t once tools and
materials in his headwork.

Any one who has read Childe Harold, must have observed that even the
Lord of Poets, with all his powers of language, was often thus
hampered, and that, for the sake of preserving the force of an
expression, or a striking word, he used what are no rhymes at all, if
Monk Lewis' remark to Scott, "that a bad rhyme is no rhyme," be true.

Whereas, by making the stanza of but eight lines and having the first
four lines to rhyme alternately, and the last four immediately, and by
having the concluding line an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserean
stanzas, the difficulty, arising from the necessity of having so many
similar rhymes, would be obviated, and the poet would have much
greater facilities in expressing himself well, without impairing the
dignity or strength of what might still be called, from its many
resemblances, the Spenserean stanzas; at the same time, the monotony
would be avoided, of which criticism has complained so much in the
works of Pope and Goldsmith.

Very few readers of poetry, in the first poems which they open, are
fond of those, no matter how great their merits, which are written in
the Spenserean stanzas. They have to acquire a taste for it. They
delight in simpler styles: this is one reason of Scott's great
popularity with many persons who seldom read any other poet, except
perhaps, Burns. And even to those who have a natural taste for poetry,
but who have not much cultivated it, the Spenserean stanza seems
complicated, and, I will even venture to say, at first untunable; and
it is not at the first perusal that they perceive the beauties of
those poems which are written in this style.

These remarks are hazarded very hastily. It would be much more
difficult for the author to build the complicated verse of the
Spenserean stanza, than this which he has attempted; and, therefore,
perhaps, very rashly, he concludes that it would be more difficult for
others; and, moreover, we easily persuade ourselves that what is most
easily done it is best to do.

NOTE II.

_"But thou art given by the good all-giver,
Blessing a land to be in turn most blest."_

_Thou exulting and abounding river,
Making thy waves a blessing as they flow._

BYRON.

NOTE III.

_"Here once Boone trod--the hardy Pioneer--
The only white man in the wilderness."_

In a late work entitled "Sketches of Western Adventure," a most