poet, is proved by a sonnet, of which I forget two of the lines, but which Byron never saw.

If I esteemed thee less, Envy would kill
Pleasure, and leave to Wonder and Despair
The ministration of the thoughts that fill
My soul, which even as a worm may share
A portion of the Unapproachable,
Marks thy creations rise as fast and fair
As perfect worlds at the Creator's will;
But not the blessings of thy happier lot,

Nor thy well-won prosperity and fame,

Move one regret for his unhonoured name,
Who dares these words the worm beneath the sod
May lift itself in homage of the God.

I have a note of a conversation I had with Shelley, which arose out of some volumes of Keats's and Leigh Hunt's Poems, of which conversation I will here give the substance."There are some people whom all the hellebore in the world cannot cure of their madness. is singular that England and Italy should have almost simultaneously set about the perversion

It

of their poetry under the crotchet of a reform. We are certainly indebted to the Lakists for a more simple and natural phraseology; but the school that has sprung out of it, have spawned a set of words neither Chaucerian nor Spencerian, words such as "glib," and "flush," 'whiffling," "perking up," "swirling," "lightsome and brightsome," and hundreds of others, which never have been, or ought to be, English. But the adoption of such a barbarous jargon in translation from the Greek!" and here he turned to a travesty of Homer, whilst tears of laughter ran out of his large, prominent eyes, confirming what Byron says in one of his letters to Moore, that he was facetious about what is serious in the suburb, and read,

and,

Up! thou most overwhelming of mankind!
Pelides-there's a dreadful roar of men

For thy friend's body, at the ships;

Off with a plague! you scandalous multitude!
Convicted knaves! &c.,

and,

Be quicker-do-and help me, evil children!
Down-looking set!

Juno, bedfellow of Jove, &c.

And in a version from another Greek Poet,

first having been

With her sweet limbs inside of Hippocrene,
And other sacred waters of the hill.-&c., &c.

Shelley lamented that a man of such talent as Leigh Hunt, and who in prose had so exquisite a taste, should have so distorted his poetry. He added, that "that school hated him worse than Byron." But had But had Shelley been, like Keats, subject to the same influences, it is most probable, from here and there a passage in Rosalind and Helen,-"A rock of ocean's own," &c., written at the period of his intimacy with his admired friend,—that he would have caught the infection from which his continental abode, his love of the Classics, his cultivation of Italian

and Spanish, happily saved him. But even

Keats had lived to see the error of his ways--to all but emancipate himself from the trammels of Cockneyism, in the Pot of Basil, in the Eve of St. Agnes, and still more in Hyperion, where scarcely a trace of it is left; and which poems Shelley often spoke of with great admiration. "The Italians," Shelley continued to say, “have carried this affectation of phraseology still farther than the sect at home. The so-called Classicists, have taken to fishing in the rancid pool of the thirteenth century, and become so prostituted and enslaved to antiquity, as to deem no word admissible in their poems, that has not the sanction of Dante or Petrarch; little regarding the obvious truth, that new images and ideas are continually multiplying, or perceiving that the great objection to the use of the obsolete is, that they render the language entirely different from that of the world and society; in fact, it might belong to some other planet. But that school will pass away.

Of the three rivals, the French have had more

reason for a reformation, (though you know I never read French). The mistermed "golden age" of Louis XIV. corrupted their literature. Poetry was mown with the scythe, and levelled with the roller, till it became as cold and artificial and monotonous as their ornamental gardening—a language of set phrases and forms of speech. They quitted Montaigne for Voltaire, and abandoned words that never ought to have been abandoned; and much praise is due to the Romanticists for their revival. Thus the Classicists have been driven out of the field. They owe this to an acquaintance with our writers, and something to the Germans.

Shelley preferred Petrarch to any Italian poet; he had his works constantly in hand, and would often spout his Ode to Italy" Italia mia." He was not partial to Tasso or Ariosto, the first he deemed often stilted and full of conceits; and I have seen Mrs. Shelley read him to sleep over the Jerusalemme Liberata. Ariosto he thought "delighted in revenge revenge and cruelty."