all that is great and good. The objection
is frivolous. The greatest work of this kind that the world has ever
produced has "the Devil" for its hero; and supported as my author is by
so great a precedent, I contend that his hero is a very decent hero,
and especially as he has the advantage of Milton's, by reforming, at
the end, is evidently entitled to a competent share of celebrity.

I shall now proceed to the more immediate examination of the poem in
its different parts. The beginning, say the critics, ought to be plain
and simple--neither embellished with the flowers of poetry, nor turgid
with pomposity of diction. In this how exactly does our author conform
to the established opinion! He begins thus:

"The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts".

Can anything be more clear! more natural! more agreeable to the true
spirit of simplicity? Here are no tropes, no figurative expressions,
not even so much as an invocation to the Muse. He does not detain his
readers by any needless circumlocution, by unnecessarily informing them
what he _is_ going to sing, or still more unnecessarily enumerating
what he _is not_ going to sing; but, according to the precept of
Horace:--

_In medias res,
Non secus ac notas, auditorem rapit--_

That is, he at once introduces us and sets us on the most easy and
familiar footing imaginable with her Majesty of Hearts, and interests
us deeply in her domestic concerns. But to proceed--

"The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts,
All on a summer's day".

Here indeed the prospect brightens, and we are led to expect some
liveliness of imagery, some warmth of poetical colouring; but here is
no such thing. There is no task more difficult to a poet than that of
rejection. Ovid among the ancients, and Dryden among the moderns, were
perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it. The latter, from the
haste in which he generally produced his compositions, seldom paid much
attention to the _limae labor_, "the labour of correction", and seldom,
therefore, rejected the assistance of any idea that presented itself.
Ovid, not content with catching the leading features of any scene or
character, indulged himself in a thousand minutiae of description, a
thousand puerile prettinesses, which were in themselves uninteresting,
and took off greatly from the effect of the whole; as the numberless
suckers and straggling branches of a fruit-tree, if permi