
ease, the flow as of original composition, the sustained spirit, and
force, and fervour--in short, by the mastery, and by the keen zest of
Writing. They are the works of his more than